All Shades Of Green In Wide, Brown Land  

I really enjoyed this story from this morning's Sydney Morning Herald, so I'll start on a light note.

"YOU want to know what's hot right now?" the Zeitgeist asked. "You are. I am. We all are. That's one of the benefits of global warming." The Zeitgeist smiled, then ordered an espresso shot. I did the same.

"I'm no meteorologist," he continued, "I just know which way the wind is blowing. And here's what I've noticed: global warming is the hot topic and suddenly there's only one side to be on. As of five minutes ago, anyone who argues against climate change looks like a flat-earther.

"Even John Howard, that devotee of the tepid, is warming to the idea. Whether it was Al Gore's film, or whether he's worried he'll soon need a snorkel and mask to watch his Menzies' Magic Moments DVD at Kirribilli, he's changed his tune. Not that he's doing much about it. The PM would still choose a keyhole probe over the Kyoto Protocol.

"And the Opposition? When Kevin Rudd took over as Labor leader this week, he promised Labor would offer 'a clear alternative on climate change'. Rudd says he'll elevate Peter Garrett to his front bench. 'Labor will take action to avoid dangerous climate change and protect our children's future,' says Garrett. But then he would, wouldn't he? His bed's been burning for years.

"In NSW, the big issue for Labor is Anvil Hill in the Hunter. A decision is due from the planning minister this month on whether to approve the new coalmine. The greenies say coal's name is mud, but Labor reckons you can tackle climate change without reducing Australia's reliance on coal. Labor is, after all, the party that represents coalminers.

"Meanwhile, no announcement is expected about a far-reaching new initiative to harness solar energy out the back of Bourke. When it comes to solar, governments are still slipping, slopping and slapping. Why are they so scared of the sun? Seems the land has to turn even browner before its leaders turn deep green.

"Still, not everyone is paying lip service and procrastinating. Greg Hunt, the PM's parliamentary secretary for the environment, advocates developing alternative energy sources, promoting hybrid cars and improving energy efficiency. He also promotes reforestation, clean-air laws and carbon trading. Now all he has to avoid is crashing a gas-guzzler into a hybrid car, as an embarrassed presidential aide just did on The West Wing."

The coffees arrived and I took a sip. Mine was burnt. "It's funny," the Zeitgeist said. "We live in an age of emails and mobiles, of broadband and BlackBerries, of unprecedented communication, and what's everyone talking about? The weather."

The Herald also has a piece on the Anvil Hill coal mine saga.

On green issues, centralism could deliver genuine leadership, applied unflinchingly in the long-term interests of nation and planet. It could see this vast continent husbanded as a single intricate ecosystem, with roads and airports, land releases and wind farms located accordingly. It could end the ceaseless blame-shifting and finger-pointing that passes for state-commonwealth relations and concentrate our meagre political talent in a single pool.

Such leadership would require abstraction, even altruism, enabling decision-makers to act as if neither they nor their mates were personally involved. And that's positively un-Australian.

At state level, meanwhile, the Land and Environment Court supported the student activist Peter Gray and his novice pro bono silk in their battle against NSW's ever more Goliath-esque Planning Minister. The proposal was for an open-cut coalmine at Anvil Hill, near Muswellbrook, submitted under Part 3A of the much-scarred Environmental Planning and Assessment Act (1979). Gray argued that the state should consider the climate-change effects of not just extracting but burning the coal. The court agreed.

For the court, as well as Gray, this was little short of heroic. The Land and Environment Court is traditionally the poor cousin of courts. It doesn't get to earth-shatter often. But Justice Nicola Pain's judgement that ministers must consider the public interest - including global climate change - in their decisions may change that. "There are three reasons," she said, "why the minister … must take into account the public interest when operating under Pt 3A."

First, she said, the minister promised Parliament last year "that Part 3A of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act … provides better outcomes for the community and the environment without unreasonable cost to the proponent".

Second, because the projects in question are "major infrastructure or projects of state or regional planning significance". And third, because the minister is required under the constitution to act "for the good management of the public affairs of NSW". This gives the Government a duty of care towards us and opens it to all sorts of potential action for failure to do so.

Which is why the Government will appeal. And why parallels are drawn with California's climate-change action against leading car makers. Commentators point to early anti-tobacco litigation, blazing the classic defendant trajectory from denial through deception to defeat.

Back in NSW, the implications are still resonating. The original act (1979) was relatively transparent but slowly thickened with age, as legislation does. Backyard additions would wait months or years before being plastered with perhaps hundreds of conditions of consent.

