A Clean Energy Future For Australia  

Crikey has an article which notes that the recent review the suitability of nuclear power for Australia completely missed the point and points to the Energy Science group who are looking to create a clean energy future.

Given its origins and the composition of its panel, the Switkowski nuclear report is in some respects surprisingly downbeat.

It supports uranium mining and nuclear power, rejects uranium conversion and enrichment, and all but ignores the original requirement to investigate the "business case" for establishing a repository accepting high-level nuclear waste from overseas. It stresses that nuclear power could be competitive only if a substantial carbon tax is imposed.

The narrow terms of reference set by the federal government have restricted the panel to a study of nuclear power, not a serious study of energy options for Australia. A panel with broader range of expertise and a less limited brief could have been asked to explore the impact of carbon tax and other policy measures on energy demand. From that it could have tackled the most effective means by which that demand can be met, and greenhouse emissions reduced, taking into account all the energy options, costs, timeframes, waste, safety and other relevant issues.

While the Switkowski panel was prevented from asking key questions, there's no reason for the rest of us to avoid them. A body of existing research indicates that the objectives of meeting energy demand and reducing greenhouse emissions can be met with a combination of renewable energy and gas to displace coal, combined with energy efficiency measures, without recourse to nuclear power.

For example, a study by AGL, Frontier Economics and WWF Australia published in May 2006 finds that a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation in Australia can be achieved by 2030 at the modest cost of $0.43/week per person over 24 years. The Australian Ministerial Council on Energy published a report in 2003, Towards a National Framework for Energy Efficiency, which concludes that "consumption in the manufacturing, commercial and residential sectors could be reduced by 20–30% with the adoption of current commercially available technologies with an average payback of four years."

A detailed study, A Clean Energy Future for Australia, by Hugh Saddler, Richard Denniss and Mark Diesendorf, identifies methods by which a 50% reduction in greenhouse emissions from stationary energy can be achieved by 2040.

Also at Crikey, a post on the difficult situation faced by the coal miners union (with the usual anti-environment spin from Christian Kerr).

Everyone remembers the successful way the Government played wedge politics with the members of the forestry division of the CFMEU at the 2004 poll. What will happen next year with the CFMEU and coal miners?

Unlike the newer mineral developments that run on a fly-in, fly-out basis, much of Australia’s coal industry is developed. Centres of population have grown up around it. And like other older, established industries, it’s unionised.

Miners, unions and politics have long been inextricably linked. Miners have been seen as providing the muscle of the labour movement. The CFMEU is a very powerful union. And it wants to stay this way. Last week it released a climate change discussion paper. It has a concise summary: "The world needs Australia’s coal. But emissions from its use are contributing to climate change. They must be substantially reduced."

Good intentions come cheap. Clean energy doesn’t.

The CFMEU has some interesting ideas. It is buying up significant parcels of shares in the coal industry. "We need to solve the climate change problem and the coal companies have got a big role to play," the president of the mining division Tony Maher told the ABC last week. "They make a fortune out of it and they've got to position themselves, or be positioned by others into part of the solution instead of the problem." "I'm honest with our members," Maher said. "I say look, if we don't solve this climate change thing we don't have any job security so we've got to fight really hard to get it solved."

The union’s discussion paper says: "The CFMEU Mining and Energy Division has a responsibility to protect and advance the interests of its members, most of whom work in the coal mining industry. Indirectly we have a responsibility to the quarter of a million Australians, mostly in regional areas, who rely on the coal industry for a large proportion of their livelihood."

Renewable Energy Access has an article on mass energy storage using Vanadium batteries - one of the keys to the renewable enegry / smart grid future.

The vanadium-based Flow Battery from VRB Power Systems, Inc. is proving that mass storage for intermittent resources such as wind and solar is achievable, according to the company's CEO Tim Hennessy.
"It's been the engineer's dream for many years to be able to catch the lightning bolt -- to catch large amounts of power and to store it," said Hennessy, speaking on RenewableEnergyAccess.com's Inside Renewable Energy podcast. The Flow Battery, said Hennessy, is one of the answers to that dream. The solar and wind industries are often criticized for their inability to store huge amounts of electricity. But the Flow Battery is changing that. VRB Power recently signed a deal with Tapbury Management to supply a 1.5-megawatt (MW) storage system for the Sorne Hill wind farm in Donegal, Ireland.

