I Made This Post Very Long, Because I Did Not Have The Time To Make It Shorter  

General Motors seems to have understood its predicament and is now getting with the program, looking to reduce oil consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. They even want the government to impose limits on these. It seems I'm going to end up out on some strange right wing fringe on this issue - demanding a hands off approach with carbon taxes being the only market signal applied while the corporate world and most of the left demand active government intervention. Still - at least opposition to doing something about global warming seems to be crumbling rapidly...

General Motors has become the first automaker to join a business coalition dedicated to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are tied to global warming. The nation's biggest automaker joined the United States Climate Action Partnership along with 13 other newcomers including Dow Chemical and PepsiCo Inc.

The partnership is an alliance of big business and environmental groups that in January told President George W Bush that mandatory emissions caps are needed to reduce the flow of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. ...

In testimony before Congress in March, Wagoner said the time had arrived for automakers to develop a "comprehensive and forward-looking national strategy" aimed at reducing oil consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.

Companies that already had joined the partnership include Royal Dutch Shell PLC's US arm, London-based oil company BP PLC and Houston-based ConocoPhillips. Other members include General Electric, Alcoa Inc, DuPont Co., Caterpillar Inc and Duke Energy Corp. In January, the CEOs of 10 members said in a letter to Bush that the cornerstone of climate policy should be an economy-wide emissions cap-and-trade system.

The CEOs have said mandatory reductions of heat-trapping emissions can be imposed without economic harm and would lead to economic opportunities if done across the economy and with provisions to mitigate costs. Many of the corporate members already have voluntarily moved to curb greenhouse emissions, but some corporate executives have noted they don't believe voluntary efforts will be enough.

GM sees vehicles powered by numerous energy sources as key way to reduce greenhouse emissions. "A central element as we see it is energy diversity, being able to offer consumers vehicles that can be powered by many different energy sources and advanced propulsion systems to help displace petroleum and reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Wagoner said in the statement.

The combination of drought and frost have reduced Australian wine production by a third.

LOW rainfall, low allocations of irrigation water and frost have slashed 2006-07 wine grape production by a third compared with the previous vintage. The Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics puts the recent harvest at 1.26 million tonnes, with premium red grapes down 40 per cent and premium whites down 28 per cent.

Production in warm climate areas is estimated to have fallen by 26 per cent. Cool climate production is down an estimated 45 per cent, with production declining most in South Australia, due largely to frost damage.

"The impact of frosts and lower water allocations in 2007 will also be felt in 2008. Even with average seasonal conditions, wine grape production is projected to only recover to 1.5 million tonnes, still 400,000 tonnes below record harvest," the bureau's executive director, Phillip Glyde, said.

If seasonal conditions remain drier than average this year and water allocations are reduced further, the bureau predicts production in 2007-08 could be around 930,000 tonnes.

The SMH has a report that concerns about water are posing another obstacle to the development of the Anvil Hill coal mine.

THE controversial proposed Anvil Hill coalmine would face serious problems if the chronically dry Upper Hunter region is subjected to zero water allocations - expected sometime in July. The water shortage will put pressure on the Minister for Planning, Frank Sartor, to reject the open-cut mine.

Centennial Coal, which is behind the planned mine near Muswellbrook, says the water shortage is hitting not only winegrowers and horse studs but also coalmining.

Even the state's main power supplier, Macquarie Generation, is making contingency plans to ensure it can retrieve the Hunter River water that it says is "essential to the security of its operation". Macquarie Generation has a higher guarantee of access to Hunter Water than other industries. But, in a reflection of the water shortage across the Hunter, the Liddell power station, which supplies 40 per cent of NSW power, is trying to increase its pumping capacity to extract water when it can from the river. ...

A Greenpeace energy campaigner, Ben Pearson, said Mr Sartor should not approve the mine. "The Anvil Hill coalmine would spell climate change disaster," he said. "Allowing it to go ahead shows this Government is not serious about climate change. Any positive steps to tackle climate change made by Iemma's Government will be negated by this mine."

While water allocations was an issue for the Minister for Water, Phil Koperberg, Mr Sartor's spokeswoman said: "The issue of access to water is certainly one of the matters considered by the Department of Planning in its assessment of these proposals". State Water has estimated that Glenbawn and Glennies Creek dams need 120,000 megalitres, or the amount of water that flowed through the Hunter River during the massive 1955 flood, to supply Upper Hunter irrigators and coalmines with their current water needs.

Mr Koperberg has increased the allocations for both general and high security water users in the Hunter, but warned that zero allocations remained a threat. "Unless combined storage levels [of Glennies and Glenbawn] recover to greater than 37 per cent prior to next July, there is a possibility of a zero allocation for general security users," he said.

