The Difference Engine  

Bruce Sterling made an unusual appearance on the pages of the Washington Post a little while ago, noting "My Dot-Green Future Is Finally Arriving".

I was standing among a crowd of radical Serbs in front of the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade last week when it dawned on me: As a futurist, things are really going my way! It's 2007, and the old world has backfired so comprehensively that a new era is truly at hand. I actually knew this would happen. I guess, for a prophet, this is what victory feels like!

Back in 1998, the Mexican state of Chiapas caught fire and the smoke from its rainless "rain forests" stretched all the way to Chicago. In Austin, my home town, the sky was the color of a dead television channel. Living under that hideous gout of smoke, I realized that the much-anticipated greenhouse effect was as real as dirt. Most people didn't grasp that at the time. That's okay by me: If everybody got it about issues of that sort, I wouldn't get paid for being a futurist. As it happened, though, five years earlier I'd written a science-fiction novel about climate change. So I was fully briefed.

Al Gore won an Academy Award last week and, who knows, may rack up a Nobel Prize for describing the perfectly obvious. Not the future, but stuff that happened years ago. Go watch his dull, plonking, painfully backward documentary. You see those ice caps melting? That has major consequences.

Wall Street investment tycoon Henry Kravis, the original "Barbarian at the Gate," is buying into Texas coal plants so they won't exist. The great and the good at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, were corporate green all the way. Austin has proclaimed itself the world capital of the war on climate change. Britain's Stern Report on the economics of climate change proves that it's cheaper to run a world than to wreck it. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has figured out that a climate crisis is as scary as a nuclear exchange. And there is an absolute explosion of trendy green design Web logs, of which mine, Viridiandesign.org, was one of the first.

They're all about creating irresistible consumer demand for cool objects that will yield a global atmosphere upgrade. It's the Net vs. the 20th-century fossil order in a fight that the cybergreens are winning. Why? Because they're not about spiritual potential, human decency, small is beautiful, peace, justice or anything else unattainable. The cybergreens are about stuff people want, such as health, sex, glamour, hot products, awesome bandwidth, tech innovation and tons of money.

We're gonna glam, spend and consume our way into planetary survival. My own favorite sci-fi planetary-saving scheme for naming, numbering and linking to the Internet every piece of junk we create so that it can be corralled and briskly recycled, creating a cradle-to-cradle postindustrial order and averting planetary doom, may sound pretty shocking and alien. But I wrote that book while in residency at a famous design school. I received an honorary doctorate there and the book was published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It gets great reviews, designers love it. It's not even science fiction -- it's a cybergreen manifesto.

In 1998, I had it figured that the dot-com boom would become a dot-green boom. It took a while for others to get it. Some still don't. They think I'm joking. They are still used to thinking of greenness as being "counter" and "alternative" -- they don't understand that 21st-century green is and must be about everything -- the works. Sustainability is comprehensive. That which is not sustainable doesn't go on. Glamorous green. I preached that stuff for years. I don't have to preach it anymore, because it couldn't be any louder. Green will never get any sexier than it is in 2007. Because, after this, brown will start going away. ...

"The Register" reckons that Bruce Sterling's recent talk at SXSW gave blogging 10 years to live. I'm not sure why the Register guys hate blogs and Wikipedia so much - they seem to have some unhealthy master-slave relationship with authority figures - constantly criticising big brother while not wanting anyone else to talk back.

Science fiction writer and professional pundit Bruce Sterling has cracked bloggers with the extinction stick, saying the plebs will crawl back into their ooze by 2017. "There are 55 million blogs and some of them have got to be good," Sterling said, during a speech here at the SXSW conference in reference to the slogan on blog search site technorati.com. "Well, no, actually. They don't. I don't think there will be that many of them around in 10 years. I think they are a passing thing."

The great blog nation seemed unthreatened by Sterling's comments, as they giggled away at his tone and language. Such satisfaction struck us odd given that most of the SXSW panels touched on blogging in one way or another and around 80 per cent of the attendees claimed to run a blog. ...

