Planning for a Climate-Changed World  

Technology Review has an article on planning for climate change.

As the global picture grows grimmer, states and cities are searching for the fine-scale predictions they need to prepare for emergencies--and to keep the faucets running.

On December 11, 1992, a powerful northeaster coalesced off the eastern seaboard of the United States, and an eight-foot storm surge struck New York City. Seawater swamped the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to a depth of six feet, cascaded down PATH subway stairs in Hoboken, NJ, and forced LaGuardia Airport and many roads and subways lines to close. Had the storm been slightly stronger, a 10-foot surge could have devastated a far wider region, inundating low-lying areas like Coney Island and Manhattan's financial district and overwhelming the 14 sewage plants dotting the New York City coastline.

A flood of comparable height in New York City's environs should occur about once every 100 years, on average, in the estimation of one Columbia University study. But global warming and rising sea levels--as well as the possibility of more-intense precipitation, stronger storms, and altered storm trajectories--will make such disasters more frequent. And to protect the people who live and work where disaster threatens, the critical first step is to determine how quickly and by how much, exactly, the threat is increasing. That knowledge is essential to deciding how seriously to consider specific countermeasures; for New York, these could range from mandatory evacuation plans for seaside neighborhoods to multibillion-dollar storm-surge barriers spanning the Verrazano Narrows and other key channels.

But there are no clear answers, and part of the problem is that well-documented predictions about planetary change haven't generally been broken down in local terms. Though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded with 90 percent certainty that human activity is warming the planet--and spelled out the likelihood of consequences that include higher seas, droughts, and fiercer storms--the United States is committing scant resources to providing usable information to the people who respond to emergencies, plan for urban development, manage coastal areas, and make sure the crops keep growing and the reservoirs stay full.

"The challenge is to increase our capability to accurately forecast climate at the regional level," says ­Ronald Prinn, an atmospheric scientist who directs the Center for Global Change Science at MIT. "That is what is needed in order to improve the information that government agencies get--[and] to then translate those regional forecasts into something useful at the city [or] state level." Equipping people to deal with climate change could mean simply giving state and local planners access to a wealth of existing information--such as calculations made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that could indicate how far inland storm surges would move if sea levels were higher. But it will also mean sharpening local and regional models, so that they can predict the effects of climate change in far greater geographic detail. And it will require new approaches to emergency planning, water-­supply management, and more. ...

Tech Review also has an article on LEDs replacing CFLs as the energy efficient light bulb of choice.

The light bulb, the symbol of bright ideas, doesn't look like such a great idea anymore, as lawmakers in the U.S. and abroad are talking about banning the century-old technology because of its contribution to global warming. But what comes next? Compact fluorescent bulbs are the only real alternative right now, but ''bulbs'' that use light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, are quickly emerging as a challenger.

LEDs, which are small chips usually encased in a glass dome the size of a matchstick head, have been in use in electronics for decades to indicate, for example, whether a VCR is on or off. Those LEDs were usually red or green, but a scientific breakthrough in the 1990s paved the way for the production of LEDs that produce white light. Because they use less power than standard incandescent bulbs, white LEDs have become common in flashlights.

Established players in the lighting industry and a host of startups are now grooming LEDs to take on the reigning champion of residential lighting, the familiar pear-shaped incandescent light bulb. The light bulb has been running out of friends recently. California and Canada have decided to ban the sale of incandescent bulbs by 2012. Australia is banning them in 2010. The European Union is looking at banning production of the bulbs. A U.S. Senate committee is working on a proposal that would phase out the light bulb in 10 years.

And in New Jersey, where the first practical incandescent bulb emerged from Thomas Edison's laboratory in 1879, a bill has been introduced to ban their use in government buildings.

Governments are gunning for the light bulb because it's much less efficient than fluorescents, using about five times more energy to produce the same amount of light. Lighting consumes 22 percent of electricity produced in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy, and widespread use of LED lighting could cut consumption in half. By 2027, LED lighting could cut annual energy use by the equivalent of 500 million barrels of oil, with the attendant reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide...

The Australian is jumping on the global warming bandwagon properly now Rupert has dyed himself a greenish shade, with a report today warning that one billion people will be displaced by 2050.

AT least one billion people may have to flee their homes over the next four decades because of conflicts and natural disasters that will worsen with global warming, a relief agency has warned.

In a report, British-based Christian Aid said countries worldwide, especially the poorest, were facing the greatest forced migration ever - one that would dwarf those displaced by World War II. In what at the time amounted to "the largest population displacement in modern history", 66 million people were displaced across Europe by May 1945,as well as the many millions more in China, it said.

Today there were an estimated 163 million people worldwide displaced by factors like conflict, drought and flooding as well as economic development projects like dams, logging and grain plantations, it said. "We believe that forced migration is now the most urgent threat facing poor people in the developing world,'' said John Davison, author of Human Tide: the real migration crisis.

