Solar Powering The Googleplex  

Google is continuing its wide ranging foray into renewable energy and energy efficiency with a plan to convert the Googleplex into the largest solar-powered office in the US. While they still have a long way to go (powering the the corporate office is one thing, their data centres are probably another, though they have been making efforts to improve energy efficiency on a number of other fronts).

I have this blurry vision of clean tech blue states emerging over the next decade while the red states get filthier and more backward courtesy of their entrapment by recalcitrant sunset fossil fuel industries.

Google plans a solar-powered electricity system at its Silicon Valley headquarters that will rank as the largest U.S. solar-powered corporate office complex, the company said on Wednesday.

The Web search leader said it is set to begin building a rooftop solar-powered generation system at its Mountain View, California, headquarters capable of generating 1.6 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power 1,000 California homes.

A Google executive said the company will rely on solar power to supply nearly a third of the electricity consumed by office workers at its roughly one-million-square-foot headquarters. This excludes power consumed by data centers that power many of Google's Web services worldwide, he said.

Radcliffe declined to comment on the cost of the project or whether the solar generation equipment might pay for itself over time. "We wanted to dispel the myth that you can't be both Green and profitable," he said.

While the move marks a major demonstration of support for alternative energy, the project may only make only a small dent in the overall amount of energy consumed by Google. A utility industry rule of thumb is that data centers consume 10 times more electricity than buildings used to house office workers.

Most of the solar panels will sit on the rooftops of office buildings in the Googleplex -- the pet name for the site. Others will provide shaded parking as part of newly constructed solar-panel canopies over existing Google car parking lots.

Earlier this year, Google rival Microsoft got the jump on Google with a 2,288-panel solar system at its research site in Mountain View that is expected to produce 480 kilowatts at peak capacity, the first large-scale use of solar power at any Microsoft office worldwide.

Silicon Valley's Cypress Semiconductor, majority owner of solar cell maker SunPower, has a 336-kilowatt system generating more than 10 percent of its corporate-office electricity needs, spokesman Matt Beevers said.

The consulting arm of Energy Innovations Inc., a company supported by venture backer Idealabs, has built 12 large-scale solar projects across California and is managing construction of the Google project.

Sharp Electronics is supplying 9,212 solar panels for the Google project. Sharp, parent of the solar panel maker, has a 5.2 megawatt solar generation system, the world's largest corporate solar system, at a Kameyama, Japan factory.

The world's largest dedicated solar-powered generation station is a 12-megawatt facility in Arnstein, Germany, near Frankfurt. The top U.S. dedicated solar facility generates 4.6 megawatts and sits in the Arizona desert near Tucson, according to a solar generation database compiled by PVResources.com.

The solar database they mention at PVResources.com is an interesting list - it shows just how far ahead the Germans are of eveyone else when it comes to solar power adoption.

On the subject of Google, Jamais at Open The Future has a post on what would be a great addition to the regular Google application portfolio - Google Data Privacy.

The Hawk Wings blog points us to a site called Freds House, wherein a writer proposes something new and, as far as I'm concerned, absolutely brilliant: Google Data Privacy.

I'm feeling increasingly uneasy about my dependence on Google services. [...] I look around my desktop and I see Google Reader, Google Mail, Google Talk, Google Toolbar, Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google News, Google Analytics, Google Earth, and of course Google Google. [...]

I think I need a new Google product to drop into beta. That would be, let's see, Google Data Privacy. GDP would allow me to review all of the information that Google retains on me across all services, from all devices, and from all sources. GDP would allow me to determine the maximum data retention period for each of my services. GDP would allow me to selectively opt out of cross-service data mining & correlation, even if it reduced the quality of the services I receive. GDP would allow me to correct any inaccurate data in my profile. And GDP would log and alert me when my data was queried by other services.

I want my Google Data Privacy.

So do I. This is exactly the kind of thing that Google could do, should do, to maintain its "Don't Be Evil" motto, while compiling better -- more accurate and more useful -- information.

Back to solar power, Kyocera and SunPower have both announced improvements in solar cell efficiency.

