Random Notes  

A Federal government commitee has recommended action be taken to "tax drivers and reward green homes". I must admit I'm a bit flabbergasted by such a sensible lot of proposals being put forward by a Coalition dominated group, but well done to them, even Greens leader Bob Brown couldn't find anything substantial to complain about. Hopefully it actually makes it through to the next stage of actually being implemented, but I won't get too excited about it in the meantime.

Scrapping tax breaks for company cars, increasing the cost of four-wheel-drives, boosting bicycle use and topping up the first home buyers' grant for people who buy greener homes must be considered to make cities liveable, says a Federal Government report.

A sustainability commission should also be created to set and monitor the nation's water and energy efficiency targets, it says. Labor, the Greens and environmentalists have hailed the bipartisan report by a Coalition-dominated committee as a positive step. It will now be considered by the Environment Minister, Ian Campbell, before the Government adopts a formal position on its recommendations.

The committee's chairman, West Australian Liberal MP Mal Washer, said the Government needed to take greater action to stop city dwellers from using more than their fair share of water and energy. Adopting the recommendations, he said, would be "a means of creating a healthy society". "This is not just an environmental issue but about our health, the economy and our children," Mr Washer said.

The independent sustainability commission would be similar to the National Competition Council and offer financial incentives to states to meet water and energy efficiency targets. Cars, with their hefty contribution to Australia's high rate of greenhouse gas emissions, were a focus of the committee. It recommended a review of the fringe benefit tax concessions for company cars and suggested raising tariffs on 4WDs for everyone except farmers and those who could prove a legitimate need. The tariff on 4WDs is 10 per cent, lower than the tariff on other imported cars, giving city dwellers an incentive to use what are in many cases inefficient and high-pollution cars.

The committee also recommended more federal money for public transport, such as light rail and bicycle paths, increasing the first home buyers' grant to $10,000 for people buying environmentally friendly houses and doubling the photovoltaic rebate to increase the use of solar panels on rooftops.

The Greens leader, Bob Brown, said the report "reads like a quite comprehensive take from Greens' policies". Auditing water and energy use was a good idea, he said, to let people know how much they were using. "We do it for the economy so why not the environment and lifestyle?"

The Opposition's environment spokesman, Anthony Albanese, was positive but said more needed to be done to deal with "soaring greenhouse pollution"."The Government's own climate change report estimated Australia could be two degrees hotter by 2030, which would devastate our cities with more intense cyclones, more heatwaves and bushfires and reduced rainfall in southern cities."

On the subject of "green homes", TreeHugger has a post up on a zero energy house in Chicago.

There are reports that Delta Airlines is about to file for bankruptcy. I've noticed visitors from Delta (and other airlines) in the server logs recently, and I suspect if airline executives are aware of and accept peak oil as a near term reality then they'll be feeling pretty despondent.

Is there a way for most airlines to survive in the post peak period ? I suspect the answer is no. Some may be able to cater purely to those who can afford to pay exorbitant prices (I can imagine some "all business class" airlines appearing in the future), but I think the days of mass discount air travel won't last all that long (though the lowest cost operators may be able to survive longer than many full-spectrum airlines). One likely survivor is Emirates, which is in the sweet spot of flying people to the land of oil and having a focus on the more well-heeled type of traveller. One thing airlines might like to consider is actively encouraging other sectors of the economy to reduce fuel use (given that they don't have too many options themselves), which could result in some novel advertising being done.

Plenty of other businesses besides airlines are already feeling the pinch of course.

And while I'm touching on sightings in the visitor logs I had a laugh tonight when I saw someone from a major car rental company looking around - not so much because of the company (as I'm sure car rental companies are almost as concerned as airlines about what is happening) but more because they came in via oilempire.us !

There is talk about punishing price gouging for petrol here (which seems to be mostly hot air), but this report did contain one interesting snippet from an economist - at least one of them gets it (which isn't entirely surprising, as most of Shane Oliver's quotes are generally pretty sensible).

Economists said there was not much governments could do to protect motorists from higher petrol prices that reflected global supply and demand. The chief economist at AMP Capital Investors, Shane Oliver, said cutting petrol excise or GST would be unwise. "It just encourages greater consumption of what is proving to be a finite resource. The better way to hand that back [increased GST and resource rents] is via income tax cuts, rather than considering artificially lowering the petrol price."

In the UK, things seem to be on the slide, with reports of fuel lines forming and more rumours about strikes. Further north the Scottish are feeling ripped off about the proceeds of North Sea oil having been funnelled southwards over the past few decades. Gordon Brown is blaming OPEC, whom I'm sure will be a convenient and much maligned scapegoat over the next decade.

In Mexico, the President has announced new energy policies to try and achieve that holy grail of the new millenium "energy security". One look at the measures he is proposing shows that he will be fighting a losing battle against geological realities.

Mexican President Vicente Fox on Monday announced a series of measures designed to keep energy costs down for millions of Mexicans and increase the country's energy independence.

The measures include limiting price increases on gas and electricity and reforms to allow more private investment in exploration and production of natural gas. World energy prices have soared amid the effects of Hurricane Katrina, and Fox said Katrina not only threatened to cause significant increases in energy prices, but also could affect supplies to Mexico.

"This has made evident the vulnerability of our energy supply structure," Fox said. "The lack of deep reforms in the energy sector seriously limits the capability to take advantage of our underground natural gas."

Rigzone also has a report on a major gas discovery at Kish Island in Iran.

There has been a large power outage in Los Angeles recently, which always brings to mind Duncan's Olduvai Cliff theory, though in this case it seems to be a maintenance accident - the third world is the most likely to fall off the cliff at this stage.

Marshall Auerbach at Prudent Bear has a look at Indonesia - "Indonesia: Asia’s New Weak Link?" as oil price rises stretch the budget deficit there to bursting point.

Lost amidst the carnage wrought by Hurricane Katrina have been ominous developments in Indonesia. Jakarta has been in the headlines this past week after President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said his government would raise fuel prices and cut ballooning subsidies, but failed either to outline how or exactly when it would do so. The government's penchant for subsidizing fuel is expected to cost $14bn this year - a third of its forecast expenditure, or 5.4 per cent of gross domestic product. This is taking its toll on the rupiah, which is close to a four-year low against the dollar, falling almost 10 per cent last week. The rupiah’s sharp fall has evoked uncomfortable memories of the Asian financial crisis of 1997/98.

Indonesia cut fuel subsidies in March, but the subsequent rise in crude oil prices has more than wiped out any savings. As a result, south-east Asia's biggest oil producer is ransacking its foreign exchange reserves to pay for imported oil and to shore up its currency. Forex reserves have fallen by about $4bn to $32bn in the first six months of this year. That is a comfortable cushion on most measures, but not one that will bear sustained intervention.

WorldChanging has a post on Shell's "Springboard" program to encourage renewable energy development.

I have a growing suspicion that Royal Dutch Shell might actually be taking this whole global warming thing seriously.

Diligence and skepticism are entirely warranted when evaluating the environmental behavior of global industrial players, especially those who have a history of (let's just say) not entirely green behavior. Even projects that pass the initial smell test can end up being less exciting than once hoped (has anyone heard much lately about GE's "Ecomagination" project beyond the TV ads extolling the virtues of coal?) Oil companies are on particularly shaky ground here, as their stock-in-trade is one of the chief culprits behind climate disruption.

That said, it's clear that there's some variation among the major oil companies. BP and Shell, for example, have arguably been more willing to accept the evidence for global warming than has ExxonMobil, and both seem to be more interested in developing non-fossil energy technologies than the other oil companies. To the extent that the efforts are used to promote their own environmental behavior, however, the "greenwashing" label is hard to avoid.

That's what makes Shell's new project, "Springboard," so interesting...

CNN has noticed problems with glaciers melting, with a report called "Water crisis looms as Himalayan glaciers melt" (via FTD) which is grim reading for those in India and China.

Imagine a world without drinking water.

It's a scary thought, but scientists say the 40 percent of humanity living in South Asia and China could well be living with little drinking water within 50 years as global warming melts Himalayan glaciers, the region's main water source. The glaciers supply 303.6 million cubic feet every year to Asian rivers, including the Yangtze and Yellow rivers in China, the Ganga in India, the Indus in Pakistan, the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh and Burma's Irrawaddy.

But as global warming increases, the glaciers have been rapidly retreating, with average temperatures in the Himalayas up 1 degree Celsius since the 1970s. A World Wide Fund report published in March said a quarter of the world's glaciers could disappear by 2050 and half by 2100.

"If the current scenario continues, there will be very little water left in the Ganga and its tributaries," Prakash Rao, climate change and energy program coordinator with the fund in India told Reuters.

TOD has a link to a rather doom laden analysis of the aftermath of Katrina (the "free energy" world that this comes from seems to be a sort of cargo cult that believes in perpetual motion to my jaundiced eye, with all due respect to Mr Tesla, "The Man Who Invented The 20th Century", of course - in reality solar, wind and tidal power are going to be the future). A later post on TOD debunks some of the inaccuracies in the text.

The Independent has a story on the disgusting New Orleans bridge account which I've seen quoted all over the place. What sort of police force shoots at starving refugees trying to escape a flooded city ?

A Louisiana police chief has admitted that he ordered his officers to block a bridge over the Mississippi river and force escaping evacuees back into the chaos and danger of New Orleans. Witnesses said the officers fired their guns above the heads of the terrified people to drive them back and "protect" their own suburbs.

Two paramedics who were attending a conference in the city and then stayed to help those affected by the hurricane, said the officers told them they did not want their community "becoming another New Orleans".

The desperate evacuees were forced to trudge back into the city they had just left. "It was a real eye-opener," Larry Bradshaw, 49, a paramedic from San Francisco, told The Independent on Sunday. "I believe it was racism. It was callousness, it was cruelty."

Reports of a complete breakdown in law and order in New Orleans still appear to largely politically driven (by the usual suspects) rather than reality based - reports from real people on the ground continue to indicate that most people behaved exactly as you'd expect after a disaster - they try and help each other and are grateful when rescue teams finally arrive - just like anywhere else in the world. From an email newsletter on recovery efforts:

Breaux Act Agencies Assist with Hurricane Katrina Search and Rescue

A team of Breaux Act agency personnel rescued more than 350 people in the mid-city/New Orleans east area during the last week after the area was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005. The team of about 50 rescuers included personnel from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and U.S. Geological Survey National Wetlands Research Center (NWRC).

The team gathered some 20 boats and made several trips, with the last trip beginning September 3 and ending September 6. Rescuers worked with the Phoenix, Arizona Fire and Rescue Team during the last mission.

Members of the team reported no incidents of violence towards rescuers, contrary to rumors and reports from the media. At one point, media personnel approached the local team after hearing that a team member had been fired upon and killed. Rescuers quickly squashed the rumor. NWRC team member Scott Wilson stated, "We experienced nothing but kindness from the local people." Wilson reported that the assistance of local residents increased the team's efficiency because they led rescuers to where people were waiting to be rescued. Some rescuers were surprised by grateful residents offering them food.

Team members also reported tremendous cooperation and integration among rescue teams.One rescuer stated that he was pleased with what the group accomplished considering the chaotic conditions that accompany a catastrophic event of this magnitude. Another team member, Kevin Roy of USFWS said, "In my 14 years of service to the federal government, helping those people in New Orleans was definitely the most gratifying experience I've ever had."

The saga of the anti-Halliburton peace activist is still in the news here, and doesn't seem to have been resolved yet. How Philip "The Cadaver" Ruddock can justify this thing in a supposedly liberal democracy is beyond me.

The proposed new restrictions on our freedoms are also getting a fair amount of discussion, with many people feeling they are really part of a war on dissent.

Strangely enough there has been the usual remarkable coincidence with the release of an "Al Qaeda" video threatening an attack on Melbourne appearing on US TV shortly after these new laws were announced - funny how this sort of thing keeps on happening - those terrorists really have a terrible sense of PR timing. A conspiracy theorist might suggest this sort of thing is just to keep us all in a state of fear while our rights are slowly stripped away.

In the US, the "shredding of liberty" is already a fait accompli it seems.

For those who are dismayed by this sort of thing, watching a BBC documentary called "The Power Of Nightmares" is something you really should do - it will make a lot of what is going on a lot clearer. Reading Orwell's "1984" again can be surprisingly enlightening too.

And as a final note, I'll just add that the "war on terror" (or "war to control middle eastern oil" as I tend to think of it) will never end (and is unwinnable) until we wean ourselves off oil (and politicians wean themselves off fear based politics) and thus no longer feel the need to interfere with what happens in the middle east and central asia.