The Sting Of Global Warming  

(This is another filler post while I struggle to finish the one that spawned off my surprisingly popular green buildings epic)

When I noted that jellyfish were taking over the oceans the other day I didn't realise how quickly the takeover was happening - apparently the really nasty ones are heading south fast - I wonder what happens to Noosa property prices when you can't go swimming in summer...

The recent discovery of [irukandji] jellyfish off the coast of Fraser Island, Australia, has stopped production of Fool's Gold, a sure-to-be-Oscar-contender starring Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson. The teensy-tiny toxic creatures ("no larger than a thumbnail") are usually found only in northern Queensland, but -- you guessed it -- warming temperatures seem to be pushing the deadly (and we mean deadly) critters south.

The upside: Now that global warming has deprived the world of the wacky romantic-comedy stylings of Matt and Kate for a few whole days, maybe the administration will finally have the motivation it needs to do something about global warming.

Engineering News reports that Botswana is looking to build a solar thermal power plant (well - they call it solar geothermal, but I suspect its just an ignorant headline writer).

The Botswana government has called for companies to tender for the provision of consultancy services to conduct a prefeasibility study for the construction of a solar geothermal power plant in the country.

“Solar energy is recognised as the most promising renewable energy source in Botswana,” State-owned Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) said in an advertisement, placed over the weekend. BPC said that the country had an abundant solar energy resource, which had gone largely untapped, although it boasted one of the highest rates of insolation in the world. “Owing to, among other things, the looming energy crisis, and, to some extent, an element of increasing the level of self-sufficiency, the government fully supports the implementation of a solar thermal generation in Botswana,” the power utility stated. ...

African countries neighbouring South Africa were having to increasingly look at power self-sufficiency, after South Africa’s Eskom was struggling to keep up with local demand.

Technology Review has a photo essay on a large solar power plant that just went online in Portugal.

One of the largest solar power plants in the world went on line this winter in the sunny pastures of Serpa, a town in southern Portugal. The plant is owned by General Electric and operated by PowerLight of Berkeley, CA. At its peak, around noon on a sunny day, the solar park can generate 11 megawatts of electricity--enough to power 8,000 homes. ...

The panels are high enough off the ground for sheep to graze underneath, and the Serpa park will double as pasture for livestock.

LA Daily News has a good article on Al Gore's "Electranet" (usually referred to around here as the smart grid) concept. I'm stodgily preferring the old term for it and consider electranet a bit clunky and retro - but as Al is a very successful politician and I'm just a guy ranting away on the internet that Al invented (I'm kidding - no comments please !) I suspect "smart grid" and "V2G" will remain niche terms and in a decade or so's time people will be telling me how electrons get delivered via tubes. Personally I don't really care what its called, so long as it gets built, pronto. And like the internet, the electranet should be a global one (I guess "Geni" and "global energy grid" will also remain niche terms).

With his new-found movie star clout, former Vice President Al Gore has begun an aggressive environmental crusade for ground-breaking technology and policy changes to the nation's electricity grid. Using the momentum of his Oscar-winning documentary on global warming, Gore is advocating a decentralized "smart grid" that would allow anyone to set up their own generator and buy or sell surplus electricity without caps.

Such an "Electranet" would eliminate the need for new-generation plants, spark widespread use of renewable energy and, ultimately, beat back global warming. "In the same way the Internet took off and stimulated the information revolution, we could see a revolution all across this country with small-scale generation of electricity everywhere," Gore told a House committee on climate change last week.

Futuristic as it may sound, experts say that despite resistance from utilities and sluggish state bureaucracies, newly designed distribution grids could be just a decade away. And California, which long ago began crediting customers for generating solar and wind electricity, is leading the nation. ...

"What Gore is talking about is not fantasy," said Joe Ramallo, spokesman for the LADWP. "California is the first state to understand that we need to rethink the social contract between the public and the utilities," added Reid Detchon, executive director of Energy Future Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based group of energy executives and environmentalists. When it comes to creating a smart grid, Detchon said, "California is furthest down the road."

