Unholy Trinity Set To Drag Us Into The Abyss  

The drought has the SMH going all "Limits to Growth" on us today (I wonder what the next generation will do when they realise all this was predicted 30 odd years ago and we never managed to get our acts together) - part of their "Scorched Earth" special today looks at the unholy trinity of global warming, peak oil and water shortages. The Bush and Howard legacy - a failed war in Iraq to grab oil that is partly responsible for the unfolding disaster while they pretend it isn't happening...

We are about to experience the convergence of three of the great issues confronting humanity. Climate change, the peaking of oil supply and water shortage are coming together in a manner which will profoundly alter our way of life, our institutions and our ability to prosper on this planet. Each is a major issue, but their convergence has received minimal attention.

Population is the main driver. In the 60 years since World War II, the world population has grown at an unprecedented rate, from 2.5 billion to 6.5billion today, with 9 billion forecast by 2050. That growth has triggered insatiable demand for natural resources, notably water, oil and other fossil fuels. Exponential economic growth in a finite world hitting physical limits is not a new idea; we have experienced limits at a local level, but we have either side-stepped them or found short-term solutions, becoming overly confident that any global limits could be similarly circumvented.

Today, just as the bulk of the world's population is about to step on to the growth escalator, global limits emerge that are real and imminent. The weight of scientific evidence points to the fact the globe cannot support its present population, let alone an additional 2.5 billion, unless we embrace change.

Climate change, peak oil, water shortage and population are contributing to a "tragedy of the commons", whereby free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource doom the resource through over-exploitation. The benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals, whereas the costs are borne by all.

The media is full of stories of drought stricken farmers now winter is over and the rains haven't come. The Rodent is now busying himself handing out taxpayer money to failing agribusiness' - I wonder if one day he'll realise he helped ruin them - and all the handouts in the world won't save farms in regions that turn into deserts.

The pastures should be green, the lambs fat and the wheat a golden stubble. But the creeks have stopped running, the dams are drying up and the crops are failing.

This is Gundagai, where farmers like Nick Keatinge move through a cloud of dust left behind by years of gruelling drought.

In good times, Gundagai has more rainfall than many other farming regions in the state, but this year it is one of the worst hit, receiving less than 20 per cent of its average annual rainfall.

Energy Bulletin has a good collection of links to articles pointing out that its actually cheaper to do something about global warming than suck up to the coal industry and various far right think tanks and do nothing (this post on Usenet has a pretty good weekly round up of global warming links too). The insurance industry continues to lead the way in the business sector in calling for action.

Weaning the world off fossil fuels sounds like an expensive fantasy, but a major government-backed report will reveal later this month that slashing greenhouse gas emissions will be far cheaper than dealing with the devastation if global warming continues unchecked.

Nick Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank and the Treasury, has spent more than a year combing through the science and economics of climate change and his final report is keenly awaited by campaigners.

Some environmentalists are sceptical about reducing global warming to a financial calculation. 'How do you put a price on the melting of the Greenland ice shelf?' says Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace.

But Whitehall insiders say Brown and Blair hope Stern's report will 'change the terms of the debate' on climate change, giving them the clout to persuade other countries to adopt ambitious solutions....

Energy Bulletin also has the world's shortest Peak Oil article from Jeffrey J. Brown.

Three points:

(1) Mathematically, based on the Hubbert Linearization method, the world is now where the Lower 48 and the North Sea peaked and declined (all crude + condensate).

(2) Through July, 2006 (based on EIA Data), the world has produced about 142 million barrels less oil than if we had simply maintained the 12/05 production rate. This is a shortfall of about 675,000 bpd. During this time period, oil prices traded in the highest (nominal) price range in history.

(3) We are virtually certain that all four oil fields currently producing one mbpd or more are in decline (we are certain that three of the four are in decline).

Given the foregoing, what is the probability that the observed production decline is a coincidence, and not the onset of a permanent decline in conventional crude + condensate production?

AP has a grim report on the surging coal fired power industry in the US - led by TXU, who are trying to build as many plants as possible before the inevitable arrival of carbon taxes.

Should power companies be permitted to build new plants that pollute more but are reliable and less expensive? Or should regulators push utilities toward cleaner burning coal plants, even if it means they will cost more and are based on newer, yet still unproven, technology?

How those questions are answered will have huge implications over the next few decades. It could determine how Americans light, heat and cool their homes and business, the rate of return on utility investments and the potential environmental impact of the new plants.

Nowhere do these competing interests play out with such force as in Texas, where 16 new coal-fired plants are proposed — 11 of them by Dallas-based TXU Corp., the state's biggest power company.

The scope of TXU's 5-year, $10 billion plan is considered bellwether and being closely watched by industry analysts, lawmakers, competitors and environmentalists across the U.S.

The company is hardly alone, however. Some 154 new coal-fired plants are on the drawing board in 42 states. Texas and Illinois are the only states where 10 or more plants are planned, according to the National Energy Technology Laboratory.

Energy analysts say factors driving coal's resurgence are soaring power demands, volatile natural gas prices and a favorable investment market.

Coal now accounts for about 50 percent of the power generated in the U.S. By the year 2030, that share will increase to 57 percent, according to Energy Department forecasts.

TreeHugger has a post on global protests about climate change, scheduled for November 4.

There is no doubt that concern about climate change is growing in all quarters. Yet whilst purchases of carbon offsets are on the rise, and An Inconvenient Truth is showing healthy box office returns, we are yet to see political demonstrations on a scale that matches the crisis we are facing. This may all change on November the 4th, as demonstrators across the world take to the streets to mark the UN climate talks in Nairobi, Kenya. They will be demanding tough action and binding targets on climate change. So far it looks like at least 45 countries will have some kind of event, including Australia, Bangladesh, Finland, France, Taiwan, USA and the United Kingdom.

Perhaps the most encouraging sign about these events is that many of the organisers, such as the UK based i count coalition, appear to involve a broad alliance of groups, including traditional environmental campaigning organizations, groups specifically targeting climate change, and even overseas aid and development organizations. Now is the time to be putting aside differences to demand immediate and decisive action from our political leaders. See you on the march.

TreeHugger also reports that Germany has approved an offshore wind power test field in the North Sea off Lower Saxony.

The German Environmental Ministry has announced an agreement to install offshore wind generation capacity in the North Sea off the coast of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony). The installation will consist of 12 windmills, each in the 5 Mwatt category, installed 45 km (28.1 miles) off of Borkum Island. The site will be called the Borkum West wind farm and expands Germany's foray into offshore power from the one test unit installed off of Brunnsbüttel in Schleswig-Holstein.

Thanks for the picture above, illustrating the beauty of windpower, to Grace Shanahan-Smith, from Southbourne, UK. The 11-year-old won the ManagEnergy Drawing and Photography competition in the category drawing. Good work Grace.

The BBC reports that Nicaragua is considering building a competitor to the Panama canal. Given that shipping is the most energy efficient form of transport this will probably be a ood move in the long term (though I imagine the "globalisation is dead" school of thought wouldn't agree with me).

Nicaragua has announced plans to build a waterway linking the Pacific and Atlantic that would carry bigger ships than the existing Panama Canal.

President Enrique Bolanos said the new route - which would cost $18bn (£9.5bn) and take 12 years to complete - was needed for the rise in world shipping.

Panama is due to vote in three weeks on whether to expand its own canal, to let larger ships pass and cut queues.

If built, the Inter-Oceanic Nicaragua Canal would cut time and several hundred miles off the route from China to Europe or North America. It would also carry super-ships of up to 250,000 tonnes, significantly bigger than the vessels that currently pass through Panama.

Spencer Weart from the American Institute of Physics (who wrote the awesomely detailed history of global warming) has a post up on how " History Is Being Manipulated to Undermine Calls for Action" on global warming.

Informed people now understand that global warming is perhaps the most severe challenge facing the well-being of human society in the coming century. Only a dwindling minority of Americans now denies this. But those who deny it include powerful people, whose interests or ideology are threatened by government regulation of the fossil fuels that are the main source of the danger we face.

History is often used in these arguments. Its role can be direct, as when global-warming denialists assert that not long ago scientists were “spectacularly wrong” in claiming that not warming but a new Ice Age threatened us. So writes, for example, the columnist George Will, quoting from news magazines of the early 1970s. However, when people checked the history they found that Will, following a practice common among denialists, “cherry-picked” a few items that served his purpose from a much larger body of evidence.1 Here’s the real history. In the 1970s scientists discovered that climate can be catastrophically variable; they didn’t agree on what would come next; but they all agreed that they knew too little at the time to make a confident prediction. Any resemblance to the current strong scientific consensus is a fantasy.

A subtler historical fantasy is that the warnings of climate change are a political plot of radical, anti-business environmentalists (so says Michael Crichton’s recent best-selling thriller). In the actual history, concerns arose in the 1950s well before any environmentalist movement. These concerns spread among scientists who were either apolitical or supported by US military agencies. But the most important historical story that people should know is how the concern gave rise to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Reagan administration wanted to forestall pronouncements by self-appointed committees of scientists, fearing they would be “alarmist.” Conservatives promoted the IPCC’s clumsy structure, which consisted of representatives appointed by every government in the world and required to consult all the thousands of experts in repeated rounds of report-drafting in order to reach a consensus. Despite these impediments the IPCC has issued unequivocal statements on the urgent need to act.

