Quiet Thunder  

Vanity Fair has an article on Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk and his dream to end the reign of the internal combustion engine (and the oil industry that fuels it).

Who in his right mind would finance an auto company start-up? Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of PayPal, the guy with a NASA contract for the next space shuttle, also expects to put a sold-out (to the likes of George Clooney, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin) fleet of electric sports cars on the road this summer. Kicking the tires of the $92,000 Tesla, which goes from 0 to 60 in four seconds, the author learns the Silicon Valley saga of big dreams, technical snags, and Aha! moments that could spell the end of the internal-combustion engine. ...

When these first cars do reach the road, they'll be little more than toys for green-minded California celebrities to drive down Sunset. But, for ... Elon Musk and his partners, the plan is to ride the technology curve down to a more affordable, $49,000 four-door sedan, then a $30,000 mass-market model. Musk, 35, wants nothing less than for Tesla Motors to be the Ford Motor Company of the 21st century—liberating the world, at last, from the internal-combustion engine that Henry Ford foisted upon it at just about this time a century ago.

Tesla's success—so far—is testimony to what four years of war in Iraq and $3-a-gallon gas have done to burnish, once again, the hundred-year-old dream of a practical, mass-market electric car. The world is truly desperate for it. This time—at last—what's under the hood may make that dream come true.

Musk isn't the one who had the Eureka! moment. That was a slight, gray-bearded, mild-mannered Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Martin Eberhard. Like anyone else in 2003, the then 43-year-old Eberhard knew that billion-dollar markets had grown almost overnight for laptop computers and cell phones. Rivals were spending huge sums on R&D to pack ever more energy into the lithium-ion batteries that powered those devices. One day Eberhard had a simple thought: Why not put lithium-ion cells into cars?

Bruce Sterling has a column in Metropolis magazine called "Chips with Everything", which looks at his "internet of things" concept run on "ambient power" (a classier way of saying "free energy" really, without the zero point energy confusion factor). This is a combination of two important topics - the "internet of things" is a way of enabling cradle-to-cradle manufacturing by making thorough implementation of item recycling possible, and the need to power this without cords or any other feed from the global grid.

In 2007 the computer gave up taking over the world. Instead the world took over the computer. The Internet became a wholly owned subset of Reality 2.0. When the actual world invades the virtual world, it scatters the computer into tiny physical pieces, some no bigger than dust. “Intelligent printing,” another modern darling, is semiconductor ink sprayed on cardboard. There’s never been a humbler, cheaper “computer.”

It’s the foggy dawn of an Internet of Things. In 2007 wireless isn’t just for phones and global satellites, it’s become domestic and personal. The new and improved 802.11n Wi-Fi standard is fast enough to ship wireless video around the house, but it is corny compared to WiMAX, a single giant tower that can drench a city in Internet traffic. There’s an explosion of methods for machines to connect to machines, and a crash in the price of a signal. A host of wireless standards competes for every niche: ZigBee, Z-Wave, HDMI, Wibree, GSM, CDMA, Bluetooth. Hooked up to physical objects, tiny local Internets assemble themselves into “stars, meshes, clusters” with “self-forming, self-healing” networks.

Knowledge is power, data is power—but power is power too, and in 2007 electrical power is the planetary crunch issue. The iPhone will have its little dock where it slots in, gasping for fossil voltage. The Microsoft Web robot will clank over and plug itself into the wall, and woe betide the competitor who gets in its way. Every other wireless chip still needs battery power; otherwise the Internet of Things becomes one giant lethal macramé of power cords. Putting chips in everything is the fast track to a greenhouse doom: you’ll be in an automated town that wirelessly watches itself catch fire and wash away in high tides.

Except, what if there were wireless chips so small and clever that they sucked renewable energy right out of the environment? To survive as truly native components of the actual world, wireless computers would have to become power plants so nifty and thrifty that they’d live off free ambient energy: the heat in a hot-water pipe, the passing glow of sunlight. Being so small yet fiercely capable, the tiniest chips need only a fleabite of power to thrive. Green chips: the smaller they get, the closer they are to a zero-footprint.

