The Bee From Oz  

Just a shortish post tonight - its late and I'm running out of time...

While bee dieoffs due to colony collapse disorder are causing consternation in the US and Europe, there is at least one group of people that is profiting from the situation - Australian bee keepers (plus Monsanto of course, if the GM crop theory turns out to be the correct one regarding the cause of this affliction). This is one area where the data visualisation tools I was talking about yesterday could come in handy - map the areas that the bees are dying and correlate against all the theorised causes (GM crops, particular types of insecticide use, temperature variations, rainfall changes etc etc) and see what links pop up. Its interesting that the Australian drought may restrict our ability to prop up the North American bee population - how does the saying go - everything is connected...

AMERICAN orchardists are looking to Australia for bee imports because a mysterious illness is wiping out domestic bee hives.

The "colony collapse disorder" is jeopardising the almond harvest in California. Almond growers rely on the bees to pollinate the blooms of the nut trees, but US beekeepers and farmers are reporting that up to 90 per cent of their bees have vanished.

Australian Honey Bee Industry Council executive director Stephen Ware said the latest problem in the US would enhance a growing export market for Australian apiarists. "It opens up the doors to a whole host of opportunities," he said. "You don't want to say someone's misfortune is your fortune but … "

Scattered in the hills of north-east Victoria, bees from Rod Whitehead's 1000 hives will be selected for the long journey to California. Mr Whitehead will dispatch hundreds of packages of bees from Milawa to almond plantations in California at the end of the year, having first sent bees there in late January.

He is also stepping up his breeding program. "We hope to lift bee numbers by another 20 per cent," Mr Whitehead said. But he is mindful that drought conditions may restrict any expansion. "Without rain this year, we're not going to see any budding from some trees for another two, three years," he said. "We just don't have the pollen and nectar to feed the bees."

Australian bees have been permitted into the US for only two years. But with orders from an expanding almond industry in the US and the impact of the varroa mite already taking its toll on bee populations, there is plenty of demand.

The bees are transported in special boxes built of compressed board and flywire, with up to two kilograms of bees, a queen bee and a tin filled with sugar syrup to feed on. They are inspected by the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service before departure. ...

After detecting the colony collapse disorder last year, the US Department of Agriculture began working to find the cause.

ABC radio has a report noting that Climate change report findings prompt industries to consider their future (via Energy Bulletin).

JENNIFER MACEY: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that within 20 years, Australia's agriculture and forestry production will fall due to increased drought and bushfires.

The CSIRO's Dr Kevin Hennessy is the coordinating lead author on the IPCC chapter on Australia and New Zealand. He says it's now certain that there will be less rainfall in much of the south-east of the country, which means big challenges for Australia's farmers.

KEVIN HENNESSY: Well, I think the challenges there, in terms of adaptation are, doing things like developing new drought resistance crops, and also heat resistant crops. Management options would include development and promotion of alternative crops, you know maybe shifting crops into different areas. And in some cases moving out of areas that become unviable.

JENNIFER MACEY: The President of the Victorian Farmers' Federation Simon Ramsay, says in light of this report it's time for the states and communities to reconsider their opposition to genetically modified crops. ..

JENNIFER MACEY: The report also projected a significant loss of biodiversity in some of Australia's main tourist attractions, such as the Great Barrier Reef, the Kakadu wetlands and the Alpine areas.

The CEO of the Queensland Tourism Industry Council Daniel Gschwind says the Barrier Reef generates up to $2-billion for regional economies and employs around 50,000 people.

DANIEL GSCHWIND: There are every indication that those severe weather events do occur with more severity and we do need to manage our infrastructure accordingly and we also have to have plans in place to deal with visitors who may be caught out in situations like that. ..

The SMH has another report on hot dry rock geothermal power prospects in Australia.

PEOPLE could be using "green nuclear" energy in their homes within three years as entrepreneurs rush to produce zero-emissions electricity.

Geodynamics Ltd told the Australian Stock Exchange yesterday it had sped up plans to harness the heat generated by natural nuclear activity deep beneath the central Australian desert.

The company plans to pipe high-pressure hot water from the granite bedrock four kilometres beneath the Queensland-South Australia border, where the slow decay of potassium, thorium and uranium generates temperatures as high as 300 degrees.

"The granite is hot because of the natural nuclear activity in there - it's green nuclear," said the company's chief executive, Adrian Williams.

Dr Williams expects the company to send electricity to the national power grid by 2010 and later directly to western Sydney. By 2015, it could produce as much electricity as the Snowy Mountains hydro scheme.