The VRB-ESS is particularly beneficial.. through its ability to "inventory" electricity, allowing for the optimal match of supply and demand....and is characterized by having the lowest ecological impact of all energy storage technologies."

Scheer argues that the reason why many still think renewable energy cannot replace fossil and nuclear power is because those working in these industries have made efforts to propagate the notion. Furthermore, a largely unsuspecting public seldom differentiates between a vested interest and an independent expert. Scientists and industrialists, dependent on nuclear and fossil fuel industries for their livelihoods, shun evidence that suggests a total shift to renewable energy is possible."

"Permaculture reflections" has a post on "passive cooling" - using the power of the sun to cool your building (picked up from the front page of Reddit today, which was a surprising place to find it).

If you happen to live in an area that depends on a lot of electricity, and you’re finding electricity to be rather expensive...or would rather wisely eliminate as much of that expense as possible so you could spend your hard earned money on other things, then you need to be looking for ways to reduce or eliminate your electrical use as much as possible. Where can we cut our electric bills?

We’ve all heard of changing our lightbulbs to the new and improved warm fluorescents (no, they no longer turn your skin green). Of course, we can shut off our lights when we’re not in a room, shut off all electrical appliances we aren’t actually using. After all, there’s really no need to have all the lights on in the house, the stereo blazing and the TV on with no sound while we browse the internet. Those kinds of things are easy to see, and cutting back on them does a lot of good. But a large portion of the energy going into a household is actually used for heating and cooling rooms, food and beverages.

Even if you think you’re rich enough to waste your money on electricity, you still need to be concerned about emergency situations when the power companies stop giving you what you need. If you lived through the LA blackouts as I did...then you know what I mean. Believe it or not...there are a number of free and effective ways to nip your electrical cooling bill in the bud while also be prepared for power-outages.
We can consider passive solar cooling and air-conditioning. Please note that we are not talking about the use of photovoltaic solar panels, those are active solar devices. I’m talking about passive solar cooling. A lot of people have trouble imagining that the hot summer sun, can actually cool your house, but it can. The second law of thermodynamics is our best friend, and it works endlessly for free (or at least as long as the sun exists).

Another one I came across at Reddit is this little article on our number one source of oxygen - algae - the most important organism on the planet.

On a recent fossil collecting trip a friend asked, "What do you think is the most important organism on the Earth?" She knew full well I would answer, "Humans!" since we are the masters of our domain and without rival in the animal world (are we good or what?).

She was a bit surprised, and gave me the "Are you nuts?" look, when, without hesitation, I answered, "No doubt about it... hands down the most important organism on this planet is marine algae."

"Algae?!?," she said.

"Yes, Algae," I answered. "Do you want an explanation or are you going to take my word on this?" I asked.

"Let me think about it and I'll get back to you on that one," she said. As we continued our hunt for shark's teeth, whale bones, and anything else we could find, she finally broke down. "I don't get it. We can change the world in so many ways…..what has algae done?

"Very simple," I said. "Algae allows us and almost every other organism you can think of, living or dead, to be here."

Suddenly, she got that look. You know, the one you get when that light bulb in your head clicks on….bing, there it is! "Ah, oxygen, right?"

"Correctomundo!" was my very scientific reply.
It is estimated that between 70% and 80% of the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced by marine plants . Nearly all marine plants are single celled, photosynthetic algae. Yup, that's right, good ol' scum on the pond…green gak…..slip slimein' away. Even marine seaweed is many times colonial algae

Renewable Energy Access has an article on the silicon shortage (I've seen conflicting reports on this shortage and how long it is expected to last - has anyone seen a definitive study showing fabrication capacity now and in the future ?).

SCHOTT Solar, Inc. issued a notice to its employees at its solar wafer and module manufacturing plant in Billerica, Massachusetts, that the facility may have to close down because of inadequate supplies of silicon. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notifications (WARNs), which were issued last Thursday, are required under federal law for manufacturing facilities with more than 200 employees. The WARNs said that the plant could close within 60 days.

