WorldChanging - The Book  

Bruce's latest Viridian note asks everyone who is interested in sustainability and clean tech solutions to buy the new WorldChanging book at Amazon and give it some publicity via a boost in the rankings when it is launched in a few weeks time.

(If you read Viridian List, you want this new book. The proper time for you to buy it is now. Why? Because the modern publishing system, such as it is, has become as deranged and sclerotic as the movie business, so a big early roll-out counts for a lot in their ridiculous biz calculations.)))

(((There are two thousand of you out there, and what we Viridians lack in raw numbers we make up for in culture-hacking perspicacity. So I want you to buy three of them. Buy one for yourself, buy two more as propaganda, I mean "gifts," and give them to someone older than yourself and younger than yourself, so as to induce a nice demographic spread across the reader-buyer user-base.)))

(((If this tome becomes as big a hit as its spiritual ancestor the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG, we can accelerate the change to a high-tech green 21C by years. Furthermore, even though it's reasonably priced, it comes in a gorgeously designed Stefan Sagmeister slipcase that looks really classy, so your gift recipients will not feel politically and culturally manipulated but will be all impressed by your good taste.)))

(((They're going to read this thing, and they're going to have stretch-marks all over their heads, because in their morose sorrow during years of domination by fundie creeps, they've forgotten what new ideas look like and this book is full of them. You won't have to lift a finger to affect this change within them -- for these are the heavy guns of the movement here, assembled in battalion. I've been showing my copy to scientists, engineering professors, government workers -- serious, seasoned people, reality-based-community people. They are awestruck. And justly so.)))

(((As it so happens, I wrote an introduction to this book. Then Al Gore muscled in and wrote a second introduction. That's how good this book is. It's heavy-duty. It's so heavy that guys who should have been President of the United States are all concerned. If you are into cybergreen issues you can't call yourself informed without WORLDCHANGING. Furthermore, the people involved in this effort are the absolute salt of the earth. They're bright, fluent, capable and they genuinely get it. They don't merely "get it," they are inventing that which it is necessary to get. These are people you need to know a lot more about.)))

(((After buying some books, for the system requires financial stimulation, go talk about it. Talk it up, talk about it incessantly. Word-of-mouth the living daylights out of it. Normally this is annoying behavior, in the case of this book we can make a moral exception. This book demands discussion because it's full of amazing and completely apt material which can't be found anywhere else.)))

(((Further note that there is an associated book tour. If your town is being graced with WORLDCHANGING authors you should get up, leave the screen, go there, press the flesh, vow some Bright Green fealty and buy more of the book, so that the tour is extended. Yes, I am completely in earnest about you doing this. That's practical, it's doable and it can make a serious difference. But, you know, not five months from now. The iron is red-hot right now.)))

(((You may have been reading Viridian Notes for eight years. Lord knows I have. Imagine those hours of labor and, uh, occasional amusement. Well, the release of this book is a crux event. If this book is a hit, the world will actually change. And in a direction of which we strongly approve. If that happens, you're going to see sprightly, forward- marching Viridian Notes full of cheery news about cool Bright Green developments hitting mainstream acceptance, like, for instance, the Googletorium bedizened with a zillion solar panels. Who can't like that?)))

(((Otherwise, you'll be locked in the souring terror-bunker watching black water pour in over the sill as a society poisoned by Lysenkoist denial drowns in its own spew. Okay, frankly, you're just bound to get some black darkside spew from Viridian List, no matter how grand things are going, but let's face it: this is a unique opportunity for you to take a direct and personal action that briskly heaves that slider-bar into the direction of light and reason. So do it.)))

The Ethanol King has shown he's not a one trick pony when it comes to energy, getting out to promote solar power. Vinod thinks thermal solar power is the way to go, and I suspect this will be the way to create cheap solar power plants (while PV will be more suited for localised uses).

The big opportunity for solar energy is in utility plants, according to Vinod Khosla, who gave back-to-back keynotes on the subject here Tuesday (Oct 16.). The iconic venture capitalist who has started his own alternative energy investment company also stumped for California's Proposition 87, which would fund research into so-called clean technology.

