The Power And The Passion  

Local energy news seems to be dominated by nuclear power and uranium mining today. Ziggy Switkowski reckons a decision will be made to introduce nuclear power here this year - though he does have the grace to admit we have no clue about handling nuclear waste.

The man who headed the government's nuclear task force believes Australia will make a decision this year on whether or not to embrace nuclear power. Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) chairman Ziggy Switkowski helped formalise the nuclear debate in Australia when he headed a government task force last year.

The task force predicted Australia could have its first nuclear plant in 10 to 15 years, with as many as 25 reactors supplying up to a third of the country's electricity by 2050. Labor has indicated it won't allow nuclear power in Australia if it wins government but Prime Minister John Howard is backing the concept of a local industry.

Dr Switkowski told ABC radio's Sunday Profile he thinks some decisions on whether Australia will take the next step in the nuclear fuel cycle will be made this year.

The Herald also has an article about a report called "A Bright Future" (as opposed to the Rodent's toxic greenhouse future), released by a range of groups urging greater use of renewable energy.

Household electricity bills would rise by just $1.23 a week if a quarter of Australia's energy came from renewable sources, a report has found. The report by three green groups says setting a renewable energy target of 25 per cent by the year 2020 would deliver more than 16,000 new jobs, slash greenhouse gas emissions by 69 million tonnes and generate $33 billion in investment. Although the average power bill would rise by $64 a year, continuing to rely on current power sources would cause prices to jump by $234 a year.

The study, A Bright Future, was released Monday by the Australian Conservation Foundation, Greenpeace and the Climate Change Action Network. It warns Australia is missing out on the economic benefits of renewable energy that are flowing to California and European nations which have boosted their renewable energy targets.

In 1997, the federal government set a mandatory renewable energy target of two per cent, on top of existing supply. At present, about 10 per cent of Australia's energy comes from renewables like wind, solar and hydro.

"With current policies, (Australia's) electricity emissions will reach 260 million tonnes by 2020, more than double 1990 levels," the report said. "Generating a quarter of our electricity from renewable energy and reversing electricity growth from 2010 onwards by ambitious energy efficiency measures would reduce overall electricity emissions to 160 million tonnes. "The reduction of about 100 million tonnes, compared to business as usual, would be equivalent to removing all the road transport in Australia. "Provided we put Australia on track for sustained renewable energy development, costs should fall to below the cost of fossil fuels over the next 15 years."

Under the plan, coal's share of power generation would fall from three-quarters to 59 per cent, drastically reducing greenhouse emissions.

The study said allowing Australia's energy use to continue rising would ultimately cost the country far more than switching to renewable sources now and becoming more energy-efficient. Australia was blessed with abundant renewable energy resources yet was lagging behind countries like Germany, which was less windy and received less sunlight.

Greenpeace campaigner Mark Wakeham said Australia should be a world leader in renewable energy. "Yet due to current government policies, we're throwing away our competitive advantage and renewable companies are moving offshore," he said.

The European Union has set a renewable energy target of 21 per cent by 2010 and California is aiming for 33 per cent by 2020.

Meanwhile the Australian Labor party is girding its loins to do battle with itself over the "three mines" uranium mining policy. Leader Kevin Rudd (fresh from sucking up to our overlord in New York) is trying to overturn the policy, backed by deputy Julia Gillard.

Kevin Rudd will ask his party to overturn its 25-year opposition to new Australian uranium mines at Labor's national conference but anti-nuclear champions deny change is in the bag. Uranium and industrial relations are shaping up as the two biggest challenges for Mr Rudd during the three-day conference, which begins on Friday. The new leader is a hit in the opinion polls but Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese believes Mr Rudd won't necessarily get it all his own way at the conference.

Mr Albanese will be leading the push for Labor to retain its no new uranium mines policy, once known as the three mines policy. "I'll go all out to put forward the position which I think has the overwhelming support of the Labor Party membership," he told the Nine Network. "And in terms of electoral politics, I just think it is beyond belief to argue that there are people out there ... who say 'Gee I'll change my vote to Labor if only they change their policy on no new uranium mines.' "I just think that's an absurd proposition."

West Australian Premier Alan Carpenter and Labor's environment spokesman Peter Garrett, who ran as a candidate for the Nuclear Disarmament Party in 1984, are other high profile ALP members who back the current policy. But few expect Mr Rudd to be rolled on uranium and many suspect the numbers on the conference floor are already fixed.

Anthony Albanese is warning about high cost, safety concerns, waste disposal issues and nuclear weapons proliferation and Peter Garrett ( and some displeasure from the Greens) has emerged from the cone of silence to actually stand up for one of his old principles. Meanwhile the demented and near-senile Rodent is blabbering away about global warming not being a serious issue (didn't he spend last week telling us we were all about to starve ?) and renewables being incapable of replacing coal - some "wisdom" from the old folks home...

Peter Garrett is worried about emissions. There's the carbon kind that wafts into the atmosphere and broils the planet. And there's another kind that he seems just as anxious about. These are the emissions from his mouth.

This is not immediately clear. The shadow minister for climate change, environment and heritage bounces into an Ultimo studio 45 minutes late. It's another hectic day - up at 6, at work by 7.30. Meetings with environmental and business groups tend to run into after-dark engagements. He opened an art gallery exhibition the other day. He turned up to the opening night of a Sydney Theatre Company performance. Soon, he'll dash to a radio interview.

Like the flash of a (fluorescent) light bulb, he offers a smile. A giant mitt extends. He bends his head forward and his pale eyes hone their gaze so that you feel like the only person in the room.

Many say Garrett is a natural. On the election trail in 2004, he met a roomful of old ladies cowering at the bald man who always looked angry. Soon, they were his new best friends.

Garrett, who turns 54 on April 16, natters with an Aussie twang. Yes, he will pose sitting on a chair over a pool of water. No, he will not stand - that may give a walking-on-water impression. Yes, he will take his shoes off. No, he will not wear a trench coat. "This is about as far as my naturalness goes," he says, elbow on knee, toes curled up in the ripples below.

Garrett's political rise, it could be argued, has roughly tracked the shift of the climate-change debate into the mainstream. In 2004, he fronted up with then Labor leader Mark Latham and announced his candidacy. This shocked some, who might have expected an idealist to have joined the Greens, but discussions had played out for months beforehand, perhaps years. As with a Midnight Oil song title, Garrett sought the power and the passion.

