The New York Times reports that the Swiss have decided that building geothermal energy projects requiring fracturing of rock under towns is a little too scary for them - Quake Threat Leads Swiss to Close Geothermal Project.

A $60 million project to extract renewable energy from the hot bedrock deep beneath Basel, Switzerland, was shut down permanently on Thursday after a government study determined that earthquakes generated by the project were likely to do millions of dollars in damage each year.

The project, led by Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was suspended in late 2006 after it generated earthquakes that did no bodily harm but caused about $9 million in mostly minor damage to homes and other structures. Mr. Häring is to go to trial next week on criminal charges stemming from the project. On Thursday, he did not respond to messages asking for comment.

The findings are a serious blow to the hopes of environmentalists, entrepreneurs and investors who believe that advanced geothermal energy could substantially cut the world’s use of emissions-causing fossil fuels. The report comes as the United States Energy Department is preparing its own review of the safety of a closely related project, by a start-up company called AltaRock Energy, in the hills north of San Francisco.

The AltaRock project is the Obama administration’s first major test of advanced geothermal energy. Like the Basel project, AltaRock’s plan is to drill miles underground, fracture hot bedrock and circulate water through it to generate steam. The Energy Department began its review after an article in The New York Times in June raised questions about whether AltaRock had been forthcoming about the earthquakes set off by the fracturing in Basel. The AltaRock project has also been plagued with technical problems.

Scientists said on Thursday that because the Swiss report focused narrowly on the Basel project and also contained positive findings, it would not prove fatal to advanced geothermal energy as a whole.

For example, while the report concluded that residents of Basel would have felt from 14 to 170 earthquakes over the 30-year life of the project, few if any of those earthquakes would be likely to cause bodily harm, according to an English summary of the report provided by Rudolf Braun, the Swiss scientist who led the work.

Transmaterial has a post on a new use for mycellium as a bonding agent - Mycobond.

Mycobond is a mycological bio-composite that can be used in a wide variety of applications. Instead of conventional manufacturing processes, Mycobond uses mycelium—which is essentially the root system of a mushroom—to transform loose aggregates into strong composites. This process can be varied by using different species of fungus and mixtures of aggregates in order to make a composite with an optimal density, strength, appearance, and performance for the specific application.

Additionally, Mycobond represents a low-embodied-energy manufacturing process as the material self assembles at room temperature and pressure in the dark. Furthermore, Mycobond upcycles resources like rice hulls, cotton burrs, and buckwheat hulls that are otherwise thrown away, transforming them into valuable products, including rigid board insulation and protective packaging buffers.

the SMH has a bevy of global warming related articles - first a prediction that this year will be the hottest in recorded history - Scientists tip 2010 as hottest yet.

HE past six months have been Australia's warmest winter-spring period on record and it is likely next year will set global temperature records.

Scientists predict that, whatever the outcome at Copenhagen, Australia must adapt to unprecedented heatwaves.

David Jones, the head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, said yesterday that claims by sceptics the planet was cooling were wrong.

Every decade in Australia for the past 70 years had been getting warmer, and this decade has been the globe's warmest so far.

''Clearly global warming hasn't stopped, and it's warming in our backyard,'' said Dr Jones, who was speaking in Melbourne after the release of the World Meteorological Organisation's annual climate statement on Tuesday night.

Apart from temperature records, which have been criticised by sceptics amid the stolen email affair, heating was evident from sea-level rises, disappearing snow and shrinking sea ice, he said. ''The climate system's having the final say.''

Dr Jones said an El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean - linked to hotter, drier conditions in Australia - would have an effect on the world's climate next year. ''There is a significant probability next year will be the globe's warmest year on record.''

The past decade has been the warmest decade too - Past decade the warmest since records began in 1850.

THIS year has been the third-hottest on record in Australia, and is ranked as the fifth-warmest globally.

A report by the World Meteorological Organisation, published last night, concluded that the decade from 2000 to 2009 was the warmest since instrumental climate records began in 1850.

In 2009, only the United States and Canada experienced conditions that were cooler than average. ''Given the current figures, large parts of southern Asia and central Africa are likely to have their warmest year on record,'' the report said.

Published as world leaders gathered in Copenhagen to consider climate change, it highlights extreme weather conditions around the globe this year, including three ''exceptional heatwaves'' in Australia, China's worst drought in 50 years and the wettest October in the US in 115 years.

Andy Pitman, co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, said this year should have been a cool year because of low solar activity and a recent La Nina weather event. ''The fact it ranked in the top 5 since 1850 is actually frightening,'' he said.

This year's heatwaves in NSW, Victoria and South Australia also did not bode well for next year, Professor Pitman said.

And finally, a look at the "climategate" affair - Climate emails: a dirty war swirls around 'swindle'.

The wall of noise plays into the hands of the vested interests who want to see nothing done. It is used to frighten people whose jobs depend on digging coal or smelting steel.

It has helped deliver a political landscape in Australia, unique in the developed world, where the leader of a major party can now base its climate change policy on the belief that the world seems to be getting cooler.

This, in turn, has taken the pressure off the Government's own questionable climate change policy.

Climate science may be complicated, but it's not rocket science. It is in the public domain, open to informed scrutiny, and it has been there for decades. The self-styled climate sceptics movement - not a term climate scientists approve of - has had ample opportunity to debunk arguments that the world can no longer ignore.

We know that carbon dioxide, some other gases and water vapour trap heat from the sun in the atmosphere. We know this because it can be measured, and replicated in lab experiments. We know that the warming trends we have detected are closely correlated with the rising carbon dioxide content. The computer models used to predict future climate change scenarios take these simple concepts and some other variables, such as solar activity, into account. The reason we know that these models work is that we can model past climate scenarios using the same criteria and match the results up against the existing temperature records. If your model starts with the conditions we know to have been present in the year 1900, and produces the conditions we know to have existed through the 20th century, it is a fair bet it works.

