Seeing the Future from High Above Greenland  

Alex Steffen at WorldChanging has a post on the challenges ahead in dealing with global warming.

Last week, I flew over the coast of Greenland at 800 kph.

As the northern sun glinted off the aluminum of the wing, I watched the ice floes -- at first rare white specks on the Prussian blue sea -- grow gradually more numerous until they ran in great streaks of broken ice where the waves were pushing them together. Gradually they grew closer together still, and more studded with icebergs, until in the distance I could see enormous sheets of ice, glowing white and blending on the horizon into clouds and fog. And then, rising steeply up, the mountains of Greenland, masses of ice and snow and dark brown rock. It was like watching a documentary on global warming in reverse.

Except it wasn't. That footage won't run backwards. I have no idea if massive expanses of broken ice at that location are the norm or unusual at this time of year. But we do know that climate change is driving us towards an ice-free world, more quickly than we expected, and by flying home from Portugal, I was helping fuel that great planetary melting.

As symbols, it doesn't get much better than that: rocketing across the sky in an aluminum tube, nibbling on a "seasonal salad" and casually admiring the way the melting floes below resemble the drifts of apple blossoms covering the sidewalk near my house earlier this spring, while going over my notes from the two conferences I spoken at over the last week on climate change, the sustainability crisis, and how big business can respond.

We are all chained to a paradox: in order to change these things, we must to transform our economy into one capable of thriving within a one planet footprint; we have to continue to use more and more of the very tools which are eroding our planet's atmosphere, ocean and living systems in the first place. No one's hands are clean here.

To pretend otherwise is silly. We absolutely all should do what we can to shrink our own footprints. But much of the damage we do is done by others in our names, and is intricately connected to being able to work in an effective way. I've made clear my ambiguous feelings about flying before (feelings which grow less ambiguous the more I fly, regardless of how many offsets I buy), but the reality is that I am certain that my personal share of the CO2 left floating in the contrails behind me is a good investment when weighed against the opportunity to share worldchanging ideas with audiences capable of creating real change. It's not ideal, but we can't afford the self-deception of false purity.

I increasingly suspect that if we in fact make this great transition, the work is going to be messy, imperfect. There'll be winners and losers -- undeserving people who get filthy rich, good people who find themselves among the billion whose crops are ruined, whose homes are engulfed by rising waters, who lives are destroyed by crazy weather. We need to strive for justice (in part because, as I've said many times, poverty and oppression retard our efforts) but we can't afford to wait for perfection. We need practical, innovative and massive responses cobbled together across the whole world, and such efforts are always flawed. I'm partial to the saying that the perfect is the enemy of the good; now I am coming to believe that the perfect is the enemy of the future.

We cannot accept the tyranny of small steps -- the idea that little actions are enough, and that calling for the big systemic changes we need is somehow too radical. ...

We don't have much time. With every new scientific report, our situation looks more dire, and the deadline for action closer. Just today, WWF released a major report finding that the window for serious action to stave off the worst effects of climate change was about five years, but that "Scientific warnings continue to mount, yet the debate continues and what passes for vision seems to have great difficulty seeing past the next filling station..."

In private, some of the best informed people I know -- who are by virtue of their positions some of the best informed people in the world on these issues, period -- confide, with increasing and disturbing regularity, that they believe we need to be planning 90% cuts in resource and energy use, alongside profoundly improved environmental performance in all manner of fields, by 2030, in part because we need to not only change our own behaviors, but do so in time for the innovations we pioneer to diffuse across the rest of the world. It is one of the great paradoxes of our day, it seems to me, that the more we learn about the large, slow-moving problems we face, the more manifestly urgent the need for action becomes.

This presents some challenges, not least of which is that people are disinclined to change dramatically until forced to do so by events, and climate change, environmental collapse and worsening poverty and conflict are unlikely to fully manifest the kind of events that get our attention in the daily lives of the people of the Global North until it's too late to do much about them. (And, indeed, our tolerance for disturbing news sometimes seems to be increasing much faster than our will to act -- two weeks ago, the first F5 tornado ever on the Enhanced Fujita Scale devastated Greensburg, Kansas, and provided what several experts said might be a taste of the future on the Great Plains; and already the story has all but disappeared from the American media.) We have, as I've heard it called, a profound perception-reality gap.

But bridging that gap, it seems to me, is something those of us who are passionate about and committed to building a bright green future have the capacity to do. We know more and more about the kinds of changes we need to make to bring our impacts within a sustainable range. We have better and better tools for imagining the future and helping people envision those futures and explore their possibilities (what we call future-making tools around here). And we certainly have no shortage of bold and innovative new ideas for how those futures might work better, as the constant stream of such ideas on this site should prove -- indeed, if anything, it seems to me that the frontier of innovation in sustainability is accelerating, moving away from the status quo at a faster and faster rate.

What we need, more than anything, it seemed to me as I shot across the Arctic sky last week, may be nothing less than a willingness to engage in a struggle for control over humanity's conception of its future.

We need, through a thousand efforts (interconnected, leapfrogging one another's best ideas), to help people see into the future we're still unfortunately creating, and help them understand that the ideas of the future we inherited from our parents are bankrupt. They won't work. We will never have them, and pursuing them will lead to disasters which are not only predictable, but predicted. If we continue chasing them, we will suffer a catastrophic collision with reality.