I don't think the comment about Liddell generating 40% of NSW power is accurate - if my memory serves me correctly it is about the same size as the Bayswater and Eraring plants, and the Vales Point and Mt Piper plants combined (which between them account for most production) - so it may generate up to 20% of state production.

The problems posed by lack of water are real though, with the inland power stations frequently running on reduced capacity while the coastal stations take most of the load as the inland plants are running short of water for cooling. This could become problematic on hot days in summer if the trend continues as (1) everything will need to run flat out, and (2) limits are placed on coastal plants that use water from lakes for cooling, as there are environmental restrictions on releasing hot water back into the lakes once they go over a certain temperature (the same problem that has affected European nuclear plants in recent summers).

The Rodent is slowly caving on on global warming policy and now seems to be angling for an emissions trading scheme. Whats the bet it follows the European example and hands out far too many pollution credits ?

Prime Minister John Howard has given his clearest signal yet that he will back a trading scheme for greenhouse gas emissions. Under fire for the budget's perceived lack of major global warming initiatives, Mr Howard said he was awaiting a report on emissions trading at the end of this month.

"Everybody agrees that you have to have some price on carbon to effectively deal with the emissions problem," he told the Seven Network. "And the best way of delivering a price on carbon is through a market mechanism, namely an emissions trading system. That ... is the centrepiece of any long-term strategy and I'll be saying quite a bit about this whole issue a few weeks after we've received the report." ...

Other climate change measures in the budget included a $126 million national research centre and $197 million towards protecting forests globally.

Labor said the government's $741 million in climate change measures over five years were neither substantial nor new. "The climate change budget is less than 0.1 per cent of GDP and declining over the forecast period," opposition environment spokesman Peter Garrett said. "The budget will not stop Australia's greenhouse pollution from soaring by 27 per cent by 2020, and clearly shows the government lacks the political will to try and prevent dangerous climate change."

The Australian Greens expressed disappointment at the budget response to climate change. "Climate change is the biggest threat for the economy, for lifestyle, for the environment of this great nation of ours, and the government just left it out in the cold," Greens Leader Bob Brown said.

Greenpeace chief executive Steve Shallhorn said the government's failure to adequately address global warming would result in extreme economic pressures. "What the treasurer does not seem to understand is that what is bad for the environment, is bad for the economy," Mr Shallhorn told reporters. "Failing to prevent dangerous climate change will cost 20 per cent of the global economy in the future."

Errr - the best market based scheme is one which doesn't involve handing out large quotas to existing players, but instead offers a level playing field - a carbon tax.

Crikey wonders if the budget is carbon neutral. Some of the figures would indicate its time for local brewers to adopt green brewing practices...

With solar energy rebates, is the 2007-08 Budget green? A long way off, says the Australian Conservation Foundation. Just take a look at the stats we've put together.

Spending on climate change 2007-08

* Budget surplus: $10.6 billion
* Total climate change spending in 2007-08*: $500 million
* Total climate change spending as a % of the 2007-08 surplus: 5%
* New climate change funding for 2007-08: $148 million
* Draught beer concessional rate of excise for 2007-2008**: $170 million

The photovoltaic rebate program (solar panels) announced in Budget 2007-08:

* $150 million over five years (or an average of $30million per year)
* Consumption tax exemptions for privately produced beer 2007-2008, $40 million†
* After five years, the program will reduce emissions by 32,100 tonnes per annum.††
* This is 0.01% of our 1990 emissions
* Around 10,000 programs of this size are needed to avoid dangerous climate change†††
* The program will reach around 14,000 (or 0.2%) of Australia’s seven million households

Comparison of spending on polluting subsidies vs climate-change spending

For every dollar spent on climate change, we spend another 12 on dirty subsidies.

Energy Bulletin points to a Newsweek article lining up Venezuela in particular and national oil companies in general as the culprits for future post-peak oil shortages. Bart comments : "Two things are worrying about an analysis of this sort. First, there is no mention of geological limits to oil production. Second, a scapegoat is being prepared for coming oil shortages - in this case, national oil companies. Arguments such as this prepare the way for intervention in the affairs of oil producing countries "for the greater good."".

Last week's announcement from Caracas that the operations of Western energy companies including BP, Chevron, Conoco, Exxon, Total and Statoil were being reduced due to continuing nationalization of oil reserves, and that the Chinese state oil giant CNPC would play a much bigger future role in exploration and production, poses a serious threat to the global oil market.

About 80 percent of the world's oil is controlled by national oil companies. Some of these state-owned enterprises operate at world-class standards, notably Petrobras of Brazil, Petronas of Malaysia and Aramco of Saudi Arabia. In those places, production is increasing.

