Material Intensity  

Gar Lipow at Grist has a post in his "No Sweat Solutions" series on improving the efficiency of our materials usage. There are some interesting thoughts floating around in the comments too. Newer posts in the series include a partial overview of green building techniques and a look at super adobe.

Previously I pointed out that efficiency, doing more with less, is a key to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. (A lot of people on Gristmill are fans of conservation, doing less with less. I have nothing against this, so long as it is a voluntary choice, but I won't be spending a lot of time on it.)

Normally, when people think of efficiency they think of direct savings -- insulating homes, electric cars, and so on. That is: make the same sort of goods we make now, but more cleverly, so they require fewer inputs to operate. And that is an extremely important kind of efficiency.

But Amory Lovins and Wolfgang Feist pointed out long ago that there is another kind of efficiency. Instead of looking at how to provide the same goods, look at what those goods do for us, and see if there is another way to provide the same service. For example, it remains essential to start making steel, cement, and mill timber more efficiently.

But in building our homes, what we call today green building can also use less of those resources. A home that reduces high intensity inputs saves industrial energy before we change one cement plant or timber mill; and by reducing virgin lumber demand, it makes sustainable forest management easier as well.

But the principles that many of us are familiar with in green building can apply to just about every good and service in our society. Note that what Lovins and Feist call "Reducing Material Intensity" is not even primarily about energy. It is about reducing total environmental footprint -- water use, land disturbed, mineral and organic resources consumed, air polluted. But, as we shall see, reducing material intensity reduces energy use and greenhouse emissions as a side effect. As we work through examples, we will find (on average) that cutting material intensity by 90 percent reduces energy use by about 80 percent; a 75 percent material intensity reduction on average cuts energy use in half.

Grist also has an article on the Energy Efficiency Promotion Act being considered in the US Congress.

What's not to love about energy efficiency? It's the paradigmatic win-win scenario -- save money, protect the climate and broader environment, and reduce reliance on unsavory sources of energy, all in one fell swoop.

As efficiency guru Amory Lovins puts it, "Using energy more efficiently offers an economic bonanza -- not because of the benefits of stopping global warming, but because saving fossil fuel is a lot cheaper than buying it."

But until recently, energy efficiency has had about as much sex appeal as, well, Amory Lovins. While Congress has tacked a smattering of appliance efficiency standards onto omnibus energy bills over the years, it has passed no legislation that would ramp up efficiency across a wide swath of the U.S. economy.

That's why efficiency advocates are cheering the Energy Efficiency Promotion Act, introduced last week in the Senate by national-security strongman Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) and bipartisan power duo Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), the Senate Energy Committee's chair and ranking member, respectively. The bill, which will get its first hearing today, sets a goal of cutting gasoline use in the U.S. 20 percent over the next decade and 45 percent by 2030; compare that to the 17 percent growth in gasoline consumption the U.S. has seen in the last decade, according to the Energy Information Administration. The legislation would also boost efficiency in everything from vehicles and consumer appliances to buildings and industrial equipment. ...

The bill -- an expanded version of one that Bingaman introduced in the last Congress -- would establish or improve efficiency standards for such mundane but energy-slurping items as light fixtures, residential boilers, dehumidifiers, washing machines, dishwashers, and electric motors used in manufacturing. Suppress that yawn! These appliance standards alone would save enough electricity to power 4.8 million typical U.S. households for a year, enough natural gas to heat about 250,000 households a year, 560 million gallons of water per day, and more than $12 billion annually in consumer costs.

The bill would also serve up government loan guarantees to automakers that manufacture fuel-efficient vehicles, help insulate the homes of low-income families, and require the federal government to increase its renewable-energy use by 10 percent of total consumption by 2010.

So what wouldn't it do? Alas, quite a bit, says Bill Prindle, acting executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which also helped to shape parts of the bill. "There is plenty to applaud in this legislation, but it doesn't grapple with the two biggest issues -- saving oil and setting industry-wide savings targets for electricity," he said. ...

New York became the latest state to wholeheartedly embrace efficiency last week when Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) unveiled an aggressive energy plan that aims to cut electricity use in the state 15 percent by 2015 while ramping up clean-energy development. Said Spitzer, "It costs one-third as much to save a given amount of energy through efficiency as it does to produce the same amount of energy by building a new power plant. Energy efficiency makes economic sense." ...