"I now believe that thermal solar will be cheaper than coal-fired electricity plants. It is far more risky to build a coal-fired plant than a solar thermal one today," said Khosla, speaking at the Emerging Ventures conference.

Photovoltaic cells have made significant advances with thin film, multi-junction technology. Utilities represent an opportunity for solar energy that could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, said Khosla, who earlier in the day he delivered a keynote at a solar power conference a block away that attracted an estimated 7,000 attendees.

Although many developers are pursuing the low-cost solar cells, Khosla said "that's exactly the wrong way to go.

"Solar systems would still cost $2 kiloWatt/hour if the cell cost went to zero. What we need are higher efficiency cells. We should be saying we will accept higher costs to get 30 percent efficient cells," he said.

Separately, Khosla spoke out in favor of California's Proposition 87 that would levy a fee on petroleum to be used in part to fund alternative energy technologies.

"This is probably going to be the most expensive race in the country this year," Khosla said, estimating oil companies have already spent $67 million attacking the measure and could spend $80-$100 million before the November vote.

Applied Materials is also enthusiastic about the solar energy market.

Any way you look at it, the solar business is going to be big in 2010, according to equipment manufacturer Applied Materials.

By then, a number of solar-cell manufacturers will be running plants with 10 production lines, and each production line will be capable of squeezing out 100 megawatts worth of solar cells a year, Charlie Gay, vice president and general manager of Applied's Solar Business Group, said on Tuesday during a luncheon briefing at Solar Power 2006, a conference taking place here this week.

That comes to 1,000 megawatts a year per factory, which is about how much electricity gets produced by a coal or nuclear plant, he said. Build a megasize solar factory, therefore, and you don't have to build a coal-fired power plant. Put another way, the entire output of solar cells made in 1980 could be produced in a day in one of these plants.

These factories, moreover, will be huge: A 1,000-megawatt solar facility will likely be 200 times larger than the typical 300-millimeter semiconductor facility. Those often cover more than 10,000 square meters. Unlike chips, solar cells don't shrink in size over time without losing efficiency.

These factories will also consume a lot of silicon. Gay estimated that each watt of power will require 7 grams of silicon, which means that each 1,000-megawatt plant will need 7,000 tons of processed silicon a year.

"If you divide that by 365 days a year, it comes to about 20 tons a day, or nearly 1 ton an hour," he said. Although the solar-panel industry right now is suffering through a shortage of processed silicon, several chemical processors in China, Japan and Korea are currently building up capacity. This should help alleviate the current shortage by mid- to late-2008, he said.

To Applied, of course, these numbers are music. The company, which is one of the largest manufacturers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, sells solar-manufacturing equipment too. Earlier this year, the company bought Applied Films, a solar-equipment manufacturer.

...

Semiconductors and TFT glass, however, sell for more, in terms of square meter, than solar panels. A square meter of LCD glass might be worth $1,350. These manufacturers can thus afford the multimillion-dollar products that Applied produces. Some solar manufacturers at the show said it remains to be seen how much, in terms of capital equipment, solar cell manufacturers will be able to afford.

Gay, however, noted that demand is rising and that the prices of solar cells, measured in cost per watt, continue to drop. In 1980, a solar panel cost about $21 per watt. (That is, each watt produced from the panel would cost about $21 each over the life of the panel.) Now it's about $2.70 per watt.

By 2010, crystalline silicon solar cells will sell for about $1.25 to $1.50 per watt, while thin-film solar cells will sell for 90 cents to $1.30 per watt.

AlterNet has a pair of articles on the capture of the greatest prize of all - though they still underestimate the size of Iraqi oil reserves in my view. It seems the Salvador option is still being exercised in Baghdad as well.

Iraq is sitting on a mother lode of some of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on earth, and the rules that will determine who will control it and on what terms are about to be set.

The Iraqi government faces a December deadline, imposed by the world's wealthiest countries, to complete its final oil law. Industry analysts expect that the result will be a radical departure from the laws governing the country's oil-rich neighbors, giving foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than with other major oil producers and locking in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades, regardless of what kind of policies future elected governments might want to pursue.

