Happy New Year  

Hopefully 2007 doesn't fly by as rapidly as 2006 did - it seems such a short time since the last new year rolled around - obviously the blogging time sink accelerates time no end.

This is something of a bumper edition post, but I'll make up for it with less frequent posting through January.

I wandered off to the Peats Ridge festival for the day on Saturday, which was quite relaxing - Glenworth Valley is a great spot for those locals who have never been up there - most of the year its dedicated to horse riding. I'll give my "best unknown act" award to Leroy Lee and thanks to The Ramblers for giving me a CD to listen to on the way home. TreeHugger comments on the sustainablity focus of the festival, which included a lot of educational displays (like the UNSW ecoliving centre) as well as the bands:

All the power is either solar or biodiesel generated. The toilets are composting, the showers low flow, the food organic, the crockery, cutlery & food boxes biodegradable, the cleaning products synthetic chemical free, the transport options include a bus or an escorted bike train. Every drink sold has a hearty container deposit levy applied, thus making economic sense for them to be returned, for recycling. This might be a four day music festival but it’s commitment to sustainable practices runs way deeper than many high profile events that we’ve reported on previously. A music festival complete with 11 stages shaking to the beat of “World Music, Blues Roots & Dub, Contemporary Music and Chilled Beats” does seem like just the place you’d expect to find performance, installation, roving and theatrical musical artists, but a University undertaking an Environmental Audit? Well, here you will, ‘coz the Peats Ridge Festival wants to achieve ISO 14001 registration for environmental management. So if you want to see in the New Year with some grooving green be sure to look it up.

Given that I was hangover free this morning I wandered across to the Australian Museum to check out this years installment of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. As usual the photos were amazing - I'm not particularly into art but some of these guys can achieve some very artistic results with just a camera and an incredible amount of patience. Here's one photo with a global warming theme:

Jocke Berglund (Sweden)

Hurricane tree

When Hurricane Gudrun thundered across southern Sweden in January 2005, it left around 100,000 people isolated and without electricity. Deep snow, fallen trees and severe temperatures meant several people died before help could reach them. Flying over Småland photographing the devastation, Jocke – who specializes in aerial photography – saw this ‘remarkable oak tree print’. It formed partly by the storm brush of nature and partly by the impact on the soil of the forestry machines retrieving logs. ‘It’s as if the heavens had sent a message to the forest industry reminding them that, in this area, deciduous trees would have withstood the winds much better than pine. It’s also another stark reminder that global warming will lead to regular and stronger storm winds.’

Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II with 28-70mm f2.8 lens; 1/800 sec; 200 ISO; Cessna aircraft.

Technology Review has a roundup of the Year in Energy - identifying the highlights as biowaste to fuels, cars that plug in, lithium-ion batteries that don't explode, and cheap energy from the sun.

Biowaste to ethanol could soon power cars.

Converting a vehicle to run primarily on ethanol costs just a couple of hundred dollars. But ethanol won't make much of a dent in gas use as long as the source of ethanol in the United States remains corn grain, which requires a lot of energy and land in order to grow. A much better alternative is cellulosic materials such as wood chips and switchgrass, which are both cheap to grow and require fewer natural resources. (See "Biomass: Hope and Hype.") In an effort to reduce the processing costs of these materials, researchers are genetically engineering organisms that can devour grasses and waste biomass, digest the complex sugars, and then transform the resulting simple sugars into alcohol. (See "Better Biofuels" and "Redesigning Life to Make Ethanol.") Already, advances in parts of this process have led to planned cellulosic-ethanol plants. (See "Making Ethanol from Wood Chips.")

The plug-in hybrid-vehicle era begins.

For years, hobbyists and a few companies have been adding bigger battery packs to hybrid vehicles, which have both battery power and an internal combustion engine, and plugging them into electrical outlets. This allows the cars, which typically rely on the electric power only for short bursts or to assist the onboard gasoline engine, to run on electricity alone for short trips. The idea of the "plug-in hybrid" has now caught the attention of government officials and researchers, who note that gas consumption would plummet if drivers could rely almost exclusively on electricity for average daily driving of about 33 miles. The gasoline engine would be available to boost performance and make it possible to use the car for long trips. Now the major car companies are taking notice and are finally developing plug-in hybrids. (See "GM's Plug-In Hybrid.") Meanwhile, researchers are beginning to anticipate benefits from plug-ins beyond gasoline conservation: millions of plug-in vehicles could serve as massive energy storage to stabilize the electric grid and make renewable energy sources more feasible. (See "How Plug-In Hybrids Will Save the Grid.") Battery costs still need to drop before such cars will approach the price of conventional hybrids or gas-only vehicles. But better batteries are already becoming available.

Massive recalls spark interest in better batteries.

The safety-related recall of millions of lithium-ion laptop and cell-phone batteries made by Sony and Sharp put batteries in the spotlight this year. Just in time, a new type of lithium-ion battery that uses materials inherently much safer than those involved in the battery recall started appearing in professional power tools. In addition to being safer, the new batteries are more powerful, have longer useful lifetimes, and are potentially less expensive than those utilized in laptops and cell phones today. All of this could make them attractive for use in mass-produced plug-in hybrids. (See "More Powerful Hybrid Batteries.") Meanwhile, a number of materials-science advances promise to as much as double the storage capacity of batteries and make them more long-lived. (See "3M's Higher-Capacity Lithium-Ion Batteries" and "Making Electric Vehicles Practical.")

Cheaper solar power is on the horizon.

Solar cells have a well-deserved reputation for being too expensive. But a steady drop in costs, along with high electricity prices and government subsidies around the world, have led to a boom in the solar market. And while advances in conventional silicon cells will continue to play a major role in continuing this boom, emerging technologies will also play an important role. A number of companies are developing efficient solar cells based on microscopically thin layers of semiconductor material; they're also developing fast, high-volume manufacturing methods that could cut costs. (See "Large-Scale, Cheap Solar Electricity.") Meanwhile, others are developing similarly inexpensive manufacturing for mirrors and lenses to concentrate sunlight, which reduces the amount of expensive photovoltaic material needed. The concentrators make it feasible to use ultra-high-efficiency (and expensive) solar cells originally developed for use in space. (See "Cheap, Superefficient Solar.") This month one manufacturer of such cells set a new record by producing cells that convert 40.7 percent of the energy in sunlight falling on them into electricity. At the same time, others are developing advanced solar cells that mimic photosynthesis or harness nanocrystals to make better cells. (See "New Solar Technologies Fueled by Hot Markets.")

Clean coal technologies get mixed up in politics.

Coal will be a major source of electricity for a long time, especially in places such as China and the United States. That's because it's cheap. The problem is that burning coal emits huge amounts of carbon dioxide. While President Bush supports research into new technology that can reduce such emissions, the fact is that good technology, such as gasification, burning coal in pure oxygen, and methods for sequestering carbon dioxide, exists now that could make a big difference. (See "Simpler and Cheaper Clean Coal Technology" and "The Dirty Secret.") At this point, cleaning up coal is more in the hands of policymakers than in the hands of researchers.

Jamais Cascio returns to WorldChanging for a post in their "What's next" series.

As a species, Homo sapiens isn't particularly good at thinking about the future. It's not really what we evolved to do. Our cognitive tools developed in a world where rapid and just-accurate-enough pattern recognition and situation analysis meant the difference between finding enough tubers & termites to munch on for the evening and ending up as dinner for the friendly neighborhood predator. In a world of constant, imminent existential threats, the ability to recognize subtle, long-term processes and multi-generational changes wasn't a particularly important adaptive advantage.

But what we haven't evolved to do, we can learn to do. And now, more than at any previous point in human history, our survival depends on our capacity to think beyond the immediate future. The existential threats we face today are, in nearly every case, slow, subtle, and seemingly -- but deceptively -- remote. We no longer live in a world of obvious cause and easily-connected effect, and choices based on these sorts of expectations are apt to cause us vastly more harm than benefit.

Unfortunately, thinking in the language of the long term isn't a habit most of us have cultivated. So the development I'd like to see happen in 2007 is something that all of us can do: try to imagine tomorrow. Not in a gauzy, indeterminate "what if..." kind of way, and not in a cyber-chrome & nano-goo science fiction kind of way. I'd like us to start with something concrete and personal.

On January 1st, as we recover from the previous night's celebrations, rather than making out a list of resolutions we know we're unlikely to keep, I'd like us each to imagine, with as much plausibility and detail as we can muster, what our lives will be like in just one year, at the beginning of 2008. What has the last year been like? What has changed? What has surprised us? What are we (the "we" of a year hence) thinking about? Regretting? Looking forward to?

Then, after we've exercised our future-thinking muscles a bit, try this: do the same thing, only for ten years hence. What are our lives like in 2017? If possible, we should try to give this as much detail as we gave 2008. Not because this will make it more accurate -- it won't. But it can make it more real, more anchored in our lives of the present.

We should write down what we've come up with, and save it (or if we're feeling a bit adventurous, blog it).

That's it; just for a little while, let's think about our future.

We create our tomorrows with every choice we make, but too few of us take even a moment to consider the consequences of our decisions. Every now and again, we need to think beyond the present, and recognize that we are as connected to our future as we are to our past. It's a good habit to get into; as our choices become ever more complex, it's the kind of habit that can even be worldchanging.

I think I might perhaps spend a bit too much time thinking about tomorrow already (and even more time blogging about it) but I think one resolution I will make is to try and come up with a couple of posts of my own that add some value instead of just collating and summarising interesting tidbits from the news flow.

Gil Friend also has a post in the "Whats next" series on the importance of generative feedback.

The key words I'm watching for 2007: generative feedback. Performance feedback that doesn't just track behavior; it drives it.

Just as Prius owners inevitably change their driving behavior (whether they want to or not, whether they intend to watch their energy dashboard or not, and regardless of penalties or incentives) relevant performance feedback can engage stakeholders, steer strategy, and markedly improve implementation - the achilles heel of most sustainability initiatives.