According to Marc Roper, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at SCHOTT Solar Inc., the decision to issue the WARNs was entirely related to the company's inability to lock up enough silicon for cell production. Roper said that SCHOTT had no intentions of pulling out of the U.S. photovoltaic (PV) market. "This is all about the silicon supply situation. It is definitely not related to any consideration of the market in the U.S.," said Roper. If the plant closes, SCHOTT Solar, Inc. will keep its headquarters in Roseville, California, and continue shipping modules into the country from its European facilities.

The Google video of fusion scientist Robert Bussard looking for investors was also noted by Ran Prieur (who doesn't seem to believe in permalinks - or complete archives - unfortunately).

Bussard is a highly respected physicist who spent most of his life working on the Tokamak, a donut-shaped fusion device that served as a way for physics researchers to get massive government funding with no chance of actually developing fusion power and thereby destabilizing society. Finally Bussard saw that it wasn't going to work, and started looking at the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor, a smaller, simpler device invented in the 1930's. It uses an electric field to hold the ions at high density for fusion, and it generates the electric field by concentrating electrons with a magnetic field. If you use hydrogen and boron as fuel, there's no radiation or radioactive waste -- the only product is helium.

He got funding from the sinister DARPA, on the condition that he couldn't publish anything. After 12 years, just exactly when they got the device working, the funding was cut! And he gave this talk to drum up new investment.

Now, the collapsists are going to say, "It'll never work. It's too late to convert the energy infrastructure. Roving gangs!" But it does work. The physics is solved, and now it's just a matter of engineering and politics. For much less than the cost of a sports stadium, a city could integrate these things into existing power plants and use fusion to make the steam for electricity.

At the other extreme, the techno-utopians are saying, "Woo-hoo! Space travel! All problems solved!" But of course more energy has never solved any problems except a small fraction of the problems it has created. And on an even deeper level, techno-utopia is based on the false assumption that satisfaction of desires is a good use of tools.

Adam from Energy Bulletin also has some comments:

Although any untested technology, currently without funding, is at best not going to have much global impact for a couple of decades, so if it does work, it is too late to avoid at least a temporary energy peak. Which I can't help but feel is a good thing in some ways, as we are facing any number of limits to growth, of which peak energy -- while frightening in its implications -- is less malign than overwhelming polution, sea-death, extreme freshwater shortages etc. We need to begin having less negative impact on the planet and more energy, even if the energy source itself is relatively clean, might make our overall impact worse. That said if we could replace coal tomorrow I'd be all for it.

Technology Review has an article on advances in "thermal rectifiers".

Scientists have been precisely controlling electric current for decades, building diodes and transistors that shuttle electrons around and make computers and cell phones work. But similarly controlling the flow of heat in solids stayed in the realm of theoretical physics--until now.

Alex Zettl and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), have shown that it is possible to make a thermal rectifier, a device that directs the flow of heat, with nanotubes. If made practical, the rectifier, which the researchers described in last week's Science, could be used to manage the overheating of microelectronic devices and to help create energy-efficient buildings, and it could even lead to new ways of computing with heat.

Whenever fusion gets raised as something that may actually be practical in the medium term, I always find my mind straying to Jeff Vail's "fear of fusion" - its "pharoah maker" potential.

Time again to raise the issue of Peak Oil: an honest psychological self-evaluation shows that I most certainly take pleasure in a certain degree of pessimism. That said, when confronted with the s.p.e.ct.r.e of Peak Oil, I'm MUCH more afraid of one of the possible solutions to peak oil: fusion. There is a very real (though my grossly underinformed guess is that it is very small) chance that once of the variety of fusion energy programs actually bears fruit. The European/Japanese bid currently underway in the south of France may even bear fruit while it's still possible to implement a global fusion-powered hydrogen economy. While this kind of Star-Trek utopia is attractive to many, I'm concerned about how centralized and "ownable" fusion technology will be. Is there any reason to believe that the fusion-energy-world system will be any less hierarchal, intensifying and uneven than the current Petro-energy-world system? Is it a coincidence that a recent article in Joint Forces Quarterly (by John M. Amidon, LtCol, USAF) was titled "America's Strategic Imperative: A "Manhattan Project" for Energy". A country that controls Fusion power in a post-peak-petroleum world will wield far more power than the US did with it's exclusive atomic armory after WWII.

