The Merchant Of Menace  

Grist has a sobering look at the rapid expansion of the coal fired power industry in the US (which is being replicated in China and India) - how "merchant coal" is changing the face of America - which notes the dubious machinations of Peabody coal to keep people hooked on their product for as long as possible. Can you say "catastrophic global warming here we come" ?

From his rolling green soybean fields above a slow river in eastern Iowa, Don Shatzer looks out over the farm where he was raised, across land he and his neighbors have farmed all their lives. Below him are the garden beds where his wife Linda grows organic vegetables to safeguard the family's health, and the farm pond and beach he built for the grandkids. A few miles to the west lies the city of Waterloo, with a population of about 66,000. The sky is clear and the southwest wind sweet on a humid summer day.

Shatzer's land is some of the most fertile in North America, part of the fecund breadbasket on which a continent relies. And if New Jersey's LS Power wins the fight it has started, a 750-megawatt pulverized-coal electrical generation plant will sit right next door by 2011.

The Shatzers, along with a dedicated coalition of local citizens, have gathered 3,000 signatures on petitions against the proposed plant. They have lawn signs, car decals, a growing library of informational handouts for public meetings, and even a blog. The couple's whole lives are invested in this land. They say they have not yet begun to fight.

And they aren't alone. Across the nation, 153 new coal plants are currently proposed, enough to power some 93 million homes. Of those 153 proposals, only 24 have expressed an intent to use gasification technology, which offers a way to handle the large amounts of carbon dioxide produced by coal combustion. A recent report from the National Energy Technology Laboratory anticipates the construction of up to 309 new 500 MW coal plants in the U.S. by 2030. If NETL's projections are correct, U.S. coal-generation capacity will more than triple by 2010, with corresponding air pollution and greenhouse-gas increases.

Some of the 153 proposed coal plants will add capacity for existing public utilities. Others, like those by developers LS Power and Peabody, are speculative "merchant" coal plants, which ultimately intend to sell the power -- or even the plant itself -- to the highest bidder. Local need for power is not part of the calculations behind these merchant plants. The concept isn't new, but the voracious expansion plans are.

The David Holmgren / Richard Heinberg "Peak oil and Permaculture" tour seems to be generating plenty of publicity, with Heinberg getting a profile in today's Sydney Morning Herald and an interview on Radio National (there is also a related article in the Adelaide Advertiser).

Richard Heinberg is an unlikely latter-day Jeremiah. The contrast between this quietly spoken Californian college professor and accomplished classical violinist and his explosive message couldn't be more marked. Heinberg, who is embarking on an Australia-wide speaking tour, is a leading proponent of the "peak oil" theory.

Peak oil is shorthand for the premise that the amount of oil left for us to use has "peaked" (or is just about to peak). Once worldwide production begins to fall and with no corresponding decrease in demand, oil prices will skyrocket, leading to widespread chaos.

How bad will it be? If Heinberg is to be believed, the impending dislocation caused by the end of the oil era will be about as bad as it gets.

From global resource wars as oil-dependent economies battle for control of remaining resources to widespread famine caused by the slowdown in oil-dependent agribusiness, the picture he paints is nothing short of cataclysmic.

Reactions to his predictions vary. "I've got some pretty virulent hate mail," he says. "But I have to say I've got mostly thanks from people for alerting them to this. I'm a little surprised because the message is so dire that when people first encounter the information it is a bit traumatic. Some people have to go through a period of psychological adjustment. Maybe they are better off not knowing, I don't know."

The Asia Times has an article called "Russia spins global energy spider's web" which says that the West is being marginalised by the rise of resource nationalism in energy producers and that Russia is trying to be at the centre of a new energy cartel that is engaging with the rising economies of China and India rather than the West. It mentions neither the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation nor the "Asian energy grid" plan, but seems to reflect the same underlying ideas. I'm not sure how real this idea of a Russian-centric energy future is, but the possibility of the energy rich states concentrating exports to the East rather than West, combined with all the other issues I moan about here (oil depletion, global warming and the ever mounting costs of our resource wars) are enough to make me wonder just how stupid our leadership is. Surely moving away from oil has enough obvious benefits to the West as a whole that its time to ignore vested interests in the oil industry and military industrial complex...

