Formula 1 and Top Gear

 

Phasing Down Fossil Fuel? Not on your Nelly!

The government has been attempting to convince us that COP26 was a real breakthrough on climate change as a result of an agreement to phase down fossil fuels. But what does this mean? Alok Sharma was an honest broker at the talks and probably exceeded the expectations of many climate change activists. I doubt that any other member of the government could have provided the diplomatic acumen required to secure any agreement. However, if the UK has any remaining soft power, the top of its agenda should be phasing out high octane motorsports like Formula 1 that are largely hosted by the UK. It could also use its influence to eliminate the world-beating TV motor programme that promotes the extravagance of the internal combustion engine. 

Take the Formula 1 Grand Prix series in which 10 teams with 20 cars spend $3-4bn per annum on competing in 21 Grand Prix in 21 countries. The logistics of transporting the cars, spares, trucks and teams by air, sea and land has an enormous carbon footprint that alone costs $800m per annum. As a way of burning fossil fuels, it is highly effective. There are 6 or 7 Boeing 747 cargo planes and 300 trucks involved in the movement of the F1 circus to all continents. And it is estimated that each Formula 1 car uses 190,000 litres of fuel each year for practices and racing.

This is half funded by the team's owners that are mainly vehicle or engine manufacturers - Mercedes, Renault, Ferrari, Aston Martin and Honda and then there's Red Bull. Sponsorship provides most of the remaining costs with tobacco companies like British-American Tobacco and Philip Morris and the oil giants: INEOS, Petronas, Shell, Mobil, BP, and Castrol the main culprits. There are many other non motor related companies drawn mainly from the IT, fashion, and luxury goods sectors. These companies  are looking for the hype of association with the glamour of F1 and a walk down the pit lane for their freeloaders. More worrying is that the Financial Times chips into the sponsorship as well.

The titans of F1 will probably argue that there has already been a phasing down of F1 (but not its carbon footprint) since its peak in 2007. Sponsorship reached $2,900m in 2007 since when it has dropped to below $2000m per annum. This is primarily a result of the non-oil sponsorship deals declining as the merit of Formula 1 as a medium of advertising has diminished compared to the benefits of using social media. In part, this is because there has been a 19% loss in TV viewers as F1, in its perpetual greed mode, sold the broadcasting rights to subscription TV companies instead of retaining the wider audiences reach from free to air broadcasters. 

It would be a useful tool for encouraging carbon abstinence if the climate change activists would publish the list of F1 sponsors as a means of putting pressure on them to phase down their support for the climate change damage caused by F1. After all, we were told at COP 26 that the private sector was going to drive the charge to become carbon neutral. Electric car racing is already growing fast, why not speed it up and make it the mainstream form of motorsport.

Meanwhile, we have witnessed a new series of Top Gear, the laddish celebration of expensive fossil fuel burners, with complex logistic escapades to far-flung lands where cars are trashed and fuel is burnt. The government have shown in recent years that they like to push the BBC around for no justifiable reason other than to promote their own agenda, so why not give Alok Sharma a bit of help and tell the BBC to scrap this outmoded worshipping of ICE supercars.

The advantage of both these moves would generate huge public controversy with both positive and negative arguments. In the process it would enable the UK government and our world-beating broadcaster, the BBC, to prove that they are in the vanguard when it comes to phasing out fossil fuels. It would also force our media and politicians to come clean and show which side they are on when it comes to phasing out fossil fuels.

Top Gear - time to phase out celebrity fossil fuel burners

Ben Chonzie

Looking north from Ben Chonzie

Monday, 22 November 2021

Ascent:     755 metres
Distance: 13 kilometres
Time:       2 hours 47 minutes

m  Ben Chonzie      931m      1hr 33mins

After only the second night of frost this autumn, I headed up to Comrie and the beautiful Glen Lednock that takes you to the start of the walk to Ben Chonzie. I had done this walk twice before on weekday birthdays, it was only a half day walk so allowed me to work as well. I was the second car to arrive at the car park and began to walk immediately, I had driven in my trail shoes, the ground conditions still too benign for boots The walk is not hard, about 4.5 kilometres on a rough track that climbs to 730 metres and then a steeper and slightly boggy path that climbs to the south ridge at 870 metres Thereafter it is a pleasant saunter over the broad grassy ridge following some old fence posts to the untidy summit shelter.