While the figure was already "staggeringly high", the report warned that "in future, climate change will push it even higher. "We estimate that over the years between now and 2050, a total of one billion people will be displaced from their homes,'' the 52-page report said.

The figures include 645 million who will migrate because of development projects, and 250 million because of phenomena linked to global warming like floods, droughts and famine, it said. ... "Security experts fear that this new migration will fuel existing conflicts and generate new ones in the areas of the world - the poorest - where resources are most scarce,'' said a statement accompanying the report. ...

The report also cited case studies in Colombia, Mali and Burma as major causes for concern. With millions having fled a civil war between paramilitary groups and guerrillas in the last 20 years, Colombians were now seeing land taken by paramilitaries-turned businessmen setting up palm oil and other plantations.

In Burma, ethnic minority groups like the Karen had suffered decades of violence, displacement and persecution only to see the military rulers now use the freed space for dams, logging and palm oil plantations.

Climate change would drive the growth of grain-producing plantations as rich countries would raise demand for bio-fuels over crude oil in a bid to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere. "In Mali, the threat from climate change is more immediate,'' it said. Crop yields had fallen sharply with erratic and declining rainfall levels, forcing farmers to move to feed their families.

The Australian is also taking up the "business does green best" line, with an article called "Capitalism clears the air".

THE business response to the risk of climate change is quickly gaining momentum. This week News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch made headlines when he announced his plan to make the world's biggest media company carbon neutral by 2010. He is the latest and biggest corporate mover on an issue increasingly being driven by business rather than governments.

Business is, by its very nature, decisive. Democratic government is inclusive. Governments like to talk the talk but they are built on a political process that must manage a range of constituencies and ideologies. The Howard Government was a relatively early mover on climate change, setting up the Australian Greenhouse Office in 1997. It was the first of its kind in the world. It peaked early.

Action on climate change is easy at the margins and politically lethal at its core. Imposing costs on the community is rarely popular. Not surprisingly, governments end up moving at the pace of the slowest wagon.

Even European governments have found the issue heavy going. Europe already depends on imports for half of its energy needs. This is tipped to reach 70 per cent by 2030. Encouraging new indigenous energy supplies will not only reduce greenhouse risk but reduce the ongoing risk of importing gas from places such as Russia.

In 2000, the European Union announced its plans for an emissions trading scheme by 2005. There were predictable teething problems but the biggest factor to undermine the scheme was the serious over-allocation of emission permits by every country except Britain, as governments succumbed to political pressure from domestic industry.

And this was only at a relatively low level of greenhouse cuts. Looming international negotiations on how to share the burden of global emissions reductions will be considerably more challenging.

The rules and boundaries for a price on carbon will ultimately need to be set by governments working in concert. But in the interim, business has its own rules. In February, a group of nearly 300 institutional investors worth $US41trillion ($49trillion) wrote to the world's biggest companies asking for greater disclosure of risks and opportunities relating to climate change. It was the fifth and biggest request by the Carbon Disclosure Project, which now represents about one-third of total global invested assets. ...

By contrast, governments have been louder in their rhetoric, but delivering results has proved more difficult. Constrained by competing political and ideological pressures, they have found sanctuary in talk, discomfort in serious action.

In 2004, the Labor states set up an emissions trading taskforce to explore how emissions trading might work in Australia. It made good politics and has played a useful role in the policy debate, even though its initial report last year was immediately dismissed by the fossil-fuel reliant West Australian and Queensland governments.

They recanted this year so that Labor could put political pressure on the Howard Government with its proposal for a state-based emissions trading scheme from 2010. It is, of course, a pre-election stunt. A state-based emissions trading scheme would come with so much commercial risk, the mere thought sends business into a cold sweat.

In the meantime, state governments have been handing out popular rebates for solar and gas hot water systems, running mini trading schemes for soft carbon credits and otherwise tinkering at the edges.

But at ground zero their pain is becoming more acute. The Iemma Government in NSW is trying to work out how it can build another coal-fired power station as the state approaches a critical shortage of electricity. Lower emission alternatives at the scale required are not economically feasible without an immediate and significant price on emissions.

It has commissioned a three-month independent review process by energy economist Tony Owen to perform a number of jobs: flush out any genuine alternatives, and to pry open the thorny issue of government ownership of the existing suite of coal-fired generating assets. If the unions allow it. With the growing commercial risk of an uncertain future price on carbon, power generation is becoming a risky business for government.

The Independent reports on the importance of deforestation as a cause of global warming.

In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York. Stopping the loggers is the fastest and cheapest solution to climate change. So why are global leaders turning a blind eye to this crisis?

The accelerating destruction of the rainforests that form a precious cooling band around the Earth's equator, is now being recognised as one of the main causes of climate change. Carbon emissions from deforestation far outstrip damage caused by planes and automobiles and factories.

The rampant slashing and burning of tropical forests is second only to the energy sector as a source of greenhouses gases according to report published today by the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of leading rainforest scientists.