Almost none of the world's oil and gas producers wants to be inordinately dependent on the US market any longer. Additionally, the steady rise of the powerful economies of Asia beckons oil and gas producers toward such lucrative markets that are politically cost-free, meaning they do not attach political demands and seek to interfere in the domestic affairs of the producing regimes, as does the US.

In virtually all cases, the interests of the West and of its multinational oil companies and big Western financial institutions are being minimized and/or pushed out as the global trend of nationalization, by one means or another, of the oil-and-gas sector picks up speed.

That is occurring in Russia, which has now surpassed Saudi Arabia as the world's largest exporter of oil, in Central Asia, the Middle East and in Latin America. Within virtually all such regimes the lines of separation between the top levels of political leadership and the directorship of key corporations and industries are not only blurred but are being obliterated. The multinational oil companies of the West are being marginalized as a direct result.

That is the case in Russia, where in many key areas of industry corporate directors are intimately tied to President Vladimir Putin, having formed a close association with him long before he became president, and many even hold key positions as upper-level Kremlin officials, or as government ministers. Not merely coincidentally, the key corporations the directors of which are so closely allied with Putin are often resources-based and are also those that are state-controlled businesses, with the Russian state holding controlling (51% or more) interests.

To varying yet alarming degrees, the resource-rich regimes around the globe are copying the Russian model. Resources-based corporate states with a profound political affinity for one another and a simultaneous collective disdain and even a hatred for US-led unipolar dominance are proliferating around the globe.

Resource-rich Russia's mounting global leverage with the world's other producing states and with the powerhouse economies of the East, and its profound political affinity with such producers and key consumer states, far outweighs the influence of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

How so? Russia is crossing the membership boundaries of OPEC to court its most powerful members and to conclude with them joint-venture agreements of huge consequence and importance for the future of global oil and gas exploration and production. The West is rapidly being pushed out of such ventures, or is being forced to take radical reductions in the size of its stakes, and is being left out entirely in many new ventures.

Instead, the world's producing regimes are increasingly entering key joint ventures between themselves and in very close cooperation with the powerhouse economies of the rising East, such as China. We are witnessing not merely the formation of some new oil-and-gas cartel with Russia at its center, but rather the formation of something that includes both producers and the key consumer states of the East in an ever more cohesive de facto confederation. This is dedicated to the achievement of strategic energy security for those within its clearly defined circle.
In the process, OPEC itself, as an entity, is being undermined and marginalized. Simultaneously, the West is being forcibly cast from the proverbial frying pan into the fire as something far more powerful, compelling and all-encompassing than OPEC is coalescing.

The ominous rise around the globe of the resources-based corporate state is accelerating. The implications for the West are enormous, yet such implications are only beginning to be understood. As noted above, such states are concluding rapidly increased numbers of strategic agreements among themselves for the joint exploration and production of oil and gas, and with the rapidly rising powerhouse economies of the East, such as China and India, for the private long-term supply of oil and gas.

The creation of such private pools of oil and gas for the consumption only by specific economic powers in the East and select economies of the West is also a new development that carries with it profound implications for the West.

Bruce Schneier has an excellent post up called "What the terrorists want" - and notes that our feeble minded politicians are giving it to them (he probably should have given "The Power of Nightmares" a nod too).

I'd like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

We're all a little jumpy after the recent arrest of 23 terror suspects in Great Britain. The men were reportedly plotting a liquid-explosive attack on airplanes, and both the press and politicians have been trumpeting the story ever since.

In truth, it's doubtful that their plan would have succeeded; chemists have been debunking the idea since it became public. Certainly the suspects were a long way off from trying: None had bought airline tickets, and some didn't even have passports.

Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers' perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they've succeeded.

Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that's basically what's happening right now.

Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists' actions, and increase the effects of their terror.

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he implausible plots and false alarms actually hurt us in two ways. Not only do they increase the level of fear, but they also waste time and resources that could be better spent fighting the real threats and increasing actual security. I'll bet the terrorists are laughing at us.

Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn't engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn't write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn't use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we'd reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.

It's time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation -- and not focusing on specific plots.

But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show's viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer.

