The Middle Is Nigh  

TreeHugger asks "If You Don't Turn Your Computer Off, Who Will?".

The answer, of course, is the penguins. This is part of an excellent advertising campaign by Électricité de France (EDF,) which also provides a lot of power to the UK. The ads show various animals assisting us in being more energy efficient and read something like "If you don't preserve nature by switching off your computer / installing solar panels / using efficient lightbulbs, who will."

They're funny, and maybe they'll get the point across, but it could also be another move by EDF to polish up its green image. While they have been touted as a green energy company, really they're a low CO2 company, deriving almost 90% of their power from nuclear power plants. They have done very little with actual renewable energies. Still, public awareness is important, and we think these ads do a good job and make a good desktop background.

The BBC reports that 10% of the world's electiricy consumption could be saved by switching to efficient light bulbs.

A global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth. That is the conclusion of a study from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which it says is the first global survey of lighting uses and costs.

The carbon dioxide emissions saved by such a switch would, it concludes, dwarf cuts so far achieved by adopting wind and solar power. Better building regulations would boost uptake of efficient lighting, it says.

"Lighting is a major source of electricity consumption," said Paul Waide, a senior policy analyst with the IEA and one of the report's authors.

"Nineteen percent of global electricity generation is taken for lighting - that's more than is produced by hydro or nuclear stations, and about the same that's produced from natural gas," he told the BBC News website.

Eight for the scrap heap

Incandescent bulbs
Low-efficiency fluorescent tubes
High-loss "ballasts" for fluorescent tubes
Halogen uplighters
High-loss halogen transformers
Mercury discharge lamps (often used in street lighting)
Low-efficiency vehicle lighting
Fuel-based lighting in developing countries

TreeHugger also has some quotes from David Attenborough on global warming and wasting energy.

We’ve already alerted you to Sir David Attenborough’s thoughts on global warming. In Australia, filming his new BBC TV series, Life in Cold Blood, he's taken the opportunity to air those feelings again: “All I do know is that climate change is happening, no doubt, and that's been no doubt for a long time. And I also know that humanity, human beings worldwide, are contributing to climate change. I also know that if it goes on the way it is, we are in for some very bad times. We ought now to have a worldwide change in moral attitudes that you don't waste energy, because energy is produced at a cost, and to waste it is sinful. I mean it … but mad as well.” When he’s spent 50 of his 80 years passionately broadcasting about life on earth, it would seem fair to suggest he knows a little something of what he says.

AutoBlogGreen ahs a post on hydrogen production in Iceland - the land of fire and ice (if you ever get a chance to go to Rekjavik, do it and go and visit the "blue lagoon" outside the main power station).

Iceland doesn't have any fossil fuel resources of it's own, but it has no shortage natural energy from deep within the earth. Thanks to abundant volcanic activity from the mid-Atlantic ridge, there is plenty of geothermal energy available. This has provided Iceland the opportunity to try and completely eliminate the import of fossil fuels over the next few decades.

Geothermal wells can be used to power electrical generators, which in turn are used to produce hydrogen from water. The Icelandic capital of Reykjavik now has a hydrogen filling station where the hydrogen is produced and stored on-site and used to power fuel cell buses. It's estimated that one tenth of one percent of the heat produced in the earth's crust would provide enough energy to meat global requirements for 13,500 years. The United States also has vast amounts of geothermal energy particularly in the west which, if it could be harnessed, would provide a means of generating large amounts of electricity without greenhouse gases or hazardous wastes like nuclear power.

ANother exotic island locale to adopt renewable energy is the Maldives, which is moving over to solar power as much as possible.

A system to reduce oil consumption by 40% in electricity generators has been implemented for the first time in the Maldives.

The Ministry of Environment, Energy and Water said on Saturday that a system to provide electricity to the whole island using solar powered electricity generators has been introduced for the first time in Alifu Dhaalu atoll Meedhoo and that its service was inaugurated by Minister Ahmed Abdulla.