"It's like watching you get beaten to death with croutons," Sterling remarked about the daily diary/moment diary fads of blogs and Twitter. Sterling has serious concerns about the technology world's obsession with blogging and group think projects such as Wikipedia. He sees the technology emanating from a "a new world of laptop gypsies". "You are never going to see a painting by committee that is a great painting," he said.

The gypsy idea plays on Sterling's notion that blogging and so-called community driven projects aren't really new at all. They're emerging from something close to tribal instincts of man passing down stories in an unregulated fashion outside of the mainstream. "It is really pretty old," he said. "It has just never been put into mass scale production. I don't call it a good thing. I think it's just a new thing."

Still, Sterling sees this "commons-based peer production" as the "third world" of current economic development, following the first world of global markets and his second world that consists of all forms of governance. ...

And, while the rise of the web has given us 55 million blogs, Sterling insisted that the US charges after more bandwidth by taking wireless spectrum from the cold, dead hands of television broadcasters and handing it to organisations willing to saturate cities with high-speed wireless services. Sterling's admitted "rant" proved one of the most popular sessions at SXSW and closed out the "interactive" portion of the event. We were shocked to see hundreds of bloggers turn up for a berating, but get the feeling they're an S&M-type set.

I don't disagree with Bruce all that often but I think (if he was quoted correctly - I haven't listened to the podcast) that he's crackers on this one. As far as I can tell MySpace and the like have become the modern day equivalent of a diary and message boards / news groups for teenagers, and I can't see that growth trend (as it ripples through the connected world and the connected world continues to expand) ending for some time.

[Update - apparently Bruce's meaning has been completely misunderstood]

While a lot of the first wave of blogs have either shut down (like the great Billmon), "sold out" (ie. gone on staff for regular media organisation like Glenn Greenwald) or reduced their posting frequency greatly, I still think blogging, especially when done properly (obviously I'm not talking about people who diarise what their cat ate today), will continue to be a uniquely valuable way of communicating for some time. Even for those people with small readerships, it still serves an important purpose - every post you write is a form of voting, especially when you use links. The "votes" are a combination of adding content and opinion to the internet at large, and, more importantly, feeding the ratings engines represented by the likes of Google and Technorati that heavily influence what people actually read - so even if an individual blog has few readers, it does help to democratically influence what the internet thinks of as valuable information. Of course, you can get a similar effect by submitting or voting on links at del.icio.us, reddit, Digg and the like as well - but this input isn't as effective as a well done blog post - as your influence can grow over time, assuming people find you interesting and worth linking to, thus increasing the weight of your "vote".

One related phenomenon Bruce criticised was "Twitter" (I suspect correctly this time), which also got a blog post of disapproval from Jamais at Open The FUture.

Please, Not A Twitter Entry: Before SXSW, I'd never heard of Twitter, a "microblogging" app that lets you send quick updates via text message (IM or SMS) to people who care about the very latest cute thing your cat did. After SXSW, I'd be happy never to hear the word again. The program went through an entire invisible except to people in the know --> fringetech that wows the geekerati --> what do you mean you don't use it? --> ubi-"we're thinking of calling it twitter-by-south-twitter next year"-quitous --> "twitter? that's so over" cycle in 4 days.

Still, this is kind of cool: near-real-time earthquake alerts via twitter. Just add sfearthquakes as a friend.

Jamais also has some ideas on a "global incident map for the environment".

Mapping the Present, Seeing the Future: Wired's Danger Room blog noted late last month the emergence of a fun little mashup map site called GlobalIncidentMap.com. Global Incident Map smooshes data about a wide array of suspicious events onto a Google Map page. It's not the first or the only site to do this, but it does so in a way that nicely maximizes visitor anxiety.