Even if climate models are discounted as evidence, direct observation of the natural world adds to an already compelling case.

We know that the ocean is struggling to absorb carbon dioxide content because we can measure it, and measure its effects on marine life. We can measure the extent of decline in Arctic and Antarctic ice, rising sea levels and melting glaciers. We can measure changes in forests and deserts. We can measure these results against the level of warming that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere leads us to expect, and they match.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded it is 90 per cent certain that the current cycle of climate change is being driven by human activity. It's fifth assessment report, discussed overnight in Copenhagen, will further bolster the evidence. Few scientific theories approach this level of certainty.

EcoGeek has a post on a wave power project in Oregon - Oregon Wave Project Under Way.

A project to build the country's first wave power station off the coast of Oregon is finally moving forward. Wave power company Ocean Power Technologies just signed a contract with Oregon Iron Works to start building 10 buoys, with the first one to be deployed a year from now off the coast of Reedsport.

This project will test the capabilities of the buoys in the area before the company goes forward with a 200-buoy project nearby. Within two years all ten buoys should be deployed and generating power for PNGC Power, the utility that is purchasing all that clean energy. The system will have a capacity of about 1.5 MW and OPT expects to sell the power for about 15 cents/kWh.

The ABC has a report on a new pilot geothermal energy project in Victoria - Vic Govt funds new geothermal project.

The Victorian Government has allocated $25-million for exploration associated with a new geothermal energy project at Anglesea, in the state's west. Geothermal energy used heat from subterrannean rocks to produce clean energy.

The Resources Minister, Peter Batchelor, says the project could become the site of Victoria's first geothermal energy plant. "We'll have the possibility of building a geothermal demonstration plant very close to the existing electricity grid," he said. "It will mean that we'll have the largest demonstration geothermal project in Victoria, and one that can be connected to the grid."

The Energy Collective has a post by Marc Gunther on a new and relatively cheap electric car from the US - An (almost) affordable electric car.

The other day, I took a spin around your nation’s capital in what is being touted as the first affordable electric car that will find its way onto America’s roads.

Not, it’s not the Chevy Volt, the Nissan Leaf, an import from BYD or Tata or a down-scaled Tesla. It’s the Coda, the product of a southern California startup with an unusual business model and some big-name investors.

My chauffeur was Kevin Czinger, Coda’s hard-charging CEO (no pun intended), about whom more in a moment. Czinger wants to build Coda Automotive into an American car maker that looks more like Apple or Dell than GM, Ford or Chrysler.

Coda’s impressive array of backers includes Hank Paulson, the former treasury secretary and CEO of Goldman Sachs; Thomas “Mack” McLarty, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, whose family owns auto dealerships; John Bryson, the former CEO of Edison International; and Tom Steyer, the well-respected founder of Farallon Capital Management.

Czinger isn’t as well known but his pedigree includes degrees from Yale (where he starred on the football team) and Yale Law, and stints at Goldman Sachs, Bertelsmann and Webvan. “I’m doing this,” Czinger says, “because I think it’s absolutely critical that we reduce our dependence on foreign oil and don’t destroy the planet earth.”

Standing in the way of his goal is the problem confronting everyone in the electric car business: How to make a powerful battery at a price that won’t put the car out of the reach of most buyers. That, Czinger says, has been the focus of Coda. “All of our R&D and all of our capital expenditures went into the battery system,” he says. “We finally have the chemistry we need.” Coda developed the battery and owns the intellectual property.

To keep costs down, Coda will make the batteries in China through a joint venture with a state-owned company, Tianjin Lishen, which makes lithium ion batteries for cell phone companies. The vehicles will also be assembled in China by a firm called Hakei Automobile Group, which will manufacture the chassis as well.

Mitsubishi are trying to drum up some support for their rather expensive little Miev electric car in Australia too - Mitsubishi champions $10,000 electric-car subsidy.

Japanese car maker Mitsubishi wants the Federal Government to reward buyers who opt for the company's new electric car.

An electric vehicle buyer would be recompensed around $10,000 if the Federal Government accepts a subsidy scheme proposed by Mitsubishi Australia.

But whether the scheme is accepted or rejected by the Rudd Labor government, Mitsubishi will press ahead with its plan to be the first major brand to sell an EV in Australia, planning to launch the plug-in i-Miev in 2010.

Mitsubishi Motors Australia president Rob McEniry said "it would be an absolute shame" if government did not accept the scheme, which will be formally presented early in 2010.

"If it means the customer has to pay more and we have less cars in Australia then so be it, but we will bring the car in."

The i-Miev is already on limited sale in Japan, is homologated for sale in Australia and has been demonstrated here previously.

Mitsubishi has put the cost of the plug-in i-Miev at AUS$70,000, an exorbitant price for a five-door mini-car, but reflective of the cost of its expensive lithium-ion battery pack.

Slideshare has an interesting presentation on how to reduce pollution (and fuel consumption) by the global shipping industry (estimating almost 3 million barrels per day of oil could be saved - Container Ship - How to reduce effect on Climate and Pollution.

Container Ship - How to reduce effect on Climate and Pollution

View more documents from Glenn Klith Andersen.

The SMH has an article on a proposal for Indonesia to dramataically increase the use of geothermal power, one of the key elemenets in the Desertec Asia plan - Indonesia plans carbon tax, geothermal push.

AS AUSTRALIA battles over an emissions trading scheme, Indonesia is set to release its draft climate change policy, which would establish a carbon tax, set up geothermal energy projects and protect forests.

