Climate and Punishment  

As I predicted not that long ago, Australia is now being threatened with trade reprisals over its "dirty world citizen" approach to global warming.

French PM Dominique de Villepin is recommending that the EU take action against countries, specifically Australia, that have been undermining the Kyoto treaty (and unlike the US, we're not big enough to have a chance in this fight, even if the EU lags well behind Asia as a major trading partner).

JOHN Howard will use two crucial meetings this week to export his belief that the world can meet the greenhouse challenge - but still keep coal as a prime energy source. But the Prime Minister's new proposals on climate change are not enough for his French counterpart - who wants Europe to impose punitive takes on Australia for not signing the Kyoto Protocol.

French PM Dominique de Villepin today proposed introducing punitive taxes on imports from Australia and other countries that refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol. "Europe has to use all its weight to stand up to this sort of environmental dumping," he said.

The myopic Rodent is starting to sweat about the rising temperature over global warming - while he's happy to ignore polls that show most Australian citizens want real action, its harder to ignore the realities of foreign trade - and the turning tide of sentiment in the business sector (outside of the mining industry of course).

Johnny is now commencing a slow, painful backflip on carbon trading which will be interesting to watch as he tries to keep the coal miners happy while trying to keep manoeuvring us in the direction of nuclear power, against the prevailing clean tech winds of change...

JOHN HOWARD has yielded to pressure to consider a global carbon trading scheme, and business leaders say they are ready to take action against global warming. In a carefully co-ordinated announcement last night, the Prime Minister told members of the Business Council of Australia that the Government would establish a working group with business to examine a carbon trading scheme.

It is a significant shift for the Government but Mr Howard added this caution: "I have indicated in the past that I don't intend to preside over policy changes in this area that are going to rob Australia of its competitive advantage in the industries that are so important to us."

His remarks followed a declaration by the business council's president, Michael Chaney, that a market-based, global agreement was the only valid, long-term solution to climate change. "It has to be global because climate does not acknowledge national boundaries and because all nations must participate to minimise the impact on individual economies," Mr Chaney told a council dinner in Sydney. "It has to be market-driven because only a clear and unambiguous link between carbon emissions and market value can provide both business and the community with a consistent and long-term motivation to reduce emissions."

The Government has been reluctant to move on setting a price on greenhouse gas pollutants such as carbon, arguing the inevitable increase in the cost of energy will erode Australia's competitive advantage. Australia generates some of the world's cheapest - but dirtiest - electricity from its large reserves of black coal. A price on carbon would make coal-fired power more expensive and renewable energy from wind turbines and solar panels more competitive.

...

The president of BP Australia and member of the Business Roundtable on Climate Change, Gerry Hueston, has told Radio National Breakfast it is a welcome initiative. "It's important now that the big emitters like the US and China and potentially India come on board because their involvement is the thing that's going to actually make the big difference," he said.

The executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Don Henry, has also welcomed the announcement. He says the Government should now set a target for reductions in carbon pollution. "The crucial thing in any emissions trading scheme is first and foremost what cap, what reductions in greenhouse gas emissions you're going to require," he said. "That's crucial for the environment, it also sets the market up so that business can reduce emissions in an efficient way."

Crikey has a feature on "What the experts REALLY think about Howard's climate change U-turn"

Climate change experts, green groups and business leaders have greeted John Howard's diminishing scepticism on climate change and his announcement yesterday of a new carbon emissions taskforce with cautious optimism.

The people who've been campaigning on this issue for years are hearing something that they thought they'd never hear – concessions on climate change coming out of the PM's mouth.

But they're walking a delicate tightrope because they don't want to alienate or discourage the flood of press coverage, the enormous public interest and the new groundswell of support by appearing too churlish, negative, lefty or too green. At a time when the issue of global warming has hit the mainstream hard, these groups are desperate to make sure they don't blow it.

Which is why they’re not shouting down the PM's carbon trading conversation. It’s a step in the right direction, some are saying. It’s the beginning of a U-turn, say others.

