The Triumph Of The Will  

Four Corners' episode on peak oil tonight was very well done - they'd obviously done plenty of research, and chose their primary interviewees well - Robert Hirsch, Chris Skrebowski and Colin Campbell featured heavily. The whole thing is now online (along with supplements on The Saudi Riddle, an online chat with some local peak oil commentators and a set of further resources).

JONATHAN HOLMES: No senior executive of Saudi Aramco - even one recently retired - will publicly contradict his own government. But Sadad Al-Husseini, who was, for many years, head of Saudi Aramco's exploration division, admits that making good on the Minister's promises won't be easy. Saudi Arabia is no exception to a global problem.

SADAD AL-HUSSEINI, FORMER DIRECTOR SAUDI ARAMCO: The easy oil has already been produced. The - the remaining reserves, as significant and substantial as they are, are going to be more expensive and gradually more demanding to produce. Therefore the future capacity is slower to come on stream than what it has been the traditional past.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Sadad Al-Husseini agrees with Robert Hirsch that the time for consuming nations to start worrying is now.

SADAD AL-HUSSEINI, FORMER DIRECTOR SAUDI ARAMCO: Well, I think in many of the major consuming countries, the leadership has been asleep on the watch. Everybody in the industry realises that oil and gas are the backbone of global economies. Somehow, I guess politicians felt that this was not going to be an issue on their watch, that it was too far into the future, and therefore didn't pay attention to it.

NEWSREADER: The biggest game in Los Angeles today was find the gas. Three out of four stations were closed. 99 out of 100 will be closed tomorrow.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Back in the early 1970s, when drivers queued at the petrol pumps throughout the western world, influential voices were prophesying the imminent end of the age of oil.

NEWSREADER: It's not likely California can avoid rationing - - -

JONATHAN HOLMES: Governments and oil companies today point out that it didn't happen then, and it won't happen now. But the doom-mongers are unabashed about crying wolf once more.

ROBERT HIRSCH, CONSULTANT US DEPT OF ENERGY: Well, the wolf did finally eat the boy.

CHRIS SKREBOWSKI, EDITOR PETROLEUM REVIEW: It's not that this data is secret. I haven't - haven't manipulated data. It's all data in the public domain. Anyone else can do this but it seems they'd rather not.

JONATHAN HOLMES: And you are being told by large numbers of people - with very official titles - that you're wrong.

CHRIS SKREBOWSKI, EDITOR PETROLEUM REVIEW: Yes.

JONATHAN HOLMES: But you're not?

CHRIS SKREBOWSKI, EDITOR PETROLEUM REVIEW: I don't think so.

JONATHAN HOLMES: We found no-one on our travels round an oil-dependent world who thought it likely we'll be buying crude at $20 a barrel, or petrol at 60 cents a litre, ever again. No-one denies either that the age of oil will ultimately end. What's in dispute is whether it will end decades hence, with a whimper, or soon, and, as George Miller predicted, with a most uncomfortable bang.

SBS' Dateline program also had a good episode recently on "Germany's New Power", featuring forward thinking energy visionary Hermann Scheer.

Already some homes here have been demolished. And here’s the reason why – the neighbouring lignite mine. It may be inefficient, subsidised and produce highly polluting brown coal, but the state government has decided the American multinational that owns it can bulldoze Huersdorf to expand the mine’s operation. Over the decades, dozens of other villages have met the same fate.

The fact that this mine continues to operate and devour entire villages is a pretty graphic illustration of how desperately Germany needs new sources of energy. On one hand this has led to a new push to reinvigorate the country’s nuclear program, on the other side there are those that say the future lies with renewable energy – an area where Germany already leads the world.

Another town – Swabisch Hall – post-card perfect and in no danger whatsoever of being bulldozed. Tourism is the big money spinner here – now it’s been joined by renewable energy. The visitors strolling across its covered bridges may not realise it, but they’re also traversing one of the Swabisch Hall’s renewable power sources. For tucked away discreetly along the river are a number of small-scale hydro-electricity turnines. This one generates about a million kilowatt hours a year – enough for about 60 houses. And here I find Hermann Scheer, the father of Germany’s renewable energy revolution.

HERMANN SCHEER, RENEWABLE ENERGY ADVOCATE: It’s a very old city, but a city with the most modern application of energy technologies. It is again an example how many devices, many small powr stations can substitute some large power stations.

Hermann Scheer has come to Swabisch Hall to address a solar power conference. He’s revered here as the author of Germany’s landmark EEG law. This law compels power companies to buy electricity at above market prices, from anyone using renewable technology to generate it. The result – thousands upon thousands of German companies, communities and individuals now sell power into the national grid.

HERMANN SCHEER: It’s the first step, yes. It’s a beginning. It’s the beginning of an energy revolution. The time of phasing out nuclear and fossil will come.

The renewable revolution has already come to the village of Juhnde. The dairy cows here are now producing more than milk. Their manure helps power the town’s new bio-gas plant – although the main raw material is a purpose-grown cereal crop produced by local farmers grateful for a new market. The mixture is fermented in large vats producing methane – the smell is yeasty – a little like a brewery. The methane powers generators – the electricity is sold into the national grid. And there’s a more direct benefit – excess heat warms water that’s then reticulated throughout the village.

ECKHARD FANGMEIR, LOCAL RESIDENT: Here’s the hot water grid, which is coming from the energy plant. The hot water is forwarded here by 80 degrees Celsius.

Local resident Eckhard Fangmeir proudly shows me his cellar – where his oil furnace once stood. He tells me he’s already saving A$1200 a year in heating costs.

ECKHARD FANGMEIR: I’m personally very, very happy because now I am independent. Independent of the international oil prices because we are producing our own energy here in our village – electricity and heat will be produced by our own energy plant and we are now independent.

Upstairs over coffee Eckhard and his wife Sabine explain their investment. 140 local residents own the bio-gas plant, borrowing most of the money from banks. With the plant producing twice as much electricity as Juhnde requires, in 20 years time the banks will be paid off and the residents will be fully-paid-up energy barons.

SABINE FANGMEIR: I think it’s a good idea because it is very environment friendly. There is no danger. No danger for us, no danger for our children, and the children of our children. And it’s all our own. Not one owner, not an oil company. It’s ours. And we all together are responsible for this plant.

The bio-mass plant at Juhnde has only been running for around six months, but already some 30 neighbouring villages are so impressed they’re planning to invest in their own plants.

Germany is now the world leader in renewable energy. 10% of its electricity requirements are now supplied by wind, solar, bio-mass and small hydro. That will grow to 20-25% within 15 years, when nuclear is scheduled to be phased out. This energy revolution can, in large part, be attributed to Hermann Scheer. As a young politician in the 1980s, his opposition to nuclear power led him to explore the possibilities of renewables.

HERMANN SCHEER: It was a surprise to me, that there was no politician, not in my country, and not in other countries who was really committed with sufficient knowledge on renewable energies. And then I concluded for me, in my mind, if that issue is so important then I should do that. It was a question of personal responsibility.

DAVID HOGG, CSG SOLAR: We’re using very thin silicon. We want the light to stay in the silicon. So we do that here.

The EEG law has also led to a boom in solar power. Near Leipzig I find a brand-spanking-new solar panel factory run by Australians, using groundbreaking technology developed over 20 years in Sydney, but now majority-owned by Germans.

DAVID HOGG: It uses crystalline silicon, which is what is being used predominantly in the industry for a very long time, but we’ve found a way of using a much, much thinner layer of the same material. So we get all the benefits without all the costs.

Germany’s support for renewable energy is sucking in technology from around the world.

The New York Times has an unsettling report on neo-nazis and other hate groups taking advantage of lax new recruitment criteria adopted by the US military courtesy of the Iraq fiasco to get some training (and on the job training) in preparation for a future race war.

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.

"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. "That's a problem." [...]

The report said that neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance, whose founder, William Pierce, wrote "The Turner Diaries," the novel that was the inspiration and blueprint for Timothy J. McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, sought to enroll followers in the Army to get training for a race war.

The groups are being abetted, the report said, by pressure on recruiters, particularly for the Army, to meet quotas that are more difficult to reach because of the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq.

Some of the recent news coming from Iraq is bad enough that its hard to see that neo nazis would be much worse (on the tinfoil plane, RI links up this story with a tale about a very perverted judge in the US and Valdimir Putin's bizarre stomach kissing episode in Russia that took the cliched politician kissing babies act to a new, and weird, low). Meanwhile it would seem the Salvador Option is still underway as well.

Five US soldiers were charged in a rape and multiple murder case that has outraged Iraqis, as documents obtained by Reuters on Sunday showed the rape victim was a minor aged just 14, and not over 20 as US officials say.

Days after former private Steven Green was charged as a civilian in a US court with rape and four murders, four serving soldiers were charged with the same offences, the US military said in statement that did not name the troops.

...

Green, 21, has since been discharged from the army due to a "personality disorder". The case came to light during stress counselling for a soldier last month following the kidnap and killing of two other men from the same unit near Mahmudiya.

A soldier cited in US court documents as the first witness told investigators that Green and three others drank alcohol and discussed rape. They then told the soldier to keep watch on the radio as they set off for the house, some in civilian clothes.

Two soldiers who said they went to the house accused Green of killing the parents and child before he and the other soldier in the home raped the woman. Green then shot her too, they said.

The East Timor situation seems to have quitened down (from a media standpoint anyway), but speculation continues about whether or not Mari Alkatiri's downfall was engineered by from outside the country. Surely not another tussle over oil and gas ? John Martinkus reports.

Mari Alkatiri's resignation was the culmination of a long-planned attack, writes John Martinkus.

THREE weeks ago in East Timor I was given information from senior members of the East Timorese military that confirmed what the now deposed prime minister had been saying all along. There had been three attempts since April last year to get senior command figures in the East Timorese army to carry out a coup against the Government of the former prime minister, Mari Alkatiri.

In light of what has happened since it seems obvious a very well orchestrated campaign has been carried out to bring the Government down. And it has worked. For reasons best known to themselves the opposition to Alkatiri enlisted the support of a group of junior officers in the East Timorese defence forces, the F-FDTL, who broke with the army command and took their weapons with them. They attacked the F-FDTL on May 23 and 24 and precipitated the widespread unrest in Dili that led to the international forces being called in. Then came the destruction of property by the gangs from the west, mainly aimed at those from the east who are perceived as supporting the Fretilin Government, then the string of allegations presented to the foreign press, that finally led to Alkatiri's resignation.

There is no doubt that whoever has been behind this campaign has covered their tracks and it will be difficult to link the interests involved to the destruction that has led to 150,000 East Timorese now living in refugee camps around the capital, too afraid to go home. But it was the plight of these people that was used as an instrument by the opposition groups to call for Alkatiri's removal even though the same groups had initiated the violence in the first place. It was a very callous and cynical political manoeuvre to say the least, especially considering these people are now facing chronic food shortages.

But some obvious questions have not been answered by the Australian press who have been almost unanimous in condemning the ruling Fretilin party that, like it or not, did have an overwhelming mandate to govern until mid next year that had been granted in elections supervised by the UN and declared free and fair - with much fanfare, I remember, as I covered them.

First, who started the violence? Surely in any other country if a group of disaffected soldiers takes off with weapons and then launches two very open assaults on the army, as Alfredo Reinado's men did on May 23 and 24, then shouldn't they be arrested? Yet they were given Australian SAS bodyguards and remain free after handing back only a fraction of the weapons they took with them.

The Al Gore show continues to roll onwards, with an excellent interview in Rolling Stone and some blunt words about the toxic disaster that is the tar sands industry.

Al Gore has pushed the buttons of Ralph Klein, premier of Canada's conservative Alberta province (think North Dakota, but even norther). Interviewed in the latest Rolling Stone, Gore disparaged Alberta's oil-sands industry: "For every barrel of oil they extract there, they have to use enough natural gas to heat a family's home for four days. And they have to tear up four tons of landscape, all for one barrel of oil. It is truly nuts." (The vice president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers confirmed Gore's figures, but demurred on the "truly nuts" part.) Klein -- who once suggested that ancient global-warming trends may have been caused by dinosaur farts -- called Gore "about as far left as you can go," and sputtered, "I don't know what [Gore] proposes the world run on, maybe hot air. ... The simple fact is America needs oil."

It's a beautiful day for enabling.

Billmon has been to see "An Inconvenient Truth", and while he's not the type to gush with praise for any politician, he did come up with yet another great post afterwards.

But in our increasingly debased political and cultural climate, just letting Al Gore be Al Gore isn’t commercially viable, not even in an art house documentary. Which I suppose is why the filmmakers felt compelled to weave in Gore's by-now familiar psychodramas – the same teary-eyed stories he used to tell (or exploit, depending on your point of view) in his political speeches. This includes, for example, the morality tale of the Gore family's decision to stop growing tobacco after his sister died of lung cancer. Like Al's old speeches, AIT neglects to mention that this supposedly guilt-stricken decision was made several years after her death.

This stuff is just as clumsy and annoying as it was when Gore was on the campaign trail. But in the Age of Oprah, such ploys are probably inevitable: Like Gore’s campaign handlers, the makers of AIT apparently felt the need to “humanize” his message, instead of letting the science speak for itself. But to me it only highlighted the long odds against what Gore is trying to do, which is to speak the language of reason to an increasingly irrational, post-Enlightenment world.

In that sense, Gore’s project makes him the diametrical opposite – the antithesis – of the unnamed Cheney administration official quoted by Ron Suskind immediately after the 2004 election:

'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

There are, of course, some truly sinister overtones to that quote – echoes of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and totalitarian delusions about the mutability of “Aryan” or “proletarian” science. As a practical guide to running the complex affairs of a modern industrial superpower, it’s certainly demonstrated its flaws, in Iraq and elsewhere. But as a political slogan – that is to say, as the basic operating principle of a propaganda machine based on lies, fear and the emotional manipulation of popular myths – it’s proven extremely effective. Even now, when the regime’s real-world failures are obvious to most, the consequences in terms of lost public support haven’t been nearly as severe as one might otherwise have expected.

In part this reflects the complicity of the semi-official media – the same pack of intellectual juveniles who savaged Gore during the 2000 campaign. But their pro-lies, anti-reality spin isn’t entirely a product of the familiar culprits: corporate control, concentrated ownership, and the elite biases of what the glorified gossip columnists at The Note like to call the Gang of 500. After all, Gore is and always has been a born-to-the-purple member of that same elite (although his father, the Senator, was an honest-to-God rural populist of the old school – the kind of politician Gore Jr. occasionally pretended to be.)

There’s something deeper at work here than just conventional media bias or capitalist economics, although they're certainly part of it. There’s always been a powerful current of anti-intellectualism in American politics, just as there is in American life. It’s the dark side of democracy: The pressure to accept what the majority, or the most vocal minority, thinks is true as truth – even when the evidence is entirely on the other side. When Henry Ford said history was bunk, he wasn’t taking about the past but about the present, and his ire wasn’t directed at historians per se but at the revisionist historians of the Progressive Era, who were telling him and his fellow know nothings inconvenient facts they didn’t want to hear. Pump Henry full of Hillbilly Heroin and put him on the radio, and you’ve got Rush Limbaugh, still making the same point.

The difference between Ford’s time and Limbaugh’s is that the political presumption against rationality is now shared, or at least pandered to, even at the top of the political and cultural pyramid. It’s curious that people who are paid to think and write for a living, and who, like Gore, attended the “best” schools, are now nearly as susceptible to the politics of ignorance as your average conservative talk show host, but then the elite media ain’t what it used to be. Like academia, it’s fighting a losing rear-guard action against the spirit of the times and the angry, irrational prejudices that go with it.

...

Against the firepower of this kind of commercialized ignorance, it’s hard to see how Gore’s dogged rationalism has much of a chance – particularly when his truth is so highly inconvenient to the oil lobby, the coal lobby, the auto lobby and the utility lobby, and not just the flat earth lobby (sometimes known as the Republican Party.)

Unlike the popular and political cultures, corporate America is utterly rationalist – more so now, perhaps, than at any time in the past – but it also defines rationality as utility maximization in the current time period. Or, to paraphrase Al Gore quoting Upton Sinclair: It’s hard to make someone understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it – especially if the costs of not understanding can be deferred to future generations. Combine that with a cheerful willingness to use popular ignorance and attenuated attention spans to serve short-term economic interests (a very different movie, Thank You For Smoking, comes to mind) and the corporate masters of astroturf PR and industry-funded junk science are in much the same position as their White House colleagues: Still firmly in control on the bridge of the Titanic, even as the forward compartments gradually fill with sea water.

There are, perhaps, some faint signs of hope – the unlikely popularity of An Inconvenient Truth being one of them. Ratings for Fox News are said to be down sharply, and someone recently sent me a link to the web site of The Progressive Review, where it is asserted that web traffic is also falling at a host of right-wing fountains of misinformation, from rushlimbaugh.com to townhall.com. Maybe, just maybe, the intellectual tide is turning.

But I doubt it. In my darker moments, it sometimes seems as if the entire world is in the middle of a fierce backlash against the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the ideological challenges they posed to the old belief systems. The forces of fundamentalism and obscurantism appear to be on the march everywhere – even as the moral and technological challenges posed by a global industrial civilization grow steadily more complex.

Climate change is only one of those challenges, and maybe not even the most urgent one – at the rate we’re going, civilization could collapse long before the Antarctic ice shelves do. Maybe as a species we really have reached the same evolutionary dead end as Australopithecus robustus – intelligent enough as a species to create problems we're not bright enough, or adaptable enough, to solve. I don’t know. But if extinction, or a return to the dark ages, is indeed our fate – or our grandchildren’s fate, anyway – I think it will be a Hobson’s choice as to which cultural tendency will bear the largest share of the blame: the arrogant empiricism that has made human society into an instrument of technological progress instead of the other way around, the ignorant prejudices of the masses, who are happy to consume the material benefits of the Enlightenment but unwilling to assume intellectual responsibility for them, or the cynical nihilism of corporate and political elites who are willing to play upon the latter in order to perpetuate the former, which is, after all is said and done, their ultimate claim to power.

Apparently George Bush thinks nuclear power is a form of renewable energy - which prompted some people to try and do what a few years hanging around Yale drinking beer and performing weird rituals in The Crypt couldn't - educate him about something.

Dear Mr. President:

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, you were quoted as saying that nuclear power "is a renewable source of energy."

Please be advised that nuclear power is not a renewable source of energy.

For that matter, oil, coal, and natural gas are also not renewable sources of energy.

Nuclear power and fossil fuels are environmentally polluting and non-renewable sources of energy.

The primary renewable sources of energy are biofuels, biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, and wind.

Sincerely,

3EStrategies
(Cylvia Hayes, Executive Director)


Alliance for Affordable Energy
(Micah Walker Parkin)


Arizona Solar Center, Inc.
(Daniel Peter Aiello, Chair)


Arizona Solar Energy Association
(Chuck Skidmore)


...

William McDonough also had some recent comments on confusion about nuclear power (in this case from Peter Schwartz, who should know better).

In response to a question from GBN's Peter Schwartz on why some green thinkers neglect to mention nuclear energy as a viable renewable energy source, William McDonough said: "Don't get me wrong: I love nuclear energy! It's just that I prefer fusion to fission. And it just so happens that there's an enormous fusion reactor safely banked a few million miles from us. It delivers more than we could ever use in just about 8 minutes. And it's wireless!"

John at The Real Deal notes that "Can’t grow yourself out of an energy crisis" - and turning food into fuel isn't much of an answer to anything.

Malaysia will not grant anymore biodiesel licenses because the manufactuers of biodiesel are sucking up all the palm oil.

”Malaysia has suspended giving new licenses for biodiesel production projects amid concerns that an excess of projects could deprive the food market of palm oil, widely used in cooking, a report said Monday.

Malaysia is the world’s biggest producer of crude palm oil, the main ingredient of biodiesel. Spurred by the interest in the fuel, touted as a cheaper substitute for gasoline and diesel, the government has so far approved 32 biodiesel projects with a combined production capacity of about 3 million tons.”

But it announced last week that it will stop issuing licenses for new biodiesel manufacturing projects until it completes a study of the palm oil downstream industry, the New Straits Times reported. It didn’t say when it expects to complete the study.

The Times quoted Malaysian Palm Oil Council chief executive Yusof Basiron as saying that the freeze on new projects was largely due to a surge in the number of applications for biodiesel production.

The government received 87 applications since last year, raising concerns that it could eat into crude palm oil, or CPO, reserves meant for food and oleochemical industries, he said.

“In any industry, there must be a realistic level. There must be a balance between CPO for food and that for fuel,” he added”

And to close, here's a snippet from Past Peak.

One day back in 1992 Lucy simply felt compassion for two boys — neither older than twelve 12 — who feared to spend the night on the rugged streets of Lima. Lucy only recently had learned of the existence of a subculture of street kids in Lima. Parents sometimes abandon these children — in some cases selling them into servitude — while other young boys and girls flee severe abuse at home. [...]

[W]hen Lucy encountered two young boys who expressed a deep fear for passing the night on the streets, she invited them to use her office as a safe haven. She told them to extend the invitation to any other child who shared their concerns. Since Lucy already had plans to attend a family party that evening, she informed the office custodian to give entry to any child who arrived in search of refuge.

After the party, Lucy decided to check in with her young guests. She hoped that the custodian, upon meeting the ragged vagrants, had not balked at her instructions. She half expected to find the boys sitting on the curb in front of her office, locked out. [...]

Lucy had a puzzle awaiting her that evening at the office. The key unlocked the front door but, try as she might, she could not shove it open. It felt like someone had lodged a rolled-up carpet behind the door to block the entry. With the help of her sons, Lucy finally moved the door to create enough space to squeeze through and pass inside the building.

As she reached blindly in the dark in search of the light switch, Lucy tripped over the "carpet roll." She caught her balance and leaned her body against the wall. Holding her pose, her fingers continued to work the wall until they eventually found the light switch and flicked it upward.

Lucy initially looked down at her feet and discovered several young kids curled up on the floor, sleeping, their bodies jammed against the door. She then cast her vision around the room, though it was hard to register at first what she saw. Every nook and cranny of the office was covered with sleeping children. "I even found young kids snuggled tightly inside the cupboards where we stored our office supplies," Lucy said.

Lucy counted more than 600 children who slept in her office that night. The word had passed like wildfire on the streets of Lima. Found: a shelter from the storm.

At that moment, Lucy did not know all the details that caused these boys and girls to run scared. But she clearly sensed that her life would never be the same. "Those children, stacked one against the other asleep on the floor of my office, looked so defenseless and vulnerable," Lucy said in a slow, soft voice. "They had no one to be their advocate, to defend their rights," she added. "I knew then what path I had to take."