You can see it in the home of Jim Chuda, a green architect whose ecologically safe Hollywood Hills home features recycled aluminum bathroom tiles, energy-efficient ceiling fans and insulation made from old blue jeans. A battery backup that looks like a chrome refrigerator sits in Chuda's garage and automatically maximizes the use of his solar panels by ensuring the electricity generated by them is used first, before any is taken from the grid. "If I'm providing more power than I'm using, then I would turn the power back," he explained.

Chuda's grid-tiered battery backup, known as GridPoint Connect, is among a slew of intelligent energy management innovations that have the power to let any home or business become a net provider of electricity back to the grid. "Most of the technology sits on a shelf today," said Kurt Yeager, former president of the Electric Power Research Institute. "It's just a matter of incentivizing the system to change."

Yeager, who now heads the Galvin Electricity Initiative, a campaign to create a new power system, noted that today's electricity grid is antiquated. With strung wires, transformers hanging at meters and overbuilt infrastructure designed to accommodate peak usages, electricity is - as activists have long pointed out - the last industry to digitize.

Designing a system that allows your dishwasher or refrigerator to sense changes in the power grid and automatically reduce a home's electricity consumption, or let homeowners see how many kilowatts of electricity they are using at any given minute, is close to a reality.

The difficult part is changing the system. "Anything that improves efficiency becomes a business problem," Yeager said, noting that outside of California, utilities are compensated based on the number of kilowatt hours they sell, not on efficiency. But he and others maintain that rising electricity prices - coupled with continually improving technology that uses sensors, controls and information technology to precisely manage electricity flows - will spark monumental changes.

"The kind of thing Gore is talking about might start to happen," said Steven Hauser, executive director of the GridWise Alliance, a nonprofit consortium of companies focused on modernizing the country's power grid through new technologies.

In dismal local reality, here in Sydney we're about to get slugged with a 26% electricity price increase just to keep the (dumb) grid functioning - according to the SMH anyway, though I'm not sure their headline writer understands what is happening either - it sounds like the retailers are being deregulated and raising prices - how much of that flows into work on the grid itself is less than clear.

THE State Government's promise of low electricity prices was formally dumped yesterday when its regulator recommended a 26 per cent rise for the average NSW household over the next three years. ...

While the Energy Minister, Ian Macdonald, talked of "small increases" coming off "a relatively low base", welfare and consumer groups warned that the poor would be pushed to the limit. And those who use little electricity may see a disproportionately big increase in bills, because the rises penalise the power-thrifty.

The director of the Total Environment Centre, Jeff Angel, said energy efficiency needed to be a central tenet of energy policy: "Unless [this occurs] the consumer will be slugged to cover the cost of new infrastructure." Gavin Gilchrist, managing director of the energy consultancy Big Switch, said the Government had failed to manage power demand. "A lot of the network we are paying for is network we don't really need," he said.

When the national electricity market first came into operation in 1996 (households and small business could not shop around until January 2002), the NSW government boasted double-digit price falls would follow. But the market has not worked as hoped, and 70 per cent of NSW customers - accounting for a third of the state's electricity consumption - have stuck with local suppliers and prices regulated by the tribunal.

For retailers such as EnergyAustralia, there would be no regulated protection against energy costs by 2010 because the Government last year did away with the Electricity Tariff Equalisation Fund. With less surety about future prices from power stations, retailers faced higher commercial risk, "and we've made allowance for that", the chief executive of the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal, Jim Cox, said yesterday.

Hmmm - I thought thats what hedging was all about - and I have a strong feeling these guys do hedge themselves against market price swings...

Back to Technology Review, they have an article on better batteries (or betteries, as I first mistyped it) - Flexible Batteries That Never Need to Be Recharged.

Mobiles phones, remote controls, and other gadgets are generally convenient--that is, until their batteries go dead. For many consumers, having to routinely recharge or replace batteries remains the weakest link in portable electronics. To solve the problem, a group of European researchers say they've found a way to combine a thin-film organic solar cell with a new type of polymer battery, giving it the capability of recharging itself when exposed to natural or indoor light.