The Ministry said that system would be able to provide all the electricity needed by using the solar panels during the daytime and will not use the diesel generators at all during that time. In that regard the solar power generators will be able to provide power from 6:30am to 5:30pm.

Minister Ahmed Abdulla said that the implementation of the system has proven to Maldivians that they do not need to rely solely on oil for their energy requirements and that they can use the various other resources available to them to provide the necessary energy. He also noted that it would not have been possible without a lot of help from various foreign sources.

Insurgents in Iraq are continuing to target oil infrastructure.

Insurgents Monday targeted key oil sites in Iraq, firing mortar rounds into an oil distribution center in northern Iraq and bombing a pipeline in a southern suburb of Baghdad, Iraqi officials said. The attack on the oil distribution center triggered a massive fire that halted the flow of crude oil to Iraq's largest refinery, a Kirkuk police official said.

The attack happened around 6:30 p.m. (10:30 a.m. ET) in Baiji, which is about 15 miles (25 km) northwest of Kirkuk, the police official said. Iraqi army and civil defense personnel were still on the scene hours later trying to put out the fire. Smoke from the blaze could been seen from miles away.

The refinery in Baiji has a daily production level of about 8.5 million liters of gasoline, 7.5 million liters of diesel and 6.5 million liters of white oil.

The second attack -- a bomb planted beneath an oil pipeline in the al-Rashid district -- also started a fire at around 11 a.m., an official with Iraqi civil defense said, adding that the civil defense put out the fire in about 2 hours. The pipeline carries crude oil from storage tanks near Latifiya, south of Baghdad, to the Dora refinery in the capital.

Oil smuggling is also a big problem in Iraq.

Smugglers were loading gasoline on a ship at an illegal port in southern
Iraq when police surprised them with a raid that ended with five smugglers and two policemen dead.

The October clash at Abu Flus was one of many attempts by security forces trying to stop smuggling of Iraqi petroleum products to neighboring countries, a practice that is costing the country billions of dollars every year.

Smugglers are selling millions of gallons of Iraqi gasoline, kerosene and diesel fuel outside the country every year. They then reap huge profits by selling the petroleum products back to the government for import.

"The most serious challenges facing the oil industry are smuggling and terrorism. They are both hitting the national economy, robbing Iraq and blocking development," said Oil Ministry spokesman Assem Jihad.

Despite the fact that Iraq has the world's third largest proven oil reserves, the government is forced to import refined oil products to cover domestic demand. As recently as September, the country's three main refineries were working at half their pre-invasion capacity, processing only about 350,000 barrels day compared with about 700,000 barrels a day before March 2003.

Aging refineries, corruption and attacks by insurgents on infrastructure, such as pipelines, have been blamed for the production shortage.

The Australian has an article on the ambitions of Woodside, and others, to ship LNG from Australia to the US.

NORTH America has been promoted as the holy grail for Australia's LNG operators but so far progress has been slow. Federal Resources Minister Ian Macfarlane has said the market could be worth $60 billion to Australian producers.

US officials say the US's gas supply shortfall will rise from 3.5 trillion cubic feet last year to 5.5tcf in 2010 and 7tcf in 2025. Yet turning the opportunity into firm sales for Australian firms is proving hard. BHP Billiton is behind schedule in developing an LNG receival terminal called Cabrillo Port in California.

A decision on the proposal has been pushed back to the first quarter of next year and the plan has run into high-profile not-in-my-backyard opposition from celebrities concerned any development off the Malibu coast could affect their property values.

Shell - which has said it will use its share of Gorgon LNG from Barrow Island to supply North American customers after 2012 through the Sempra-owned terminal in Baja California - won't be able to do so in that timeframe because Gorgon deliveries have been delayed by up to two years even before that project receives the go ahead.

Senior West Australian government sources said last week the environmental approvals process for Gorgon could be done before Christmas, citing concerns over the impact of the project on the nesting sites of the flatback turtle, dredging of load-out berths up to 4km offshore, as well as how construction of the huge plant could meet Barrow Island's strict quarantine procedures.

