The Asia-Pacific Climate Summit  

De Smog Blog has a good summation of the waste of time that was the recent Asia Pacific Climate Summit by Ross Gelbspan (via Grist).

The signals preceding today's meeting of the Asia-Pacific climate summit are ominous. The principals – U.S., Australia, Japan, India, South Korea and China – have made clear in advance that they reject any mandatory timetables for reducing greenhouse gases.

They have invited 120 industry observers – primarily from oil and coal interests – to provide input – while locking out environmental organizations whose voices traditionally have provided valuable corrections at other international climate meetings. The U.S. and Australia acknowledge they will be recruiting other countries into the APAC group. That, in turn, will dilute if not completely negate those countries’ commitments to the United Nations under the Kyoto Protocol. And they will be promoting a host of technologies designed not to pacify our inflamed climate but to provide a facade of acceptability for the continued use of coal, the most climate-destabilizing of all fuels.

This gathering is the latest manifestation of the Bush Administration’s six-year campaign to undermine and marginalize the UN and its mission of promoting a more sustainable and equitable world. It is also profoundly anti-democratic in its drive to put the world’s great energy companies in charge of the world’s climate policies. There is no argument that the current goals of the Kyoto Protocol are inadequate, judged against the demands of nature.

For one example, nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1995 and the planet is heating at a rate faster than any time in the last 10,000 years. But, judged by the history of human political achievements, the Protocol provides a groundbreaking framework to bring the nations of the world together in a common project to rewire the planet with clean energy. That is not what will emerge from the APAC summit. Given the input of companies like Peabody Energy, Rio Tinto and Chevron, the summit will be promoting a batch of sleight-of-hand, short-term technological fixes.

Clean coal technology, with its reliance on hugely expensive geo-engineering projects like mechanical carbon sequestration, basically represents a full-employment act for companies like Bechtel and Halliburton. These projects are also wasteful in the extreme. Given their huge pricetags, the same amount of money would generate far more electricity per dollar were it to be spent on constructing windfarms. A real “pro-technology pro-growth” initiative would center on a worldwide project to replace every coal-burning generating plant, every oil-burning furnace, every gasoline-powered car with clean, climate-friendly energy technologies.

The construction and installation of windmills, solar panels and tidal power devices, coupled with the construction of an infrastructure for a hydrogen economy, are far more labor intensive than the extraction of coal and oil (which are heavily automated). There are, to be sure, problems with the Kyoto framework. Its goals are too modest and its timetable too slow to match the escalating pace of climate change. But given the flexibility built into the Protocol’s design, it will be easy, when the time comes, for delegates to increase the targets to match the scope and urgency of the threat.

As several oil company presidents have said off the record, any meaningful effort to avert climate chaos requires the governments of the world to impose binding and enforceable timetables and goals on the energy industry. That sentiment was echoed publicly by executives of some of America’s largest utilities including Cinergy Corporation – as well as by the investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs. And that approach is at the heart of the Kyoto Protocol. By contrast, the real agenda behind the APAC summit involves a new framework—the emergence of a global corporate state whose goals are determined by short-term profit calculations rather than an authentic concern for our common future or our common planet.

Grist also had some comments on the summit.

The U.S. and Australia today marked the end of the Asia-Pacific climate summit in Sydney by pledging $127 million to support technology projects that would lower greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate activists derided the commitment from the two big polluters as laughably small; the Kyoto Protocol, which both the U.S. and Australia have spurned, is expected to result in up to $12 billion being spent on clean-technology projects in developing countries by 2012. Enviros also say much of the newly announced funding will go to propping up dirty energy industries rather than promoting clean power sources like solar.

The U.S. and Australia, for their part, contend the world should trust big business to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions without any strong government regulations. Said U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, "The people who run the private sector ... also have children and grandchildren, and they too live and breathe in the world and would like [climate change] dealt with effectively." Despite all evidence to the contrary.

To a certain extent Bodman is right - I'm sure most power company execs would be more than happy to build clean tech power plants instead of coal fired ones. But as long as coal is the cheapest option they are forced by the market to build coal fired plants. The solution ? Make the cost of coal reflect the cost of global warming - impose carbon taxes now and I'm sure most companies will start doing the right thing. But Bush and Howard have absolutely no intention of letting that happen unfortunately (and I'm sure history will judge them very harshly for this).

The problem with Australia being a large exporter of both coal and uranium is that the whole debate here is being framed (correctly incorrectly) as a choice between "clean" coal and nuclear power (which is reflected in a lot of state politics depending on which resource they have more of), as this article in the Herald demonstrates.

At the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate meeting in Sydney this week, the focus was on initiatives the six member countries could adopt to reduce their production of greenhouse gases.