So I will admit that I am more than a little eager to see the peak of oil come and go. Because when it does, if nothing else, it will prevent the development of a fusion, a modern "Pharo Maker" as i've written about before in "Energy, Society & Hierarchy."

Coincidentally, take a look at the cover graphic on Amidon's JFQ article. Despite what the caption says, the cover graphic is one of the offshore Gas & Oil terminals in the al-Faw complex. It was one of the least-publicized operations of the Iraq War, but the very first land operation was a seizure of two of these platforms, as well as three other key oil infrastructure installations in al-Faw by a Seal Team 3 and the Royal Marines' 40th Commando Brigade.

James Hansen is the subject of a detailed article at The Oil Drum Europe on climate change and peak oil. Hansen is something of a fan of "clean coal" and carbon sequestration unfortunately (though in his favour he does want to bulldoze all the existing dirty coal plants) and is of the view that peak oil helps towards mitigating global warming - as long as we don't fall into the tar sand trap (along with shale oil and coal-to-liquids).

The dominant forcing now at work is human CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

When looking forward things became interesting, Hansen suggesting it is feasible to contain CO2 emissions, chiefly because the reservoirs of oil and gas are limited.

Figure 6 indicates the potential carbon contributions from oil and gas. This, coupled with the decay of CO2 emissions means that the combustion of remaining oil and gas aren’t critical to climate change.

The problem lies squarely with Coal. Hansen’s plan for dealing with coal?

* Sequester CO2 at new coal power plants after 2012/2022 in developed/developing countries
* Bulldoze Coal Power Plants without sequestration during 2025-2050
* Stretch oil/gas via slowly increasing carbon tax, avoiding use of non-conventional fossil fuels, permitting time to develop non-CO2 technologies.

What Hansen is saying is that the remaining oil and gas can be burnt whilst limiting atmospheric CO2 to ~450ppm and incremental temperature increase to only 1°C, which really should be the limit unless we want to live on a very different planet. The challenge is that the oil and gas combustion use most of the 450ppm limit, the key therefore is CO2 sequestration or abstinence from coal and unconventional fossil fuels.

This was confirmed in the Q&A session. I asked Hansen his opinion on oil peak within a decade and impacts of peak oil on climate change. He replied that he expects to see oil peak within 20 years as we would have passed the 50% point by then adding, in that case we can probably live with the CO2 emissions from oil without hitting 450ppm. However he did stress the point that we have to start emphasising conservation and efficiency by taxing emissions otherwise we will start squeezing oil/gas from unconventional sources such as shale oil and tar sands. That is something we absolutely can not afford to do.

Our long hot summer has begun here, with bushfires causing blackouts in the city yesterday (the haze and smell of smoke combined with 39 degree temeperatures made leaving the office yesterday afternoon a rather ghastly experience too).

A SMALL grassfire underneath power lines in Sydney's west blacked out 30,000 homes, plunged Parliament House into darkness twice and triggered major interruptions to the energy grid yesterday as the city sweltered in 40 degree temperatures.

As the afternoon heat caused huge demand for electricity, power failures were felt in dozens of city offices. Computers had to be shut down and some office workers were stranded in lifts for more than an hour. The events unravelled while a smoky haze from Blue Mountains bushfires smothered the city and pushed temperatures up to 40 degrees at Sydney Airport. It also halted Parliament just an hour after the Premier, Morris Iemma, insisted his Government had the nation's best record of reliable supply of electricity.
Figures from the National Electricity Market Management Company show energy demand across NSW spiked just after 3pm, soaring to almost 12,500 megawatts, as thousands of Sydneysiders switched on airconditioners.

Ex Shell chairman Lord Oxburgh has an article on global warming and the undiginified position adopted by global warming deniers in Online Opinion.

The debate over whether human beings are changing the Earth’s climate for the worse is over - we certainly are. The question now is “how should we respond?”