Japan's Kyocera (Kyoto) claimed that it has achieved a new world record of 18.5 percent energy conversion efficiency for a 15- x 15-cm multicrystalline silicon solar cell.

Prior records for energy conversion efficiency in multicrystalline cells of this size were also set by Kyocera, including 14.5 percent in 1989, 17.1 percent in 1996, and 17.7 percent in 2004, the company said.

Kyocera's other recent efficiency benchmarks were achieved both by optimizing the cell's grid-line configuration and by texturing the cell's surface using the company's proprietary ''d.Blue'' process, which maximizes sunlight collection by reducing reflectivity. The latest improvement is the result of increasing the amount of light intercepted by the cell by moving the front contacts to the back of the cell, according to the company.

Meanwhile, SunPower, based here, announced its latest solar panel, offering higher power output and conversion efficiency than its current products. The new SPR-315 solar panel utilizes the company's new 22-percent-efficient Gen 2 solar cells and carries a rated power output of 315 watts, said Peter Aschenbrenner, vice president of marketing and sales.

While solar power is something I wholeheartedly approve of, I can't quite get enthusiastic about this lunatic plan to ship water to Australian cities in solar powered water tankers.

A FLEET of supertankers shipping in hundreds of millions of litres of water every week could be the solution to the drought threatening Australia's cities.
Ambitious plans are being developed to ship desperately needed water to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne from Tasmania, New Zealand or Papua New Guinea.

Proponents say it would cost a fraction of new dams, desalination plants or the pipeline between north Queensland and Brisbane being considered by the Beattie Government.

"This is how we have been shipping oil for years," said Robert Dane, chief executive officer of Solar Sailor, a company chaired by former prime minister Bob Hawke.

The firm is already in talks with the Tasmanian Government about buying fresh water from two sites near the coast in the north and west of the island – areas often soaked with rain. Much of it now runs off into the sea.

Solar Sailor is also in discussions with a firm which holds the right to water supplies in New Zealand. The company is also investing tens of millions of dollars into developing electric-hybrid "Aquatankers" powered by solar wings which harvest energy from both sun and wind.

Another option is to ship water from PNG. "We have so much water and we are happy to assist Australia," said PNG's Consul-General in Australia Paul Nerau.

On a more sane note, solar powered boats are also appearing in Venice, which sounds like a great way of traversing the canals and lagoon (go and do it while air fares are still cheap).

Venice recently welcomed a new solar-powered vaporetto to the Grand Canal. Owned and operated by the Bauer Hotel Group, the B mare shuttle boat is powered by solar energy collected on the roof of the boat. The vaporetto is not only emission free, it is also very quiet and does not produce troublesome waves - each of which are important issues on the Venetian canals. According to Family Travel Forum the "components of the shuttle boat require no external lubrication, do not have combustible parts and require no battery maintenance besides a change of battery once every seven years."

Among the places in the world that will experience a major impact from global warming, Venice may be the leading candidate for most threatened. The rise in water levels would cause unfathomable damage to the delicate city.

While the Rodent is happy to fiddle while the nation's agricultural system cooks thanks to his inaction over global warming, he is still lusting after his vision of Australia as radioactive wasteland - after all - its the perfect combination of sucking up to the big mining companies and creating a wedge issue to use against the Laborites (who showed a small amount of spine this week by deciding its time we left Iraq to George and those death squads that appeared somehow). Kim also earned some brownie points through his willingnes to state the obvious - nuclear power is a waste of money that would be better spent on renewables.

THE Federal Government has ramped up its push for nuclear energy with one minister suggesting work on the first power station could begin within 10 years.

With crippling drought placing the focus on climate change, the Prime Minister, John Howard, the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, and the Industry Minister, Ian Macfarlane, all spruiked nuclear energy yesterday as part of the solution.

A Government-appointed taskforce inquiring into the nuclear industry is due to report by the end of this year, but it was clear yesterday the Government had embraced the concept of nuclear power in the context of climate change and would be pushing it in the lead-up to next year's federal election.

The Finance Minister, Nick Minchin, warned recently the only way to make nuclear energy financially competitive would be to tax the rival coal and gas industries so heavily as to make them non-viable.

