Another sorry reminder of the state of manufacturing and engineering in the UK is the push (and I very much welcome this) to a massive investment in off-shore wind power generation in the UK, mostly in the North Sea, but also along some western coasts. The wind resource in the UK is huge, theoretically it could power the UK's electricity several times over, but of course, these sorts of projections are a bit meaningless. However it is planned to install 33 GW generating capacity (which would be more than sufficient for all of NZ's present electrical needs. However NZ's offshore potential is presently minimal, due to our steeply sloping continental shelf and lack of waters shallow enough for installation. Floating windpower would be more productive, and an exciting option, but not yet economically feasible or tested.) An article in the Times give some background.

The British Wind Energy Association provides a very interesting web site, and you can find a link, here, to a pdf document, with a very thorough examination for the potential for offshore windpower for the UK. On page 11 of this document you can read this: "Wind turbine supply remains a critical path item for most developers and the one least within the UK sphere of influence, as currently no wind turbine suppliers are headquarted in the UK, and no offshore wind turbines are assembled in the UK." Yet on that same page it is predicted that the UK will account for 50% of European offshore installations. What I want to know is exactly how the UK is going to pay for all this high tech imported material, when its economy is just about moribund, because it doesn't make anything else in return? So here are one of the major, sustainable infrastructural investments the country is crying out for, but the only beneficiaries will be foreigners. This site describes how the run-down port of Bremerhaven is re-inventing itself as the major windpower logistics, manufacturing and servicing centre - Germany is promising up to 25 GW of off-shore power in the North Sea and the Baltic. The page also describes Yarmouth's expansion plans to import and service wind turbines, but of course they won't be made in the UK.

The UK in particular is going to face massive problems with this economic crisis because advanced manufacturing, high grade infrastructural investment both in the material and the human sense, and science based high tech industries are not just important in themselves, but they are vitally important strategic interest of any country which wishes to remain as an advanced industrial and wealthy nation. Perhaps it is the UK's fate, having been the first to enter the industrial age, that it will be the first to leave it? But that begs the question, exactly what age is going to replace it (the Stone Age?) and what will be the near sixty million inhabitants of the British Isles place in it?

I can't help noticing in today's news the spat between the German finance minister, Peer Steinbruck, and the UK's PM, and ex-Chancellor, Gordon Brown. Mr Steinbruck used very undiplomatic language to describe the reversals of British economic policy as "breathtaking" and "crass". Angela Merkel has tried to pour oil on troubled waters, and Mr Steinbrucks comments have been brushed aside by Mr Brown as being due to internal German politics. There may be some truth in this comment, but unfortunately there is a good deal more truth in Mr Steinbruck's original accusations.

However the European Union and particularly the Euro nations are facing a very severe test as well. The pressure is on Sterling for the moment, but the sharks are in a feeding frenzy, and once the corpse of Sterling has been picked to the bones, the Euro is next in line. Ultimately the US dollar will fail, and we'll see gold soar to thousands of dollars an ounce, if you can get it. I am pretty confident the Euro will not survive in its present form for much longer, the strains and stresses building up throughout the Eurozone are becoming ever more extreme. Spain is an economic basket case, so is Greece and Italy isn't far behind. Ireland too, the European tiger, is looking distinctly unhealthy.

But even though Germany and France and other nations that have kept a better "balance" in their economies they are not going escape scot free. Indeed, one could look at things another and rather more reassuring way, at least for the UK. When no-one in the Anglo-Saxon world or the developing economies or China can afford their fancy BMWs or Mercedes or Peugeots any more, and have bought a bicycle instead, or elect to catch a bus, there are going to be a lot of redundant, motivated, active and proud Germans and similarly described bolshie Frenchmen who's days are presently filled with productive, noisy, vigourous and honest activity, suddenly presented with a great physical and mental void in their lives. It could be psychologically very hard for them, and they might not take to it kindly, and their protests might be as robust as their labour. Whereas in the UK, all those bankers and wheeler-dealers are used to doing nothing all day in any case, they might quite like to lie in the morning and if they can't afford a cup of tea at the local cafe, they can always make themselves one at home.

However, in the longer term, these comparative advantages and disadvantages of sovereign nations are probably only of temporary importance. . The reason being that no nation yet has even started to understand the reality of our present economic chaos, which has nothing to do with crooked or greedy bankers, naive or corrupt politicians or a supine or ignorant public, but that in the ultimate this economic melee is an environmental problem. Today the Independent online published an article in its business section written by Jeremy Warner, entitled "The City is humbled, but remains unbowed". He says:"

There seem to me to be two related concerns. One is the general perception that the City has failed the UK economy, even though much of what the City does has nothing to do with what's going on in Britain. Yet this confusion has the potential seriously to influence public policy and regulation with regard to the City......The other is that globalisation as a whole goes into reverse, which is more than possible as a more protectionist mindset of competitive devaluation and state aid to distressed industries takes hold. If the free flow of capital, goods and labour across borders is damaged or disrupted, then that too would destroy the City in its present form. The City may or may not deserve its newly acquired pariah status, but to defenestrate it in retribution for the credit crunch would be madness."

I have posted elsewhere my thoughts about this matter, and my contempt, for want of a better word, for the vast rump of economists, who with a few honourable exceptions, fail to understand that humanity, and our economy, don't exist is some separate parallel plane of existence, but are utterly, totally, completely, entirely and absolutely dependent on the resources of the planet and the universe that sustains us; that we are, as someone much cleverer than me pointed out, a totally owned subsidiary of the environment. But that's just repeating myself, again, as is my wont. Sorry. This is what I wrote on in response to Jeremy Warner's article:

The free flow of capital and resources is not going to continue in its present state, whatever the "City" does, because the energy and raw material resources on which this particular way of running the World's economy depends are finite. The ultimate cause of our present financial and economic collapse was in fact the soaring oil and other raw material prices, and for a brief moment early this year we saw what a resource depleted world looks like, and it was very sobering. The present collapse of prices is merely temporary, which is why simplistic nostrums such as trying to stimulate demand or by subsidising misdirected economic activity are ultimately futile.

Unless we understand the limits to growth, and redirect all our human and material capital into long term, sustainable and non-polluting activity, we will see all our societies sink into a morass that makes the 1930s look like a rather innocent interlude of last century. It seems that of all the World's depleting resources the most valuable, but the most lacking, is wisdom.

Addendum - 18th April 2009 - an article in the Guardian examines the problems of nuclear waste at western Europe's most contaminated site, Sellafield. There are some very serious problems there, and the expenditure of tens of billions of pounds will be needed to make the site safe. But there is at the end of the article a more general comment related the failure of British industry. The writer says this:"In fact, Sellafield is a classic illustration of the failure of British industry. We were pioneers of nuclear power but in our desire to build our own atomic weapons, failed abysmally when it came to developing and managing our own civil reactors and reprocessing plants.

As a result, we have been left with a multibillion-pound clean-up bill and the prospect of buying either American or French reactors for our next generation nuclear plants. The lesson of Sellafield is not so much that nuclear power is dangerous but that Britain seems incapable of implementing any long-term engineering plan that comes its way, from high-speed trains to wind turbines or rocket launchers." In other words, the ASS.