Boiling The Ocean  

The SMH reports on the politics of water in Sydney - the best option (distributed water storage plus water recycling) is being ignored in favour of large, centralised solutions - a desalination plant and a new dam in the Hunter.

In Sydney, dam levels are hovering at about 38 per cent, or 32 per cent in reality, if you ignore Sydney Catchment Authority "fudge-figures" in use since April last year whereby it adds 6 percentage points to storage capacity by accessing deep water at Warragamba Dam.

Before the March state election, we were told that the desalination plant contract would be awarded this month, non-drinkable recycling would reach 70 billion litres a year by 2015 and bore fields would be constructed by 2009 to deliver an additional 30 to 45 billion litres of pristine groundwater.

But since the election, Professor Stuart White, the NSW Government's Metropolitan Water Plan expert who did the review last year that supported desalination, has backed away from desalination and has publicly stated that the decision should be reviewed. However, his advice has been ignored and the desalination plant tender process rolls on apace behind closed doors.

On the Central Coast, the Gosford Wyong Water Authority has finally decided to upgrade its infrastructure with the $80 million Mardi Creek transfer pipe. This pipeline should have been built 20 years ago when the original water supply was built. Building this link means the Central Coast will not need to get water from the recently announced Tillegra Dam in the Hunter region, promised by the Premier, Morris Iemma, to deflect the fallout from the Milton Orkopoulos scandal.

Hunter Water consumers don't need this $340 million-plus dam, but Hunter Water wants to build the dam and a massive pipeline to the Central Coast, in one step extending its empire to gain control of the Central Coast's water supply. Yet with water recycling, rainwater harvesting and more effective local management, the water from the dam would not be needed by the people of the Hunter or the Central Coast.

WA is now planning a second desalination plant. While I'm generally very unenthusiastic about desalination, at least they made their first one completely wind powered (and hopefully this next one will be too), which mitigates a lot of the problems.

Western Australia has shelved controversial plans to tap a south-west aquifer to supply Perth's water in favour of building a second seawater desalination plant.

Premier Alan Carpenter said the state's wind-powered desalination plant at Kwinana had shown that large quantities of water from an unlimited ocean supply could be provided using a clean and green process. "Unlike South West Yarragadee [aquifer] and traditional water sources, it is also climate independent," Mr Carpenter said today. "That is why the State Government has decided that the next major water source can be provided by the seawater desalination process."

The new plant will cost $640 million and is expected to provide at least 45 gigalitres of water a year into the integrated water supply system by the end of 2011, with potential to increase to 100 gigalitres.

Meanwhile further water restrictions are being planned for the inland, with industry getting priority over other users (commonly known as country people).

EVERY town along the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers could be forced on to level four water restrictions as the NSW Government prepares to take the unprecedented step of overriding local councils and water utilities. It is understood the Government will step in and enforce powers under the Water Management Act if cities and towns along the rivers have failed to impose the restrictions by July 1.

It would mean an outright ban on householders using town water from outside taps for gardens or washing cars. There would also be no town water for local sporting fields, school ovals or grassed areas.

The five-year drought has reached crisis point, with only 17 per cent of NSW spared its grip. The Water Minister, Phil Koperberg, told the Herald the Government was urging councils and water utility providers to prepare to introduce the restrictions now in a bid to lessen the blow to water-reliant industries.

Mr Koperberg would not confirm that he was prepared to enforce the level four restrictions, but said they were inevitable. He strongly encouraged councils to take matters into their own hands immediately.

One more from the SMH, this time on fear of climate change. As with most of these large scale issues, the correct way to react is to do something about it, not to be afraid.

There is growing consensus among psychologists and educators that children are becoming fearful of climate change and global warming in the same way their parents fretted over the Cold War. The difference with climate change, however, is that it is not perceived so much as a single, definable issue but as an amorphous, wide-ranging problem where cows, coal and even the kitchen sink can be seen as a threat.

A survey of 1150 British children between the ages of seven and 11 found half were anxious about global warming and often lay awake worrying about it. Twenty-five per cent of those questioned earlier this year blamed politicians for the problem, while one in seven pointed the finger at their own parents.

The anxiety many youngsters feel is increased by a sense that they are too young to influence events. Denial, resignation, cynicism, anxiety, hopelessness and even despair can arise from a perception that global problems are overwhelming and complicated.

Ben Roche, the manager of the OutThere community engagement unit of the faculty of the built environment at the University of NSW, has worked with thousands of secondary school students around Australia. He says they are hungry for knowledge and for practical ways to deal with what they see in the media. The Sustainable Living Challenge (www.sustainableliving.com.au) run by the faculty works with about 400 schools each year through workshops and teacher mentoring.

"Although it's vital to know the state of the world, the heavy-handed nature of reporting on the environment has not, to date, been balanced with advice and best-practice approaches and teenagers are responding to this … fear is not a motivator," Roche says.

Many parents feel anxious and helpless about the environmental situation and are passing these feelings on to their children, he adds. "There is a noticeable sense of crisis but I am not sure if this manifests as anxiety for all. It also manifests as apathy, resentment and depression." However, he believes this sense of crisis can also lead to "excitement, stimulation and motivation".

What is important, he and many other sustainability educators believe, is giving youth a feeling that they can individually and collectively make a difference. "You need to foster a sense of confidence and desire to act," Roche says. ...

Andrew Best, the principal of Leumeah Public School, is one of 84 Australian Al Gore ambassadors - people who have attended a training session with Gore to learn how to deliver his climate change presentation. He agrees there is much "doom and gloom" that students need to deal with but says this can be counteracted by "empowering them and teaching them ways they can make a difference".

"I am conscious of the risk you run with kids that it will all seem too hard," Best says. "Al Gore said [that] every time we give a presentation we are working with three budgets: time, complexity - don't be too simplistic but don't get bogged down too much - and hope. You have to leave your audience with the feeling they can make a difference. "There are so many renewable energies. The technology doesn't have to be invented. All we need is the political and moral will. David Suzuki said recently that when you look back at the Earth from space, you can't see the economy."

Best believes An Inconvenient Truth can be a catalyst for action, but that those in years 5 and 6 should receive accompanying explanations and guides if their teacher wishes to present it.

Technology Review has the follow up to their article on Planning for a Climate-Changed World.

High in the Rocky Mountains, not far from Vail, CO, it is part of a network of reservoirs and pipelines that feed water to Colorado Springs. In June 2006, the reservoir filled at the unprecedented average rate of nearly two feet per day. Because of higher temperatures earlier in the season, the snowpack was melting more quickly than usual.

The unprecedented may become routine as global warming makes more precipitation fall as rain, while what snow there is melts ever faster. That's worrisome: a reservoir that fills more quickly than expected can stress a dry levee. And there are other concerns. At what point will earlier snowmelt translate into summer water shortages? Will early spring torrents raise the risk of downstream flooding? Will more-intense spring rainfalls increase sediment, overwhelming filtration systems and washing more pollutants into the water supply? And these climate-related questions arise at a time when rapid population growth is already stressing water resources.

Planners need to understand as precisely as possible the amount, timing, and form--rain or snow--of future precipitation. Only then can they determine when and where to build new water-storage, flood-control, and filtration systems and how to guide future residential or commercial development in watershed areas. So last winter, in a windowless conference room in an industrial area of Colorado Springs, engineers from Colorado Springs Utilities met with David Yates, an NCAR hydrologist, to start revising their water-supply management plans in light of climate-change projections. "Plans are typically made based on historical 20- to 40-year stream-flow averages," Yates said. "That mode of planning is no longer relevant."

Concrete local projections are especially important in this region, where politics constrain the way scientific findings can be discussed. Colorado Springs is a politically conservative city and home to a powerful Christian evangelical organization that is skeptical of concerns about global warming. Toward the end of the meeting, the utilities' manager of water-supply resources, Wayne ­Vanderschuere, entered the room. He was already thinking about how any new climate-change-related findings might be framed. "All the talk about climate change and CO2--we don't want to go there. We don't want to talk about Kyoto, all the posturing," he said, referring to the Kyoto Protocol, the U.S.-rejected treaty that mandates limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. "We just want the analytic risk to supplying water that this poses." ...

The WSJ's Energy Roundup continues putting out good summaries of the day's mainstream energy news (in stark contrast to the tendency here to head straight for the fringes), with "Of Servers and Solar Panels: MarketWatch Looks at the Business of Clean Energy" being the pick of today's posts.

Our colleagues at MarketWatch are doing a series this week about the business opportunities being created by the effort to fight global warming. We all get our paychecks signed by the same people, so Energy Roundup is not a credible source on this, but we think the first day’s lineup is pretty good and will be checking in with the series all week.

Today’s entries include:

# John Shinal takes a look at how Internet and other technology firms are struggling to contain soaring energy bills. “Silicon Valley-based companies like eBay and Google are seeing their energy use increase by 20% to 40% annually,” Shinal writes.

# Jeffry Bartash profiles EPA official Andrew Fanara and scientist Jon Koomey, who are together trying to figure out how to make data-center servers more energy-efficient.

# Matt Andrejczak tracks the soaring price of polysilicon, an essential raw material in the production of solar cells.

# Newsletter guru Mark Hulbert rounds up what newsletter writers are saying about alternative energy. In a nutshell: They love solar, especially Suntech Power, MEMC Electronic Materials, Trina Solar and First Solar (Energy Roundup wrote about a couple of these companies last week). They’re not so hot on other industries such as wind and ethanol, citing a dearth of publicly traded choices and the runups many such stocks have already enjoyed. One newsletter writer, John Dessauer, suggests some technology stocks could be indirect plays on clean technology, including Intel and Cisco Systems.

# And Stephanie Cohen takes a look at how solar-panel makers are trying to make the panels cheaper and more attractive, giving them more “curb appeal” for homeowners.

Dave Roberts has a post at Grist on Yahoo! going green(er) as part of their battle to be the greenest search engine company.

A few weeks ago I noted that Yahoo! has pledged to go carbon neutral in 2007. Today the company is making some more splashy green announcements. Company co-founder David Filo, along with Global Green and Matt Dillon (?!), will be taking to Times Square later today to announce a series of initiatives around climate change. You can read about the details in this blog post from Filo.

The main push is around "Be a Better Planet," a site that will serve as the center of a contest to determine America's greenest city. As part of the announcement, Yahoo! is donating 10 hybrid taxis to New York City. The winner of the greenest city contest will also receive a fleet of hybrid taxis (or the cash equivalent to devote to going greener). If you join the effort and take the green pledge, Yahoo! will send you a free CFL.

The other big debut is Yahoo! Green, a site that will serve as a hub for green news and tips. Says Filo:

In a matter of a week or so, the site will also be full of green news headlines; featured content from Global Green USA, Environmental Defense, NRDC and Lime; blog feeds from environmental authority Amory Lovins, Environmental Defense's chief scientist Bill Chameides and EcoGeek; green shopping tips; the 18Seconds.org site; and relevant content from Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Groups, and the Yahoo! Autos Green Center. And it'll evolve from there with even more content and features, all in the name of informing and empowering you to be as green as you can be. The site was designed and built by our Yahoo! For Good Scrum team, an internal sabbatical program for employees who want to use their talents to do some good for the world.

(Where is Grist in there, you're wondering. Good question!)

[BG: and where is Peak Energy ? How about you readers at Yahoo adding me to the list - I'll try and keep the tone semi-respectable if I get enough readers coming in !]

As TechCrunch notes, this is the latest in an escalating battle with Google to see who's greener. I've always thought that the real heroes of the environment in the coming few decades won't be activists or gov't officials but entrepreneurs from the tech biz. In that crowd, green has become a status symbol, and when you combine the quest for status, lots of money, and creative young people ... things happen quickly. Best case scenario, green innovation gets on the same exponential upward curve that internet tech innovation has been on for the last 20 years. Here's hoping for a green Moore's Law.

Continuing the green technology theme, Joel Makower has launched GreenerComputing.com.

My colleagues and I at Greener World Media are pleased to announce the launch of GreenerComputing.com, the latest addition to the GreenBiz family of sites and e-newsletters.

GreenerComputing -- along with its companion e-newsletter, GreenerComputing News -- is a free news and resource center on the greening of information technology. Over the past few years, the environmental issues associated with IT have grown, as I've covered in previous posts: The energy use of computers, server farms, and other paraphernalia of the digital age; the hazardous ingredients of much IT equipment, and the efforts to restrict or eliminate them; and the e-waste problem -- what to do with the millions of used gizmos once we've moved on to the Next Cool Thing.

All of which will be part of GreenerComputing's daily menu of editorial fare.

In the site's inaugural feature story, managing editor Matthew Wheeland looks into Google's efforts to reduce the environmental impacts of its vast computing empire. Wheeland found that Google is looking very closely at a resource that most companies already have, but may not be using: a computer's power-management software.

Simply activating the power-save features on a fleet of corporate desktops -- which in Google's case could be as high as 12,000 computers for its employees worldwide -- can save 50 or 60 percent of the energy wasted when computers are left on, and idle, for 16 hours a day.

These features -- like dimming the monitor, spinning down the hard disks, putting the drive to sleep -- have been standard features on laptops from the beginning, but they're also regular features of most desktop computers made in the last few years.

But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that only a tiny fraction of computers -- as low as 5 percent -- actually use these power management features. When they do, it's worth it. In one case study, General Electric saved $6.5 million in electricity costs a year simply by changing computers' settings.

There are also columns by Fortune magazine writer Marc Gunther and U.K. technology journalist James Murray, along with scores of tools and other resources to help organization's lighten their computing footprint.

I encourage you to stop by GreenerComputing.com and check out what's there -- and to share it with those in your organization who may be seeking ways that computers, printers, servers, and other electronics can take a little less byte from the earth

Continuing yesterdays thread of Mexico's potential to collapse, NASA's Peak Engineer added a comment pointing to this story form MSNBC.

Mexican drug cartels armed with powerful weapons and angered by a nationwide military crackdown are striking back, killing soldiers in bold, daily attacks that threaten the one force strong enough to take on the gangs.

The daily bloodshed includes an ambush that killed five soldiers this month, a severed head left with a defiant note outside a military barracks on Saturday and the slaying Monday of a top federal intelligence official who was shot in the face in his car outside his office in Mexico City.

Mexicans were particularly shocked last week by televised images of kindergartners fleeing their school during a grenade-and-gun battle between traffickers and soldiers that lasted for nearly two hours in this small town in President Felipe Calderon’s home state of Michoacan. ...

Moving on from the Peak Engineer to the problem of peak engineers, The Australian reports that skill shortages are just one more hurdle faced by the nuclear power industry. The nuclear lobby thinks this is just a matter of training engineers, but I think they are ignoring the shortage of educators, and the difficulty of selling a career in a toxic, unpleasant industry when young engineers could learn about clean tech generated energy and smart grids instead. What sort of smart kid is going to want to go back to the 1950's when they have one of the brightest options going as the direct alternative ? And, of course, there is the aging population (making young workers a scarce commodity anyway) along with the much better paying mining and financial sectors to contend with. Must be a hard life doing PR for the radioactive waste industry...

FORMER Iraq hostage and engineer Douglas Wood said today skill shortages were undermining the push for nuclear energy, and urged the government to educate voters about the benefits of the nuclear industry to overcome negative public sentiment.
Mr Wood, who worked as a project manager on nuclear power plants in the United States and the Philippines, said Australia would need to train up 1000 engineers and gain public approval before it could successfully kick-start its nuclear industry.

“We've got a skills shortage,” he told an Australian Institute of Project Management function in Melbourne. “Where are we going to get 1000 pipe fitter welders? Where are we going to get those 1000 engineers? It's not an easy job.” Mr Wood said it would take four year to educate engineers for the job.

The Independent reports that the BBC is axing its online education service after the private sector complained it couldn't compete. Sounds like a case of the totalitarian capitalism George Monbiot is wont to moan about.

The BBC is to axe all 200 posts within its online education service, BBC Jam, it was announced yesterday. The move follows the BBC Trust's decision to suspend the £150 million service in March as a result of claims it was damaging the interests of commercial competitors.

In a statement, the controller of BBC Learning, Liz Cleaver, said: "I recognise that the past few weeks have been stressful for everyone involved in Jam following the suspension of the service in March, and commend staff for their patience and professionalism."

BBC Jam is based on the national curriculum and is aimed at five to 16-year-olds. The service had 170,000 registered users before the BBC Trust pulled the plug.

The Trust acted in response to news that the European Commission had received complaints from the commercial sector. The BBC's learning department is preparing fresh proposals for a replacement service. They will be submitted to the Trust in the next few months.

Liberal Democrat culture, media and sport spokesman Don Foster said: "This ongoing farce is far from the BBC's finest hour. The decision to suspend BBC Jam before the European Commission had even reached a judgment seems ludicrous. "BBC Jam was meant to represent a new era in the education services the BBC is known the world over for. Instead the Trust seems more concerned with damage limitation. At the very least, the BBC Trust should have waited until firm proposals were in place for a viable alternative before suspending the service."

The Australian reports that Iran is forging ahead with its uranium enrichment program.

UN nuclear inspectors say Iran is enriching uranium on a larger scale than before, the New York Times reported today.
The newspaper said the International Atomic Energy Agency made a short-notice inspection Sunday of Iran's main nuclear facility in Natanz and found that all of its 1300 centrifuges were up and running smoothly, producing nuclear fuel. The centrifuges "were producing fuel suitable for use in nuclear reactors," the US newspaper said, citing diplomats and nuclear experts in Vienna where the agency is based. It said the plant had overcome earlier technical difficulties in making them spin to produce the material.

Iran has defied months of international pressure and two sets of UN sanctions over its nuclear program, which it insists aims to produce energy for peaceful civilian use. The material currently being produced by the centrifuges would need to undergo further enrichment before it could be made into bomb-grade fuel. Reactor-grade uranium is enriched to levels of around five percent, while weapons-grade uranium must be enriched to 90 percent or higher.

Maybe they'll open the enrichment facilities up for tourism one day.

China has declassified its first nuclear weapons base and is inviting tourists to visit the site, in a remote part of the northwestern province of Qinghai, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday. Built in 1958 over more than 1100 square kilometres of the grasslands of northern Qinghai, the base was the birthplace of China's atomic and hydrogen bombs, but was closed in the late 1980s, Xinhua said. China became a nuclear power in 1964.

"The underground headquarters of the nuclear weapons research and production base are a curiosity to many people. They can see the 'nuclear city' for themselves," the report quoted Zuo Xumin, an official in the mainly Tibetan region where the base is situated, as saying. "The base will be developed into a key travel site, and it will become a platform for spurring the patriotic spirit of Chinese people," he said.

Opening the base is a rare move for China, where the definition of state secrets is notoriously broad and its weapons development is seen as highly sensitive. The headquarters of the base comprises several rooms more than 9 metres (30 feet) underground and reinforced with concrete, which originally held a research laboratory, electricity generation room, telegraph transmitting room and a command room.

TreeHugger has a post on the British tradition of "Anclient Lights".

What happens if you spend $25K covering your roof with solar panels and somebody builds a tall building that throws them into shade? We used to have rights. When working with a real estate developer in the early nineties we had a neighbour oppose our project, saying that their building had a "right to ancient light" (extinguished in Toronto in 1880 but their building was older. As you can see here, it is now completely in shadow) and had us all scratching our heads. According to Bldgblog, they still have it in the UK but you have to work to preserve it :

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors says that "many people are allowing adjacent buildings to block their natural light, unaware that they have a legal right to it. Light blocking can be classified as a ‘nuisance’ alongside noise and air pollution and culprits range from large new commercial developments to a neighbour’s building extension or a new garden shed. Even a tall hedge can be a problem."

The tone of the RICS abruptly shifts at this point, however, as they begin to explain how you can actually prevent your neighbours from acquiring ancient light rights. There is a "need for vigilance to prevent neighbours acquiring a right to light," they warn; after all, such an acquisition "may hamper future development and investment possibilities" on your own property. "It is possible to prevent a building acquiring a right to light," the RICS explains, "but despite the procedure being simple, it is rarely used."

Energy Bulletin points to a new Nature article on Terra Preta called "A handful of carbon".

An existing approach to removing carbon from the atmosphere is to grow plants that sequester carbon dioxide in their biomass or in soil organic matter2. Indeed, methods for sequestering carbon dioxide through afforestation have already been accepted as tradable 'carbon offsets' under the Kyoto Protocol. But this sequestration can be taken a step further by heating the plant biomass without oxygen (a process known as low-temperature pyrolysis). Pyrolysis converts trees, grasses or crop residues into biochar, with twofold higher carbon content than ordinary biomass. Moreover, biochar locks up rapidly decomposing carbon in plant biomass in a much more durable form4.

The precise duration of biochar's storage time is under debate, with opinions ranging from millennial (as some dating of naturally occurring biochar suggests) to centennial timescales (as indicated by some field and laboratory trials)5. Whether biochar remains in soils for hundreds or thousands of years, it would be considered a long-term sink for the purposes of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

...Biochar is a lower-risk strategy than other sequestration options, in which stored carbon can be released, say, by forest fires, by converting no-tillage back to conventional tillage, or by leaks from geological carbon storage. Once biochar is incorporated into soil, it is difficult to imagine any incident or change in practice that would cause a sudden loss of stored carbon.

The bottom line is that plant biomass decomposes in a relatively short period of time, whereas biochar is orders of magnitudes more stable.

...At the local or field scale, biochar can usefully enhance existing sequestration approaches. It can be mixed with manures or fertilizers and included in no-tillage methods, without the need for additional equipment. Biochar has been shown to improve the structure and fertility of soils, thereby improving biomass production3. Biochar not only enhances the retention6 and therefore efficiency of fertilizers but may, by the same mechanism, also decrease fertilizer run-off.

For biochar sequestration to work on a much larger scale, an important factor is combining low-temperature pyrolysis with simultaneous capture of the exhaust gases and converting them to energy as heat, electricity, biofuel or hydrogen

...The consequences of climate change are already being felt1 and there is an urgency not only to identify but also to implement solutions. Biochar sequestration does not require a fundamental scientific advance and the underlying production technology is robust and simple, making it appropriate for many regions of the world. It does, however, require studies to optimize biochar properties and to evaluate the economic costs and benefits of large-scale deployment.

Harpers is pondering the question "how do you completely alienate and infuriate a population under military occupation ?".

Last summer, the Associated Press and New York Times each did stories on the detention facilities operated by the United States inside of Iraq. The conclusions of each investigation were roughly the same. At the time, they noted roughly 14,000 Iraqis were being held in a “legal vacuum.” The detention facilities were chaotic, a large portion of the persons held were taken in on sweeps through their neighborhoods and were suspected and charged with nothing. No trials occur, but the detainees languish often for many months – in some cases for more than a year. “They may not be enemies when they enter these prisons,” one Army officer told me, “but you can count on it that they are insurgent sympathizers by the time they leave.” He was alluding not just to the treatment standards, which he called “nothing I would be proud of as an American,” but the fact that the facilities are allowed to function as recruitment and training centers for the insurgents. Politically uninvolved Iraqis enter. But to find a way of surviving in the brutal gang reality of the prisons, they cast their lot with insurgent groups.

The United States government views this as a “security detention” system that has nothing to do with justice. They are literally right about that. The system has no legal basis. When challenged for authority, spokesmen for U.S. Forces in Iraq constantly cite Security Council Resolution 1546. However, this resolution does not authorize the detentions. To the contrary, it, and the letter from Secretary of State Colin Powell which accompanied it, make clear that detentions must be made in accordance with the Iraqi Constitution and laws. And Iraqi law requires any detention to be justified before a magistrate in a matter of only a few days. One of the most striking features of the U.S. detention regime in Iraq is, however, its complete contempt for the requirements of Iraqi law.

But beyond this, it’s a formula for how to lose a civil war.

Today, McClatchy reports on the situation and finds the conditions are essentially the same as found by the AP and New York Times in the fall, except that the number of persons under detention has now spiraled to nineteen thousand. But the McClatchy piece puts its focus on ten thousand Iraqis who have simply gone missing – as family and friends are unable to establish any connection with persons in detention, even to establish whether they are simply still alive.

There’s no accurate count of the missing since the war began. Iraqi human rights groups put the figure at 15,000 or more, while government officials say 40 to 60 people disappeared each day throughout the country for much of last year, a rate equal to at least 14,600 in one year.

What happened to them is a frustrating mystery that compounds Iraq’s overwhelming sense of chaos and anarchy. Are they dead? Were they kidnapped or killed in some mass bombing? Is the Iraqi government or some militia group holding them? Were they taken prisoner by the United States, which is holding 19,000 Iraqis at its two main detention centers, at Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca?

You were wondering perhaps, how do you completely alienate and infuriate a population under military occupation? Well, this is how.

And to close with some tinfoil, here's the dubious crew from InfoWars complaining that an "Eco-Extremist Wants World Population to Drop below 1 Billion". I looked at the Sea Shepherd site in the hope they'd been misquoted, but alas, it was all there as claimed. While I find the annual duel with Japanese whalers entertaining in a way, they do appear to treat the laws of the sea with little respect (the Japanese whalers are committing another type of crime of course), and this "we have to somehow make 5 out of every 6 people on the planet disappear" stuff is the sort of thing that gives environmentalism a bad name (ecofascism being the name usually used). Of course, some peak oil doomers aren't much better than the deep ecologist fringes, as controversies in previous years have shown...

Apparently, saving the whales is more important than saving 5.5 billion people. Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and famous for militant intervention to stop whalers, now warns mankind is “acting like a virus” and is harming Mother Earth.

Watson's May 4 editorial asked the question “The Beginning of the End for Life as We Know it on Planet Earth?” Then he left no doubt about the answer. “We are killing our host the planet Earth,” he claimed and called for a population drop to less than 1 billion.

The commentary reminded readers that Watson had called humans a disease before and he wasn't sorry. “I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the ‘AIDS of the Earth.' I make no apologies for that statement,” the column continued.

Watson was invoking the worst of Robert Malthus, an English political economist who claimed that mankind was overpopulating the earth. That claimed first appeared in the late 1700s. Watson urged some solutions for mankind as part of a process to “need to re-wild the planet”:

· “No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas.” New York, London, Paris, Moscow are all too big. Then again, so are Moose Jaw, Timbuktu and even Annapolis, Md.
· “We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference.”
· “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.”
· “Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.”
· At least Watson was generous and said people could still talk with one another across great distances. “Communication systems can link the communities,” he proclaimed from on high.

The Watson rant kept on going calling for everything from cutting down on the population of domesticated dogs and cats to cutting down on everything else in what he called “simplify, simplify, simplify.” ...