Woodside, which is promoting its innovative Oceanway disappearing loading buoy plan as a means of overcoming Californian environmental concerns, probably won't be able to supply North American markets from its existing production or even from the Pluto plant which is planned to be operating by 2010.

Pluto production, from a development that could cost up to $10 billion, is likely to be taken up by customers in North Asia, specifically Japan and South Korea, while the surplus capacity of the North West Shelf LNG project which Woodside manages is expected to be fully committed by the end of February. So that's why a virtual throwaway line by the company's CEO, Don Voelte, at a recent investor briefing is attracting interest.

Mr Voelte has been making the point that Woodside could not only supply LNG to the US west coast, it had received some interest from potential customers on the east coast - part of a market region described as the Atlantic Basin, which includes customers in western Europe.

While analysts have regarded Mr Voelte's previous remarks on Woodside being a potential supplier in the Atlantic Basin as "talking the book" for the company's future Australian gas developments, particularly the Browse Basin north of Broome, this may not be the only option.

Dave at The Oil Drum has a detailed look at the other end of the shipping lanes and the proepcts for LNG in the US.

As even a casual reading of the story The North American Red Queen: Our Natural Gas Treadmill indicates, the importance of future Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) imports to North America can hardly be overstated.



This story will discuss the emergence of a globalized LNG market and the ability of that market to supply the high volumes of LNG that the United State will need to avoid future shortfalls. Will such a globalized market really come to pass? What form will it take? What does the current LNG market look like? How will the United States become integrated into the expanding LNG trade? These are the questions we shall examine here.

"Moscow News" has an article on the wrestling going on over whether or not ">Iran can pipe gas inland to Georgia (and I imagine eventually to Europe once the ball starts rolling down the slippery slope).

U.S. Ambassador to Georgia John Tefft announced that his country is opposed to a long term strategic cooperation between Georgia and Iran regarding natural gas deliveries.

In an interview, which was published on Monday, Nov. 27, by Tbilisi newspaper Kviris palitra, the diplomat said that Georgian authorities incorrectly interpreted the statement of Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Mathew Bryza that the White House won’t be opposed to Tbilisi using Iranian gas to overcome its energy crisis.

“We have understood when Georgia imported a small quantity of gas from Iran following a force majeoure situation when the gas link from Russia was broken and Georgia was left with no gas supplies in the winter. But long-term strategic cooperation in this issue [of gas deliveries] between Iran and Georgia is unacceptable to us,” the diplomat explained.

Ambassador Tefft explained that the United States put a lot of hopes on gas pipeline that will transport gas to Georgia from the Shakh Deniz deposit in Azerbaijan. “Using this project will give Georgia additional reliable energy source. We support Georgia’s energy independence and are making all the efforts in this direction,” the U.S. Ambassador said.

Temporary agreement on supplies of Iranian gas to Georgia was signed after January 2006 blasts at the North Caucasus — Transcaucasis and Mozdok-Tbilisi gas pipelines. As results of the blasts, Russian gas deliveries to Georgia were temporarily interrupted.

The Oil Drum Europe has a good post looking at oil depletion in the UK.

In the wake of last week's $1000 attempted debunking of the peak oil hypothesis by CERA, I felt it was time to examine CERA's powers of prediction in relation to real world, deterministic data.

This article is going to be in two parts. This week I am going to look in detail at the architecture of UK oil production since 1975 and on this basis provide a combined top down and bottom up forecast for UK oil production to 2012, incorporating future production data kindly provided by Rembrandt Koppelaar. Next week I will look at other production models produced by CERA (pdf), Kemp, Koppelaar and the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) in relation to my own forecast produced here which is called Mearns2.

The starting point of this exploration of the architecture of UK offshore oil production is to look at the stacked field production history from 1975 to 1999 - which was the peak production year ...

The Kashagan field in Kazakhstan was the last huge oil field to be discovered - while it has often seemed to be a disappointment to many people, the latest reserve revisions have been up by 10% according to this badly written report.

Kazakhstan's Kashagan field will produce 25 percent more oil than expected, the Financial Times reported Monday.

The newspaper reported that peak production at the field, due at the end of the next decade, is expected to be 1.5 million barrels per day, 25 percent more than previous estimates. Italy's ENI, the field's operator, is expected to pump1.5 million bpd for more than 10 years, the newspaper said. In other words, Kashagan will yield 10 percent more reserves than assumed.

The field was expected to start production in 2005, but there have been setbacks and ENI is expected to announce more delays, the newspaper said, adding production was not likely to start before 2009.

The price tag for the field is expected to be in the mid-$30 billion range.

Bruce's latest Viridian rant is out, looking at the sulphur based geoengineeering approach to global warming mitgation. Call me conservative but I still think this is madness, and with all due respect to Stewart Brand, I don't think we're likely to get good at geoengineering before we wipe ourselves out in the process.

Bruce also has a swipe at peak oilers (Kunstler in particular) - I really wish the "peak oil = apocalyptic cult" meme wasn't so well established...

I can't be bothered reformatting it to something more readable (no offence Pope Emperor), but Bruce's interjections are between the ((()))s.

Key concepts:

climate change, Global Haze Proposal, Paul Crutzen, geoengineering, terraforming, sulfur in the stratosphere, volcanoes

Attention Conservation Notice:

This proposition is straight outta of Mark Twain's novel "The American Claimant" from 1892, except, uh, it just came out in WIRED.

Links:

(((Keeping up with the furrow-browed efforts of the global political class. They've been beavering away on Kyoto 2.0. Realistically, are these crumbling, oil-hungry nation-states and their violently disordered remnants gonna get on the same page? Even if the UN makes all the right noises?)))
http://www.pewclimate.org/what_s_being_done/in_the_world/cop12/summary.cfm
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39037/story.htm

(((A grimly detailed ten-point climate-change plan that's considerably less nutty than this one, only it'll likely get zero traction because it's from an unrepentant British socialist.)))
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/george_monbiot/2006/10/stern.html

(((Yet another design contest for rousing public awareness of global warming. We Viridians were very into this kinda effort == about ten years ago. Nowadays we Viridians get rather more interested when large numbers of the public get killed by storms. Everybody now knows climate crisis is happening. They just figure maybe it won't bite them personally. Give it another ten years, and something like the "Greenhouse Mass Grave Design Contest" might be in order.)))
http://design21sdn.com/designit/designit_enter_competition.php?usrid=&sid=

"God is still up there," says evil crank denialist James Imhofe. Precisely the sentiment I don't want written on my Greenhouse mass grave tombstone. That sentiment sure works for suicide bombers.
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/11/17/inhofe-hoax/

Metropolis is running a design contest for green energy, because Metropolis is hip. Plus, they've got good taste and ten grand! Wow!
http://www.metropolismag.com/nextgen/

Is anybody still worried about "Peak Oil"? You know what's happening this season? "Peak Solar." Everybody wants the silicon, and there just isn't enough to go round. So I guess we'll be eating dogfood out of cans soon. The suburbs are clearly doomed. Oh wait, did that make any sense? "Peak Solar" economics is so counterintuitive that I got all confused.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/e50784ea-78cb-11db-8743-0000779e2340.html

The real solution to our intractable difficulties: not artificial sulfur shot into the stratosphere, but bacteria that can eat junk. Okay, I'm kidding about that. Not.
http://www.citris-uc.org/CRE-Nov8-2006

Now for the good news. There's less methane in the sky. Nobody has a clue why. But hey, there's less, and that's good. It's great. Probably.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2006/11/21/methane.html

We didn't get blown to pieces by hurricanes in 2005. Hurricanes were remarkably few. Nobody has a clue why. But what the heck, we weren't Katrina'd straight to hell, and that was good. It was great. Merry Xmas.
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39119/story.htm

Source: David Wolman, WIRED magazine

http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/start.html?pg=3

"Repeat after me: We humans have screwed up our planet. Feels better, doesn't it?

((("We humans have screwed up our planet, we humans have screwed up our planet, we humans have screwed up our planet." Hey wait! Facing the awful truth DOES feel better.)))