Latham blew up. Garrett stuck. He spent the next two years in Parliament listening, observing and saying little. Some members of the party thought Garrett's environmental credentials were being wasted. Presumably, that included Kevin Rudd, who promptly plonked Garrett on his front bench when he won the Labor leadership challenge last December.

Greens leader Bob Brown was "profoundly disappointed" when Garrett chose a major party. Brown says now that Garrett could shine representing either Liberal or Labor but there is a price - the forcing of a clean break from Garrett's long-standing views on uranium, US bases and many other issues. "I'm glad it's him and not me," says Brown. ...

UPI has an article on Germany's renewable energy boom and the competition they are facing from the Japanese in world clean energy markets. Meanwhile we lead the world in coal exports - care to guess who has the sunset economy out of the 3 ?

Great export numbers and thousands of new jobs -- Germany is expecting a "green" economic boom sparked by its renewable energy sector.

As early as 2020, sales from wind and solar energy companies will surpass those of automobile and machinery companies, right now among the largest industry sectors in Germany, according to a study from international consulting firm Roland Berger. "The 'green' sector is turning into a leading sector in Germany," Torsten Henzelmann, a senior official at Roland Berger, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung weekly. "It really is a job motor. In 2020, the renewable energy and environment technology sector will employ more people than the machinery or car sector. Today already, companies complain that they can't find enough qualified personnel."

The study, commissioned by the German Environment Ministry, polled officials at 1,500 German renewable energy and environment technology firms. It won't be published until June at a European Union environment summit, but Roland Berger spokesman Stefan Schuessler provided United Press International with an excerpt Friday.

The world market for environmentally friendly products has a volume of roughly $1.3 billion, and that will double by 2020, the study said. The main drivers of this growth will be renewable energy generation and energy-efficiency technologies, thus handing Germany great chances for additional economic development. Already, the country's renewable energy sector is among the most innovative and successful worldwide. Nordex, Repower, Enercon (all wind energy), SolarWorld and Conenergy (solar energy) -- renewable companies based in Germany -- dominate the world market. Every third solar panel and every second wind rotor is made in Germany, and German turbines and generators used in hydro energy generation are among the most popular worldwide.

Most companies in German told Roland Berger they want to hire more staff because they expect even more growth. Nearly 800,000 people work in the German environment technology sector; an estimated 214,000 people work with renewables in Germany, up from 157,000 in 2004, an increase of 36 percent. "Last year alone, the number of people employed in the German renewable energy sector grew by 24,000," German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said last month in Berlin. "This is a real success story."

But before another chapter can be added to that success story, firms and especially politics in Germany need to keep up with the competition, the study warned, citing several examples of ambitious government support programs in other parts of the world.

Germany's main competitor is Japan, with which it dominates the solar energy sector. While Germany leads biodiesel production, the Japanese are ahead in the fuel-cell sector and the hybrid car sector. Toyota by far dominates that market niche, with the German giants, Volkswagen, BMW and DaimlerChrysler having reacted too late to the growing demand for "green" cars. ...

Khebab has posted part 2 of his review of Mobjectivist's "Shock Model" for oil depletion modelling.

This post is the second part of a review of the Shock Model that was introduced in part I. The shock model was developed by WebHubbleTelecsope and aims at modeling oil production based on the backdated oil discovery data. In the first part, we proposed to apply a bootstrap filter in order to estimate the shock function that was previously manually set by the user. We also observed that the predictive ability was limited because of a too conservative projection of future extraction rate values.

In this second part, I propose a modification of the extraction rate function in order to improve the predictive ability of the model. This modification is based on the observation that the extraction rate function is linearly dependent to the ratio of the cumulative production to the cumulative shifted discovery. The new formulation is similar to the logistic differential equation at the difference that the Ultimate Recoverable Resource (URR) is replaced by the cumulative shifted discovery.

I look also at the modelisation of reserve growth which is an important aspect of modern oil production that is often overlooked in the peak oil community. ...

Conclusions
About the Hybrid Shock Model:

1. The interest of the Shock Model approach resides in its capacity to exploit the discovery data, the production profile and the reserve growth models.
2. The URR is not an output of the model as it is the case for the Hubbert Linearization but results directly from the discovery curves and the application of reserve growth models. The HSM is a nice way to inject prior information about the URR.
3. The method can potentially deal with difficult multi-modal production profiles such as Saudi Arabia.
4. The logistic case can be seen as a particular case of the HSM when the extraction of total resource (URR) is instantaneous.

Jeff Vail is wondering if the decline of Gazprom's gas reserves (and thus Russia's gas exports) means Russian natural gas is past peak. While Russia is generally thought to have massive gas reserves, even a short term downturn in exports could prove problematic for Russian customers.

The US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) reports that Gazprom Chairman (and Russia's Deputy Vice President) Dmitriy Medvedev is demanding Russia’s electric monopoly UES substitute coal-generation for gas generation. This is a reversal of the “gasification” policy of the ‘70s that attempted to reduce the environmental damage and transportation costs of coal-fired power plants. The obvious rationale for reducing domestic consumption is to make more natural gas available for export to Europe and elsewhere. Is this intended to obscure production declines, evidence that Russian natural gas production has peaked?

Gazprom’s existing fields are currently in decline (see image). The most realistic strategy to offset the sharp decline in production from existing fields is to bring production online from new fields at Yamal, Shtokman, and Sakhalin. These mega-projects, however, have experienced repeated delays and complications. Gazprom is bridging the gap by acquiring producing fields, masking the decline of existing fields. This may preserve the appearance of normalcy, but it doesn’t actually replace declining gas production.

Gazprom’s demands that UES shift to coal-generation can also be explained by simple profit maximization—more gas to sell on the foreign market, where it commands a higher price than under domestic price controls. This explanation, however, fails to explain the timing of Gazprom’s demand. It seems logical that if profit maximization was sufficient rationale to switch back to coal-generation, we would have heard of these demands years ago when this rationale would have been equally valid. Is the more reasonable rationale that Gazprom is scrambling to compensate for plummeting production, under the realization that their mega-projects will not live up to expectations? Europe may have an answer to this question next Winter.

