A Is For Atom, R is For Resource War  

Grist has a wealth of good content today, starting with a piece by John McGrath on sustainability in world politics - the cost of empire and resource wars.

Via Political Animal, this little nugget got me thinking:

In other words, the bill to bring Army and Navy battalions back to the status they were in before the invasion ... [will be] $50 to $100 billion. "The next president will face a staggering bill," Wilkerson says, not even counting the costs of further efforts in Iraq.

So, not counting the cost of the war itself, just returning U.S. armed forces to the fighting condition they maintained back in ye olden dayes of Feb. 2003 will cost as much as $100 billion. The estimates for the total cost of the war have been pegged as high as $2 trillion.

We talk a great deal about the "externalities" of oil. It's important to remember that one of its costliest externalities -- probably No. 2 behind climate change -- is American military spending in the Persian Gulf, and at least two major wars.

Of course, America is only dependent on Persian Gulf oil so long as it is dependent on oil -- but the inverse is true, as well: so long as America is dependent on oil, it will be dependent on Middle East oil, the cheapest and most plentiful source available. Indeed, the Gulf's share of global oil reserves is expected to grow in the future as non-Gulf supplies decline more rapidly.

That is why the first president to enunciate a strategic foreign policy with the Persian Gulf at its heart was not named Bush or Reagan, but Carter. This isn't a partisan issue, really: so long as America is dependent on oil, it is in America's national security interests to keep the supply stable.

Which brings me to one of the more tragic books in the English language, The Great Illusion by Norman Angell. Wikipedia has a nice summary:

The thesis of that work is commonly (and incorrectly) described as saying that the integration of the economies of European countries had grown to such a degree that war between them was unimaginable, making militarism obsolete. However this is not what Angell actually argued. His central argument was that war between modern powers was futile in the sense that no matter what the outcome, he thought both the losing and the victorious nations would be economically worse off than they would have been had they avoided war. [emphasis mine - JM]

Angell was right, of course -- even the nominal "victors" of World War I were deeply impoverished by the war. The Great Illusion was written in the last years before World War I, and Angell was writing in direct opposition to the sentiment in London, Paris, and Berlin that saw colonies and imperialism as the road to national greatness.

Angell proposed the remarkable heresy that it didn't really matter who "owned" India so long as British merchants could trade with Indian ones. Meanwhile, efforts to keep India, South Africa, and other colonies within the imperial fold were a substantial net cost for Great Britain. Rather than being a source of national greatness, Empire made Britain less Great with every passing year.

So why was Empire so popular? Well, it wasn't "popular" in the sense you or I would use the word -- imperialism has never had much electoral cachet, and doesn't today in the U.S. Rather, historian Douglas Porch argues that the classic imperialism of the 18th and 19th centuries was a result of commercial expansion coupled with a lack of political accountability: Merchants and far-off soldiers would "claim" some chunk of land for the mother country, and by the time the word got back to the capital, it was a fait accompli. Ah, the freedom the telegraph cost us.

Bills always come due, though. As Porch notes in his book Wars of Empire:

Lacking a deep wellspring of public support, colonial adventures could be continued 1) only if their costs were small and hence easily hidden from the public and 2) if colonial wars were also fought without significant costs in either lives or money. The Second South African War brought this harsh reality home as never before.

Before 9/11, you could expect a storm of protest if you described America's role in the world as imperial. This was before intellectuals like Ignatieff, Ferguson, and others began attempting to resuscitate the term. Either way, America's relationship with the Gulf states -- especially Saudi Arabia -- mirrors those of Great Britain in South Asia (though historical analogies are always inexact). Read any decent history of the Arab-American Oil Company (ARAMCO) to get a feel for this.

Which brings us back to oil. America has a massive commercial interest in oil and natural gas, two resources concentrated in the Persian Gulf. While the oil majors control relatively little of the oil produced in the Middle East, they control virtually all of the gasoline, diesel, and other products refined and sold in the United States. Most U.S. oil now comes from outside U.S. borders. (The U.S. produces less oil domestically than any time since Truman was re-elected.) American leaders have consistently said that the flow of oil from the Gulf is a strategic concern for the United States.

This means that, whatever else happens, so long as Americans consume gasoline (and perhaps, in the future, liquid natural gas) there will be a major U.S. military presence in the Middle East. That's costly, and leads inevitably to wars. Remember bin Laden's repeated statements about the intolerable U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, if nothing else.

Meanwhile, those of us who advocate for a change from the status quo are, like Angell in his day, effectively aligning ourselves against the forces of nationalism and Empire. Getting off oil is synonymous with a threat to America's way of life. This resistance isn't reserved solely for the environmental movement, either: Exxon's reaction to President Bush's wish to get America off foreign oil was ridicule.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, oil imperialism costs us mightily, as it cost Empires back in the day. You can point to the hundreds of billions (perhaps trillions) for the war, you can point to climate change, you can point to any number of costs -- and the alternatives would be cheaper. (Ask Gar Lipow about that part.) Like the British of the early 1900s, the only thing that stands in our way is making the choice: give up the Grand Illusion that colonies/oil are vital to our national greatness, and decide that it isn't worth fighting a war over.