"Now that we've accepted this reality, at least we don't have to argue about it anymore. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are at the highest they've been in at least 800,000 years. Greenland's ice sheet is melting fast. Some == probably a lot == of the current warming trend is because of us, and so are the consequent threats to ecosystems, food supplies, coastal cities, and all that other stuff from An Inconvenient Truth.

"Of course, that means we're responsible for repairing the damage, but stopgaps like carbon sequestration just aren't going to cut it.

(((Actually, it means that we human beings from the last two full centuries of fossil-fuel use are "responsible for repairing the damage," and most of us are dead. I'd say the clearest implication here is that WIRED readers would also be dead long before "humans" fully repair this situation, but what the heck, read on.)))

"Luckily, a growing number of scientists are thinking more aggressively, developing incredibly ambitious technical fixes to cool the planet. (((Uh-oh. Ever hear the useful expression, "Be careful what you wish for, you might get what you want?" That would be the Viridian moment o' truth there, when the ecosystem design boffins just roll the gizmo right off the launching pad and turn the blue sky bright green.)))

"These efforts to remedy the accidental experiment of climate change with intentional, megascale experimentation are called geoengineering. (((Or, as Stewart Brand points out, "we're already terraforming so we might as well get good at it."))) ...

WorldChanging also has some comments on bruce and the geoengineering option.

Past Peak has a demoralising post on long term trends.

More and more, I think we're fucked — we in the industrialized world, especially. The fundamental problem is that we're never going to voluntarily change course to the radical degree needed to stave off disaster. All of the trends that point to disaster — greenhouse gas emissions, depletion of nonrenewable resources, worldwide ecosystem destruction, species extinctions, etc. — are accelerating. In fact, the rate at which they're accelerating is accelerating. We see where it's all heading, and still we can't stop ourselves. We're addicts, addicted to comfort, power, artificial stimulation of all kinds, and like most addicts we’ll never recover without first hitting bottom — that's if we manage to recover at all. We'll take the path of least resistance until it ends in disaster and stops being the path of least resistance.

Here's a story that strikes me as the perfect epitome of what I'm talking about. BBC:

Marine scientists say the case for a moratorium on the use of heavy trawling gear in deep waters is now overwhelming and should be put in place immediately.

A new report prepared for the UN indicates the equipment is doing immense damage to the ecosystems around seamounts, or underwater mountains. ...

The swing to the left in Latin America continues, with Rafael Correa winning election in Ecuador against some bible thumping banana baron. I wonder what is in store for Chevron and co ?

LEFTIST economist Rafael Correa, a friend of Venezuela's virulently anti-US president Hugo Chavez, won Ecuador's presidential election today, according to exit polls.

On average, the three polls gave him a lead of 14.5 percentage points over Alvaro Noboa, a folksy, conservative banana tycoon. Ecuador's wealthiest man, Mr Noboa had earlier insisted he was headed to victory and urged voters to ignore exit polls.

Mr Correa, 43, has stirred unease on financial markets with his calls to renegotiate the country's debt and revise foreign oil companies' contracts in Ecuador. His friendship with Venezuela's Mr Chavez, and his determination not to renew a lease for a US military base in Ecuador also have caused concern in Washington.

Mr Correa, who once called George W. Bush a "dimwit", toned down his criticism of the US President after trailing Mr Noboa by four points in the first round of voting on October 15. He said yesterday he wanted "the best possible'' relations with Washington.

A former finance minister who describes himself as a "humanist, leftist Christian", Mr Correa says he is a representative of the new Latin American left that offers an alternative to strict free-market policies he says have proved a failure in Latin America.

Mr Correa saw his support rise gradually after the first round of voting, eventually grabbing the lead from his conservative rival. He had warned ahead of the election that his conservative had resorted to electoral fraud and might try to do so again.

As the voting was still under way, Mr Noboa insisted victory was his. Bible in hand, down on his knees and invoking God's name, the conservative banana baron predicted victory by a large margin, and urged Ecuadorans to pay no heed to exit polls he suggested were fixed by his rival.