I kept a steady pace, my regular morning walk has kept me reasonably fit so that there is no need for rests. I had reached 800 metres before stopping for some water and to take a few photos. The path was slightly icy and the northerly breeze was a gentle reminder that winter was ahead. On previous visits to the hill, I had been struck by the number of hares but I saw none today and the only bird apart from several groups of squawking grouse was a red kite. Just before reaching the summit the walker who had started ahead of me passed on his descent and we exchanged greetings. He looked to be in his sixties and seemed content with his outing.

On the descent, my right knee began to trouble me on the steeper boggy path but I pushed on.  As I reached the track there was a sudden spurt of walkers on their way up. In the next half hour I passed three couples in their thirties, two solo men walkers in their fifties who were both a bit taciturn, a solo woman in her thirties who was enthusiastic about the walk, a man in his thirties wearing enormous headphones and carrying a 60 litre rucksack and another woman in her twenties. I said to her it was quite crowded today and she retorted, yes and its a Monday but with all this home working its really an extension of the weekend. She had a point on my last two weekday trips in March, there had been only hares on the hill. Today there were 13 of us and it was not yet noon.

I kept a good pace on the descent as I tried to beat three hours, the guide book had said 4 hours 30 minutes. In fact I was surprised on getting home and looking at an old log that I was 2 minutes quicker than in March 2009, a couple of months before I retired. It was 12:30pm when I reached the car, the afternoon was mine, no need to go to work.

Start of the walk at Glen Lednock

Hydro scheme on Invergeldie Burn

Track towards Ben Chonzie south ridge

Summit cairn looking west

Loch Turret Reservoir, our water supply

Stob Binnein and Ben More

Starting the descent

Gone Boy

Unmasked and dozing PM at COP26 next to David Attenborough

"He's just a boy," was my mother's refrain when my friend's parents complained that I was leading their sons astray by going out of bounds on long bike rides to distant towns, or breaking curfews when coming back from adventures in the nearby woods or playing football after dark. It is a term that could be applied equally to our current prime minister, Boris Johnson.

I have met no one in the past two years who has had a good word to say about the man and I have been banging on about his unsuitability to hold any public office since his time as Mayor of London when he behaved like Benny Hill on steroids, most notably when he got stuck on a zip wire over the Thames, he was defying both gravity and gravitas. 

He has always been a loose cannon, someone whose self-esteem and sense of entitlement make him unreliable, incoherent, and unhinged - an inchoate man or just a boy really. Someone totally unsuited to public office as Max Hastings, his editor at the Telegraph said many years ago: “a cavorting charlatan, exhibiting moral bankruptcy rooted in a contempt for truth who cares for nothing but his own fame and gratification.”

Yet he has surfed his way to the top of the Tory party as an MP, the Mayor of London, a mouthpiece and champion for Brexit, the Foreign Secretary and, most disturbingly, as Prime Minister. He is becoming an albatross for the Tory Party as they have rumbled his assumed reputation as a serial winner. His career was greased by inheriting the safe Tory seat of Henley from Michael Heseltine, by the London electorate growing impatient with the incumbent Labour Mayor, Ken Livingstone, by the Tory Party losing confidence in Theresa May and by facing an unelectable Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour opposition leader. Like any bully, he has picked his contests, losing would have been difficult if not impossible in any of these contests. 

It is staggering that it has taken so long for his authority and popularity to perish. Maybe it's a result of the nascent English Nationalism and the still substantial power of the fourth estate who have championed his quasi-authoritarian government. But even the Mail, Express and Times have turned on him following his attempt to rescue the disgraced former cabinet minister Owen Paterson who has been paid over £500k  to lobby government departments. This has been the last straw following his failures in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit is far from done, it has become the car crash that economists, the financial sector and most serious political observers always warned against. He constantly avoids decisions and then changes them, sacks anyone who challenges his authority, breaks rules, and trashes diplomatic relations with the EU and many other nations. He has destroyed the soft power that the UK enjoyed through International Aid, the BBC and the network of Foreign Office postings. 

The boy has done more damage to the UK economy, its public services and its self-respect than anyone or any event since the last World War. It is difficult to think of anything good that has happened during his two years as prime minister. OK, the vaccine rollout started well but lapsed as the government overdosed on self-congratulation and announcing freedom which has led to the UK once again having one of the highest COVID rates in the world.

Perhaps there is a silver lining. The Brexiters who have controlled the Tory Party for the past six years are also under the cosh. The popularity of Boris Johnson is at an all-time low, parliament seems likely to pursue the PM over his failure to follow the rules and to accept bribes for seats in the House of Lords. His cavalier attitude to funding his flat refurbishment and accepting free holidays from donors merely confirms his lack of a moral compass. When Lord Evans, the chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, berates the government for failing to maintain ethical standards and suggests that our "soft power abroad depends on our country’s reputation for integrity at home," you know that we are on the slide with stories of sleaze and corruption appearing every day. 

