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Richard Branson is a master of creating publicity (usually involving some form of adventuring and/or a lot of scantily clad women). It is pleasing to see him using his talents for good, with his announcement that he will invest US$3 billion in renewable energy technology.

Sir Richard Branson is to invest $3bn (£1.6bn) to fight global warming.

The Virgin boss said he would commit all profits from his travel firms, such as airline Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains, over the next 10 years. "We must rapidly wean ourselves off our dependence on coal and fossil fuels," Sir Richard said.

The funds will be invested in schemes to develop new renewable energy technologies, through an investment unit called Virgin Fuels.

One of the UK's best known entrepreneurs, Sir Richard made the announcement in New York on the second day of the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual conference hosted by former US President Bill Clinton. Sir Richard, 56, said that transport and energy companies "must be at the forefront of developing environmentally friendly business strategies".

Dave Roberts attributes Branson's commitment to some moral leadership from Al Gore (and points to a video of Gore and Branson discussing the issue).

It's called moral leadership. Maybe you remember it from last century.

Sir Richard said his new commitment grew out of a visit to his London home a few months ago by former Vice President Al Gore ...

"You are in a position maybe to make a difference," Sir Richard said Mr. Gore told him. "If you can make a giant step forward other people will follow."

Crikey notes that while the Rodent refused to meet Al Gore while he was in town, Johnny is still going have to decide when to perform a policy backflip on global warming as most of the remaining stable of climate change deniers (ie. the loonier columnists in the Murdoch press) will likely be singing a different song shortly.

John Howard is a famously voracious consumer of media offerings, but as he contemplated today’s industrial relations backflip during the morning walk, his looming political crisis over climate change scepticism would have been front and centre.

The AFR’s influential Chanticleer columnist, John Durie, has been in New York all week talking to a range of people, including executives from News Corp. His lead item today again reiterated the huge backflip that Rupert has made in response to the carbon neutral policies pursued by his son James at BskyB and the presence of Al Gore at his recent Pebble Beach management conference.

Rupert is now completely on-song with the need for urgent climate change action and when that translates to editorial posturing by his Australian newspaper stable, the PM will have a huge political problem.

If that wasn’t enough to scare the world’s most laggard leader on climate change, Richard Branson popped up on the PM’s favourite breakfast program, Radio National’s Fran Kelly, after unveiling a pledge to invest $3 billion into renewable energy in front of Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch and Al Gore in New York.

Knowing that Howard would have been listening through his earpiece at 6.40am, Branson let fly at Australia’s head-in-the-sand approach and sought to isolate the fossil fuel industries which have so captured Federal Government environment policy. Branson’s airlines are big carbon emitters, so this is a big moment in the debate.

After refusing to see Gore during his recent visit, the PM has now agreed to watch An Inconvenient Truth. Surely that will be just be the first of many backflips that will extend his green credentials well beyond a pro-uranium policy.

It seems that science (in the form of the British Royal Society) has decided to return fire in the Republican war on science, with a strong compliant being issued about corporate funding of global warming denial kooks and think tanks (not to mention the truly underhanded antics of the tobacco industry). John Quiggin at Crooked Timber reports:

The war on science driven by a combination of Republican* ideology and corporate cash has been ably documented by Chris Mooney. Now, finally, science is striking back at one of the worst corporate enemies of science, ExxonMobil. As evidence of human-caused global warming has accumulated, leading energy companies like BP have seen the need to respond, with the result that industry groups like the Global Climate Coalition have broken down, leaving ExxonMobil to carry on a rearguard action through a network of shills and front groups. Now the company is finally being exposed by a major scientific organisation.

In an apparently unprecedented move, the British Royal Society has written to Exxon, stating that of the organization listed in Exxon’s 2005 WorldWide Giving Report for ‘public information and policy research‘, 39 feature:

information on their websites that misrepresented the science on climate change, either by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge, or by conveying misleading impression of the potential impacts of climate change

I haven’t found the list of organizations noted as engaging in misrepresentation yet, but from reports I’ve read they include the International Policy Network, the George C Marshall Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Reading the Exxon list, it’s easy to identify other consistently dishonest groups like the American Enterprise Institute, the National Centre for Policy Analysis, the Pacific Research Institute and so on.

In the letter, Bob Ward of the Royal Society writes:

At our meeting in July … you indicated that ExxonMobil would not be providing any further funding to these organisations. I would be grateful if you could let me know when ExxonMobil plans to carry out this pledge.

With rumors swirling about that Rupert Murdoch has also seen the light on this issue, some professional denialists could find themselves out of work before long.

The unequivocal tone of the letter leaves no room for ambiguity here. Either the Royal Society (along with the dozens of scientific organisations cited in the letter) is lying about Exxon, or Exxon and its front groups are lying about science.

Grist has an article from Bill McKibben on Bush's (long delayed) climate plan. Al Gore seems to have succeeded in making this a center stage issue for the coming elections.

After almost two decades of inaction, at long last America seems ready to start considering some kind of action to address global warming. With states setting conflicting standards, with the scientists announcing weekly updates on the speed and size of the approaching cataclysm, with shareholder activism starting to push business, and with green stirrings even from the evangelical wing of American Christianity, the time when the fossil-fuel lobby could get away with total obstruction may be passing.

Not too quickly, mind you -- yesterday's announcement from the White House that their new climate plan consists of a few billion dollars in odds and ends, mostly to help build a few reactors, was about as tiny a sop as one could imagine. Pressed for a moon-shot-style program to lift us toward renewable energy, the president offered a cherry bomb in a tin can.

His announcement was apparently designed to undercut Bill Clinton's call for international action on global warming this week. And it came a few days after Al Gore's truly landmark speech -- the missing reel from the end of An Inconvenient Truth -- in which he became the first major American politician to call explicitly for stringent carbon taxes. His plan to replace the payroll tax with a levy on fossil fuel might even make political sense.

