OLEd, OLEd, OLEd  

Local company Global Renewables is about to win a big contract in the UK for waste recycling and biogas production.

AN AUSTRALIAN company that has developed an environmentally friendly system for household waste disposal is close to signing a £2 billion ($4.9 billion) contract with Lancashire and Blackpool councils in Britain. The 25-year deal, agreed under the British Government's private finance initiative, covers 1.4 million people and 775,000 tonnes of waste a year, and is due to be finalised in the next few days.

Global Renewables, a Manchester-based subsidiary of the Australian engineering group GRD Ltd, plans to invest £340 million to build two waste facilities in partnership with Bovis Lend Lease. The company also intends to look at other British waste contracts up for renewal in the next 18 months.

Development director David Singh said the company's system substantially reduces the amount of household waste going to landfill sites - which produce greenhouse gases - and avoids the need to incinerate waste. It also produces biogas and compost from the organic component of the waste. "Globally, we can't continue to plunder the world's resources and then bury the refuse on our doorstep," Mr Singh said.

Well said Mr Singh.

The nuclear power debate has become front page news again today with the release of the Switkowski report.

There are 5 aspects to this - expanded uranium mining, uranium enrichment, local nuclear power generation, nuclear waste storage (for our waste, and, most likely, everyone elses) and finally, the subject we don't speak about, the ability to produce nuclear weapons.

I don't see how the first aspect can be avoided, and I'm actually in favour of the last. I'm mostly against uranium enrichment but I figure there will be a greedy rush to extract some big export dollars out of this.

Nuclear power itself is a complete waste of money of course, and I suspect pretty much everyone is against Australia becoming the world's nuclear waste dump, though no doubt the Rodent has a cunning plan to try and make it happen anyway (who cares about inconvenient public opinion when you're a great leader).

The sole positive aspect of this radioactive topic is that it keeps attention focussed on global warming solutions and requires the introduction of carbon taxes to make it feasible - which opens the way for a clean energy future instead.

Environmental groups are horrified by all this pro-nuclear campaigning by the government.

he Labor leader Kim Beazley says it will become an election issue.

"Where will the 25 reactors go?" Mr Beazley said.

Greens Senator Christine Milne is also critical. "It's a major distraction from dealing with climate change," Senator Milne said.

The report says 25 nuclear power stations could provide a third of the country's power by 2050. The uranium industry has welcomed the report.

Martin Blakeman from the mining company Newera Uranium says Australia must start planning to secure nuclear energy. "While I think it's probably not viable at the moment, I think it will become viable within a 10- to 15-year time frame. And I think that's why we have to start planning now because if we were to leave it 10 to 15 years to start planning for the construction of these facilities, by then it may well be too late."

But the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) says the report is cold comfort to those promoting nuclear power as the 'one-size-fits-all' answer to climate change. ACF nuclear campaigner Dave Sweeney says international experience shows nuclear power is only possible with massive subsidies.

"A carbon tax or emissions trading system will not address the full costs of nuclear power, which include huge construction and insurance costs, de-commissioning and perpetual nuclear waste management liabilities and the reality that all nuclear facilities are potential terrorist targets," he said.

"Australia is well past the crossroads and is now at the energy future T junction. We have the potential to be a world leader in renewable energy generation and manufacture - a clean energy future that powers not only our appliances but also employment growth - especially in regional Australia. On the other hand Dr Switkowski's path would lead us down an increasingly costly and insecure route that is directly linked to the production of high level radioactive waste and the threat of nuclear weapons and terrorism."

Al Gore says that we shouldn't go down the nuclear road and that the tide of opinion is towards clean energy sources.

PEOPLE are caught in the headlights of the global warming crisis - so much so they are in danger of being run over, the former US vice-president Al Gore says.

The climate-change campaigner said people were startled at the extent of their impact on the environment.

"There has been a slowness to recognise how swiftly we have changed the relationship between the human race and the ecology," Mr Gore told the Herald yesterday. "We're in danger of outstripping the environmental niche that sustains us … We have acquired the ability to change the Earth's atmosphere." That, he said, was a huge challenge to the imagination.

