Editor and Publisher takes a look at the furore over the US Government's attempts to suppress warnings about global warming coming from NASA's James Hansen in a story called Is the World on a Path to Doom - With an Assist from the White House ?.

While most Americans remain preoccupied with war, terrorism, high gas prices--or the coming Pitt-Jolie baby--an issue that may dwarf all of those concerns receives major attention on the front page of the Sunday editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

One story raises a nightmare global warming scenario for the end of the world, at least as we know it, while the other suggests that the Bush administration doesn't want anyone to know about that.

From The New York Times article by Andrew C. Revkin:

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

This story seemed to get reported pretty much everywhere, though its really just part of a normal day's work for the global warming denial bureaucracy I guess - maybe Mr Hansen should study the fate of Winston Smith to see where his career will end up if the Republicans stay in charge for too much longer. More commentary can be found at at RealClimate, the SMH and Grist, with Dave Roberts commenting:

Eilperin [in the Washington Post] also touches on the political pressure being put on Hansen, and digs up this deliciously Orwellian quote:

Mary L. Cleave, deputy associate administrator for NASA's Office of Earth Science, said the agency insists on monitoring interviews with scientists to ensure they are not misquoted.

"People could see it as a constraint," Cleave said. "As a manager, I might see it as protection."

Yes, Dr. Hansen, this is for your own good. Now please relax -- it's easier when you don't struggle ...

The Independent has an article on the possible decimation of plankton by global warming (via MonkeyGrinder, who is displaying an unhealthy interest in Vogon poetry).

The microscopic plants that underpin all life in the oceans are likely to be destroyed by global warming, a study has found. Any plankton haul near the surface of the sea brings in a huge variety of life forms. Plants animals larvae adults vertebrates invertebrates carnivores and herbivores are all represented in the plankton community.

Scientists have discovered a way that the vital plankton of the oceans can be starved of nutrients as a result of the seas getting warmer. They believe the findings have catastrophic implications for the entire marine habitat, which ultimately relies on plankton at the base of the food chain.

The study is also potentially devastating because it has thrown up a new "positive feedback" mechanism that could result in more carbon dioxide ending up in the atmosphere to cause a runaway greenhouse effect. Scientists led by Jef Huisman of the University of Amsterdam have calculated that global warming, which is causing the temperature of the sea surface to rise, will also interfere with the vital upward movement of nutrients from the deep sea.

The BBC has an article on a "Stark warning over climate change" issued by the UK government.

Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases may have more serious impacts than previously believed, a major scientific report has said. The report, published by the UK government, says there is only a small chance of greenhouse gas emissions being kept below "dangerous" levels.

It fears the Greenland ice sheet is likely to melt, leading sea levels to rise by 7m (23ft) over 1,000 years. The poorest countries will be most vulnerable to these effects, it adds.

The report asked scientists to calculate which greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere would be enough to cause these "dangerous" temperature increases. Currently, the atmosphere contains about 380 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, compared to levels before the industrial revolution of about 275ppm. To have a good chance of achieving the EU's two-degree target, levels should be stabilised at 450ppm or below, the report concludes.

But, speaking on Today, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, said that was unlikely to happen. "We're going to be at 400 ppm in 10 years' time, I predict that without any delight in saying it," he said. "But no country is going to turn off a power station which is providing much-desired energy for its population to tackle this problem - we have to accept that.

Gary Sauer Thompson has some comments on the recent blackouts in South Australia.

Adelaide has experienced a heatwave of four consecutive days above 40C within a fortnight of hot days in the mid 30s. That heatwave resulted in a number of blackouts across the state, particularly in metropolitan Adelaide that left at least 50,000 people without power over the weekend.

Some power cuts lasted up to 48 hours. Even if you had an airconditioner it would not have worked for some because they had no power available. Since the houses are not built for the hot summer condtions it is hotter inside the house than outside. Consequently, people drive around in their airconditioned cars to keep cool.

What we have is an energy system in SA unable to cope with demands in conditions of extreme heat. It is well known that electricity infrastructure has been neglected or run down, even though the heat of Adelaide summers are predictable.

Since there is no encouragement by the state government for households to make the shift to solar power to increase the supply in peak demand situations, consumers should receive compensation for damage and the lack of power.

The extreme heat conditions are due to return in a few days. So we can expect more power blackouts or rationing. And more promises tto fix things that will not be kept. And we wil have ever more reliance on electricity generated from those coal-fired powerplants in the eastern states that produce the greenhouse emissions.That's the national grid for you.

What is not happening in Canberra is a prioritising of the development of a transitional, mixed energy profile (renewables and fossil fuels) by the federal government. What is happening is a consideration of only those measures that allow the fossil fuel industry to conduct business as usual. Business as usual means more noxious by-products from the existing modes of energy production and a resistance by the fossil fuel industry to pay the costs of their greenhouse emissions.

It is unlikely that the national grid lacks sufficient capacity at this point to handle spikes in demand (though if there is a plant failure for whatever reason prices do go through the roof) and if a shortfall of supply does occur the standard procedure is to turn off some major consumers (aluminium smelters in particular).

However user demand grows ever higher (thanks to poor new house design, increasing summer temperatures and ubiquitous air-conditioning - not to mention the ever increasing proliferation of computers and other household gadgets) so there is a fairly continuous stream of announcements of new additions to the grid - in SA AGL has just announced they will be building the nation's largest wind farm, while in NSW they recently announced a new gas fired peaking plant (using coal seam methane if my memory serves me correctly), while Delta has announced they will be increasing the capacity of some of their (coal fired) plants as well.

The Australian Gas Light Company (AGL) today announced it is to spend $236 million to construct Australia’s largest wind farm at Hallett, 220 kilometres north of Adelaide in South Australia. Construction of the wind farm, which will result in 45 wind turbines on a 14-kilometre area over the Brown Hill ridge near Hallett, is scheduled to commence in September 2006 with initial commissioning expected in December 2007.

The company is expecting the project to create around 150 jobs during the construction phase, while the 95 megawatt (MW) facility will be integrated with AGL’s existing 180 MW gas-fired peaking power plant at Hallett.

AGL Managing Director Greg noted that the new wind farm would help the group meet its commitment to increase the amount of electricity generated from renewable sources and also contribute to AGL’s obligations under the Federal Government’s Mandatory Renewable Energy Target scheme ("MRET") by supplying around 24% of AGL’s future Renewable Energy Certificate ("REC") requirements.

“Hallett is an ideal location for a wind farm as it offers a number of competitive advantages including one of the largest wind resources on mainland Australia, access to existing infrastructure and close proximity to the high voltage electricity transmission system,” said Mr Martin. “The strategic location at Hallett will also enable the development of an integrated gas-fired power plant and wind farm facility to ensure continuous operation during periods of high electricity demand,” Mr Martin added.

Currently, Australia’s largest wind farm is the 91 MW facility at Wattle Point in South Australia, which AGL also owns following its acquisition of Southern Hydro in October 2005.

The Herald has an article on mining and energy giants BHP and RIO, which mentions BHP's hurricane induced production problems. While the author seems to think oil exposure isn't a big positive for BHP, personally I suspect BHP's oil, gas and uranium assets will make it more successful than RIO in a post peak world (which would likely consume much less iron ore and aluminium) - especially if there is a bust in China, which seems to be a reasonable possibility in the medium term.

In the middle of 2003 China was booming but the markets hadn't woken up to it. I was in Hong Kong, chatting with Morgan Stanley's China economist, Andy Xie, and I asked him what Australian investors needed to do to get on board. "Buy big resources companies with China contracts, put them in your bottom drawer, and don't take them out for 20 years. When you finally do, you will be a wealthy man," Xie replied.

It was good advice. BHP shares were available for less than $9 a share when Xie and I spoke, and Rio Tinto shares were a shade over $29 each. On Friday, news that China's economy grew by 9.9 per cent in 2005 propelled them to new peaks that few imagined then. BHP jumped 97c to $26.05 and traded as high as $26.35, and Rio shot up by $2.14 to $76.10, after trading as high as $76.25.

Since mid 2003, BHP shares are up 204 per cent and Rio shares are up 160 per cent - but it is Rio that is outperforming now. The two shares marched up in step in the first eight months of 2005 but since then BHP shares have risen by 25 per cent and Rio by more than 46 per cent.

If Australia has a genuine corporate icon, Melbourne-based BHP Billiton is it, but powerhouse commodity prices and powerhouse profits are masking the fact that, compared with Rio, it is a more complicated investment proposition in 2006.

BHP is not a pure miner, for one thing. It is also a substantial oil and gas producer, and it is worth noting that Rio's shares began to outperform just after the oil price peaked above $US70 a barrel at the end of August last year, when Hurricane Katrina belted the Gulf of Mexico.

The oil price is rebounding now on fears that Iran's nuclear ambitions will see its share of OPEC production withdrawn or withheld from the global supply chain, but it isn't back to last year's Katrina highs yet. Katrina and other Gulf of Mexico hurricanes also affected BHP's own oil production directly.

The group is developing significant acreage in the gulf and said in October that it was scaling back its oil and gas production forecast for 2006 by as much as 8 per cent to take the effect of the hurricanes into account. In its quarterly production report last week it added that hurricane activity had created equipment shortages that were pressuring its development timeline.

Now I wouldn't want to suggest that having an oil business is an outright negative for BHP Billiton. Oil has been a fantastically profitable business for the group in recent years and as the oil price rises again on the Iran concerns, continues to be. But BHP's experience in the Gulf of Mexico last year and the highly politicised gyrations in the oil price are something some investors may be considering.

Rio, on the other hand, has no oil. And it has more exposure to one of the commodities most affected by China's boom: iron ore. Rio produces more iron ore - almost 30 million tonnes in the December quarter compared with almost 23 million tonnes by BHP Billiton - and its iron ore business accounts for 38 per cent of the total group on a net present value basis. On the same basis, iron ore accounts for about 17 per cent of BHP's total enterprise.

Technology Review has an article on US energy policy, with some experts saying too much funding is going into hydrogen at the expense of near-term technologies (leaving aside all the other glaring problems with that particular set of policies).

High oil prices and the dangers of global warming have some experts hoping that President Bush's State of the Union address tonight will redirect energy research priorities. The president, they say, needs to start funding a wider range of promising technologies, including ones that could have a near-term impact on both fuel costs and emissions.

"There clearly are serious issues about the balance of the [research] portfolio," says Ernest Moniz, former undersecretary at the Department of Energy and now professor of physics at MIT, where he co-chairs the Energy Research Council, set up to spearhead energy research.

Moniz says there "is a huge amount" of money going into research on new technologies, especially for transportation, that use hydrogen for fuel. Yet such hydrogen technology "is a very long way into the future, if ever, whereas lots of other kinds of work that could have very profound impacts in the shorter term are not being funded." In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush proposed $1.2 billion for hydrogen research.

According to Moniz, shorter-term technologies that deserve more funding include advanced internal combustion engines and new techniques for burning fossil fuels more cleanly in power plants. Advanced engines could improve fuel efficiency by 15-20%, he says, significantly easing the demand for oil, while simultaneously decreasing emissions.

One promising candidate is homogeneous charge compression ignition, known as HCCI, a technology that uses sophisticated controls to combine the best elements of diesel and gasoline engines. Since the advanced controls make the engines tunable for running on different fuels, they could further decrease dependence on oil by burning ethanol, biodiesel, or even hydrogen.

In sme oil related news, the Observer has a report on the Nigeria situation called "Oil delta burns with hate".

Fears are growing from investors, oil workers and agencies working in the Niger delta that the escalating violence may force the four major oil companies - Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, Exxon and ENI - to close onshore operations.

Paul Horsnell, head of commodities research at Barclays Capital, said: 'There's always been low-level violence about not enough money trickling down or local difficulties, but this is different. There's a sliding scale of events that could happen and at one end it gets to the stage where it becomes impossible to continue operations in certain areas of the delta. There's no getting away from the fact that this is a possible outcome.'

And, in a new report out last week, Stakeholder Democracy Network, an anti-corruption campaign group active in the region, said: 'We, and most experts on the region, are gravely concerned by many strong indications that, despite the outward appearance of a year-long ceasefire, various factions are quietly arming as though for war... The most pessimistic assessments suggest Shell and foreign oil operators may have to go offshore altogether by 2008 as security and public order deteriorates.'

Shell relies on Nigeria for 11 per cent of its global output. But it has suffered four attacks in recent weeks and had to cut production in the delta by 10 per cent. Now some Shell insiders are privately questioning how secure its operations are and to what extent it can rely on production there. Shutdowns would not only hurt the revenues of oil majors but also threaten a surge in oil prices.

The Niger delta is already classified by international agencies as a danger zone on a par with Chechnya and Colombia. The number of guns in circulation has increased dramatically since 2003, the year the last presidential elections were held. Those elections were widely condemned as being rigged, with armed gangs seizing ballot boxes and intimidating voters.

Criminal gangs with international connections make billions of pounds by 'bunkering' - illegally siphoning off - a tenth of all Nigerian oil. Some say the oil firms must know oil bunkering happens but tolerate it so operations can continue. Bunkering gangs then launder their cash abroad and buy machine guns to bolster their criminal empires.

Then there has been the recent rise of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend). The organisation claims responsibility for the kidnapping of Shell workers and is demanding $1.5bn compensation from the firm for the pollution it says Shell has caused.

Some suggest that the wave of violence will see oil majors sell out to Chinese firms desperate to secure oil supplies, who will come into the country with a clean slate. Two weeks ago, Cnooc, the state-owned Chinese energy company, said it would pay nearly $2.3bn to acquire a large stake in a Nigerian oil and gas field, one of the biggest overseas acquisitions by a Chinese company.

Others say that the Nigerian government has plans to take control of the oil industry in a tactic similar to that used by Russia's President Putin. One thing is clear, though: the oil supply from Nigeria is now far from secure - and it could not have come at a worse time for the global economy.

And to close, one from last week - Past Peak takes a look at Jerome a Paris' post on the world's 4 major oilfields being in decline (though I'm a bit dubious that anyone has proved that Ghawar is in decline with any degree of certainty).

Jeremy Leggett reminds us that so-called "super giant" oilfields are rare, and almost all were discovered decades ago:

Only around 50 super-giant oilfields have ever been found, and the most recent, in 2000, was the first in 25 years: the problematically acidic 9-12 billion barrel Kashagan field in Kazakhstan. [...]

In 2000 there were 16 discoveries of 500 million barrels of oil equivalent or bigger. In 2001 there were nine. In 2002 there were just two. In 2003 there were none. [Emphasis added]

So we stopped finding super-giant fields long ago. What about the super-giants currently in production?

Mexico — Mexico's Canterrell, the third largest oilfield ever discovered, is now in decline. FT:

The Cantarell oil field, in the shallow waters of Campeche Bay, is regarded by Mexicans as their crown jewel. It is the second largest oil field in the world by production, behind Saudi Arabia's mammoth Ghawar oil field, pumping 2.2m barrels a day, the same amount as all the Kuwaiti fields together.

For that reason, Mexicans were recently dismayed when Petróleos Mexicanos, the state oil company, said that the field's production would decline this year, signalling a trend towards its depletion. [Emphasis added]

Russia — Russia's Samotlor, Russia's largest and the world's second largest, is also in decline. Jerome:

Next, we can talk about Samotlor, the largest Russia oil field, and the second largest ever found. From a peak of close to 2mb/d, its production is now down to less than 0.5mb/d. [According to BP's own data,] more than two thirds of the oil to be recovered, in the most optimistic scenarios, already has. [...]

In case you've never heard it, as most news in recent years talk about rapidly growing oil production in Russia, Russia's oil production peaked in the first half of the 1980s — what we witnessed in recent years was simply some catching up after the collapse of the early 90s which was not due to technical reasons but to the chaos in the early post-Sovier years. Russia is about to know a second, lower peak as its production is now stagnating again. [Emphasis added]

Kuwait — Kuwait's Burgan, one of the five largest oilfields in the world and until recently the world's number two in production, is in decline as well. See this post from a couple of months ago.

Saudi Arabia — Which leaves Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, the world's heavyweight champ. The Saudis haven't admitted it yet, but Ghawar, too, is almost certainly in decline. Here, for example, is Matthew Simmons, the oil industry's foremost investment banker, who has studied the Saudi situation in great detail:

Saudi's "king" of oil fields, Ghawar, is the world's largest oil field. Wildcat discoveries there from 1948 to 1952 proved reserves estimated at 170 billion barrels of oil in place and 60 billion barrels recoverable. Those numbers remained unchanged in Aramco's 1975 reserve estimates. Ghawar has accounted for 55 percent to 60 percent of all Saudi oil produced. If these numbers are correct, Ghawar's oil is 90 percent gone. [Emphasis added]

As Jerome concludes:

No super giant fields have been found in the past 25 years, and all the rock structures on the planet where such fields could be found are known.

We will not find more oil. We will squeeze more out of the existing fields, thus generating new "reserves" (in their economic definition), but we are already running out of the cheap and easy to produce stuff.

Peak oil is very real.

Posted by Big Gav at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments

Discussion about the impact (or lack thereof) of the Iranian oil bourse has gained steam in recent weeks. Jeff Vail came up with a good post on the topic late last year and has more recently been followed by a somewhat fervent article by Krassimir Petrov, an attempted debunking by James Hamilton, a discussion at PeakOil.com and most recently an article by Cóilín Nunan on Energy Bulletin.

With speculation mounting over the possibility of a US- or Israeli-led military attack of Iran sometime later this year, it has been suggested that real motivation for US antipathy towards the Iranian government has little to do with concerns that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons. Some commentators have instead suggested that Iran’s real Iranian threat to the US and its economy is that, in defiance of the US administration, it is attempting to establish an oil ‘bourse’ (exchange) in March of this year which would enable oil to be traded in euros. This would move oil sales away from their usual denomination in dollars and would, it is argued, undermine the American currency with grave consequences for the US economy.

This internet-based debate is reminiscent of what occurred before the invasion of Iraq when several observers, myself included, hypothesised that Saddam Hussein’s decision to sell Iraqi oil in euros was perhaps one of the reasons the US wanted ‘regime change’. The US decision after the invasion to return Iraqi oil sales to dollar denomination and to convert back into dollars all Iraqi foreign currency reserves, which had been in euros prior to the war, was certainly entirely consistent with this theory.

However, others have claimed that the idea that the currency in which oil is sold matters at all is based on a poor understanding of economics. If oil sales were switched away from the dollar, they claim, it would make no difference to the US economy, and therefore this cannot have anything to do with the reasons the US went to war in Iraq and is now adopting a threatening stance towards Iran. I will try and address their main argument, as I feel the economic reasons why the denomination of oil sales are is an important issue have not always been clearly explained, including by myself.

Those arguing that the denomination of sales is crucial to dollar strength have tended to say that countries are forced to save dollars so that they have dollars to buy oil. Their critics, however, reply that you do not have to save in dollars to buy oil since you can save in whichever currency you want and then buy dollars on the foreign exchange market whenever you want to buy oil. What matters, say the critics, is in which currency people ultimately save rather than in which currency they trade. It is people saving in dollars, or in US financial assets, which results in high levels of investment in the US and ultimately permits the US to run a huge trade deficit.

The latter argument is largely correct, but it leaves out the crucial fact that the reason countries choose to save in dollars, to a far greater extent than in any other currency, is nonetheless related to the fact that oil is sold in dollars. Yes, what is important is in which currency countries save, but this is to a significant extent determined by which currency they trade in...

The Guardian has a report which suggests that Britain isn't too keen on using the military option against Iran.

Though world leaders agreed that strong measures were necessary to prevent Iran gaining nuclear weapon capacity, there was little consensus this weekend [at Davos] as to what those measures should be. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, yesterday conceded that Britain and the US were divided over using military force.

Responding to comments by US politicians stressing the 'leverage' the military option allowed, Straw said such action was not under discussion. 'I understand that's the American position. Our position is different There isn't a military option. And no one is talking about it.'

Britain, along with most EU states, has been pursuing a policy of 'engagement' with the Iranians. Straw was speaking ahead of talks with Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

JeffVail has a couple of new posts on Iran - the first looks at an unlikely report that Iran has staged a nuclear test already while the second considers the idea that the US may change tack and try to break Khuzestan (the important part that contains most of the oil) away from the rest of Iran (which I've mentioned before here and there).

Keep an eye on Khuzestan. That's the South-Western Iranian province, bordering Iraq and the Persian Gulf, that currently has a modest but growing independence movement. It was also the site of the recent bombings that Iran is blaming on UK influence. Within the US intelligence community, at least, it is widely believed that the best option for dealing with Iran is through fomenting internal unrest of some sort. The classic formula for this (see "Coup D'Etat: A Practical Handbook" by Luttwak) is to leverage existing internal devisions--and that is exactly what is happening here. The US is actively supporting this Khuzestan independence movement, and the various "Free Iran Movements" that are being supported by right-wing think tanks in D.C. have many ties to this region. Not surprisingly, Khuzestan is the major oil producing region in Iran, but the revenues don't provide much benefit to the local and ethnically distinct Arab population.

You may also recall the Iranian Embassy siege in London in 1980--also the work of the a group from Khuzestan agitating for autonomy from Tehran. So there are definitely some genuine tensions here for US exploitation. This is, of course, highly speculative, but I think it is still worth considering: the US may not need to invade all of Iran to influence their choices--they may just need to help the people of Khuzestan break away, and "help" a pro-US government set up shop.

The Falls Church News Press's latest peak oil article also looks at the Iran situation.

At the minute, the most serious of the several threats facing the world's oil supply is clearly the Iranian situation. Iran's leadership is determined to start a uranium enrichment program. Tehran claims it is for electric power, but the US and Europe say "nuclear weapons." To make matters worse, nearly every major world power (and numerous minor ones) has a finger in the Iran pie either as an actual or potential customer for Iranian oil, or as a friend or foe of Tehran.

The important new factor in this crisis, however, is the lack of much spare oil production capacity anywhere in the world. There certainly is not enough to offset the 2.4 million barrels a day Iran is currently exporting. Thus, for the first time we are seeing the threat of a completely new kind of economic embargo called "who gets hurt the worst" - the world economy, or the one embargoed. Both sides are aware of this situation with Tehran threatening to send world oil prices to over $100 per barrel if anyone interferes with their enrichment program. The US spokesmen seem to be saying that we must pay any economic price to keep the Iranians from nuclear weapons.

From a peak oil point of view, however, stoppage of Iranian exports would be a seminal event. Oil prices obviously would be driven higher. Whether they get to the "serious damage" level is hard to say because so many factors go into shaping the price of oil. Given that we are very close to peak oil, it is quite possible a major stoppage of Iranian exports could play a significant part in the actual event.

The Globalist has an article by the "guru of the gap", Thomas Barnett, which looks at the Iran issue from a rather different angle to most commentators. His plan looks like something of a blueprint for removing the present regime over a longer period of time and replacing it with a relatively pro-western leadership, while giving Iran more power in regional affairs. Unlike many more fevered commentators, he notes that Iran is a nation state and like all nation states is a fairly rational actor - if they don't feel their existance is threatened they will behave much like any other mid size nuclear power.

It is Iran that can effectively veto movement toward peace and stability in either Jerusalem or Baghdad through its effective support to, and manipulation of, the political agendas of regional terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It is Iran that has the capacity to destabilize the flow of oil out of the Gulf.

It is Iran that determines how much of the energy coming out of the Caspian Basin may be safely accessed by both India and China. And it is Iran, which, by virtue of being a top-five player in both oil and natural gas and a longtime diplomatic pariah as far as the United States is concerned, that offers Asia the best possibilities for locking in long-term bilateral energy ties, a process already begun by India and China.

And yet, oddly enough, for all the same reasons why the Shah of Iran was once the preferred security partner of the United States in the region, today’s Iran still retains many of those same attributes.

If America wants Iran to act responsibly in the region, it needs to give Iran some responsibility for regional security.

Iran is not a source for, or a supporter of, the jihadist movement embodied by al Qaeda. As a Shiite state, its definition of “revolution” differs from that track altogether.

Iran’s Islamist regime results in a sort of tired authoritarianism, never truly aspiring to the sort of totalitarianism pursued by the Salafis, who can be thought of as the over-the-top Maoists (or Trotskyites) to Iran’s rather pedantic post-Stalin Soviet Union. Iran is a nation-state first and foremost, not some transnational religious-inspired movement.

Yes, like Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, Iran is more than willing to exploit transnational terrorist movements to its own ends, but this is a cynical pursuit of national power, not a millenarian fantasy of regional, much less global, revolution.

Iran is not interested in overthrowing the West’s political and economic order, it just wants to receive its due place in those corridors of power.

...

Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons levels that playing field in a proximate sense, by finally allowing the Muslim Middle East to sit one player at the negotiating table as Israel’s nuclear equal. This is not just opportune, it is crucial.

As for the fears that Iran’s possession of the bomb will destabilize the region, there is no good historical evidence for that. Rather, the historical record is quite clear: Two relative equals with nuclear weapons is a far better equation than one that features a permanent imbalance.

Would Iran give terrorists the bomb? Only if terrorists could get Iran something that it could not otherwise achieve directly with the West.

Finally, William Engdahl has another article out, this time on "Pricing the Risk of War in Iran".

In the past weeks rumors have circulated widely amid growing tensions around a possible bombing strike against Iran. Among the reports—in violation of all precedent since the 1945 USA bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—is discussion of possible deployment of nuclear bombs by either the United States or Israel, to destroy or render useless the deep underground Iranian nuclear facilities.

The possibility of war against Iran presents a geo-strategic and geopolitical problem of far more complexity than did the bombing and occupation of Iraq. And Iraq has proven complicated enough for the United States. Below we try to identify some of the main motives of the main actors in the new drama and the outlook for possible war.

The dramatis personae include the Bush Administration, most especially the Cheney-led neo-conservative hawks in control now of not only the Pentagon, but also the CIA, the UN Ambassadorship and a growing part of the State Department planning bureaucracy under Condi Rice. It includes Iran under the new and outspoken President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It includes Putin`s Russia, a nuclear-armed veto member of the UN Security Council. It includes a nuclear-armed Israel, whose acting Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, recently declared that Israel could ‘under no circumstances’ allow Iranian development of nuclear weapons ‘that can threaten our existence.’ It includes the EU, especially Security Council Permanent Member, France and the weakening President Chirac. It includes China, whose dependence on Iranian oil and potentially natural gas is large.

Each of these actors has differing agendas and different goals, making the issue of Iran one of the most complex in recent international politics. What’s going on here? Is a nuclear war, with all that implies for the global financial and political stability, imminent? What are the possible and even probable outcomes?

...

The role of Putin’s Russia in the unfolding Iran showdown is central. In geopolitical terms, one must not forget that Russia is the ultimate ‘prize’ or endgame in the more than decade long US strategy of controlling Eurasia and preventing any possible rival from emerging to challenge US hegemony.

Russian engineers and technical advisers are in Iran constructing the Bushehr nuclear plant, at least 300 Russian technicians. Iran has been a strategic cooperation partner of the Putin government in terms of opposing US-UK designs for control of Caspian oil. Iran has been a major purchaser of Russian military hardware since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in addition to buying Russian nuclear technology and expertise.

In March 2005 Iran-Russian relations took a qualitative shift closer. That month Moscow agreed to the sale of a ‘defensive’ missile system to Tehran, worth up to $7 billion-worth of future defense contracts. In 2000 Putin had announced Russia would no longer continue to abide by a secret US-Russia agreement to ban Russian weapons sales to Iran that the government of Boris Yeltsin had concluded. Since then, Russian-Iranian relations have become more entwined to put it mildly.

Moscow currently says it is in talks with Iran to build five to seven additional nuclear power reactors on the Bushehr site after completion of the present reactor. Russia expects to get up to $10 billion from the planned larger Bushehr reactors deal and additional arms sales to Iran. It is currently building the reactor on credit to be paid by Iran only after the completion of the project. Sanctions and admonitions will not change Russia's relationship with one of the most demonized states in America's ‘axis of evil.’ Iran has become a major counterweight for Moscow in the geopolitical game for Washington’s total domination over Eurasia, and Putin is shrewdly aware of that potential.

