Forrest Gump  

The LA Times has an interesting piece on a guy named John Francis who gave up motorized travel (and speaking) as a protest against pollution (via Energy Bulletin).

In his determined style, environmentalist John Francis juggles a busy speaking schedule at schools, colleges and Earth-friendly conferences nationwide.

He's in such demand in large part because from 1973 to 1990, Francis refused to utter a single word, stubbornly keeping a vow of silence as a protest against pollution. He also swore off motor vehicles and walked wherever he went.

Francis engaged the modern culture he sought to change. A five-string banjo strung across his back, looking like a bearded roustabout from a Woody Guthrie anthem, he hiked across the country. He worked odd jobs to pay his bills and even taught classes without talking.

He stopped along the way to get bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees, all in science and related environmental studies. He wore out 100 pairs of shoes.

Some people, including his own family, questioned his sanity. Still, Francis slowly gained national notoriety. He became the subject of hundreds of newspaper and TV stories in the communities he passed through. He was asked to give silent speeches in many towns.

Via the same Energy Bulletin post, Nature has an article on an imminent attack on open information by a pit bull nicknamed Eric Dezenhall.

Journal publishers lock horns with free-information movement.

The author of "Nail 'Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses" is not the kind of figure normally associated with the relatively sedate world of scientific publishing. Besides writing the odd novel, Eric Dezenhall has made a name for himself helping companies and celebrities protect their reputations, working for example with Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief now serving a 24-year jail term for fraud.

Although Dezenhall declines to comment on Skilling and his other clients, his firm, Dezenhall Resources, was also reported by Business Week to have used money from oil giant ExxonMobil to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace. "He's the pit bull of public relations," says Kevin McCauley, an editor at the magazine O'Dwyer's PR Report.

Now, Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.

From e-mails passed to Nature, it seems Dezenhall spoke to employees from Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society at a meeting arranged last July by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). A follow-up message in which Dezenhall suggests a strategy for the publishers provides some insight into the approach they are considering taking.

The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship". He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and "paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles".

Tim Flannery has received the "Australian of the year" award - I imagine the Rodent was overjoyed when he presented this one.

NVIRONMENTALIST Tim Flannery got an early birthday present today when he was named the 2007 Australian of the Year, giving him a platform to convince Australians about the dangers of over-consumption. As a scientist who has been warning about sustainability and the risk of climate change for decades, public opinion is finally catching up with Dr Flannery. But the next year will give him an even greater opportunity to convince sceptics that the globe needs to better live within its means.

Prime Minister John Howard, a late climate change convert, bestowed the honour on Dr Flannery at a ceremony at Parliament House. "He has encouraged Australians into new ways of thinking about our environmental history and future ecological challenges," Mr Howard said.

A renowned explorer and palaeontologist, Dr Flannery, who will turn 51 on Sunday, was the bookies' favourite to take out the award. His expertise on climate change has come into its own of late as the nation grows increasingly concerned about what global warming could do to our already dry continent.

The Australian of the year himself is calling for Australia to lead the energy revolution (and a fairly radical version of it at that).

Australia is at the forefront of the devastating impact of climate change and must undergo an energy revolution to survive, says Australian scientist and author Tim Flannery.

If ever a textbook example of the impact of global warming was needed, Australia provides it, says Flannery. Bushfires have raged for weeks in the country's alpine regions and water reserves in the major cities are drying up while a once-in-a-century drought has ravaged farming land, cutting into the nation's economic output.

"We are the worst, as a developed country. There is nowhere else that is getting the hammering that we are getting at the moment," he says.

...To avert biological disaster, Flannery's suggestions are radical: the coal industry should be shunted aside, traditional methods of producing power junked, and a desert metropolis established and placed at the centre of Australia's electricity grid. "We need to 'decarbonise' the economy extremely rapidly - which we could do if we were on a raw footing," he says. "We could just close down the coal-fired power plants. We could. We could mandate we are going to have electricity rationing, we are going to close things down, we are going to build a new infrastructure as quick as we can."

