The overwhelming odour of rodent  

The SMH has an opinion piece from Peter Garrett declaring the economy is at risk from climate inertia.

In the past week the debate on climate change reached a watershed. Finally, after years of inertia over the future of our planet, we saw the promising signs of meaningful action. European leaders committed to a 20 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020.

The British Government released the world's first climate change bill, committing the Government to 60 per cent cuts in Britain's emissions by 2050, and one of Australia's biggest banks, NAB, said it aimed to be carbon neutral by 2010.

These bold moves do not simply recognise the environmental challenges ahead. They are clear signals that climate change presents an economic challenge that directly affects our long-term prosperity. But it is also true that along with the challenges there are some substantial opportunities.

Last week Michael Molitor, the principal of CarbonShift (a wholesale supplier of voluntary carbon units) and a former director of climate change services at PricewaterhouseCoopers, described the opportunity in this way: globally, we will need to prevent 600 billion tonnes of carbon emissions that will otherwise accumulate in the atmosphere over the next 43 years in order to stabilise atmospheric concentrations at or below 500 parts per million.

Using a low average abatement cost of $25 a tonne creates a capital-market opportunity of $15 trillion. This would be the largest global financial market opportunity in history. The question Australia needs to answer is: how much of that $15 trillion is coming our way?

Unfortunately, after a decade of inaction on climate change, the Howard Government has been left standing at the docks waving goodbye to Australian jobs, investment and technology. Last week the Australian company Global Renewables announced a $5 billion deal with Britain's Lancashire County Council and Blackpool Council. The Lancashire project aims to cut greenhouse pollution by more than 4 million tonnes.

Global Renewable has had to go to Britain to realise its ambitions.

Four weeks ago another Australian company, Pacific Hydro - which has 1800 megawatts of clean energy assets around the world - announced its move into Brazil. Why?

Because according to its general manager, Rob Grant, the growth in Australian clean energy assets has been held back by Australia's decision to not sign the Kyoto Protocol. The company is looking internationally for investment opportunities in countries that are enacting positive policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address global warming.

Zhengrong Shi, an academic from the University of NSW who was unable to realise his ambitions to develop solar technology in Australia, moved his business to China, where he is now that nation's third-richest man. His technology is helping reduce China's emissions. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that in a few years we might have to import these technologies, which were developed in Australia, from China. We should not be in the business of exporting jobs, technology or our brightest and best minds. ...

The Prime Minister insists that dealing with climate change is an either/or proposition: either we cut emissions or we grow the economy. The fact is we can and must do both.

Local energy conmpany AGL has announced it will join the Chicago Climate Exchange.

THE energy giant AGL has said it will become the first big Australian company to join the Chicago Climate Exchange, a move that may embarrass the Federal Government as it wrangles over climate change. The move will allow AGL to do something it cannot do at home: profit from cutting its greenhouse gas pollution in Australia.

It will help the company expand its renewable energy operations, including plans to build the largest wind farm in the southern hemisphere at Macarthur in Victoria. This will power about 190,000 homes.

AGL's managing director, Paul Anthony, told the Herald the company had invested almost $2 billion in renewable energy in the past 12 months. Mr Anthony said he hoped the board would soon agree to the big investment needed for the Macarthur wind farm. It has also just bought three "bio-mass" power stations in Queensland fired by, among other things, macadamia nuts.

By joining the Chicago Climate Exchange, AGL can market the cuts it makes to its emissions in Australia to less efficient companies around the world. ...

Last week, European leaders agreed to new targets by 2020. They include cutting carbon dioxide emissions to 20 per cent below 1990 levels and boosting renewable energy use by 20 per cent, which Mr Anthony endorsed. "It's a very positive step," he said. Australia urgently needs a strong national target for renewable energy, he said. "That's usually the first building block in trying to reduce emissions."

Canberra's renewable energy target is 2 per cent.

Philip Adams has a few thoughts about the politics of the greenhouse debate in The Australian.

JUST as the run-up to the Iraq war confirmed military intelligence as an oxymoron, the rash of resignations from Perth to Canberra mocks the notion of the honest politician. And with this weekend's NSW election a curtain raiser for the federal grand final, state and national politics abound with other contradictions in terms.