Technology Review has an article on a New York project to submerge turbines in the East River to generate electricity from tidal currents. Its not on the same scale as those huge Russian projects I mentioned recently - but it is a good example of harvesting local energy sources.

Working from barges and tugboats off New York City's Roosevelt Island, engineers are battling northeasters and this month's heavy spring tides to install the first major tidal-power project in the United States. The project involves a set of six submerged turbines that are designed to capture energy from the East River's tidal currents. The three-bladed turbines, which are five meters in diameter and resemble wind turbines, are made by Verdant Power of Arlington, VA.

Thanks to lessons learned by wind turbine designers, tidal power is already economically competitive, producing electricity at prices similar to wind power, according to feasibility studies by the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry R&D consortium. And it offers a big advantage over wind and other renewables: a precisely predictable source of energy. As a result, developers in the United States have laid claim to the best sites up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. In the past four years the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, DC, has issued preliminary permits for tidal installations at 25 sites, and it is considering another 31 applications.

Current-harvesting turbines represent a sharp break from the first wave of tidal power, so-called "barrages" in which impoundments installed across estuaries or bays created hydroelectric reservoirs refilled twice daily by rising tides. The La Rance barrage in Normandy has produced up to 240 megawatts of power--as much as many natural-gas-fired power plants--since 1966. Halifax utility Nova Scotia Power has been generating up to 20 megawatts of power since 1984 at a tidal barrage in the Bay of Fundy, whose funnel-shaped inlet produces the world's largest tides--16 meters at its head.

But these constructions have fallen out of favor because of their outsize impact on ocean ecosystems. James Taylor, general manager of environmental planning and monitoring for Nova Scotia Power, notes that commercial-scale installations planned for the Bay of Fundy in the 1980s would have altered tides as far away as Boston. "It would be a pretty hard thing to get permitted today," says Taylor.

Hence the attraction of in-flow turbines such as Verdant's. "The whole point of doing kinetic hydro is to have a very small environmental footprint," says Dean Corren, Verdant's director of technology development, who designed the tidal turbines in the early 1980s while conducting energy research at New York University.

Corren's team installed its first two turbines in the East River in December. One has been delivering a maximum of 35 kilowatts of power to New York City, swiveling to generate power as the river swells with the high tides and empties with the low. The other turbine delivers performance data that Corren says will be crucial to refining the blades and gearbox, generator, and control system to optimize power generation.

This month Verdant added four more 35-kilowatt turbines. Corren says Verdant is now working on a next-generation design that will be cheaper to mass-produce, in anticipation of installing a farm of at least 100 turbines at the East River site. ...

Other competitors are scaling up so-called ducted turbines, which are surrounded by a power-boosting shroud to guide water flow. Nova Scotia Power recently signed up Dublin's OpenHydro to install a one-megawatt ducted turbine in the Bay of Fundy, while Vancouver-based Clean Current Power Systems is working on a two-megawatt version of the 65-kilowatt ducted turbine it installed off the coast of British Columbia in December.

Although scale will reduce costs, Clean Current president Glen Darou says the nascent industry will also have plenty of work ahead proving the reliability of its mechanical and electrical systems underwater. "Salt water is insidious," says Darou; try as you might to seal it out, corrosive seawater "will get in there eventually."

Green Car Congress has a post on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan (PlaNYC for a More Sustainable New York) to achieve a 30% Reduction in CO2 by 2030.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg chose Earth Day to present a package of 127 initiatives designed to achieve the sustainability goals that he had outlined in December 2006, including reducing carbon emissions by 30% by 2030.

As a coastal city, we’re on the leading edge of one of the most dramatic effects of global warming: rising sea levels and intensifying storms. The science is there. It’s time to stop debating it and to start dealing with it. Of course, no city or country can address this issue alone. But that doesn’t mean we can walk away from the responsibility to do our part and to show others it can be done in ways that will strengthen the economy’s long-term health.
—Mayor Bloomberg

Other goals of PlaNYC: A Greener, Greater New York include: affordable housing for an expected additional 1 million New Yorkers; increasing access to parks, playgrounds and open spaces; reclaiming brownfields; developing critical backup systems for the aging water network to ensure reliability; providing additional reliable power sources and upgrading existing power plants; and reducing water pollution.
Earlier this month, the Mayor released New York’s first-ever comprehensive inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, which was the first step towards achieving major emissions reductions. For transportation, one major set of initiatives is focused on expanding and improving mass transit.

In analyzing congestion pricing, we studied commuting patterns across the city, and we arrived at an astounding finding. Of the New Yorkers who work in Manhattan but live outside it, only five percent commute by car.
—Mayor Bloomberg

PlaNYC will seek to fund five key projects that eliminate capacity constraints on some of our most clogged mass transit routes into Manhattan.

Technology Review also has an article on GM's new Fuel-Cell car - innovative but "freighted with hydrogen's flaws".

Last week General Motors (GM) unveiled a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered version of its Chevrolet Volt concept, a family of electric cars that get a portion of their energy from being plugged into the electrical grid. The first version, announced in January, married plug-in electric drive to a gasoline or ethanol generator that can recharge the battery.

But swapping out the generator for a fuel cell may be a step backward. That is in part because producing the hydrogen needed to power the fuel-cell version could increase rather than decrease energy demand, and it may not make sense economically.

"The possibility that this vehicle would be built successfully as a commercial vehicle seems to me rather unlikely," says Joseph Romm, who managed energy-efficiency programs at the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration. "If you're going to the trouble of building a plug-in and therefore have an electric drive train and a battery capable of storing a charge, then you could have a cheap gasoline engine along with you, or an expensive fuel cell." Consumers will likely opt for the cheaper version, Romm notes.

Still, the Volt is part of a promising trend toward automotive electrification--which could decrease petroleum use and reduce carbon emissions. It is part of GM's response to an anticipated future in which both petroleum and carbon-dioxide emissions will carry a heavy price, driving consumers to buy vehicles that run on alternative, low-carbon power sources. ...

The car emits no harmful emissions from the tailpipe. But because hydrogen fuel today is primarily made from fossil fuels this means the carbon-dioxide emissions are simply happening someplace else, Romm notes. He says that using renewable energy to charge up the battery in the gas-generator version of the Volt makes more sense than using it to make hydrogen. That's because it's more efficient to charge a battery than to make hydrogen, compress it, and then convert it back into electricity using a fuel cell.