Mobjectivist points to a good quote from Al Gore about the correct description for unsustainable resource extraction.

Al Gore provides a potential name for the latest model sprung forth from the fevered imaginings of this here blog. Thus,

Civilization is "operating planet earth like a business in liquidation"

I thought "Resource collapse" sounded pretty good but "Liquidation" about nails it.

Nicholas Stern has declared those opposing carbon taxes "plain daft".

Sir Nicholas Stern, the author of an apocalyptic report on the dangers of global warming, called for more green taxes from world governments in an attempt to cut carbon emissions.

He said that it would be "plain daft" to reject the notion of a global carbon tax given the urgent need to tackle climate change, which he called the "biggest market failure the world has ever seen". He added: "We need to use all the tools we've got. It would be mad to throw one away."

The former World Bank economist stopped short yesterday of calling for a global carbon tax, but said it was "very important to harmonise taxes as best we can". He pointed to the example of the UK, where high taxes on petrol in effect act as carbon taxes, as evidence of how national governments could force citizens to change their behaviour and emit less carbon.

"We should use tax mechanisms as one weapon in an armoury, along with regulation," he said, expressing scepticism that a global carbon tax would work. "Taxes are there for many reasons. You don't have to label them carbon taxes to be effective."

Sir Nicholas was speaking from a Davos obsessed by the environmental threat posed by greenhouse gases. The 2,400-plus delegates have the option of attending no fewer than 17 separate debates on climate change, should they share Sir Nicholas's concerns. The WEF meeting itself is attempting to be 100 per cent carbon neutral and has called on all attendees to offset the emissions produced by their own journeys to the venue.

Technology Review has an article on using new techniques provide clearer pictures of Greenland's ice sheets in order to gain better insight into future sea-level increases.

Greenland holds enough water to raise global sea levels seven meters, and southern Greenland is already showing accelerated melting. But the rate of this melting and other ice dynamics are poorly understood, partly because Greenland's surface is so inscrutably white and featureless in ordinary satellite images. Now, a new image-processing approach gives a clearer view of subtle inland features, providing sharper clues into glacial movements--and better insight into future sea-level increases.

The technology starts with as many as 94 red and infrared images of the same region, taken by two NASA satellites, called Terra and Aqua, that have polar orbits and cross Greenland several times a day. Each raw image--a measure of light from the surface--has a resolution of 250 meters per pixel. But by aligning and averaging values within areas of pixel overlap among multiple images of the same area, researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder tightened the resolution to as little as 100 meters per pixel and roughly quadrupled contrast sensitivity.

As one example of a payoff, researchers are finally getting a clear picture of a 600-by-50-kilometer eyedropper-shaped ice formation informally known as NEGIS (for Northeast Greenland Ice Stream). This massive feature--which is sliding toward the sea at a few hundred meters per year--wasn't even known to science until 1991. And it hasn't been imaged in detail until recent months. "What we've done now is see how far upstream it goes, how close it comes to the summit of Greenland, and see some structures at the edges, to get an idea [of] how fast ice flows" and what directions it flows in, says Ted Scambos, lead scientist and glaciologist at the Boulder center, who codeveloped the image-processing approach.

Scambos says that such insights are everything when it comes to finding out how fast Greenland's ice will pour into the ocean and begin inundating the world's coastlines. The same technology is being applied to images of Antarctica, whose ice sheet contains enough water to raise sea levels 65 meters if all of it melts. The rate of such melting is one of the most poorly understood yet most high-impact effects of global warming.

TreeHugger has a post on cheaper, more efficient white LEDs (the future of energy efficient lighting).

A company called Cyberlux, which specializes in LEDs, plans to reveal a prototype of a white-light LED that would cost less manufacture and provide more light than conventional LEDs. These two advantages would enable light fixtures based on LEDs, which are now relatively expensive, to better compete with traditional lamps based on conventional glass bulbs and fluorescent lights, according to Cyberlux President Mark Schmidt. The technology was invented by UC Santa Barbara's Steven DenBaars, who has been a big advocate of LED lighting as a way to increase energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gases, and Nobel Prize winner Alan Heeger. Heeger also helped found solar-technology company Konarka Technologies.

Gist has a new goal : roll coal.

If you care about global warming, you've got to care about coal. Unlike oil and gas -- for which North American production is in decline -- there's plenty of coal left on American soil. And while some energy companies and promoters of "energy independence" see this as an unqualified good, those of us who see most issues through the lens of climate change see the "wall of coal" as one of the scariest things out there.

That's why California's latest foray into climate policy is so heartening:

On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission is expected to approve rules that would ... effectively ban Southern California Edison Co. and other non-municipal utilities in California from signing long-term contracts to import electricity from existing plants that burn coal in the intermountain West.

Go California!

Now on the one hand, this is a huge deal. California isn't just acting to curb coal consumption within its own boundaries; it's putting limits on electricity purchases from other states. As a result, it's influencing infrastructure decisions all across the intermountain West, where heaps of new coal-fired power plants have been proposed.

Grist also has a post on the scuppering of one LNG terminal plan for California (which will make both BHP and Woodside happy).

Friends, we are gathered here today to wo0t the death of a planned liquefied-natural-gas terminal in Long Beach, Calif. Citing a city attorney's conclusion that the environmental review of the project "is and in all likelihood will remain legally inadequate," Long Beach officials yesterday unanimously voted to pull the plug. The death of the project, sited in the busiest port in the nation, comes after years of controversy; concerns largely centered around safety in the event of a terrorist attack or earthquake. "This project would have put over 140,000 people who live and work within three miles of that LNG terminal at risk," said Harvey Morris, an attorney for the California Public Utilities Commission. An executive with Mitsubishi-ConocoPhillips, the partnership backing the project, said of the decision, "We're very surprised. ... We assumed things were going through a normal environmental review process." Uh, yes, they were -- and sometimes it actually works.

Technology Review also has an article that notes some of the dangers posed by Bush's new high ethanol energy strategy.

TR: One of the technologies the president emphasized is converting wood chips and grasses, known as cellulosic feedstocks, into ethanol. Could that make his goals achievable?

DV: You have to be careful because a very large part of our biofuels policy is not about energy at all. It's really about the heartland and farm politics because the current corn-based biofuels don't really save us that much energy. Cellulosic biomass [which is potentially much more efficient] is still really some distance off in the future. If we try to meet these aggressive targets very quickly, what we're going to end up with is a much, much larger version of the current, already inefficient, corn-based ethanol program.

TR: Documents released by the White House said that the vast majority of the 20 percent reduction in gasoline use in the next decade should come from using more biofuels such as ethanol. Is this a good strategy?

DV: In my view, this is a dangerous goal because the other technologies [such as cellulosic ethanol] are not available, [and] it really demands that we dramatically scale up our corn-based ethanol program. And I think that has serious ecological problems because of the large amount of land that they're going to have to put under cultivation. [There are] big economic problems because [making ethanol from corn] certainly isn't competitive with other ways of making biofuels, such as from sugar.

The other part of the problem is that it now appears that the price of sugar and the price of corn is tied to the oil market. Planters are looking at oil prices and making decision about how much to plant and about how much of their crop they're going to send into ethanol production and how much into food. So if oil prices stay high, then you're going to see the prices of these important food products rising at the same time. And there's already warnings from ranchers, who use corn for feed. And food processors are raising the price of their products and warning their shareholders because the prices of corn syrup and other corn-based feedstocks [are] rising.

Crikey also has some comments on Bush's affair with biofuels.

The benefits of biofuels seem obvious – since the carbon dioxide emitted in their combustion logically can’t exceed the amount fixed by the growth of the feedstock, the process can theoretically be made carbon neutral. Your solar power plants are self-producing - all you need do is give them food and water and play them Beethoven in the morning (Mozart in the evening, Tchaikovsky if it’s inclement).

Note theoretically. Let’s focus on the energy question. Say that you’re selling it (energy, not ‘it’), in the form of a given biofuel. To meet the condition of carbon neutrality, let’s say the biofuel you’re selling is used to power the process that generates and distributes it.

