Gazpromghast and the Solar Revolution  

BldgBlog has a post on some of the designs for the Gazprom tower from which Tsar Vladimir will oversee St Petersburg.

Because Gazprom City "is part of a longer range plan by Russian President Vladimir Putin to boost the prestige of his home city," however, it seems unlikely that the project will be held back. This, after all, may be St. Petersburg's newest architectural moment: "Much of the development that has occurred in recent years has benefited Moscow, whereas St. Petersburg has seen little change. Only recently, with the celebration of the city's 300th birthday in 2003, did the city begin awakening from its centuries-long sleep. But even as high-tech projects and a new theater designed by Sir Norman Foster have gone ahead, major changes to the city center, with its numerous UNESCO-protected royal residences and palaces, are considered taboo."

In any case, the winner of the competition will be announced on December 1st, and the actual tower should be fully constructed by 2016.

Until that time, here's a quick bet that at least one person out there – whether they're a novelist, a filmmaker, a graphic artist or even just a refreshingly ambitious architectural student – will design, write, film, or draw some futuristic sci-fi dystopia called Gazprom City, simply because the name is so cool. Of course, you'll probably get sued. But think Perdido Street Station – described by this reviewer as "Metropolis meeting Gormenghast in the heart of Dickensian London" – goes to Renaissance Paris via, perhaps, Nostromo... and you get the picture.

So: Gazprom City. Artists and writers, show us what will happen there.

While Russia / Gazprom is the world's largest source of gas, they seem to think that this isn't enough to power their future, so a nuclear reactor building binge is planned in order to save gas for export. I find the floating reactor idea really creepy (though I guess you could say this is just an oversized version of all those nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers floating around out there already). I wonder what a Chernobyl event in the Baltic sea will be like ?

Russia plans to build 42 new nuclear reactors by 2030 as part of an ambitious program to revive its atomic power industry, the top nuclear official said Tuesday.

Federal Nuclear Agency director Sergei Kiriyenko said at a news conference that Russia would need to build at least two nuclear reactors a year to meet the goal.

Russia now has 31 reactors at 10 nuclear power plants, accounting for 16-17 percent of Russia's electricity generation, and President Vladimir Putin has called for raising the share to 25 percent.

Kiriyenko said the government would earmark some US$24 billion (€18.3 billion) for building new nuclear reactors through 2015, and that Rosenergoatom, the state-controlled agency in charge of the nation's nuclear plants, would provide another US$26 billion (€20 billion) through 2030 as nuclear power generation becomes increasingly profitable.

Expanding the share of nuclear energy would allow the nation to save more natural gas for export, Kiriyenko said. The government has kept Russia's domestic gas prices at a fraction of export prices, and gas accounts for about half of electricity generation now.

Kiriyenko said that nuclear industries would also develop floating nuclear power plants to deliver energy to remote northern areas and also for exports to other nations, particularly those which did not need high-power nuclear reactors. He said that such reactors could stay afloat near the shore or put on land.

Gar Lipow at Grist has some notes on the Guardian's recent article on using solar thermal power to provide energy to Europe (the Sahara vs Gazprom showdown). One aspect of solar thermal not mentioned is the ability to use thermal storage to store generated energy for a time.

The Guardian had a story yesterday on concentrating solar collectors. They have caught on to something I've been saying for a while: concentrating mirrors and heat engines can produce solar electricity less expensively than photovoltaic cells. Currently, we are able to store heat less expensively than electricity.

Whether the electricity comes from direct sun, or stored heat, Dr. Gerhard Knies and Dr. Franz Trieb are quoted pointing out that the lower temperature waste heat from electrical generation by this means can purify water and power air conditioning, providing host countries with additional value.

Since this type of power is only economical in deserts with strong sun and few cloudy days, the power has to be transmitted long distances -- which Knies and Trieb say is practical. Power loss even between Libya and London would be quite reasonable.

Joel Makower at WorldChanging wonders if energy efficiency can be as sexy as solar - noting that the gains to be had from energy efficiency initiatives are enormous. Of course, in an ideal world we'd be pursuing both courses of action and retired fossil fuled vehicles and power stations. Joel also has a collection of energy efficiency resources posted at his own blog.

It's long been axiomatic that energy efficiency is the awkward stepchild of renewables -- that is, that it's sexier to install cutting-edge renewable-energy technologies like solar panels than to engage in more prosaic (and less-visible) measures to get more value out of each BTU or barrel.

That mindset has bedeviled proponents of efficiency -- people like Amory Lovins, who for some thirty years has promulgated the notion that we can solve our energy and climate challenges by harnessing existing technologies that allow us to garner ever-greater economic productivity out of fewer barrels of oil, tons of coal, cubic feet of natural gas, and pounds of uranium. (Lovins' 1997 white paper, Climate: Making Money and Making Sense (download - PDF) remains one of the best articulations of how companies and economies can profitably harness efficiency.)

The world is ripe with efficiency opportunities. ("The low-hanging fruit," as Lovins puts it, "is mushing up around our ankles.") His Rocky Mountain Institute points out that in industrial settings, "there are abundant opportunities to save 70% to 90% of the energy and cost for lighting, fan, and pump systems; 50% for electric motors; and 60% in areas such as heating, cooling, office equipment, and appliances." In general, up to 75% of the electricity used in the U.S. today could be saved with efficiency measures that cost less than the electricity itself.

A report (download - registration required) just published by the McKinsey Global Institute, a think tank within the venerable McKinsey & Co. consulting empire, brings new life to Lovins' and others' assertions, making the case that "there are sufficient economically viable opportunities for energy-productivity improvements that could keep global energy-demand growth at less than 1 percent per annum" -- less than half of the 2.2 percent average growth anticipated through 2020 in a business-as-usual scenario.

Joel also has a look at the greening of Hollywood.

The entertainment industry and the environmental movement have always had a strong relationship, one that, for my money, is double-edged. On the one hand, Hollywood has enormous communications clout, to say the least. Through movies, TV shows, fashion, and celebrity status, the industry and its members have both mirrored and fomented social change. Hollywood helped break racial barriers through movies, popularized the antiwar movement, and shined a Kleig light on everything from political corruption to nuclear waste.

On the other hand, the last thing the environmental movement -- always struggling for relevance as a mainstream force in America and elsewhere -- needs is a closer alliance with the left-leaning Hollywood elite.

Still, honor is due -- and no one is better at honoring the show business crowd than themselves -- so it's great to see that Variety, the industry standard, this week has published a special section on the greening of Hollywood. It's got the usual array of celebrity, including profiles of 20 leading showbiz eco-activists, a piece on the move by studio and production houses to go carbon neutral (turns out that Hollywood is the second-largest emitter of CO2 in Los Angeles, just behind the petroleum industry), and a piece featuring the growth of green buildings among studios.