Past Peak notes that more neoconservative idiocy is sending a lot of Venezuelan oil China's way.

Policy Pete on Hugo Chavez:

So he likes Fidel, so what? This is business, not personal, as the Corleones used to like to say. The US just lost half a million barrels a day forever to the Chinese. Having managed to tick off every Muslim on the planet, it would have been expecting too much for an unsophisticated presidency to try to mend fences in the southern hemisphere. Why not anger everyone who will be supplying the marginal oil that the US will need pretty desperately in less than a decade? "We're imperious; you're the third world. We get to give you little lectures on Freedom and The Free Market, you get to ship us your crude."

While it is not impossible that this may be the right strategy for a secure US, more than a few foreign offices must be watching Washington with genuine puzzlement. Do the Americans really think that a policy aimed (unsuccessfully) at eradicating terrorists means the rest of the world will supply the US with its petroleum in gratitude?

It's going to be painful to live through, but the US is giving the world a pretty good object lesson on the futility of trying to dictate terms through intimidation and military force in a world that's becoming ever more fragmented, fluid, unconquerable, and ungovernable, at an ever-accelerating pace. Bullies get what's coming to them, in the end.

The White House thought the US was the new Rome. They thought they could dominate the world's oil producers by purely military means. Ain't working out too well. For the near term, world oil markets will stay open to the highest bidder and oil will continue to be fungible. But who is to say markets won't begin to break down when the oil picture gets more desperate. Oil producers will have opportunities to exert leverage beyond just getting a good price. We're giving a lot of people a lot of reasons to look for payback.

Past Peak also has a look at the drought in the US.

The US is currently experiencing one of the worst droughts in its history. The current drought hasn't reached Dust Bowl levels, but the demand for water is much greater today than it was in the 30s, so the consequences of drought are considerably more severe. Topeka Capital-Journal:

While the prolonged Dust Bowl droughts of the 1930s and droughts of the 1950s are considered the historically devastating dry periods in the United States, less severe events today can create enormous problems, [climatologist Mark] Svoboda said.

That is because population growth, particularly in Southwestern states like Nevada, puts a heavier strain on water sources during a drought.

"When a little drought comes along now, it can be very disruptive," he said. "The amount of water hasn't changed, but the demand has increased greatly. You don't need to have a drought of the '50s to have the impact of the '50s."

This all seems to be happening under the radar in areas that haven't been affected. There will be downstream consequences, however, as crops fail, food prices rise, farms go out of business, etc. Expect more of the same in years to come.

Ex MI6 chief Stella Rimington has been in town echoing Dick Cheney's 30 year war prayer (though at least she admits the whole concept is ridiculous). No talk of alternative approaches unfortunately - or any pointing out that the 30 year timeframe is roughly how long middle eastern oil will flow in large quantities.

TERRORISM in its current form is likely to continue for at least another generation, the first female director-general of the British intelligence agency MI5 has warned.

Stella Rimington, who headed the internal defensive arm of Britain's secret service for more than four years in the 1990s, said it was likely to take this long for politicians to make a difference.

"It could certainly last for a generation because the issues underlying it are so complex that it is going to take at least another generation to solve," Dame Stella said yesterday.

In Sydney to promote her latest novel, the veteran of 31 years in the secret service was also critical of the US-led forces' handling of the Iraq war.

"I think the idea of a 'war on terrorism' … is, in my view, a mistaken idea - you cannot fight a war on '-isms' and beliefs," she said, adding that overstating this angle inevitably led to the creation of more terrorists.

The Orwellian notion of perpetual war seems to be a favourite of the Rodent's - he's announced new plans to further expand our armed forces. It seems we're to follow the US lead and allow pretty much anyone who feels like joining to don a uniform. We aren't going to let go of East Timor either, it seems.

FEARS of a worsening security crisis in the region have prompted cabinet to approve a $10 billion defence boost which will give the army 2600 more troops.

Announcing two new battalions yesterday, the Prime Minister, John Howard, cited the near collapse of East Timor, ethnic strife in the Solomon Islands, coups in Fiji, a security force split in Vanuatu, and - to Port Moresby's annoyance - "the inherently unstable situation in Papua New Guinea".

The situation, bad for some time, had got worse, Mr Howard said. Australia faced "ongoing and, in my opinion, increasing instances of destabilised and failing states in our region". The world expected Australia to carry most of the military and police burden in its "patch".

Mr Howard is expected to announce today a near doubling of the Australian Federal Police international deployment group - including formation of a riot squad - to about 1000.

He acknowledged the challenge of expanding the army when recruitment was struggling to keep pace with attrition. The army is already 1000 under strength, and yesterday's 2600 is in addition to 1485 extra troops authorised last December.

The new spending, spread over more than a decade, will add to the $20 billion defence budget.

Mr Howard identified school cadets as a recruitment source, saying the fall-off in participation might assist. With less compulsion to join cadets, those who did were more likely to regard their experience as "the beginning of a lifetime of interest in the military", he said.

Young people would also be attracted by advertising that emphasised "traditional" military values, he said. To ease the army recruitment challenge, entry standards would be eased or, in Mr Howard's word, "modernised".

The Defence Minister, Brendan Nelson, confirmed army doors would no longer be closed to older, tattooed or overweight aspirants with histories of illicit drug use or asthma.

"Seeing the Forest" has a post on "Bush Purging NASA of Scientists".

Advisors Who Questioned NASA Priorities Leaving Agency:

Levy, a physics and astronomy professor as well as provost at Houston's Rice University, said the men's commitment to scientific research didn't jibe "with the kind of advice that the administrator and the chairman of the committee were looking for."

My source tells me there's more behind this story than is reaching the public yet,

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin yesterday read the riot act to the outside scientists who advise him, accusing them of thinking more of themselves and their research than of the agency's mission.

That's BUSH's NASA mission the Administrator is talking about, which is publicly said to be about Mars, but maybe is a lot more about weaponizing space.

David Brin doesn't like the look of "Karl Rove's Big Tent" (I enjoyed his writing when I was younger, but his blog posts are very hard for me to parse sometimes - hopefully any of you who click through have more luck - there is a good quote from Dr Strangelove at the end - he does seem to have the odd idea that the Democratic party are leftists though).

In an era when the vast American center is deeply unhappy and up for grabs, we can hear the same old failed melody. The lefties want us to “concentrate on our core values” instead of offering reassurance and hope to those vast millions in the middle -- a sense that they are appreciated and welcome and that their legitimate concerns will be heeded, when honest men and women retake power in this great land. They seem quite content to go along with Karl Rove’s Giggle. The lose-lose situation in which BOTH the far left and far right say:

“If you hold even one conservative view, that means you ARE a conservative...

...and thus, by self-identification, you will trend toward listening to Hannity and O’Reilly and take in even more of their big lies.”

A situation that radicals of both sides seem to like just fine.

Above all it is important to note that Karl Rove’s Big Conservative Tent is only for show!

In fact, very few of those American conservatives who have been lured inside ever received any actual policy benefit from the neocon revolution! Only a few small constituencies, the klepto-masters (of course), the crony no-bid contract parasites, some fundamentalist charities, and some loony Straussian warlords, have benefitted at all.

All the rest -- every other type of conservative -- from free-marketers to libertarians to efficiency freaks and budget balancers, all the way to nativist border-watchers -- all of them stew under Rove’s Big Tent, simmering and unhappy over a litany of betrayals, holding their noses against the stench, yet staying inside out of loyalty to that single word. “Conservative.”

That may be their fault, a flaw in personality, in courage, imagination and patriotism. Still, whose fault is it whenever some of them pokes their heads out, testing the wind... and the left helps to drive them back inside.

I know this hypothesis may anger some of you. If there is even a chance I am right, then it leads not only to blame-casting, but also to some interesting possible tactics for our campaign to retake America from those who want to impose a new feudal age.

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But first, I just have to share the following from Russ Daggatt, who comments on the latest put-up “terrorist conspiracy” - having to do with a few pathetic losers aiming to smuggle volatile liquids onto planes:

”I can understand the existential threat posed by tweezers and corkscrews. But hand cream and lip stick? And WATER? We’re now supposed to be afraid of your basic H2O? But, then, I guess it is too bad Bush didn’t focus on the destructive threat from water earlier. After all, it was WATER that devastated New Orleans.