A look at the map (see below), will reveal how geo-politically strategic Iran is for Russia, as well as for Israel and the USA. Iran controls the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the choke point for oil from the Persian Gulf to Japan and the rest of the world. Iran borders the oil-rich Caspian Sea as it does NATO member Turkey.

Significantly, on January 23, the Russian daily, Kommersant reported that Armenia, sandwiched between Iran and Georgia, had agreed to sell 45% control of its Iran-Armenia gas pipeline to Russia’s Gazprom. The Russian daily added, ‘If Russia takes over this [Iran-Armenia] pipeline, Russia will be able to control transit of Iranian gas to Georgia, Ukraine and Europe.’ That would be a major blow to the series of Washington operations to insert US-friendly pro-NATO governments in Georgia as well as Ukraine. It would also bind Iran and Russian energy relations. While the Armenian government denies they have agreed, negotiations continue with Gazprom holding out the prospect of demanding double the price or $110 per 1000 cubic meters rather than the present $54 unless Armenia agree to sell the stake to Gazprom.



...

Were the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis to risk launching a nuclear strike on Iran, given the geopolitical context, it would mark a point of no return in international relations. Even with sagging popularity, the White House knows this. The danger of the initial strategy of pre-emptive wars is that, as now, when someone like Iran calls the US bluff with a formidable response potential, the US is left with little option but to launch the unthinkable-nuclear first strike.

There are saner voices within the US political establishment, such as former NSC heads, Brent Scowcroft or even Zbigniew Brzezinski, who clearly understand the deadly logic of Bush’s and the Pentagon hawks’ pre-emptive posture. The question is whether their faction within the US power establishment today is powerful enough to do to Bush and Cheney what was done to Richard Nixon when his exercise of Presidential power got out of hand.

Posted by Big Gav at 7:43 PM | Permalink | Comments

BHP has announced that the opening of their Atlantis field in the Gulf of Mexico has been delayed due to the aftermath of last year's hurricanes.

BHP Billiton confirmed fears of production delays at its $US1.1 billion ($1.46 billion) Atlantis oil and gas project in a quarterly report released yesterday.

"The recent hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico have impacted the availability of equipment required to allow for completion on schedule in the third quarter of 2006," BHP said. "As a result, the project schedule remains under review."

Energy group president Philip Aiken first raised the possibility of commissioning delays at the BP-operated Atlantis project at a closed analysts briefing in December.

Macquarie Equities analysts yesterday told clients they believed expected production of 200,000 barrels of oil and 180 million cubic feet of gas a day would be delayed by at least six months, with a significant effect on BHP's 2007 earnings.

At an oil price of $US62.80 a barrel, Atlantis would deliver nearly $US1 billion - or 7.5 per cent - of earnings before interest and taxes in 2007. Therefore delaying the start-up by six months could reduce 2007 EBIT by $US340 million, or 3 per cent.

Macquarie attributed some of the delay to BP, which as the operator had prioritised the repair of its damaged Thunderhorse platform in the Gulf of Mexico rather than the start-up of the Atlantis project.

"The Atlantis issue highlights one disadvantage of being a minority partner and not operating major assets," Macquarie analysts said.

BHP is also talking up the prospects of their Californian LNG terminal, announcing that they have keen customers for all the planned capacity. Treasurer Peter Costello has been over there lobbying on BHP's behalf - hopefully he picks up some tips on how to commit to renewable energy from the Californian government.

One week after Woodside Petroleum announced new plans to export liquefied natural gas to California, BHP Billiton said 18 large buyers had signed letters of interest in purchasing gas from its rival $US600 million ($795 million) Cabrillo Port import terminal project.

No final agreements will be struck until the offshore terminal is approved by the US Coast Guard, the California State Lands Commission and the Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, which BHP believes could occur later this year.

The US Coast Guard "stopped the clock" on the approvals process last year, asking BHP to submit more information about the environmental impact of the project, which has faced fierce opposition from environmentalists. "We're confident the information that is in there will allay the fears and concerns the environmental community had over the last year or so," Kathi Hann, BHP's Californian spokeswoman said yesterday.

A new draft environmental report is expected to be released on March 2. Cabrillo Port will then undergo a 45-day public review process - including hearings in April - before authorities decide its fate. "We're hoping to have everything finalised and issued by late [Northern hemisphere] summer, maybe early [autumn]," Ms Hann said.

Of the 18 potential buyers expressing interest in BHP's LNG, all names were kept confidential except for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. But it is understood the letters of intent, if converted to contracts, would represent more than the terminal's LNG capacity when it opens as early as 2010.

Last week, Woodside announced it would develop a rival LNG import project in California, called OceanWay, which would reheat the gas on dedicated ships rather than using a floating terminal like Cabrillo Port.

Looking at it from the other side of the ocean, The Oil Drum has a detailed post on North American Gas (including LNG) supply which includes a link to Michael Klare's latest on the Geopolitics of Natural Gas.

In the high-stakes arena of energy geopolitics, natural gas is rapidly emerging as the next big prize. What oil was to the twentieth century, natural gas will be to the twenty-first. Consider these recent developments:

* As we went to press, Russia was restoring the flow of natural gas to Western and Central Europe after state-controlled Gazprom curtailed deliveries on January 1 in a bid to force Ukraine to pay the market price for gas previously supplied at subsidized rates. Although emphasizing the price issue, Russian officials apparently intended to constrict Ukraine's energy supplies as a way of punishing that country's pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko, architect of the Orange Revolution, for his overtures to NATO and the EU. Gazprom's pipelines to Western Europe (which buys a quarter of its gas from Russia) pass through Ukraine so it could siphon off some of the diminished supply, leaving very little for other customers and provoking fears of an energy crisis at the onset of winter.

* A dispute between China and Japan over the ownership of an undersea gas field in an area of the East China Sea claimed by both countries has grown increasingly inflammatory, with China sending warships into the area and Japan threatening "bold action" if the Chinese begin pumping gas from the field. The conflict has soured relations between Beijing and Tokyo and provoked a strong nationalistic response from the populations of both countries. The huge anti-Japanese demonstrations in Shanghai and other Chinese cities last April were prompted, in part, by Tokyo's announcement that it would permit drilling in the area by Japanese firms. A peaceful resolution of the dispute does not appear imminent.

* Ever since India announced plans more than a year ago to build a natural gas pipeline from fields in Iran to its own territory via Pakistan, the Bush Administration has been applying pressure on New Delhi to cancel the project, claiming it will undermine US attempts to isolate Tehran and curb its nuclear efforts. "We have communicated to the Indian government our concerns about the gas pipeline cooperation between Iran and India," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced after meeting with Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh on March 16. But the Indians have continued talks with Islamabad and Tehran over the pipeline plan.

The United States is becoming increasingly dependent on natural gas. This country now relies on natural gas for approximately one-fourth of its total energy supply, more than from any source except oil. As a result, the economy has become more and more vulnerable to fluctuations in gas supply and pricing--a vulnerability that should be especially evident this winter as gas prices hit record levels, with painful effects on the poor. Natural gas provides approximately 14 percent of the energy used to generate electricity in this country, 45 percent of home heating fuel and 31 percent of the energy and petrochemicals consumed by agriculture and industry. Gas is also used as a feedstock for the manufacture of hydrogen, a promising new entrant in the race to develop alternative fuels.

The United States currently relies on North American supplies for most of its gas, but with those reserves being depleted at a rapid pace and few untapped fields available for exploitation, need for gas from other regions is growing and energy plants seek more gas from foreign suppliers like Qatar, Nigeria and Russia. As with oil, America could become heavily dependent on foreign suppliers for essential energy needs, a situation fraught with danger for national security. Many of America's key allies, including the NATO powers and Japan, are dependent on imports.

There is also a lot of fuss going on about the disruption of gas supplies to Georgia from Russia after a number of pipelines were suspiciously blown up. I did read some interesting commentary on this (which talked about the juggling of supplies from Russia and Iran to various customers via various pipelines) but I've lost the links. Energy Bulletin has a couple of links here.

The Governor General devoted his Australia Day speech to the topic of global warming and the need to move away from fossil fuels. At least someone associated with the government is talking sense.

Global warming is one of the greatest threats to Australia's future, the Governor-General, Michael Jeffery, has warned in his Australia Day address.

More care must be taken of the country's natural wealth, he warned, and this would require people to make individual change their way of life - including turning to more environmentally friendly energy sources.

"One of the most daunting environmental challenges is global warming," he said. "Governments are responding around the world, but lifestyle changes we can make as individuals are also important. There is no single solution. It requires a range of strategies."

Major-General Jeffery has previously spoken of the need for more sustainable use of water resources, a theme he returned to in yesterday's address. "We are now realising how to better conserve and utilise our most precious natural resource - water - by more sensible and efficient household, agricultural, industrial and commercial use, and by restoring the health of our rivers and groundwater systems," he said.

General Jeffery acknowledged the important role that mineral resources such as coal play in Australia's economy, but warned they were finite and said alternative sources of energy should be considered.

"Our land is our golden soil, yielding mineral wealth to miners and opportunity for farmers," he said. "Mineral resources, including offshore oil and gas reserves, generate tens of billions of dollars annually in an energy- and construction-hungry world.

"But our mineral resources are not infinite. In particular we need to encourage further research and development of alternative, safe, efficient and clean energy sources."

The Rodent, on the other hand, used the day to demand "root and branch" reform of history teaching (exactly which levels and which states he had in mind weren't specified), focusing in particular on the need for students to know the date of the Battle of Hastings (for those who don't know, 1066, with William the Conqueror of Normandy defeating King Harold of England). Apparently critical analysis of history is considered some sort of thought crime in the Prime Miniature's eyes and students should be rote learning a series of dates that mark various triumphs of the British Empire (and calamitous defeats, in the case of 1066) and accepting whatever knowledge is being handed down from above unquestioningly. Funny that.

John Howard declared the "phoney and divisive" debate over national identity was finished but argued for "root and branch renewal of the teaching of Australian history in schools".

"Too often, Australian history has fallen victim in an ever more crowded curriculum to subjects deemed more relevant to today," Mr Howard said in a speech on the eve of Australia Day.

"Too often it is taught without any sense of structured narrative, replaced by a fragmented stew of themes and issues. And too often history, along with other subjects in the humanities, has succumbed to a postmodern culture of relativism where any objective record of achievement is questioned or repudiated."

Mr Howard said he would prefer history was taught with a strong emphasis on pivotal dates and events such as the Battle of Hastings and the European discovery of Australia. More students needed to study history, Mr Howard said, to help prepare them to become informed and active citizens.

The NSW Board of Studies' history inspector, Jennifer Lawless, said the Prime Minister's criticisms did not apply to the NSW history syllabus, which was "very rigorous and content-driven as opposed to theme-driven".

She described the ability to memorise dates as "a fairly lower order skill that students acquire early on. We move on from that and teach more sophisticated historical skills, like using historical sources appropriately, questioning those sources, analysing and interpreting, looking at perspectives and interpretations."

NSW is the only state where history is taught as a separate, mandatory subject from years 7 to 10. All year 9 and year 10 students must learn the history of Australia from Federation to the 1990s.

Ms Lawless said the number of students enrolled in HSC history courses had increased in recent years. Last year 9996 year 12 students studied modern history and 10,336 ancient history.

The president of the History Teachers Association of NSW, Pamela Panczyk, said: "I don't think students need to know the date of the Battle of Hastings. I wouldn't usually mention it.

On the subject of history and postmodern relativism, while I was on my Xmas break I came across Liddell Hart's "History of the First World War" amongst my old books collection and decided to take a look to see how much it had in common with the view of some modern left wing commentators that one of the causes of the first world war was Germany's plan to build a railway from Berlin to Baghdad, in part to transport oil from what is now Iraq and Saudi Arabia - but was then part of the Ottoman (Turkish) empire. This plan is viewed as a major threat to British dominance of India and the Orient in general, because it gives the Germans direct access to the Indian Ocean (via the Persian Gulf) along with access to middle eastern oil.

Liddell Hart appears to be a true blue Tory based on his writing (he spends a lot of time praising Winston Churchill's role in the war, which is unusual given that the book was written in the 1930's, a time during which Winston was rather unpopular) so he would seem to be unlikely to be making too many excuses on behalf of the Germans.

The British didn't wait for long after hostilities broke out to make a grab for the oil fields of southern Iraq (which also helped to protect their own fields in Kuwait), dispatching a division from India which had successfully captured Basra by November 1914 (3 months after the war had started). Hart notes that "the oilfields near the Persian Gulf were of essential importance to Britain's oil supply".

Hart also notes that the planned Baghdad railway was the symbol of Germany's dream of a "Germanic Middle East", but doesn't comment much more on the topic - so it doesn't appear to have been a particularly important issue at the time, at least not publically.

Another interesting snippet from the book included the note that both Britain and Germany were well into overshoot even back then - neither country could feed itself which made the British naval blockade and the German submarine campaign of prime importance - with both sides coming close at various stages to starving the other into submission. The British managed to develop enough anti-submarine capbility to keep their shipping moving goods from the colonies and North America, while the Germans were bailed out twice - in 1916 by Rumania's unfortunate decision to join the war on the side of the Allies, only to promptly crumble to defeat, enabling Germany to seize their wheat (and oil) supplies, then in 1917 the collapse of Russia enabled the Germans to occupy the Ukraine, which again helped bolster their grain supplies.

Posted by Big Gav at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments

I'm offline for a week or two to enjoy the summer weather...

Posted by Big Gav at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments

Grist points to a number of articles on the situation in the Niger delta.

Oil pollution, corruption contribute to hostage-taking in Nigeria

In Nigeria, oil, corruption, pollution, and violence have produced a drama rich with 21st-century portent. Last week, militants in Nigeria's oil-rich delta region took four Western oil workers hostage. Their demands include more local control of Nigeria's massive oil wealth -- the proceeds of which typically end up in the pockets of crooked leaders -- and $1.5 billion from Royal Dutch Shell in compensation for pollution in the delta, like the big pipeline rupture last July that oozed contamination over farmers' fields and a fishing stream near the poor village of Iwhrekan.

Villagers accuse Shell of sending thugs to ransack Iwhrekan after villagers chased off the company's chosen cleanup contractor -- charges the company denies. The Nigerian government and Shell reportedly want to pay the ransom and get back to business as usual. Nigeria is Africa's largest oil exporter, and is the fifth-largest supplier of America's imported oil.

WorldChanging comments on Jeremy Leggett's long peak oil rant in The Independent.

Are we at peak oil? Jeremy Leggett, author of Half Gone (The Empty Tank here in North America), writes in this very long opinion piece on the subject, that not only are we peaking, but we'd better get moving on the responses. Nothing new if you've been reading all the stuff we post on the subject, but a good overview if you're looking to catch up:

Microcosms of what could be done can be found already on the local government scene. Take the small town of Woking. Its borough council has cut carbon-dioxide emissions by fully 77 per cent - yes, more than three quarters - since 1990 using a hybrid-energy system involving small private electricity grids, combined heat and power (CHP), solar photovoltaics (PV), and energy efficiency. Woking has turned its town centre, its housing estates, and its old people's homes into inspirational islands of energy self-sufficiency. The UK grid could go down for ever, and these folks would have their own heating and electricity year-round. The technologies work in perfect harmony. The CHP units generate heating when needed in winter, and lots of electricity along with it when the PV is not working at its best. The PV generates plenty of electricity in the summer, when the heating isn't needed, meaning the CHP can't generate much electricity. Because the use of private wires is so much cheaper than using the national grid, the whole package costs fractionally less than the equivalent heating and electricity supply would cost from the big energy suppliers.

Compare such out-of-the-box ingenuity with what nuclear has to offer. Even if there were no environmental problems associated with it, and we could afford the billions needed in perpetuity from the public purse to make the voodoo economics stack up, a new fleet of stations couldn't come on-stream in the UK much before 2020. And if we and the Americans can't solve the energy crisis without resorting to nuclear, the whole world will follow our example. Bad as the terrorist threat is now, it would be compounded many times as a result.

Kuro5hin (a high traffic geek site) has the second part of their series on "Peak Oil: The Next Big Thing", which takes a pessimistic look at alternatives to oil.

To recap, "Peak Oil" is a catch phrase for the theory that we are facing an upcoming slow exhaustion of conventionally obtained fossil fuels. That much is so patently true that it borders on tautology. Oil is a finite resource. One way or another, our use of it therefore will cease. Larger oil deposits are easier to find than smaller ones. Sooner or later, the oil fields we drill would run out, and we would have to look for others, finding less and less as time went by. What the Peak oil theory also claims is that as oil extraction became more difficult, demand for oil would continue to increase, making each barrel pricier and your share of oil production smaller.

It's been 6 months after my first article, and the 200 day moving average for the price of oil has reached $60 per barrel, and will continue to rise slowly since winter has begun. The day by day price continues to fluctuate by over a dollar. Oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico has been severely disrupted by the last hurricane season, and is not expected to recover until the summer, right in time for the next. The Saudis have admitted that by 2015 they expect not to be able to increase production in line with demand, which in real terms means this day will come much sooner. In the last six months, just as in the last 30 years, there have been no new major finds of oil. And in the Appalachian Mountains, old oil wells are back in production, now that their care and operation is profitable again. Let's look at the alternatives.

Jeff Vail has some comments on the report that Kuwait's oil reserves may be just half of what they claim that I linked to earlier today. He also has a post on oil price movements.

So what does this mean for our ability to produce oil? Well, the classical Hubbert peak takes place when half the oil in the ground has been produced. However, if you discount OPEC reserves by 50%, it becomes clear that we are WELL past that half-way point. So production should have already begun to decline. This suggests that, as widely feared, only the use of water injection and water flood tecniques to keep reservoir pressure artificially high have kept production rates up for the past several years.

The problem with this is that when a field who's production rate has been artificially sustained beyond the half-way point finally does begin to decline, its rate of decline tends to be very, very high. 10-18% has been suggested (by Simmons and others) as the decline rate for fields that have been pressed to the limits with injection technologies. This is critical, because while Peak Oil may be a quite manageable problem at 2% depletion, 10%+ depletion means that world production will fall by half in less than 7 years. That would be absolutely catastrophic. No wonder this story isn't available on CNN.

Maybe those Mayans were on to something with their "2012" prediction?

WorldChanging has a post on Lester Brown's Plan B (v2.0).

About two years ago, we posted a brief piece on Lester Brown's book, Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. Brown is the founder of the Worldwatch Institute and head of the Earth Policy Institute, and is best-known for the State of the World series. Brown has just come out with Plan B 2.0, updating the original work, and it looks to be one of the better summations of the WorldChanging perspective yet in print. Best of all, the entire work is online as both HTML and PDF (you can, of course, purchase a paper copy as well).

A listing of some of the chapter titles will give you a sense of the direction Brown's taking:

2. Beyond the Oil Peak
4. Rising Temperatures and Rising Seas
9. Feeding Seven Billion Well
11. Designing Sustainable Cities
13. Plan B: Building a New Future

Brown also discusses global poverty, energy efficiency, water shortages, and what would need to be done to shift the global economy towards greater sustainability.

WorldChanging also has a post on the Diesel-Electric Hypercar (so does Wired) that looks at a particularly efficient new hybrid design.

Accelerated Composites, a startup in Carlsbad, California, is now assembling a new diesel-electric hybrid of its own design, made of high-end composite materials and using supercapacitors instead of batteries. Like the Honda Insight, it will seat two. Accelerated Composites expects the vehicle, called the Aptera, to cost around $20,000.

Estimate mileage: 330 miles per gallon at 65 miles per hour.

That's not a typo. The combination of super-streamlined shape, ultra low-weight materials, and high-output supercapacitors gives the design incredible efficiency. And because the composite production process developed by Accelerated Composites is faster and more efficient than previous methods, the overall cost of the vehicle can be startlingly low.

MIT Technology Review has a look at the Soldius solar powered gizmo recharger, while Wired has a look at a foldable solar battery charger.

If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then where does the unlimited power of the sun fit into the picture?

Sundance Solar's PowerFilm 10-Watt Foldable Solar Battery Charger F15-600 weighs only 9 ounces, but it kicks out 10 watts of power to charge your notebook, cell phone, PDA, iPod, or just about anything else you've got handy. And when you're not using it, you can roll it up and throw it in your glove box. At $299, it ain't cheap. But if you're planning on being off the grid for a while, it'll keep you juiced and ready to work.

WorldChanging notes that the transcript of The Long Now's debate about nuclear power has now been posted.

The audio recording of the Peter Schwartz/Ralph Cavanagh discussion at the last Seminar About Long-Term Thinking isn't yet up, but Stewart has written up a brief but fairly complete summary of their arguments, and posted it to the new Long Now discussion boards.

Meanwhile, Schwartz said, world demand for energy will continue to grow for decades, as two billion more people climb out of poverty and developing nations become fully developed economies. China and India alone will double or quadruple their energy use over the next 50 years. We will run out of oil in that period. That leaves coal or nuclear for electricity. Conservation is crucial, but it doesn't generate power. Renewables must grow fast, but they cannot hope to fill the whole need. Nuclear technology has improved its efficiency and safety and can improve a lot more. Reprocessing fuel will add further efficiency. [...]

California, Cavanagh said, has led the way in developing a balanced energy policy. Places like China are paying close attention. PG&E has become the world's largest investor in efficiency, led by Carl Weinberg (who was in the audience and got a round of applause). And now there are signs that California may become the leader in setting limits to carbon emissions. Within limits like that, then the private sector can compete with full entrepreneurial zest, and may the best technologies win. Nuclear would have to compete fairly with new forms of biofuels and with ever improving renewables.

Fair warning: most of the comments on the Long Now boards are from people with quite a bit of knowledge about nuclear power engineering and a strong pro-nuclear perspective. If you choose to weigh in, be sure to have your facts straight. That said, the posters seem to have very little knowledge about renewables, and a few have made the kinds of blanket -- and factually incorrect -- pronouncements about renewable energy that they'd quickly dismiss were they about about nuclear energy.

Aside from the nuclear discussion, there's not a lot of content up yet on the Long Now boards, but go and take a look around. I'm certain that you'll find much of interest for WorldChangers.

Some other links that caught my eye - the Huffington Post notes that social engineering isn't just for communists any more, Mike Carlton takes a look at the political implications of Australia's bribes to Saddam scandal (as well as the steady stripping away of our freedoms), Grist reports on a lawsuit against the NSA over Bush's illegal wiretapping exploits (with the great title of "the sound of one hand tapping") along with another post on a gaggle of past EPA chiefs slamming Bush's do nothing about global warming policy, WorldChanging has a hesitant look at global warming-resistant agriculture, The Energy Blog has a post on Inovalight's "Solar Ink" and TomDispatch takes a look at the psychology behind chickenhawk war mongering and the similarities between the "war on terror" and the Indian wars that stretched on for more than a century during the early days of US settlement.

Six former heads of the U.S. EPA -- including five Republicans -- have blasted the Bush administration for failing to act on global warming. In an unprecedented united front, the ex-chiefs, gathered yesterday to commemorate the agency's 35th anniversary, agreed that debating the extent to which climate change is a human-caused phenomenon (a favorite Bushy pastime) is pointless. They want federally regulated carbon caps and cuts. Current EPA head Stephen Johnson defended Bush policies, but the panel wasn't biting. "This is not a sort of short-term cycle problem. This is a major disaster for the world," said Russell E. Train, EPA boss under Presidents Nixon and Ford. "To say we'll deal with it later and try to push it away is dishonest to the people, and self-destructive."

And to finish on a completely off topic note, here are a couple of reports on whales - the first about a whale who has swum up the Thames as far as Battersea, and the second about a novel Greenpeace protest - dumping a dead whale outside the Japanese embassy in Berlin.

escue workers are trying to save a northern bottle-nosed whale that swam up the River Thames past Big Ben and other London landmarks, the first such sighting of the endangered species since records began nearly a century ago.

Amazed onlookers crowded the Thames riverbanks yesterday as the mammal, about five metres long, swam upstream through the heart of the British capital past the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye ferris wheel.

Today's newspapers ran the story and photographs on their front pages. Save the Whale was the choice of words from the environmentally-minded Independent. Free Willy! the mass circulation Daily Mail appealed.

The rare whale, which normally lives in deep water, became briefly stranded in the shallows around Chelsea in west London and people waded into the river to try to encourage it back into the channel.

Posted by Big Gav at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments

Reports about Iran moving their foreign reserves out of Europe yesterday seemed to contribute to the latest spike in oil prices (briefly over US$70 a barrel) and the 200 point drop on the Dow.

Iran's decision Friday to transfer its foreign currency reserves out of Europe ahead of possible U.N. sanctions could affect as much as $50 billion in deposits, analysts estimated, and helped send oil prices above $68 a barrel.

But economists said the impact on the global economy would be muted, with the figure not large in comparison to other countries' reserves and uncertainty about where the money would be moved and whether it would be shifted from dollars and euros to other currencies.

"The banking system in Europe is sufficiently well developed and stable enough that even a wholesale withdrawal of reserves within wide bands of uncertainty wouldn't likely cause severe problems," said Mark Austin, a currency analyst with HSBC in London.

Iran, under increasing international pressure over its nuclear program - and mindful of the freezing of its U.S. assets after the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran - said it had begun transferring its reserves from European banks to an undisclosed location.

Three analysts who did not want to be identified because the delicate nature of the information estimated that the figure was between $40 billion and $50 billion, while a fourth said it was more likely to be between $25 billion to $30 billion.

The range puts Iran's holding on about a par with the $54 billion that Algeria holds, and is far below the holdings of countries such as China, which had $ 818.9 billion at the end of December.

The Bank for International Settlements says data indicates Iran had $23.5 billion in the international bank system at the end of June 2005. That total represented a 10% increase compared to six months earlier, according to the Basel, Switzerland-based BIS.

Steve Barrow, a fixed income strategist at Bear Stearns in London, said the latest IMF data indicated that Iran holds around $35 billion-$40 billion in overseas assets.

Presumably reports that Gazprom has cut gas supplies to Europe due the the cold snap in Russia aren't helping either.

Russia's state gas giant Gazprom yesterday raised the spectre of energy shortages across Europe when it cut exports to Italy and Hungary amid cold weather at home. Hungary said it had experienced a 20% cut in natural gas supplies from Russia. A spokesman for gas and oil company MOL Rt told Associated Press that its Russian suppliers had warned it of the drop in supply yesterday morning. He said it was because of Russia's cold snap.

Italy's Eni energy company said supplies had been cut by 5.4% between 6am on Tuesday and 6am yesterday. There were also unconfirmed reports of cuts in supplies to Bosnia and Austria. British Gas warned that the Gazprom move would result in a "worrying domino impact" on the UK wholesale market, where prices are already 75% higher than last year.

But Gazprom denied any problems and said it was delivering 7% more than its contracts with clients in Europe required.

The dispute again undermined President Vladimir Putin's attempt to use Russia's chairmanship of the G8 to boost his country's status as a reliable energy supplier. On January 1 a price row led to Gazprom cutting off the gas to Ukraine. The cuts hit supplies across eastern Europe, and sparked criticism from both the EU and the US that Moscow was "politicising" energy. Yesterday Wolfgang Schüssel, the chancellor of Austria which holds the EU presidency, said the EU should cut its dependency on Russian gas to ensure "security of supply".

Temperatures were predicted to fall to -37C overnight in Moscow, the lowest since 1979. At least 24 people reportedly died across the country.

The energy disputes will raise doubts about Gazprom's reliability. The company has said it wants to secure up to 20% of the British market within a decade. Mr Putin said recently that Russia could supply 10% of Britain's gas.

Petroleum Intelligence Weekly has a report which claims that Kuwait's oil reserves are only half those officially stated.