But I thought of it again when I saw this pair of reports: the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has opened up its CarbonTracker website, offering high-quality maps and animations of carbon dioxide levels for both North America and the globe; and the European Space Agency has now released its SCIAMACHY maps and data, showing the global flux of both atmospheric CO2 and methane. In neither case is the mapping real-time (the ESA data goes through 2005, while the NOAA maps go through 2006), but that will change.

My question, though: Why can't we have a Global Incident Map type site for the environment? Combing through news reports, NASA/ESA/NOAA data, even user submissions to put together an anxiety-inducing map of where the world is going environmentally. It should be possible...

An interesting post on the evolution of the blogosphere also appeared at Progressive Historians, with "nonpartisan" invoking the ghost of the great blogger - asking "Have the Bannings Proved Billmon Right ?". I always thought that masthead graphic on Kos looked a little Stalinesque, and it certainly provoked plenty of comment ... (if there are any Kossacks reading I'm just kidding about the Stalin thing).

On this one I'd note that this is one reason I don't particularly like group blogs - especially large hives like Kos with an individual ruler- I prefer the model where everyone has their own soapbox and they use links, comments, trackbacks and Technorati to interconnect everything. Small pieces, loosely joined, as the saying goes.

In the history of every sociopolitical movement, there comes a seminal moment when the leaders of the movement must decide whether to stay true to their principles or to give in to the easy prerogatives of success.

Typically such a moment takes the shape of a struggle between two great movement leaders, one of whom becomes ostracized as a result. In Athens, where the term "ostracism" was invented to determine who would lead the city-state in war against the invading Persians, Aristides the Just lost to Themistocles and had to leave the city while Themistocles successfully directed the battle. In medieval England, the supporters of aristocratic rule symbolically (and literally) defeated the tyrant King John at Runnymede and forced him to sign the Magna Carta. In the American Revolution, the confrontation between farmer-turned-rebel Daniel Shays and the post-revolutionary federal system represented by Samuel Adams resulted in the increased nationalism of the Constitution. In Soviet Russia, Stalin's exile (and eventual assassination) of Leon Trotsky represented the critical break with the ideals of the Revolution -- a dynamic that was repeated in China later in the century with Mao's imprisonment of Liu Shaoqi.

The impact of these confrontations cannot be underestimated. The defeats of John and Aristides ushered in new eras of prosperity and reform in their respective countries, while the elimination of Trotsky and Liu signaled the end of fealty to the ideals of the revolutions they represented. The defeat and exile of Shays presaged the victory of his demand for a more nationalized system of American governance.

So when we who observe the political blogosphere with an eye to history notice the same sort of confrontation brewing between two of the movement's leading lights, we ought to stand up and say something, because the moment is likely very, very important. In fact, such a moment has already arrived and passed, its significance overlooked in the rush of political news. Allow me to take my eye off the electoral ball for a moment and analyze the impact Armando/Big Tent Democrat's recent banning has on he state of the political blogosphere.
Nonpartisan :: Have the Bannings Proved Billmon Right?
But before we get to Armando, let's look at someone who made exactly the same argument I'm about to make -- over two years ago. In an eerily prescient op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Billmon, one of the original front-pagers at Daily Kos, argued that Big Blogging had sold out to the corporate media:

Even as it collectively achieves celebrity status for its anti-establishment views, blogging is already being domesticated by its success. What began as a spontaneous eruption of populist creativity is on the verge of being absorbed by the media-industrial complex it claims to despise.

In the process, a charmed circle of bloggers - those glib enough and ideologically safe enough to fit within the conventional media punditocracy - is gaining larger audiences and greater influence. But the passion and energy that made blogging such a potent alternative to the corporate-owned media are in danger of being lost, or driven back to the outer fringes of the Internet. ...