Since Dubyah himself proposed a 20 percent reduction in gasoline use over the next decade in his last State of the Union address, maybe he would even sign it. To quote Lovins again [PDF], "preventable energy waste costs Americans hundreds of billions of dollars and the global economy more than $1 trillion a year, destabilizing the climate while producing no value." That should make it an enemy Bush, Congress, and the whole country could agree to fight.

Tyler at Clean Break has a post on a new type of wood that sounds like a classic cradle-to-cradle material.

I have a [Toronto Star] column today that looks at a small B.C.-based company called JER Envirotech, which makes a wood-plastic composite that can be used to replace wood/plywood in building construction and a slew of other applications, from the making of toys and furniture to parts for vehicles. The attraction? The material resists moisture, bugs, rot, mould, and warping. It can be recycled and made into other products. It uses wood waste, not trees, and uses far less than your typical panel board or plywood. It costs more, but like compact fluorescent bulbs the return on investment comes with its longevity. Anyway, worth a look... I know there are other companies playing in this field but JER appears to have a unique approach.

Tyler also notes that North America's largest solar PV plant is to be built in Ontario (I must admit I never thought you'd see large scale PV plants that far north). He also points to a Merrill Lynch report on the massive growth of the solar sector.

I have an article in today's Toronto Star about a California startup called OptiSolar that has just received approval from the Ontario government to build a sprawling 40-megawatt solar farm in Sarnia. Hundreds of thousands of OptiSolar's proprietary thin-film panels will be used to cover nearly 900 acres of farm and industrial lands -- the equivalent of about 680 football fields (NFL football fields). The project will be build in four 10-megawatt phases and is expected to start in 2008 and finish in 2010. OptiSolar Farms Canada Inc., a subsidiary of the California company, has struck a 20-year contract with the Ontario Power Authority to sell the power from the farm into the provincial grid at 42-cents per kilowatt hour, the established rate for solar power under the province's new standard offer program. OptiSolar said it chose Ontario for this enormous project because of the standard offer program, which is unique to North America. The Sarnia farm, when complete, is expected to be the largest PV farm in North America and one of the largest in the world, championing other projects underway in Germany and Spain.

Perhaps most interesting is that the power authority, in its 20-year power system forecast, only counted on 40 megawatts of solar power in total being added to the Ontario grid between now and 2025. We've already surpassed that goal after just a few months of the standard offer program being introduced, assuming of course these projects actually get built. Obviously, and I've pointed this out in previous columns and posts, the power authority low-balled the potential of solar power in Ontario.

One last post from Clean Break, this one on a spat between Vinod Khosla and Herman Scheer. While I think the long term target architecture for our energy infrastructure should be based around fully distributed and decentralised generation and dsitribution, I tend to agree with Khosla - replacing coal and nuclear in the medium term will require plenty of large wind, thermal solar, geothermal and tidal power plants - and these will still be owned and run by utility companies. And this will still be a far better outcome than the current status quo.

If you read Vinod Khosla's critique of German environmentalist Herman Scheer, then you'll want to read this retort from the man himself. Scheer decided to respond to Khosla by writing a rebuttal for CNET's News.com. In a nutshull, he calls Khosla's viewpoint naive, contradictory and an example of established forces trying to perpetuate the centralized power infrastructure that has served and made profitable a handful of the world's biggest power suppliers. Scheer makes some solid points here -- it will be interesting to see how -- and if -- Khosla replies.

Before you read Scheer's reply, I do want you do read the following comment that Khosla posted on this blog: "I love PV and am invested in PV but don't believe it can replace 50-100 per cent of coal... we need something that can match the scale and 'utility requirements' of coal at the price of coal-based electricity."

Until cheaper, reliable and large-scale storage is available, this won't happen with solar PV. I'm surprised that Scheer didn't address this point in his reply. I think the debate between these two is not solar thermal power versus solar PV, but rather solar PV as a majority of the world's power versus solar PV as a restricted minority player.

From the comments to that post, some thoughts on intermittency and the baseload fallacy - all power sources are intermittent - they just have different availability windows and periods.

I believe that there is no real reason to believe solar and wind can't be "baseload". If you don't mind, I'll post a relatively long explanation.

Wind (and solar) isn't the only generation source that has variance. In fact, all sources do. Most of it (maintenance, refueling, etc) can be scheduled, but not all. Nuclear can be tripped very suddenly - it doesn't happen all that often, but when it does the plant is offline for more than one day. The size of nuclear plants, and the duration of outages amplifies the impact of the variance, such that a small market like Ireland, for instance, has ruled out nuclear.