Figures from the GCP, summarising the latest findings from the United Nations, and building on estimates contained in the Stern Report, show deforestation accounts for up to 25 per cent of global emissions of heat-trapping gases, while transport and industry account for 14 per cent each; and aviation makes up only 3 per cent of the total.

"Tropical forests are the elephant in the living room of climate change," said Andrew Mitchell, the head of the GCP.

Scientists say one days' deforestation is equivalent to the carbon footprint of eight million people flying to New York. Reducing those catastrophic emissions can be achieved most quickly and most cheaply by halting the destruction in Brazil, Indonesia, the Congo and elsewhere.

No new technology is needed, says the GCP, just the political will and a system of enforcement and incentives that makes the trees worth more to governments and individuals standing than felled. "The focus on technological fixes for the emissions of rich nations while giving no incentive to poorer nations to stop burning the standing forest means we are putting the cart before the horse," said Mr Mitchell.

Most people think of forests only in terms of the CO2 they absorb. The rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo basin and Indonesia are thought of as the lungs of the planet. But the destruction of those forests will in the next four years alone, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern, pump more CO2 into the atmosphere than every flight in the history of aviation to at least 2025.

Indonesia became the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world last week. Following close behind is Brazil. Neither nation has heavy industry on a comparable scale with the EU, India or Russia and yet they comfortably outstrip all other countries, except the United States and China.

What both countries do have in common is tropical forest that is being cut and burned with staggering swiftness. Smoke stacks visible from space climb into the sky above both countries, while satellite images capture similar destruction from the Congo basin, across the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo....

The Register reports that Biofuels are the 'next environmental danger'.

Far from being the salvation of an oil-hungry society, biofuels could actually trigger increases in food prices and deforestation, according to a report. The Co-operative Insurance Company, part of the UK's Co-op Group, has published a study that warns that the fuels might never live up to their promise, and could have a negative, rather than positive environmental impact, the BBC reports.

It doesn't suggest doing away with them altogether, but says that current targets for swapping petrol and diesel for fuel derived from crops are too ambitious.

The UK government, and the European Union have set their sights on using biofuels in 10 per cent of our cars by 2020. But the Co-op's report suggests that to produce this amount of fuel on a global scale would require as much as nine per cent of arable land being diverted to fuel crops.

Professor Dieter Helm, who sits of the government's Council for Science and Technology, told the BBC: "The sort of targets being set for biofuels will have quite radical effects on agriculture and therefore will have very substantial consequences for food prices and agriculture more generally."

He points out that rainforest is already being felled to make way for fuel crops. "Think of the energy involved in felling those rainforests. Think about the damage to the climate being done by the loss of those trees. Think about the ploughing and the cultivation of fields. Think about the transport of those fuels, and you start to realise the carbon imprints are about much more than simply what happens to grow in a particular field at a particular point in time."

The WSJ Energy Roundup has a post on Shining Solar Stocks.

The future looks bright for solar power, analysts say, as a recent silicon shortage eases and prices come down, helping the industry increase its share of the global energy market. But some companies stand to benefit more than others.

Michael Carboy, clean-energy analyst at Signal Hill, says demand for solar power is high, but supply is lacking due to a shortage of the silicon used to make most solar panels. But silicon producers have expanded their operations lately, and silicon prices are coming down, allowing solar-panel makers to increase production.

That trend could be a boon for companies such as SunPower and Suntech Power Holdings , whose silicon-based photovoltaic solar panels are among the most efficient on the market, converting between 17% and 22% of sunlight into electricity. “As more and more silicon becomes available, the game shifts back in favor of SunPower and SunTech,” said Carboy, who has a “buy” rating on both companies, and away from First Solar , which he rates a “hold.” During the silicon shortage, First Solar was able to “grow like a weed” said Carboy, as the company uses cadmium telluride in its panels instead of silicon. Such panels only convert about 10% of sunlight into electricity, however.

The end of the silicon shortage will lift annual gross profits at SunPower, SunTech and other solar-panel makers to $11.5 billion in four years from $7.7 billion today, estimates RBC Capital Markets. “Solar industry profits are here to stay, since both public and government support are likely to remain strong until solar can compete on a cost basis with grid electricity,” said RBC alternative energy analyst Bush — although he thinks solar stocks could be volatile in the near term. Bush estimates the average installed cost for photovoltaic solar to drop to $4.40 per watt in 2011 from $7.37 in 2007 and eventually compete with grid electricity at about $3.50 per watt.

Once this occurs, solar power and other alternative forms of energy will start making up a larger portion of the global energy supply. The wind-power industry, which is currently more economical than solar, is also about 12 times larger, but Mr. Carboy expects the two markets to equalize by 2025. Combined, he expects the two forms of energy to account for 27% of the world’s supply by 2030.

The Energy Blog reports thats Green Star Products has completed Phase One Testing of its algae growing system. Also at The Energy Blog, Phoenix Orders More Altair Battery Packs and Toyota to Reduce Price Differential and Use Li-ion Battery in Hybrids.

