Reds, Greens, Bears And Black Gold  

The Guardian (via The SMH) has a report on some Russian resource nationalism being played out using green concerns as an excuse to do some renegotiating with Shell and its partners over projects on Sakhalin island. While the enviros are reported to be happy to "prostitute themselves" to undo some of the environmental damage, somehow I can't see Gazprom being better behaved than Shell once they've got their slice of the pie. And what's the point of prostituting yourself to a non paying client ? Kremlin sees red over black gold, goes green.

Russia is playing the environmental card to wrest control of its resources from western companies.

It was a meeting that seemed to encapsulate the growing conflict between a bullish Kremlin and the foreign oil companies working in Russia.

On one side was Oleg Mitvol, 190cm and dressed in a black coat, the Kremlin's attack dog leading the charge against the vast Sakhalin-2 oil and gas development off Russia's far east coast. Mr Mitvol has vowed to do "everything in his power" to stop the project and force an environmental clean-up.

Against him: Mike D'Ardenne, a 90kg bearded Australian oilman in a hard hat, representing the foreign consortium led by Shell which is running the $US20 billion ($27 billion) project.

"Look, you can't come on this boat because we don't have enough safety equipment for all of you," said the man from Adelaide. Mr Mitvol drew himself to his full height and stabbed an angry finger at Mr D'Ardenne's chest. "This is the Russian Federation," he boomed. "You haven't bought it yet. I am the deputy head of a government agency and I decide what happens here. This vessel leaves now. And if there isn't enough space, then get off."

In a roadshow reminiscent of high farce, Mr Mitvol recently led a posse of journalists, ecologists and one confused-looking South Korean diplomat on a breakneck tour of alleged environmental violations committed by Shell and its Japanese partners in Sakhalin Energy.

No effort was spared to expose the rot. The group, including The Guardian, was flown from Moscow 6000 miles east to Sakhalin Island in a chartered Ilyushin with leopard-print seats.

"You must see with your own eyes how Shell is destroying our nature," said Mr Mitvol, a former associate of the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who has emerged as the Kremlin's prizefighter in an increasingly nasty scrap with foreign oil and gas companies. He has claimed the cost of correcting the alleged mistakes on Sakhalin could be as high as $US50 billion and promised a criminal case for every illegally destroyed tree.

Russian officials are furious that companies such as Shell have refused to renegotiate production-sharing agreements struck in the early 1990s when the country was poor and obliged to accept unfavourable terms. Under the Sakhalin-2 agreement Shell can recover all project costs before it begins to share profits with the Russian government.

Moscow's sudden eagerness to protect the environment has brought it some unlikely bedfellows: the ecologists who usually criticise the Kremlin. "We are prepared to be prostitutes with anyone if the end result is protection of the environment," said Igor Chestin, head of the World Wildlife Fund's Russia branch, who joined the trip and acknowledged the removal of Sakhalin Energy's permit "was probably linked to Gazprom".

One theory is that Gazprom wants to get its hands on shares in regasification plants owned by Shell in the US - where liquefied natural gas is heated to turn it back into gas form.

Energy Bulletin has a new article from Byron King up on Hubbert's Defense Department.

WHAT WILL THE WORLD LOOK LIKE on the backside of Hubbert's Peak? What you see depends upon where you stand. If you happen to stand in the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, the view is rather sobering. Well, what I mean to say is that if the view is not rather sobering, then whoever is doing the looking had better get their eyes checked.

The U.S. government, as a whole, consumes not quite 2% of all the liquid fuel that the entire U.S. economy uses in a given year. That translates into about 440,000 barrels of oil per day, or slightly more than the entire output of the oil field at Prudhoe Bay, when the pipelines are not shut down due to corrosion. Multiply by 365 days per year, and the U.S. government burns up about 160 million barrels of oil per year, at a cost of something over $10 billion at recent price levels.

Of the total U.S. government liquid fuel use, about 97% of that is consumed by the Department of Defense, making that agency the world's single largest fuel-burning entity. But even within the U.S. DOD, the respective services are themselves gargantuan users of liquid fuel. According to data supplied by the Defense Energy Support Center, the interservice breakdown for fuel use is as follows:

* Department of the Air Force: 53%
* Department of the Navy (including Marine Corps): 32%
* Department of the Army: 12%

In recent testimony before the U.S. Congress, a DOD representative stated that "mobility"-type fuel, used in aircraft, ships, and vehicles, accounts for almost 75% of total DOD energy consumption. Thus fuel used to heat and power buildings and facilities accounts for about 25% of DOD energy usage. In terms of fuel types, jet fuel accounts for 58% of mobility fuel. (Jet fuel is used in aircraft and nonaircraft platforms, such as tanks, other ground vehicles, and power generators.) The balance of energy usage comes from marine diesel, electricity, fuel oil, gasoline, and other sources, such as nuclear, wind, and solar. Yes, the DOD is one of the largest single generators and users of renewable power in the U.S.