The key is managing the variance, and reducing it to tolerable levels. As discussed, this can be done in many ways, and in much the same way as is done to match nuclear's flat output with the variation in demand.

You need:

Geographical diversity, including expanded long-distance transmission, perhaps with HVDC that has roughly 5% loss per 1000 miles). Additional LDT would make the grid more robust, and reduce the variation of wind by increasing geographic diversity and reducing the ratio of variance to mean production;

Demand management, similar to the kind of daytime demand charges that moved so much industrial/commercial consumption to the night time, thus creating "baseload".

"Baseload" itself is a bit of a misconception. Humans live in the light, and in effect have evolved to use solar energy. "Natural" night time energy use is very low. A large % of what we call "baseload" is Industrial/Commercial demand which has been shifted from daytime to night time by very simple Demand Side Management (DSM): charging higher rates, or "demand charges" for peak daytime usage.

DSM could be easily expanded. The first, obvious place to start is eliminating flat pricing for residential. Other steps: home electricity monitoring -- allowing homeowners, business and factory owners to track their electricity use in real time; dynamic pricing, to reflect variable costs; smart, grid-networked appliances that can modulate their electricity use based on current power availability and pricing; and utility control of those appliances.

Solar insolation is pretty nicely correlated with demand. It would require very little DSM to shift the A/C demand curve to match solar insolation.

"Negawatts" in the form of reduced demand as a result of DSM can be very cheap.The most obvious use is with plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles (PHEV's), such as the Chevy Volt series hybrid that could be charged at night and during peak production periods. PHEV storage will be cost-justified by the vehicle owner, and reduced rates for scheduled charging will be a bonus. As PHEV's expand they will provide an enormous synergy with variable sources like wind and solar;

Storage can be very cheap, and storage that is here now or will be very soon includes pumped storage and PHEV's. The Ludington, MI pumped storage facility has time-shifted nuclear production for 30 years(Pumped storage is very cheap at about .6 cents per kwhr., which is no more than a 10% cost premium for 100% storage) , and PHEV’s are certainly on their way. PHEV’s won’t arrive for several years. On the other hand, neither wind nor solar will reach a level that needs storage until then;

Backup generation capacity, such as inexpensive gas turbines for the rare extended outage, powered by gasified biomass (which is very efficient for power generation, even though very, very inefficient for liquid fuels). Remember, capacity is very cheap, if you don't have to use it often. The cost of diesel and natural gas generators is almost entirely in the fuel.

This is one big reason pumped storage hasn't been more widely used: until very recently natural gas peak capacity has been dirt cheap, and so relatively large-scale, long-term projects couldn't be justified. They often had to be paired with other large projects, like nuclear plants.

So, the upshot of the above is that wind doesn't have to be 100% reliable, just reliable enough.

As a system this would be significantly cheaper than coal, once you added in coal's external costs. Whether it would be cheaper than nuclear depends on how you value nuclear's external costs, especially the Price-Anderson liability cap, weapons proliferation risk, and opportunity costs for foregone investment in renewables.

What some have described as irrational NIMBYism and unreasonable regulatory delay is really the political process, lurching about in an effort to put a value on those external costs.

TreeHugger has a post on a wind turbine that can power 4000 houses from Enercon.

Enercon, Germany's largest wind turbine manufacturer, now makes the most powerful wind turbine in the world, the E112. This giant turbine was upgraded, so that instead of generating 4.5 megawatts, it now produces 6 megawatts, that's enough to supply power to 4000 homes in Germany. It's named the E112 because it has a rotor diameter of 112 meters (about 367 feet). It also has an innovative gearless drive system, so it doesn't require any oil to operate. The tips of the turbine's blades are tilted to reduce noise emissions.

One of these turbines is being used to supply power in Dardesheim. This remarkable town makes use of renewable power almost exclusively (read more about the town here).

Manufacturers have been increasing the size turbines over the past few decades, as the diagram below shows. To see the largest wind turbines (in terms of rotor diameter) see this previous post on the RePower turbines.

CNet has an article on bioplastics and plastic microbes.

American Excelsior has already developed a line of plastic stakes to hold down its erosion prevention blankets. The plastic stakes are better than metal stakes because they will not rust in seawater and don't require crews to retrieve them at the end of their use, said Jerry Bohannon, director of earth science at American Excelsior. The company will also upgrade its software so that engineers can design systems around biodegradable products, a move that will allow "engineers to create products with the environment in mind," Bohannon said.

Mirel will initially be made from corn starch, but other sources of sugar can be used as well. Meanwhile, Metabolix is already at work on a second generation of plastics grown within plants. The company is developing a method by which the microbes that make up its biodegradeable plastic can be produced within switchgrass, Barber said. The microbes, which are innocuous to the switchgrass they're growing in, can be extracted and made into plastic pellets. Residual biomass also could be converted into biofuels. "It'll be huge," he said, adding that the process will be available in about five years.

Mirel plastic stems from genetic research started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nearly 20 years ago. The plastic is made by combining genes of several naturally occurring substances and making them function together, said Oliver Peoples, chief scientific officer and co-founder of Metabolix. Genetic engineering is well understood but hasn't been widely applied to plastics, he said. Mirel uses many of the same techniques that pharmaceutical companies do. "We are interested in using a number of genes to assemble teams of genes and make them work in living cells," Peoples said.

Crikey notes that all the publicity about Kevin Rudd's new "uranium mines for all" federal Labor policy ignores one crucial fact - the state governments who currently actually implement restrictions on new mines.

The logical absurdity of defending mining at three places but banning it at any others is no longer the problem of the Federal Labor Leader. From now on it is state Labor governments alone which must make the decision about allowing new uranium mines.

The Labor Premiers and Chief Ministers will not be thanking their federal colleague for this transfer of powers. From now on it's the State governments which will have to deal with what is still a very contentious subject within the Labor Party. The vote in Sydney at the national conference to abolish export controls showed that. The majority in favour of Mr Rudd’s position of abolishing export restrictions was narrow. If his prestige had not so clearly been at stake, in all likelihood the vote would have gone the other way. What allowed opponents of uranium expansion among the delegates to live with their consciences by finding a proxy prepared to vote the other way was the knowledge that they in fact would live to fight another day. Instead of the federal conference being the important forum for deciding what happens to uranium mining it will now be a matter for the eight state and territory Labor Conferences to determine.

The stock market certainly should not be ramping up the prices of would-be-uranium-miners just yet. State ALP conferences are far more democratic affairs than the state managed charade held in Sydney. In all likelihood the vote in every state would be to order state and territory Labor governments not to allow new mines.

The state (Labor) governments have also cheekily commissioned an Australian version of the Stern report to look at the cost of letting global warming rip versus mitigating it. It will be interesting to see how the Rodent tries to squirm away from the inevitable outcome that doing something is a lot more cost effective than doing nothing.

AUSTRALIA should not try to pick winners such as nuclear energy to address climate change, a prominent economist appointed by Labor to produce Australia's version of Britain's Stern review has warned.

Ross Garnaut, an economics professor at the Australian National University and ambassador to China when Kevin Rudd, now Leader of the Opposition, was a diplomat there in the late 1980s, will spend the next 18 months calculating the economic cost to Australia of action, versus inaction, to combat climate change. Professor Garnaut, whose appointment yesterday was praised by economists on the basis of his "groundbreaking" work on the development of China, said the economic case for nuclear energy had not been established. "I don't think there is a basis for picking nuclear energy at the moment," he said. "The Ziggy Switkowski report shows that you would need a very high carbon tax to make nuclear economic."

The push by the Prime Minister, John Howard, for nuclear energy was also attacked yesterday from within state Liberal ranks, echoing the views of Victoria's Opposition Leader, Ted Baillieu, who said he was committed to clean coal technology rather than Mr Howard's plans for nuclear power. A spokesman for the NSW Opposition Leader, Barry O'Farrell, said: "We took into the last election a policy that we would not support the construction of a nuclear power plant in NSW". In Western Australia, a spokesman for the Liberal leader, Paul Omodei, said: "We don't see the need for nuclear power in WA for a range of reasons but we do support the expansion of uranium mining."

Professor Garnaut acknowledged the politicised context of his appointment but vowed to deliver a "highly professional" report. "These matters are contentious matters in Australian politics at the moment, but the fact that something has become a matter for political debate can't be a reason for professional analysts to vacate the field."