To be sure, there are still plenty of bloggers out there putting the 1st Amendment through its paces, their only compensation the satisfaction of speaking the truth to power. But it's going to become more difficult for those voices to reach a broad audience. If the mainstream media are true to past form, they will treat the A-list blogs - commercialized, domesticated - as if they are the entire blogosphere, while studiously ignoring the more eccentric, subversive currents swirling deeper down. Not the most glorious ending for a would-be revolution, but also not a surprising one. Bloggers aren't the first, and won't be the last, rebellious critics to try to storm the castle, only to be invited to come inside and make themselves at home.

At the time, Markos' response to the post seemed sufficient:

I don't think Daily Kos represents the ideal of blogging. I think bloggers with 100 daily visitors are the essence of the blogosphere -- and those guys, collectively, reach a lot more than Daily Kos does. While 100 daily visitors may seem shrimpy, it's pretty darn impressive to build an audience that size. When I hit that milestone, I remember thinking, "Damn, I couldn't even fit that many people in my house!" Now it's seen as a sign of failure, and that's just bullshit.

I'm willing to bet that there are far more blogs getting 100 visitors a day today than there were 2 years ago when I hit that milestone. To me, that's what's important, not that some people have commercialized their blogs.

But wasn't it telling even at the time that Markos only highlighted the response pieces of Kevin Drum, Chris Bowers, and Digby, commercialized bloggers all (and voices who agreed with him all)?

Since that time, the situation Billmon described in his article has gotten worse. Where once there were few in the blogosphere who attacked the legitimacy of Daily Kos, now there are many. Some are merely jealous of Markos' success; but there are others who see a growing problem with the movement he has led for the past five years. Powerful voices have been banned from the site in recent months, people like Armando and Pyrrho, and others have been warned for "infractions" which usually amount to disrespecting the site or its proprietor. If this is not "selling out" a movement, I'm not sure what is.

Markos' banning of Armando last month was, in my view, the critical break with the "Let a Hundred Bloggers Bloom" model of blogging that had predominated since the beginning of the movement. It was the historical equivalent of Stalin's exiling of Trotsky from Russia. Marisacat and her circle have routinely viewed Armando as sitting at the epicenter of the nefarious corruption of the Big Boyz of Blogging, his abusive behavior to other posters held up as evidence of a double standard of behavior for those who were "in" with the BBB and those who were "out." Such analyses miss some essential differences between Armando and the other members of the BBB. While Armando was in fact abusive to other posters when he considered their arguments intellectually dishonest, he was also a powerful and influential voice for equality. To Armando, the only thing that mattered was whether he thought your argument was valid; he didn't care whether you were Meteor Blades or some newbie who just signed up yesterday, you were dealt with based only on your ideas. This stance resulted in Armando's often finding himself in the uncomfortable position of supporting someone he barely knew over his friends in the BBB - friends who, like DHinMI and Plutonium Page, later turned on him and called for his ouster.

Armando was also unique among the BBB in his willingness to befriend a wide variety of unique characters, people who he defended for their incisive minds when others wanted them ignored or banned. Maryscott O'Connor, Pyrrho, BooMan, Galiel, Miss Devore - all at one time or another found solace in Armando's comment threads. This celebration of oddballs and counter-blog-culture individuals was something absolutely unique to Armando among the BBB; with his fall from grace, no such creative minds have gotten anywhere near the inner circle of the BBB. The result is a shocking Stepfordization of the elite left blogosphere, with few dissenting or creative opinions expressed on any but the smaller blogs.

Various people have argued that Markos crashed the gate and then locked it up again. I'm not convinced that's true - it's still possible for individuals who blog hard and politick harder to achieve a marked influence in electoral politics. The problem is that this situation in itself is antithetical to what the Internet politics movement was supposed to be in the first place. Blogging wasn't intended as a way for political ladder-climbers like Markos, Matt Stoller, and the rest to claw their way into the DC elite; it was supposed to be a way for every American to have a greater voice in their national governance. Howard Dean spoke for every American when he vowed to "take our party back, and then take our country back;" today, those few who entered the political elite have come to resemble it so much that they are as far from the public they hope to represent as the DLC once was.