But for the moment, it serves as a kind of starter pistol for the congressional battle. If the Democrats manage to pick up one or both houses of Congress in November's election, there will be a real chance to actually pass a law. That's an opportunity. And that's also an enormous danger, because if we lock into the wrong plan now, it may be years before we revisit the issue again. And years are what we don't have.

The temptation will be to simply pass something -- most likely some version of the McCain-Lieberman bill introduced years ago. But that bill was pretty feeble when it arrived (appreciated, but feeble), and the passage of time has made it clear that you might just as well pass a law mandating anti-global warming bumper stickers. Compared with what we've learned in the last three years about the speed of melting ice caps and glaciers, about the surge in monster storms, about the release of methane from the permafrost -- compared with all that, McCain-Lieberman isn't even lipstick on a pig. It's like nail polish on Godzilla. Clear nail polish.

By contrast, the legislation introduced by Henry Waxman in the House and Jim Jeffords in the Senate at least has targets with the right number of digits. It talks about 80 percent carbon reductions from 1990 levels by 2050, and about 20 percent renewables by 2020. It's not enough to meet the real-world minimum set out by NASA's Jim Hansen (that we reverse carbon increases worldwide in a decade), but its numbers might shock the system enough to give us a fighting chance.

Crikey has also wondered if this abrupt about face in climate policy was due to the inconvenient Gore juggernaut.

Rumours are swirling that an announcement from the Bush administration signalling a profound departure from past climate policy may be days away.

Will it be enough to send fossil fuel lobbyists in DC scrambling to update their résumés? Speculation ranges from the sort of middling policy that will succeed only in annoying just about everybody, to a radical program of emissions reduction that would draw a cautious smile from the sulkiest environmentalists and simultaneous howls of betrayal from conservatives. Time will tell.

It’s difficult to imagine a genuine conversion – if there’s an epiphany to be had, it will be a political rather than an environmental one. The governator’s siding with the Democrats on a bill to slash California’s emissions hasn’t helped matters – there’ll be no Christmas card from the misunderestimated Texan this year, unless it reads something like, "Hey Arnold – you sucked in Junior! How much you sellin’ that Humvee for?"

So is the policy shift a knee-jerk response to the inconvenient Gore juggernaut? No doubt the film has hit a chord of concern amongst a surprising proportion of the public, but there is bound to be renewed speculation about those scrupulously structured answers from Mr Gore to questions concerning his plans. Two years ago climate change would have seemed an unwise platform for a run at the presidency. Will this still be the case two years hence? Maybe it all hinges on the next hurricane season.

James Lovelock hasn't resiled from his prophecies of doom due to climate chaos - from this point of view the antics of Bush and Howard are pretty much irrelevant at this point (though personally I prefer to think the serious action can avert a major problem, particularly if we get a break from the sun).

As we've noted in the past, James Lovelock, the environmental scientist who discovered that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, and who proposed the Gaia Hypothesis that views terrestrial systems as a sort of self-regulating superorganism, sees a global warming apocalypse coming our way, and quickly. WaPo (via Billmon):

"It's going too fast," he says softly. "We will burn." [...]

"Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return." [...]

Lovelock's conclusion is straightforward.

To wit, we are poached.

He measured atmospheric gases and ocean temperatures, and examined forests tropical and arboreal (last year a forest the size of Italy burned in rapidly heating Siberia, releasing from the permafrost a vast sink of methane, which contributes to global warming). He found Gaia trapped in a vicious cycle of positive-feedback loops — from air to water, everything is getting warmer at once. The nature of Earth's biosphere is that, under pressure from industrialization, it resists such heating, and then it resists some more.

Then, he says, it adjusts.

Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean.

"There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover." [...]

Lovelock's radical view of global warming doesn't sit well with David Archer, a scientist at the University of Chicago and a frequent contributor to the Web site RealClimate, which accepts the reality of global warning.

"No one, not Lovelock or anyone else, has proposed a specific quantitative scenario for a climate-driven, blow the doors off, civilization ending catastrophe," writes Archer. [...]

What's perhaps as intriguing are the top scientists who decline to dismiss Lovelock's warning. Lovelock may be an outlier, but he's not drifting far from shore. Sir David King, science adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair, saluted Lovelock's book and proclaimed global warming a far more serious threat than terrorism. Sir Brian Heap, a Cambridge University biologist and past foreign secretary of the Royal Society, says Lovelock's views are tightly argued, if perhaps too gloomy. [...]

"I'm an optimist," [Lovelock] says. "I think that after the warming sets in and the survivors have settled in near the Arctic, they will find a way to adjust. It will be a tough life enlivened by excitement and fear." [...]

Lovelock was a prodigy, earning degrees in chemistry and medicine. In the 1950s he designed an electron capture machine, which provided environmentalist Rachel Carson with the data to prove that pesticides infected everything from penguins to mother's milk. Later he took a detector on a ship to Antarctica and proved that man-made chemicals — CFCs — were burning a hole in the ozone. [...]

[Says Paul Ehrlich,] "If Lovelock hadn't discovered the erosion of the ozone, we'd all be living under the ocean in snorkels and fins to escape that poisonous sun." [...]

How will our splendid Spaceship Earth so quickly become the oven of our doom? As we sit at his table in Devon, Lovelock expands on his vision.

It begins with the melting of ice and snow. As the Arctic grows bare — the Greenland ice cap is shrinking far faster than had been expected — dark ground emerges and absorbs heat. That melts more snow and softens peat bogs, which release methane. As oceans warm, algae are dying and so absorbing less heat-causing carbon dioxide.

To the south, drought already is drying out the great tropical forests of the Amazon. "The forests will melt away just like the snow," Lovelock says.

Even the northern forests, those dark cool beauties of pines and firs, suffer. They absorb heat and shelter bears, lynxes and wolves through harsh winters. But recent studies show the boreal forests are drying and dying and inducing more warming.