But most of the large state firms (including CNPC) have much lower operating standards than multinationals, such as the ones leaving Venezuela. This is due largely to political interference. The inefficient bureaucracies of state-run firms are too slow and incompetent to reinvest record industry profits in the modernization of their aging oilfields. Both national oil-company executives and politicians may be corrupted by the surge in cash from high prices.

The result is a number of countries with huge oil reserves and falling production, including Iran, Iraq and Mexico. Russia and Kuwait will also stagnate unless practices change. These countries represent more than one third of the world's oil reserves.

...The situation in Venezuela is symbolic of a growing trend. High prices have spurred unprecedented resource nationalism, and it is no surprise that the Chinese are capitalizing on this. Politicians detest the demands of transparency and accountability that often come with multinationals.

...The implications for the world economy are potentially catastrophic. The world is not running out of oil, but it will run out of production capacity if the national companies, the new rule makers in this business, don't invest.

UPI reports that uranium prices are soaring as US government stockpile sales slow - apparently partly because they want to be "good neighbours" with miners (BHP and RIO say thanks) and partly because of strategic concerns about energy security, with the idea of a uranium reserve being floated...

As the price of uranium surged another $7 over the past week, the U.S. Energy Department may scale back its inventory sale and open a strategic reserve. Uranium prices hit $120 per pound Monday, the weekly pricing date, on the heels of expected growing demand and a new futures trading product offered by the New York Mercantile Exchange and uranium analyst Ux Consulting. The price has jumped from $56 per pound last October. It was around $20 at the start of 2005.

Governments like the United States, intent on addressing proliferation, controlled uranium programs. The inventory was also increased after the Cold War when weapons-grade uranium from the former Soviet Union was blended down to energy stock. The United States still sells from its inventory, which competes against suppliers. When the price was low, there was little incentive to invest in exploring, mining and producing uranium.

Ed Rutkowski of the U.S. Energy Department's Nuclear Fuel Supply Security group told StockInterview.com this year's sale will likely be a small amount. "We don't plan to dump uranium," he said. "We have a lot of inventory, but uranium miners are worried that DOE would affect the market. We want to be good neighbors with them."

With an enhanced demand for uranium to fuel a nuclear-power boom worldwide, supplies are quickly dwindling. While that is incentive to build the uranium industry, it worries the Energy Department and U.S. nuclear plants, which need a constant and affordable supply. Like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which stockpiles oil in case of emergency, the department is looking into a uranium reserve.

The WSJ's energy roundup reports that Citigroup's greenish plans haven't been entirely enthusiastically received, while reconstruction of oil infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico continues in the hope of weathering future hurricanes better than the last round.

Environmentalists gave a lukewarm response to Citigroup Inc.’s plan to spend $50 billion on climate-change issues over the next 10 years, saying the financial-services institution should do more to curb its involvement with businesses that contribute to global warming.

Above the waves, oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico has almost returned to normal, nearly two years after the devastating 2005 hurricane season. But deep below the surface, teams of divers are still working around the clock to steel aging infrastructure against the next storm.

The WSJ also ponders the "Pros and Cons of Biofuels", along with the rising cost of petrol.

The United Nations warned that biofuels such as ethanol pose serious environmental problems and could raise global food prices, potentially offsetting any of their benefits. President Bush and other political leaders in the U.S. and Europe have touted biofuels — made from corn, palm oil, switch grass or other plant products — as a way to reduce reliance on expensive foreign oil and cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

But as Energy Roundup has pointed out, critics on the right and left of the political spectrum argue it is unethical to use food to produce biofuels, while environmentalists warn that biofuel production can create still more greenhouse gases and say burning biofuels can cause other pollution problems.

In its report, the U.N. warned that “rapid growth in liquid biofuel production will make substantial demands on the world’s land and water resources at a time when demand for both food and forest products is also rising rapidly. Use of large-scale monocropping could lead to significant biodiversity loss, soil erosion and nutrient leaching,” it added.

Update: And now BusinessWeek says Wall Street is getting skeptical about the ethanol boom.

The New York Times reports that some owners of The WSJ are vowing not to sell to Rupert because the business world needs accurate information. This reminds me of an old article I read by someone from the far left or the tinfoil world about quality business papers being one of the best places to get real foreign news - as you certainly won't get it from mass market press like the stuff pumped about by Mr Murdoch.

TWO members of the Ottaway family, a minority partner in Dow Jones & Co, released scathing statements on Sunday saying that a takeover by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp would ruin Dow Jones and its crown jewel, The Wall Street Journal. ...