Some may choose to deny climate change and bury their heads deeply in the sand. Unfortunately that inelegant posture prevents them from seeing the opportunities that lie ahead. But even among those who accept climate change some may try to persuade us that all is doom and gloom and that our only future is to wear hair shirts and live in caves. Indeed that might happen, but only if we fail to take determined action now. I believe that there is a third way.

We have to respond to climate change with a double strategy - we have to take precautions against the climate changes that are coming our way. In other words we have to adapt.But we also have to attack the causes of climate change - we have to maintain our standard of living while not pouring into the atmosphere the greenhouse gases that we now know to be the root cause of climate change. In other words we also need to mitigate the causes of climate change.

Mitigation involves concerted action by everyone because everyone produces greenhouse gases; but the lead will have to be taken by the richer countries of the world. Adaptation will be at a local level because different places will experience climate change differently.

One frightening strategy for adaptation is geoengineering / (re) terra-forming. Both Boston.com and Wired have articles on this today.

today some of the country's leading minds in science, history, and economics will gather in a closed session organized by NASA and Stanford University to discuss researching such a strategy -- a subject long taboo in environmental circles because so much could go wrong. Some fear it would be seen as a quick fix, replacing the need to reduce fossil fuel emissions, but others contend that the world needs an emergency plan in case global warming triggers a catastrophe, such as a break up of the Greenland ice sheet and massive flooding in coastal regions.

"Is it better to let polar bears go extinct and let the ice sheets melt? Is it worse to inject some aerosols into the stratosphere that could deflect some sunlight?" said Ken Caldeira , a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, which is hosting the two-day meeting.

The idea is called geoengineering: using technology to tinker with the Earth's delicate climate balance. Many scientists doubt it is possible. Even those who have studied the idea worry about the possible misuse of their research.

Those scientists who believe it could work point to the eruption of volcanoes in which masses of particles have deflected sunlight and reduced global temperatures by an average of 0.9 degrees.

Caldeira, who conducted various models of geoengineering while at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the past decade, said he is "philosophically opposed" to the use of geoengineering without first reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But he said his modeling shows the idea works.

"We found that if you blocked 20 percent of the sunlight over the Arctic Ocean, it would be enough to restore sea ice," he said. "That would be blocking 1/300th of the entire sunlight hitting the Earth, but focusing it on the Arctic would prevent the ice from melting."

The notion of tinkering with the Earth's climate is not new, dating at least to 1839, when James Espy , who would become the United States' first meteorologist, tried to produce rain using updrafts from large fires, said James R. Fleming , a professor of science, technology, and society at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Fleming is researching climate change this year at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington

Fleming said militaries have long wanted the power to manipulate climate, and that worries him in relation to geoengineering

"This seems to be a relatively heroic response to climate warming, but it does have the possibility of getting out of hand," without controls over who could use the technology, Fleming said.

Tha Australian government is providing a $60 million subsidy to the "sweep it under the carpet" method of global warming mitigation - carbon sequestration.

Conservation groups have criticised the Federal Government for helping to fund the world's largest carbon capture and storage project off the Western Australian coast. The proponents of the $15 billion Gorgon gas project on Barrow Island, off the Pilbara coast, plan to inject 3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide underground each year.

The Federal Government has contributed $60 million towards the carbon capture program, which is expected to cost $850 million in total. Environment Minister Ian Campbell says the technology will play a significant role in fighting global warming. "About 25 per cent of all of the carbon dioxide emissions in Australia could be stored this way," he said.

But WA Conservation Council spokesman Chris Tallentire says he is concerned about the potential environmental impact. "It's an unproven technology at this scale and it could see massive leakages," he said.

Tom Paine has an article on "Big oil subsidies and Africa".

As the United Nations discussions on climate change drew to a close in Nairobi, Kenya, last week, Secretary General Kofi Annan faulted policymakers worldwide for a “frightening lack of leadership” in confronting this crucial global issue. According to the just-released Stern Report, climate change is “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen,” and it will have massive costs for the global economy. Some of the underlying reasons for this market failure are the perverse incentives and signals created by subsidies to the oil industry.

