The Barrels From Brazil  

MonkeyGrinder has a post on the big green fuel lie and the migration of the chainsaw birds to Brazil to eat the rainforest.

The Big Green Fuel Lie

Ethanol is nothing new in Brazil. It has been used as fuel since 1925. But the real boom came after the oil crisis of 1973 spurred the military dictatorship to lessen the country's reliance on foreign imports of fossil fuels.

...

But there is a darker side to this green revolution, which argues for a cautious assessment of how big a role ethanol can play in filling the developed world's fuel tank. The prospect of a sudden surge in demand for ethanol is causing serious concerns even in Brazil. The ethanol industry has been linked with air and water pollution on an epic scale, along with deforestation in both the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests, as well as the wholesale destruction of Brazil's unique savannah land.

Fabio Feldman, a leading Brazilian environmentalist (...) believes that Brazil's trailblazing switch has had serious side effects. "Some of the cane plantations are the size of European states, these vast monocultures have replaced important eco-systems," he said. "If you see the size of the plantations in the state of Sao Paolo they are oceans of sugar cane. In order to harvest you must burn the plantations which creates a serious air pollution problem in the city."

Another post card from our dark green future. One million "flex" cars a sold in Brazil in 2005, against 300k in 2005, and the results can be seen from space.

Sugar cane is the best natural bio-fuel crop, bar none. Best EROEI. And the best disaster.

Where, exactly, are these psuedo-green cars driving?

It seems important. Got to cross 15 miles, or 15 city blocks. It is hip to drive. Brazil is a big country, USA big. Gotta go - somewhere. Time to go.

Fops and technocrats point to Brazil as some kind of great green energy success.

I think not.

No one will understand what all those cars were doing, when they look back at our civilization from one hundred years hence. New fields of mathematics will be devised to uncover the truth. Mad fools will suspect an endless quest for cheese poofs and sex, and will propose unsolvable conjectures.

Negative trends in the world culture are not being reversed now that "Global Warming" is recieved wisdom. Earth services are being consumed with finality. Like the Middle East before, only faster. Desertification is the new black. The national bird of Brazil is a chainsaw.

Maybe this is the final solution. Maybe it is working.

The Australian has a report on the effect ethanol demand is having on food prices.

CLIMATE change and energy security are beginning to underwrite world grain and oilseed prices as governments increase subsidies and mandatory targets for biofuels. The use of corn in ethanol production in the US is tipped to reach 80 million tonnes this year, consuming about 30 per cent of the entire US crop.

Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics commodities manager Vince O'Donnell told the Outlook conference in Canberra yesterday that promotion of alternative fuel sources by governments in the US, Europe and China would continue to boost most grains prices over the next five years. Coarse grains such as barley and corn, and oilseeds such as canola can be used for production of fuels such as ethanol and biodiesels, which are being promoted to compete with OPEC producers and for their lower greenhouse gas emissions.

The use and development of these fuels was relatively low in Australia, Mr O'Donnell said, but grain growers recovering from the drought could expect export prices to hold and improve with strong global demand. "In the medium term, demand for grains and oilseeds is expected to increase, driven largely by increasing demand for use in the production of biofuels," he said.

Ethanol has become a major driver of course grains demand, with 100 operational plants in the US producing 20 billion litres and another 73 under construction, he said. ABARE has previously forecast that existing biofuel technology would require a sustained world oil price of more than $US55 ($71) a barrel to make ethanol production competitive.

Without sourcing alternative feedstocks, the effect of major mandatory biofuel targets will be to cannibalise food crop production.

The US government announced plans earlier this year to reduce petrol usage by 20 per cent within a decade, largely by increased use of biofuels. In his State of the Union speech last month, US President George W. Bush said domestic ethanol and alternative fuel output was expected to reach 160 billion litres a year by 2017. Europe has mandated 2 per cent use of biofuels, rising to 5.75 per cent by 2010, estimated by the International Energy Agency to require 20 per cent of Europe's cropland area be diverted from food to fuel.

George Bush has been to Brazil to sign an ethanol deal with the Brazilians, prompting an outburst of emotion from the locals.

Police have clashed with Brazilian protesters over a visit by US President George W Bush and his push for an ethanol energy alliance with Latin America's largest nation.

Riot police fired tear gas at protesters and beat them with batons after more than 6,000 people held a largely peaceful march through the financial heart of South America's largest city, sending hundreds of demonstrators fleeing and ducking into businesses to avoid the mayhem. Authorities did not immediately report any injuries, but Brazilian media said at least six people were hurt and photographers took pictures of injured people being carried away. ...

During the march, some protesters carried stalks of sugarcane - used to make ethanol in Brazil - and a banner reading: "For every litre of ethanol produced, 4 litres of fresh water are consumed, monoculture is destroying the nation's greatest asset." "Bush and the United States go to war to control oil reserves, and now Bush and his pals are trying to control the production of ethanol in Brazil. And that has to be stopped," said Suzanne Pereira dos Santos of Brazil's Landless Workers Movement.