There's also an article about the upcoming wave of green TV shows -- "a jam-packed reservoir of eco-friendly programs are in the works for the coming year," as Variety puts it. Everyone from ABC to the Weather Channel has some new program in the works.

...

It's unclear whether any of these will actually get greenlit. There are just so many sponsors -- and so many viewers -- ready, willing, and able to commit to environmental causes. But I'm rooting that at least one of them catches fire and helps to build a new green meme. If that happens, the "good" Hollywood -- the consciousness-raising communications machine -- will win out over the cult of eco-celebrity.

Dave Roberts at Grist has an excellent interview with fund manager and former corporate buyout specialist Travis Bradford on his book Solar Revolution.

question Your book's central claim is pretty bold.

answer Thanks for recognizing that.

It's not just that we're moving toward alternatives, it's that we're moving toward distributed [power generation] as well. If both of those are true, solar is the only viable option.

Solar is different from other energy technologies in that it delivers energy at the point of use, directly to the end user. That allows it to circumvent the entire supply chain. It's not another option for a utility, it's a competitor to a utility -- the first time utilities have really had a competitor.

The best way to describe it is with an anecdote about cell phones. We used to have these monopoly telephone infrastructure players. They controlled everything, and they had all the processing power at central switching stations. You had these dummy terminals that you just picked up; you had a connection, but no brains. All the brains were in the center of the network. And then these cell-phone producers came along and, in the Telecommunications Act of '96, were given access to the telephone grid. They began to go completely around the supply chain and offer competing services to the same customers, wireless and easier. The telephone utilities ... first they ignored it, then they tried to fight it legislatively, and when they lost that they tried to fight it economically. Eventually they just decided, screw it, we're going to buy them. Today those are the most profitable parts of their business. That's the transformation.

This also happened in computers. We went from large, centralized mainframes with dummy terminals to a distributed hybrid architecture.

Solar is slowly going to begin to unwind the existing utility economics, to the point where utilities decide they have to get in or they risk losing their core business -- exactly the transformations we've lived through in the last 20 years.

The solar revolution does not require new breakthroughs in technology. You could do it with the technology we have, scaling it up and learning how to do it incrementally better every year -- which is what naturally happens with scale.

question Solar is mainly used for electricity, which represents just over a third of energy use. How do you account for transportation fuels?

answer We'll never solve the problem of transportation until we reconnect the transportation and electricity infrastructures. There's not enough liquid fuels.

I'm not a big fan of biofuels -- on close examination their environmental impact is wretched. What it does is export part of our energy price for transportation through the grocery store, right? We end up subsidizing the cost of our transportation infrastructure in the price of food stocks. Biofuels will solve some problems, but at the end of the day there's not enough land in the entire Mississippi River Valley to meet our transportation needs. And then where would we get food from? There's cellulosic, but that's only another 10 percent.

There are real capacity constraints in any transportation-fuel option until we reconnect it with the electricity infrastructure. You do that either with plug-in hybrids or with electrolyzed hydrogen. My guess is that batteries will be better for transportation purposes, and electrolyzed hydrogen for stationary applications, because fuel cells on site are much easier to make than fuel cells with the thrust needed in automobiles.

Other than industrial processes, we use thermal applications in heating and hot water. There are electric analogs to both of them. We can have electric hot water heaters just as easily as gas hot water heaters. We can have electric home heating. Historically it was believed that thermal applications were about a third the price of electricity-based heating applications, but that was based on $2 per thousand cubic-foot natural gas and whatever the prevailing price of electricity was. These have come a whole lot more in parity, and in a lot of places in the world, electric heat's the way they go.

Everything has to reconnect. The infrastructures that separated -- first at the beginning of the century, and again in the middle of the century for natural-gas infrastructure -- have to reconnect. And we'll need a lot more electricity to drive that.

question A lot more. What do you do about coal?

answer Coal is the enemy of the human race.

question There's my pull quote. Do you think solar's going to beat coal?

answer Solar's going to change the electricity infrastructure in a way that will make coal unnecessary. This distributed architecture is going to get to the point where wind and geothermal, where available, take over a lot of the baseload needs; solar will meet a lot of the peak needs, and some of the base needs during the day. The combination of these portfolios will make coal irrelevant. Wind and thermal are nearly as cheap as coal, if not cheaper, and coal still enjoys tremendous subsidies. Under certain circumstances nuclear power would be OK, but I highly doubt those circumstances can be met.

Solar is a universal system available inversely with the wealth of the nation. The richest countries have less and the poorest countries have more.

question It's frequently said that the U.S. is falling behind in 21st-century energy industries. Is it true?

answer I often claim that we are in danger of trading our addiction to Middle Eastern oil and Russian natural gas for an addiction to Chinese polysilicon and solar cells. That is a risk.

But if you look at where the materials come from for the solar industry today, while a lot of the cells are made in Germany and Japan and a few in China, a majority of the silicon they use comes from the United States. We're shipping them the feed stocks, and we're making a tremendous amount of money doing it. That's where all the profit is in the supply chain right now, because of the shortage.

The U.S. has lost the glamorous parts of the supply chain. But the profitable and the potentially path-breaking parts like thin-film solar are still here. If we don't get in the game, those will go away, too. We are at risk of losing those, but right now we actually have a pretty strong position, at least in solar.

question Are you a "crash and contraction are inevitable" environmentalist or an Amory Lovins-style techno-optimist?

answer I am definitely in the latter family. The way I characterize those two schools of thought are the defense school and the offense school. The defense school is filling the sandbags -- they think we have passed the point of no return, so their strategies to cope are defense-based strategies. My deepest concern is that the defense crowd is right. But I'm not ready to play defense yet.

If we're going to solve the problem, the solar revolution is a necessary and significant component of the solution.

question Will the decentralization of power production be accompanied by a decentralization of political power?

answer Solar power is empowering. All things being equal, people like to control the resources upon which they rely. That's why I spend time thinking about solar technologies rather than centralized, easily controlled technologies. At the end of the day, sustainability includes distributed power and democratization.

I don't think you can describe coal any better than that - "coal: the enemy of the human race". Actually - maybe you can say it better - "coal: the enemy of life".

Jim at The Energy Blog also had a review of this book recently.

In his new book, "Solar Revolution," fund manager and former corporate buyout specialist Travis Bradford says that is happening not so much because solar is the clean, renewable source of energy but because it has proved to be cost-effective. Solar Revolution outlines the path by which the transition to solar technology and sustainable energy practices will occur.

"The shift will happen in years rather than decades and will occur because of fundamental economics."

Although that process could be expedited by more government incentives for the promotion of solar energy use and disincentives for investment in fossil fuels and nuclear power, the inevitable dominance of solar will not depend on government assistance, Bradford writes.