It’s still only 2007. Apple has not yet shipped a single iPhone. We don’t have Windows with Wheels and Eyeballs either. But self-powered green chips? The Germans, in the unlikely global stronghold of wind and solar, are very busy on ambient power: unlike Apple and Microsoft, nobody’s ever heard of EnOcean. It’s a start-up specializing in wireless doodads that can harvest and store the tiniest traces of environmental energy: a flux in daylight, a change of air pressure. Green-powered ­micronetworks—no more batteries.

Fast, cheap, wireless, inky, self-powered, and out of control: at a price point like that, every product is an Internet site. Even a stick of gum isn’t safe.

The Christian Science Monitor has an article about some people who seem to be failing to see the big picture, complaining about the impact of power lines on wilderness areas - even though these are the transmission links for new renewable energy projects. Take your pick - powerlines or global warming. Some concerns about routing of the powerlines may be valid though - it does make sense to try and link up with existing transmission corridors rather than building links straight across national parks.

California and the city of Los Angeles have set an ambitious goal for 'greener' power: obtain 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2010. But to do that difficult decisions need to be made. Wind, solar, and geothermal electric power produced in the rural reaches of the state must be somehow be transported to faraway cities – meaning some transmission lines must cut through national forests, wildlife refuges, and other treasured land areas.

Solar panels require the expanse and cloudless climes of desert areas, wind requires the funneling effect of mountain passes, and geothermal power is derived from hot or steamed water underground.

But how does the city get the energy to where it's needed without spoiling the pristine environments that it's trying to preserve?

"The fact of the matter is that renewable resources are from remote areas … and that is the challenge now facing California," says Stephanie McCorkle, spokeswoman for the California Independent Systems Operator. "We are trying to green the grid, and there are deadlines looming," she adds. "Transmission lines are the missing link. Where do we put them? That is what we have to decide."

It's all part of the "California greenin' " vision being trumpeted loudly and often by officials from Sacramento to Los Angeles. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has put the state in the forefront of developing alternative energy resources while Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants to make America's second-largest city "the greenest and cleanest city in America." ...

two weeks ago, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) announced that it plans to build an 80-mile-long "green path" corridor to bring solar and geothermal power from southeastern California to connecting lines just northeast of Los Angeles.

Some environmental groups are up in arms over the project. "There is absolutely no reason to go through the best wild lands and wild views of a national forest and private conservancy lands," says Justin Augustine of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental organization. He and other environmentalists offer alternative options, including following existing corridors, promoting more conservation in urban centers, and deriving more renewable energy nearby and within urban areas.

"This is another example of public representatives and the LADWP not understanding the sensitivity of the desert and making uninformed unilateral decisions," says April Sall of Wildlands Conservancy, which also oversees lands in the path of the proposed lines.

For its part, the LADWP says the agency is committed to designing a corridor with the least possible environmental impact, but that the city must make tough choices. Much of Los Angeles is surrounded by national forest and some of the existing transmission corridors are not wide enough to accommodate the new lines, says LADWP Commission president David Nahai. [It is] … a 'greater-good issue,' which means the society and the city have to balance all the advantages and disadvantages to make the aggressive step to move away from the filthiest of fuels, which is coal," he says.

Energy Bulletin has a mini roundup of Iraq oil news, including this piece from "Corporate Watch" - "Iraq: Big contracts for Big Oil".

After a 35 year wait, American and British oil corporations are on the verge of securing control of Iraq's vast oil reserves. Becca Fisher reveals how the unholy alliance of Big Oil, government and the IMF is getting closer to its goal of reconstructing the Iraqi state to gain secure oil supplies. ....

The new law would allow foreign oil companies to sign long term contracts, giving them exclusive rights over Iraq's huge oil fields. Its very terms reflect the public opposition to privatisation in Iraq, as the proposed contracts carefully ensure that the state still owns the oil whilst the company controls production, secures huge rates of profit, and is immune from Iraqi state regulation. As former Iraqi oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, puts it, 'The Iraqi oil sector needs privatisation but it's a cultural issue'. The solution has been to disguise the plunder in this covert form of privatisation. As Professor Thomas Wälder, oil law expert at the University of Dundee, explains:

'The government can be seen to be running the show and the company can run it behind the camouflage of a legal title symbolising the assertion of national sovereignty.'