"I am the president of labour, of the poor,'' the billionaire cried out at the gates of a polling station in Guayaquil, the country's second largest city.

Jeff Vail talked a little about Julius Caesar being misunderstood in a recent post, noting that some people (which I guess included me) mistakenly call him a dictator and fascist of sorts, but that there is a case that Caesar was really a populist with the good of the people at heart who has been demonised by the upper classes over the centuries. Jeff points to Michael Parenti's book on "The Assassination of Julius Caesar". I guess this book is basically a marxist take on the topic but its an interesting idea to consider.

I'm sure if you asked Caesar's foreign victims their opinion they might not care one way or the other of course (as I recall Caesar deliberately burnt and chopped down huge swathes of forests throught Gaul in order to wipe out the Druid priestly class and their sacred groves and thus sap the spirit of the Gauls - so he wasn't exaclty a green either way - though he was admittedly a genius on a number of other levels).

The New York Times has an interesting article on Warren Buffett and his dismay at "class warfare" in recent years in the US - and he's talking about the rich waging war against the poor. The subject of Republican economic mismanagement on a grand scale is also considered.

NOT long ago, I had the pleasure of a lengthy meeting with one of the smartest men on the planet, Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, in his unpretentious offices in Omaha. We talked of many things that, I hope, will inspire me for years to come. But one of the main subjects was taxes. Mr. Buffett, who probably does not feel sick when he sees his MasterCard bill in his mailbox the way I do, is at least as exercised about the tax system as I am.

Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don’t pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

This conversation keeps coming back to mind because, in the last couple of weeks, I have been on one television panel after another, talking about how questionable it is that the country is enjoying what economists call full employment while we are still running a federal budget deficit of roughly $434 billion for fiscal 2006 (not counting off-budget items like Social Security) and economists forecast that it will grow to $567 billion in fiscal 2010.

When I mentioned on these panels that we should consider all options for closing this gap — including raising taxes, particularly for the wealthiest people — I was met with several arguments by people who call themselves conservatives and free marketers.

One argument was that the mere suggestion constituted class warfare. I think Mr. Buffett answered that one.

Another argument was that raising taxes actually lowers total revenue, and that only cutting taxes stimulates federal revenue. This is supposedly proved by the history of tax receipts since my friend George W. Bush became president.

In fact, the federal government collected roughly $1.004 trillion in income taxes from individuals in fiscal 2000, the last full year of President Bill Clinton’s merry rule. It fell to a low of $794 billion in 2003 after Mr. Bush’s tax cuts (but not, you understand, because of them, his supporters like to say). Only by the end of fiscal 2006 did income tax revenue surpass the $1 trillion level again.

By this time, we Republicans had added a mere $2.7 trillion to the national debt. So much for tax cuts adding to revenue. To be fair, corporate profits taxes have increased greatly, as corporate profits have increased stupendously. This may be because of the cut in corporate tax rates. Anything is possible.

The third argument that kind, well-meaning people made in response to the idea of rolling back the tax cuts was this: “Don’t raise taxes. Cut spending.”

The sad fact is that spending rises every year, no matter what people want or say they want. Every president and every member of Congress promises to cut “needless” spending. But spending has risen every year since 1940 except for a few years after World War II and a brief period after the Korean War.

The imperatives for spending are built into the system, and now, with entitlements expanding rapidly, increased spending is locked in. Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt — all are growing like mad, and how they will ever be stopped or slowed is beyond imagining. Gross interest on Treasury debt is approaching $350 billion a year. And none of this counts major deferred maintenance for the military.

The fourth argument in response to my suggestion was that “deficits don’t matter.”

There is something to this. One would think that big deficits would be highly inflationary, according to Keynesian economics. But we have modest inflation (except in New York City, where a martini at a good bar is now $22). On the other hand, we have all that interest to pay, soon roughly $7 billion a week, a lot of it to overseas owners of our debt. This, to me, seems to matter.