The Ottaways' statements left no such ambiguity, questioning the journalism and the ethics of Mr Murdoch and of News Corp properties like Fox News Channel and The New York Post, known for their right-wing political bent and racy tone.

James H Ottaway jnr, a trustee for most of the family shares and formerly a long-time Dow Jones executive and board member, said: "Dow Jones has no good reason to be sold to anyone." And the reputation of the Journal and Dow Jones for serious, accurate and objective work, he said, "would be damaged if Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp take over".

"He has for a long time expressed his personal, political and business biases through his newspapers and television channels," Mr Ottaway said. The Post "regularly runs biased news stories and headlines supporting his friends, political candidates and public policies, and attacks people he personally opposes", while at Fox News, "one man's political opinions have become the editorial and news policy".

He accused Mr Murdoch of caving in to political pressure to advance his business interests, contrasting the actions of a News Corp property, Star TV, in bowing to Chinese Government censorship, with the Journal's editorial page censure of Chinese human rights abuses. "I doubt its freedom to criticise the Chinese Government would continue under Murdoch ownership," he said. The right answer to News Corp's bid, Mr Ottaway added, is that "Dow Jones is not for sale, at any price, to Rupert Murdoch". ...

Mr Murdoch wants the Journal in part to bolster the new cable business channel he intends to start this year, in competition with CNBC. He said in an interview early this year with the Journal that CNBC was too eager to report on scandals and his channel would take a more positive view of business.

That approach was disturbing, said James W Ottaway, a son of James H Ottaway jnr, who released a statement of his own. "As an investor, I would be very concerned to live in an era of making investment decisions based on the Murdoch-filtered business information," he said.

Stephen Mayne at Crikey has a few suggestions about how Rupert could tart himself up in order to appear less unattractive.

If Rupert Murdoch really thinks he’s an appropriate guardian of The Wall Street Journal, he needs to clean up his act. Firstly, he needs to make a public declaration that Dow Jones journalists would be free to comment about News Corp’s affairs rather than be regarded as PR adjuncts to the Sun King’s relentless empire building.

When I ran for the News Corp board in 2002, Rupert censored the entire platform, including this line:

Mayne believes the company needs an experienced journalist on its board to complement the strong business focus of the existing directors and to promote the concept of editorial independence from the company's commercial operations.

The deadline for nominating at the 2007 AGM -- Rupert’s first re-election contest in decades -- is next Tuesday and I’m very tempted to test whether Rupert has learnt to behave in light of his self-portrayal as a good boy. As part of Rupert’s charm offensive with Dow Jones shareholders, maybe he should try making the following pledges:

* Admit he was wrong to back the Iraq war.
* Announce the phasing out of page 3 girls in The Sun.
* Appoint an independent chairman of News Corp and a clear majority of independent directors.
* Unwind the notorious poison pill and introduce one class of shares to reduce his voting stake from 38% to 12%.

O'Reilly's "Radar" blog has a post on a new power management system for PC's called "Surveyor", pointing to a TreeHugger interview.

It's common to leave computers on all the time. People want their machine to always be there for them. The problem is PCs consume a lot of power -- whether or not they are actually being used. Verdiem has developed SURVEYOR, a product that aims to help PCs be smart about power, save businesses money, and still keep PCs responsive.

SURVEYOR is installed on a business' PCs and develops a profile of the computer user. In time it manages that PCs power settings. It will power down during off hours, power up before an expected morning arrival, and hibernate during work-hour break periods (like lunch).


In an informative interview on Treehugger the founder, Kevin Klustner talks about the product:

What does your product do? It's smart, right?

It's smart. SURVEYOR works by intelligently placing PCs into lower power settings when not in use. SURVEYOR’s Adaptive SmartProfile (TM) analyzes the behavior of the user. This information is used to control the power settings, ensuring that networked PCs are in right power state (on, hibernate, standby, etc.) at the right time. This maximizes energy savings without interfering with end-user productivity. SURVEYOR also features reporting capabilities to quantify savings.

And how much can I save? I assume energy is the big savings but there may be others.

Verdiem helps save energy, but as we all know, energy is money, and it is getting more expensive all the time, particularly in developing countries. A typical PC consumes 600 kWh of electricity a year. We actually provide a money back guarantee that you will save at least 10 percent off your computing energy bill, but we find that SURVEYOR consistently reduces consumption by about a third. That translates into a 3-6% annual reduction in total electricity consumption. Additionally, organizations also reduce associated CO2, greenhouse gas emissions. It averages about $20 per PC, per year.

What is the payback period and return on investment (ROI)?

Our pricing starts at $25 per PC – a one time licensing cost. The payback period averages about 15-18 months or less, depending on the cost of energy. However, we have agreements in place with several US utilities which provide various rebates to organizations that buy and install the software. Companies that take advantage of these rebates will see a significantly faster payback. For example, Southern California Edison offers a $15/PC rebate on SURVEYOR through their Express Efficiency program. Obviously, if you take advantage of this offer, the payback period drops significantly.

If you would like to hear more about the power consumption of PCs Avi Geiger did an excellent Ignite talk on the subject.

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on harnessing the power of the jetstream, which (like many renewable energy sources) has the potential to supply all our energy needs many times over (though this one is unlikely to be easily harnessed and probably would have some very unpleasant side effects if too much energy was drained from it).

Scientists are eyeing the jet stream, an energy source that rages night and day, 365 days a year, just a few miles above our heads. If they can tap into its fierce winds, the world's entire electrical needs could be met, they say. The trick is figuring out how to harness the energy and get it down to the ground cost-effectively and safely.

Dozens of researchers in California and around the world believe huge kite-like wind-power generators could be the solution. As bizarre as that might seem, respected experts say the idea is sound enough to justify further investigation.

The jet stream typically blows from west to east 6 to 9 miles over the northern hemisphere at speeds up to 310 mph. By lofting generators into the upper atmosphere, scientists theorize they could capture the power of the jet stream and transmit the electricity along cables back to Earth.

A wind machine, floated into such a monstrous force, would transmit electricity on aluminum or copper cables -- or through invisible microwave beams -- down to power grids, where it would be distributed to homes and businesses. Unlike ground-based wind generators, the high-altitude devices would be too high to be heard and barely visible against the blue sky.

"My calculations show that if we could just tap into 1 percent of the energy in high-altitude winds, it would be enough to power all civilization. The whole planet!" said atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University

Alex Steffen has a bit of a Viridian rant going at WordChanging about a Grist article called "Personal Planets and the Little Prince".

Now we're talking! Rampaging across my own little Earth like a super-sized Godzilla, that's something I can understand.

What's more, Tobis does a great job of taking us on a tour of our private planets:

Your little asteroid has a six-billionth of the earth's total surface area. It is a sphere with a radius of 82 meters, and with a surface area of about 85,000 square meters. That, depending on how you prefer to think about it, is almost exactly 21 acres, or 8.5 hectares. ...

Since the ocean covers fifteen acres, the land surface covers the remaining six acres. [T]he area under cultivation is ... a bit over a third of an acre. If you push matters to less valuable soil, you might be able to grow things on as much as an acre, but most of your 6 acres are desert or tundra. You even have some substantial ice sheets on your land. There is also the problem that you have built your house, your workshop, your garage, your driveway and many of your industrial outbuildings on the best farmland.

About a third of your land under cultivation is irrigated, much of it using depletable groundwater. Some of the groundwater is being contaminated by some of your industrial processes. To a lesser extent, your soils are also being contaminated, but a bigger problem is that as you till them for food they erode much faster than the natural rate of replenishment.

You also like to eat fish, but most of your ocean does not naturally support large fish. From the few areas that do, you have been eating the fish faster than they reproduce. This would astonish your great-grandparents, but of course they lived on a larger world. (Their per capita share was bigger with a smaller population.)

So, there we are, on our personal Earths, spinning around the planet, having a good time but making a bit of a mess of things. So far so good.

But then things start to go a little wrong. Tobis wisely informs us that our ancestors had larger personal Earths than we do because there were fewer of them on the planet -- but he neglects to mention another important reason why their personal planets were bigger than ours: they're the same planets, and they burned through a lot of real estate before we ever inherited them. You and I, for instance, don't have a sustainable share of time spent swimming with Chinese river dolphins, because there aren't any more. They're now extinct.

Indeed, if we do a little research (for instance, by reading WWF's Living Planet Report), we quickly realize that we have already dramatically disrupted over a third of the planet's ecosystems. Our personal planets are crumbling away, chunk after chunk flying out from under our feet and off into space.

And because our lives are so resource- and energy-intensive -- the average American would need his or her own personal planet and four other people's as well to feed his or her consumption -- we're breaking off bigger and bigger chunks every day. Every day that passes means our personal planets shrink a bit more.

What is to be done about this dire state of affairs? Pretty important question. And here, unfortunately, Tobis jumps a little wrong and goes hurtling off into space... because it is here that the metaphor of ecological footprints breaks down.

"There is no replacing your six acres, no frontier," Tobis tells us. "No amount of human ingenuity will make your world's surface bigger."

and

"Increasing wealth won't make your asteroid any bigger..." he says. "No matter how clever our advances, we will never have more than an acre to feed us."