Thanks to climate change we've got two spectacularly moronic oxymorons, clean coal and safe nuclear power. The PM gave us the latter when deciding to trade his resolute denial of global warming for what the conservative think tanks call climate realism. This is code for scepticism muted and masked by electoral necessities. You pretend to believe in climate change and proffer wedge-style solutions.

OK, John Howard says, if panic-merchants want to cut carbon dioxide emissions we'll have to do it with nuclear power. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island notwithstanding, that's perfectly safe these days, even though rogue states and Osama bin Laden franchisees are desperate for bombs. As for that pesky radioactive waste, it can be safely accommodated underground for the next million years barring accidents or earthquakes. Remember that nuclear power plants only become dangerous when the wrong people want to build them. So Iranian or North Korean nuclear plants may need to be nuked.

But when it comes to the PM's preferred solution to Australia's greenhouse emissions the greatest danger isn't a big bang or radiation leaks. It's time, money and the not-in-our-backyard factor. Apart from no one wanting a plant in the neighbourhood, they cost a motser and don't come on-stream for decades. By then Australia's coastal and harbourside residents will need submarines for public transport.

Which brings us to the other oxymoron, clean coal. Where Liberal and Labor are divided on nuclear power, clean coal is a bipartisan fantasy. Howard and Kevin Rudd, Morris Iemma and Peter Debnam, and Malcolm Turnbull and (astonishingly) Peter Garrett speak as one. Let's go for something that doesn't exist backed by another technology - carbon dioxide sequestration - that may not work. As with Howard's safe nuclear option, Rudd's clean coal couldn't possibly kick in until most of the population is safely sequestered in the cemetery. If climate change lets us live that long. ...

Instead look at the economics. It's not only that some very important people will lose money on their harbourside real estate. What was the Stern report's stern admonishment? That without determined political and industrial action the cost of climate change in the near future, measured in hard currency, will be greater than the cost of the two world wars and the Great Depression.

The funding for cleaning up coal's act should not come from the public kitty as Labor, Liberal and (surprise, surprise) the local and international coal industry propose. The investment in their own product and future should be paid for by the mining companies, by the marketers and burners of the principal source of greenhouse emissions.

Taxpayer money should be directed at the long list of sustainable energy sources that must be recruited for the crisis. With our planetary credit cards maxed out this is no time for oxymoronic politics.

Energy Bulletin has a good roundup of articles on the nuclear resurgence, including Russia to build 3 nuclear plants each year from 2016, Alarms rang 'nonstop' during nuclear accident at Shika plant, Thousands in 5 French cities protest new nuclear reactors, Yucca Mountain waste dump estimates at $26.9 billion and Moore Spin: Or, How Reporters Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Front Groups, which looks at the nuclear industry PR campaign (something which has been riding the back of the peak oil and global warming issues the past 2 years, which I used to note regularly until I got tired of repeating myself).

"We just find it maddening that Hill & Knowlton, which has an $8 million account with the nuclear industry, should have such an easy time working the press," concluded the Columbia Journalism Review in an editorial in its July / August 2006 issue.

The magazine was rightly bemoaning the tendency of news outlets to present former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore and former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman as environmentalists who support nuclear power, without noting that both are paid spokespeople for a group bankrolled by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). NEI represents nuclear power plant operators, plant designers, fuel suppliers and other sectors of the nuclear power industry. Hill & Knowlton is NEI's public relations firm, though it's not the only firm working to build support for nuclear power.

Thanks in part to an ongoing, multifaceted PR push -- along with very real concerns about energy prices, rising energy demand, aging infrastructure, sustainability and global warming -- nuclear power is attracting serious attention from reporters and policymakers alike. The question is whether a vital public debate over energy choices is being skewed by deep-pocketed interests with a dog in the fight.

Both NEI and Moore decline to say how much he's paid; Whitman won't answer that question either. Presumably, the nuclear industry feels it's getting its money's worth. A Nexis news database search on March 1, 2007 identified 302 news items about nuclear power that cite Moore, since April 2006. Only 37 of those pieces -- 12 percent of the total -- mention his financial relationship with NEI.

