Co-opted By Big Media !  

Somewhat to my surprise, I noticed incoming links from both Tim Blair and the Wall Street Journal's blog into Peak Energy today. It would seem my efforts to try and maintain a disreputable atmosphere around here are failing dismally.

It appears Tim (kind of a poor-man's Andrew Bolt - or perhaps an angry-redneck's Andrew Bolt would be more accurate) was trying to mock me by bizarrely trying to associate the geothermal energy vision with a guy living in a hole in the ground. Tim's blog is kind of a wingnut conspiracy theorist haven, with an endless stream of paranoid global warming denial fantasies spewed forth to a manic, but obviously committed, group of readers.

The WSJ is also a little notorious for publishing global warming denial pieces (though they are more likely to get debunked by RealClimate than by a psychiatrist) - but as their link was a straight up recommendation I think I'll just say thanks and not be rude to them. They also recommended Jeff Vail (whose site refresh has removed its own small aura of disreputability, with the "Theory of Power" title, the Chomsky and Zarzan accolades and links to the likes of Hakim Bey now gone - maybe Jeff is now positioning himself as the thinking man's version of John Robb), Energy Outlook (which I haven't looked at for 2 years or so - a real blast from the past), New Energy News and, errr, Climate Audit (I'll bite my tongue on that one).

The blog itself has some interesting content - largely focussed on big business of course - but it does seem to attempt some sort of balance with other considerations. Here's a few links - first on concerns about ethanol (with a later follow up doing some Chavez bashing).

Is the anti-ethanol crusade beginning to gather steam among mainstream Western publications?

Two weeks after The Economist confessed, in a stunned-sounding editorial that it found itself in agreement with Fidel Castro’s vehement critique of foods-as-fuels, Foreign Affairs magazine has also jumped on board. In the magazine’s May edition, two professors from the University of Minnesota write that, like Castro and The Economist, they believe the growing use of biofuels may starve the world’s poor by pushing up food prices for minimal environmental gains.

“Washington’s fixation on corn-based ethanol has distorted the national agenda,” charge the authors, noting that corn and soybeans are some of the least environmentally friendly feedstocks to use for biofuels.

What’s more, rising global interest in cassava-based ethanol could pose an especially grave threat to the world’s poor in future years, they note. The potato-like tuber provides one-third of the caloric needs of the entire population of sub-Saharan Africa and is the primary staple for more than 200 million of Africa’s poorest people.

“If peasant farmers in developing countries could become suppliers for the emerging industry, they would benefit from the increased income,” say professors C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer. “But the history of industrial demand for agricultural crops in these countries suggests that large producers will be the main beneficiaries.” Key countries now considering the use of cassava for ethanol include China, Nigeria and Thailand.

Next, a roundup of their own energy news called "The Danish Model (no - not that sort of model JCW) which included the interesting note that Danish energy consumption has remained static for 30 years (and if you ever go to Copenhagen you'll see why - exceptionally bike and pedestrian friendly and excellent public transport) and another note that uranium futures are going to appear soon.

If you’re hungry for WSJ energy news, but too busy to flip through the entire paper to find it, here’s a quick roundup:

Through a wide variety of government-driven initiatives, Denmark’s energy consumption has held stable for more than 30 years, even as the country’s gross domestic product has doubled.

Americans face sizable increases in their grocery bills this year as a boom in ethanol production diverts more corn from the nation’s dinner table to its gas tank. Indeed, their pocketbooks could feel the pinch for years to come.

ConocoPhillips and Tyson Foods Inc. say they plan to make diesel fuel from animal fat, a sign of how traditional companies are trying to capitalize on rising interest in alternative energy.

In an opinion piece, Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes that Exxon Mobil has to decide: Is it worth doing business with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez?

Looking to capitalize on surging interest in uranium investment, the New York Mercantile Exchange plans to launch a uranium futures contract, people familiar with the situation said Friday.

One last link to the WSJ - this one on Harnessing the Sun in Abu Dabhi (there is also a good one on "Billionaires for coal).

The United Arab Emirates sits on the world’s fifth-biggest oil reserves, but it also has abundant sunshine — and it plans to spend some of its oil riches to tap that alternative-energy resource, The Emirates Evening Post reports. “The plan may be expensive, but the handsome surpluses currently earned from oil revenues can cover the cost,” the paper writes.