Iraq's energy reserves are an incredibly rich prize. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, "Iraq contains 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the second largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia), along with roughly 220 billion barrels of probable and possible resources. Iraq's true potential may be far greater than this, however, as the country is relatively unexplored due to years of war and sanctions." For perspective, the Saudis have 260 billion barrels of proven reserves.

Iraqi oil is close to the surface and easy to extract, making it all the more profitable. James Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, points out that oil companies "can produce a barrel of Iraqi oil for less than $1.50 and possibly as little as $1, including all exploration, oilfield development and production costs." Contrast that with other areas where oil is considered cheap to produce at $5 per barrel or the North Sea, where production costs are $12-16 per barrel.

And Iraq's oil sector is largely undeveloped. Former Iraqi Oil Minister Issam Chalabi (no relation to the neocons' favorite exile, Ahmed Chalabi) told the Associated Press that "Iraq has more oil fields that have been discovered, but not developed, than any other country in the world." British-based analyst Mohammad Al-Gallani told the Canadian Press that of 526 prospective drilling sites, just 125 have been opened.

But the real gem -- what one oil consultant called the "Holy Grail" of the industry -- lies in Iraq's vast western desert. It's one of the last "virgin" fields on the planet, and it has the potential to catapult Iraq to No. 1 in the world in oil reserves. Sparsely populated, the western fields are less prone to sabotage than the country's current centers of production in the north, near Kirkuk, and in the south near Basra. The Nation's Aram Roston predicts Iraq's western desert will yield "untold riches."

Iraq also may have large natural gas deposits that so far remain virtually unexplored.

But even "untold riches" don't tell the whole story. Depending on how Iraq's petroleum law shakes out, the country's enormous reserves could break the back of OPEC, a wet dream in Western capitals for three decades. James Paul predicted that "even before Iraq had reached its full production potential of 8 million barrels or more per day, the companies would gain huge leverage over the international oil system. OPEC would be weakened by the withdrawal of one of its key producers from the OPEC quota system." Depending on how things shape up in the next few months, Western oil companies could end up controlling the country's output levels, or the government, heavily influenced by the United States, could even pull out of the cartel entirely.

Both independent analysts and officials within Iraq's Oil Ministry anticipate that when all is said and done, the big winners in Iraq will be the Big Four -- the American firms Exxon-Mobile and Chevron, the British BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell -- that dominate the world oil market. Ibrahim Mohammed, an industry consultant with close contacts in the Iraqi Oil Ministry, told the Associated Press that there's a universal belief among ministry staff that the major U.S. companies will win the lion's share of contracts. "The feeling is that the new government is going to be influenced by the United States," he said.

...

At this point, the situation is very fluid. Last week, Iraqis were shocked when a controversial measure that might lead to the country's effective breakup was passed by Parliament by one vote. The major Sunni parties and Muqtada al Sadr's ministers boycotted the vote in outrage. Muddying the waters further is a heated debate about whether a somewhat ambiguous provision in the Iraqi Constitution already gives provincial governments the right to hold on to oil revenues rather than send them to the central government. The results of all of these debates will have an enormous impact on Iraq's chances to build an autonomous and potentially prosperous country down the road.

It's possible that the administration and its partners badly overplayed their hand. Iraq's new government stands on the verge of a complete meltdown, faced with a crisis of legitimacy based largely on the fact that it is seen as collaborating with American forces. Overwhelming majorities of Iraqis of every sect believe the United States is an occupier, not a liberator, and is convinced that it intends to stay in Iraq permanently. "If you go in front of Parliament, Raed Jarrar told me, "and ask: 'who is opposed to demanding a timetable for the Americans to withdrawal?' nobody would dare raise their hand." The passage of a sweetheart oil law could prove to be a tipping point. It's also possible Iraq's government won't make it to December; at this writing, rumors of a "palace coup" are swirling around Baghdad, according to Iraqi lawmakers.