Nuclear power was one topic at the forefront, as the US, Japan, South Korea, India and China all operate nuclear power plants - and are planning to build more to help tackle the issue of climate change. Australia, never having built a nuclear power plant, is clearly the odd one out.

The nation's lack of a nuclear power industry might seem curious to foreigners when Australia possesses more uranium than any other country - although it has large reserves of other energy sources such as coal and natural gas, and a small population.

Despite its large trade deficit, Australia mines a relatively low proportion of its uranium reserves, meaning it isn't milking the export market as much as it could.

It's not due to lack of interest from mining companies, which view Australia as a dream destination because of its stable political system, skilled workforce and abundant natural resources.

Rather, it's restrictive Australian government policy - at both the federal and state level - that has so far prevented most of the country's uranium from being mined.

Under the Coalition Government, federal policy has changed, but all state Labor premiers except South Australia's Mike Rann oppose mining uranium, in part because of Labor's long opposition to it.

The policy has forced local miners to look overseas for viable projects.

Take Perth's Paladin Resources. Instead of mining or even closely studying one of its deposits in Western Australia, it will start production at its Langer Heinrich project in Namibia this year. And next on its list is a deposit in Malawi, one of the world's poorest and most corrupt nations.

Paladin managing director John Borshoff is upfront about why his company is developing its first projects abroad. Countries in southern Africa are "less politically hostile" than Australia, he says. "I know that sounds ironic," he's quick to add.

Borshoff has a point. WA's premier, Dr Geoff Gallop, is adamant no uranium mining will be allowed in his state while he remains in office - and his current term lasts until 2009.

"In terms of uranium mining, I'm the premier. We took this policy to the election [last year]," Gallop told the Herald."Our uranium will stay in the ground in Western Australia."

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Redport chairman Richard Homsany certainly believed change was coming when his company invested in Lake Maitland. "I think at the moment there is enormous pressure to re-examine that [WA] policy on uranium mining," he said in April. "One cannot ignore the fact it is a clean fuel." Neither, in the current climate, can it be ignored that Australia is home to 41 per cent of the world's economic uranium reserves and the world's biggest uranium mine, BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam.

On the other hand, for all of coal's environmental ills, Australia's cheap and plentiful supply of the fossil fuel will last the nation hundreds of years.

Coal is also the reason there is a ban on uranium mining in Queensland - its premier, Peter Beattie, believes exporting uranium would undermine its lucrative coal industry. "There are countries which have to choose between sources for their power stations," says Beattie's spokesman, citing Italy as an example. "He [Beattie] is not going to encourage the nuclear industry."

And apart from coal, there are other energy options in Australia. Power stations fuelled by natural gas are a possibility, based on large reserves of coal-seam gas and conventional on- and offshore natural gas in Australia and Papua New Guinea, although much of Australia's gas is sold at high prices for export. Still, Queensland is busy building coal-seam gas power stations to meet environmental targets.

But although nuclear energy has lower emissions than coal - or even natural gas - the costs of building a nuclear power plant are daunting. An International Energy Agency report found the cost per kilowatt of building a modern nuclear reactor would be around $US2000 ($2650), compared with $US1200 for coal and $US500 for gas.

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Nuclear weapons proliferation is another major issue. Australia does not allow the sale of uranium for weapons purposes and uranium proponents argue that strict international safeguards are effective, but WA's Gallop disagrees.

"The last time there was a major expansion of the nuclear industry there was a proliferation of nuclear weapons, and I have no reason to think the same thing wouldn't happen again," he says. "Added to that, you have the new terrorist threats."

Radioactive waste disposal is another problem - and a daunting one for WA voters. In 1998, the plan of the US company Pangea Resources to build a nuclear waste dump in the state came to public notice after a UK environmental group aired a corporate video touting the project.

After widespread opposition, the WA Parliament passed a bill that made it illegal to dispose of radioactive waste in the state without specific approval. But Gallop worries that if he allows uranium mining, his state will become "part of the nuclear fuel cycle" and will be obliged to accept waste.

So despite the use of nuclear power in developed countries such as the US, Canada, France and Japan, Australia has long been regarded as hostile to uranium and nuclear power.

It wasn't always that way. For a time, it looked like Australia would join the nuclear club, both for energy and weapons purposes. The local history of uranium goes back to the 1940s. The Rum Jungle mine in the Northern Territory, owned by the government and operated by Consolidated Zinc (now Rio Tinto), was used to provide fuel for the UK's nuclear weapons arsenal, and South Australia was used as a testing ground for those missiles.

On Australia Day in 1958, the UK provided Australia with its first nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, and by 1969 there were plans for a nuclear power plant at Jervis Bay, NSW.

At that time, the Liberal prime minister John Gorton wanted to leave open the possibility of producing nuclear weapons and refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But after widespread protests, Gorton's successor, fellow Liberal William McMahon, canned the Jervis Bay project in 1971.