The potential carbon tax, part of Indonesia's ''green paper'' on climate change, would apply to the combustion of fossil fuels and start at $9 a tonne of carbon dioxide, rising 5 per cent in real terms per year until 2020.

The tax could be coupled with cuts to subsidies for coal and oil-generated power, in an attempt to promote clean energy in the one of the world's fastest-growing economies. ...

Indonesia will also develop a detailed plan to tap the country's huge geothermal potential - which represents 40 per cent of the world's hot-rock resources. The geothermal strategy is aimed at partially offsetting a 7 per cent increase in energy demand every year.

The plan includes a geothermal tariff, in which the Government subsidises the purchase of clean energy by electricity retailers.

Crikey has an article from Guy Rundle trying (in rather tortured English) to explain the how a "green" leftist (not the only type of green, I might add) is different to an old school "red" marxist and how conservatives don't seem to understand either of them - Rundle: on Minchin, the green movement and Marxism.

Argues Kerr, there’s no doubt that the radical left moved holus-bolus into the environmentalist movement in the late ’80s and ’90s, Kerr argues, noting the entrist push into the 1984 Nuclear Disarmament Party by the then Socialist Workers Party (later DSP) among others.

More acutely, Kerr sounds a note of caution: though environmental issues are a real problem, they’re ultimately a business problem, a question of cost — and people really believe that climate change is happening.

Pari passu, the upshot of this is, let’s create a conspiracy about the conspiracy — regard the whole green movement as communism by other means, but let the lumpensuburbatariat think that you really care about the issue.

By now, the whole issue has become so live, that it’s worth disentangling it a little — if only because it throws light on the Liberal Party’s separation from the mainstream.

Everyone knows, or should, that the Communist movement — the Old Left — wasn’t anti-industrial in the slightest. It’s about as wrong a definition as you can get.

The whole aim of Communist movements within capitalist countries was to build a movement within the industrial working class — and thus the growth and expansion of that class was vital to its task. In Communist countries, industrial development was vital to standing against the capitalist world.

Left, Old Left, New Left … by the 1960s Communist Party dominance of the left was starting to slide, as a more civilisational critique of industrial and organisational humanity came to a head — including our impact on nature. Silent Spring, One Dimensional Man, DeSchooling Society, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Steal This Book, Growing Up Absurd, The Dialectic of Sex, and a hundred others suggested implicitly and otherwise that the Old Left was part of a monolithic system of growth and alienation, whose victory would do nothing to solve humanity’s deepest problems.

Lord, by the time that official Communist parties had taken onboard this wider critique, they were irrelevant — and they often remained highly critical of much of its efflorescences. David “Burnout” Burchell fits well into The Oz’s op-ed page because as a CPA intellectual and editor in the ’70s and ’80s, a lot of his role was to hold back much of the “New Left” tide, both its macro-civilisational critique and its micropolitics of non-hierachical participatory organisation and frikkin face painting. He’s a grumpy sod, because those people were most of the readers of ALR, which he edited.

In Michin and Kerr’s account, the accurate part is that a section of the Marxist left — the Trotskyist “far left” groups — began to see the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, as places for entry, activity and recruitment. Within the far-left there was keen debate about the dangers of “movementism” — of getting sucked into the actual cause, rather than building the party. “Far left” groups remained scrupulously agnostic about what form a socialist society would take — but their insistent motif was that environmental destruction was caused by the profit motive (often rendered rather unmarxistally as “greed”), and lack of social control of the economy.

Seen thus, a section of the Green movement was Marxism by other means. But it’s more complicated than that. Because Minchin, Kerr and others can give no credence to the Marxist argument about capitalism — that it must expand endlessly, and at ever greater velocity just to keep going, that the idea of a stabilised capitalism is an illusion of the pre-Marxist classical economists who thought of it as an eternal structure (hidden beneath centuries of bondage) — they can’t credit the possibility that left wing people would work in either a Marxist organisation or a Green one, because they believe the criticism to be correct.

Now, you would have to say that not only is there a strong case for this, but also that many people believe it — that our way of life, especially if it were generalised to all six billion people — would simply choke the planet dead. Many people aren’t prepared to actually change their life at this stage — which is why useless activities such as personal recycling are devised, to give the illusion of action — but hypocrisy is not the worst of vices.

Understand this clearly — more people now believe the Red-Green hypothesis, that capitalism is a system testing us to destruction in its current form, than go with the idea that it is some empty charade of communism by other means. The idea that it’s merely a “business problem” is one they’re increasingly rejecting, at least in thought.

To put it plainly, that group includes a lot of Liberal voters, and a high majority of Labor voters. None of them want to live in grass huts, but the idea that factors other than business will have to be brought into global economic calculus is one that appeals to them — including fairly radical schemes to make the electricity grid two-way with clean domestic power generation, relocalisation of parts of the economy, and drawing areas of life out of the commodity cycle. Ideas that are Green and, in a way, vaguely communistic.

Seriously, it’s early days for all that. But it will grow and grow — and voters will assess parties on their seriousness about addressing the deep problems of global growth, not in advancing cheap kludges that give the sense of appeasing a fringe.

The trouble for Minchin, Kerr and co is that they won the battle at one level — the privatisation of the economy — while culturally the new left prevailed in terms of a sense of what life is about. Now that the right’s victory delivered us a global financial crisis, the new left’s critique of its illusions is still there, and growing stronger by the day.

Beyond Zero Emissions has an interview with the CEO of New Zealand wind turbine manufacturer Windflow - Beyond Zero interviews Geoff Henderson of Windflow.