The story doesn’t talk about how much money the government expects to spend, but it mentions plans for a $350 million, 100-megawatt solar plant, which might be expanded to 500 megawatts (presumably at far greater expense).

The plans represent a new direction for the UAE, which — like many other Persian Gulf nations — has been slow to embrace alternative energy. “Despite its constant access to sunshine, only parking meters currently seem to be powered by solar energy in the UAE,” the paper says. “Even solar water-heaters — popular in several sunny countries — are seldom seen.”

Last time I checked in at "Beyond the Beyond", Bruce was on the road in Sharjah - the Beirut Daily Star reports that he was doing a keynote at the Sharjah Biennial.

The eighth edition of the Sharjah Biennial opened last week with an irony too rich to ignore. Sharjah is one of seven tiny emirates constituting the UAE, a rentier state on the Gulf whose export of fossil fuels has made it the fourth wealthiest nation in the world. To mitigate the foreseeable exhaustion of oil and gas reserves, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and to a lesser extent Sharjah are in the midst of a massive construction boom aimed at creating additional sources of income through tourism, financial services and trade. With its rampant consumerism, man-made islands, audacious luxury towers, energy-chomping desalinization plants and cookie-cutter suburbs carved into desert sands, the UAE is something of an environmentalist's nightmare.

For the government of Sharjah to fund a "green" biennial certainly flips things around - and stokes considerable skepticism. Is the event motivated by a genuine desire to cast a critical eye on the UAE's role in environmental degradation? Or is it predicated on a keen understanding that critics, particularly artists, can be co-opted and made complicit in a public relations feint?

The science fiction novelist Bruce Sterling, who gave a keynote address for the biennial's symposium, probably framed it best when he termed the event a harbinger of things to come. Climate change, he argued, will fundamentally alter fashion, commerce, infrastructure, government, culture and nature - in that order. The only motivating factor will be fear, he said, so jumping on the green bandwagon now is nice, but art's time will come. The biennial, then, is a practice run.

Technology Review has an article on Solar Cells That Work All Day.

Solar cells generally crank out the most power at noon, when the sun is at its highest point and can strike the cell at a 90-degree angle. Before and after noon, efficiencies drop off. But researchers Georgia Tech Research Institute have come up with a prototype that does the opposite. Their solar cell, whose surface consists of hundreds of thousands of 100-micrometer-high towers, catches light at many angles and actually works best in the morning and afternoon.

"It may be intuitive: when the light goes straight down, the only interaction is with the tops of towers and the 'streets' below," says Jud Ready, senior research engineer at the institute's Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory. "But at an angle, the light has an opportunity to reflect off the sides of the towers." When the sun is at a 90-degree angle, the prototype delivers only 3.5 percent efficiency. But it delivers better efficiencies at many other angles and is actually at its peak efficiency--7 percent--when light comes in at a 45-degree angle. That means the device operates at relatively high efficiencies during much of the day and has two efficiency peaks: one before noon, and one after noon.

While those efficiencies are too low for commercialization, Ready is working on optimizing the size and spacing of his towers as well as their chemical composition. As a first application, his sights are set on powering spacecraft and satellites, which could benefit from solar cells that don't require a mechanical means of moving the orientation of the cell to keep it facing the sun. "Anytime you have anything mechanical, it breaks," says Ready. "In space, that is fabulously difficult to try and repair."

Construction of the towers begins with a foundation of silicon wafers coated with a patterned layer of iron. The iron-coated areas become a seedbed for carbon nanotubes, which are grown using standard chemical vapor deposition; the carbon--separated from hydrocarbon gases in a furnace--assembles into nanotubes on the iron areas. The finished towers, each made of arrays of nanotubes, are 100 micrometers tall, 40 micrometers wide, and 10 micrometers apart.

Once the carbon-nanotube towers are complete, they are coated with cadmium-telluride and cadmium-sulfide semiconductors, which do the work of electron generation. Finally, a thin coating of indium tin oxide is deposited to serve as an electrode. In the finished cells, as with some other nanosolar approaches, the nanotubes serve both as a scaffold for the photovoltaic material and also as a conductor to help move electrons to the electrodes. (See "Cheap Nano Solar Cells.") In Ready's technology, each square centimeter of the finished solar cell contains 40,000 towers, and each tower consists of millions of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes. ...

The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on "How solar ran out of puff" in Australia.

The president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Professor Ian Lowe, remembers a time when solar had all the answers. "In the 1970s, the case for solar energy was the case against all other forms of energy," Lowe says.

It was the superstar solution to the energy crisis. The expectation was that because solar offered no-risk electricity generation and would never run out, it would swiftly dispatch coal-fired electricity to the dustbin of absurd human inventions. And with our climate, it seemed better suited to conditions in Australia than almost anywhere else. But 30 years later solar is the renewable power that never grew up - at least in Australia.

While global growth in the installation of rooftop solar panels is estimated at 40 per cent a year (and higher in booming solar markets such as Germany and Japan), in Australia it is about 16 per cent, says the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. And that growth is on such a small base that solar barely registers in figures from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resources Economics figures on how our electricity is made.

Of the nearly 8 per cent of Australian electricity generated by renewables, 6.5 per cent is hydroelectricity, 0.8 per cent is bioenergy (power from reusing waste), wind accounts for 0.6 per cent and less than 0.1 per cent is generated by solar power. The rest of our power is coal-fired electricity, which, Lowe points out, compares poorly to countries such as New Zealand (mostly hydroelectricity), Norway (where renewables account for a third of electricity generation) and Iceland (three-quarters).

Nowhere is the good news/bad news nature of the solar story more evident than at the University of NSW's world-renowned School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering, which claims its many solar-cell breakthroughs have generated "approximately $1 billion" in sales worldwide. The school's researchers have collected a swag of prestigious awards, including the Alternative Nobel Prize, the Australia Prize and the World Technology Award. One of its graduates, Zhengrong Shi, heads one of the largest solar energy corporations in the world, China's Suntech Power Holdings. He is worth a reported $2.7 billion.

But ask its head of school, Dr Richard Corkish, why more Australians aren't installing grid-connected solar systems at home and his frustration is obvious. "If you don't include the environmental costs of coal-fired electricity when comparing them with solar, it becomes very difficult." ...

Gary at "Public Opinion" has a post on "Sustainable Energy Futures" in Australia.

CoAG is meeting today in Canberra and climate change is still the big issue, even though people are started to talk about productivity and the national reform agenda. Even Peter Costello, speaking in London, is starting to talk sense on the issue. He says:

One of the other factors that is working against our longer term economic prospects is climate change. Climate change is recognised as a crucial environmental challenge – one that calls for a careful balancing of environmental and economic considerations, and a deep understanding of the long-term implications of actions taken today. Australia is on track to achieve its Kyoto target.

Costello goes on to say that for a country like Australia, which has huge resources of fossil fuel, the economic cost of moving to substantial cuts in greenhouse emissions will be enormous. Consequently, the best strategy will be to pursue technological improvements which will allow existing resources to be used more efficiently. And technological improvements will be the greatest assistance we can deliver to our regional partners.

Mark Diesendorf, director of the Sustainability Centre, has an op-ed in The Age where he contests one of the assumptions underpinning Costello's reasoning.

Diesendorf says:

The barriers to a sustainable energy future are neither technological nor economic, but the immense political power of the big greenhouse gas polluting industries — coal, aluminium, iron and steel, cement, motor vehicles and part of the oil industry.

He says that opponents of renewable energy from the coal and nuclear industries, and their political supporters, are disseminating the fallacy that renewable energy cannot provide base-load power to substitute for coal-fired electricity.They are endeavouring to ensure that renewable energy will remain a niche market and to prevent it from achieving its potential of being part of mainstream energy supply technologies.

Diesendorf's recent report, The Base Load Fallacy, challenges the myth that renewables were unable to provide Australia's base load electricity needs and it argues that a mixture of bio-energy, solar thermal, geothermal and wind power could provide the answer.

Back to the SMH, an article on a landfill methane project down at Goulburn - a positive example of the old maxim, "where there's muck, there's brass" (you'll have to imagine the accent I have in mind for that one).

THEY call it the void. A giant open-cut mine on the outskirts of Goulburn is slowly filling with Sydney's waste, but this super tip is also a new source of green power.

When the switch is flicked at a small power plant nearby in about six months, methane from the decomposing waste will be burned to generate electricity. The food scraps and paper a growing number of Sydneysiders throw out will be used to generate the electricity to power their homes. Methane is a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. About 20 per cent of human-induced global warming since pre-industrial times has been attributed to methane emanating from landfills, coalmines, oil and gas operations, and agriculture.