Activists from the environmental group Greenpeace warned that increased ethanol production could lead to further clearing of the Amazon rainforest as well as cause social unrest, since most sugarcane-ethanol operations are run by wealthy families or corporations that reap most of the benefits while the poor are left to cut the cane with machetes.

"It can create more problems than solutions," said Rebeca Lerer, 30, Greenpeace's Brazil co-ordinator for climate and energy. "The cane cutters will be affected, we're going to have more jungle burning, which could harm the environment, and even producers of other crops will suffer."

I wonder if the Brazilians have called in the priests to purify the site after Bush's visit, like the Guatemalans plan to do ?

Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday. "That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday. ...

Tiney said the "spirit guides of the Mayan community" decided it would be necessary to cleanse the sacred site of "bad spirits" after Bush's visit so that their ancestors could rest in peace. He also said the rites — which entail chanting and burning incense, herbs and candles — would prepare the site for the third summit of Latin American Indians March 26-30.

Bush's trip has already has sparked protests elsewhere in Latin America, including protests and clashes with police in Brazil hours before his arrival. In Bogota, Colombia, which Bush will visit on Sunday, 200 masked students battled 300 riot police with rocks and small homemade explosives.

The tour is aimed at challenging a widespread perception that the United States has neglected the region and at combatting the rising influence of Venezuelan leftist President Hugo Chavez, who has called Bush "history's greatest killer" and "the devil."

When I look at this time and energy being wasted on an environmentally destructive energy security chimera I think of Steve Jobs' old challenge to John Sculley (which didn't work out at that well, but nevertheless) - "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water or do you want a chance to change the world ?". If only this effort was being spent on building clean energy infrastructure and electric (or fuel cell based) transport infrastructure.

Of course, you could say George has changed the world - but I doubt anyone would claim its for the better.

Moving on, the Energy Blog has a post on the world's first 100% biodiesel power plant.

Biofuels Power Corp. announced today that it has begun producing and selling electricity into the ERCOT Power Grid from its biodiesel powered generating plant in Oak Ridge North, Texas. The Oak Ridge North facility is the first power plant in the country to run entirely on biodiesel, a renewable carbon neutral fuel produced from vegetable oil and animal fat. Biofuels Power plans to build a series of biodiesel powered electric generating plants to serve residential and industrial customers in the Houston Metropolitan area.

The Oak Ridge North facility has a capacity of up to 5 Megawatts and uses three diesel powered Caterpillar generators that run exclusively on biodiesel fuel produced by the Safe Renewables refinery located within two miles of the power plant.

Biofuels Power is now constructing a larger turbine-based biodiesel power plant at the Safe Renewables’ refinery site. The second facility is expected to deliver over 10 Megawatts into the Entergy power grid.

The Energy Blog also has a post on making ethanol from whey - Little Miss Muffet, take note.

Red Herring reports that startup Earthanol of Newport Beach, CA has raised $7.1 million in venture funding to make ethanol from waste.

Unlike typical ethanol producers, Earthanol is trying to utilize a cheese industry waste called whey permeate, an acidic by-product that is generally considered environmentally harmful. Earthanol will also try to utilize forestry biomass and municipal waste containing high energy content. The $7.1 million is being earmarked for development work. The company will decide within two years whether to build an ethanol manufacturing facility.

The Alarm:Clock adds: The Company sees its total market opportunity as approximately ten whey permeate projects totaling 100M gallons of ethanol per year.

The more feedstocks that are developed, the more ethanol we can make. Whey will not produce much volume, but since whey is normally disposed of it makes an excellent feedstock requiring no land use to produce the feedstock.

The Australian has an interesting article on a bioplastic company called Plantic.

A MELBOURNE-based firm which has developed the world's most environment-friendly plastic has met a strong response from potential investors in London as Europe increasingly searches for "green" products.

Grant Dow, the chief executive of Plantic Technologies, which makes plastics using corn rather than oil products, said yesterday that after three days of initial talks in London he was confident the firm would succeed in a float on London's Alternative Investment Market in May, which is expected to value the firm at $100 million.

Plantic has struggled for three years to meet its initial goals for its oil-free product, but Mr Dow said the time was now right, as European industry and policy-makers focus more on ways to reduce carbon emissions and oil dependence. "This is just a great time to be selling this in Europe because our story resonates with people here," he said. "There is a huge awareness right across Europe of the need to do something about carbon emissions and it is a fantastic opening for us. Germany has imposed a tax on non-degradable plastic packaging, the EU is getting into all sorts of negative incentives with other penalties and taxes, and industry is spending more and more money to reduce its carbon footprint."

Britain, for example, is trying to reduce its plastic consumption, which includes 150 million plastic carrier bags each week, with 85 per cent of the waste ending up as landfill. "Britain is trying to minimise the amount of landfill it uses and (retailers) Tesco and Sainsbury are trying to out-green each other every day, talking about reducing their energy use and increasing recycling," Mr Dow said.

Sweden has set an ambitious goal of becoming the world's first oil-free economy, and British Environment Secretary David Milliband this week followed the Swedes in raising the prospect of becoming of an oil-free economy.

"All that awareness has really only taken off here in the last six months and it is growing exponentially, and that is playing right into what we are trying to do," Mr Dow said. Using technology developed by CSIRO, Swinburne University and Queensland University, Plantic was set up in 2001 to produce plastics based on corn starch rather than oil products. The firm claims it takes less energy to manufacture the product, which can dissolve in water or turn into fertiliser rather than taking up to 500 years to break down - like many plastics.

Billabong founder Gordon Merchant is the largest shareholder, holding about a quarter of Plantic, which takes its name from a combination of plastic and plant. ...

In his meetings with institutional investors in London, where he hopes to raise pound stg. 15 million ($37.2 million), Mr Dow has found Plantic's ambitions "a pretty easy story to tell". "I show them some of our material and they think it is regular plastic until I show them what it can do. If you pour water on it, it actually starts to melt in front of you." While other plastic wrappers lingered for years as "branded litter", any Plantic product left outside in the rain would soon break down into a healthy fertiliser. "The total amount of energy consumed during the life cycle of this product - from manufacture to decomposition - is approximately half that of plastics derived from non-biodegradable petrochemicals. It doesn't take a lot of brain power to understand the significance of that nowadays," said Mr Dow.

I'm not sure the "breaks down in water quickly" characteristic will always be seen as a positive - water resistance would seem to be a major reason for using plastic packaging rather than paper or cardboard....

The Australian also has a report on a new biofuel plant in Europe that uses a variant of the Fischer-Tropsch process to process woodchips and other waste biomass.

A NEW road fuel made from woodchips and straw will be launched in Europe later this year from a pilot plant developed by Shell and Choren Industries, the German biofuel company.

The synthetic diesel, made using a novel biomass-to-liquids (BTL) process, will eradicate many of the current concerns about the biodiesel industry by using waste plant material instead of valuable food crops. The pilot plant, near Freiberg in eastern Germany, will produce 15,000 tonnes a year of synthetic diesel, dubbed Sunfuel.

Most first-generation biofuels, such as ethanol, are made from food crops such as sugar, rapeseed and palm oil. Growing concern about global warming and the consequent rising interest in alternative fuels have caused the cost of food crops to soar.

It is the second major investment in biofuels for Shell in as many weeks after it secured a $US80 million ($102 million) grant from the US Government to build a plant in Idaho, which will produce cellulosic ethanol from plant waste and straw. Construction of a much bigger plant in Schleswig-Holstein, costing E500 million ($839 million) and capable of producing 200,000 tonnes of BTL, will begin next year in an effort to quickly bring the product up to commercial scale.

Energy companies are under huge, and increasing, political and regulatory pressure to find low-carbon alternatives to conventional road fuels. Shell's vice-president for strategy, Ken Fisher, admitted yesterday the cost of BTL was still high compared with oil at $US60 to $US70 a barrel. But he said the company was confident it could bring down the price with much higher volumes. Mr Fisher expects full-scale production on a commercial basis by the middle of the next decade. "We would like to be the leading provider of second-generation biofuels," he said.

The technology used to produce the biofuel is based on the Fischer-Tropsch process, invented in Germany in the 1930s to synthesise liquid fuels from coal. The process was initially uneconomic, but was used in Nazi Germany and South Africa under apartheid when the country lacked access to crude oil.

The same article notes the development of a hybrid tug boat.

The cost of ethanol rose 70 per cent last year as the market reacted to the regulatory pressure to reduce carbon and sulphur emissions. With shipping also under pressure to find alternative fuels, a US-based tugboat company has unveiled plans to give the industry's grimy workhorse an ecological makeover, adding an electric hybrid system to the tug's powerful diesel engines.

Foss Maritime, a tug and barge operator based in Seattle, is teaming with the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, to build the electric-diesel hybrid tug. Foss's hybrid design is similar to the technology used in hybrid cars such as Toyota's Prius, though the tug's engine was more directly inspired by diesel hybrids used in some railroad vehicles.

"Inside GreenTech" has a post on the latest report from Clean Edge, noting the large growth expected for fuel cells (mainly Combined Heat and Power units). It notes the Honda fuel cell and hydrogen powered car combination (mentioned in that Edwin Black interview the other day) now isn't expected until 2018. Inside Greentech also notes that the French postal service plans to buy thousands of electric vehicles, and the US government is granting $385M to six cellulosic ethanol plants.

A latest report from industry analyst firm Clean Edge predicts continued healthy growth in solar, wind and other high profile clean energy industries. But look for the biggest growth in the fuel cell market, according to the report, forecasting an increase of more than 11x in the next ten years, even without taking into account fuel cell vehicles.

In its report Clean Energy Trends 2007, released today, Clean Edge forecasts that the fuel cell sector will continue to grow steadily from $1.4B in 2006, primarily for research contracts and demonstration and test units, to $15.6B over the next decade. By comparison, the group is predicting 3x to 4x growth in solar, wind and biofuels over the same time period.

Clean Edge sees the increase coming primarily from stationary fuel cells used in power plant and combined heat-and-power (CHP) applications. (examples: Sierra Nevada Brewing buys fuel cell power plants and Cal State Northridge fuel cell power plant now online.) And if anything, its fuel cell sector growth estimates may be conservative, Clean Edge said in a press conference this morning. "The one wild card in fuel cells is in Japan, where the government is calling for tens of thousands of stationary residential fuel cell systems and fuel cell vehicles over the next 5-10 years. If Japan is successful, our numbers will need to be revised."

The Japanese government has set a goal to power 1.2 million homes with fuel cells by 2010 – a total of 1.2GW of distributed generating power, and has provided subsidies and other incentives to encourage uptake. While appearing ambitious, that only represents around two per cent of the country’s 47 million households - indicative of a major market opportunity there and elsewhere.

In recent months, major automakers have announced fuel cell vehicles (see Ford's HySeries Drive to power other vehicles and Honda to take until 2018 to produce fuel cell cars.)

Yet despite optimism about stationary applications, Clean Edge analysts don't expect significant uptake of fuel cell cars in the near future, highlighting the evolution of electric batteries as a trend of more significance to the transportation industry. "Hydrogen is not going to be the realm of mom and pop sedans anytime soon," said Joel Makower, co-founder and principal of Clean Edge. "It's going to be a specialty fuel, one of a myriad of fuels we'll be using in the diverse transportation world of the future." Makower pointed to encouraging use of fuel cell vehicles in niche transportation markets, such as golf cart and forklift applications (see Fuel cell trucks complete trials at Wal-Mart.)

TreeHugger also has a post on the Clean Edge report.

Yesterday, clean energy and technology research and publishing firm Clean Edge released its sixth annual Clean Energy Trends report. According to the report, as well as to company principals Ron Pernick and Joel Makower in a press conference yesterday, 2006 was another year that demonstrated that clean energy technologies, including wind and solar power, biofuels, and fuel cells, are on an "inexorable upward march." Growth and technological breakthroughs are now the norm:

We have reached the point where the steady and rapid growth of clean energy has become an old story. Each year, it seems, brings an ever-higher plateau of success. This appears to be the future of clean energy: a rolling series of technology breakthroughs, landmark corporate investments, industry consolidation, and the not-infrequent emergence of new and sometimes surprising players entering the field.

According to the report, the four benchmark technologies for Clean Edge's research -- solar photovoltaics, wind power, biofuels and fuel cells -- posted a combined 39% jump in annual revenue. In ten years, however, that will be just a drop in the bucket:



Additionally, Rodrigo Prudencio, a partner in VC firm Nth Power, the report's lead sponsor, took note of a "flood" of venture capital pouring into energy tech startups in '06: $2.4 billion, which represents a 262% jump over 2005, and stands as second only to the year 2000 in energy technology investing. Prudencio noted that one of the most "curious" developments of the year involved VC investment in infrastructure: "Investors poured more than $1 billion into steel, cable, and concrete." This is curious because they don't carry the promise of high payoffs typical for projects that VCs normally back. Prudencio also addressed concerns about a clean tech "bubble," noting that the growth in deal size shows a realistic perspective on company valuations.

Finally, the report, as in past years, takes note of five trends worth watching:

* Carbon Finally Has a Price...and a Market
* Biorefineries Begin to Close the Loop
* Advanced Battery Makers Take Charge
* Wal-Mart Becomes a Clean-Energy Market Maker
* Utilities Get Enlightened

For the details on these trends, download and read the report. In eighteen pages, Clean Edge argues convincingly (and pardon the cliche') that the future really is so bright, we have to wear shades.

Green groups are urging the Australian government to follow the EU lead on renewable energy.

The federal government should follow the European Union's lead and set serious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Green groups say. European Union leaders from 27 countries including the United Kingdom overnight pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 per cent from 1990 levels before 2020.

They also agreed to increase renewable energy sources from six per cent to 20 per cent by 2020, although they remain divided on nuclear energy, and to run at least 10 per cent of European cars on biofuels made from plants. German Chancellor Angela Merkel challenged other nations to follow suit, saying the world still had time to "avoid what could well be a human calamity" caused by climate change.

The Greens and the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) today urged the federal government to take up the EU's challenge.

"This is a major breakthrough in the international effort to tackle climate change," ACF executive director Don Henry said. "Our federal government and opposition should position Australia as a global leader on climate change, rather than a climate laggard, by adopting strong, legally binding 2020 targets to reduce greenhouse pollution." Scientists had said a reduction target of 20-30 per cent among industrialised countries was needed to avoid dangerous climate change, Mr Henry said.

The Greens' climate change spokeswoman senator Christine Milne also urged Prime Minster John Howard and Labor Leader Kevin Rudd to follow the EU's lead. She said the Liberal's two per cent mandatory renewable energy target and Labor's five per cent target were pitiful in a nation with such an abundance of clean energy available. ...

Many Australian states have also set their own targets to buy more renewable energy. Western Australia has pledged to use renewable sources for one-fifth of its energy needs within three years, South Australia within seven years and Victoria within 13 years. NSW has set targets of 15 per cent renewable energy consumption by 2020.

European leaders hope their commitment to tackling climate change will encourage other leading polluters, such as the US, Russia, China and India, to agree on deep emissions cuts.

The SMH reports that the coal industry is trying to shut down a website of a anti-coal ming group.

THE mining industry has used copyright laws to close an anti-mining website launched by a small protest group in Newcastle.

The NSW Minerals Council has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a TV, print and billboard advertising campaign and launched a website extolling the virtues of mining. The campaign's slogan is "Life: brought to you by mining". The anti-coal group Rising Tide created its own website sending up the campaign with comments such as "Rising sea levels: brought to you by mining".

The website's hosts were forced to remove it within 24 hours of its launch, after the Minerals Council issued a notice under the Copyright Regulations 1969 complaining the content and layout infringed copyright. Rising Tide remade the website, using its own photographs and layout. However, the council lodged a second complaint. "They are trying to silence us," said a Rising Tide member, Steve Phillips. "We have issued a counter-notice rejecting the Minerals Council's spurious claims. [It] now has 10 days in which to take the matter [to court]."

There is growing public concern about coal's contribution to climate change, and mining's threat to underground and above-ground water supplies.

The coal industry isn't happy about the Greens' climate change plans either.

Local Greens candidates have jumped on Senator Bob Brown's climate-change bandwagon, touting the phasing-out of coal exports as the answer to global warming. Reaction to the plan has been hostile, with Mark O'Neil, executive director of the Australian Coal Association (ACA), calling it a "dangerous distortion".

The Greens assert that burning coal is the biggest cause of climate change, and have called for a three-year plan to phase out coal exports. "Australia is the world's largest coal exporter, accounting for about 30 per cent of total world trade. This makes us a heavy contributor to global warming," Kelly Marks, Greens candidate for Coogee, said. "In fact our coal exports result in emissions of more than 600 million tonnes when burnt. This is more than Australia's total domestic emissions."

Grist reports that Britain's favorite topless model is now an eco-spokesperson. I guess that means Viridian strategy is working.... (JCWinnie - you can go straight here instead).

Lots of climate and energy news today, so here's some Friday frippery. How excited do you think Guy Adams of The Independent was when his editor told him to interview Keeley Hazell about her green principles? Hazell, well known in Britain as a winsome Page Three girl (that's British for "nudie newspaper model"), posed last year slathered in green paint, alongside several tips for green living. As a result, she was named on Tory leader David Cameron's Christmas list of eco-heroes. Now The Independent is all over the follow-up story, giving Adams a chance to find out how green this model -- whose "assets perk up The Sun once a fortnight" -- really is. Seems the 20-year-old's green habits include buying organic, lighting her flat with candles and energy-saving bulbs, riding a scooter, recycling, and not getting breast implants. Swear to god! As Adams writes, "If the green lobby is to work, it must be a broad church ... if it can conquer Page Three it can probably conquer anything."

Its quite entertaining watching the various contenders (and their partisans) for the next US election trying to blacken one anothers' names early on in the running. I'm not much of a fan of Hillary Clinton but this apparent hit job on MSNBC about her university thesis had me somewhat bemused - is it trying to marginalise her as a closet radical or win her some friends on the far left (i'd assume the first as the second seems to be a very small constituency) ?

he senior thesis of Hillary D. Rodham, Wellesley College class of 1969, has been speculated about, spun, analyzed, debated, criticized and defended. But rarely has it been read, because for the eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency it was locked away.

As forbidden fruit, the writings of a 21-year-old college senior, examining the tactics of radical community organizer Saul D. Alinsky, have gained mythic status among her critics — a “Rosetta Stone,” in the words of one, that would allow readers to decode the thinking of the former first lady and 2008 presidential candidate. ...

Rodham’s thesis describes trying to pin him down on his personal philosophy: “Alinsky, cringing at the use of labels, ruefully admitted that he might be called an existentialist,” she wrote. Rodham tried to ask him about his moral relativism — particular ends, he said, often do justify the means — but Alinsky would only concede that “idealism can parallel self-interest.”

In her paper, she accepted Alinsky's view that the problem of the poor isn't so much a lack of money as a lack of power, as well as his view of federal anti-poverty programs as ineffective. (To Alinsky, the War on Poverty was a “prize piece of political pornography,” even though some of its funds flowed through his organizations.) “A cycle of dependency has been created,” she wrote, “which ensnares its victims into resignation and apathy.”

In formal academic language, Rodham offered a “perspective” or muted critique on Alinsky's methods, sometimes leaving unclear whether she was quoting his critics or stating her own opinion. She cited scholars who claimed that Alinsky's small gains actually delayed attainment of bigger goals for the poor and minorities.

In criticizing the “few material gains” that Alinsky engineered — such as pressing Kodak Co. to hire blacks in Rochester, or delaying the University of Chicago's expansion into the Woodlawn neighborhood — Rodham placed part of the blame on demography, the diminishing role of neighborhoods in American life. Another part she laid charitably to an Alinsky character trait: “One of the primary problems of the Alinsky model is that the removal of Alinsky dramatically alters its composition," she wrote. "Alinsky is a born organizer who is not easily duplicated, but, in addition to his skill, he is a man of exceptional charm."

In the end, she judged that Alinsky's “power/conflict model is rendered inapplicable by existing social conflicts” — overriding national issues such as racial tension and segregation. Alinsky had no success in forming an effective national movement, she said, referring dismissively to “the anachronistic nature of small autonomous conflict.”

Putting Alinsky's Rochester symphony threat into academic language, Rodham found that the conflict approach to power is limited. “Alinsky's conclusion that the ‘ventilation’ of hostilities is healthy in certain situations is valid, but across-the-board ‘social catharsis’ cannot be prescribed,” she wrote.

She noted, however, that he was trying to broaden his reach: In 1969, Alinsky was developing an institute in Chicago at his Industrial Arts Foundation, aimed at training organizers to galvanize a surprising target: the middle class. That was the job he offered to Hillary Rodham.

Though some student activists of the 1960s may have idolized Alinsky, he didn't particularly idolize them. At the time Hillary Rodham brought him to Wellesley in January 1969 to speak at a private dinner for a dozen students, he was expressing dissatisfaction with New Left protesters such as the Students for a Democratic Society. One of his criticisms, surprisingly, was their tactical mistake of rejecting middle-class values.

Rodham closed her thesis by emphasizing that she reserved a place for Alinsky in the pantheon of social action — seated next to Martin Luther King, the poet-humanist Walt Whitman, and Eugene Debs, the labor leader now best remembered as the five-time Socialist Party candidate for president.

“In spite of his being featured in the Sunday New York Times," she wrote of Alinsky, "and living a comfortable, expenses-paid life, he considers himself a revolutionary. In a very important way he is. If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, the result would be social revolution. Ironically, this is not a disjunctive projection if considered in the tradition of Western democratic theory. In the first chapter it was pointed out that Alinsky is regarded by many as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy. As such, he has been feared — just as Eugene Debs or Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has been feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths — democracy.”

Sidebar: ALINSKY's RULES FOR RADICALS - "Personalize it"

Saul Alinsky's rules of power tactics, excerpted from his 1971 book "Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals"

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Whenever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. Maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Raise The Hammer points to a review of "Crude Awakening" via a post called "An Inconvenient Despair".

The Toronto Star's Peter Howell has panned the just released Peak Oil movie, "A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash." Noting its depressing no-light at the end of the tunnel undercurrent, Howell concludes: "A movie this grim risks switching off the very minds it seeks to engage."

That's a shame, but it's not entirely surprising. After watching the End of Suburbia and The Corporation in the same week, my wife told me she was "going shopping for a new husband" because I was so depressed.

Similarly, I have many friends who refuse to watch An Inconvenient Truth because they "know it will be too depressing."

The challenge for environmentally concious movie makers is how to educate their audience and instruct them as well. If we cannot take any hope away with us from the theatre, then what's the point?

As Howell also notes, "There are actually people out there who are trying to solve this problem, although you'd never know it by watching A Crude Awakening."

It's a point we all should take note of.

Long ago I reported that Jay Hanson had given up peak oil prognostication. I noticed an odd military visitor in the logs recently who was apparently doing some research on Jay which prompted me to see if he'd reappeared - and lo and behold - "killer ape peak oil" is apparently thriving. The content looks much the same as "The Dieoff Q&A" - don't waste your brain space is my advice, unless you enjoy wallowing in doomerism, year after year after year...

To close, here's George Monbiot's confession to being an agent of the New World Order, which has probably been highly annoying to the tinfoil world, though I haven't noticed any discussion of it (not that I follow the "911 Truth" world).

I've still failed to form a strong opinion about 911 conspiracy theories - personally I'd regard "Loose Change" as good tinfoil from my usual standpoint of viewing tinfoil as form of art (basically a tightly defined form of speculative fiction) - but Loose Change wasn't good tinfoil when compared to better exponents of the art of making connections and weaving them into a conspiracy theory - RI and WantToKnow seem to be the best on this front (obviously RI is also a great example of tinfoil as art form as well being a gold mine for apopheniacs indulging in some paranoia or looking for little known stories from the past)...

“You did this hit piece because your corporate masters instructed you to. You are a controlled asset of the New World Order … bought and paid for.” “Everyone has some skeleton in the cupboard. How else would MI5 and the Special Branch recruit agents?” “Shill, traitor, sleeper”, “leftwing gatekeeper”, “accessory after the fact”, “political whore of the biggest conspiracy of them all.”

These are a few of the measured responses to my article, a fortnight ago, about the film Loose Change, which maintains that the US government destroyed the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Having spent years building up my left-wing credibility on behalf of my paymasters in MI5, I’ve blown it. I overplayed my hand, and have been exposed, like Bush and Cheney, by a bunch of kids with laptops. My handlers are furious.

I believe that George Bush is surrounded by some of the most scheming, devious, ruthless men to have found their way into government since the days of the Borgias. I believe that they were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence about a potential attack by Al Qaeda, and that they have sought to disguise their incompetence by classifying crucial documents. I believe, too, that the Bush government seized the opportunity provided by the attacks to pursue a long-standing plan to invade Iraq and reshape the Middle East, knowing full well that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush deliberately misled the American people about the links between 9/11 and Iraq and about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He is responsible for the murder of many tens of thousands of Iraqis.

But none of this is sufficient. To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile, while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the Twin Towers with explosives without attracting attention, and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly-timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes, and induce them all to kept their mouths shut, for ever.

In other words, you must believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their pals are all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful, despite the fact that they were incapable of faking either weapons of mass destruction or any evidence at Ground Zero that Saddam Hussein was responsible. You must believe that the impression of cackhandedness and incompetence they have managed to project since taking office is a front. Otherwise you are a traitor and a spy.

Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements which some of us have spent a long time trying to build. Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues – climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality – are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress; that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy; that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish.

The obvious corollorary to the belief that the Bush administration is all-powerful is that the rest of us are completely powerless. In fact it seems to me that the purpose of the “9/11 truth movement” is to be powerless. The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward’s fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don’t have the stomach to engage in real political fights.

Let me give you an example. The column I wrote about Loose Change two weeks ago two weeks ago generated 777 posts on Comment is Free, which is almost a record. Most of them were furious. The response from a producer of the film, published last week, attracted 467. On the same day I published an article about a genuine, demonstrable conspiracy: a spy network feeding confidential information from an arms control campaign to Britain’s biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE. It drew 60 responses. The members of the 9/11 cult weren’t interested. If they were, they might have had to do something. The great virtue of a fake conspiracy is that it calls on you to do nothing.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a displacement activity. A displacement activity is something you do because you feel incapable of doing what you ought to do. A squirrel sees a larger squirrel stealing its hoard of nuts. Instead of attacking its rival, it sinks its teeth into a tree and starts ripping it to pieces. Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the “truth” movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don’t exist, they can’t fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.

Many of those who posted responses on Comment is Free contend that Loose Change (which was neatly demolished in the BBC’s film The Conspiracy Files on Sunday night) is a poor representation of the conspiracists’ case. They urge us instead to visit websites like 911truth.org, physics911.net and 911scholars.org, and to read articles by the theology professor David Ray Griffin and the physicist Steven E. Jones. Concerned that I might have missed something, I have now done all those things, and have come across exactly the same concatenation of ill-attested nonsense as I saw in Loose Change. In all these cases you will find wild supposition raised to the status of incontrovertible fact; rumour and confusion transformed into evidence; selective editing; the citation of fake experts; the dismissal of real ones. Doubtless I will now be told that these are not the true believers: I will need to dive into another vat of tripe to get to the heart of the conspiracy.

The 9/11 truthers remind me of nothing so much as the climate-change deniers, cherry-picking their evidence, seizing any excuse for ignoring the arguments of their opponents. Witness the respondents to my Loose Change column who maintain that the magazine Popular Mechanics, which has ripped the demolition theories apart, is a government front. They know this because one of its editors, Benjamin Chertoff, is the brother/nephew/first cousin of the US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. (They are, as far as Benjamin can discover, unrelated, but what does he know?).

Like the millenarian fantasies which helped to destroy the Levellers as a political force in the mid-17th century, this crazy distraction presents a mortal danger to popular oppositional movements. If I were Bush or Blair, nothing would please me more than to see my opponents making idiots of themselves, while devoting their lives to chasing a phantom. But as a controlled asset of the New World Order, I would say that, wouldn’t I? It’s all part of the plot.

Monbiot also has a post on "Another species of denial".

George Bush proposes to deal with climate change by means of smoke and mirrors. So what’s new? Only that it is no longer just a metaphor. After six years of obfuscation and denial, the US government now insists that we find ways to block some of the sunlight reaching the earth. This means launching either mirrors or clouds of small particles into the atmosphere.

The demand appears in a recent US memo to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It describes “modifying solar radiance” as “important insurance” against the threat of climate change. A more accurate description might be important insurance against the need to cut emissions.

Every scheme that could give us a chance of preventing runaway climate change should be considered on its merits. But the proposals for building a global parasol don’t have very many. A group of nuclear weapons scientists at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California, apparently bored of experimenting with only one kind of mass death, have proposed launching into the atmosphere a million tonnes of tiny aluminium balloons, filled with hydrogen, every year. One unfortunate side-effect would be to eliminate the ozone layer.

Another proposal, developed by a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, suggests spraying billions of tonnes of seawater into the air. Regrettably the production of small salt particles, while generating obscuring mists, could also cause droughts in the countries downwind. Another scheme would inject sulphate particles into the stratosphere. It is perhaps less dangerous than the others, but still carries a risk of causing changes in rainfall patterns. As for flipping a giant mirror into orbit, the necessary technologies are probably a century away. All these fixes appear to be more expensive than cutting the amount of energy we consume. None of them reduces the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which threatens to acidify the oceans, with grave consequences for the food chain.

The demand that money and research be diverted into these quixotic solutions is another indication that Bush’s avowed conversion to the cause of cutting emissions is illusory. He is simply drumming up some new business for his chums. In his State of the Union address last week, he spoke of “the serious challenge of global climate change” and announced that he was raising the government’s mandatory target for alternative transport fuels fivefold. This is wonderful news for the grain barons of the red states, who will grow the maize and rapeseed that will be turned into biofuel. It’s a catastrophe for everyone else.

An analysis published last year by the Sarasin Bank found that until a new generation of vegetable fuels, made from straw or wood, is developed “the present limit for the environmentally and socially responsible use of biofuels [is] roughly 5% of current petrol and diesel consumption in the EU and US.” Bush now proposes to raise the proportion to 24% by 2017. Already, though the rich world has replaced just a fraction of one per cent of its transport fuels, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that using crops to feed cars has raised world food prices, with serious consequences for the poor. Biofuels fall into the same category as atmospheric smoke and mirrors – a means of avoiding difficult decisions.

But at least, or so we are told, the argument over whether or not manmade climate change is happening is now over. On Friday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publishes the first instalment of its vast report, which collates the findings of the world’s climate scientists. Though conservative in its assumptions, it shows that if you persist in believing that there is no cause for concern you must have buried your head till only your toes are showing. If even George Bush now grudgingly acknowledges that there’s a problem, surely we’ve seen the last of the cranks and charalatans who had managed to grab so much attention with their claims that global warming wasn’t happening?

Some chance. A company called WAG TV is currently completing a 90-minute documentary for Channel 4 called “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. Manmade climate change, the channel tells us, is “a lie … the biggest scam of modern times. The truth is that Global Warming is a multi-billion dollar worldwide industry: created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists; supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding; and propped up by complicit politicians and the media. ... The fact is that CO2 has no proven link to global temperatures … solar activity is far more likely to be the culprit.”

So it’s the same old conspiracy theory that we’ve been hearing from the denial industry for the past ten years, and it carries as much scientific weight as the contention that the Twin Towers were brought down by missiles. The programme’s thesis revolves around the deniers’ favourite canard: that the “hockey-stick graph” showing rising global temperatures is based on a statistical mistake made in a paper by the scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes. What it will not be showing is that their results have now been repeated several times by other scientists using different statistical methods; that the paper claiming to have exposed the mistake has been comprehensively debunked and that the lines of evidence used by Mann, Bradley and Hughes are just a few among hundreds demonstrating that 20th century temperatures were anomalous.

The decision to commission this programme seems even odder when you discover who is making it. In 1997, the director, Martin Durkin, produced a very similar series for Channel 4 called “Against Nature”, which also maintained that global warming was a scam dreamt up by environmentalists. It was riddled with hilarious scientific howlers. More damagingly, the only way in which Durkin could sustain his thesis was to deceive the people he interviewed and to edit their answers to change their meaning. Following complaints by his interviewees, the Independent Television Commission found that “the views of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing” and that they had been “misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.”(14) Channel 4 was obliged to broadcast one of the most humiliating primetime apologies it has ever made. Are institutional memories really so short?

So now the whole weary business of pointing out that the evidence against manmade climate change is sparse and unable to withstand critical scrutiny while the evidence in favour is overwhelming and repeatedly confirmed must begin all over again. How often do scientists have to remind the media that a handful of cherry-picked studies does not amount to the refutation of an entire discipline?

But with George Bush’s defection, the band of quacks making these claims is diminishing fast. Now the oil and coal companies which support such people have changed their target. Instead of trying to persuade us that manmade global warming is a myth, they are seeking to divert us into doing everything except the one thing that has to happen – reducing our consumption of fuel. It is another species of denial.