The Labor leader, Kim Beazley, restated his party's opposition to nuclear energy yesterday because it was old and dirty technology that created problems with waste. He has been using the drought to promote his climate change policies which focus on clean, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.

"Our future is about renewables, not reactors," he said during a visit to a wind- and solar-powered school in Canberra.

Pacific Nuclear Council vice-president Clarence Hardy said nuclear power stations would have to be built on the coast and he nominated the Hunter Valley, Queensland and Western Australia as potential sites.

Fortune magazine reckons those conspiracy theories abput oil price manipulation are unfounded and hedge funds are entirely to blame - "trust us".

By late summer, hedge funds and other investors had poured billions into long positions in oil, gasoline, natural gas and the rest of what traders call the "energy complex," all betting on a replay of the severe 2005 hurricane season that sent prices soaring in the wake of Katrina and Rita. But one day after oil reached a monthly high of $76.98 a barrel on Aug. 7, government meteorologists downgraded their hurricane forecast and cautioned that a repeat of 2005 was "unlikely."

That announcement, combined with the end of the summer driving season and a recalibration of the Goldman Sachs (Charts) commodity index that reduced the weighting of gasoline, prompted speculators to head for the exits even faster than they'd piled in.

The switch in Goldman's basket of commodities had been previously announced by the firm, but that didn't stop the conspiracy theorists. "Hmm, what a coincidence, luring Goldman's top dog to take a HUGE pay cut by becoming Treasury's top dog, and then Goldman Sachs makes this unexpected decision, serving to dramatically drive down gas prices," said the Grey Matter, a liberal blog.

...

Unfortunately for drivers, Stanislaw doesn't expect the premium caused by worries about tensions in key oil-producing countries like Iran, Iraq, Venezuela and Nigeria to fade anywhere near as quickly as all that hot money did. And there's no reason that money won't move back into energy if sentiment turns and there's a new trend to play.

Right now, the latest bet by traders is for a normal winter - if there's a sudden cold snap before Thanksgiving, expect a bump in crude. So enjoy the low gas prices while they last. You can be sure the White House will, even if it didn't orchestrate them.

Meanwhile The Oil Drum has a mammoth post up from Khebab showing all the latest oil production graphs and forecasts.



Mike Davis (a connoisseur of disaster) has an article in the "New Left Review" on "Fear and Money in Dubai" in which he seems to have discovered peak oil (this also has an obligatory Trotsky quote and talk of dialectic that I find reads like a foreign language to me - if the Australian public education system is infested by marxists as the Rodent claims in his more paranoid moments, then they failed to impart much marxist theory into my skull). He's a good writer and there are lots of interesting details in there - go read it.

In the cases of Dubai and China, all the arduous intermediate stages of commercial evolution have been telescoped or short-circuited to embrace the ‘perfected’ synthesis of shopping, entertainment and architectural spectacle, on the most pharaonic scale.

As a sweepstake in national pride—Arabs versus Chinese—this frantic quest for hyperbole is not of course, unprecedented; recall the famed competition between Britain and imperial Germany to build dreadnoughts in the early 1900s. But is it an economically sustainable strategy of development? The textbook answer is probably not. Architectural gigantism has always been a perverse symptom of economies in speculative overdrive, and each modern boom has left behind overweening skyscrapers, the Empire State Building or the former World Trade Center, as its tombstones. Cynics rightly point out that the hypertrophic real-estate markets in Dubai and urban China are the sinks for global excess profits—of oil and manufacturing exports, respectively—currently being pyramided by rich countries’ inability to reduce oil consumption and, in the case of the United States, to balance current accounts. If past business cycles are any guide, the end could be nigh and very messy. Yet, like the king of the enigmatic floating island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels, al-Maktoum believes that he has discovered the secret of eternal levitation.