Geoff Henderson: I decided back in ’76 really to get into wind power. One of the contributing things I remember was one of my school mates had actually done a summer course on renewable energy at I think the University of Sydney, and he came back with some interesting information about the relative merits of solar and wind and so on. And I remember out of that that the basic flux(?) available, the solar resource, is of the order of a few hundreds watts a square metre of land area taken on a year-round basis, that very sunny places can have an average flux of 400 watts a square metre.

And by contrast, wind power, you can get the same or higher flux(?) 5.00min, but in warps(?)5.05min per square metre of vertical space, and therefore inherently the wind power uses a lot less land area than any of the other forms of solar. And I know this sounds a bit dry and boring and technical, but that is actually a very fundamental reason why wind power is the most economic form of renewable energy and has had the highest growth rate over the last 20-30 years.

So that the wind resource is huge – New Zealand of course is beautifully positioned in the Roaring Forties and I believe we will get most of our new electricity generation out of wind power over the next few decades. In some years – in the last ten years – wind power has actually been 100 per cent of new generation already. We’ve had no other new power stations going on but we’ve had 100 or 200 megawatts of wind power going in. ...

Scott Bilby: And your flagship technology to take you there is what you call the Windflow 500 Turbine. Can you tell us, you know, give us some basic specs to just to start off with that wind turbine, but also, what is it that sets it apart from other turbines. Why have you chosen that type of turbine?

Geoff Henderson: ,Sure. It’s a 500 kilowatt rating, 33-metre rota diameter with a hub height of about 30 metres which means that the top of the blade is about – when it goes through the top of its arc is about 46 metres above ground level, so less than 50 metres high. That’s enough for about 200 households at a very windy site, or 100 households at least. And given that our footprint is about a two-and-a-half metre diameter monopile concrete foundation now puts it in perspective the amount of power that we can get out of this turbine.

The two main technologies that set us apart are the two-bladed teetering rotor and the torque limiting gearbox, both of which come out of my time in the UK working for Wind Energy Group which was the leading R&D contractor to the UK Department of Energy, and the torque limiting gearbox was my contribution and my invention and that works with a two-bladed or a three-bladed windmill, and gives you some real torque control and electrical advantages as well.

The two-bladed teetering was something that I learnt over in the UK – became a convert to, having had a background in three-bladers prior to that. It does really work and it enables a lighter machine.

So, to summarise the commercial advantage, we’re coming in at about half the weight of comparable European three-bladed machines. So we’re using half the Earth’s resources if you like, tones of steel and concrete and other materials per unit of output. We’ve got less environmental impact in terms of earth works and road works and so on and my, the perspective that I’ve always taken on this is that I’m trying to get wind power going in New Zealand primarily, it’s the windiest country in the world so you’ve got to have tough turbines, but we’re also very much an unsubsidised environment in New Zealand, especially since the 1980s with the Rogernomics years. Subsidy has become a dirty word in New Zealand and in that lean and mean economic environment we have to make something that’s fundamentally cost effective.

George Monbiot has a look at the effort to try and discredit global warming science - The Real Climate Scandal (with supporting data here - case studies).

Even if you were to exclude every line of evidence which could possibly be disputed - the proxy records, the computer models, the complex science of clouds and ocean currents - the evidence for manmade global warming would still be unequivocal. You can see it in the measured temperature record, which goes back to 1850; in the shrinkage of glaciers and the thinning of sea ice; in the responses of wild animals and plants and the rapidly changing crop zones.

No other explanation for these shifts makes sense. Solar cycles have been out of synch with the temperature record for 40 years(1). The Milankovic cycle, which describes variations in the earth’s orbit, doesn’t explain it either. But the warming trend is closely correlated with the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The impact of these gases can be demonstrated in the laboratory. To assert that they do not have the same effect in the atmosphere, a novel and radical theory would be required. No such theory exists. The science is not fixed - no science ever is - but it is as firm as science can be. The evidence for manmade global warming remains as strong as the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer or HIV to AIDS.

The third observation is the contrast between the global scandal these emails have provoked and the muted response to 20 years of revelations about the propaganda planted by fossil fuel companies. I have placed on my website four case studies, each of which provides a shocking example of how the denial industry works(2).

Two of them are drawn from Climate Cover-Up, the fascinating, funny and beautifully-written new book by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore(3). If every allegation it contained could not be traced back to leaked documents (I have checked all the sources), their findings would be unbelievable. Nothing exposed by the hacking of the Climatic Research Unit’s server is one tenth as bad as the least of these revelations.

When I use the term denial industry, I’m referring to those who are paid to say that manmade global warming isn’t happening. The great majority of people who believe this have not been paid: they have been duped. Reading Climate Cover-Up, you keep stumbling across familiar phrases and concepts, which you can see every day on the comment threads. The book shows that these memes were planted by PR companies and hired experts.

The first case study I’ve posted reveals how a coalition of US coal companies sought to persuade people that the science is uncertain. It listed the two social groups it was trying to reach: “Target 1: Older, less educated males”; “Target 2: Younger, lower-income women” and the methods by which it would reach them. One of its findings was that “members of the public feel more confident expressing opinions on others’ motivations and tactics than they do expressing opinions of scientific issues.”(4)

Remember this, next time you hear people claiming that climate scientists are only in it for the money, or that environmentalists are trying to create a communist world government: these ideas were devised and broadcast by energy companies. The people who inform me, apparently without irony, that “your article is an ad hominem attack, you four-eyed, big-nosed, commie sack of shit” or “you scaremongers will destroy the entire world economy and take us back to the Stone Age” are the unwitting recruits of campaigns they have never heard of.