Green Star Products announced Friday that it has completed Phase I of its 40,000 liter microalgae demonstration facility and has been successful in controlling the most important variables in algae production, i.e. temperature of water in large systems, salinity (salt content), evaporation, pH (acidity-alkalinity) and most of all initial costs of construction.

Greenstar_haps_algaeIn summary, GSPI has developed the field expertise to build and operate the patent pending, proprietary Hybrid Algae Production System (HAPS), a cross between an open and closed pond system. The demonstration, prototype facility is located in Montana with an individual pond capacity of 40,000 liters, which can easily be scaled up to larger systems and acreage. ...

The GSPI (licensed) algae system is a Hybrid Algae Production System (HAPS) that incorporates the controlled environment of the closed photobioreactors coupled with inexpensive construction technology to reduce the cost to a level very close to the open pond systems.

Temperature and light control are the two most important parameters identified by industry reports and must be accomplished at an effective low cost. The next important parameter to be controlled is salinity. Open ponds continually evaporate large quantities of water and leave salt behind. Salt content continually increases and adversely affects the growth of the algae and must eventually be disposed of and exchanged with new water and algae. ...

Many suitable high-lipid (oil) algae species have been cultivated and already exits to produce the First Generation of sustainable energy farms. Present available algae species can produce 4,000 gallons of oil per acre each year, which is 50 times greater than the oil yield from oilseed crops such as soybean or canola crops. Recent news stories have publish the fact that the world is already experiencing significant increases in food prices because oil crops compete with food crops (Reuters May 8, 2007 – “United Nations tackles sustainable bioenergy growth”).

Algae farms, on the other hand, do not compete with food crops. Algae may be the only long-term feedstock solution for biodiesel production. ...

GSPI still has many major steps to demonstrate before their HAPS can be said ready to work. In my mind these initial test, although required, are trivial compared to operating a system that is growing algae. The must demonstrated that 1) they can keep the system adequately mixed so that the algae is fairly evenly distributed over the pond, 2) they can inject the CO2 into the pond and distribute it evenly without pressurizing the enclosure or releasing significant amounts to the atmosphere and 3) they must demonstrate that they can efficiently harvest the algae without losing significant amounts of water and still maintain a stable environment for growing the water. I assume that after that the pressing of the remaining water out of the algae and converting it to biodiesel are relatively straight foreword tasks.

Looking at their 2006 financials the question must be raised as to how they going to provide the money required for these tasks. They have received a $10.8 million order, plus royalties, announced Nov. 13, 2006, for 90 of biodiesel reactors and control systems with DeBeers, scheduled for delivery over 18 months from the date of order, which was received subsequent to the 2006 statements.

TreeHugger has a post on Google Sketchup going green.

I have been a Sketchup user since it started, and was ambivalent when Google bought it, I had been spending hundreds of dollars on it and now it was being given away! I continue with my SketchUp Pro but realize now the power of free, now there are tens of thousands of people creating components and models that are available for me to use, and learn via Energyenthusiast at Hugg that there is now a vast library of alternative energy drawings and components available for download. Of course they can all be tied into Google Earth so we can redesign the world online.

After spending a day with Cameron Sinclair of Achitecture for Humanity the power of open source has become so obvious, that there is an economic model that works by sharing rather than hiding, that exposure is more important than secrecy. Never have such powerful tools for collaboration and communication existed as the Open architecture Network, Google or Sketchup. What a great time to be a designer.

Tony Blair's heir apparent Gordon Brown has thankfully stopped ranting about the New World Order and is instead talking about building swathes of eco-homes at a price that young would-be homeowners might be able to afford, unlike much of the rest of Britain's housing stock.

BRITAIN'S leader-in-waiting Gordon Brown, eager to seize the green initiative on a vital election battleground, announced plans to build five environmentally friendly and affordable "eco-towns". ... In the run-up to the next election expected in 2009, the main political parties are vying to extol their green policies.

“Young couples find it difficult to buy their first home,” Mr Brown told BBC Television. “There is a housing problem we have got to deal with,” he acknowledged. Laying out his environmental credentials, he said: “We can combine the building of new houses with low carbon and carbon-free homes.” “I want to get to us building 200,000 houses in total as quickly as possible,” he said. “The eco-towns will make their contribution to that.”

The towns would be powered by locally generated energy from sustainable sources. "A home-owning, asset-owning, wealth-owning democracy is what would be in the interests of our country because everybody would have a stake in the country,” Mr Brown said. ...

Voters said the best way for Mr Brown to boost his popularity would be to cut immigration and pull British troops out of Iraq. Mr Blair's popularity plummeted after he sent British forces to join the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and a Labour Party rebellion in September forced him to say he would quit within a year, opening the way for Mr Brown to take over. Yesterday, Mr Brown said he planned to visit Iraq soon but he refused to set out a timetable for the withdrawal of British troops from the south of the country.

Jeff Vail has a post up at The Oil Drum on the Prospects for an Oil Insurgency in the Angolan Exclave of Cabinda.

Angola is one of the few bright spots in global oil production—oil production is expected to increase by roughly 2 million barrels per day to around 3.4 mbpd within the next 10 years. Angola has been wracked by civil war and violence since its independence from Portugal, with perhaps 1.5 million people dying in conflict. That 27 year civil war ended, however, in 2002, and Angola is generally seen as a relatively stable host for oil production, a perception that is further enhanced because the far-offshore, deep-water nature of most Angolan oil production makes it a difficult target for local groups with an axe to grind.

Is there anything standing in the way of this “Angolan Oil Miracle?” Other than the majority of present and future oil production being locatdd in a small and ethnically separate territory, a territory with an active and violent independence movement, and with the budding capability to effectively disrupt oil production, no.

Is Angola a budding success story or the next Nigeria?

Through a quirk of colonial cartography, Angola includes the exclave province of Cabinda (it was actually three independent African kingdoms who collectively asked the Portugese for protection from the Belgians). And, to complicate matters further, the offshore territory controlled by Angola by way of this exclave is home to the most productive present and future oil fields—currently accounting for roughly 700,000 barrels per day of production, and home to many of the major production blocks currently making Western oil companies salivate.



Figure 1: Map of Cabinda Exclave, with location relevant to Angola shown in inset.



Figure 2: Cabinda's offshore oil "Production Block O"

The situation with regards to the Cabinda exclave would be far less problematic if the people of Cabinda were happy participants in the “Angolan Oil Miracle.” The huge royalties derived from Cabinda’s oil production, however, flow directly to the Angolan capital of Luanda, with very little flowing back in the form of development funds. This is especially significant considering that Cabinda has a population of only 300,000 people—that’s nearly two barrels of crude produced per person, per day, with this number expected to increase significantly over the next few years. The people of Cabinda understand that they should be among the wealthiest in Africa. Instead, only 10% of the oil revenues produced in Cabinda stay there--in theory. Because Angola hasn't held elections in 14 years, and because provincial governments are appointed top-down from Luanda, the theoretical 10% that "stays" in fact enriches the pockets of Angolan officials hand-picked for these luctrative positions (see Ghazvinian, "Untapped," pg. 154-65)

Complicating the situation further, there is a long history of armed struggle for independence in Cabinda. The FLEC (Frente para a Libertação do Enclave de Cabinda, or Cabinda Liberation Front) and FAC (Fuerzas Armadas de Cabinda, or Armed Forces of Cabinda) have been longtime participants in Angola’s past conflicts, and were the lone holdouts to the 2002 cease fire. The Government of Angola claims that the FLEC & FAC signed a cease fire in the Summer of 2006, but this is widely considered a sham by the people of Cabinda, and is disputed by the “President” of the “Republic of Cabinda,” Nzita Henriques Tiago. Communiqués by various independence organizations from as recently as March, 2007, suggest that this movement is very much alive. John Ghazvinian, while visiting Cambida several months after the "cease fire," reported that the armed conflict continued in the mountainous villages outside Cabinda City (Ghazvinian, id.).

The Potential for a “Nigerian-Style” Oil Insurgency

What is the potential for the Cabinda insurgency to significantly impact the future oil output from Angola? While some major oil facilities are located ashore in Cabinda, the majority of oil infrastructure is far offshore (See Figure 2). What are the probabilities that Cabinda will decide to target its own oil production as a means of gaining independence or autonomy? Do they have the tactical capabilities to carry out such a campaign? Are there any signs that this will happen?

In analyzing these questions, I think the “open-source” model for learning in insurgencies is highly relevant. Increasingly, due to better access to information and global communications, as well as lower barriers to entry for potential violent actors, insurgents around the world are using an open-source methodology to innovate in the areas of tactics and targeting methodology. The effect of oil-infrastructure targeting in Nigeria, for example, is likely not passing unnoticed in the cafes of Cabinda. Likewise, the tactical methods for attacking oil infrastructure—especially the developments in the tactics for attacking far-offshore infrastructure—are being effectively communicated “open-source” by the news media. To the extent that tactical and targeting innovations are being made in Nigeria by groups like MEND, or other violent factions, they are available for adoption by insurgents in Cabinda. Does this mean that insurgents in Cabinda have the means of disrupting the “Angolan Oil Miracle?” Probably not yet, but it seems likely that if more development funds and revenue sharing efforts are not advanced by Luanda, this combination of capability and intent cannot be far off.

In a troubling recent development, a Total oil platform in the Nkossa field (in neighboring Congo, see Figure 2 above) caught fire on May 10th. There is insufficient evidence at this time to firmly establish the cause of the fire, but investigations have turned up a “suspicious boat, its hull and body completely burned.” The result of the fire: 60,000 barrels per day are currently shut in, with no word on when the production will be restored. Is this the opening salvo in a new Cabinda Oil Insurgency? It’s far too early to tell, but one thing is certain: if the incident was not an intentional attack, it certainly publicized a potentially effective tactic to carry out such attacks. ...