While the US government is the world's largest burner of oil, its also apparently the world's largest land owner (until Putin reclaims all of Russia anyway). WorldChanging has a post on the cost of green building and how government buy in could help make green design standard practice.

An interesting article came through our pipelines from Patrick Rollens, a writer for commercial real estate trade journal, which closely examines the premiums for achieving LEED basic compliance, and reveals that those premiums are starting to drop, and the rift in perception between "first cost" and "lifecycle cost" is starting to close, giving builders real reasons to go green.

Getting behind the "it costs more" resistance to building greener does require some philsophical consideration -- as in, what does more mean? It's a question of economics couched in a question of mindset. This is the very factoring that comes into play with environmental economics; what is the true cost of any project when you look at its impacts on the earth -- and its benefit to the user -- over the entire span of its functional existence (and through its disassembly and disposal)?

Interestingly, when Gil wrote about the economics of green building last year, he pointed out that untangling the economic argument around building greener really is a question of attitude and conviction. Apparently, there is no clear correlation between cost and the integrity of a building's ecological profile; successful green construction is about early adoption and sufficient understanding of new building techniques.

In that piece, Gil quoted a Washington Post reporter who tagged energy efficiency in building as being intergral to energy savings and economic stability at a national level. At that time, the expressed sentiment was exasperation at government response to green building efforts.

It's an interesting place to circle back to the more recent article cited above, which emphasizes that as the largest landowner on the planet, the U.S. Government may actually become the tipping point for widespread adoption of green building. "[T]heir willingness to embrace green design in federal buildings, military bases and auxiliary facilities will irrevocably drive sustainable design into the mainstream." With the demand this would create, of course, the market would be able to produce more at a lower cost, and the argument between initial investment and eventual return might begin to reconcile itself.

Heading back to Energy Bulletin, they have a few more ethanol articles (including the one from my post yesterday on ethanol producing microbes). It seems biofuel bear Robert Rapier is reasonably enthusiastic about ethanol from sugarcane production in Brazil.

For those who are expecting a Brazilian debunking, I am going to have to disappoint you. My previous debunking was not aimed at the issue of whether Brazilian ethanol is sustainable, but rather whether their example can be exported to the U.S. Whenever the topic of Brazilian sugarcane ethanol has come up, my response is generally that from what I have read, it appears to be a pretty good deal. Furthermore, I have never seen evidence to dispute the high EROEI claims of sugarcane ethanol. However, I will usually note that there are few comprehensive reports that have examined the process in detail, and I would feel more comfortable about the positive assessments if someone did such a study. My wish has been granted.

IEA Bioenergy has recently publicized a report entitled "Sustainability of Brazilian bio-ethanol". The report was commissioned by The Netherlands Agency for Sustainable Development and Innovation, and is in my opinion the most important endorsement of Brazilian ethanol to date.

I also noticed a talk from the ethanol king, Vinod Khosla, at Google as part of their tech talks series (which they helpfully post online at Google Video).

In the meantime, we're still busy killing off Iraqis to keep control of their oil. Billmon has a long hard look at who is the more effective Iraqi slaughterer - Saddam or Dick Cheney.

"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."

Apocryphal, often attributed to Joseph Stalin


It's hardly a laughing matter, but I had to laugh nonetheless at Shrub's reaction to the latest estimate that the war in Iraq has resulted in at least 655,000 Iraqi deaths -- a total that is not only still rising but accelerating:

"No, I don't consider it a credible report."

Well of course Bible Boy doesn't think it's credible. After all, what do Johns Hopkins University and The Lancet know about faith-based epidemiology? Nothing. They're just a bunch of doctors. Now if the study had been conducted by a committee of evangelical chiropractors from Oral Roberts University, that would be different.

But I thought the number was impressive, particularly when matched against the much more conservative (so to speak) total of 44,000 to 49,000 deaths listed by Iraq Body Count -- a figure based, as the name implies, on actual toe tags, not the baseline projections used by the Johns Hopkins team.

One can argue with the methodology of comparing Iraq's current population to what it would otherwise have been if the Cheney Administration hadn't set its mind on destroying the country in order to save it, but the IBC's more literal-minded approach is equally open to criticism, since in a country like Iraq at a time like this, it's hard just keeping track of all the body parts, much less figuring out how many whole corpses they add up to.