Ross Gittins has an article on recently retired Reserver Bank boss Ian Macfarlane and his speech on all manner of subjects economic - including the phenomenon of stagflation. MacFralane has also noted that the next economic slowdown will hit households hardest.

What was it that caused stagflation? Well, certainly not the first OPEC oil shock in December 1973. Macfarlane reminds us that our inflation rate had reached double figures before the oil shock. (It had been steadily rising as the 1960s progressed, exceeding 7 per cent by the end of 1971.)

He even defends the OPEC price hike. Long-term contracts with the oil majors had kept the world price of oil steady in nominal US dollars for many years despite rising inflation and the devaluation of the greenback following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in 1971.

"Seen in this light, the large rise in oil prices was largely a 'catch-up' that was bound to occur at some stage," Macfarlane argues. That, of course, didn't stop the sudden leap in oil prices compounding the world recession of the mid-1970s.

As he explains, the oil price leap was a "negative supply shock" - an event that simultaneously pushes up the price level and reduces real spending in the economy, thus being inflationary and contractionary at the same time.

(The direct effect on Australia was limited, however, because at that time retail petrol prices weren't closely linked to the world price of oil. "Import parity pricing" of Australian produced oil was to come in 1977 under Malcolm Fraser. So the main effect would have come indirectly via the effect on our trading partners' economies.)

So what did cause stagflation? Globally, Macfarlane puts it down to the abuse of Keynesian policies for managing demand. "What was initially a good policy eventually was pushed too far - well beyond its natural limits," he says.

The macro managers became too willing to meet any deficiency in private demand by an increase in public demand, too willing to ignore worsening inflation in an ultimately futile attempt to push the unemployment rate lower than it could go given structural rigidities in the labour market.

(This, of course, is a macro manager's purely macro-economic explanation of the stagflation phenomenon. One of the lessons economists had yet to learn was that, in their enthusiasm for managing demand, they'd taken too little interest in the way steadily accruing government intervention was fouling up the supply side of the economy. So I'd attribute more responsibility to the consequent increase in "cost-push" inflation pressure.)

Within Australia, our difficulty in coping with stagflation was compounded by the policy errors of the McMahon and Whitlam governments. The McMahon government caused a lot of inflation pressure to build when it couldn't bring itself to revalue the Aussie dollar in response to the commodities boom that preceded the first oil shock.

US Today reports that the number 1 Toyota Prius evangelist in the US has died in a plane crashhttp://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2006-11-26-toyota-engineer_x.htm.

A pilot who died when his aerobatic plane plunged into the sea was an engineer who promoted fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles and was dubbed the "American father of the Prius."

David Hermance, 59, didn't invent the gasoline-electric engine but the Toyota Motor executive made it palatable to a skeptical U.S. public, colleagues said Sunday.

"When that car came out, no one knew what it was," said Bill Reinert, a Toyota national manager. "Dave dedicated his life to championing this technology. He was the American father of the Prius," he said.

Hermance, a Huntington Beach resident and father of two grown children, also was a dedicated pilot. Authorities believe he was the only person aboard his single-engine Interavia E-3 when it crashed Saturday afternoon off Los Angeles.

There have been reports that Tesla Motors has announced a new sedan - alas they aren't true.

Following the enthusiastic response from its electric Roadster, Tesla Motors is working on a sedan. The new four-door model is tipped to share similar dimensions and performance with the BMW 5-Series, which, as the benchmark sports sedan, is a pretty ambitious target.

The Tesla sedan will have the electric motor and batteries up front, sending power down the rear wheels. Two powertrain options are expected to be on offer, the smaller featuring a range of 200 miles, and a more powerful version with a 300-mile range. Unlike the Roadster, with a Lotus-built aluminum structure, the sedan is expected to be made of steel. Tesla figures on building 10,000-20,000 sedans each year and will be sold globally.

Along with the sedan, the roadster will undergo an update by 2010, at which point the more powerful engine from the higher-end sedan will also likely be offered in the two-door, giving it some serious punch.