JM Juran pegged this nearly 60 years ago, when he observed that "To be in a state of self-control, a person must know: what he [or she] is supposed to do, what he [or she] is actually doing, what choices [or she] has to improve results wherever necessary. If any of these three conditions are not met, a person cannot be held responsible." (I ask for a show of hands in every business audience I speak to: "How many of you have all three in your organization? How many have two? One?" The silence is consistently deafening and the unease palpable, as everyone realizes what a fix we're each/all in.)

Which is why it's such good news that technology is conspiring to break this logjam (even if management and organizational culture may still lag the opportunity).

- Business intelligence "dashboards" are all the rage - though how well and how fully they're used is open to question.
- Web 2.0 mashups, with lots of stuff, both silly and cool, underway, including the geospatial opportunities being cataloged at Where 2.0 (Participatory Panopticon).
- Worldwatch Institute has been chronicling planetary "vital signs" for years (but hasn't yet made the leap to web interactivity
- FAO's FAOSTAT offers a richness of breadth and interactivity that one can only hope for from the US government, which is hopefully near the end of its recent phase of constraining rather than expanding information access
- Gapminder's slick - and dynamic - views of Human Development Trends provides a fascinating way to understand trend and pattern. (For example, look at how differently income distribution changes as China, India and Brazil develop.
- Buckminster Fuller Institute's EarthScope offers up trending data in "geostories" rather than charts and graphs, providing dynamic maps with supporting graphics, imagery, sound, and text - all inspired by Bucky's "GeoScope" vision, laid out in Critical Path.
- Swivel's preview provides a cool tool for data mashups or all sorts.

TreeHugger has an interesting post on the EU's REACH for Greener Chemistry.

Toxic waste. You know it is bad. Must be controlled. But think about this for a second: factories are not built to make waste. Factories make products. Most of the chemicals which go into a factory come out in the products you buy. Furthermore, the product you buy is often a short detour on the path to becoming waste. Did you ever think: who is making certain that the chemicals in the products I buy are safe? Or at least...are made using the least harmful chemicals available to make a product for which the social benefits outweigh the environmental and health risks? This post may not be the most glamorous or interesting on TreeHugger this month. But if you care about these questions, you should read on. Because the most ambitious law ever to address the question of chemicals in modern life is about to hit the books in Europe. Inquiring minds want to know.

Yes, there are laws. Japan was the leader, adopting their Chemical Substances Control Law (CSCL) in 1974, largely in reaction to mercury building up in their island environment. USA followed shortly with TSCA (Toxic Substances Control Act) and Europe with their inventories of existing and new chemicals (EINECS/ELINCS). Recently, under UN tutelage, fast growing economies like China and Korea have adopted similar measures. But are these laws working as intended? Not according to leaders in the EU.

On 18 December 2006, the EU Council approved the most ambitious regulation of chemicals yet conceived, the REACH law, for Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals. REACH is a response to the observation that we live in a chemical soup. Over 100,000 chemicals are currently commercially available and over 30,000 chemicals circulate widely in the products of modern life. The chemical laws currently in force started from the assumption that the chemicals which have been sold for many years are probably safe enough, since there has not yet been any significant problems identified with their use. To a great extent this is a good assumption. However, there is no systematic way to ensure the assumption is valid, and there is continuously more evidence that we do not know enough to make the correct decisions. Decisions such as which of the chemicals found in human blood or breastmilk could be harmful? Are frog mutations the results of natural environmental factors or due to build up of chemicals? How is growing use of hormone-mimicking chemicals affecting the delicate balance of nature?

So just how comprehensive is REACH? How will it change things? Will it drive industry away from Europe and into countries with little or no environmental control? Or will it set a new standard, forcing green chemistry into the boardrooms and strategic planning committees of companies around the world?

The European viewpoint identifies the change of responsibility from the State to the Industry as one of the key provisions of REACH. In the EU, the government used to be responsible to tell industry which chemicals should be tested more and to decide if they are safe for use. Under REACH, the industry has a duty to know their chemicals are safe. You may be thinking: but the duty has always been on industry in the USA (with the EPA autorized to force the issue a bit by certain mechanisms such as significant new use rules.) How is REACH different?

REACH has a twist: each supplier is required to know how the users are using their chemicals. And to determine specifically, according to defined methods, if the intended uses are safe. And REACH will require every single supplier to register their chemicals and intended uses over an eleven year period, giving the new European Chemicals Agency an opportunity to check up on how well industry is meeting its obligation (one aspect of the so-called evaluation). This will apply equally to suppliers anywhere in the world--if they want to sell their chemicals to Europe, or if their customers sell products to Europe from which the release of the chemicals may occur.

Authorization provides a mechanism to assess and decide whether the social benefits of a risky chemical (for which no substitute is yet available) should justify continued use. Perhaps a chemical which may cause cancer or hormonal disruptions should be banned from use in kitchen products but allowed for manufacturing of medical devices which can save lives.

This may sound easy, and obvious, as a clear solution to a problem which concerns us all. But hidden in the simple process is significant complexity. For example: how does a supplier get a customer to tell him about his "intended uses" of the chemical if the use is considered a trade secret? How much is the efficiency of industry reduced by the pure volume of information which must be exchanged--up and down the supply chain as well as between industry and government? Will the complexity of getting a chemical registered freeze innovation by locking in the accepted chemicals already registered? Or will the pressure to plan for and find substitutes to existing harmful or potentially harmful substances spur a wave of research and development? Will industry leave Europe to avoid these burdensome requirements? Or will other countries implement similar laws to ensure that their industries stay competitive?

Energy Bulletin points to an article by James Woolsey in the Wall Street Journal called "Gentlemen, Start Your Plug-Ins" that mentions peak oil and correctly notes that an electric transport system is the solution to this and global warming (the Journal editors must have relaxed their anti-global warming news policy for a moment).

Once plug-ins start appearing in showrooms it is not only consumers and utility shareholders who will be smiling. If cheap off-peak electricity supplies a portion of our transportation needs, this will help insulate alternative liquid fuels from OPEC market manipulation designed to cripple oil's competitors. Indian and Chinese demand and peaking oil production may make it much harder for OPEC today to use any excess production capacity to drive prices down and destroy competitive technology. But as plug-ins come into the fleet low electricity costs will stand as a substantial further barrier to such market manipulation. Since OPEC cannot drive oil prices low enough to undermine our use of off-peak electricity, it is unlikely to embark on a course of radical price cuts at all because such cuts are painful for its oil-exporter members. Plug-ins thus may well give investors enough confidence to back alternative liquid fuels without any need for new taxes on oil or subsidies to protect them.

Environmentalists should join this march with enthusiasm. Replacing hydrocarbons with fuels derived from biomass and waste reduces vehicles' carbon emissions very substantially. And replacing gasoline with electricity further brightens the environmental picture. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute has shown that, with today's electricity grid, there would be a national average reduction in carbon emissions by about 60% per vehicle when a plug-in hybrid with 20-mile all-electric range replaces a conventional car.

Energy Bulletin also points to an interesting post in Foreign Policy asking if Avatars consume as much power as Brazilians. Hopefully the work companies like Google and Sun are putting into making data centres more energy efficient becomes a higher priority over the next year.

It was only a matter of time before someone took the avatar world to task for their environmental impact. (In case you think an avatar is a new model of Hyundai, here's a brief primer. Avatars are computer-generated, physical representations of people in virtual online games or social worlds. Think Second Life, Sims, World of Warcraft, etc.)

The virtual world of Second Life, which hit one million residents back in October, is one of the most popular online games of its kind. To even call it a game is perhaps inaccurate. It's a full-fledged virtual world, complete with crime, sex, commodities, and real-world advertising. (Don't miss BusinessWeek's journey into Second Life or its great "Old Fogey's Guide to the Online Universe.") It goes way beyond the traditional online games of old: These days, politicians like former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner hold town meetings and musicians use music streaming to stage "live" concerts in Second Life in order to be heard.

So, it's fascinating to see blogger Nick Carr (also a former exec editor at Harvard Business Review) calculate whether avatars consume more energy than their human counterparts. He found that the thousands of avatars "living" in Second Life at any given moment, given the servers and computers needed to run the virtual world, use about the same amount of electricity as a comparable number of real-life Brazilians. So, here's my question: Has anyone done any research on whether avatars are much more wasteful than their human counterparts? Say, in terms of energy: Do avatars not bother to turn off the lights?

One interesting clean energy blog I came across this week is Tom Konrad's blog "EE/RE Investing" - this post looks at the "Gust Ceiling " for wind power - how much is too much ? I tend to think limits for wind power need to be understood as a lack of energy storage capacity and inflexibility in the grid more than a limitation of wind power itself - as grids become smarter and more storage is built, wind will provide more and more of our energy needs.

On Dec 13, the Midwest Wind Integration Study, (see article) which was required by the Minnesota legislature in 2005 to evaluate reliability and other impacts of higher levels of wind generation and carried out independently by EnerNex Corporation and WindLogics, found that the total integration cost for up to 25% wind energy delivered to all Minnesota customers is less than one-half cent ($0.0045 cents) per kWh of wind generation. Great news, but it’s a little bit anticlimactic (as well as “anti-climatic change”) compared to the announcement on Dec 5 that Denmark plans to increase wind powerfrom 20% today to over 50% by 2025. (All penetration rates are given as percentage of power supplied, as opposed to nameplate capacity, a measure which would make wind penetration rates seem even higher.)

That’s not to say this report is a total yawn. First, Europe has a much more robust electric grid than the US (as the Northeast found out in 2003), and the fact that the study was sanctioned by a government body, rather than a renewable energy or environmental group gives it added weight. Finally, by using extensive simulation, they came up with some relatively hard numbers on what it would cost to reach various levels of penetration.

The study concludes that the total integration operating cost for up to 25%wind energy delivered to Minnesota customers is less than $4.50 per MWh of wind generation, or less than 1/2 of 1 cent per kWh. Put another way, this is less than 10% of the average cost per kWh of wind energy.

As I alluded to before, when talking about Europe, we need to be careful when we generalize from one utility grid to another as to the costs of integration: Europe’s grid is not the same as America’s, and Colorado’s grid is not the same as Minnesota’s. Costs for integrating wind into Colorado’s grid are likely to be higher than in Minnesota, because we are behind the rest of the country in terms of how robust and well integrated our grid is to the rest of the country. Because of the limitations of out grid, all of the major wind farms now in Colorado or under construction have had to be scaled back.

