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I've solved the world's energy problems. Well, to give due credit, my boss and I did out on our lunchtime "health walk" (yes me!).

And no, it doesn't involve harnessing the steam coming off my shirt after a quick perambulation round Headington Hill Park!

For a few years now I've been dimly aware of some statistic that the energy from the sun that reaches the planet's surface is so enormous overall that just a few hundred square miles of hot desert covered with the right kind of solar panels/collectors/converters could supply every drop of the world's current energy use from fossil, nuclear, and all other large commercial sources and a whole load more.

And I found this map at Wikipedia tonight:

Basically it shows in the orange areas the relative amounts of solar energy that hits the surface and the little black disks are the area required on each continent to between them supply the entire planet's energy needs.

But every time I've thought about it the nagging thought has come along, what about transmission loss? Just how do you get all that electricity from Mali to Manchester? And I mentioned it out walking today and the boss had an instant answer - you don't. If the solar potential is so great why not use it to power hydrogen extraction plants for fuel cells?

Bingo. What's wrong with that then? Sun, sea, sand and power cells...better than sex - well, at least all those exhibitionists amongst you will be able to keep the lights on still....:)

You could even use it, I suppose, to water the deserts. Surely the amount of money we are storing up in disposal costs for nuclear waste, current and future, could be well put to developing this sort of thing. These people seem to be doing a "Sterling" job developing the technology.

Failing that, personally, I would really love to live in one of these:

Last week Vince Cable seems to have unilaterally added to Lib Dem tax plans in response to repeated more-heat-than-lght stories in the media about private equity bosses and their tax treatment, "non-domiciles" and their property in the UK going untaxed and the continued cris de coeur of middle England against Inheritance Taxes on their homes. Later in the week it seems George Osborne joined in, on what must be pretty unfamiliar Tory territory.

And then yesterday there was a story on the BBC about how buy-to-let property owners are able to avoid up to £2bn in taxes by offsetting their mortgage interest against their rental income before tax.

This seems to me to be something of an unhealthy return to the politics of envy, where the only question the taxman asks is "how much have you got?" As I wrote last week at the 1909 Group website, our Liberal forebears wanted to change that attitude. They realised that "equity" in the tax system was not solely a question of how much someone has, but just as importantly of how they got that wealth. Whether it was through healthy economic processes, creating new wealth, or by exploiting such things as protectionist policies, negative externalities or land and other natural monopolies.

Take supermarkets as an example. Private Equity firms have been circling Sainsbury's recently. Though they may have been seen off by other investors such as Robert Tchenguiz, he himself, a noted property tycoon, said he was investing in a "property company with a retain business". Indeed, with a Stock Market capitalization of £8.7bn, estimates value their property estate at more like £10bn - more than the whole business! If someone were to take over Sainsbury's they would not be creating new wealth but releasing the embodied profit of land ownership.

Many new entrepreneurs are basically leveraging land values to make a killing, hiding behind diverse operating businesses. INTO University Partnerships is an international English Language teaching business, but the partnership deals it forges with universities all seem to revolve around land acquisition and becoming a successful and profitable landlord to the students it brings from all corners of the planet. Last year, the HBOS banking group attempted to become a major player in the UK house building industry, pipped by Barratts in a contested bid for what had been the fifth largest house builder - this last is a double whammy - not only do they get to build your home, and capture the land value profit for themselves, but they get to charge you for borrowing the money to pay them for that land!

As to "non-doms" why should only they be penalised for owning property in the UK? Why not a land tax that would fall on everyone regardless of domicile status and instead of income and other capital taxes, including the hated Inheritance Tax? The non-doms would not be able to avoid it - and neither, incidentally, would the company involved in the outsourcing of the HM Revenue & Customs property estate, Mapeley, who subsequently off-shored the ownership of the property to avoid any taxes on it.

Anyway, the point is there are ways of making a tax system which is fair and equitable, that is not complicated, and doesn't seek to fleece people just because they have made money, but on the basis of how they make that money, and where that wealth is accumulated by processes like land ownership, where the value is created not by themselves but by others' need for their monopoly locations, they will be taxed the most, automatically, and according to market valuations not intrusive tax assessors. Land Value Tax.

Technorati Tags: vince cable, lib dems, tories, land value tax, Henry George, property tax, george osborne

Whilst I am sure that petty threats from a minor blogger well beyond the outskirts of the Westminster village who only leaves Headington Hill once a month to buy toiletries in Crabtree and Evelyn will cut little ice with Lib Dem party apparatchiks either in Cowley Street or the West Midlands region, I hereby pledge my support for Cllr Gavin Webb, the "Stoke One". Gavin has been suspended from the party pending a full hearing for, ostensibly at least, voicing personal opinions on liberal and libertarian issues which we both largely share.

If he is out of the party for that, then it is likely that I would be too if it weren't for the fact that I get on seemingly much better with my local party.

I am aware that Gavin has taken the decision not to be in the official Lib Dem council group at Stoke for some time, and that to some he has been a bit of a thorn in the side, but that in itself is no good reason to expel him from the party, nor, he says, has he actually been given details yet (six weeks or so after the event now) of the "charges" against him, so we can only really assume it is for the temerity of holding an opinion.

A number of fellow party members with libertarian leanings have started up a web site to support Gavin at "Save the Stoke One". Having spent my best years at school very near Stoke, I never thought I'd find anything amongst the former smoke stacks and bottle kilns to want to save! Though I distinctly remember some older school friends raving on about seeing The Clash at Victoria Hall in the early eighties!

