War and Climate  

I tend to rattle on about resource wars caused by oil dependency, but there is a growing chorus of voices poitning to water as another catalyst for resource wars, courtesy of global warming, such as this effort from Jeffrey Sachs.

Our political systems and global politics are largely unequipped for the real challenges of today’s world. Global economic growth and rising populations are putting unprecedented stresses on the physical environment, and these stresses in turn are causing unprecedented challenges for our societies. Yet politicians are largely ignorant of these trends. Governments are not organized to meet them. And crises that are fundamentally ecological in nature are managed by outdated strategies of war and diplomacy.

Consider, for example, the situation in Darfur, Sudan. This horrible conflict is being addressed through threats of military force, sanctions and generally the language of war and peacekeeping. Yet the undoubted origin of the conflict is the region’s extreme poverty, which was made disastrously worse in the 1980s by a drought that has essentially lasted until today. It appears that long-term climate change is leading to lower rainfall not only in Sudan, but also in much of Africa just south of the Sahara Desert—an area where life depends on the rains, and where drought means death.

Darfur has been caught in a drought-induced death trap, but nobody has seen fit to approach the Darfur crisis from the perspective of long-term development rather than the perspective of war. Darfur needs a water strategy more than a military strategy. Its 7 million people cannot survive without a new approach that gives them a chance to grow crops and water their animals. Yet all of the talk at the United Nations is about sanctions and armies, with no path to peace in sight.

Water stress is becoming a major obstacle to economic development in many parts of the world. The water crisis in Gaza is a cause of disease and suffering among Palestinians, and is a major source of underlying tensions between Palestine and Israel. Yet again, billions of dollars are spent on bombing and destruction in the region, while virtually nothing is done about the growing water crisis.

China and India, too, will face growing water crises in the coming years, with potentially horrendous consequences. The economic takeoff of these two giants started 40 years ago with the introduction of higher agricultural output and an end to famines. Yet part of that increased agricultural output resulted from millions of wells that were sunk to tap underground water supplies for irrigation. Now the water table is falling at a dangerous pace, as the underground water is being pumped much faster than the rains are recharging it.

Moreover, aside from rainfall patterns, climate change is upsetting the flow of rivers, as glaciers, which provide a huge amount of water for irrigation and household use, are rapidly receding due to global warming. Snow pack in the mountains is melting earlier in the season, so that river water is less available during summer growing seasons. For all of these reasons, India and China are experiencing serious water crises that are likely to intensify in the future.

The United States faces risks as well. Midwestern and southwestern states have been in a prolonged drought that might well be the result of long-term warming, and the farm states rely heavily on water from a huge underground reservoir that is being depleted by over-pumping.

Just as pressures on oil and gas supplies have driven up energy prices, environmental stresses may now push up food and water prices in many parts of the world. Given the heat waves, droughts, and other climate stresses across the U.S., Europe, Australia and elsewhere this year, wheat prices are now shooting up to their highest levels in decades. Thus, environmental pressures are now hitting the bottom line—affecting incomes and livelihoods around the world.

With rising populations, economic growth and climate change, we will face intensifying droughts, hurricanes and typhoons, powerful El Nino’s, water stress, heat waves, species extinctions and more. The “soft” issues of environment and climate will become the hard and strategic issues of the 21st century. Yet there is almost no recognition of this basic truth in our governments or our global politics. People who speak about hunger and environmental crises are viewed as muddle-headed “moralists,” as opposed to the hard-headed “realists” who deal with war and peace. This is nonsense. The so-called realists just don’t understand the sources of tensions and stresses that are leading to a growing number of crises around the world.

It seems the Rodent is starting to wonder if his legacy will be a dustbowl, withr reports that half of all farmland here is now in need of drought relief funding.

Although the Prime Minister, John Howard, last week cautiously linked the drought to global warming, neither Mr Vaile nor Mr McGauran mentioned climate change.

But Mr Vaile did concede the length and the severity of the drought meant Australia was entering "uncharted waters". Farmers are now being forced to agist their animals in Tasmania because of the lack of feed.

The former chairman of Shell Oil, Lord Oxburgh, who is visiting Australia, yesterday likened the threat posed by climate change to a new kind of war. "We're really talking about quite a different war from that which has ever been fought on earth," he said. "It is going to be a modern-day equivalent of something like World War II."

A report released yesterday by the conservation group WWF puts Australia's consumption habits among the 10 worst in the world. The area of land and water it takes to support each person's lifestyle is now 6.6 hectares a year. This makes Australians bigger consumers than Americans, Japanese, Chinese and Russians, according to WWF's Living Planet Report.

Australia's high rate of consumption is largely due to greenhouse gas emissions, which continue to be among the highest per capita in the world. The chief executive officer of WWF Australia, Greg Bourne, said: "If the rest of the world led the kind of lifestyles we do here in Australia, we would require 3½ planets to provide the resources we use and to absorb the waste we create."

While our farmland turns to dust, the Rodent has gained enough of a clue to realise that handouts to farmers going broke isn't a long strategy of any sort - it won't even guarantee electoral survival, let alone anything positive. So reluctantly he is starting to bow to the inevitable, announcing funding of what I think will be the world's largest solar power station (something we should be building large numbers of) while still trying to hide behind the fig leaf of "clean coal" technology (something that will remain meaningless as long as there is no incentive to adopt it - whether mandated by regulation or via some market driven mechanism like carbon taxes). Peter Costello's myopia is also slowly lessening, with the epiphany that we could actually make money exporting solar technology (and thus help rid ourselves of our dependency on export earnings from coal).

A PROPOSED $400 million solar plant that could deliver 154 megawatts of power will be the cornerstone of the Howard Government's fight against climate change.

In a political shift that steals an approach trumpeted by federal Labor, the federal and Victorian governments will contribute $125 million towards the plant, to be built in northern Victoria using technology developed by Melbourne firm Solar Systems.

The announcement today, part of a $230 million package, is the first in a series that will see an eventual $2 billion invested in new technology aimed at cutting greenhouse emissions.

A coal-drying project in the Latrobe Valley is also expected to be announced today, to help burn Victoria's large brown coal deposits more cleanly than current technology allows. Other projects include seed funding for developing affordable ways of pumping carbon gases from coal-fired power stations underground or diverting carbon dioxide from coal before it is used to generate electricity.

The federal Government hopes its spending will encourage up to $10 billion in greenhouse-friendly electricity projects.

The funding is also going towards developing solar and wind technologies as part of a mix between fossil fuel power and renewable energy sources.

Treasurer Peter Costello, who will announce the funding today with Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane, has kept alive the prospect of domestic nuclear power, predicting that a plant will be built in Australia as soon as it becomes economically viable, perhaps within 10 years.

Mr Costello said the Government should not legislate to stop companies investing in nuclear energy apart from on safety and environmental grounds. "I don't think we should legislatively stop it," he said yesterday.

"I think we should legislatively say, provided you meet all of the requirements in relation to safety and export controls and all those sorts of things, environmental consideration, that there is no legislative bar and then I would let the market work. And the day it becomes commercial someone will build it."

The Howard Government's announcements come before the release next week of a British review, which will radically change the attitude to the economic effect of climate change with long-term predictions of economic costs if it's not addressed quickly.

Before heading to Fiji for the Pacific Islands Forum, where climate change and rising sea levels are major concerns, John Howard said climate change had to be addressed.

The Prime Minister said there was no single answer, but Australia's role as an energy producer for the world meant it should look at technological ways to cut greenhouse emissions from coal-fired power.

Instead of simply converting direct sunlight that hits expensive photovoltaic cells to electricity, the Solar Systems technology works by concentrating the sun's rays with cheap glass and steel on to highly efficient photovoltaic units. The Melbourne-based company has been focusing its efforts on drawing ever greater efficiencies from photovoltaic cells, as well as improving its mirror technology. It has invested more than $40 million in developing its technologies.

Such a solar power station would be one of the biggest in the world, but would produce only a quarter of the power of a small coal-fired station.

The Australian Conservation Foundation called this a "welcome small first step".

CLEAN energy announcements by the federal Government were a welcome small step towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions but a huge leap forward was needed, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) said today.

Treasurer Peter Costello has flagged the announcement of $75 million towards a major solar power station in northern Victoria and $50 million towards reducing emissions from the Hazelwood brown coal power station in eastern Victoria.

ACF executive director Don Henry said the solar project, tipped to be the largest of its kind in the world, showed solar could be a serious player in the alternative energy mix.

"But the truth is, in our fight to tackle climate change, this is a small first step when we really need a huge leap forward," he said on ABC radio. "For example, our governments could require and assist us all to have solar hot water on every roof. That's the equivalent of a brand new power station being built in Australia."

Mr Henry said that to actually reduce emissions in a serious way, the announcements totalled a small drop in the ocean of what is needed. "If we really want to get serious about cutting our greenhouse emissions in Australia, the most effective way is to ensure that we're setting national targets that require greenhouse pollution to be cut and that we put a price on that greenhouse pollution, that is, make the polluters pay," he said. "Then we'll encourage a whole range of technologies at the scale that is needed."

Opposition environment spokesman Anthony Albanese said it was clear there was a range of projects available today to make a huge difference to climate change. "But what we need to do is set up an economic mechanism which makes sure that we don't just have one-off announcements, that we have a mandatory renewable energy target that actually encourages investment across the board," he said. "Under the clean development mechanism of Kyoto, some $133 billion of projects are in the pipelines for clean energy in developing countries in our region."

Crikey notes this is all largely hot air - rehashing previously announced initiatives.

This morning the Treasurer trumpeted economically viable, technological solutions to the climate change problem off the back of the government’s announcement of $75 million towards a major solar power station in northern Victoria.

According to the government, to be eligible for support under their Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund, “technologies will have to demonstrate a potential to be commercially available by 2020 to 2030 and able to reduce the energy sector’s greenhouse gas signature by at least 2% per annum from 2030.”

Doesn’t exactly have a sense of urgency to it, but at least it means the government is putting climate change firmly on the agenda -- or does it?

Not necessarily, says Corin Millais, Chief Executive of The Climate Institute. “There’s no new money and no new policy… it’s a reannouncement. We're all waiting for a new policy announcement from the government -- this is not it, ” Millais told Crikey. “The $125 million announced today is a pittance compared to the scale of the climate change problem. The 2002 drought alone cost Australia $6.6 billion so we need a more immediate intervention.”

And according to Millais, while the Government promises the equivalent of a "cup of water on a bushfire", there's an international boom in clean energy – in 2005 the market was worth $74 billion. So why, according to the Climate Institute, has the government effectively killed off what was a good government policy -- the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target scheme (MRET)?

In 2005, there was a 229% growth in commissioned clean energy projects compared with 2004, which means the 2010 MRET target for renewables has been met – and now there’s no incentive for continued growth and investment. Under current policy, the "renewables industry is firing not hiring, going offshore and abandoning future investments" and the "proportion of energy that Australia generates from renewables is in decline, in contrast to global trends."

"The loss of income from the government's decision to end the renewable energies scheme is billions," says Millais, "...a $230 million wind farm in Tasmania has been cancelled... and wind farm manufacturer, Vestas is closing its Tasmanian factory citing regulatory uncertainty.”

The government is big on crunching numbers when it comes to climate change, but the books don’t seem to be balancing on this issue. Shadow Minister for Public Accountability Kelvin Thompson has done a bit of his own accounting. By his calculations, the government has underspent on climate change in the years from 1998-2006 by $362,475,000.

So are the Treasurer’s economic credentials in question when it comes to climate change? “The cheapest method to approach the greenhouse problem would be to have a carbon price, the most expensive way is to subsidise a lot of technologies -- this isn’t the market friendly way,” says Millais.

“One would expect the government to be more market friendly than they actually are; they’ve taken a very subsidised non-commercial approach to the issue," says Millais. "Clear regulation that sets a price on carbon and rewards all companies, that’s a pretty mainstream economic and business view that's quite prevalent.”

Except within the halls of government. A U-turn on climate change? Maybe not.

Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald's lead story was "Energy Crisis - We're Running Out Of Power", breathelessly announcing the imminent demise of the electrical grid. For those who read past the headline, this is simply announcement that peak summer demand is now getting close to maximum supply and we may have some brownouts in the coming years if there are any errors on particularly hot days, unless some new generation capacity is built (which is happening). that said, errors do occur and some load shedding would seem likely this summer. I remember one classic episode a few years ago where some Homer at the company I was working with decided to do a "test" on a plant on a very high demand day - with disastrous consequences - on another occasion bushfires took down some distribution lines, with similar results. These sorts of problems are why I tend to view nuclear power plants with horror - there is almost always something that can go wrong, even if extreme and active human stupidity is required.

NSW faces blackouts and skyrocketing electricity prices within five years unless it increases supply, the national energy market regulator has warned.

In a report to be released today, it forecasts that demand for electricity in the state could outstrip supply by 2010-11, causing the network to fall below its tough reliability standards.

The forecast for NSW and other states will again focus debate on how Australia should meet its power needs in the face of mounting evidence about the effects of climate change on farming, tourism and other industries.

Today the federal and Victorian governments will announce funding to help build one of the world's biggest solar power stations, a $400 million project that will be a key part of the national strategy to fight climate change.

The federal Treasurer, Peter Costello - who has previously dismissed the prospect of Australian nuclear power as commercially unviable - shifted his position yesterday. He said a nuclear plant would be built as soon as it became commercial, and that was possible within 10 years.

Australia's greenhouse emissions are among the worst in the world - 3.41 tonnes of CO2 per capita - according to a report released yesterday by the conservation group WWF.

NSW's energy demand is being fuelled mainly by air-conditioning - a standard feature in new homes - which leads to bigger and more frequent peaks in demand in summer, according to the report by the National Electricity Market Management Company.

NSW's demand is projected to grow by 0.2 per cent in the year to June 2007, but the number of summer days with a 10 per cent or more likelihood of exceeding the network's reliability standard is forecast to rise by 2.7 per cent.

Mainland states depend mainly on greenhouse-causing coal, although NSW is turning to gas-fired plants to meet the increasingly sharp peaks in demand. Gas-fired plants are more expensive to run but have about half the emissions and are more suited to peak demand. But the rising population will mean more need for baseload power to meet everyday needs, which are currently met by coal-fired stations running 24 hours a day.

The regulator is responsible for managing the wholesale electricity market, following the introduction of a national trading system. Its predictions are notoriously conservative, based on the worst case, such as the failure of a power station on a hot day.

NSW is not the most vulnerable state. South Australia faces potential power shortages as early as 2007-08 and Victoria a year later.

The New York Times is still looking at solar power - and how General Motors is taking a similar approach to Google - putting solar panels on top of its facilities. Maybe they'll soon follow the lead of Toyota and Tesla and start building hybrids and elecric vehicles...

General Motors liked the idea of using the sun to power its buildings. But until recently, one immutable economic fact held G.M. back: The upfront costs were simply too high to justify the ultimate payoff.

G.M. is not alone. Even solar energy’s biggest fans concede that the high investment costs have kept companies from pursuing what is arguably the cleanest, most renewable and least politically sensitive energy source around. But now, G.M. and a small but growing number of other companies and municipalities are getting solar energy from systems installed by others. Even though the installations are right on their own roofs, they buy the electricity much as they would from a utility’s grid. And because the companies that paid for the systems will get a steady income, they can provide power from the sun at competitive electricity rates.

Since June, the roof of G.M.’s parts warehouse in Cucamonga, Calif., has been host to a photovoltaic array with the ability to generate as much as 1.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year. The installation, which G.M. expects will provide half of the building’s electricity, cost G.M. nothing. A solar developer called Developing Energy Efficient Roof Systems — commonly called Deers — bought the equipment with money it raised from private financiers. Deers and its investors own the cells; G.M. signed a long-term contract to purchase the solar-generated electricity from them, at a discount to the prevailing rate for electricity in the region.

These days, that rate is 9 cents to 10 cents a kilowatt hour; G.M. expects that the solar system will reduce its overall electricity costs by 10 percent a year. “We assume the risk, because we know that companies like G.M. have budgets to buy electricity, not to spend millions of dollars generating it,” said Jack P. DeLiddo, president of Deers.

G.M. is already negotiating with Deers to put a similar solar array on a warehouse in nearby Fontana. “The savings are small, but it’s exciting to create such an environmentally sound project without any need to shell out capital,” said Kamesh Gupta, manager of planning and programs for General Motors Energy and Utility Services, which purchases all the energy used by G.M.

Similar deals are cropping up elsewhere. Some specify that the users pay the solar developers a fixed rate for electricity, while others specify a fixed discount to the going rate.

Other factors are involved as well. The parties generally negotiate who will retain potential credits for reducing carbon emissions. When the developers and their backers keep the carbon abatement credits, they generally plan to sell them to companies that might otherwise have trouble complying with rules planned in California and expected elsewhere aimed at limiting global warming.

The electricity users could do that, too, but some of them might also use the credits to offset emissions from other parts of their operations.

But the same logic underpins all of the deals: The electricity users get a clean, reliable source of energy. The developers and their backers get an equally reliable return on their investment — which can be as high as $6,000 per kilowatt hour of capacity — as well as the tax credits and rebates that California and other states offer for renewable energy projects.

“Corporations like solar energy, but they would rather make sizable investments in their core businesses,” said Craig Hanson, head of the Green Power Market Development Group, a consortium of large companies working under the auspices of the World Resources Institute to promote renewable energy. “But for the financiers, it’s like buying the bond of a triple-A-rated company. It may not offer a 20 percent return, but it’s a stable and secure investment.”

The “solar services model,” as Mr. Hanson calls the solar contracts, is drawing interest from a diverse group of companies and financiers.

Alcoa is negotiating with developers to put solar cells on a manufacturing plant, although it will not specify details. General Electric Energy Financial Services has installed solar roofs that provide half the electricity used by 23 San Diego schools.

Mobjectivist has kindly annotated Khebab's collection of oil depletion cruves with the results of his oil shock model - coming in at the pessimistic end of predictions.

I placed the Oil Shock Model data as stars on the graph. My estimate -- based on discovery data -- remains on the pessimistic side, agreeing largely with the ASPO data from October 2004 and Bakhtiari from 2003 (both using conventional plus NGL as the production total). ASPO has since upwardly corrected their estimates, something that I have really no basis for, as discoveries have not gone up much since late 2004.

The other missing depletion curve is Jean Laherre's (pdf).


Billmon's latest retirement sems to have been entirly forgotten, with an unending stream of posts. While this one is a little localised it still tickled my fancy, as I find it hard to be too inspired by the Democrats as they take on the forces of evil. It once again enforced my belief that parliaments (or whatever they get called in the native argot) should have a diverse range of representation - diversity is good for economies, its good for ecosystems, its good for agriculture - and its good for politics. In this case I'd like to think the Libertarian guy makes it - western democracy needs to have a few more libertarians, anarchists and socialists to add some balance to the liberals, conservatives and fascists who dominate our creaky democracies these days.

I've been thinking about posting something about the contrast between absolute rabid ferocity of the GOP's closing ad blitz and the Dems' predictably whimpish response ("My opponent likes Bush! He's got cooties!") And it probably would have included some kind of sexist, elementary school cliche about "hitting like a girl."

But then I heard about this:

The Libertarian challenger for Wyoming’s lone U.S. House seat says Rep. Barbara Cubin offended him by uttering a slur related to his physical disability.

Thomas Rankin said Cubin approached him after a campaign debate on Sunday and said, "If you weren't sitting in that chair, I'd slap you across the face" . . .

The post-debate confrontation arose from a question about the impact of lobbyists by moderator Bob Beck of Wyoming Public Radio.

Trauner responded first, saying he favors public financing of campaigns to remove the influence of special interests and well-heeled industries.

Cubin responded that lobbyists have a legitimate role to represent their industries and interests. "Lobbyists aren't boogiemen that are hiding around," she said.

The laws regarding lobbying are adequate, and those who break the laws should be punished, she said.

Cubin said she never took any money from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is serving a jail sentence after pleading guilty to mail fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion charges.

However, after Abramoff's guilty plea in January, Cubin announced she would donate the $250 she received from the lobbyist in 1996 to the Wyoming Substance Abuse Treatment and Recovery Center in Sheridan.

Rankin then said Cubin received $22,000 from groups linked to Abramoff, and has refused to return those funds.

Cubin challenged Rankin to name which Abramoff organization gave her $22,000.

Rankin later responded that the $22,000 actually was from DeLay.

At that point, Cubin shook her head and waved her hands in disgust.

OK, let's go to instant replay: Asked to comment on the political sewer that is the Republican Congress, the Democratic candidate starts babbling about giving away taxpayer dollars to finance the kind of sleazy shit we're all seeing on the tube these days -- in Wyoming! The Libertarian candidate, on the other hand, deftly plants the Abramoff shiv directly between the GOP candidate's bony shoulders, causing her to go completely ballistic and threaten to slap a person in a wheelchair.

And what does the Democratic campaign have to say about this outrageous behavior?

Democrat challenger Gary Trauner's spokeswoman, Linda Stoval, declined to comment about the incident.

Yeah, that's showing 'em the old killer instinct.

Clearly, in this case to say the Democrat hits like a girl would be both sexist and a filthy lie. The truth is that he wouldn't last two rounds with your average Brownie.

Richard Haass at the Council on Foreign Relations seems to have given up on the Iraq war and the idea of US dominance of the region, in this look at the new middle east.

The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union brought about a fourth era in the region's history, during which the United States enjoyed unprecedented influence and freedom to act. Dominant features of this American era were the U.S.-led liberation of Kuwait, the long-term stationing of U.S. ground and air forces on the Arabian Peninsula, and an active diplomatic interest in trying to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict once and for all (which culminated in the Clinton administration's intense but ultimately unsuccessful effort at Camp David). More than any other, this period exemplified what is now thought of as the "old Middle East." The region was defined by an aggressive but frustrated Iraq, a radical but divided and relatively weak Iran, Israel as the region's most powerful state and sole nuclear power, fluctuating oil prices, top-heavy Arab regimes that repressed their peoples, uneasy coexistence between Israel and both the Palestinians and the Arabs, and, more generally, American primacy.

What has brought this era to an end after less than two decades is a number of factors, some structural, some self-created. The most significant has been the Bush administration's decision to attack Iraq in 2003 and its conduct of the operation and resulting occupation. One casualty of the war has been a Sunni-dominated Iraq, which was strong enough and motivated enough to balance Shiite Iran. Sunni-Shiite tensions, dormant for a while, have come to the surface in Iraq and throughout the region. Terrorists have gained a base in Iraq and developed there a new set of techniques to export. Throughout much of the region, democracy has become associated with the loss of public order and the end of Sunni primacy. Anti-American sentiment, already considerable, has been reinforced. And by tying down a huge portion of the U.S. military, the war has reduced U.S. leverage worldwide. It is one of history's ironies that the first war in Iraq, a war of necessity, marked the beginning of the American era in the Middle East and the second Iraq war, a war of choice, has precipitated its end.

Other factors have also been relevant. One is the demise of the Middle East peace process. The United States had traditionally enjoyed a unique capacity to work with both the Arabs and the Israelis. But the limits of that capacity were exposed at Camp David in 2000. Since then, the weakness of Yasir Arafat's successors, the rise of Hamas, and the Israeli embrace of unilateralism have all helped sideline the United States, a shift reinforced by the disinclination of the current Bush administration to undertake active diplomacy.

Another factor that has helped bring about the end of the American era has been the failure of traditional Arab regimes to counter the appeal of radical Islamism. Faced with a choice between what they perceived as distant and corrupt political leaders and vibrant religious ones, many in the region have opted for the latter. It took 9/11 for U.S. leaders to draw the connection between closed societies and the incubation of radicals. But their response -- often a hasty push for elections regardless of the local political context -- has provided terrorists and their supporters with more opportunities for advancement than they had before.

Finally, globalization has changed the region. It is now less difficult for radicals to acquire funding, arms, ideas, and recruits. The rise of new media, and above all of satellite television, has turned the Arab world into a "regional village" and politicized it. Much of the content shown -- scenes of violence and destruction in Iraq; images of mistreated Iraqi and Muslim prisoners; suffering in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon -- has further alienated many people in the Middle East from the United States. As a result, governments in the Middle East now have a more difficult time working openly with the United States, and U.S. influence in the region has waned.

WorldChanging has a post on a topic that is the opposite end of the spectrum to a lot of "limits to growth" style articles - in this case, they look at what happens when things get free (presumably to get free they'll need to be created in a manner that is very efficient in terms of resource consumption).

Chris Anderson - Mr. Long Tail, editor of Wired Magazine - makes a great decision here at Pop!tech: assuming that everyone in the audience has either read The Long Tail or knows the argument, he gives a different talk: “What Happens When Things Get Free?” (It covers much of the same ground as the book, but draws a different narrative through many of the same examples.)

He starts with a photo of Dr. Carver Mead. Mead started thinking about what happens as semiconductors get cheap to the point where they’re free. The answer is, “you should waste them.” This insight led to VLSI - Very Large Scale Integration - chips that included thousands of transitors, not just single ones.

Alan Kay figured out what you might do with these plentiful, free transistors - be wasteful on the screen. If processing power is abundant, you can make pictures on the screen - icons - instead of forcing people into the command line. This helped make computers beautiful, fun and useful to many more people.

We’re moving from economies of scarcity to “abundant economics”. Hard drive storage has become abundant to the point where GMail is able to give users 2 gigabytes of mail, instead of the 2 megabytes Hotmail used to give you. “Your mailbox is full? What was that about?”

Broadcast media is a product of scarcity. Since there’s a limited set of channels, you have to be very discriminating about what gets out, releasing only things that have a very broad appeal. The emergence of YouTube and others shows what happens when there’s an infinite set of channels available.

3D printing means that, for the first time in history, complexity is free. “What beautiful, extravagant, and unnecesarily complex things will we make now that we can?”

Chris runs through a quick set of examples of the move from economies of scarcity to economies to abundance: Walmart’s ability to offer three colors of Kitchenaid blender, versus 57 on the Amazon site; Blockbuster versus Netflix; Tower Records versus iTunes and peer to peer networks.

Also at WordChanging - a visit to Tesla motors.

Their building is practically hidden in San Carlos, an unobtrusive light-industrial space sitting off the beaten path amongst warehouses and more blue-collar industry than most of Silicon Valley's sprawling office parks contain. But once you step inside, the cover is blown, and you can tell there's something exciting happening. You can also tell they're a high-tech company, not a normal car company. They're small, and dominated by engineers. In fact, they're effectively just an engineering company, since both the aesthetic design and the manufacturing are outsourced to Lotus. (That's why the Tesla looks like an Elise.)

Aerodynamically the car is good, but its body is designed for looks, first and foremost. It has a drag coefficient of around .3, as compared to the EV1's .19. So although the Tesla gets 250 miles on a charge--which is excellent, more than double most EV's--the range could have been far longer. Some EV-geek chatter at GasSavers.org has suggested by back-of-the-envelope calculations that the power train of the Tesla in the body of an EV1 or an Opel Eco Speedster would have a 400 mile range. Conversely, if they had designed the car with the EV1's drag coefficient and kept a 250-mile range, they could have eliminated a lot of the battery bank, and thus a fair chunk of the cost of the vehicle. However, I don't begrudge them their decision to prioritize looks over efficiency. The Tesla, being electric, is already far more efficient than a combustion-engine car. It's a big step in the right direction, and a 250-mile range at a $100K price tag for the first run of an amazingly hot all-electric roadster is great. Too often we let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

The hardest part of an electric vehicle is not the motor, it's the controller--the power electronics which drive the motor, handle regenerative braking, and manage the power from the batteries. Tesla chose AC Propulsion's controller because of their expertise and reputation as the best in the business. Their founder and lead engineer, Alan Cocconi, is apparently so smart that instead of having CAD-refined schematics and models of the circuitry, he had the whole layout in his head. Before designing the controller for AC Propulsion, he designed the controller for the GM Impact (which became the EV1).

Tesla's motor is a high-performance induction motor; not revolutionary new technology, but top-of-the-line. In fact, it's the same one the EV1 and AC Propulsion's tZero prototype cars used. Tesla's innovation is in the way it is manufactured, keeping performance quality high but reducing costs. I also asked whether they thought about using in-wheel motors, since putting a small motor in every wheel instead of having one big motor with a drivetrain connecting it to the four wheels can greatly reduce mechanical complexity and weight, as well as improving reliability.

And while I'm quoting WorldChanging, here's an interesting one from Alex on the Virtual Water Trade and Water Footprints.

When we manufacture goods, we embed energy in them: that is, their existance means we have already spent a certain amount of energy, no matter what we then do with them.

In a similar way, when we grow crops we are in a sense embedding water within them. If a kilo of wheat takes a thousand liters of water to grow from sowing to harvest, we can, seen from a certain light, think of that kilo of wheat as containing 1,000 liters of water.

When we consider how much water is embedded in the food we transport around the planet, it turns out that there is a massive trade in virtual water. The wetter regions of the world every year ship vast amounts of embedded water to the drier parts of the planet. This has gigantic ecological and geopolitical consequences, and as climate change intensifies, could be a trend which produces great friction.

One helpful concept? Thinking of our water footprints, which, like ecological footprints or carbon footprints, allow us to measure the ways in which our actions echo in the world -- in this case, how what we buy, use and eat influences the amount of water (both immediate and virtual) we consume.

Today's tinfoil decoration is from RI once again - my ast post before moving included some notes on the rumours of George Bush buying land in Paraguay next to the Moonie ecological retreat - a topic which RI also felt the need to comment on in MoonShadow.

Trouble in the water, trouble in the air
Go all the way to the other side of the world
You'll find trouble there - Bob Dylan

About a year and a half ago (here and here), I referred to Sun Myung Moon's purchase of 600,000 hectares of Paraguay's Chaco for the stated intention of erecting an "ecological paradise." Moon's land sits atop the Guarani Aquifer, the Earth's largest resource of fresh drinking water, and also happens to be an "enormously strategic point in both the narcotics and arms trades," according to Paraguay's drug czar from 1976-89. "The available intelligence clearly shows that the Moon sect is involved in both these enterprises."

Now, apparently, the Reverend is again keeping familiar company...