The second case study reveals how Dr Patrick Michaels, one of a handful of climate change deniers with a qualification in climate science, has been lavishly paid by companies seeking to protect their profits from burning coal(5). As far as I can discover, none of the media outlets who use him as a commentator - including the Guardian - has disclosed this interest at the time of his appearance. Dr Michaels is one of many people commenting on climate change who presents himself as an independent expert while being secretly paid for his services by fossil fuel companies.

The third example shows how a list published by the Heartland Institute (which has been sponsored by Exxon) of 500 scientists “whose research contradicts man-made global warming scares”(6) turns out to be nothing of the kind: as soon as these scientists found out what the institute was saying about them, many angrily demanded that their names be removed. Twenty months later, they are still on the list. The fourth example shows how, during the Bush presidency, White House officials worked with oil companies to remove regulators they didn’t like, and doctor official documents about climate change.

In Climate Cover-Up, in Ross Gelbspan’s books The Heat is On and Boiling Point; in my book Heat and on the websites DeSmogBlog.com and exxonsecrets.org, you can find dozens of such examples. Together they expose a systematic, well-funded campaign to con the public. To judge by the comments you can read on this paper’s website, it has worked.

But people behind these campaigns know that their claims are untrue. One of the biggest was run by the Global Climate Coalition, which represented ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, the American Petroleum Institute and several big motor manufacturers. In 1995 the coalition’s own scientists reported that “the scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”(7) The coalition hid this finding from the public, and spent millions of dollars seeking to persuade people that the opposite was true.

The University of Queensland thinks that geothermal energy could be used to produce fresh water via reverse osmosis in the outback - Cheap fresh water for Queensland country towns using geothermal heat.

An underground source of hot-rock energy may have the potential to produce low-cost fresh water, according to The University of Queensland's Queensland Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence.

The Centre's research has found that Queensland has ample geothermal energy resources to power thermal desalination plants and provide clean water for small towns suffering from water shortages.

Centre Director Professor Gurgenci said the geothermal-powered desalination systems could play a pivotal role in helping ease the water crisis facing small towns.

“This may not be the solution for large-scale desalination needed for cities like Brisbane, but should have a significant contribution in smaller towns like Dalby and Maleny, which have recently experienced extreme water shortages,” he said.

“Overseas experience suggests that these systems can be scaled up to provide 10 to 20 kilolitres of water per day while also helping greenhouse plant growing.”

Queensland's geothermal resources range from high-temperature Hot Fractured Rock (HFR) of the Cooper, Eromanga and possibly Drummond Basins to Hot Sedimentary Aquifiers (HSA) of the Great Artesian Basin.

Professor Gurgenci said that while some of these resources may not be hot enough for electricity generation, they would be a perfect fit for thermal desalination of underground brackish aquifers.

“Australian emphasis so far has been on large-scale desalination using reverse osmosis technology although an overwhelming fraction of desalination around the whole is done by thermal means,” Professor Gurgenci said.

“Studies indicate that for plants in the range of one to 100 megalitres per day, thermal desalination technologies are more suitable than reverse osmosis especially if there is a cheap and abundant supply of heat.

“A geothermal-powered desalination plant in that range can easily provide the entire fresh water needs for an outback city at the cost of around 80 cents to $1.60 per kilolitre.”

The estimated cost developed by the Centre's researchers significantly undercuts the 2010/2011 bulk water prices of $1.00 to $2.00 per kilolitre outlined by the Queensland Water Commission.

Boing Boing reports that British police might be about to stop harrassing photographers - Photographers win British war on photography ?.

Is Britain's war on photography coming to an end? After the Independent newspaper got senior officials to admit that anti-terror legislation was being "widely abused...to question and search innocent photographers," the Association of Chief Police Officers has sent out a strongly worded memo to all officers ordering them to cease the practice. The harrassment of photographers by police officers is said to have senior officers "exasperated, depressed and embarrassed," and they characterize officers' belief that anti-terror laws prohibit photography as an "internal urban myth."

Chief Constable Andy Trotter, chairman of Acpo's media advisory group, took the decision to send the warning after growing criticism of the police's treatment of photographers.

Writing in today's Independent, he says: "Everyone... has a right to take photographs and film in public places. Taking photographs... is not normally cause for suspicion and there are no powers prohibiting the taking of photographs, film or digital images in a public place."

He added: "We need to make sure that our officers and Police Community Support Officers [PCSOs] are not unnecessarily targeting photographers just because they are going about their business. The last thing in the world we want to do is give photographers a hard time or alienate the public. We need the public to help us.

"Photographers should be left alone to get on with what they are doing. If an officer is suspicious of them for some reason they can just go up to them and have a chat with them - use old-fashioned policing skills to be frank - rather than using these powers, which we don't want to over-use at all."

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act allows the police to stop and search anyone they want, without need for suspicion, in a designated area. The exact locations of many of these areas are kept secret from the public, but are thought to include every railway station in and well-known tourist landmarks thought to be at risk of terrorist attacks...

Grist points to The Guardian's joint editorial that they published along with a raft of other newspapers this week to push for a meaningful agreement at Copenhagen - ‘Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation’.

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Sign Up for More News from GristFew believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of U.S. obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the U.S. Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: “We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay.”

At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tons of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Gas deals in Australia and PNG seem to be the hot topic of the week - the latest one is Wheatstone customer TEP signing up another supplier in Papua New Guinea. The SMH reports - Tokyo latest to sign for PNG gas.

THE $US15 billion ($A16.2 billion) Papua New Guinea liquefied natural gas project has signed another off-take agreement, this time with Japan, as the joint-venture partners prepare to give the development the go-ahead today.