Nevertheless, the study is great ground for hope. Colorado desperately needs to upgrade our transmission anyway, and the Minnesota study only takes advantage of one of the many possibile strategies that helps firm up the capacity factor of wind: geographical diversification: “the wind is always blowing somewhere.”

Other strategies not considered:

* Time of use pricing, which can be used to shift demand to times when the wind is blowing.
* Plug in Hybrids, which can be programmed to be charged when power is cheap, or even supply peaking capacity to the grid.
* Energy storage, such as the Wind-to-Hydrogen project recently unveiled at NREL’s Wind Technology Center (in partnership with Xcel Energy.) One interesting aspect of this project that did not make most of the articles on the center is that they are experimenting with directly connecting the wind turbine to the electrolyzer, without the intermediate step of a transformer which has to be used to convert the wild AC power from a wind turbine the regulated AC power used by the grid.

In short, I see 25% as a good start, but given that wind power has already shown itself to be cheap, safe for the environment (despite claims to the contrary, wind kills far fewer birds than coal; just ask the Audobon society), and is proving much easier to integrate into the grid than skeptics imagine, we need to start thinking like Denmark, and aim for numbers much higher than 25%. It will take creative thinking, and serious investment not only in wind farms, but also in our grid, and even behavioral changes on the part of consumers.

The small sacrifices we will need to make in terms of our behavior to get large penetrations of wind onto the grid, such as checking our time of use meter before we start the dishwasher or dryer, are much smaller, in my mind, than the giant sacrifices we are currently making to coal fired generation in terms of the effects of pollution and global warming on ourselves and our children. We just don’t see the current sacrifices, because we have become used to the death from a thousand cuts in the form of mercury and other pollutants, and the incremental year on year warming of our planet, lost in the noise of large local and seasonal variations.

Grist has a post on the Top 10 bizarro environmental moments of 2006.

Michael Crichton Wins "Excellence In Journalism" Award. That's right -- Crichton's anti-enviro fantasy thriller State Of Fear won him the highly coveted award for journalistic excellence from ... the Society Of Petroleum Geologists. I only include this because I'm bitter I lost the award with my "Interview With Jesus And Uncle Sam About Why It's Our Spiritual And Patriotic Duty To Use Lots Of Petroleum."

Federal Funding For Climate Research Increased To Stall Climate Action. Until only a few months ago, President Bush's stand on global warming was that we need "more research." In May, federal climate scientists spoke to the Washington Post about being pressured by the Bush administration to clam up on certain sensitive topics -- like ones with the words "global" and "warming" appearing too close together. Just to be certain, the feds went in and purged key words from their findings.

Create Your Own Chevy Attack Ad. When Chevy offered net surfers the opportunity to edit their own Chevy Tahoe ads online, enviros grabbed the opportunity to match slick, soaring shots of SUVs rolling over mountainous terrain with titles like "Gas Guzzler!" They got so popular, our own David Roberts was interviewed on NPR's "All Things Considered" about the phenomenon.

America Outsourcing Its Pollution To China. After decades of relying on China to produce all our plastic whatsits, the smog those whatsit factories generate has followed its progeny across the Pacific to show up in Seattle and Los Angeles.

Hunting Licenses Sold To Protect Wildlife. China announced that hunting licenses for several rare species would be sold to raise money for wildlife conservation. For the lucky ones, I suppose. But if that sounds strange, guess what? We do it here, too.

Christian Coalition Calls Out Bush On Global Warming. The true irony is that there was ever a division in the public mind between Christian values and conservation. In April, 86 evangelical leaders signed a letter hoping to remedy that. It criticized Bush for his inaction on global warming and gave rise to a new green movement among Christians in which church groups recycle and plant trees.

Kennedys Come Out Against Cape Wind Project. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., shortly after appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair as a green hero, spoke out against the Cape Wind project that would have lit up all of Nantucket Sound with enviro-friendly wind power. Coincidentally, it would have also placed several large windmills right in view from his family's Hyannis Port beachhouse.

Utility Companies Ask Congress For Emission Caps. The frustrating inertia of the 109th Congress reached such a pitch in 2006 that in April several utility companies actually asked the Senate to introduce greenhouse gas emissions caps, seeing the handwriting on the wall. The Senate declined. Better luck with the 110th.

Al Gore Turns A Documentary Of A Slide Show Into A Hit Film With His Charisma. In 2000, Al Gore (sort of) lost an election due largely to his incredibly wooden stage presence. Well, his stage presence must have wished upon a star and been visited by a blue fairy, because in the film An Inconvenient Truth Gore stands on a stage and jokes, regales, and ribs, turning an in-depth discussion of climate change into a movie ten times more entertaining than The Day After Tomorrow.

Eskimos Buying Air Conditioners. Really. An article in Reuters on lifestyle-related economic opportunities reported that air conditioning business in far north Inuit villages is booming.

A sobering sign that with all the progress we've made in 2006, we still have a long road ahead. Happy holidays, and here's to a non-ironic 2007 ...

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the arctic is getting smaller as the Ellesmere island ice sheets break away and float off to melt in the Atlantic.

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic, scientists say. The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada's remote north. Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, travelled to the newly formed ice island and could not believe what he saw. "This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead," Vincent said today. In 10 years of working in the region he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice, he said. The collapse was so powerful that earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away picked up tremors from it. The Ayles Ice Shelf, roughly 66 square kilometres in area, was one of six major ice shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic.

Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor. "It is consistent with climate change," Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 per cent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906. We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role."

Mobjectivist also points to a photo of the recently submerged Lohachara island.

The melting of the icebergs that this chunk created will further displace sea-levels elsewhere. Consider the island of Lohachara where the Ganges river empties into the Bay of Bengal. With little fanfare it recently sunk below the water-line.

The uppermost arrow points to the island where apparently 10,000 residents once lived (10,000 people per km2?). The lower arrow I believe points to the uninhabited island of Suparibhanga (or Bedford?), which now looks like a submerged sandbar from the satellite photos.

The SMH also reports that the radioactive Rodent would like to have a nuclear power plant built in Wollstonecraft. I've got to say that I, for one, would be highly annoyed by such a move - but I suspect that the rest of the lower north shore would be even more outraged, given the local obsession with property prices. I wonder what Joe Hockey, who can be a reasonable chap, thinks of the idea - perhaps any other North Sydney residents out there should give his electoral office a call and ask...

THE Prime Minister, John Howard, has declared he would have no problem with a nuclear power plant being built next door to his family home in Wollstonecraft as he stepped up his push for Australians to embrace the nuclear fuel cycle. Releasing the final report of a government taskforce on uranium mining and nuclear energy, Mr Howard said a country like Australia with abundant uranium reserves would be "crazy in the extreme" if it did not allow for the development of nuclear power.

Asked by reporters whether he would share community concerns about safety if a nuclear reactor was located next to his own home, Mr Howard said: "I wouldn't have any objection, none whatsoever. I'm serious, quite serious." His pro-nuclear comments mean the issue will figure prominently in next year's federal election. Labor says it will campaign locally on the issue by warning that nuclear plants could be built in neighbourhoods or towns if the Government was re-elected.

The report found that growing world demand for uranium gave Australia a timely opportunity to expand mining of the ore. It estimated exports of uranium oxide could double to more than $1 billion a year by 2010 if state legislative restrictions were lifted. It gave a more qualified endorsement to processing and enrichment. Although this would add significant value to local production, there were high commercial and technological barriers to a local processing industry, it said.

The report said investment in nuclear plants would ease the challenge Australia faced in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But it said nuclear power would be commercially viable only if coal- and gas-fired electricity generators were obliged to meet the environmental costs of their greenhouse gas emissions through a carbon pricing scheme.

The Wilderness Society released its own report, arguing that several European countries were containing growth in greenhouse emissions without going down the nuclear path. It said this could be achieved by Australia ratifying the Kyoto Protocol and adopting a target of cutting emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.

The SMH also reports that Australia is drying out.

SATELLITES have been used to map all of Australia's fresh water for the first time, and the picture is bleak. In just three years, the continent has suffered a net loss of 46 cubic kilometres of fresh water - enough to fill Sydney Harbour more than 90 times. Initial results of an extraordinary international satellite project provide yet another indication that Australia is drying out.

Based on current consumption patterns of about 1.5 billion litres a day, the water lost could have quenched Sydney's thirst for more than 80 years. The discovery has been made using two US and German satellites designed to map all the world's water stocks - a task never before possible.

Launched by a Russian rocket in 2002, GRACE, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, involves two identical craft circling 220 kilometres apart, 485 kilometres up. By repeatedly plotting variations in the tug of earth's gravity, GRACE can estimate changes in the mass of the water below. "Even water in aquifers," said Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine. It also measures water in river basins and reservoirs.

While key findings will not be published until next year, Professor Famiglietti calculated for the Herald the overall decline observed in Australia's fresh water. Between February 2003 and January this year, Australia lost the 46 cubic kilometres. 'Some regions are gaining, while others are losing," said the professor.

The Peak Energy "Visitor of the week" award goes to a seeker from the Society of Petroleum Engineers in Houston who was searching for information about the "search for petroleum in outer space". What he made of Plan B From Outer Space is (and will probably remain) a mystery.

Prof Goose has a post at The Oil Drum on their top 50 stories for 2006 (as determined by the number of comments anyway, which is an arbitrary but reasonable criteria - don't suppose you have a ranking by page views as well somewhere PG ?).

I am doubting that we will have much content over the weekend and Monday, so instead I'll paste the top 50 posts for the year (by number of comments, which is a completely unfair way to proclaim a top 50, I'll grant you, especially for some of HO and Dave C's technical posts, which leave people more awestruck than conversational) under the fold (thanks again to stiffpicken, whose blog can be found here.)

I'll also point you to the thread below which has folks' suggestions for what posts they thought had the most impact on them, which can be found here.