Some scientists say hot-rocks technology could soon deliver huge volumes of economically viable power, thanks to the continent having the hottest and most geologically favourable granite deposits on earth.

"There's enough energy to run the country for thousands of years," said Prame Chopra, a scientist who sits on the Geodynamics board.

According to a conservative estimate by the Centre for International Economics, Australia has enough geothermal energy to meet electricity consumption for 450 years.

The industry has strong backing in Canberra. "I've been a fan for a long time," the Minister for Industry, Ian Macfarlane, told the Herald. "The theory is very sound. What they've got to do now is prove that it works."

The granite in South Australia's Cooper basin contains "fractures" that hold super-hot, high-pressure water. It could power a steam turbine then recyle water back into the bedrock for reheating. The hotter the water, the more efficiently it can be converted into electricity.

Australia is home to all of the world's six listed hot fractured rock geothermal energy companies. One, Petratherm, recently signed a memorandum of understanding to supply geothermal electricity to South Australia's Beverley uranium mine by late 2009.

Torrens Energy, which listed on the stock exchange three weeks ago, is exploring hot sites near Adelaide.

The Age reports that Victorian power and water bills are due to soar due to the drought.

THE drought is set to deliver a double financial impost on households and businesses in Victoria — higher charges for water and for electricity too.

The Bracks Government warned yesterday that the price of water could rise by up to 20 per cent from the middle of next year, in part to help pay for new infrastructure to guard against future shortages.

But an even bigger hit on households could come in their power bills, with experts warning that prices will have to jump in response to the drought and booming demand for electricity.

The drought has put pressure on the national power supply — and on prices — by depleting the availability of hydro-electricity from the major generators in the Victorian and NSW alps, as well as in Tasmania.

The limited hydro capacity has forced Victoria to tap into more expensive and polluting options to meet demand, pushing up wholesale power prices by more than 80 per cent in peak times in the past year.

Experts say this will lead, in turn, to retailers such as Origin Energy and TRU passing on the costs in higher charges to consumers and businesses — bringing to an end a five-year run of relatively stable electricity prices in Victoria. ...

Consumers in NSW are already facing higher power bills. The state's Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal, which sets bills for customers who have not entered into contracts with retailers, last week recommended an increase of 24 per cent over the next three years.

The warnings on power came as the State Government flagged increases in water prices next year — both to discourage excess use and to pay for infrastructure.

The SMH's "Heckler" column features a rant on the local response to climate change - "Empty talk and weak excuses don't hide climate hypocrisy".

THE way Australians carry on about the need to curb greenhouse gases and save water, you'd think they were setting a good example for the rest of the world. In reality, we are the highest generators per capita of greenhouse gases on the planet and use more water per capita than anyone else.

Am I the only one who sees the hypocrisy in that? Somehow individuals, governments, media (collectively called Australians) have made it seem like someone else's problem; as though the Government was the polluter, or that big business, or not signing the Kyoto Protocol, or lack of subsidies were to blame. All this is just a pathetic excuse to avoid individual responsibility.

Look at how many houses have solar water heating - fewer than 5 per cent. Solar water heating is a mature, proven technology that pays for itself in about five years and then goes on saving you and the planet. It doesn't need a subsidy, and asking for one is just a weak excuse to avoid action.

Look at mothers driving their children to school in large four-wheel-drive vehicles, generating vast quantities of greenhouse emissions and then pretending that their reusable supermarket shopping bags are saving the planet.

Look at modern two-story McMansions, oversized and greenhouse-hungry to heat and cool. Look at the number of houses with rainwater tanks, a much better option compared with dams and desalination plants.

These are all personal choices. If you live in a McMansion, steer a four-wheel-drive around town, don't have solar water heating and haven't installed a rainwater tank, that is your choice; but understand, you are the reason we lead the world in something we should be ashamed of.

Congratulations, Australia, for saving water in the drought, but you did it only because of water restrictions, not because you wanted to. Do we have to make rules for everything before people start to change their energy- and water-using habits? You'd think from all the talk that we were doing it voluntarily. Turning off the lights for one hour (Earth Hour) and then talking up our contribution is plainly self-deluding.

Most European countries just quietly get on with the job, but here? Why do the hard work when you can just talk about it? ...

Technology Review's Nanotechnology column has an article on nano power generators

An array of zinc-oxide nanowires that generates current when vibrated with ultrasonic waves could provide a new way to power biological sensors and nanodevices.

Using ultrasonic waves to vibrate an array of zinc-oxide nanowires, researchers at Georgia Tech have made a tiny generator that can produce direct current. By taking advantage of the fact that zinc-oxide nanowires are piezoelectric--they can convert mechanical energy into electricity--and by finding a way to collect electricity from multiple nanowires, the researchers have taken a big step toward a practical nanoscale power generator.

"We can make each and every wire simultaneously and continuously produce electricity," says Zhong Lin Wang, a professor of materials science at Georgia Tech, who led the work. In a Science paper published this week, Wang and his colleagues demonstrate a prototype device, about two millimeters square, that generates around 0.5 nanoamperes of current for more than an hour.

"The technique essentially provides a new method of power generation," says Pulickel Ajayan, a materials engineering professor at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute. He says that the generator could be coupled with devices that are difficult or inefficient to power using conventional means.

One important application is powering implantable biological sensors. According to Thomas Thundat, who researches nanoscale biological sensors at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, current battery technology limits the use of microelectromechanical sensors that measure cancer biomarkers, blood pH, and glucose. These sensors are getting smaller and smaller, but conventional chemical batteries can't keep up. "[The batteries] are huge and they run out of power...most of the time it's the battery that's big compared to the sensing part," Thundat says. "We have always been looking for very small power sources that don't need refilling." The new nanowire generator looks like a promising answer, he says. It could be implanted in the body, and, driven by muscle contractions, blood flow, or external vibrations transmitted through tissue, it could power the sensors.

The generator could also drive nanodevices. Wang's research group has previously made nanowire pressure sensors that can detect extremely small piconewton forces as well as nanowire gas sensors. (See "A Nano Pressure Sensor.") Instead of an external battery, these devices could run on wind or water flow using the new generator. ...

Energy Bulletin points to a George Monbiot column at Transition Culture on "Peak Oil and Transition Towns". George doesn't buy the "peak coal" argument it seems and notes that the "dirty energy future" (based on that flithy four letter word beginning with "c") that I abhor is a likely outcome of peak oil if we aren't careful.

At last week’s event in Lampeter writer and activist George Monbiot was asked to give a 5 minute reflection on the presentation I had just given. His response focused on the concerns he has with the concept of peak oil, and why he feels climate change to be the more important driver. Much of what he said about the dangers of synfuels and biofuels I very much agree with, but his optimism about peak oil isn’t, as regular readers will know, something I share. Indeed I struggle to see what it might be based on. Here is the transcript, I’d love to hear your thoughts…

“There’s some supplementary stuff which I’d just like to run through quickly. Over the past two or three years or so, I’ve become pretty sure that peak oil isn’t as imminent as I first thought. There are a couple of reasons for this. First off, there are some very large unexplored areas, north-west Saudi Arabia, most of Siberia, we can go into that in greater depth if you like during the discussion.

Secondly, quite recently there have been various innovations for enhancing the amount of oil removed from existing oil fields, particularly something called “Enhanced Oil Recovery”, which uses carbon dioxide that becomes super-critical at 800 metres down and is used to drive the dregs of the oil fields out. Also there is horizontal drilling, there is deep drilling, it is not going to happen as soon as Kenneth Deffeyes and Colin Campbell and one or two others say, I’m pretty much convinced of that.

The second thing to say is a very dirty word, beginning with “c”, with four letters, which Rob was kind enough scarcely to mention, being a very polite man, and it is coal. Peak oil and peak energy are not the same thing, and the bad news is we have hundreds of years of coal left. That’s even before you start to investigate things like underground coal gasification which could boost total global reserves by 10 or 15 times. This is where you don’t mine the coal, but you basically cook it underground and extract the methane.

Now coal can be used to produce almost anything. It has an enormous, horrendous environmental cost, but of course it can, among other things, be used to produce liquid fuels for transport, this is what kept the Vermacht on the road, this is what is helping to keep South Africa on the road today. One of the conclusions of the Hirsch report, which Rob brought up, is that we ought to be switching to these synfuels, made from coal, which would have enormous implications in terms of climate change, also in terms of local pollution, but which would in fact save us from peak oil. ...

George once pointed out a few alternative newsletters in one of his Guardian columns - one of which was "Undercurrents", which is producing a DVD on Ecovillages in the UK.

The Situation

Climate change will change how we live in the future. There is a need for radical changes in the way we plan for, design and build homes, to render them affordable and environmentally sustainable. Several generations have now grown up in towns and cities, many with little appreciation of our essential connection with the earth & nature. Rising sea levels, water and energy shortages could create chaos.

The Story

Undercurrents has travelled to Australia, Spain, Ireland, Scotland and Wales to explore the ecovillage movement. Here is the story of Britains first legally planned Ecovillage. We will launch the film in Summer 200 at Glastonbuy festival.

The Solutions

To find solutions to this problem, undercurrents are planning a DVD highlighting the working positive examples from the growing number of housing pioneers across the UK. We are working with Community Channel to produce a monthly video about the development of an EcoVillage in West Wales which you can watch online here for free each month. We are also working with Permaculture magazine who will handle distribution in Summer 2007.

For a decade undercurrents has recorded the UK's most high profile campaigners on low impact living. We have charted how Tony Wrench and his partner challenged and radically changed a council's policy on rural housing. Their unique, inexpensive ecohome made from oak, cobwood and recycled window walls, straw-insulated turf roof, with solar power for electricity, compost toilet and reed beds for grey water is now a proven example of what the Government needs to be providing under Agenda 21.

Why now?

Pembroke Council recently changed its policy on rural housing and has agreed to work with Lammas to provide land to develop England and Wales first ecovillage (30 low impact dwellings).There are currently no other legal ecovillages in England or Wales although there are intentional communities. You can learn more about the Ecovillage via a BBC weblog.The project will create a model for highly sustainable development: socially, environmentally and economically. All units, and the development itself, will be at or below a 'one planet' ecological footprint. The settlement will become integrated with the local community and be an asset to the local economy. It will also serve as a blueprint and inspiration for other councils and the wider public nationwide. ...

WorldChanging has an interview with Bill McKibben on creating a durable future. Energy Bulletin has a roundup of other news on upcoming climate change demonstrations.

Emily Gertz: You've got a lot going on: you've been helping to organize a day of nationwide demonstrations for action on global warming on April 14, and you have a new book coming out.

Bill McKibben: To me, they're the emergency response to the situation we're in, and the long-term response to the situation we're in.

EG: Why don't we start with the emergency response -- what's the Step It Up campaign?

BM: I should say at the beginning that it's really not my forte, this organizing stuff. I'm a writer; I wrote the first book on global warming way back in 1989. And I've watched with increasing despair over the years, as we've done nothing in this country.

So, last Labor Day, I organized with a few friends a 50-mile walk across the state of Vermont for climate action. It was entirely successful: we had a thousand people at our final rally, which is a lot in the state of Vermont. The papers the next day said this was the largest rally on global warming that there had yet been in this country, which struck me as pathetic.

So, we decided to see if we could do a modest national campaign. When I say "we," I mean me, and six Middlebury College students who were getting paid $100 a week. We launched a web site on January 10th, asking people if they would organize rallies in their home communities to fight global warming on April 14th, and told them that we would try to link these all together via the web into some interesting thing. We expected we might get a couple of hundred at most -- a hundred, maybe two hundred if we were lucky.

After about just over two months, we had nine hundred and fifty-some rallies scheduled in all fifty states. It's clearly going to be the largest grassroots environmental protest of any kind since Earth Day 1970.

We're very hopeful that this is changing some of the feeling about this issue on Capitol Hill; we're getting a lot of Congress people coming on board. One presidential candidate, John Edwards, endorsed our demand for eighty percent cuts in atmospheric carbon emissions by 2050.

It's taken off amazingly -- not because we're great organizers, but because people are really ready to try and do something about this problem. They realize that screwing in a light bulb is a really good thing, but they also realize that it's not solving the problem. You almost feel that as you're physically turning the light bulb. So they want to figure out how to be active as citizens as well.

UncleSam2.jpg What's really remarkable is the degree to which we've been able to organize this odd hybrid of a thing: local demonstrations about climate change. And they're happening in the most amazing ways. People are scuba diving in the coral reefs off the Florida Keys, which are endangered by global warming, as underwater demonstrations. Or skiing down dwindling glaciers in the Rockies, or gathering thousands of people in blue shirts in lower Manhattan, a kind of Sea of People that will show where the water's going to be when the sea level starts to rise. It should be fantastic -- all that creativity.

But we've also been able to make it national, using the web. I think it's a beginning of a new kind of political organizing, that's able to be dispersed and yet add up to more than the sum of it's parts.

EG: Have you heard of the concept of the second superpower: civil society powered by networked communications -- like the internet and mobile phones -- which allows seemingly a seemingly scattered constituency to become a real counterweight to government power?

BM: Well this is a perfect example of that. I can't imagine how we would have possibly organized this before the web; we would have needed a huge organization. Instead we're going to pull off this enormous thing with a budget of about $100 thousand: seven of us sitting in a room, and tens of thousands of people in their local communities, working really hard to make those local events happen. ...

TomDispatch has a little Iranian history lesson today.

Like a giant piece in an intricate, if ugly, jigsaw puzzle, the aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, and its strike group are now sailing toward the Persian Gulf. On arrival, they will join the strike groups of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (which it is officially replacing) and the USS John C. Stennis patrolling the region, as stunning an example of "gunship diplomacy" as we've seen in our lifetimes. I think it's a fair guess that, like most Americans, few, if any, of the Nimitz strike group's 6,000 sailors and Marines, who may become part of a massive Bush administration air assault on Iranian nuclear and other facilities, know much about modern Iranian history. Most may be unaware of the CIA/British coup d'état in Iran, in 1953, that overthrew the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (which had just ca! rried out the nationalizing of Iranian oil), reinstalled the Shah, and ushered in a long, contentious relationship between the two countries -- with all the "unintended consequences" that may end, whether through miscalculation or cold calculation, in a devastating war.

It was this very "success" to which CIA operatives first applied the term "blowback," for those unintended consequences of covert Agency operations which, when they finally land on Americans, are not recognized as such. Just this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bragged to the world that Iran was on its way to industrial-scale uranium enrichment. But who today knows that the first seeds of the present Iranian "peaceful" nuclear program came from the United States. Under Dwight D. Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program, one of the planet's first nuclear proliferation engines back in the 1950s and 1960s, the Shah's Iran gained its initial nuclear technology, including a U.S.-supplied 5-megawatt nuclear research reactor. At the time, it was believed, the ! Shah was dreaming of something far more ambitious than a peaceful nuclear program.

Ah, but that was then, this, of course, is now; and not making historical connections is a great American talent. As it happens, it's not an Iranian one. When covert "operations" occur at your expense, you tend to remember -- for a long, long time. Fortunately, Behzad Yaghmaian, author of Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West and a Tomdispatch writer, is here with his remarkable memoir of a life lived in and between two worlds, Iranian and American. His is a tale that can both help us remember how it all began and think more clearly about what an attack on Iran might actually mean in human terms. Tom

Bonded at Birth
How a CIA Coup d'État in Iran and My Life Became One
By Behzad Yaghmaian

I am a child of the coup d'état, born in Iran a few days after the CIA helped overthrow the popular, democratic government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953.

Not long before my birth, facing nationwide protests, the Shah of Iran was forced to abdicate his power and flee the country. My mother used to tell me how men and women celebrated in the streets, how strangers gave flowers and sweets to each other. "The Shah left," they cried with joy. However, the celebration did not last long. In just a few more days, the political landscape changed again. Men paid by the U.S. government began to roam the streets of Tehran, armed with truncheons and chains, assaulting Mossadegh's supporters. Soon the Shah returned and Mossadegh was put under house arrest. That was when I was born.

A witch-hunt for the followers of Mossadegh, communists, anyone who opposed the Shah and the coup d'état now began. Many were jailed -- and tortured. Some opposition figures went underground or left the country; the rest lived in fear of the Shah and, within a few years, the SAVAK, his brutal secret police (also set up with CIA help). ...

Writer Kurt Vonnegut passed away today - RIP Kurt. From Boing Boing:

Kurt Vonnegut, one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, is dead. Oh, shit. Vonnegut wrote 14 novels. He had fallen several weeks ago and received brain injuries. He was 84.

My first Vonnegut was Breakfast of Champions. I'd never read anything like it. It was a novel that was so easy, everything just happening, one thing after another. The book almost read itself. That was his gift, I think: to tell you things that were hard to hear, without you even noticing it. Like a nurse who can slide a needle into your vein without making you wince.

Vonnegut has haunted me, delighted me, and made me sad. I still think of the world in terms of Wampeters, Foma, and Karasses, the Boknonism ideas set out in Cat's Cradle. I still think that "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time," may be the best opening line of any novel -- and that the novel, Slaughterhouse 5 lives up to that line.

In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.

Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American war planes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.

Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.

And a segment from Kurt Vonnegut's Apocalypse (which I think is the last I read of him). Energy Bulletin also has a tribute.

He survived being captured by the Nazis and the suicide of his mother to write some of the funniest, darkest novels of our time, but it took George W. Bush to break him.

"I'm Jeremiah, and I'm not talking about God being mad at us," novelist Kurt Vonnegut says with a straight face, gazing out the parlor windows of his Manhattan brownstone. "I'm talking about us killing the planet as a life-support system with gasoline. What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world. We've become far too dependent on hydrocarbons, and it's going to suddenly dry up. You talk about the gluttonous Roaring Twenties. That was nothing. We're crazy, going crazy, about petroleum. It's a drug like crack cocaine. Of course, the lunatic fringe of Christianity is welcoming the end of the world as the rapture. So I'm Jeremiah. It's going to have to stop. I'm sorry." ...

Later, remembering his hyperagitation about global warming, I telephoned him at his Long Island summer cottage, curious about whether he saw Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. "I know what it's all about," he scoffed. "I don't need any more persuasion." Not satisfied with his answer, I pressed him to expand, wondering if he had any advice for young people who want to join the increasingly vocal environmental movement. "There is nothing they can do," he bleakly answered. "It's over, my friend. The game is lost." ...

AS A SELF-PROCLAIMED AGNOSTIC, Vonnegut is afflicted not with a fear of a vengeful deity but with the "gasoline blues" and "Bushfluenza." He longs for the days of impassioned voices for the downtrodden like FDR or Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther Kingjr. "Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by honest research and excellent scholarship and investigative reporting," he believes. "They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard." ...

SINCE DRESDEN TRANSFORMED VONnegut into a card-carrying pacifist, it's not surprising that he disdains everything about the Iraq War. The very notion that more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed in what he sees as an unnecessary conflict makes him groan. "Honestly, I wish Nixon were president," Vonnegut laments. "Bush is so ignorant. And I don't like idiotic, impulsive people. He's not a capable human being. The war in Iraq shows that he's a phony Christian. Remember what William Shakespeare taught us a long time ago: The devil can cite Scripture for his [own] purpose.'"

He asks me if I know why President Bush is so pissed off at Arabs. I shrug no. "They brought us algebra," he says, laughing. "Also the numbers we use, including the symbol for nothing. Zero." When asked about the current Israel-Hezbollah conflict, he offers only a droll "We all, even our newborn babies, have done something terrible to be inflicted with such lethal nonsense."

These days, Vonnegut claims to be just a "farting-around master" - the occupation that, in fact, people, he believes, were put on Earth to do. Farting around for Vonnegut, however, is a smorgasbord-like affair. He occasionally writes the odd column or essay, many of which eventually became A Man Without a Country. Then there are the mounds of doggerel. Atop Vonnegut's desktop is a cache of unpublished poems, some poking fun at W and the geeky radical right. Take, for example, "Neo-Cons":

I feel as though we have been invaded by body-snatchers or Martians. Sometimes I wish we had been. Isn't it time somebody investigated Yale University? ...

And although Vonnegut hasn't published a major novel since Bluebeard, nearly twenty years ago, a flood of letters arrives daily from his international fans, many searching for advice in the angst-ridden post-9/11 world. A young Seattle fan, for example, wrote Vonnegut about the indignation he experienced at an airport when a quasi strip search occurred. Amused by the letter, Vonnegut wrote back. "The shoe thing at the airports and Code Orange and so on are world-class practical jokes, all right," he concurred. "But my all-time favorite is one the holy anti-war clown Abbie Hoffman pulled off during the Vietnam War. He announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if it was true or not."

But Kurt Vonnegut is clearly weary. His road has hit a dead end. He is a man void of silver linings. "Like they say, I'm eighty-three and homeless," he says. ...

After a couple of hours of fine conversation, Vonnegut and I head out to a nearby Manhattan eatery. We walk down Third Avenue in suffocating heat; the airpollution level feels lethal, and for a couple of minutes, Vonnegut just keeps coughing. Perspiration beads form on our brows. Vonnegut's good humor dissipates. He is back on his "perils of oil" soapbox, insinuating that the evil slime has gushed into our lives via the River Styx, courtesy of Hades. "Evolution is a mistake," he says in disgust, paraphrasing from A Man Without a Country. "Humans are a mistake. We have destroyed our entire planet over transportation-whoopee. The Bush administration says it's conducting a war against drugs? Then let them bust the oil lobby. Talk about an awful, destructive substance. You pump this gas stuff into your car and you can zoom a hundred miles an hour, kill pets and shatter the atmosphere to smithereens."

Bust the oil lobby ? Doesn't sound like a bad idea...