Joint-venture partners ExxonMobil (which owns 41.5 per cent), Oil Search (34 per cent) and Santos (17.7 per cent) told the market late yesterday that Tokyo Electric Power Company had signed on to receive 1.8 million tonnes of LNG annually over 20 years.

This was two days after TEPCO signed Australia's largest trade deal to receive 4.1 million tonnes of LNG from Chevron's Wheatstone project in Western Australia in an agreement worth a reported $90 billion.

The TEPCO/ExxonMobil deal provided further evidence that the PNG project would get the green light today and came after China's Sinopec said last week it would take 2 million tonnes a year from the 6.3 million tonnes-a-year project, which would deliver first gas by late 2013 or early 2014.

Earth2tech has a post on Lockheed-Martin's interest in expanding from defence into the clean energy industry - Why Lockheed Martin Wants to Be In The Clean Energy Biz.

Lockheed Martin is looking to take its skills in managing, integrating and financing large engineering projects and apply them to the emerging clean energy and energy efficiency businesses. As clean energy projects move from demo size to large commercial scale (1 GW or more), a company like Lockheed Martin will start to attract interest from utilities that want to work with a large player that can streamline the process. For example Christopher D. Myers, VP of Solar Energy Programs for Lockheed Martin, said there hasn’t been a lot of upfront systems engineering or modeling systems for an industry like solar thermal. We can deliver a project on time, and on budget, said Myers, in an industry that has been dominated by a lot of small and VC backed companies.

One area that’s particularly attractive to Lockheed Martin is the smart grid. Like Boeing is doing, Lockheed can use its background in defense and security systems to appeal to utilities’ desire for robust security technology. Kenneth D. Van Meter, a principal within Lockheed Martin’s Enterprise Integration Group, said that Lockheed can offer the four things that utilities want: scalability, interoperability, security and situational awareness.

Lockheed is already working with a dozen utilities on security and integration, said Meter. With American Electric Power, for example, he said Lockheed is working on the world’s first cyber security grid operations center. That grid security center will accumulate data from real time sources and help mitigate possible threats. The center “will change in a material way security of the electric grid,” said Meter.

Lockheed Martin has been working in bits and pieces in the energy sector for awhile. It has solar thermal and solar PV demo plants in Moorestown, New Jersey, and has had its ocean thermal energy conversion project in Hawaii for years. Lockheed Martin is now taking a more aggressive approach and expanding its portfolio to offer customers a range of technologies. For example, ocean thermal conversion technology works well where wave power buoys don’t, so we can offer something like that as a package, said Kohlhaas.

Beyond these specific energy verticals, Lockheed Martin sees energy as a fundamental global opportunity. Kohlhaas said that energy could be the next transformative initiative that could fundamentally change the global economy and the workforce. But even in Lockheed Martin’s more traditional defense business, energy is rising as an important issue. Soldiers burdened with less fuel weight are more secure, and having troops independent from fuel lines (which can commonly be targets) can increase troop security, too. Lockheed has been working with stealthy ultracacitor firm EEStor to embed the startup’s Electric Energy Storage Units (EESUs) into Lockheed’s military applications.

And there’s also the fact that the defense industry has faced budget cuts and constraints from the economy. Lockheed’s future growth has to come from somewhere, and the company sees clean energy and energy efficiency as a reasonable crossover.

Energy Matters has a post on the NSW gross feed in tariff for solar power - Solar Bonus Scheme Boom In New South Wales.

While the New South Wales Solar Bonus Scheme doesn't kick off until January 1 next year; home solar power providers are already enjoying a sharp increase in orders for systems.

According to Max Sylvester of national solar solutions provider Energy Matters, the rush is already on. "There is usually some weeks of lead up time from the initial interest to installation and this may increase as more people become aware of the program and order systems."

"Given the Solar Bonus Scheme rate of 60 cents per kilowatt hour is guaranteed for seven years and applies to every kilowatt generated; people are understandably very eager to have a system installed sooner rather than later in order to maximize their returns. The activity in our instant online quoting system over the last couple of weeks from New South Wales has been phenomenal and we're ramping up our resources to ensure we can continue to meet the demand."

The NSW Solar Bonus Scheme is currently the most generous feed in tariff in Australia and combined with the Solar Credits rebate, home owners can recoup their investment in just a few years, depending on the installation location. Additionally, the Federal Government's Green Loans program can in some cases see home owners acquire a solar power system for free.

A typical residential solar power installation system has a capacity of around 1.5 kilowatts. According to information provided by the NSW Government., a solar power system of this size would generate approximately 2500 kWh annually, which translates to around $1500 return each year through the Solar Bonus Scheme.

The SMH has an article on the Australian coal seam gas industry, saying that it is time it lived up to the hype regarding LNG exports - Coal seam gas must prove its real worth.

FOR the past three years the coal seam gas industry has been the new god of energy, promising big profits, green energy solutions and providing the gateway to align Australia's gas prices to the more lucrative global prices.

Investors have crammed into the stocks, lifting the value of the listed Coal seam gas (CSG) sector from $100 million in 2002 to $1 billion in 2006, and $5.8 billion at the close of business on Friday.

What makes this valuation explosion even more impressive is that the figures exclude the larger, vertically integrated companies Santos and Origin Energy, which have big exposures to CSG.

But the clock is now ticking for the industry to turn rhetoric into reality and start making some financial investment decisions (FID).

The brutal reality is that no CSG to LNG venture has reached a financial investment decision on the many projects that have been talked about in Queensland's Gladstone region.

There are five FIDs, worth more than $60 billion, that need to be made in the next 12 months, at a time when concerns are growing that there will be too much capacity fighting for a market.