OPEC producer Kuwait's oil reserves are only half those officially stated, according to internal Kuwaiti records seen by industry newsletter Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW). "PIW learns from sources that Kuwait's actual oil reserves, which are officially stated at around 99 billion barrels, or close to 10 percent of the global total, are a good deal lower, according to internal Kuwaiti records," the weekly PIW reported on Friday.

It said that according to data circulated in Kuwait Oil Co (KOC), the upstream arm of state Kuwait Petroleum Corp, Kuwait's remaining proven and non-proven oil reserves are about 48 billion barrels. Officials from KOC were not immediately available for comment to Reuters.

PIW said the official public Kuwaiti figures do not distinguish between proven, probable and possible reserves. But it said the data it had seen show that of the current remaining 48 billion barrels of proven and non-proven reserves, only about 24 billion barrels are so far fully proven -- 15 billion in its biggest oilfield Burgan.

Kuwait has been adding up to 500 million barrels a year at Burgan which means the remaining non-proven reserves of some 5.3 billion barrels will likely be upgraded to proven, according to PIW.

The Herald's economics column this weekend takes a look at the "empire of debt".

In half a century flat, America has transformed itself from the world's largest creditor into its biggest-ever debtor.

To fully grasp the risk this creates for the global financial system, we have to get a handle on how such a seismic shift occurred in the first place. The most common explanation offered these days, and that of the US Federal Reserve, is that a "savings glut" has emerged among Asian nations.

But there is another way to look at it. Perhaps the Asian nations are as frugal as they ever were, and it is the US that has gone on a "borrowing binge".

In a new book titled Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis, American financial journalists Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin argue just that.

Beginning with Woodrow Wilson, American presidents have set about transforming the US into an empire akin to those of the Greeks or the Romans, they argue.

Gripped by a desire to reshape the world in its own image, the US has set itself on a warpath, beginning in Europe in 1917 which has dragged it through the jungles of Vietnam, right through to the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Expanding an empire always carries costs, but, Bonner and Wiggin argue, the US empire is even more unstable than its ancient predecessors because it is has been built in reverse.

Instead of accumulating tributes from its neighbouring lands, as in the good old days of pillage and plunder, the US economy has been shelling out cash to the far-flung corners of its empire as fast as it can go. A steady stream of US dollars and bonds flow out to countries such as China, Japan, and India, where they are ploughed into expanding production and investment.

But there is another drain on this modern empire, even greater than warfare: welfare.

In the 1930s and '60s the US initiated two massive campaigns aimed at lifting all its citizens out of poverty. Roosevelt's "New Deal" and Johnson's "Great Society" offered the prospect of social harmony. What they delivered was a mountain of debt.

Bonner and Wiggin have done the figures. The total value of assets in the US is about $50,000 billion ($67,000 billion). Current debt stands at about $US37,000 billion. Adding in the present value of future government liabilities and their conclusion is grim: "America is broke. Busted. Bankrupt. It couldn't pay its debts even if it wanted to."

When Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981, as with George W. Bush two decades later, cutting taxes proved a far easier political option than tackling the other side of the equation, cutting spending. In Reagan's first year Americans got a 25 per cent across-the-board tax cut. Bush has delivered several. Neither made any progress in curbing government spending.

Not only has the US Government sent itself hopelessly into debt, but through lower taxes it has encouraged US consumers to spend freely and do the same. Other countries have been only too happy to grab their slice of the American pie, soaking up more and more US Treasury bonds.

According to Bonner and Wiggin, the American "empire of debt" officially came into being when it crossed the line from creditor to debtor in the mid 1980s. Today, the annual US current account deficit stands at around $US750 billion, requiring around $US2 billion each day in foreign investment to finance it.

This seismic shift in the world's most powerful economic and military force has the potential to destabilise the entire international financial system.

Jacques Chirac is muttering about nuclear strikes in response to any terrorist attack on France or French interests, with the remarks seemingly directed at Iran.

Jacques Chirac says France is prepared to launch a nuclear strike against any country that sponsors a terrorist attack against French interests.

The French President said the country's nuclear arsenal is capable of making a tactical strike in retaliation for terrorism.

"The leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would envisage using … weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and fitting response on our part," he said during a visit to a nuclear submarine base in Brittany. "This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind."

Mr Chirac said his country had reduced the number of nuclear warheads on some missiles deployed on France's four nuclear submarines in order to target specific points rather than risk wide-scale destruction.

"Against a regional power, our choice is not between inaction and destruction," he said. "The flexibility and reaction of our strategic forces allow us to respond directly against the centres of power … All of our nuclear forces have been configured in this spirit."

At the same time he condemned "the temptation by certain countries to obtain nuclear capabilities in contravention of treaties".

Posted by Big Gav at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments

Fortune has a global warming warning for the business community.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 opened insurers' eyes to a catastrophic risk that they had been assuming for free. Their reaction provided a foretaste of how the global market might react to abrupt climate change. Following 9/11, insurers stopped writing policies that automatically included coverage of terrorist attacks. A number of major construction projects had to halt because banks would not finance them without terrorism coverage. Ultimately Congress passed and President Bush signed a law shifting responsibility for $100 billion in damage from future terrorist attacks to the U.S. government, and the construction projects got rolling again.

As climate change starts inflicting losses, insurers will again pull back, shifting financial risk to businesses and homeowners, the banks that finance them--and finally to taxpayers. In Florida, huge increases (up to 40%) in insurance rates are already making it harder for people to sell homes, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

More than 1,000 miles from New Orleans, in Cape Cod, Mass., a far-flung echo of Katrina has been the 20% rise in reinsurance costs (reinsurers are financial institutions that backstop insurance companies). The increase prompted Hingham Mutual Group, a property and casualty insurer, to drop coverage for 6,500 commercial properties. Customers left in the lurch have a fallback in FAIR (short for Fair Access to Insurance Requirements), a program mandated by various states and run by insurers. But Massachusetts's FAIR plan recently requested big rate increases, arguing that past weather patterns may no longer be a guide to estimating future climate risks. That rationale was "unprecedented," a team of industry experts noted in a report entitled "Availability and Affordability of Insurance Under Climate Change"; it's a vivid example of how insurance has difficulty adapting to changing climate.

For insurers the hazards of climate change become more concrete each year. Andrew Dlugolecki, a risk analyst at the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Britain, recently estimated that if climate gradually warms, the chances of the industry getting wiped out by weather-related catastrophes will rise from about one in 100 worldwide today to nine in 100 by 2050. A ninefold increase in the risk of collapse places a heavy burden on insurers, but the risks may be far greater than that. Asked in 2003 how climate change that's abrupt and chaotic might affect those odds, Dlugolecki speculated that the risk of catastrophic weather-related losses rises to about nine chances in 100 by as early as 2010. To insure a property or business affected by that degree of risk, a carrier would have to charge annual rates as high as 12% of insured value--most businesses and individuals start self-insuring (industry-speak for dropping their coverage and taking their chances) when premiums reach 3% of value.

Already the pain of weather-related insurance risks is being felt by owners of highly vulnerable properties such as offshore oil platforms, for which some rates have risen 400% in one year. That may be an omen for many businesses. Three years ago John Dutton, dean emeritus of Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, estimated that $2.7 trillion of the $10-trillion-a-year U.S. economy is susceptible to weather-related loss of revenue, implying that an enormous number of companies have off-balance-sheet risks related to weather--even without the cataclysms a flickering climate might bring.

Corporate leaders could soon feel the heat too. In 2004, Swiss Reinsurance, a $29 billion financial giant, sent a questionnaire to companies that had purchased its directors-and-officers coverage, inquiring about their corporate strategies for dealing with climate change regulations. D&O insurance, as it is called, insulates executives and board members from the costs of lawsuits resulting from their companies' actions; Swiss Re is a major player in D&O reinsurance.

What Swiss Re is after, says Christopher Walker, who heads its Greenhouse Gas Risk Solutions unit, is reassurance that customers will not make themselves vulnerable to global-warming-related lawsuits. He cites as an example Exxon Mobil: The oil giant, which accounts for roughly 1% of global carbon emissions, has lobbied aggressively against efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. If Swiss Re judges that a company is exposing itself to lawsuits, says Walker, "we might then go to them and say, 'Since you don't think climate change is a problem, and you're betting your stockholders' assets on that, we're sure you won't mind if we exclude climate-related lawsuits and penalties from your D&O insurance.' "

WorldChanging has a post on James Lovelock's prediction of unavoidable climate doom and Bruce's caustic response in his latest Viridian note - which Jamais uses as the springboard for a rare rant - in this case against apocaphilia and apocaphiliacs.

James Lovelock's recent essay in the Independent has prompted abundant discussion across the sustainable blogosphere, including here at WorldChanging, with Alan's recent post on Mega-Engineering. It's a dark and intentionally depressing vision of widespread famine, ecological crashes and conflict -- all driven by human-caused global warming. Lovelock, who claims to be an optimist on most issues, simply cannot see a way for humankind to avoid utter ruin.

The commentaries and discussions arising from the Lovelock essay have been wide-ranging, but the one that stands out for me is Bruce Sterling's most recent Viridian Note, wherein he tears apart Lovelock in a caustic and merciless fashion. This is Bruce with poisoned daggers drawn, and unlike some of Lovelock's critics, he doesn't pay lip service to Lovelock's past influence.

As much as the Gaia concept helped to spur the consideration of the planet as a system of systems, I must admit to a great deal of sympathy for Bruce's take. Lovelock was once a highly-regarded environmental scientist, but little of that shows in this essay. Instead, he joins the list of apocaphiles, strenuously denying that humans can do anything else but wallow in their own filth and destroy the planet (or, as he describes it, put Gaia into a "morbid fever" for 100,000 years). He expresses great dismay that we've come to this state, but offers neither solutions nor solace, choosing instead to detail some of the awful ways that billions of us will die.

I really dislike apocaphilia.

Apocaphiles tell us that our fate is pre-determined, and that any attempt to avoid it is doomed to failure. They're not simply defeatist, they're positively offended by any suggestion that we might figure out a way to avoid disaster.

...

I dislike apocaphilia because I believe that deeds can make a difference.

I also dislike apocaphilia because it presumes to predict the future. The truth is, we simply cannot know if we are, in fact, doomed. We may be -- but there's a damn good chance that we aren't, at least if we make an effort to change global conditions. And that, ultimately, is what makes me so irritated at doomsayers: the denial of our ability to make a difference. Tell people over and over that there's nothing that they can do, and eventually they'll start to believe you, making the negative outcome inevitable. I would much rather try to change things for the better and fail than to lie back and just let the world collapse around me.

Lovelock tells us that billions of us will die, that it's too late to stop the end of the world. I say that such an outcome is a choice, one that we need not make.

On the topic of apocaphiliacs, James Kunstler's latest diary is quite well done, even if it is, unsurprisingly, rather depressing. Has the US north east really deteriorated as much as he says or is this just a very negative view of the region ? Comments from any readers from up that way are welcome.

It would be hard to imagine a sadder landscape than these rural backwaters along the New York / Vermont border. Geographically they are still beautiful. It's a region of tender hills, well-wooded now, and ribboned with trout streams. It's the human furnishings that are desolate and what they say about what we have become as a nation. This was a farming region of course, and the re-growth of the woods is a symptom of farming's decline the past fifty years.

Dairying was the big thing through the first three-quarters of the 20th century. But regional milk production became irrelevant during the decades of cheap oil, when New Yorkers could just as easily get milk and cheese from Wisconsin or California. So now only a few relic farms still operate.

Every building in the landscape related to farming is now decrepit. Siding and shingles have peeled off the barns. The sills are rotting and the ridgeboards sag. The tractor sheds are too far gone to keep tractors in, so the machines sit out in the rain now. The older houses -- many of them dating from the Greek Revival of the 1850s -- are subject to indignities beyond simple neglect. Many are partially cocooned in plastic, because fixing the wooden parts was too expensive, or just too difficult for people whose skills are now limited to operating cars, televisions, and forklifts. The yards are littered with plastic debris: tricycles, hoses, and patio chairs disintegrating under the daily ultraviolet -- and you could see it all because a week of January temperatures into the 50s melted all the snow cover off.

You can track the decades of overgrowth in the pastures: sumac and poplar in the early going, then regular trees. In many places, stone walls from the 19th century run along the roads in woods that were sheep meadows a hundred and fifty years ago. You have to wonder how long all that wood will be there now, with heating bills up 50 percent this year and no relief in sight.

Indeed, I wonder if the remnant of people living here will have any idea what to do with their land, when the forklift jobs in the Target Store regional warehouse thirty-eight miles away are no longer there. I'd like to suppose that even people unaccustomed to challenges can be resilient and resourceful when they simply have to be. But if the televisions stay on, they may just choose to die in front of them.

The towns along way -- Salem, Granville, Fair Haven -- may be even sadder than the farms. All civic vitality seems to have been drained out of them by a persistent wasting disease. Little of any value has been built in decades, and certainly nothing with any beauty. Here and there gas stations bloated into snack marts vie for supremacy of the highway intersections, but the little downtowns with their vacant storefronts echo with loss and grief.

Everything fixed has been fixed badly. The houses are encased in plastic siding, grimy with years of tailpipe emissions. Here and there a screw falls out of a sofit and a dangling plastic panel flutters in the wind. The town streets are empty. The windows are broken in the small factories along the trout streams. Only the county highways that turn into the Main Streets show any signs of life, and that, of course, is the life of the highway itself, the endless cavalcade of motoring. Cars and trucks are the sole investments made here.

I traverse this landscape goggling at the sights in wonder and nausea. This part of America has become something worse than a former Soviet backwater, something sadder. In these places, we have managed to overcome even the hard-won fruits of enterprise achieved by the independent people who preceded those alive now. Everything they wrested from the land has been thrown away, or allowed to rot in place -- so that more attention can be paid to televised entertainments.

RealClimate takes a look at the record Amazon drought and investigates if it was caused by warm seas.

On December 11, 2005, The New York Times ran a story on record drought conditions in the Amazonas region of Brasil, linking it to global warming, and specifically the warm ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic that have also been linked to the ferocity of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. This prompted a response from Chris Mooney, calling for a comment from RealClimate about whether such an assertion is valid, as we earlier made it very clear that it is impossible to say whether one single extreme event in a very noisy environment - such as Hurricane Katrina - is related to climate change. So we decided to take a look at this phenomena, and address why there might be a connection and what it takes to make an attribution.

WorldChanging has a post on the recent story that plants produce methane, which prompted a small storm of wingnut nonsense about trees being responsible for global warming - as this effect is very small in the scheme of things, and has been going on forever, htey point out we shouldn't blame the plants.

A few days ago, a report in Nature from the Max Planck Institute suggested that plants may be responsible for quite a bit more methane than previously believed (methane is, as we know, 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but isn't nearly as abundant in the atmosphere). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this report exploded across the newsosphere, usually with headlines suggesting that plants were responsible for global warming, that planting trees to mitigate atmospheric CO2 just made things worse, and otherwise striking an odd balance of "we're doomed" and "it's not our fault!"

...

The press release includes a brief paragraph explaining in more detail how the estimates were calculated; the amount of methane (CH4) emitted by plants is a tiny fraction of the amount of CO2 captured in the same time frame -- no more than 2g of CH4 for every kilogram of CO2. The greater greenhouse characteristics of methane make the effect of that small amount of methane disproportionately large, but (as quoted above) the overall reduction in carbon uptake is 1-4%.

In short, don't worry. Planting trees for carbon sequestration is still a good idea -- you should just plan to plant 1-4% more of them now.

TreeHugger has a report on the producers of Syriana making it "Climate Neutral".

Syriana, the geopolitical oil flick from Participant Productions starring George Clooney, (for which he just won a Golden Globe -- congrats, George!) has announced that the film has gone "climate neutral." Accomplished by offsetting 100% of carbon dioxide emissions generated by its production, an estimated 2,040 tons have been offset through investments made in renewable energy.

TH pal NativeEnergy helped the film's producers calculate all carbon dioxide emissions from all of Syriana's production activities, including filming, air travel, rental car and truck emissions, hotel energy use, diesel generators used on location, office and warehouse energy use, and emissions from shipping, and then purchased renewable energy credits from renewable energy projects to achieve neutrality.

And to close, a clip from Wired - South Korea seems to be well on the way to introducing Robocop onto their streets. I wonder when he will arrive everywhere else...

The South Korean government has robot fever, and they're about to unleash a whole army -- literally -- of the mechanized creatures on their public. According to The Korea Times, the country will see the rollout of police and military robots within the next five years, thanks to a newly approved $33.9 million spending appropriation. Patrol bots will guard the streets at night, and even chase criminals, while horse-shaped combat bots will augment the country's fighting force. In both cases, the bots will communicate via Korea's vast mobile network.

Posted by Big Gav at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Comments

Tom Whipple's latest article in the Falls Church News Press takes a look at the natural gas situation in the US. He doesn't mention the huge LNG deal signed with Dubai, which would seem, to me anyway, to mean that the situation isn't quite as dire as he paints it (assuming the US$ holds up and a larger scale war or revolution doesn't break out in the middle east).

If you heat with natural gas, you must have noticed the price has been going up lately. Well, I have some bad news for you -- this is only the beginning. For the 62 million households heating with natural gas in the United States , the cost of home heating has doubled in the last few years and there is no end in sight.

Unlike the situation with oil and oil products, only a minimal amount of natural gas — around 2 percent of total consumption— is being brought to America in liquefied form by LNG tankers. Currently 83 percent of our consumption comes from our own gas wells and 15 percent comes by pipeline from Canada . The problem is that our domestic production is declining, the Canadians are becoming antsy about sending so much of a valuable resource to the US , and we are going to have to compete with an increasingly desperate world for cargos of liquefied gas.

There are some bright spots. There is talk of a pipeline to Alaska and more LNG compression plants are being built overseas, but these will take years to complete and will only ease the pain a bit, not solve the coming supply crunch. Although we continue to find new pockets of natural gas in the US , those that are being found are smaller and much more expensive to drill. The bottom line is that US natural gas consumption will drop one way or another. We will have rationing by price and there is little anybody can do about it.

In the wake of Three-Mile Island nuclear accident and growing concerns about air pollution, the US started building gas fired generating plants at a rapid pace. Currently 17 percent of our electricity is being generated by natural gas. Consumption by electric power plants nearly doubled in the last 15 years and over 25 percent of our annual natural gas consumption is used to make electricity. As matter of interest, only about 6 percent of the electricity used here in Virginia is generated by natural gas and is brought online only when needed to meet peak demand.

Gas for making electricity, however, is a problem that ultimately will take care of itself. As the cost of generating power by natural gas goes beyond the cost of other sources of energy, the power companies will switch to cheaper sources of fuel where possible, or pass on the increased costs to customers where they can't. This, in turn, will encourage serious conservation efforts so the net result will be less and less natural gas going to fire generating stations.

Woodside has announced a new strategy to try and get approval to deliver LNG to California called "OceanWay". Yesterday's TV news report made this sound like a done deal, though press reports were a little more realistic. There were earlier reports about the Bush administration working to " clear final barriers for the sale of Australian liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the US by the end of the decade".

Woodside, which abandoned a partnership with a US company to build a $US300 million ($400 million) offshore terminal on an old oil platform last year, now plans to convert its LNG to gas on a dedicated ship.

Rival BHP Billiton's $US600 million plan for the same market, Cabrillo Port, would instead use a floating terminal to heat the gas before sending it to shore via a pipeline.

BHP's plan has already faced several delays and fierce opposition from sceptical environmentalists but Woodside believes its bid to supply about 10 per cent of California's natural gas is environmentally superior and will ultimately succeed.

Chief executive Don Voelte and North American LNG director Jane Cutler met politicians and held a media conference yesterday in the state's capital, Sacramento, to announce the "OceanWay" plan.

The development timeline, location and cost of the project were not revealed yesterday but are expected to be made public next month. The company said the timeline would depend on whether the LNG was supplied by Woodside's Pluto field or its Browse field but OceanWay is unlikely to be active before 2010.

"The cost is not the major consideration here," Ms Cutler told the Herald yesterday. "What's really important is a contract that minimises the impact on the environment, addressing the concerns Californians have about permanent features … and LNG in close proximity to population centres."

Along with Woodside and BHP, several other companies have proposed building import terminals in California, although none has received final approval. Billions of dollars of gas exports are at stake and Ms Cutler said the market would probably support two terminals at most.

Woodside's advantage in gaining approval, she said, would be its solid track record of safely making more than 2000 LNG deliveries from the North-West Shelf project it operates in Western Australia.

Woodside has also been in the press over its expanding operations in Libya.

Woodside Petroleum Ltd is due to drill the first exploration well next month in a 194 mln usd hunt for oil beneath the desert sands and gulf waters of Libya, The Age newspaper reported citing company sources.

Libya had been off limits to Western companies due to sanctions imposed by the US and the United Nations in the 1980s and 1990s in response to terrorist activities.

The newspaper said Woodside, 34 pct owned by Royal Dutch Shell, is among the first back into the country, known for its big oilfields, following the sanctions being lifted in 2003.

It said Woodside's first exploration well is due to start late next month in a rapid-fire six-well program in the onshore Murzuq Basin, 1500 km south-west of Tripoli.

A separate seven well program will also be drilled in the onshore portion of the Sirte Basin on the other side of the country. Woodside is a 45 pct partner and operator with Repsol and Hellenic Petroleum.

The Age said Woodside has yet to detail the size of the oil targets it has identified beneath the Sahara's sand dunes, but its permits in the Murzuq and Sirte basins are very much in "elephant" country in oilfield terms.

There have also been reports of possible problems in Mauritania for Woodside (and ROC and Hardman) due to some potential untowardness of their relationship with the ex-energy minister.

Australia's biggest oil producer Woodside Petroleum Ltd is confident that the rumoured detention of Mauritania's former energy minister will not affect its operations in that country.

Woodside on Wednesday confirmed that its Chinguetti oil project, which is located off the Mauritanian coast, was still on track to produce its first oil next month.

Other exploration and development activities were also unaffected by the discussions, the company added.

Local media reports have speculated that the former Mauritanian minister for energy and petroleum has been detained in connection with agreements signed with foreign companies.

Woodside is at least partially responsible for the booming WA economy (and out of control Perth property market) - my visit over Xmas reminded me a bit of the tech boom (in a dry and dusty way) with oil and gas engineers all happily rolling in money and talking about setting up their own oil services companies.

Talk around town indicated that Woodside are planning on hiring 1200 people this year (which I imagine translates to a whole lot of hiring in the local - and offshore - service companies that do most of the actual work). The Pluto project already looks likely to go ahead and there seemed to be a lot of confidence that customers for gas from the Browse field will also be signed up in the next couple of months.

Presumably Pluto gas will end up being handled at the existing LNG plant at the Burrup that handles North West Shelf gas (via 2 new LNG trains). As I understand it design has begun and construction is expected to start in 2007 and will get up and running in 2010.

Browse, on the other hand, is far away from Karratha. One engineer I talked said the project would be similar in size to the North West Shelf. There is some speculation that an LNG plant in the Broome / Derby area won't get the go ahead, and that instead the gas would be piped undersea to Darwin (a rather large distance away) for processing there. (I'm not sure if he meant in the existing Conoco Philips LNG plant or if a new one would be built).

There was also some talk of a smaller field closer to Darwin in Australian waters being developed and the gas piped to Darwin, but I didn't catch the name and haven't noticed any press on this one.

The Sunrise project in the Timor sea is on hold despite a deal finally being agreed between Australia and East Timor over sharing of revenue from fields in the disputed area.

Having a lot of existing LNG plants in Darwin would no doubt make it much harder for any plant to be built in East Timor to process gas from Sunrise once the project finally goes ahead.

I also asked about Woodside's expansion in the Gulf of Mexico - no one seemed particularly concerned about hurricanes - and one person quipped that the GOM will run out of oil within 10 years anyway.

One final note on gas, AGL has signed a deal with Oil Search and ExxonMobil's PNG gas project which makes it seem very likely this will go ahead (and one Sydney firm will get to see a naked stockbroker running around the floor).

Changing the subject back to Darwin, I read an interesting article in "The Monthly" recently called "Lilypad of the Arafura" which looked at the evolution of Darwin from frontier town to somewhat bland northern city (which one resident described as "Canberra with palms"). The article talked a lot about the development of gas fields in the Timor Sea and the potential for Darwin to become the Australian equivalent of Aberdeen. It also looked at the build up of the defence forces in the area, with a lot of our operational capacity moving up from the south and leaving just the administrative functions back in the south.

The author pointed out that while the presence of the Navy and Air Force up there makes a lot of sense, its not quite as easy to understand why the Army is putting Abrams tanks up there, especially given that (1) we don't have any equipment capable of transporting them and (2) the terrain in nearby regions isn't exactly suitable for their use. He speculates that they are there for joint training exercises with US forces, who would then transport them to areas where they may be need, such as Iran. He also speculates that we are likely to see an American base in the Darwin area before too long - the "lilypad" of the Arafura sea.

Posted by Big Gav at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments

The Independent gives their readers another introduction to the topic of peak oil.

As the oil price nudged above $64 a barrel yesterday on heightened concerns about disruption to supplies from Iran and Nigeria, a small group of geologists, economists and commodity traders was meeting in London to consider a more fundamental question: when will the world begin to run out of oil?

That moment is known as "peak oil" - the point at which production stops increasing and goes into inexorable decline. Some commentators believe that moment may be as little as two years away, some reckon we do not need to worry for another 20 years and some think the peak of production is so far in the distance that it is pointless to even try to put a timescale on it.

But one thing that all shades of opinion are agreed on is that when peak oil does happen, its impact on the world economy - and the consumer lifestyles so many of us take for granted - will be profound. Chris Skrebowski, the editor of the Energy Institute's Petroleum Review, believes peak oil will occur in 2008, at which point the world will move into "a land without maps where we are all likely to be poorer".

Posted by Big Gav at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments

The Age's economics editor, Tim Colebatch, takes a look at the Australian government's inaction on global warming. Strangely enough, like most other educated followers of the issue, he thinks carbon taxes are a good idea too.

If the scientists are right, global warming will become the most important issue facing us this century. So far, the trends suggest they are right. The world's weather is getting hotter, more volatile. What is the world doing about it?

The responses vary. But by and large, governments and companies are going about business as usual, with some low-cost amelioration measures at the fringe. There are exceptions, but on the whole, there is little sense that we are facing a long-term crisis requiring radical changes.

Last week saw a stunning example. To back up the Government's Asia Pacific summit on climate change in Sydney, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics produced a report estimating that, based on heroic assumptions about new technology being invented and implemented, its projected level of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 could be reduced by 23 per cent. Good news!

But ABARE did not feel it necessary to tell us what those projected levels are. Only one graph let the secret out: even with this best-case scenario it projects, global emissions of greenhouse gases would more than double by 2050. Instead of heating up the planet by emitting about 8 billion tonnes a year of carbon dioxide equivalent, mankind would fry it by emitting 17 to 18 billion tonnes a year.

Bear in mind that Environment Minister Ian Campbell, backed by leading scientists, has warned that the world needs to reduce emissions by 50 to 60 per cent to stabilise the climate. ABARE is projecting that by 2050 global emissions will be four to five times higher than the level Senator Campbell says is needed. That is simply alarming.

The same day in Washington, the Worldwatch Institute released its annual State of the World report for 2006. It estimated that if China and India were to match even Japanese and European levels of resource use, they would consume the world's entire annual supply of oil and mineral resources. The soaring oil and resource prices of 2004 and 2005, are "a preview of the future".

"It is clear that the current Western development model is not sustainable," the institute's director, Christopher Flavin, concludes. "We therefore face a choice: rethink almost everything, or risk a downward spiral of political competition and economic collapse."

I vote for rethinking almost everything. But governments and businesses, with some exceptions, do not work that way.

What do we need to do? Let's move beyond the argument over whether we should sign the Kyoto Protocol, or merely comply with it. What we need is a realistic policy within Australia that is commensurate with a problem that, as Campbell says, threatens to become a disaster.

