Fun Online Polls: SLOPOTY & how to minimise flood damage

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Sports Lack Of Personality Of The Year Award

Andy Murray - 40%
Tyson Fury - 16%
Lewis Hamilton - 10%
Mo Farah - 7%
Greg Rutherford - 6%
Lizzie Armitstead - 6%
Jessica Ennis-Hill - 5%
Chris Froome - 4%
Kevin Sinfield - 4%
Max Whitlock - 4%

Strange.

Andy Murray ticked nearly all the boxes - not having any noticeable personality or having won or done anything notable this year. The only ones he failed on were we've all actually heard of him and know he plays tennis.

Runner-up Tyson Fury on the other hand, ticked none, having a cool name, taking part in an inherently controversial sport, having strong opinions, however repugnant, and actually having won something notable this year and then being promptly stripped of his title for some obscure reason.

Just goes to show.
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I have no strong opinion on how to minimise flood damage and those who do take an interest have strongly diverging views:

In the green corner, George Monbiot:

Just as remarkable is the collective lack of interest in what happens when rain hits the ground. The government boasts that “we are spending £3.2 billion in flood management and defences over the course of this parliament – half a billion pounds more than in the previous parliament.” Yet almost all the money devoted to freshwater flood relief is being spent at the bottom of river catchments. This means waiting until the wall of water arrives before seeking to contain it; a perfect formula for disappointment.

A rational policy would aim to prevent the flood from gathering in the first place. It would address the problem, literally and metaphorically, upstream. A study in mid-Wales suggests that rainwater’s infiltration rate into the soil is 67 times higher under trees than under sheep pasture. Rain that percolates into the soil is released more slowly than rain that flashes over the surface. But Cumbria’s hills are almost entirely treeless, and taxpayers, through the subsidy regime, pay farmers to keep them that way.

Rivers that have been dredged and canalised to protect farmland rush the water instead into the nearest town. Engineering works of this kind were removed a few years ago from the River Liza in Ennerdale. It was allowed to braid, meander and accumulate logs and stones. When the last great storm hit Cumbria, in 2009, the Liza remained clear and fordable the following day, while other rivers roared into furious spate. The Liza’s obstructions held the water back, filtered it and released it slowly. Had all the rivers of Cumbria been rewilded in this way, there might have been no floods, then or now.

So trees and rewilding good; dredging pointless.

Speaking on behalf of Britian's agricultural landowners (three-quarters of the land by area, one or two percent by value):

Amid all the devastation and recrimination over the floods in Cumbria hardly anybody mentions one factor that may not be the sole cause, but certainly hasn’t helped. That is the almost complete cessation of dredging of our rivers since we were required to accept the European Water Framework Directive (EWF) into UK law in 2000...

It was obvious to people, who depended on the land for their living that failing to keep the rivers clear of sand and gravel would cause them to burst their banks and destroy in a few hours fertility that had taken generations to create, wash away their houses, and drown their livestock… all this changed with the creation of the Environment Agency in 1997 and when we adopted the European Water Framework Directive in 2000. No longer were the authorities charged with a duty to prevent flooding. Instead, the emphasis shifted, in an astonishing reversal of policy, to a primary obligation to achieve ‘good ecological status’ for our national rivers. This is defined as being as close as possible to ‘undisturbed natural conditions.

… they all have the same aim, entirely consonant [sic] with EU policy, to return rivers to their ‘natural healthy’ state, reversing any ‘straightening and modifying’ which was done in ‘a misguided attempt to get water off the land quicker’. They only think it ‘misguided’ because fast flowing water contained within its banks can scour out its bed and maybe wash out some rare crayfish or freshwater mussel, and that conflicts with their (and the EU’s) ideal of a ‘natural’ river.

So dredging good; trees (for which there are no subsidies) and rewilding bad.

The only thing that everybody seems to agree on is that we shouldn't allow building on flood plains, obviously, but that doesn't help people in long established towns.

I know I did a Fun Online Poll on this last year, but let's narrow it down a bit to those two contrasting points of view without an 'other' option.

(I'm always happy to blame the EU when things go wrong, but the EU is also to blame for the subsidies for clearing trees so that's a worst-of-both-worlds as per usual.)

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

George Monbiot shoots from the hip again

and misses.

In an article entitled "Dredging rivers won't stop floods. It will make them worse", George is surprised to find the Environment agency agreeing with him. They have released a paper on dredging. In it they cleverly state that dredging is carried out "to improve navigation, by increasing depths and straightening channels or "to improve land drainage, particularly by creating artificial channels". So despite the fact that they state that "Dredging is the process of removing silt from the bottom and sides of the river channel", clearing silt from riverbeds and returning them to their original depth, the activity in which they have a twenty year backlog is obviously not dredging.

So, cheered by this unexpected help in his campaign that started with trying to get rid of sheep and seemingly unaware that the whole paper appears to be designed simply to justify the EA's inactivity in dredging over the last twenty years, George launches forth,

"A river's capacity is tiny by comparison to the catchment from which it draws its water. You can increase the flow of a river by dredging, but that is likely to cause faster and more dangerous floods downstream when the water hits the nearest urban bridge (something the residents of towns like Taunton and Bridgwater should be worried about). If you cut it off from its floodplain by turning it into a deep trench, you might raise its capacity from, say, 2% of the water moving through the catchment to 4%. You will have solved nothing while creating a host of new problems."

George, please look at a map of Somerset. Taunton is upstream of the floods. No-one is talking about dredging the Tone upstream of Taunton. The Parrett at Bridgwater is tidal, so at low tide, there is always going to be huge spare capacity in its channel. The burghers of Taunton and Bridgwater can sleep safe in their beds.

Next he posts a litany of excuses by the EA to do nothing:

"1. Massive expense. Once you have started dredging, "it must be repeated after every extreme flood, as the river silts up again".

2. More dangerous rivers: "Removing river bank vegetation such as trees and shrubs decreases bank stability and increases erosion and siltation."

3. The destabilisation of bridges, weirs, culverts and river walls, whose foundations are undermined by deepening the channel: "If the river channels are dredged and structures are not realigned, 'Pinch Points' at structures would occur. This would increase the risk of flooding at the structure." That means more expense and more danger.

4. Destruction of the natural world: "Removing gravel from river beds by dredging leads to the loss of spawning grounds for fish, and can cause loss of some species. Removing river bank soils disturbs the habitat of river bank fauna such as otters and water voles."

1. Dredging started in the C18th. The EA isn't being asked to start dredging, it's being asked to continue dredging. All the rivers draining the Somerset Levels run in man-made channels. No-one is talking about widening them or deepening them. All the residents of the levels want is for the twenty year accumulation of silt to be removed from them.

2. How did the (man-made) banks cope before there were trees growing on them?

3. See point 1.

4. No-one is talking about removing gravel from river beds.

George then goes on to both hit and miss the point in one sentence:

"More trees and bogs in the uplands – reconnecting rivers with their floodplains in places where it is safe to flood (and paying farmers to store water on their fields while the danger passes)"

The first is a good idea, the second is how the Somerset Levels already work, and have worked for centuries. The problem is not that the Levels have flooded: they do that most years and it's how the problem of having more water entering the levels than can drain out is solved. George and the Environment Agency are pointing out that you can't stop the flooding in Somerset by dredging the rivers. This is true, but no-one is asking to stop the flooding, what they want is for the flooding to be less extreme and not to last so long. They want the water to be able to flow more quickly to the sea, like it did in the past, when the man-made rivers and drains of the Levels were properly maintained.

Idiot Farmer

From The Daily Mail:

Farmers have criticised the BBC programme Countryfile after a report claimed that sheep were to blame for causing flooding. Journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot said on the show:

"Sheep in the hills cause floods in the flood plains. We are very prone to flooding... one of the major reasons is because all the vegetation has been removed and soil compacted by the hooves of the sheep and water just flashes off the pasture."

So it's a bit more nuanced than "blaming sheep", for a start.

He's on to something here, is George, he wrote a lengthy article in The G about it, all makes perfect sense if you gloss over the inevitable references to Climate Change.

Sheep farmer Gareth Wyn Jones, of Llanfairfechan, North Wales, who lost 300 sheep on the hills in last winter’s snow, said he had complained about the programme.

He added: "Farmers are furious with the comments on the programme. The floods can’t be blamed on sheep on the uplands of Wales and elsewhere. I’d like Mr Monbiot to see what the life of an uplands farmer means."

What sort of fucking relevance does that have?

It's like Person A claiming that McDonalds generate too much packaging waste (which might or might not be true) and Idiot Company Director hitting back by saying: "I'd like Person A to see how hard our employees have to work."

Retard, presumed guilty.

George Monbiot talks sense: Shock

Spotted by MBK in The Guardian:

So where do we look for the idea that can make hope more powerful than fear? Not to the Labour party. If Ed Miliband cannot bring himself even to oppose a bill which retrospectively denies compensation to cheated jobseekers, the most we can expect from him is a low-alcohol conservatism of the kind that doused all aspiration under Tony Blair.

Last week I ran a small online poll, asking people to nominate inspiring, transfiguring ideas. The two mentioned most often were land value taxation and a basic income. As it happens, both are championed by the Green party.(1) On this and other measures, its policies are by a long way more progressive than Labour's.

I discussed land value taxation in a recent column. A basic income (also known as a citizen's income) gives everyone, rich and poor, without means-testing or conditions, a guaranteed sum every week. It replaces some but not all benefits (there would, for instance, be extra payments for pensioners and people with disabilities). It banishes the fear and insecurity now stalking the poorer half of the population. Economic survival becomes a right, not a privilege.

A basic income removes the stigma of benefits while also breaking open what politicians call the welfare trap. Because taking work would not reduce your entitlement to social security, there would be no disincentive to find a job – all the money you earn is extra income. The poor are not forced by desperation into the arms of unscrupulous employers: people will work if conditions are good and pay fair, but will refuse to be treated like mules. It redresses the wild imbalance in bargaining power that the current system exacerbates. It could do more than any other measure to dislodge the emotional legacy of serfdom. It would be financed by progressive taxation – in fact it meshes well with land value tax.(2)

1) And YPP of course, although for slightly different reasons.

2) As I said in the comments:

Yup, LVT and CI is an intellectually coherent match.

The gimmick being that people in the middle pay neither tax nor receive benefits as the two sides net off to zero. So it's like feudalism on its head, instead of The One Per Cent collecting all the rent, interest and tax and people in the middle paying for it, the bottom half receive a small net payment from the people willing and able to occupy the best locations.