Jeff Vail's predictions for 2007 included the alarming claim that Mexico would collapse as oil depletion wipes out their oil export revenues and inflation lets rip (hows that prediction going so far Jeff ?). I also remember Jeff's peer John Robb posting a link on the potential for Mexico to collapse into chaos in the near future, so this article in The Guardian on subcomandante Marcos caught my eye today.

Marcos says that his next writing project will be a work of political theory analysing the forces he believes are pushing Mexico towards social upheaval. From dispossessed indigenous communities powerless to stop dams and agribusiness destroying their lands, to street vendors evicted from the capital's kerbs to make way for the retail magnates, he says the country's poor and exploited are close to their limit.

The former orthodox Marxist-Leninist turned anti-globalisation guru, who is not himself indigenous, predicts that the subconscious power of the year 2010 - the 200th anniversary of the war of independence and the 100th of Mexico's revolution - will ignite a fuse laid by American efforts to secure the bilateral border, leaving millions unable to escape to jobs in the north. "Mexico will turn into a pressure cooker," he says. "And, believe me, it will explode."

Marcos says that Mexico's politicians, the media, and even earnest leftwing academics are oblivious to the radicalisation he sees bubbling just under the surface. He points out that they also had no idea that the reputedly docile indigenous population in Chiapas was on the point of armed revolt 13 years ago. Not that the Zapatista rebellion fitted the traditional mould of macho Latin American armed struggle, or Marcos ever looked or sounded like rebel leaders elsewhere. Even the "sub" in his title - designed to imply an improbable subordination to a council of indigenous commanders - subverted the concept of military discipline employed in most other guerrilla armies.

"We left the jungle to die," Marcos recalls, remembering how poorly armed his fighters were. "It sounds dramatic I know, but that's the way it was."

The Zapatistas were beaten back by the Mexican army within days, but not before triggering a wave of sympathy across the country and the world that forced the government to call a ceasefire, as well as agree to peace negotiations that would eventually crumble.

In less than two weeks the Chiapas Indians became an international cause celebre and their mysterious mask-wearing, pipe-smoking, and poetry-spouting leader emerged as the closest approximation yet to the romance of the martyred Che Guevara. They have hardly done any fighting since then. ...

The subcomandante's specific aim in his current low-key tour of the country is to consolidate the broad and loose collection of marginal left groups known as The Other Campaign. Marcos hopes this rather chaotic mix of everybody from radical transvestites to Marxist trade unionists will eventually play a leading role in channelling the discontent he is sure will soon be raging into an unarmed civilian movement organised around the principle of respect for difference.

"We think that what is going to happen here will have no 'ism' to describe it." His voice becomes wistful. "It will be so new, beautiful and terrible that it will make the world turn to look at this country in a completely different way."

Such talk could be seen as contrary, perhaps, at a time when the left has taken power in much of Latin America through the ballot box, but Marcos is unimpressed by elections he views as primarily a mechanism for ping-ponging power within the elite. So while he gives Evo Morales in Bolivia a nod of approval for his links to a radical indigenous movement, he describes Hugo Chávez in Venezuela as "disconcerting", and brands Brazil's President Lula and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega as traitors.

The Guardian also has an article on the "scariest man in Washington" - Henry Waxman.

Henry Waxman, the most dogged of congressional committee chairmen, has been described by the Republicans as 'the scariest man in Washington'.

Since the Democrats took control of the House and Senate in January, he has been in overdrive, launching inquiries into issues ranging from global warming to White House emails, and the one that concerns the congressman most - Iraq.

Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, is the public face of the new Democrat-led Congress, but Mr Waxman is the embodiment of the pent-up release of Democratic energy, determined to harry George Bush in his last two years in office.

The Bush administration is feeling the squeeze, from the White House to the Pentagon, state department and various federal organisations. Mr Waxman is currently waiting for the response from the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, on whether she will give evidence about the run-up to the war in Iraq. He issued a subpoena last month demanding her presence before his committee and, though she has hinted she will not attend, he seems confident that she will.

In an interview in his office overlooking Congress, he said his main concern is to discover why Mr Bush took the country to war. The issue has been churned over by journalists, by books from insiders and in reports but Mr Waxman does not feel anyone has yet got to the heart of the matter.

"We have gone to war, lost thousands of people _ Americans, British, many more Iraqis - and spent billions of dollars. The whole of the Middle East is in turmoil ... It is hard to know where you are going if you do not know how you got there."

He is aware of the label "the scariest man in Washington" and says he is amused rather than proud of it. "I do not think of myself as scary. I think people who are frightened are not frightened of me but of things they have done, the questions they do not want answered."