Developments in the photovoltaic (PV) industry over the last ten years have made direct electricity generation from PV cells a cost-effective and feasible energy solution, despite the common view that PV technology appeals only to a premium niche market. Bradford shows that PV electricity today has become the choice of hundreds of thousands of mainstream homeowners and businesses in many markets worldwide, including Japan, Germany, and the American Southwest.

Solar energy will eventually be the cheapest source of energy in nearly all markets and locations because PV can bypass the aging and fragile electricity grid and deliver its power directly to the end user, fundamentally changing the underlying economics of energy. As the scale of PV production increases and costs continue to decline at historic rates, demand for PV electricity will outpace supply of systems for years to come.

Ultimately, the shift from fossil fuels to solar energy will take place not because solar energy is better for the environment or energy security, or because of future government subsidies or as yet undeveloped technology. The solar revolution is already occurring through decisions made by self-interested energy users. The shift to solar energy is inevitable and will be as transformative as the last century's revolutions in information and communication technologies. Solar energy has emerged as the wave of the present for replacing dwindling fossil fuels as the primary source of the world's energy needs.

JCWinnie at After Gutenberg has a post on new developments in solar pv cells using some exotic materials (ie. not silicon) in the quest for greater efficiency.

In November 2002 researchers in the Materials Sciences Division (MSD) of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory learned1 that the band gap of the semiconductor indium nitride is not 2 electron volts (2 eV), as previously thought, but instead is a much lower 0.7 eV. Because the researchers looked elsewhere than expected, they made what one industry insider has described as “a breakthrough scientific discovery that accelerates the concept of full spectrum solutions in the global photo voltaic markets.”

Working with crystal-growing teams at Cornell University and Japan’s Ritsumeikan University, the Berkeley Lab discovered that photons over virtually the full spectrum of sunlight — from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet could be harvested using “a single system of alloys incorporating indium, gallium, and nitrogen”.

Wladek Walukiewicz, who led the collaborators in the search for greater efficiency, has overcome one of the most fundamental limitations: the band gap of the semiconductor from which the cell is made. Four years later developers at Boeing Spectrolab are working with advanced multi-junction PV cells with efficiencies approaching 38%.

Unfortunately, while the solar cells that Spectrolab produces are of very high efficiency, they also are “NASA budget” expensive. As yet, solar panels using Indium Gallium Nitride solar cells cannot compete with typical flat panels intended for household use, e.g., BP 120W solar panel using wafers made of polycrystalline, amorphous silicon.

Nevertheless, there is interest in multi-junction solar cells manufactured by Boeing-Spectrolab or other high-tech firms. For instance, on 21 November Lion Energy signed a letter of intent to purchase solar farm quantities from Pyron Solar. Boeing – Spectrolab multi-junction photo voltaic cells, along with Pyron’s proprietary power electronics and a proprietary system of lenses to concentrate the sun’s energy by 400 times, are the key components of an innovative solar package for high-efficiency conversion of sunlight into electricity that will be utilized at power generation locations in the United States, Germany, India and China.

Renewable Energy Access has an article on glass based solar cells that sounds a lot like XSunX's "power glass". I'd love to build a conservatory out of this stuff one day (it would also be handy for skylights).

Octillion Corp.'s research and development initiatives are under way for the development of a patent-pending technology using nanosilicon photovoltaic (PV) solar cells that can convert normal home and office glass windows into ones capable of converting solar energy into electricity.

These nanosilicon PV solar cells are created through a electrochemical and ultrasound process that produces identically sized (1 to 4 nanometers in diameter) highly luminescent nanoparticles of silicon that provide varying wavelengths of photoluminescence with high quantum down conversion efficiency of short wavelengths (50% to 60%). The process of producing these silicon nanoparticles is supported by 10 issued U.S. patents, 7 pending U.S. patents, 2 issued foreign counterpart patents and 19 pending foreign counterpart patents.

When thin films of silicon nanoparticles are deposited (sprayed) onto silicon substrates, ultraviolet light is absorbed and converted into electrical current. With appropriate connections, the film acts as nanosilicon PV solar cells that have the potential of converting solar radiation to electrical energy.

Octillion's R&D work involves integrating films of silicon nanoparticles on glass surfaces in order to convert solar energy coming through home and office windows into electricity, without losing significant transparency or requiring major changes in manufacturing infrastructure.

The Age has a follow up article to the one which criticised the squandering of Malaysia's oil wealth. I renamed the first one "Pissing Oil Against The Wall" thereby earning myself a small flood of visitors via Google wanting to know more about pissing - these are almost all from France and Italy strangely enough - I never realised there was such an obsession with golden showers in these 2 countries.

At least the Malaysians have plenty of sun, so they should have a bright future in spite of their government's profligacy.

MY LAST column on wasteful government spending in Malaysia (Business, 15/11) generated a furore. I received more than 600 emails from readers, mostly Malaysians (both expatriate and in Malaysia) and nearly all supportive.

The column was the most emailed item on The Age's website for six days straight and it was replicated in dozens of blogs worldwide.

My personal website received more than 50,000 hits. A Malaysian Government minister criticised the column publicly. And the Malaysian Opposition Leader issued a news release in its support.

As if to underscore my points about waste, on the day that my column was published, an assistant minister told the Malaysian Parliament that Malaysia's first astronaut to be sent into space next year aboard a Russian space mission will be tasked to play batu seremban, a traditional Malay children's game played with pebbles, will do some batik painting and will make teh tarik, a type of Malaysian milky tea, all to see how these things can be done without gravity.

The day before, the Government announced that a new RM400 million ($A142 million) palace will be built for Malaysia's king, a position that is almost entirely ceremonial.

And the week before a groundbreaking ceremony was held for a second bridge between Penang and the Malaysian peninsular costing RM3 billion, a bridge that many consider unnecessary.

Where would the money be better spent?

Education is the obvious answer. But not on school buildings, for it matters less in what children are educated than how. And how children are educated in Malaysia is a national disaster.

Learning is largely by rote. In an email to me last week, one Malaysian recalled her schooling as being in a system all about spoon-feeding, memory work and regurgitation.

Students are not encouraged to think for themselves and they become adults who swallow everything they're told.

Even the existing system fails many. It has just emerged that in Sabah state, only 46 per cent of the students who had sat the UPSR — the exam that students sit before going to secondary school — had passed. One small school actually had a 100 per cent failure rate.

But does the Malaysian Government want creative, critical thinkers? Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi said to the ruling party's recent general assembly Malaysia needed to make students creative. But that means they must be questioning and thus critical; what hope is there of that when one of Abdullah's own ministers tells Malaysians that they cannot say the things that I can and hundreds of them write to me to complain because they don't feel that they can complain to their own Government?

Malaysia needs to do something. Its oil will run out soon and it has lost much of its appeal to foreign investors — recent UN figures show that from 2004 to 2005, foreign investment in Malaysia fell by 14 per cent, when the world economy was enjoying one of its longest periods of growth. One might wonder what the Trade and Industry Minister has actually been doing.

