200,000 Up  

Much to my surprise Peak Energy has now clocked up more than 200,000 readers - for those of you who check up on a regular basis, thanks for coming.

Plenty of relevant article in "The Australian" today (unusually I didn't notice anything in The Herald) - first up, Vinod Khosla warning that clean coal is a mirage and solar thermal power is more appropriate. Hear hear. There is also one of those bizarre articles courtesy of the nuclear industry PR blitz that also bags clean coal while claiming nuclear power is cleaner than wind or solar. Yeah right....

US-BASED billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has slammed Australia for pinning its climate change hopes on clean-coal technology.
Mr Khosla, the Indian-born co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a prominent Silicon Valley identity, said clean coal was too expensive and would cost Australia its industrial development. "Most of the attempts at clean coal are half-hearted and very far away," he told ABC's Four Corners program. "I suspect when we get there we will find those technologies ... are very expensive."

He said Australia needed to invest in alternatives such as solar thermal energy. "I believe if you're going to do something about climate change we need technologies that can be more cost-effective than clean-coal technologies," he said. "And solar thermal is one of the most promising areas to do that."

Mr Khosla said Australia relied too heavily on its abundant coal resources and said reliance would leave the country behind in the energy race.

Now, solar thermal power combined with energy storage is one of the big 4 clean energy sources (along with wind, wave / tidal and geothermal) that will provide all of our power needs if we go down the "clean energy future" path (rather than either the coal based - global warming suicide - or nuclear based "dirty energy future" paths), so I'm pleased to see that Vinod Khosla is pursuing this as well as biofuels. The ABC's "Four Corners" program had an excellent segment tonight called "Earth, Wind and Fire" on developments in solar thermal in Australia, and the backling Khosla is giving to get a large plant set up in southern Californai this year, with gigawatt plus capacities predicted in 3 years. See the full transcript here and video here.

I wonder when Silicon Valley's war on big oil will reach the "shock and awe" stage...

Picture a windswept hillside lined with slender white skyscrapers, each crowned by a giant whirring rotor longer than a jumbo jet. Or a swathe of desert covered by a sea of mirrors drawing power from the sun.

Wind and solar projects are already in place, or planned, on a much grander scale overseas than here. For decades coal-rich Australia has regarded renewable energy as virtuous, but incapable of meeting the needs of a modern economy. It’s been too costly, not yet proven, intermittent, at best a help at the margins.

But as urgency creeps into the hunt for climate-friendly alternatives can Australia afford to go on downplaying the potential of renewable energy? How much power could we extract from sun, wind and geothermal sources, and at what cost compared with the government’s preferred solutions – nuclear power and "clean" coal?

Jonathan Holmes looks to the future – California – to gauge the challenge that faces Australia. Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has joined hands with Democrat legislators to set some of the world’s most ambitious targets for cutting greenhouse emissions and boosting renewable energy. In just three years 20 per cent of California’s power will have to come from renewable energy. There’s serious consideration to making that target 33 per cent by 2020.

Australian entrepreneurs are flocking to the Californian action. A Sydney based company is financing a wind farm there that will produce twice as much power as all Australia’s wind farms put together. An Australian solar thermal technologist has scored the backing of futurist Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems. “It’s cheap,” explains Khosla to Four Corners, when asked what he likes about the technology. Khosla expects to make money and help the climate too.

Can Australia, whose coal-fired power stations currently produce power at half the price of Californian electricity, provide enough incentive to attract investment to ambitious solar and geothermal schemes that are still in their infancy? Is Australia in danger of getting left behind? Khosla says "most industrial advantage in the world comes through innovation. And if you stick with coal, you won’t have that."

Jim at The Energy Blog has a post on Parabolic Trough Technology.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has created a new website, "TroughNet." Currently parabolic trough solar technology offers the lowest cost solar electric option for large power plant applications. TroughNet is a technical resource that offers:

* information about the various components of a solar trough,
* the power cycles that can be used with solar troughs,
* the status of thermal energy storage that could be applied to solar trough power plants,
* research and development being conducted and
* a market and economic assessment.

I hope that you find this site useful in pursuing your interests in renewable energy.

Back at the ABC, an opinion piece noting that Planting the right trees could combat global warming.

We hear almost daily that the planet is warming. Spring is arriving earlier, glaciers are melting, Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking, sea levels are rising and the weather is going wild with more heat waves, more floods and droughts in several regions of the globe.

Do you wonder what is causing our planet to have this fever? Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by humans in the industrial era are blamed. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that the increase in atmospheric CO2 in the industrial era has exerted the largest warming effect on the planet. That brings us to the question: "How do we prevent or slow down global warming?"

Cutting down fossil fuel emissions and revamping our entire energy systems is clearly the best solution. That is what believers of "prevention is better than cure" would say. However, some advocates of "climate mitigation" have come up up with several strategies, called carbon sequestration, to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. One of them is the hotly-debated terrestrial carbon sequestration that includes planting new trees. Many companies have started signing up for reforestation and afforestation projects in the US and Europe to offset their carbon footprint. Will this work?

Our recent modelling study suggests that these projects in the temperate and boreal zones are not going to help to slow down global warming. Location is the key to the success of these projects, and planting new trees in regions outside the tropics will actually warm the Earth.

Forests affect climate in three different ways: they take up CO2 from the atmosphere and cool the planet; they evaporate water to the atmosphere and increase cloudiness, which also cools the planet; and they are dark and absorb a lot of sunlight, warming the Earth. The carbon offsetting programs that promote planting trees are taking only the first effect into account.

When the changes to the surface properties are also taken into account, it is clear only tropical rainforests are strongly beneficial to slow down global warming. In the tropics, in addition to absorbing carbon dioxide, trees promote clouds which help to cool the planet. In other locations, specifically in the seasonally snow-covered high latitude area, the warming from the darkening of the surface either cancels or exceeds the net cooling from the other two effects.

These new results have initiated a lively scientific discussion on the effectiveness of terrestrial carbon sequestration. Clearly, more studies will be needed to confirm these results and narrow the uncertainties that are inherent in any single modelling study. Climate policy on terrestrial sequestration should follow later.

Based on the results from this new study, one may think that deforestation outside of the tropics could be an effective strategy to combat climate change. In dealing with our environment, a broader view should be taken and narrower criteria should be avoided to prevent environmentally harmful consequences. Apart from their role in climate, forests provide natural habitat to plants and animals, preserve the biodiversity, produce economically valuable timber and firewood, and protect watersheds.

Dr Govindasamy Bala is an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

Also in The Oz, Nigel Wilson has a look at Santos' declaration that LNG is the future.

SANTOS aims to be producing at least half its earnings from LNG by 2020.
Australia's third-largest petroleum company says selling LNG into the Asian and possibly North American markets will be a key part of its future.

Already a minority partner in the 3.24 million tonnes a year Wickham Point LNG project in Darwin, using the Bayu Undan gas reservoirs in the Timor Sea, Santos is a strong supporter of the plan being studied to develop a PNG LNG industry. And it has secured exploration acreage in the Bay of Bengal, with the aim of chasing targets later this decade that could deliver large gas reservoirs that might fuel further LNG developments.

Jon Young, executive vice-president of operations, said yesterday that LNG was an important means of Santos developing from its present mature assets such as the Cooper Eromanga Basin and its West Australian oil and gas operations.

While the Cooper Basin still had about 3 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas and would probably be producing for 40 years, international demand for LNG was taking gas prices higher, meaning that LNG was attractive in the medium term rather than just on the long-term horizon.

Santos is prepared to spend more than $1000 million on a 1000-well program to deliver more oil from the Cooper, but says coal seam methane (CSM) and LNG will be the long-term keys to growth.

Santos, with partner ConcoPhillips, has conducted an exploration program in the Timor Sea around the Caldita discovery but Mr Young said it was too early to say whether there were sufficient gas reserves to justify an expansion at Wickham Point, which has a licence to process 10 million tonnes of LNG a year. He expected reserves assessment to be completed by the end of the year. In PNG, ExxonMobil is leading an investigation into an LNG project based on the Hides gas reservoir in which Santos has a 25 per cent stake.

Also in The Oz, an article on ERA's problems with cyclones and their efforts to expand exploration at Ranger (all seems quiet on the Jabiluka front lately)

Energy Resources of Australia (ERA) has promising signs of new high grade uranium reserves at its Northern Territory Ranger mine as it prepares to invest in further exploration. But the world's third largest largest uranium producer - 11 per cent of global supply comes from Ranger - is also encountering more intense wet seasons in tropical west Arnhem Land that have affected production.

At its annual general meeting in Sydney today, ERA said intense rainfall meant uranium oxide production was 32 per cent lower in the first quarter, compared with last year, at 399,303 tonnes. Approximately 300 tonnes of uranium oxide production were lost to the monsoonal downpour that forced ERA to declare force majeure on its sales contracts on March 7.

Chief executive Chris Salisbury said the 850 millimetres of rain associated with cyclone George would affect production for some time. “In 2007, production is likely to be similar to 2006, while production in 2008 could be 25 to 30 per cent lower than this,” Mr Salisbury told shareholders.

Environmentalists at the meeting suggested climate change meant increased tropical rainfall could be an ongoing problem, affecting production and environmental management into the future.

For those of you who live on the North Shore in Sydney, North Sydney council has a community energy forum on Tuesday night (ie. probably tonight depending on when you read this).

In response to the growing concern about emissions and climate change householders are questioning where their energy supply comes from. Council will be organising a Community Energy Forum with the following experts:

* Ric Brazzale

"Australia has a wealth of clean energy resources (wind, solar, gas,bioenergy and geothermal), the technologies are available today, the investment is available now (all we need is an effective policy framework) - we don't have 15 years to wait."

Ric is Executive Director of the Australian Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE) a position he has held since April 1997. The BCSE is the national industry association and leading advocate for the sustainable energy industry in Australia. Ric participates in a number of industry and government consultative groups and chairs the Renewable Energy Action Agenda Group. Prior to joining the BCSE, Ric worked with Westcoast Energy Australia and Fletcher Challenge Energy in developing cogeneration and energy projects in Eastern Australia. Ric has also worked as Project Manager for the Victorian Gas Industry Reform Unit, Finance Manager for John Holland and prior to that worked for Woodside Petroleum where he held a number of positions including corporate planning, gas marketing and finance.

* Barry Hooper

Barry Hooper is Chief Technologist of the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies, commonly known as the CO2CRC. He has a BE (Hons) in Chemical Engineering from the University of Queensland. He has over 25 years experience in design and operations within the chemical processing industries having worked for Mobil, Davy McKee, Shedden Pacific and ICI/Orica. Before taking up his current position he was Corporate Engineering and Manufacturing Manager for Orica. He is a Chartered Chemical Engineer, Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineering and lectures at the University of Melbourne.

* Dr Mark Diesendorf

"Nuclear power and coal with CO2 burial could not make significant contributions before 2025. However, efficient energy use and several renewable energy sources are ready now and cheaper."

Dr Mark Diesendorf teaches in the Institute of Environmental Studies at University of New South Wales and is also Director of Sustainability Centre Pty Ltd. He is co-author of the national energy scenario study, A Clean Energy Future for Australia (2004), and sole author of the forthcoming book, Greenhouse Solutions from Sustainable Energy (to be published in May-June).

* Dr John Harries

"Nuclear power is a mature technology for economic baseload electricity that would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

Dr John Harries President of the Australian Nuclear Association. Dr Harries was a senior principal research scientist at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) where he worked on the physics of reactors, the management of radioactive waste and nuclear policy issues. He was leader of the team responsible for environmental management and monitoring around the research reactor at Lucas Heights.

What is Clean Coal/Gas? Is there enough Renewable Energy - wind, water, solar, biomass? How safe is Nuclear? The panel will be invited to speak on the pros and cons of each type of supply. It will help our community make an informed choice on power supply.

Everyone is invited to attend: RSVP below, or ring Fiona Shadbolt on 9936 8100.

One last article from the Oz, noting that more rainwater tanks are far more economic than a desalination plant in Sydney. No kidding.

THE New South Wales Government has asked for an expert review of a new report suggesting installing domestic rainwater tanks could allow a Sydney desalination plant to be delayed until 2026. A study by economists Marsden Jacob Associates found rainwater tanks to be more than five times as energy efficient as a desalination plant per kilolitre of water produced.

The independent report, commissioned by three conservation groups, also found if tanks were installed in just 5 per cent of NSW households per year, the switch to desalination could be put back until 2026. ...

The NSW Greens said the Government's support for desalination was about maintaining centralised state control over water supply. “Water utilities make money from consumption, they're less interested in conserving water and empowering people to manage their own supply,” Ian Cohen, Greens Upper House environment spokesman said.

The Energy Blog reports that Russia has commenced construction of a flotilla of floating Chernobyls.

Russia has launched the construction of floating nuclear power plants said Sergei Kiriyenko, the head of Russia's nuclear power agency. Kiriyenko said the first floating nuclear power plant, to be named after the great Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov, will have a capacity of 70 megawatts of electricity and about 300 megawatts of thermal power.

Floating nuclear power plants can operate without fuel reload for 12-15 years and have enhanced radiation protection. Floating NPPs are expected to be widely used in regions that experience a shortage of energy and also in the implementation of projects requiring standalone and uninterrupted energy supply in the absence of a development power system.

One more from The Energy Blog, this one on Geothermal Power, which Jim points out is not just for the Western US.

Jefferson Tester, the H.P. Meissner Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT headed an MIT-led study of the potential for ramping up geothermal energy within the United States. Tester was part of the 18-member panel that prepared the 400-plus page study, "The Future of Geothermal Energy," (PDF 14.1MB) for the U.S. Department of Energy.

I have summarized some of the main points from an article (page 3) in MIT TechTalk.

* Geothermal resources are available nationwide, although the highest-grade sites are in western states.
* Geothermal energy using enhanced geothermal system (EGS) technology would greatly increase the fraction of the U.S. geothermal resource that could be recovered commercially.
* The United States, generating 300 megawatts, is already the biggest producer of geothermal.
* If geothermal is going to be anything more than a minor curiosity, it has to reach at least the level of hydro and nuclear power, or 100,000 megawatts out of 1 million--one-tenth of total capacity," he said.
* The study found that geothermal could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact.
* The process involves drilling to as deep as 30,000 feet, pumping water under pressure into fractures to break apart underground rock formations and freeing up reservoirs.
* Seismic activity is a risk, he said. "The big challenge is to show you can do it not only in California, but also in the Midwest and ultimately on the East Coast, where you have to go deeper."
* Among geothermal's advantages are its below-ground, out-of-sight nature, making it easier to site, and its high capacity and because, unike solar or wind, it runs a the time.
* Environmental impacts are "markedly lower than conventional fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants."
* Meeting water requirements for geothermal plants may be an issue, particularly in arid regions.

Energy Bulletin points to an EV World article on "What The Cheney Energy Task Force Talked About". I'd love to see the minutes (and the treasure maps) from those meetings released one day - more grist for peak oil modellers...

Retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the US Department of State offers educated insight into the real purpose of the 2001 energy task force.

...the scale of the planned American presence in Iraq does not make sense, diplomatically or militarily, if the only goal is to safeguard US interests in that country. The plan begins to make some sense, however, as one looks to the northeast and the Caspian region where a mad scramble is now underway for control over exploitation and movement of Central Asian and Caspian region oil and gas resources. This competition involves all the "stans" in that region (Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Turkmeni, Uzbeki, Tadjiki) as well as Azerbaijan and Georgia that have been part of the Russian outback and Afghanistan.

...Whether or not the "peak" of world oil or gas output has occurred, growing global demand is raising the pressure on supplies from all sources. No matter whether oil is a fossil of natural vegetative processes or a product of basic earth forming chemistry, the expert view is that most of it has been found. Either way the costs of the next barrel to be produced are going up at the same time that predictable demand for that barrel is also rising. The need for greater diversity of sourcing to assure energy security is growing.

...These developments suggest the answers to two long unanswered questions about the energy policy of the George W. Bush administration: Who attended Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force discussions, and what did they talk about? Without too much risk of being wrong, you can now answer both questions. The participants in the group mostly represented the US energy companies that took part in designing the new Iraqi oil law and that are now working on deals in Central Asia. What they discussed was the plan we now see unfolding in Baghdad and in various Caspian and Central Asian capitals.

The name of the game is to enhance US and allied control over global energy resources by adding important long-term new sources of oil and gas. That sounds only prudent in a situation where the key resources cannot readily be replaced by substitutes. However, the game presently is being played by zero sum rules. Those rules mean that sooner or later there will be defined winners and losers. But the global economy is moving toward an urgent need for cooperative principles for allocating resources. If the game is played properly, there should only be winners who share the available pool of resources, the marginal consequences of scarcity, and the costs of adjustment. In the present and prospective global economy the free market approach, meaning sales to the highest bidders, is a distortion. Even in a less advanced global system it has led to conflicts, some of them wars. In the nuclear era such wars can be terminal. Cooperative solutions to this problem so far only have been discussed. We need to implement them now.

TreeHugger has a post on Tiny Quantum Computers in Bacteria = Efficient Solar Power which is quite amazing if the near 100% conversion efficiency is true.

Scientists at Berkeley report a breakthrough in the riddle of how bacteria can convert sunlight to energy at efficiencies nearing 100%. And the answer is more elegant and amazing than you will believe. Imagine your favorite Sci-fi character trapped in a maze. The future of the planet depends upon finding the fastest way out. Utilizing their quantum super-powers, they run all possible combinations of the maze simultaneously in parallel universes, calculating the best path before committing to any. Hurrah, the planet is saved! The truth behind quantum physics is always more complex than the sci-fi version, but reality is not too far off.

Scientists have struggled to explain how plants can convert sunlight with high efficiencies. In the conventional model, a plant has many chlorophyll molecules, with only a few that are receptive to each specific bundle of energy that hits the plant. If electrons are hopping around looking for the right place to dock, it is a bit like trying to find the right path out of the maze. Energy should be wasted in each attempt which fails at a dead-end.

Now scientists led by chemistry prof Graham Flemming and lead author Gregory Engel at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, have achieved a breakthrough advance in understanding the photosynthesis process. The team fired ultra-short laser pulses at the proteins bacteria use in photosynthesis. The proteins were frozen to more than 300 degrees below zero, which makes the quantum effects easier to observe and reduces the "noise" due to greater motion in warmer molecules. What they found is quantum waves of energy exploring different excitation possibilities in the protein at the same time. Like a tiny quantum computer, the protein answers the question: which is the right path to convert this energy at highest efficiency? The scientists, and peers in the field, expect that a similar phenomenon will be found in plants, explaining nature's efficiency in using sunlight.

Understanding the role of quantum physics in efficient use of the sun's energy may lead to break-throughs in solar power technology. We know plants use solar energy 3 to 5 times better than the current state-of-the-art in silicon technology. If we can learn how they do it, perhaps mankind can do it better too.

TreeHugger also has Yet Another Reason to Gripe About Ethanol: Water

Even after all our interminable rants about the silliness of ethanol from corn, we have found yet another thing to complain about. It seems that besides fossil fuel, pesticides, and corn, making it also uses a lot of water, 4.5 gallons per gallon of ethanol produced. There are concerns that this is not being taken into account when planning ethanol plants. Richard Cruse, director of the Iowa Water Center at Iowa State University, pointed to potential conflicts when the ethanol industry seeks to use the same pure water that people drink and give to their livestock.

"I'm not suggesting they're maniacs running wild not thinking about water, But with the industry growing so fast and drawing so much water, it can become a risk issue. When we go for three, four or five months with shallow aquifers being drawn down to the point where we have to limit or ration high-quality water, who has the priority?"

Thomas Friedman is still beating the geo-green drum at the New York Times, with the latest effort being "The power of green".

One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get its groove back. We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order — as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have an idea how. It’s called “green.”

...I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

... a new green ideology, properly defined, has the power to mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists, big business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us together and propel us forward. That’s why I say: We don’t just need the first black president. We need the first green president. We don’t just need the first woman president. We need the first environmental president. We don’t just need a president who has been toughened by years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level with the American people about the profound economic, geopolitical and climate threats posed by our addiction to oil — and to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

...The good news is that after traveling around America this past year, looking at how we use energy and the emerging alternatives, I can report that green really has gone Main Street — thanks to the perfect storm created by 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Internet revolution. The first flattened the twin towers, the second flattened New Orleans and the third flattened the global economic playing field. The convergence of all three has turned many of our previous assumptions about “green” upside down in a very short period of time, making it much more compelling to many more Americans.

But here’s the bad news: While green has hit Main Street — more Americans than ever now identify themselves as greens, or what I call “Geo-Greens” to differentiate their more muscular and strategic green ideology — green has not gone very far down Main Street. It certainly has not gone anywhere near the distance required to preserve our lifestyle. The dirty little secret is that we’re fooling ourselves. We in America talk like we’re already “the greenest generation,” as the business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here’s the really inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country, and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years.

...The notion that conserving energy is a geostrategic imperative has also moved into the Pentagon, for slightly different reasons. Generals are realizing that the more energy they save in the heat of battle, the more power they can project. The Pentagon has been looking to improve its energy efficiency for several years now to save money. But the Iraq war has given birth to a new movement in the U.S. military: the “Green Hawks.”

...Pay attention: When the U.S. Army desegregated, the country really desegregated; when the Army goes green, the country could really go green.

...The second big reason green has gone Main Street is because global warming has. A decade ago, it was mostly experts who worried that climate change was real, largely brought about by humans and likely to lead to species loss and environmental crises. Now Main Street is starting to worry because people are seeing things they’ve never seen before in their own front yards and reading things they’ve never read before in their papers — like the recent draft report by the United Nations ’s 2,000-expert Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which concluded that “changes in climate are now affecting physical and biological systems on every continent.”

...But how? Now we arrive at the first big roadblock to green going down Main Street. Most people have no clue — no clue — how huge an industrial project is required to blunt climate change. Here are two people who do: Robert Socolow, an engineering professor, and Stephen Pacala, an ecology professor, who together lead the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton, a consortium designing scalable solutions for the climate issue.

...To convey the scale involved, Socolow and Pacala have created a pie chart with 15 different wedges. Some wedges represent carbon-free or carbon-diminishing power-generating technologies; other wedges represent efficiency programs that could conserve large amounts of energy and prevent CO2 emissions. They argue that the world needs to deploy any 7 of these 15 wedges, or sufficient amounts of all 15, to have enough conservation, and enough carbon-free energy, to increase the world economy and still avoid the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Each wedge, when phased in over 50 years, would avoid the release of 25 billion tons of carbon, for a total of 175 billion tons of carbon avoided between now and 2056.

...“There has never been a deliberate industrial project in history as big as this,” Pacala said. Through a combination of clean power technology and conservation, “we have to get rid of 175 billion tons of carbon over the next 50 years — and still keep growing. It is possible to accomplish this if we start today. But every year that we delay, the job becomes more difficult — and if we delay a decade or two, avoiding the doubling or more may well become impossible.”

...Green has also gone Main Street because the end of Communism, the rise of the personal computer and the diffusion of the Internet have opened the global economic playing field to so many more people, all coming with their own versions of the American dream — a house, a car, a toaster, a microwave and a refrigerator. It is a blessing to see so many people growing out of poverty. But when three billion people move from “low-impact” to “high-impact” lifestyles, Jared Diamond wrote in “Collapse,” it makes it urgent that we find cleaner ways to fuel their dreams. ....

That’s why McKinsey Global Institute forecasts that developing countries will generate nearly 80 percent of the growth in world energy demand between now and 2020, with China representing 32 percent and the Middle East 10 percent. So if Red China doesn’t become Green China there is no chance we will keep the climate monsters behind the door. ...

The good news is that China knows it has to grow green — or it won’t grow at all.

The Independent has the latest theory about what is causing bee colony collapse disorder - this time mobile phones are being blamed. There is an interesting comment towards the end about the increasing incidence of brain tumours in humans thought to be caused by phones - my father had one a few years ago and the specialist who treated him reckoned there had been a huge increase in the incidence of this type of cancer (on the auditory nerve).

t seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.

Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: "There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK."

The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".

No one knows why it is happening. Theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops have been proposed, but all have drawbacks.

German research has long shown that bees' behaviour changes near power lines.

Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.

Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: "I am convinced the possibility is real."

The case against handsets

Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up.

Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset.

Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.

Studies in India and the US have raised the possibility that men who use mobile phones heavily have reduced sperm counts. And, more prosaically, doctors have identified the condition of "text thumb", a form of RSI from constant texting.

Professor Sir William Stewart, who has headed two official inquiries, warned that children under eight should not use mobiles and made a series of safety recommendations, largely ignored by ministers.

And to close, Neal at CleanTech has a post on gambling on global warming.

Gambling on global warming? It sounds like a really bad made-for-the-internet soap opera. But apparently at one online betting site, you actually can. So move over carbon trading and Sir Nicholas Stern - Vegas is weighing in on the true likelihood of damages from climate change.

I figured that rated a column on a lazy Friday the 13th afternoon. And while not for the not for faint of heart - here are the bets and the odds listed on their website:

"Will any of the following occur?
Hollywood will be under water before 2015 +10000
A major motion picture studio will be under water +5000
A celebrity sea-side will be under water bef 2015 +500
"Water World" becoming a reality +30000

Which will cause more damage in California?
Global warming +5000
Earthquakes -9999"

You can look it up at BetUs.com under their sportsbook "other". According to one news story on the subject, they have received over 3,000 bets.

My preference, let's just invest in cleantech and next generation energy technologies and actually try to solve the problem, but if you happen to prefer to spend your money in casinos, be my guest.