Jul. 24 - 463 comments - Jay Hanson and Dieoff.org
Dec. 11 - 428 comments - A Debate on the Substance and Timing of the Peak of Oil Production and Consumption, Part II
Mar. 01 - 388 comments - Why peak oil is probably about now
Dec. 13 - 379 comments - Why We Drive
Aug. 28 - 375 comments - The Energy Balance of Ethanol versus Gasoline
Nov. 11 - 352 comments - From the Editor's Desk: Peak Oil, Heretical Thought, Complexity, and the Future of The Oil Drum
Dec. 20 - 340 comments - The Auto Efficiency Wedge
Nov. 16 - 340 comments - Does the Peak Oil "Myth" Just Fall Down? -- Our Response to CERA
Aug. 08 - 337 comments - Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs?
Oct. 19 - 336 comments - Energy from Wind: A Discussion of the EROI Research
Jul. 27 - 333 comments - Vinod Khosla - Give Him Your Ideas
Aug. 09 - 329 comments - Khosla Responds: "Imagining the Future of Gasoline: Reality or Blue-sky Dreaming?"
Feb. 16 - 327 comments - Why the US Political System Is Unable to React to Peak Oil: Institutions
Dec. 16 - 319 comments - A Different Approach to Calculating Saudi Arabia's Oil Reserves
Apr. 09 - 306 comments - Iran -- Apocalypse Now?
Feb. 13 - 302 comments - Dr Deffeyes defines a date
Sep. 18 - 297 comments - Let's Talk Gas Tax (Poll)
Apr. 28 - 290 comments - The Politics of Oil: The Discourse Must Change
Jul. 12 - 289 comments - Peak Oil, Persuasion, and the World Meme
Oct. 07 - 284 comments - The End of Fossil Energy
Aug. 22 - 282 comments - NY Times Energy Series: Nuclear
Aug. 08 - 276 comments - More thoughts on Prudhoe Bay
Dec. 01 - 274 comments - A Credible Threat?
Nov. 28 - 274 comments - Sustainability, Energy Independence and Agricultural Policy
Jun. 29 - 272 comments - Inflationary Collapses, or The NPV of Grandchildren
May 19 - 271 comments - XTL: Promise and Peril
Oct. 02 - 266 comments - JHK: "A Hard Place"
Jul. 15 - 266 comments - The Course of Our Lives WILL Be Determined by the First Derivative of a Function
Feb. 01 - 264 comments - Numbers and the State of the Union Energy segment
Mar. 31 - 262 comments - From an Insider: Rig Prices, Rig Depth, and How to Get a Job
Oct. 04 - 260 comments - The Specter of Recession
Sep. 27 - 257 comments - Burning Buried Sunshine
Jul. 26 - 257 comments - A Letter from the TOD Editors Box...
Aug. 13 - 254 comments - Due Diligence: A reader's response to Khosla
Jul. 15 - 251 comments - Peak Oil and L.A.
Feb. 04 - 241 comments - World Nuclear Panel Refers Iran to the Security Council
Aug. 04 - 240 comments - Heinberg: Middle East at a Crossroads
Aug. 03 - 239 comments - EIA insisting on plateau
Apr. 30 - 235 comments - Wishful thinking
Sep. 17 - 230 comments - A Thought for Today: "Losing Faith in Peak Oil's Transformative Power"
May 24 - 230 comments - E85: Spinning Our Wheels
Jul. 31 - 228 comments - A Conversation with Vinod Khosla
Dec. 04 - 226 comments - A Debate on the Substance and Timing of the Peak of Oil Production and Consumption, Part I
Jan. 27 - 223 comments - Hubbert Linearization Analysis of the Top Three Net Oil Exporters
Jan. 16 - 222 comments - The Iranian Oil Weapon
Mar. 01 - 221 comments - NYT says peak oil "almost certainly correct"
Jun. 18 - 218 comments - "Oil Shale Development Imminent"
Jul. 25 - 216 comments - Vinod Khosla Debunked: Ethanol is NOT the Answer
May 09 - 212 comments - The Limits of Biofuels
Nov. 22 - 211 comments - Dr James Hansen: Can We Still Avoid Dangerous Human-Made Climate Change?

Energy Bulletin has an "open letter to US policymakers" by William Clark titled "It’s the energy and the economy, stupid".

“This is very important….I never had a security briefing which said what some of these very serious, but conservative petroleum geologists say, which they think that, either now or before the end the decade’s out, we’ll reach peak oil production globally, and with the rise of China and India and others coming along, unless we can dramatically reduce our oil usage, we will run out of recoverable oil within 35 to 50 years. And that would mean that…in addition to climate change, we have a very short time in the life of the planet to turn this around….we may not have as much oil as we think. So we need to get in gear.”

— Former President Bill Clinton, Aspen Ideas Festival, July 2006 [1]


The 21st century will likely be defined by three overarching forces: climate change, Peak Oil, and macroeconomics. The twin issues of climate change and Peak Oil are intertwined variables, and each represent extremely important phenomena that have slowly gained some public awareness. However, the third issue, macroeconomics, and more specifically the global trends regarding multiple petrocurrencies remains essentially unreported by the five US corporate media conglomerates.

Despite the general lack of public debate, the geopolitical landscape of this young century is increasingly being driven by escalating competition for energy supplies before global oil production peaks, and the erosion of dollar hegemony with the emergence of new petrocurrency alignments. The hypothesis outlined in Petrodollar Warfare; Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar, is that the tragic war in Iraq is in many ways the first oil-depletion and oil-currency war of the 21st century. [2]

Indeed, the geostrategic drivers behind the current “Iran crisis” are essentially the same as the previous “Iraq crisis,” including: structural imbalances in the global economy, which is being exacerbated by the weak US dollar, and the emerging liquid fuel energy crisis that will inexorably follow the peak in global oil production. The fact is that the post-World War II status of the US dollar as premier world reserve currency is quietly but assuredly eroding. [3] There are three key variables to analyze concerning the changing status of the dollar’s reserve role in the global financial system:

1. Central banks may shift their reserves out of dollars (e.g. into euros, Asian currencies, etc.)
2. The Asian currencies could end their pegs to the US currency (e.g. China circa July 2005)
3. We could witness a breakdown in the pricing of commodities in dollars (e.g. a “basket of currencies” for global oil trade including the dollar, euro, ruble, renminbi and perhaps rial).


All three of these trends have become evident. Regarding the third item, the most important globally traded commodity is oil, and this is where erosion of the dollar’s world reserve currency status is significant. [4] This segues into the larger issue of geopolitics, and corresponding attempts by Washington to retain its hegemonic status as the world’s sole superpower. A careful analysis of the macroeconomic, geopolitical, and geological trends indicates that over the next few years we will witness a continued decline of US dollar/petrodollar supremacy, and almost certainly a peak in global oil production between 2010 and 2015. Mitigating these trends before they become a fait accompli should be the focal point of every major policy-maker in both the domestic and international realms.

The ill-fated unilateral invasion of Iraq that was designed to maintain US dominance of the global oil supply and enforce petrodollar supremacy — has had the ironic effect of encouraging momentum towards petroeuros and other petrocurrencies — along with new geopolitical and energy alignments unfavorable to the US. [5][6][7][8] In the meantime, the American military is trapped in a tragic quagmire in Iraq, even as the Bush-Blair administrations are once again obfuscating their real geostrategic and macroeconomic agenda regarding Iran by engaging in a propaganda campaign about an Iranian “nuclear weapons program” that according to both the IAEA and CIA simply does not exist. [9]

Unfortunately, America’s current domestic energy and monetary policies are unsustainable, and US geostrategy is at odds with the interests of global stability: the two greatest challenges facing the world today are the need for global energy reconfiguration and monetary reform. The success or failure to create multilateral accords towards these two colossal undertakings will be the drivers of war and peace, and thereby define the human condition during the opening decades of the 21st century.

...

Recommended Reforms: Escaping the Destiny of Empires

Great Powers in relative decline instinctively respond by spending more on ‘security,’ and thereby divert potential resources from ‘investment’ and compound their long-term dilemma.

— Historian Paul Kennedy describing “imperial overstretch” in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1989) [15]


In his classic study of empires, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Yale historian Paul Kennedy observes that when great powers begin to decline, they almost invariably resort to war and belligerency, thereby accelerating their demise as they waste their national treasuries on military spending to the detriment of their economies and their peoples. Kennedy described this pattern as "overstretch." The United States is not immune to these historical patterns — the ultimate legacy of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq — may in time be viewed by future historians as the pivotal event that solidified our own classical “imperial overstretch.”

To save the American experiment and stop our slide towards an authoritarian and militant empire, we will need to elect an enlightened president in 2008. Nothing less than revolutionary changes are needed of the political landscape. Regrettably, both political parties appear to be different factions representing the same richest two percent of the population, and both espouse an imperial agenda. Their prime constituency is the elite that funds their political campaigns, which is the powerful and unaccountable military–industrial–petroleum–banking conglomerate. This is the natural result of a structurally flawed campaign finance system that renders much of Congress and the president incapable of voicing the concerns and interests of the other 98 percent of Americans.

There is no easy way out, and I do not envy the arduous journey that awaits the 44th president, who will likely face a combined economic and energy crisis. Global monetary reform, including a compromise with the EU regarding the world reserve/petrocurrency issues, implies that the US will have to forfeit its superpower status and revert to being one nation among equals. Many Americans do not want to hear this message, but unless this bitter pill is swallowed, the US economy may experience a disorderly decline, inducing far more pain than would be experienced via multilateral compromises for controlled contraction. Regardless, we may not have the luxury of choice for much longer, as the dictates of the global economy and physics will soon come to the forefront.

The only solution is international cooperation, real US leadership based on sustainable fiscal and energy policies, implementation of a phrased but rapid strategy to adjust to oil and gas depletion, reform of the global monetary system, and behavioral changes to reduce our gluttonous addictions to oil and debt. The five US media conglomerates are not serving the public’s interest and should be broken up by anti-trust legislation. Comprehensive campaign finance reform and the rejection of ‘corporate personhood’ may be the only way for the US to enact the required energy reforms.

To save the American experiment from the shared destiny of all empires — military overextension and subsequent economic decline — I recommend the following six measures.

