Bush & Brezhnev: Separated at Birth?  

Energy related stories are still much in the local news lately, with the collapse of the Snowy hydro privatisation and the nuclear power debate getting a lot of attention over the weekend.

Crikey seems to be less than amused that the float of Snowy hydro has been defeated by a coalition of largely grassroots opposition from all parts of the political spectrum.

The Snowy sale is off – all three governments involved announced their withdrawal this morning. Why? Well, Malcolm Fraser explained his objections to the sale on the ABC yesterday:

It's a great Australian icon and I think it represents privatisation gone mad. But more important than that, I'm against private companies having control of Australia's water resources. Water is a scarce resource for the whole continent, and to have express use determined by private companies whose interest is profit for shareholders is not going to lead to the best answer.

Indeed. It's much better for subsidised water to go to the shareholders of the great agrarian socialist paradise and have it paid for by the taxpayers, isn't it? Good to see that economics still remains such a strong point with Big Mal. And now that the Snowy sale has been abandoned can we be the first to compare John Howard to his old boss – circa 1982? Malcolm Fraser's strengths seem to be reflected in his old Treasurer.

“There is overwhelming feeling in the community that the Snowy is an icon, it's part of the great saga of post World War II development in Australia”, a stroppy and defensive Prime Minister said. “I have listened to that, and it is important that on occasions a government have both the courage and the willingness to change its mind on something.”

Really? Did public opposition stop the Telstra sale? The GST? WorkChoices? Or is because there has been no Budget bounce. Is the IR issue starting to catch up? What's in the Government's polling? Is it showing that Howard's political position is nowhere near as strong as we might have been led to believe?

Admitting that you've got a policy wrong can be a demonstration of political courage, but it can also be a sign that the wheels are falling off. If the polling is poor, why not back down on WorkChoices? The Prime Minister has been boasting all week about increases in real pay for workers, so why not go the full Malcolm and preside over a wages explosion?

Personally I think its probably an asset best eft in public hands - water issues will mean it will always be an entity controlled by political forces and the private sector is better off staying out of it, for everyone's sake.

Alan Ramsay came up with the best description of the Rodent I've seen in a while (a question for American readers - would the NY Times or Washington Post ever let a reporter call Bush a "toad" or a "lickspittle" ?), as he noted that Johnny has probably enjoyed throwing the cat amongst the Labor party premiers.

It was Ben Chifley who moved mountains. In May 1949 the Labor prime minister told Australians by radio: "The Snowy Mountains scheme, the greatest single project in our history, is a plan for the whole nation, belonging to no one state." John Howard, finally, agreed yesterday. He bowed to Chifley - and to public opinion. In doing so he shafted Morris Iemma and Kim Beazley, absolutely and utterly. It was a political doing over as thorough as you get.

Who is left looking weak and silly and powerless? Howard might be a toad and an international lickspittle, but as a politician, in every insinuating nuance of the word, the others aren't up to wiping his boots.

Howard called his press conference at 9.30am, in the Blue Room, walking across the corridor from his prime ministerial suite opposite, in Parliament's executive wing. By then his decision to "save" Snowy Hydro was a day old. He just hadn't told the rest of us. He orchestrated the timing for the weekend headlines. Now he didn't beat around the bush (no pun).

"Ladies and gentlemen," Howard began, looking very pleased himself. "I've called this news conference this morning to announce that the Commonwealth has decided to withdraw from the sale of Snowy Hydro. We will no longer have our 13 per cent share on offer in the sale by the NSW and Victorian governments of their shares."

Whack! I swear you could hear Australians everywhere letting rip their pleasure, however much the economists might gag.

This was (another) one for "the people".

Ross Gittins notes that "Howard has seen the light" - "and it's a nuclear one" - strangely enough he comes to much the same conclusion about the nuclear "debate" that I've been talking about in recent weeks.

HEAVEN be praised. John Howard, the great climate change procrastinator, has experienced a road-from-the-White-House conversion. In a blinding revelation, he now realises we must embrace our inevitable nuclear future.

Mr Howard has suddenly discovered that climate change is much worse than we thought - very worrying, in fact - and nuclear power is the obvious answer.

And this from the man who, while never actually coming out of the closet to reveal himself as a climate-change denier, refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, saw no need for serious measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and was perfectly happy with his ineffective Australian Greenhouse Office and its you've-got-to-be-joking voluntary targets.

So, starting tomorrow, we need to have a full debate about the merits of switching to nuclear power and find out if it's economically feasible.

Trouble is, in a country where coal is so readily available, we already know it isn't. Take the latest report, prepared by a British scientist for the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation.

As Peter Martin summarises its findings on the New Matilda website, the report finds that a privately owned nuclear power plant could make money only if the government contributed 14 per cent of the cost of building it and then paid 21 per cent of the electricity bills for the first 12 years.

Apparently, the knowledge that nuclear power could only be introduced with heavy public subsidies hasn't deterred Mr Howard from spruiking it. So here we have the self-proclaimed father of economic rationalism, happily flirting with the notion of picking winners in a big way.

Mr Howard's economic rationalism extends only as far as refusing to contemplate any kind of leg-up for renewable energy (always excepting ethanol, of course).