And now there is a new complication: regulatory costs related to environmental issues. Until recently, the CSG industry was seen as an environmentally friendly energy, but farmers and environmental campaigners are concerned about the potential damage to waterways and crop land and the impact of the disposal of salt produced during the CSG extraction process.

Until recently, the water extracted during the coal seam gas process was pumped into ponds, where it would evaporate. But this technique was recently frowned on by the Queensland Government because it was creating ponds of salt.

This has forced companies including Santos to search for alternative solutions.

A report released on Friday following a Senate inquiry into the impact of CSG in the country's most important agricultural area, the Murray-Darling Basin, links CSG with Australia's most sensitive environmental subject, water.

After receiving numerous submissions from environmental groups highlighting concerns, the report recommends as a matter of priority, and preferably before the release of future mineral exploration licences, that state governments establish regional water plans in areas potentially subject to mining or extractive industry operations.

The NYT has an article by Paul Krugman on the cost of switching to clean energy - An Affordable Truth.

Maybe I’m naïve, but I’m feeling optimistic about the climate talks starting in Copenhagen on Monday. President Obama now plans to address the conference on its last day, which suggests that the White House expects real progress. It’s also encouraging to see developing countries — including China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide — agreeing, at least in principle, that they need to be part of the solution.

Of course, if things go well in Copenhagen, the usual suspects will go wild. We’ll hear cries that the whole notion of global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a vast scientific conspiracy, as demonstrated by stolen e-mail messages that show — well, actually all they show is that scientists are human, but never mind. We’ll also, however, hear cries that climate-change policies will destroy jobs and growth.

The truth, however, is that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is affordable as well as essential. Serious studies say that we can achieve sharp reductions in emissions with only a small impact on the economy’s growth. And the depressed economy is no reason to wait — on the contrary, an agreement in Copenhagen would probably help the economy recover.

Why should you believe that cutting emissions is affordable? First, because financial incentives work.

Action on climate, if it happens, will take the form of “cap and trade”: businesses won’t be told what to produce or how, but they will have to buy permits to cover their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. So they’ll be able to increase their profits if they can burn less carbon — and there’s every reason to believe that they’ll be clever and creative about finding ways to do just that.

As a recent study by McKinsey & Company showed, there are many ways to reduce emissions at relatively low cost: improved insulation; more efficient appliances; more fuel-efficient cars and trucks; greater use of solar, wind and nuclear power; and much, much more. And you can be sure that given the right incentives, people would find many tricks the study missed.

The truth is that conservatives who predict economic doom if we try to fight climate change are betraying their own principles. They claim to believe that capitalism is infinitely adaptable, that the magic of the marketplace can deal with any problem. But for some reason they insist that cap and trade — a system specifically designed to bring the power of market incentives to bear on environmental problems — can’t work.

While a prefer a carbon tax (with matching reductions in income tax) to carbon trading, either is better than the mishmash of "options" proposed by conservatives, with new Liberal leader Tony Abbott apparently preferring a $50 billion package of regulation and subsidies to a market based mechanism - $50b bill for Abbott carbon plan.

THE shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, has estimated the cost of Tony Abbott's climate change policy at over $50 billion.

In a tense confidential exchange in shadow cabinet two weeks ago, before Mr Abbott seized the Liberal leadership, Mr Hockey challenged his colleague's position on climate change.

According to people present during the spirited debate, Mr Hockey spoke strongly in favour of the Liberal policy at that time - pushed by the then leader, Malcolm Turnbull - to support the Government's amended emissions trading scheme.

Mr Abbott was one of six in the 20-member shadow cabinet who spoke out against the policy.

Mr Hockey challenged him by asking: "What's the alternative?"

Mr Abbott cited a list of carbon abatement measures - other than an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax - that Mr Turnbull had mentioned in a speech on January 24.

Mr Hockey, exasperated, shot back: "That's $50 billion plus!"

This figure apparently is based on his own estimate of the cost of the measures, which are now at the core of Liberal policy since Mr Abbott took the leadership last week and dumped support for the ETS or a carbon tax.

Ross Gittins in the SMH is also ruminating about this bizarre reluctance to use a market based mechanism to tackle the problem - Abbott can't escape climate change and taxes.

Tony Abbott's stated intention to have ''a strong and effective climate change policy'' that doesn't involve either an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax is rife with internal contradictions.

For a start, it's strange for a party of the right to reject the pro-market solution to climate change in favour of a much more intrusive, regulatory approach.

For another thing, it's strange to reject ''a big new tax'' in favour of an approach that, if it were to work, would require a huge increase in government spending on subsidies and incentives. If such an approach weren't to involve huge deficits and debt, or swingeing cuts in other government spending, it would require huge increases in old taxes.

These contradictions arise because of Kevin Rudd's success in driving a wedge between the Liberals' heartland supporters (never agree to anything proposed by evil Labor) and the wider electorate. The Herald's Nielsen poll says that even a majority of Liberal voters supports a trading scheme.

The pragmatist in Abbott knows he must go to the election with a credible-sounding plan to respond to the threat of climate change. But all the populist campaigning against ''a big new tax'' has, ironically, ruled out the most sensible approach.

But there's an even more fundamental contradiction: Abbott owes his job to the machinations of Nick Minchin and his band of climate-change deniers. If they couldn't stomach Malcolm Turnbull's compromise deal (which would have removed climate change as an election issue) why would they agree to any alternative approach proposed by Abbott?

Let's get back to basics. If you agree that global warming is a problem and something should be done to limit it, you have to accept it's a case of ''market failure'' which market forces aren't capable of correcting by themselves.

You must therefore accept the need for government intervention in the market in some form. (It's because libertarians are opposed to almost all intervention bar that needed for law, order and defence, and rarely admit the existence of market failure, that they find it so tempting to deny climate change is a problem.)

Most economic rationalists accept the need for intervention, but want to ensure it does as little as possible to disrupt the market and distort the choices made by producers and consumers. They see the problem as that the ''social cost'' of the damage done by greenhouse gas emissions isn't reflected in market prices.

So if they can find a way to get the social cost incorporated into market prices - to ''internalise the externality'' - they can leave it to market forces to do the rest.

One way to do this is impose a tax on carbon emissions, which forces up the prices of emissions-intensive goods and services, thereby reducing the demand for such items, encouraging energy efficiency, reducing any price disadvantage suffered by less-polluting energy sources and creating a monetary incentive for firms to find new technological solutions to the problem.

An emissions trading scheme is very similar. Its key role is also to raise prices, with the proceeds from sales of emissions permits going to government as a de facto tax. It creates a whole new synthetic market for the purchase and sale of permits and associated derivatives.

In theory, this makes it superior to a carbon tax. In practice, it makes it more difficult to administer and possibly opens it to greater price manipulation and uncertainty.

Dan Cass has a post at Crikey's "Rooted" blog looking at some of the pitfalls awaiting the Liberals - The top three climate pitfalls for the Opposition to avoid.

Here is my Top Three Avoidable Pitfalls for an ambitious Opposition in the era of climate change:

1. Underestimating the climate movement

Australian Prime Ministers are used to dealing with a small corps of key environmental groups and commentators: the Australian Conservation Foundation, WWF, Tim Flannery etc. It would be a grave mistake to think that these few groups or individuals are still able to award the big green publicity medals.

Every month that goes by, a new climate action group starts in Australia. This under-reported sector is reinventing the environmental movement. It wields the moral authority and is rapidly building an organisational capacity.

2. Patronising the media

PM John Howard got away with speaking ecological bunkum to the Canberra Press Gallery because so few reporters took environmental issues seriously. This changed in the wake of the Stern Report and Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.

Over the past two years, a corps of influential journalists have become climate experts. Young journalists coming up through the ranks are even more environmentally literate and motivated.

3. Shunning green business

New energy firms are billion dollar enterprises and old corporations are greening their production. The current air-freighted issue of Harvard Business Review has green business on the cover and says it is way out of the global recession.

The Coalition partners can retain their reputation as parties of business only if they support the interests of the emerging green economy. Already, in the USA, the Chamber of Commerce is splitting over its allegiance to fossil fuel firms at the expense of the rising green businesses.

And finally, the ABC has an article on Malcolm Turnbull's latest broadside in his blog (Time for some straight talking on climate change) against the new Liberal leadership (it must be nice knowing that after they openly defied him when he was leader, he now need have no qualms about doing the same thing to them) - Turnbull savages Abbott over climate 'bullshit'.

Former Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull has unleashed an attack on his successor Tony Abbott, describing his climate change position as "bullshit".

In a strongly-worded blog entry posted this morning, Mr Turnbull personally attacks Mr Abbott for putting the party's integrity on the line, saying Coalition climate change policy has descended into "farce", because it does not have a policy.

He vows to cross the floor and vote for the Government's emissions trading scheme and urges his colleagues to follow him.

Mr Abbott declined to respond to the attack at a press conference in Sydney this morning, insisting his fight was with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

After ousting Mr Turnbull six days ago Mr Abbott withdrew Coalition support for an emissions trading scheme and said a Coalition policy would not involve any new taxes.

But in today's blog entry Mr Turnbull says emissions cannot be cut without a cost.

"While a shadow minister, Tony Abbott was never afraid of speaking bluntly in a manner that was at odds with Coalition policy," he writes.

"So as I am a humble backbencher I am sure he won't complain if I tell a few home truths about the farce that the Coalition's policy, or lack of policy, on climate change has descended into.

"To replace dirty coal fired power stations with cleaner gas fired ones, or renewables like wind let alone nuclear power or even coal fired power with carbon capture and storage is all going to cost money.

To get farmers to change the way they manage their land, or plant trees and vegetation all costs money.

"Somebody has to pay.

"So any suggestion that you can dramatically cut emissions without any cost is, to use a favourite term of Mr Abbott, 'bullshit.' Moreover he knows it.

"It is not possible to criticise the new Coalition policy on climate change because it does not exist."

Mr Turnbull goes on to describe those who backed Mr Abbott's leadership as climate change sceptics.

"As we are being blunt, the fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job do not want to do anything about climate change. They do not believe in human caused global warming.

"As Tony observed on one occasion 'climate change is crap', or if you consider his mentor, Senator Minchin, the world is not warming, it's cooling and the climate change issue is part of a vast left wing conspiracy to deindustrialise the world.

"The Liberal Party is currently led by people whose conviction on climate change is that it is "crap" and you don't need to do anything about it. Any policy that is announced will simply be a con, an environmental figleaf to cover a determination to do nothing."

Chevron's Wheatstone gas field has long been the subject of a tug of war between Chevron (who want to develop it themselves - at one point talking up the possibility of building a GTL plant) and Woodside, who want to use the gas as feedstock for their second Pluto LNG train, which will shortly begin construction at the Burrup Penninsula.

It appears that Chevron have found a customer for the gas at last, with weekend press reports trumpeting a "$90 billion" gas sale to Japanese power company Tokyo Electric. The development is expected to produce 4.1 million tonnes of LNG exported each year. A final decision on the project is expected in 2011.

With Pluto, Gorgon and Wheatstone all looking to move forward after long delays, and the federal government's "use it or lose it" push to get holders of gas reserves to develop them quickly, we may see the Browse and Sunrise fields developed in the coming decade as well.