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Mark Wheatley, an Australian who serves as a director of Toronto-listed SXR Uranium One, says his company listed in Canada in 1997(as Southern Cross Resources) because at the time "there was simply no support for uranium exploration and development in Australia". SXR, formed last month through the merger of Southern Cross and South Africa's Aflease Gold and Uranium, is fortunate that its Honeymoon project is in South Australia rather than 90 kilometres away in Broken Hill, as there is a blanket ban on uranium exploration in NSW.

Having gained nearly all of the needed regulatory approvals, the $US30 million Honeymoon project could be up and running in 18 months, but was delayed by the uranium price in 2004, given the relatively small size of the project. When a study was done last year, uranium was trading at around $US25 a pound. With the spot price at $US36.25, and many analysts believing it will rise further, the board has approved further development expenditure to gather the extra data required to support a development decision, which could come as early as the first half of this year.

Being in South Australia is definitely a plus, with the Rann administration looking favourably on uranium mining. Prospectors get government grants to help fund exploration, and the environment is so cordial that the Australian division of French nuclear giant Cogema plans to move its headquarters from Perth to Adelaide. "Adelaide, in five years' time, I think, is going to become a real centre of activity for uranium in Australia," says SXR's Wheatley.

Back in WA, however, large projects owned by mining giants BHP and Rio - both of which might well be economic at today's high uranium prices - are stalled indefinitely in the face of Gallop's opposition.

For a time, Rio Tinto had looked set to proceed with its Kintyre project in WA. It proved up a substantial reserve base and installed a pilot plant to investigate how to process the ore. But development of the 35,000 tonne deposit was stalled in 1997 because of the low uranium price. The site was decommissioned and rehabilitated in 2002. Now prices have risen, the possibility of development is "academic", a Rio spokesman says, due to Gallop's ban. But he says Kintyre is a good project that the company plans to retain - meaning Rio seems hopeful of a change in policy.

BHP faces different issues with the Yeelirrie project in WA, which it picked up with the $9.2 billion acquisition of WMC Resources earlier this year (along with Olympic Dam). At 52,000 tonnes, Yeelirrie is Australia's second largest unmined source of uranium behind Jabiluka's 163,000 tonne resource base.

In the 12 years to 1983, WMC and partner Esso spent $35 million planning Yeelirrie as an open cut mine, but plans were withdrawn after Labor instituted its Three Mines policy in 1984. WMC instead decided to focus on mining the 1.5 million tonne resource base at Olympic Dam, by far the world's largest uranium deposit.

Gallop's Government revoked Yeelirrie's WA mining agreement last year, and a BHP spokeswoman said her company's focus regarding uranium mining was "squarely on Olympic Dam and its expansion".

I never cease to be amazed that anyone in their right mind can oppose a well sited wind farm. Even Robert F Kennedy Jr has fallen into this trap.

A long-simmering disagreement within the environmental community over a plan to build a massive wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., is now boiling over into a highly public quarrel.

The four-year-old battle started heating up last summer when Greenpeace USA staged a demonstration against well-known eco-activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's been an outspoken opponent of the proposal for a 130-turbine wind-power project in Horseshoe Shoal, a shallow portion of Nantucket Sound south of Cape Cod. Kennedy -- a senior attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council and a pioneer in the waterway-protection movement -- was on a sailboat for an event with the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, which opposes the wind project. A Greenpeace vessel cruised up alongside with a banner that read, "Bobby, you're on the wrong boat" -- a stunt that was part of a larger Greenpeace campaign pressuring Kennedy to change his mind on the development.

In mid-December, Kennedy, wanting to explain his position to critics and the public at large, published an impassioned op-ed in The New York Times in which he argued that the wind farm would mar a precious seascape, privatize a publicly owned commons, and damage the local economy.

That, in turn, prompted about 150 environmental advocates -- including global-warming authors and activists Bill McKibben and Ross Gelbspan, Bluewater Network founder Russell Long, and youth leader Billy Parish -- to circulate a letter asking Kennedy to reconsider his position. "We are, simply put, in a state of ecological emergency," it read. "Constructing windmills six miles from Cape Cod, where they will be visible as half-inch dots on the horizon, is the least that we can do."

Bill McKibben isn't too impressed by this display of NIMBYism and writes of his displeasure.

I'm by nature a conflict avoider too -- if you're thinking of cutting in line at the supermarket, you couldn't ask for an easier mark than me. But twice last week I acted in ways entirely out of character. I signed a letter criticizing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for his New York Times op-ed opposing the big Cape Wind project. And I wrote a few paragraphs disparaging the most powerful of my local environmental groups, the Adirondack Council, for the way they'd worked on clean-air issues. Both criticisms were respectful -- I am my mother's son -- but they were also stern. I wouldn't have enjoyed being on the receiving end of either one (though a lifetime of book writing does tend to inure you to bad reviews).