That’s the positive, public line – but what are they saying in private? Crikey spoke to a number of climate change industry insiders, and what they're saying behind closed doors is much more interesting:

* "This is about public image, not policy."
* "A global emissions market? It already exists and it's worth $30 billion. If that’s what they want, why aren’t they moving towards aligning with that? All of this stuff exists under Kyoto mechanisms… and we can't get access to any of that money because we haven't signed Kyoto. "
* "This is disingenuous. The Howard government are calling for something they don’t want and they know won’t happen…."
* "Announcing inquiries is a way of not doing anything… they’re making it up as they go along..."
* "The government's concern is watering down the media fire, not the climate fire…. It’s trying to get it off the news cycle… "
* "Kyoto is not just a symbol. It’s a very serious international system which is starting a process of major cuts in emissions. It took ten years of really hard negotiation to get a scheme under Kyoto that imposes caps on emissions."
* "I’m deeply sceptical. The PM has been spooked by the politics and he’s looking for a way out. There’s no evidence this is anything but a political move."
* "You have to be naïve in the extreme to think that Howard is serious about reducing emissions… At the heart is the coal and aluminium industry…"
* "I think in the end, Howard hates greenies. It’s as visceral as that. Doing something about climate change feels like caving in to them to him…. Look at what he says about Al Gore."
* "To talk about AP6 is just lunacy, it’s completely disconnected from what it takes to get an international emissions cap and trade system…."
* "As soon as you step outside Australia and go to an international meeting you realise the debate in Australia is carried on in a cocoon. People at the international conferences laugh at Australia and the position it takes. But because so few people go and talk to the rest of the world on this issue… you get an epidemic of foolishness."
* "There’s no international diplomacy behind this. They’re going to get slaughtered in Nairobi, New Kyoto just doesn’t exist….The thought that suddenly everyone's going to listen to Australia after ten years of us not doing anything is laughable."
* "It's all spin and no substance. There's no U-turn in policy."
* "If our scheme in Australia doesn't follow Kyoto rules we can’t join in. We need domestic carbon rules to fall in line with Kyoto rules. If you want to trade a carbon product it has to fall in line with global schemes…"
* "New Kyoto is either spin or the product of Ian Campbell’s overactive imagination. Campbell has the mark of death on him…"
* "Costello and Howard have said we have to do something about this but that we have time and this is profoundly ignorant. Stern gave us ten years and that's realistic. Howard and Costello still haven’t got it."
* "The irony is that 80% of our coal goes into the global market so it will already be restricted…."
* "In politics, there's this weird support for the coal industry… I can’t explain it… it has a long history, and it's bipartisan… but it's totally disproportionate. With Labor it’s the unions, with Liberals it’s the companies."
* "The game that Howard is playing is a global game to undermine initiatives to preserve the game for Australia's coal exports… The only way you can stop this stuff harming our exports is to wreck any global agreement which puts Australia in the camp of Saudi Arabia and the other oil nations."

Crikey also notes that "Environment" minister Ian Campbell is "not the most popular kid at the Nairobi climate convention".

A cynical observer might suggest that the quality that makes Ian Campbell most ideally suited to his current portfolio is an apparently malfunctioning blush reflex.

The Minister’s own opinion piece on climate change: "Among our international peers we are considered world leaders."

Again: "Very few Australians know the Australian Government is a world leader in combating climate change."

And again: "Australia is doing more than most countries in the greenhouse policy area. We're respected internationally for our policy efforts, for our investments and for our practical outcomes."

It’s like watching Perfect Match – your instinct is to cower behind the couch with your hands over your ears, but you’re somehow transfixed by the breathtaking inanity of it all.

Let’s face it. Regardless of whether or not one accepts that the federal government should be taking effective action to curb emissions, it’s rather difficult to sell the idea that it is. Right now its climate change initiatives resemble the high-noon set of a spaghetti western – some money spent on the facade, but no real substance behind it.

This week the Minister is in Nairobi for the second Kyoto MOP, to discuss– among other things– new emissions targets post-Kyoto. Campbell will argue that the big emerging emitters (plus the US) must be included in future agreements. Meanwhile, the PM is set to push the government’s clean coal technology stance at the APEC summit.

In broad brush strokes, the government has two things right: technology must play a central role in winding down carbon emissions, and the US and emerging emitters must be brought into the fold. It is Kyoto’s failure to accomplish the latter that has always been the government’s justification for its rejection.

But this rejection means that the Australian delegation can only attend the Nairobi meeting with observer status. In this capacity, will Campbell get a chance to talk up Australia’s "world leader" credentials? Will anybody take him seriously, or will somebody from the German delegation just stick a Post-It with "kick me" on his back at the cocktail party?

Nobody who ratified the Kyoto protocol would doubt that the agreement must expand to include all significant emitters. But if the nations that made their economic fortunes burning fossil fuels can’t show leadership by example on this issue, it seems naïve to expect the emerging economies to come to the table– the PM's "all in or we’re out" stance is surely a political and diplomatic pipedream. Yet this remains the fundamental philosophical sticking point between those who favour building on Kyoto versus those all for scrapping it.