As the British began to change their relationship with their colonies after the Boer War, and especially after World War I, I hope Americans will begin the process of changing their relationship with oil after the war in Iraq reaches it's bloody end.

Also at Grist, Umbra Fisk answers a reader question on whether or not to prepare for peak oil.

Who cares if it's another Y2K? Prepare away, my friend. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Peak oil is a concept originally developed by a geophysicist, Dr. M. King Hubbert, which is why it is sometimes called Hubbert's Peak. Hubbert geophysicked his way through oodles of data and concluded that oil production would follow a bell-shaped curve. The peak of the curve would represent the highest production, and the curve's downslope would represent the increasing difficulty of extracting usable oil from the field. On the downslope, oil costs rise, and eventually the difficulty of extraction is not worth the financial returns -- id est, we basically run out of oil.

Those of you who are not yet obsessed can get more information about the current debate on peak oil from -- well, why not start in our very own Gristmill? The debate there consists of all manner of claims, like "Hubbert was right about oil reserves in the U.S., so that proves a global peak exists!"; "Hubbert didn't account for technological advances!"; "We have already started down the global curve, so get ready for global markets to collapse!"; "We're not going to run out of oil, I've discovered reserves in my armpit!" and so on, with a few useful resources thrown in for good measure. You might also read Grist's interview with peak-oil author Matthew Simmons, a former Bush-Cheney energy-policy adviser who is quite sold on the notion, and read up on biofuels in Grist's special series that starts today.

I think to have a worthy, scientist-type opinion about peak oil, one needs to do quite a bit of reading about global oil supply, global oil politics, geophysics, and the like. I just can't summon the passion you feel and do all that reading, because my obsession cancels out your obsession. My obsession, of course, is global climate change.

Our obsessions are related. I grant you, the action plans for them might differ a tad. For example, if you are mainly concerned about peak oil, switching to coal power is a choice you could make. You also might be more concerned about your oil-related market investments. If you are expecting petroleum to skyrocket in price sooner than your climate will irrevocably morph, your survivalist blueprints will reflect that bias.

But I'd like to argue that you should go ahead and prepare for peak oil's imminence, in whatever ways you can. I'll just have to imagine what you already have in mind, but let's say it includes de-emphasizing your car; reworking your home heating, cooling, kitchen, and electrical systems; divesting of oil-related stocks; getting your home garden up to speed; building up food networks in your local community -- things like that. None of these actions would harm you in any way should oil not skyrocket in price, and, save for using coal, all would certainly benefit the global climate.

On a related note, Rob at Transition Culture has a great post on peak oil pessimism.

In this post I want to discuss an evolving theory I have which may illuminate some and enrage others. I have come to think that part of the reason behind the “die-off” perspective and the mind-set which thinks that Western civilisation is doomed because humanity is basically selfish and foolish, and that it is too late for humanity to do anything on the necessary scale is in fact that a generation of men are coming to realise on some level that they are almost entirely unequipped to face the challenge that peak oil creates.

One of the main impacts of the Age of Cheap Oil, the great Petroleum Party so rapidly drawing to a close, has been the monumental deskilling that has gone on during that time. A friend of mine recently told me of a friend of his 14 year old son, who had grown up eating sliced bread, and was unable to actually cut a slice of bread from a loaf! How many people now know how to cook, garden, build, repair, mend, pickle, prune or scythe? In the space of two generations, we have lost so much basic knowledge and skills that previous generations learnt by osmosis without even thinking about it.

Over the last few weeks I have been doing oral history interviews with older people in and around Totnes of their memories of the 30s, 40s and 50s. They remember working with horses on the farms, raising children with gas lamps, candles, home grown vegetables and home made clothes. This is less than 2 generations ago. What emerges is an innate sense, in the generation that made it through World War Two, of what constitutes enough, of an instinctive sense of self-reliance and an almost universal ability to turn one’s hand to anything.

A couple of years ago I went to London to a peak oil conference, and the evening before it I went to the pre-event social. I was struck by the fact that everyone there (with one exception) was male, aged 25-40, and, as far as I could tell, worked in IT. They were all very pleasant, intelligent, well read on the whole peak oil issue, and as able as anyone to argue that the peak is imminent and we need to act. There were however, almost no women, no gardeners, no builders, no foresters in the room, nor at the subsequent conference as far as I can tell.

One final one from Grist is the biofuels special Umbra mentioned (one day I'm going to have to take a look at the original biofuel pioneer, Rudolf Diesel).

These days, ethanol is praised as the whiz-bang cure-all for our energy ills. And maybe all the sweet talk will cause this "new" fuel to forget that America dumped her for oil in the early 20th century. Oil's just so ... ew all of a sudden. We may finally be ready to return to our first love, an energy source that's been by our side in some form or another since Neolithic times. Oil was too high-maintenance and demanding, anyway.

And ethanol's a much better match ... right? Or maybe biodiesel is the one? Or vegetable oil? Hemp? Turkey guts?