Viewed in this fashion, the goal should not have been to crash the gate at all; it should have been to move the center of political power from inside the gate to outside it. The problem wasn't who was in the DC elite, but that there was a DC elite at all - the whole people, from the mechanic down the street to the executive in his swanky office, should have a real say in their governance beyond just their vote. That goal has emphatically not been achieved through the political blogosphere, and I now believe it never will be. The BBB have no interest in eschewing meritocracy in order to preserve true equality in the blogosphere for all Americans who choose to participate. For them, as for the Orwellian porkers in Animal Farm, some are truly more equal than others.

All political movements are at risk of foundering when their leaders are invited into the elite circle, or when they lose track of the bigger issues (the disenfranchisement of Middle America) in favor of the more superficial ones (Iraq, impeachment). This one, however, never had a chance. Built of a spontaneous thirst for individualized political ownership, Internet blogging has become, finally and inexorably, just another flavor of corporatized media. The only difference is that those in power now are still new enough to have some memory of where they came from, and are therefore more responsive to the rest of us than were the dried-up people they replaced. That's a good thing, but it's far from the sweeping political revolution many of us envisioned during the Dean campaign. In the end, all that's left of that vision are Armando's electronic record and Billmon's Cassandra-like lament.

Of course, the old Monty Python criticism of the squabbling left comes to mind a bit, as one commenter noted:

REG: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah...
JUDITH: Splitters.
P.F.J.: Splitters...
FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
REG: What?
LORETTA: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters.
REG: We're the People's Front of Judea!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
REG: People's Front! C-huh.
FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?
REG: He's over there.
P.F.J.: Splitter!

Moving on, TreeHugger has an in depth guide to greening your electronics.

Yes, electronic devices are becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives, especially as they get smaller and smaller. We use them as tools and toys to communicate, work, enjoy media, and be expressive. Being green with electronics doesn’t mean living in a teepee listening to truckers squalk on the old short-wave. Greening your electronics is a matter of knowing what tech to get, how to use it best, and what to do with it when its useful life is done. Many of these best practices aren’t things you’ll read in the instruction manual, either. In this guide we’ll tell you how to stop wasted energy, what gizmos are greener than others, and what to do about e-waste and electronics recycling. We’ll also show you some of the newest green gadgets coming over the horizon. ...

Grist has a post on Al Gore's visit to Congress. I like the "electranet" proposal (a stepping stone to the global distributed energy grid) - putting in place the infrastructure to enable distributed, renewable energy generation by everyone...

Exhibiting a curious mixture of nostalgia and irreverence, Al Gore returned to the halls of Congress yesterday to make the case for sweeping federal action to fight global warming.

Buoyed by his recent Academy Award triumph, Gore testified at hearings in both the House and the Senate. Audiences of hundreds lined the oak-paneled walls of the hearing rooms, crowded the aisles, and craned their necks for a glimpse of Capitol Hill's comeback kid. It was the kind of blockbuster turnout that Gore now draws at nearly every public appearance, yet in this case it felt particularly profound given that his last visit to congressional turf in January 2001 -- when he presided over the Senate in his final days as veep, after a foiled presidential bid -- marked the loneliest hour of his political career.

"It's an emotional occasion for me," Gore confessed at the outset of his House testimony. Throughout the course of the hearings, which together lasted more than four hours, he exchanged affectionate greetings and memories with many of the dozens of participants from both sides of the aisle -- former colleagues on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, both of which he served on during his 16-year congressional career.

But amid the niceties, Gore got down to business. While much of the media coverage has portrayed his visit as a largely symbolic attempt to raise the political profile of the climate issue, too little attention has been paid to the ambitious set of 10 legislative recommendations that were the centerpiece of his testimony. The recommendations were so ambitious -- so politically implausible, some might say -- that they could arguably disqualify Gore from any hope of again becoming a viable political candidate. Either that, or these high-flying goals could make him all the more unstoppable.