As world leaders continue to search for solutions to the global problem of climate change, our public funds continue to flow into the pockets of the oil industry. Yet, oil is playing a major role in many of the most urgent problems facing humanity today. Volatile oil prices are putting serious stress on many of the world's most impoverished countries and threatening to deepen the debt crisis. Oil is triggering and exacerbating conflict around the world and is all too often associated with human rights abuses and state-sponsored repression. Pollution associated with the production, transportation, processing and burning of oil is also taking a tremendous toll on human health and is responsible for undermining the livelihoods of many local communities and the well-being of sensitive ecosystems. These problems are now joined by the growing crisis of climate change.

Oil and climate change complicate debt and poverty in already impoverished countries. Soaring oil prices are undermining the benefits of limited debt cancellation in many of the world’s most impoverished countries, particularly those that are oil importers. For example, the estimated cost of Tanzania’s oil imports rose from $190 million in 2002 to $480 million this year—for the same amount of oil. In comparison, debt cancellation is expected to only free up about $140 million for Tanzania in 2006. Furthermore, this cancellation doesn’t even touch on the debt held by large private banks in London, Paris and New York. At the same time, oil companies are raking in record profits, with ExxonMobil reporting profits of $4.7 million an hour in July 2006.

Climate change will hurt the poor, too. Christian Aid in the United Kingdom has estimated an astonishing 182 million people in sub-Saharan Africa alone could die of diseases attributable to climate change by the end of the century. Floods, famine, drought and conflict all resulting from climate change could threaten the existence of millions more worldwide.

Despite these warnings, the U.S. government, along with publicly-supported international institutions, continue to protect the interests of private investors, whether they are oil companies or Wall Street banks that profit from the oil industry’s activities.
Since 1992, the publicly-backed World Bank has provided more than $5 billion in subsidies to the oil industry, while devoting only five percent of its energy budget to clean, renewable energy sources.

Joel Makower at WorldChanging has a look at Milton Friedman and corporate social responsibility.

Friedman concluded:

"The difficulty of exercising 'social responsibility' illustrates, of course, the great virtue of private competitive enterprise -- it forces people to be responsible for their own actions and makes it difficult for them to 'exploit' other people for either selfish or unselfish purposes. They can do good -- but only at their own expense."

We know better now. For example, we understand that ignoring environmental and social issues can be bad for business. Companies that pollute their local communities risk poisoning their customers. Ignoring the state of the local school system risks depleting the pool of qualified workers. Abusing workers risks higher turnover and training costs, not to mention greater difficulty attracting the most qualified candidates.

It's never that simple, of course. In a globalized world, companies are free to exploit or pollute a local community, then move on to the next place. Unfettered markets and exploitation-friendly tax schemes reward companies for acting in their own interests in the name of economic growth and competitiveness. So, Friedman's philosophy still reigns supreme.

Friedman's philosophy is far from universally shared, even in the business community. In 1979, for example, Quaker Oats president Kenneth Mason, writing in Business Week, declared Friedman's profits-are-everything philosophy "a dreary and demeaning view of the role of business and business leaders in our society." Wrote Mason: "Making a profit is no more the purpose of a corporation than getting enough to eat is the purpose of life. Getting enough to eat is a requirement of life; life's purpose, one would hope, is somewhat broader and more challenging. Likewise with business and profit."

Mason went on:

"The moral imperative all of us share in this world is that of getting the best return we can on whatever assets we are privileged to employ. What American business leaders too often forget is that this means all the assets employed -- not just the financial assets but also the brains employed, the labor employed, the materials employed, and the land, air, and water employed."

He urged readers to "encourage, not evade, discussion of those problems that arise when the activities of business conflict with the needs and concerns of society."

But these were largely just well-intentioned words. Action, and even discussion, on some of these issues would be decades in coming. Even when it did take place, the discussion involved only big companies. The social responsibility of smaller firms is just now entering the conversation.

Richard Branson has called for the break up of News Corp because of its anti-democratic influence in the UK (and elsewhere).

RICHARD BRANSON, founder of the Virgin group, has called for an all-party review of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, claiming it should be broken up to preserve democracy in Britain.