The lodestone of Dubai, of course, is ‘peak oil’ and each time you spend $50 to fill your tank, you are helping to irrigate al-Maktoum’s oasis. Fuel prices are currently inflated by industrial China’s soaring demand as well as growing fears of war and terrorism in the global oil patch. According to the Wall Street Journal, ‘consumers will [have paid] $1.2 trillion more in 2004 and 2005 together for oil products than they did in 2003’. As in the 1970s, a huge and disruptive transfer of wealth is taking place between oil-consuming and oil-producing nations. Already visible on the horizon, moreover, is Hubbert’s Peak, the tipping point when new petroleum reserves will no longer offset global demand, and thereafter oil prices will become truly stratospheric. In some utopian economic model, perhaps, this windfall would become an investment fund for shifting the global economy to renewable energy while reducing greenhouse gas output and raising the environmental efficiency of urban systems. In the real world of capitalism, however, it has become a subsidy for the apocalyptic luxuries that Dubai is coming to epitomize.

According to his hagiographers, Dubai has arrived at its blessed state thanks largely to the entrepreneurial vision that al-Maktoum inherited from his father, Sheikh Rashid, who ‘committed himself and his resources to turning his emirate into a modern world-class entrepôt where free enterprise flourished’. In fact, Dubai’s irresistible rise, like that of its parent, the United Arab Emirates, owes as much to a sequence of fortuitous geopolitical accidents. Dubai’s chief regional advantage, paradoxically, has been its modest endowment, now rapidly being exhausted, of offshore oil. With a tiny hinterland lacking the geological wealth of Kuwait or Abu Dhabi, Dubai has escaped poverty by a Singaporean strategy of becoming the key commercial, financial and recreational hub of the Gulf. It is a postmodern ‘city of nets’—as Brecht called ‘Mahagonny’—where the super-profits of the international oil trade are intercepted and then reinvested in Arabia’s one truly inexhaustible natural resource: sand. (Indeed, mega-projects in Dubai are typically measured by volumes of sand moved: one billion cubic feet in the case of the ‘island world’.) If the current mega-project blitzkrieg, exemplified by Dubailand, succeeds as planned, Dubai will derive all of its gdp from non-oil activities like tourism and finance by 2010.

While Dubai is famous from the enormous amount of oil wealth being poured into fantastic real estate developments in the sand, Kazakhstan also has a despot and a bit of hydrocarbon generated cash to throw about (don't let Borat's ignorant peasant act fool you). In their case, backyard pyramids are the new black.

Oh, and we want an opera house in the basement.

That was the message given to British architect Lord Norman Foster by the president of Kazakhstan four months into designing a pyramid in the Central Asian state's capital, Astana.

The resulting 62-metre (203-feet) high Pyramid of Peace and Accord, constructed in less than two years, juts out into the barren plain behind President Nursultan Nazarbayev's palace.

Sounds odd? Astana, a Brasilia of the steppe, is like that.

Nazarbayev moved the capital city here in 1997 and has poured billions of dollars of revenues from oil, gas and metals exports into the construction of a new city in the middle of the vast, empty heartland of the world's ninth largest country.

The pyramid is the first building in Astana designed by a big-name architect like Foster, famous among other things for the glass cupola on Berlin's Reichstag and the Swiss Re tower in London that is nicknamed the "gherkin".

Nazarbayev commissioned his pyramid to host a congress of world religious leaders, an event he dreamt up in order to put Kazakhstan on the map as a serious player in global affairs, a sign that it is not just another ex-Soviet state.

Energy Bulletin has some interesting articles on electricity consumption. First one from the Wall Street Journal (never let it be said that Peak Energy won't cover all ends of the political spectrum) with Less Power to the People: Ten innovations that will reduce the amount of energy we consume.

The forces that put us here look grim. Energy prices are high, supplies are increasingly tight, and anxiety is growing about climate change. But that dark outlook is driving consumers, utilities and public officials to finally take advantage of innovations that could radically reshape the nation's power consumption without lowering the standard of living.

Some are technological fixes, from more-efficient light bulbs to variable-speed motors that use less energy when the load on them isn't as heavy. Others involve public policy. States are rewriting their building codes with an eye on conservation, and Washington is trying to lay down efficiency standards for more household appliances and electronic goods. Utilities are joining the effort as well, offering consumers rebates for buying efficient appliances and urging customers to use electricity more wisely.