Mr Waxman is investigating why Mr Bush, in his state of the union address in 2003, only months before the invasion, cited British intelligence saying that Iraq had tried to secure uranium from Niger for use in a nuclear weapons programme.

"This issue is important to me. I voted for authorisation to go to war in Iraq on the claim that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. I found out that before the war began, the CIA knew that claim was based on forgeries. We wrote to Bush and said 'Did [the CIA] ever tell the administration? If they did not, that would be maladministration."

He is not planning to call any British government officials to give evidence. The UK has never formally admitted that MI6 was wrong but privately acknowledges the information was untrue while insisting it was put together in good faith.

What matters to Mr Waxman is not that the intelligence was wrong and that the CIA had concluded it was wrong, but why Mr Bush chose to cite British intelligence in his speech. "To say British intelligence provided information was almost a way of being technically accurate but attempting to deceive," he said.

That is why he wants Ms Rice, who was national security adviser at the time, to give evidence. The CIA said that it told the White House that the British information was wrong, but she says she either did not see that or cannot remember seeing it.

He is investigating other aspects of the war too, from post-war reconstruction, and in particular the role of the US conglomerate Halliburton, to battlefield misinformation. As part of the latter, Private Jessica Lynch gave evidence to his committee last month that the Pentagon had misrepresented her as a heroine.

The committee inquiry is also looking into the death of Pat Tillman, an American football player who turned down a lucrative contract to go to war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon initially said he had died in heroic action against the Taliban, but it turned out he was killed by friendly fire. "The administration made up a wholly fictious story," Mr Waxman said. ...

The LA Times notes Iraq's oil law is struggling to make it to parliament, though they are still parroting the party line by and large - estimating Iraqi oil reserves at maybe one third of their real levels and talking about oil profits being spread across the country and reducing instability. Cough.

It has not even reached parliament, but the oil law that U.S. officials call vital to ending Iraq's civil war is in serious trouble among Iraqi lawmakers, many of whom see it as a sloppy document rushed forward to satisfy Washington's clock.

Opposition ranges from vehement to measured, but two things are clear: The May deadline that the White House had been banking on is in doubt. And even if the law is passed, it fails to resolve key issues, including how to divide Iraq's oil revenue among its Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni regions, and how much foreign investment to allow. Those questions would be put off for future debates.

The problems of the oil bill bode poorly for the other so-called benchmarks that the Bush administration has been pressuring Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's government to meet. Those include provincial elections, reversing a prohibition against former Baath Party members holding government and military positions and revision of Iraq's constitution.

Republican leaders in Washington have warned administration officials that if the Iraqi government fails to meet those benchmarks by the end of the summer, remaining congressional support for Bush's Iraq policies could crumble. Their impatience was underscored Wednesday by Vice President Dick Cheney during a visit here.

"I did make it clear that we believe it's very important to move on the issues before us in a timely fashion, and that any undue delay would be difficult to explain," Cheney told reporters.

But Iraqi lawmakers show little sign of bending to accommodate Bush on an issue as crucial as oil.

"We have two clocks — the Baghdad clock and the Washington clock — and this is a perfect example," said Mahmoud Othman, a lawmaker from the semiautonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. "This has always been the case. Washington has been pushing the Iraqis to do things to fit their agenda."

Iraq is believed to have some of the world's largest oil reserves, about 115 billion barrels. The country's 2007 budget is based on predictions that oil proceeds will reach $31 billion, 93% of the government's revenue.

But war and political instability have kept production down. Just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, production was 2.6 million barrels per day. U.S. officials predicted a rapid rise to 3 million barrels. Instead, Iraq often has struggled to push the daily total to 2 million barrels because of obsolete equipment and security problems.

The oil law is supposed to change this by opening the industry to foreign investors who could modernize equipment and increase production. U.S. officials hope that spreading oil profit fairly across the country would cause instability to ebb.

The LA Times also has a classic history lesson from William Dalrymple.

IN EARLY MAY 1857 — 150 years ago this month — the British empire found itself threatened by the largest and bloodiest anti-colonial revolt to face any European empire anywhere in the world during the 19th century.

The British had been trading in India through the East India Co. since the early 1600s. But in the late 1700s, the dynamic had begun to shift. A new group of conservatives came to power, determined to radically expand British power abroad and to defend the economic interests of Britain against all threats. The governor general of India, Lord Wellesley, called his new, aggressive approach the "forward policy." Wellesley was determined to establish British dominance over all its European rivals, and he firmly believed in removing hostile Muslim regimes preemptively if they presumed to resist the West's growing power.

There were many voices in the right-wing press supporting this view. They argued that the puppet Muslim allies that effectively allowed the empire to run their affairs could stay for the time being, but that those governments that were intent on resisting the advance of the West were simply not to be tolerated.

Nor was there any doubt who would be the first to go: a dictator whose family had usurped power in a military coup. According to British sources close to government, he was "a cruel and relentless enemy," an "intolerant bigot," a "furious fanatic" who had "perpetually on his tongue the projects of jihad." This dictator was also deemed to be an "oppressive and unjust ruler … [and a] perfidious negotiator."