And here the whole Matrix-world of the metaphor comes crashing down in shards of mental glass. For neither statement is true.

It is manifestly possible for us to increase the biological health and capacity of the planet -- not only to preserve what exists, but to add to it. Every time we practice ecological restoration -- even being as clumsy a set of practitioners of that art as we are -- we increase the vigor of a small patch of the Earth. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that we could not, eventually, get much wiser about restoring ecological function while we reduce our ecological impact, perhaps even eliminating our ecological footprints and beginning to leave instead ecological handprints where we have made the Earth healthier. We can rebuild the surface of our personal planets, replacing acres, perhaps even restoring acres lost before we were even born. It won't be easy, and we still need to fight like hell to preserve what we have, but all is not lost.

More importantly, Tobis' views on wealth and ingenuity fly far wide of the mark: while it is mostly true that we "will never have more than an acre to feed us" in the sense that there is a limited amount of tillable land in the world (though even there, I'd place bets that careful stewardship and agricultural innovation could restore much farmland now regarded as lost), it is false in that the yields that acre gives us can vary profoundly: clever advances can in fact offer us the same fruits of prosperity at a fraction of the footprint.

Many old-school environmentalists can't wrap their heads around this fact. Based on a combination of historical observation (industrial prosperity has so far increased ecological damage, so it must always -- a statement about as realistic as saying my niece has always, for the four years of her life, been less than three-and-a-half feet tall, therefore she will be always be a yardling) and a culturally inherited distaste for modernity (with, you know, its dark satanic mills and lack of bears), OSEs love to recite the PAT formula: that environmental impact is equal to the size of the population times its affluence times its technology.

But what we know now is that affluence is a complex concept, not (beyond the meeting of certain essential needs) easily bound to material consumption, because a great many of the things that make us prosperous are in fact intangible or offer ecologically negligible impact, including art, innovation and care.

What's more, through efficiency and redesign, a great many products and services can, in theory if not current practice, be offered at ecologically meaningless impacts. If I own a bright green car, say one that runs efficiently off electricity from wind turbines, is built of completely non-toxic components, is designed to be disassembled with its materials reused and recycled in a closed loop, and I travel 300 miles to visit grandma, I am doing so at a minute fraction of the footprint that Wally Waster has when he drives his Ford Earthcrusher SUV on a similar journey. Yes, for all practical purposes, I am just as prosperous.

Which is why the "T" part of the PAT equation is also dumb. Products which are more technologically advanced offer us far greater possibilities for efficiency and ecological sanity. Think, for instance, of the ways in which technology enables us to car share, or design smart green homes which most effectively use natural airflow and light.

If each of us has a personal planet, and on that planet sit miniature personal cars and homes, cities and factories, one of the most encouraging facts I know is that by sharing better ideas with one another and working together to innovate new solutions, we are actually capable of building prosperous lives which leave us living on what feel like much roomier asteroids.

Cool Tools has a post on a solar powered LED light - clean energy + energy efficiency in one hit...

I've used these solar LED lights for reading at night for over a year. There are three models and I have one of each -- the Heavy Duty Compact model, the Compact model and the Mini, which I attach with Velcro to my backpack and then to my bike helmet when I need it for night riding. On full brightness, the Mini lasts 12 hours (recharge time is advertised as 7 hours).The Heavy Duty charges completely in 10 hours and, at full brightness, gives 12+ hours of light, while the Compact charges completely in 6 hours and, at full brightness, gives 12+ hours of light.

I've never run the lights until battery drain so I can't speak to recharge from zero. I use them for reading at night so that is usually only an hour or two a night and they are always connected to the solar panels in my south facing window.

I took all three lights on vacation to Jamaica last December, and used each of them except for the Mini (no biking). After the trip, I gave two sets of friends the extra lights I'd bought. Both couples like these lights, too.

They also offer a variety of connectors, which work with all models of the lights, that allow you to charge your phone, camera, computer, etc.

The Times reports that James Lovelock has issued a relatively optimistic forecast for humanity, with up to 20% of us possibly surviving global warming instead of us being reduced to a few breeding pairs in the arctic. The Times also reports that global warming induced coral reef destruction may be due to a virus.

If you want to get some idea of what much of the Earth might look like in 50 years’ time then, says James Lovelock, get hold of a powerful telescope or log onto Nasa’s Mars website. That arid, empty, lifeless landscape is, he believes, how most of Earth’s equatorial lands will be looking by 2050. A few decades later and that same uninhabitable desert will have extended into Spain, Italy, Australia and much of the southern United States.