It's not only ultraslim, but also flexible enough to integrate with a wide range of low-wattage electronic devices, including flat but bendable objects like a smart card and, potentially, mobile phones with curves. The results of the research, part of the three-year, five-country European Polymer Solar Battery project, were recently published online in the journal Solar Energy.

"It's the first time that a device combining energy creation and storage shows [such] tremendous properties," says Gilles Dennler, a coauthor of the paper and a researcher at solar startup Konarka Technologies, based in Lowell, MA. Prior to joining Konarka, Dennler was a professor at the Linz Institute for Organic Solar Cells at Johannes Kepler University, in Austria. "The potential for this type of product is large, given [that] there is a growing demand for portable self-rechargeable power supplies."

Prototypes of the solar battery weigh as little as two grams and are less than one millimeter thick. "The device is meant to ensure that the battery is always charged with optimum voltage, independently of the light intensity seen by the solar cell," according to the paper. Dennler says that a single cell delivers about 0.6 volts. By shaping a module with strips connected in series, "one can add on voltages to fit the requirements of the device."

The organic solar cell used in the prototype is the same technology being developed by Konarka. (See "Solar-Cell Rollout.") It's based on a mix of electrically conducting polymers and fullerenes. The cells can be cut or produced in special shapes and can be printed on a roll-to-roll machine at low temperature, offering the potential of low-cost, high-volume production. ...

Tech Review also has an article on a better biofuel.

A California biotech company is engineering microbes to produce cheap biofuels that could outcompete ethanol.

Stroll the streets of San Francisco and you're likely to overhear someone talking about biofuels. It's the latest technology wave to hit the Bay Area, and scientists and investors are swarming toward any startup claiming a better way to make ethanol or biodiesels. Amyris Biotechnologies may actually have found one. Having previously reengineered microbes so that they would produce a malaria drug, the company is now drawing on its expertise at creating efficient bacterial factories to cheaply churn out novel types of biofuels.

Amyris is one of the first companies to spring from the relatively new field of synthetic biology. Unlike the conventional genetic engineering currently used in the manufacture of antibiotics and protein drugs such as insulin, synthetic biology involves hacking the entire metabolic system--changing the structure of some proteins, altering the expression of others, and adding in genes from other organisms--to create an efficient microbial machine. "We think of biological components as parts you assemble and try to get to function as a whole," says Jay Keasling, a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of Amyris's cofounders.

Plants and microbes naturally make small quantities of chemicals called terpenoids, which are the precursors of myriad products, including some pharmaceuticals and fuels. Several years ago, after developing new ways to boost bacteria's production of terpenoids, Keasling and three of his postdoctoral students founded Amyris to commercialize their work.

For its first project, the company selected artemisinin, a potent malaria drug derived from the sweet wormwood tree (see TR10 2005). By tinkering with yeast's metabolic processes, Keasling and his colleagues were able to boost its production of an artemisinin precursor a million-fold. After just two years of work, they are close to meeting their final goal for the drug--producing it in industrial quantities at prices affordable to developing nations. Now, having created microbial factories that can cheaply churn out carbon-based molecules, the group has turned its attention to biofuels.

Making fuel is different from making medicine. In most cases, pharmaceutical companies aren't concerned with how efficiently they make their drugs because they know they can charge premium prices for them. New fuels, on the other hand, must compete in price with petroleum. Rather than trying to find better ways to make ethanol--the aim of most new biofuel efforts--the researchers chose to create entirely novel biofuels, guided by their own ideas about what a fuel might look like if designed from scratch. "We looked at the Merck Index and said, If you could pick any molecule to use as fuel, what would you pick?" says Jack Newman, one of Amyris's cofounders and vice president of research.

The researchers selected several candidate compounds based on their energy content (ethanol has only 70 percent the energy of gasoline), their volatility (an ideal fuel shouldn't evaporate too fast), and their solubility in water (unlike ethanol, a water-insoluble fuel could be piped around the country like petroleum). After narrowing the list by determining which fuels could be both produced in the lab and used in today's engines, they were left with a selection of compounds including replacements for both diesel and jet fuel. "We've tested a lot of fuels with fantastic properties," says Neil Renninger, Amyris cofounder and vice president of development.

Amyris scientists are now designing metabolic pathways that yield these compounds and tinkering with them to make production as efficient as possible. "You have to walk down a cost curve of production," says Renninger. "At the bottom, you get a product so cheap you can burn it." ...

Crikey has surveyed the local political landscape and declared - "Its the economy and climate change, stupid".

The traditional view when it comes to party politics is that the Government's relationship with business is much cosier than Labor's. It's the economy, stupid, says the Government, and the ALP have to play catch up to prove their credentials. But when it comes to climate change action, there seems to be a widening chasm between what business is calling for and what the Government is promising. And Labor is looking to fill the gap. "The Howard Government’s rigid approach to climate change is destablilising the traditional alliance between the Liberal Party and the business community," head of the Australia Institute, Clive Hamilton, who attended the ALP's climate change summit at the weekend, told Crikey.

In response to Rudd's 'climate change blueprint', released at the ALP's National Climate Change Summit, Howard said this:

"We react in a measured, sensible way and we react when we know what the consequences of our reaction will be...But to commit this country to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent within 13 years must do economic damage to Australia, must cost Australian jobs."

According to Hamilton: "That traditional view of damaging the economy no longer applies, certainly in the case of companies where climate change is a major factor in their future. I think that Labor’s view is much more consistent with that of big business which is why they attracted so many names at the summit."

Skye Laris, of the Climate Institute, says: "Emissions targets are necessary to provide certainty for business. As for damaging the economy, the Climate Institute cited this graph released by the CSIRO and the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change ...

The general consensus among big business, notably groups such as the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change seems to be a call not just to ratify Kyoto, but also to set an emissions target -- or at least engage in a debate over one. But on these points, the Government's not budging, at least not publicly. ...

"There’s a lot of support for a target in the business community, there really is a growing desire to have some policy direction and clarity," Frank Muller, of the UNSW Institute of Environmental Studies told Crikey. "It’s no longer about business versus the environment. In taking the position, the government have picked particular parts of business over other parts of business. Even many of those parts of that industry want more policy certainty," says Mullar. "It’s not necessarily a pro-business position to focus on one particular industry..."

Clive Hamilton told Crikey that the Government's latest rhetoric threatens to throw the business community offside. "Malcolm Turnbull is labelling Labor as fanatical for their approach to climate change, but the business community are calling for ratification, and emissions targets," says Hamilton. "Representatives from Westpac, IAG, BHP -- are they fanatics?"

Reuters has a post on the surge in CleanTech investment in SIlicon Valley (nothing particularly new here but its good to see this is still getting plenty of mainstream press).

Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley have been searching for the next big thing in high-tech for years, but now many have switched to greener pursuits -- finding technology to help cut global warming. Although commercial success could take years, venture capitalists are pouring cash into solar power, fuel cells, wind energy, biofuels, new lighting microchips, "smart" power grids, and other innovative energies.

"The best brains in the country are no longer working on the next pharmaceutical drug or the next Silicon Revolution. They want to work on energy," said Vinod Khosla, a top venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. While there is competition from Canada, Germany, China, India and other nations, traditional energy companies have been relatively quiet. "It is under-researched. There are easy pluckings. Oil companies spend no money on research, especially outside of how you discover more oil. All their efforts are token or nominal. The same is true of the coal business," Khosla said.

It could be years, however, before "clean" power plans translate into commercial products, not only because of scientific barriers, but also due to uncertainties about timing, market development and competition.

"We have yet to see any major successes. A lot happening right now is sort of a research-and-development wave for individual technologies, Silicon Valley and industry itself," said Regis McKenna, a veteran marketing strategist who helped launch Apple Inc., Electronic Arts, and Genentech, among others. McKenna recalled that the microprocessor, the brain of computers, was developed in 1971 but it took another 10 years before pioneer Intel found a market for the device in personal computers.

More than two-thirds, or $883.6 million, of all clean technology investments last year were made by U.S. investors.

Cleantech Venture Network, an industry trade group, estimates that clean energy investment in Silicon Valley topped $500 million last year, including not just venture capital but also corporate and some debt financing. The group estimates $3.6 billion was invested across the United States and Europe.

Among the largest clean tech investments were $75 million in solar cell maker NanoSolar of Palo Alto, California, and $50 million for Los Angeles-based renewable biofuels producer Altra Inc. Biofuels, wind power, solar photovoltaics and fuel cells are likely to pace new energy growth, according to Clean Edge.

While I've probably said enough about green building for one week, WorldChanging has a pair of posts for those who want more - see Architecture: Green and Greener and 1:1 Digital House and the Future of Green Building (go see the originals for a ton of links).

There is a direct link between the growing "intelligence" of our homes -- their increasing ability to use electronics to sense, monitor and adapt -- and their sustainability. Many of the coolest aspects of green building involve the building itself responding to the conditions around it, working with, rather than against, the sun, wind and weather. Such adaptive, responsive buildings are at least as important a goal as radical new material breakthroughs.

We don't even need robotic edge monkeys crawling all over our homes to get there. The tools are ready-to-hand or coming soon. Smart homes can automate the opening and closing of windows to maintain ventilation and cooling, angle sunshades for optimal solar heat gain, even turn geothermal heat pumps on and off.

Smart homes can also change the way we think about inhabiting our homes, by revealing to us previously hidden connections and facilitating better choices. Making intelligent action the easiest choice is a powerful design strategy. Using meters (like the PowerCost Monitor) to show us the results of our actions has a powerful effect: as we've noted before, studies show that simply making people aware of their energy use can induce them to use 10% less energy before they even get around to a swapping out an incandescent for a CFL. Sending price signals as we make consumption choices (from pay-as-you-go car insurance to pay-as-you-throw garbage fees) can bring home the backstory of actions we've tended to ignore: true costing can become a form of perspective-shifting.

But our homes needn't be smart only in operation. We are increasingly able to customize the design of pre-fab structures in such a way that their particular responses to a site context could be maximized. Each home site is different: why shouldn't each home reflect its site in ways large and small?

Add to the mass-customization of home designs the existing sustainability benefits of pre-fabricated buildings, and what we see revealed is a potential breakthrough in producing lovely one planet homes on a mass scale.

But how realistic is such an idea? Such a technology must be decades away, we might think, but we'd be wrong. It's here now, on demonstration in London: The Digital House. ...

Materials: Simply put, we're getting better at making digital tools which help designers factor in the ecological implications of their materials choices at the initial design stage, by using databases and models to assess whether another material or technique might offer a more sustainable solution to a particular design challenge. As Dawn said in her piece in the Worldchanging Book, Ecodesign's Killer Application, building the ecological impacts of design decisions into the very software designers use to create and prototype products changes the very way designers think. And such information could just as easily be incorporated into building design programs. ...

The Economist has a post of flying wind farms. I've never taken these things seriously (there is plenty of available land and offshore territory begging for turbines to be installed as it is) but the idea is interesting enough.

IF IT ever seems windy where you live, be thankful you do not live 10km up in the air. At that height, the jet-stream winds blow stronger and more constantly than ground level winds, carrying up to a hundred times more energy.

So, just as oil companies are drilling deeper and in more remote locations in search of new reserves, pioneer wind-power engineers are looking higher in the sky for new sources of energy. Conventional turbines will not take them there—the highest to date is just over 200 metres tall. So they are trying to invent a whole new technology for harvesting wind: electricity generators that fly.

One of the most ambitious ideas has been developed by Sky WindPower, a company based in San Diego and led by Dave Shepard. Mr Shepard began his career cracking Japanese military codes during the Second World War, then developed machines for reading written text. His work led to the squared-off numbers still seen on bank cards today.

Mr Shepard’s flying generator looks like a cross between a kite and a helicopter. It has four rotors at the points of an H-shaped frame that is tethered to the ground by a long cable. The rotors act like the surface of a kite, providing the lift needed to keep the platform in the air. As they do so, they also turn dynamos that generate electricity. This power is transmitted to the ground through aluminium cables. Should there be a lull in the wind, the dynamos can be used in reverse as electric motors, to keep the generator airborne.

Mr Shepard estimates these rigs could produce power for as little as two cents a kilowatt hour. That is cheaper than the three to five cents conventional energy generation costs. It is an attractive idea, but a flying generator is difficult thing to build—and there is a limit to how helpful existing helicopter technology will be. Aircraft require maintenance after a few days of operation, if not sooner. To operate cost-effectively, wind turbines will need to keep turning for many months without upkeep.

Mr Shepard, however, thinks he has a way out. Stabilising and directing a conventional helicopter requires that the pitch of the individual blades be adjusted with every rotation—up to a thousand times a minute. That puts massive stress on the turning mechanism and wears it out rapidly. On a four-rotor arrangement, you can achieve the same effect by changing the pitch of one or two whole rotors, rather than adjusting the pitch of individual blades. Mr Shepard reckons that this will make a big difference, and will increase the periods between maintenance enough to make the project viable.

Exploiting the jet stream represents the zenith (both literally and figuratively) of aerial wind-engineers’ ambitions. Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution who has worked with Sky WindPower, estimates that harvesting just 1% of its energy would produce enough power for the whole of civilisation. But even at lower altitudes, the winds are stronger than they are at the surface, and that has attracted the attention of other inventors. ...

Any promise of such cheap energy has to be treated with scepticism, and all these projects are still a long way from the full-scale test rigs needed to prove they will succeed. No-one denies that it will be hard to build a flying generator that can make money. However, the political impetus behind renewable energy is growing and space is limited at ground level. Perhaps it is time for the wind power industry to reach for the sky.

Dave Roberts at Grist has a post on "peak coal". I'm more than a little wary of this idea - from everything I've read there seams (sorry - couldn't resist) to be a rather large amount of coal out there, just begging to be left in the ground before we cook the atmosphere and ourselves. I might also add that I'm rather firmly of the belief that we are capable of harvesting more energy from renewable sources than we currently get from fossil fuels, so the vision of energy scarcity post peak oil/gas/coal (and I'm not criticising Dave in particular here - this view is pretty much omnipresent throughout the peak oil world) is something I only see as occurring if we're foolish enough to turn our backs on a range of large energy sources - go and do the sums on the total amount of solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and tidal / wave/ hydrokinetic power out there waiting to be harnessed if you don't believe me...

Virtually everyone involved in energy discussions takes for granted that there's plenty of coal waiting to be burnt. The typical claim is that the U.S. has "200 years" worth of domestic energy in its coal reserves.

That's why some people aren't as worried as they might be about the imminent peak in oil production. The notion is that we'll burn coal for electricity, liquefy it for transportation fuel, and be on our merry way. (And oh yeah, to shut the global warming crowd up, we'll sequester the carbon emissions.)

If you doubt just how much future energy supply is dependent on coal, watch this slideshow by peak oil expert Matt Simmons. All hope of satisfying the massive projected growth in global energy demand rests on coal.

But what if our core beliefs about coal are wrong? What if coal isn't as abundant as we thought? What if we're rapidly approaching peak coal?

That, apparently, is the conclusion of a forthcoming report from the Energy Watch Group in Germany. Putting aside the technical details, the report's blockbuster finding is that the world will hit peak coal energy around 2025. Check your calendar. Yup -- that's 18 years from now. Not very long. After we cross the peak, coal energy will get inexorably more and more expensive, until it costs more to get the coal than it pays to burn it.

If this turns out to be true, it completely changes the game. It will mean that all three primary fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal) are heading for decline. No alternative source of energy, under any realistic scenario, can hope to compensate for this loss of energy.