The good news is, "we haven't found a major use of electricity for which there aren't great opportunities for savings," says David B. Goldstein, director of energy programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation award for his work on appliance-efficiency standards

...Here's a look at 10 innovations capable of making a big difference immediately and in coming years:

1) LET THE LIGHT SHINE [compact fluorescents and LEDs]
2) MORE-EFFICIENT HARDWARE [for example, electric motors]
3) SMARTER SENSORS [to better control energy use]
4) BETTER MEASURES [for example the Kill-A-Watt meter]
5) SETTING STANDARDS [for energy efficiency in appliances]
6) NEW BUILDING CODES [for energy efficiency]
7) INCENTIVES FOR UTILITIES [to have energy-reduction programs]
8) VARIABLE PRICING [different rates at different seasons, times of day]
9) REBATES [on energy-efficient appliances]
10) CUSTOMER-RESPONSE PROGRAMS [ways to temporarily cut consumption, particularly among big energy users]

And The New York Times is weakly channeling Richard "Olduvai Cliff" Duncan - Power-Grid Report Suggests Some Dark Days Ahead.

Companies are not building power plants and power lines fast enough to meet growing demand, according to a group recently assigned by the federal government to assure proper operation of the power grid.

The group, the North American Electric Reliability Council, in its annual report, to be released Monday, said the amount of power that could be generated or transmitted would drop below the target levels meant to ensure reliability on peak days in Texas, New England, the Mid-Atlantic area and the Midwest during the next two to three years.

The council was established in 1965 after a blackout across the Northeast, and has since set voluntary standards for the industry. ...

For years, the council has produced often-gloomy annual reports, but this is the first to be officially filed with federal agencies, and to recommend specific action.

The Australian has a report on the opening of the Norway to UK gas pipeline.

HE biggest underwater gas pipeline in the world, transporting Norwegian gas 1200km under the North Sea to Britain, was officially opened today by the prime ministers of both countries.

Britain's Tony Blair praised the project, saying it was a crucial step towards securing his country's energy needs. The Langeled pipeline is expected to supply one fifth of Britain's total gas requirements in the coming decades.

Construction of the pipeline by Norwegian firm Hydro began in 2004 and gas began flowing unofficially about two weeks ago. Mr Blair said that over the next 10-15 years, Britain would move from a position of 80-90 per cent self-sufficiency in oil and gas towards being a net importer of 80-90 per cent of its needs.

In Australia, a new pipeline from Bass Strait to Victoria has finally opened.

Victorian premier Steve Bracks has finally unveiled the state's new $750 million gas facility BassGas after two years of delays.

But joint venture operator Origin Energy Ltd says it may take up to a year to resolve arbitration with the project's main contractor Clough Ltd, after numerous delays and $300 million in cost blowouts.

Located in South Gippsland in the state's south-east, BassGas consists of an unmanned offshore platform, 180km pipeline and processing plant and aims to deliver gas, condensate and LPG to the Victorian market.

It hopes to fill 10 per cent of Victoria's current gas demand for 15 years, through the commercialisation of gas from the Yolla gas field in the Bass Strait.

Santos look like they may escape punishment for some environmental destruction they were involved in in Indonesia.

Australian company Santos looks likely to avoid any criminal prosecution over a massive environmental disaster linked to its part-owned exploratory gas well in Indonesia's east Java.

Authorities have just begun pumping the first of millions of litres of hot, toxic mud into a local river, to push it to the sea, amid fears the coming rainy season with spark heavier flooding and make the catastrophe even worse.

A seemingly unstoppable "mud volcano" erupted 200 metres from Santos' part-owned Banjar Panji exploration well during deep drilling almost five months ago, spewing 126,000 cubic metres of sludge a day.

Despite efforts to stop it, the thick sulphuric sludge has flooded eight villages in heavily populated east Java - covering houses, businesses, mosques and schools to their rooftops and forcing the permanent relocation of 12,000 local residents.

New Scientist has an article up asking is Venezuela's pipeline the highway to eco-hell (mostly paywalled unfortunately) ?