For all the hype, most people barely know enough about biofuels to drop a line or two at a cocktail party. What is ethanol, and how's it different from biodiesel, and where does fry grease come in? Are there cars that can run on this stuff, and who's making them, and where can they fuel up? Who sells it, who makes money off it, and why's it such a political darling? Does "cellulosic" ethanol actually exist in the wild? What's the big deal with Brazil? And does Willie Nelson really run his bong on biodiesel?

We're here to help. Biofuels -- derived from recently living organisms or their metabolic byproducts, aka plants, animals, and poop -- are back, big time. Here's your two-week crash course.

Be sure to check back often for fresh, hot content!

* On the Road Again, by Tom Philpott. How the world got addicted to oil, and where biofuels will take us.
* The Big Three, by Maywa Montenegro. The numbers behind ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, and biodiesel in the U.S.
* Newfangled? Hardly, by Sarah Kraybill Burkhalter. A lighthearted look at biofuels through time.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the vast majority of Australian religious groups (with the main exceptions being reactionary Cardinal George Pell and the happy clappy Assemblies of God types) have advised their followers that it is a sin to wilfully destroy the earth (prompting angry muttering about pagan nature worshippers from somewhere near Hyde Park).

IN THE beginning, the environment ranked behind public morality, personal salvation and social justice as the chief concerns of the religious majority.

But the face of faith is now a deeper shade of green, with the leaders of 16 religious faiths today saying their beliefs ask Australians to become responsible stewards of God's creation and immediately tackle climate change.

Invoking Genesis, three Christian denominations - Anglican, Greek Orthodox and Baptist - declare the wilful destruction of Earth a sin in a document published this week by the Climate Institute.

The Australian Evangelical Alliance says Christians are answerable to God for the way their actions affect the world and future generations, and should be happy to bear the extra cost of new energy options.

And the Australian Christian Lobby warns that the faithful will use their votes to "weigh the degree of determination in each party to tackle it [climate change] at the next federal election".

The collection of statements, titled Common Belief, is believed to be the most comprehensive gathering of Australian contemporary religious thought on climate change.

Joining Anglicans, the Salvation Army, Lutherans, Baptists, Catholics and the Uniting Church in arguing for immediate action on climate change are Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jews.

The only significant absentee is the Pentecostal Assemblies of God churches. Missing, too, is the signature of the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Dr George Pell, who this year said "pagan emptiness" and Western fears about the uncontrollable forces of nature had contributed to "hysteric and extreme claims" about global warming.

The Anglican Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn, George Browning, said: "If Christians believe in Jesus they must recognise that concern for climate change is not an optional extra but a core matter of faith." He called for discussions to take all nations beyond the Kyoto Protocol. At a local level he called for Australians to reduce heating and air-conditioning, install energy-saving light bulbs and take advantage of rain tanks and grey water systems.

It was no coincidence that the colour of Islam was green, said the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils. It urged Muslims, where possible, to dump the car in favour of public transport, restrict the use of disposable items and adopt alternative technologies. "We are living in a world which is on the verge of calamity but we do not see any awakening in the minds of our political masters," the federation said.

Technology Review has an article up on GM's new plugin hybrid - maybe the dinosaur won't die after all.

Last week General Motors (GM) gave a boost to plug-in hybrid vehicles. It announced a new gas-saving technology that could transform transportation and make renewable sources of electricity, such as wind and sun, more feasible.

At the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show, the automaker committed to manufacturing versions of its hybrid Saturn Vue SUV with a much larger battery pack that can be charged via an ordinary household socket. The increased size of the battery pack makes it possible to rely more on electric drive than current hybrid vehicles do, thereby saving much more gasoline. The actual rollout date will depend on the development of suitable battery technology, according to GM chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner.

With the announcement, GM joined other major automakers that are developing plug-in hybrid technology, including Ford, Daimler Chrysler, and Toyota. "We hope to have some products in the near future, but we're not prepared to say yet when that will be," says Bruce Brownlee, the senior executive administrator at Toyota Technical Center, in Gardena, CA. "The potential [of plug-in hybrids] is terrific." (None of these car companies have yet committed to widespread production of such a vehicle.)

The announcement marks a change in strategy for GM, which has previously focused on addressing environmental issues and high fuel prices by modifying existing vehicles to run on ethanol and by developing hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. Although GM still plans to continue its fuel-cell program, the decision to produce plug-in hybrids represents a move toward a more evolutionary transition from internal combustion vehicles. "It's nice to see General Motors not just putting all their bets on hydrogen," says Jason Mark, vehicles director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, based in Cambridge, MA.

Plug-in hybrids, which use both an electric motor and a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine, have been hailed as a bridge technology that could make it possible to cut gasoline consumption in the short term; meanwhile, researchers will continue to work out the problems with all-electric vehicles, such as the high costs that make long-range battery-powered vehicles unaffordable. The most commonly described version of this technology would allow drivers to commute about 20 miles without using gasoline at all. But in reality, plug-in hybrids will likely use a blended strategy, relying on the gasoline engine to boost power for acceleration or for climbing hills even during the first 20 miles. This blended strategy would still mean that a typical commute would use almost no gasoline.

The radioactive Rodent has decided the best way to overcome resistance to his planned 1950's style atomic utopia is to brainwash the kids into thinking that nuclear power is good (authoritarians of whatever stripe always seem to end up using the same set of tactics).