1. Disavow the Preventive War Doctrine. The unrealistic neoconservative goal of global domination must be quickly discarded by any new US administration if it hopes to relieve current and future geopolitical tensions. The concept of the United States openly violating international law with unilateral “preventive wars” in the oil-rich regions of the world will simply not be tolerated by other industrialized nations. One of the first official acts of the next president should be to officially disavow the “Bush doctrine” and state a desire for a multilateral approach to international relations, including a revamped anti-terrorism campaign utilizing INTERPOL. These are critical gestures needed in order to diffuse the tensions between Iran and US. Such a gesture would let the world community breathe a collective sign of relief and extend to the new administration much-needed political capital.

2. Launch International Energy Projects. Washington should propose to the UN that it form an international consortium of energy scientists and researchers to develop alternative fuels for transportation. The evidence supporting global supply limitations is building. In April 2006 a Saudi Aramco spokesman stated that despite all efforts to maintain production, they expect on average a 2 percent annual decline from Saudi’s mature oil fields. [16] If true, world oil production will simply not be able to expand enough to meet projected demand by 2010 and beyond. If alternative fuels for transportation cannot be developed and implemented over the next decade, disaster will follow, including major disruptions in global food supplies. Ideally, the G8 nations plus China and India would immediately advocate the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in UN-coordinated international energy programs with the urgency of the Manhattan and Apollo projects. The following technologies pursuant to energy reconfiguration should be vigorously developed and implemented:

Short-term “bridge technologies” and other energy reforms (present day to 2020)

* Ultra fuel-efficient gasoline and diesel engines (vehicles exceeding 60 mpg).
* Clean-coal technology with mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions to power electricity-based transportation systems (light rail systems, plug-in hybrids, etc).
* Massive light-rail projects, including using land currently used by the Interstate Highway System (preferably driven by electrical power generated with renewable energy).
* Aggressive agricultural programs to reduce fossil-fuel inputs (fertilizers and pesticides) and dramatically increased localized, organic food production.
* Wind power (rapid deployments in both small and large-scale settings).
* Massive solar-energy/photo-voltaic retrofitting of residential and commercial buildings.


Intermediate to long-term energy projects utilizing renewable energy (2010 to 2030)

* Large-scale deployments of Geothermal and ground-source heat pumps (retrofitting both commercial and residential buildings).
* Biomass and biodiesel limited to localized, agriculture-based farm production and food distribution (technology is non-scalable for mass transit use due to low energy return on energy invested or EROEI, and should be restricted to food production and distribution).


Research & Development for Long-Term Energy Systems (2020 and beyond)

* Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) (e.g., fleet of 50 to 100-megawatt floating “plant-ships” producing liquefied ammonia for hydrogen fuel cells and potable water).
* Hydrogen/ammonia fuel cells for mass transit via non-fossil fuel-based energy systems.
* Thermal depolyermization (new technology that warrants more R&D).
* Holistic environmental and EROEI analysis of improved breeder reactors that recycle uranium by-products and continued R&D on nuclear fusion (still unproven technology).

...

Conclusion

In the end, the choice [between] these two alternatives — Grab the Oil or Energy Reconfiguration — this decision is much bigger than oil alone. It is a choice about the fundamental ethos and, in fact, the very nature of the country. Most immediately, it is about democracy versus empire. In economic terms, it is about prosperity or poverty. In engineering terms, it is a matter of efficiency over waste. In moral terms this is the choice of sufficiency or gluttony.

From the standpoint of the environment, it is a preference for stewardship over continued predation. In the ways the US deals with other countries it is the choice of co-operation versus dominance. And in spiritual terms, it is the choice of hope, freedom and purpose over fear, dependency and despair. In this sense, this is truly the decision that will define the future of America and perhaps the world.

— Robert Freeman, “Will the End of Oil Mean the End of America?,” 2004 [23]


This essay is intended to inform others of the challenges and choices that are directly ahead. Two decades of wasteful US fiscal and energy policies have placed the US at risk for an economic downturn of considerable depth and duration, and we are woefully unprepared as a nation to reduce our fossil-fuel consumption. Unfortunately, recent US foreign policies are exacerbating global tensions and could lead to even worse warfare than the Bush years have already wrought. Their must be no misunderstanding — global resource warfare will ultimately leave even the so-called “winner” in a ruined state of energy deprivation along with economic and moral bankruptcy.

This need not be the case, but global Peak Oil is undoubtedly the test that will define the human condition in this new century. As Robert Freeman observed, the destiny of the US will be decided by how willing the American people are able to adjust to the realities of hydrocarbon depletion. The reduction of fossil-fuel consumption and the transition to a more sustainable energy paradigm will be decades long and very difficult, but our generation can not escape these facts.

Americans are largely blinded by government propaganda and a pervasive corporate media bias that is subtly imperialist and very often filtered, thus rendering the People unaware that terrorism and other international frictions are too often the result of 50 years of US meddling overseas, including the overt or covert replacement of governments with puppet regimes and dictators. [24] America’s uncritical support of Israel’s policies is also not in the interest of anyone’s long-term national security. This combination of foreign policies, as practiced under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has produced increasingly painful levels of blowback.

Regrettably, the US electoral system has broken down under its current funding mechanisms, and the corporate media conglomerates have become the docile handmaidens who excessively filter the daily news to favor the status quo and the interests of the elite. As a result both political parties appear incapable of initiating the needed reforms. This must change, and time is running short. Most importantly, the American people — especially those in Congress — must not allow the executive branch to cynically use the “war on terror” as a tool of fear to gain our complicity for more unprovoked resource wars. The US military should not and cannot be used to enforce the petrodollar system. Current US-led antagonism toward Iran should be replaced by negotiations regarding its nuclear energy program and a compromise with the EU, Russia, and OPEC regarding a graduated implementation of a multiple-petrocurrency global economy.

Failure to pursue multilateral reforms will result in increasing levels of societal disorder, endless war that requires military conscription, increased levels of political deception and repression at home, and moral and economic bankruptcy. The only rational strategy is to compromise our hegemonic status and pursue multilateral treaties. This would require politicians to disavow today’s imperial conquests and focus instead on managing our decline. Unfortunately, I remain quite skeptical that the reforms I have proposed will happen until a global crisis occurs, thereby forcing these monetary and energy issues to the negotiating table.

Indeed, the real struggle for the United States is internal. Can we return to our republican origins and restrain ourselves from empire building? Can we rejoin the community of industrialized nations as an equal? The ultimate test for the American experiment: Can we once again begin living within our means from both fiscal and energy perspectives? Do we have the will and the wisdom to reduce our oil and gas consumption and engage in what Heinberg calls “powerdown”? [25] If the US could rise to that level of enlightenment, our problems with anti-Americanism and terrorism would quickly subside.

This analysis proffers that six difficult challenges await the next US administration:

1. developing a national energy strategy to reduce fossil-fuel consumption;
2. negotiating global monetary reform,
3. broadly re-organizing US fiscal policies,
4. repairing damaged foreign relationships with the UN, the EU, the Middle East, Russia, and Latin America by realigning foreign polices with American principles and human rights,
5. reigning in the unwarranted power of the military-industrial-petroleum-banking consortium through comprehensive campaign finance reform, and
6. massive reallocation of public funds from military spending towards energy reconfiguration utilizing renewable energy sources in an attempt to mitigate both Peak Oil and Global Warming.

Regrettably, the next President will have to undertake these colossal challenges from a weakened position both economically and diplomatically. I do not envy the arduous journey that awaits the 44th President of the United States.

The beginning of the 21st century will be an epochal moment in history; either a disastrous period of resource-related military and economic warfare or an unprecedented and noble effort at international cooperation. Either way, maintaining the status quo will not be possible much longer due to both physics and macroeconomics, nor is it desirable if we wish to preserve our humanity. Our political, social, and economic choices in the next few years will decide which path we take. Will America succumb to an endless “war on terror,” increased militarism, and economic ruin in a desperate attempt to retain its superpower status, or will it rejoin the community of nations as an equal to collectively work on future challenges? Will future historians write that America was just another reckless, selfish empire that collapsed due to imperial overstretch? Or will they sing praises of a long-lived, enlightened democratic republic that finally resisted the temptations and follies of empire — and compromised for peace, sustainability, and the rule of law as it entered the 21st century?

*****

“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government….All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.…I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny imposed upon the mind of man.”

— Thomas Jefferson, United States Founding Father

I know I'm a peak oil heretic when it comes to this but I just can't help myself: "powerdown" isn't the answer. What would should be striving for is a energy plateau well above our current level of energy consumption - there is plenty of clean, renewable energy out there - it just needs to be harnessed effectively. Add in a strong drive for efficiency in all forms of energy consumption and you should be able to create a world economy that thrives on abundant energy for all. But then I'm just a techno-optimist I guess - it must be my inner libertarian coming out again...

I might throw in another quote from THomas Jefferson here, given my tendency to moan about the rise of big brother.

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt... If the game runs sometime against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."

-Thomas Jefferson, after the passage of the Sedition Act, 1798

The Australian has a "decline and fall" style piece on the failing of US power and influence and the rise of China. I think simply extrapolating current trends linearly and forecasting the downfall of America and its replacement with a Chinese hegemon is incorrect (as well as alarmist) - most likely we'll see continuous readjustments until some sort of multi-polar world like Jacques Chirac called for eventuates (barring the outbreak of war of course, in which case who knows what will happen). I have this vague vision of a world in 20 years time where the EU, China, US, Russia, India and a Latin American bloc all have roughly equivalent influence without any single power dominating the way the US has the past 15 years or so.

"These workers, they get $30 a month for a 70-hour week. And they're desperate for the jobs. Desperate. They sleep 15 to a room to come to town to get work. And there's many millions more like them. Which is why whenever you buy something these days, electrical goods, furniture, clothing, shoes, unless you're a snob demanding something actually made in Italy, it will come from China. We used to think their population was the source of their poverty. Now it's the source of their wealth. Same with India. It's the source of their cheap labour, and their market too. Imagine, a billion consumers. More than. They already have a middle class of 300million. That's as many as there are people in the US."