Environmentalists are furious about the Venezuelan president's plans for a giant oil pipeline to unite the continent

When Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, called George W. Bush a "devil" at a UN summit last month it was only the latest in a series of provocative statements that has made him one of the White House's least favourite foreign leaders. That antipathy may soon be shared by South America's environmentalists, who are infuriated by his plans for a giant oil pipeline to unite the continent. The proposal alone will be disastrous, they say.

Last year, Chávez secured the backing of the continent's other main leaders to construct the world's biggest oil pipeline, 10,000 kilometres long, linking the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, with the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires. At an estimated cost of $23 billion, it would pass through Brazil and Uruguay and also connect to Bolivia and Paraguay.

"We think the proposed pipeline is absolutely insane," says Cláudio Maretti, director of WWF's Programme for Protected Areas in the Amazon. ...

On the subject of Venezuela, Noam Chomsky has been pretending he works for the Pentagon and is working out how to ensure future supplies of oil and gas. These all sound plausible (the Khuzestan theory has been discussed here previously a few times)

If you want my speculation, based on no information except what I would be doing if I was sitting in the Pentagon planning office and told to figure out a way to overthrow the governments of Bolivia, Venezuela, and Iran, in fact. The idea that immediately comes to mind, so I assume they are working on it, is to support secessionist movements, which is conceivable if you look at the geography and the places where the oil is and so on.

In Venezuela, the oil is in Zulia province, which is where the opposition candidate is coming from, right on the boarder of Colombia (one of the only states [in Latin America] where the US has a firm military presence). It’s a rich province, pretty anti-Chavez, and it happens to be where most of the oil is, and in fact there is rumor of a Zulia independence movement, which, if they can carry it off, the US could then intervene to protect against the dictator. That’s Venezuela.

In Bolivia, the major gas resources are in the low-lands, the eastern low-lands, which is mostly European, not indigenous, opposed to the government, rich area, near Paraguay (one of the other countries where the US has military bases), so you can imagine the same project going on - also secessionist movements.

In Iran, which is the big one, if you look at it, the oil of the region (that’s where most of the hydrocarbons in the world are) they are right around the gulf, the Shiite sections of Iraq, the Shiite sections of Saudi Arabia and an Arab-not Persian-region of Iran, Khuzestan, right near the Gulf, it happens to be Arab. There is talk floating around Europe (you know it’s probably planted by the CIA) of an Ahwazi Liberation Movement for this region. A feasible, I don’t know if it’s feasible or not, but I think the kind of thought that would be occurring to the Pentagon planners is to sponsor a liberation movement, so-called, in the area near the Gulf then move in to defend it. They’ve got 150,000 troops in Iraq; presumably, you might try that, and then bomb the rest of the country back to the Stone Age. It’s conceivable, I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if those are the kinds of plans that are being toyed with.

The Paraguay reference above reminded me where I saw that Cuban story about Bush buying up land over the Guarani aquifer - it was in reddit of all places, and the comments had a pretty good range of tinfoil theories of why he might want it (I liked one politically incorrect comparison to Nazis fleeing to South America after the war).

"Political Cortex" has some more on this story (suggesting it may have been prompted by Jenna Bush's visit to Paraguay), which made a reference to the 9/11 commission report.

A visit by Jenna Bush on behalf of Unicef may have triggered speculation, as Upsidedownworld also suggests. But, could there be truth to the rumors? As calls increase for his impeachment, the President could well be thinking that South America would make a fine place to retire.

Another rumored land deal, this one involving the U.S. military, attracted the attention of Project Censored, which listed "U.S. Military in Paraguay" as one of its top 25 censored stories of 2007.

Five hundred U.S. troops arrived in Paraguay with planes, weapons, and ammunition in July 2005, shortly after the Paraguayan Senate granted U.S. troops immunity from national and International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction. Neighboring countries and human rights organizations are concerned that the massive air base at Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay is potential real estate for the U.S. military. [Project Censored]

"U.S. and Paraguayan officials vehemently deny ambitions to establish a U.S. military base at Mariscal Estigarribia," writes Project Censored. But, there's good reason to believe this rumor, based on a top-secret memo described by Newsweek on August 9, 2006. The memo, cited in the 9/11 Commission report, "lamented the lack of good targets in Afghanistan and proposed instead U.S. military attacks in South America or Southeast Asia as 'a surprise to the terrorists.'"