Obviously, you’d need a surplus - a positive energy balance, the bigger the better. If you just broke even, you’d have no product to sell. Like eating celery, it’d be an energetic bust. Nobody in their right mind would bother. Not without peanut butter.

In reality, cheap fossil fuels provide most of the energy input to the production process (including farming, processing and distribution) for ethanol, the US biofuel of choice. This means two things: 1) the process is currently far from carbon neutral, and; 2) depending on the state of subsidies for biofuels, the fact that the energy balance is marginal doesn’t automatically mean you can’t make money. Mmmm, peanut butter.

But from the perspective of both oil dependence and climate change, if the principal energy input to the production process is gasoline, then a biofuel of marginal energy balance is pointless (except perhaps as a make-work program). The linked benchmark questions for biofuels, then, are: do they deliver – and if so, to what extent - positive energy balance, and how do total life cycle emissions per unit energy delivered compare with good old-fashioned gasoline?

The biofuel of choice in the US is ethanol, the feedstock largely corn. Nearly 20% of its heavily subsidised crop goes to ethanol production, the fuel in turn subsidised with a tax credit of 15c/L (not to mention a still standing Reagan-era tariff on Brazilian cane ethanol). Corn is pretty energetically marginal – the most optimistic assessments seem to be around +1.25, with more vehement critics arguing that the return is actually negative.

So what’s the emissions saving? A study published in Science last year (27/1/06) reported that current US corn ethanol production saves - on best estimate - 13% relative to emissions from the energetic equivalent in the current fuel mix. Not great.

It’s pretty clear that at its current stage of development, ethanol production (99% from corn) would struggle severely to reach Bush’s milestone. But proponents say that both energy and emissions equations can be made more favourable in future with more efficient agricultural practices and the development of cellulosic ethanol (to which Bush alluded in his speech). Critics, on the other hand, see profiteers in green camouflage and a potential environmental and food security nightmare. The proverbial swallowing of a spider to catch a fly.

AFter Gutenberg has a little roundup of other commentary.

# I didn’t watch the SOTU address because I had better things to do than listen to a dull-witted bore tell me more lies.” Mark H., Biomes Blog


# “A claim made by President Bush in his State of the Union speech last night, that an attack on an L.A. skyscraper had been averted, was universally debunked as a hoax by Mayors, CIA, FBI and NSA personnel and counter-terror experts nearly a year ago when it first surfaced. By regurgitating this fraud, Bush has committed an impeachable offense by knowingly lying to the American people.” Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet


# “In this most recent SOTU, he pronounced terrorist properly each and every time that he said it, which was several more times than he said climate change.

Since he increasingly is being recognized as the world’s greatest terrorist, it is comforting to know that he at least can improve his pronunication.” jcwinnie comment to EcoGeek

# “He remains delusional,” was the view of Greenpeace’s Steve Sawyer after Bush called for production of domestic oil and crop-made ethanol fuel to be ramped up to ease US dependence on energy imports. “He’s still trying to drill his way out of the problem, and he’s found an ingenious method for increasing US farm subsidies while pretending to do something about the energy problem.”

On the positive side, Jim at The Energy Blog notes that Bush has issued an executive order requiring the US government to purchase plugin hybrid vehicles - so he is capable of making some good decisions after all.

He instructed government agencies to take eight steps to reduce energy consumption, two of which I am focusing on.

1) If agencies operates a fleet of at least 20 motor vehicles

(i) reduce the fleet's total consumption of petroleum products by 2 percent annually through the end of fiscal year 2015,
(ii) increases the total fuel consumption that is non-petroleum-based by 10 percent annually, and
(iii) use plug-in hybrid (PIH) vehicles when PIH vehicles are commercially available at a cost reasonably comparable, on the basis of life-cycle cost, to non-PIH vehicles

Lester Brown has an article on "Considering the Real Costs of Our Energy Economy".

Davos 2007 has officially begun. For me, the highlight of the first day consisted of a series of debates, part of CNBC's Make Green Pay panel. I participated as a featured speaker discussing, among other things, the viability of nuclear energy as a solution to our world's current fossil-fuel-based energy economy.

As concerns over climate change have mounted in recent years, nuclear energy has been touted as a viable alternative to our current dependency on carbon-intensive energy sources. The truth however, is that when the real costs of nuclear power are considered, the energy source is quickly taken out of the running.

In fact, on a level playing field with no taxpayer subsidies, nuclear power is dead. If utilities pay the full costs of nuclear waste disposal, of insurance against an accident, and of decommissioning plants that are worn out, the cost of nuclear power will far exceed that of other promising alternatives. This notion of real costs is something that our fossil-fuel-based throwaway economy does not take into account. ...

When it comes to energy, the International Center for Technology Assessment has done a detailed analysis, entitled "The Real Price of Gasoline." The group calculates several indirect costs, including oil industry tax breaks, oil supply protection costs, oil industry subsidies, and health care costs of treating auto exhaust-related respiratory illnesses. The total of these indirect costs centers around $9 per gallon, somewhat higher than the social cost of smoking a pack of cigarettes. Add this external or social cost to the roughly $2 per gallon average price of gasoline in the United States in early 2005, and gas would cost $11 a gallon (this does not include projected costs of climate change). These costs are real; someone bears them.

Now that these costs have been calculated, they can be used to restructure taxes--lowering income taxes and offsetting this with a rise in gasoline taxes.

This practice is a necessary component to any energy economy we consider as a solution to our current fossil-fuel-based energy economy.

That being said, nuclear energy with the real costs of insurance, construction, security and waste disposal becomes among the most expensive form of energy in the world.

Conversely, green, clean, renewable energy becomes the most viable; the costs we see today are very close to the real costs we would endure as most of these energy sources have few if any hidden effects on society.

It's time we start being honest about what various energy options actually cost in the long run. It was the failure to do so in the first place that brought us to this juncture in human history, where we must decide on our future. If we are willing to acknowledge the full effects of our actions - including total societal costs of our energy choices - then we may yet avert some of the impending consequences of global climate change.

Another HuffPo poster at Davos noted that American soft power is at its lowest ebb ever - one more cost of a foreign policy based on the military control of oil.

Day 1 at Davos. A maddening process. Too many people and too many topics crowded into too little space and time. But worth it for the insights that can be gleaned from people drawn from all over. One nice feature this year is that the Young Global Leaders selected by the World Economic Forum (which include business, academics, and non-profits) were given a prominent
role in the opening plenary. The theme this year is "power shifts," and Angela Merkel referred to the importance of soft power in her keynote. But my strongest take-away of the day was a seasoned Asian diplomat telling me that in all his travels, he has never seen American soft power at such a low ebb. In his words, only the Israelis, Indians, and Vietnamese have a positive view of the U.S. Then he added, "and Iran, if you look only at the people, not the government." But there is much speculation that the Administration will change that for the worse.

Another cost of oil dependency (and the war on terror it has generated) is the toll it is taking on the US tourism industry - partly because of the US' soiled image internationally and partly because of the onerous security theatre visitors are put through. Most foreigners are a little averse to being treated like criminals and having their fingerprints and retina scans taken on entry into the US (and DNA samples if they've now moved onto the ultimate intrusion). I know one bank executive here who gets held up for 4-8 hours every time he passes through a US airport because he happens to share the same name as a guy who wrote an "anti american book" (about Vietnam - talk about holding a grudge !) - he says that he gives his kids $100 so they can entertain themselves in the airport while they wait for him to get released. He said he once tried taking a copy of the book with him to demonstrate he wasn't the author (by comparing himself to a picture of the guy on the dust jacket) - but being in possession of this forbidden literature apparently made the process even worse...

The number of foreign visitors to the United States has dropped sharply since the attacks of September 11, 2001, costing the country tens of billions of dollars, a travel industry study has shown.

The report released by the Travel Industry Association of America found that the US market share of the six trillion dollar worldwide travel market fell from 7.5 per cent in 2000 to 6.1 per cent by 2006, a 20 per cent drop.

Over the five years, the decline has meant 58 million fewer visitors, 194,000 lost jobs, 94 billion dollars ($A120 billion) in lost spending and 15.6 billion in lost tax revenues.

Steve Gloor notes that the Federal Government has successfully repelled Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas (and the cleantech jobs it brought with it) from Australia.

Our free market (as long as it is clean coal or uranium) government consistently refused to raise the MRET, urged by large energy corporations, which caused amongst other things this:

Vestas has blamed uncertainty over wind power in Australia for its decision to close its Wynyard turbine assembly plant in northern Tasmania. The Danish-owned company will leave the state at the end of the year but hopes a majority of its work force will stay in the wind power industry. The Wynyard factory is designed to make two megawatt turbines but Vestas says the market is changing towards larger ones.

Senior vice-president Johnny Hoy Henriksen says the company has failed to sell a single turbine in 2006, and there are no orders for next year. He says it is too costly to upgrade the factory for larger turbines. Mr Henriksen says the Federal Government's decision not to raise renewable energy targets has left the future of wind power in Australia uncertain. The closure will almost certainly result in the shutdown of a component manufacturer in Burnie.

Oztec Composites, run by Rob and Jackie Gee, employs 25 people manufacturing the housing for rotor blades. "Rob and I have put a lot of years in getting the facility up and running to manufacture for Vestas," Ms Gee said. "On a personal front, it's quite cutting - I just can't even put words to it."

Of course, the government's pro-coal attitude does have a positive aspect for crocodiles.


Energy Bulletin points to some articles on Somalia and oil (something I looked at a while ago in "Planet of Slums") - "Somalia - A trip down memory hole lane" in "MediaLens" and "Oil, Not Terrorists, the Reason for US Attack on Somalia" at "Information Clearing House Blog".

There is also a piece from The Times which offers an interesting theory about oil price movements - they are designed to put pressure on the Iranian economy andIran's ability to financially support groups in Iraq and elsewhere. Sounds a little like the theory that Saudi Arabia manipulated the oil price down in the 1980's as a way of putting financial pressure on the Soviets during the 1980s.

Start with the premise that America is indeed being tough on Iran in order to strengthen internal opposition to the extremist confrontational policies of President Ahmadinejad. The purpose is not necessarily to trigger the removal of Ahmadinejad, but rather to shatter Iran’s present grandiose delusions of regional hegemony and bring Iran into negotiations from a position of relative weakness, rather than its present perceived strength.

Three strands of policy are now being directed to achieving this internal shift in Iranian politics.

...This brings us to the final and most interesting strand in the anti-Iranian policy nexus: the price of oil. Iran’s economy depends entirely on oil sales, which account for 90 per cent of exports and a roughly equal share of the Government’s budget. Since last July, a barrel of oil has fallen from $78 to just over $50, reducing the Government’s revenues by one third. If the oil price fell into the $35 to $40 range, Iran would shift into deficit, and with access to foreign borrowing cut off by UN sanctions, the Government’s capacity to continue financing foreign proxies would quickly run out. Iran has reacted to this threat by calling on Opec to stabilise prices but, in practice, only one country has the clout to do this: Saudi Arabia. Earlier this month, in a highly significant statement, Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi Oil Minister, publicly opposed Iranian calls for production cuts to halt the decline in prices. Mr Naimi's pronouncement was cast as a technical matter unconnected with politics, but it seemed to confirm private warnings by King Abdullah that his country would try everything to thwart Iran’s hegemony in Iraq and throughout the region, whether by military intervention or more subtle economic means.

This policy was spelt out with surprising precision in an article by Nawaf Obaid, a senior Saudi security adviser, in The Washington Post: "King Abdullah may decide to strangle Iranian funding of the Iraqi militias through oil policy. If Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half, the kingdom could still finance its current spending. But it would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties even with today's high prices. The result would be to limit Tehran's ability to continue funnelling hundreds of millions each year to Shiite militias in Iraq and elsewhere."

This article attracted huge attention in the Middle East and Washington, but was hardly noticed in the financial markets and the business community. But that was when the bulls still thought that they commanded the oil market and most analysts believed that the only direction for oil prices was up. Maybe they should think again.

For those who are following the topic, commenter SP pointed out a journal with a new article on Terra Preta.

Soil Biology and Biochemistry
Volume 39, Issue 2 , February 2007, Pages 684-690

Bacterial diversity of terra preta and pristine forest soil from the Western Amazon

Abstract

The survey presented here describes the bacterial diversity and community structures of a pristine forest soil and an anthropogenic terra preta from the Western Amazon forest using molecular methods to identify the predominant phylogenetic groups. Bacterial community similarities and species diversity in the two soils were compared using oligonucleotide fingerprint grouping of 16S rRNA gene sequences for 1500 clones (OFRG) and by DNA sequencing. The results showed that both soils had similar bacterial community compositions over a range of phylogenetic distances, among which Acidobacteria were predominant, but that terra preta supported approximately 25% greater species richness. The survey provides the first detailed analysis of the composition and structure of bacterial communities from terra preta anthrosols using noncultured-based molecular methods.

From the discussion...
"The relationship between organic matter inputs from different overstory trees, rhizosphere effects, and the bacterial community composition of forest soils is still not understood, but likely contributes to differences in diversity and community composition along the forest floor. There was also increased earthworm activity and soil aggregation in terra preta that may provide a wide range of niches and thereby contribute to increased bacterial species diversity."

During my brief pre-Christmas hiatus (I'm still hoping the water will eventually warm up so I can go and wallow in it for a few days) I missed the official death notice for the new american century (though it seems the hardcore bitter-enders have just beaten a strategic retreat to the American Enterprise Institute from which they plan to wage a bloody insurgency). But there is no more PNAC.

The ambitions proclaimed when the neo-cons' mission statement "The Project for the New American Century" was declared in 1997 have turned into disappointment and recriminations as the crisis in Iraq has grown.

"The Project for the New American Century" has been reduced to a voice-mail box and a ghostly website. A single employee has been left to wrap things up.

The idea of the "Project" was to project American power and influence around the world. ... Since so much was pinned on Iraq, it is inevitable that the problems there should have undermined the whole idea.

"Neo-conservatism has gone for a generation, if in fact it ever returns," says one of the movement's critics, David Rothkopf, currently at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, and a former official in the Clinton administration. Their signal enterprise was the invasion of Iraq and their failure to produce results is clear. Precisely the opposite has happened," he says. "The US use of force has been seen as doing wrong and as inflaming a region that has been less than susceptible to democracy. Their plan has fallen on hard times. There were flaws in the conception and horrendously bad execution. The neo-cons have been undone by their own ideas and the incompetence of the Bush administration.

"George Bush is about the last neo-conservative standing, Cheney as well maybe. Bush is not an analytical person so he just adopted the neo-cons' philosophy. It fitted into his Manichean, his black and white view of the world. After all, he gave up his dissolute youth and was born again as a new man, so it appealed to his character."

I'll close with some eschatology from the Ukraine (via Energy Bulletin) - maybe "Revelations" is about the danger of nuclear power...

There are more than 1,000 dead towns and villages (some say there are twice that many) within a radius of 250 kms (155 miles) around the twisted, Chernobyl reactor. There is no way to count all the villages because many have been systematically demolished by the authorities.

Traveling through the dead zone I have yet to see any ruined church. Looters are superstitious folks and are afraid to rob churches. Also, nearby community members come to fix the abandoned churches every few years, so they stand longer than all other buildings in the area.

Doors in these old churches are unlocked. There is nothing valuable inside, only a couple of cheap icons, towels and slightly radioactive Bible - usually opened to the page where the age of wormwood is foretold (Revelation 8: 10,11). Few people can remain unaffected when they learn that the Ukrainian word for 'wormwood' is 'Chernobyl'. I am not exception and this inspired me to explore the sacred side of Chernobyl.