But, while politicians from the ruling party preach about Malay nationalism, there are at least some who quietly go about the business of trying to secure the country's future. Not all of them are Chinese.

Two weeks ago, Malaysia's MMC Corporation, together with a local partner, won a $US30 billion infrastructure deal in Saudi Arabia. That's a huge undertaking for any company, let alone a Malaysian one, and just as well too — someone has to pay the bills.

Another region that should be thinking about how to invest its oil and gas wealth are the persian gulf countries. While mammoth real estate developments and energy wasting indoor ski fields in the deserts haven't indicated much hope, there are some signs they might be getting a clue, with a solar powered rotating tower planned - though it seems only the rotation is solar powered, so they are still a long way from green buildings. Even worse, the UAE is now consorting with the enemy of humanity and building a coal fired power station to feed the air conditioners in these monsters.

Dubai's latest mind-boggling project will be yet another global first - a fully rotating tower powered by the sun.

Project engineers say the Dh400 million Time Residences tower in the City of Arabia master development will turn through 360 degrees, its rotation mechanism driven by stored solar energy.

The project, which will put 200 apartments onto the market, is another addition to Dubai's list of world exclusives which will include the world's tallest tower, biggest mall and largest man-made island - even a collection of dozens of man-made islands dubbed The World.

In July, Dubai-based High Rise Real estate launched the Rotating Tower, a Dh175 million project in Jumeirah Village South featuring four rotating penthouses and a rotating villa with its own car lift.

Dubai Property Ring, developer of the 30-floor Time Residences, says it has gone one step better by launching a fully rotating structure.

"We didn't want to build just another building or tower, we wanted to create something unique - a precious place to live - a genuine contender to be one of the great buildings in the world," said Tav Singh, director of Dubai Property Ring, the Dubai arm of UK-based property investors UK Property Group.

Gulf News also has an article on the "new Saudi alignment with China" which isn't the sort of thing Washington wants to hear I imagine.

When Haytham Zam-zami began studying Chinese, the rising superpower had only just begun to register on the horizon for Saudi Arabia. Eight years later China is all the rage.

China's insatiable demand for oil - and Saudi Arabia's position as the world's top exporter - have become the basis for a trade partnership that analysts say could upset Riyadh's decades-old oil-for-security relationship with Washington.

"We were the pioneers, the first group," says Zamzami, a chemical engineer with state oil firm Saudi Aramco, which this month opened an office in the Chinese business hub of Shanghai. The Chinese are a proud people, with a long history and glorious civilisation behind them. Understanding them well will bring benefit to both sides," he said.

Saudi Arabia has become the key regional player as China quietly moves onto traditional US turf in the Middle East.

This new alignment has also seen China boosting ties with six booming Gulf Arab states, including oil producers Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE. China National Offshore Oil Co. (CNOOC) is in talks with Qatar for liquefied natural gas supplies, PetroChina is studying plans with Kuwait to build a refinery and petrochemical complex in South China, and Aramco is negotiating refinery joint ventures in China.

China's economic thrust has coincided with a time when US prestige in the Arab world is at a low ebb due to the Iraq war and US support for Israel.

In addition, once-cosy US-Saudi ties have not fully recovered from the shock of the September 11 attacks in which 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers were Saudis.

This has hit the oil-for-security "special relationship" long based on the role of U.S. military forces as guarantor of Saudi Arabia's safety, largely to protect huge Saudi oilfields.

The Australian has an article on GM's planned plug in bybrid car - hopefully they won't kill this one off like their last round of electric cars. It sounds like they are dragging their feet - keeping the oil industry happy as usual, which will be their undoing as they get eaten by the Japanese and Europeans.

GENERAL Motors has begun work on a mass-produced plug-in hybrid vehicle as part of what the world's biggest car maker sees as an inexorable shift towards electrically powered cars and trucks.

"We see a logical journey from stand-alone, largely mechanical automobiles to vehicles that run on electricity," GM's chief executive Rick Wagoner said this week at a Los Angeles car show.

His remarks come amid growing interest in alternative fuels since the recent rise in oil prices, as well as mounting pressure from environmental groups for action against global warming. The US Supreme Court began hearing a closely watched case on Wednesday in which 12 states, backed by environmental groups, are asking that the Environmental Protection Agency be required to set national limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from vehicle exhausts.

The Bush administration and the automotive industry have opposed the claim, partly on the grounds that the Clean Air Act's definition of "air pollutants" does not cover greenhouse gases.

DaimlerChrysler, Volkswagen and BMW are promoting diesel vehicles that would meet air-quality standards in all 50 states, including California, which has the strictest rules.

The Australian also has a report on Walmart's moves to sell a lot more compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

WAL-MART, the largest US retailer, publicly set itself the goal of selling 100 million low-energy light bulbs in the coming year, in a potentially industry-changing move that is part of a broader effort to improve its environmental reputation.

If successful, the retailer would double the current US market for the bulbs, which use about 75 per cent less energy than traditional incandescent bulbs and can last more than six times longer.

Currently low-energy bulbs make up only about 5 per cent of the total US bulb market, compared with around 11 per cent in Britain.

A Wal-Mart spokesman said the retailer would double shelf space devoted to the bulbs. It will also develop displays aimed at educating customers about the potential long-term savings from buying the bulbs, which have in the past cost far more than the conventional equivalents.

Wal-Mart estimates that selling 100 million bulbs could save its customers $US3 billion ($4.4 billion) in energy costs, and produce a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Byron King has an article on Chinese efforts to increase coal to liquids production. Why waste time with these evil stuff when you could be setting about the real task of electrifying your transport system and powering it with solar and wind ?

TreeHugger also has some comments on China and methanol / CTL.

In the past year or so, we have received a lot of e-mail from readers asking why we do not write more about alternative fuels like methanol and ethanol. It is not that we don't follow these developments. Our colleagues at Strategic Investment, Outstanding Investments, and Capital & Crisis have covered these subjects quite a bit. And if you want to get into the commodities end of these things, Resource Trader Alert's Kevin Kerr is on a hitting streak that would land him in the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown if he were playing baseball instead of helping his subscribers manage their portfolios. But yes, we are watching the synthetic fuels business with our 20/20-corrected vision. And on the day after Thanksgiving, something grabbed our editorial attention.