Thus: humanity will have to adjust to a sharply energy constrained world. This might happen thoughtfully, with planning and foresight. Or it might happen through the law of the jungle, with resource wars and massive dislocations. But it will happen.

It also changes the climate change equation. Climate change activists have always proceeded as though we have a choice: move to renewables and efficiency, or screw up the climate by burning coal. But if coal is bumping up against a peak just like oil and natural gas, there is no choice. We're going to use less energy, like it or not. The only relevant discussion is about how we choose to get from here to there.

It will take a while for everyone to adjust to this new information, and I expect we'll be discussing it again.

In the meantime, Chris Nelder has a fairly accessible summary of the report; Oil Drum has a slightly more detailed and technical summary; but the best place to get a perspective on what this could mean is this piece from peak oil guru Richard Heinberg. I hesitate to attempt to summarize Heinberg's thoughts -- it really is worth reading the whole thing.

(Important note: this is all based on a preliminary version of the report. The results will need to be verified by further study and analysis. Data on coal reserves are notoriously spotty. Etc. Etc. So caveat lector.)

While I'm being contrarian I'll throw in this article from AlwaysOn about supply side environmentalism. While I think this guy has it totally wrong on some fronts (nuclear power and encouraging endlessly sprawling exurbs with houses on large lots) on the whole I tend to agree with what he is saying.

This is where we find ourselves in 2007 - environmentalism has become a powerful force with a legacy of improvements to our quality of life, our health, our planet. But what direction should environmentalism take today - with energy independence becoming an important priority for all nations, new concerns about global warming, ongoing challenges to preserve wilderness, and unfinished business with respect to air and water pollution?

At a time like this, where the momentum to do anything to achieve energy independence dovetails fitfully with the momentum to do anything to reduce CO2 emissions, policymakers pressured by environmentalists may enact sweeping legislation that could completely change our way of life. But there are two ways environmentalists can go to pursue their core values in the 21st century, and they represent very, very different choices. One of the most fundamental areas where these two choices diverge concerns energy and water policy.

A “supply side” environmentalist - for lack of a better term - would argue that the priority should be to achieve energy and water abundance. To do this, for example, they would advocate construction of nuclear powered desalinization plants, as well as pumping stations and aqueducts. They would advocate increased production of fresh water from seawater, and they would advocate distributing this water to restore every depleted aquifer on earth.

A “demand side” environmentalist, by contrast, would argue that conservation of energy and water is the only approach that could possibly make sense. They would argue that it isn’t possible to produce enough energy for everyone at current levels of consumption. They would fight for energy and water rationing, with punitive fines and even criminal penalties for overuse of these resources.

The supply side environmentalist, in rebuttal, would argue that anyone overusing water and energy could simply pay a small but fair premium for their excess consumption, causing more revenues to accrue to the water and energy companies, who could then use those surpluses to invest in additional energy and water production facilities. A supply side environmentalist would argue there is abundant energy and always will be, because the market sets the price, and as soon as one energy source becomes scarce, the price of all energy rises somewhat, stimulating more investment in these energy alternatives.

Another critical choice for environmentalists is what sort of land use to advocate. A demand side environmentalist would say we don’t have enough land for new homes, so everyone must live in high-rises, or if they’re lucky, “cluster homes.” A demand side environmentalist would say we don’t have enough land for freeways, or enough energy for personal transportation devices (cars), so road construction must be curtailed in order to force people to choose mass transit.

A supply side environmentalist would say we have plenty of land, and the problem with suburban sprawl is it doesn’t sprawl enough - if homes on the outskirts of cities were “ranchettes” with very large lots, then wildlife could pass through these neighborhoods, and big trees could grow, and the roads would be uncongested, and sprawl would be beautiful instead of ugly. A supply side environmentalist would say there are now cars that emit virtually no pollution and are incredibly energy efficient, and eventually cars will use energy from cheap photovoltaics mounted on everyone’s roof, so build more cars, and double the mileage of roads to encourage car travel.

A demand side environmentalist would say that we need to ration energy and water and land because there are too many people on earth, and that we’ve outgrown our planet’s “carrying capacity.” A supply side environmentalist would say it is rationing that perpetuates poverty, and poverty delays female emancipation, and prosperity accelerates female emancipation, which always results in dramatic lowering of birthrates.

Obviously both approaches - managing demand while also increasing supplies of clean water and energy - is the solution to environmental challenges today. But it is vital to maintain this balance, and not dismiss the perspective nor the projects coming from the supply side.

On the subject of nuclear power, Dave Roberts has a good post on the nuclear PR industry (something I've moaned about periodicially for a few years now).

I'm way, way, waaay behind on this one, but I nonetheless want to draw your attention to two pieces on the massive, ongoing PR push from the nuclear industry.

The first is an editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review on the maddening phenomenon of mainstream news reporters accepting the claims of paid shills (i.e., Patrick Moore and Christie Todd Whitman) at face value, without making clear their relationship to the nuclear industry.

The second is a more extensive and well-documented piece called "Moore Spin: Or, How Reporters Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Front Groups," by Diane Farsetta. It surveys the entire panoply of PR efforts underway by the nuke industry -- and quite a panoply it is. You'd almost have to admire it, if it didn't make you want to puke. And by "you" I mean "me."

Here's the kick-ass conclusion to this kick-ass piece:

Entergy [owner/operator of 10 nuke plants] and NEI [nuke industry group] spend millions of dollars doing media outreach, under their own names. Both spend millions more to lobby federal officials. From 1998 to 2004, Entergy spent $13.5 million and NEI spent $9.7 million on federal lobbying, according to the Center for Public Integrity's LobbyWatch database.

But both, while using solely their own names, failed to garner significant public support. So both formed "coalitions" and "alliances," designed to deliver essentially the same pro-nuclear message. Unlike the funders behind classic front groups, NEI and Entergy admit their role in CASEnergy or NY AREA, Mass AREA and Vermont Energy Partnership, respectively. But that disclosure is done in a whisper, with a nod and wink, and sloppy reporting takes care of the rest.

The end result is the same -- instead of a fully informed and vigorous public debate on complex energy issues, the United States is having a lopsided discussion. And the nuclear power industry isn't just dominating it; it has several seats at the table.

Read-the-whole-thing'o'meter: pegged. Especially if you're a mainstream reporter. Yeah, I'm looking at you.

I'll close with a pair of Orwellian articles from Orwell's homeland - first the BBC talking about the rise of CCTV cameras that tell you what to do.

"Talking" CCTV cameras that tell off people dropping litter or committing anti-social behaviour are to be extended to 20 areas across England.

They are already used in Middlesbrough where people seen misbehaving can be told to stop via a loudspeaker, controlled by control centre staff. About £500,000 will be spent adding speaker facilities to existing cameras. Shadow home affairs minister James Brokenshire said the government should be "very careful" over the cameras.

Home Secretary John Reid told BBC News there would be some people, "in the minority who will be more concerned about what they claim are civil liberties intrusions". "But the vast majority of people find that their life is more upset by people who make their life a misery in the inner cities because they can't go out and feel safe and secure in a healthy, clean environment because of a minority of people," he added. The talking cameras did not constitute "secret surveillance", he said. "It's very public, it's interactive."

Competitions would also be held at schools in many of the areas for children to become the voice of the cameras, Mr Reid said.

Downing Street's "respect tsar", Louise Casey, said the cameras "nipped problems in the bud" and reduced bureaucracy. "It gets across the message, 'please don't litter our streets because someone else will have to pay to pick up that litter again'," she told BBC News. "Half a billion pounds a year is spent picking up litter."

A "respect tsar" ??? Words fail me...

The one from Boing Boing on how many cameras cover Orwell's old flat.

Dozens of private and public spy-cameras surveil the streets, walls and windows of the area around George Orwell's apartment. Britain, the nation that "sleepwalked into a surveillance society," has created the landscape that Orwell envisioned, a world where your every step is recorded from every angle. And as Cardinal Richelieu said, "If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him." Is there any among us whose movements aren't suspicious under the wrong circumstances?