"First, we need to immediately freeze CO2 levels in the U.S.," Gore enjoined the crowd. He then proposed a cap-and-trade program that would slash greenhouse-gas emissions 90 percent by 2050. (This goal outstrips the most ambitious yet proposed in Congress, which calls for reductions of 80 percent by the same date, and is widely considered unattainable.)

Gore went on to recommend a program that would significantly cut income taxes and make up the lost federal revenue with pollution taxes, principally on carbon dioxide. "I fully understand this is considered politically impossible," he said, "but part of our challenge is trying to expand the limits of what is possible." When Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) questioned the need for both a carbon cap and a carbon tax, given that the debate is typically over one or the other, Gore argued for both.

Other items on Gore's legislative list included a new global post-Kyoto treaty that Congress should "sprint to ratify" by 2010; a moratorium on the construction of new coal plants that would not be compatible with carbon-capture and sequestration technology; stricter fuel-economy standards; a ban on incandescent light bulbs; and a carbon-neutral mortgage association (CNMA or, as Gore pronounced it, "Connie Mae") that would help homeowners finance energy-saving technologies and renewable-energy installations.

Capping off his list was a proposal for a so-called "electranet" -- a distributed network that would enable small-business owners and homeowners to become individual electricity producers, feeding their excess renewable energy back into the grid. ...

Further reaffirming Gore's sway were the discomfort and dismay he seemed to effortlessly inflict on a handful of skeptical Republicans. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, was beside himself at the House hearing, complaining that Gore hadn't handed in a copy of his testimony 24 hours in advance, thereby leaving committee members at a disadvantage. "How are we supposed to prepare questions?" he griped. Groaned Texas Rep. Ralph Hall (R), "Today we are witnessing an all-out assault on all forms of fossil fuels and energy!" Later in the day, James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Senate's most die-hard climate-change denier, fumed when he felt Gore was taking too long to answer his questions. "You had 30 [minutes to speak]," he squawked. "I had 15! You've got to let me have my 15!" Gore came out of it all looking like an elder statesman while his detractors looked like fearful, squabbling teenagers.

Aaron from PeakOil.com has a blog post of an interview he did with the greatly missed Richard Smalley a few years ago - "Our Energy Challenge.

I had the distinct honor of spending time with the late Dr. Richard Smalley at his office on Rice University's campus in 2004 (Bad Audio Recording of Interview). Smalley & his team are credited with discovering Bucky Balls & Nano Tubes, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The linked video is a presentation he gave which outlines his understanding of the challenges we face as humanity journeys into this strange new world of the future.

Basically he says that Man's biggest problem is our energy profile, & how we will meet the demands of future generations. He speculates that the difficulties expected as conventional oil peaks in production & begins declining could be met by harvesting the Terra watts of energy which fall on our Planet everyday... if only we understood the science behind this energy in greater detail.

His argument is that our technologies are so inefficient, that all of our planet's energy needs could be met through harvesting sunlight by reclaiming this wasted energy.

The central difficulty is our ability to control materials at the micron-level.

Without the technology to manufacture to this micron standard, we lose most of the energy we harvest to the inefficient nature of how the materials conduct & distribute this energy.

Dr. Smalley noted that we still use the same technology to transmit electricity as we have for 150 years... & it's terribly inefficient as a carrier. Around half the electric power we generate from any source is wasted in "leakage" from these poorly constructed materials. (Copper wire)

But if we could figure out how to manipulate these materials, we could build new systems which would be many times more efficient than today's materials.

There is plenty of primary science which lays ahead of such developments, with no clear guarantee of success. But this line of research may well represent our best hope of meeting our energy challenge.

So without further adieu, take a peek at Dr. Smalley as he explains his thoughts about our future.

* We miss you sir.

http://128.42.10.107/media/Smalley_OEF_20031101_300k.wmv

Michael Meacher has an excellent article in The Guardian on "The rape of Iraq's oil", which outlines a lot of the case for Iraq being "The Greatest Prize of All".