Beijing Sets National Standard

"Beijing Sets National Standard for Methanol as Automotive Fuel," stated the well- regarded, if salmon-tinted newspaper. Methanol? Yes, good old "wood alcohol." This is the stuff that if you drink it, will make you blind. But this particular label of Chinese methanol is not and will not be somebody's moonshine. Instead, this Chinese methanol will be derived from coal in the so-called "Fischer-Tropsch" chemical process, which leads to an industrial method described as "coal-to-liquid" (CTL). Added to gasoline, coal-derived methanol creates a cleaner-burning type of fuel. And at oil prices above about $35 per barrel, methanol is very much a cost-competitive option for automotive fuel. Very clever, those Chinese. Here are a few of the key paragraphs from the Financial Times report:

Beijing has settled on a national standard for methanol as an automotive fuel, a decision which will legitimize and bolster a market that has been growing rapidly without central government approval. The standard, which has yet to be officially announced, was reported in a trade magazine and confirmed yesterday by an official attached to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the economic planning body responsible for the standards.

Local companies have under construction, or are awaiting approval to build, plants to produce methanol equivalent to about 20% of China's present oil consumption...By the time the plants, which convert coal to liquids, start producing in 2011-2013, China's oil demand will have doubled, allowing methanol to supply about 10% of the market.

A New Kind of Energy for China

Methanol will become, for China, "a major alternative fuel which does not exist in any other country in the world," said James Brock, a Beijing-based energy consultant. Another commentator, a senior Chinese regional official who is deeply involved in China's methanol industry, has stated that China's coal industry "is doing the best job in China in promoting the use of methanol as fuel." The Chinese official added, "Our aim is to solve the problem of China's oil shortage. We are creating a new kind of energy."

The man must mean "a new kind of energy for China." The technology to turn coal into gas and oil was invented in the 1910s and 1920s in Germany. CTL processes were used extensively to manufacture motor fuel for the German armed forces during the Second World War. Of more recent vintage, CTL technology was greatly advanced by the South African company Sasol over the past three decades. Initially, the Sasol technology was used as a means for South Africa to avoid apartheid-era sanctions, and more recently, Sasol's technology has been highly competitive in world markets on its own merits.

Large Foreign Investment, Advanced U.S. Technology

Within the past few years, China has been experiencing an investment surge into CTL plants. One recent announcement, for example, stated that Royal Dutch/Shell and a Chinese partner have committed to a three-year study of a CTL plant, which, if it proceeds, will cost between $5-6 billion and be one of China's largest single foreign investments. The proposed Shell project, to be located in the western province of Ningxia, would produce the equivalent of about 70,000 barrels of oil a day, equal to about 1% of Chinese oil demand, now just over 7 million barrels per day (mpd).

Shell, which is a leader in liquefaction technology, has already licensed its technology to 15 projects in China. Shell has one plant with Sinopec, one of China's leading petrochemical companies, under construction. According to Lim Haw Kuang, executive chairman of Shell in China, "We have proven technology that converts coal to gas and then gas to liquids. We believe this technology is important to China."

The Shell process uses oxygenated gasification, a technology pioneered in the U.S., under the sponsorship of quite a bit of U.S. government funding over the years. Oxygenated gasification permits isolating carbon dioxide (CO2) during the manufacturing process, and thus is more compatible with carbon sequestration than other leading fossil fuel technologies. If the Chinese actually sequester the CO2, or use it for purposes such as enhancing oil production from older oil fields, this will be a big step forward for China's environmental protection, as well as for controlling emissions of greenhouse gases.

30 Plants Under Construction

According to a report by Credit Suisse, there are at least 30 large-scale CTL projects in the detailed planning, permitting, or feasibility stage. The Credit Suisse report notes that the expensive, capital-intensive CTL plants are generally considered financially viable when oil prices are above $35-40 a barrel, which is a safe bet in a world that is catching on to the concept of Peak Oil. Coal is China's "real strategic (energy) reserve," states the Credit Suisse report, because it can be obtained locally, although China is also a major coal importer.

One place that loves to export coal to China is Australia, though the local environmental movement is trying its best to stop this suicidal activity.

Local miner Centennial Coal is somewhat annoyed by a court decision that global warming inducing carbon emissions need to be considered for development approval of their massive Anvil Hill coal mine. This put pathetic state planning minister Frank Sartor in something of a spot, with him complaining feebly that he can't just block new coal mine development. The Herald editorial noted none of this would be necessary if the Federal Government put carbon caps and trading or carbon taxes in place.

In the bizarrest news I've seen here in some time Alan Jones has allied himself with Greens MP Lee Rhiannon to support blocking the mine (unless I was hallucinating during the TV news this morning). Upon further investigation this may be due to Jones's investments in horse breeding in the Hunter Valley (my original speculation was that it might have to do with some rural populism as he's annoyed about the impact of the drought on some of his base).

The climate-change impacts of new industries, including burning coal extracted from NSW mines, will have to be considered by the State Government following a landmark judgement on Monday.

While the decision, delivered in the Land and Environment court, does not block the mine's development entirely, Justice Nicola Pain ruled the Government will now have to take account of the greenhouse gas emissions from burning the mine's output - even though 80 per cent will be exported.

The environmental assessment of Centennial Coal's proposed Anvil Hill coalmine at the centre of this week's decision, was a Clayton's assessment; the assessment you do when you don't want to admit the project being assessed will lead to a lot of greenhouse gas pollution.

Centennial Coal wants to dig up 10.5 million tonnes of coal a year from Anvil Hill in the Upper Hunter, for the next 21 years. It will dig up that coal for the express purpose of selling it to power stations in NSW and Japan. Those power stations will burn the coal to generate electricity.

When you burn a tonne of coal you generate 2.4 tonnes of CO2, the Australian Greenhouse Office says. Over 21 years, the coal from Anvil Hill will pump 529 million tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere - regardless of where it is burnt or who burns it.

Britain's Stern report put a $US85 price on a tonne of CO2, taking into account climate change's effect on human health, the environment, agriculture, industry and infrastructure. On that basis, the coal from Anvil Hill will be responsible for $A58 billion worth of climate change damage in less than one generation.

The output of the mine will be one of many human activities that are already raising global temperatures and sea levels, changing rainfall patterns and, in this country, delivering more and fiercer droughts and bushfires. That's a pretty big environmental impact.

One of the few Federal Government MPs to support doing something about global warming is Greg Hunt - while he appears overly enamoured of "clean coal", at least he's not trying to kill the issue off like the radioactive Rodent is. Even BP is pushing for something to be done.

Business would be forced to comply with tough new limits cutting damaging greenhouse gas emissions under a sweeping plan to tackle global warming delivered last night by the parliamentary secretary for the environment.

In a speech to the Centre for Independent Studies, Greg Hunt urged the Government to consider a number of policy initiatives including a phased-in cap on carbon dioxide emissions, tough new rules to clean up emissions from cars, and accelerating investment in "clean" coal technology.

His system would be a hybrid of an emissions trading scheme, where pollution is capped and companies then trade credits and debits if they go over or under the limit.

Mr Hunt's proposals go further than senior Government players have on the issue of climate change and they follow the Stern Review in Britain, which warned governments to take action on global warming.

Prime Minister John Howard has flagged a new joint government-business taskforce to consider emissions trading schemes, but has not yet announced its membership.