He said Australian agriculture was particularly at risk if nothing was done to address rising temperatures. "Of all the developed countries … we start with climatic conditions towards the upper end of the range at which you can have economic agriculture," he said. Westpac's chief economist, Bill Evans, described Professor Garnaut as "one of the most highly regarded economists in Australia".

Vanity Fair has an article on Prince Charles and his interests in sustainability and other greenery.

After years of being called an eccentric who talked to his plants, Prince Charles is now an environmental hero. But his latest, most ambitious proposal—to label products with their carbon-emissions "cost"—makes him a target too.

Charles is a prince whose time has come.

Not to take the throne—may his mother live long and provide Helen Mirren with material for many sequels—but to be granted an honor as impressive in its own way. More than a quarter-century has passed since the Prince of Wales began calling for wiser stewardship of the environment and doing what he could to set an example. The British press called him loony and eccentric: the prince who talked to plants. He doesn't look loony now. Charles's honor is the acknowledgment, both at home and abroad, that he had it right from the start. Passionate about organic farming and sustainable development, curious about ways to improve the "built environment" with holistic communities designed from scratch, unafraid to condemn trends he abhors—genetically modified foods, for one, wind farms for another—he's what his American counterpart, Al Gore, calls a "thought leader." His latest notion is his boldest yet.

To launch it, one day last December, Charles gathered some 200 of his influential countrymen at London's St. James's Palace. Lord John Browne, of British Petroleum, Stuart Rose, of Marks & Spencer, and BBC director general Mark Thompson mingled with members of Parliament, as well as eco-mavericks such as Zac Goldsmith. Finally the crowd moved into the high, wide Picture Gallery, its red flocked walls covered with oil portraits, many of them life-size, of kings, queens, and cardinals. The surprise guest was Prime Minister Tony Blair. Governments must lead, he said, if mankind is to reduce carbon emissions 60 percent or more by 2050, a goal the U.K. has set for itself. "But," he added, "this is not just about government. It's about companies and individuals. That's why I'm so anxious to give my support to what the Prince is proposing today." Accounting might seem boring to some, he said, with a nod to the banner behind him. "I find the subject riveting."

Charles's program does have the eye-glazing title of Accounting for Sustainability—"an exciting and interesting topic," as he put it dryly. ... But as he warmed to his message, his passion emerged. "This is my own small attempt to consider how we might more accurately, more 'truly and fairly'—to use that phrase much favored by accountants—begin to account for the wider social and environmental costs of our activities.… At one level, it appears that no one is accounting for these costs. Yet, at another level … we are all paying for them."

Charles's idea is at once simple and wildly ambitious. If a can of soup lists calories, why can't it also list the environmental costs of getting that can to market? A product flown halfway across the world leaves far more carbon emissions in its wake than a similar one made just down the road and brought to town by truck. Why not quantify that on the label? Companies can compete for the lowest "green" costs, consumers can make "green" buying choices, and those products with the lowest environmental costs—likely those made and sold locally—can be given the market value they deserve.

As a first step, Charles is "accounting" for the green costs of his own Duchy Originals, the food company he started in 1990, amid much eye rolling, to sell biscuits made with organically grown wheat and oats from the 900-acre Home Farm, near his country estate of Highgrove, in Gloucestershire. Today, Duchy Originals makes some 200 products, generating net profits of $2.3 million last year—all of which goes to charity—on sales of nearly $90 million, and sustaining what Charles calls a "virtuous circle." Raw ingredients are bought from small farmers—not the mega-farms that Charles so loathes—who use organic growing methods. Now, Charles told his crowd, he intends to quantify just how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are emitted in growing, processing, and distributing those products, and give that information to consumers—"if," he acknowledged wryly, "it does not result in additional packaging."

Already, the Prince has converted the 18th-century Highgrove to "green electricity," generated by providers who use sustainable energy sources. The estate has solar panels for some heat and hot water, a carbon-neutral boiler heated by woodchips, double-glazed windows, and eco-efficient insulation. It has a walled kitchen garden to supply fruits and vegetables on a self-sustaining basis year-round. It even has a reedbed sewage system to process waste, with solid matter recycled as manure and liquid sewage reconstituted as clean drinking water. (Weekend visitors take note.) Similar measures are being undertaken at Birkhall, the Prince's Scotland home. His city home is more of a challenge—Clarence House and the adjoining St. James apartments are part of the central power grid—but along with the obvious steps (energy-efficient lightbulbs, lights and appliances that shut off when not in use), Charles is looking into green power sources for those residences too. ...