The Baghdad government has caved in to a damaging plan that will enrich western companies.


The recent cabinet agreement in Baghdad on the new draft oil law was hailed as a landmark deal bringing together the warring factions in the allocation of the country's oil wealth. What was concealed was that this is being forced through by relentless pressure from the US and will sow the seeds of intense future conflict, with serious knock-on impacts on the world economy.

The draft law, now before the Iraqi parliament, sets up "production sharing partnerships" to allow the US and British oil majors to extract Iraqi oil for up to 30 years. While Iraq would retain legal ownership of its oil, companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP that invest in the infrastructure and refineries would get a large share of the profits.

No other Middle Eastern oil producer has ever offered such a hugely lucrative concession to the big oil companies, since Opec has always run its oil business through tightly-controlled state companies. Only Iraq in its present dire condition, dependent on US troops for the survival of the government, lacks the bargaining capacity to resist.

This is not a new plan. According to documents obtained from the US State Department by BBC Newsnight under the US Freedom of Information Act, the US oil industry plan drafted early in 2001 for takeover of the Iraqi oilfields (after the removal of Saddam) was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, calling for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oilfields.

This secret plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas. However, Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme. As Ariel Cohen of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation later told Newsnight, an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oilfields.

Now the plan is being revisited, or as much of it as can be salvaged after the fading of American power on the battlefield made enforced sell-off impossible. This revision of the original plan has been drafted by BearingPoint, a US consultancy firm, at the request of the US government. Significantly, it was checked first with Big Oil and the IMF and is only now being presented to the Iraqi parliament. But if accepted by the Iraqis under intense pressure, it will lock the country into weakness and dependence for decades. The neo-cons may have lost the war, but they are still manipulating to win the most substantial chunk of the peace when and if it ever comes.

It isn't difficult to see why. The super-giant oilfields of south-eastern Iraq, particularly the Majnoon and West Qurna, together with the East Baghdad field, are the largest concentration to be found anywhere in the world. Oil exploration costs are among the cheapest globally, with the current cost estimated at around 50c per barrel compared with the current retail price of about $60 a barrel. Petroleum geologists have discovered 73 major fields and identified some 239 as having a high degree of certainty. Yet only 30 fields have been partially developed and only 12 are actually on stream. Undrilled structures and undeveloped fields could represent the largest untapped hydrocarbon resource anywhere in the world. While most other Middle East countries are fully exploiting their reserves, large parts of Iraq are still virgin.

This prize is cast in even greater relief by recent assessments of the looming imminence of global peak oil production. The International Energy Agency now estimates that world production outside Opec has already peaked and that world production overall will peak between 2010 and 2020. Optimists who project large reserves remaining of over 1 trillion barrels base their figures on three illusory premises - inclusion of heavy oil and tar sands whose exploitation would entail colossal economic and environmental costs, exaggeration by Opec countries lobbying for higher production quotas within the cartel, or new drilling technologies which may accelerate production but are unlikely to expand reserves. In contrast, the pessimists are steadily gaining ground, and against this background Iraq remains potentially the last remaining major breakthrough.

Nevertheless, on every count the latest US plan to get control of Iraqi oil at almost any cost is profoundly misconceived. Even from the point of view of America's own self-interest, its security is imperilled more by the failure to develop alternative energy options than by the lack of capabilities of its weapons systems. Yet the US government continues to spend about 20 times more R&D money on the latter problem than on the former. It is still the case that funding the import of oil represents about 40% of the current US trade deficit, yet no vigorous programme in renewable technologies is being supported.

As Senator Richard Lugar and James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, said prophetically in 1999 about growing US dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil, "our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily through price increases, agonisingly through developing nation poverty, relentlessly through climate change - or through all of them".

