Confessions Of A Gored Rodent  

Al Gore is back in town at the moment to do some training for global warming activists. Al doesn't think much of the Rodent's attempts to evade the Kyoto treaty and sensible measures like carbon trading or carbon taxes (neither do the Chinese it seems).

JOHN HOWARD'S promotion of a new global climate-change pact that would protect Australia's economic interests is unrealistic and likely to fail, the former US vice-president Al Gore says.

In Australia this month to train "climate change presenters", Mr Gore yesterday urged the Prime Minister to join negotiations taking place in Nairobi on a tougher second phase of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

"If [Australia's proposal] is not part of the rest of the world community then it has no meaningful force," Mr Gore said.

"If the proposition is that Australia will design a completely different [greenhouse gas emissions] trading system and then wait until the rest of the world abandons the main one and adopts the Australian one, that's probably not realistic … Joining the process now in Nairobi and seeking some modifications to Kyoto - that is entirely proper."

Mr Howard said on Monday he would form a taskforce to consider a global carbon trading scheme to help tackle climate change. His own Greenhouse Office has researched and made recommendations on emissions trading in papers dating as far back as 1999, but they have been ignored by the Government.

Yesterday the Prime Minister met with business leaders - including Don Argus from BHP, Oscar Groeneveld from Rio Tinto Aluminium and Colin Beckett from Chevron Oil - to discuss emissions trading. It appears scientists, energy experts and environmentalists will not be consulted although they have been long-term supporters of such a global scheme.

However, Mr Howard has warned he would not support any scheme that would damage Australia's fossil fuel sector or energy-intensive industries such as aluminium, steel and cement. Nor would he take part in any global agreement that did not set tough emission reduction targets for developing nations such as China and India.

Mr Gore agreed it was vital that future heavy polluters such as China and India dramatically cut their emissions, "but since the end of World War II every global treaty has had the same basis: the wealthy countries … go first and then those nations … if their per capita incomes are so much lower [than those of the developed world], they come along in the second phase".

On Tuesday the French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, threatened to tax imports from countries that had not committed themselves to the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol. "Europe has to use all its weight to stand up to this sort of environmental dumping," he said.

One place the Rodent would not be advised to flee to in the hope of escaping global warming activists is Siberia, which is now plagued by angry and confused bears suffering from insomia.

Insomniac bears are roaming the forests of southwestern Siberia scaring local people as the weather stays too warm for the animals to fall into their usual winter slumber.

The bears escape harsh winters by going to sleep in October-November for around six months, but in the snowless Kemerovo region where the weather is unseasonably warm, bears have no desire yet to hibernate.

"Due to weather conditions, bears didn't go into the winter sleep in time," said Tatiana Maslova, chief expert at a regional environmental agency in the city of Kemerovo, about 3,500km south-east of Moscow.

The weather here is rather weird at the moment - in NSW we managed to have snowfalls and bushfires going at the same time today - it even snowed up in "beautiful one day, perfect the next" Queensland. Shame we didn't get more of the white stuff during skiing season.

"It is a bit weird," one meteorologist quipped yesterday about the likelihood that the same Antarctic wind blast bringing snow in Victoria and Tasmania was fuelling fires west of Sydney.

Much of the east coast was shaking off the effects of a cold snap that saw temperatures plunge across Victoria and heavy snowfalls just a fortnight before the start of summer. Melbournians shivered through the coldest November day in more than a decade - a chilly 8C - while some areas of the state recorded the first November snowfalls in 23 years.

And further north, storms lashed southeast Queensland, cutting power to more than 30,000 homes, as hailstones and gales brought down trees and powerlines, damaging houses and cars. The 70km/h storm struck Brisbane yesterday afternoon, dumping marble-sized hailstones and heavy rain, blacking out traffic lights and forcing roads to close. The severe thunderstorm - the third for the southeast corner in this year's storm season - developed just after midday southwest of Esk and began moving east to Ipswich and towards Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

The biggest local insurer, IAG, has been concerned about the effect of global warming for some time and says we're going to have to get used to rising insurance premiums - just one more entirely predictable outcome of putting the interests of the coal mining industry ahead of everyone else's.

BUSHFIRES, snow, hail, thunderstorms and chilling wind. Spring this year has got the lot. And the country's biggest insurer has made a grim prediction about climate change.

There will be more frequent and ferocious storms, fiercer bushfires, larger hailstones, more damage to property - and home owners left with bigger insurance bills.

Storm surges, longer droughts and huge rainfall when the dry weather broke would also be a feature of the changing environment as the impact of global warming grew, said IAG, which owns NRMA Insurance and CGU. While this trend had been slowly increasing over the last 20 years, IAG's chief executive, Michael Hawker, pointed to a number of recent catastrophic events to have hit Australia and New Zealand as indicators of the greater scale and severity of the damage now being caused.

The list was headed by Cyclone Larry this year in Far North Queensland, the impact of which is still being felt and which cost IAG $165 million in claims.

It also includes recent storms in New Zealand that resulted in the second highest insurance payouts in the group's history and the devastating bushfires in Canberra in 2003 which led to the destruction of more than 500 homes and the loss of four lives. Mr Hawker, whose group insures 2 million homes, 5 million cars and 250,000 businesses around Australia, told the company's annual meeting in Sydney yesterday that home owners would increasingly feel the impact in higher insurance bills as the costs of global warming grew.

Grist reports that energy efficiency standards for appliances are being raised in the US. This sort of thing should be mandatory for both electircal items and vehicles every year - mandated efficiency improvements - companies that make cleaner, better products propser, the dirty ones die out...

U.S. DOE will phase in energy-efficiency standards for household appliances

After years of thumb-twiddling, the U.S. Department of Energy will phase in more stringent energy-efficiency requirements for 22 household appliances and other pieces of equipment over the next five years. Congress requires ramped-up efficiency standards according to periodic deadlines; this update is only a dozen or so years late, so you'd think critics would cut the DOE some slack. But steely-eyed green groups, joined by 15 states and New York City, sued over the delay last year, and now a settlement is forcing the department to get off its arse. Gizmos with better energy efficiency -- including dishwashers, fluorescent lamps, ovens, and the like -- could stave off the construction of dozens of new power plants and save enough juice to meet the needs of 12 million homes once fully in place. Under the settlement, the department must set standards at the maximum technologically feasible and cost-effective level possible. What a bright idea.

Renewable Energy Access has an article comparing the "Environmental Footprints of Renewable Energy vs. Nuclear Power".

According to wind energy expert Tom Gray (and Director of Communications and Outreach at the American Wind Energy Assocation), "My rule of thumb is 60 acres per megawatt (MW) for wind farms on land."

According to the Energy Information Administration, The Fort Calhoun 476 MW nuclear power plant, operational since August 9, 1973, is located on 660 acres near Omaha, Nebraska and has an easement for another 580 acres, the acreage being maintained in a natural state (see Fort Calhoun link below). So on the face of it, on the same 1200+ acres, nuclear gets 480 MW versus 20 MW for wind, or 40 times more. But the capacity factor for the nuclear plant hovers above 80% and wind is approximately 30%, so clearly the '100 times more' claim seems to be 'on the mark' if you chose to forget the nuclear fuel cycle.

We now have active farming onsite at large windfarms, and there is no reason to believe we could not also harvest crops between the large wind generators for biomass electric power, which could increase electrical output of the same acreage substantially.

But a nuclear power generation plant is not an independent entity like wind. A number of processes are needed to keep the generation plant operational, most of which take place elsewhere or at other times than the actual production of electricity. The total package is referred to as the 'process chain,' which consists of the following steps:

* mining, refining and transport of the raw materials and uranium fuels;
* construction and maintenance of the power station;
* conversion of fuel or uranium into electricity;
* dismantlement of the power station at the end of its life span;
* processing of the resulting waste during the life of the generation plant.

Mining uranium takes lots of land. Uranium is widely distributed in the earth's crust but only in minute quantities, with the exception of a few places where it has accumulated in concentrations rich enough to be economically mined as an ore. The main deposits of ore, in order of size, are in Australia, Kazakhstan, Canada, South Africa, Namibia, Brazil, the Russian Federation, the USA, and Uzbekistan.

Storing nuclear wastes also takes lots of land. According to EPA, in 2000, the USA had approximately 600,000 cubic meters of different types of radioactive waste were generated, and approximately 700,000 cubic meters were in storage awaiting disposal. Radioactive wastes in the form of spent nuclear fuel (2,467 metric tons of heavy metal) and high-level waste "glass logs" (1,201 canisters of vitrified high-level waste) are in storage awaiting long-term disposal....

Also at REA - "Solar: California's Rising Star", Integrating Wind Energy into the European Power Network, SCHOTT to Build New Solar Receiver Manufacturing Facility in Spain, US Geothermal Power Expanding Dramatically and Algae as a Biofuel.

The Oil Drum has a summary of all the arguments against CERA's latest denial that peak oil exists in the next couple of decades.

There has been a considerable stir in the TOD house, since CERA have just come out with a report restating their position that there is no Peak Oil Problem. For a mere $1,000 you may discover (perhaps) what is new since the last time they said this. Now we have commented about problems with the CERA position on a number of occasions (try one, two, three , four and five for a start). But since it is better to do a little checking first, it may take a little time to go through and see exactly what is different this time around, if anything.

In the meantime, the election is over, and a small, cynical, part of my mind wonders how long it will be before we start adding more oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Last year's Energy Policy Act authorized increasing the size of the reserve to 1 billion barrels. The current reserve is made up of 273.5 million bbls of sweet and 415 million bbls of sour, for a total of 688.5 million, as of November 3rd. However, over the past few months there has been very little activity. The reserve had been filled to its initial target of 700 million barrels by August 2005, but then, following Katrina there was a period where it proved its intended value...

The G20 meets in Melbourne this weekend and energy security and global warming are top of the agenda.

A KEY subplot in Syriana, the recent film about the Byzantine world of oil politics, involved the increasingly intense competition between Chinese and Western oil companies in the Middle East. Today there is a risk that energy insecurity will fuel new geopolitical rivalries. But a forum of the world's leading finance ministers - the G-20 - meeting in Melbourne this weekend could make a significant contribution to ensuring this does not happen.

Energy insecurity has returned to the global policy agenda, thanks to a combination of strong oil demand and tight supply. Asia has joined the United States as a key driver of global oil demand. Last year China and Japan were the world's second and third largest consumers of oil, respectively, and India the sixth. Moreover, Asia will become even more reliant on imported oil, and the distribution of proven global reserves means a growing dependence on the Middle East in the medium term.

Concern about the future supply and price of energy is also contributing to an economically irrational impulse. Rather than relying solely on the market, energy-dependent Asian economies are seeking to secure supplies by gaining equity in foreign oil and gas fields.

China has reportedly invested about $US12.5 billion ($16.35 billion) in foreign upstream projects in the past five years. Japanese companies have a stake in about 15 per cent of the crude oil imported to Japan. Under a new national energy strategy, this is targeted to increase to 40 per cent by 2030.

The result is intense competition for energy stakes, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, with a danger that an aggressive energy-driven diplomacy will cut across the interests of other players and feed into tensions between states.

Peter Costello has worked out we need to reduce our dependence on oil - what does he plan to do about it ? Call for more investment in the shrinking band of oil exporting countries - yeah - I'm sure that will do the trick !

Mr Swan said it would also be a good opportunity to discuss the Stern Report, commissioned by the British Government, which he said joined the economics of climate change to the science of climate change.

The report, by former world bank economist Sir Nicholas Stern, warned that without action, global warming risked forcing the world into another depression on the scale of that of the 1930s. "(It) points out if we want to continue to have prosperous economies in the future we have to deal with climate change," Mr Swan said before giving a talk at the Make Poverty History conference in Melbourne.

However, a spokeswoman for Mr Costello on Thursday said the agenda had not been officially released, although a copy of the summit's work program was available on the G20's website on Thursday afternoon.

Earlier on Thursday, Mr Costello said the summit was likely to discuss the hot topic of greenhouse gas emissions.

The federal treasurer, who will chair the summit, said a key issue of the weekend's agenda would be the security of resources such as oil in the hope of avoiding the high prices of earlier this year. "I think we've got to reduce our (oil) reliance but that's going to take a long time and in the interim everybody drives cars and oil powers a lot of our industry," he told Macquarie Radio.

"What we've got to do is encourage the supply countries to lift supply, have more investment because when you get a big country like China sucking up oil production, then that means it affects the whole world price."

Meanwhile energy companies are busy lobbying to have access to foreign resources (funnily enough that's just what Costello was suggesting) - those silly thrid world governments don't know how to extract resources rapidly enough and should be firmly shunted aside by the big boys it seems. Some of the recently developed nations may not be so keen on this idea though.

The meeting on Saturday will include about 15 chief executives from the world's most important energy and resource companies. As well as Rio Tinto's Leigh Clifford and BHP Billiton's Chip Goodyear, the head of Brazilian mining giant CVRD, Roger Agnelli, is likely to attend.

South Africa takes over the chair of the G20 next year, and its resources giant, Anglo American, will almost certainly be represented, although possibly not by its newly appointed chief executive, Cynthia Carroll. The group will include the heads of some major state oil companies, possibly including Saudi Arabia's Saudi Aramco and Mexico's Pemex.

The resource companies will be seeking the support of the World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, who will attend the G20 meeting, for a program to improve conditions for global companies investing in resource projects in developing nations. They will argue that massive investments will be required over the next 25 years to feed the demands of the emerging nations, and will say companies need greater certainty to take on the risks of projects that might have lifespans of up to 40 years.

Governments pose the biggest risks to investment through poor policy, such as barriers to investment, weak property rights or poor governance.

Mr Costello is trying to steer a careful path on energy and resources at the meeting so that countries such as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia do not perceive the topic as a cover for a capitalist takeover of the resources industry.

The concerns the G20 has about future tensions over access to oil are somewhat amusing if you note that Iraq (our ongoing war over oil) doesn't seem to be high on the list of priorities. Nevertheless, the march of the death squads continues, with the toll contiuing to rise with ever more blatant atrocities (the morgues are now full, so who knows where all the bodies end up). I occasionally wonder, assuming the Salvador Option theory is correct, if this is still being done as counter-insurgency or if it now has a life of its own and needs no further encouragement. In the case of the second option, I tend to wonder if we've simply repeated the Al Qaeda experiment on a much larger scale (which may blowback with equivalently larger force)...

SIGNS of the abduction were everywhere. A splatter of blood smeared on the grey floor. A telephone yanked out of its socket, tangled in a mess of cords. The dirt outlines of boot prints on a door the kidnappers kicked. And, at the receptionist desk, a single pink rose abandoned in the chaos.

This was the scene on Tuesday at an Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education building in Baghdad, an hour after a small army of 80 gunmen, dressed in police uniforms, staged a swift, brazen daylight raid, seizing scores of employees and visitors.

Five senior police officers, including the police chief and four high-ranking deputies in the Karrada neighbourhood, where the abductions took place, had been arrested by Tuesday evening. Politicians branded the kidnappings "a national catastrophe" and a loss of credibility for Iraq.

It was one of the largest mass abductions since the US-led invasion in 2003 and came on a day when at least 117 people were killed around the country.

Estimates of the number of kidnap victims varied widely. A spokesman for the Higher Education Ministry reiterated his minister's estimate on Tuesday that at least 100 had been taken.

The Prime Minister's media office said about 40 people had been kidnapped but that "most of them have been released". The official did not give exact numbers or say how they were freed.

The drama started to unfold at 10.30am, when gunmen arrived in a convoy of about 30 blue-and-yellow police cars and utes, some mounted with machine-guns. None had licence plates and the gunmen wore neither hoods nor masks. They carried police-issued weapons such as Glock pistols, witnesses said.

Some fired their guns in the air, ordering pedestrians off the street yelling that the US ambassador and was coming and they were clearing the way, witnesses said.

Past Peak has an interesting post on Bechtel's reconstruction contracts in Iraq.

Halliburton's not the only company with friends in high places that is making a killing in Iraq. There's also construction giant Bechtel, who has picked up $2.3 billion for accomplishing next to nothing. Now they're leaving. IPS News:

The decision of the giant engineering company Bechtel to withdraw from Iraq has left many Iraqis feeling betrayed. In its departure they see the end of remaining hopes for the reconstruction of Iraq. [...]

Bechtel, whose board members have close ties to the Bush administration, announced last week that it was done with trying to operate in the war-torn country. The company has received 2.3 billion dollars of Iraqi reconstruction funds and U.S. taxpayer money, but is leaving without completing most of the tasks it set out to.

On every level of infrastructure measurable, the situation in Iraq is worse now than under the rule of Saddam Hussein. That includes the 12 years of economic sanctions since the first Gulf War in 1991, a period that former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq Dennis Halliday described as "genocidal" for Iraqis.

The average household in Iraq now gets two hours of electricity a day. There is 70 percent unemployment, 68 percent of Iraqis have no access to safe drinking water, and only 19 percent have sewage access. Not even oil production has matched pre-invasion levels.

The security situation is hellish, with a recent study published in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet estimating 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq as a result of the invasion and occupation.

The group Medact recently said that easily treatable conditions such as diarrhea and respiratory illness are causing 70 percent of all child deaths, and that "of the 180 health clinics the U.S. hoped to build by the end of 2005, only four have been completed — and none opened."

A proposed 200 million dollar project to build 142 primary care centres ran out of cash after building just 20 clinics, a performance that the World Health Organisation described as "shocking."

Iraqis are complaining louder now than under the sanctions. Lack of electricity has led to increasing demand for gasoline to run generators. And gasoline is among the most scarce commodities in this oil-rich country. [...]

"The [electricity] situation now is much worse and it seems not to be improving despite the huge contracts signed with American companies. It is strange how billions of dollars spent on electricity brought no improvement whatsoever, but in fact worsened the situation." [...]

"I see the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq," Maki al-Nazzal told IPS. "It started with Bechtel and Haliburton's propaganda, and might end with their escape from the field. They came with Bremer and introduced themselves as heroes and saviours who would bring prosperity to Iraq, but all they did was market U.S. propaganda."

U.S. President George W. Bush told reporters on a visit to Iraq last June: "You can measure progress in megawatts of electricity delivered. You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on the market on behalf of the Iraqi people."

$2.3 billion is one hell of a lot of money. Especially since it doesn't seem to have bought much of anything. But Bechtel, like Halliburton, won't suffer because of its failure to get the job done. When the next multi-billion dollar contracts come along, they'll be right back at the head of the line. The game's rigged, and they're playing with our money.

Crony capitalism is way too polite a term. It's pillage and plunder, rape and looting. They're pirates, gangsters, vampires with their fangs in the neck of the world.

This tale of corruption is reminiscent of some of the content in "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by John Perkins, which I finally got around to reading this week. The book left me somewhat bemused - I'm not sure what to make of Perkins himself, and the story frequently reads like fiction, even though the basic premises - that loans to third world countries from the World Bank and IMF are a form of debt trap used to subordinate countries to US interests, and that most of the money loaned finds its way straight back into the coffers of US companies - particularly ones like Halliburton and Bechtel - (except for the bit kept by local dictators and their cronies), seem to be fairly well aligned with reality.

The more interesting periods of his life in he EHM role (which he describes as something that has been built into the systems rather than some part conspiracy / part secret agent role that the title implies) include dealing with the oil companies in Ecuador and the tale of Jaime Roldos, his involvement in the arranging of the petrodollar recycling scheme to send Saudi Arabian oil money back to the US in the wake of the 1970's oil shocks, a strange piece from Indonesia that didn't ruing true at all but was nonetheless interesting and the story of Omar Torrijos (and later Manuel Noriega) and the Panama Canal.

Steve from Deconsumption has a detailed book review, Democracy Now has an interview with Perkins and RI has a tinfoil interpretation (there is also some banter about the book and the US State Department conspiracy theory website's debunking of it at Moon of Alabama)...

There's a school of liberal American thought - one that serves a gated community - that says John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is about as deep as it gets. If there is a conspiracy, so that mindset goes, then it goes this far: the cheating of nations of their inheritance by persuading their rulers to take on massive developments contracted to US industry, paid for by enormous loans, that in turn become the weapon of indebtedness to buy a government's allegiance. The story Perkins tells in Hit Man is that of the privateering ruin of the world, coordinated by the deniable aegis of covert statecraft, and it's as good as it goes. But it's not Perkins' only story.

Perkins has written other books about his time spent in the wild places of the world, but they're the kind of books liable to embarrass the reader who thinks Hit Man is tell all. He's taken ayahuasca and seen the holy anacondas; discovered the power of dream and learned principles of shapeshifting from the shamans. In fact, "he is currently working with several major corporations to introduce the concepts of shapeshifting and tribal wisdom into the highest levels of executive thinking."

Now, whatever that may mean (and it may include such dispiriting "transformations" as Bono's equity firm buying 40% of Forbes Magazine, which may make MacPhisto more skinwalker than shapeshifter), Perkins doesn't intend shapeshifting to be understood as pure metaphor. (Though presumably, when he describes the CIA's "jackals" who are called in to perform the wet jobs, it's just a figure of speech.) He means, literally, shapeshifting: that it can entail authentic, cellular change.

Perkins' esoteric knowledge may not be known to the casual reader of Hit Man, but the State Department, in its page "Identifying Misinformation," draws attention to Perkins' other titles in order to scare away the faint of mind. Alluding to The World Is As You Dream It: "shamanistic techniques from the Amazon and Andes," the anonymous flunky writes: "As to whether Perkins was acting at the behest of the US government, the world is not "as he dreams it." Higher up the food chain, where people are known to "create our own reality" and "other new realities, which you can study, too," opinions may differ.

I was listening to another RU Sirius Neofiles podcast on the way to work today which made me flashback to one of Bruce Sterling's comment in the interview with Reason I linked to recently "the sign of a true adept is wanting to "trace back your spiritual ancestors". This podcast - "How Stewart Brand Took Us From Counterculture to Cyberculture" - was exceptionally coherent (Neofiles always seems more on track than the rather looser RU Sirius show) and looked at the evolution of the cyberculture from its roots back in the 1940's and 1950's in the military contracting companies that formed in the Silicon Valley area around Stanford. It tended to revolve around Stewart Brand and the progression of some of his ideas from the Whole Earth Catalog to the Well to Wired and the Global Business Network - all of which should ring bells if you're into the Viridian stuff I like to link to (particularly WorldChanging, which descended from all of these though I don't think Stewart is involved in it).

There is also quite a bit of talk about different approaches to politics, and the problem with trying to pretend that politics doesn't exist, particularly regarding back to the earth types of movement.