For a globe-traveling royal, transportation is the hardest part of the footprint to reduce. The Prince's Jaguar and Land Rover are being retrofitted to run 100 percent on biodiesel. Charles plans to take trains instead of cars whenever he can, and so, apparently, do other members of the royal family. (The Prince's mother, Queen Elizabeth II, recently took a scheduled train to her country home at Sandringham, in Norfolk. She liked it.) And again, when possible, Charles plans to fly commercial instead of chartering private jets.

At this, the distinguished members of the British press, grudgingly respectful as they are now of Charles the Eco-visionary, suppressed a collective snicker. Last spring, Charles and his wife, Camilla Parker Bowles (now the Duchess of Cornwall), flew to the Middle East and India for two weeks with an entourage of 22 on Charles's chartered Airbus 319. The daily Independent commissioned an analysis which concluded that the air tour produced 40 tons of carbon dioxide—as the newspaper smirkingly put it, "the weight of six London buses." After all his talk about global warming as the greatest problem facing mankind, declared a spokesman for the eco-group Plane Stupid, the Prince was "clearly not walking the walk but talking the talk. If he is serious about climate change—and I am sure he is—he needs to start flying less." ...

Vanity Fair also has a tribute to an obese fascist painkiller addict who hates the environment - Rush Limbaugh.

For us non-dittoheads (that is, the unconverted), a more fitting memorial to Mount Rushbo might be a diorama of the environmental destruction that he did so much to enable in his multi-decade reign of denigration. Global warming's most popular denialist, talk radio's most imitated showman, conservatism's minister of disinformation, he has injected millions of semi-vacant American skulls with a cream filling of complacency that has helped thrust this country into the forefront of backward leadership. He has given Republican lawmakers the rhetorical cover fire to do nothing but snicker as the crisis emerged and impressed itself on the rest of the world. He conscripted concern for nature as just another weapon in the Culture Wars. May the grasses of his favorite golf courses go forever yellow and dust storms whip from the sand traps.

From Teddy Roosevelt, who made wilderness protection a priority and created national parks, bird sanctuaries, big-game refuges, and national forests, to Richard Nixon, under whose bad-moon presidency the Environmental Protection Agency was formed and the Clean Air Act of 1970 was passed, the Republican Party carried a tradition of conservation that crumbled under Ronald Reagan, for whom nature was mostly a scenic backdrop whose resources could be exploited out of camera frame. Reagan's selections of James Watt for the Department of the Interior and Anne Gorsuch for the E.P.A. put bureaucratic vandals in positions of stewardship, and in 1987 he vetoed re-authorization of the Clean Water Act, a veto that fortunately was overridden. It is a measure of how awful the George W. Bush administration has been on the environment that some activists miss the old, upfront hostility of the Reagan era, when at least the political and corporate machinations took place in open daylight. "Unfortunately, now," lamented Daniel Weiss, an environmental activist (quoted by Amanda Griscom in her article for online's Grist), "our leaders are much more savvy—and far more insidious. They undo laws in the dead of night." Under Bush II, environmentalists no longer need to be engaged, because they've been so stridently marginalized and stigmatized as a pantheistic kook cult practicing socialism under the guise of Gaia worship. This was largely Limbaugh's doing, and now every right-wing pundit from Cal Thomas to Michael Savage croaks the same tune.

Alternet has an article on "How Much Iraqi Crude Oil is Being Stolen?" - the "Mystery of the Missing Meters". It would be interesting to see what Iraqi oil production levels really are...

Nobody really knows how much crude oil is being stolen by corrupt Iraqi officials because, four years after the invasion, the oil meters haven't been fixed.

The line of ships at the Al Basra Oil Terminal (ABOT) stretches south to the horizon, patiently waiting in the searing heat of the Northern Arabian Gulf as four giant supertankers load up. Close by, two more tankers fill up at the smaller Khawr Al Amaya Oil Terminal (KAAOT). Guarding both terminals are dozens of heavily-armed U.S. Navy troops and Iraqi Marines who live on the platforms.

These two offshore terminals, a maze of pipes and precarious metal walkways, deliver some 1.6 million barrels of crude oil, at least 85 percent of Iraq's output, to buyers from all over the world. If the southern oil fields are the heart of Iraq's economy, its main arteries are three 40-plus inch pipelines that stretch some 52 miles from Iraq's wells to the ports.