So, let's compromise, average the results, and say, just for the sake of the argument, that the number of Iraqis killed as a direct result of the invasion is probably about 350,000 -- give or take a few headless torsos.

This morbid math leaves me wondering two things: How does the death toll directly attributable to the U.S. invasion and occupation compare to the human costs of Saddam Hussein's own reign of terror? And how does it measure against the casualties caused by the policy Shrub abandoned: the containment strategy followed by the Bush I and Clinton administrations?

...

The final issue to be considered, I suppose, is one of moral purpose. Saddam was a ruthless psychopath who killed without mercy in order to safeguard his tenuous grip on power. His sons were sadistic morons who killed for pleasure as well as business. Jointly, they owned and operated a machine built for just one purpose: to liquidate the regime's opponents and terrorize any potential ones.

Shrub, on the other hand, claims the mantle of liberator. He proclaims his desire to bring the blessings of democracy and freedom (not to mention American-style capitalism) to Iraq. By his lights, I suppose you could say he's tried -- even if the Cheney Administration's true motives were a good deal more cynical than Shrub's canned rhetoric. Either way, I don't really think the goal of the American intervention in Iraq was or is to rule through Saddam-style terror.

And yet, in his own deluded and inarticulate way, Shrub is starting to sound like a Leninist in his willingness to break eggs (or at least see them get broken) if that's what it takes to keep his liberation fantasy -- which is really a personal power fantasy -- alive. And so we get bizarre statements like this one:

I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.

I'm not exactly sure what Shrub meant by that (he probably doesn't either) but it didn't exactly reflect a great deal of ethical sensitivity to, or concern about, the enormous blood price of his decision to invade -- and all the foolish decisions that have since followed. (And yes, I'm using absurd understatement as a sarcastic device here.)

The moral of the story, I guess, is that you don't need to be an inhuman monster to cause an inhuman amount of death, destruction and suffering. You don't even need evil -- ignorance and arrogance and incompetence can manage the job quite nicely. But, as I've said before, it does requires a rare combination of those qualities to take a situation like Saddam's Iraq and make it worse.

The numbers may be (and will be) debated, but at this point they strongly suggest that Shrub and company have managed to do just that -- or will, in the fullness of time.

The death squads that stalk the streets of Baghdad (leaving aside the issue of who created them) dressed as police and soldiers may have met their match after a bold new strategic move by the authorities - issuing new uniforms. Bruce Schneier comments:

In an effort to deal with the problem of imposters in fake uniforms, Iraqi policemen now have a new uniform:

Police Colonel Abdul-Munim Jassim explained why the new uniform would be difficult for criminals to fake.

"The Americans take a photo of the policeman together with the number of the uniform. If found elsewhere, it will immediately be recognised as stolen," he said.

Bolani promised tough measures against anyone caught counterfeiting or trading in the uniforms and praised his officers, telling them their work had begun to turn back the tide of violence around Iraq.

I'm sure these things help, but I don't see what kind of difference it will make to a normal citizen faced with someone in a police uniform breaking down his door at night. Or when gunmen dressed in police uniforms execute the brother of Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi.

Bruce also has interesting posts on torture and Francis Fukuyama slowly drifting away from the neocon reservation.

All new threats entail huge uncertainties. Then, as now, there was a pronounced tendency to assume the worst, and for the government to claim enormous discretion in protecting the American public. The Bush administration has consistently argued that it needs to be protected from Congressional oversight and media scrutiny. An example is the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance of telephone traffic into and out of the United States. Rather than going to Congress and trying to negotiate changes to the law that regulates such activities, the administration simply grabbed that authority for itself, saying, in effect, "Trust us: if you knew what we know about the threat, you'd be perfectly happy to have us do what we're doing." In other areas, like the holding of prisoners in Guantanamo and interrogation methods used there and in the Middle East, one can only quote Moynihan on an earlier era: "As fears of Communist conspiracies and German subversion mounted, it was the U.S. government's conduct that approached the illegal."

Even if we do not at this juncture know the full scope of the threat we face from jihadist terrorism, it is certainly large enough to justify many changes in the way we conduct our lives, both at home and abroad. But the American government does have a track record in dealing with similar problems in the past, one suggesting that all American institutions -- Congress, the courts, the news media -- need to do their jobs in scrutinizing official behavior, and not take the easy way out of deferring to the executive. Past experience also suggests that the government would do far better to make public what it knows, as well as the limits of that knowledge, if we are to arrive at a balanced view of the challenges we face today.

William Gibson has an interesting North Korean tale (there is plenty of blustering going on over North Korea which I'm happy to ignore, but Gibson always makes good points):

Host: How did you end up marching there?