In his second attack since the Murdoch-controlled British Sky Broadcasting swooped on Britain's ITV network, paying £940 million for a 17.9 per cent blocking stake, Sir Richard said: "All of us know governments are scared stiff of Murdoch. If The Sun, The Sunday Times, The Times, Sky, the News of the World - just to name a few of the things that Murdoch owns - all come out in favour of a particular political party, the election is likely to be won by that particular party.

"If you tag on ITV to that as well, basically we've got rid of democracy in this country and we might as well just let Murdoch decide who is going to be our prime minister."

He said Mr Murdoch had given an insight into his power in a recent interview when he was quoted saying that, when he visits England, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair compete to have breakfast with him. "Why are they competing to have breakfast with this person? Because he has such influence."

Simon Jenkins has some notes on Rupert's current poodle at Number 10 and the paranoid delusions he is suffering in the deserts of Afghanistan.

What is it about a desert that drives men mad? On Monday morning the prime minister stood on the Afghan sand and said: "Here in this extraordinary piece of desert is where the fate of world security in the early 21st century is going to be decided."

Tony Blair was talking to soldiers he had sent to fight the toughest guerrillas on earth for control of southern Afghanistan. He told them: "Your defeat [of the Taliban] is not just on behalf of the people of Afghanistan but the people of Britain ... We have got to stay for as long as it takes."

The prime minister's brain has clearly lost touch with reality. Even under the Raj there was no conceivable way Britain could conquer and hold the arc of territory to which Blair was referring. It stretches from the Persian Gulf through Iranian Baluchistan and Afghanistan to Pakistan. No central government has come near to controlling this region, and its aversion to outside intervention is ageless and ruthless, currently fuelled by the world's voracious appetite for oil and opium. But it poses no threat to world security.

The sole basis for Blair's statement is Mullah Omar's hospitality to the fanatic, Osama bin Laden, at the end of the 1990s. As we now know, this was never popular (an Arab among Pashtuns); after 9/11, when the Taliban had collaborated with the west over opium, either Bin Laden would eventually have had to leave or the Tajiks would have taken revenge for his killing of their leader, Sheikh Massoud. Even the Pakistanis were on his tail. Either way, Talib Afghanistan was no more a "threat" after 9/11 than were the American flying schools at which the 9/11 perpetrators trained.

So what is Blair getting at? He once confessed to his hero, Roy Jenkins, that he regretted not having studied history at Oxford. He never spoke a truer word. The concept of world security as holistic and vulnerable to incidents such as 9/11 is nonsensical. Politics is not a variant of the Gaia thesis, in which each component of an ecosystem depends on and responds to every other. There is no butterfly effect in international relations. For want of a victory in Helmand, the Middle East is not lost, nor for want of victory in the Middle East is western civilisation lost.

This is as well, since Blair's resumed war in Afghanistan is clearly not being won. We know from the former army chief Lord Guthrie that Blair, despite promising to "give the army anything it takes", has refused the extra troops and armour needed by the pathetically small expeditionary force of 7,000 in Helmand. He has already had to switch tactics from winning hearts and minds to American-style "search and destroy", blowing up villages with 1,000lb bombs (as we saw on TV last week). British commanders are describing "successes" in terms of enemy kills. They should recall that Victorian officers in the Punjab were told that such boasts would be treated as a sign of failure, not success. Such killings infuriated the population and presaged revenge attacks. Has the British army learned nothing?

Blair has not been able to persuade his Nato allies in Europe of his apocalyptic world-view. The use of the word terrorism to imply some grand military offensive against the west may sound good in White House national security documents and Downing Street speeches. But terrorism is not an enemy or an ideology, let alone a country or an army. It is a weapon, like a gun or a bomb. It is not something that can be defeated, only guarded against.

Nor can terrorism ever win. Blair's flattering reference to it was in reality to al-Qaida and to the Islamist jihadism whose cause he has so incessantly advertised. As the American strategist Louise Richardson points out in What Terrorists Want, al-Qaida has not the remotest chance of defeating the west or undermining its civilisation. Only a deranged paranoid could think that.