But Mr Gore is not depressed that people are not moving faster; he believes the message is getting through. He sees public opinion in Australia shifting quickly towards demanding more action from politicians.

"I have had the clear impression that in a lot of minds there has been a very powerful change in public opinion on the issue of the climate crisis," he said. "I think that the role of business leadership in bringing about that shift has been significant."

Meanwhile, the Herald had an article on a different form of nuclear power - using thorium - while this largely seems much better than uranium based power - you still have the waste disposal problem - and the global warming while you work out the technology to make it happen.

THE interim report from the Federal Government's committee into nuclear power, chaired by Ziggy Switkowski, is to be released today. It is widely expected to support pursuing the development of nuclear energy, which raises the question: is it possible to develop an environmentally friendly, ethically acceptable nuclear strategy for the benefit of all?

The advantages of nuclear-powered electricity production are that it is more environmentally friendly than fossil fuel-based energy because it generates less greenhouse gases, and that Australia has some of the world's largest reserves of the raw material needed - uranium-235 (U-235).

Proponents also say that the high-level waste produced can now be safely dealt with, through technology such as synroc (synthetic rock) which chemically binds radioactive waste elements so they cannot leach out.

However, uranium-based fission reactors still have significant environmental issues to deal with, and perhaps always will.

Is this the only option for non-fossil fuel based nuclear power? Is it possible to enjoy the benefits of nuclear power without the potentially toxic waste and diversion of nuclear programs to produce material for weapons of mass destruction? The answer, potentially, is yes.

A new generation of nuclear power reactors is being developed using thorium-232 as their fuel, instead of uranium, which may be a solution.

Early designs and prototypes for thorium reactors use uranium as the source of neutrons, but an ingenious design uses a particle accelerator and elemental lead instead. These are referred to as "accelerator-driven" thorium reactors.

The beauty of this approach is that the reaction and energy production is only sustained as long as the proton beam is on.

With this type of thorium reactor there is no possibility of fission continuing when the proton beam is off. This means that thorium reactors are sub-critical devices which cannot maintain a self-sustaining chain reaction, and hence there is no chance of Chernobyl-style meltdown.

Australia has abundant supplies of thorium. Unlike uranium, thorium doesn't need significant enriching because it is more than 500 times more abundant in nature than uranium, which should make it cheaper to extract and process.

Meanwhile demand for coal is growing so fast there is a massive backlog of ships waiting off Newcastle to load up.

A sudden increase in demand for export coal has generated a three-week long queue for ships to enter the port of Newcastle. Forty-eight ships are waiting to enter the port. The long queues could hurt the region's coal producers, who have to pay fees to their buyers to compensate for any delays.

The Hunter Valley coal chain logistics team chairman Graeme Davidson says he expects it to take a few months to clear the backlog. "The logistics team is running at a maximum rate at this point in time to help assist with clearing the queue," he said. "We've supplied year to date, a capacity of 85 million tonnes and at this stage the coal industry has used around 80 to 81 million tonnes of that capacity."

Mr Davidson says demand is currently outstripping supply. "It would have a marked affect on the profitability of the coal industry up the [Hunter] Valley," he said. "The issue is that our capacity for October is at 6.2 million tonnes and we have a demand profile of vessel arrival of 8.4, 8.5."

Technology Review has an article on OLEDs and their potential to dramatically increase the energy efficiency of lighting.

In an advance that could hasten the day when energy-efficient glowing plastic sheets replace traditional lightbulbs, a method for printing microscopic lenses nearly doubles the amount of photons coming out of the materials, called organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs.

Stephen Forrest, an electrical engineer and vice president of research at the University of Michigan, says his technology increases the light output of the thin, flexible OLEDs by 70 percent. "They just create local curvature that allows light to pass through," he explains.

This means that OLEDs, which are currently used for superbright color displays in a number of applications, are getting closer to being competitive as white-light sources too. "It's a significant benefit, because the one big challenge in OLEDs is coming up with ways to get light out of them," says Vladimir Bulovic, head of MIT's Laboratory of Organic Optics and Electronics. "There's a lot of light in the OLED that never makes it out."