The Prime Minister's unwillingness to accept recommendations from the Standards Commissioner adds to the impression that he is addicted to entitlement. These decisions fit his personality which is bereft of integrity, consistency, empathy and gravitas. If the Tory Party do not take action, and they have never knowingly avoided getting rid of their leaders when they are deemed to be losers, who do we appeal to? His father, Eton, Oxford University or Her Majesty, she gave the boot to the Australian PM, Gough Whitlam for far less serious breaches of protocol. Our unwritten constitution was not designed to deal with a problem like Boris.

He has shattered many protocols, ignored common practice and undermined institutions but perhaps he has provided much evidence for modernising and enhancing democracy by freeing ourselves of the confusion that arises from our outdated unwritten constitution. There is no shortage of actions that could be undertaken to relinquish the UK from these dark democratic days that the Gone Boy will be remembered for. Here are some starters.

• An opportunity to adopt a written constitution like most mature democracies.
• Establish a federal state where the regions of England and the three nations assume responsibility for a far larger share of governance. 
• Introduce a proportional voting system, not one that allows just 30% of the electorate to vote in a government with a majority of 80.
• Reduce the number of MPs in the UK government that will be responsible for far fewer functions and in doing so make the UK a far less London-centric state.
• Create a second chamber in the UK comprised of democratically elected representatives.
• Revisit the relationship with the EU including customs and trade agreements, environmental standards and the Schengen Information System that have had devastating effects on the UK.
• Restore independence and transparency to the operation of institutions such as the BBC that have been subject to increasing political interference.
• Devolve power and functions to the most local level through a genuine commitment to subsidiarity.
• Take decisive action on reducing flying within the UK and eliminate subsidies to fossil fuel industries.
• Commit to eliminating UK-protected tax havens
• Restore International Aid to 0.7%
• Restore the UK's soft power in tackling issues like climate change, poverty, and health and increase support for global institutions like the UN and WHO.

The Clocks Go Back

Morning walk/run on Lime Craig

Topping out

The last few weeks have taxed my patience with 2021. The mainly dry summer has given way to grey days with no frost, just mild windy wet autumn days. The clocks going back has always signalled the reduction of outdoor activities amid the gloom that descends on life. I have never seen the sense of British summertime reverting to Greenwich Mean Time at the end of October. If we had summertime all-year-round time, there would be light at the end of the day, which is more useful for most folk and most activities than in the morning when for a couple of months it is dark anyway on the way to work or school. 

Life is still very restricted with Covid cases higher than they have ever been, 1 in 16 people have Covid in England according to research from Imperial College with children having the highest proportion of cases and England seemingly encouraging a free market in herd immunity. The other home nations do not have the same levels of Covid but they have retained mask-wearing in shops and public transport, social distancing and adopted a less cavalier approach to opening up. Devolution seems to have been more adept at handling the operational issues than the centralised managerialism that Westminster has foisted on England.

I am still managing early morning exercise 4 or 5 times a week by climbing a local hill and running down. It gives some purpose to the day. My 40 kilometres a month seem paltry compared to Gregor's 100 kilometres a week, even after the London Marathon where he managed a very respectable 2 hours 23 minutes and 24th place. He competed on the day the clocks went back in the local 10k race starting from his old school and made it look easy when winning in 32:02 over a tricky undulating course with hills and some trails. The number of entrants was almost 600, a figure that would have been impossible pre-Covid, so there are some positives beginning to emerge as we slowly ease out of lockdown.

For the first time in two years, I travelled by train to Edinburgh to meet with former colleagues who have become firm friends during weekly Zoom sessions that began during the first lockdown. We have written papers, produced videos of lived experiences and had occasional competitions on such topics as what was our first record, earliest job experiences, the favourite car we have owned, best national anthems or what colour loons did we wear. Reliving the 1960s and 70s was fun and kept us vaguely sane. 

Meeting these colleagues again, now 3% older since the last meeting with them in late 2019 was strangely reassuring. The prizes for our competitions had been appealing until they were presented at the splendid flat of one of our group by the Mercat Cross on the Royal Mile. I had won my colleague's Heinkel Bubble car for my detailed memory of my first job but was presented with a Chinese Dinky Toy equivalent version of a bubble car instead.  I had to catch the train home. Friends!

Start of the 10k

Gregor winning Callander 10k

Stirling Station for the first time in 2 years

Mercat Cross, Royal Mile