The Great Warming  

It looks like this will be the year of the global warming documentary, with the latest instance being Stonehaven Productions' TV series "The Great Warming". Interestingly this was partly financed by insurance company Swiss Re - they probably don't have pockets as deep as Exxon does but I'm sure they can help raise awareness and pressure on our pitiful leaders.

We are living at the dawn of a new epoch. Year by year, degree by degree, Earth is growing warmer... a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, population growth, and our addiction to technology, speed and power.

Just as other generations spoke of a Great Plague and a Great Depression, our children will be compelled to endure The Great Warming - and find a way to conquer its consequences.

Filmed in eight countries on four continents, endorsed by dozens of the world's leading scientists, this three-hour television series is the most factually accurate, visually stunning and wide-ranging production ever mounted about this complex, fascinating subject.

Renewable Energy Access reports on how the problem of rising solar PV prices is affecting the third world (another example of why they will bear the brunt, as usual, of peak energy). Hopefully the new wave of solar power technology will result in falling prices once enough new supply comes online.

We all know now that, in the last 24 to 30 months, the cost of solar panels ($/watt) is increasing drastically (rather than decreasing as predicted by experts) and fingers are pointing toward Germany.

The sudden boom in the German market and competition from the semiconductor industry has led to an imbalance in the supply and demand of feedstock. This has been one of the causes for the steady rise in solar module prices.

Adding to the rise in prices has been the lack of availability of smaller modules, those that are required to power the meager load requirements of households in the rural areas of India, Sri Lanka, Honduras, Uganda or Fiji.

Steady cash flow and decent profitability has forced the manufactures to weave away from manufacturing smaller modules, in order to cater to demand from Germany and other western countries.

REA also has a report that Canadian wind power capacity grew by 239 MW last year (less than half of a coal fired generation unit - but the amount is growing rapidly in percentage terms at least).

Talks between Iran and Russia over nuclear fuel processing have ended without any greement being reached.

Nigerian oil production has dropped by almost 20% after the latest round of attacks by militants in the Niger delta, who are aiming for a 30% fall it seems (nothing like a stretch target to keep the troops working hard). Saudi Arabia is claiming it can step in and produce enough extra oil to make up the shortfall. Nigerian oil worker's unions are considering their response to safety issues (I wonder if can you get paid penalty rates while you are being held hostage ?).

Crude oil rose for a third session in New York after rebel attacks over the weekend halted almost a fifth of Nigeria's output. The militants threatened to intensify their offensive, aiming to reduce production by 30 percent.

Since Feb. 18, militants have assaulted a Royal Dutch Shell Plc export terminal and a pipeline, kidnapped nine foreign workers and idled 455,000 barrels a day of output, or 19 percent of the country's total. Nigeria, Africa's top oil producer, pumps about 8 percent of OPEC's crude and plans to increase that proportion, helping to restore the group's spare production capacity.

There are also supply disruptions occurring in Ecuador after local Indians damaged a pipeline and pumping station.

According to a report quoted on peakOil.com, Canada's natural gas supply will run out in 8 years (presumably this doesn't include future discoveries, but it still sounds excessively doomerish - if true it would seem to make all that tar sands processing a bit difficult - I wonder how those nuclear power plant plans are coming along).

Jamais at WorldCHanging has written a manifesto on "The Open Future".

As a planet, we face a handful of truly profound dilemmas taking shape in the first part of this century. It's no exaggeration to say that the decisions we make about how to handle these dilemmas will make the difference between a flourishing of global civilization and a fate akin to extinction. And while there is a small variety of world-ending challenges that could emerge at any moment -- from an asteroid impact to a naturally-emerging pandemic -- the key dilemmas of this century are entirely in our hands.

The first, and most certain, is the threat from global climate disruption. The more we learn about the changes now taking place in our planet's climate systems, the greater the challenge appears. We are unaccustomed to thinking about slow-moving problems with long lag times between actions and reactions; there is a real risk that the first serious efforts to cut carbon emissions will coincide with an acceleration of problems arising from decades-old changes to the atmosphere. Successful response to this challenge will require us to think in terms of big systems and long cycles far outside our every day experience.

...

Across all of these issues, the fundamental tools of information, collaboration and access will be our best hope for turning world-ending problems into worldchanging solutions. If we're willing to try, we can create a future that's knowledgable, democratic and sustainable -- a future that's open. Open as in transparent. Open as in participatory. Open as in available to all. Open as in filled with an abundance of options. There are few other choices that see us through the century.

We can have an open future, or we might have no future at all.

SlashDot has a post on Donald Rumsfeld complaining that he needs a 24 hour a day propaganda machine - the current one isn't doing the job properly. Maybe he should reflect on why British and American propaganda was successful in the world wars and why it isn't now (hint: he who invades first has an uphill battle).

The BBC is reporting that US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is unhappy with the existing propaganda systems in place and insists that the US must create a 'more effective, 24-hour propaganda machine' or risk losing the battle for the minds of Muslims. In an era where we've already got government-created and funded media outlets and the Pentagon bribing Iraqi journalists to run favorable war stories, not to mention other departments paying journalists to endorse their positions, it begs the question, how much more can they possibly do ?

Francis "I'm not a neoconservative, honest" Fukuyama has an article in the New York Times on "The End of Neoconservatism" - maybe the rats have started leaving the ship before it sinks. Its an interesting double-pike-with-twist act that he tries to perform, simultaneously trying to disavow neoconservatism, while saying that its aims were noble and Leo Strauss was just a humble philosopher. The argument that the neocons are just a modernised group of Leninists is also trotted out, which I've seen around the traps a few times lately.

I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

And to close, Past Peak has a post on the science of torure, which makes an interesting companion piece to "The Men Who Stare At Goats".