Green Car Congress also reports that Tesla Motors have had to reduce the range of the new Tesla Roadster somewhat.

To improve safety and durability, design changes were made during the building of the first validation prototypes of the Tesla Roadster. As a result, the company has downgraded the electric vehicle’s range from 250 miles to “greater than 200.” Changes made to increase the car’s safety and durability increased the weight by several hundred pounds. In addition, the company selected li-ion cells with a slightly lower capacity than the largest cells available because the smaller and more mature cells have better long-term durability and higher abuse tolerance.

Writing on his company’s blog, CEO Martin Eberhard said that the company sent letters out to the company’s customers last week informing them of the decisions. As he describes in his post, it was not one or two large additions but a long list of small items, all of which added up to the additional mass.

Maybe I was a bit naive expecting to hold the line on mass. Those of us at Tesla Motors who have a long automotive experience say that fixes to problems discovered [at] this stage of the program always adds mass. The upside of all this is that the Tesla Roadster will be a much more reliable car for having added this mass. At more than 200 miles, the Tesla Roadster will still have the highest range of any production EV in history by a large margin, and we will continue working hard to deliver even better range in the coming months.

Eberhard said that the company is holding to a floor of a 200-mile range, and striving for upward revisions. The target for acceleration remains the same, because improvements in the drivetrain have offset the additional weight.

Jamais Cascio has a guest post at WorldChanging as part of their Earth Day series - some scenario planning on global warming called "Four Futures for the Earth".

Bart at Energy Bulletin comments "David Holmgren, the co-originator of permaculture, developed a similar matrix of scenarios: "BrownTech", "GreenTech", "Earth Steward" and "Lifeboats." I find scenario approach used by Cascio and Holmgren to be much more fruitful than a fixation upon one inevitable future, whether that future be envisioned as Petro-ollapse or Cornucopian Business-as-Usual. ".

Never trust a futurist who only offers one vision of tomorrow.

We don't know what the future will hold, but we can try to tease out what it might. Scenarios, which combine a variety of important and uncertain drivers into a mix of different -- but plausible -- futures, offer a useful methodology for coming up with a diverse set of plausible tomorrows. Scenarios are not predictions, but examples, giving us a wind-tunnel to test out different strategies for managing large, complex problems.

And there really isn't a bigger or more complicated problem right now than the incipient climate disaster. Today, there seems to be two schools of thought regarding the best way to deal with global warming: the "act now" approach, demanding (in essence) that we change our behavior and the ways that our societies are structured, and do it as quickly as possible, or else we're boned; and the "techno-fix" approach, which says (in essence) don't worry, the nano/info/bio revolution that's just around the corner will save us. Generally, the Worldchanging approach is to emphasize the first, with a sprinkle of the second for flavor (and as backup).

The thing is, these are not mutually-exclusive propositions, and success or failure in one doesn't determine the chance of success or failure in the other. It's entirely possible that we will change our behavior/society/world (ahem), and also come up with fantastic new technologies; it's also possible that we'll stumble on both paths, neither fixing things in time nor getting our hands on the tools we could use to repair the worst damage.

To a futurist, a pair of distinct, largely independent variables just begs to be turned into a scenario matrix. So let's give in, and take a brief look a the four scenarios the combinations of these two paths create:

Dodging a Bullet

2037: It's amazing how fast we went from "is this real?" to "what can we do?" to "let's do it now." There was no silver bullet, no green leap forward, just a billion quiet decisions to act. People made better, smarter choices, and the headlong rush to disaster slowed; encouraged by this, we started to focus our investments and social energy into solving this problem, and eventually (but much faster than we'd dared hope!) the growth of atmospheric carbon stopped. There's still too much CO2 in the air, and we know we're going to be dealing with a warming climate for awhile still, but the human species actually managed to choose to avoid killing itself off.

This is a world in which civil society begins to focus on averting climate disaster as its primary, immediate task, even at the cost of some economic growth and general technological acceleration. Most governments and institutions curtail research and development without direct climate benefits, leading to a world of 2037 that's nowhere near as advanced as futurists and technology enthusiasts had expected. A succession of environmental disasters linked (in the public mind, at the very least) to global warming -- killing hundreds of thousands, and leaving tens of millions as refugees -- gave added impetus to a world-wide effort; by 2017, a clear majority of the world's population was willing to do anything necessary to avoid the environmental collapse that many scientists saw as nearly inevitable. One popular slogan for the climate campaign was "we could be the best, or we could be the last."

Teaching the World to Sing

02037: I stumbled across a memory archive from twenty years ago, before the emergence of the Chorus, and was shocked to see the Earth as it was. Oceans near death, climate system lurching towards collapse, overall energy flux just horribly out-of-balance. I can't believe the Earth actually survived that. I had assumed that the Chorus was responsible for repairing the planet, but no -- We told me that, even by 02017, the Earth's human populace was making the kind of substantive changes to how it lived necessary to avoid real disaster, and that 02017 was actually one of the first years of improvement! What the Chorus made possible was the planetary repair, although We says that this project still has many years left, in part because We had to fix some of We's own mistakes from the first few repair attempts. The Chorus actually seemed embarrassed when We told me that!

This is a world in which immediate efforts to make the social and behavioral changes necessary to avoid climate disaster make possible longer-term projects to apply powerful, transformative technologies (such as molecular manufacturing and cognitive augmentation) to the problem of stabilizing and, eventually, repairing the broken environment. It's not quite a Singularity, but is perhaps something nearly as strange: a world that has come to see few differences between human systems and natural/geophysical systems. "We are Gaia, too," the aging (but quite healthy) James Lovelock reminded us in 2023. And Gaia is us: billions of molecular-scale eco-sensors and intelligent simulations give the Earth itself an important voice in the global Chorus.

Geoengineering 101: Pass/Fail

2037: The Hephaestus 2 mission reported last week that it had managed to stabilize the wobble on the Mirror, but JustinNN.tv blurbed me a minute ago that New Tyndall Center is still showing temperature instabilities. According to Tyndall, that clinches it: we have another rogue at work. NATO ended the last one with extreme prejudice (as dramatized in last Summer's blockbuster, "Shutdown" -- I loved that Bruce Willis came out of retirement to play Gates), but this one's more subtle. My eyecrawl has some bluster from the SecGen now, saying that "this will not stand," blah blah blah. I just wish that these boy geniuses (and they're all guys, you ever notice that?) would put half as much time and effort into figuring out the Atlantic Seawall problem as they do these crazy-ass plans to fix the sky.

This is a world in which attempts to make the broad social and behavioral changes necessary to avoid climate disaster are generally too late and too limited, and the global environment starts to show early signs of collapse. The 2010s to early 2020s are characterized by millions of dead from extreme weather events, hundreds of millions of refugees, and a thousand or more coastal cities lost all over the globe. The continued trend of general technological acceleration gets diverted by 2020 into haphazard, massive projects to avert disaster. Few of these succeed -- serious climate problems hit too fast for the more responsible advocates of geoengineering to get beyond the "what if..." stage -- and the many that fail often do so in a spectacular (and legally actionable) fashion. Those that do work serve mainly to keep the Earth poised on the brink: bioengineered plants that consume enough extra CO2 and methane to keep the atmosphere stable; a very slow project to reduce the acidity of the oceans; and the Mirror, a thousands of miles in diameter solar shield at the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun, reducing incoming sunlight by 2% -- enough to start a gradual cooling trend.

Say Goodnight

2030-something. Late in the decade, I think. Living day-to-day makes it hard to keep track of the years. The new seasons don't help -- Stormy, Still Stormy, Hellaciously Stormy, and Blast Furnace -- and neither does the constant travel, north to the Nunavut Protectorate, if it's still around. I hear things are even worse in Europe, if you can believe that. I don't hear much about Asia anymore, but I suppose nobody does now. The Greenland icepack went sometime in the last few years, and I hear a rumor that Antarctica is starting to go now. Who knows? I still see occasional aircraft high overhead, but they mostly look like military planes, so don't get your hopes up: they're probably from somebody who thinks it's still worth it to fight over the remaining oil.

This is a world in which we don't adopt the changes we need, and technology-based fixes end up being too hard to implement in sufficient quantity and scale to make a real difference. Competition for the last bit of advantage (in economics, in security, in resources) accelerates the general collapse. Things fall apart; the center does not hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

PIck your future.

CNN has an article on the disappearing bees and colony collapse disorder - low on alarmism and on potential causes - no risk of offending Monsanto or mobile phone companies with this one.

Go to work, come home.

Go to work, come home.

Go to work -- and vanish without a trace.

Billions of bees have done just that, leaving the crop fields they are supposed to pollinate, and scientists are mystified about why. The phenomenon was first noticed late last year in the United States, where honeybees are used to pollinate $15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and other crops annually. Disappearing bees have also been reported in Europe and Brazil.

Commercial beekeepers would set their bees near a crop field as usual and come back in two or three weeks to find the hives bereft of foraging worker bees, with only the queen and the immature insects remaining. Whatever worker bees survived were often too weak to perform their tasks. If the bees were dying of pesticide poisoning or freezing, their bodies would be expected to lie around the hive. And if they were absconding because of some threat -- which they have been known to do -- they wouldn't leave without the queen.

Since about one-third of the U.S. diet depends on pollination and most of that is performed by honeybees, this constitutes a serious problem, according to Jeff Pettis of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service. "They're the heavy lifters of agriculture," Pettis said of honeybees. "And the reason they are is they're so mobile and we can rear them in large numbers and move them to a crop when it's blooming."

Honeybees are used to pollinate some of the tastiest parts of the American diet, Pettis said, including cherries, blueberries, apples, almonds, asparagus and macadamia nuts. "It's not the staples," he said. "If you can imagine eating a bowl of oatmeal every day with no fruit on it, that's what it would be like" without honeybee pollination.

Pettis and other experts are gathering outside Washington for a two-day workshop starting on Monday to pool their knowledge and come up with a plan of action to combat what they call colony collapse disorder. "What we're describing as colony collapse disorder is the rapid loss of adult worker bees from the colony over a very short period of time, at a time in the season when we wouldn't expect a rapid die-off of workers: late fall and early spring," Pettis said. ...

Jay Hakes ha an article in the SF Chronicle on Jimmy Carter's powerful energy idea.

Thirty years ago this month, a solemn Jimmy Carter sat behind the historic Resolute desk in the Oval Office to announce to a prime-time national television audience his new comprehensive energy plan. In the most memorable line of the evening, the president declared the challenge of energy "the moral equivalent of war."

The Carter energy strategy was both praised for its ambition (the written version had 113 parts) and derided for its interventionism -- critics tried to brand it with the acronym MEOW.

Contrary to common mythology, Carter was far from a lonely voice calling for strenuous action. After the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, both of his predecessors, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, called energy the nation's top priority and set an ambitious goal for "energy independence" (eliminating reliance on foreign oil by 1980, no less).

...Calls for energy independence continue to reverberate through the energy debates of today. On the whole, however, the rhetoric of that earlier era creates considerable dissonance for the modern ear.

In his address of April 18, 1977, Carter used the word "sacrifice" (or "sacrifices") eight times and argued: "Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy." He repeatedly decried the "waste" of scarce fuels. Moreover, energy plans in the 1970s set bold goals and put meat on the bones to achieve them. Nixon, Ford and Carter called for sharp drops in oil imports and Carter set a goal of obtaining a fifth of America's needs from renewable energy by the turn of the century. Ford and Congress set strict standards for automobile fuel efficiency to offset high-priced foreign oil.

...Since oil imports have risen from 9 million barrels a day in 1977 to the current level of 12 million, there has been a tendency to view the efforts of Carter and others to cut reliance on oil from unstable sources as quixotic. But a closer look at the data shows otherwise.

By the time Carter left office, imports had dropped to 7 million barrels a day. Within a few years, they fell to 5 million. The plunge was the result of higher oil prices, a weak economy, the Alaska oil pipeline and new federal policies such as the auto efficiency standards. The slide in oil imports defanged the grip of oil-exporting countries on the world market and helped achieve considerable independence from foreign suppliers.

Since then, the trend of oil imports, rather than a straight line upward, has been a hockey stick. Foreign deliveries dropped sharply and then (after earlier supply and conservation efforts were largely abandoned) started a new upward trajectory, allowing OPEC to again seize control of the market early in 2000.

The largely unremembered "victory" in the war on imported oil was temporary. It is still worth noting, however, in an age when many think that making dramatic cuts in the security risks of dependence on Persian Gulf oil or in greenhouse gases resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels is just too difficult.

It remains to be seen whether America has the appetite for a new moral equivalent of war to deal with oil imports and climate change. But the lesson of the successes in the earlier war is that we shouldn't operate under the delusion that efforts to deal with these great challenges -- which are indeed daunting -- have to prove fruitless.

There was an interesting snippet in The Daily Reckoning newsletter today with some thoughts from Kevin Phillips and Ron Paul on the symptoms of late stage empires.

Chris Mayer, reporting from Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA:

"I headed over to the Empire Salon to hear Kevin Phillips deliver a talk on his latest book: American Theocracy: The Peril And Politics Of Radical Religion, Oil And Borrowed Money In The 21st Century. The Salon meets regularly in Washington D.C. where one can practically hear the beating heart of empire and feel its tremors in the ground. They look to hash out the implications of American Empire. In Phillips they had the man for the job.

"Phillips is a former Republican strategist turned fiery critic of the Republican Party's metamorphosis under George W. Bush. He has also dedicated much of efforts in studying leading economic powers of the past - Great Britain, Spain, the Dutch and Rome in particular. Phillips has come up with some yardsticks to gauge the decline of these powers. All past empires suffered through the following. And all of the below 'seem to be intensifying under the George W. Bush administration.'

"1. As the empire topped out, there was a popular sense that something was wrong - loss of jobs, increased violence, moral decay and more.
"2. An intensification of religious fervour (See the rise of the mega churches in the 'red states.')
"3. Conflicts between faith and science (witness the Evolution-creationism 'debate.')
4. Imperialism and global overreach. (See the Iraq War, which Phillips called 'the most poorly thought out war in U.S. history.')
5. Decline of industry and the rise of finance (as Phillips says, 'moving money around as opposed to building things.')
6. The burden of excessive debt. No need to comment here.

"The other interesting wrinkle Phillips tackles is the role of energy. Past empires mastered an energy source and as the importance of that energy source diminished, they could not make the adjustment. America's addiction to increasingly expensive oil will play a role in its downfall, Phillips says. "The U.S. is not going to make it with another energy regime." It is oil or bust.

"Finally, attendees got a surprise when congressman and presidential hopeful Ron Paul showed up. He made a few remarks, which brought cheers from the gathering: 'I'm not running based on what I'm going to do for you. I'm running telling you what I'm not going to do. I don't want to run your life. I don't want to run the economy. I don't want to police the world.'

"Are the American people ready to walk without a shepherd? Many will decide in 2008. Somehow, there is little suspense as to the answer."

The Herald has a report from The New York Times on the return of authoritarianism to Russia - "Back to the USSR: Putin turns to thought control". The new cold war seems to be gathering to steam, to judge by the cranking up of the propaganda machines.

Russia's media isn't as restricted as it was in the bad old days, but it's close, writes Andrew Kramer in Moscow.

AT THEIR first meeting with journalists since taking over Russia's largest independent radio news network, the managers had startling news of their own: from now on, they said, at least half of the reports about Russia must be "positive". Journalists employed by the network, Russian News Service, also said they were told by the new managers, who are allies of the Kremlin, that opposition leaders could not be mentioned on the air, and the US was to be portrayed as an enemy.

How would they know what constituted positive news?

"When we talk of death, violence or poverty, for example, this is not positive," said one editor, who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. "If the stockmarket is up, that is positive. The weather can also be positive."

In a darkening media landscape, radio news had been a rare bright spot. Now the implementation of the "50 per cent positive" rule at the Russian News Service leaves an increasingly small number of news outlets that are not managed by the Kremlin, either directly or through the state gas company Gazprom, a main owner of media assets. The three national television networks are already state-controlled, although small-circulation newspapers generally remain independent.

This month alone a bank loyal to the President, Vladimir Putin, tightened its control of an independent television station, parliament passed a measure banning "extremism" in politics, and prosecutors have gone after individuals who post critical comments in internet chat rooms. Parliament is also considering extending state control to internet sites that report news, reflecting the growing importance of web news as the country becomes more affluent and growing numbers of middle-class Russians acquire computers.

Last Tuesday police raided the Educated Media Foundation, a non-government group sponsored by US and European donors that helps foster an independent news media. The police carried away documents and computers that were used as servers for the websites of similar groups. That brought down a site run by the Glasnost Defence Foundation, a media rights group, which published bulletins on violations of press freedoms. "Russia is dropping off the list of countries that respect press freedoms," said a spokesman for the foundation, Boris Timoshenko. "We have propaganda, not information."

Harpers has an article on a man Putin would love to have on his staff, Alberto "Gonzo" Gonzales - while he's busy shredding emails and dodging subpoenas (strange pastimes for an Attorney General, it must be said), I'm sure he's glad someone remembers the good ole days, when shutting down the American press was his goal, rather than simply avoiding it. Talk about ingratitude - didn't they do a fine job of getting the war in Iraq underway - where's the love !

In June, a case is slated to go to trial in Northern Virginia that will mark a first step in a plan to silence press coverage of essential national security issues. The plan was hatched by Alberto Gonzales and his deputy, Paul J. McNulty—the two figures at the center of a growing scandal over the politicization of the prosecutorial process. This may in fact be the most audacious act of political prosecution yet. But so far, it has gained little attention and is poorly understood.

In the summer of 2005, Alberto Gonzales paid a visit to British Attorney General Peter Goldsmith. A British civil servant who attended told me “it was quite amazing really. Gonzales was obsessed with the Official Secrets Act. In particular, he wanted to know exactly how it was used to block newspapers and broadcasters from running news stories derived from official secrets and how it could be used to criminalise persons who had no formal duty to maintain secrets. He saw it as a panacea for his problems: silence the press. Then you can torture and abuse prisoners and what you will—without fear of political repercussions. It was the easy route to dealing with the Guantánamo dilemma. Don't close down Guantánamo. Close down the press. We were appalled by it.” Appalled, he added, “but not surprised.”