In the meantime– Australia a world leader in the fight against climate change? To work your hardest to rip the teeth out of an agreement, repudiate it because it lacks bite, then claim this mantle is more than a little bit cheeky. Suffice to say it would be more than enough to make Greg Evans blush.

Crikey's Christian Kerr hates greens every bit as much as Johnny does, so its no surprise to see him parroting the party line. He does however point to yet another piece of economic wisdom from the great sage, Ross Gittens at the Sydney Morning Herald.

Is John Howard fair dinkum in his belated discovery of the importance of climate change? A key test will be whether, in the new policies he adopts, he seeks to harness or frustrate market mechanisms.

The strange thing is that the man who claims to be such a terrific economic manager and who, in an earlier life, claimed to be the father of economic rationalism, has so far steadfastly avoided a rationalist approach to global warming.

Why? Because of all the damage it could do to the economy. Huh?

Scratch Mr Howard on the subject of climate change and you expose an old fashioned Liberal Party "private enterprise" man who believes good economic management means swinging government favours to your industry mates - the mining industry in this case.

His strategy has been to stick mainly to window-dressing, avoid any impositions on the coal industry and, when pressed, make the taxpayer finance any progress.

As part of the Howard Government's decade-long blocking action, the formerly respected Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics has been turned into an industry propagandist, churning out studies focusing on the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions while steadfastly ignoring the benefits of reducing them (which are, of course, the costs of doing nothing).

One way Mr Howard seeks to let the coal industry off the hook is by holding out the prospect of "carbon sequestration" - some future technology that would allow carbon emissions from the use of coal to be captured and stored underground.

Is such a solution feasible? Don't know. If it was feasible would it be cost-effective? Don't know. How long before we do know? Don't know.

So what are we doing about it? Holding it out as a magic answer coming down the pike. If pressed, we could make the taxpayer subsidise some research.

The point is not that carbon sequestration is a crazy idea that could never work. It may prove an excellent idea. But we're avoiding doing the obvious thing to increase the likelihood of the industry coming up with cost-effective solutions.

Mr Howard has adopted the strange position of claiming we'll meet our emission target under the Kyoto agreement while refusing point blank to ratify the agreement.

Why? Presumably, because signing up would take us nearer to having to participate in an international regime of trading emission permits. Mr Howard wants to avoid tradeable permit schemes at all costs. Why? Because they'd impose costs on our precious coal industry and that might cost jobs.

It seems pretty clear Mr Howard is moving towards endorsing nuclear energy as an obvious way of reducing carbon emissions. But don't we already know that nuclear power would be vastly more expensive than coal-fired power?

Sure. So what's the answer? The taxpayer would stump up much of the capital cost of the nuclear power stations, of course.

The subject matter of all this may be new, but the mentality - the protectionism, the favouritism, the half-baked government intervention - is depressingly familiar.

It's so antediluvian. It's as though Mr Howard has learnt nothing from the whole rationalist project, as though he knows no more economics than the Fraser government did.

The rational solution to the problem of global warming is hardly rocket science. We need as far as possible to harness market forces in solving the problem so as minimise the misallocation of resources and loss of economic welfare.

We need to avoid ad hoc interventions and resist the temptation to have politicians and bureaucrats deciding which industries, energy sources and technologies offer the best bet. That is, we should avoid picking winners and rather establish a level playing-field between the contenders.

How do we do that? It's obvious. We make the polluter pay. We use a carbon tax - or its first cousin, a tradeable emission permit scheme - to ensure the market prices of the various types of energy reflect the (varying) social costs they impose on the community by way of their greenhouse gas emissions.

This means the costs of global warming are borne directly and proportionately by the offending industries and their customers. It encourages energy users to be less wasteful.

It maximises the incentive for those industries to seek out the cheapest means of minimising their emissions, including by the discovery and development of new technological solutions.

It gives renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power a natural cost advantage against fossil fuels such as coal, it favours cleaner black coal against dirtier brown coal, and it removes nuclear power's unnatural cost disadvantage against coal-fired power.

It may well be that such a regime leads to contraction and job losses in the coal industry. But since when have economic reformers been held back by the possibility of job losses?

Whenever we cut protection or deregulate industries we know some people will be "displaced". The only issue is how much assistance we give those people to help them find new employment in the new industries that will no doubt be created.

But while Mr Howard seems to have forgotten all he's supposed to know about the principles of economic reform, Labor isn't much better. It's running the populist line that no jobs need be lost in the coal industry.