Mr Hunt said his cap limiting carbon dioxide emissions would be set in legislation, not left up to business to comply voluntarily.

He also gave an optimistic assessment of how clean coal technology could reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He claimed carbon sequestration, which involves capturing carbon and storing it, could slash emissions by 40 per cent within 15 years. "In particular, there is the capacity to clean up 50 of the Latrobe Valley's 60 million tonnes of CO2," Mr Hunt said last night.

Clean coal technology was only in its formative stages, but governments worldwide were increasing investment in major projects with the hope of relying on coal-fired power and reducing pressure on the environment.

Mr Hunt said it also was important to lift Australia's current standards ensuring that vehicles were fuel-efficient. Australia should align its vehicle standards with those in Japan and Europe, which were among the highest in the world, he said.

In some good news, water consumption here has dropped 14 per cent (partly because there just isn't much water around).

Stage three restrictions would require Parliament House to reduce its water consumption by 35 per cent. "I think water restrictions should apply across the board, but I don't want to delve into the embassies lest I create a diplomatic incident," Mr Turnbull told reporters in Canberra. I think Parliament House should certainly set an example for water use."

Mr Turnbull said parliament had reduced its water usage, but complained the large building lacked many basic water saving devices. "This building is, I suppose a bit over 20 years old and yet it doesn't have a lot of basic water saving devices and measures that if it were built today would all be regarded as commonplace," he said.

Mr Turnbull, the government's Parliamentary Secretary for water policy, was speaking at the launch of a new paper exploring water recycling in Australia. The paper, produced by the Water Services Association of Australia (WSAA) said that the use of recycled water for non-drinking purposes would continue to increase around Australia.

It said while per capita Australia already recycled two-and-a-half times the amount of water compared to European countries, even more had to be done to meet future needs.

Mr Turnbull also said a two-tiered system could be introduced whereby households paid a certain amount for a set base of water and extra could be charged for all water consumed produced from expensive methods such as desalination. Households could also be given rebates if they used less than their allowed amount that could be carried over to the next water bill.

Also figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showed Australia's water consumption dropped 14 per cent in the four years to 2005, largely because of precautions taken by households in the face of the drought. However, the mining boom is sucking up water though increased production.

"There is certainly less water available. In 2001 there was a wetter year than 2005," Michael Vardon, director, Centre of Environment and Energy Studies told reporters.

Water consumption in Australia decreased by nearly 3,000 gigalitres between 2000-1 and 2004-05 to 18,767 gigalitres. The report did not take into account the current drought, the worst in more than 100 years.

"Household consumption was down, and down most in the ACT, and that can be attributed to mandatory water restrictions. More households are undertaking water saving measures - mulching the garden, using dual flush toilets, bucketing water out of showers." Mr Vardon said 16 per cent of households were using water saving measures in 2004-05, compared with eight per cent in 2000-01.

Household consumption decreased eight per cent from 2000-01. There was also some big increases in water recycling by households. "There was basically a 10-fold increase in NSW, there was also some increases in mining and manufacturing," Mr Vardon said.

However, overall water reuse is down, largely a function of the climate, falling to 400 gigalitres in 2004-05 from 500 on 2000-01.

Salon has an article on the Dawning of the age of Frankenfuels.

Following up on the preliminary decision released by the WTO in February, a panel of judges found that between 1998 and 2003, the E.U. had been operating a "de facto moratorium" blocking GMOs. The ruling did not say that the E.U. cannot ban GMOs on scientific grounds. Instead, it declared that the E.U. had been engaging in "undue delay" in processing import applications, and that individual E.U. countries were wrong to ban products that the E.U. had declared safe.

Now the battle will commence on whether all those words mean anything. On Nov. 21, the E.U. declined to appeal the ruling, arguing that changes made to the application process in 2004 made the ruling moot. In a gorgeous example of passive-aggressive trade diplomacy, European Commission trade spokesman Peter Power stated that "The European Commission has decided not to appeal the GMO decision as the current regulatory provisions are not in any way affected by the judgment... "The impact of that judgment is entirely of historical interest."

The U.S., Canada, Argentina and Brazil, which dominate the world's production of genetically modified crops, will no doubt beg to differ. Canada is already crowing over the news that the E.U. won't appeal, announcing that the decision will result in a boom in canola exports to the E.U.

This is where it gets interesting. Until now, the main factor explaining the lack of popularity of GM crops in Europe has been consumer resistance to genetically modified food. But as Biopact points out, the implications of the ruling open a market for genetically modified energy crops, such as canola oil seeds, which can be used as feedstock for biodiesel.

Is there a difference between food and fuel? Will consumers who refuse to buy genetically modified corn meal also decline to fill up their cars with genetically modified biodiesel or ethanol? In both cases, the big issue is identical: We can't say with certainty what the ultimate long-term impact of introducing genetically modified organisms into the wild (or our bodies) will be. But it's one thing to go with organic produce over "Frankenfood" at the local grocery story. It's quite another to try to replace fossil fuels. If some kind of genetically modified Frankenfuel helps mitigate climate change and the impact of peak oil, consumer sentiment on the evils of GMOs may shift.

Critics of GMOs will likely call the prospect of super-crops coming to the rescue just another techno-fix that fails to address the fundamental unsustainability of how humans currently go about their business on this planet. And if, for example, Frankenfuels require fertilizer inputs that are themselves hugely energy-intensive, they may well be right. But there's too much money to be made in supplying the world's demand for energy to imagine that such critics will be successful in slowing down or halting the discoveries that are incubating in laboratories all over the world.

Tom Whipple's latest peak oil article is out, admiring the view from capitol hill.

While up on Capitol Hill discussing the prospects for the peak oil message in the new Congress, I was brought up short by a question from a hill staffer. "Can’t you guys sharpen the time frame when oil production is going to peak?"

“Telling us that all sorts of bad things are going happen sometime in the next five or ten years really is not that useful. Here, in the Congress we constantly hear about so many crises about to befall us— Iraq, budget and trade deficits, global warming, avian flu, Medicare, social security, housing bubble, terrorism, and immigration, to name a few— that trying to put peak oil threat in its proper perspective is difficult.”

Good question, let's try to get some perspective on the urgency of peak oil.

For Americans, and therefore the Congress, it is going to take something big, a development that really hurts, to get our attention. Therefore, for the immediate future, here in America, peak oil is going to be about gasoline prices. World oil production could peak, even begin dropping rapidly, but if gas prices stayed about the same or only inch up, few would notice or care. On the other hand, when the day comes that gasoline prices rise to new highs and begin causing major economic dislocations, Congress will be moved to take some sort of action no matter how much oil OPEC is supplying to world markets.