Last year, in desperation, the Government drafted Part 3A. But instead of letting the small stuff out the bottom for as-of-right approval, it pushed the biggest projects out the top for ministerial fast-tracking, removing them from public scrutiny and putting enormous pressure on the minister. Previously, Anvil Hill would have been subject to rigorous environmental standards. Under Part 3A, and the extra loopholes whipped through Parliament in October, all standards are discretionary.

Beneath the mine's 3700 bush-clad hectares sit 150 million tonnes of coal. Extraction will damage more than 2200 hectares and produce 167,574 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. That's the proponent's own assessment.

The question for the court was whether the minister should have required the proponent, Centennial Hunter, to evaluate the climate-change effect of the 27 million tonnes of carbon dioxide produced each year when the coal is burnt as fuel, although 60 per cent of this will be outside Australia. Has "think globally act locally" become a duty of care?

Our Prime Minister thinks not, habitually arguing that Australia's global-warming contribution is so small we may as well go on doing it. Katie Brassil, for Centennial Hunter, agrees: "Anvil Hill will contribute less than 0.1 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, globally." But is this, in fact, so small? Even 0.1 per cent of the Stern review's estimated $9.1 trillion cost of climate change, gives $9.1 billion. From just one mine.

So the Upper Hunter can send its blessings to the court. Might need to, in view of the dam at Tillegra, approved as a climate-change measure by Parliament in the same pre-election rush as the planning loopholes. Then, if that doesn't scare 'em, Howard has a nice big nuclear reactor poised for Port Stephens. That'll show them grape growers.

I got another email from the future from James Woolsey's merry men in the mail today - this one (Vol 9, Number 17) has the usual assortment of interesting links, with the relevant ones quoted below (most of the stuff I've left out is still in my general realms of interest but I'm going to try and keep vaguely on topic for a change).

Woolsey himself came in for quite a drubbing in the comments at RI today, but I'm going on a tinfoil diet for a while and really can't see anything sinister in TAI's research (especially as its aligned with almost everything I write about, minus the cranky diatribes) - though I'm sure the content would probably alarm traditionalist tinfoil types every bit as much as the backers would alarm leftie ones. I'm going to theorise that Woolsey (like a lot of us amateur prognosticators) likes having some objective analysis of what the future holds in order to position himself and his phalanx of alphabet soup organisations appropriately - and personally I'll take a geo-green attitude towards the future over the old neocon / Committee on the ever Present Danger one any day.

DID YOU KNOW THAT...

* Human saliva produces a pain-killing protein six times as powerful as morphine.
* Water shortages affect 538 million people in northern China.
* On average, each year 200,000 people in the United States are hospitalized from influenza virus infection, and 36,000 of them die.
* The average U.S. office worker prints 1,200 pages of paper a month.

NEW REALITIES

Greatest Mass Extinction Gave Oceans a Face Lift -- (Live Science -- November 23, 2006)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20061124/
sc_livescience/greatestmassextinctiongaveoceansafacelift
The largest extinction in Earth's history not only wiped out 95 percent of sea creatures and 70 percent of land animals, it also gave the oceans a fundamental "face lift," according to a new study. Before the end-Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago, the seas were home to a balance of both ecologically simple communities and complex ones. Following the extinction, complex communities displaced simple ones, coming to outnumber them three-to-one, a pattern that prevails today.

Hybrid Butterflies High in the Sierra -- (Physorg -- December 1, 2006)
http://www.physorg.com/news84206464.html
High in the Sierra Nevada mountains, a new species of butterfly has been determined to be a hybrid of two existing species. It is the first time that this type of species formation has been shown in animals. Researchers calculate that the hybrids arose about half a million years ago, when L. melissa and L. idas came into contact in the Sierra Nevada.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Physics Promises Wireless Power -- (BBC -- November 15, 2006)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6129460.stm
Researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires. The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many meters.

Xerox Developing Erasable Paper System -- (International Herald Tribune -- November 27, 2006)
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/27/business/xerox.php
Researchers now have a prototype copier that will produce documents on a specially coated paper with a light yellow tint. The process works without toner and produces a low-resolution document that appears to be printed with purple ink. The printed information on the document "disappears" within 16 hours. The documents can be reused more quickly by simply placing them in the copier paper tray. Individual pieces of paper have been reused up to 50 times, and the only limit in the process appears to be paper life.