Here, too, we see echoes of the old battles over protection: the Libs react to pressure from the industry; Labor reacts to pressure from the industry's union.

This may help explain why the party making the most sensible noises about how we should tackle global warming is actually the Greens. They at least seem to understand environmental economics.

One last piece from Crikey takes a look at the prospect of the Democrats in the US trying to ratify the Kyoto treaty.

Does the Democrats control of the US Congress mean there is fresh hope for the Kyoto Protocol? New Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a supporter of Kyoto, and while a policy change on Iraq will take months if not years to implement, Kyoto is the ideal message to send to the electorate. It's also the type of contentious policy that is best dispatched as far away from 2008 as possible.

However, there are two reasons why the Democrats may not act on climate change. Some fairly centrist pseudo-Republican "Blue Dog" Democrats have helped swing the balance. Among them, the two men slated to take over key environmental committees, John Dingell and Nick Rahal have links to the auto and coal industries.

Secondly, Democrats, in their desire to avoid over-reaching, may wish to reassure business leaders and constituents of their economic credentials, and climate change is never going to be revenue neutral.

Someone who is actually doing something about trying to clean up coal fired power, rather than just talking about it to protect coal mining companies, is Bill McDonough disciple Tom Kiser, who is working on carbon capture solutions. TreeHugger reports in "Liquid Chimney Could Reduce Global Warming".

Turn global warming gases into coral beds? Could this be real? Tom Kiser, who made his reputation working together with William McDonough on the greening of the Ford River Rouge plant, claims to have a smokestack which will capture the gases which cause greenhouse effects and turn them into harmless material, which could even be deposited in the ocean to restore coral reefs.

The full report at CNN Money is worth reading, as much for the interesting profile of a man driven to solve the technological problems of waste as for information about the system Kiser dubs a "liquid chimney". But the issue which concerns us is: could this work?

On another positive note, WorldChanging has a post by Joel Makower summarising the efforts to increase energy efficiency within data centres - one of the big power hogs - "Serving up energy efficiency, market style".

A rather cool thing has been happening lately in the hot world of computer server farms: product manufacturers are serving up dramatic improvements in energy efficiency -- with scarcely an activist, regulator, or other pressure group to claim credit for it.

Except for customers, that is.

The problem, for the uninitiated, is that server farms -- those massive banks of computers that manage traffic for Web sites, email hosts, and company networks, among others -- are ravenous energy consumers. There are at least nine million servers in the U.S., operating 24/7, providing the bandwidth that allows businesses, individuals, and governments to store and serve up every type of data and media imaginable, from iTunes to IRS forms.

Servers are growing at an astonishing rate -- not just in numbers, but in speed, demanding ever-greater amounts of power. According to the research firm Gartner, there has been a significant increase in the deployment of high-density servers over the past twelve months, leading to huge power and cooling challenges for data centers. The energy needed for a rack of these high-density servers can be between 10 and 15 times higher than for a traditional server environment.

Here's just one amazing factoid: According to a study last year by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab:

"A single high-powered rack of servers consumes enough energy in a single year to power a hybrid car across the United States 337 times."

That's not all. Additional power is needed to remove the huge quantity of heat generated by these newer machines. If the machines aren't cooled sufficiently, they can shut down, with potentially devastating consequences to affected businesses, agencies, or other organizations. All told, server farms consume many times more energy than office facilities of equivalent size.

For those who operate server farms, this has become a nontrivial issue. While energy costs represent less than 10% of a typical company's information technology (IT) budget, that could rise to more than 50% in the next few years, says Gartner. For companies like Google, whose massive computing infrastructure, by one estimate, gives it "the largest utility bill in the planet," the push to make servers run cooler and more efficiently has taken on added urgency. According to Google engineer Luiz André Barroso, writing in the September issue of the Association for Computing Machinery's Queue:

The possibility of computer equipment power consumption spiraling out of control could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet.

Canada's "Globe and Mail" has a look at the rapid growth in renewable power generation in the great white (for the time being) north.

Here's another stereotype about oil-rich Alberta you can toss out. Renowned for its governmental resistance to the Kyoto Protocol, Wild Rose Country actually leads the nation in wind-power generation. And next spring, the community of Okotoks, south of Calgary, will be home to North America's first solar neighbourhood.

The Canadian solar- and wind-power industries have grown remarkably in the past few years, thanks to increased energy demands from a growing population and booming economy, as well as rising fossil-fuel costs and fears about climate change. Even slow-acting provincial and municipal governments are seeking out these green technologies.