Capturing the gas and using it to generate electricity prevents it from entering the atmosphere and displaces electricity that would otherwise have been generated by coal-fired power stations.

What is good for the environment is also good for companies such as Veolia, the international waste and water group that owns the Woodlawn tip at Goulburn. Once viewed as nothing more than a problem that had to be buried, literally, waste is increasingly considered a valuable resource, Veolia says. The company hopes to make money not just from selling methane-generated electricity into the national electricity grid, but also from turning organic waste into fertiliser. Hot water from waste processing could also be used to establish greenhouses and fish farms.

Unlike traditional landfills, which capture the methane only when a tip is full, Veolia's team of engineering and environmental managers want to generate as much methane as possible and suck it from the decomposing waste while the tip fills. They have designed a system of pipes that run horizontally and vertically through the waste that pumps the gas to their nearby power plant. Leachate in the pit - created when rain percolating through the waste reacts with decomposing material - is pumped through the layers of rubbish to speed up the decomposition, which in turn generates more methane.

Veolia has entered a long-term contract to provide the electricity to EnergyAustralia, which estimates that capturing gas from the landfill will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 800,000 tonnes a year and generate 20 megawatts an hour, or enough green electricity a year to power 30,000 homes. Veolia also has State Government approval to build a 25-turbine wind farm near the Woodlawn tip, which would generate another 50 megawatts an hour.

But a $50 a tonne levy imposed by the NSW Government on waste that goes to landfill has prompted Veolia to look at ways of using some of the waste instead of burying it. Veolia's ambitious plans have not been without problems. Clyde and Auburn residents went to court several years ago in an unsuccessful bid to stop the construction of a waste transfer station at Clyde, from which the waste is sent by rail to the tip. Veolia defends the efficiency of its transport system. It says the trains that transfer almost 9000 tonnes of waste from Clyde every week have taken 39,000 truck movements off the roads.

One more from the SMH, this one on the mountains of un-recycled e-waste our techno-fetishes are creating. Freecycling is a good start for dealing with some of this stuff - though good recycling strategies for truly dead equipment aren't all that common - their really should be cradle-to-cradle processes put in place by all the big manufacturers if we ever want to deal with the problem properly.

WORN-OUT computers, printers and electronic household appliances are the Triffids of waste, threatening to rise up and smother all in their path, an environmental lawyer says. Just try getting rid of something old, says Mariann Lloyd-Smith, an adviser to governments and a member of the National Toxics Network. She thinks that Australia should be doing better.

Computers and electronic junk, called e-waste, are what come of our lust for upgrades. This year's new iPod or PSP is next year's throwaway; last year's chunky screen is on its way to the computer crematorium; a big TV is an embarrassment; videos are very last century; DVD players cost less than $100; and a 50-centimetre television can be bought for $119. Repairers are few, from a check of the directory. At these prices why bother? But where does it all end up? "I remember saving up for my first electric drill and thinking when I bought it that it would last me a lifetime," said Peter Netchaef, the manager of recycling at the industrial recycler Sims Group.

The trouble is that e-waste is unwanted in landfill because of its volume. It has unique environmental problems that might include high lead content in screens, complex and toxic plastics in computers, unsafe alloys in phones and even, in some appliances, microscopic amounts of uranium.

Dr Lloyd-Smith cites her own case as an example of what a consumer with a conscience can be up against. Wanting to offload defunct computers, she rang a recycling scheme in Canberra. "'Before I send them to you I'd like to know what will happen to them,"' she said. "And they said: 'That's fine; they go to China.' And I said: 'But aren't you aware that is illegal?"'

For Dr Lloyd-Smith, a formidable environmental activist, it was a matter of principle and a dispute that was all in a day's work. But to anyone else with a long-dead and loathed computer taking up space it would be a moment for despair. What to do next? "We can't say that the public purse will absorb it in landfill or that it will be exported to Asia," Dr Lloyd-Smith said.

While consumers might dream of a "control+alt+delete" solution for their old computer, the reality is far less elegant. Evidence to the Productivity Commission last year estimated about 5 million defunct computers are sitting in sheds and storerooms. That is a cautious guess, industry experts say.

The problem of e-waste is worldwide, but it is exaggerated in Australia, where product stewardship principles - where manufacturers and consumers share a role in safe disposal - do not yet apply. ...

In a bizarre twist to the mud volcano unleashed by Santos' exploration for natural gas in Java, affected locals are talking about trying to claim refugee status in Australia.

Some victims of a mud volcano disaster which has displaced thousands of people in East Java may seek asylum in Australia if they do not receive adequate compensation. Local media reports have quoted protesters gathered outside Indonesia's presidential palace as saying that if they do not receive adequate attention from the Government they may seek asylum in Australia or the United States.

The protesters are from Sidoarjo in East Java, where a fractured mining well spewing hot mud for almost a year has consumed seven villages and displaced more than 14,000 people. But protest leaders say that their main demand is for the government to pay them cash compensation up front rather than making promises to pay it in the future.

AP has a pretty alarming report on global warming and its impact on the US and elsewhere.

As the world warms, water — either too little or too much of it — is going to be the major problem for the United States, scientists and military experts said Monday. It will be a domestic problem, with states clashing over controls of rivers, and a national security problem as water shortages and floods worsen conflicts and terrorism elsewhere in the world, they said. At home, especially in the Southwest, regions will need to find new sources of drinking water, the Great Lakes will shrink, fish and other species will be left high and dry, and coastal areas will on occasion be inundated because of sea-level rises and souped-up storms, U.S. scientists said. ...

Meanwhile, global-warming water problems will make poor, unstable parts of the world — the Middle East, Africa and South Asia — even more prone to wars, terrorism and the need for international intervention, a panel of retired military leaders said in a separate report.

"Water at large is the central (global warming) problem for the U.S.," Princeton University geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer said after a press conference featuring eight American scientists who were lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's climate-effects report. Roger Pulwarty, one of the federal government's top drought scientists, said states such as Arizona and Colorado, which already fight over the Colorado River basin water, will step up legal skirmishes. They may look to the Great Lakes, but water availability there will shrink, he said. Reduced snow melt supplying water for the Sacramento Valley in California means that by 2020 there won't be enough water "to meet the needs of the community," Pulwarty said. That will step-up the competition for water, he said.

On the East Coast, rising sea levels will make storm surge "the No. 1 vulnerability for the metropolitan East Coast," said study lead author Cynthia Rosenzweig of
NASA. "It's a very real threat and needs to be considered for all coastal development." Rising sea level can harm Florida's biodiversity and be dangerous during hurricanes, the scientists added.

A few hours later, retired Gen. Charles F. "Chuck" Wald focused on the same global warming problem. "One of the biggest likely areas of conflict is going to be over water," said Wald, former deputy commander of U.S. European Command. He pointed to the Middle East and Africa. The military report's co-author, former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, also pointed to sea-level rise floods as potentially destabilizing South Asia countries of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Lack of water and food in places already the most volatile will make those regions even more unstable with global warming and "foster the conditions for internal conflicts, extremism and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies," states the 63-page military report, issued by the CNA Corp., an Alexandria, Va.-based national security think tank.

Kristi Ebi, a Virginia epidemiologist on the scientific panel, said reduced water supplies globally will hinder human health. "We're seeing mass migration of people because of things like water resource constraint, and that's certainly a factor in conflict," she added.

Peter Glieck, president of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, Calif., think tank, said the national security and domestic infighting over water comes as little surprise. "Water is connected to everything we care about — energy, human health, food production and politics," said Glieck, who was not part of either panel. "And that fact alone means we better pay more attention to the security connections. Climate will effect all of those things. Water resources are especially vulnerable to climate change."

As water fights erupt between nations and regions and especially between cities and agricultural areas, Stanford scientist Terry Root said there will be one sure loser low on the priority list for water: other species. "The fish will lose out and the birds and everything," she said. Pollution will also worsen with global warming, the scientists said. As places like the Great Lakes draw down on water, the pollution inside will get more concentrated and trapped toxins will come more to the surface, said Stanford scientist Stephen Schneider. And even the air, especially in the Northeast, will become more deadly. More heat means more smog cooked and about a 4 to 5 percent increase in smog-related deaths, Ebi said. That's thousands of people, she said.

The scientists and military leaders held out hope that dramatic cuts in fossil fuel emissions could prevent much of the harm they are predicting. But they said the U.S. government — and the rest of the world — has to act now.

Dave at Grist points to a classic report from US News and World Report on the Bush Administrations successful efforts in dealing with global warming - apparently its "mission accomplished" with this problem too.

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Monday the growth of greenhouse gases by less than 1 percent in 2005 shows the administration's program to address global warming "is delivering real results." The pronouncement by EPA Administrator Dave Johnson brought a quick response from some environmentalists.

"Things have come to a pretty sad state of affairs when the EPA tries to spin increased greenhouse gas emissions as a victory," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, an environmental advocacy group.

The EPA said its annual greenhouse gas assessment showed that 7.26 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases were released by U.S. sources in 2005, an increase of 0.8 percent from the previous year. ...

Greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing an average of 1.2 percent a year since 1990, according to the Energy Department, and the smaller increase in 2005 may have had little to do with Bush's climate policy.

"The slow growth in emissions from 2004 to 2005 can be attributed mainly to higher energy prices that suppressed demand, low or negative growth in several energy-intensive industries, and weather-related disruptions," the Energy Department said in a separate report on greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina disrupted oil and natural gas supplies from the Gulf of Mexico, causing gasoline prices to jump briefly well above $3 a gallon and caused havoc in a number of industries that rely heavily on natural gas.

Maybe they're right - Bush's policy on carbon emissions helped contribute to Hurricane Katrina, which made energy prices soar, which reduced demand somewhat, which slowed down the rate of increase of carbon emissions a little. Obviously they are betting on larger, more frequent hurricanes as a way of actually reducing carbon emissions - us unbeleivers simply aren't thinking laterally enough...

Gar Lipow at Grist has a post on No sweat solutions to global warming (not quite as low-sweat as official US policy obviously but perhaps a little more practical). Also at Grist a note that the L.A. Times won a Pulitzer for their oceans reporting.

I'm restarting my series on solutions to global warming, both on how to phase out fossil fuels and the best means to sequester carbon, because I consider the topic a critical one.

The carbon lobby has mostly (not entirely) given up disputing that global warming is occurring. They know that they won't be able to confuse the public on its human-caused nature much longer. But a final stalling tactic is open to deniers -- to pretend that nothing can be done, or at least nothing that most people are willing to live with. There is an old engineering saying: "no solution, no problem."

Converging with this, there is a small but unfortunately influential primitivist movement. In their belief that technology itself is totalitarian, they also contribute to the idea that the only solution to global warming is a drastic reduction in the technical level of civilization -- perhaps down to the hunter-gatherer level. Many well-meaning, intelligent people promote a less extreme version of this trope -- the conviction that we need to impoverish working people in rich nations to solve our environmental crisis and deal justly with the poorer countries.

The primary purpose of this series is to ensure that energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies become known as inexpensive fossil fuel substitutes available today, rather than a high-priced vision of tomorrow. The U.S. needs to understand that continued use of fossil fuel is a political decision rather than a technical one. Our only choices are not destructive, expensive continued burning of fossil fuels or dramatic cuts in standard of living.

The argument that more and more global warming deniers will rely on is that it is too expensive to phase out fossil fuel use. There is a certain absurdity to making a long series of posts refuting the idea that saving the world is too expensive. But this absurd task is also a necessary one. If the methods offered to stop global warming are too costly or too unpleasant, many people will prefer to wait and hope that technology provides some magical painless solution.

Many series, studies, and books have been written about efficiency and renewables. What will follow differs in not assuming technical breakthroughs, or drastic price drops in prices of existing technology; while these are both likely and desirable, let's examine the cost-effective solutions available now.

Although I will deal with sources, such as wind power, the bulk of the series will deal with efficiency improvements. Please note that word is efficiency rather than conservation -- gaining the same convenience and benefits with fewer emissions, rather than living with less. For example, automatic washer/dryer combinations that reduce energy use increase efficiency; clotheslines that substitute human labor for commercial dryers conserve energy and emissions. If somebody who makes a good enough living that they can afford a washer and dryer chooses to switch to a clothesline, to trade some of their time for energy savings, that is a choice; it is not the only way to reduce emissions. Similarly, while the poorest of the poor currently need clean water, sanitation,and healthy food more than any type of luxury good, it is important to show that fighting global warming does not rule out their some day having survival necessities and the luxuries many of us take for granted that can make day-to-day living easier.

The TED website has had a revamp, with a new look and a whole lot of new content and features.

TED, known for its annual invitation-only summit of the world's brightest minds, today unveiled the new TED website (www.ted.com), showcasing the extraordinary talks that have made TED famous. With its striking design and groundbreaking video technology, the free site encourages audience participation consistent with its tagline, "Ideas worth spreading".

"This is an important moment in TED's history," said Chris Anderson, Curator of TED. "With the launch of our new website we're really saying to the world: We want to share with you our best content for free, and we want you to connect with like-minded people inspired by these talks. In other words, we see the site as a way of dramatically expanding our community from the 1000 people who attend the conference to millions of knowledge seekers around the globe."

TED is owned by a non-profit foundation whose mission is to leverage the power of ideas. The new website was inspired by the viral success of TEDTalks, the audio and video podcast series, which premiered in June 2006 and has been viewed more than 8.5 million times worldwide. The TEDTalks series was exclusively sponsored by BMW, who returns as the inaugural sponsor for TED.com.

"We were astounded by how quickly the audience for TEDTalks grew. But what surprised us even more was the impact the talks had on viewers. The extensive discussion in the blogosphere, and the depth of the emotional response inspired us to create this new site," said June Cohen, Director of TED Media, who led the development of TED.com. "When you think about the impact a single talk can have on a single person, and multiply that millions of times, the overall effect can be world-changing."

The new TED.com features:

* More than 100 full-length TED talks, including 30 never-before-seen outside the exclusive TED Conference
* First-of-its-kind video player with an elegant interface and innovative features including large-screen playback, automatic adjustment for bandwidth speed, and chapter-marking technology that lets users find and skip to key moments in a given talk
* A unique ratings system more nuanced than the typical 5-star approach, allowing users to describe talks with adjectives, such as "beautiful", "eloquent" and "courageous"
* High-resolution video that can be viewed online or downloaded for playback on a computer, iPod or set-top box
* Ideas, insight and inspiration from a diverse group of thinkers and doers, including Bono, Bill Clinton, Jeff Bezos, Jane Goodall, Stefan Sagmeister, Malcolm Gladwell, Eve Ensler, Nicholas Negroponte, Peter Gabriel, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Tony Robbins, Anna Deavere Smith, Hans Rosling, Jeff Han, and many others
* Detailed talk summaries and speaker biographies to provide more context around each talk
* Innovative ways to browse talks, which are grouped into TED-like themes, such as "Inspired by nature", "How the mind works" and "Tales of Invention"
* Social-networking tools -- including Profile Pages, Comments and Favorites -- that allow for interaction among members of the extended TED community
* Free site membership for everyone worldwide

One of the new talks is from WorldChanging's Alex Steffen.

Worldchanging.com founder Alex Steffen offers a fast-paced round-up of radical (but possible) answers to our planet’s greatest challenges, ranging from green cities and buildings, to digital collaboration tools, to ingenious tools for the developing world (flowers that detect landmines; straws that purify water as you drink; merry-go-rounds that pump water using the energy expended by children at play). As Western-style consumerism spreads to developing countries, we must re-imagine our world -- a process he believes is slowly happening in such cities as Vancouver and Portland, Oregon, and also in the developing world, where new technologies and new forms of collaboration are combining to solve 21st-century problems.

Jamais at Open The Future is moderating a wiki and online discussion on reducing nitrogen pollution. Maybe peak natural gas will be a contributing factor...

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation invites you to be part of an online collaboration to create strategies for reducing nitrogen pollution. Please join at http://nitrogen.packard.org.

An increasingly dangerous threat to our environment and human health, nitrogen pollution is degrading water quality and coastal ecosystems, contributing to climate change and posing a variety of health risks. Despite its rapid growth and harmful consequences, the problem of nitrogen pollution has received relatively little attention, except in areas suffering the consequences. In response to this gap, the Packard Foundation is exploring opportunities for philanthropic investments to make a significant contribution to solutions.

Since the most robust strategies for addressing a problem as complex as nitrogen pollution can not be developed by Packard alone, the Foundation has launched a public forum for collaboration. Everyone with an interest in reducing nitrogen pollution is invited to join and work together to create effective strategies for addressing this pressing problem.

The forum will be live and open to public participation through May 10th.

Packard will make the full product of this forum available to the Foundation’s Trustees at its June Board meeting and the Foundation staff will use the product of the site in developing a recommended strategy for the Trustees to consider. Once the forum closes, the outcomes of this work will be available to the public, archived online and protected under a Creative Commons License.