First, dump the complacency and self-congratulation. The Australian Greenhouse Office estimates that even with all the measures taken to reduce them, greenhouse emissions from energy use will rise 70 per cent between 1990 and 2020, while industrial emissions will rise 75 per cent. Total emission growth would be held to 23 per cent only by one-off changes in land use, which are now behind us. Admit the problem, and come up with policies appropriate to the scale of it.

Second, we need a policy structure that gives markets and households a strong incentive to reduce their use of energy, both by changing their behaviour and by investing in energy-saving technology. There is a simple, logical way to do it - tax carbon emissions.

A tax on carbon could be offset by cuts in other taxes. Or the funds raised could be used to subsidise research, development and installation of energy-efficient technology, from a solar water heater to a pilot plant of new technology for generating electricity. Or we could do both. It need not make us poorer, and it will make our children richer...

Crikey today led in with some speculation about the impact of the unfolding Iraq oil-for-food scandal here in Australia, which seems to have the government in a spot of bother - unless this is just some sophisticated propaganda campaign run by the American wheat industry to try and grab Australia's wheat exports to Iraq (anything is possible of course but I'd rate that unlikely).

Although it's highly premature to suggest that Wheatgate is about to become the Howard government's Watergate, the signs are beginning to look ominous. As Hugo Kelly writes in Crikey today, "it's clear the Government is facing major – major – trouble," with reliable sources suggesting the existence of a number of "smoking cables and emails" floating around DFAT which, we understand, have found their way into the hands of the federal Opposition.

Apart from the duplicity, illegality, immorality and stupidity of an Australian government organisation paying the biggest bribe of all the bribes paid to Saddam Hussein's regime, if it all turns out to be true then what on earth would it say about the stated reasons for Australia's participation in the invasion of Iraq?

Reasons that were articulately outlined in John Howard's Address to the Nation on 20 March, 2003 – which included assertions that Iraq possessed "weapons of mass destruction ... which even in minute quantities are capable of causing death and destruction on a mammoth scale"; that Iraq is run by an "appalling regime"; that Iraq "has long supported international terrorism"; that "Saddam Hussein pays $25,000 to each family of Palestinian suicide bombers who wreak ... murderous havoc"; that "I passionately believe that action must be taken to disarm Iraq"; that while "there are many dictatorships in the world ... this is a dictatorship of a particularly horrific kind"; and that "our argument is with Saddam Hussein's regime."

That's the same regime, it now appears, that was enriched by the Australian Wheat Board to the tune of some $300 million between 2000 and 2003. Which raises this rather tricky question for the government: did it know one of its instrumentalities was paying large bribes to a "dictatorship of a particularly horrific kind" at the same time as it was attacking the very same "appalling regime"?

This is how the Prime Minister ended his Address to the Nation in March 2003: "This has been a very difficult decision for the Government but a decision which is good for Australia's long term security and the cause of a safer world. Good night."

Good night, and good luck.

Crikey also has a piece saying that "Lovelock's doomsday prediction is counterproductive".

Jim Green, national nuclear campaigner for Friends of the Earth, writes:

I must admit to considerable scepticism when I hear James Lovelock's name (yesterday, editorial & item 9). His work on the Gaia Theory – and the interdependence of ecological systems – is important and interesting. But it's not particularly original. His fame owes more to his simplistic conception and presentation of complex phenomena.

The anthropomorphism of his 'Mother Earth' theory has probably also helped to popularise it. And he has a poetic turn of phrase – "Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe" – which attracts mystics and repels his academic colleagues in equal measure.

In his latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock is almost, but not quite, so pessimistic as to have lost interest in efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions and thereby to reduce the impacts of climate change. We can hope that climate sceptics such as Mark Steyn are right, pray that Lovelock's doomsday scenario is wrong, but public policy must be guided by the weight of scientific opinion which holds that climate change is happening and that its adverse effects will become more apparent in the coming decades.

Few if any scientists would argue that the situation is hopeless and that climate change abatement measures are pointless. Therefore, we should assume that concerted efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions will be worthwhile and must be pursued.

Stripped of its extreme pessimism and the mystical language, Lovelock is saying this: the adverse effects of climate change are already apparent and will only get worse, so we need to adapt to climate change in addition to making ongoing efforts to reduce emissions. There's nothing new there.

Recently, the ALP released a policy recognising the need to address the problem of climate refugees. The Howard government has also put more emphasis on climate change adaptation in recent years, but it's no more than a cynical manoeuvre to distract attention from its failure to get serious about reducing greenhouse emissions. The government refuses to recognise or resettle climate refugees.

In reality, the government is doing little to avoid climate change or adapt to it. Last week's Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate conference was typical. The government promised $25 million for renewable energy – enough to build one wind farm. The government's record on renewable energy is disgraceful – abolishing the Energy Research and Development Corporation in 1997-98, withdrawing funding from the Co-operative Research Centre for Renewable Energy in 2002, and refusing to extend the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target, to name but a few examples.

As for Lovelock, my main problem with him is that his proposal for a nuclear 'solution' to climate change, which has attracted mountains of publicity, is so intellectually vacuous. For example, he claims that less than 50 people were killed by the Chernobyl disaster, but all the scientific estimates put the death toll in the thousands or tens of thousands. Lovelock wants high-level nuclear waste in the basement of his home to provide heating and for food irradiation, and he insists it is a serious proposal. Suffice to say that he is a self-declared eccentric.

The BBC reports that the Iran situation is posing a dilemma for China given its dependency on Iranian energy exports. The war drums seem to be beating louder and louder to me - and the oil and gold markets both seem to be predicting trouble ahead. I can't imagine Russia or China supporting any sort of formal UN action against Iran at this stage - but I can imagine another oil shock if Iranian exports are halted - either by them or because sanctions are applied. Only 2 months until the oil bourse is due to open...

Beijing's initial reaction to news that Iran was breaking its deal with the EU3 was to express its concern, but immediately reaffirm its commitment to multilateral negotiations. Since then, the diplomatic temperature has increased dramatically but China has refused to change its position.

Officials have repeated the Chinese government's view that the best way forward is to restart the EU3 diplomacy with Iran, despite the fact many in the West are now dismissing it as exhausted. China's work behind the scenes seems to be focussed on trying to keep the diplomacy alive.

China's most obvious interest is energy. Three years ago, when Iran was already supplying 13 per cent of China's oil needs, the two governments signed a major deal which included Chinese development of Iranian oil fields. It is a source of supply of growing importance for China - one it doesn't want disrupted by politics.

China also has a deeply-engrained reluctance to takes sides with the US against a fellow non-Western nation. Much of its current energy-driven diplomacy is on forging political alliances which exclude the West and are faithful to Chinese principles of non-interference in each other's internal affairs.

Apparently the Corsi-Ruppert abiotic oil vs peak oil talk radio mud wrestle has now been staged, with the radio audience apparently feeling Corsi had the better of the matchup. One listener comments:

Corsi's main argument - "we'll never run out of oil because we never have" - was and is inherently flawed. At the same time, I'm surprised Ruppert didn't go after him about it when given the opportunity. Corsi talked his way around the issue and the fact that the audience deemed his side the winning one showed that this was the case.

I have more supporting arguments, but I'll explain those in my book. You should buy it.

Al Gore has delivered another good speech, this one looking at the need to restore the American constitution and the rule of law in the US - one more casualty of our shared fossil fuel dependency.

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens-Democrats and Republicans alike-to express our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger.

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the "most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on "large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States." The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program "without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection."

Posted by Big Gav at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments

WorldChanging has a post on a smart grid experiment in the US Pcific Northwest.

The US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in cooperation with Whirlpool and IBM, has embarked on a year-long experiment in smart power distribution called GridWise -- and it could prove to be the sign that a revolution is at hand.

Smart grids and distributed energy are central to the bright green energy model. By decentralizing power generation and adding digital intelligence to the power network, we can build an energy infrastructure that's more flexible, better able to take advantage of renewable energy technologies, and more resilient in times of crisis. Groups as diverse as the Pacific Gas & Electric utility and Greenpeace UK support the concept, and an increasingly robust set of technologies make it possible to monitor and control how one uses -- and produces -- electricity.

The GridWise project connects 300 homes in the cities of Yakima, Washington and Gresham, Oregon to a new intelligent power network combining real-time monitoring of consumption and pricing, Internet-based usage controls, and appliances able to respond to power grid signals indicating problems by temporarily reducing energy use; this smart grid will be coupled with a distributed generation microturbine network. If all goes as planned, the result will be decreased demand on the utility and lower cost for the consumers. This will increase both the stability and the efficiency of the power grid.

The cornerstone of the GridWise project is the concept of "demand response" -- automation allowing customers to reduce or shift consumption during times of peak demand or higher prices. This automation shows up in both web-accessible usage controls and "smart appliances" able to both display power consumption information and respond to power network instability by cutting back on use for a few seconds or minutes. PNNL researchers believe that only 30% of a power grid's customers need to have such smart appliances to make a substantive difference in both demand and grid performance. Although only 300 households will be involved in this experiment, researchers are confident that GridWise will become a standard part of the regional power grid.

Elsewhere on the US West coast, California is further expanding its solar power programs. Its a shame Australian politicians on LNG terminal lobbying trips to California don't pick up some hints about the future of power generation while they are there.

The California state public utilities commission has approved the California Solar Initiative, a massive new program to support the expansion of solar power in the state, USD$2.8 billion going for incentives for solar power retrofits and USD$400 million going for incentives for adding solar to new construction. At USD$3.2 billion over 11 years, this puts California second only to Germany in investment in solar power. The plan's passage is the direct result of an outpouring of public support. According to Renewable Energy Access, the plan will lead to...

...the installation of approximately 3000 MW of solar energy, roughly the power equivalent of six large natural-gas fired power plants. [...] public support for the plan was repeatedly mentioned as a critical factor in bringing this plan to the CPUC. Over the last three months, 50,000 people have written to the California Public Utilities Commissioners to ask them to pass a long-term solar rebate program - more public comment than the CPUC has received on any issue they have ever considered, including the 2001 energy crisis.

WorldChanging also has posts on the Norwegian seed vault idea (which they then extend to a cool plan for a "backup" of civilisation - though I'm not so sure about the siting of this on the moon - just make lots of copies and scatter them around the planet) along with one on developments in biodiesel from algae - both of which I've mentioned recently.

It's a bit staggering to think on this kind of scale. This isn't just a warehouse for seeds in the off-season; the Norwegian seed vault is explicitly a project meant to be used only in the face of civilization-threatening catastrophes. Less-encompassing seed banks have already helped to restore agriculture in areas torn by decades of conflict. This bank will help to restore agriculture globally after planetary-scale disasters.

Seeds aren't all we need to have backups for. Right now, everything that we know as a species, everything we believe as individuals, everything that we are as a global civilization could be gone in an instant. Human civilization could fall victim to an uncharted asteroid crashing into the Earth, pandemic disease (natural or otherwise), or even global chaos from the worst-case peak oil scenarios; by having our civilization and all that we know in just one place -- the Earth -- we are extremely vulnerable. Engineers refer to this as a "single point of failure" problem: the loss of a single element dooms the entire system. Good engineers try to avoid these sorts of problems whenever possible. Right now, the Earth is our single point of failure.

Here is my overly-ambitous proposal, one that makes the Norwegian seed vault look lazy: we need to create an "off-site backup" for human civilization. We should create a backup of everything that we, as a world, know and believe. This would include everything from scientific knowledge to oral histories, proprietary research to genetic maps, great religious texts to comic books. Everything. This would become an ongoing, living record of who we are as a global civilization. Once collected (which would undoubtedly take a generation or more), the backup must be updated regularly to keep it complete. And it must be someplace off-site, someplace not vulnerable to being damaged or destroyed along with the original.

When I say that the backup would need to be "off-site", I mean somewhere off of Earth. Our Moon is a good candidate for such a backup. It's easy to get to (relatively speaking) and not vulnerable to the sorts of erosion one finds in a world with an atmosphere and active geology (the footsteps of the Apollo astronauts, for example, will last millions of years). Solar power could provide more than enough power for the facility, and the site would be visible from everywhere on Earth.

Such a project would have some extraordinary benefits, even before any disaster hit. Compiling that much data over what would likely be a very long term would require research into novel storage technologies. Concerns about media format, translation, and data compression would be confronted, along with seemingly intractable issue of copyright. The Off-Site Backup project would force us to answer many (if not most) of the critical questions of the digital age.

But the most important benefit would be that the Off-Site Backup Project would allow human civilization to rebuild after the unthinkable happens -- and it does happen. We've written repeatedly about the possibility of a major asteroid strike, and other overwhelming crises -- from the collapse of La Palma causing a tsunami that would wipe out the east coast of the Americas to massive "supervolcanos" -- are all too possible. In many respects, we're lucky that humankind has lasted as long as it has.

Always On has a brief note on the recognition of the need for alternative energy sources by the major Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists.

I had a front row seat at the Churchill Club's 8th Annual Top Trends Debate Thursday night in Palo Alto.

Part forecast of the future and part roast, venture luminaries John Doerr, Steve Jurvetson, Roger McNamee, Joe Schoendorf, and Ann Winblad promoted their views of tomorrow.

When the program started, John Doerr was first to make his prediction. Effectively, what he said was "Green is Good," or specifically, he took the words from Tom Friedman, "Green is the New Red, White, and Blue."

The classic investment opportunity exists where there is a problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. Whether oil prices are $60 or $20, the fundamental problem is that there is a finite amount of oil. It's also a fact that oil pollutes our environment in a way that's not sustainable.

A price of $60 a barrel provides obscene cash flow to bad guys in bad places who will use that wealth to make the world a worse and more dangerous place.

The issue isn't: "Should we drill for oil in Alaska or not?" (having been to Alaska, my vote is "yes" in that Alaska is so vast, nobody is going to notice drilling on the small area proposed). The real issue is: "How do we create a sensible long-term energy plan?"

Alternative energy such as wind, solar, and hydro are key to this as are fuel cells and biomass. Wind farms currently can provide enough energy for 1.6 million homes. By 2020, it will be ten times that number.

Posted by Big Gav at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments

James Lovelock has caused quite a stir with his prophecy of climate chaos doom. Hopefully he is wrong about the inevitability of impending disaster and we do still have the ability to change our ways (once the current generation of Australian and American political leaders vanish into the dustbin of history anyway) before the situation does become irretrevably bad.

Crikey comments on the benighted state of the global warming debate in the pages of our national Murdoch daily "The Australian", which seems to think for some inexplicable reason that Mark Steyn isn't a demented misanthrope and has something meaningful to say on the subject (instead of identifying him as the member of a shrinking lunatic fringe).

Crikey also notes that the word "conservative" was supposed to mean risk averse. That's the old meaning of the word of course, before it was replaced with "corrupt, zealous ideologue who refuses to acknowledge reality".

The state of the world's environment is complex, critical and contentious enough without needing to turn it into a political or ideological issue. Yet according to The Australian, the debate about global warming is being sensationalised by "environmental activists" for whom it is "an article of green faith that the world's climate is changing for the worse." And according to one of that newspaper's climate collaborationists, columnist Mark Steyn, climate change is "the new buzz phrase" created by "Kyotocrats" who "are, literally, a church, and under the Holy Book of Kyoto their bishops demand that the great industrial nations of the world tithe their incomes to them."

What, then, to make of the views of James Lovelock, a distinguished environmental scientist, who says in today's London Independent that the world has "already passed the point of no return for climate change" and that "civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive." Thirty years ago, Lovelock worked out that the earth possessed a "planetary-scale control system" which kept the environment "fit for life." Dubbed Gaia, the theory argues that the Earth System contains "myriad feedback mechanisms" which in the past have acted together to keep the Earth much cooler than it otherwise would be. Now, however, they'll "come together to amplify the warming being caused by human activities such as transport and industry through huge emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide." And the results of damaging the living planet's "ancient regulatory system" are likely to "accelerate uncontrollably."

Who is right and who is wrong? Lovelock or Steyn? The Australian or the New Green Weekly? Well, unlike most other political or ideological debates, this one has dire consequences if the conservatives have got it wrong. Surely this is an issue where taking the benefit-of-the-doubt approach is the truly conservative path, even if conservatives aren't the ones taking it.

Lovelock's column does contain some real estate investment tips for those paying attention - sell Britain and buy Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia...

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 percent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilization is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent. On these British Isles, we are used to thinking of all humanity and not just ourselves; environmental change is global, but we have to deal with the consequences here in the UK.

Unfortunately our nation is now so urbanized as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from overseas.

We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.

I'm never sure of the wisdom of saying "you're all going to die" to the world at large and not providing some sort of carrot for people to change their ways - maybe he genuinely believes we are all doomed, but if thats the case, why not just shut up about it and go off and enjoy yourself somewhere ?

Moving on to a less grim analysis of events, Henry Thornton quotes the weekend Financial Review on the impact of global warming on Australia's economy, which points out that relying on fossil fuel exports is going to leave us in a sorry way as the world abandons them in the coming years and we find out that an economy based on being Asia's quarry (which still can't afford the goodies we want right now) is just a house of cards.

David Bassanese in the weekend fin discusses a longer term threat - global warming. "Global warming could wreak havoc with Australia's coasts, not to mention agriculture. Meanwhile, our energy-importing customers will aggressively seek ways to cut reliance on fossil fuels. To maintain our leading status as an energy exporter, Australia should be in the vanguard of these efforts - not resisting them. Or we'll be left behind, like today's change-resistant pharmacists."

Crikey also has an interesting post from the inventor of the Sunball on the lack of government support for clean technologies like solar power.

Greg Watson, inventor and solar power expert, writes:

By eliminating solar PV rebates, the federal government is saying to the vast majority of Australians who want to generate their own electricity on their rooftops: DON'T. This is basically denying their legal right to decide who they buy their electricity from – and that includes themselves if they want to generate their own.

My company has developed the SunBall, which won the ABC New Inventors 2005 People's Choice Award against 123 other inventions. It generates electricity on rooftops at a much lower cost than electricity bought from the grid. We have been trying to get the Australian Greenhouse Office to tells us what testing they need us to put the SunBall through to qualify for rebates and allow us a level playing field against less efficient and more costly flat panels.

After about six months of attempted discussions the AGO is no longer answering our emails.

This action and the elimination of the solar PV rebate seem to suggest the government is not interested in giving people their rights to get power from their own rooftops and to reduce their electricity bills. I would hope this is not an attempt to protect fossil fuel suppliers, electricity generators, electricity distributors or electricity retailers profit margins.

In a world where, almost every day, another state or country announces leading edge rebate programs for solar rooftop installations, it seems strange that here in Australia we're going back to a fossil fuel-based economy and walking away from all the wider benefits that solar can bring such as reduced hot summer network peak demands.

We live in a strange world.

And while I'm linking to Crikey, here's their view on the moves towards impeaching George Bush.

Without Watergate, the Clinton impeachment would have been unthinkable. Although Nixon was brought down by a bipartisan majority, the Republican Party suffers from collective amnesia about its role, and has come to regard his fall as a Democrat political assassination. Hence much of the bitterness of the Clinton era.

But the failure of Clinton's impeachment in turn made future impeachments less likely. No president will be at risk for a long time unless they actually deliver their opponents a smoking gun.

Yet that is what George W Bush seems to have done. His unapologetic admission to wiretaps of US citizens without warrants, in apparently clear violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, has put impeachment back on the agenda, however tentatively. As John Dean, Watergate conspirator and whistleblower, put it before Christmas, he is "the first president to actually admit to an impeachable offence."

This week, The Nation carries a long article by Elizabeth Holtzman, who was a Democrat member of the Judiciary Committee that voted Nixon's impeachment, presenting the case for impeaching Bush. Yesterday former vice-president Al Gore called for the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the wiretapping affair. And Sunday's New York Times editorial, without mentioning the "i" word, used unusually strong language to condemn the president:

The administration's behaviour shows ... how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.

So why is Bush so set on a course that has revived a previously taboo subject? It's not as if FISA warrants were hard to get; they can be applied for retrospectively, and it's said that out of many thousands of applications only four have ever been turned down. Maybe Bush is using the wiretaps to spy on political opponents, although as yet there is no evidence of that.

More likely, the administration just wants power for its own sake. That, after all, is what governments do. As Holtzman says, "it may well be that the warrantless wiretap program has had much more to do with restoring the trappings of the Nixon imperial presidency than it ever had to do with protecting national security.

And to close, a joke:

President Bush met with all the former secretaries of State and Defense for advice on Iraq. This is quite a change. This is the first time Bush has listened to anybody. Well, if you don't count the wiretaps. — Jay Leno

Posted by Big Gav at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments

I'm never quite sure if William Engdahl should be filed under "parahistory" or not - but he does write some interesting stuff on oil geopolitics. Here is his take on the Russia-Ukraine gas game .

Putin is many things but he can’t be accused of being passive in the face of strategic threat to Russian national interests. Moscow moved swiftly last summer to exploit a growing rift between Uzbekistan and Washington, and the result was a ban by Uzbekistan of US military overflights and use of its airbase, a right that had been granted by President Karimov after September 2001 to get Uzbekistan into the ‘good’ side of the US War on Terror. Relations between Uzbekistan and Moscow today are very close, including in military mutual defense agreements. That rapprochement dealt a major blow to the Washington encirclement on the Eurasian space of both Russia and China.

The next move in this complex geopolitical power chess game will be in Ukraine where Yushchenko faces parliamentary elections in March. Discontent with his lack of progress on the economy had given him very low poll ratings. Some Russian experts believe Putin is playing hardball with Yushchenko to remind Ukraine voters where their energy security lies, i.e. not with Yushchenko and his Western friends, but with Moscow. Russia regards a NATO Ukraine inside the EU as a ‘strategic threat’ to put it mildly.

The Gazprom Ukraine ‘compromise’

By ending the dispute so swiftly, with a doctored compromise, Putin made his point, and he immediately reassured edgy West European gas importers that Gazprom never intended to cut their gas, only the uppity Ukraine’s.

Under the terms of the new deal, Gazprom will sell the gas which Ukraine receives, but in a devious way. It will be sold for $230 thousand cubic meters (tcm) to an Austrian trading company, Rosukrenergo. Rosukrenergo is in turn owned by Gazprom and the Austrian Raifeissen Investment AG. Then Rosukrenergo simultaneously buys gas from Turkmenistan for $50 a tcm. The two are ‘mixed’ and Ukraine’s Naftogas buys the final gas for a price of $95 tcm. Both sides can claim ‘victory.’

Gazprom also agreed to pay a 50% higher Transit Fee to Ukraine for its pipeline route through Ukraine to Europe, a fee of $1.60 instead of $1.06 per tcm per 100 kilometer. As well, both parties will settle in dollars not in the form of gas.

The West was caught in a dilemma in opposing the Gazprom price demand of $230. First, as it was only half the ‘market’ price, showing some restraint on Gazprom’s account. Second, because Western organizations from the WTO to the IMF to the Washington Bush Administration have been demanding Gazprom begin selling its gas in Eastern Europe at ‘market’ prices and not at a ‘subsidized’ price. Ukraine is far the largest Eastern Europe gas customer of Gazprom.

Significantly enough, on January 5 US Energy Secretary Sam Bodman told US companies they should not be discouraged from investing into the Russian energy sector merely because of the Ukraine dispute, adding that the dispute had not undermined his confidence that Russia was a good place to invest. ‘We continue to encourage our companies to explore opportunities with Russia,’ he added. Washington clearly has a larger agenda in the region. So too does Putin, and the two agendas are manifestly divergent.

The swift settlement of the Ukraine gas dispute, as well as the details of the compromise, in which Ukraine de facto pays what it offered before the cut-off, suggests what Yushchenko claimed. It was not an issue of commercial policy. It was and is an issue of power politics, Russian power geopolitics.

Its real focus is how Putin perceives the danger posed by an ever-more-ambitious USA foreign policy in Eurasia and what he can do to contain that threat. It’s clear the cut-off was intended to send a sharp signal to Kiev: don’t get any cute ideas of joining NATO and becoming a part of a hostile alignment to Russia. Here the US build -up of potential war threat against Iran also figures into the Kremlin calculus.

Moscow’s military muscle shows

On December 26, as most of the West was distracted in Holiday cheer, the Russian military activated a new fleet of Topol-M missiles. The new generation weapon is capable of fitting a nuclear warhead, as well as changing trajectory to foil an enemy interception device such as the current generation of US anti-missile defense weapon.

This was no small act of macho bravado. General Nikolai Solovtsov, commander of Russian Missile Forces simultaneously announced the mobilization of a new battalion for the Topol-M missiles. The missiles have a 1 megaton impact, some 75 times the Hiroshima A-bomb of 1945. Solovtsov is an outspoken critic of the US decision to forge ahead with its anti-missile defense, which is a Rumsfeld priority. The Russian general announced that the Topol-M was, ‘capable of piercing any missile defense system,’ and was immune to electromagnetic blasts used by current US missile defenses. For military experts that is impressive.

Russia announced it has also formed 20 new nuclear missile units, its largest increase of nuclear spending since the 1962 Cuba Missile Crisis.

Meanwhile, The Times is saying that we need to "Find a couple of spare planets or face global oil war".

THE world faces the real threat of a new conflict over oil as China competes with existing world powers for scarce resources to feed its growing economy, according to a report published today.

The State of the World 2006, released by the Worldwatch Institute, says that last year China became the second- largest importer of oil, after the US, while consuming 26 per cent of the world’s steel, 32 per cent of rice production,

37 per cent of cotton and 47 per cent of cement. China is set to become the world’s largest carmaker in the coming decade.

While environmentalists are concerned about the impact on the world’s climate and the drain on its resources, strategists fear that the competition for energy, particularly oil, could destabilise the planet. According to the report, China was nearly self-sufficient in oil in the mid-1990s. But over the past decade its consumption has doubled and it has now overtaken Japan as the second-largest importer of oil, with 3.2 million barrels a day in 2004.

It predicts that if the economies of China and India continue to grow at their current rate, the world will not be able to produce enough oil to meet demand by 2050, when consumption will have grown from the current 85 million barrels a day to 200 million barrels. “Few geologists believe that output will reach even half those levels before beginning to decline,” the report says.

As a result China is already looking for new oil suppliers from Siberia to Sudan, often dealing with notorious regimes, such as the junta in Burma. Of even greater concern is the possibility that open conflict could break out between nations competing for resources or trying to protect their supply lines, such as key trade routes, currently patrolled by the US Navy.

The report draws the parallel between Japan in the 1930s and China today. It recalls that it was Japan’s inability to secure its oil supplies from South-East Asia that prompted its entry into the Second World War. Today Beijing is strengthening its Navy to protect its energy supplies, shipped at great distances from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

Reports from Nigeria say that Shell is considering evacuations from their oil fields in the delta.

Royal Dutch Shell is considering evacuating all its workers from swamp areas in the western side of Nigeria's delta where militants have staged four attacks in five days, a senior industry source has said.

The impact of such a move on Shell's 380,000 barrel-a-day oil output from the Warri region was unclear, the source said because evacuation did not always mean halting production. About three-quarters of the Warri region's output is from the swamps where militants gain easy access to production platforms by boat, he said.

Shell, the largest oil producer in Nigeria, pulled out about 330 workers from four platforms in the swamps after a militant attack on the Benisede flow station in which at least six people died.

The Energy Blog has an update on Biodiesel from Algae processes.

A Cristian Science Monitor article gives an update to the Greenfuels Technologies Corporation CO2 mitigation/algae production system. Geenfuels process, invented by MIT scientist Issac Berzin, grows algae in clear plastic tubes placed in the exhaust stream of emissions from power plants. The CO2 in the exhaust plus photosynthesis grow the algae which absorbs the CO2 and nitrous oxide in the exhaust stream. The algae then can be harvested and used to produce biodiesel and the remaining solids can be further processed to produce ethanol.