The interesting question in all this is the relationship between the other "looming crises" and peak oil. Will unacceptably high gasoline prices come first and trigger an economic crisis or will something else cause such economic difficulties that the demand for oil drops precipitously thereby keeping gasoline prices low for many years. The intricacies of all this, of course, are obviously too much to tackle here.

Global warming is frequently mentioned as being intertwined with the peaking of oil production. If we start burning less and less oil then there should be less and less carbon released into the atmosphere, which is good. If, however, we should start substituting more and more coal to replace depleting oil and natural gas, then we would end up with more and more carbon being released with is not only bad, but very bad.

All of our looming crises will have some sort of interrelationship with peak oil, even the avian flu crisis. Should a flu epidemic ever take hold, it is a good guess that there would be less driving and less economic activity as quarantines came into effect. Should the epidemic get so far out of the control that the deaths from the flu became demographically significant, there would obviously be less demand for oil.

Some believe that the current increase in global temperatures will eventually lead to far more serious problems than we are currently envisioning. Global warming might ultimately be in the class with the impact of a large meteor or the eruption of a super volcano.

If this is true, then the consequences of global warming will be far beyond anything the end of the oil age can ever do to life on earth and the world's economy. The problem with global warming, however, is that from a "looming crisis" point of view it is coming on too slowly to get the average person's, or even the average government's attention. I suspect that very high food prices caused by continuing crop failures may be the first clue for many that there is a real global warming problem out there.

Moving away from energy related matters, the SMH has an article on London, whcih may be the world's new financial capital.

IS LONDON the capital of the world? What an absurd idea, 100 years out of date.

The earth shakes to decisions made in Washington, not Whitehall. When Beijing's mandarins plot their nation's rise, they aren't dreaming of Piccadilly.

Still, the thought occurred to me after the brutal death last week of Alexander Litvinenko. The former KGB spy turned antagonist of President Vladimir Putin had been granted asylum in Britain in 1998. He lived in the leafy quiet of north London's Muswell Hill, in the same street as the Chechen leader, Ahmed Zakayev, who also won asylum, despite Russian efforts to extradite him.

Litvinenko belonged to the large and sometimes shadowy Russian migrant community that has sprung up in London - or Moscow-on-the-Thames, as some call it - since the Soviet Union fell.

It includes many who made vast fortunes during the state-sanctioned lawlessness of Boris Yeltsin's reign. They buy into the preposterous, if impeccably discreet, wealth of Chelsea, send their boys to Eton and let British financiers manage their money. Naturally, the British ask no questions.

Russians are not the only ones lured to London. It is a centre for Libyan dissidents fighting Colonel Gaddafi's regime. In the 1980s, Arab oil magnates famously pitched their tents in exclusive Knightsbridge. The Iraqi National Congress, the government-in-waiting of the roguish Ahmad Chalabi, also operated from there in the 1990s.

In the same decade Islamists came: Abu Hamza, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed and others. In sermons and on websites they preached hatred and murder, even as some of them drew welfare benefits from the Western society they pledged to destroy.

They, too, got asylum, prompting the French and American security services, furious at what they saw as wilful neglect of a growing threat, to call the city Londonistan.

No doubt Britain was lax, and may pay a price in terrorist attacks for years to come, but London has long harboured dissidents without questioning their philosophies. Voltaire, Rousseau and Marx all fled here to escape persecution. So did the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, before a Bulgarian agent - in a killing even more bizarre than Litvinenko's - prodded him with a poison-tipped umbrella as he waited for a bus on Waterloo Bridge in 1978.

The paradox is that Londoners are not known as a particularly welcoming people. George Orwell defined suspicion of foreigners as one of the salient characteristics of the English. But, Orwell wrote, they also cared about fairness and the underdog.

Add English reasonableness and a belief in minding one's own business and it is easy to see why fugitives of all stripes have found London so inviting. People are left alone to be what they want to be.

The legacy of colonialism has also shaped the city - in its immigrants from the subcontinent and the West Indies, in its financial ties to Hong Kong.

While reporting on the Live 8 concert and G8 meeting on Africa last year, I met activists from Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia and Uganda. All of them saw London as a natural base from which to campaign for greater freedom in their countries.

Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role, said the US secretary of state, Dean Acheson, after World War II.

That is no longer true for London. If it is not the world's capital it is surely its most open city. It makes almost nothing yet thrives on invisibles: education, tourism, management, entertainment, importing the best minds and handling other people's money. Wall Street is tightening its controls in the wake of the Enron scandals; the refusal of Congress this year to allow an Arab syndicate to run US ports led to a flood of Middle Eastern money out of New York and into London.

These trends and others led the New York Mayor, Mike Bloomberg, to warn last month that London threatened to knock off Wall Street as the world's financial capital.

Things may change. Britons are getting anxious about immigrants, after 580,000 came in 2004 - far more than to any other European country - and half of them fetched up in the capital.

Yet with millions of invisible threads tying London to the rest of the globe, openness seems built into its DNA. The business of London is the business of the world.

In an unsurprising move, Kansas has outlawed evolution.

In response to a Nov. 7 referendum, Kansas lawmakers passed emergency legislation outlawing evolution, the highly controversial process responsible for the development and diversity of species and the continued survival of all life.

"From now on, the streets, forests, plains, and rivers of Kansas will be safe from the godless practice of evolution, and species will be able to procreate without deviating from God's intended design," said Bob Bethell, a member of the state House of Representatives. "This is about protecting the integrity of all creation."

The sweeping new law prohibits all living beings within state borders from being born with random genetic mutations that could make them better suited to evade predators, secure a mate, or, adapt to a changing environment. In addition, it bars any sexual reproduction, battles for survival, or instances of pure happenstance that might lead, after several generations, to a more well-adapted species or subspecies.

Violators of the new law may face punishments that include jail time, stiff fines, and rehabilitative education and training to rid organisms suspected of evolutionary tendencies. Repeat offenders could face chemical sterilization.

To enforce the law, Kansas state police will be trained to investigate and apprehend organisms who exhibit suspected signs of evolutionary behavior, such as natural selection or speciation. Plans are underway to track and monitor DNA strands in every Kansan life form for even the slightest change in allele frequencies.

"Barn swallows that develop lighter, more streamlined builds to enable faster migration, for example, could live out the rest of their brief lives in prison," said Indiana University chemist and pro-intelligent-design author Robert Hellenbaum, who helped compose the language of the law. "And butterflies who mimic the wing patterns and colors of other butterflies for an adaptive advantage, well, their days of flaunting God's will are over."

And finally, for those still reading, here's 10 Zen Monkey's asking a range of people "is america a fascist state".

Allen Hacker
Campaign consultant for Michael Badnarik, 2004 Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate and 2006 candidate for Congress in Texas; Libertarian Party activist

Do we live in a fascist state?

Are you kidding? Yes. Absolutely, and very unfortunately, yes.