A federal parliamentary committee is calling on the states to lift their bans on uranium mining, saying billions in potential exports are under threat.

The House of Representatives committee, which will officially release its report on Monday, has suggested examining the viability of nuclear leasing, The Australian newspaper reports. Under a leasing scheme Australia would provide uranium to foreign countries and then take back the waste.

The industry and resources committee also raises the possibility of establishing nuclear enrichment plants, using licensed technologies from nations such as France.

A national communications and education strategy was also needed to dispel myths about nuclear energy, the two-year committee study concluded.

I can see it now - year 8 chemistry students will get to make synroc as part of the standard curriculum, while some classic propaganda films from the dawn of the nuclear age are played to inform the students of the wonders of energy that is "too cheap to meter" (or thereabouts, not including subsidies, health costs, decommissioning and clean up costs, insurance indemnities, waste reprocessing and storage, security etc etc).

Classics of this genre include A is for Atom, Our Friend the Atom and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Energy Explorations - best of all I imagine they are no longer under copyright and free to display, keeping public education costs down.

PR Watch has a history of spin on behalf of nuclear power - "Doctor Srangelove and how we learned to love the bomb".

Despite decades of efforts to generate favorable publicity, the nuclear industry was strikingly unprepared to handle the image crisis that erupted in Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979, when control systems failed at the Three-Mile Island facility. According to Robert Dilenschneider, the Hill & Knowlton PR executive who was brought in to manage the crisis, "the miscommunication at Three-Mile Island was the most monumental I have ever witnessed in business, and itself caused a crisis of epic proportions."

By way of bad luck, public alarm was heightened by the ominously coincidental similarity of events at Three-Mile Island to the plot of a recently-released Hollywood movie, The China Syndrome, which portrayed a utility company more concerned with corporate profits and coverups than with serious safety problems. Metropolitan Edison, the company managing Three-Mile Island for parent company General Public Utilities, seemed to be reading from the same script as the film in its initial response to the discovery that its reactor was overheating.

The first rule of effective public relations in a crisis is to announce the bad news as completely and quickly as possible. Metropolitan Edison broke this rule in the first day of the crisis by attempting to evade the facts and downplay the extent of radiation released from the ailing reactor. Worse yet, Met Ed's public-relations staff gave out contradictory and inaccurate information.

"There have been no recordings of any significant levels of radiation, and none are expected outside the plant," said Met Ed's chief spokesman, Don Curry. Shortly after this statement was released, Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Resources sent a helicopter over the plant with a geiger counter and detected radiation. Company officials backpedaled and said they didn't know how much radiation had been released. Later that afternoon, they changed their position again and said the release was minor.

Company vice-president Jack Herbein became the perfect target for skeptical journalists, talking in technical jargon and losing his temper with reporters. When someone asked what might happen if the hydrogen bubble inside the reactor came in contact with a spark, he answered that the result could be "spontaneous energetic disassembly" of the reactor. When a reporter asked him to explain the difference between "spontaneous energetic disassembly" and an explosion, he angrily refused to answer further questions.

Alarmed by the utility company's refusal or inability to explain what was happening inside the plant, Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburgh suggested that pregnant women and children leave an area within a five-mile radius of the plant. Panic followed. Forty-nine percent of the population living within fifteen miles of the plant--144,000 people--packed up and fled. "The photographs in the press were appalling," Dilenschneider recalled. "They resembled refugee lines in World War II. People were living off bottled water and canned food. There was an exodus. They packed their cars and their campers with everything they could, and jammed the highways: babies bundled in blankets, kids with scarves wrapped across their faces to limit their exposure to the 'radiation,' and pregnant women in sheer panic about the future they might be facing."

Following the accident, opinion polls registered a sharp drop in public support for nuclear power, and the nuclear industry responded with a multi-million-dollar media blitz. Teams of utility executives spread across the country to hold press conferences and appear on TV talk shows. Pro-nuclear advertisements were placed in magazines aimed at women readers. Videotapes of experts discussing technical aspects of nuclear power were distributed free to TV stations, and information packets were sent to the print media. An industry-funded Nuclear Energy Education Day was organized on October 18, 1979, with over 1,000 sponsored events, including a brunch for congressional wives in Washington and a joggers' mass relay race in California. When Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden went on an anti-nuclear speaking tour, the industry sent out two nuclear engineers as a "truth squad" to follow them and refute their arguments.

In reality, however, the nuclear power industry was in decline even before Three-Mile Island. Between 1970 and 1980, the price for building a new reactor had quintupled. The nuclear industry complained that legal challenges and delays from anti-nuclear citizens were responsible for many of the cost increases. Rising costs led utility companies to cancel their plans to build new reactors. The last order for a nuclear power plant was placed in 1978. In 1984 at least half a dozen nuclear power plants under construction were cancelled as the industry realized that it was cheaper to let them sit unused and incomplete than to try to finish and operate them. The 1985 meltdown of the Russian nuclear plant at Chernobyl, which spewed radioactive contamination over Europe and around the globe, seemed to mark the final nail in the coffin of an already dying technology, born of hype and deception.