In fact, wind-generated energy is the fastest growing renewable power source, according to Industry Canada. In 2005, the wind-energy industry added 240 megawatts of capacity. By the end of this year, it expects to add an additional 700, and the national total will be 1,218 megawatts, primarily in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, PEI and Nova Scotia.

While wind serves only 370,000 Canadian homes now, energy consumers can expect more to come. The previous Liberal federal government provided incentives to the industry that caused rapid growth in the past four years but, since last April, the Conservatives have made no funds available for additional wind energy projects.

However, many provincial governments have established targets for wind energy, says Robert Hornung, president of the Canadian Wind Energy Association, which represents more than 250 wind-energy companies.

"If you add those targets up, they represent about 10,000 megawatts by 2015. One megawatt represents about 300 homes, so this would meet the energy needs of three million homes," Mr. Hornung says.

Since 1997, Alberta has set up more than a dozen wind farms in its windy southwest. Calgary-based Vision Quest Windelectric Inc., an industry pioneer that operates three wind farms near Pincher Creek, is the largest such company in Canada.

"Why in Alberta, the redneck oil patch?" says Jason Edworthy, one of three company founders. "Albertans are environmentally aware because they work in industries that have environmental sensitivities. That, combined with the entrepreneurial bent of the people here, is why we got involved."

Meanwhile, solar power, once seen as the purview of tree-huggers, is coming on strong among mainstream adapters.

The BBC reports there is still hope for the world's forests.

A new technique for measuring the state of the world's forests shows the future may not be as bad as previously feared.

An international team of researchers say its Forest Identity study suggests the world could be approaching a "turning point" from deforestation. The study measures timber volumes, biomass and captured carbon - not just land areas covered by trees.

The findings are being published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor Kauppi, from the University of Helsinki, said data from the Forest Identity methodology offered a more sophisticated view than previous studies. "Previously, the focus was almost exclusively on the size of a forest area," he told BBC News. "Now, we have included other components, including biomass and the amount of carbon stored."

He said this approach offered a better understanding of the natural resource: "When we look at changes in both area covered and biomass, we can get a more complete picture of the ecosystems."

When the technique was applied to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) Global Forest Assessment report, the researchers found that forest stocks had actually expanded over the past 15 years in 22 of the world's 50 most forested nations.

They also showed increases in biomass and carbon storage capacity in about half of the 50 countries.

But the data also revealed that forest area and biomass was still in decline in Brazil and Indonesia, home to some of the world's most important rainforests.

Forest Facts:

* Forests cover 30% of the world's total land area
* Deforestation rate: 13m hectares per year
* Iceland has three native tree species, Brazil has 7,780
* The world's trees store 283 gigatonnes of carbon, 50% more than there is in the atmosphere

The BBC also has a report on rainwater harvesting in Africa.

Rainwater harvesting could prove a cheap, easy solution to Africa's water woes, according to a UN report.

Scientists found enough rain falls in some countries to supply six or seven times the current need, and provide security against future droughts. A pilot project in a Kenyan Maasai community has improved supplies and done away with the daily trek to collect river water.

Currently, 14 out of 53 nations are classified as "water stressed". This number is forecast to double by 2025.

The UN Environment Programme (Unep) says that a cultural change is needed across the continent. "The biggest problem is awareness," said Elizabeth Khaka of Unep. "Many people think of rainwater harvesting as a 'poor person's technology'," she told the BBC News website, "and we have to change that."

Last week, the Kenyan government announced plans to make all new buildings include capacity for rainwater collection and storage.

The Wall Street Journal has a report on the future trajectory of renewable energy (assuming you count ethanol in this category) in the US. It also contains the usual global warming denial nonsense you'd expect from the most anti-science periodical in the world.

A new Rand Corp. study showing the falling costs of ethanol, wind power and other forms of renewable energy predicts such sources could furnish as much as 25% of the U.S.'s conventional energy by 2025 at little or no additional expense.

A second renewable-energy report soon to be released by the National Academy of Sciences suggests wood chips may become a plentiful source of ethanol and electricity for industrial nations because their forested areas are expanding, led by the U.S. and China.

Khebab has another one of his usual excellent articles up at The Oil Drum, suggesting we're on a production plateau for oil now. Whenever I look at a graph like this, with individual country production broken out, I always wonder what it would look like if Iraqi oil production was at a more normal level.