They were also, at some level, divisive. In both cases, you could truthfully say I was willing to inflict a little damage on an important part of the environmental movement. It doesn't mean, I hope, that I'm growing a mean streak. I think it means something else: that the environmental movement is reaching an important point of division, between those who truly get global warming, and those who don't.

By get, I don't mean understanding the chemistry of carbon dioxide, or the importance of the Kyoto Protocol, or something like that -- pretty much everyone who thinks of themselves as an environmentalist has reached that point. By get, I mean understanding that the question is of transcending urgency, that it represents the one overarching global civilizational challenge that humans have ever faced. That it's as big as the Bomb.

Do I think Bobby Kennedy Jr. is a bad environmentalist? No, I think he's a great environmentalist. I've heard him convert 400 Republicans at one fell swoop in the auditorium of my Adirondack high-school gym. Hell, by helping establish the Hudson Riverkeeper, the guy added a whole new class of words to our vocabulary -- now there are baykeepers and airkeepers and summitkeepers. He's sued and written and organized with passion and prowess. But his op-ed on Cape Wind, with its (risible) fear that the windmills might be heard ashore, showed that he hadn't quite understood just how critical the need to get the U.S. off fossil fuels really is.

In the face of that need, even possible damage to the livelihoods of commercial fishers is distinctly secondary. If someone were proposing to erect a giant blender in Nantucket Sound so yachtsmen could obtain frozen margaritas more conveniently, then Bobby would be right to object, and the rest of us would go along with him. Instead, they're talking about the nation's first big offshore wind complex, one that would in effect allow residents of Cape Cod to use electricity nine months of the year without emitting a single carbon atom.

If we had decades to burn, then he'd also doubtless be right that there's a better site for the thing, and a nicer developer. There's always a better site and a nicer developer. But in the real world, according to Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have at most 10 years to reverse this trend. Which means we have to do everything quickly -- hybrid cars and solar panels and compact light bulbs and local food and tree planting. And windmills, lots and lots of windmills, just like off the shores of Europe.

Both the Herald and the Financial Review had prominent articles talking about oil prices rising over US$70 as tensions mount over Iran's nuclear program.

Crude oil in New York traded near a three-month high amid concern about Iran's nuclear program and oil production cuts in Nigeria.

Iran, which accounts for almost 5 per cent of global output, resumed research on uranium reprocessing this week, risking United Nations sanctions. That may limit the investment Iran needs to raise oil production.

Royal Dutch Shell's venture in Nigeria shut 10 per cent of the country's output as violence swept through the Niger Delta oil-producing region.

"People are finding it hard to sell because of the situations in Iran and Nigeria," said Naohiro Niimura, vice-president of derivative products at Mizuho Corporate Bank in Tokyo. "If Iran is punished with sanctions, then the market will go much higher."

Crude oil for February delivery was at $US63.77 a barrel, down US17c, in after-hours electronic trading in Singapore after earlier reaching $US65.05 in New York, the highest intra-day price since October 4.

A Bloomberg survey of 42 analysts showed 25, or 60 per cent, said prices would rise next week, the most bullish response since March.

Antonio Szabo, chief executive of Houston-based consultant Stone Bond Technologies, said that with political tensions high in the Middle East, prices were likely to go "slightly above $US70 a barrel" in the weeks ahead.

The US, Germany, France and the UK have called for the International Atomic Energy Agency to hold an emergency meeting to refer the dispute with Iran to the UN Security Council. Iran could face censure or sanctions.

Moving across the border from Iran, Billmon reports on the increasingly unbelievable propaganda war being waged in Iraq.

Fans of Paddy Chayefsky's incredibly prophetic '70 satire Network may remember the The Mao Tse-tung Hour -- the terrorist-of-the-week reality show produced by his fictional UBS news division:

Diana: Look, we've got a bunch of hobgoblin radicals called the Ecumenical Liberation Army who go around taking home movies of themselves robbing banks. Maybe they'll take movies of themselves kidnapping heiresses, hijacking 747's, bombing bridges, assassinating ambassadors. We'd open each week's segment with that authentic footage, hire a couple of writers to write some story behind that footage, and we've got ourselves a series.

Given that Paddy's dark vision of the future of broadcast journalism has since become the programming bible for an entire generation of cable news executives, I guess it's no great surprise that the Mao Tse Tung Hour has also reached the little screen -- but in Iraq, not the U.S., and suitably updated to reflect both modern political realities and the rise of the Internet.

Iraqi blogger Nibras Kazimi (a neocon fan of Ahmed Chalabi, but also an increasingly disillusioned witness to Iraq's "democratization:") tells the story at his blog, Talisman Gate...

Billmon also has a very low key demonstration about the old joke about how to tell when a politician is lying - look for when his lips are moving...