MB: It's a parade leading up to a missile launch. It's a direct message to the US. We were told it's a "peace march" but the retoric is "Kill, murder, smash!" and for some reason they put Jacob and I in the front of this marching legion of workers. So in a way they've used us for their own propaganda. You could see us on TV that evening.

Host: And you were presented as Danes visiting. "Look here, our friends go in the front for the launching of missiles."

MB: Exactly.

Host: In the fight against the Americans. How do you feel about that?

MB: Being there was one of the scariest situations I've ever been in. Nürnberg in Nazi Germany was like Roskilde Festival compared with that. But the scene is important because Jacob Nossel gets scared and starts shouting, "I want to go home, I'm scared"

(BACK TO STUDIO)

MB: I try to calm him and the interpretor is asking "What's happening, what is he saying?" and I say "He's very happy, but tired." And I think it's a scene that tells a lot about the society.

Host: What surprised you the most about North Korea.

MB: There are lots of things to choose from on the shelves but in every room you walk into there are portraits of Great Leader, Kim Il Sung and Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il, the great leader's son. The portraits are painted just like in George Orwell's 1984, so no matter where you stand, they are looking at you. They've taken it a step further and made the frames a bit thicker at the top, so that they are also looking down at you. It's a good example of how they have taken 1984 as a type of manual. North Korea was founded the year 1984 was published, 1948, and they've refined it and taken it to a level where it's nearly satirical.

While I feel unclean agreeing with Rummy, this is an interesting photo for a number of reasons:



And lastly some tinfoil North Korean notes from Xymphora:

NK nukes:

1. The link doesn’t work, but this old posting holds up.
2. From Newsweek, an article by Selig S. Harrison (there are no coincidences in diplomacy):

“On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to ‘abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.’ In return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would ‘respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations.’

Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country's access to the international banking system, branding it a ‘criminal state’ guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration says that this sequence of events was a coincidence. Whatever the truth, I found on a recent trip to Pyongyang that North Korean leaders view the financial sanctions as the cutting edge of a calculated effort by dominant elements in the administration to undercut the Sept. 19 accord, squeeze the Kim Jong Il regime and eventually force its collapse. My conversations made clear that North Korea's missile tests in July and its threat last week to conduct a nuclear test explosion at an unspecified date "in the future" were directly provoked by the U.S. sanctions. In North Korean eyes, pressure must be met with pressure to maintain national honor and, hopefully, to jump-start new bilateral negotiations with Washington that could ease the financial squeeze. When I warned against a nuclear test, saying that it would only strengthen opponents of negotiations in Washington, several top officials replied that ‘soft’ tactics had not worked and they had nothing to lose.”

3. From the excellent “Rolling Blunder” by Fred Kaplan:

“. . . on Oct. 21, 1994, the United States and North Korea signed a formal accord based on those outlines, called the Agreed Framework. Under its terms, North Korea would renew its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, lock up the fuel rods, and let the IAEA inspectors back in to monitor the facility. In exchange, the United States, with financial backing from South Korea and Japan, would provide two light-water nuclear reactors for electricity (explicitly allowed under the NPT), a huge supply of fuel oil, and a pledge not to invade North Korea.

The accord also specified that, upon delivery of the first light-water reactor (the target date was 2003), intrusive inspections of suspected North Korean nuclear sites would begin. After the second reactor arrived, North Korea would ship its fuel rods out of the country. It would essentially give up the ability to build nuclear weapons.

Other sections of the accord – which were less publicized – pledged both sides to ‘move toward full normalization of political and economic relations.’ Within three months of its signing, the two countries were to lower trade barriers and install ambassadors in each other's capitals. The United States was also to ‘provide full assurances’ that it would never use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against North Korea.

Initially, North Korea kept to its side of the bargain. The same cannot be said of our side. Since the accord was not a formal treaty, Congress did not have to ratify the terms, but it did balk on the financial commitment. So did South Korea. The light-water reactors were never funded.”

The bottom line is that the Bush Administration, and the Republicans who blocked funding of Clinton’s agreement, got exactly what could be expected, if not exactly what some of them wanted (not what they wanted as a real North Korean nuclear threat complicates the neocon attacks on Iran for a phony nuclear threat). The North Koreans are doing the only things they know how to receive some attention. The general neocon plan is to label neocon enemies as insane, but the North Koreans are acting completely rationally (as are the Iranians) – it’s the American leaders who are insane.

I'll close with a picture from The Times - I can't find the associated article but it would be interesting to guess the topic (something along the lines of "what would happen if all the people disppeared")...