He showed us some furniture leather samples. "Finest Italian leather. For furniture, armchairs, sofas ... soft, so fine, isn't it? ... and here, feel, the Chinese make exactly the same quality at a fraction of the price. Which is why China will soon become the most powerful nation on earth."

He might also have said it was why the US was in serious danger of being shaken out of the top of the economic tree. So many of the manufactured goods we buy have become much more affordable, cheap even. Why? Globalisation, we are told. But the real answer is China.

China's threat to American power and prestige is far more threatening than anything Osama bin Laden can throw at them. He attacked New York and Washington, killed thousands of people, and inflicted damage upon American self-belief and way of life - but in terms of power compared with China, he is an irritant. China's growth has been double-digit for a decade, during which it has become a vacuum cleaner for raw materials from around the world, from which, utilising cheap domestic labour and European and American technologies, it has made and sent a tsunami of consumer goods back out across the world.

Its advantages are manifest. While the US relies upon the under-educated, the underprivileged and illegal immigrants to hold down wages, China has a gargantuan domestic labour pool. It also rules as it pleases, using the Orwellian machinery of the modern totalitarian state, from persuasion and surveillance through to imprisonment and the death penalty, which it uses with even greater alacrity than the US. Not for China the niceties of liberal democracy: no velvet glove over this iron fist. The oligarchy of the Communist Party decrees and the assembly abides, rendering China effectively a boom capitalist economy run by a theoretically anti-capitalist clique. It is a perfect doublethink, and, infuriatingly for China's competitors, it is working very well thank you very much.

The leadership knows, as the people do, that provided the economy continues to perform in terms of rising incomes for greater numbers of Chinese, and wages are kept under control, the system will be deemed to be delivering the goods. In other words, the masses implicitly agree to the myth of the communist doctrine (if they consider it at all) while the elite continues the flow of the cargo to them - the cars, televisions, fridges and washing machines.

If their daughters can wear trendy clothes - and their sons too - who cares about Mao or Marx? Those two are now poster designs, T-shirt images, mugs. And so the show goes on, and the Chinese slice of the pie just gets tastier and fatter, and the American slice smaller, weightwatchers-ish and, well, just not American pie at all any more.

But America has had other things on its mind, literally shaken to its foundations by a fanatical yet wily enemy in a cloak and beard, a cave-dwelling djinn out of the Arabian Nights who has become its public enemy No.1, and who has become a branding for disaffected young Muslims across the world.

In the aftermath of September 11, with the world shocked into sympathy for the US, when painstaking police work was required to find, capture and bring bin Laden to trial, the US instead invaded two sovereign countries. It bombed, rocketed, strafed. It carpet-bombed and cluster-bombed homes, cars and villages. It acted blindly, like a hurt bully.

While Afghanistan is a graveyard of imperial intruders, Iraq is a fish trap. Acting on intelligence now known to be completely wrong and very probably deliberately spurious, the American son went after the black hat his daddy didn't take out in the first place. That, oh, and oil. The US, with the support of Britain and ourselves (though not Russia, most of Europe, the rest of the world, or the UN) went in. And China broke out the beers and deckchairs.

Despite battlefield brouhaha and enough tub-thumping for a Roman galley, the US almost instantly found itself mired in a war it predictably could not win, and which Blind Freddy could have told them - and did - would only ever breed more terrorists. In Iraq insurgents are literally queuing for suicide bomb vests. It's sick, a cult of death, and the US has in effect cultivated it.

What, one might ask, were the lessons of Vietnam? Number one, the big one at the top of the list, triple-underlined in red, was that the US didn't lose because its opponents hid in all that inconvenient jungle. They hid amid the people, because they were the people. They fought the Americans because they saw them as aggressors and invaders of the homeland, just as many Iraqis have seen them. Did the US really think Iraq would be any different because the terrain was open and a desert theatre easier to game? The insurgents didn't need trees to hide in, not even bunkers. As the Vietnamese did, they merge with the populace.

There are, of course, many more complications this time: religious, ethnic, tribal. At least in Vietnam they weren't in the middle of a sectarian conflict in which women and children at markets are seen as legitimate targets for blasting to bits on a daily basis. To the US troops it must feel like trying to keep apart two insane people desperate to kill each other - while knowing that the person both of them wants to kill more than anything, is you. Worse still, you don't understand what they are saying, it's so hot with dust and flies, and you would so much rather be home with your air-con and drive-thru pizza and Xbox and cable, downtown with the good old boys cruising in your Hummer. Iraq is Old Testament. Very old. And the X-gen Chads and Jakes of the US forces are New World. Like, totally. They are not cut out for this kind of stuff, and they know it.

No matter what George W. Bush comes up with over the holiday season, his goose is cooked. One has only to observe the body language on the television news to see US forces are beaten. Rattling over potholes in dusty armoured vehicles, forever tensed at the trigger, expecting any moment to be blown away by a roadside bomb, they are exhausted. Beaten by an enemy of guile, ruthlessness, without fear or moral scruples, and by their own foolish commander-in-chief who dispatched them to a war that lacked any clear goal and was always unwinnable (indeed, as unwinnable as that other war, the one against an abstraction, the so-called war on terror). They have been betrayed by a mixture of gullibility, bravado, greed and simple bloody-mindedness. They are spiritually defeated, beaten by men who possess little more than spirit.

The cost of keeping them there is astronomical, but the final cost item in the column is that while America has been making war, its real opponent, China, has been making money. A lot of it. A very big pot of the stuff, filthy lucre indeed.

In Iraq, we may well be witnessing the eclipse of the US as the world's leading power. Lose, draw, stalemate in Iraq - especially lose, the most likely outcome - and the US will never be the same. Once beaten, its spirit will not recover, and it will go the way of Egypt, Athens, Rome, the Ottomans and Britons. It is finished on the battlefield, finished in the retail stores, even finished on the tennis court, the basketball court for god's sake.

It is being surpassed by peaceful, resourceful China, clever China, ruthless China, China one in nationhood and in spirit, a nation of history, of antiquity, which daily grows stronger and eyes the prizes to be showcased at its coming big event, the 2008 Olympics - indeed, the medal count in Beijing will see these two 21st-century superpowers going head to head.

And, lest we forget, it is a communist country. One Lenin would rant against and Marx would say was in the grip of a rather severe counter-revolutionary setback, but which is nonetheless still run by the Communist Party of Mao, triumphant over Japanese invaders, the nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek, and all outside efforts since to defeat it. And Mao's own response? There might just be a small smile at the edge of his lips, at the achievements of his agrarian revolutionists, now the industrial shock-troops of the Chinese boom.

Commentators expect China to surpass the gross domestic product of the US some time in the next two decades. It stands at the brink of economic triumph over the First World's first nation, the US. And everything springs from economics. We all know that, from the bottoms of our wallets. Marx said it too, and he was right.

Reports of the death of history were exaggerated. The years 2001-08, September 11 to the Beijing Olympics, have been critical for the US, and may well mark its turning point towards eclipse.

Jason at Anthropik once did a post "The Eschatology of the Left" which described peak oil doomerism as the left wing equivalent of the evangelical right's "rapture" in terms of its apocalyptic outlook (and what I'd view as a generally unhealthy set of conclusions about actions that should be taken regarding the future as a result of this worldview).

There are 2 manifestations of this sort of thinking that most irk me (which I could go on and on about with copious examples, but I'll keep this short) - the first is the "we must deliberately collapse industrial society to save the environment" idea that circulates in some eco-anarchist fringes, and the second is the more widespread, and pernicious, belief that the world is over-populated and population must be "controlled" or "reduced", which is often referred to as "ecofascism" (for an interesting summary of the ecofascist movement in Nazi Germany, check out this article). The second of these is one aspect which always makes me wary of parts of the green movement - there seems to be a tendency for Green parties around the world to be heavily influenced (or infiltrated, depending on your point of view) by both the far left and the far right (which seems to vary over time and location), which is why I'd rather see green ideas go completely mainstream and be adopted by all parts of the political spectrum rather than pushing the green political movement itself.

Fascist Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents - Peter Staudenmaier

"We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."

In our zeal to condemn the status quo, radicals often carelessly toss about epithets like "fascist" and "ecofascist," thus contributing to a sort of conceptual inflation that in no way furthers effective social critique. In such a situation, it is easy to overlook the fact that there are still virulent strains of fascism in our political culture which, however marginal, demand our attention. One of the least recognized or understood of these strains is the phenomenon one might call "actually existing ecofascism," that is, the preoccupation of authentically fascist movements with environmentalist concerns. In order to grasp the peculiar intensity and endurance of this affiliation, we would do well to examine more closely its most notorious historical incarnation, the so-called "green wing" of German National Socialism.

Despite an extensive documentary record, the subject remains an elusive one, underappreciated by professional historians and environmental activists alike. In English-speaking countries as well as in Germany itself, the very existence of a "green wing" in the Nazi movement, much less its inspiration, goals, and consequences, has yet to be adequately researched and analyzed. Most of the handful of available interpretations succumb to either an alarming intellectual affinity with their subject." or a naive refusal to examine the full extent of the "ideological overlap between nature conservation and National Socialism." This article presents a brief and necessarily schematic overview of the ecological components of Nazism, emphasizing both their central role in Nazi ideology and their practical implementation during the Third Reich. A preliminary survey of nineteenth and twentieth century precursors to classical ecofascism should serve to illuminate the conceptual underpinnings common to all forms of reactionary ecology.

Two initial clarifications are in order. First, the terms "environmental" and "ecological" are here used more or less interchangeably to denote ideas, attitudes, and practices commonly associated with the contemporary environmental movement. This is not an anachronism; it simply indicates an interpretive approach which highlights connections to present-day concerns. Second, this approach is not meant to endorse the historiographically discredited notion that pre-1933 historical data can or should be read as "leading inexorably" to the Nazi calamity. Rather, our concern here is with discerning ideological continuities and tracing political genealogies, in an attempt to understand the past in light of our current situation -- to make history relevant to the present social and ecological crisis. ...

Reason magazine has an article by Ronald Bailey on "The Lingering Stench of Malthus" which takes issue with Jeremy Rifkin's "beef with cities", which I'll throw in here as it resonates with my belief that cities are the future - and that this is the most important pathway to sustainability.

The majority of human beings are living in cities for the first time in history. Hurray! As the Renaissance Germans said, "Stadtluft macht frei," or "City air makes you free." But not everyone is pleased. Jeremy Rifkin, the president of the leftist Foundation on Economic Trends, recently wrote an op/ed entitled "The Risks of Too Much City" in the Washington Post. Mostly it's filled with vacuous platitudes about "sustainability," but he does decry the growth of cities. "In the great era of urbanization we have increasingly shut off the human race from the rest of the natural world in the belief that we could conquer, colonize and utilize the riches of the planet to ensure our autonomy without dire consequences to us and future generations," he declares. Of course that's exactly what we've done and it's a good thing too.

Rikfin's concern about humanity's alienation from nature has a long pedigree. The foremost philosophical proponent was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who argued that man's natural goodness has been corrupted by civilization, the myth of the "Noble Savage." Romantic poet William Wordsworth penned the lines, "Nature never did betray, The Heart that Loved her." Rifkin himself paints a picture of a prelapsarian idyll. "As long as the human race had to rely on solar flow, the winds and currents, and animal and human power to sustain life, the population remained relatively low to accommodate nature's carrying capacity: the biosphere's ability to recycle waste and replenish resources," he writes.

But let's look behind Rifkin's rhetoric. Why, until a couple of centuries ago, did human population remain, as Rifkin so delicately puts it, "relatively low?" Mostly because of the "positive checks" on population growth identified by economist Thomas Robert Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population, e.g., famine, disease, and war. As a result of these "checks" economic historian Angus Maddison estimates that in 1800 average life expectancy in France was about 30 years and 36 years in Britain. In the 18th century infant mortality was so great in cities that they grew chiefly by means of migration from the countryside. In other words, nature constantly betrayed humanity.

But that began to change in the 19th century. As Karl Marx noted in The Communist Manifesto, bourgeois capitalism fueled the growth of cities and "thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life." History has shown that people prefer the opportunities and excitement of city life to rural idiocy. And the former country idiots are voting with their feet. While some people may be pushed by war or drought, or poverty into cities, most people today are pulled in by the prospect of reinventing themselves, escaping from the narrow strictures of family, class and community, and a shot at really making it.

As humanity has urbanized, we have become ever less subject to nature's vagaries. For instance, a globally interconnected world made possible by the transportation networks between cities means that a crop failure in one place can be overcome by food imports from areas with bumper crops. Similarly resources of all types can be shifted quickly to ameliorate human emergencies caused by the random acts of a brutal insensate nature. Autonomy is just another word for freedom.

The further good news is that the movement of humanity's burgeoning population into the thousand of megacities foreseen that Rifkin is part of a process that ultimately will leave more land for nature. Today cities occupy just 2 percent of the earth's surface, but that will likely double to 4 percent over the next half century. In order to avoid this ostensibly terrible fate Rifkin proclaims, "In the next phase of human history, we will need to find a way to reintegrate ourselves into the rest of the living Earth if we are to preserve our own species and conserve the planet for our fellow creatures." Actually, he's got it completely backwards. Humanity must not reintegrate into nature-that way lays disaster for humanity and nature. Instead we must make ourselves even more autonomous than we already are from her.

Since nothing is more destructive of nature than poverty stricken subsistence farmers, boosting agricultural productivity is the key to the human retreat from wild nature. As Jesse Ausubel, the director for the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, points out: "If the world farmer reaches the average yield of today's US corn grower during the next 70 years, ten billion people eating as people now on average do will need only half of today's cropland. The land spared exceeds Amazonia." Similarly all of the world's industrial wood could be produced on an area that is less than 10 percent of the world's forested area today leaving 90 percent of the world's forests for Nature.

Ausubel argues that the wealth produced by human creativity will spark the Great Restoration of the natural world in this century. As the amount of land and sea needed to supply human needs decreases, both cities and wild nature will expand with nature occupying, or reoccupying, the bulk of the land and sea freed up by human ingenuity. Nature will become an arena for human pleasure and instruction-much as Wordsworth desired--not a source of raw materials.

Ultimately Rifkin is just using vague complaints about urbanization as a stalking horse for "runaway population growth." He thinks that there are just too many people whether they live in cities or not. In other words, Rifkin's just another Malthusian boob with a Gaia-worshiping fetish.

I was listening to a Neofiles episode recently featuring Patrick Di Justo from Wired which touched on the number one factor influencing population growth - education levels for girls. If you are concerned about population growth and want to "defuse the population bomb", the best way to accomplish this is to make sure that girls get good educations (and have the freedom to choose what to do with their lives). Apparently he wrote a section for the WorldChanging book on this though I can't find a section which makes the linkage (though there is a chapter on the importance of educating girls).

One of Stewart Brand's "4 environmental heresies" also deals with the "population bomb" - while I don't really agree with Stewart about nuclear power (yes - its better than coal but its not as good as the other alternatives) I do agree that population isn't the problem some people believe it is.

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

...

The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces -- romanticism and science -- that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.

There are a great many more environmental romantics than there are scientists. That's fortunate, since their inspiration means that most people in developed socie­ties see themselves as environmentalists. But it also means that scientific perceptions are always a minority view, easily ignored, suppressed, or demonized if they don't fit the consensus story line.

Take population growth. For 50 years, the demographers in charge of human population projections for the United Nations released hard numbers that substantiated environmentalists' greatest fears about indefinite exponential population increase. For a while, those projections proved fairly accurate. However, in the 1990s, the U.N. started taking a closer look at fertility patterns, and in 2002, it adopted a new theory that shocked many demographers: human population is leveling off rapidly, even precipitously, in developed countries, with the rest of the world soon to follow. Most environmentalists still haven't got the word. Worldwide, birthrates are in free fall. Around one-third of countries now have birthrates below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) and sinking. Nowhere does the downward trend show signs of leveling off. Nations already in a birth dearth crisis include Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Russia -- whose population is now in absolute decline and is expected to be 30 percent lower by 2050. On every part of every continent and in every culture (even Mormon), birthrates are headed down. They reach replacement level and keep on dropping. It turns out that population decrease accelerates downward just as fiercely as population increase accelerated upward, for the same reason. Any variation from the 2.1 rate compounds over time.

That's great news for environmentalists (or it will be when finally noticed), but they need to recognize what caused the turnaround. The world population growth rate actually peaked at 2 percent way back in 1968, the very year my old teacher Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The world's women didn't suddenly have fewer kids because of his book, though. They had fewer kids because they moved to town.

Cities are population sinks-always have been. Although more children are an asset in the countryside, they're a liability in the city. A global tipping point in urbanization is what stopped the population explosion. As of this year, 50 percent of the world's population lives in cities, with 61 percent expected by 2030. In 1800 it was 3 percent; in 1900 it was 14 percent.

The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history. Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it. In every single region in the world, including the U.S., small towns and rural areas are emptying out. The trees and wildlife are returning. Now is the time to put in place permanent protection for those rural environments. Meanwhile, the global population of illegal urban squatters -- which Robert Neuwirth's book Shadow Cities already estimates at a billion -- is growing fast. Environmentalists could help ensure that the new dominant human habitat is humane and has a reduced footprint of overall environmental impact.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the passing away of ex US president Gerald Ford and his views on the wisdom of the Iraq war.

GEORGE BUSH, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney "made a big mistake" in going to war in Iraq, the former US president Gerald Ford believed. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said in July 2004, a little more than a year after Bush had launched the invasion, supported and carried out by Rumsfeld and Cheney, prominent veterans of the Ford administration.

Cheney, the Vice-President, was Ford's White House chief of staff; Rumsfeld, defence secretary at the time of the invasion, served as Ford's chief of staff and Pentagon chief. The interview with Ford, who died on Boxing Day, was embargoed until his death.

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the President made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

Ford "very strongly" disagreed with Bush's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. Ford, who presided over the bitter end of the Vietnam War, took issue with the notion of the United States entering a conflict to spread democracy. "Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people," Ford said, referring to Bush's assertion that the US has a "duty to free people." But Ford was sceptical "whether you can detach that from the obligation No.1, of what's in our national interest."

Dave Roberts at Grist has a post on Ford and the deferred dream of energy independence.

Former U.S. President Gerald Ford died yesterday at 93.

At the bottom of this post is a long section on energy from Ford's 1975 State of the Union speech. In it he noted that America's surplus oil -- and its attendant ability to stabilize world oil prices and prevent the emergence of a petroleum cartel -- had vanished in 1970; we had become net importers of oil. He worried about our loss of energy independence and recommended a crash course in energy production.

You will recall that President Carter took those concerns seriously and put in place programs to address them. But the cartel that formed after we lost our energy independence, OPEC, quite enjoyed our dependence. Rather than use it to hurt us, it plied the world market with cheap oil, upon which floated enormous U.S. prosperity. Ronald Reagan abandoned all pretense of fighting for energy independence and instead cruised on cheap-oil-driven economic growth to "Morning in America."

Reagan's decision to suck at the teat of OPEC, and offer political obeisance in return, was driven by many things, not least political expedience, but high among them was the realization that cheap oil prosperity could help us expand our military and weaponry and spend the Soviet Union into the dirt.

Was it worth it? That's a more complicated question than lots of folks will admit, but one thing's for sure: We're paying the piper now. We've got to figure out the energy independence equation in circumstances much more difficult than those that faced Gerald Ford. We import and use vastly more energy now, real shortages in our energy sources are imminent, and above all, we now know that fossil fuel use is driving global warming.

Look at Ford's solution: more oil drilling; more coal mining and coal-fired power plants; more nukes; synfuels; oil shale; natural gas deregulation. Conservation was an afterthought, and attempts to tax oil imports or oil company profits were easily swatted away by Big Oil.

Despite our changed circumstances, and despite the demonstrated failure of supply-oriented energy strategy, those same priorities still hold sway in federal energy policy. The economic and political elites still push for more supply and more consumption.

It's time to try demand reduction. And it's time to think of an answer to "how much is enough?" more thoughtful than "more."

Dave also has a post on the opportunity costs of the Iraq War.

Yes! Yes, yes, yes. This is the op-ed column I've been waiting to see, and there's nobody better to write it than Richard Clarke.

His point is simple but poorly understood and rarely discussed: the total cost of the Iraq War includes not just the tangible price of personnel and materiel. There are also the opportunity costs -- the other things we could and should have been dealing with while our Munch-meets-Marx Brothers nightmare has been consuming all our attention and capital.

Foremost among them?

Global warming: When the possibility of invading Iraq surfaced in 2001, senior Bush administration officials hadn't thought much about global warming, except to wonder whether it was caused by human activity or by sunspots. Today, the world's scientists and many national leaders worry that the world has passed the point of no return on global warming. If it has, then human damage to the ecosphere will cause more major cities to flood and make the planet significantly less conducive to human habitation -- all over the lifetime of a child now in kindergarten. British Prime Minister Tony Blair keeps trying to convince President Bush of the magnitude of the problem, but in every session between the two leaders Iraq squeezes out the time to discuss the pending planetary disaster.

I generally try to avoid the "read the whole thing" shtick, but ... really. Read the whole thing.

It seems Christopher Hitchens wasn't much of a Ford fan, as he delivers a departing salvo from the pages of Slate.

One expects a certain amount of piety and hypocrisy when retired statesmen give up the ghost, but this doesn't excuse the astonishing number of omissions and misstatements that have characterized the sickly national farewell to Gerald Ford. One could graze for hours on the great slopes of the massive obituaries and never guess that during his mercifully brief occupation of the White House, this president had:

1. Disgraced the United States in Iraq and inaugurated a long period of calamitous misjudgment of that country.
2. Colluded with the Indonesian dictatorship in a gross violation of international law that led to a near-genocide in East Timor.
3. Delivered a resounding snub to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the time when the Soviet dissident movement was in the greatest need of solidarity.

Instead, there was endless talk about "healing," and of the "courage" that it had taken for Ford to excuse his former boss from the consequences of his law-breaking. You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so. But by the standards of "healing" celebrated this week, one could argue that O.J. Simpson should have been spared indictment lest the vexing questions of race be unleashed to trouble us again, or that the Tower Commission did us all a favor by trying to bury the implications of the Iran-Contra scandal. Fine, if you don't mind living in a banana republic.

To enlarge on the points that I touched upon above: Bob Woodward has gone into print this week with the news that Ford opposed the Bush administration's intervention in Iraq. But Ford's own interference in the life of that country has gone unmentioned. During his tenure, and while Henry Kissinger was secretary of state, the United States secretly armed and financed a Kurdish rebellion against Saddam Hussein. This was done in collusion with the Shah of Iran, who was then considered in Washington a man who could do no wrong. So that when the shah signed a separate peace with Saddam in 1975, and abandoned his opportunist support for the Kurds, the United States shamefacedly followed his lead and knifed the Kurds in the back. The congressional inquiry led by Rep. Otis Pike was later to describe this betrayal as one of the most cynical acts of statecraft on record.

In December 1975, Ford was actually in the same room as Gen. Suharto of Indonesia when the latter asked for American permission to impose Indonesian military occupation on East Timor. Despite many denials and evasions, we now possess the conclusive evidence that Ford (and his deputy Kissinger) did more than simply nod assent to this outrageous proposition. They also undertook to defend it from criticism in the United States Congress and elsewhere. From that time forward, the Indonesian dictatorship knew that it would not lack for armaments or excuses, both of these lavishly supplied from Washington. The figures for civilian deaths in this shameful business have never been properly calculated, but may well amount to several hundred thousand and thus more than a quarter of East Timor's population.

Ford's refusal to meet with Solzhenitsyn, when the great dissident historian came to America, was consistent with his general style of making excuses for power. As Timothy Noah has suggested lately, there seems to have been a confusion in Ford's mind as to whether the Helsinki Treaty was intended to stabilize, recognize, or challenge the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. However that may be, the great moral component of the Helsinki agreement—that it placed the United States on the side of the repressed populations—was ridiculed by Ford's repudiation of Solzhenitsyn, as well as by his later fatuities on the nature of Soviet domination. To have been soft on Republican crime, soft on Baathism, soft on the shah, soft on Indonesian fascism, and soft on Communism, all in one brief and transient presidency, argues for the sort of sportsmanlike Midwestern geniality that we do not ever need to see again.

Another leader to pass away, who won't be mourned by anyone, let alone Christopher Hitchens was Saddam Hussein - Josh Marshall reports on the demise of the dictator.

"Bush administration officials" are telling CNN that Saddam Hussein will be hanged this weekend. Convention dictates that we precede any discussion of this execution with the obligatory nod to Saddam's treachery, bloodthirsty rule and tyranny. But enough of the cowardly chatter. This thing is a sham, of a piece with the whole corrupt, disastrous sham that the war and occupation have been. Bush administration officials are the ones who leak the news about the time of the execution. One key reason we know Saddam's about to be executed is that he's about to be transferred from US to Iraqi custody, which tells you a lot. And, of course, the verdict in his trial gets timed to coincide with the US elections.

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur -- phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

Try to dress this up as an Iraqi trial and it doesn't come close to cutting it -- the Iraqis only take possession of him for the final act, sort of like the Church always left execution itself to the 'secular arm'. Try pretending it's a war crimes trial but it's just more of the pretend mumbojumbo that makes this out to be World War IX or whatever number it is they're up to now.

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren't grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing's a mess and that they're going to be remembered for it -- defined by it -- for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president's issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off -- so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic 'So There!'

Marx might say that this was not tragedy but farce. But I think we need to get way beyond options one and two even to get close to this one -- claptrap justice meted out to the former dictator in some puffed-up act of self-justification as the country itself collapses in the hands of the occupying army.

Marty Peretz, with some sort of projection, calls any attempt to rain on this parade "prissy and finicky." Myself, I just find it embarrassing. This is what we're reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there's nothing else this president can get right.

What do you figure this farce will look like 10, 30 or 50 years down the road? A signal of American power or weakness?

The Independent has Robert Fisk's take on the end of Saddam - He takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him.

How the West armed Saddam, fed him intelligence on his 'enemies', equipped him for atrocities - and then made sure he wouldn't squeal

We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States - and Britain - gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support - given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War - is dead.

Gone is the man who personally received the CIA's help in destroying the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized power, US intelligence gave his minions the home addresses of communists in Baghdad and other cities in an effort to destroy the Soviet Union's influence in Iraq. Saddam's mukhabarat visited every home, arrested the occupants and their families, and butchered the lot. Public hanging was for plotters; the communists, their wives and children, were given special treatment - extreme torture before execution at Abu Ghraib.

There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam held a series of meetings with senior American officials prior to his invasion of Iran in 1980 - both he and the US administration believed that the Islamic Republic would collapse if Saddam sent his legions across the border - and the Pentagon was instructed to assist Iraq's military machine by providing intelligence on the Iranian order of battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct contacts between Washington and Baghdad - at America's request.

I'll close with a piece from the Cato Institute on "Russia's Disproportionate Response to Borat". I accidentally saw Borat a few days ago and I'm still trying to rid my brain of the hotel room scene (which ends with Borat chasing his manager down to the floor of the Mortgage Brokers Convention). While Sacha Baron Cohen generally makes me cringe and has a tendency to go way past the point of what is funny, I did enjoy bits of it - and it also reminded me that what Australians or English people would either laugh at or simply ignore (as they automatically understand when someone is taking the piss) is often taken seriously in some quarters of America, with the modern day evangelical right notably lacking in any sense of humour whatsoever. The rodeo scene did show some guts (Borat was looking pretty pale when he sang the "Kazakhstan is number one / other countries have girly men for leaders bit) - I wish they'd kept the cameras rolling when he fled the arena - but the reaction of the crowd to the "kill everyone in Iraq and drink their blood" line was rather illuminating (you wouldn't get that crowd reaction in Oz or the UK, thats for sure, no matter where you went)...

In Russia today one hears more and more about which activities should be banned because they might be "offensive" to "certain types of viewers." It's not just movies, either. The Moscow city authorities recently banned the gay-pride parade in Russia's capital because some people might be offended by the existence of gay people. However, after banning that peaceful expression, they went on to ban a racist "Russian March" by ultra-nationalists, which was an aggressive expression of hatred against all foreigners and "aliens." ...

A ban on Borat, though, is a ban of a different and more alarming kind. Television broadcasts (set aside cable) are broadcast on the "public airwaves." Marches take place in public and on public streets. A public body may claim the right to decide what will be shown on television or who may march on the public streets. But films (Borat's Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan included) are shown in private movie theaters. So whether someone considers Sasha Baron Cohen a talented comic, a witless jerk, a clever and provocative social critic, an offensive boor, or something else, everyone can make the choice of whether to buy a movie ticket and enter a private theater. No one is forced to be a part of the audience.

Until recently, while the post-Soviet Russian state rigorously claimed its monopoly over the public domain, it left self-expression, art, and entertainment largely to the free choices of free people. For example, earlier calls by some Orthodox activists to ban the screening of Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ" and the "Da Vinci Code" were completely ignored. However the Danish cartoon scandal led the authorities to undertake an all-out campaign against "religiously offensive" publications in the (public?) media domain.

For the first time in post-Soviet history, the government banned a non-pornographic film, thereby intervening in the cultural domain. Whether the state's actions could be explained by poor sense of humor or rigid foreign policy perspectives ("let's not offend the neighboring Kazakhstan"), they are dangerous and unforgivable. Naturally, "Borat" is better-off now - the surrounding drama hyped up the public interest and undoubtedly the movie will be readily available on Russia's vast entertainment black market. ...

The Russian government's actions in blatantly banning Borat are not justified. The ability to accept the freedom of others to express themselves without infringing on the equal freedom of other men is an integral part of living in an open society. This is something that is yet to be learned in Russia – after all, if one would ban movies, plays, music or videos that are offensive to "certain ethnic groups and religions", who makes the decision of what is offensive, and how is that not cultural authoritarianism?