“We are on the edge of the greatest die-off humanity has ever seen,” said Lovelock. “We will be lucky if 20% of us survive what is coming. We should be scared stiff.”

Lovelock has delivered such warnings before, but this weekend they have a special resonance. Last week in Bangkok, Thailand, the world’s governments finalised this year’s third and final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) setting out how humanity might save itself from the worst effects of climate change.

In it was a message of hope, albeit a faint one. The report set out a complex mix of political, economic and technological solutions. If they all worked, said the report, they could achieve huge cuts in the 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released by humanity into the air each year, thus keeping global temperature rises below 3C.

At the same time in Cologne, Germany, 4,000 sharp-suited bankers, lawyers and financial traders at Carbon Expo 2007 were congratulating themselves on the booming new markets in carbon credits that will, they boasted, save the world as well as making them rich. ...

For Lovelock, however, such dreams are dangerous nonsense on a par with a drowning man clutching at straws. “It’s all ridiculous,” he sighed. “These new markets do some good in that they generate wealth and keep these people employed, but they and the IPCC are just raising false hopes. We have done too much damage to the world and now it is changing too fast for us to make much difference.”

Lovelock’s view is that the world has two stable states: the “icehouse”, when ice covers both poles, sometimes extending far into lower latitudes in the form of ice ages; and the “greenhouse”, when all the ice melts. Both have already happened many times in the Earth’s history.

“Human outpourings of greenhouse gases have flicked the switch that turns the world from its colder to its warm state – and it is probably too late to stop it,” he said. “The warming impact of the carbon we have already released is such that the Earth has taken over and our greenhouse gas emissions are being amplified by nature itself.”

Lovelock believes that the transformation is happening far too fast for humanity to tackle, especially in a world that remains committed to economic growth and whose 6.5 billion population is predicted to reach more than 9 billion by mid-century.

For evidence, he points to Siberia where the melting of the permafrost, already widely reported in scientific literature, will enable bacteria to decompose organic matter that has accumulated in the soil over tens of millions of years – potentially releasing billions more tons of CO2 “I have just come back from Norway where the temperatures are even further above normal than Britain’s. The climate is changing every year now. Everyone can see it – as in this very warm April. By mid-century the heatwave [in Europe] that killed 20,000 people in 2003 will be a cool summer by comparison.”

At first sight Lovelock’s predictions seem wildly at odds with the IPCC’s reports, but in many ways the only difference is in the vividness of the language. “The progressive acidification of oceans due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is expected to have negative impacts on marine shell-forming organisms (ie corals) and their dependent species,” said the IPCC report detailing the impacts of climate change – its careful language draining the drama from a warning that vast tracts of the ocean may turn so acidic that little life will be left in them.

Smart Mobs has a "carbon dictatorship" style story from the UK about heat cameras identifying energy wasters.

In the UK the Times Online reports "spy-in-the-sky cameras are being used to identify householders who are wasting the most energy and to shame them into turning the central heating down. Thermal images of homes have been taken by a light aircraft fitted with military spy technology to record the heat escaping from people’s houses. Maps identifying individual homes have now been placed on the internet to encourage occupiers to reduce their wastage and carbon emissions by fitting insulation and turning the thermostat down. Haringey Council, in London, has become the first authority in England to place house-by-house thermal maps on the web, after the example of Aberdeen in Scotland. Making the information available to the public is intended to raise awareness of how much energy is being used needlessly, putting up bills and contributing to global warming".

A Swiss built solar powered boat has apparently crossed the Atlantic.

A Swiss-built solar vessel arrived in New York on what the group behind the project said was the first sun-powered voyage across the Atlantic. Dubbed "sun21", the catamaran reached North Cove Marina after a journey of six months and some 13,000km from Chipiona, Spain, to the Caribbean island of Martinique and then along the US East Coast to New York, the Switzerland-based group transatlantic21 said in a statement.

According to the organisation, the 14 metre-boat produced 2,000 kilowatt hours of solar energy during its voyage thanks to a roof of photovoltaic panels mounted above the twin-hulled design. The solar energy was used to power the boat's electric motors and any surplus was stored in batteries, allowing it to travel at a constant speed of 56 knots (103.7km/h) day or night, the group's website said.

It said the boat was able to store electricity generated during the day in its batteries, which it then used to travel at night as well.

My recent post on the voyage of the Planktos had a comment from Peter Mc of the Beagle Project Blog. It seems that the 200th anniversary of Darwin's voyage on the Beagle is almost upon us, and the Beagle Project guys are building a replica of the ship to re-enact the voyage on. I'll quote 2 of their recent blog posts - first on Craig Venter's efforts to be a modern day Darwin.