So what gives? One minute climate change is a beat-up and in no way urgent, the next we're really worried about it. One minute we're not wasting the taxpayers' hard-earned on renewable energy, the next we're happy to contemplate establishing an industry that could only survive in a government-provided iron lung.

The conventional wisdom is that Mr Howard's only interest in the nuclear debate is to use it as a diversion and a way to drive a wedge through the ranks of the Labor Party.

I'm sure those benefits wouldn't have escaped his attention. But, when you think about it, there is a logical connection between these two apparently contradictory positions: both fit the interests of the mining industry.

Who would hate to see us ratify Kyoto or introduce a carbon tax or give renewable energy an advantage over coal-fired electricity? The miners.

Who would love to see a softening of the restrictions on, and general public disapprobation of, uranium and nuclear power - so much so they'd be prepared to use climate change as their cover? The miners.

The ABC has an article which links concerns about an oil production crisis to the nuclear energy subject. Its a shame there isn't a direct quote in the report - it might be the first time the Rodent has explicitly mentioned peak oil.

Mr Howard says the review will investigate whether nuclear power can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He says since an an oil production crisis is approaching, alternative energy sources must be investigated.

His Science Minister Julie Bishop says several experts will conduct the inquiry. "I would imagine it would take some time, could be a matter of months, could be throughout the course of this year," she said.

But the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) chairman Don Henry says it could be a waste of time and money. He says the debate must consider the broader issue of climate change.

"Well if the inquiry is just about nuclear power it will be a waste of taxpayers' money because nuclear power is too dangerous, too dirty, and too slow to tackle climate change," he said. "If the inquiry is going to be fairdinkum, it needs to look at that issue: what can we do right now to tackle climate change in Australia?"

NSW Premier Morris Iemma is having none of Johnny's glow in the dark solution to peak oil, declaring no nuclear power plant will be built in NSW (though that won't stop us all playing the "where will it be built" game to freak out sitting Liberal party politicians).

NSW Premier Morris Iemma has vowed no nuclear power stations would be built in NSW as long as he is premier. Mr Iemma today urged state opposition leader Peter Debnam to join him in opposing the construction of nuclear power plants in NSW.

"While ever I'm premier of NSW there won't be any nuclear power plants in NSW," he told reporters. "It'll be interesting to see whether the Opposition stands up to the Prime Minister and his plan for nuclear power plants in Port Stephens, the Central Coast, the South Coast, [and] Moorebank."

The head of the nation's nuclear research group says any nuclear power stations built in Australia would need to be near major cities or towns on the east coast.

Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) executive director Ian Smith today said it was too early to speculate about precise locations for nuclear reactors, but said they would need to be built in eastern Australia where they could be easily hooked up to the electricity grid.

He said that four or five nuclear plants would have to be built to make an atomic energy industry viable. "Because nuclear power produces large quantities of power, it would need to be on the major grid," Dr Smith told ABC Radio. "We're talking about, yeah, the east coast is the major grid in Australia."

An ANSTO report, released yesterday, found nuclear power would be competitive with gas- or coal-fired electricity - but only if taxpayers helped to pay for it or shouldered the risk of producing it.

BHP appears to have decided that the time has come to abandon the North Sea.

Despite the sale being widely reported in Britain, with US investment bank Jefferies to handle the sale, BHP would not comment yesterday.

The sale of the North Sea assets would follow BHP's recent deal to sell its Tintaya copper mine in Peru to Xstrata for $US634 million.

Both sales are similar in strategy to a series of earlier asset sales by Rio Tinto - the selling of less than world-class assets during a period of super strong commodity prices.

The North Sea asset sale would be the first since US oilman Mike Yeager replaced Phil Aiken as group president of BHP's energy division. Mr Yeager has completed a whirlwind tour of the group's global operations and a decision to quit the North Sea comes as no surprise.

Most of the majors have been pulling out on the basis that the "big" oilfields have all been found and are now in rapid decline. The tax regime has also been a turn-off.

Mr Yeager is expected to be more a wheeler and dealer than Mr Aiken and is expected to strengthen BHP's resolve to expand its oil and gas production interests in the US, Africa and the Middle East. Monster cash flows being generated at present by the petroleum division, plus cash freed by asset sales, will give Mr Yeager unprecedented latitude to build the business.

Apart from anything else, the oil and gas industry is one of the few in the resource sector in which BHP can grow substantially without the market and competition constraints it runs into in most other areas.

Mr Yeager was previously vice-president of ExxonMobil's development arm, with responsibility for major joint venture projects.

Reuters has a report linking China's concerns about peak oil to the rapidly expanding solar energy industry there - in this case, the low tech alternative of solar energy water heaters.

Himin will almost certainly be one of the new powerhouses. Huang says revenues will expand 80 to 100 percent this year, although he declined to give figures in yuan.

The trim 48-year-old, who is so committed to efficiency that an office rule bans workers from using the elevator to travel less than three floors, is also considering a listing on the Hong Kong stock market.

As a delegate to China's parliament, he helped draft a new renewable energy law that found favour in Beijing as official worries grow about reliance on imported oil and polluting coal.

Huang started on the other side of the energy industry, training as a petroleum engineer. But he took worries about "peak oil" -- the time when global production will peak, followed by a decline -- seriously enough to nurture a second career.

"One of my professors told me that petroleum resources would only be valid for 50 years, so I thought maybe this is a sunset field," he said with a grin.

He got a job at a petroleum institute in Dezhou, but poured all his spare time and cash into researching solar technology, even after selling a patent for oilfield equipment.

He worked as designer, engineer, porter, plumber and salesman, and to the concern of his ever-poorer wife, gave his first heaters away as gifts to family and colleagues.

The first big break came when a factory manager at a family wedding ordered heaters for all his workers, forcing Huang to build the factory he's been using ever since.

The Herald had an interesting report on Woodside's adventures in Mauritania on the weekend.

Woodside's $1 billion investment in Mauritania's oil catapulted the company into the big league. Then came a coup, claims of corruption and a $US100 million settlement.

ON FEBRUARY 21, a white four-wheel drive with darkened windows swept up to the front of the clay-coloured courthouse in the ramshackle Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott. Slipping out of the vehicle, past the armed security guards in navy blue uniforms and through the wire doors into the courtroom were representatives from Australia's largest oil company, Woodside Petroleum.

Not in court that day, but a couple of minutes drive away behind the lush green hedging and white-trimmed, thick tan walls of Woodside's secure compound, was its chief executive, Donald Rudolph Voelte.

The Mauritanian capital, a sandy, decaying and poverty-stricken city, isn't often host to someone of 53-year-old Voelte's standing. In Mauritania, bottled water counts as hard currency and business is done over a centuries-old tea-pouring ritual. What the Islamic nation in north-west Africa does have is oil - and plenty of it.

Voelte was in town that day for Mauritania's oil. Or rather to try and salvage a situation on the brink of going horribly wrong. Woodside and its partners have a $1 billion investment sitting just 80 kilometres off Mauritania's coast. It has taken five years to develop the Chinguetti oilfield, and oil has just started flowing.

But a change of government last August after a military coup left everything hanging in the balance.

The Iranians seem keen to keep their nuclear pot boiling with oil prices rising in the wake of Ayatollah Khamenei's warnings about dire consequences to energy supplies in the event of US action.

US ENERGY SUPPLIES

In order to threaten Iran, you [America] say that you can secure the energy flow in the region. You are wrong. Beware that if you make the slightest mistake over Iran, the energy flow through this region will be seriously endangered. You will never be capable of providing energy security in this region. You are not capable and you should know this.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS

We have no problem with the world. We are no threat whatsoever to the world and the world knows it...

The other suggestion is that Iran is seeking a nuclear bomb. This is an irrelevant and wrong statement, it is a sheer lie. We do not need a nuclear bomb. We do not have any objectives or aspirations for which we will need to use a nuclear bomb. We consider using nuclear weapons against Islamic rules...

We think imposing the costs of building and maintaining nuclear weapons on our nation is unnecessary. Building and maintaining such weapons is costly. In no way do we deem it correct to impose these costs on the people.

"Dissident Voice" has an article on peak oil and the danger it poses to the US, given its dependence on foreign energy supplies (and makes the now fairly common comparisons between the pre collapse Soviet Union and the present day United States).

The strategic importance of the world’s oil fields has long been a pre-eminent policy issue among military analysts around the world. The major military campaigns and imperial ambitions of the major powers engaged in the World Wars of the Twentieth Century revolved around control of world oil supplies and supply lines.

As America ascended to its current position of global hegemon during these World Wars, the American “way of life” has been synonymous with cheap energy to sustain its suburban lifestyle, its global industrial agricultural system, its worldwide war machine, and the dominance of its global corporations, which all depend upon massive utilization of cheap energy resources to support their far-flung globalized supply lines.

Since the 1970s, when the OPEC nations unveiled their “oil weapon” and the Club of Rome predicted a future of booming population growth and looming shortages of natural resources, the facts have been readily available for those who chose to seek them out.

American oil companies reached their peak of domestic oil production in the 1970s, as predicted by the geologist King Hubbert, who created what is now known as peak oil theory. Hubbert predicted that we would reach peak oil production worldwide around this time, and that the future could only bring the end of cheap oil and the culture that depends upon it.

Since the 1970s, America has relied more and more heavily on imported oil, and since that time, America’s military presence and covert wars have impacted oil-producing countries around the world.

Any threat to cheap oil has rightly been seen by a succession of American Presidents as a threat to America’s Global Empire. Prior to the ascension of George Bush the Younger, America’s proxies, allies and pawns dominated the Middle East, the primary source of cheap oil, and American oil companies had their way North and South, East and West, certain that their interests would be bolstered and protected by American military might and America’s covert warriors. Regime change was effected around the world to insure the continuation of the cheap-oil lubricated Pax Americana.

Americans now burn 20+ million barrels of oil per day, and 12 million barrels of that amount are imported from 70 foreign countries, as crude oil and various refined products, but the American economic miracle has stalled for all but the wealthiest, most privileged twenty percent of Americans.