Meanwhile, we're busy throwing the non-proliferation treaty out the door in our haste to export some glowing dirt to India.

AUSTRALIA could sell uranium to India without increasing the risks of weapons proliferation, according to an investigation of the nuclear industry tabled in the Federal Parliament.

The report, from a bipart- isan committee, finds "sound reasons to allow an exception to Australia's exports policy in order to permit uranium sales to India".

It says it is "conceivable" that Australian uranium sales would "not undermine the non-proliferation regime".

The report also calls for an expansion of uranium mining, the possible development of enrichment and conversion facilities, and the removal of bans on nuclear power plants.

It urges the industry to better educate the public about the sector — including allowing schoolchildren to visit uranium mines.

The proposal has outraged the Australian Greens. "It seems that school students are to become the new battleground in the Government's nuclear offensive," Greens energy spokeswoman Christine Milne said.

In a highly unusual move, three Labor committee members, Michael Hatton, Martin Ferguson and Dick Adams, issued "supplementary remarks" indicating they did not support Australia enriching uranium, building nuclear power plants or importing radioactive waste.

While the Rodent is out spinning the line that the older generation is irrationally afraid of nuclear power and the younger generation have no such qualms (having grown up post Three Mile Island and Chernobyl), it seems that opinion polls show the opposite - as Johnny's aging conservatives disappear we'll have an ever greener population that understands that their health and wellbeing is tied to that of the environment they live in, in spite of the massive nuclear PR campaign we've had in recent years.

The beginning of this year, nobody was talking about having a debate on nuclear power in this country, or very few people, and I think we've come a long way," Howard said. "I think the public's interested, I think the public will listen to the debate, I don't think they have the prejudice against nuclear power that Mr Beazley and Bob Brown have."

Howard may be right, but the ground shifted on nuclear power well before the Switkowski review grabbed all the headlines. Nevertheless, Howard's caution is justified, because not everyone is convinced.

Polls conducted since the late 1980s - when the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine was still fresh in the international consciousness - show that Australians have come a long way on the nuclear issue.

Environmentalism has moved from a fringe activity to the centre of national politics, as the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence has convinced all but the most ardent sceptics about the dangers of global warming.

But a critical question for Howard as he tries to take the public with him will be the politics of age. What the polls show is that despite living through the postwar period, the open hostilities and nuclear threat of the Cold War and near-catastrophic incidents such as Chernobyl and 1979's Three Mile Island in the US, Australia's baby boomers are largely on board.

According to the most recent Newspoll to test the water on the nuclear issue, 46 per cent of those aged over 50 are in favour of nuclear power, compared with 43 per cent against it, including 14 per cent who are only partly against the idea.

But only 32 per cent of those aged 18 to 34, and 33 per cent of those 35 to 49, are interested in nuclear power for Australia. Many young people are horrified by the thought, with a solid 56 per cent of people younger than 50 against developing the contentious power source here, including 42per cent who are strongly opposed.

According to demographer Bernard Salt, people under 40 were the first generation of Australians to be "brought up in a culture of environmentalism as a belief system",

In Salt's view, generations X and Y are far more aware of environmental issues than their predecessors, having been inculcated with green thinking through education and the media. He says environmentalism is almost their belief system, as valid for them as religion is for their forebears.

The SMH had an interesting article on media consumption patterns, which indicate that there is plenty of scope for our brainwashed little uns to find information for themselves, as top down propaganda campaigns struggle to overwhelm the rapidly decentralising media landscape.

One person in two on the planet is expected to be a mobile phone user within two years, said the report coinciding with the opening of the Telecom World 2006 trade fair in Hong Kong.

"Around one in three people on the planet own a digital mobile phone today and they're hard pressed to be separated from it," Srivastava told journalists.

The trend is transforming not only business transactions, but is also starting to have a deep impact on the way people interact and their privacy, the report warned.

The internet and mobile communications are now the prime leisure time medium for under-55 year-olds, outstripping television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and cinema, according to data compiled by the ITU.

While it took 125 years for fixed line telephone connections to break through the 1.0 billion mark in 2001, the mobile telephone took just 21 years to reach the same level a year later, the report said.

Fixed line connections have since grown at a much slower rate to over 1.2 billion users, but mobile phone use has continued its rapid expansion.

"What's remarkable is that the second billion was reached in just three years and most likely with current trends we we have three billion users, one for every two people on the planet. by the end of 2008," said co-author Tim Kelly, head of the ITU's policy and strategy unit.

Dave Pollard has a review of Jeff Vail's book "A Theory Of Power" (which hopefully most of you have read by now - Jeff himself has a post today called "Tort: The Once And Future King).

Jeff Vail's short, free online book A Theory of Power begins with a series of provocative theses:

* The best representation of our world, of what 'is', is not matter, but the connections between matter.

* These connections define 'power-relationships' -- the ability of one entity to influence the action of another.

* The 'law' of evolution can therefore be restated as: if new patterns of forces can survive their impacts with one another, if they tend to hold together rather than tear apart, they then represent a stable collection of power-relationships which survive, self-replicate, and mutate into further new patterns which are in turn subject to the same law.