Of course it's no big secret that I am a complete legalizer as far as drugs go. But it is good to see the police chief constables taking such an idea seriously. We know that a high proportion of property crime and crime against person are perpetrated by drug users funding the criminal underworld market to get their next fix. These crimes cost a huge amount both financially and emotionally on the rest of society, and an even bigger amount to incarcerate people who have perpetrated them, and they are still not getting the treatment while inside to prevent the revolving door.

Complete legalization would still, in my opinion, be preferable by far - as only then would people who are addicted be most amenable to getting treatment when it is not also a criminal thing, but this would be a big step and deserves support. Incidentally the poll on the BBC website covering the story is currently running at 52% in favour of the idea, which is way more than I would have expected - though maybe the Daily Mail hasn't told its readers to go vote against yet.

Give addicts heroin, says officer:

Howard Roberts said prescribing heroin to criminals would cut crime

Heroin should be prescribed to drug addicts to curb crime, the deputy chief constable of Nottinghamshire has said at a drugs conference.

UPDATE: Just saw Professor Griffth Edwards on C4 News laying into this idea. And he's not the first I've seen today - one of the charitable bodies working on drugs misuse said a similar thing - that you're just going to stoke up the problem. that the addict will have the system over a barrel - give me more or I'll go back to crime. Dr Edwards says that the only way is to get people off these hard drugs. I agree.

But I say the way to do that is to make it possible and socially acceptable to acknowledge a problem and get treatment for it. And the only way of doing that is in an open and accepting enviroment. And while they do come to realise they have a problem and seek help, they will also be able to get cheap, well regulated and much safer drugs so they're less likely to die before they get help.

Having been a bit behind the mood on Charles Kennedy's resignation, I quickly made up for it getting ahead of the game by encouraging others to urge Chris Huhne, MP for Eastleigh to think about putting his name forward...

What a sad weekend of intrigue and at times farce it's been. Anyway, as no doubt people are going to be trying to move quickly I thought I'd drop you a note to encourage you to contact anyone you can in the first instance to ensure that there should be a leadership election. If our parliamentarians were annoyed on Thursday night that CK was going over their heads as the news suggests, their position will be no more tenable in the view of many members if they engineer a stitch up for one candidate. So please, tell anyone you can that we need an election!

And there will be one. I've been in contact all weekend and emailing privately one or two MPs and one for sure is intending to stand to make a contest of it if nobody else comes forward (I would actually like John Hemming to win and I've offered to work on John's campaign assuming someone else doesn't stand).

That someone else, I'd like to lobby you to encourage, is our own former MEP, Chris Huhne. He's either only just back from holiday yesterday or today so I have not heard from him but have written to him encouraging him to think about it. Here's why:

1. Europe. With Blair having failed to make much of his EU presidency and Brown more anti- due to succeed him, and with Cameron anti- and likely to take the Tories that way, there is room for us to be the party of Europe and internationalism as we should be, I may not agree 100% with Chris about the Euro (I prefer James Robertson's idea of a "Common Currency" to a single currency at the moment), but it would be a first to have a former MEP as a party leader at Westminster. Both he and Nick Clegg, who I think has ruled himself out and is supporting Ming, have a full term at Strasbourg/Brussels under their belts and we should be prepared, as a pro-European party, to count that for what it is - parliamentary experience. It might even make a refreshing change to have someone who has cut his parliamentary teeth on something other than the yah-boo of Westminster (though watching the European parliament does not look all that different at times!). Let's get him in there now while he has more MEP experience than MP experience. He is in the ideal position, having done it himself, to explain and develop how we scrutinise and criticise Europe positively compared with the other positions seen to be either plain anti-Europe, or, on the other side, the "Europe can do no wrong" type pro-Europeans.

2. PR. I am disappointed that we quietly dropped PR as "unattainable", and didn't get terribly involved in the campaign after the general Election last year led by the Independent. Chris is not only committed to PR but of course is one of our two parliamentarians who has actually been elected under a PR system, of sorts. He was a director of Electoral Reform Ballot Services. We should be pushing PR right now in view of the probability that Labour will be waning in the run up to the next election and the dissatisfaction with the present situation.

3. International Development. Chris's economic interests have focussed on International Development. If we are to believe Cameron and Brown and their "save Africa" type rhetoric, Geldof Groups and so on, this is to be the foreign policy and humanitarian agenda for the next few years. Chris is a real economist who has made real studies of different mechanisms for International Development. Gordon Brown's naive sounding "drop the debt" type measures will not be sufficient in the longer run and we need someone who really understands these issues to promote better solutions.

4. Radical economics. Chris is President of Lib Dems ALTER (Action for Land Tax and Economic Reform). Personally I have not met him yet in that context, having only been Secretary of ALTER for less than a year and not having attended any of the conference events yet. So I don't know if he is a passionate proponent of LVT or simply someone who recognises the benefits of being open to unconventional economic and fiscal ideas. But either way, we do need to be open to radical economic solutions and need someone to promote that openness. If memory serves he was also supportive of our earlier attempts to set up an Association of Lib Dem Co-operators and supports mutual solutions to delivering public goods where appropriate.

5. Meedja. Chris is of course a former journalist. I do think we need someone whom the media can feel is "one of their own". But he also has strong credibility in the city - writing for the Economists and at times the FT as well as the economics pages of the Guardian and Independent.

Yes, he's likely to be an outsider. But that didn't stop some of us previously supporting David Rendel (who I would nominate again if we hadn't lost Newbury). But he's "different", "fresh" in all sorts of ways. He may feel that he's too new in Westminster but that's not been too great a barrier to Cameron for example (who would have recognised him this time last year if we weren't Oxfordshire activists?). I feel it is time to make use of the great strides we have made at Westminster over the past five years and skip the generation that seems lining up to arrange a succession (Simon/Ming/Mark etc). However he is being spoken of very positively as someone who would make a very good leader, so there is some momentum behind him.