Last month, a press conference was held in California to launch something called the Global Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Research and Analysis (CAMERA). CAMERA is a user-driven site dedicated to providing the scientific community with metagenomics data and analysis tools.

Um, right. Jargon alert! What on earth is "metagenomics"? It's a simple breakdown: "meta" = in the midst of, among, with, and "genome" = the totality of genetic material from a single individual. So, metagenomics is simply the study of the amalgam of genetic material contained in an environmental sample containing more than one individual organism. It is an especially powerful tool for documenting and monitoring the diversity of life in the most difficult of environments: the ocean.

Before going forward with "metagenomes", let's take a stroll down memory lane for a moment, back to a simpler time when individual "genomes" were all the rage. You might remember something called the Human Genome Project, and if you've got enviably deep memory banks you might remember that the project was in essence a race between a consortium of public institutions and a private company, Celera Genomics, headed by Craig Venter. Remember what I said above about a genome being from an individual organism? Well, the so-called "human genome" is actually Craig Venter's own personal genome. Creepy, at best. But we should be willing to forgive Craig Venter for this because he has spent the last several years applying his considerable powers of entrepreneurship to ocean biodiversity.

First, it was shotgun sequencing of the Sargasso sea, and now, in fact at this very moment, Venter's research vessel the Sorcerer II is circumnavigating the globe taking environmental samples along the way (sound familiar?). On the new Voyage of the Beagle (2009-11) we plan a similar marine environmental metagenomics project, with regular sampling and some overlap with Venter's Sorcerer II data set. In other words, we will see what Darwin couldn't. We'll see what is in the ocean beneath the Beagle even in the most murky and mysterious depths simply by using a pair of fancy DNA goggles.

All aboard, and we do mean all.

And second a post on a book called "Fossils, Finches and Fuegians".

Fossils, Finches and Fuegians by Richard Keynes. If you want an account of the context to the voyage, the ship and its crew, events aboard during the voyage, Darwin's shore expeditions and especially the science carried out by Charles Darwin, this is the book to get. Richard Keynes is a former Professor of Physiology at Cambridge University, so no slouch on the science front. He is also Charles Darwin's great grandson, and has waded through Darwin's primary sources on our behalf: the field notebooks and Beagle diaries which were the raw materials for The Voyage of the Beagle. Given the nature of the Beagle Project beast, my shelves bend under the strain of Darwin-related books, but Fossils, Finches and Fuegians is one of the most-reached for because it is authoritative and a good read. Sadly, you can't barrel down to your local bookshop and buy a copy because it's out of print, and it would a crying shame if 2009 were to come and go without a reprint of this excellent book. It would also be a shame if the British government were to let Darwin's bicentenary go by without ensuring that every secondary school had a copy of this book in its biology labs to lend to curious young minds.

I'll close with Bruce Sterling quoting David Strom on shrinking attention spans (which may be wasted if no one has made it this far into the post). I'll liked the closing quote from Blaise Pascal - I find that the less time I have to write these things the less able I am to cut down pieces to just the new or important information - and as a result the posts seem to be getting longer and longer...

I find that my attention span is getting shorter and shorter, and I have coined a description for this condition: hair-trigger multitasker. I start a task, and if it is taking too long to complete, I move on to something else. It means that I find it difficult to spend long periods of time working on particular projects. And it also offers a convenient excuse why it took me until today to write this column: I just couldn't find the time to complete it earlier in the week.

I am in good company: Even Rupert Murdoch says he rarely finishes the longer WSJ stories.

The hair-trigger part of this means we have become more impatient. What about slow-to-load Web sites? Outta here. Long-winded emails? Hit the delete key. Some of us have bought a second screen for our PCs just so we can have lots of windows open to keep us amused.

I find that the way I interact with my computer is also changing: I used to be able to read long Web pages and articles online. No longer. I watch shorter online videos too: five minutes is almost the outer edge for me. I guess this is one reason why Sony (and I would assume others will join them) are now repackaging five-minute episodes of Charlie's Angels and TJ Hooker. While some of you might say that there never was more than five minutes' worth of content in these episodes, it goes to show that online, life is short. Cut to the chase (literally for both programs mentioned), get in, get out.

I find that my own video viewing habits are going bi-modal: the short Web videos that you can find on You Tube et al. The longer feature-length films I still watch in my living room. Not much in-between. ...

Does this spell the end of deep content diving? I don't think so. But it does show that as we design new Web sites, we need to make more of our content more digestible. More componentized. Summaries up at the top of the page. Sentences shorter.

It is harder to write these nuggets too. It was Blaise Pascal who said: "I made this letter very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter."