The Weather Makers  

Energy Bulletin has a good roundup of all the latest global warming news, including a summary of excerpts from Tim Flannery's new book "The Weathermakers". The also have links to a great series of articles in The Seattle Times, starting with "The truth about global warming".

Bart comments on the New York Times' (or The New Pravda as Billmon accurately calls it) article on the "bright side" of global warming - being able to drill for oil in the Arctic when the polar ice cap has vanished.

Jon S. rightfully skewers this insane article at Peak Energy (Seattle). Shame on the NY Times for clapping its hands in glee at the rape of the planet. What a contrast to the in-depth, responsible coverage by the Seattle Times (see previous articles). Related article from the Oil and Gas Journal: Arctic melt brings new E&P promise.

Over at Treehugger, they have a post on "North South East West - A 360° View of Climate Change", an exhibition on how people’s lives are affected by climate change.



The Energy Blog notes that "clean coal" isn't climate friendly yet, for a variety of reasons.

In energy news, Dow Chemical is asking for the US government to declare a national Natural Gas emergency.

Malaysia Airlines has raised its fuel surcharges again.

Mobjectvist has continued his modelling binge (now in the optimisation stage) with a look at lower US 48 states production, and also looks back at Jimmy Carter's brave energy vision, now ever-so-slowly being adopted by the present loser incumbent after 30 wasted years.

... to Carter the energy crisis offered an opportunity to regain our sense of hopefulness and national self-confidence. "Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally," he observed. "On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny ... . It can rekindle our sense of unity, our confidence in the future, and give our nation and all of us individually a new sense of purpose."

Carter established a clear goal. "Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 -- never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation." By the end of the 1980s, the nation would reduce "our dependence on foreign oil by one-half."

To achieve these goals Carter requested of Congress "the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun."

For Carter, fairness was to be an important criterion in shaping energy policy. Since the poor suffer most from rising energy prices, "Our nation must be fair to the poorest among us, so we will increase aid to needy Americans to cope with rising energy prices ... ."

Carter also applied the principle to the other end of the wealth spectrum: the oil companies reaping enormous profits because of OPEC-inspired price hikes.

"Congress must enact the windfall profits tax without delay," Carter insisted. "It will be money well spent. Unlike the billions of dollars that we ship to foreign countries to pay for foreign oil, these funds will be paid by Americans to Americans."

Congress enacted much of what Jimmy Carter proposed. Coupled with the energy-efficiency standards for cars enacted by an earlier Democratic Congress, and the passage in 1978 of five energy bills directed at spurring energy efficiency and renewable energy, the Energy Security Act of 1980 created a comprehensive and coherent energy policy directed toward eliminating our dependence on imported oil.

Why don't we remember this?

BHP is exploring offshore South Africa with another billion barrel field being speculated about.

Uranium miner ERA is in the news, with a number of offshore shareholders looking to offload their minority stakes after a huge share price run up and uncertainty as to whether or not Jabiluka will go ahead when Ranger shuts down in a few years time.

The Oil Drum is continuing to analyze the large projects listed by CERA - this round looks at 2006 starts. Australian investors note how small the Chinguetti project is in comparison with some of the others.



According to IEA chief Claude Mandil the world's oil supply is "Not Peaking" - he claims "current shortage concerns could be addressed by increasing exploration investment in the Middle East and in the countries of the former Soviet Union". What a relief.

WorldChanging has a post on the question of what is more important - producing more energy or using what we have more efficiently.

The UK Design Council's RED group has been working on a variety of projects linking design and energy/climate issues, and the corresponding RED blog is paying attention to new developments in the field. Today, RED linked to an article in the UK's Guardian containing a particularly pithy observation: a call for more power generation -- whether desired by politicians or energy industry executives -- is the answer to the wrong problem.

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There's a saying that runs something like "people aren't interested in lightbulbs, they're interested in light" -- that is, improvements to a given specific technology must always be in the service of the larger purpose of the technology. Too narrow a focus on improving a given technology (e.g., internal combustion engine cars) can blind one to the rewards of meeting the same needs with entirely different systems (e.g., smart planning and personal mass transit). Alex is fond of remarking that "the solution to the problem of cars won't be found under the hood," and to the extent this means that meeting transportation needs efficiently and sustainably is likely to mean something more than plug-in hybrids and fuel cells, he's right.

WorldChanging also has an intersing little note on Steven Chu on Termite Guts and Global Warming which raises the idea that we should look at "the role of bioengineered bacteria in the shift away from fossil fuels".

Business2 has a look at the relationship between Sun and Google. The energy related hook is that Google is looking to cut power consumption (when you have 250,000 servers, this is an issue) in the face of likely electricity price spikes in (the northern) winter.

So why would Google choose to invest specifically in the Sun Fire line? The newest models, the Sun Fire x4100 and x4200, are designed exactly for the type of computing capabilities Google needs. Also, Sun's servers are built to stay cool and sit on top of each other in sprawling data centers -- exactly the kind of computing environment Google uses.

When you squeeze an extremely high-powered computer into a case designed to fit in a rack (about the size of a pizza box), there are different demands to account for than with a stand-alone desktop computer. It's well documented that minimizing heat production and power consumption are the biggest problems with rack servers. By adapting tricks it has learned from a decade of making 64-bit servers using its own Sparc chips, Sun has pulled off some technical feats that Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM have yet to match. The x4100, for example, manages 50 percent more performance, according to Sun, while consuming a third of the power and a quarter of the space of a comparable Dell server. It does this primarily by using the latest dual-core chips from AMD, while Dell uses less-efficient single-core chips from Intel.

Few companies have computing demands on the scale of Google's, of course. But space in data centers is getting tight across the United States, according to commercial real estate brokerage CB Richard Ellis, which helps locate available data centers for its customers. Also, electricity prices could spike this winter, making power consumption even more of a concern than it already is.

It appears the French are paying their citizens to have more babies - though they still have a way to go before they reach the $5000 per baby the Australian government will be paying next year. This one is also via Energy Bulletin, which noted "This article on encouraging population growth belongs in an "anti-solutions" category.".

Millenialism is on the rise, with gloomy pronouncements all around lately. Lunatic preacher Pat Robertson is gleefully looking forward to the end times.

Perennial bear Steve Roach from Morgan Stanely has issued another declaration that the end is nigh for the US dollar. he has joined the gold bug camp it seems.

Alas, liquidity-driven markets always seem to have a knack of creating a false sense of confidence that long outlasts underlying fundamentals. Most still believe that this year’s under-performance of dollar-denominated assets is an aberration that is about to be reversed. My guess is that dollar-overweight investors are now moving into the final phase of denial. In my view, the biggest anomalies in world financial markets remain the US dollar, US bonds, spreads on risky assets (emerging-market debt and high-yield corporates), and energy prices. And who wouldn’t like gold in this climate?

Yes, I, too, am getting sick and tired of droning on endlessly about the coming rebalancing of an unbalanced world. The wait is always most painful at the end. Remember the early months of 2000? George Eliot put it best in Silas Marner: “The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.”

Past Peak also has a dose of economic bearishness from John Hussman.

There has to be a lot wrong with market action to provoke me to increase hedges when the market is down rather than up. There was a lot wrong on Wednesday — it was singularly the worst technical showing I can recall in years.

Other veteran market-watchers had similar comments. The Dow was down 123 points, which wasn't in itself so unusual, but the internal action was terrible. Richard Russell commented after the close that the action was "a really mean mark today, with my PTI [Power Trend Index] close to a bear signal, and Lowry's also close to a major sell signal. I still get the feeling that complacency rules. Today was what I call a semi-crash day." On the subject of complacency, Investors Intelligence reports that the majority of investment advisors have been bullish now for 154 weeks, which is the longest bullish stretch in the 42 years the figures have been tracked. Joe Granville described Wednesday as having "the most bearish reversal patterns that I have ever seen in one day," which is an interesting statement even for a perennial bear. [...]

At least these guys aren't seeing the fabled "Hindenburg Omen" that some people were freaking out about last week. Not to say that things don't appear on thin ice - I'm somewhat surprised at how bearish non-peak oil obsessed (or even aware) some of my acquantainces have become lately - that 1914 feeling must be affecting everyone.

Zbigniew Brzezinski (try saying that quickly 3 times in a row) has a column in the LA Times excoriating the Bush administration's actions in the middle east. The points are mostly well made, but might sound more convincing coming from someone who hadn't drawn up the blueprint for this stuff 25 years ago. What game is being played here ?