Casting 30, 40 years into the future, Lovelock sees sub-Saharan lands becoming uninhabitable. India runs out of water, Bangladesh drowns, China eyes a Siberian land grab, and local warlords fight bloody wars over water and energy. [...]

"We like to think of Hurricane Katrina, or a killer heat wave in Europe, as a one-off," he says. "Or we like to think that we'll come up with a technological fix." [...]

Today the environmentally conscious seek salvation in solar cells, recycling and ten thousand wind turbines. "It won't matter a damn," Lovelock says. "They make the mistake of thinking we have decades. We don't."

Of course, Bush and Rove would far rather that everyone be trembling in fear about the terrorist menace han worrying about global warming - so no doubt the next series of the Al Zarqawi show will be getting plenty of publicity (in spite of many poor reviews for the last series). The star of this season's show is apparently called Abu Ayyoub al-Masri. I'm not sure how rumours of the latest death of Osama Bin Laden (supposedly from French intelligence) fit into this (the right wing press is denouncing the claims, so presumably this isn't a story that Bush wishes to see propagated) - and presumably he won't be keen for people to dwell on the fact more American soldiers have died in Iraq than people died in the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq has purportedly appeared in a video as the executioner of a Turkish hostage - his first appearance since taking over the group in June - according to a statement posted with the recording on the internet.

The items were posted on Friday night just after Iraq announced that Ramadan would begin yesterday. The statement said the recording, the authenticity of which could not be independently verified, was "old", but gave no other indication about when it was made.

Abu Ayyoub al-Masri, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, assumed leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was slain in a June 7 US airstrike.

Three men masked in red and white scarves stand behind the hostage who is seated on the ground wearing a tan shirt. The one in the middle, believed to be al-Masri, reads a statement in Arabic, then the hostage, identified in Arabic subtitles as Murad Bujer from Ankara, reads a statement in Turkish.

After Bujer finishes, the militant in the middle shoots the now-blindfolded hostage three times in the head.

The scarves make it impossible to identify the three militants, however the statement accompanying the recording says the execution was performed by al-Masri.

Thom Hartmann wonders if much of the noise being made in the Republican debate about how much torture and big brother activity they will perform is just another form of distraction from George Bush's legal woes due to violating the Geneva convention (not to mention the Nuremberg principles). He also makes a link to the Karr / JonBenet Ramsay case (now released - please forgive the dubious source) - which I find interesting given my extreme cyncism about the timing of many media circuses.

On the surface, it seems the Republicans are having a debate about "wiretapping terrorists" and "harsh interrogation of prisoners." These frames about the current "rebellion" by McCain, Graham, Warner, et al, are today embraced by both the Republican Party and the mainstream media.

But the real issue is whether Republicans in Congress will trade the principles of democracy and the rule of law to keep George W. Bush and several of his colleagues out of jail, or whether they'll uphold the rule of law and American democracy while abandoning him to face the consequences of his illegal acts.

On June 29, 2006, in the Hamden Case, the US Supreme Court ruled that Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration had violated the Geneva Convention and other international treaties with regard to the treatment and prosecution of detainees in the so-called "war on terror."

The logic of the decision could subject Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and Rumsfeld - along with those down the chain of command who followed their orders - to prosecution as war criminals both in the United States and internationally. If they violated Common Article 3 and others of the Geneva Conventions, they could be subject to lengthy imprisonment in the US for violating US laws, as well as being brought before the United Nation's International Court of Justice at The Hague, the same as Slobodan Milosevic.

A hastily convened conference call by the Justice Department to discuss the ruling caused Brian Roehrkasse at the Department of Justice Public Affairs Office to comment to those on the call that "the Supreme Court's holding indicates the military commissions, as currently constituted by DOD, while robust in affording enemy combatants more process than this or any other country has ever afforded enemy combatants, are not consistent with current congressional statutes, especially the UCMJ and treaty provisions, Common Article 3."

A plain English translation would be close to: "The Supreme Court said we've broken US law, we've broken the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and we've broken the Geneva Conventions' Common Article 3."

About six weeks later, on August 17, 2006, Federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled in Detroit that George W. Bush and his administration had committed numerous felonies with regard to wiretapping American citizens without a legal warrant, including violating the FISA act (which carries a 5-year prison term as the penalty for each violation) and violating the Constitution (which carries impeachment as its penalty). Later in the day, the Department of Homeland Security facilitated the arrest in Thailand of John Mark Karr for killing JonBenet Ramsey, sweeping the story off the front page and out of the weekend news analysis shows, but the ruling is still there.

Hugo Chavez seemed to cause a bit of a stir at the UN this week, labelling Bush "The Devil" and complaining about his sulphurous stench, to the hilarity of many (though John "The Walrus" Bolton waggled his droopy mustache angrily afterwards and made all sorts of unlikely allegations about the state of democracy in Venezuela).

Amusingly, looking at today's Amazon book rankings Chomsky's tome is at #1 and #7 (with Frank Rich's "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina" coming in at #2).

BRANDISHING a copy of Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance", the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, has cemented his reputation as Washington's chief irritant with a fiery performance at the United Nations.

In a 15-minute address to the annual gathering of international leaders in New York on Wednesday, Mr Chavez said he could still "smell sulfur" left behind by the "devil", George Bush, who had addressed the chamber 24 hours before.

His speech, which veered between a rousing appeal for a better world and a florid denunciation of the United States, included the claim that the US President thought he was in a western where people shot from the hip.

Mr Chavez complained that his personal doctor and head of security had been prevented from disembarking at New York airport by US authorities. "This is another abuse and another abuse of power on the part of the devil," he said. "It smells of sulfur here, but God is with us and I embrace you all."

Many diplomats in the vaulted chamber laughed and clapped.

Mr Chavez went on to accuse the US of double standards on terrorism. "The US has already planned, financed and set in motion a coup in Venezuela, and it continues to support coup attempts in Venezuela and elsewhere," he said. "I accuse the American Government of protecting terrorists and of having a completely cynical discourse."