The benefits could be substantial. Sandia National Laboratory projects that if half of all lighting is solid-state by 2025--that is, made up of OLEDs and their technological cousin, LEDs made from inorganic semiconducting materials--it will cut worldwide power use by 120 gigawatts. That would save $100 billion a year and reduce the carbon dioxide emitted by electrical plants by 350 megatons a year. And OLEDs would offer more variety in lighting design, since they would take the form of flexible sheets.

Technology Review also has an article on the rapidly increasing demand for labour in the wind power industry in North Dakota.

A company that makes wind turbine blades here is looking to hire more than 200 full-time employees in the next two months.

By the end of this year, Denmark-based LM Glasfiber is expected to become the largest manufacturer in Grand Forks in terms of workers. The company has announced plans to increase its work force by 60 percent this year, from 330 people at the start of 2006 to 526 by the start of next year.

''Right now, we're hiring at the absolute maximum rate,'' said Warren Ault, the company's national account manager. ''We have more demand than we can handle right now.''

Officials said the company trained 27 new employees on one recent day.

When LM Glasfiber came to Grand Forks seven years ago, it had about 60 workers.

Past Peak has a post on "religious firms" and their need to manufacture conflict to get the punters through the door (this seems symbiotic with the "Merchants of death" racket).

Everywhere we look, some religious leader or other is promoting conflict against another religious group. Sunnis and Shiites, Jews and Muslims, Muslims and Hindus, etc., etc. And now this (Time):

When [Pope] Benedict XVI travels to Turkey next week on his first visit to a Muslim country since becoming pope last year, he is unlikely to cloak himself in the downy banner of brotherhood, the way Pope John Paul II did during his sojourn there 27 years ago.

Instead, Benedict, 79, will arrive carrying a much different reputation: that of a hard-knuckle intellect with a taste for blunt talk and interreligious confrontation. Just 19 months into his tenure, the pope has become as much a lightning rod as a moral leader; suddenly, when he speaks, the whole world listens.

And what takes place over four days in three Turkish cities has the potential to define his papacy — and a good deal more. [...]

[T]his year he has emerged as a far more compelling and complex figure than anyone had imagined. And much of that has to do with his willingness to take on what some people feel is today's equivalent of the communist scourge — the threat of Islamic violence.

The topic is extraordinarily fraught: there are, after all, a billion or so nonviolent Muslims on the globe; the Roman Catholic church's own record in the religious-mayhem department is hardly pristine; and even the most naive of observers understands that the Vicar of Christ might harbor an institutional prejudice against one of Christianity's main global competitors.

But by speaking out last September in Regensburg, Germany, about the possible intrinsic connection between Islam and violence and refusing to retract its essence — even when Islamic extremists destroyed several churches and murdered a nun in Somalia — the pontiff suddenly became a lot more interesting.

In one imperfect but powerful stroke, he departed from his predecessor's largely benign approach to Islam, discovered an issue that might attract even the most religiously jaded and managed (for better or worse) to reanimate the clash-of-civilizations discussion by focusing scrutiny on the core question of whether Islam, as a religion, sanctions violence.

He was hailed by cultural conservatives worldwide. Says Helen Hull Hitchcock, a St. Louis, Missouri, lay leader who heads the conservative Catholic organization Women for Faith & Family: "He has said what needed to be said." [Emphasis added]

By slandering Islam, one of "Christianity's main global competitors," Benedict made himself, Time says, "a lot more interesting." Now, "when he speaks, the whole world listens."

Sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke have studied religions from the perspective of rational choice theory — people adhere to religions because they believe the benefits they get from religion justify the costs. Their analysis has led to a number of propostions about religious "firms" that must compete for adherents. To wit:

Proposition 76. Even where competition is limited, religious firms can generate high levels of participation to the extent that the firms serve as the primary organizational vehicles for social conflict. (Conversely, if religious firms become significantly less important as vehicles for social conflict, they will be correspondingly less able to generate commitment.)

Or, as Danial Dennett puts it in his book Breaking the Spell,

In other words, expect religious "firms" to exploit and exacerbate social conflict whenever possible, since it is a way of generating business.

I leave it to you to decide if Robertson, Benedict, et al, act out of instinct or calculated manipulation. Either way, the result is the same. In what should be an increasingly interconnected world, religion has emerged (or, re-emerged) as a deliberate, active sower of discord, giving people something we really don't need: yet another reason to hate one another, a reason supposedly bearing a stamp of approval from one god or another.

On the subject of religion, Richard Dawkins has a rant on people who say "I'm an atheist, but ...".

Of all the questions I fielded during the course of my recent book tour, the only ones that really depressed me were those that began "I'm an atheist, BUT . . ." What follows such an opening is nearly always unhelpful, nihilistic or – worse – suffused with a sort of exultant negativity. Notice, by the way, the distinction from another favourite genre: "I used to be an atheist, but . . ." That is one of the oldest tricks in the book, practised by, among many others, C S Lewis, Alister McGrath and Francis Collins. It is designed to gain street cred before the writer starts on about Jesus, and it is amazing how often it works. Look out for it, and be forewarned.

I've noticed five variants of I'm-an-atheist-buttery, and I'll list them in turn, in the hope that others will recognize them, be armed against them, and perhaps extend the list by contributing examples from their own experience.

1. I'm an atheist, but religion is here to stay. You think you can get rid of religion? Good luck to you! You want to get rid of religion? What planet are you living on? Religion is a fixture. Get over it!

I could bear any of these downers, if they were uttered in something approaching a tone of regret or concern. On the contrary. The tone of voice is almost always gleeful, and accompanied by a self-satisfied smirk. Anybody who opens with "I'm an atheist, BUT . . ." can be more or less guaranteed to be one of those religious fellow-travellers who, in Dan Dennett's wickedly perceptive phrase, believes in belief. They may not be religious themselves, but they love the idea that other people are religious. This brings me to my second category of naysayers.

2. I'm an atheist, but people need religion. What are you going to put in its place? How are you going to comfort the bereaved? How are you going to fill the need?

I dealt with this in the last chapter of The God Delusion, 'A Much Needed Gap' and also, at more length, in Unweaving the Rainbow. Here I'll make one additional point. Did you notice the patronizing condescension in the quotations I just listed? You and I, of course, are much too intelligent and well educated to need religion. But ordinary people, hoi polloi, the Orwellian proles, the Huxleian Deltas and Epsilon semi-morons, need religion. Well, I want to cultivate more respect for people than that. I suspect that the only reason many cling to religion is that they have been let down by our educational system and don't understand the options on offer. This is certainly true of most people who think they are creationists. They have simply not been taught the alternative. Probably the same is true of the belittling myth that people 'need' religion. On the contrary, I am tempted to say "I believe in people . . ." And this leads me to the next example.

3. I'm an atheist, but religion is one of the glories of human culture.

At a conference in San Diego which I attended at the end of my book tour, Sam Harris and I were attacked by two "I'm an atheist, but . . ." merchants. One of these quoted Golda Meir when she was asked whether she believed in God: "I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God." Our smirking critic substituted his own version: "I believe in people, and people believe in God."

Religion, he presumably thought, is like a great work of art. Many works of art, rather, because different religions are so varied. I was reminded of Nicholas Humphrey's devastating indictment of an extreme version of this kind of thing, quoted in Chapter 9 of The God Delusion. Humphrey was discussing the discovery in the mountains of Peru of the frozen remains of a young Inca girl who was, according to the archaeologist who found her, the victim of a religious sacrifice. Humphrey described a television documentary in which viewers were invited . . .

" . . . to marvel at the spiritual commitment of the Inca priests and to share with the girl on her last journey her pride and excitement at having been selected for the signal honour of being sacrificed. The message of the television programme was in effect that the practice of human sacrifice was in its own way a glorious cultural invention – another jewel in the crown of multiculturalism . . ."

I share the outrage that Humphrey eloquently expressed: -

"Yet, how dare anyone even suggest this? How dare they invite us – in our sitting rooms, watching television – to feel uplifted by contemplating an act of ritual murder: the murder of a dependent child by a group of stupid, puffed up, superstitious, ignorant old men? How dare they invite us to find good for ourselves in contemplating an immoral action against someone else?"

It would be unfair to accuse our critic in San Diego of complicity in such an odious attitude towards the Inca 'ice maiden'. But I hope at least he will think twice before repeating that bon mot (as he obviously thought of it): "I believe in people, and people believe in God." I could have overlooked the patronizing condescension of his remark, if only he hadn't sounded so smugly satisfied by this lamentable state of affairs.

4. I'm an atheist, but you are only preaching to the choir. What's the point?

There are various points. One is that the choir is a lot bigger than many people think it is, especially in America. But, again especially in America, it is largely a closet choir, and it desperately needs encouragement to come out. Judging by the thanks I received all over North America, the encouragement that people like Sam Harris, Dan Dennett and I are able to give is greatly appreciated. So is this website, as I heard again and again. My thanks, yet again, to Josh.

A more subtle reason for preaching to the choir is the need to raise consciousness. When the feminists raised our consciousness about sexist pronouns, they would have been preaching to the choir where the more substantive issues of the rights of women and the evils of discrimination against them were concerned. But that decent, liberal choir still needed its consciousness raising with respect to everyday language. However right-on we may have been on the political issues of rights and discrimination, we nevertheless still unconsciously bought into linguistic conventions that made half the human race feel excluded.

There are other linguistic conventions that still need to go the same way as sexist pronouns, and the atheist choir is not exempt. We all need our consciousness raised. Atheists as well as theists unconsciously buy into our society's convention that religion has uniquely privileged status. I've already mentioned the convention that we must be especially polite and respectful to a person's faith. And I never tire of drawing attention to society's tacit acceptance that it is right to label small children with the religious opinions of their parents.

That's consciousness-raising, and atheists need it just as much as anybody else because atheists, too, have been lulled into overlooking the anomaly: religious opinion is the one kind of parental opinion that – by almost universal consent – can be battened upon children who are, in truth, too young to know what their opinion really is.

5. I'm an atheist, but I wish to dissociate myself from your intemperately strong language.

Sam Harris and I have both received criticism of this kind, and Nick Humphrey probably has too, for the quotation given above. Yet if you look at the language we employ, it is no more strong or intemperate than anybody would use if criticizing a political or economic point of view: no stronger or more intemperate than any theatre critic, art critic or book critic when writing a negative review. Our language sounds strong and intemperate only because of the same weird convention I have already mentioned, that religious faith is uniquely privileged: above and beyond criticism. On pages 20-21 of The God Delusion I gave a wonderful quote from Douglas Adams on the subject.

Book critics or theatre critics can be derisively negative and earn delighted praise for the trenchant wit of their review. A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a critic of religion employ a fraction of the same direct forthrightness, and polite society will purse its lips and shake its head: even secular polite society, and especially that part of secular society that loves to announce, "I'm an atheist, BUT . . ."

My notes about the Iridescent Cuttlefish yesterday bought this post by Bruce Schneier on Steganographic Squid to mind.

Seems that some squid can hide messages in their skin:

In the animal world, squid are masters of disguise. Pigmented skin cells enable them to camouflage themselves—almost instantaneously—from predators. Squid also produce polarized skin patterns by regulating the iridescence of their skin, possibly creating a “hidden communication channel” visible only to animals that are sensitive to polarized light.

[...]

Mäthger and Hanlon’s findings present the first anatomical evidence for a “hidden communication channel” that can remain masked by typical camouflage patterns. Their results suggest that it might be possible for squid to send concealed polarized signals to one other while staying camouflaged to fish or mammalian predators, most of which do not have polarization vision.

My favorite security stories are from the natural world. Evolution results in some of the most interesting security countermeasures.

I quite like this note in the comments about the BP sponsored occy:

I believe that squid can also 'flash' colours at a rate higher than we can perceive - therefore they could be easily write "you must feed the squid" on their sides to subliminally sugest that divers feed them.

Did anyone ever see the famous wild octopus with the 'BP' (British Petroleum) emblem on it ? The emblem was on the oxygen tank of the camerman, and I guess the 'puss thought that it was safest to look like the diver (creatures don't generally attack unharmed creatures of similar species and size)

The 'mimmic octopus' goes one better - pretending to be the PREDATOR of the thing that's too near it - not just colour, but shape and behaviour too. Awesome eh?
Kind of like an ISP redirecting web application probes to return content from the FBI website :-)