Heavily armed soldiers spend their days at the oil terminals scanning the horizon looking for suicide bombers and stray fishing dhows (boats). Meanwhile, right under their noses, smugglers are suspected to be diverting an estimated billions of dollars worth of crude onto tankers because the oil metering system that is supposed monitor how much crude flows into and out of ABOT and KAAOT -- has not worked since the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Officials blame the four-year delay in repairing the relatively simple system on "security problems." Others point to the failed efforts of the two U.S. companies hired to repair the southern oil fields, fix the two terminals, and the meters: Halliburton of Houston, Texas, and Parsons of Pasadena, California.

The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) is scheduled to publish a report this spring that is expected criticize the companies' failure to complete the work.

Rumors are rife among suspicious Iraqis about the failure to measure the oil flow. "Iraq is the victim of the biggest robbery of its oil production in modern history," blazed a March 2006 headline in Azzaman, Iraq's most widely read newspaper. A May 2006 study of oil production and export figures by Platt's Oilgram News, an industry magazine, showed that up to $3 billion a year is unaccounted for. ...

One of the lesser known Democrat contenders to be their presidential candidate is Mike Gravel, who seems (like Ron Paul on the Republican side) to get a lot of attention online but none in the mainstream press. I like his quip about Iraqi oil in this piece - "US policy is an abomination". Kind of sums it up...

One of the cornerstones of your presidential campaign is opposition to the Iraq War and the recent troop surge. You mention the use of “aggressive and skilled diplomacy” as part of the follow up to withdrawal. What does this mean exactly?

First off, you concentrate on bringing people together. Let’s take Iraq. We won’t get help from anybody because we are a superpower and we are arrogant. Whether it is personal or payback, Iraqis are not willing to help us. They are willing to sit on the sidelines and let us bleed.


If we take out our troops, now they have a different equation. We then initiate meetings with Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, even Israel—all those who have a stake in the stability of the Middle East.

Secondly, I would knock off these sanctions. Sanctions don’t work. We have been sanctioning North Korea for 56 years, 26 years for Iran. All it does is strengthen the hand of the tyrant, because all they do is blame those conducting the sanctions. That’s aggressive diplomacy to counteract the stupid diplomacy we have been using so far.

Would you support a three-state solution in Iraq?

I support what the Iraqis want. What we have done is engineered an oil agreement with their government which satisfies our corporate interests, and it’s an abomination. We went in for oil, we are there to maintain control over oil, and we are going to leave enough troops there to enforce the oil agreements we already have and to sustain some type of activity to buy people off.

Make no mistake about it, money comes through our coffers before it gets to the Iraqi people.

And to close with some tinfoil, Cryptogon points to a Global Research article claiming that the war in Afghanistan is over the heroin racket. Is this an example of the triumph of free-enterprise ? Obviously those bearded fundamentalists had no clue about how to run a thriving business...

The United Nations has announced that opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has soared. There was a 59% increase in areas under opium cultivation in 2006. Production of opium is estimated to have increased by 49% in relation to 2005. The Western media in chorus blame the Taliban and the warlords. Western officials are said to believe that “the trade is controlled by 25 smugglers including three government ministers.” (Guardian, op. cit).

Yet in a bitter irony, US military presence has served to restore rather than eradicate the drug trade. Opium production has increased 33 fold from 185 tons in 2001 under the Taliban to 6100 tons in 2006. Cultivated areas have increased 21 fold since the 2001 US-led invasion.

What the media reports fail to acknowledge is that the Taliban government was instrumental in 2000-2001 in implementing a successful drug eradication program, with the support and collaboration of the UN. Implemented in 2000-2001, the Taliban’s drug eradication program led to a 94 percent decline in opium cultivation. In 2001, according to UN figures, opium production had fallen to 185 tons. Immediately following the October 2001 US led invasion, production increased dramatically, regaining its historical levels. ...

The Afghan trade in opiates (92 percent of total World production of opiates) constitutes a large share of the worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, which was estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $400-500 billion. ...

Based on 2003 figures, drug trafficking constitutes “the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade.” (The Independent, 29 February 2004). Afghanistan and Colombia (together with Bolivia and Peru) constitute the largest drug producing economies in the world, which feed a flourishing criminal economy. These countries are heavily militarized. The drug trade is protected.