We know that some countries (around 56) have seen their production peaked (also called type III depletion). The remaining group consists of 17 countries that have the potential to grow or maintain their current production (the type II group). I propose to apply the HL technique only on the total production from the the type III group and try to assess the future production decline coming from that group. My observations are the following:

* The type III group (~56 countries) seems to have peaked around 1999 at 40 mbpd with an URR around 1.0Tb and a cumulative production of 600 Gb in 2005.
* The decline rate in the group III is currently around 1% per year but will accelerate with time and possibility reach 2% after 2010
* When a high case scenario for the production derived from the Canadian Tar Sands is included, the decline rate will be reduced around 0.5% per year until 2010.
* In order to satisfy a relatively moderate demand growth at 1.5%/year, the supply coming from the type II group should be around 3.5-4.0%/year and reach a production level of 56-59 mbpd in 2010 (from 40 mbpd in 2005).
* The total production from Russia and Saudi Arabia that are leading the type II group, is almost flat since mid-2004 despite record oil prices.

Energy Bulletin notes that Matt Simmons' "Twilight in the desert" has been translated into Chinese.

Xiaojie Xu, peakoil.com

A Chinese translation team under my supervision has finalised its translation of respected investment banker Mr. Matt Simmons' book Twilight in the Desert from English into China. The Twilight Chinese version, coming out in the December 2006, could [be] a starting point to warn Chinese once again and then kick off Chinese review of this wake-up call seriously. As chief translator, I will hold Twilight Chinese version release ceremony in January 2007 in Beijing.

Dave Sifry from Technorati has published one of his periodic "state of the blogosphere" reports. There are a few blogs in the top 50 sites by traffic now (Engadget leading the way with Boing Boing following away behind). Looking at the seasonal trends and the events that cause posting spike is interesting.







For some reason Google Alerts thought this old interview with Bruce Sterling at Reason was something I needed to be aware of today. In view of the graphs above I guess it could be relevant.

reason: It never ceases to amaze me how much material is sort of spontaneously thrown up on the Web.

Sterling: I think that's an early response. You get this database toxicity. You go into a system like Lexis-Nexis and you put in a search word and get 60,000 hits, and you think, this is all the knowledge there is in the universe. But it's actually 10,000 references to six different things, and the actual story is something very few people know.

reason: I think there are some positive social changes happening as a result of this spontaneous database building and Web page building. There are more and more of us who reflexively look things up.

Sterling: There is a Google blindness. It's a kind of common wisdom generator, but it's not necessarily going to get you to the real story of what's actually going on.

reason: As today's children get older they're internalizing Boolean search logic, and they actually do show some discrimination and drill down to the useful information.

Sterling: It is a form of literacy that's really peculiar. Socrates used to talk about this: "The problem with writing is that no one memorizes the Iliad any more. You've got to just know all of it. And how can you call yourself an educated man if you cannot recite Book Three, not missing a single epithet?" He's got a point there.
It has a profound effect on literary composition. I've got Google up all the time. It gives you this veneer of command of the facts which you do not, in point of fact, have. It's extremely useful for novelists but somewhat dangerous if you're pretending to be a brain surgeon.

reason: Let's talk about the Viridian movement. You're obviously trying to take some dimension of environmentalism and take it in a new and different direction that isn't particularly anti-modern or anti-technological. And you've tried to frame your "Greens" as an art movement rather than as a political movement.

Sterling: I've always been extremely interested in art movements and political movements and social movements, the small gangs of intelligentsia and who reads whom. Professional musicians are into that too. I just got this new Starbucks album that the Rolling Stones put together. Keith Richards, of all people, talks about how he always wanted to know who the musicians he likes listen to. That's the sign of a true adept there. You want to trace back your spiritual ancestors.

That's what André Breton did, and that's what the pre-Raphaelites did. And they self-published to get the news out. The pre-Raphaelites had this fanzine called The Germ, and it went through four issues. And it always goes through four issues. That's the classic fanzine thing. The surrealists had this fanzine called The Minotaur, and it went through four issues. The cyberpunks had two fanzines -- Cheap Truth and SF Eye. Cheap Truth went through 17 issues. But the issues were only one page long.

They're blogs now. And there are various other social software mechanisms. I'm doing a Viridian blog [www.viridiandesign.org] which is an electro version of a design magazine. I use it as a kind of social probe. It's an experiment for me, a way to give and get back at the same time. It's an organizational experiment. It's a private intelligence network.

reason: And the substance, the topic area, is what?

Sterling: The central topic is the greenhouse effect as a post-industrial design problem. It's not just about raising money for flood victims, which is one way to deal with the consequences. It's about thinking about how we got into this mess, making people realize the mess, and exploring mechanisms -- technologies -- by which we might conceivably get out.

reason: The traditional green approach, as distinct from the Viridian Green approach, is typically framed in negative terms: a "Thou shalt not" or "We must stop X."

Sterling: Traditional environmentalism is tied in with a human self-actualization movement, which says there are certain things we must renounce for moral reasons.
reason: You were not engaged by that?

Sterling: I'm extremely interested in that, actually, but it doesn't really get me anything. One of the things I introduced deliberately in the Viridian movement is Viridian hate objects. There are people who are our bête noirs, on whom we focus scorn and loathing, and of course they are the people who are most Viridian-like but on the other side. Like the Greening Earth Society, which is like six guys getting paid by coal companies. They sit in a hangar out by the Beltway making up lies. So they've got a better budget than us.

Sure, we hate Exxon because they're huge and they're everywhere. They are the worst of the oil majors, and plus they are involved in a lot of black propaganda activities. But the real people you want to hate from a Viridian perspective are the Greening Earth Society, because they are so much like us.

I singled out the Greening Earth Society as a psychological experiment in the manufacture of a social movement because I've noticed that other social movements hate heretics far more than they hate pagans. Pagans who have never heard the gospel -- you should clothe them. You should send out missionaries. They just don't know. It's the people who do know, who have the opposite idea, whom you hate.

reason: Nowadays the political lines seem increasingly blurry, but there were periods in the 20th century when it seemed you could draw some lines.

Sterling: Right now, the Republicans are the party of reckless spending, and the Democrats are the party of responsibility and the balanced budget.

reason: Not many of us saw that coming.

Now I'm something of an acolyte of Bruce (as much as I can be an acolyte of anyone, which isn't saying much) having read his stuff for more than 2 decades and I've got to say the "Viridian hate object" idea is one I bought into a while ago without even realising it was official movement policy.

The anti-environment movement also has hate objects, one of the most prominent being Maurice "Chairman Mo" Strong, who I've talked about a number of times before, and no doubt will again, given his location at the intersection of almost every variety of conspiracy theory going.

World Nut Daily is one of those fringe right wing periodicals that regards Mo as the embodiment of evil, and has a great piece of frothing anti-green propaganda linking Strong, Pastor Ted "gay hookers and meth" Haggard and the "earth religion".

The Republican Party lost the mid-term elections primarily due to the war in Iraq; however, there were other contributing factors. According to the Pew Research Centre, 78 percent of evangelicals in the United States voted Republican in 2004. This week polls indicate that just 50 percent of evangelicals voted for the Republicans, and evangelical turnout was dramatically lower. The Democrats, with pro same-sex marriage, pro-abortion leader Nancy Pelosi, now control the legislative agenda of the U.S. government. How did this happen?

The Rev. Ted Haggard, the defrocked president of the National Association of Evangelicals led a two-year campaign to subject the evangelical church to the laws of global warming. The introduction of the earth movement has confused the church with neo-pagan teachings. In Romans Chapter 1, God warns us not to place creation over the Creator.

The global warming movement began at the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit where its director, Maurice Strong, started with the statement "We must therefore transform our attitudes and values, and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of divine nature." Strong subsequently passed several worldwide laws in 1997 known as the Kyoto Accord. In 1994, the U.N. commissioned Strong to write the Earth Covenant that was introduced in 2000 as the Earth Charter. The new edict was written on papyrus paper, placed in a replica of the Ark of the Covenant, ceremoniously ushered into the U.N. and called "the new 10 commandments," a "Global Ethic" that will transcend all religions and countries.

Nearly two years ago, Rev. Haggard began his earth campaign as he threatened the Republican U.S. Senate, stating that he would turn the evangelicals against them if they refused to ratify global warming laws. On March 10, 2005, the New York Times described his efforts with the headline "Evangelical Leaders Swing Influence Behind Effort to Combat Global Warming." Haggard said in the article: "The question is, will evangelicals make a difference? And the answer is, the Senate thinks so. We do represent 30 million people, and we can mobilize them if we have to." Haggard's vice president, Richard Cizik, followed by saying, "When evangelicals speak, Republicans tend to listen, and frankly it's Republicans who need to get the message."

The Republican Senate did not take heed to the threat – therefore, Haggard carried out his plan. By February 2006, Evangelicals Against Climate Change was launched with a joint declaration signed by 86 prominent leaders. They went ahead with the program despite protests from a Who's Who of politically powerful evangelicals, including Chuck Colson, James Dobson and the Rev. D. James Kennedy. The CNN headline read "Strange Bedfellows," as evangelicals had joined forces with environmentalists who are well-known for being ungodly and sexually immoral. James 4:4 says, "Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God." They spent an initial $200,000 on the crusade. "We will see tens of millions of evangelicals engaged in the work we are talking about today," said the Rev. Dr. Leith Anderson, now the interim president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Haggard's "environmental evangelism" as he calls it, continued. In October, the NAE promoted their program "Is God Green?" The organization then stepped up its efforts and launched a new vision for the church on Oct. 18 called Re:Vision, a new action plan to promote environmental activism.