Britain has of course never had a media with the freedom of the American press. John Milton railed against the abusive requirements of licensing without making headway. Britain had the tradition of Royal Prerogative, a tradition of branding political rabble rousers with the mark “SL” for “seditious libeler.” Of course, many of those seditious libelers emigrated to America, which helps explain why this was an issue contributing to a revolution that broke out in 1776. The erstwhile colonists heard Milton's appeal and followed it, producing a decisive parting of the ways in the English-speaking world. But that's all very inconvenient history, which is certain soon to be expunged from the history books. After all, those who control the present, control the past. And Gonzales had come down with a very bad case of Official Secrets envy.

By May 2006, Gonzales was on ABC's “This Week” program, convinced he had found the link. Could the United States gag the media to prevent its publication of classified information? “It depends on the circumstances.” Gonzales explained, “There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility. That's a policy judgment by the Congress in passing that kind of legislation. We have an obligation to enforce those laws.” This, to be sure, is the same Alberto Gonzales who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and insisted in the face of an incredulous Senator Arlen Specter that the Constitution incorporated no guarantee of habeas corpus. He is an attorney general possessed of a copy of the Constitution which is strangely different from that ratified by the states in 1789 and amended to include the Bill of Rights in 1791. And he is the attorney general who felt that the limitations of FISA with respect to surveillance without warrants didn't matter, though he couldn't coherently articulate a reason why. (That, after all, is why you have John Yoo.) When he says “we have an obligation to enforce those laws,” he means of course to enforce the laws the way he and the president secretly understand them. ...

Let's imagine America with the Gonzales-McNulty contortion of the law in effect. We'd never know how the Bush Administration came to embrace torture as a tactic in the war on terror. We'd know nothing about the torture-by-proxy system developed with key administration allies such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen—not to mention the system of “blacksites” established by the CIA in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. We wouldn't know that the administration was violating the FISA statute with a massive surveillance program. And to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, that's just the known unknowns.

This would be a dream world for Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales. And a nightmare for the rest of us.

Back to Russia, the Herald has an article from The Guardian on a "diplomatic chill" between Britain and Russia - Shell must be rather displeased about having half of Sakhalin ripped out of their hands.

RELATIONS between London and Moscow threatened to plummet to a post-Cold War low amid renewed Russian demands for action against Boris Berezovsky over the tycoon's claim that he is plotting to overthrow Vladimir Putin. Russia's ambassador to Britain warned that bilateral relations would inevitably suffer if prompt action was not taken against the British-based billionaire, who told an interviewer he was fomenting a revolution to topple the Russian President by force.

It emerged on Wednesday that British authorities had begun a second inquiry into his comments, with the Home Office's border and immigration agency investigating whether they could undermine his refugee status. The remarks of the Russian ambassador, Yury Fedotov, have alarmed Downing Street at a time when ministers and senior officials are increasingly concerned about Russia's assertiveness on the international stage.

Speaking at the embassy in west London, Mr Fedotov said he had sent a letter on Wednesday to the Home Secretary, John Reid, underlining the gravity with which the issue was viewed in Moscow. He also enclosed a copy of a warrant for Mr Berezovsky's arrest signed by Yury Chaika, the Russian prosecutor-general. "Absence of a reaction would have some impact on bilateral relations and create a 'new situation"', the letter said.

Moscow is at odds with Britain on many issues, including how to curb Iran's suspected nuclear program and plans to grant Kosovo independence. Tensions surround US-led plans for European missile defence and NATO'S eastward expansion. "The Russians are already causing trouble across the board. This could just make them behave even worse," one former official said.

But David Clark, a former British Foreign Office adviser, said it would be a mistake to "try to mollify the Kremlin".

The British company Shell put a brave face on a final deal signed on Wednesday to hand over a 50 per cent stake in Sakhalin-2 - the world's largest oil and gas export project - to Russia's state-owned gas company Gazprom. Sergei Ivanov, Russia's first deputy prime minister, had defended the return of the oil and gas assets to Russian control, the Financial Times said. "They are our resources, and how to develop them and where to get funds from is our business," Mr Ivanov, a potential successor to Mr Putin, told the newspaper.

The 54-year-old former spy also said Moscow's stance on lifting previously subsidised energy prices to Ukraine and Belarus was down to an embrace of capitalism rather than a Soviet echo. "There is no energy imperialism. Oil and gas have a price. In the mid-1990s you taught us how to be a … market economy. We learnt our lesson," Mr Ivanov said.

Meanwhile the Economist is giving the neocons a kicking while they are down (and hopefully out).

THE American legal system has rediscovered the virtue of one of the most ancient forms of punishment—public humiliation. Prostitutes' “Johns” can now have their names aired on television. Mail thieves can find themselves wearing a sandwichboard giving full details of their crime. And people who deface Nativity scenes can end up parading through town accompanied by a donkey.

And neoconservatives? These too, it seems, are now being subjected to a grand exercise in public humiliation. Paul Wolfowitz is hanging on to his job at the World Bank by his fingernails. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a Wolfowitz protégé, is facing prison; Douglas Feith, who worked with Mr Wolfowitz at the Pentagon, is an “untouchable” who is floating around the margins of academia.

As for their patrons, Donald Rumsfeld, Mr Wolfowitz's patron, was sacked from the Pentagon amid accusations that he had lost the Republicans their majority. Dick Cheney is so unpopular that he has provoked protests even at Brigham Young University, a Mormon redoubt which is as conservative as they come. Conrad Black, one of the movement's most generous sugar daddies, is on trial for fraud. It seems that those whom the gods wish to punish they first make neocons.

Not all the neocons have been humiliated quite as badly as Mr Wolfowitz, let alone Mr Libby. Many of them—including Richard Perle, who is widely known as the Prince of Darkness, and David Frum, the man who co-coined the phrase “axis of evil”—are safely on board the starship American Enterprise Institute. Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol are as ubiquitous as ever in the media; indeed, Mr Kristol has been given a column in Time magazine to go along with his self-constructed platform at the Weekly Standard. Robert Kagan is in the middle of writing an ambitious history of American foreign policy. ...

They are also being marginalised—or at least slapped down a bit—within the conservative movement. The “paleocons” have always disliked the neocons, sometimes (disgracefully) just because they are Jewish. But now they are being joined by conservatives of almost every other stripe. Realists dislike them for their destabilising foreign policy. Small-government types dislike them for their indifference to government spending. Libertarians dislike them for their preoccupation with using the state to impose virtue. Neoconservatism could well return to where it started—the intellectual property of a handful of families called Kristol, Podhoretz and Kagan.

Why does the movement seem so discredited? Partly for practical reasons. They misread intelligence about WMD and links between al-Qaeda and Saddam (though some still believe in both notions). They bungled the war in Iraq. They had little real experience of either the Arab world or soldiering. Many of them were even poor managers. Gary Schmitt, a fellow neocon, complained of Mr Feith that he “can't manage anything, and he doesn't trust anyone else's judgment”. General Tommy Franks describes him as the “dumbest fucking guy on the planet”.

But, more important, neocons have been discredited for ideological reasons. Most of the recent mistakes can be traced back not just to flawed execution but to flawed thinking. The neocons argued that democracy might be an antidote to the Middle East's problems: but democracy proved too delicate a plant. They claimed that the assertion of American power might wipe out “Vietnam syndrome”: but it has ended up making America more reluctant to intervene abroad. They talked about linking American power with American ideals: but it turned out, at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, that power can corrupt those ideals.

Daily Kos has a diary with the eye-catching title "Is George W. Bush Planning To Trigger Apocalyptic War ?", which includes some classic neocon quotes along with a whole lot of other stuff on the messianic Shrub.

Given that neoconservatives close to the Bush Administration have articulated visions for the Middle East that involve the replacement of numerous existing governments in the regions, not to mention the replacement of the atrocious North Korean regime, how could we distinguish, in practice, that plan in action from moves to bring on the apocalypse ? The two projects would tend to look quite similar. Both would involve increasingly expanded theaters of war : maximal mayhem.

IN fact, some prominent neoconservatives have stated their desire for maximal mayhem, maximal war: ...

"[Richard] Perle told journalist John Pilger in 2002 that "if we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war ... our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

"Israel is part of a global war, the war of radical Islam against civilization. Right now Israel is doing the work of the rest of the civilized world by taking on the terrorists. It is not only for Israel's sake that we must get the facts out -- it is for ourselves, America, for every free country in the world, and for civilization itself." - David Horowitz

"One can only hope that we turn the region [the Middle East] into a cauldron [of war], and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today." -Michael Ledeen

"I think an explosion is long overdue and turning the whole region into a cauldron [of war] is a necessary step toward reforming it." - Mark Steyn

"Norm Podhoretz ranks among the most prominent American editors of the 20th century. And he's doing pretty well in the 21st. (Laughter.) Never a man to tailor his opinions to please others, Mr. Podhoretz has always written and spoken with directness and honesty. Sometimes speaking the truth has carried a cost. Yet, over the years, he has only gained in stature among his fellow writers and thinkers. Today we pay tribute to this fierce intellectual man [sic] and his fine writing and his great love for our country." - George W. Bush, presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Podhoretz in June of 2004

"God willing, Judgment Day is coming to the Middle East." -Michael Ledeen

"Prof Ledeen is...believed to have the ear of the White House's current Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and has regular conversations with him. ...His view on the war on terror is clear, he said: 'Iraq is just one battle in a larger war, bringing down the regime in Iran is the central act...' "
-BBC News

"Whether or not the White House listens, it seems that they’ve listened to a lot of things about Iran, that I will say. I mean, some of the language and some of the speech is very familiar to me, and really reflects the sort of thing that I’ve been pushing for." - Ledeen, April 2003

"The regime must go." - [Richard] Perle and [David] Frum, on Iran

"All of Korea will be united in liberty." - Perle and Frum, on North Korea

"We should force European governments to choose between Paris and Washington." - Perle and Frum, on Europe

...

I guess Somalia is part of the middle east in some ways - thats one part of Ledeen's cauldron that is well aflame.

At least 51 people have been killed as clashes between Ethiopian forces and Islamist insurgents raged in the Somali capital Mogadishu, bringing the toll to more than 200 after five days of fighting. Scores of rotting corpses lay abandoned in the streets as the rival forces exchanged artillery and machinegun fire, demolishing buildings in northern and southern Mogadishu.

Hundreds of terrified civilians were streaming out of the city, adding to tens of thousands who have been forced from their homes in recent weeks amid some of the worst violence in the battle-scarred port city for 15 years. The latest deaths brought the death toll from the past five days to 219, Sudan Ali Ahmed, head of the Elman Peace and Human Rights Organisation that tracks casualty figures, told AFP. Sixty-two injured civilians were taken to hospital. "As of today, we collected the bodies of 42 civilians and nine of the opposition (insurgents)," Ahmed said.

Witnesses said the toll could be much higher as wounded and dead people lay in areas too dangerous to reach, while hospitals were being overwhelmed with casualties. "Bodies are lying rotting in areas we cannot access. We are appealing to both sides to stop the fighting. This is unacceptable, the civilians are bearing the brunt," said Ahmed.

Residents said both sides were firing without regard for the consequences to civilians. "We can see Ethiopian tanks firing ... towards civilian areas. They are firing indiscriminately and the mortars are landing everywhere," said Abdulkarim Ali, a resident of southern Mogadishu's Gupta area. "The fighting is going on heavily in this area. Both sides are using machineguns and anti-aircraft guns and many people are trapped in their houses," said Mukhtar Mohamed, a resident of Fagah in northern Mogadishu.

The irrepressible Iridescent Cuttlefish was often moved to expansively post on the suppressed chemurgy industry of the 1930's in the US, back in the day when RI was still a functioning honeypot for conspiracy theorists - here's a old propaganda video from World War 2 on the miracle feedstock of this now gone industry - "Hemp For Victory".

1942 United States Department of Agriculture Film, Hemp for Victory extolling some of the many uses of this ancient plant and premier world resource.

Long ago when these ancient Grecian temples were new, hemp was already old in the service of mankind. For thousands of years, even then, this plant had been grown for cordage and cloth in China and elsewhere in the East.

For centuries prior to about 1850 all the ships that sailed the western seas were rigged with hempen rope and sails. For the sailor, no less than the hangman, hemp was indispensable.

And to close, one of those jealousy inducing images from Aquabumps, this time from the island of Mentawi, off the coast of Sumatra.