Coming just 12 hours after Washington's other nemesis the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had stood at the same spot and accused the US of hegemony and hypocrisy, Mr Chavez's colourful speech left senior Bush Administration officials exasperated.

Greg Palast has a long interview with Chavez up - its a bit of a puff piece but it does let him explain his policies in his own words to an English speaking audience I guess.

Q: How do you respond to Bush’s charge that you are destabilizing the region and interfering in the elections of other Latin American countries?

Chavez: Mr. Bush is an illegitimate President. In Florida, his brother Jeb deleted many black voters from the electoral registers. So this President is the result of a fraud. Not only that, he is also currently applying a dictatorship in the U.S. People can be put in jail without being charged. They tap phones without court orders. They check what books people take out of public libraries. They arrested Cindy Sheehan because of a T-shirt she was wearing demanding the return of the troops from Iraq. They abuse blacks and Latinos. And if we are going to talk about meddling in other countries, then the U.S. is the champion of meddling in other people’s affairs. They invaded Guatemala, they overthrew Salvador Allende, invaded Panama and the Dominican Republic. They were involved in the coup d’etat in Argentina thirty years ago.

Q: Is the U.S. interfering in your elections here?

Chavez: They have interfered for 200 years. They have tried to prevent us from winning the elections, they supported the coup d’etat, they gave millions of dollars to the coup plotters, they supported the media, newspapers, outlaw movements, military intervention, and espionage. But here the empire is finished, and I believe that before the end of this century, it will be finished in the rest of the world. We will see the burial of the empire of the eagle.

Q: You don’t interfere in the elections of other nations in Latin America?

Chavez: Absolutely not. I concern myself with Venezuela. However, what’s going on now is that some rightwing movements are transforming me into a pawn in the domestic politics of their countries, by making statements that are groundless. About candidates like Morales [of Bolivia], for example. They said I financed the candidacy of President Lula [of Brazil], which is totally false. They said I financed the candidacy of Kirchner [of Argentina], which is totally false. In Mexico, recently, the rightwing party has used my image for its own profit. What’s happened is that in Latin America there is a turn to the left. Latin Americans have gotten tired of the Washington consensus — a neoliberalism that has aggravated misery and poverty.

Q: You have spent millions of dollars of your nation’s oil wealth throughout Latin America. Are you really helping these other nations or are you simply buying political support for your regime?

Chavez: We are brothers and sisters. That’s one of the reasons for the wrath of the empire. You know that Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world. And the biggest gas reserves in this hemisphere, the eighth in the world. Up until seven years ago, Venezuela was a U.S. oil colony. All of our oil was going up to the north, and the gas was being used by the U.S. and not by us. Now we are diversifying. Our oil is helping the poor. We are selling to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, some Central American countries, Uruguay, Argentina.

Q: And the Bronx?

Chavez: In the Bronx it is a donation. In all the cases I just mentioned before, it is trade. However, it’s not free trade, just fair commerce. We also have an international humanitarian fund as a result of oil revenues.

Q: Why did George Bush turn down your help for New Orleans after the hurricane?

Chavez: You should ask him, but from the very beginning of the terrible disaster of Katrina, our people in the U.S., like the president of CITGO, went to New Orleans to rescue people. We were in close contact by phone with Jesse Jackson. We hired buses. We got food and water. We tried to protect them; they are our brothers and sisters. Doesn’t matter if they are African, Asian, Cuban, whatever.

Q: Are you replacing the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as “Daddy Big Bucks”?

Chavez: I do wish that the IMF and the World Bank would disappear soon.

Q: And it would be the Bank of Hugo?

Chavez: No. The International Humanitarian Bank. We are just creating an alternative way to conduct financial exchange. It is based on cooperation. For example, we send oil to Uruguay for their refinery and they are paying us with cows.

Q: Milk for oil.

Chavez: That’s right. Milk for oil. The Argentineans also pay us with cows. And they give us medical equipment to combat cancer. It’s a transfer of technology. We also exchange oil for software technology. Uruguay is one of the biggest producers of software. We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade. We believe in fair trade and exchange, not competition but cooperation. I’m not giving away oil for free. Just using oil, first to benefit our people, to relieve poverty. For a hundred years we have been one of the largest oil-producing countries in the world but with a 60 percent poverty rate and now we are canceling the historical debt.

Q: Speaking of the free market, you’ve demanded back taxes from U.S. oil companies. You have eliminated contracts for North American, British, and European oil companies. Are you trying to slice out the British and American oil companies from Venezuela?

Chavez: No, we don’t want them to go, and I don’t think they want to leave the country, either. We need each other. It’s simply that we have recovered our oil sovereignty. They didn’t pay taxes. They didn’t pay royalties. They didn’t give an account of their actions to the government. They had more land than had previously been established in the contracts. They didn’t comply with the agreed technology exchange. They polluted the environment and didn’t pay anything towards the cleanup. They now have to comply with the law.

Q: You’ve said that you imagine the price of oil rising to $100 dollars per barrel. Are you going to use your new oil wealth to squeeze the planet?

Chavez: No, no. We have no intention of squeezing anyone. Now, we have been squeezed and very hard. Five hundred years of squeezing us and stifling us, the people of the South. I do believe that demand is increasing and supply is dropping and the large reservoirs are running out. But it’s not our fault. In the future, there must be an agreement between the large consumers and the large producers.

Michael Klare has a new (and, as usual) article up, noting that there is only way way to end terrorism and instability across the middle east - taking oil out of the equation.

In his September 11 address to the nation, President Bush declared that the war against on terror is the “decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” pitting the ideals of Western civilization against a “perverted vision of Islam.” Bush is certainly correct that ideology plays a critical role in the war on terror and that this struggle cannot be won if Washington fails in the “battle of ideas” (which its abysmal record in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo is helping to ensure). But ideology is only part of the equation.