Yet perhaps the most important use of history can come through simple explanation. Historians have often worked to illuminate current affairs through their historical descriptions of social and political forces. With a technical subject like the science of climate, history can also clarify the subject itself. Such is the main use of a website I created to describe the history of scientific work on climate change. With a quarter-million words and a thousand references, it is the equivalent of a thick tome. Several hundred visitors come to the site each day. Most are brought by a search engine, either because they entered a general term like “history global warming” or because they sought specific facts about a particular scientist or technical point. Others come through links provided by other climate Websites, blogs, or personal recommendations. What do the visitors want, and do they get it?

Bush and his mates seem to be getting plenty of bad press - sex scandals, corruption, an unpopular and failed war whose reason for being keeps getting changed - now wonder the Republicans are on the nose with everyone (even the evangelicals are getting a bit miffed now it seems). From Past Peak:

Conservative William S. Lind, a leading thinking on fourth-generation warfare, tells us why we're still in Iraq:

At least 32 American troops have been killed in Iraq this month [as of October 11]. Approximately 300 have been wounded. The "battle for Baghdad" is going nowhere. A Marine friend just back from Ramadi said to me, "It didn't get any better while I was there, and it's not going to get better." Virtually everyone in Washington, except the people in the White House, knows that is true for all of Iraq.

Actually, I think the White House knows it too. Why then does it insist on "staying the course" at a casualty rate of more than one thousand Americans per month? The answer is breathtaking in its cynicism: so the retreat from Iraq happens on the next President's watch. That is why we still fight.

Yep, it's now all about George. Anyone who thinks that is too low, too mean, too despicable even for this bunch does not understand the meaning of the adjective "Rovian." Would they let thousands more young Americans get killed or wounded just so George W. does not have to face the consequences of his own folly? In a heartbeat.

Not that it's going to help. When history finally lifts it leg on the Bush administration, it will wash all such tricks away, leaving only the hubris and the incompetence. Jeffrey Hart, who with Russell Kirk gone is probably the top intellectual in the conservative movement, has already written that George W. Bush is the worst President America ever had. I think the honor still belongs to the sainted Woodrow, but if Bush attacks Iran, he may yet earn the prize. That third and final act in the Bush tragicomedy is waiting in the wings.

Lind sees no reason to expect Democratic victories in next month's midterm elections to change anything:

A Democratic Congress will be as stupid, cowardly and corrupt as its Republican predecessor; in reality, both parties are one party, the party of successful career politicians. The White House will continue a lost war in Iraq, solely to dump the mess in the next President's lap. America or Israel will attack Iran, pulling what's left of the temple down on our heads. Congress will do nothing to stop either war.

The never ending "war on terror and oil exporting nations" has spawned no end of civil liberties outrages - the latest one is this EU idea to tag all travellers with arphid s.

The consensus seems to be that the best way to combat the nebulous threat of terrorism is to curtail exactly those freedoms that genuine terrorists so resent, and there's no US monopoly on the idea either. An engineer from London's University College is working on an EU-funded airport security system that hinges on fitting every passenger with an RFID tag so that their every move can be monitored for suspicious behaviour. As if airports weren't demeaning enough already...

Tinfoil time - while I was browsing the US State Department's catalog of popular conspiracy theories yesterday, I came across their rebuttal of the "US air base in Paraguay" meme. I've commented on this story a few times over the years - the basic hypothesis that the US might like to have a base close to the Bolivian gas fields in order to sieze them one day seems sound enough, but the evidence for this seems pretty sketchy and the air base story usually tends to appear in far left and/or fringe periodicals (and SourceWatch).

This story often gets tied into tinfoil theories about the tri-borders region (an I'm not talking about conservative tinfoil about seething hordes of Al Qaeda operatives running around in the jungle). These usually feature the (Washington Times / Korean Unification Church) Moonies and some sinister plot to sieze the resources of the Guarani aquifer (the world's largest water reserves apparently) and/or the drugs trade from the region. I've noted before my near total inability to get a grip on these but they crop quite persistently. Anyway - all this is just a long winded way of pointing to this article I noticed in the news stream today - "Bush Buys Land in Northern Paraguay" - from "Prensa Latina" - so presumably its just a little trouble-making anti-yanqui propaganda - if not the implications are a little disturbing:

Buenos Aires, Oct 13 (Prensa Latina) An Argentine official regarded the intention of the George W. Bush family to settle on the Acuifero Guarani (Paraguay) as surprising, besides being a bad signal for the governments of the region.

Luis D Elia, undersecretary for the Social Habitat in the Argentine Federal Planning Ministry, issued a memo partially reproduced by digital INFOBAE.com, in which he spoke of the purchase by Bush of a 98,842-acre farm in northern Paraguay, between Brazil and Bolivia.

The news circulated Thursday in non-official sources in Asuncion, Paraguay.

D Elia considered this Bush step counterproductive for the regional power expressed by Presidents Nestor Kirchner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

He said that "it is a bad signal that the Bush family is doing business with natural resources linked to the future of MERCOSUR."

The official pointed out that this situation could cause a hypothetical conflict of all the armies in the region, and called attention to the Bush family habit of associating business and politics.

This old post on RI that I just came across via Google seems to summarise the tinfoil view:

I think Moyers misses something important here, but I can't fault him. When the lights are going out, it's hardest to see the darkest things. And especially hard for someone like Moyers, who's accustomed to reading events by the light of liberal Reason. But while Bush's evangelical base is undoubtedly, for the most part, sincere in its convictions, I believe the Bush White House is no more Christian than it is genuinely conservative. Which is to say, not at all. And the same, I suspect, goes for many of the religious leaders who stump for an agenda which seems cribbed from a comic book version of the Book of Revelations.

In other words, the top-down expressions of apocalyptic, fundamentalist faith represent a screen theology, to deceive the sincerely devout - for instance, that Bush is a "godly man" who holds power by the "will of God" in these "Last Days" - and to mask the true hearts and intentions of the gangster elite. At best, they are hypocrites. And if they are worse than that, then they are much worse.

Many of America's conservative Christians may be surprised to learn their Christian Right isn't so Christian anymore. Over the past 15 years, it's been largely bought, borrowed, compromised and blackmailed by Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And what Moon represents is yet another hub in the fascist/intelligence/criminal nexus of money laundering, drug trafficking and arms dealing we frequently see behind the thinning veil of America.

In my last post I speculated that Moon may have dangled unsavoury details of the White House call boy scandal over the head of George HW Bush in order to gain influence. It's certainly true that, just a few years before, Moon was either an embarrassment or a pariah to Republicans and evangelicals alike. (That was when they were merely alike, and not, effectively, one and the same.) In 1978, Jerry Falwell told Esquire that "Reverend Sun Myung Moon is like the plague: he exploits boys and girls, and he should be exported [sic]." Then, in 1994, one of Moon's many front organizations gifted Falwell's Liberty Baptist University $3.5 million, and otherwise forgave tens of millions of dollars in debt. Falwell's college was saved, by Moon, and surprise: Falwell changed his tune.

How does he do it? Where has Moon drawn his billions, to make the empires of Falwell and Pat Robertson look like Virginia Beach sand castles? Investigative reporter Robert Parry asks the same question in last September's "Mysterious Republican Money":

"Limited investigations of Moon’s organization have revealed large sums of money flowing into the United States mostly from untraceable accounts in Japan, where Moon had close ties to yakuza gangster Ryoichi Sasakawa. Former Moon associates also have revealed major money flows from shadowy sources in South America, where Moon built relationships with right-wing elements associated with the cocaine trade, including the so-called Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia in the early 1980s."

Allegations of Moon's relationship to the South American drug trade don't stop with the fall of Klaus Barbie's neo-fascist narco-state. Since 1999, Moon has acquired 600,000 hectares of arid land in Paraguay's northern state of Chaco, bordering Brazil, directly above the world's largest aquifer. Senator Domingo Laino claims that Moon intends to control his nation's narcotics trafficking, as well as the "largest fresh drinking water source in the world."

Paraguay's drugs tsar from 1976-89, Dr Montiel, has said:

"The fact that they came and bought in Chaco and on both sides of the Brazilian border is very telling. It is an enormously strategic point in both the narcotics and arms trades and indeed the available intelligence clearly shows that the Moon sect is involved in both these enterprises."

If that's not bad enough, Iran-Contra vet Elliot Abrams - Bush's new "Deputy National Security Adviser for global democracy strategy" - is also deep in Moon's pocket. Abrams spoke at three Moon rallies in 1998, including one in Sao Paolo, Brazil, attacking anti-cult "deprogrammers" and those who hire them to rescue their family members from the Unification Church. According to Abrams - about whom we're expected to believe this matters - it's simply an issue of "religious freedom."

While Moon is a large, and largely hidden, part of the story of the corruption of religion for criminal and covert ends, the story neither begins nor ends with him. There are many examples on the spooky side of life, that demonstrate that evangelical Christianity has been penetrated and exploited by intelligence assets, and that what may sound like a profession of faith may be nothing more a cover story, and a joke at the expense of the faithfully deceived.