Wellesley had arrived in India in 1798 with specific instructions to effect regime change and replace this dictator — Tipu Sultan of Mysore — with a Western-backed puppet. First, however, Wellesley had to justify publicly a policy the outcome of which had already been decided in private. It was only by marshaling a body of apparently persuasive evidence against opponents that the bellyaching anti-imperialists at home — in this case the coterie that had gathered around the statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke — could be shut up.

It was with this in mind that Wellesley and his allies began a comprehensive campaign of vilification against Tipu, portraying him as a vicious and aggressive Muslim monster who planned to wipe the British off the map of India. This essay in imperial villain-making duly opened the way for a lucrative conquest and the installation of a more pliable regime.

The British, however, were not satisfied with removing Tipu. As the years passed, they slowly progressed from removing threatening Muslim rulers to destabilizing even the most malleable Islamic states and annexing them to British India. In February 1856, they annexed the prosperous kingdom of Avadh on the somewhat lame excuse that the Nawab, or provincial governor, was "excessively debauched." By early 1857, the East India Co. was directly ruling about two-thirds of the subcontinent.

Moreover, many British officials who believed in the forward policy were nursing plans to impose not just British laws and technology on India but British values as well. This meant banning the burning of widows, allowing them to remarry and outlawing infanticide. An evangelical lobby at home also pressed for increased missionary activity, and India in the 1840s and 1850s slowly filled with pious Christian fundamentalists who wanted not just to rule India but to redeem and improve it.

The tracts of the missionaries reinforced Muslim fears, increasing opposition to British rule and creating a constituency for the rapidly multiplying jihadis determined to stop the rule of the kafir infidels. At the same time, the existence of such "Wahhabi conspiracies" to resist the Christians strengthened the conviction of the evangelicals that a "strong attack" was needed to take on "Muslim fanatics."

The reaction to this steady crescendo of insensitivity came in 1857 with the Great Mutiny. On a May morning, 300 mutinous Indian soldiers (known as "sepoys"), who had been fighting on behalf of the British, rode into Delhi, massacred every Christian man, woman and child they could find and declared the Mughal emperor to be the leader of a chaotic and officerless army of unpaid peasant soldiers set against the forces of the world's greatest military power.

Of the 139,000 sepoys of the Bengal army — the largest modern army in Asia — all but 7,796 turned against their British masters. In some parts of northern India, such as Avadh, the sepoys were joined by a very large proportion of the population. Atrocities abounded on both sides. The great Mughal capital, caught in the middle of a remarkable cultural flowering, was turned overnight into a battleground.

Though it had many causes and reflected many deeply held political and economic grievances — particularly the feeling that heathen foreigners were interfering in a part of the world where they were entirely alien — the uprising was nevertheless articulated as a war of religion, and especially as a defensive action against the rapid inroads missionaries and Christian ideas were making in India.

Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, a flag of jihad was raised in the principal mosque in Delhi, and many of the insurgents described themselves as "mujahedin" or "jihadis." Indeed, by the end of the siege, the proportion of jihadis in the rebellion's storm center of Delhi grew to be about half of the total rebel force and included a regiment of "suicide ghazis" who had vowed never to eat again and to fight until they met death at the hands of the kafirs.

Finally, on Sept. 14, 1857, the British assaulted and took the city, sacking the Mughal capital and massacring innocent civilians along with the sepoys and the jihadis. In one neighborhood alone, Kucha Chelan, 1,400 unarmed citizens of Delhi were cut down.

In addition to the obvious historical parallels, there is a direct link between the jihadis of 1857 and those we face today. The reaction of some of the Islamic scholars after 1857 was to reject the West in favor of a return to pure Islamic roots. A Wahhabi-like madrasa was founded at Deoband in India that went back to Koranic basics. One hundred and forty years later, the movement has spread, and it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible out of which emerged Al Qaeda.

So does history repeat itself. Not only are Westerners again playing their old game of installing puppet regimes, propped up by Western garrisons, for their own political ends, but more alarmingly, the intellectual attitudes that have sustained such adventures remain intact. ...

I'll close with Cryptogon pulling one out of the memory hole, quoting The Daily Mail in "Hookers, Spies, Cases Full of Dollars…How BP Spent £45m to Win ‘Wild East’ Oil Rights".

This article has been pulled from dailymail.co.uk (Google Cache) and thisislondon.co.uk. Prisonplanet.com is mirroring the entire article since the British Government appears to have issued a D-Notice over this. I’ll mirror it here as well:

Hookers, Spies, Cases Full of Dollars…How BP Spent £45m to Win ‘Wild East’ Oil Rights

GLEN OWEN
UK Daily Mail
Sunday May 13, 2007

BP executives working for Lord Browne spent millions of pounds on champagne-fuelled sex parties to help secure lucrative international oil contracts. ...