On the surface, this all seems like harmless activity to ensure clean air and clean water. God does command us to be good stewards of the earth but not subservient to it. Everyone wants to reduce pollution and save cute cuddly animals. Unfortunately, this is not the focus. Instead, the global warming movement seeks to trump all other issues, including spiritual concerns, with threats of catastrophic destruction if we don't follow its precepts plus reduce CO2 production, the very gas every plant on earth needs to survive.

After this it pretty much takes off into fantasy land - however, one interesting conspiracy theory tangentially alluded to in this, which I'm not endorsing but which does make some sense if you put your tinfoil lenses on, is the note that Haggard was prominent in the move by parts of the evangelical movement to adopt the global warming issue at the start of the year (ref - New York Times) and thus could be a pawn in the great liberal conspiracy, with the job of wedging away a chunk of evangelical support from the Republicans in an election year. And I think you could say his global warming work at the start of the year was a small step, but his outing just before the election was a much bigger one in terms of the ongoing disillusionment of the conservative base. Kind of reminiscent of those theories about what really went on at Watergate back in the day (if not more recently)...

Canada Free Press is another publication that views Strong as some sort of marxist occultist bent on creating one world government (the traditionalist variant of New World Order conspiracy theory).

Courtesy of Clinton’s President’s Council on Sustainable Development, Agenda 21 policy recommendations filtered into every federal agency in America. Many of those agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), had their own representative in attendance at the Rio Earth Summit and were already acting upon Agenda 21, but this new source of support from the White House gave extra clout to their activities.

Anti-American, Canadian environmental guru Maurice Strong was the godfather of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Strong--who more than a decade later was to be driven off the radar screen when his alleged ties to the UN Oil-for-Food scandal became public--was the one-man force who pulled the wool over the world’s eyes with Agenda 21. At Rio, dubbed “the mother of all summits” while his occultist wife, Hanne was “tapping into Mother Earth’s energy”, hubby looked after the serious business of setting policy on sustainable development for the entire world. Hanne staged a three-week vigil with ‘Wisdomkeepers’, a group of “global transformationalists”. “Through round-the-clock sacred fire, drumbeat and meditation, the group helped hold the “energy pattern” for the duration of the summit.”

And if that sounds like the kind of bunk more befitting to fast-buck hucksters, very few among world leaders and the tens of thousands attending the summit blinked an eye.

We don’t know whether Madam Pelosi danced Hanne’s occultist dance, but she was unquestionably first off the mark in shepherding Agenda 21 through American Congress.

As Michael Park reminds us in his story Pelosi and others promote Agenda 21, “Apart from the PCSD, a multitude of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), (organized by Maurice Strong) were working in communities across America to translate the overarching principles and recommendations of Agenda 21 into local policy. One of the most prominent NGOs was the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI). ICLEI, launched in 1990 at the World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Future, is based in Toronto, Canada, but has offices around the globe, including Berkeley, California. Its stated mission is to provide policy recommendations to assist local governments in the implementation of Sustainable Development. ICLEI was instrumental in the development of Agenda 21, having drafted Chapter 28 in 1991 in preparation for an upcoming summit. Their boilerplate sustainable development policies are being implemented in every county in the United States. Ditto for municipalities in Canada.

Strong, hardly a household word in the land of his birth let alone in America, was working to advance the UN world crawl.

While the UN continues to spin its image as a warm fuzzy blanket, it has long adhered to the Marxist dialect. Operating in a system that leans heavily on information overload, tons of media communiqués inundate Mother Earth’s plebes, on an all but daily basis.

Official gibberish is often used to further confuse and obfuscate. How much attention is the average lay person going to pay to something with a name called, International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives?

Back in watershed year 1992 and with a little help from insider Pelosi, the UN was well on its way to co-opting the mighty United States of America into its capacious fold. As so many had predicted, America was swallowed whole without a single shot ever fired.

In other words, government by stealth already placed the United States on the path to the one designed by one-world-government advocate Maurice Strong.

Moving away from conservative tinfoil, I'll close with a link to some great photos of a "sea of stones" and the birth of an island.