What is clear is that the future of Iraq ultimately hinges to a great degree on the outcome of a complex game of chess -- only part of which is out in the open -- that is playing out right now, and oil is at the center of it. It's equally clear that there's a yawning disconnect between Iraqis' and Americans' views of the situation. Erik Leaver, a senior analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, told me that the disposition of Iraq's oil wealth is "definitely causing problems on the ground," but the entire topic is taboo in polite D.C. circles. "Nobody in Washington wants to talk about it," he said. "They don't want to sound like freaks talking about blood for oil." At the same time, a recent poll asked Iraqis what they believed was the main reason for the invasion and 76 percent gave "to control Iraqi oil" as their first choice.

The New York Times has an interesting article of the collapse of elephant society into violent anarchy courtesy of the pressure humans are putting on their social systems (via Energy Bulletin, who got it from LATOC - nice catch AMPOD). In some ways this story reminded me of an unusual book I read a few years ago called "The White Bone".

After 15 minutes or so, Okello started inching the jeep forward, revving the engine, trying to make us sound as beastly as possible. The matriarch, however, was having none of it, holding her ground, the fierce white of her eyes as bright as that of her tusks. Although I pretty much knew the answer, I asked Okello if he was considering trying to drive around. ‘‘No,’’ he said, raising an index finger for emphasis. ‘‘She’ll charge. We should stay right here.’’

I’d have considered it a wise policy even at a more peaceable juncture in the course of human-elephant relations. In recent years, however, those relations have become markedly more bellicose. Just two days before I arrived, a woman was killed by an elephant in Kazinga, a fishing village nearby. Two months earlier, a man was fatally gored by a young male elephant at the northern edge of the park, near the village of Katwe. African elephants use their long tusks to forage through dense jungle brush. They’ve also been known to wield them, however, with the ceremonious flash and precision of gladiators, pinning down a victim with one knee in order to deliver the decisive thrust. Okello told me that a young Indian tourist was killed in this fashion two years ago in Murchison Falls National Park, north of where we were.

These were not isolated incidents. All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state of Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.

Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in ‘‘a number of reserves’’ in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities.

In a coming book on this phenomenon, Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the environmental-sciences program at Oregon State University, notes that in India, where the elephant has long been regarded as a deity, a recent headline in a leading newspaper warned, ‘‘To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.’’ ‘‘Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship between elephants and people has dramatically changed,’’ Bradshaw told me recently. ‘‘What we are seeing today is extraordinary. Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility and violence. Now, I use the term ‘violence’ because of the intentionality associated with it, both in the aggression of humans and, at times, the recently observed behavior of elephants.’’

For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But in ‘‘Elephant Breakdown,’’ a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention.

Albert Bartlett has spent a lifetime warning us about the dangers of exponential growth. He doesn't see the recent "300 millionth american milestone" as being something to celebrate.

When the new American is born or arrives across the border sometime today to push the U.S. population to 300 million, don't expect 83-year-old Albert Bartlett to party like it's 1967.

For one thing, he's pretty sure the Census Bureau's estimate for when the population ticker hit the 300 million mark is late by a year or more. For another, he's watched what has happened since the population hit 200 million 39 years ago, and he sees no cause to celebrate.

Never mind what the get-rich-quick crowd says, he said. "Growth never pays for itself." By every measure - environmental, economic, quality of life - it is a costly proposition.

It all comes down to arithmetic, said the retired professor of physics at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Those who equate growth with prosperity have sold our math-phobic culture a dangerous lie.

He offers the commonly held solution to the problem of a burgeoning number of retirees as an example.

Increasing immigration rates and birthrates to provide additional young workers to support the elderly only exacerbates that problem in the future, he said. "It's like a Ponzi scheme."

The benefits of job-creation programs are another myth. "If creating jobs really lowered unemployment, here in Colorado we would have reached negative unemployment (full employment with excess jobs) decades ago," he said.

Instead, whenever jobs are created, people move here to fill them. More houses, schools, roads and public services are needed to serve them, and the unemployment rate continues mostly unchanged.