The revival of the nuclear frankenstein has uranium miners aquiver, with rapidly expanding local miner Paladin trying to takeover Summit resources in anticipation of changes to Australia's "three mines" policy (something I hope they'll be disappointed in).

PALADIN Resources has hit back at criticism of its $1 billion hostile offer by target Summit Resources, saying Summit's reasons for rejecting the bid are flawed. ..

Summit said in April last year it expected to announce eight new resources at the joint venture in north-west Queensland but this was downgraded to five or six in October. By the end of 2006 only one resource, Valhalla, had been confirmed. The deposit is part of the Isa Uranium Joint Venture Agreement, of which Summit is manager and holder of a 50 per cent stake. Paladin holds the other half following its $174 million takeover of Valhalla Uranium last year.

Summit has staarted legal proceedings against Paladin in relation to the Valhalla transaction, claiming privileged information was disclosed to Paladin before the acquisition was completed. "We think the Summit offer is fair and reasonable and it considers all elements," Paladin managing director John Borshoff said.

Among these considerations is when the Labor Party might change its uranium policy to allow more than three uranium mines. "It is inevitable that that will happen," Mr Borshoff said. "I believe that by 2010 West Australia and Queensland will be uranium friendly, as are currently South Australia and the Northern Territory."

Mr Borshoff, considered one of the founding fathers of the Australian uranium industry, is on the national executive committee establishing resource policy with the Federal Government. "I sort of have insight into both the Labor Party and Coalition in relation to uranium mining," Mr Borshoff said. He added all the positive upside for the uranium industry had been factored into the offer price for Summit. ...

Meanwhile the really smart money in town here is busy adding European wind farms to its Californian assets.

ALLCO Finance Group, which manages aircraft and property, has agreed to buy $US200 million ($252 million) of wind energy assets in Germany and France as part of a plan to start an investment fund. The wind farms have a capacity of 112 megawatts, Allco said in a statement yesterday. The company entered partnerships with closely held German developers WPD and JUWI to buy wind farms and energy projects.

Allco has eight wind projects under construction or operating in the US and Europe as the company buys energy assets, aircraft and property to boost management fees and earn more from leasing. In December, Allco unveiled plans to build a $US2.5 billion wind energy project in California to take advantage of rising institutional demand for wind investments. ...

The company had a pipeline of development projects with capacity of more than 2000 megawatts, according to Steen Stavnsbo, head of the firm's wind energy business.

The European purchases include three wind farms in Germany, that have a capacity of 60 megawatts, according to the statement. The agreement also covers eight wind energy projects in Germany and France totalling another 48.5 megawatts of power. ..

Wind power is gaining in popularity among utilities as the most cost-competitive form of renewable energy.

US power producers will spend more than $US4 billion this year to construct a record 3000 megawatts of wind turbine generators, says the American Wind Energy Association. The installations will top last year's 2454 megawatts of wind turbines and bring the US total to almost 15,000 megawatts.

Things are looking a lot less rosy in the local biodiesel sector, reflecting one of the key problems with biofuels - competition with food eaters - along with a range of other obstacles.

IN A troubling sign for Australia's biofuels sector, two producers have posted big net losses for calendar 2006. In separate reports, Australian Biodiesel Group announced a loss after tax of nearly $14 million and Australian Renewable Fuels of just over $5 million.

Australian Biodiesel Group

ABG described its $18.3 million revenue result, or sale of 17.5 million litres of biodiesel, as "well below expectations".

The company announced in December that it was mothballing its Berkeley Vale plant in New South Wales as it finalised commissioning of the larger and more efficient 160 million litre per annum Narangba plant, also located in the state. As of last week, ABG said the Narangba plant had produced 5 million litres of biodiesel. ABG attributed its "poor financial performance" to a variety of factors, namely production problems; drought-induced rising feedstock prices; lower world oil prices; new fuel excise laws; and the negligible uptake of biodiesel by oil majors.

In a bid to improve its financial position, ABG says it has extensively reviewed regulatory and market changes, subsequently changing its business strategy. Among other things, the company says it plans to increase the blend ratio to 20%, use cheaper feedstock such as tallow and used cooking oil, and look to secure longer term contracts.

Australian Renewable Fuels

With production problems of its own during 2006, ARF is planning a move into the more lucrative North American market. "The board has observed that support for the biofuels sector in the US is both bipartisan and strong," ARF managing director Darryl Butcher said, pointing to the various government incentives. "The next half-year will see a sustained focus by the company on reducing costs and increasing sales in Australia as well as the completion of pre-development work for our first project in the US."

Having undergone a recent corporate restructure, ARF has biodiesel production from its two plants in Largs Bay, South Australia, and at Picton, Western Australia.

Joel Makower has a look at the winners and losers from climate change.

I've long maintained that one of the biggest mistakes that the environmental community -- and many of us -- made around climate change is relegating it to being an "environmental issue." It is, of course, but it's also a public health issue, a human rights issue -- and a huge economic issue.

Now that the public conversation about climate change has morphed from the "whether" to the "when" and "how," the topic has come out of the closet somewhat. Pundits and other professionals are finally beginning to discuss our climate future from an economic and business perspective: who stands to gain and lose as the climate shifts?

That's a question addressed by two noteworthy articles published this month: a discussion on "competitive advantage on a warming planet" in the March issue of Harvard Business Review, and a cover story in the April Atlantic on "who loses -- and who wins -- in a warming world."

The HBR article, by World Resources Institute president Jonathan Lash and WRI senior financial analyst Fred Wellington, is presented as "a guide for identifying the ways in which climate change can affect your business and for creating a strategy that will help you manage the risks and pursue the opportunities."

It doesn't exactly deliver all that, but it's well worth reading anyway. After all, this IS Harvard Business Review, the big Kahuna of corporate strategy journals. ...

Lash and Wellington go on to describe the six types of risk: regulatory risk (the impact of emissions caps or carbon taxes); supply chain risk (disruptions or price hikes in materials or energy, in many cases because of the huge distances such supplies are shipped); product and technology risk (companies' varying ability to identify ways to exploit new market opportunities for climate-friendly products and services); litigation risk (the threat of lawsuits for significant carbon generators, similar to the suits faced in the tobacco, pharmaceutical, and asbestos industries); reputation risk (companies found guilty in the court of public opinion for selling or using products, processes, or practices that have a negative impact on the climate); and physical risk (the direct impacts of droughts, floods, storms, rising sea levels, etc.).

The authors proffer "four key steps" to "improving your company's climate competitiveness," none of which will be big news to companies already engaged in this space (but may be news to many of HBR's readers): quantify your carbon footprint; assess your carbon-related risks and opportunities; adapt your business in response to the risks and opportunities; and "do it better than your competitors." ...

Clean energy continues to be the hot new thing in Silicon Valley, with Always On pitting the Going Green conference against the CleanTech Forum set of conferences.

GoingGreen is where cutting-edge greentech CEOs meet the movers and shakers from the biggest industries on earth. Green technology innovators are transforming the global energy, water, agriculture, transportation, construction, manufacturing, and resource recovery establishments. This two-and-a-half-day executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on the most promising emerging green technologies and new entrepreneurial opportunities.

At GoingGreen, our editors will also honor the GoingGreen 100 Top Private Companies. Fifty of the top CEOs from the GoingGreen 100 will pitch their market strategies to a panel of industry experts in our “CEO Showcase.”

Trends and Topics

The Green Energy of Tomorrow - Batteries - Water Supply, Storage & Treatment - Photovoltaics - The Green City - Growing Biofuel - Alternative Fuels - Landfill Waste, Animal Fat, Plant Fiber - Organic & Biofuel Impacts on Global Agriculture - Global Warming Challenges - Water Entrepreneurs - Wastewater Treatment Opportunities - Distributed Energy Infrastructure - The Virtual Utility - Wind Power - Fuel Cells vs. Batteries

- Green Consumer Products - The Next Generation Automobile - Biofuel Refining - The Green Home - Waste and Pollution Treatment - The 500,000 Year Timeline - Green Energy Companies - Mega-Projects - Watering & Cooling the World - Big vs. Small - Synergies for Green Civilization - Fuel Cells - Public & Private, Who is Greenest? - What are the Most Lucrative, Transformative Green Technologies?

Future Pundit has some comments on a New York Times article on energy investment by venture capital firms.

VCs see huge riches in creating the next great energy source.

In 2006, venture capitalists put $727 million into 39 alternative energy start-ups, compared with $195 million in 18 such firms for 2005, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

For investors in alternatives to oil and gas, the driving force has been the belief that whoever develops the next great energy sources will enjoy spoils that will make the gains from creating the next Amazon.com or Google seem puny in comparison.

Unless we are hitting peak oil right now I do not expect it to make much of a dent on world economic development. Oil prices are already high enough to cause a flood of money into energy technologies.

The VCs are also upping the spending on fossil fuels technologies.

Yet money has also flowed into start-ups built to serve the oil and gas industries. In 2006, venture capitalists put $163 million into 18 such companies, up from $56 million in 14 oil and gas ventures in 2005. This is an investment category that has ebbed and flowed and that was as high as $586 million in 1999, the height of the dot-com bubble.

There's big money in energy. Consider just oil. At about 85 million barrels a day of world oil production and $60 per barrel that is about $5.1 billion dollars per day. Throw in coal, natural gas, nuclear electric, hydro, and assorted other energy sources and the amount of money spent on energy is enormous. This enormous quantity of money and the growing demand for energy assure that investment money for research, development, and capital investments will be there to find new solutions as old energy sources dry up.

My arguments about energy are motivated by a desire to switch away from dirty fossil fuels sooner and to develop cheaper energy sources that are simultaneously cleaner. I also want to avoid switching to biomass to an extent that the demand for biomass drives large scale habitat destruction.

John Robb says that peak oil is behind all this new wave energy investment.

The VCs are pouring money into energy start-ups. This, of course, is based on the idea of a substrate jump. Here's what that means. Our current energy system is based mostly on a non-renewable resource (oil/gas). Until now, increases in price and improvements in technology have allowed us to expand production of this resource in line with demand. However, that appears to be peaking (lots of analysis on this) at the very time growth in demand is zooming (due to China).


The naive optimist will argue that we will be able to increase production of this limited resource forever using better technology despite the data to the contrary. The big picture optimist will maintain that new technology (based on a long view of how technology actually works) will enable a substrate jump, given sufficient time, from oil to something else. That jump could be worth billions/trillions to the right investor, hence the big bets.

Greg Palast has a look back on the 4th anniversary of the Operation Iraqi Liberation and predicts that Exxon and the rest of the oil industry are celebrating mission accomplished.

Four years ago this week, the tanks rolled for what President Bush originally called, "Operation Iraqi Liberation" -- O.I.L.
I kid you not.

And it was four years ago that, from the White House, George Bush, declaring war, said, "I want to talk to the Iraqi people." That Dick Cheney didn't tell Bush that Iraqis speak Arabic … well, never mind. I expected the President to say something like, "Our troops are coming to liberate you, so don't shoot them." Instead, Mr. Bush told, the Iraqis,

"Do not destroy oil wells."

Nevertheless, the Bush Administration said the war had nothing to do with Iraq's oil. Indeed, in 2002, the State Department stated, and its official newsletter, the Washington Post, repeated, that State's Iraq study group, "does not have oil on its list of issues."

But now, we've learned that, despite protestations to the contrary, Condoleezza Rice held a secret meeting with the former Secretary-General of OPEC, Fadhil Chalabi, an Iraqi, and offered Chalabi the job of Oil Minister for Iraq. (It is well established that the President of the United States may appoint the cabinet ministers of another nation if that appointment is confirmed by the 101st Airborne.)

In all the chest-beating about how the war did badly, no one seems to remember how the war did very, very well -- for Big Oil.

The war has kept Iraq's oil production to 2.1 million barrels a day from pre-war, pre-embargo production of over 4 million barrels. In the oil game, that's a lot to lose. In fact, the loss of Iraq's 2 million barrels a day is equal to the entire planet's reserve production capacity.

In other words, the war has caused a hell of a supply squeeze -- and Big Oil just loves it. Oil today is $57 a barrel versus the $18 a barrel price under Bill "Love-Not-War" Clinton.

Since the launch of Operation Iraqi Liberation, Halliburton stock has tripled to $64 a share -- not, as some believe, because of those Iraq reconstruction contracts -- peanuts for Halliburton. Cheney's former company's main business is "oil services." And, as one oilman complained to me, Cheney's former company has captured a big hunk of the rise in oil prices by jacking up the charges for Halliburton drilling and piping equipment.

But before we shed tears for Big Oil's having to hand Halliburton its slice, let me note that the value of the reserves of the five biggest oil companies more than doubled during the war to $2.36 trillion.

And that was the plan: putting a new floor under the price of oil. I've have that in writing. In 2005, after a two-year battle with the State and Defense Departments, they released to my team at BBC Newsnight the "Options for a Sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry." Now, you might think our government shouldn't be writing a plan for another nation's oil. Well, our government didn't write it, despite the State Department seal on the cover. In fact, we discovered that the 323-page plan was drafted in Houston by oil industry executives and consultants.

The suspicion is that Bush went to war to get Iraq's oil. That's not true. The document, and secret recordings of those in on the scheme, made it clear that the Administration wanted to make certain America did not get the oil. In other words, keep the lid on Iraq's oil production -- and thereby keep the price of oil high.

Of course, the language was far more subtle than, "Let's cut Iraq's oil production and jack up prices." Rather, the report uses industry jargon and euphemisms which require Iraq to remain an obedient member of the OPEC cartel and stick to the oil-production limits -- "quotas" -- which keep up oil prices.

The Houston plan, enforced by an army of occupation, would, "enhance [Iraq's] relationship with OPEC," the oil cartel.

And that's undoubtedly why Condoleezza Rice asked Fadhil Chalabi to take charge of Iraq's Oil Ministry. As former chief operating officer of OPEC, the oil cartel, Fadhil was a Big Oil favorite, certain to ensure that Iraq would never again allow the world to slip back to the Clinton era of low prices and low profits. (In investigating for BBC, I was told by the former chief of the CIA's oil unit that he'd met with Fadhil regarding oil at Bush's request. Fadhil recently complained to the BBC. He denied the meeting with the Bush emissary in London because, he noted, he was secretly meeting that week in Washington with Condi!)

Fadhil, by the way, turned down Condi's offer to run Iraq's Oil Ministry. Ultimately, Iraq's Oil Ministry was given to Fadhil's fellow tribesman, Ahmad Chalabi, a convicted bank swindler and neo-con idol. But whichever Chalabi is nominal head of Iraq's oil industry in Baghdad, the orders come from Houston. Indeed, the oil law adopted by Iraq's shaky government this month is virtually a photocopy of the "Options" plan first conceived in Texas long before Iraq was "liberated."

In other words, the war has gone exactly to plan -- the Houston plan. So forget the naïve cloth-rending about a conflict gone haywire. Exxon-Mobil reported a record $10 billion profit last quarter, the largest of any corporation in history. Mission Accomplished.

"B12 Solipsism" has a link to a Frank Rich post with a good chronology of events around the Iraq invasion called "The Ides of March 2003".

Regular readers of this space know I'm a fan of Frank Rich, but I especially like today's column, written almost in the style of classic Billmon. With URL links as appropriate.

Frank Rich: The Ides of March 2003

A chronology of some of the high and low points in the days leading up to the national train wreck whose anniversary we mourn this week.

TOMORROW night is the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s prime-time address declaring the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the broad sweep of history, four years is a nanosecond, but in America, where memories are congenitally short, it’s an eternity. That’s why a revisionist history of the White House’s rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same “bad intelligence” before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion’s aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. “If only I had known then what I know now ...” has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration’s case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.

By the time the ides of March arrived in March 2003, these warning signs were visible on a nearly daily basis. So were the signs that Americans were completely ill prepared for the costs ahead. Iraq was largely anticipated as a distant, mildly disruptive geopolitical video game that would be over in a flash.

Now many of the same leaders who sold the war argue that escalation should be given a chance. This time they’re peddling the new doomsday scenario that any withdrawal timetable will lead to the next 9/11. The question we must ask is: Has history taught us anything in four years?

Here is a chronology of some of the high and low points in the days leading up to the national train wreck whose anniversary we mourn this week [with occasional “where are they now” updates]....

There have been a few protests to mark the anniversary of the start of the war.

Police have arrested more than 100 Iraq war protesters in San Francisco and New York City as the nation marked the fourth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. ... "Stop the money, stop the war," demonstrators chanted as police hauled away limp-bodied protesters. A police spokesman said 44 were arrested.

Demonstrators said they were directing their protest at major defence contractors Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Halliburton, General Electric and others. The protest had no impact on the stock exchange's trading. "US service members and Iraqi civilians are dying so that an elite few can profit," said Fabian Bouthillette, 26, a high school teacher who served for two years in the US Navy. ...

Polls show most Americans now oppose the war in Iraq, yet without a military draft like that which helped focus public opposition to the Vietnam War, public protests have been far smaller than they were in that era.

Our fearless leader was featured prominently in the news recently after a visit to Iraq was made particularly eventful by his aircraft reportedly filling up with smoke, requiring an emergency landing. Crikey thinks that something smells a little odd about this latest piece of kabuki theatre from The War Against Terror (TWAT).

I watched ABC TV's lead news story last night re John Howard's in-flight "emergency" in Southern Iraq -- watch the video here -- and have reached the conclusion that the story may have been something of a contrived beat-up.

As the narrative tells it, the plane filled with smoke and was diverted to an emergency landing. We are then treated to footage of the Prime Minister running from the plane accompanied by bodyguards, amidst apparent alarm and looks of deep concern etc.

But it's all humbug, as careful examination of the footage shows:

* One cameraman got out of the aircraft before the PM, in sufficient time to capture him exiting the aircraft. Another cameraman was inside the aircraft, near the rear ramp, and panned with the PM’s party as they ran from the aircraft. However, cut to the second camera as the PM exits the plane, and the first cameraman inside the plane is nowhere to be seen. Very strange – or were there several takes of this?
* Camera on ground pans with PM and bodyguard as they run past, and we then see numerous passengers calmly walking away from the aircraft with their baggage –so they must have exited the aircraft well ahead of the PM and escort. Which, given the apparent emergency, is unlikely.
* If you look at the aircraft's engines in the background, the propellers have almost come to a halt when the PM and bodyguard emerge running down the ramp. As anyone familiar with C-130 aircraft will know, it takes well over a minute from the time that the pilot cuts the engines until the propellers actually stop. So the aircraft was stopped on the ground for some time, and had initiated normal engine shutdown, well before the PM was bundled off.
* Add to that the fact that only the PM and escort are running – everybody else in shot appears calm and relaxed – and the odour of rodent becomes overwhelming.

Moving from one fossil to another, it seems that the "dinosaur plant", the Wollemi Pine, is a water wise piece of vegetation.

As many states in Australia are being affected by drought and tight water restrictions, there is an increasing emphasis on the value of waterwise plants. We know the Wollemi Pine is a tough Australian native conifer as it survived 200 million years, the dinosaurs and climate change – but new research shows it is also waterwise.

“When compared to the production of other Australian natives species including Grevillea, Banksia and Eucalypts, the Wollemi is in the low water use category,” said Malcolm Baxter, the Wollemi Nursery Manager at Forestry Plantations Queensland.

“Trials at our nursery have shown that the Wollemi Pine will survive without water for extended periods when compared to other native nursery stock such as Grevilleas and Eucalypts.”

Horticultural experience at Mount Annan Botanic Garden in Sydney has supported the case for the Wollemi as waterwise. Dr Cathy Offord, Horticultural Research Scientist at Mount Annan Botanic Gardens (Sydney) has commented that “the Wollemi Pine does not require a lot of water to grow well and it requires a lot less water than many species which have evolved in similar environments.”

Trials by an established indoor plant rental business (Rentokil) has further endorsed the waterwise claim with research that shows: “the Wollemi Pine has a remarkable ability to tolerate soil dryness for an extended period of three weeks under medium to high light conditions with fluctuating temperatures between 5°C and 30°C – a unique feature to this species which is not evident in our comprehensive range of traditional interior plants.”

The waterwise nature of the Wollemi Pine may be attributed to its many unique features which have helped it adapt to the harsh, drought affected Australian environment:

* Foliage: Its leaves have a thick cuticle (a very thin film covering the outer, or epidermis, layer of the leaf), a fibrous hypodermis (a layer of cells just under the epidermis) and sunken stomata (pores), a survival characteristic which helps it reduce water loss.
* Coppicing: The Wollemi Pine has a habit of developing multiple stems, called “coppicing”, which may have evolved as a defence against drought, fire or rockfall in the wild, thereby ensuring its survival.
* Polar caps: During the colder months, the Wollemi Pine becomes dormant and its growing buds develop an attractive white waxy coating with pink ruby lines. This protects its growing tips and is thought to have helped it survive many ice ages.

Cryptogon has a pointer to an article at the Christian Science Monitor about Mike Strizki and his solar-hydrogen house that Wired mentioned last week.

Mike Strizki lives in the nation’s first solar-hydrogen house. The technology this civil engineer has been able to string together – solar panels, a hydrogen fuel cell, storage tanks, and a piece of equipment called an electrolyzer – provides electricity to his home year-round, even on the cloudiest of winter days.

Mr. Strizki’s monthly utility bill is zero – he’s off the power grid – and his system creates no carbon-dioxide emissions. Neither does the fuel-cell car parked in his garage, which runs off the hydrogen his system creates.

It sounds promising, even utopian: homemade, storable energy that doesn’t contribute to global warming. But does Strizki’s method – converting electricity generated from renewable sources into hydrogen – make sense for widespread adoption?

According to some renewable-energy experts, the answer is “no,” at least not anytime soon. The system is too expensive, they say, and the process of creating hydrogen from clean sources is itself laced with inefficiency – the numbers just don’t add up.

Strizki’s response: “Nothing is as wildly expensive as destroying the whole planet.”

And to close, here's some tinfoil from Cryptogon about the War On Milk.

Via: Information Liberation:

In many states, you can possess it, but the law prohibits its sale. It is a violation of federal law to transport the substance across state lines with the intent to sell it. In many states, undercover investigators are at work trying to uncover the furtive networks that produce and distribute the stuff. Dealers have been pulled over and spectacular quantities of the contraband substance have been seized by triumphant investigators. Is this a tale from the War on Drugs?

Not exactly. But it is a tale from the war many states are conducting on those who sell raw milk.

That’s right, there is a dangerous underground of dairy devotees who prefer to drink their milk straight from the cow, sans pasteurization and homogenization – and government is increasingly out to stop them. Some states, in fact, equate the sale of raw milk with the sale of drugs. Consider this from Washington Post reporter Thomas Bartlett:

The issue of selling raw milk is, legally speaking, dicey. To determine exactly how dicey, I call Ted Elkin, deputy director of the Office of Food Protection and Consumer Health Services at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Elkin is in charge of making sure the state’s dairy laws are enforced.

“So,” I begin carefully, “Maryland’s position on raw milk is . . .?”

“Raw milk is illegal for sale,” Elkin says. “Period.”

“Huh,” I reply.

To help drive this point home, he compares selling raw milk to selling pot.

“Interesting,” I say. At that moment, I am standing in my kitchen with the fridge door open, staring at my gallon of possible contraband.

This seems positively surreal, like some parody of the war on drugs aired on Saturday Night Live.

Proof that the war on contraband milk is taken all too seriously by some state officials, Bartlett’s conversation with Elkin next turned frighteningly serious. Noting that Maryland lacks the resources to track down all users of raw milk, Elkin suggested that the state might eventually catch them. “Using an analogy, Elkin explains that a small-time heroin dealer in Baltimore might be able to elude the authorities for quite a while,” Bartlett wrote of his interview with Elkin. “So, during our conversation, raw milk was compared to marijuana and heroin. What’s more, Hitler’s secret police were mentioned – in passing, sure, but still.”