Secondly, in neo-conservative eyes Iraq was also required as an alternative to Saudi Arabia to provide a military base for the US to police the whole of Gulf oil. It was no longer possible for the US to maintain troops in Saudi Arabia for that purpose without risking the collapse of the dictatorial Saudi regime and its giant oil assets falling into the hands of Islamic extremists. The removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia was the principal demand contained in Osama bin Laden's fatwa of 1996. This was why, shortly after invading Iraq, the US announced that it was pulling its combat troops out of Saudi Arabia, thereby meeting Bin Laden's principal pre-9/11 political demand. But unfortunately for the US, al-Qaida is now seeking the removal of US troops from Iraq as well.

Above all, the policy is flawed by its extreme short-sightedness. Even if the US were to win its war in Iraq, which now looks virtually impossible, its incremental gain before the oil runs out would be short-term, while its exposure to intensified and unending insurgency because of perceived US seizure of Iraqi oil rights, especially if extended to Iran, would be disproportionately enormous both in the Middle East and maybe also at home. It is diametrically the opposite of the policy to which the whole world will be forced ineluctably by the accelerating onset of climate change. Perhaps the single greatest gain of the west learning this lesson of weaning itself off its oil addiction is that it would end this interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries simply because they happen to have oil - the central cause of world conflict today.

The Oil Drum (Canada) has an interesting post on Entropy and Empire .

n his recent book The Upside of Down, a review of which can be found here, Thomas Homer-Dixon interpreted the development of the Roman Empire in terms of thermodynamics.

The success of the empire depended on its ability to extract energy surpluses, in the form of food, from the imperial territories and concentrate them at the centre, where they enabled the development of a tremendous degree of organizational complexity. Without a large, and growing, hinterland to collect surpluses from, complexity on such as scale would not have been possible to establish and maintain. ..

For enough relative wealth to accumulate in a political centre for a complex civilization to develop, there must be a much larger periphery available to be relatively impoverished in providing the necessary energy subsidy. An equal distribution would, in accordance thermodynamics, only be possible at a low level for all. ..

The interesting question for the future would be whether the developing competitors - initially fed by exported Western capital but now reaching critical mass as new centres in their own right - would be able to achieve self-sustaining development as capital exports from the old centre cease. ..

And to close, here's a post from Crooked Timber looking at incarceration rates around the world - which might give you an inkling of where "Prison Planet" style conspiracy theories come from - and may make you question the wisdom of for profit prison systems (one of those corner cases where libertarian dogma is unsupportable unfortunately)...

Via Chris Uggen, some new Bureau of Justice Statistics for incarceration in the United States as of mid-2005. Imprisonment rose by 1.6 percent on the pervious year, and jail populations rose by 4.7 percent, for a total of just over 2.1 million people behind bars. The total population in prison has gone up by almost 600,000 since 1995.

Women make up 12.7 percent of jail inmates. Nearly 6 in 10 offenders in local jails are racial or ethnic minorities. In mid-2005, the BJS reports that “nearly 4.7 percent of black males were in prison or jail, compared to 1.9 percent of Hispanic males, and 0.7 percent of white males. Among males in their late 20s, nearly 12 percent of black males, compared to 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males, were incarcerated.” State by state, “Louisiana and Georgia led the nation in percentage of their state residents incarcerated (with more than 1 percent of their state residents in prison or jail at midyear 2005). Maine and Minnesota had the lowest rates of incarceration (with 0.3 percent or less of their state residents incarcerated).”



Comparative context is provided by Roy Walmsley’s World Prison Population List. The U.S. has an overall incarceration rate of 738 per 100,000 people, the highest in the world. Belarus, Russia and Bermuda (!) come next, distantly trailing with rates in the 530s. Fifty eight percent of countries have incarceration rates below 150 per 100,000. There is a lot of heterogeneity within continents. I left China out of the figure above—its incarceration rate is 118, but this only includes 1.55 million sentenced prisoners, not trial detainees or those in “administrative detention.”

And to close on a completely related note, here's a photo from the fine folk at NASA.