The memo's content, NEWSWEEK has learned, was in part the product of ideas from a two-man secret Pentagon intelligence unit appointed by Feith after 9/11: veteran defense analyst Michael Maloof and Mideast expert David Wurmser, now a top foreign-policy aide to Dick Cheney.

They argued that an attack on terrorists in South America—for example, a remote region on the border of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil where intelligence reports said Iranian-backed Hizbullah had a presence—would have ripple effects on other terrorist operations.

The arrival of U.S. troops at a massive air base in Paraguay - interestingly, not far from rich Bolivian gas fields - suggests that administration officials may have dusted off an old plan, having learned no lessons from their disastrous intervention in Iraq.

On a related tangent, it seems there are rumours that the new UN Secretary General, with the classy nickname "slippery eel", may have Moonie connections.

THE South Korean elected to be the next UN Secretary- General plans to appoint a special envoy to North Korea when he takes over in January, filling a job left vacant for 18 months after the previous incumbent became embroiled in scandal.

Ban Ki Moon, the South Korean Foreign Minister, told The Times that he planned to pick his own envoy to replace Maurice Strong, the veteran Canadian diplomat-businessman who was forced to step aside because of the Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal.

Mr Ban distanced himself from the scandal that brought down the previous UN envoy to Korea.

Mr Strong, who once served on a company board with Mr Annan’s son Kojo, was compelled to step aside in April 2005 when he admitted that he had received an investment of $1 million from a South Korean businessman who was later convicted of acting as an illegal agent for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Mr Ban said that he had met Mr Strong only two or three times in his official capacity. “He visited [North Korea] several times, mostly on humanitarian issues. He briefed me [on his conversation] with North Korean figures,” he said. “Of course, we appreciated what he had been doing at that time. But we were not aware he was involved in this kind of scandal. That was unfortunate. Since then I have never met him.”

He said that he had never met the convicted South Korean Tong Sun Park, an infamous wheeler-dealer who was the central figure in the Koreagate bribery scandal in Washington in the 1970s.

Mr Ban, 62, the son of a rice-mill worker from a poor rural area, has become a polished and apparently good-natured diplomat after studying at Seoul National University and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

He dreamt of becoming a diplomat when, at the age of 18, he visited President Kennedy at the White House. He married Yoo Soon Taek, one of the girls who presented him with a bamboo strainer as a send-off present for the trip. They have a son and two daughters, one of whom works for Unicef in Africa.

His evasiveness in answering questions earned him the nickname “Slippery Eel” among the South Korean press. Nevertheless, he said that he was thinking of appointing a woman deputy. “I’m pretty much inclined to have some very able, qualified woman for the post of DSG.” He also dismissed as groundless rumours sweeping UN headquarters that he or his family is connected to the Rev Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. “My mother is Buddhist. She has been praying her whole life for me,” he said

Tonight's tinfoil decoration is an interesting podcast from RU Sirius featuring a very mild mannered debate between a 911 conspiracy theorist and a skeptic (though politically they don't seem far apart, which might explain the civility). RU plays agnostic moderator, with a tendency towards skepticism - though he admits he knows Phil Silverstein (and says he wouldn't kill lots of people) which would probably set true tinfoil types off. The tinfoil merchant (Fred Burks) is a pretty good one and makes plenty of interesting points. His web site also has a section on energy - though this includes some "free energy" stuff as well, which I find interesting from a tinfoil watchers viewpoint but will annoy the more practically inclined (he points to a Google Video of the The Race To Zero Point).

I've also got through a few more of RU's other podcasts lately, both of which resonated with a lot of the stuff covered here in recent months ("California, The Altered State" and "Speed Freak Fascists - Drugs in the Third Reich") both of which were enjoyable listens.