In the tinfoil slot is The Times (hmm, that doesn't sound right) reporting that the US has bombed a Madrasseh in Pakistan - apparently the Pakistani government has decided that this wasn't such a great idea.

THE bombing of a Pakistani madrasah last month, in which 82 students were killed, was carried out by the United States, a Pakistani official has admitted, writes Christina Lamb.

The madrasah in the tribal agency of Bajaur was bombed during a visit to Pakistan by the Prince of Wales amid allegations that it was being used to train suicide bombers.

“We thought it would be less damaging if we said we did it rather than the US,” said a key aide to President Pervez Musharraf. “But there was a lot of collateral damage and we’ve requested the Americans not to do it again.”

The Americans are believed to have attacked after a tip-off that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy leader of Al-Qaeda, was present. Local people claimed the victims included boys as young as 12 and that the tribal area had been negotiating with the Pakistan government for a peace deal.

OK - thats not really tinfoil, just more "war on terror" nastiness (wouldn't it be easier to just kick the oil habit and forget about the middle east ?).

So here's some real tinfoil from RI on the Litvinenko affair (I still like Warren Buffett though - and I quite like what George Soros has to say as a general rule too). One commenter noted Litvinenko has been on the front page of the BBC site for 4 days - like a "head on a pike" (there are a number of other interesting snippets in there too - now the US election is over the troll population has pretty much disappeared).

AntiWar.com has an alternate theory (maybe this is tinfoil too, but its a lot straighter than RI, even with that stupid picture of Justin in the masthead), which is similar to the alternate that I came up with a few days ago but in a lot more detail - rising energy superpower Russia is being added to the "Axis of evil" via an orchestrated demonisation campaign. I guess the "Power of Nightmares" regarding international terrorism is on the wane too, so a new bogeyman could be needed to keep a few people in their jobs.

I'm not sure which theory (if any) to believe and I guess its possible both are true - a new cold war is deliberately being started and Putin is a monster as well...

I've been thinking about Alexander Litvinenko's alleged last words: "The bastards got me, but they won't get everybody." Not that the bastards won't try. In a year in which the Texas Academy of Science gave a standing ovation to its most distinguished member for a paper advocating the eradication of 90% of the Earth's population by airborne Ebola, only the unguardedly naive would think some bastards with the means wouldn't dream of getting everybody, or near enough everybody.

But before we make his last words our first, we should consider who he meant by them. Litvinenko's bastards were Russian, specifically Putin loyalists, though his employers in exile have also been called bastards and worse. Notably Boris Berezovsky, formerly lawless oligarch and latterly investor in Neil Bush's scholastic software firm "Ignite" (to which was funneled Barbara Bush's donation to the "Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund.") It's reported that weeks before his death, Litvinenko delivered a dossier on the Kremlin's takeover of oil giant Yukos to its former second-in-command, Leonid Nevzlin, who had found asylum in Israel. And that reminds me of another suspicious death on British soil: the 2004 helicopter crash of wealthy lawyer Stephen Curtis, managing director of Yukos after the jailing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. To avoid Russian prosecution, and after weeks of anonymous death threats, Curtis approached Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service "days before his death, offering information in return for protection." Two weeks prior to the crash, Curtis told his uncle that if "anything happened" to him, it would not be an accident.

Even as spectators, we want to choose sides. We want to know who are the good guys. For the past six years at least, that's often meant finding out which side the Bush family was on and then cheering on the other. But playing a single side would mean risking loss and so, by delivering his own son to crucifixion by James Baker, George HW Bush has won again. There have been other strange and uncomfortable and pathetic scenes, such as George Soros and Warren Buffet welcomed as white-knight plutocrats, and the uncritical embrace of a parade of self-described former Republicans, Bush insiders and CIA officials saying the darnedest things about 9/11.

I think of a passage in Litvinenko's Blowing Up Russia recounting the night in Ryazan when sacks of explosive hexogene rigged with a timing device were discovered in the basement of an apartment complex. The building was evacuated, except for an elderly woman who couldn't be moved and her daughter who refused to leave her. They remained within the emergency cordon, expecting their apartment to collapse upon them...