Nike+ IPod = Surveillance -- (Wired -- November 30, 2006)
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72202-0.html?tw=wn_index_16
If you enhance your workout with the new Nike+ iPod Sport Kit, you may be making yourself a surveillance target. A report from four University of Washington researchers reveals that security flaws in the new RFID-powered device from Nike and Apple make it easy for tech-savvy stalkers, thieves and corporations to track your movements. With just a few hundred dollars and a little know-how, someone could even plot your running routes on a Google map without your knowledge.

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Energy Firms Come to Terms with Climate Change -- (Washington Post -- November 25, 2006)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/11/24/AR2006112401361.html?referrer=email
While the political debate over global warming continues, top executives at many of the nation's largest energy companies have accepted the scientific consensus about climate change and see federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions as inevitable.

Global Warming Goes to Court -- (International Herald Tribune -- November 28, 2006)
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/28/opinion/edwarm.php
A group of states is suing the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to properly do its job. These states, backed by environmental groups and scientists, say that the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to impose limits on greenhouse gases emitted by new cars. The Bush Administration contends that these gasses are not "air pollutants" under the Clean Air Act

Predicting the Timing of Major Earthquakes -- (Physorg -- December 1, 2006)
http://www.physorg.com/news84206626.html
Forecasting when a major earthquake will erupt -- within a window of two to three years -- could be possible, based on new mathematical studies. The new approach narrows the time window of predictions, but does so at the cost of expanding the forecast over a broader geographical area.

Tibet's Disappearing Glaciers Threaten China -- (Bloomberg -- November 14, 2006)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=
20601086&sid=as.VsLN0AqhA&refer=latin_america
Tibet's glaciers may disappear within 100 years due to global warming, threatening China's overused and polluted water supplies. Almost all glaciers in China have already shown substantial melting, which could have devastating consequences for literally hundreds of millions of farmers in China's western regions.

Emissions of Key Greenhouse Gas Stabilize -- (New Scientist -- November 22, 2006)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10643
-emissions-of-key-greenhouse-gas-stabilise.html
Levels of the second most important greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere -methane - have leveled off. Between 1978 to 1987, methane levels increased by 11% - an average growth rate of more than 1% a year. Over the following decade, growth rates slowed to between 0.3% and 0.6% a year. From December 1998 to December 2005, they dropped down to near-zero, ranging from a 0.3% increase to a 0.2% decrease.

Dutch Bask in Warmest Autumn in Three Centuries -- (AFP -- November 19, 2006)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061119/sc_afp/netherlandsclimate
The autumn of 2006 has been the warmest in the Netherlands for over 300 years, 12.5 percent hotter than the previous year which was already a record. The average temperature for the months leading up to November 17 was up to 13.5 degrees Celsius, as compared to 12 degrees last year, which was already the hottest autumn on record.

Global Warming May Explain India's Extreme Storm Rise -- (AFP -- November 30, 2006)
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Global_Warming
_May_Explain_India_Extreme_Storm_Rise_999.html
A rise in the number and strength of "extreme" rainstorms over the past fifty years in central India could be linked to global warming. While average annual rainfall has generally gone unchanged, there was a 10 percent increase each decade in the number of heavy rainstorms (more than 100 millimeters a day) and a doubling over the five decades of very heavy storms (more than 150 millimeters a day).

TERRORISM, SECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

Registered Traveler Program Is Fake Security -- (Wired -- November 30, 2006)
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2006/11/registered_trav.html
The Registered Traveler program, which was just cleared for deployment the nation's airports, has nothing to do with security and is simply a way to pay $100 to cut to the front of the line. While $28 out of the approximately $100 fee goes to a security check performed by the Department of Homeland Security, there's actually no rational reason to do the check other than to make the program look like it's security-related.

U.S. Finds Iraq Insurgency Has Funds to Sustain Itself -- (NY Times -- November 26, 2006)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112606Z.shtml
The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising between $70-200 million a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded. This will almost certainly damp hopes for an improvement in the insurgent situation anytime in the near future.

JUST FOR FUN

Michigan Teen Creates Nuclear Fusion -- (UPI -- November 19, 2006)
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20061119-071856-1844r
An ambitious teenager in Rochester Hills, Mich., is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion - combining atoms to create energy. 17-year-old Thiago Olson set up a machine in his parents' garage and has been working exhaustively for more than two years. His machine creates nuclear fusion on a small scale.

Scientists Levitate Small Animals -- (Live Science -- November 29, 2006)
http://www.livescience.com/technology/061129_acoustic_levitation.html
Scientists have now levitated small live animals using sounds that are, well, uplifting. In the past, researchers have used ultrasound fields to successfully levitate globs of the heaviest solid and liquid—iridium and mercury, respectively. The question arose, "What will happen if a living animal is put into the acoustic field?", and these researchers decided to find an answer.

A FINAL QUOTE...

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. -Isaac Asimov

The ABC has a report on solar sliver research being done at the ANU.

The cost of producing solar panels could be sliced by more than 60% thanks to technology being developed by Australian researchers, physicists heard today.

Professor Andrew Blakers, director of the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems at the Australian National University, says 'sliver technology' could reduce the price of solar power to below the current retail price of electricity. And he says this could make it cost-effective for householders to buy solar panels rather than electricity from the grid.

Blakers describes the latest refinements in the technology at the Australian Institute of Physics conference in Brisbane.

The system works by taking a standard solar cell about 1 millimetre thick and cutting it into tiny slices that are just 120 micrometres wide. "Imagine a standard solar cell is a loaf of bread. When you put it out in the sun it generates energy based on its surface area," Blakers says. "Now imagine you cut that loaf up into slices and lay them horizontally. You get a lot more surface area."

This technique allows researchers to use much smaller amounts of expensive silicon to generate the same amount of electricity. This can also keep manufacturing costs down, as all the processing steps normally carried out on solar cells are done while the slices are still in the 'loaf'.

"We're looking at major reductions in the total cost without the need for major scientific breakthroughs," Blakers says. "It's about doing a good engineering job using known scientific principles, in contrast to some other technologies."

The sliver technology is also efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, he says. In recent months, the researchers have achieved efficiencies over 20%, making it the world's most efficient commercial thin-film solar cell.

The ABC also has a bizarre report that suggests that the new moon base proposed by NASA will help power the post fossil fuel era by providing us with a supply of helium 3. I am a little bit skeptical about this (yes - you detect sarcasm), even though I think the moon base is a cool idea (albeit one you'd probably need to shut down both the Iraq war and death star construction to fund).

A potential gas source found on the moon's surface could hold the key to meeting future energy demands as the earth's fossil fuels dry up in the coming decades, scientists say.

Mineral samples from the moon contain abundant quantities of helium-3, a variant of the gas used in lasers and refrigerators.

"When compared to the earth the moon has a tremendous amount of helium-3," Lawrence Taylor, a director of the US Planetary Geosciences Institute, said. "When helium-3 combines with deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) the fusion reaction proceeds at a very high temperature and it can produce awesome amounts of energy. Just 25 tonnes of helium, which can be transported on a space shuttle, is enough to provide electricity for the US for one full year."

Helium-3 is deposited on the lunar surface by solar winds and would have to be extracted from moon soil and rocks. To extract helium-3 gas the rocks have to be heated above 800 degrees Celsius.

Dr Taylor says 200 million tonnes of lunar soil would produce one tonne of helium. Only 10 kilograms of helium-3 are available on earth.

Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam has told the International Conference on Exploration and Utilisation of the Moon that the barren planet held about 1 million tonnes of helium-3. "The moon contains 10 times more energy in the form of helium-3 than all the fossil fuels on the earth," Mr Kalam said.

The world's largest cargo ship, the Emma Maersk has been launched. The energy efficiency of shipping has been much overlooked in a lot of peak oil discussion - one aspect the relocalisation movement might like to consider is that coastal regions will still be able to trade with one another quite easily in a low oil world, even if my pure clean energy utopia doesn't eventuate. Note that they are building 10 more of these behemoths.

After months of speculation overseas about her alleged dimensions and capacity, $38 billion, Denmark-based Maersk Line—the Microsoft of the shipping industry—has officially launched the Emma Maersk, now the largest container ship on the planet. How large? For starters, she's a quarter-mile bow to stern (1,303 ft.), longer than the Saratoga or any aircraft carrier. The ship also reportedly carries the largest diesel engines ever manufactured.

More important, her capacity is estimated to be nearly 14,000 TEU, far and away the largest of the industry. (The company lists official capacity at a little over 11,000, but has a long history of under-reporting these figures for all its vessels.) Most Oakland-bound shipping vessels from Asia and other international ports are toting loads between 4,000 and 5,000. Now for the Microsoft comparison: Maersk already boats twice the overall fleet capacity of its nearest rival, and its parent company, A.P. Moller-Maersk Group, owns 40 container ports around the world. Why all of this matters? Maersk keeps expanding the economies of scale in shipping, a key driver of trade globalization. Emma cruises at an amazing 27 knots. More amazingly, she requires a crew of just 13. Result? According to the Financial Times, "it often now costs more to ship a container by road 100km from a port to its final destination than it does to move the container by sea from China to Europe." Maersk, meanwhile, is building 10 more sister ships, just like Emma.

Nate at The Oil Drum has a post on a report on "national security consequences of oil dependency" by the CFR. I've only skimmed the summary but it looks to me a lot like business as usual (but with some recognition of the peak oil problem) - a range of measures that half heartedly tackle oil dependency on the demand side and rely mostly on political and military pressure to enable US access to the remaining oil. I'm not sure in an era where the US dollar is looking shaky and American prestige has probably never been lower around the world that this is the right approach (especially when there are a lot more measures that could be taken to achieve the energy independence that they don't seem all that enamoured by - they do at least recognise some of the solutions but there is no urgency in pushing the uptake of them).

With little media fanfare as of yet, a major report by the political heavyweight think tank Council on Foreign Relations was recently released. "Independent Task Force Report #58 - National Security Consequences of Oil Dependency" paints a somewhat more urgent picture of our energy situation than most other oil and energy research coming out of Washington.

Though there is no mention of the words "Peak Oil' in the 90 page report, to the astute reader it is clear that this group of experts, led by ex-CIA chiefs, John Deutsch and James Schlesinger, understand that the era of cheap energy is ending, and that our dependency on oil has major geopolitical implications with few easy answers.

The bombshell in this report is the admission that the United States will be unable to achieve energy independence, and should focus instead on reducing our dependency on oil.

Though this concept is nothing new to readers of this site, coming from a highly respected mainstream think tank (CFR), recommendations such as conservation, gasoline taxes, and gasoline rationing might be an uncomfortable but necessary wake up call to some of the conservative (cornucopian?) decisionmakers in our nations capital. Indeed, this report may be the next integral step of political eye-opening (the first being the Hirsch Report last year) that hastens our national efforts towards addressing our energy addiction.

James K Galbraith has an article on the melting dollar in The Guardian.

The melting away of the dollar is like global warming: you can't say that any one heat wave proves the trend, and there might be a cold snap next week. Still, over time, evidence builds up. And so, as the greenback approaches two to the pound, old-timers will remember the fall of sterling, under similar conditions of deficits and imperial retreat, a generation back. We have to ask: is the American financial empire on the brink? Let's take stock.

It's clear that Ben Bernanke got buffaloed, early on, by the tripe about his need to "establish credibility with the markets." There never was an inflation threat, apart from an oil-price bubble that popped last summer. Long-term interest rates would have reflected the threat if it existed, but they never did. So the Fed overshot, and raised rates too much. Now long rates are falling; Bernanke faces an inverting yield curve and even bank economists are starting to call his next move. That will be to start cutting rates, after a decent interval, sometime next year.

Once again, all you monetary policy buffs, in unison please:

The grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men.

He marched them up to the top of the hill. And marched them down again.

This is not good news for the dollar.

The US economy is going soft faster than the inflation hawks and growth optimists thought. Housing has been in free-fall for months. With the new Congress anxious to display "fiscal responsibility" - cue Robert Rubin who has moved in very fast on Nancy Pelosi - there won't be any help next year from them. If business investment falls off, recession could hit in 2007 or 2008. With that fear in mind, gloomy profit expectations are setting in, and that's not good for the dollar.

The US trade deficit is near all-time records. By itself, this proves nothing: the US supplies reserves to the world system, and it can run any deficit that the world is prepared to finance. But, sooner or later the world may start to get other ideas.

So here's the big question: is the age of the dollar economy lurching toward an end? Are China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and other big holders of T-bonds about to start a rush, or even a stately promenade, toward the exits? Let's hope not, because the world is unprepared to replace the dollar with anything else. The euro is not suited for the job, and a joint dollar-euro system would need better central bankers than either America or Europe has got. An end to the dollar system would therefore be chaotic, inflationary, and very tough on world trade. The best argument for the dollar has always been: it's not in anyone's interest to bring it down.

Could it happen, though? Yes, it could. And it could be connected to that other unfolding disaster. As the "Pax Americana" goes to hell in Iraq - producing a nervous breakdown among the pro-war elites - let's remember that security and finance are linked. Typically, the country that provides global economic security enjoys the use of its financial assets in world trade. And when the security situation changes, that privilege can be revoked. The consequences are unpleasant. Ask the British: after the sterling area folded, it took a generation for the UK to come all the way back.

That is partly why Economists for Peace and Security - a group I chair - opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. As far back as 2002, we understood - as the economically illiterate neo-imperialists did not - that a world system very favourable to America was on the line. And it was not, as they seemed to think, just a matter of military might. We knew that if the war undermined confidence in the power, good faith and common sense of the United States, that could lead toward disastrous changes on the financial front.

Four years in and with no end in sight, that risk may finally be catching up to the almighty dollar.

One last note on energy - I've been blathering a lot about thermal solar and the solar revolution a lot lately, with one example being the idea that European energy needs could be met by building thermal solar installations and hooking these up to the European energy grid (a much more attractive prospect geopolitically than becoming a captive customer at the end of one of Mr Putin's gas pipelines).

This is really just an example of one of Buckminster Fuller's old dreams - the global energy grid, which I think is an idea that may be worth resurrecting - a planet where every region builds a swathe of wind and thermal solar generation capacity and feeds it into the grid. The only part of the supply chain that you need to defend against energy monopolists then becomes the grid itself - and this regulation is by and large already in place...

Some 30 years ago, Buckminster Fuller came up with a plan to plug all the world's continents into the same electrical grid. The idea was to let power flow between, say, Siberia and the northwestern US, or Norway and Laos. Energy companies dismissed the notion as pie in the sky - and then proceeded to build such a grid. To get the most use of their generation capacity and to maintain an emergency reserve, power companies found it efficient to connect their grids to their neighbor's, who then connected to their neighbor's.

The result, according to Peter Meisen of the Global Energy Network Institute, is that the electricity grids of all the nations of North and South America should be interconnected within the next 10 years. The Eastern Hemisphere could follow a decade later, as companies like Eskom, the largest energy firm in South Africa, plow ahead with plans to install high-capacity transmission lines across Africa and into Europe.

Once the grid is fully functional, the only excuse for power shortages will be greed. When demand is high in one region, it's almost certain to be low in another. By making electric power as easily transferrable as data, analysts expect a global grid to smooth the market spikes out of the world's most useful commodity.

Given England's stunning collpase in day 5 of the second Ashes test yesterday, I thought I'd close with this tale of some poor English cricket fan in London getting harrassed by big brother for daring to walk around carrying a cricket ball.

In the hands of Shane Warne, a cricket ball is an offensive weapon. A total of 650 fallen wickets prove it.

Police on a London Underground station thought it was an equally dangerous item in the hands of Chris Hurd, a 28-year-old City accountant who occasionally bowls leg spin for his local team in Belsize Park, North London.

Mr Hurd claimed that he had been merely holding the ball as he rode the escalator at Baker Street station in London when he was stopped by a female British Transport Police officer and subjected to a ten-minute inquisition and allegations that he was carrying “a very hard object”, which he should not have done in public as it was a potentially lethal weapon. He had, he said, taken the ball to work because he planned to watch the opening Ashes Test between England and Australia in a pub with friends later in the evening. Earlier in the day he had been throwing it in the air to strengthen his spin-bowling muscles.

But by the time he got to the station, he said, he was holding it firmly in his hand. He accused the officer of ridiculous overreaction.

“There was a policewoman on the step below me and she was staring at the ball all the way up. As we got to the top she tapped me on the shoulder and said she wanted a word.”

Mr Hurd, who works for Ernst and Young, the accountants, said the officer asked him if he knew he was carring a very hard object and he replied: “Yes, it’s a cricket ball.”

She confiscated the ball while she questioned Mr Hurd for ten minutes, gave him a verbal warning and filled out a stop-and-search report.

“I told her I was only carrying it because the Ashes were about to start and I was very excited. I was wearing a very boring suit and looked every inch the bean-counter I am. It is not as if I was unshaven and looked dangerous. But she was completely humourless and showed no understanding of my excitement,” Mr Hurd said.

“When she let me go and gave me my ball back, she said she was being extremely lenient with me. She failed to realise that I presented no threat whatsoever and I left feeling completely misunderstood.”

Mr Hurd said the encounter had shaken his faith in the police, and had caused him to sympathise with members of ethnic minorities who were subjected to stop-and-searches.

“How can a cricket ball be an offensive weapon? I don’t think it would be anyone’s weapon of choice, and all I was doing was holding it. It wasted ten minutes of time for both of us, and left her with paperwork.”