Just as significant, if far less acknowledged, is the relationship between oil and Islamic extremism. If it weren’t for our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, we wouldn’t project such a conspicuous and over-bearing presence in the Middle East—and it is this presence, more than anything else, that has generated the toxic anti-Americanism on which al-Qaida feeds. Doing better in the battle of ideas is not enough; if we ever hope to prevail in the war on terror, we must also remove oil from the strategic equation.

To fully appreciate the relationship between America’s oil dependency and contemporary Middle Eastern terrorism, it is necessary to know something about the historical trajectories of both. Prior to World War II, the United States had very little official presence in the Persian Gulf area—at that time we were self-sufficient in oil, and in any case were content to allow Great Britain to control the region. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt correctly surmised that the United States would eventually become dependent on imported oil as our domestic reserves were drained, and so he set out to establish American control over a major foreign source of supply—eventually selecting Saudi Arabia to assume this role.

On February 14, 1945, he met with King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud aboard a U.S. warship in the Suez Canal and forged an oil-for-protection arrangement under which the United States pledged to defend the Saudi royal family in return for privileged access to Saudi petroleum reserves. All else that has occurred in the Gulf, including 9/11, has followed from this fateful encounter.

To carry out the terms of the 1945 Roosevelt-Ibn Saud agreement, successive American presidents deployed an ever-larger U.S. military presence in the region and helped establish both the Saudi Royal Army and the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), responsible for internal security. The growing U.S. military presence was coupled with the growing presence of American oil companies, which helped turned Saudi Arabia into the world’s leading producer. With fields in most other parts of the world in decline—the United States reached its “peak,” or maximum sustainable output in 1971—production from the Persian Gulf became increasingly essential for the smooth operation of the global economy.

The conspicuous presence of American soldiers and oil company personnel in the Gulf area was not without its detractors, however. Many devout Muslims saw this as an unwelcome intrusion of non-believers in the Islamic heartland, and others saw it as a form of imperialism. America’s close association with Israel was also a source of irritation for many. Still, it was the British who first experienced the intractable wrath of Islamic militants: when state-controlled British Petroleum (BP) refused to cede control over its refinery at Abadan in southwestern Iran, the company’s vast Iranian assets were nationalized by Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1951 with strong support from the Muslim clergy. London responded to this perceived affront by persuading President Eisenhower to spearhead a coup against Mossadegh and to install the playboy Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, as the absolute ruler of Iran. The Shah, in turn, invited U.S. and British oil firms back into the country while suppressing the Shiite clergy, thus setting the stage for the Islamic Revolution of 1979-80 and all else that followed.

Speculation about a US invasion of Iran refuses to die, with the latest round prompted by Colonel Sam Gardiner and his musing that the US has already begun military operations (as per the Iraq invasion, where planning took place long before the "war on terror" had begun and military ops began well before the official sabre rattling reached its crescendo).

Past Peak notes that it is an error to try and apply the "Making Sense" filter when considering neocon policy towards Iran (though it might be worth considering the value of an "October Surprise" before the US elections).

Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner (via Billmon):

When I discuss the possibility of an American military strike on Iran with my European friends, they invariably point out that an armed confrontation does not make sense — that it would be unlikely to yield any of the results that American policymakers do want, and that it would be highly likely to yield results that they do not. I tell them they cannot understand U.S. policy if they insist on passing options through that filter. The "making sense" filter was not applied over the past four years for Iraq, and it is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to attack Iran.

Once again, we're confronted with a choice between two equally frightening possibilities. Either everything's going according to plan — they wanted chaos and civil war in Iraq and Iraq's eventual breakup into three easy-to-dominate statelets, and they wanted chaos in Afghanistan and, for example, the truly astonishing upsurge in heroin exports that's occurred there — or they're just completely clueless, applying the logic of the compulsive gambler: trying to recoup their losses by doubling and redoubling their bet. Either way, they're out of control, and American democracy looks like so much window dressing.

Ethan Heitner at Tom Paine says when it comes to Iran, he puts his money on war.

I made a bet with my friend over beer yesterday after work. “If the Republicans retain control of at least one house of Congress after the November elections, we will be bombing Iran within four months.” That puts us at early February. At stake is a melon shisha at our favorite shisha bar. And, you know, the assured death and suffering of innocents, the predictable backlash around the world, the continuing madness of life in Bush's America, the despair of the impotent antiwar movement, etc.

Then I biked over to Camp Democracy to hear Ray McGovern be much less optimistic. He brought up this weekend's Time magazine article that revealed a “Prepare To Deploy” order has been given to “a submarine, an Aegis-class cruiser, two minesweepers and two minehunters,” to Iran's eastern coast. McGovern thinks there are 50-50 odds on a military strike on Iran before the elections. The orders call for the naval vessels to be ready to leave port by October 1. According to McGovern, that makes the end of October prime-time for striking. “An October surprise par excellance ,” he says.

To be fair, there is another credible explanation: “Such orders may in the short term have more to do with planning to prevent possible effort by Iran to close the straits of Hormuz, in the event of sanctions,” as security and foreign policy correspondent Laura Rozen points out. An entirely less paranoid reading of Bush's current weakness and inability to engage in military action these days is expressed by Robert Dreyfuss on TomPaine.com today.

But I found Bush's speech at the U.N. yesterday less reassuring than Robert Dreyfuss did. Bush's statements directed to the Iranian people clearly show he still buys into one of the key premises of neocon plans to attack Iran—that the Iranian people would somehow support such a strike and that regime change, not nuclear disarmament is the true goal we should keep in mind:

The greatest obstacle to this future is that your rulers have chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation's resources to fund terrorism and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, Col. Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force officer who has taught strategy at the Air Force college, the Naval College and the National War College, has just published a lengthy analysis called "The End Of Summer Diplomacy" of military options against Iran and Bush's possible strategies leading up to a massive bombing run. He makes a number of excellent points, the most provocative and noteworthy being that it has already begun . News reports place American and Israeli commandos inside Iran since the summer of 2004. He points out correctly we were bombing Iraq months before we went to the United Nations asking for permission to invade.

Gardiner doesn't think that the diplomatic track that Bush has publically endorsed since at least this spring is in good faith, which is no shocker, but he makes the further point that sanctions against Iran will not weaken the regime, but will likely make it stronger, as Iranians rally around their besieged government. And this is what the war planners want:

If the experience of 1979 and other sanctions scenarios is a guide, sanctions will actually empower the conservative leadership in Iran. There is an irony here. It is a pattern that seems to be playing out in the selection of the military option. From diplomacy to sanctions, the administration is not making good-faith efforts to avert a war so much as going through the motions, eliminating other possible strategies of engagement, until the only option left on the table is the military one.

Matthew Yglesias has some rumors to pass on that should chill us even with the possibility they are being discussed: the idea of using tactical nukes in a first-strike against Iran.

Grist reports that Arnold Schwarzenegger has sold his Hummers in "I Know What You Did With That Last Hummer".

Had your doubts that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) was walking his green talk? Oh, he's walking all right -- the guv has sold his eight Hummers. It was Schwarzenegger who originally convinced then-manufacturer AM General to make a version of the hulking vehicles for the civilian market, and in 1992 he was the first person to buy one. But friends, he's a changed man. In other Greenernator news, Schwarzenegger palled around yesterday with a fellow high-profile green Republican, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. While visiting a hydrogen fuel-cell research firm in Silicon Valley, Schwarzenegger talked up California's soon-to-be-signed greenhouse-gas-cutting bill, while Bloomberg trumpeted new climate and sustainability goals for his city. Both men were eager to separate themselves from the Republican residing in the White House, but were effusive about each other: Bloomberg said he was "a fan" of Schwarzenegger, and Schwarzenegger upped the ante, saying of Bloomberg, "He's my soul mate. He's the man."

Arnie has generally been considered a friend of BHP's bid to build an LNG terminal offshore from Malibu, but this venture now appears to be doomed.

BHP Billiton faces another barrage of public comments - and more delays - in its push to build a controversial $US800 million ($1 billion) liquefied natural gas terminal off the Californian coast.

A week after Hollywood stars, led by former James Bond star Pierce Brosnan, asked Malibu residents to join them in opposing the project, authorities have put more regulatory hurdles in front of BHP.

Earlier this year, it was thought the company could receive final approval as soon as this month from California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the latest setback means a decision seems unlikely to be made this year.

New entrant into the Australian biodiesel market Axiom Energy has scored a trial with trucking company Linfox.

RENEWABLE fuel company Axiom Energy has opened its $36 million initial public offering (IPO) and entered into a trial arrangement of its biodiesel fuels with trucking company Linfox.

Axiom is offering about 51.5 million shares at 70 cents each in an attempt to raise the $36 million.

Axiom intends to use the money to fund its first project based at Toll Geelong Port, for which it has secured a 20 year lease with logistics firm Toll Holdings Ltd .

The plant could make up to 150 million litres of biodiesel a year, which could be made from renewable plant oils and animal fats, helping tap into the 15 billion litre-a-year diesel market, Axiom said.

The company said it already had a strong pre-registration response from the majority of previous applicants for its withdrawn $37.6 million IPO in 2005, which had been oversubscribed.

A spokesperson for the Fox family, which owns Linfox, said they believed the logistics industry needed to play a more active role in tackling carbon emissions, and that biodiesel would play an integral part of this.

Tima has an article on efforts to create a green revolution in Africa called "Seeds of Hope" which looks at the challenges posed by soil degradation.

Walk through countless small villages in sub-Saharan Africa, and you will find the same scene repeated again and again: women bent over double, hoeing scrawny plants in dirt packed so hard it's tough to imagine anything ever growing in it. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent over the past half-century trying to do something about the region's crushing poverty, but the situation remains desperate. Rural Africa is hollowing out, unable to feed itself, let alone supply food to the continent's rapidly growing megacities.

In this context, the Gates and Rockefeller foundations announced last week their plan to spend $150 million over the next five years to boost agricultural productivity on the continent. The initial investments will go to developing hardy seed varieties of regionally appropriate crops, creating markets for the distribution of those seeds and educating a new generation of African plant scientists. It's a back-to-basics approach that avoids gambling on shortcuts. But to be successful the new initiative--dubbed the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa--will very soon have to address two equally pressing issues: the need for widespread use of chemical fertilizers to replenish exhausted soil and some sort of system to ensure greater participation of women--who perform the bulk of the work on Africa's farms.

Action is urgently needed. More than 80% of African soil is seriously degraded, and in many areas it is on the verge of permanent failure. For centuries, farmers survived by clearing new land for each season's plantings and allowing old fields to lie fallow and replenish their nutrients. But the continent's fourfold increase in population since the 1950s has forced farmers to grow crop after crop on the same fields, draining them of all nourishment. Do that for a long enough time, and the physical nature of the soil changes. It becomes so tightly compacted that it can't hold water or let roots spread. "Eventually you get to the point where even weeds won't grow," says Gary Toenniessen, director of food security at the Rockefeller Foundation. "Just adding fertilizer back doesn't help. You actually have to replace the soil." The loss of productive land has driven farmers to clear ever more marginal areas, including forests and hillsides, for agriculture.

Fertilizer has a bad reputation among environmentalists in the West because pollution from runoff can be such a problem. But replenishing Africa's soil before it's too late--and thus decreasing the amount of land that has to be dedicated to agriculture--is probably one of the most practical ways of protecting wildlife habitats and reducing erosion. And new micro-dosing techniques, in which a capful of fertilizer is applied to the roots of a plant, minimize the flow of chemicals into rivers and streams.

Many African countries that used to subsidize fertilizers stopped under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, forcing farmers to return to subsistence practices. Today farmers in sub-Saharan Africa use about 7 lbs. of fertilizer per acre, compared with 75 lbs. in South America, 87 lbs. in North America and 91 lbs. in South Asia.

Business Week has an article on the solar resurgence in Silicon Valley (though solar stocks have suffered somewhat as the oil price has drawn back a little bit).

"We all realize that green is gold," Guardino said. "Venture capitalists are betting with their wallets that cleantech will play a significant role in Silicon Valley."

So many valley companies, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are rushing into the burgeoning solar industry that it's inviting comparisons to the early expansion of the microchip industry more than two decades ago.

"If there's anywhere in the world that can push the envelope on solar, it might very well be Silicon Valley," said Clean Edge co-founder Ron Pernick.

But the valley's rush to solar isn't without risk. The solar industry must first bring down costs significantly to persuade homeowners and businesses to install solar systems onsite rather than just buy electricity from the local utility.

The industry also faces a worldwide shortage of polysilicon created by the rapid expansion of solar. This year, for the first time, the solar industry is expected to consume more silicon than the computer chip industry.

Some valley solar startups are moving beyond silicon. Miasole of San Jose and Nanosolar Inc. of Palo Alto are developing thin-film solar cells made from alternative materials like copper and selenium. Nanosolar has raised $100 million in venture funding and plans to build what it says will be the world's largest solar-cell factory.

Solar still generates far less than 1 percent of the world's electricity supply, but it has grown by more than 40 percent annually over the past five years, according to Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

"The solar industry is the next great high-tech industry," Resch said. "Our estimate is that within 10 years solar will be the lowest cost option for electricity in the U.S."

State governments from Arizona to New Jersey are creating programs to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and expand use of carbon-free energy such as wind and solar.

California hopes to overtake Germany and Japan as the world's largest solar market with its "Million Solar Roofs" program, which provides $3 billion in rebates to consumers who install rooftop panels. The state's landmark global warming legislation, which seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent over the next 14 years, is also expected to dramatically expand the market for solar power.

Technology Review has an article on gnerating power from Not-So-Hot Geothermal sources.

A large share of the geothermal resources suitable for power generation--those with temperatures higher than 300°F--are deep underground, beyond the reach of current technology. Lower-temperature resources, which are common across the United States, are generally used for heating, but could be a bountiful source of power as well, if researchers were able to find an economical way to convert them into electricity.

Engineers at the United Technologies Research Center (UTRC), a unit of United Technologies based in East Hartford, CT, say they have developed a low-cost system that can utilize low-temperature geothermal resources. The technology could be particularly useful in generating electricity from waste hot water generated at oil and gas wells.

The UTRC power plant can be thought of as a reverse cooling system, and the new turbine is essentially a refrigerator compressor running backwards, Biederman says. Instead of using power to create a temperature difference, like a refrigerator does, it converts a temperature difference into electricity.

The company is now testing a unit at a remote hot springs resort 60 miles northeast of Fairbanks, Alaska. Biederman expects a commercial power plant to be ready by early next year, after they've tested the reliability of the demonstration system.

According to him, the system could utilize the large amount of hot water pumped out of the ground at oil and gas wells. In Texas alone, more than 12 billon barrels of water are produced from wells. Oil companies usually discard the waste water by re-injecting it into the earth; but they could use it to generate electricity. Biederman is planning to set up demonstration projects at oil and gas wells in Texas and Nevada next year.

Alex at WorldChanging has a post on energy efficiency called "Energy rebounds and amplifications" - noting its important to aim for amplifation of energy efficiency and avoid rebound effects.

Increased energy efficiency is an obvious good, allowing us to do more of the things we want to do at less cost and with a smaller ecological footprint. But it turns out that for a variety of reasons, people rarely merely implement improved energy efficiency and get on with their lives. Instead, one of two things often happens: either they end up again using more energy (their energy use "rebounds"), or the start down a path where they use even less energy (their energy efficiency is "amplified"). As Future Currents puts it:

When people save money by improving energy efficiency, or by cutting back their energy use, they have more money to spend. How they spend this money influences whether there is a rebound or an amplification effect, and the size of that effect. For example, if someone spends the money they saved on buying lots of aluminium, which is produced with large amounts of electricity, the rebound effect may be so large that total energy use goes up. However, if that person invested their money into further energy efficiency improvements, the savings would be amplified. Within this spectrum, goods and services vary considerably in the amount of energy needed to provide them. ...Energy use is still growing in many countries despite improvements in energy efficiency.

To use concrete examples, let's say that two people, Ms. R and Ms. A, have both decided to save energy and have taken the big basic steps one does -- replacing their light bulbs with compact florescents, buying energy efficient appliances, putting electronics on power strips to avoid vampire power drains, checking their homes' insulation and the like. Both will usually see significant savings. It's what they do next that makes all the difference.

Ms. R decides that she's been good, and money's looking flush, so she's going to get rid of her efficient little car and buy that SUV she's always secretly wanted. As a result, her gas use skyrockets, and, in fact her total energy could potentially even go up compared to what she was using before she began. This is rebound.

Ms. A, on the other hand, decides that she likes saving money on energy efficiency, and decides to use the extra money she has on buying a zero energy home, knowing that it will, over time, save her even more money though increased energy efficiency. This is amplification.

Since one of our big goals has to be increasing our energy intensity -- getting richer faster using less energy -- figuring out how to encourage more amplification and less rebound is pretty important.

Dave Roberts at Grist has a look at the idea that the falling oil price is being manipulated for political reasons - and decides probably not.

As you probably know, gas prices -- which peaked in August with a national average just over $3 -- are falling. Some optimists think the national average could drop below $2 by the end of the year.

This autumn also happens to mark the U.S. mid-term congressional elections.

Hmm ... [strokes chin, adjusts tinfoil hat] ... is something fishy going on here? Is Big Oil colluding with Big GOP to dampen voter discontent and preserve a Republican majority?

Well, no. Not by lowering gas prices, anyway. And if they tried it, it probably wouldn't work.

As Jerome a Paris explains over on dKos, the recent downturn in prices is fairly predictable based on market forces. Margins are too thin, and taxes too fixed, for any particular player to have the power to manipulate prices in the short term. Once upon a time OPEC could have done it by flooding the market with crude, but they don't have sufficient reserves to pull that kind of trick any more.

Anyway, as Brendan Nyhan points out, the strength of correlation between gas prices and the ruling party's approval rating is vastly overstated anyway.

I'm afraid if Republicans want to game the mid-terms, they're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: by starting a war.

Steve at Deconsumption has an update on his "Timeline for the Unfolding Crises" which also considers the oil price movement - at a rather more paranoid level than mere suspicions of Republican shenanigans.

Now oil prices have been declining for couple months now, but still I didn't actually think about the above statement until just recently. Up to now I figured the price correction we've been seeing was just a trading phase, perhaps even an orchestrated pre-election gambit to pacify the voters a bit. Certainly the markets were entitled to a counter-trend correction, and when markets change their course the media is always ready to parrot whatever flimsy excuse they can find to intellectually support what was already happening just fine without one. These kind of after-the-fact justifications are really just background noise, and good traders learn to "fade the noise" and stick to the underlying fundamentals.

But that isn't what I was alluding to when I made the above comment. What I was outlining was my belief that following an initial, preparatory phase in which the realization of our peak-oil situation begins to dawn on our society, we should eventually encounter a significant backlash of sorts--an intentional, reactionary counter-attack against this awakening which aims at undermining the message on a fundamental level. Of course such an attack can only seek to fly in the face of reality altogether, since it has no other choice. And if this kind of subversive action is to happen at all, it must occur sometime after our situation has become generally apparent, but before it has become distinctly undeniable. It would of course be media-driven, and would specifically strive to strengthen the very cultural illusions which are in jeopardy: "The whole crisis-show is over, folks. Move along with your lives just as they were before." A desperate head-fake. A short-lived turning-point in the larger crisis whereby the media is not simply grasping at straws to explain what the markets are doing anyway, but actually attempting to feed into society the misinformation needed to keep the game going a little longer...

Resource Investor's "Peak Oil Passnotes" column thinks there is a rather more prosaic explanation for oil price movements - the absence of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico - maybe its time for some tinfoil theories that HAARP is being used to steer them away this year :-)

When a commodity or a stock moves fast we tend to get very excited. We hope to discover whether or not it has made some kind of quantum leap or is just part of a long term trend. So what the heck is happening to crude oil? Is this a slip? A correction? Or gigantic profit taking? Or none of the above?

Since we last wrote this column oil has continued its most excellent nosedive, actually breaching the $60 at $59.80 intraday this week. Just six weeks ago it was busting out at $78 and everyone – this commentator included – thought it was only a matter of time before $80 oil arrived.

We did also think that before it hit $80 there could well be a pull back, $64 maybe, $62 possibly. But the recent declines have been savage. There are many factors that have precluded this fall in price but one that most people have forgotten – amidst Iran, the UN and Hugo Chavez – is the end of the effect from Katrina.

The effects of Katrina lasted a long time. In the first three months of this year they were still heavily in evidence. Damaged refineries sat along the Gulf of Mexico coast, it exacerbated the flood of cash that came back into the market following the Christmas bonus season.

The tightness in the supply of gasoline to the U.S. was compounded through the year to June. It hung around until summer picking up other items like Iran, Lebanon and so on. But sitting high in people’s mind was that the effect of Katrina, plus the cost of the repairs, could be thrown away by another hurricane season like the one in 2005.

Almost a year from the formation of Katrina, tensions in the oil market reached their highest. Oil was busting its gut on August 8th and 9th. Many people had almost assumed that hurricanes were going to come crashing through on top of all the problems that existed. But they did not.

On a tinfoil note, Steve at Deconsumption is also recommending some new 911 conspiracy videos on the "controlled demolition" of the world trade center (I don't have a view on WTC 1 and 2, but I still fail to understand why WTC 7 collapsed - perhaps I should watch the videos - which would require more free time than I have unfortunately). Jeff at RI remains dubious about collapse theories (even if he has a million other theories about 911).

"9/11 Mysteries - Demolitions" was launched on Google Video on 9/11/2006, just a week and a half after I noted that the 9/11 Truth Movement seemed to have acquired a renewed force in recent months, and was fast becoming a rallying point for anti-establishment passions of all kinds. I think this social renewal is worth making note of, and that it can be attributed to two things.

One is that the formerly disorganized and disbursed 9/11 Truth Movement of old--the one that even Michael Ruppert finally lamented was a dead horse that could run no more--has now done what it's most stauch advocates have long been pleading for it to do, and found it's center of gravity around one fundamental point: the questionable "collapse" of the three WTC buildings. And I suspect that's an effective and fitting place to circle the wagons, because it's a nexus that resonates with a great many people on a very visceral level. I can still to this day recall the absolute mystification I had while watching events unfold on that fateful day that the collapse of not just one but both towers had happened so "perfectly". Several of the people I stood with throughout that morning remarked how it seemed like we were watching a Hollywood movie. I can even remember wrestling with the suspicion that perhaps the singular and strange "beauty" to these collapses might hint there really were perhaps some kind of higher forces behind them. Of course I never stopped to imagine there might actually be lower forces at work...

And the other factor that's most significantly responsible for the reawakening of the 9/11 Truth Movement is the development of services like YouTube and Google Video. I don't think anyone can argue anymore that, at bottom, we as a society give our attention much more readily to things which are presented to us in TV form. Indeed it's been acknowledged long ago that the highly centralized "control of the airwaves" is the primary reason why our world has so quickly become so monoculture--and "monoculture", as every permaculturalist is aware, is defined as a sustained battle against Nature. In this respect, unless the "establishment" can come up with an even more enticing way to communicate with people, internet video may very well be the "killer app" needed to usher in a truly global cultural revolution.