Let’s analyze the Dictionary.com definition of fascism. It begins with “a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power.” George Bush and his administration are assuming vast powers not delegated to them by the Constitution. President Bush has developed a habit of issuing “signing statements,” declaring what portions of legislation he chooses to enforce or ignore.

Fascism, “forcibly suppress[es] opposition and criticism.” There is growing concern and mounting evidence that the 2000 and 2004 presidential election results were manipulated using electronic voting machines and physical intimidation. As the 2004 Libertarian Presidential nominee, I joined with Green Party nominee, David Cobb, to challenge the vote totals in Ohio. One precinct in Ohio recorded 4,000 votes for George Bush, 2,000 votes for John Kerry, in a precinct with only 600 registered voters. There are numerous reports of people being handcuffed and escorted away from George Bush’s campaign events simply because they wore pro-Liberty t-shirts, or asked the President embarrassing questions.

Fascism includes “regimenting all industry, commerce, etc.” which can be summed up nicely by mentioning NAFTA, GATT, and the “Free Trade Area of the Americas” (FTAA). Our government has been subsidizing the oil and automotive industry for nearly a century, and now the pharmaceutical companies are getting blatant assistance in a vast array of regulations that put smaller drug companies out of business. If patients in the United States are not allowed to purchase drugs from Canada because “they’re not safe,” then why did American companies sell the drugs to Canada in the first place?

The definition ends with, “emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.” How many times does George Bush have to say, “You’re either with us or against us,” before people realize that anyone critical of our government is now viewed by the administration as a potential terrorist? The government already controls and manipulates our health care system. The National Animal Identification System (NAIS) will soon give the government control over most of our food supply by requiring Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags on all farm animals. The REAL ID Act has already been passed, and will require every drivers license and passport to contain an RFID chip as early as 2008.

Ken Layne
West Coast Bureau Chief, Wonkette

Fascism is such a twisted, loaded and abused word. We need a completely new term.

Humorless liberals yell “Fascist!” at anything they don’t like: NASCAR, Wal-Mart, or especially somebody enjoying a nice hamburger.

The Neocons have made the bizarre decision that Fascism is actually a 1,400-year-old Semitic religion from Arabia, even though that religion is virtually indistinguishable from the monotheistic Semitic religions they claim to follow. Of course, the Neocons are the closest thing to a purely Fascist party in America.

And my beloved libertarians have the bad habit of believing Fascism is a mom asking grandpa not to blow cigar smoke on the babies, or the cops asking some target shooters to point away from the pre-school.

So what the hell is Fascism in 2006? Russia provides a pretty good example: Media directly controlled by the Kremlin, ethnic minorities literally deported by the military (re: Georgians), oil companies nationalized (and their executives jailed), official skinheads attacking farmers markets, faux-terrorist apartment bombings in Moscow used to justify aggressive wars against bordering ethnic states, and the murder of investigative journalists.

It isn’t so obvious in the United States. There are only a few hundred people in America (that we know of) being tortured and jailed forever due to alleged “terrorist” activities. A handful of powerful government/corporate insiders are assassinated each year — see Philip Merrill — and the corporate media ignores these murders because it’s just too horrifying to go down that bloody path.

But the laws have changed since 9/11, and those laws were drawn up before 9/11. Today, even a U.S. citizen can be locked up and sodomized forever by a robot just for turning up on some government list. Yet the multi-ethnic character of America’s urban elite makes it tough to lock up all the Asians or Mexicans or Muslims or Negroes or Homosexuals or Presbyterians or Atheists — old-school Fascism needs an internal ethnic enemy.

Habeas corpus is gone. Military tribunals have been officially authorized to sentence those who go against White House policy. Much of the news media is either directly owned or covertly financed by the Not So Secret Elite. Idiots and Jesus Freaks are paid to stir up the yokels. Election machines are increasingly owned and operated by the GOP interests, and vote stealing is all but ignored. American culture has intentionally become idiotic, as American education has become both widespread and anti-intellectual. Today’s college graduate is much dumber than an 8th grader from the 1940s.

New passport laws restrict even going across the Mexican and Canadian borders. Proposed “homeland security” laws will make it impossible for any dissident to travel by sea or air to other nations.

It’s not fascism, yet. And it’s unlikely that the USA’s post-9/11 dystopia will ever be called Fascism by future historians.

Rabbi Michael Lerner
Founder and Editor of Tikkun; progressive Jewish activist; author; National Chair of The Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP)

If you are talking about “we” as the people of the U.S., then no, we are not living in a fascist society yet, though we are not far from it and are on a slippery slope in that direction. But if the “we” is the people of the world, under the global economic and military system ruled by the U.S. with the other G8 countries as major lieutenants, then yes, there is much of the world that is in fact already living in a fascist society, and we cannot separate ourselves from them and say, “no, we are not in a fascist society,” because in fact their fate is imposed by the indifference, ignorance, fear, and sense of futility that characterizes many of the people living in the U.S. today.

Inside the U.S., the similarity to fascism is in the power of corporations to control government, media, universities, and the economic lives of most of our citizens. Plus the massive power of these institutions working together and through the mass media to shape a world view and filters in the individual consciousness of many Americans. That is massive power, beyond anything that has ever existed in the history of the human race before.

It would be best to have a different name for this massively oppressive reality, rather than to use a term developed to describe a different reality in the first half of the twentieth century, a reality whose memory gets invoked in the hope of making people tremble at how bad the current reality is. But it would be far more impactful if we simply described this reality and did not seek to draw historical comparisons which may shake and rattle the consciousness of historians and intellectuals but which are increasingly irrelevant to people born after 1960 and who do not have the same associations with this word.

The truth is that if we lived in a fascist society as it used to be, we’d be trembling at having this conversation and having our names attached to it, knowing that we might be subject to prison for even raising this topic. The fact is that America retains much of its democratic and human rights for most (not all) of its citizens, and that is more than we can say for many of the countries on earth. Such a society cannot be fascist.

Yet we can be on the path. The recent torture bill was a significant step, and the failure of Democrats to wage a filibuster against it once again demonstrates to those who would move more quickly in the direction of a full-scaled fascism that their opponents have no backbone and hence are not to be worried about. It seems unlikely that the Democrats in power will revoke that bill.

Some have invented the term “friendly fascism” or “soft fascism” to describe the contemporary reality. Well, perhaps. But if you want to use that term, you want to because you want to milk the remaining negative energy toward the word “fascism” while in fact acknowledging that the situation is qualitatively different. When a full-scale fascism arrives in all its authenticity, you will know it by its deeds and there will not be an argument among progressives about whether it is here or not. Chances are great that instead we will be locked up in some modern style concentration camp, or possibly even subjected to torture. I’m not looking forward to such a period — I was sent to prison by the Nixon White House for my role as a national leader of the anti-war movement at that time, and it wasn’t fun, and yet it was easy compared to what we may face when fascism fully arrives.