Iraqi sovereignty in the oil industry can thus be removed under the guise of state ownership. This smokescreen operates on another level: the law itself is an instance of a wider removal of Iraqi sovereignty, under the guise of democracy.

E&E TV has a talk by Sun Microsystems VP Dave Douglas on the IT sector's push for eco-responsibility.

As a major contributor of emissions, the information technology sector is coming together to find ways to reduce damage to the environment and provide its customers with more energy efficient products.

During today's OnPoint, Dave Douglas, vice president of eco-responsibility at Sun Microsystems, discusses the financial and environmental benefits for IT companies to go green. Douglas discusses the recommendations his company is making to lawmakers regarding efficiency in the technology industry. He also encourages the government to provide some clarity on future approaches to climate change so the IT industry can begin to make long-term investments.

Chris Vernon has a response to George Monbiot's recent speech at Totnes, looking at the interplay between global warming and peak oil and the "peak coal" question.

Whilst I am in total agreement with the problems associated with some of the “solutions” to peak oil, coal to liquids, non-conventional oil etc. are clearly environmentally disastrous this is no reason not to address peak oil. Peak oil must be used to justify lowering our energy demands and climate change must be used to justify lowering our CO2 emissions. There is clearly strong coloration and therefore reinforcement between the two but also limited areas of contradiction. In my experience the fear of peak oil’s ramifications is a strong driver for some individuals to reduce their reliance on oil and energy in general with the socially beneficial reduction of CO2 emissions. Peak oil can drive powerful, sometimes selfishly motivated actions which tend to be climate positive.

The subtle difference between the peak oil and climate change arguments is this:

Climate change says we should change whereas peak oil says we will be forced to change. Both are right. Informing people that forced change is approaching through raising awareness of oil depletion and the related price increases will bring about changes in people’s activities beneficial to the environment in general.

I strongly believe the areas of reinforcement outweigh those of contradiction leaving peak oil a valuable argument on balance.

Coal

My fourth point regards coal and Monbiot’s suggestion that peak oil and peak energy are not the same thing. At 37% oil represents the largest proportion of global marketed energy therefore it would be surprising if peak oil did not represent peak energy. Including gas, as it too faces near identical problems of peak followed by decline and the proportion increases to over 60%.

Monbiot seems to have fallen for the general consensus view that there are centuries of coal left, on analysis this does not seem to be the case. A paper this month from the German Energy Watch Group investigates this belief and finds it wanting. All around the world coal reserves are being systematically revised downward in stark contrast to how “proved” oil reserves have been historically revised upwards. Much of the data is old, for example the most recent reserves data from China is from 1992 when 55 years supply remained, 15 years on and no more than 40 years supply remain but factoring in the production profile illustrates a peak in coal production within 5-15 years. Remember China is to coal production as all of OPEC combined is to oil. When China’s coal peaks, the world peaks.

There simply isn’t coal resource or logistic capability to scale up coal production (and energy intensive liquefaction) to offset peak oil. Just 5 years of 2% per year decline in the oil supply after it peaks at say 90 million barrels per day represents a 3.2 billion barrel annual shortfall before considering further demand growth. That’s 440 million tonnes of oil or (assuming 50% energy efficient liquefaction) 1.3 billion tonnes of coal (coal has a lower energy density that oil) per year – considerably more than the total production of the US, the world number two producer.

Peak oil and peak energy are very likely one and the same thing. ...

The Age reports that the CSIRO has undermined the Rodent's head in the sand approach to global warming, and also notes that Tim Flannery is struggling to remain a politically neutral "Australian of the year" given the government's stance on his core issue.

THE nation's leading scientific body, the CSIRO, has undermined Prime Minister John Howard's position on climate change by advising that big cuts in greenhouse gas emissions appear to be both inevitable and affordable for Australia.

As the Federal Government yesterday intensified its attacks on "crazy" pledges from Labor and the Greens to reduce Australia's emissions by 60 to 80 per cent by 2050, it emerged that the CSIRO had told Mr Howard's emissions trading task group last month that most studies agreed developed countries needed to cut emissions by 60 to 90 per cent to avoid "dangerous" climate change.

Mr Howard's line on climate change was also publicly challenged yesterday by Australian of the Year Tim Flannery, when he urged all political parties to adopt long-term greenhouse targets before this year's federal election.

Professor Flannery also stunned guests at an RMIT University breakfast by questioning whether he should return his Australian of the Year award because he felt torn between speaking out on climate and remaining politically neutral. "A couple of years ago there used to be four countries that hadn't ratified Kyoto," Professor Flannery said. "There was Australia, the USA, Monaco and Liechtenstein. I'm afraid to say that Monaco and Liechtenstein have seen the light, so there's only two of us left now — the Bonnie and Clyde of climate change, as Al Gore calls us. ...

Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane also accused the Greens of "political populism" for their call to cut emissions by 80 per cent less than 1990 levels, challenging to them to produce scientific evidence to support their pledge.

Yet, as an official submission from the CSIRO to the Prime Minister's emissions trading task group last month pointed out, most international studies now show developed countries such as Australia will need to slash emissions by 60 to 90 per cent by 2050 to avoid "dangerous levels of climate interference".

The CSIRO also said that a range of economic studies had shown that rapid action to cut greenhouse emissions would only slightly slow economic growth in Australia and globally, with Australia's economy still expected to more than double by 2040 even with deep emission cuts.

Alan Kohler has an article in the SMH claiming there is "Hot air on both sides of political fence".

CARBON emissions trading has now joined fibre broadband networks in the wonderland of politics, which means no one will talk any sense on the subject for nine months. Oh well. At least with carbon trading, unlike fibre broadband, there can't be any permanent damage done this year - just a lot of lies told and time lost.

Global warming is a highly appealing subject for the political parties because they can use it to assert their green/economic credentials, but not enough people understand it for them to easily move the Public Bewilderment Gauge into the red with very few details. But it is the detail on which the whole thing rests.

No matter who is in power, Australia will introduce a "cap and trade" system for limiting carbon emissions. That is, emissions will be capped, both for the nation overall and for individual firms, and permits, or credits, will be created by those who emit less than the cap (or none at all, in the case of wind and solar). Those who would otherwise exceed the cap will be able to buy these credits.

To help existing carbon emitters such as coal power stations with the transition, the Government will issue them with free credits for a while. It's a simple system, and it should work. Essentially it is a market-based global insurance scheme - that is, price signals are used to insure against a possible catastrophe.

We have moved on from arguing about whether global warming is real to just how much insurance to take out. The problem is that the system is market-based, the decisions are political and the supervision is bureaucratic.

Europe did it with a cap set at 90 per cent of current emissions, but the trouble was the power generators "gamed" the regulators - absolutely ran rings around them. The generators overestimated the base level of their emissions, which meant the European Union's regulators issued them with too many credits. The generators ended up making billions of dollars in profits selling the excess carbon credits and the market price collapsed from €30 ($49) to €3 in a month.

In Australia the differences between the parties on this subject are rhetorical rather than substantial, and they will try to keep it that way until the election so no one is pinned down.

The key issues are: Is the cap uniform or will different industries have different caps (and certain emitters "let off")? What level of "free credits" will be issued to coal generators (see European debacle)? At what rate will the cap be reduced (which flows from the long-term emissions target) and what will be the penalty for non-compliance?

Fairfax's other economic guru, Ross Gittens, has an interesting Anzac day piece explaining"Why 'never again' will never work".

A common emotion on Anzac Day is: never again. And yet we keep marching off to war. Consider the latest. Why was George Bush so anxious to invade Iraq? Why were Tony Blair and John Howard so anxious to join in? Anyway, now it's gone pear-shaped, are the Tenacious Trio so reluctant to cut their losses and pull out?

We've heard - ad nauseam - the explanations proffered by the foreign affairs experts, with all their references to the specifics of the case: weapons of mass destruction and so forth. But could it be there's a deeper, purely psychological explanation of this phenomenon and the many other examples of armed conflict between nations? Could it be humans are so warlike because of the way their minds work?

That's the novel thesis advanced by Professor Daniel Kahneman, of Princeton University, and Jonathan Renshon, of Harvard University, in an article published in the journal Foreign Policy earlier this year. Kahneman, a psychologist, is a founder of behavioural economics and was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his trouble.

National leaders get rival opinions from two broad categories of advisers: the hawks and the doves. Hawks tend to favour coercion, are more willing to use military force and are more likely to doubt the value of offering concessions. When they look at foreign adversaries, they often see unremittingly hostile regimes that only understand the language of force.

Doves, on the other hand, are sceptical about the usefulness of force and more inclined to contemplate political solutions. Where hawks see little but hostility in their adversaries, doves often see subtle openings for dialogue.

Why do the hawks so often prevail over the doves? Kahneman and Renshon argue that a bias in favour of hawkish beliefs and preferences is built into the fabric of the human mind. Their point is not that the hawkish advisers are necessarily wrong, only that they're likely to be more persuasive than they deserve to be.

Kahneman's great contribution to economics has been to demonstrate that humans simply don't have the neural processing power to be the careful, rational calculators conventional economics assumes. We're prone to taking mental shortcuts - known as "heuristics" - which, though they usually serve us well, often cause us to make predictable errors. When Kahneman and Renshon considered a list of these biases, they were startled to find that all of them favour hawkish advice. ...

"When things are going badly in a conflict, the aversion to cutting one's losses, often compounded by wishful thinking, is likely to dominate the calculus of the losing side," the authors say. "This brew of psychological factors tends to cause conflicts to endure long beyond the point where a reasonable observer would see the outcome as a near-certainty. Many other factors pull in the same direction, notably the fact that for the leaders who have led their nation to the brink of defeat, the consequences of giving up will usually not be worse if the conflict is prolonged, even if they are worse for the citizens they lead."

I fear we'll never run out of diggers to march on Anzac Day.

The SMH also has an article pondering the question "will carbon trading make multi-generation family housing popular once again ?".

All the talk about targets for greenhouse gas emissions and carbon trading may seem entirely unrelated to homes and how we live -- but it ain't.

If Australia decides to become involved in emissions trading, it could mean stinking carbon polluters who hog the shower and turn on the air-conditioning face carbon trading penalties or burn through their allocation. Rationing people's carbon use is an idea being floated by politicians -- including former NSW premier Bob Carr -- and its introduction could drastically change our lifestyle. Especially for those with a large carbon footprint.

British environmental expert Peter Head -- who created China's sustainable city of Dongtan -- says individual carbon allocation could prompt us to move in with elderly parents and return to multi-generation households. "Something we could all do tomorrow to make a big difference to our carbon footprint is have our elderly parents move in. You divide your carbon emissions by the number of people living in the house," explains Head, a director of Arup, the company that engineered the Sydney Opera House and creates sustainable projects all over the world. If you team up as a family, you will find a better way of living. You wouldn't have to travel to see your parents anymore, which is fantastically good for reducing emissions," says the global guru of Green engineering. "Child care, having people around to help, eating communally and heating or cooling only one house instead of two or three is much more efficient than single households."

Head says multi-generation households could save and trade individual carbon allocations more easily than single-person households. "There is no question that people will move to find these sorts of solutions to climate change," Head says. "Whether it would work socially is another matter -- I mean, what if you hate your daughter-in-law or can't stand your father?"

The Chinese are apparently planning to take the Olympic torch over Mt Everest (or Mt Qomolangma, as they call it) - prompting protestors to mount a novel protest against the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Three Americans and a Tibetan-American were detained on Mount Everest on Wednesday as they called for independence for Tibet and protested against the Beijing Olympics, an activist group said.

The protest was organised by Students for a Free Tibet, which said three people were taken away after holding up a banner at a base camp on the Tibetan side of the mountain that said "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008." The fourth person detained by Chinese authorities was a cameraman, said the group's executive director Lhadon Tethong. "One World, One Dream" is the slogan of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. ...

Activist groups have been using the Olympics to protest against China and its policies. China has already criticised calls by some groups to use the Olympics to pressure Beijing into doing more to stop the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region. China buys two-thirds of Sudan's oil and sells it weapons and military aircraft.