* This law applies to physical (matter), biological (gene) and cultural (meme) patterns; all matter and life and consciousness, and their evolution, are 'creatures' of their/our material, genetic and cultural constituents, created for the perpetuation of these patterns and sustained through their stable power-relationships.

* Because of the evolutionary success of memes (due to their ability to adapt and change much more quickly and successfully than genes), culture has come to play an increasingly dominant role in our planet's power-relationships.

* Most significantly, the advent of agriculture, which was provoked by climate change (the ice ages) brought about a necessary power shift from the individual to the group in the interest of memes' survival, to the point the individual became largely enslaved to the culture, and the survival of the civilization culture now outweighs in importance the survival of any of its members or communities.

* A consequence of that has been the advent of the codependent cultural constructs of market and state, and, as agriculture has enabled exponential growth in population and created new scarcities, egalitarian societies of abundance have given way to hierarchical societies of managed scarcity.

* This hierarchy has been further entrenched with the cultural evolution of technologies that enable even greater self-perpetuation of the memes that gave rise to it, and have led to the 'efficient' subjugation of the human individual to technology -- that's the power-relationship that most supports the survival and stasis of the culture, and under it even those at the top of the hierarchy become slave-hosts to the memes and culture.

* These memes and culture can now self-perpetuate and thrive more effectively with technology and the artificial constructs of market and globalizations than they could with inefficient and unreliable human hosts, so technology growth is now even outstripping human growth, to the point that humans are becoming commodities and could even become redundant.

* So: if we are now becoming slaves to the machine-powered perpetuation of memes that are outgrowing their need for us (to the point that although catastrophic global warming and human extinction now seem inevitable, this is not something our meme-culture 'cares' about) can we, the human slaves, thanks to the genetic and memetic evolution of self-awareness, 'liberate' ourselves and defeat the meme-culture before it destroys us? In other words, can we consciously, collectively take control for the first time over power-relationships, and establish new power-relationships that put the genetic survival of the human race (and, hopefully, the survival of all other life on Earth on which that genetic survival depends) ahead of the reckless survival of the Frankenstein 'civilization' culture we have created?

Vail's answer to this final question is a qualified 'yes'. He argues that the way to establish power-relationships that put our genes' interest ahead of memes' is to "confront hierarchy with its opposite -- rhizome -- a web-like structure of connected but independent nodes", borrowing from successful models in nature of such structures. The working units (nodes) of this 'revolutionary' structure are self-sufficient, egalitarian communities, and the concept of 'ownership' in such communities is eliminated to prevent the reemergence of hierarchy.

Rhizome-based structures need to be developed and then institutionalized from the bottom up to replace hierarchical ones, Vail argues, in all areas of our society -- social, political, economic, educational etc. to entrench the power and sustainability of self-sufficient communities and render them invulnerable to re-expropriation of that power by hierarchies.

I'm not so sure meme culture should be viewed as the enemy - its more a matter of creating and propagating good memes to replace the bad ones, which is what I try to do here in a very limited way (I suspect many analysts of religion and other memetic frameworks would tell you much the same thing - most religions seem to try and align gene replication along with their meme replication for example - which seems to be one of the many things that gets Richard Dawkins' goat about them - but it does make sense - even though those memes often tend to be ones which reinforce hierarchy, which is what I dislike about them).

Jamais from Open The Future has a post up at Futurismic on the participatory panopticon - "Watching the Watchmen Watching Us".

This November, comedian Michael Richards learned about the participatory panopticon. So did the UCLA police. And early in the month, Virginia Senator George Allen learned that it can have a political bite.

The participatory panopticon is the emerging scenario of distributed observation of the world around us, using cheap, networked tools like mobile phones and open, web-based tools like YouTube. A rapidly-growing number of us have literally at our fingertips systems of capturing and sharing what we see. Most of what we capture will be of interest only to ourselves, or to close friends and relatives; some, however, will have a far greater reach that we might suspect.

What all three of the examples I cite at the beginning of this piece have in common is that they were recordings of events that (a) the perpetrators would, in retrospect, probably wish to have done differently, if at all, and (b) would have received little notice in the era before personal networked cameras and video-sharing websites. Certainly there may have been rumors that a comedian had "gone nuts" on stage, or that UCLA cops had beaten a student, but as rumors, they'd have a limited life-span, and would soon be forgotten. Because of the participatory panopticon, however, these events will for a very long time shape how many of us think about these people.

The participatory panopticon is not going to go away any time soon. The publicity associated with the Richards and UCLA cases -- and the political impact of the George Allen "macaca" incident -- virtually guarantees that more citizens will have cameraphones at the ready to capture and share damning evidence of the misbehavior of officials and celebrities. So what will the participatory panopticon explosion look like?

Mass Participation: The next time we see a cameraphone-recorded, newsworthy event, chances are we'll have multiple perspectives on it, each video providing additional context and evidence. On balance, this will be useful, as a typical response by those caught on video is that the recording misses what happened before, or after; the more witnesses, the greater the accuracy. Moreover, having multiple recordings helps to mitigate the effect of...

Fakes: The combination of the impact of these recordings, the low quality of the actual video, and the rise of easy-to-use digital image and video tools means we are almost certain to see faked cameraphone recordings of seemingly volatile incidents, whether involving celebrities or civic officials. A video uploaded to YouTube can be highly disruptive to the "story" a movie star or presidential candidate wants told, even if the video is later shown to be a hoax. The initial scandal usually carries more memetic weight than the subsequent correction. Especially given what happened to George Allen, expect to see one or more faked videos used to attack candidates in the run-up to the 2008 election in the US. That's why we'll see more...

Self-recording for self-defense: A key lesson from the 2004 presidential campaign in the US was that it's vitally important for protestors to make their own (multiple) video recordings of protests and arrests. The NY police videotaped protestors, but apparently edited the recordings later on to justify the arrests -- edits that were exposed by comparisons to the protestor videos. If the UCLA cops that beat the kid in the library last month had been wearing their own personal cameras, they'd be able to demonstrate that the kid was, as they claimed, behaving in a way that warranted the beating prior to the point where the citizen cameraphone recording started.

Self-recording for self-defense won't be much help if the individual does, in fact, mess up -- it wouldn't have helped Michael Richards or George Allen, for example. In the case of public officials, however, that's a good thing. If a police officer or elected leader knows that every contact he or she has with the public is being recorded, they will presumably be less inclined to behave in careless or corrupt ways. This deterrent effect would be even greater if the recordings were made available to the public soon after they're made (with appropriate blurring or muting to protect the privacy rights of the citizens involved).

Jamais also has yet another post on the frightening concept of geoengineering. I still say we'd be better off doing a crash conversion from coal and oil to electric vehicles, solar and wind (the discussion about Lowell Wood in the comments is also interesting BTW)...

Geoengineering -- aka planetary engineering, aka (re-)terraforming the Earth -- has once again popped up into the public limelight. The latest issue of Wired has an article about Nobel-prize-winner Paul Crutzen's proposal to spray sulfur particles into the high atmosphere over the arctic, reflecting sunlight and cooling the region, allowing icepack to reform. Coincidentally, the November 16 issue of Rolling Stone (of all places) has a profile of Dr. Lowell Wood, former nuclear weapons designer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Wood has proposed a sulfur-seeding plan essentially identical to that of Dr. Crutzen. The idea that we may have to engineer the planet to avoid climate change disaster is taking off.

I wrote about geoengineering for my Futurismic column at the beginning of October, and it's a subject I've been following for a few years. The potential methods abound, from orbiting solar shades to bioengineered plants or microbes slurping methane or CO2. They're all big, expensive, and hold the potential to be cures even worse than the sickness. We know so little about the complex interrelationships of our geophysical systems that a clumsy intervention could easily lead to catastrophe.

Unfortunately, global warming is coming on so fast, and the effects have the potential to be so devastating, that we will almost certainly see someone -- a dramatically-affected country, for example, or as Bruce Sterling suggests, a well-heeled tycoon with a rocket fixation -- attempt some measure of geoengineering.

Asserting that it's a bad idea won't stop a desperate effort. If global warming gets as bad as it could (and there's an all-too-great chance that it will), human civilization will not go quietly. We'll try everything we can think of to forestall climate disaster.

Dismissing the notion because it's wrong to conduct a planet-wide experiment in climate engineering neglects the fact that we're already conducting a planetary climate experiment, only we've lost the lab notes, don't have a control, and got massively drunk the night before. We've dumped massive amounts of garbage into the atmosphere with little consideration of the long-term results. Now we get to see what happens.

Moving from sousveillence and altering the atmosphere to laser armed surveillence from above the atmosphere, Pajamas Media has a post on the development of an "orbital battle station" (these guys really need a good marketing person - surely even a school kid could tell you that the name for one of these objects just has to be "death star").

While this thing sounds more like the world's largest pork barrel (akin to the SDI program the aforementioned wannabe geoengineer Lowell Wood was part of) than a threat to humanity, the frightening thing about the article isn't the death star itself but the "semen stained genocide addicts" (as Billmon once aptly named them) in the comments who just can't wait to launch the thing so they can kill all 1.2 billion muslims (obviously not understanding that the US can already do that without a death star - but I guess reason and logic probably aren't in their list of cognitive skills).

Democratic leaders are poised to gut America’s missile defense - at the same time North Korea and Iran are testing long-range missiles that can strike the U.S. and its allies, including Israel, Japan and Britain.

Meanwhile, sources inside the missile-defense community tell Pajamas Media that the Bush administration is planning to ask Congress to begin funding development of an “orbital battle station.”

With these key developments, 2007 is set to be the biggest battle of space-based weapons since President Reagan proposed “Star Wars” in 1983.

The incoming chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee is Carl Levin. Levin, a Michigan Democrat, has long been a foe of missile defense. In 1980s, he worried that President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative — which aimed to develop technology to destroy Soviet missiles during all phases of flight — was “destabilizing.”

Today Sen. Levin sings the same tune in a different key. “They’ve not done the operational testing yet that is convincing,” said Senator Levin during a post-election press conference. He was referring to the Ground based Missile Defense [GMD] system being installed in Alaska and California, to defend against North Korean missiles. He added that he favors stalling purchases of interceptor missiles - vital for missile defense — until after testing is complete.

In short, Sen. Levin and other longtime opponents of missile defense plan to use “testing” - set to an unrealistically high level - to stop missile defense.

Bruce Sterling has written his last column for Wired (though no doubt Viridian Notes will continue to flow for some time), on the collision between the virtual world and the real, and the future of futurism.

For instance, Pew daintily inquires: In coming decades, are people going to vanish into the Net, permanently absorbed by addictive VR-style experiences? The reaction stretches predictably from "You must be nuts" to "Of course, it's happening already." And what's the centrist opinion? If an innovation works, some people will thrive on it, while others who are screwed up to begin with will face severe new problems.

I know this is true because I've lived it. I'm a pre-Internet novelist who became moderately famous online, only to have my paperback writing slow down as I began to spend uncontrollable amounts of time surfing and blogging. This experience is both grand and problematic. It reflects not two extremes but the slider-bar that is my everyday life.

And that's what surveys are good at: revealing the spirit of the times rather than delivering keen individual insights. Reading the Pew study, it becomes clear that we're entering a new era, the post-Internet age, a world in which the Net will be everywhere, like the air we breathe, and we'll take it for granted. It will be neither the glossy nirvana of technophilic dreams nor the dystopia of traditionalist nightmares. It will look a lot like today – but with higher contrast, sharper focus, and a wide-angle lens.

The bubble-era vision of a utopian Internet is dented and dirty. The Pew respondents seem to agree that personal privacy is a thing of the past, and they're split nearly 50-50 on whether the costs will outweigh the benefits. Technophobic refuseniks are likely to carry out violent resistance, and they may have good reason: Out-of-control technology is a distinct risk. The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders.

The future of the Internet lies not with institutions but with individuals. Low-cost connections will proliferate, encouraging creativity, collaboration, and telecommuting. The Net itself will recede into the background. If you're under 21, you likely don't care much about any supposed difference between virtual and actual, online and off. That's because the two realms are penetrating each other; Google Earth mingles with Google Maps, and daily life shows up on Flickr. Like the real world, the Net will be increasingly international and decreasingly reliant on English. It will be wrapped in a Chinese kung fu outfit, intoned in an Indian accent, oozing Brazilian sex appeal.

One extremely popular virtual world where all sorts of echoes of reality appear is Second Life, which is the setting for this tale about pyschological education (which sounds like something to steer well clear of if you're just wandering around Second Life).

Wander down the corridors of Professor Peter Yellowlees's virtual classroom in the three-dimensional online world of Second Life and you bump into a familiar face. An image of former prime minister Bob Hawke appears on the television and over the swirling sounds of bagpipes, a disembodied voice says: "You are the most worthless person in the world and I won't have you contaminating my society ..."
This is not some game, rather a representation of a paranoid hallucination - in which Bob Hawke features prominently - as experienced by one of Professor Yellowlees's patients several years ago.

The professor's project has brought the sounds and visions previously only "visible" in the mind of a schizophrenic into virtual reality space for anyone to experience.

The voices appear to be talking directly to you, urging you to harm yourself. Suggestive headlines jump out from the newspaper and all manner of strange things morph from the television, windows, walls and floors.

Professor Yellowlees, now with the University of California Davis, recreated that experience and embedded it in this three-dimensional world so that his students could better understand what it's like for a schizophrenic.

He began building the virtual classroom when he was at the University of Queensland. When he moved to the US two-and-a-half years ago he transported his experiment into Second Life, a virtual playground that boasts about 1.6 million members around the world. "I literally took some of the artwork that I'd made in Australia and we just plugged it into the environment here rather than remaking it," Professor Yellowlees said.

His project is an example of how Second Life is being used for purposes other than recreation and commerce.

"For teaching, it's actually quite powerful because the alternative is showing a movie like A Beautiful Mind or getting a patient in to describe how they hear things or see things or simply just telling people about hallucinations," Professor Yellowlees said "But none of them are actually as powerful as putting someone into an environment."

I'll close with another story about an Australian prime Minister - in this case a joke about the radioactive Rodent that got one of our national TV news presenters in a little bit of trouble this morning (and while I'm not really a Kochy fan he did go up several pegs in my estimation for exhibiting some true blue character in this case):

John Howard is on a skiing trip - Christmas holidays, Aspen, the whole thing.

He's coming down the slopes and then in the snow written - obviously someone has relieved themselves in the snow - and written, "John Howard is a dork".

Well, John stops in front of it and looks at it absolutely fuming and says to the secret service guys who are sort of shadowing him while he's on his holiday in Aspen: "Look into this. I want to know who did it, under what circumstances." They say, "Yes sir" and he went off skiing.

That night the forensic guys have taken a sample of the thing in the snow. They go to him, "Well, Mr Prime Minister, we've got good news and bad news.

"We've tested the urine samples and we've come to a conclusion. What do you want - good or bad news?"

And he said, "Well, what's the good news?"

And they said, "Well, it's Kim Beazley's urine".

And he said, "Well, what's the bad news?"

And they said, "Well, it was in Janette's handwriting".