Meanwhile, economic growth in Korea, China, India and Japan is exploding, and the Asian powers collectively seek to insure the oil supplies necessary to continue fueling their drive to lift billions of impoverished Asians into an American Twentieth Century lifestyle. Their rapidly rising energy requirements combined with America’s energy profligacy are creating global energy demand that simply cannot be met with today’s existing supplies of easy-to-refine oil, today’s oil technologies and today’s worship of the consumption society.

Over the last forty years, numerous countries have realized the increasing value of their oil reserves and have nationalized their oil infrastructure. Mexico, Middle Eastern oil producers, Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela have all taken control of their oil resources away from multi-national oil companies during this period.

All this constitutes a threat to US hegemony, but for America, the worst by far is soon to come. America’s dependence on foreign oil will soon prove its undoing.

Readers of this newsletter know that Russia, Iran, Japan, Venezuela and China are creating new energy partnerships and new pipelines are being built to provide Middle Eastern and Caspian Sea oil and natural gas to Asian powers at the expense of American interests.

Vladimir Putin, who wrote his graduate school thesis on the creation of a Russian natural gas company, is now creating a multi-national energy conglomerate with geo-strategic influence and has armed Russia with a potent oil weapon.

...

In a striking parallel to the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era, America’s existing social, political, and economic systems appear to be dominant, immovable and totally geared toward preserving the status quo for those in power. Just as in Brezhnev’s USSR, America’s economic system, based on an aggressive Utopian ideology out of touch with the real world, provides increasing rewards only for the privileged few.

Over the last twenty-five years in the US, a Utopian economic ideology, free-market laissez-faire capitalism, has been deified as the guiding principle for all segments of society and all forms of social interaction.

However, free markets in America are a fraud. All major economic segments, including banking and finance, health care, insurance, agriculture, military contracting, oil and energy, utilities, publishing and media, advertising, automobiles, and the rest are dominated by comfortable oligopolies. A small group of transnational corporations controls the "free market" for their own benefit. These oligopolies control the government agencies charged with regulating their behavior so they can socialize and externalize costs and privatize profits as much as possible.

Just as in the Soviet Union, America has developed a militarized society slavishly devoted to exporting its inflexible economic ideology of fundamentalist free market Utopianism to the rest of the world. Just as the Communists sought to export their Utopia at gunpoint around the world, America now promises to export American style "free market society" and “democracy” through a series of Imperial wars.

...

Evidence of American incompetence is mounting everywhere one looks, and although America appears to be the invincible world hegemon, there are disturbing parallels between America's current position and the waning days of the Soviet Empire.

Under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union waged a disastrous war in Afghanistan that undermined Soviet pretensions to military invulnerability, cast the Soviet army as a an Imperial aggressor, and set the world's billions of Muslims against Soviet rule everywhere.

Under Bush, America is waging a disastrous war in Afghanistan and Iraq that is undermining American pretensions to military invulnerability, casting the American army as an Imperial aggressor, and setting the world's billions of Muslims against American interests everywhere.

In Brezhnev’s USSR, technology in the service of ideology produced monsters of inefficient design and engineering debacles on a regular basis. America’s worship of technology divorced from social consequences is producing monsters such as the levees that broke in New Orleans, the technologies of surveillance and control that threaten human rights and the freedom of speech and the Internet, junk food, industrial agriculture, genetically modified foods, the Hummer and other SUVs that require American troops to oppress and invade oil producing countries to support obsolete engineering solutions that exacerbate the global energy, political and economic crises.

Brezhnev’s USSR relied on an oppressive political establishment, secret police, a militarized society, and a fossilized ideology dedicated to world domination to uphold communist rule. In America, the unholy ménage a trois between America’s fundamentalist Christian conservative political movement, the US military establishment and the Republican party threatens to undermine the institutions of American democracy and the foundations of American intellectual leadership -- allegations of rigged elections, attacks on basic scientific methodologies, increasingly overt police state tactics applied wholesale at home and abroad, contempt for human rights and international treaties and bloody culture civil wars escalate year by year.

The situation in East Timor doesn't seem to be improving much, with President Gusmao reportedly crying in a meeting with Lord Downer of Baghdad.

When East Timor's President, Xanana Gusmao, received Australia's Alexander Downer on Saturday in his office in the Palace of the Ashes, the humiliation of his country's collapse overcame him.

Gusmao, the charismatic warrior-poet who led East Timor's guerilla resistance movement and spent seven years in an Indonesian jail, broke down in tears and wept openly.

He had spent his life working to win independence from one foreign power after another, Portugal then Indonesia, now found his country, just four years after it became the world's newest nation, dependent for its stability on a third.

Gusmao was grateful to the man sitting before him, the representative of that power, but felt bitterly the failure of his nation.

With armed Australian troops standing just beyond the office door and local gangs still sporadically operating beyond, Downer presented the Australian plan for returning East Timor to self-governance. But he also made several firm demands of Gusmao and the other East Timorese leaders as prerequisites.

Progress in restoring order to the capital, Dili, has been good, but serious short-term uncertainties remain, including the tenure of the Prime Minister, Mari Alkatiri, and Portugal's decision to deploy paramilitary forces but to refuse any co-operation with the Australian military command.

Wayne Madsen continues to post small snippets of conspiracy theory on the subject - as usual he could do with some fact checking to get rid of some of the glaring inaccuracies (earth to Wayne - Vanuatu isn't part of Papua New Guinea - its not even close to it).

June 1, 2006 -- More details emerge on Australian-U.S. destabilization of East Timor. Informed sources from Australia report that the recent attempted coup in East Timor and resulting violence was prompted by covert Australian and American support for a combination of sacked members of the western command of the East Timor Defense Force and former pro-Indonesian Timorese militias operating from the Indonesian western half of Timor island. The Indonesian army (TNI) apparently was aware of the Australian and American interference but took no measures to stop it or report it to the United Nations or other nations. The John Howard and George Bush regimes have their eyes on East Timor's share of Timor Sea oil blocks and fomented the coup to ensure a pro-oil industry regime was installed in Dili.

June 4, 2006 -- More on neo-con machinations in East Timor. Australian sources report that the Australian-U.S.-inspired rebellion in East Timor was partly intended to force secular Muslim Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri from office. Information received by WMR indicates that rebel leader Major Alfredo Reinado, in addition to being supported by Australian and U.S. oil interests and Australian and U.S. intelligence operatives, is supported by anti-Muslim Roman Catholic elements that include members of the proto-fascist Catholic secretive organization Opus Dei. The Bush administration is using Opus Dei in destabilization efforts in Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil. The Iberian roots of the organization and the adherence of many Spanish and Portuguese Catholics to the sect make it an ideal vehicle for stirring up problems in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking nations. East Timor is a former Portuguese colony. Opus Dei is very strong in the Liberal Party of Australia, one of the two conservative parties that make up John Howard's coalition.

Australian sources also report that the same Australian covert operatives who stirred up the rebellion in East Timor were also involved in fomenting deadly rebellions in the Solomon Islands. Next in the Australian plans are the islands of Papua New Guinea, including volatile Bougainville, Vanuatu, and Indonesian-occupied West Papua. There is a neo-con/neo-colonialist plan to virtually re-colonize the small island nations of the Pacific under the Australian flag.

Nick Possum's site (which has posted the occasional bizarre peak oil post like the semi-famous "Peak Oil: The turd on the table" last year) is also doing some theorising on the Timor situation.

The one thing East Timorese Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri didn’t want was for his small dirt-poor nation to be caught in the vise-like grip of the World Bank and its so-called “economic reforms”. Consequently, Alkatiri declined to accept their offers of loans. That was a fundamentally smart strategic decision, but it probably doomed his leadership.

Alkatiri was also keen to keep out of the political grip of Australia – as led by John Howard, George Bush’s self-described “deputy sherriff” in South-East Asia. He saw the importance of charting an independent course, so he oriented his fledgling economy towards the Chinese and the Europeans. In 2004, for example, he gave CNPC, the Chinese oil company, a contract to search for oil and gas in Dili’s bit of the Timor Sea.

...

On 9 April, World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz visited Dili. In a disarming speech, full of kind words, he said East Timor had made dramatic steps forward. He was eager to encourage development of the private sector and called for “simple rules for doing business” (code words for enforcement of low wages and the ability to export all profits).

“The stark reality is that in almost all cases, oil wealth has been a curse for developing nations more than it has been a blessing. It has often been associated with corruption, entrenches social divisions, increased poverty, even violence”, Wolfowitz said.

The neo-con leader should know. He was one of the main architects of the US invasion of oil-rich Iraq, from which, cynics allege, an avalanche of corruption, social divisions, increased poverty and even violence resulted.

Another site which has been casting a jaundiced eye over Australian actions relating to East Timor is the "World Socialist Web Site" - they tend to view Australian policy as being designed to keep the Chinese out of our backyard (echoing American policy over South America in many ways).

Alkatiri and his supporters are neither “Marxists” nor “communists”. Nor are the Howard government and its mouthpieces in the media concerned about the government’s policies toward the people of East Timor. Their opposition to Alkatiri centres on the fact that his faction has sought to win support from other major powers, principally Portugal, and increasingly in the recent period, China, as a counter-weight to the pressure of Australian imperialism.

Alkatiri, in particular, raised the ire of Canberra during the protracted negotiations over the exploitation of the oil and gas reserves when he denounced the Australian government for its bullying tactics.

After four years of intransigence from Howard and Downer, the Dili government was last year forced to agree to delay the final settlement of the maritime border between the two countries for 50 to 60 years. Under international boundary law—which Australia has refused to recognise—East Timor is entitled to most of the oil and gas revenues. But Canberra finally succeeded in having Dili drop its claim of sovereignty over key resource-rich areas of the Timor Sea for two generations; by which time the main oil and gas fields will be commercially exhausted.

If Alkatiri were regarded as an Australian ally in East Timor, rather than as an obstacle, then the attitude of the Howard government, and, correspondingly, commentary in the mass media, would have been quite different.

For a start, the so-called dissident soldiers, whose rebellion sparked the crisis, would not have been portrayed as having legitimate grievances. Instead, the government’s decision to sack them after they went on strike would have been supported. Rather than Australian military commanders holding discussions with the “rebels,” they would have been denounced for organising a mutiny, taking the law into their own hands, and creating the conditions for “terrorism”. Their campaign for the ousting of the Alkatiri government, however, dovetails with Australian interests.

Those interests centre on securing Australia’s position in a region where great power conflicts are increasing. As a comment in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review noted, the emerging rivalry between Japan and China is extending into the Pacific, posing a “real challenge for a government that is always claiming to be on such good terms with Tokyo and Beijing”.

Pointing to the long-standing economic issues that have always motivated Australian foreign policy in this region, the comment continued: “It’s worth remembering that in 1920, Australian strategic planners were worried about Japan trying to get its hands on the rumoured oil resources of Portuguese Timor, but in 1975 there were fears that China would manipulate a leftish independent Timor for territorial advantage.”

Now that the existence of oil and gas resources had been clearly established, the rivalry between Japan and China for energy would pose increasing challenges for Australia, the comment noted.

One of the ways of meeting these challenges is to ensure that a “reliable” regime is in place in Dili. This is a major factor underlying the power struggle now being played out in the East Timorese capital.

Given my essentially libertarian nature, I'm somewhat sad to say that some of their analysis seems likely to be true. But as I'm more interested in accurate interpretations of events (as far as I'm able to perceive them anyway) than toeing any particular ideological line, I'll continue to quote from the traditional left (which I'm always somewhat surprised still exists) whenever I think they've got a good point to make. Plus I tend to find there is an unhealthy lack of balance in the political debate in recent years, with the old left so marginalised that it can no longer provide a counter-argument that enables more centrist political decisions to be made.

Reverting back to tinfoil mode for a moment, I haven't seen (or looked for) any conpiracy oriented analysis of the news of the Al Qaeda menace reaching Canada yet, but I've got a little suspicion the new conservative government in Ottawa may be wanting to take a more role in the Coalition of the Willing's noble War on Terror and that this foiled attack on the freedom loving citizens of Canada will be a convenient vehicle to enable this. Call me a cynic but for some reason I find it hard to believe Canada would be high on any Islamic terrorist's list of worthy targets. I wonder if there will turn out to be any Iranian link surfacing in the coming weeks ?

CANADIAN police claim to have foiled plans for a terrorist attack with the arrests of 17 people who they say had obtained three times the amount of explosives used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

The arrests represent one of the largest counter-terrorism sweeps in North America since September 2001.

Police said the home-grown terrorist cell, which had been under surveillance for about two years, was inspired by al-Qaeda and was on the verge of striking targets in southern Ontario.

Authorities refused to identify the group's planned targets, but the Toronto Star reported that they included the Parliament in Ottawa and the offices of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in Toronto.

..

Just days before the attack, the deputy head of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, Jack Hooper, told a Senate committee that "home-grown terrorists now posed a more serious risk" than immigrants or visitors.

The police and many experts maintain that Canada is a target because Islamist terrorists want to strike any prosperous, Western, Christian nation.

But repeating the cliched response of Western leaders, the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, said it was because "who we are and how we live, our society, our diversity and our values. Values such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law".

Many Canadians had started to believe that the country's limited international role - there are no Canadian troops in Iraq, for example - and less belligerent public posture might have isolated it from the terrorist attacks that had struck other Western nations.

"I really thought there was a good chance we wouldn't get hit, that nobody would care enough to come after us," said a former member of parliament, David McCombe. "But when people from within start attacking, people that went to our schools and should share our values, then I suppose no one is immune."

Back to the subject of socialists, I noticed that Bart at Energy Bulletin came up with an indirect answer to my question about what was going on with the attack on Alex Steffen's "Bright Green Revolution" in "The Monthly Review".

A satire of green capitalism from Monthly Review, the most prominent independent socialist publication. This interchange is a continuation of the socialist-environmentalist debate that started more than 50 years ago.

This episode reminded me a conversation I had with one of my leftie friends about 10 years ago. I loosely characterised my generally pragmatic politics as "green right" which brought on a small fit of apoplexy, with my friend basically echoing the "conservative" charge that greens are "watermelons" - green on the outside and red on the inside - and declaring that it was impossible to be both right wing (which to me simply means capitalist - rather than a member of the unpleasant sections of the right that make up the modern day rogue coalition) and green.

To me the whole point of Bruce's original Viridian Design sermon (which tended to crystallise a lot of what I was thinking about) was that green capitalism isn't an oxymoron - there are plenty of industries that are (or can be) environmentally friendly, and an economy based on "cradle to cradle" industrial design principles could be capitalist in nature - and this would quite probably be a more effective way of running it than trying to impose a centrally planned workers paradise on top of it (though as we've seen repeatedly, both forms of political organisation are prone to corruption over time, as one of my other favourite prophets, George Orwell, was fond of pointing out).

So - moving from socialists to tech libertarians, this article by Jaron Lanier on "DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" caught my eye recently (I was having some Mondo 2000 flashbacks last week, listening to some RU Sirius podcasts as well as reading Lanier). He mostly spends his time warning of the dangers of Wikipedia (not something I'd regard as a threat to world peace, but to each his own) but does touch on global warming and makes a number of interesting points about political feedback loops and various phenomena that occur when different groups attempt to control the framing of history (or current events) - even in the microcosm of Wikipedia.

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

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Reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure. In my particular case, it appears that the goblins are probably members or descendants of the rather sweet old Mondo 2000 culture linking psychedelic experimentation with computers. They seem to place great importance on relating my ideas to those of the psychedelic luminaries of old (and in ways that I happen to find sloppy and incorrect.) Edits deviating from this set of odd ideas that are important to this one particular small subculture are immediately removed. This makes sense. Who else would volunteer to pay that much attention and do all that work?

The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It's been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it's a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that's actually interesting information.

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A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don't. Often we don't live long enough to find out. Later in this essay I'll point out what constraints make a collective smart. But first, it's important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality.

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The collective isn't always stupid. In some special cases the collective can be brilliant. For instance, there's a demonstrative ritual often presented to incoming students at business schools. In one version of the ritual, a large jar of jellybeans is placed in the front of a classroom. Each student guesses how many beans there are. While the guesses vary widely, the average is usually accurate to an uncanny degree.

This is an example of the special kind of intelligence offered by a collective. It is that peculiar trait that has been celebrated as the "Wisdom of Crowds," though I think the word "wisdom" is misleading. It is part of what makes Adam Smith's Invisible Hand clever, and is connected to the reasons Google's page rank algorithms work. It was long ago adapted to futurism, where it was known as the Delphi technique. The phenomenon is real, and immensely useful.

But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles. Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania.

The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential.

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Some of the regulating mechanisms for collectives that have been most successful in the pre-Internet world can be understood in part as modulating the time domain. For instance, what if a collective moves too readily and quickly, jittering instead of settling down to provide a single answer? This happens on the most active Wikipedia entries, for example, and has also been seen in some speculation frenzies in open markets.

One service performed by representative democracy is low-pass filtering. Imagine the jittery shifts that would take place if a wiki were put in charge of writing laws. It's a terrifying thing to consider. Super-energized people would be struggling to shift the wording of the tax-code on a frantic, never-ending basis. The Internet would be swamped.

Such chaos can be avoided in the same way it already is, albeit imperfectly, by the slower processes of elections and court proceedings. The calming effect of orderly democracy achieves more than just the smoothing out of peripatetic struggles for consensus. It also reduces the potential for the collective to suddenly jump into an over-excited state when too many rapid changes to answers coincide in such a way that they don't cancel each other out. (Technical readers will recognize familiar principles in signal processing.)

The Wikipedia has recently slapped a crude low pass filter on the jitteriest entries, such as "President George W. Bush." There's now a limit to how often a particular person can remove someone else's text fragments. I suspect that this will eventually have to evolve into an approximate mirror of democracy as it was before the Internet arrived.

The reverse problem can also appear. The hive mind can be on the right track, but moving too slowly. Sometimes collectives would yield brilliant results given enough time but there isn't enough time. A problem like global warming would automatically be addressed eventually if the market had enough time to respond to it, for instance. Insurance rates would climb, and so on. Alas, in this case there isn't enough time, because the market conversation is slowed down by the legacy effect of existing investments. Therefore some other process has to intervene, such as politics invoked by individuals.

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The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.

These are just a few ideas about how to train a potentially dangerous collective and not let it get out of the yard. When there's a problem, you want it to bark but not bite you.

The illusion that what we already have is close to good enough, or that it is alive and will fix itself, is the most dangerous illusion of all. By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.

Now while I like much of Jaron's thinking I'm not so sure that I agree with the idea that the market would solve the global warming problem given enough time (which I'm glad to see he points out that we don't have).

Insurance rates don't directly impact the carbon emitting industries in a direct (or at least focussed) enough way - and though I guess it is possible the insurance industry may eventually start to outstrip fossil fuel industries in political donations and thereby sway the decision making process back in the direction of sanity, I wouldn't bet on it.

Looking at it purely from an economic rationalist's perspective, as long as coal fired power is the cheapest way of generating electricity (and for baseload that may well be true in countries like Australia for quite a while), I can't see the market ever being able to deal with global warming - the only way for this to happen is for the market to be guided by sending it the appropriate price signal - carbon dioxide is bad for everyone, so emissions must, and will, be taxed at ever increasing rates. Then the market can solve the carbon emissions problem.

Veering back to Bruce, I see the latest Viridian Note has a look at an environmental success story - the undoing of a socialist environmental disaster - returning the wreck of the Aral Sea back to life (to a certain extent anyway). Go read the whole thing (the article he quotes is from The Independent, who seem to have the best environmental coverage of the world's major newspapers). Bruce also points to the nascent "Field Guide to Surreal Botany" - while I've got no idea what this is, I'd love to see the final result !

The Aral Sea was one of the world's biggest inland bodies of water – until Soviet engineers destroyed it in the 1960s. Now, thanks to a new dam, it's coming back.

Fresh fish are on sale cheaply again in markets near the world's most desiccated sea. Cold green water is creeping back towards dozens of long-abandoned harbours, and for the first time in a generation, fishermen are launching their boats where recently there were only waves of sand.

Life is returning astonishingly quickly to the North Aral Sea in Central Asia, partially reversing one of the world's greatest environmental disasters. Just months after the completion of a dam to conserve its waters, the sea has largely recovered – confounding experts who said it was beyond rescue.

(((I'd be guessing that the Aral Sea was indeed "beyond rescue" and we're now seeing a brand-new sea that might as well be called the "Aral.")))

Since April the level of the sea has risen by more than 3m, flooding over 800 sq km of dried-out seabed, and bringing hope to a part of the world bereft of it since Soviet engineers stole the waters in the 1960s. The drying up of the Aral Sea – once the world's fourth largest inland water body, covering an area the size of Belgium and the Netherlands combined – has long been one of the biggest man-made catastrophes in history, bringing poverty, disease and death to the 3.5 million people living around it.
(((Aw c'mon, Belgium, Netherlands, who would miss those.)))

You would never know it, however, by looking at an atlas. Most still show it as it was, a squarish 66,000 sq km blue blob, east of the much larger Caspian, fed by two giant rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, perhaps better known as the Oxus and the Jaxartes of classical times. (((How fast will people have to change atlases as the seas rise? Maybe denialists will just leave the maps in place and pretend that New Orleans is still there.)))

But the maps are harking back to long-gone days, when the sea was filled to the brim with more than 1,000 cubic kilometres of pristine water, and its beaches, busy ports and abundant fish were famed throughout the region. During the second half of the 20th century the water receded to a 10th of its natural volume, and the sea's area fell by three-quarters. The water retreated – up to 150km from the former southern port of Muynak – leaving hundreds of fishing boats apparently beached in the middle of a desert.

It happened because the two great rivers died – or rather were murdered. The Soviet Union, deciding that the Aral Sea was 'nature's error,' diverted almost their entire flow to grow cotton in the surrounding desert. By 1980, enough canals to stretch three times to the moon had been dug to run the sea's lifeblood off into the sand.

By 1990 the falling waters cut the North, or 'Small,' Aral Sea off from the bigger southern part. In 2001 the island of Vozrozdeniya – once so isolated that it was used for biological weapons research – joined the mainland, turning the southern sea into the shape of two collapsing lungs. (((That's some fine writing there, folks.)))

And two years later, the Northern Sea itself was chopped in two. The remaining water became ever saltier, killing off the sea's 24 species of freshwater fish and ruining its fishermen. Once-thriving communities died.

To close, Billmon has a new installment on his travels in Egypt.

Certainly, the fact that Egypt’s most famous stronghold of Islamic fundamentalism overlaps with the country’s densest concentration of native Christians isn’t exactly calculated to produce ecumenical harmony. And it probably doesn’t help that many local Copts occupy a familiar niche, one filled in other lands and times by Jews, Chinese, Parsees, Koreans and other ethnic and religious minorities. Copts are, at least by reputation, the shop owners, goldsmiths, crop buyers and petty lenders of the local economy, roles almost guaranteed to produce conflict – in rural Egypt as much as in L.A.’s South Central District. The worst recent outbreak of violence, in the village of el-Kosheh on the other side of the Nile in 2000, reportedly started with a dispute between a Muslim customer and a Coptic storeowner. By the time it was over, 20 Copts and one Muslim were dead.

It’s also true, however, that more recent episodes of violence have taken place elsewhere, like the stabbings at a Coptic church in Alexandria in April, which set off a small riot. I don’t know whether this reflects the heavy hand of the security forces in this part of Egypt, or is just a sign that local communal passions have temporarily burnt themselves out, but I saw no evidence of the “genocide” the Copts and their neocon and Christian fundamentalist supporters in the United States have been fulminating about. Most of the churches I saw along this part of the journey looked shiny and prosperous – certainly by comparison to the multitude of small and shabby mosques, most badly in need of a new coat of paint. Nor are the local Copts shy about advertising their faith, as I would discovered after dark when we pulled into the city of Nag Hammadi (site of the discovery of the famous “Gnostic Gospels”.) The night sky was lit up by church towers outlined in neon and topped with neon white crosses. These competed with, and more than held their own against, the neon minarets with their bright green crescents.

That conditions are hard for Egyptian Copts, and getting harder, I have no doubt. I was told as much – or at least, as much was hinted at – by Copts I spoke to later on my trip. The Mubarak regime is under enormous pressure to co-opt the fundamentalists by pandering to religious prejudice and making symbolic gestures towards Islamic piety. (Now doesn’t that sound familiar?) Discrimination is increasing. The violence, and the threat of it, are all too real.

But as usual, the story doesn’t appear to be nearly as simple, or as catastrophic, as our homegrown cultural warriors would like to believe. Contempt for, and resentment of, a successful commercial minority is not a uniquely Islamic or Arabian social tendency. Nor is communal violence – including violence on a much grander scale than anything the Copts have yet endured.

One can’t blame the Copts for seeking allies where they can find them, but pretending that Egypt is an Islamic hellhole of religious persecution, instead of a grindingly poor Third World country with lots of social problems and not many solutions, is the apex of intellectual dishonesty – which, of course, is exactly what we’ve come to expect from the neocons and their fellow travelers.