"If growth really was paying for itself, the state would be in great financial circumstances after the go-go 1990s," he said. "Instead, it's practically bankrupt."

The effects of tax-limitation measures offer no excuse, he said. Voters endorsed those policies because "they were rebelling against the cost of growth and the higher taxes needed to support it."

But in his view, the scariest deficit looms in the natural world.

Among the unsustainable policies sneaking up on Americans is the depletion of global oil reserves.

The concept of peak oil - when the production of oil worldwide reaches its maximum and begins its inevitable decline - "has been in the literature since 1956," said Bartlett. Scientists predict peak oil will occur this decade, and "this is serious."

The SMH's "Scorched Earth" special continues to make plain the gloomy situation global warming is creating for Australian agriculture. The Rodent, in his usual myopic way, continues to focus on government handouts to the afflicted National party voters while ignoring the root cause of the problem - him.

The Roman emperor Nero is best remembered for having his mother and wife assassinated, murdering his second wife, indulging in orgies, concerts and sporting spectacles while persecuting Christians, and blaming them for the great fire of Rome during which, most infamously, he supposedly played the lyre from the balcony of his palace. Nero playing while Rome burned is myth. The rest is not.

I wonder what history will say about us when we are gone, off to that great absolute water frontage in the sky?

That we fiddled while Rome burned? That we were the wealthiest society in our history, worth more than $350,000 for every man, woman and child, with the biggest homes, the most cars, the highest debt, the lowest savings, the highest rates of obesity and excess weight, and the greatest amount of consumerism, gambling and drug consumption, while the landscape, the lifeblood of the nation, died around us, a disaster drowned out by the clamour of consumerism.

Harsh? We have elected a prime minister, four times, who has led Australia through an era of unbroken and unprecedented prosperity, yet appeared obdurately impervious to the greatest issue of our times. He promised to reduce the size and intrusiveness of government but instead increased federal taxes, including the GST, to a peacetime record of 25.7 per cent of gross domestic product, but did not use this unprecedented flow of funds to mobilise the nation against the greatest threat to its survival. Two great strokes of fortune marked his longevity as leader - the economic revolution in China, and an opposition dominated by the factional Frankensteins of the Labor Party.

All the while, month after month, year after year, the implacable advance of Australia's collective environmental stupidity crept closer until it is now within striking distance of the coastal capitals. After 200 years of trying to turn this continent into another Europe, we are now in retreat, as the arid zones advance.

In this column in August last year, I wrote about a highly innovative grazing enterprise, Coombing Park, not far from Orange, run by George King, who inherited a badly eroded property and turned it into a showpiece, using holistic landcare techniques that are absent from most rural businesses. He had been forced to drop the stock level on Coombing Park to 40 per cent of peak capacity and was deeply worried for the future. As we flew over the western plains in his Cessna 182, he said: "Our politicians and bureaucrats are still illiterate about this environment. We're still treating the symptoms, not the underlying cause. Droughts and water shortages are just symptoms."

Tinfoil time - Rigorous Intuition has a typically creepy post up that concludes by noting that everything is going to plan in Iraq (as we saw earlier with the oil "profit sharing" arrangements) - we're now moving on to the divide and conquer phase.

Regarding Iraq, there's been a lot of noise how James Baker's "Bipartisan Study Group" has weighed in and assessed the mission as a failure, and what a blow this must be to the Bush White House.

"Staying the course" is not an option, but it never was the intent. The Iraq project has always envisioned the dissolution of the country into three "federal states" - sectarian bantustans ruled by obliging strongmen - but to get to that point a united Iraq, that had never seen a civil war, needed destabilizing. To that end, the US and UK mission has truly been a catastrophic success. Now, it's the time for the neocon berserkers to take one on the chin, and the "grown-ups" to move in and complete the job in such a way that it appears they're simply cleaning up an unfortunate mess. "Few officials in either party are talking about an immediate pullout of U.S. combat troops. But interest appears to be growing in several broad ideas. One would be some kind of effort to divide the country along regional lines...."

Don't be fooled again, or for the first time.