The company has received $11,000,000 in venture capital financing since the last report. A field trial at an undisclosed power plant is underway. Next year, GreenFuel expects two to seven more such demonstration projects, scaling up to a full production system by 2009. Technology to produce ethanol from the residue is new. Berzin estimates that just one 1,000 MW power plant could produce 40 million gallons of biodiesel and 50 million gallons of ethanol a year. Such a facility would require a "farm" of 2,000 acres of algae growing tubes. There are about 1000 power plants in the U.S. with enough acreage for a "farm."

GreenShift Corporation has licensed a competing CO2 mitigation/algae production system from Ohio University. They claim that their system requires a smaller footprint because their tubes can be taller and have more surface area. GreenShift is also building a series of biodiesel plants which could process their algae and has a process to convert ethanol waste to biodiesel.

The Herald has an article called "A power station in every home" which looks at some of the obstacles hindering wider take up of solar power in the suburbs.

While delegates to the inaugural meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate were rubbing their foreheads in Sydney last week, not everyone was waiting for the Government's lead on climate change. At ground level, individuals are finding personal solutions.

"We are doing home renovations and extensions, and we are going to invest so much in our house, I thought we should invest in free power too," dela Russo says. But she also concedes she feels great instead of guilty using so much power to cool down the stuffy, weatherboard cottage. And nowadays, when she stares out of the train window on her way to work she doesn't just see the same blank expanse of baking surburban rooftops, she sees wasted opportunities for solar power.

Bob Crooks covered much of the roof of his Northbridge home with photo-voltaic panels three years ago because, he says: "The sun is there and it's free - if you are prepared to make the initial outlay. But I was also making a bit of a statement. I wanted to reduce my own contribution to greenhouse gases."

Last year was Australia's hottest on record and summer peak power demands now exceed winter peaks, mainly because of the consumer stampede towards residential air-conditioning. More than 60 per cent of Australian dwellings are now air-conditioned, compared with 33 per cent in 1994. And last month was Australia's sunniest on record; an average of 10.4 cloud-free hours of sun a day were recorded in December.

But for the 900,000 or so air-conditioners bought a year only 1300 or so homeowners Australia-wide invest in photo-voltaic systems. Australia has about 30,000 solar buildings, in the main in remote areas with no access to the power grid, and most solar use is for hot water, now installed in about 4 per cent of homes.

Solar power seems like a logical power solution, especially for western Sydney where hectares upon hectares of rooftops could be turned into mini-power generators. Since 1950 Sydney's population has doubled, but its power consumption has increased 12-fold, pushing the grid close to collapse, especially on summer afternoons when the air-conditioners all kick in at once.

Australia's overwhelming reliance on coal-fired power stations means growing electricity demand is translating directly into increasing greenhouse gas emissions, a fact clearly laid out in the tonnes of CO2 per household on the back of power bills.

Grid-connected solar systems mean homeowners can effectively sell their power by (sunny) day and buy it back at night, cutting electricity bills or doing away with them altogether and reducing or erasing their own environmental footprint.

But there are two decisive, connected issues - price and community attitudes.

For a basic one-kilowatt start-up system, the dela Russos paid more than $14,000, and received a rebate of about $3700 through the Australian Greenhouse Office. That's only enough extra power to cut their bill by 30 or 40 per cent. Crooks paid more than $40,000 for a much larger system capable of producing all his electricity, but qualified for almost $14,000 in subsidies before rebates were reduced in 2003.

Australia's electricity is among the cheapest in the world and NSW enjoys some of the cheapest power in Australia. This means solar grid-connect systems won't realistically pay for themselves for decades.

MonkeyGrinder points out there is a lot of "do as I say, not as I do" in the air.



MonkeyGrinder and Bart at Energy Bulletin have also noted the problem with prolonged peak oil blogging - it does tend to burn you out after a while (especially given that we all seem to do it as a night time hobby rather than a day job).

A couple of us at Energy Bulletin have been feeling the same way: the web is awash with articles on peak oil and climate change. It's impossible to keep up with it all. How can we best focus our efforts -- and not burn out?

While the structure adopted by Energy Bulletin, The Oil Drum and PeakOil.com (multiple editors and contributors) is one way of coping with the problem, it obviously isn't quite enough - but perhaps its just a matter of getting a larger pool of editors at a given site.

The other alternative (which was implemented during one design iteration of the much missed Flying Talking Donkey) is to build a single page view of the latest peak oil news from selected sites by integrating their RSS feeds into one portal style interface. This version of FTD included about 10 key sites into his single page portal which I thought worked really well. I don't think that design required any ongoing maintenance either, so presumably it could be resurrected on Blogger and then just left in place - then when individual sites take a break you don't really notice and no one needs to spend any time on a coordinating role. How about it Tim ?

And to close, MonkeyGrinder also notes that our future may hold green ham and eggs rather than Dr Suess' complementary vision of breakfast...

Posted by Big Gav at 9:24 PM | Permalink | Comments

De Smog Blog has a good summation of the waste of time that was the recent Asia Pacific Climate Summit by Ross Gelbspan (via Grist).

The signals preceding today's meeting of the Asia-Pacific climate summit are ominous. The principals – U.S., Australia, Japan, India, South Korea and China – have made clear in advance that they reject any mandatory timetables for reducing greenhouse gases.

They have invited 120 industry observers – primarily from oil and coal interests – to provide input – while locking out environmental organizations whose voices traditionally have provided valuable corrections at other international climate meetings. The U.S. and Australia acknowledge they will be recruiting other countries into the APAC group. That, in turn, will dilute if not completely negate those countries’ commitments to the United Nations under the Kyoto Protocol. And they will be promoting a host of technologies designed not to pacify our inflamed climate but to provide a facade of acceptability for the continued use of coal, the most climate-destabilizing of all fuels.

This gathering is the latest manifestation of the Bush Administration’s six-year campaign to undermine and marginalize the UN and its mission of promoting a more sustainable and equitable world. It is also profoundly anti-democratic in its drive to put the world’s great energy companies in charge of the world’s climate policies. There is no argument that the current goals of the Kyoto Protocol are inadequate, judged against the demands of nature.

For one example, nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1995 and the planet is heating at a rate faster than any time in the last 10,000 years. But, judged by the history of human political achievements, the Protocol provides a groundbreaking framework to bring the nations of the world together in a common project to rewire the planet with clean energy. That is not what will emerge from the APAC summit. Given the input of companies like Peabody Energy, Rio Tinto and Chevron, the summit will be promoting a batch of sleight-of-hand, short-term technological fixes.

Clean coal technology, with its reliance on hugely expensive geo-engineering projects like mechanical carbon sequestration, basically represents a full-employment act for companies like Bechtel and Halliburton. These projects are also wasteful in the extreme. Given their huge pricetags, the same amount of money would generate far more electricity per dollar were it to be spent on constructing windfarms. A real “pro-technology pro-growth” initiative would center on a worldwide project to replace every coal-burning generating plant, every oil-burning furnace, every gasoline-powered car with clean, climate-friendly energy technologies.

The construction and installation of windmills, solar panels and tidal power devices, coupled with the construction of an infrastructure for a hydrogen economy, are far more labor intensive than the extraction of coal and oil (which are heavily automated). There are, to be sure, problems with the Kyoto framework. Its goals are too modest and its timetable too slow to match the escalating pace of climate change. But given the flexibility built into the Protocol’s design, it will be easy, when the time comes, for delegates to increase the targets to match the scope and urgency of the threat.

As several oil company presidents have said off the record, any meaningful effort to avert climate chaos requires the governments of the world to impose binding and enforceable timetables and goals on the energy industry. That sentiment was echoed publicly by executives of some of America’s largest utilities including Cinergy Corporation – as well as by the investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs. And that approach is at the heart of the Kyoto Protocol. By contrast, the real agenda behind the APAC summit involves a new framework—the emergence of a global corporate state whose goals are determined by short-term profit calculations rather than an authentic concern for our common future or our common planet.

Grist also had some comments on the summit.

The U.S. and Australia today marked the end of the Asia-Pacific climate summit in Sydney by pledging $127 million to support technology projects that would lower greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate activists derided the commitment from the two big polluters as laughably small; the Kyoto Protocol, which both the U.S. and Australia have spurned, is expected to result in up to $12 billion being spent on clean-technology projects in developing countries by 2012. Enviros also say much of the newly announced funding will go to propping up dirty energy industries rather than promoting clean power sources like solar.

The U.S. and Australia, for their part, contend the world should trust big business to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions without any strong government regulations. Said U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, "The people who run the private sector ... also have children and grandchildren, and they too live and breathe in the world and would like [climate change] dealt with effectively." Despite all evidence to the contrary.

To a certain extent Bodman is right - I'm sure most power company execs would be more than happy to build clean tech power plants instead of coal fired ones. But as long as coal is the cheapest option they are forced by the market to build coal fired plants. The solution ? Make the cost of coal reflect the cost of global warming - impose carbon taxes now and I'm sure most companies will start doing the right thing. But Bush and Howard have absolutely no intention of letting that happen unfortunately (and I'm sure history will judge them very harshly for this).

The problem with Australia being a large exporter of both coal and uranium is that the whole debate here is being framed (correctly incorrectly) as a choice between "clean" coal and nuclear power (which is reflected in a lot of state politics depending on which resource they have more of), as this article in the Herald demonstrates.

At the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate meeting in Sydney this week, the focus was on initiatives the six member countries could adopt to reduce their production of greenhouse gases.

Nuclear power was one topic at the forefront, as the US, Japan, South Korea, India and China all operate nuclear power plants - and are planning to build more to help tackle the issue of climate change. Australia, never having built a nuclear power plant, is clearly the odd one out.

The nation's lack of a nuclear power industry might seem curious to foreigners when Australia possesses more uranium than any other country - although it has large reserves of other energy sources such as coal and natural gas, and a small population.

Despite its large trade deficit, Australia mines a relatively low proportion of its uranium reserves, meaning it isn't milking the export market as much as it could.

It's not due to lack of interest from mining companies, which view Australia as a dream destination because of its stable political system, skilled workforce and abundant natural resources.

Rather, it's restrictive Australian government policy - at both the federal and state level - that has so far prevented most of the country's uranium from being mined.

Under the Coalition Government, federal policy has changed, but all state Labor premiers except South Australia's Mike Rann oppose mining uranium, in part because of Labor's long opposition to it.

The policy has forced local miners to look overseas for viable projects.

Take Perth's Paladin Resources. Instead of mining or even closely studying one of its deposits in Western Australia, it will start production at its Langer Heinrich project in Namibia this year. And next on its list is a deposit in Malawi, one of the world's poorest and most corrupt nations.

Paladin managing director John Borshoff is upfront about why his company is developing its first projects abroad. Countries in southern Africa are "less politically hostile" than Australia, he says. "I know that sounds ironic," he's quick to add.

Borshoff has a point. WA's premier, Dr Geoff Gallop, is adamant no uranium mining will be allowed in his state while he remains in office - and his current term lasts until 2009.

"In terms of uranium mining, I'm the premier. We took this policy to the election [last year]," Gallop told the Herald."Our uranium will stay in the ground in Western Australia."

...

Redport chairman Richard Homsany certainly believed change was coming when his company invested in Lake Maitland. "I think at the moment there is enormous pressure to re-examine that [WA] policy on uranium mining," he said in April. "One cannot ignore the fact it is a clean fuel." Neither, in the current climate, can it be ignored that Australia is home to 41 per cent of the world's economic uranium reserves and the world's biggest uranium mine, BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam.

On the other hand, for all of coal's environmental ills, Australia's cheap and plentiful supply of the fossil fuel will last the nation hundreds of years.

Coal is also the reason there is a ban on uranium mining in Queensland - its premier, Peter Beattie, believes exporting uranium would undermine its lucrative coal industry. "There are countries which have to choose between sources for their power stations," says Beattie's spokesman, citing Italy as an example. "He [Beattie] is not going to encourage the nuclear industry."

And apart from coal, there are other energy options in Australia. Power stations fuelled by natural gas are a possibility, based on large reserves of coal-seam gas and conventional on- and offshore natural gas in Australia and Papua New Guinea, although much of Australia's gas is sold at high prices for export. Still, Queensland is busy building coal-seam gas power stations to meet environmental targets.

But although nuclear energy has lower emissions than coal - or even natural gas - the costs of building a nuclear power plant are daunting. An International Energy Agency report found the cost per kilowatt of building a modern nuclear reactor would be around $US2000 ($2650), compared with $US1200 for coal and $US500 for gas.

...

Nuclear weapons proliferation is another major issue. Australia does not allow the sale of uranium for weapons purposes and uranium proponents argue that strict international safeguards are effective, but WA's Gallop disagrees.

"The last time there was a major expansion of the nuclear industry there was a proliferation of nuclear weapons, and I have no reason to think the same thing wouldn't happen again," he says. "Added to that, you have the new terrorist threats."

Radioactive waste disposal is another problem - and a daunting one for WA voters. In 1998, the plan of the US company Pangea Resources to build a nuclear waste dump in the state came to public notice after a UK environmental group aired a corporate video touting the project.

After widespread opposition, the WA Parliament passed a bill that made it illegal to dispose of radioactive waste in the state without specific approval. But Gallop worries that if he allows uranium mining, his state will become "part of the nuclear fuel cycle" and will be obliged to accept waste.

So despite the use of nuclear power in developed countries such as the US, Canada, France and Japan, Australia has long been regarded as hostile to uranium and nuclear power.

It wasn't always that way. For a time, it looked like Australia would join the nuclear club, both for energy and weapons purposes. The local history of uranium goes back to the 1940s. The Rum Jungle mine in the Northern Territory, owned by the government and operated by Consolidated Zinc (now Rio Tinto), was used to provide fuel for the UK's nuclear weapons arsenal, and South Australia was used as a testing ground for those missiles.

On Australia Day in 1958, the UK provided Australia with its first nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, and by 1969 there were plans for a nuclear power plant at Jervis Bay, NSW.

At that time, the Liberal prime minister John Gorton wanted to leave open the possibility of producing nuclear weapons and refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But after widespread protests, Gorton's successor, fellow Liberal William McMahon, canned the Jervis Bay project in 1971.

...

Mark Wheatley, an Australian who serves as a director of Toronto-listed SXR Uranium One, says his company listed in Canada in 1997(as Southern Cross Resources) because at the time "there was simply no support for uranium exploration and development in Australia". SXR, formed last month through the merger of Southern Cross and South Africa's Aflease Gold and Uranium, is fortunate that its Honeymoon project is in South Australia rather than 90 kilometres away in Broken Hill, as there is a blanket ban on uranium exploration in NSW.

Having gained nearly all of the needed regulatory approvals, the $US30 million Honeymoon project could be up and running in 18 months, but was delayed by the uranium price in 2004, given the relatively small size of the project. When a study was done last year, uranium was trading at around $US25 a pound. With the spot price at $US36.25, and many analysts believing it will rise further, the board has approved further development expenditure to gather the extra data required to support a development decision, which could come as early as the first half of this year.

Being in South Australia is definitely a plus, with the Rann administration looking favourably on uranium mining. Prospectors get government grants to help fund exploration, and the environment is so cordial that the Australian division of French nuclear giant Cogema plans to move its headquarters from Perth to Adelaide. "Adelaide, in five years' time, I think, is going to become a real centre of activity for uranium in Australia," says SXR's Wheatley.

Back in WA, however, large projects owned by mining giants BHP and Rio - both of which might well be economic at today's high uranium prices - are stalled indefinitely in the face of Gallop's opposition.

For a time, Rio Tinto had looked set to proceed with its Kintyre project in WA. It proved up a substantial reserve base and installed a pilot plant to investigate how to process the ore. But development of the 35,000 tonne deposit was stalled in 1997 because of the low uranium price. The site was decommissioned and rehabilitated in 2002. Now prices have risen, the possibility of development is "academic", a Rio spokesman says, due to Gallop's ban. But he says Kintyre is a good project that the company plans to retain - meaning Rio seems hopeful of a change in policy.

BHP faces different issues with the Yeelirrie project in WA, which it picked up with the $9.2 billion acquisition of WMC Resources earlier this year (along with Olympic Dam). At 52,000 tonnes, Yeelirrie is Australia's second largest unmined source of uranium behind Jabiluka's 163,000 tonne resource base.

In the 12 years to 1983, WMC and partner Esso spent $35 million planning Yeelirrie as an open cut mine, but plans were withdrawn after Labor instituted its Three Mines policy in 1984. WMC instead decided to focus on mining the 1.5 million tonne resource base at Olympic Dam, by far the world's largest uranium deposit.

Gallop's Government revoked Yeelirrie's WA mining agreement last year, and a BHP spokeswoman said her company's focus regarding uranium mining was "squarely on Olympic Dam and its expansion".

I never cease to be amazed that anyone in their right mind can oppose a well sited wind farm. Even Robert F Kennedy Jr has fallen into this trap.

A long-simmering disagreement within the environmental community over a plan to build a massive wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., is now boiling over into a highly public quarrel.

The four-year-old battle started heating up last summer when Greenpeace USA staged a demonstration against well-known eco-activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's been an outspoken opponent of the proposal for a 130-turbine wind-power project in Horseshoe Shoal, a shallow portion of Nantucket Sound south of Cape Cod. Kennedy -- a senior attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council and a pioneer in the waterway-protection movement -- was on a sailboat for an event with the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, which opposes the wind project. A Greenpeace vessel cruised up alongside with a banner that read, "Bobby, you're on the wrong boat" -- a stunt that was part of a larger Greenpeace campaign pressuring Kennedy to change his mind on the development.

In mid-December, Kennedy, wanting to explain his position to critics and the public at large, published an impassioned op-ed in The New York Times in which he argued that the wind farm would mar a precious seascape, privatize a publicly owned commons, and damage the local economy.

That, in turn, prompted about 150 environmental advocates -- including global-warming authors and activists Bill McKibben and Ross Gelbspan, Bluewater Network founder Russell Long, and youth leader Billy Parish -- to circulate a letter asking Kennedy to reconsider his position. "We are, simply put, in a state of ecological emergency," it read. "Constructing windmills six miles from Cape Cod, where they will be visible as half-inch dots on the horizon, is the least that we can do."

Bill McKibben isn't too impressed by this display of NIMBYism and writes of his displeasure.

I'm by nature a conflict avoider too -- if you're thinking of cutting in line at the supermarket, you couldn't ask for an easier mark than me. But twice last week I acted in ways entirely out of character. I signed a letter criticizing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for his New York Times op-ed opposing the big Cape Wind project. And I wrote a few paragraphs disparaging the most powerful of my local environmental groups, the Adirondack Council, for the way they'd worked on clean-air issues. Both criticisms were respectful -- I am my mother's son -- but they were also stern. I wouldn't have enjoyed being on the receiving end of either one (though a lifetime of book writing does tend to inure you to bad reviews).

They were also, at some level, divisive. In both cases, you could truthfully say I was willing to inflict a little damage on an important part of the environmental movement. It doesn't mean, I hope, that I'm growing a mean streak. I think it means something else: that the environmental movement is reaching an important point of division, between those who truly get global warming, and those who don't.

By get, I don't mean understanding the chemistry of carbon dioxide, or the importance of the Kyoto Protocol, or something like that -- pretty much everyone who thinks of themselves as an environmentalist has reached that point. By get, I mean understanding that the question is of transcending urgency, that it represents the one overarching global civilizational challenge that humans have ever faced. That it's as big as the Bomb.

Do I think Bobby Kennedy Jr. is a bad environmentalist? No, I think he's a great environmentalist. I've heard him convert 400 Republicans at one fell swoop in the auditorium of my Adirondack high-school gym. Hell, by helping establish the Hudson Riverkeeper, the guy added a whole new class of words to our vocabulary -- now there are baykeepers and airkeepers and summitkeepers. He's sued and written and organized with passion and prowess. But his op-ed on Cape Wind, with its (risible) fear that the windmills might be heard ashore, showed that he hadn't quite understood just how critical the need to get the U.S. off fossil fuels really is.

In the face of that need, even possible damage to the livelihoods of commercial fishers is distinctly secondary. If someone were proposing to erect a giant blender in Nantucket Sound so yachtsmen could obtain frozen margaritas more conveniently, then Bobby would be right to object, and the rest of us would go along with him. Instead, they're talking about the nation's first big offshore wind complex, one that would in effect allow residents of Cape Cod to use electricity nine months of the year without emitting a single carbon atom.

If we had decades to burn, then he'd also doubtless be right that there's a better site for the thing, and a nicer developer. There's always a better site and a nicer developer. But in the real world, according to Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have at most 10 years to reverse this trend. Which means we have to do everything quickly -- hybrid cars and solar panels and compact light bulbs and local food and tree planting. And windmills, lots and lots of windmills, just like off the shores of Europe.

Both the Herald and the Financial Review had prominent articles talking about oil prices rising over US$70 as tensions mount over Iran's nuclear program.

Crude oil in New York traded near a three-month high amid concern about Iran's nuclear program and oil production cuts in Nigeria.

Iran, which accounts for almost 5 per cent of global output, resumed research on uranium reprocessing this week, risking United Nations sanctions. That may limit the investment Iran needs to raise oil production.

Royal Dutch Shell's venture in Nigeria shut 10 per cent of the country's output as violence swept through the Niger Delta oil-producing region.

"People are finding it hard to sell because of the situations in Iran and Nigeria," said Naohiro Niimura, vice-president of derivative products at Mizuho Corporate Bank in Tokyo. "If Iran is punished with sanctions, then the market will go much higher."

Crude oil for February delivery was at $US63.77 a barrel, down US17c, in after-hours electronic trading in Singapore after earlier reaching $US65.05 in New York, the highest intra-day price since October 4.

A Bloomberg survey of 42 analysts showed 25, or 60 per cent, said prices would rise next week, the most bullish response since March.

Antonio Szabo, chief executive of Houston-based consultant Stone Bond Technologies, said that with political tensions high in the Middle East, prices were likely to go "slightly above $US70 a barrel" in the weeks ahead.

The US, Germany, France and the UK have called for the International Atomic Energy Agency to hold an emergency meeting to refer the dispute with Iran to the UN Security Council. Iran could face censure or sanctions.

Moving across the border from Iran, Billmon reports on the increasingly unbelievable propaganda war being waged in Iraq.

Fans of Paddy Chayefsky's incredibly prophetic '70 satire Network may remember the The Mao Tse-tung Hour -- the terrorist-of-the-week reality show produced by his fictional UBS news division:

Diana: Look, we've got a bunch of hobgoblin radicals called the Ecumenical Liberation Army who go around taking home movies of themselves robbing banks. Maybe they'll take movies of themselves kidnapping heiresses, hijacking 747's, bombing bridges, assassinating ambassadors. We'd open each week's segment with that authentic footage, hire a couple of writers to write some story behind that footage, and we've got ourselves a series.

Given that Paddy's dark vision of the future of broadcast journalism has since become the programming bible for an entire generation of cable news executives, I guess it's no great surprise that the Mao Tse Tung Hour has also reached the little screen -- but in Iraq, not the U.S., and suitably updated to reflect both modern political realities and the rise of the Internet.

Iraqi blogger Nibras Kazimi (a neocon fan of Ahmed Chalabi, but also an increasingly disillusioned witness to Iraq's "democratization:") tells the story at his blog, Talisman Gate...

Billmon also has a very low key demonstration about the old joke about how to tell when a politician is lying - look for when his lips are moving...

Posted by Big Gav at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments

omPaine has an interesting column on the new China-India energy pact.

What better to shake Washington out of its strategic tunnel vision than a new alliance over oil between the world's two most populous countries? An article that appeared last night in the Financial Times states that, "China and India, the world’s two fastest-growing energy consumers, on Thursday set aside long-standing rivalries and agreed to co-operate in securing crude oil resources overseas."

That's a strategic bombshell. It's also a major opportunity.

First the story. China and India have been busy over the past few years attempting to secure oil fields and other energy assets for their domestic or state-owned oil companies. China, for instance, has secured a major deal to develop Alberta 's tar sands oil deposit, a deposit which places Canada above Iraq in terms of recoverable reserves. It has sealed deals in Africa, notoriously with fellow human rights violator Sudan. India has sealed major energy deals with Iran but, as reported in the FT, "lost out to Chinese rivals in the race to acquire fields in Angola, Nigeria, Kazakhstan and Ecuador." China, of course, was recently rebuffed by the U.S. Congress in its attempt to buy Unocal.

Faced with a market in which politics—be it the U.S. Congress or OPEC or Hugo Chavez—have an equal if not greater influence on price as economics, the two have agreed to coordinate their efforts to secure energy resources. The plan is modeled on their recent joint deal in Syria. India and China will essentially work together to secure their energy resources without unnecessarily bidding up the price of those resources. In other words, the Indians and Chinese have agreed to a consumer's cartel representing 2.3 billion potential consumers.

The significance of the alliance is hard to understate. India and China represent the two leading sources of increased oil demand globally. Each have enormous populations that are entering the modern economy at breakneck speed. As these populations increase their per capita income, they demand products and services that require higher and higher amounts of energy—particularly oil for the new cars their citizens want to drive.

Both the Indians and the Chinese are feeling the pressure of diminishing oil discoveries and flatlined oil production at a time when expansion of their domestic economies is rapidly increasing demand for energy.

It is clear is that this pact escalates the global competition for oil. Yet it does so in a fairly sophisticated way. The two nations have agreed to distort the market rather than continue to compete and lose to global market imbalances (India 's concern) or nationalistic politics (China 's).

At the same time, the deal demonstrates that neither China nor India can, or have an interest in attempting to, secure access to oil through military means, as the British did through World War II and as the United States has done since. This pact is not a military alliance. However, strategic resources have a long and bloody history of attracting military protection, and none less than energy. If this pact does not produce results and if the balance between oil production and demand continues to weaken, we may in the future see an Asian equivalent of the Carter Doctrine.

Here in Washington, however, this news offers leading strategic advisers and their political clients a perfect moment in which to change the strategic narrative—a false narrative—which has been imposed on America since the attacks of 9/11.

In Washington, the conventional storyline is still that nuclear terrorism is the single greatest threat to the United States and should therefore be the center of our national security strategy. As Col. Larry Wilkerson pointed out earlier this week, that assessment is wrong. And it has been since September 12.

This new alliance offers message-makers the out that they have been missing. Ever since the White House starting hyping its war on terror to a scared and underinformed American public as an existential conflict comparable to the World War II or the Cold War, politicians have refused to say otherwise. Now, with the failure in Iraq palpable, the arrogation of power so obvious, and now the rise of a real strategic challenge evident, it is time to change the story.

And yet, dangers lurk. The administration has released slides from its forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review that place an enormous priority on preparing to deter the rise of a future "near peer" superpower. In other words, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is salivating at the prospect of a rising China (and the massive weapons budgets such a foe would require).

To rush into the breech claiming China and India are the new grand strategic threat is to play into Rumsfeld's hands. It would also hasten the economic disaster that lies just over the horizon. Rather, it is time for really big-picture thinking to figure out just how we can prevent the increasing competition over oil to turn into a strategic threat that destroys the American economy, doing to America what we did to the Soviets. That will require a new grand strategy that bridges our economy and our foreign policy.

The time to start is now.

TomPaine also has a look at the internal political games being played in Iran.

Why is Iran 's new president going out of his way to provoke the United States, Israel and Europe with his brinkmanship over Iran's nuclear program and repeated denial of the Holocaust?

Many commentators have put the international posturing of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad down to inexperience and incompetence. But it would be foolish to underrate a man who has survived the hurly-burly of Iran's Islamic revolution and one of the bloodiest conflicts of the past quarter century (the Iran-Iraq war, where Ahmadinejad served as a Revolutionary Guard commander) to emerge in his 40s as post-revolutionary Iran's first non-clerical president.

The signs are that Ahmadinejad's rhetoric, both on Iran's civil nuclear program (which the West fears is a cover for plans to produce nuclear weapons) and on Israel, is deliberate and calculated. Like much of his political maneuvering since he unexpectedly won last year's presidential elections, Ahmadinejad's international gestures are probably designed with one principle aim in mind: to ensure political survival in the power struggle that is now underway at the heart of Iran's fragmented power structure.

Posted by Big Gav at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments

Moving from incandescent lighting to LEDs should be something that everyone can agree is a good thing (except incandescent globe manufacturers of course) - MIT Technology Review takes a look at the state of LED technology.

When the Christmas tree at the U.S. Capitol was illuminated this year, it shone with the light of 10,000 light-emitting diodes (LEDs). And next year the giant New Year's Eve ball in Times Square will also be festooned with LED lights. Such milestones are another indication that the use of solid-state lighting made from semiconductor chips or organic polymers is advancing rapidly.

According to projections from Sandia National Laboratories, the energy-saving benefits of LED lighting would be impressive: If the technology can be improved so that half of all lighting is solid-state by 2025, it will cut worldwide power use by 120 gigawatts, saving $100 billion a year and reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 350 megatons a year.

Moreover, lighting experts say, semiconductor LEDs and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) would change the way people think about lighting their homes. Rather than static fixtures holding single-color bulbs, solid-state lighting will be more flexible, allowing for glowing ceiling tiles or accent lights whose colors can be digitally adjusted at the touch of a button.

In the wake of reports late last year about the imminent demise of natural gas supplies to New Zealand, Rigzone reports on a newly arrived drilling rig search for more Maui gas.

A specially-imported drilling rig has arrived in Taranaki from Texas to begin a landmark assignment -- finding more gas in the offshore Maui field. The rig, owned by the Nabors group of companies which owns and operates more than 1500 drilling rigs worldwide, is being unloaded from the vessel Umiavut at Port Taranaki after a delivery journey from Houston.

Soon it will be taken to the Maui-A production platform where it will drill a series of exploration wells in an effort to discover a number of pockets of gas that the field's owners believe may have been missed by the existing gas production wells. The wells -- and it is not know how many will be drilled -- will probe into the already productive Kapuni D Sands and another geological zone known as the Ihi Prospect.

This prospect is in the northern part of the Maui field and is believed to contain gas with a high carbon dioxide content. This means that if the Ihi wells were commercially developed, the gas could be used by Methanex New Zealand for the manufacture of methanol, but would need to be treated for other users.

Last week Methanex announced it intended restarting its Waitara Valley plant on January 13 for a two-month stint, during which it would use up its remaining allocation of Maui gas.

Jeff Rubin at CIBC World Markets has issued some research (pdf) that is very bullish on Canadian tar sands, saying that onshore oil production has peaked and any future production growth will be coming from offshore oil and alternative sources like tar sands. Additional commentary can be found at The Oil Drum.

Alberta's oil sands will become the most important source of new oil in the world by 2010 as conventional crude dries up, CIBC World Markets says in its latest monthly report.

Alberta will sit on one of the most valuable energy sources in the world by that time, and one of the few still open to private investment, said Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC World Markets, the bank's wholesale banking arm. He added that conventional oil production around the world apparently peaked in 2004.

Rubin found that total oil supplies around the world grew by less than one million barrels a day last year. None of that growth came from outside the OPEC sphere. That finding was particularly surprising because oil prices have doubled in recent years, making exploration of many new areas economically feasible for the first time.

Rubin looked at 164 upcoming oil fields in his study and found that new oil is, in fact, being discovered and it is coming on stream. But more than half simply balances declining production from existing fields in the North Sea and Kuwait's Burgan region.

Rubin does expect a net gain in oil production in coming years, but it will be small and getting smaller. Rubin expects 3.6 million barrels of new oil to come on stream in 2006, but 2.2 million barrels will go to replace declining reserves elsewhere, leaving just 1.4 million barrels of new oil. He expects 1.5 million barrels of new oil in 2006 and 2007, but less than a million barrels a day in 2008.

Energy companies are finding new oil, but most of it will come from non-conventional sources. Ocean oil rigs are the primary source of new oil today, with Alberta's oil sands tomorrow, with expansion projects rivaling those of Saudi Arabia.

The Guardian has a report on a Norwegian effort to create a "Noah's Ark" of seeds.

The Norwegian government plans to build a "doomsday vault" to house 2m seeds which represent the entire agricultural diversity of the planet. The idea is to safeguard the world's food supply against threats such as nuclear war, asteroid impact, terror attack, climate change and rising sea levels.

"It's a Noah's ark for seeds," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, who carried out a feasibility study on the project. "It would be used to re-establish agriculture."

The precise location has not been decided, but it will be close to Longyearbyen on Svalbaard, well inside the Arctic Circle. The vault, measuring 5 metres by 5 metres by 15 metres, will be cut from solid rock in the side of a mountain and should be finished by September 2007.

The £1.7m cost is being put up by Norway, which will own the facility, but technically not the seeds inside. "It's a gift to humanity," said Dr Fowler. "It's a fairly cheap insurance policy given the importance of agriculture."

The seeds will be cooled to between -10C and -20C, but if the cooling system fails the permafrost surrounding the vault will keep them at around -4C, cold enough to save most of them. The facility will not need to be permanently manned, but "the mountains are patrolled by polar bears", said Dr Fowler.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that 75% of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has already been lost. The US, for example, had 7,100 varieties of apple in the 19th century; 6,800 no longer exist. "They are extinct - never to be seen again. Like a dinosaur," said Dr Fowler.

TreeHugger has a post on a Japanese obsession with small Sitrling engines - Stirling Engines in the Palm of your Hand.

Treehugger loves Stirling engines-they have been the way of the future since 1816. They work on the basis of temperature differences and can be powered by just about anything- This Japanese toy version appears here to be powered variously by a dog, lunch, a cup of tea and an ice rink- that is versatility! We hope they manage to scale it up a bit.

"The Stirling engine works by the repeated heating and cooling of a sealed amount of working gas, usually air or other gases such as hydrogen or helium. When the gas is heated, because it is in a sealed chamber, the pressure rises and this then acts on the power piston to produce a power stroke. When the gas is cooled the pressure drops and this means that less work needs to be done by the piston to recompress the gas on the return stroke, giving a net gain in power available on the shaft. The working gas flows cyclically between the hot and cold heat exchangers.The working gas is sealed within the piston cylinders, so there is no exhaust gas, (other than that incidental to heat production if combustion is used as the heat source). No valves are required, unlike other types of piston engines."

WorldChanging has a post on "China, India, and the 'State of the World'" which takes a look at the latest WorldWatch "State of the World" report.

Worldwatch's venerable State of the World annual is just out, and the 2006 edition zeroes in on China and India -- and the threats and opportunities they present to sustainability.

The litany of bad news has been well told. As Worldwatch puts it "If China and India were to consume resources and produce pollution at the current U.S. per-capital level, it would require two planet Earths just to sustain their two economies."

Among the realities: China has only 8% of the world's fresh water to meet the needs of 22% of the world's people. . . . China and India have both just started to build what are slated to be two of the largest automobile industries in the world . . . If Chinese per-capital grain consumption were to double to roughly European levels, China would require the equivalent of nearly 40% of today's global grain harvest.

And so it goes.

What could the good news possibly be? Turns out there's plenty. For starters, both China and India committed during 2005 to accelerate the development of renewable energy sources. India plans to increase renewables' share of power from 5% to as much as 25%, while China's new energy law will help jumpstart wind power, biofuels, and other renewable fuels.

China's automobile industry has adopted Europe's environmental standards, which are tougher than those in the U.S., part of that country's efforts to promote energy efficiency. China has achieved status as the world leader in producing and installing compact fluorescent light bulbs. India already has the fourth-largest wind power industry, while China and India are the third and fourth largest ethanol producers, respectively.

And then there are leapfrogging technologies and systems that could head off some of the more dire predictions about the development world's environmental footprint. One example is in transportation: A growing number of people in China now argue that an automobile-based transportation system simply is not capable of providing mass mobility to over a billion people without destroying resources that are required to meet other human needs. ...

Rigzone has a report on moves by the new Bolivian president to nationalise Bolivia's energy reserves and his invitation to China to help exploit these reserves.

Bolivian President-elect Evo Morales invited energy-hungry China on Sunday to help develop his country's vast gas reserves after his government carries out plans to nationalize them, a Morales adviser said.

Morales met with State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan, a senior Cabinet official, after
arriving from Europe on a world tour. He was due to meet Monday with President Hu Jintao and China's commerce minister.

"For the government of President Morales, hydrocarbons is a fundamental topic, in particular the industrialization of natural gas," said Carlos Villegas, an economic adviser to Morales. "He invited the Chinese government, through its state companies, to participate."

Morales has alarmed Western governments with his plans to nationalize Bolivia's gas resources. Villegas said Bolivia wants private companies to remain as partners to develop them and will renegotiate existing contracts following Morales' Jan. 22 inauguration.

Villegas said Morales wants to develop industries to turn Bolivia's gas into more profitable products such as cleaner-burning diesel instead of exporting it as a low-priced raw material. "We have made the proposal in Spain and France, and now in China," Villegas said. "We are offering. It doesn't mean that we are relying only on China."

Finally, Bruce Schneier has written his response to Kevin Kelly on the value of anonymity. Given all the kerfuffle about the easy availability of people's phone records in the US, perhaps he should also write a piece on the value of privacy.

Posted by Big Gav at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments

WorldChanging has a look at two abrupt climate change scenarios. The choice is between the bad (mini northern hemisphere ice age) and the awful (everything goes haywire).

If global warming results in the "abrupt climate change" scenario of a "little ice age" in the Northern Hemisphere, just how bad might it be? A couple of new studies take a look at the paleogeological evidence to find out.

Although the idea of global warming triggering an ice age may be couter-intuitive, the science is pretty solid. Melting icepack in Greenland results in the dumping of large amounts of fresh water right into the path of the North Atlantic warm water flow, resulting in the slowing and eventual cut-off of the circulation; this, in turn, results in lower temperatures in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, with Europe likely to be hit the hardest. Such a pattern has happened in the past due to the slower natural cycles of global temperatures; the fossil and ice core evidence suggests that the shift from a warm, wet environment to a cold, dry climate could take place over a matter of a few years.

Recent findings that the warm water flow may, in fact, be seeing a dramatic reduction has turned this concept from a theoretical possibility to a very real threat. But what would that world look like? Two studies give us very different images of what might happen...

WorldChanging also links to an interview with climate scientist Kerry Emanuel.

Climate scientist Kerry Emanuel knows hurricanes, and has historically been extremely cautious about drawing connections between global warming and hurricane strength or frequency. So when he published an article this past summer in Nature arguing a strong connection between climate change-driven ocean warming and hurricane intensity, the scientific world took notice. And when hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast a couple of weeks later, lots of other people took notice, too.

Today's New York Times has a brief profile and interview with Dr. Emanuel, one that helps to underscore the shift he has made from caution to concern.

There is no doubt that in the last 20 years, the earth has been warming up. And it's warming up much too fast to ascribe to any natural process we know about.

We still don't have a good grasp of how clouds and water vapor, the two big feedbacks in the climate system, will respond to global warming. What we are seeing is a modest increase in the intensity of hurricanes.

I predicted years ago that if you warmed the tropical oceans by a degree Centigrade, you should see something on the order of a 5 percent increase in the wind speed during hurricanes. We've seen a larger increase, more like 10 percent, for an ocean temperature increase of only one-half degree Centigrade.

Katrina was just the beginning.

TreeHugger has a post on cheaper insurance premiums for hybrid car drivers.

Owners of hybrid cars already get to feel deep personal satisfaction every time they watch other people fill up their gas guzzling SUVs. Starting next month, hybrid drivers will have yet another reason to pat themselves on the back (besides, you know, helping to save the planet): cheaper insurance. An insurance company will begin giving ten percent discounts to hybrid owners next month, based on early indications that the type of people attracted to hybrid cars are also those who qualify for low-risk car insurance.

The insurance provider, St. Paul Travelers, found that hybrid drivers tend to use their cars mainly to commute between home and work, according to a Reuters story. They also tend to be married, in their 40s or 50s, and drive within the speed limit. All these factors are associated with low-risk drivers, who are eligible for discounted insurance.

Fifteen percent of cars on the road in the next 10 years could be hybrids, according to St. Paul Travelers. The company is the first to offer discounted insurance premiums for hybrids.

Energy Bulletin has a link to a story about a Japanese plan to build a ocean thermal energy conversion (which seems to serve a strategic purpose as well).

he government is considering installing an ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) system around Okinotorishima island, the country's southernmost uninhabited island, government sources said Wednesday.

Japan is at odds with China over the establishment of exclusive economic zones (EEZ) around the atoll--which is about 11 kilometers in circumference--under the U.N. Convention of the Law of Sea.

If the findings of the research confirm the feasibility of an OTEC system around Okinotorishima island, the government will go ahead with its OTEC plan for the territory by fiscal 2006, beginning with the selection of a spot where an ocean temperature gradient power generation system will be set up, the sources said.

The temperature gradient system uses warm seawater from the surface to vaporize liquid ammonia into steam for driving the power-generating turbines. The steam is then cooled with low-temperature water pumped from the sea depths, which returns the ammonia to liquid form for use again in the system.

I've seen quite a few articles on this one, but Past Peak has distilled down some of the relevant reportage relating to China's decision to start diversifying its foreign currency reserves away from the US dollar.

Mike Whitney has some more commentary on this at The Smirking Chimp (which I feel slightly uneasy linking to for some reason), which he also to the phenomena of the soaring gold price, dire predictions of future inflation and the Fed's decision to discontinue reporting M3 in a couple of month's time. This is at least an alternative to the Iran oil bourse / petroeuro theory of the M3's demise.

This is probably bad form, but as my reader from the Fed seems to be rusted on now, I'd like to ask would you (or anyone else) care to explain the official reason for giving up on reporting M3 ?

The only thing keeping the dollar atop its fragile perch is the fact that other countries have been willing to lap up the $600 billion of American red ink every year via the trade deficit. That amounts to roughly $2 billion per day or nearly 7% GDP.

Currently, China is holding $769 billion, the vast majority of its foreign exchange reserves. This is a humongous sum by any measurement and represents approximately 30% of China's gross domestic product. Regrettably, the Bush administration's wasteful spending makes the dollar look like a bad long term investment, so China will either have to change its strategy or face a huge loss on its reserves. It's a thorny predicament and one that China needs to handle delicately. If they move too aggressively it could trigger a sell-off and send the dollar plummeting.

It is unlikely that China will act recklessly, but even the mere suggestion of change has put the markets on edge.

Gold futures already jumped 4% in one week as large institutional buyers are voting with their feet that the dollar is headed for the dumpster. In fact, since Bush took office, gold has gone from the $200 range to $540 on Friday; a sure sign that investors have lost confidence in Washington's ability to curb spending.

Even if China does not begin to cash in its greenbacks, we can expect to see considerable market volatility on Monday.

The Federal Reserve had anticipated China's action for some time. That's why the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve announced earlier this year that they would cease to publish the M3 monetary aggregate (including the following components: large-denomination time deposits, repurchase agreements, and Eurodollars.) That way the Fed can print enough money to absorb the shock waves of a massive sell-off without the nosy public knowing what's going on. It's a clever ruse, and an effective way of bilking the American people out of their hard-earned savings while the dollar continues to burrow into its earthen grave.

Greenspan knew this day was coming, that's probably why he chose to take an early retirement; splashing around in the Barbados while the dog-dung hits the fan.

The BBC has a report on a "huge" find (700 million barrels) offshore Brazil. ASPO Australia puts this in perspective - its just over 8 days of world consumption.

Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, says it has discovered a huge new offshore oil field off the coast of Rio de Janeiro state. Petrobras estimates it contains at least 700 million barrels of crude - about 10% of Brazil's current reserves.

But it would only supply the world for 8.3 days. The world is using about 84 million barrels of oil each day, so we need a string of similar "Huge" discoveries, one every 8.3 days to keep us going.

The Energy Blog has an update on XsunX's "Power Glass" technology, which is one of the more interesting advances in solar power technology.

XsunX, developer of Power Glass -- a thin film solar technology that allows glass windows to produce electricity from the power of the sun -- announced that it ended 2005 with continued progress in the development of its semi-transparent Power Glass thin films, that may allow the Company to begin marketing efforts of its technologies as early as Spring 2006. Power Glass is a solar technology that allows windows to produce electricity from the power of the sun without significantly altering the appearance or use of the window.

The design of the solar cell provides for the manufacture of very thin solar cells on transparent flexible plastics. As part of the manufacturing process numerous individual cells are produced on rolled plastics substrates and interconnected using minimally apparent segmentations. The resulting integrated solar cell design is monolithic or uniform in appearance and simulates tinted solar control films used in window shading applications. The Company believes the advantages to the use of Power Glass films over current solar glass designs lie in improved esthetic appearance, reduced manufacturing or assembly requirements, and lower finished product costs. The company estimates that Power Glass™ solar cells operating at half the efficiency of conventional opaque amorphous solar cells yet costing one fourth to produce results in a 100% efficiency-to-cost gain over conventional opaque solar cells. Final cost to efficiency analysis will be determined upon completion of development.

Another year end milestone is the launch of a program for the development of a new patent-pending 4 Terminal Nano-Crystalline solar cell. The 4 terminal solar cell design uses a combination of thin film transparent cell technology, derived from the Company's Power Glass initiative, with that of a nano-crystalline solar cell. XsunX believes that the combination of these two technologies into a single device holds a promising opportunity to deliver low cost, high efficiency, flexible, and light weight solar cells providing performance characteristics commonly found only in various forms of crystalline wafer technologies. Tom Djokovich, XsunX’s CEO. said: “Expanding our product base to include opaque solar cells will allow us to offer BIPV solutions for transparent building surfaces such as architectural glass, and the balance of buildings opaque surfaces such as residential and commercial roofs systems."

The GristMill has a little list of apocalyptic visions, which closes with "Coming to a boil" (on the topic of global warming, obviously).

Last but not least is everyone's favorite: the death-by-carbon-emissions scenario. But exactly how does global warming kill? Will we get swept up in a swirl of chaotic weather, drown in a pool of melted ice sheets, or succumb to a bevy of hot-weather-loving diseases? All of the above. Maybe. According to Susan Joy Hassol, one of the lead authors of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, we're already committed to about another 1 degree Fahrenheit of global warming in this century, which our species could likely adapt to, albeit at some cost. But a worst-case scenario -- in which we lollygag on coming up with energy alternatives and instead burn all the oil and coal we can scrape out of the earth, thus raising average global temperatures 5 to 10 degrees F -- involves, at least by my interpretation, the following Rapture Index categories: floods, plague, wild weather, oil supply/price, global turmoil, beast government, and apostasy.

The bad news: While the rest of the world is trying to deal with this issue, the U.S. sorely needs a national policy that limits CO2 emissions. "We're still speeding in the wrong direction," says Hassol.

The good news: By taking the necessary measures to address global warming, the U.S. could also decrease our dependency on foreign oil, clean up our air, improve our health, and boost our economy. "We can slow the rate and magnitude of global warming," says Hassol. "We have the technologies and we know what we have to do."

Tim Lambert takes a swipe at one of the few remaining global warming deniers and also takes a look at how the disinformation cycle works (in this case he is talking about some sort of chemical industry campaign but the diagram for global warming denial would be similar.



Deconsumption has a post on how to build a zero (net) energy home.

Jeff Christian of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL) Building Technology Center has been on a quest to create an affordable (approx. $100,000) "zero-energy" home design. He was most popularly covered in a Mother Earth News article from December of 2004 which described ORNL's recent success with their "Harmony Heights" project in Lenoir City, TN:

"The four homes Jeff Christian has built, on Bethel Drive in Lenoir City, Tenn., are much more modest in size — just 1,000 to 1,200 square feet — but they might offer the most convincing evidence to date that the dream of affordable net-zero-energy homes is on a fast track to reality. Collectively dubbed “Harmony Heights,” the homes were constructed by Habitat for Humanity volunteers for about $100,000 each. That includes the cost of the photovoltaic solar system and factors in the labor provided by the Habitat volunteers.

Noam Chomsky has taken a look at the recent elections in Iraq.

The US President Bush called last month’s Iraqi elections a "major milestone in the march to democracy." They are indeed a milestone — just not the kind that Washington would welcome. Disregarding the standard declarations of benign intent on the part of leaders, let’s review the history. When Bush and Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, invaded Iraq, the pretext, insistently repeated, was a "single question": Will Iraq eliminate its weapons of mass destruction?

Within a few months this "single question" was answered the wrong way. Then, very quickly, the real reason for the invasion became Bush’s "messianic mission" to bring democracy to Iraq and the Middle East. Even apart from the timing, the democratisation bandwagon runs up against the fact that the United States has tried, in every possible way, to prevent elections in Iraq.

Last January’s elections came about because of mass nonviolent resistance, for which the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani became a symbol. (The violent insurgency is another creature altogether from this popular movement.) Few competent observers would disagree with the editors of the Financial Times, who wrote last March that "the reason (the elections) took place was the insistence of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who vetoed three schemes by the US-led occupation authorities to shelve or dilute them."

Elections, if taken seriously, mean you pay some attention to the will of the population. The crucial question for an invading army is: "Do they want us to be here?" [...]

"...There’s a good reason why the United States cannot tolerate a sovereign, more or less democratic Iraq. The issue can scarcely be raised because it conflicts with firmly established doctrine: We’re supposed to believe that the United States would have invaded Iraq if it was an island in the Indian Ocean and its main export was pickles, not petroleum." [...]

TreeHugger has a post on another variety of solar powered outdoor tiles.

In the recent past we covered solar lit floor tiles from Chile. The design relied on common rechargeable batteries to store the electricity generated by the built-in SPV panels. All small batteries, unfortunately, have limited design lives, use fairly toxic electrolytes, and have little realistic chance of being recycled. When was the last time you made sure your spent batteries were recycled?

With that as background, we thought these newly designed solar powered floor tiles by Orion, wherein electricity is stored in ultracapacitors was a very positive step forward. "Very" is the right modifier for another reason: the ultra's have a design life of a minimum of 10 years, as compared to two or three for typical rechargeable batteries.

The ultra's manufacturer, Maxwell Technologies, also claims that their storage devices "are made of non-hazardous, non-polluting materials, which present no environmental hazards or human safety concerns". Returning to the tiles, Orion states that the solar cells built into these tiles will gather enough energy, even if not in direct sunlight or on rainy days, to power the lights for at least 12 hours. The lights are LED's of course.

And to close, Monkeygrinder has an excellent rant going on coelecanths, chimps and our possible weedy future (I'll also note that Mobjectivist has been modelling up a storm lately too).

Posted by Big Gav at 7:27 PM | Permalink | Comments

WorldChanging has a post up on the genesis of the ocean power industry.

Solar and wind are the twin giants of the renewable energy world. Everybody knows about them, and power generation projects involving photovoltaic or turbine technologies are, relatively speaking, commonplace. But there are other forms of renewable power out there; one we've followed for awhile now is ocean/tidal generation, something we usually call "hydrokinetic power." It's fascinating to watch this technology move from idea to implementation, and today we can see the surest sign that hydrokinetic power is beginning to hit the mainstream: regulation.

In the Ocean Energy Report for 2005 and Renewable Energy Access, Carolyn Elefant and Sean O'Neill of the Ocean Renewable Energy Coalition lay out the current state of the ocean power industry. What's notable is that the report says little about innovative new ideas -- instead, it's all about how the companies actually testing new technologies are dealing with government oversight. It's a pleasingly mundane report, filled with detailed looks at the complexities of compliance with federal energy regulations while trying to test out new technologies.

For a better sense of what those new technologies are doing, we can hit the Ocean Energy Web Page at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). A year ago, EPRI released its final report on the potential for ocean and tidal power in the United States, spelling out the potential benefits of deployment of this technology. With its Ocean Energy project, EPRI is now following the evolution of this new power industry. The white paper on ocean energy submitted last month to the Western Governors Assocation Clean and Diversified Energy Advisory Committee spells out the technology's benefits:

First, with proper siting, converting ocean wave energy to electricity is believed to be one of the most environmentally benign ways to generate electricity. Second, offshore wave energy offers a way to minimize the aesthetic issues that plague many energy infrastructure projects, from nuclear to coal and to wind generation. Since wave energy conversion devices have a very low profile and are located at a distance from the shore, they are generally not visible. In addition, wave energy is more predicatable than direct solar or wind energy, and therefore can be more easily integrated into the overall electricity grid for providing reliable power.

So what's underway now? According to EPRI, there's currently around 2.3 MW of installed offshore wave energy capacity worldwide, coming from four locations: a 1 megwatt facility at Lexious, Portugal; a 0.75 MW system at Orkney, Scotland; a 0.5 MW generator at Port Kembla, Australia; and a 0.04 MW -- 40 kilowatt -- unit at the naval station in Hawaii. EPRI goes on to argue that, if the states of Hawaii, Oregon and California were to enact policies to stimulate ocean power construction, the US capacity could increase to over 100 MW by 2010, at which point the cost of power will be between 8 and 16 cents per kWhr, "substantially less than the entry point for wind technology when it reached a capacity of 100 MW back in the early 1980s."

WorldChanging also has a post on "Debating Nukes" that takes a look at the evolution of the debate (for want of a better word) on whether or not nuclear power has a role to play in mitigating global warming.

Yesterday's Sustainability Sundays post from Gil Friend, "Houston: We've Got A Problem," generated quite a bit of discussion, much of it about whether or not nuclear power should be considered a -- or the -- solution to global warming, peak oil, and other unfolding energy-related problems. There are plenty of good reasons for worldchangers to oppose the expansion of nuclear power, but the institutional forces pushing for it are formidable.

It's a recurring debate, one not limited to the comments in WorldChanging: this Friday, the Long Now lecture series will hold a discussion about this very topic, pitting Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the Energy Program at the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, who opposes expansion of nuclear power, and Peter Schwartz, a former board member of Rocky Mountain Institute and chair of Global Business Network, who sees the potential for abrupt climate change as sufficient cause to support the expansion of nuclear power. (Disclosure: I used to work for Global Business Network, and still do occasional projects for them.)

As always, if you can't make the event (because you don't live anywhere near San Francisco, for example), you can download the Long Now programs within a few days (a couple of weeks at the outside).

A useful argument about nuclear power is one that admits that the opposing sides each may have strong arguments; fortunately, Friday's discussion looks to be of that nature. Long Now characterizes it as a disagreement between environmentalists, and given that Schwartz now sees global warming as the biggest problem going, I'll accept that depiction. Moreover, the discussion is explicitly not a debate: The format requires each speaker to draw out the other's views and then restate them in a way that satisfies the opponent, "That's right. You got it." Smart.

It's an important topic, and I look forward to the event. I am hopeful that the discussion will be a good one; normally, the issue of nuclear power provokes an epidemic of jerking-knee syndrome. Many long-time opponents of nuclear energy are set to reject anything that has "nuclear" in its name, and dismiss new technologies designed to prevent meltdowns or similar problems as just more "electricity too cheap to meter" nonsense. At the same time, many of the loudest pro-nuclear voices are of the same ilk that not too long ago accused global warming of being "junk science," and now latch onto any idea to discredit environmentalists.

I'm hopeful that the discussion will quickly brush past tired old arguments. No talk about meltdowns (a variety of reactor designs can now make meltdowns physically impossible) or about the impossibility of solar alone totally replacing all energy production (a mix of solar, wind, ocean and bio could); let's hear more about molten salt thorium and the economic efficiency of "negawatts." Let's move this debate -- or whatever it is -- forward, please.

Commenter Arthur Smith makes some interesting points:

I'm not entirely clear what all the fuss is about - it sounds like the recent cries of alarm about a "war on Christmas", manufactured by certain networks apparently for ratings purposes.

* research on advanced nuclear fission reactors, particularly the integral fast reactor approach, and fusion as well, is an excellent idea, and should be adequately funded. There was money for some of this in the recently passed energy bill; perhaps it should be enhanced, but it's there now.

* we have plenty of experience building and operating reactors around the world; plants based on the existing once-through cycle are a mature technology. If power companies found them economical to build they would be building more. Every power plant has regulatory hurdles to cross; there must be lots of states that would be quite friendly to new plants.

* Nevertheless, and despite large handouts from the government in the past (for example, all nuclear operators are still indemnified from major liabilities by the federal government, and for a fee the feds have also taken on long-term waste disposal responsibilities) no nuclear facility has been built in the US in several decades.

* The main reason is probably simply that coal is much cheaper than nuclear.

So what nuclear advocates should really be calling for is huge carbon taxes sufficient to price coal power higher than nuclear - and then let the nuclear industry compete on a fair footing in the energy marketplace.

As I've said before and I'll say again - the number one best thing to do about global warming is to impose carbon taxes everywhere. Then renewables can compete on a level financial playing field with nuclear (assuming the nuclear industry doesn't get too many more government handouts) and the coal industry can go the way of the dinosaur (unless it, more likely, morphs into a coal-to-liquids industry, assuming depletion and liquid fuel dependency outweigh carbon taxes).

Crooked Timber has a note on "The end of the global warming debate".

The news that 2005 was the warmest year ever recorded in Australia comes at the end of a year in which, to the extent that facts can settle anything, the debate over human-caused global warming has been settled. Worldwide, 2005 was equal (to within the margin of error of the stats) with 1998 as the warmest year in at least the past millennium.

More significantly, perhaps, 2005 saw the final nail hammered into the arguments climate change contrarians have been pushing for years. The few remaining legitimate sceptics (such as John Christy), along with some of the smarter ideological contrarians (like Ron Bailey), have looked at the evidence and conceded the reality of human-caused global warming.

...

Finally, the evidence has mounted up that, with a handful of exceptions, “sceptics” are not, as they claim, fearless seekers after scientific truth, but ideological partisans and paid advocates, presenting dishonest arguments for a predetermined party-line conclusion. Even three years ago, sites like Tech Central Station, and writers like Ross McKitrick were taken seriously by many. Now, anyone with access to Google can discover that they have no credibility. Chris Mooney’s Republican War on Science which I plan to review soon, gives chapter and verse and the whole network of thinktanks, politicians and tame scientists who have popularised GW contrarianism, Intelligent Design and so on.

A couple of thoughts on all this.

First, in the course of the debate, a lot of nasty things were said about the IPCC, including some by people who should have known better. Now that it’s clear that the IPCC has been pretty much spot-on in its assessment (and conservative in terms of its caution about reaching definite conclusions), it would be nice to see some apologies.

Second, now that the scientific phase of the debate is over, attention will move to the question of the costs and benefits of mitigation options. There are legitimate issues to be debated here. But having seen the disregard for truth exhibited by anti-environmental think tanks in the first phase of the debate, we shouldn’t give them a free pass in the second. Any analysis on this issue coming out of a think tank that has engaged in global warming contrarianism must be regarded as valueless unless its results have been reproduced independently, after taking account of possible data mining and cherry picking. That disqualifies virtually all the major right-wing think tanks, both in Australia and in the US. Their performance on this and other scientific issues has been a disgrace.

Moving back to renewable energy - particularly wind power - while I was on holiday in WA I spent some time in Albany and visited the nearby wind farm, which can provide up to 75% of the town's power requirements (and usually does, with the wind failing to blow on only 7 days per year.

The farm itself looks great to me and was basically silent - just a small swooshing noise when you stand underneath the turbines - I can never quite understand why anyone would object to a wind farm when you consider most of the alternatives.







Of course, that doesn't mean much to the residents of the nearby town of Denmark, who are vigorously opposing a similar development there (egged on by some nutty federal Liberal MP who thinks that this anti - clean development agenda is a good thing for some mysterious reason - which a cynic might guess is coal related).

This sort of thing is happening everywhere it seems - Wired has a report on some windpower NIMBYism in New York state.

Back to WA, on another annoying note Western Power has decided to build a new 400MW coal fired power station at Muja - why does anything think it is a sane idea (even on business grounds) to be building new coal fired generation capacity at this stage ? Can you hedge against future carbon taxes being imposed in a few years time ?

While the government likes to drone on about carbon sequestration and "clean coal" being the solution, no one really believes this - with some local experts feeling compelled to note the bleeding obvious in the leadup to the big "lets not do anything meaningful about global warming other then emit lots of hot air" talkfest - if there isn't a cost associated with burning coal in a dirty fashion, then the power companies will keep doing it.

Research and development of clean coal technologies would be a waste of time and Australia's greenhouse gas emissions will keep rising unless the Federal Government sets a price on carbon, energy experts and power providers say.

Ministers from Australia, the US, China, India, Japan and South Korea will meet on Wednesday as part of the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate to discuss technologies that aim to capture and store underground the carbon dioxide generated by burning fossil fuels.

It could be 10 to 40 years before carbon capture and storage technologies are commercially viable and well entrenched in industry, and they could double the cost of fossil fuel power.

But if the only benefit of such emerging technologies was that they cut greenhouse gas emissions, investors would build power plants without them, said Tony Wood, general manager for public and government affairs at the power provider Origin Energy. "There is absolutely no incentive for business to adopt [such technologies]," Mr Wood said.

"You would have to put a value or a penalty on greenhouse gas emissions. You need a level playing field in terms of carbon value so the market can decide what is the lowest-cost way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

A research analyst at AMP Capital Investors, Dr Ian Woods, agreed, saying developing new technologies was only half the story. "The other half is the cost at which a technology can compete in the market.

"Currently there is no driver to do clean coal technology."

TreeHugger has an article on storing wind energy called "Compressed Air Underground Battery for Wind Farms". As this sort of idea becomes more widely implemented we'll find that distributed renewable power generation has an even greater cost advantage.

CAES steps. This is essentially a peaking power design.

Wind turbines generate electricity which can flow directly to grid or, alternatively, power the site's air compressor bank.

Compressors run at "off peak" times when wind happens to be blowing strongly, but regional electricity demand is low, driving air down into a subterranean cavern of sorts.

Compressed air driven underground both dissolves in, and temporarily displaces, groundwater. The horizonatally displaced water is "contained" by surrounding aquitards, however, so the air remains under pressure for extended periods, ready to be let back up the pipes to the surface when needed. When air pressure is reduced, the previously displaced groundwater flows back toward the zone of lowered pressure, which is now under the "dome". This is the "battery-like" part of the design.

Air flowing back up the pipes, toward the non-wind turbines, is pre-heated by the combustion of natural gas...Our reading of the design narrative indicates this heating is from in-situ' combustion, not requiring a heat exchanger..., further increasing the air's pressure, prior to it's passing through the turbine blade chambers.

The hot compressed air turns the turbine blades just as would flowing water as it passes through a hydroelectric generator.

The turbines turn dynamos that generate electricity for the regional grid at peak demand periods.

The BBC has a report on the 'Critical danger' for fish, warning that new research suggests deep sea fish species in the northern Atlantic are on the brink of extinction.

Deep sea fish species in the northern Atlantic are on the brink of extinction, new research suggests.

Canadian scientists studied five deep water species including hake and eel. Writing in the journal Nature, they say that some populations have plummeted by 98% in a generation, meeting the definition of 'critically endangered'.

Scientists and conservation bodies are pressing for a global moratorium on deep-sea fishing which they regard as particularly destructive.

Some fleets have switched to deep-sea fisheries following the collapse in more commonly-caught species such as cod. Known as bottom-trawling, ships often use heavy trawls which are dragged across the ocean floor, destroying coral and other ecosystems.

And to close, given that I can't seem to resist anti gravity stories at the moment, here's one more anti-gravity link - this one from the conspiracy theorists at RI, who add some more detail to their peak oil / anti gravity / NWO theorising...

When asked to choose which of five avenues proposed by NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program stood the greatest chance of success, Puthoff selected without hesitation the perturbation of space-time through antigravity.

Cook left the interview with the impression that Puthoff meant to indirectly communicate that tangible results had already been achieved. There is much more direct evidence in The Hunt for Zero Point to support such an assumption. And as Cook suggests, "if antigravity had been discovered in the white world, then someone, somewhere had to be perfecting it - maybe even building real hardware - in the black."

Was there an antigravity Manhattan Project about which now the general public is finally being fed the theory? I think it would be more astonishing if there wasn't. For one thing, there have been too many reliable sightings of discoid craft being piloted or repaired by seemingly ordinary men in military uniforms and even baseball caps. (Though as I've made clear in other posts, I don't believe the relatively prosaic explanation of nuts and bolts black budget craft can account for the genuine UFO phenomenon. If humans can already build craft capable of slipping into other dimensions, then the veil is exceedingly thin, and presumably may be crossed in the opposite direction.) And for another, it makes an awful sense. I suggested last March that our "Immortals" have been preparing - covertly, and for a long time - for a post-carbon world. One that may not include most of Earth's population.

If the G-Engines are coming, they've probably already arrived. And they're not meant for the likes of us.

Posted by Big Gav at 8:16 PM | Permalink | Comments

The Independent reports on fuel shortages afflicting the UK.

Britain is in the grip of a fresh oil crisis, with supplies to hospitals, petrol stations and households all under threat, according to independent wholesalers and retailers.

NHS Trusts on interruptible gas contracts have begun frantically shopping around for oil supplies to heat hospitals, while petrol stations in the South-east are said to be begging independent wholesalers for fresh stocks.

Some heating oil distributors are reported to be refusing to supply business or domestic customers because they do not know when they will be able to get new stocks, and householders who rely on oil to heat their homes are facing delays in getting supplies just as the country braces itself for a cold snap.

The Association of UK Oil Independents (AUKOI), which represents the country's largest privately owned distributors and importers and all of the major supermarket chains apart from Asda, fears that once the extent of the problem emerges it will trigger panic buying, making the crisis still worse. There were reports last night of petrol stations in north-west London running out of supplies, with motorists having to drive miles to fill up.

The looming crisis has been caused by a combination of factors such as bad weather, Hurricane Katrina, the Buncefield oil depot fire and fears that the dispute between Russia and Ukraine over gas supplies would cause a run on oil. But it has been exacerbated by the sharp rise in gas prices, which has prompted some gas-fired power stations to switch to gasoil and kerosene. This has reduced the amount of refining capacity available to produce petrol and diesel and also threatens to squeeze supplies of home heating oil which many householders in rural areas rely upon.

I'm not sure what the real / official story is about the fuel depot that went up (presumably the original reports of some sort of accident occurring still hold), but Monkeygrinder has some speculation inspired by John Robb's blog that this could be an example of actual - and if so, very effective - sabotage by terrorists.

Back to my UK theme, Rigzone has a report that Great Britain will be import half of its natural gas supplies by 2010.

Britain, once an energy exporter, will import about half of its gas needs by 2010, according to a BBC report on Wednesday.

By 2020, existing North Sea gas fields will be supplying only 10 percent of the gas needed in Britain, the report said. The existing pipeline to Belgium, which has been used to export gas to continental Europe, is being upgraded to be able to deliver 15 percent of the UK's peak gas demand by the end of this year. A new interconnector to be built between Holland and Bacton will supply a further 10 percent.

The biggest pipeline of all is due to be completed later this year. The Langeled pipe will link Britain directly to a huge gas field off the coast of Norway, which will be capable of supplying 16 percent of the UK's peak demand when it is fully operational.

A small amount of gas is also imported as liquefied natural gas (LNG) via a terminal on the Isle of Grain, in Medway, Kent, which was opened last year. At the same time, new import terminals for LNG are being built at Milford Haven in Wales.

TreeHugger notes that Norway's supplies from the North Sea are depleting just as fast as Britain's (luckily for them they have a much smaller population so they are still raking in, and investing, the export dollars - and they also have the Barents sea to turn to as well, along with, reportedly, 3000 million tons of offshore coal).

As one of the major non-OPEC producers of oil and an important source of oil and natural gas to Europe, Norway's production decline is a big deal. Lets hope that this will encourage policy makers to invest in clean technologies and not to try to drill their way out of it - at best it will push back the problem a few years and make global warming and pollution worse, at worse it will be a waste of time and resources that could better be used making the transition to a post-fossil fuel world smoother.

The Russian-Ukrainian gas imbroglio seems to have been sorted out with some sort of bizarre compromise solution reported that reeked of the Germans agreeing to pay part of the difference of opinion between the two to keep Ukraine's gas flowing. The Herald's report here focussed on "Putins power play". While the Russian's are no doubt firing a warning shot about future energy negotiations with the Europeans, to a certain extent its hard to be too critical of the pricing they offered the Ukraine - as a client state of Russia they got a discount rate - now they aren't a client any more they get the privilege of paying full market rate like everyone else - everything has a price - even freedom.

European leaders lined up to condemn the move, which was unacceptable because it "mixed foreign policy with gas supplies policy", said the Polish Deputy Prime Minister, Ludwik Dorn.

An Oxford University energy analyst, Jonathan Stern, sees the dispute as essentially economic and Russia's behaviour as more consistent than punitive. As Professor Stern explains it, Russia has offered cut-price gas to former Soviet republics such as Belarus and Ukraine in exchange for them giving Russia ownership of the pipelines that run through their countries - which Russia believes will guarantee it security of supply. Belarus accepted, and gets cheap gas. Ukraine has not.

On Wednesday Russia and Ukraine reached a complex agreement that uses intermediaries and gas from Turkmenistan to ensure Russia gets market price while Ukraine pays only $US95 per 1000 cubic metres. But Eberhard Schneider, a Russia specialist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, presumes that with important Ukrainian elections due in March, Mr Putin wanted to send Ukrainians a message that the Yushchenko Government was "unfit to run the country" because it could not secure a good deal on gas.

He believes the move will be counterproductive in Europe. Britain has for some time considered reinvesting in nuclear power in part to avoid being reliant on Russian gas. And the European Union plans to establish a European energy agency to help countries such as Lithuania, which takes all its gas from Russia, and Hungary, which takes 80 per cent, to have greater certainty of supply.

The Financial Review had one brief report this weekend on an announcement by French President Jacques Chirac that he plans to cut oil consumption in France, in particular the train system will not use any oil in 20 years time - instead being (nuclear) powered by electricity. I wonder if uranium suppliers like Canada and Australia will eventually start acting like the Russians ? Well - thats pretty far-fetched of course, but our imperial influencers in Washington might like to get some leverage using the assets of their client states perhaps, one day - especially if occasionally recalcitrant allies like the French and Japanese become extremely nuclear dependent in the coming years.

It seems Mr Putin is also starting his own propaganda campaign to improve Russia's image in the world. He's not the only one doing this of course - I wonder how much news we read is actually genuine analysis reflecting the views of the author after he has studied real events, and how much might be better thought of as "paid content" ?

Of course, propaganda is used by everyone to some extent or another, and I thought this quote from Bruce's interview that I linked to yesterday was apt. Its probably important for all bloggers to try and make sure that they aren't just inadvertently parroting someone else's propaganda line, no matter who they are...

"Which way does the surveillance backlash go, Bruce? More state power, or less, and with what results?"

The hot-button here is always domestic spying for political advantage. Nixon could have used all the Cuban refugees he wanted to spy on Cubans inside the USA; but when he let them loose on the Democrats, it meant his head. It took a while, but the state can't stand internal spying on the state.

Obviously it takes some state-power to run an outfit like ECHELON, and In-Q-Tel is busily spreading the grant money for tomorrow's Total Information Awareness system right now. But I suspect that the "backlash" goes someplace pretty strange.

I'm thinking the future of surveillance belongs to partisan blogger-mobs howling for blood. You can see a guy like Josh Marshall trying to start his own private-investigation agency over at TALKING POINTS MEMO... He's nickel-and-diming it, but what if he had a few million? A cat like Abramoff has had the run of K Street for years now. Nobody brought it up, nobody said a thing...

If I were a spook from an unfriendly power and I wanted to destabilize the American political system, I'd be feeding the American poli-bloggers big chunks of fresh meat. It wouldn't matter if it came from right or left. Just as long as it was shocking, and not the sort of thing the mainstream media saw fit to touch. Blowjobs. Gay White House reporters. That sort of thing.

There's a major-league video sex scandal in Indian politics right now. It's got rather little to do with India per se and everything to do with how easy it is for political operatives to videotape moral panics and distribute them.

It is proving enough to wreck the major opposition party in the biggest democracy in the world. Pakistani intelligence couldn't have done a neater job, and, you know, maybe they did.

Moving on from the topic of propaganda to the related one of big brother style surveillence, there has been a lot of commentary about Bush's admission that US intelligence services monitor the communications of US citizens in violation of a law that was put in place in the aftermath of the Church hearings in the 1970s (sparking a rash of calls for his impeachment and prompting Dick Cheney to defend this practice, along with torture, as being necessary and that the administration can do whatever it feels like when there is a war, without end, against a bunch of guys with bad haircuts who hide in caves and now reportedly use carrier pigeons to communicate to get around all the electronic eavesdropping).

Senator Church must have been a busy man because The Control Of Oil also referred quite a few times to some of his hearings on the oil industry in the 1970's as well.

Of course, I've long been of the belief that all communication is probably monitored and stored away for later reference (and has been for many years) and that all sorts of other useful data will be vacuumed up from financial institutions, phone companies, toll road operators and the like and cross referenced against it over time - eventually various government agencies will have a fairly comprehensive picture of the movements, financial transactions and communications of pretty much every individual. As Bruce Schneier has frequently pointed out, this isn't a good thing, but it may be that the "Transparent Society" is the best we can hope for.

Of course, even amateurs can play this game on a smaller scale, as this tale of a bored programmers hunt for subversive book readers demonstrates.

Elsewhere, John Pilger is lamenting the death of freedom with some observations on the seemingly over-the-top laws suppressing legitimate dissent in the UK.

On Christmas Eve, I dropped in on Brian Haw, whose hunched, pacing figure was just visible through the freezing fog. For four and a half years, Brian has camped in Parliament Square with a graphic display of photographs that show the terror and suffering imposed on Iraqi children by British policies. The effectiveness of his action was demonstrated last April when the Blair government banned any expression of opposition within a kilometre of parliament. The high court subsequently ruled that, because his presence preceded the ban, Brian was an exception.

Day after day, night after night, season upon season, he remains a beacon, illuminating the great crime of Iraq and the cowardice of the House of Commons. As we talked, two women brought him a Christmas meal and mulled wine. They thanked him, shook his hand and hurried on. He had never seen them before. "That's typical of the public," he said. A man in a pinstriped suit and tie emerged from the fog, carrying a small wreath. "I intend to place this at the Cenotaph and read out the names of the dead in Iraq," he said to Brian, who cautioned him: "You'll spend the night in the cells, mate." We watched him stride off and lay his wreath. His head bowed, he appeared to be whispering. Thirty years ago, I watched dissidents do something similar outside the walls of the Kremlin.

As the night had covered him, he was lucky. On 7 December, Maya Evans, a vegan chef aged 25, was convicted of breaching the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act by reading aloud at the Cenotaph the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. So serious was her crime that it required 14 policemen in two vans to arrest her. She was fined and given a criminal record for the rest of her life.

Freedom is dying.

Eighty-year-old John Catt served with the RAF in the Second World War. Last September, he was stopped by police in Brighton for wearing an "offensive" T-shirt which suggested that Bush and Blair be tried for war crimes. He was arrested under the Terrorism Act and handcuffed, with his arms held behind his back. The official record of the arrest says the "purpose" of searching him was "terrorism" and the "grounds for intervention" were "carrying plackard and T-shirt with anti-Blair info" (sic).

He is awaiting trial.

For X-Files fans here are a few more "anti gravity" links (spurred by this article in New Scientist) - while I still think the whole idea is probably nuts there certainly seems to be a committed core in the conspiracy theory world that believe passionately in this stuff - I even saw one theorist claim recently that the US will win an upcoming war against China because of this power (how it handles nuclear weapons and why a war with China would be necessary in a "free energy" world weren't explained unfortunately).

Posted by Big Gav at 9:39 PM | Permalink | Comments

Euopre bound Viridian guru Bruce Sterling has been fairly quiet of late but he has managed to put out another Viridian note - this one looking at "LA Weekly"'s summary of global warming (or climate chaos, if you prefer the alternate description) in 2006 and then moving on to Tom Friedman's almost getting it rant on "petrolist" states. Unfortunately Tom, as usual, doesn't understand the concept of looking in the mirror when casting accusations around - he might find he's living in a "petrolist" state himself if he thought to consider the topic closely...

Bruce's sarcastic interjections are contained within ((( ))) markers.

(((A journalist from LA Weekly once cheerily told me, ‘We’re supported by porn, so we can say anything we want!’ They probably ought to be supported by televangelism, so they could call for the elected leader of Venezuela to be assassinated. In any case, this LA Weekly piece says plenty.)))

“Running Hot and Cold: A Dozen Weird Weather Moments
by JUDITH LEWIS

“Katrina turned the weather into the year’s biggest news event, as the natural world against which Bush has made war since 2000 decided to send back a return salvo.

“The storm quickly became a political portent for both ends of the spectrum, with Christian conservatives interpreting the supposed fetal shape of Katrina to be
a pro-life meteorological statement sent by a vengeful Lord to ravage the Gulf of Mexico, and the sane world noting apprehensively that hurricane season has been
worsening with steadily increasing ocean-surface temperatures. Bad as it was, the scientists added, 2005’s weather is just a taste of what’s to come.

Here’s the rest of the year in bad weather.

“1. 2005 was the hottest year on record. This year’s global average temperature topped the previous record, set in 1998.

“2. The Amazon River basin experienced its worst drought in recorded history.

“3. The National Climate Data Center (NCDC) reported that nine of the 10 warmest years in history have occurred in the past decade.

“4. Satellite monitoring in September revealed that the summer Arctic sea ice has shrunk as much as 40 percent since monitoring began in the late 1970s. At the current rate of decline, there will be no summer Arctic ice pack within two decades. (((If so, I wonder how many of this list’s readers will survive to witness that.)))

“5. Multiple studies showed that the higher average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the last decade are unprecedented over the past 2,000 years.

“6. Swiss and U.S. climatologists working in Antarctica built ‘EPICA Dome C,’ the longest ice-core record to date. Gas bubbles trapped in ice crystals record the
atmospheric compositions over time. From this, researchers reported that today’s levels of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, are higher now than at any time in the past 650,000 years.

“7. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that sea-surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico this summer were the highest since measurements began in 1890.

“8. The warm waters contributed to the year’s record-breaking hurricane season, with 26 named storms forming in the Atlantic. Fourteen became hurricanes, and Katrina, Rita and Wilma created an unprecedented triumvirate of category 5 storms. The NOAA also exhausted its pre-assigned list of storm names, and for the first time had to turn to the Greek alphabet. On the last official day in hurricane season, tropical storm Epsilon strengthened into a hurricane. (((This precedes Zeta, which fell to pieces today. I guess this means we can start over at “A” if January brings another tropical storm.)))

Link:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1479633

“9. Wilma played second fiddle to Katrina despite being the stronger storm. In Florida, Wilma was ‘the Big One’ they’ve been expecting for a century. It knocked out the power for weeks, and left a destruction path wider than any previous hurricane in the state. With a central ultralow pressure of 882 millibars, Wilma surpassed 1988’s Gilbert as the strongest hurricane on record.

“10. Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology reported in the May issue of Science that the long-term process of global dimming, a diminishing of the sun’s effects caused by an accumulation of particulate matter in the atmosphere, began to turn around in 1990. Since global dimming has a cooling effect, its decline could speed the effects of global warming. (((One really has to wonder what the hell is going on with that.)))

“11. Researchers on a scientific expedition in the Atlantic Ocean discovered that the strength of the current that drives the Gulf Stream == and bathes Britain and Northern Europe in warm waters from the tropics each summer == has slowed by 30 percent in just the past decade. Thought to be a consequence of global warming, the weakened current could trigger severe winters and cooler summers on both sides of the North Atlantic.

“12. Outlandish weather effects materialized all over the world. On July 26, 37 inches of rain fell in Mumbai, India’s financial center, during one 24-hour period. Four hundred thirty-eight people drowned or were buried in landslides in India’s highest recorded rainfall. A record 22 tornadoes hit Southwest Australia in May, causing the state’s most expensive natural disaster. In October, 78.9 inches of snow fell on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, nearly doubling the previous record of 39.8 inches, set in 2000.”


Source: New York Times

January 6, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

“The New Red, White and Blue
By Thomas L. Friedman

“As we enter 2006, we find ourselves in trouble, at home and abroad. We are in trouble because we are led by defeatists == wimps, actually.

“What's so disturbing about President Bush and Dick Cheney is that they talk tough about the necessity of invading Iraq, torturing terror suspects and engaging in domestic spying == all to defend our way of life and promote democracy around the globe.

“But when it comes to what is actually the most important issue in U.S. foreign and domestic policy today == making ourselves energy efficient and independent, and environmentally green == they ridicule it as something only liberals, tree-huggers and sissies believe is possible or necessary.

“Sorry, but being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue. It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. Living green is not for sissies. Sticking with oil, and basically saying that a country that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow incapable of innovating its way to energy independence == that is for sissies, defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded at home and abroad.

“Living green is not just a ‘personal virtue,’ as Mr. Cheney says. It's a national security imperative. “The biggest threat to America and its values today is not communism, authoritarianism or Islamism. It's petrolism. (((A neologism! Welcome to 2006!))) Petrolism is my term (((our Tom is ever the egoist))) for the corrupting, antidemocratic governing practices == in oil states from Russia to Nigeria and Iran == that result from a long run of $60-a-barrel oil. (((How great that he noticed the “curse of oil.”)))

“Petrolism is the politics of using oil income to buy off one's citizens (((Are you listening, Jack Abramoff?))) with subsidies and government jobs, using oil and gas exports to intimidate or buy off one's enemies, and using oil profits to build up one's internal security forces and army to keep oneself ensconced in power, without any transparency or checks and balances. (((Wait wait, I’ve got a genius “petrolist” idea == use the NSA to wiretap Americans who moan about gasoline prices!)))

“When a nation's leaders can practice petrolism, they never have to tap their people's energy and creativity; they simply have to tap an oil well. (((Yep!))) And therefore politics in a petrolist state is not about building a society or an educational system that maximizes its people's ability to innovate, export and compete. It is simply about who controls the oil tap.

“In petrolist states like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Sudan, people get rich by being in government and sucking the treasury dry == so they never want to cede power. In non-petrolist states, like Taiwan, Singapore and Korea, people get rich by staying outside government and building real businesses. (((I hope my Singaporean friends are enjoying this rare pat on the head from the NY Times.)))

“Our energy gluttony fosters and strengthens various kinds of petrolist regimes. It emboldens authoritarian petrolism in Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sudan and Central Asia. It empowers Islamist petrolism in Sudan, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It even helps sustain communism in Castro's Cuba, which survives today in part thanks to cheap oil from Venezuela. Most of these petrolist regimes would have collapsed long ago, having proved utterly incapable of delivering a modern future for their people, but they have been saved by our energy excesses. (((Unless they were selling us cocaine, in which case they were supported by our other excesses.)))

“No matter what happens in Iraq, we cannot dry up the swamps of authoritarianism and violent Islamism in the Middle East without also drying up our consumption of oil == thereby bringing down the price of crude. A democratization policy in the Middle East without a different energy policy at home is a waste of time, money and, most important, the lives of our young people. (((“Won’t somebody think of the children?” Hey, it’s the OLD people who die in droves in Greenhouse heat waves.)))

“That's because there is a huge difference in what these bad regimes can do with $20-a-barrel oil compared with the current $60-a-barrel oil. It is no accident that the reform era in Russia under Boris Yeltsin, and in Iran under Mohammad Khatami, coincided with low oil prices. When prices soared again, petrolist authoritarians in both societies reasserted themselves. (((Not to mention the new Venezuelan-Bolivian alliance == oil and cocaine, together at last.)))

“We need a president and a Congress with the guts not just to invade Iraq, but to also impose a gasoline tax and inspire conservation at home. That takes a real energy policy with long-term incentives for renewable energy == wind, solar, biofuels == rather than the welfare-for-oil-companies-and-special-interests that masqueraded last year as an energy bill.

“Enough of this Bush-Cheney nonsense that conservation, energy efficiency and environmentalism are some hobby we can't afford. I can't think of anything more cowardly or un-American. Real patriots, real advocates of spreading democracy around the world, live green.

“Green is the new red, white and blue.”

I like Mr Flat Earth's paragraph that read "It is no accident that the reform era in Russia under Boris Yeltsin, and in Iran under Mohammad Khatami, coincided with low oil prices. When prices soared again, petrolist authoritarians in both societies reasserted themselves."

So, given this definition of a petrolist state - was it a coincidence that high oil prices in the early 90's found George HW Bush, Dick Cheney and James Baker running the US administration ? While the subsequent oil price bust had Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Madeliene Albright running the show (not a lot of oil industry connections amongst that lot) ? Then lo and behold, oil prices start rising again and the US finds itself with George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice wandering the halls of the White House ? Hmmm....

Posted by Big Gav at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments

Sydney certainly had a hot start to the year, with a record 44 degrees greeting me when I arrived back home - the Herald calls this "a searing preview of greenhouse life". On the other hand, I had been over in the normally scorching Western Australia which just experienced its coldest December ever (the average max temperature in Perth in December is normally about 29 degrees, but this year was around 24 degrees - a pretty sizable variation). I still managed to get sunburnt on numerous occasions though.

Sydney can expect more of the searing temperatures that fanned fires, stopped trains, disrupted air travel and blacked out suburbs on New Year's Day, according to CSIRO global warming projections. On average, Sydney experiences temperatures above 35 degrees three days a year. That could double by 2030 and rise to as many as 18 days by 2070.

That would put more pressure on the city's infrastructure and increase heat-related health risks, said the chairman of the Climate Institute, Clive Hamilton. "CSIRO projections indicate that Australian cities can expect a doubling in the number of very hot days in coming decades and drought conditions to become the norm, yet the relentless growth in carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels in Australia has gone unchecked," Dr Hamilton said yesterday.

In the past 200 years large amounts of greenhouse gases released by land clearing and burning of fossil fuels have trapped more heat in the atmosphere and warmed the planet.

According to CSIRO projections, it will not just get hotter in Sydney. There will be less rain, but winds will be stronger and extreme weather events such as floods and hailstorms will be more frequent. And if hot days fall during the working week rather than at weekends or on public holidays the city's electrical infrastructure will face greater difficulties than those experienced on the weekend.

The Rodent's chief headkicker Bill Heffernan got partly burnt out during by one of the bushfires generated by the hot weather - maybe we'll start to see a change of tune on global warming coming out of Canberra (but I won't hold my breath).

John McCain has been in town as well to have a chat about Iraq and global warming - the Herald's report reads like a slightly reworded government press release though - and the nuclear power PR campaign continues unabated....

A potential contender for the Republican nomination in the 2008 US presidential election, John McCain, has visited the Prime Minister, John Howard, in Sydney to discuss Iraq and climate change. Senator McCain, who also held a meeting yesterday with the Environment and Heritage Minister, Ian Campbell, expressed a "strong view" that nuclear power needed to be a part of the American response to the problems of climate change. Senator Campbell said Senator McCain was fascinated to know the direction Australia was taking in a post-Kyoto world in dealing with climate-change issues.

The senior Republican's visit precedes next week's important inaugural meeting in Sydney of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate - the US-led alternative to the Kyoto Protocol. The US and Australia have refused to sign the United Nations-backed protocol. It also comes amid a growing domestic debate on the future of nuclear power in Australia as an alternative to fossil fuels. Several Howard Government ministers have advocated the use of nuclear energy as one way to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The foreign ministers and environment and industry ministers from the six countries involved in the partnership - the US, Japan, China, India, South Korea and Australia - are expected to attend the two-day summit. The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, will be among them.

The climate-change partnership, first announced at the Association of South-East Asian Nations regional forum in Vientiane last July, aims to generate discussions between the six developed and developing nations about using and sharing technology to cut greenhouse emissions.

Government sources say that at the first meeting, which starts in Sydney tomorrow week, countries will be expected to generate ideas and plans will be made for initiatives. Several private industry representatives from each of the countries involved have also been invited to participate in the summit.

Senator McCain has had a strong interest in climate change, and has advocated different views on some occasions to the US President, George Bush, earning him a reputation as a maverick.

The Vietnam War veteran, who is a supporter of the US's war in Iraq, also told Mr Howard in a 45-minute meeting that there was "still a distance to go in Iraq", a spokesman for the Prime Minister said.

In peak oil news, James Kunstler is forecasting doom and destruction will commence this year. More than a few commenters point out that he has been wrong about this before and that very few peak oil modellers (not even Colin Campbell) predict that the peak was achieved last year. While he is forecasting imminent depression, the bursting of the housing bubble, the collapse of the airline and auto manufacturing industries, war with Mexico and various other horrors, he is "allergic to conspiracy theories" about attacks on Iran, to which a few commenters countered with this German report.

Surprisingly (to me anyway, having happily detached from the news flow for a few weeks, other than reading the execrable local Perth paper which doesn't present any risk of troubling anyone's brain with any news whatsoever), there is quite a bit of chatter around on the Iran topic. Stirling Newberry at Daily Kos has a look at Iran and a number of other energy related issues, including the Russian's shutting off the gas flow to to the Ukraine (not very effectively, as they have to rely on the Ukrianians not siphoning off gas that is meant to flow further along the pipeline to western europe, which the Ukrainians of course aren't cooperating with).

The march of Iran to deterrent state status are prompting "use it or lose it" pressures for preventative - that is aggressive - strikes against Iran and its atomic weapons program, as Iran declares that it has a right to enrich Uranium on its own soil. The Ukraine-Russia gas stand off escalates as Russia accuses Ukraine of stealing Natural gas. In Iraq insurgent threats keep a major refinery shut down in Iraq.

On this, the first working day of the New Year, we are already getting a good stiff taste of the running theme of 2006. If 2004 and 2005 saw resource inflation, 2006 is the year when resource rich countries begin using those resources as weapons, and resource poor countries begin taking aggressive steps to secure resources. The current world market approach to energy is going to break down, as more and more nations are forced to jostle for position.

Somewhere in the next two years it will dawn on the American public that we live in the pre-war, not post-war, era, and that Iraq was a foreshock.

For reasons outlined before, an attack against Iran is unlikely at this time - the danger zone begins in July and runs through late October - because that is the point where a spike of popularity and power will be necessary for Bush, if it seems he is going to lose the Congress. The next danger zone is next year, as he needs to reframe the debate should he lose congress. However, before there are large airstrikes, there must be an escalating campaign of crowding Iranian airspace, in hopes that a pilot will give the US an excuse for further action.

But the larger picture needs to be looked at.

SW made an interesting point in the comments (one I've noted before, but I like to belabor the obvious for new readers and those who miss some of my rantings) - the deluge of lies we've all been subjected to is now a large part of the problem - and until people face up to reality we'll never be able to have a proper debate in any of our so-called democracies about the right course of action (in my view running a real democracy requires a population that is aware of the issues and the facts surrounding them so that they can make informed decisions. I'm not sure what the correct description is for countries full of people that are by and large uninformed and periodically allowed to vote while being subjected to various fear campaigns by the major political parties).

Stirling noted that "the other part of this is saddam - everyone in power knew that it was becoming impossible not to buy oil from iraq, which meant giving him money, which no one trusted him not to spend on WMD.", to which SW noted "To my way of thinking that was the primary crime of the Cheney administration. The fact that they felt compelled to pathologically lie about the reasons for their actions. Even today serious people treat it like it is a mystery. The lies are clear, but what was the true reason?

Jesus Christ on Roller Skates!

They got themselves into this mess because they insist on publicly denying the reality of depletion. Yet their entire middle east foreign policy is based on that reality.

If they would have tried to treat the electorate like adults and simply pointed out that the shrinking pool of crude oil was going to create a situation where either Iraq's resources were developed, enriching a dangerous madman, or we were headed for crude oil shortages, or we had to find some way to remove him from power, world events would have generated public opinion and pressure that would have made the first gulf war coalition look like tea party.

It's the lie piled on top of lie that has gotten them into this mess."

Jeff Vail also takes a look at Iran in his glimpse into the crystal ball for 2006, speculating that US military weakness in the middle east may not be as great as those interpreting Mr Murtha's comments may suggest.

Iran: With the US military drawing down to perhaps less than 50,000 troops (more likely 80,000) by the end of 2006, along with the drawdown of some forces from Europe and South Korea, the US military will surprise many pundits with a reconstituted expeditionary capability.

Equally important will be the forces that are not withdrawn from Iraq but are freed up for internal re-deployment (preventing the notification that is a de-facto result of re-deployment overseas from the US). All of which leads directly to a discussion of Iran and Syria.

An almost unending stream of commentators have theorized that the US will attack Iran in March of 2006. Not at all likely--that's too early--but by the end of the year it will be certainly within the realm of possibility. Which demands a brief analysis of what kind of an attack that might be. A ground invasion is simply impractical--the terrain, size and population of Iran are vastly different from that of Iraq. Of course, the hubris of the current US administration is such that it can't entirely be ruled out--it just isn't very likely.

More likely would be some kind of airstrikes aimed at Iran's nuclear facilities--by either the US or Israel. While there seems to be the kind of political will necessary to carry out such an attack in Israel, it isn't very likely to succeed. The Iranians just bought enough top-of-the-line Russian SA-15 surface-to-air missile systems to provide excellent point defense of their nuclear facilities--even some defense against cruise missiles and GPS-guided bombs. They'll take delivery beginning this Spring.

Despite the rusty nature of Iran's Shah-era air force (Vietnam-era US fighters like the F-4 and older Soviet models), they also have been long rumored to have the Russian-built SA-10 system, which makes US Air Force planners wince. More significantly, however, is the political fall-out of a potential attack.

It's my opinion that Israeli long-term interests would not be served by an airstrike, even if it successfully derailed the Iranian nuclear program for several years, as it would build resolve to finally get a bomb AND use it. US "interests" (by which I mean the current administration's), however, might be better served by such airstrikes, as it could create an environment of instability regarding Iran that would pressure early-adopters to shy away from Iran's euro-denominated oil bourse that opens this March. Which, of course, leads us to a discussion of oil...

Parahistorian Wayne Madsen is one of those theorists who has been predicting a US invasion of Iran for a long time now, and he's still going. His latest (very long) effort even includes the somewhat bizarre assertion that the surprise recent move of Burma's capital to a small unfinished town 200 miles north of Rangoon is due to the fear of nuclear fallout from destroyed Iranian nuclear facilities getting caught up in the monsoon and being dumped on the city by the rains (which sounds pretty far fetched even for him, but I like the level of imagination involved).

Intelligence indications and warnings abound as Bush administration finalizes military attack on Iran.

Intelligence and military sources in the United States and abroad are reporting on various factors that indicate a U.S. military hit on Iranian nuclear and military installations, that may involve tactical nuclear weapons, is in the final stages of preparation. Likely targets for saturation bombing are the Bushehr nuclear power plant (where Russian and other foreign national technicians are present), a uranium mining site in Saghand near the city of Yazd, the uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, a heavy water plant and radioisotope facility in Arak, the Ardekan Nuclear Fuel Unit, the Uranium Conversion Facility and Nuclear Technology Center in Isfahan, the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, the Tehran Molybdenum, Iodine and Xenon Radioisotope Production Facility, the Tehran Jabr Ibn Hayan Multipurpose Laboratories, the Kalaye Electric Company in the Tehran suburbs, a reportedly dismantled uranium enrichment plant in Lashkar Abad, and the Radioactive Waste Storage Units in Karaj and Anarak.

Other first targets would be Shahab-I, II, and III missile launch sites, air bases (including the large Mehrabad air base/international airport near Tehran), naval installations on the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea, command, control, communications and intelligence facilities. Secondary targets would include civilian airports, radio and TV installations, telecommunications centers, government buildings, conventional power plants, highways and bridges, and rail lines. Oil installations and commercial port facilities would likely be relatively untouched by U.S. forces in order to preserve them for U.S. oil and business interests.

...

European intelligence sources also report that the recent decision by Putin and Russia's state-owned Gazprom natural gas company to cut supplied of natural gas to Ukraine was a clear warning by Putin to nations like Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Moldova, France, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Bosnia, Serbia, and Germany that it would do the same if they support the U.S. attack on Iran. Gazprom natural gas is supplied, via pipelines in Ukraine, from Russia and Turkmenistan to countries in Eastern and Western Europe. The Bush administration charged Russia with using gas supplies as a "political tool."

Putin has additional leverage on Western Europe since former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder accepted an appointment to the board of a joint Russian-German North European Gas Pipeline Consortium that is controlled by Gazprom. The pipeline will bring Russian gas to Scandinavia, Germany, Netherlands, and Britain, giving Putin additional leverage over Washington in Europe.

Southeast Asian intelligence sources report that Burma's (Myanmar's) recent abrupt decision to move its capital from Rangoon (Yangon) to remote Pyinmana, 200 miles to the north, is a result of Chinese intelligence warnings to its Burmese allies about the effects of radiation resulting from a U.S. conventional or tactical nuclear attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. There is concern that a series of attacks on Iranian nuclear installations will create a Chernobyl-like radioactive cloud that would be caught up in monsoon weather in the Indian Ocean.

Low-lying Rangoon lies in the path of monsoon rains that would continue to carry radioactive fallout from Iran over South and Southeast Asia between May and October. Coastal Indian Ocean cities like Rangoon, Dhaka, Calcutta, Mumbai, Chennai, and Colombo would be affected by the radioactive fallout more than higher elevation cities since humidity intensifies the effects of the fallout. Thousands of government workers were given only two days' notice to pack up and leave Rangoon for the higher (and dryer) mountainous Pyinmana.

So what is going to happen ? I sure as hell don't know.

Chaging tack, the Guardian has a report on the steady conversion of arable land worldwide into cropland (and into urban areas) - another limit to growth slowly hoving ominously into sight.

New maps show that the Earth is rapidly running out of fertile land and that food production will soon be unable to keep up with the world's burgeoning population. The maps reveal that more than one third of the world's land is being used to grow crops or graze cattle.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison combined satellite land cover images with agricultural census data from every country in the world to create detailed maps of global land use. Each grid square was 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) across and showed the most prevalent land use in that square, such as forest, grassland or ice.

"In the act of making these maps we are asking: where is the human footprint on the Earth?" said Amato Evan, a member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison research team presenting its results this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

The current map shows a snapshot of global land use for the year 2000, but the scientists also have land use data going back to 1700, showing how things have changed.

"The maps show, very strikingly, that a large part of our planet (roughly 40%) is being used for either growing crops or grazing cattle," said Dr Navin Ramankutty, a member of the Wisconsin-Madison team. By comparison, only 7% of the world's land was being used for agriculture in 1700.

The Amazon basin has seen some of the greatest changes in recent times, with huge swaths of the rainforest being felled to grow soya beans.

"One of the major changes we see is the fast expansion of soybeans in Brazil and Argentina, grown for export to China and the EU," said Dr Ramankutty.

This agricultural expansion has come at the expense of tropical forests in both countries.

Meanwhile, intensive farming practices mean that cropland areas have decreased slightly in the US and Europe and the land is being gobbled up by urbanisation.

Posted by Big Gav at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments

The Alternative Energy blog has a post on Alternative Energy Grants in Australia, which looks at a few interesting projects, including another geothermal energy project in South Australia from Scope Energy, which they hope to expand to a 1000MW plant (to put this in perspective, South Australian peak demand today was 1500MW and reached 2400MW last week on an exceptionally hot day).

From geothermal power to better batteries, millions have been spent on alternative energy research in Australia, according to Rod Myer writing for The Age.

The AUD $23 million (approximately $17 million) spent by the Australian Federal Government under the first tranche of its $100 million (US $73m) pledge to aid the alternative energy sector has highlighted innovations by local companies to cure Australia's fossil fuel addiction.

Two companies funded under the Renewable Energy Development Initiative (REDI) have developed a no-emissions alternative for base-load generation. Geodynamics received $5 million to help develop its geothermal electricity plant near Innamincka in the north of South Australia. Scope Energy, another betting its future on geothermal energy, received $3.9 million to help with development. Its principal, Roger Massey-Greene, says the grant will help finance a drilling program of 500-metre deep holes to prove up its resource. Scope plans to open a 50-megawatt plant, but Mr Massey-Greene says he hopes to see this expand to 1000 MW in the longer term.

Scope has a geographic advantage, he believes. Its site is near Millicent, in the south-east of South Australia, meaning it is close to transmission lines and the population centres of Melbourne and Adelaide. "We expect the cost to be very competitive with combined-cycle gas power plants," Mr Massey-Greene said.

Scope's geothermal technology will tap hot water heated deep in the earth and run it through a heat exchanger to generate electricity. Mr Massey-Greene likens this process to a "fridge operating in reverse".

Geodynamics' system will pump water through hot rocks and use the resulting steam to generate power. Scope's wells will be as deep as 4.5 kilometres. The technology that Scope is planning has been in use at a plant in Italy that has operated for 101 years, Mr Massey-Greene said.

Stage one of the plant is expected to cost $4 million per megawatt to construct, compared with about $750,000 for a combined-cycle gas plant. "But we have no fuel costs," Mr Massey-Greene said. Geothermal plants run at an output of about 98 per cent of rated capacity. Mr Massey-Green believes geothermal power has a great future. In New Zealand it provides 7 per cent of power needs and this could rise to as much as 15 per cent. Some in the market believe that Scope will float in the first half of 2006.

Melbourne-based Katrix will use its $811,000 REDI grant to further develop its new fluid expander that may enable solar energy to be harnessed for electricity. Founder Attilio Demichelli says the expander, which does the job of a turbine, will allow solar thermal power to be adapted for small-scale use far more cheaply than photovoltaic systems.

Katrix is developing units in which solar energy will heat refrigeration fluid that will run through an expander linked to a generator to produce power. The expander is cheaper than a miniature turbine to build and has a number of advantages, including its ability to take gas or steam at 22 atmospheres (twenty two times atmospheric pressure) back to one atmosphere in one step.

Katrix projects that in the Californian market — once government subsidies are factored in — its system will return its cost to consumers in two to three years, compared with 15 years for photovoltaic systems. Mr Demichelli, a private investor, and inventor Yannis Tropalis have invested over $3 million in the technology in three years.

Origin Energy received $5 million to help develop its facilities for manufacturing solar cells using photovoltaic sliver technology. The technology will cut the cost of solar cells by reducing silicon usage by up to 90 per cent. Silicon is the most expensive part of a solar cell. Origin says it costs $11,000 to fit a house with a one-kilowatt unit. This would take 20 years or more to pay itself off. However, as power prices rise and production costs fall, this payback time will be cut.

James also has an interesting post on China up as well.

China is to spend billions on alternative energy and many times more on oil and coal.

Tim Johnson of Knight Ridder reports that barely a dozen years ago the country didn't need deep-sea oil ports, massive tank farms and a brawny foreign policy to procure oil in far-flung spots.

Today, China is an oil-guzzling dragon with a voracious thirst, much like the United States. Supertankers stretching three football fields in length now wait to enter China's deep-sea ports.

The busiest oil terminal is at Ningbo on the East China Sea. Shipping records show that in November, supertankers arrived there from Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iran, Yemen, Equatorial Guinea, Angola and Congo to feed a craving that's helped drive up crude oil prices, rattle global politics and put China and the United States at odds in some of the world's most unstable regions.

China's thirst for oil has emboldened Iran and complicated the refugee crisis in Sudan. With its economy growing at a 9 percent annual rate, China is also courting many of America's oil suppliers, including Canada and Venezuela.

Increasingly, the United States and China are throwing elbows as global rivals for energy. The tussle could get more aggressive if the two nations can't manage to co-exist in the global energy contest.

"We've got to start those discussions before the race for oil becomes as hot and dangerous as the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union," Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said in a Nov. 30 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. "If we let it go, this could end up in real military conflict, not just economic conflict." It is interesting to note that this "race for oil" is framed as a zero sum game in which one country wins and another loses. An alternative would be international cooperation to maximise energy efficiency, minimise pollution and radically increase renewable energy.

Compared with the United States, which consumes 25 percent of the world's annual oil output, China burns only 6 percent of the world's production. Yet its energy use is rising steeply.

Finally, Sweden is seeking to become completely oil independent, which is a goal the rest of us should aspire to.

With the creation of the newly established National Commission on Oil, Sweden -- along with a number of other European nations -- hopes to find an avenue to achieve its independence from oil by 2020.

The government held a hearing Tuesday to address petroleum challenges and use of energy from renewables.

"As the founding co-chairmen of the Peak Oil Caucus of the United States House of Representatives, we are writing to commend you and the government of Sweden for the December 13, 2005 hearing about peak oil by the newly established National Commission on Oil Independence," according to a letter obtain by United Press International from Roscoe Bartlett, R-MD, and Tom Udall, D-NM, to Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson late Monday.

"The National Commission on Oil Independence appointed by the government of Sweden is creating a model effort for the world in partnership with the private sector," the two congressmen wrote. "These types of partnerships will lead to greater innovation in energy efficiency and alternatives to contribute to achieving the goal of energy independence from oil."

One of the commission members, Volvo Trucks, partnered with American businesses such as Maryland-based Mack Truck, Inc., developer of the gas electric hybrid powertrain and deliverer of a prototype refueler to the U.S. Air Force, Congressman Bartlett's office told UPI.

Sweden is not alone. Iceland is completely energy independent. Denmark, Austria, and Sweden are generating more than 20 percent of their energy from renewables.

Posted by Big Gav at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments

This month's "Big Issues for 2006" edition of Future Edition from the Arlington Institute takes a look at both global warming and peak oil as key issues for the coming year (linking to LATOC as their introduction to peak oil for the uninitiated, which I'm not entirely sure is a good idea - no disprespect to Matt of course).

The text for this newsletter doesn't appear to be online yet, so I'll quote the relevant sections below.

I’d like to send along to you my best wishes for 2006. It really is a cliché, but it is kind of amazing how time flies. It doesn’t seem very long ago that we were working very hard getting ready for the turnover of the century, wondering what might happen if there was large-scale computer failure. Now we have another set of equally important issues that are moving off the horizon into our near-term field of concern.

For a number of years now here at The Arlington Institute we have been talking about the increasing rate of change and the growing significance and implications of the big issues on our global horizon. From our point of view, we’re now watching it all happen – big, accelerating change with more potential wild card surprises.

The best books that I’ve read that discuss the technological drivers of the change is Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology and Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution : The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human. Both are very important overviews of where we’re going in terms of modifying ourselves. The first two chapters of Kurzweil alone are worth the cost of the book. I highly recommend them both.

Although technology is clearly one of the major change drivers that we are living with, it is not the only one – by any means. The changing climate has extraordinary near-term potential implications for all of us who live on this planet. Last year Walter Cronkite wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer that “Global warming is at least as important as gay marriage or the cost of Social Security. And if it is not seriously debated in the general election, it will measure the irresponsibility of the entire political class. This is an issue that cannot, and must not, be ignored any longer.” If you do not remember the debate on global warming, you are forgiven, because it has never taken place.

The lack of US governmental interest and concern for effectively confronting this issue is convincing growing numbers of people that they cannot presume that the government will fulfill their obligation to provide for the national security of the country in this instance and initiate policies to effectively offset the clear trend and develop contingencies for possible climate shift. Let me recommend two recent sources in this regard.

The New York Times had a very good December book review by Bill McKibben called The Coming Meltdown that serves up the magnitude of the issue and how climate change (particularly rapid climate change) is so huge in its implications that it is hard to effectively comprehend the potential scope of the problem. If you think Katrina was bad, wait until the climate rapidly changes and among other things, food doesn’t grow where and how it used to.

This is not a farfetched idea. Whitley Streiber has written about a scenario where the rapidly warming arctic surface air (the subject of McKibben’s review) that has been held down by the denser cold artic upper air masses, suddenly rises – like warm air does – and a huge amount of frigid air displaces it at the surface and sweeps down from the pole, initiating a mini ice age . . . in a matter of months.

It seems to me that another issue that has the same architecture – common structure – as climate change is peak oil. The notion that we are rapidly approaching the point in time where we will begin, for the first time, to extract less and less of the energy source that has fundamentally fueled the industrial revolution (i.e. that life that most people reading this enjoy) is profound in its implications.

The problem is that the demand, driven by population growth and economic development of countries like the U.S. and China, continues to expand rapidly even though the supply suddenly starts to decrease. Like climate change this is a very fundamental factor (energy) that defines our options for living on this planet. The notion that the most important energy source in the world for which there is no clear alternative would rapidly start to go away, is enough to keep thoughtful people up late at night writing scenarios of doom.

They’re doing that, of course. If you’re not familiar with the peak oil issue, you should be. Here’s one of quite a few sources that are painting the pictures that will remind you of Y2K scenarios.

There are those, of course, who say we will keep finding cheap oil and that the peak is decades away. But if they’re wrong (and so far, the trends appear to be against them) then the whole world could be on the verge of a major shift that, absent the rapid integration of a new global energy source, could be quite painful.

Rapid climate change and peak oil are so big that they have the fundamental requirement that you need to be working on an alternative long before the actual event takes place or things come unraveled rather fast. To give you a sense of that, check out this study by SAIC for “a government agency” outlining three different scenarios based upon actively responding to peak oil twenty years before the peak, ten years before, and at the time of identifying the peak. The bottom line is that if you don’t actively start to put in place alternatives two decades before the peak, the underlying infrastructure and economies are very badly damaged. It is catastrophic if you wait until the peak is obvious. It’s the same for rapid climate change.

There are big, deep forces at play here, committed to changing the way humans live on this earth. Lindsey Grant, former deputy assistant secretary for environment and population affairs at the State Department and National Security Council staffer has written a very persuasive little tome called The Collapsing Bubble: Growth and Fossil Energy. Grant writes things like, “World population quadrupled in one century, a change so astonishing that it has altered – or should have altered – our assumptions as to the human connection to the rest of the planet.” He put together his own projection on how energy and population might interact in the U.S. in the coming half century which is shown below.



You can see that he presumes that oil peaks about now and that coal takes over as the major fuel supporting our economy until the coal peaks about 2075 and then everything comes apart. I think it is interesting think about how the use of coal might (or most likely might not) expand so quickly to take up the slack from the petroleum peak.

There are other systemic issues that are not being effectively addressed which promise to scuttle our economic ship if we don’t do something pretty different, pretty fast. In this country there’s social security and our other big problem, health care costs. General Motors appears to be a vulnerable to be bought by someone like Toyota in part because they have a $65 billion unfunded health care obligation, mostly for retired employees. As former Colorado governor Richard Lamm says in The Brave New World of Health Care: “No trees grow to the sky and no element of the U.S. national budget can grow at over twice the rate of inflation. Yet that is the rate of growth of health car during my professional lifetime.” Lamm’s book is full of provocative but solid policy suggestions for dealing with the future of health care. It’s a great place to not only understand the problem but to find potential solutions.

...

So to put it far less elegantly than Dr. O’Hara does, if we keep doing what we have been doing, we will keep getting what we have been getting . . . so we need to be about seeing this world in new and different ways that allow us to behave differently. That’s the only way that we’ll be able to effectively deal with the extraordinary change that is working its way toward us.

My hope is that you and far more or your and my friends begin to seriously understand this in the coming months. As the SAIC study says, there comes a time when no matter how well meaning our activities are, there just isn’t enough time left to influence the future that is exploding in front of us.

Posted by Big Gav at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments

Posted by Big Gav at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments