Green Beer  

It seems to be beer week here at Peak Energy - today's installment is a story on a green brewer in Colorado that uses energy efficient brewing kettles and a microbial fuel cell for generating energy from waste (as per the Fosters story recently).

At the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, Colo., it's time to raise a glass for beer brewed with a conscience. Kim Jordan is co-founder of New Belgium. When she and her husband, Jeff, first started brewing beer in their basement back in 1991, they set a few ground rules. "Having fun, brewing world class beer, promoting beer culture and being environment stewards," Kim says, recounting the rules.

Sixteen years and 300 employees later, New Belgium is now the nation's third largest mid-sized brewery, and its corporate soul is still very much intact. "Success here is about more than just the bottom line," Kim says. "It's also about the 'Three R's:'" reduce, reuse, recycle.

The brew kettles at New Belgium use 65 percent less energy than a standard brew kettle, spent grain goes to a local cattle farmer, and, perhaps most surprising, the brewery turns waste water into energy. "We have bacteria that are doing the 'cleaning" of the waste water,' Brandon Weaver says. "They're consuming the pollutants — giving off a bio-product which is methane-rich gas." The methane gas is then used to produce 15 percent of the brewery's electricity needs. The rest comes from wind. New Belgium saves $3,000 a month on electricity bills, while reducing carbon dioxide emissions by eight million pounds a year.

The single largest ingredient in beer is water. And as part of its commitment to conservation, New Belgium uses 50 percent less than the industry average. The brewery also uses desks made from old FedEx tubes, the building is constructed from reclaimed timber, and solar tubes light the warehouse.

Kelpie Wilson has a good article at TruthOut on the agrichar conference in Terrigal.

As delegates met in Bangkok this week to debate climate change solutions contained in the IPCC's latest report, one technology not mentioned in the draft report was being closely examined at a conference in Australia in the beach town of Terrigal, just north of Sydney.

The first meeting of the International Agrichar Initiative convened about 100 scientists, policymakers, farmers and investors with the goal of birthing an entire new industry to produce a biofuel that goes beyond carbon neutral and is actually carbon negative. The industry could provide a "wedge" of carbon reduction amounting to a minimum of ten percent of world emissions and possibly much more.

Agrichar is the term not for the biomass fuel, but for what is left over after the energy is removed: a charcoal-based soil amendment. In simple terms, the agrichar process takes dry biomass of any kind and bakes it in a kiln to produce charcoal. The process is called pyrolysis. Various gases and bio-oils are driven off the material and collected to use in heat or power generation. The charcoal is buried in the ground, sequestering the carbon that the growing plants had pulled out of the atmosphere. The end result is increased soil fertility and an energy source with negative carbon emissions.

Prominent Australian scientist Tim Flannery, who has written a book on global warming called "The Weather Makers," was on hand to give encouragement to the conferees. "I am deeply committed to your solution," he told the group. In a keynote address, Flannery provided an update on the acceleration of global warming, from the rapidly melting Greenland ice sheet to the unprecedented drought that has gripped Australia.

Because the pace of global warming already exceeds projections, Flannery is convinced that the world must do more than just reduce emissions; we must find ways to rapidly remove CO2 from the atmosphere. According to many researchers at the conference, agrichar has the potential to store billions of tons of carbon safely away in soils.

The attendees were clearly excited by this potential, and, unlike other meetings concerned with climate change, an electric buzz of optimism was in the air. Joe Herbertson, director of a consulting company called Crucible Carbon, said, "When I heard about this technology, the hairs went up on the back of my neck. This is the best news on climate change I've ever heard."

One reason for the excitement is agrichar's potential to address a range of problems from poor soil fertility to waste disposal to rural development. About half the world's population relies on charcoal for cooking fuel, and the production of charcoal drives deforestation in Africa and other places. Smoky, inefficient charcoal kilns pollute the air with noxious gases that harm health and heat the planet.

An effort to replace these kilns with modern, efficient pyrolysis units would relieve the pressure on forests by reducing waste and adding the ability to use any source of biomass, including agricultural waste products such as rice hulls. The ultimate objective is to produce enough charcoal to have some left over to bury and increase soil fertility, leading to a bootstrapping effect where increased yields provide both more food and more biomass for energy.

Projects discussed at the agrichar meeting ranged from a household-size pyrolyzing stove that produces both cooking gas and charcoal, to industrial-scale units capable of processing large waste streams from sugar mills, pulp mills, poultry farms and even municipalities.

Some participants suggested that energy, rather than agriculture, would be the key driver for adopting biomass pyrolysis. There is a tradeoff between producing energy or charcoal, as the process can be optimized for either one. Desmond Radlein of Dynamotive Energy Systems said, "It is wishful thinking that people will switch to renewable fuels unless it is cheaper. All of this is tied to the price of oil; as it goes up, many more things are possible." Because it costs money for transport and the labor to put agrichar into soil, Radlein feels that the path forward lies with biomass energy plantations fertilized by agrichar, which will become a self-sustaining loop pumping carbon into soils, paid for by the energy yield.

Robert Flanagan, an entrepreneur working in China, had a different view. There are 700 million farmers in China, he pointed out. China could quickly deploy a small, village-level pyrolysis unit he is developing, and because labor is cheap, spreading the agrichar on fields would be affordable even without a large energy harvest.

Others at the conference felt that an expanding market for carbon credits under the Kyoto protocol would be the force that drives the adoption of agrichar. Mike Mason, director of the UK biomass company, Biojoule, said the impact of agrichar on nitrous oxide emissions alone would be enough incentive to fund the needed projects.

Nitrous oxide is 270 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas and it lasts for 150 years in the atmosphere. Use of nitrogen fertilizers is a major source of the gas, and a difficult one to mitigate. But agrichar applied to fields seems to have a significant damping effect on nitrous oxide emissions. Lukas Van Zwieten, a researcher at the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, looking at preliminary results of his field trials measuring nitrous oxide emissions from agrichar amended soils, said "the more I look into this, the more excited I get."

Several farmers attending the conference were primarily interested in the increased yields possible with agrichar. Australia has some of the poorest soils in the world - 75 percent of Australia's soils have less than one percent carbon.

The exceptional properties of charcoal in soil were first noticed in the Amazon where there are large areas of what is called "terra preta" or Amazonian dark earths. These dark earths can be several feet deep and contain up to nine percent carbon, as compared with nearby soils that have only about half of one percent. In one of the most fascinating aspects of this story, the terra preta soils turn out to have been deliberately created by a lost Amazonian civilization. Some of the areas have been dated going back to more than 7,000 years, and they are still highly fertile.

Field trials and experiments in pots show impressive yield gains in charcoal-amended soils, but so far researchers don't completely understand why. One question is whether the effect is primarily chemical and physical or primarily biological. Charcoal is a highly porous material that is very good at holding nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus and making them available to plant roots. It also aerates soil and helps it retain water.

Charcoal's pores also make excellent habitat for a variety of soil microorganisms and fungi. Think of a coral reef that provides structure and habitat for a bewildering variety of marine species. Charcoal is like a reef on a micro-scale. ...

PNG paper "The National" has a report on 4 potential LNG projects in the country.

The current spate of activity revolving around proposed LNG or liquefied natural gas projects is nothing short of amazing and could not have been foreseen even two or three years ago. The crucial factor for PNG’s gas suddenly coming of age – the largest proven gas field at Hides was discovered exactly 20 years ago – has been the upsurge in oil and gas prices and widespread concern that the day of ‘peak oil’ may be coming.


‘Peak oil’ refers to the expectation that in coming years, maybe as soon as the next decade, world oil production would hit a peak and begin an inexorable decline.
Even though the rate of new oil discoveries has been declining for some considerable period, ‘peak oil’ is only likely to occur if trouble in the Middle East, or conscious policy-making by these countries, stifles production and export growth.


World prices have reached record highs recently because of supply constraints exercised by OPEC for the purpose of ensuring high export revenues, and because of burgeoning demand from China and India. As a result of these trends, the world focus is rapidly shifting to natural gas which happens to be a much cleaner fuel than other alternatives, particularly coal.

If markets are easily accessible natural gas is easy to transport via pipelines compared to the highly polluting coal, one of the main contributors to global warming.
For this reason where companies in previous decades shunned the search for natural gas, these days it is regarded as a premium fuel and a potential company maker for many corporations.


It was the discovery in Queensland and New South Wales of large quantities of coal bed methane – natural gas tapped from within coal deposits – that led to the demise early this year of PNG’s ambitious long-held dream of piping natural gas across the Gulf of Papua for sale to Australia. But as Oil Search managing director Peter Botten said, in announcing this decision, studies had shown it would be much preferable from a company, and a national viewpoint, for the gas to be converted to LNG for export or used as a feedstock and energy source for two petrochemical plants now under active consideration.


At the time this decision was taken only InterOil, and its joint venture partners, had been seriously pursuing the idea of LNG, based on their Elk discovery, where the size of the gas reserves will only be known late this year. Oil Search itself is involved in two separate LNG studies. The first is led by ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, which is assessing a plant that can produce between five million and 6.5 million tonnes a year. This project is based largely on reserves at the huge Hides gas deposit and nearby deposits at Angore and Juha.

Recent drilling has downgraded Juha’s potential from a high estimate of four million trillion cubic feet to half that quantity. Botten believes there are adequate gas reserves in the oil producing fields at Kutubu, Gobe and Moran to support a separate project and Oil Search together with British Gas are assessing the economics of such an operation. ...

Brazil is considering building a new nuclear reactor to cope with rising gas prices. Surely Brazil has plenty of room for solar thermal and wind plants - what are they dredging up the past for ?

Brazil will increase the use of nuclear energy if it cannot build enough hydroelectric plants, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Thursday.
"We either build the hydroelectric plants we need or we`ll enter the nuclear age," Lula said during the inauguration of a hydro-powered plant in central Minas Gerais state.

Lula da Silva last week split up the environmental protection agency Ibama, saying it was too slow in granting operating licenses for infrastructure projects such as hydroelectric plants. The government is particularly interested in two hydro dams on the Amazon basin`s Madeira River. Lula da Silva is also to decide in coming weeks whether Brazil will build a third nuclear energy plant. Work on the Angra 3 reactor, 100 km from Rio de Janeiro, was halted in 1985 due to lack of funds. Completion of the 1,350 megawatt power plant would cost over 1.5 billion US dollars. Brazil relies on dams to generate around 90 percent of its energy.

Oil and gas plants are more expensive than hydro and nuclear energy, and Brazil has a shortage of fossil fuels, Lula said. "We can`t continue depending on gas we don`t have. We need to think about the type of energy in our matrix" insisted the Brazilian president.

The Energy Blog has a post on a cheaper method for making quantum dots.

Research by Michael Wong (left) and Rice University scientists at Rice's Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN), today revealed a breakthrough method for producing molecular specks of semiconductors called quantum dots, a discovery that could clear the way for better, cheaper solar energy panels.

Quantum dots interact with light in unique ways, to give off different-colored light or to create electrons and holes, due partly to their tiny size, partly to their shape and partly to the material they're made of. Rice scientists have developed a new chemical method for making four-legged cadmium selenide quantum dots, which previous research has shown to be particularly effective at converting sunlight into electrical energy.

Quantum dots are "megamolecules" of semiconducting materials that are smaller than living cells. Prior research by others has shown that four-legged quantum dots, which are called tetrapods, are many times more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than regular quantum dots. But, principal investigator Michael Wong, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering said the problem is that there is still no good way of producing tetrapods. Current methods lead to a lot of particles with uneven-length arms, crooked arms, and even missing arms. Even in the best recipe, 30 percent of the prepared particles are not tetrapods, he said.

CBEN's formula produces same-sized particles, in which more than 90 percent are tetrapods. The essence of the new recipe is to use cetyltrimethylammonium bromide instead of the standard alkylphosphonic acid compounds. Cetyltrimethylammonium bromide happens to be safer – it's used in some shampoos, for example – and it's much cheaper than alkylphosphonic acids. For producers looking to eventually ramp up tetrapod production, this means cheaper raw materials and less purification steps, Wong said.

Energy Bulletin has returned from holiday and are apparently about to take over The Wall Street Journal (unless Rupert gets there first) or some other media organisation. One of their latest posts is from Sharyn Astyk on "Food preservation and democracy".

Preserving food is every day work - it begins now, with the first rhubarb that will be dried or canned or made into sauce (and a reminder that I still have a bit left of last year's to eat). Next come the strawberries (I don't bother to preserve asparagus - doesn't taste as good as fresh), and nettles (very nutritious dried in tea), and then the cycle begins in earnest. It really doesn't take much time, once you get into a routine, and is well worth it. There are always some busy days in the summer, but it isn't too hard to put berries in the dehydrator after work or mix up pickle brine while making dinner.

Even if you don't grow your own, preserving what is seasonal and fresh can provide you with a great deal of economic and food security - if you go to the farmer's market at the end of the day, you may be able to get bushels of produce for almost nothing. Then comes the work of dehydration, or canning, or pickling. But the work is worth it - both because it enables you to eat a local diet and frees you from dangers in the food supply, but also because it means you don't depend on corporations or others to provision you.

And that last point may be the most important. Food preservation, and food production are keys to democracy. We accept that a politician who is dependent on the money special interests provides cannot be wholly independent in their thought, and know that no matter how much personal integrity they may have, their intentions are fundamentally corrupted by being beholden to others.

Well the same is equally true of individuals - as long as we depend on large corporations to meet our basic needs, we'll never be able to judge them fairly or recreate our society. That is, we cannot simultaneously call for an end to multinational monoliths and also pay them to feed us. As long as we admit we are dependent on corporations, any attempt at reform or culture change will fail, because we ourselves are corrupted by that dependence. We cannot deplore McDonalds, and then complain because poor people cannot buy their food from the equally troubling industrial organic producers who sell through whole foods. We need to recognize that our food dependence affects not just what we eat, but the fundamentals of our democracy and our political power.

We should not owe our lives to entities we deplore. And the only possible escape from that bind is to declare food independence - to meet as many of our basic needs as possible ourselves, and through small, sustainable farms with which we have real and direct relationships. And that means not just growing food, but ensuring a stable food supply, reasonable reserves and a dinner that depends on no one.

The recent freeway explosion in San Francisco didn't have the negative impact people imagined, with the city apparently adapting well and public transport usage soaring.

The nightmare commute scenario that many feared after Sunday's East Bay freeway inferno still had not materialized by Wednesday, with many motorists opting to take public transit rather than drive. Traffic congestion was down Monday and Tuesday. The amount of time drivers were stuck in traffic moving slower than 60 mph was down 8 percent around the entire Bay Area, according to Caltrans data. Congestion on Oakland freeways, meanwhile, was down by more than 50 percent, the data showed. ...

BART ridership, meanwhile, spiked dramatically, hitting an all-time record on Tuesday. The number of BART commuters was up 10.4 percent Tuesday and 5.2 percent Wednesday morning; no figure was available for Monday, when fares were waived.

The latest installement of "Peak Oil Passnotes" from Resource Investor takes a look at "Empires that Never Die".

Quite rightly human beings do not generally like being ruled over by people from other countries. We could run through a whole host of examples from Vietnam to Ireland to Hungary, Ukraine and Estonia. People also do not like being under the influence of other country’s power. They do not like being dominated by bigger neighbours or greater economic clout. Even if it means being poorer or making their own mistakes.

America is certainly one of those places. President Bush has railed against what he sees as “foreign dependence,” mainly in the energy realm. He has tried to paint a picture of a United States that is manipulated by other countries, which he does partly for duplicitous reasons, but he recognises that this is a tactic that works. Make American people feel as if they are being threatened from outside, basically the opposite of what is truly happening.

The U.S. business and political community - in reality the same set of people as they generally tend to be in all countries - has rallied around the idea. Like Venezuela, Nigeria, Bolivia, the U.K., Spain, Norway and others, they have practised resource nationalism. As obvious examples the company Dubai Ports was forbidden from purchasing facilities in the U.S., this when Dubai is one of the most benign and westernised patches of the middle east you can find.

When the Chinese National Oil Company (CNOOC) outbid an American company Chevron, in an attempt to purchase the mainly Asian focussed Unocal the U.S. political elite wasted no time in branding this a threat to national security. As if somehow China might invade the U.S. via a network of oil storage depots. After all we know the story of Troy do we not?

Then there is BP. The company that blew up part of the Texas City refinery in south Houston in March 2005. It killed 15 workers and injured 180 others. So far one person has left the company, no court cases have implicated anyone and the panels to look at the incident have been toothless - the Chemical Safety Board which cannot even hand out sanctions - and the Baker panel report which was set up by BP itself.

BP has also spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil around Alaska, too often failed to monitor safety standards and generally used the glorious dollar as justification. BP cut costs and as the newest document in the mix points out - the internal report commissioned by BP released this week by court order - appears to have thought more on commercial activity than of safety.

But BP has responded saying they have already studied all the recommendations of the various reports and have done all that they see fit. The dead cannot respond and the injured have already been paid off without litigation. BP’s refinery chief, by BP’s own internal report, knew little about refining, failed to monitor his managers at the plant, cared more about commercial activity than process safety and failed to learn anything about refining in the three years after he became refining head. This includes a fatal blast at the plant in 2004. But what can America do? Nothing. Only BP can act.

Perhaps this might give American power - not its blameless citizens - an insight into what it feels like in the Middle East. U.S. troops are in Oman, Kuwait, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen, Djibouti, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Khazakhstan, Afghanistan, Qatar and are floating on the Mediterranean Sea. They recently bombed a country with whom they are not at war, Somalia, ushering in violence unseen even in Somalia for 10 of years. This after relative peace, for once, had descended on the country. The people of the region, like those who abhor BP, can do nothing. Only American power can act.

At some point major corporations and political elites need to get to grips with an interdependent world, not a dependent world. Where the needs of the U.S. worker to return to his or her home, without being fried by a vapour blast, or the need of the Iraqi to be able to leave his or her house in Fallujah - are just as important as each other. When the production of crude oil is seen as a global luxury for the good of the majority, not a simple commodity to be brought to market and profited from. Because as the people of Texas City and Baghdad know, empires eventually fail.

Judging by the news flow on Digg and Reddit lately, the 2 most popular contenders for the US Presidency are Mike Gravel and Ron Paul (though I'm not sure getting approval from CounterPunch will help them). Judging by this comment at one article at ABC (caving in to viewer protests and including Ron Paul in their poll), there aren't too many Republicans who want to be associated with the reign of the miserable failure.

Was that the Republican Presidential debate or an epsiode of "I Love the 80s"? Yes, I know the debate was held in the Reagan Library - but hey, it was just the name of the venue - not the "theme" for the event. The candidates invoked Regan's name more times that a Baptist on Sunday saying the word "Jesus". Maybe it's the same thing to them. On the other hand, it did allow the candidates to avoid the name of another, more recent, Republican President. According to one count - the name "Bush" was spoken just once, the entire debate, by any of the Republican candidates.

The longer version of the story, from the Anachronistic Futurist.

Over the course of the debate, I became very much interested in Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) and the fact that he was the only candidate who not only deviated from the current GOP party line, but managed to stand out in his earnestness and sincerity when he spoke. Very far from John McCain's awkward rants about Osama Bin Laden, and Giuliani's duck and cover response to nearly every question. I was pleased to see that I was not alone in this and as such something of a grassroots internet movement sprung up supporting Congressman Paul. Following the debate, MSNBC launched a web poll in which Congressman Paul came out on top across the board. Very strange that there was very little reporting of this and that Giuliani's abortion comments blasted across the internet as the only thing that happened in the debate well that and the fact that Ronald Reagan's name was used 36 times in an hour and a half.

I was disheartened that the dark horse of the Republican Party was getting the shaft by the mainstream media, but I somewhat expected it given that the media has a raging news-on for Giuliani and McCain at the moment. Then this morning via reddit the following ABC News Story and Poll Came to my attention. When asking who won the debate...Congressman Ron Paul wasn't even listed. Nowhere to be seen. Apparently, I imagined him at the debates and he was a figment of my imagination after all. But wait...it gets worse. When I looked at the comments section for the article, there were 80 strong. Many of these comments were questioning why Congressman Paul was left out of the Poll. ABC's response? Delete every comment asking the question.


This then hit the website Digg (a community based website where news stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ.) Digg this past week showed how effective they could be as a community:

Last night, Digg.com underwent a user rebellion. Digg removed many posts -- and terminated the accounts of some of its users -- for posting a 16-digit hexadecimal number that is used to lock up HD-DVD movies. The number -- a "processing key" -- was discovered by Doom9 message-board poster muslix64, who was frustrated by his inability to play his lawfully purchased HD-DVD movies because of failure in the anti-copying system.

...Digg's users revolted at this stricture, and saw to it that every single item on the front page of Digg contained the forbidden number. Users accused Digg of taking money from the HD-DVD manufacturers (Digg ran an ad campaign from the company in the late summer of 2006), and complained about the site's deletion of user accounts.

Effectively the users of digg took over the site. In the end there were approximately 50,000 independant statements of anger over this issue on a website with hundreds of thousands of users. Thus showing how angry a group of free-speech promoting community users could be.

When the Ron Paul information was just beginning to hit digg, comments began flooding the ABC news boards. ABC's response? Delete. And fast. Then things ratcheted up as Digg users began posting the numbers of ABC's Media Division straight up through the Senior Vice President of News Media Relations Jeffrey Snyder....

It remains to be seen how all this will turn out, but I will posit that the fact that this even has happened is very telling. Even on MSNBC who hosted the debate and where Ron Paul is at the top of the 'who won' poll he remains absent in the window below- where you can click to visit each candidate's profile his name is missing.

So what does this mean to you? It should mean a lot. It means that the ones who hold the purse strings are the ones who dictate our American elections...or at least that's what it used to mean. The past few days have shown me a few things. We are in a new age of media and electioneering. Hell every current declared candidate has a myspace page and youtube is ad hoc allowing people to air any relevant data. Things candidates let slip no longer fade into history, they live on in the constant exposure of youtube and web 2.0 blogsites like this one. And whats most important, we as individuals now have the tools at our fingertips to be educated, active, and hold the mainstream media, and the candidates accountable.

Monty Python's Terry Jones says that John McCain has hit upon a solution to all the Republican party's woes: a nuclear war with Iran.

Campaigning in Oklahoma the other day, the Republican senator John McCain was asked what should be done about Iran. He responded by singing, "Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran", to the tune of the Beach Boys' Barbara Ann. (Join the hilarity and see for yourself on YouTube.) How can any thinking person disagree? I mean, any country with a president who doesn't shave properly and never wears a tie deserves what's coming to it - a lot of American bombs, with a few British ones thrown in to ensure we don't miss out on the ensuing upsurge in terrorism.

The problem is how to unload enough bombs on Iran before next year's US election to bring about enough flag-waving to get the Republican party re-elected. This is essential if we are to safeguard the revenues of companies such as Halliburton - particularly at a time when the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction is discovering what a shoddy job Halliburton has been doing. In projects at Nasiriya, Mosul and Hilla - declared successes by the US - inspectors have discovered buckled floors, crumbling concrete, failed generators and blocked sewage systems - due not to sabotage but largely to poor construction and lack of maintenance.

The trouble is that the re-election of the GOP is becoming more problematic as opinion turns against George Bush's little invasion of Iraq. Even Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah recently condemned the US action as "an illegal foreign occupation"; his nephew, Prince Bandar, hasn't been returning calls for weeks.

More worrying is the plummeting popularity of the party, as White House corruption becomes ever more difficult to disguise. The LA Times reports that what Representative Thomas M Davis III called a "poisonous" environment has begun to dent fundraising - an unheard-of problem for the Republicans.

So the only solution is to bomb Iran, as Senator McCain so wisely and amusingly suggests. The real issue is whether to use regular weapons or do the job properly and go nuclear.

Nuclear bombs have the advantage of being much bigger, and they will also pollute vast swathes of Iran and make much of the country uninhabitable for years. With a bit of luck some of the fallout will sweep into Iraq and finish off the job the US and UK have begun without incurring more costs.

But the biggest advantage of nuclear weapons is that the repercussions would be so enormous, the upsurge in terrorism so overwhelming, that the world would be totally changed. A year before 9/11, Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby signed a statement for the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative thinktank. They rather hoped for "some catastrophic and catalysing event like a new Pearl Harbor" to kickstart their dream of a world run by US military might. A nuclear war would do the trick in spades. The Republican party could expect to stay in power for the next 50 or even 100 years.

Of course, a large proportion of the human race could be wiped out in the process, but that shouldn't be a problem as long as there are anti-radiation suits for White House and Pentagon staff. Such a shake-up would give the US a golden opportunity to corner what's left of the world's oil reserves.

In 1955 Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell said the world was faced by a "stark and dreadful and inescapable" choice: "Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?" Senator McCain wasn't bothered by such questions; the human race may be standing on a precipice, but the Republicans have a chance of permanent re-election.

With Tony Blair about to disappear to an ignominious retirement, the BBC is quoting retired British General Michael Rose saying that Iraqi insurgents are "right to try to force US troops out of the country". Lucky he didn't say it here or he'd be dragged off for sedition...

Gen Sir Michael Rose also told the BBC's Newsnight programme that the US and the UK must "admit defeat" and stop fighting "a hopeless war" in Iraq. Iraqi insurgents would not give in, he said. "I don't excuse them for some of the terrible things they do, but I do understand why they are resisting." ...

Sir Michael has written a book drawing similarities between the tactics of insurgents and George Washington's men in America's War of Independence. He told Newsnight: "As Lord Chatham said, when he was speaking on the British presence in North America, he said 'if I was an American, as I am an Englishman, as long as one Englishman remained on American native soil, I would never, never, never lay down my arms'. "The Iraqi insurgents feel exactly the same way."

He said it was time to bring troops home. "It is the soldiers who have been telling me from the frontline that the war they have been fighting is a hopeless war, that they cannot possibly win it and the sooner we start talking politics and not military solutions, the sooner they will come home and their lives will be preserved."

This meant the UK government would have to admit defeat, he added. "The British admitted defeat in North America and the catastrophes that were predicted at the time never happened," the ex-Bosnia UN chief said. "The catastrophes that were predicted after Vietnam never happened. The same thing will occur after we leave Iraq."