Some 60 years ago Arnold Toynbee concluded, in his monumental "Study of History," that the ultimate cause of imperial collapse was "suicidal statecraft." Sadly for George W. Bush's place in history and — much more important — ominously for America's future, that adroit phrase increasingly seems applicable to the policies pursued by the United States since the cataclysm of 9/11.

Though there have been some hints that the Bush administration may be beginning to reassess the goals, so far defined largely by slogans, of its unsuccessful military intervention in Iraq, President Bush's speech Thursday was a throwback to the demagogic formulations he employed during the 2004 presidential campaign to justify a war that he himself started.

That war, advocated by a narrow circle of decision-makers for motives still not fully exposed, propagated publicly by rhetoric reliant on false assertions, has turned out to be much more costly in blood and money than anticipated. It has precipitated worldwide criticism. In the Middle East it has stamped the United States as the imperialistic successor to Britain and as a partner of Israel in the military repression of the Arabs. Fair or not, that perception has become widespread throughout the world of Islam.

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Compounding such political dilemmas is the degradation of America's moral standing in the world. The country that has for decades stood tall in opposition to political repression, torture and other violations of human rights has been exposed as sanctioning practices that hardly qualify as respect for human dignity. Even more reprehensible is the fact that the shameful abuse and/or torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was exposed not by an outraged administration but by the U.S. media. In response, the administration confined itself to punishing a few low-level perpetrators; none of the top civilian and military decision-makers in the Department of Defense and on the National Security Council who sanctioned "stress interrogations" (a.k.a. torture) were publicly disgraced, prosecuted or forced to resign. The administration's opposition to the International Criminal Court now seems quite self-serving.

Finally, complicating this sorry foreign policy record are war-related economic trends. The budgets for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security are now larger than the total budget of any nation, and they are likely to continue escalating as budget and trade deficits transform America into the world's No. 1 debtor nation. At the same time, the direct and indirect costs of the war in Iraq are mounting, even beyond the pessimistic prognoses of its early opponents, making a mockery of the administration's initial predictions. Every dollar so committed is a dollar not spent on investment, on scientific innovation or on education, all fundamentally relevant to America's long-term economic primacy in a highly competitive world.

It should be a source of special concern for thoughtful Americans that even nations known for their traditional affection for America have become openly critical of U.S. policy. As a result, large swathes of the world — including nations in East Asia, Europe and Latin America — have been quietly exploring ways of shaping regional associations tied less to the notions of transpacific, or transatlantic, or hemispheric cooperation with the United States. Geopolitical alienation from America could become a lasting and menacing reality.

CNN has a very interesting (but rather alarming, given some of the subtexts) article on he 1918 Flu pandemic.

Historian John Barry, author of "The Great Influenza," said the disease "killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years." The worst-hit U.S. cities were Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Barry said vigilantes patrolled the streets of Albuquerque, New Mexico, making people wear their masks.

President Woodrow Wilson continued sending troop ships to Europe, something Barry describes as "floating coffins." Treatment was limited in 1918 -- Crotty said people tried folk medicine, prayer, anything. "There were no antibiotics, there was just hope that you'd get through, that fate was kind enough that it wouldn't hit you or yours," he said.

Bayer aspirin was just hitting the market. But because it was a German company, and Germany was a foe in World War I, many Americans distrusted it and even believed the new product was a form of germ warfare.

A theory, Barry notes, that was even suggested by U.S. government officials. He said the pandemic caused the United States largely to "grind to a stop." "Fear drove everybody inside," he said. Across the United States, "60 percent absentee rates" and empty city streets were common, Barry said.

He said the climate of fear was brought on by a mistrust of government officials and the press. "People could see while they were being told on the one hand that it's ordinary influenza, on the other hand they are seeing their spouse die in 24 hours or less, bleeding from their eyes, ears, nose and mouth, turning so dark that people thought it was the black death," Barry says said. "People knew that they were being lied to; they knew that this was not ordinary influenza."

Nearly as quickly as it struck, the 1918 flu seemed to disappear.

And to close, here's a water saving device from Kevin Kelly at Cool Tools. Apparently it is functionally robust.