Then we need to do something even bolder: we need to show them futures that could work, explain the ideas and innovations that drive them, and show how life in those bright green futures is not only possible, but could quite likely be better for most of us than the lives we're living now. We need to excite the passions and commitments of millions more people, encourage their creative involvement, elicit their best ideas for what their futures could be. We need to transform ourselves from a movement which uses vague but dramatic threats to prod people into comparatively meaningless actions, into a movement that tells them the truth and invites them to exceed the expectations they have for themselves.

WorldChanging also has a new post in their "Principles" series - "Principle 14: Density, Compact Communities and Smart Growth" (which contains a big list of links outlining the "cities are the future" case).

Urban density is major element in the picture of a bright green future. Compact homes, closely situated, make a drastic difference in the all-around efficiency of a city, from energy to transportation to shopping for basic necessities. They also make it easy to skip driving and take transit or walk, which decreases pollution and improves physical health. Finally, they foster the creation of supportive community networks in which resources can be better shared and everyone feels safer.

Knowing, however, that populations in general are on the rise, and urban populations in particular, it's important to look ahead towards growth that can accommodate greater numbers without degrading the surrounding natural environment and encouraging sprawl. Smart growth strategies look at ways to make living closer to the city more appealing than a life out in the suburbs, encouraging more dense development on the edge of cities and less sprawl out into the open space outside the metropolitan area.

One last post from WorldChanging, this one on urban gardens in Singapore.

A growing culture of urban gardening in Singapore and other major cities in Asia may hold the key to reducing city temperatures, Reuters reports. Apartment dwellers who tire of endless rows of concrete buildings have resorted to planting vegetables in boxes, trees in troughs, and even lawns on concrete yards. Gardeners boast of the visual aesthetics of the gardens, but the vegetation itself has the added benefit of blocking the sun’s rays and lowering temperatures through evapotranspiration, according to experts.

The high-rise gardening movement started small but is growing, participants say. “I thought I was the only one—the only odd nut, the only crazy person interested in growing vegetables,” said Wilson Wong, a Singaporean who started a website where fellow urbanites can share advice and arrange nursery shopping trips and plant swaps. Furn Li, who transformed his concrete balcony into a garden featuring aquatic life, giant tropical ferns, and white pebbles, won Singapore’s first “apartment gardener of the year” award last year. And Hong Kong resident Arthur Van Langenberg has written the book Urban Gardening, documenting his lush urban garden that showcases hundreds of plants and several tree varieties.

The government of Singapore is recognizing the importance of urban gardens as well. In April, it unveiled its first “green” housing estate, integrating walls of vegetation into the architecture itself. “From the scientific point of view, every plant produces a cooling effect,” explained the walls’ designer, Professor Nyuk Hien Wong with the National University of Singapore. “If you look at it as one individual unit doing that, it may not be that significant. But if everybody is doing it, there may be a very big impact,” he said.

Mark Morford at the SF Gate has one of his trademark rants celebrating the death of the Hummer. I saw what was easily the ugliest vehicle I've ever come across last week in Melbourne - a 14 seater stretch Hummer limousine, sitting obscenely in the window of a dealership in Docklands. Hopefully it will soon be as extinct as the dinosaurs it resembles.

The late Rev. Jerry Falwell? He was exactly like a Hummer H2. Oh yes he was. Bloated, arrogant, offensive to millions and deeply wrong in a thousand ways and yet blindly worshipped by a shockingly large and happily uninformed throng of devout minions for no other reason than he was, well, bloated, arrogant and wrong.

Is that too harsh? Lacking in prudent subtlety? I'm completely OK with that.

See, it is time for much rejoicing. It is time for an upraising of hands and a hallelujah and a praise be to the heavens despite how, of course, the heavens don't really exist.

No, not for the death of Falwell, for that would be pointless and in poor taste and besides, the ever-acerbic Christopher Hitchens did it much better over at Slate. And as I pointed out last week, Falwell's own collection of (in)famous quotes do a far better job of revealing the man's true nature and worth to humanity than any sort of carefully articulated, cheerful celebration of his demise ever could.

No, this minor offering of joy is for the imminent and forthcoming death of the Hummer H2 itself. Oh my yes.

See, sales of this particular model -- perhaps the most idiotic consumer vehicle ever produced in your lifetime -- are down. Way down, a full 27 percent from last year alone, which was already way down 22 percent from the year prior, with sales continuing to plummet as fast as gas prices are rising and Bush's war is raging and Americans are generally snapping awake to the fact that dumping well over 100 bucks to fill the tank of this monster abomination every other day might not be the best way to waste their kid's college fund.

Hence, it's heavily rumored that GM will soon kill the model entirely, which is already being supplanted by a slew of smaller, less disgusting H2 offspring like the H3 and the H3 pickup and the H3 whatever-the-hell-else-they-can-think-of to milk this horrible idea until it's deader than Dick Cheney's black soul at a pagan tree festival.

Is this not good news? Is this not a sign that times, at long last, might be changing for the better, even just a little? Wait, don't answer just yet.

First, a flashback. Do you remember the time, that dark and skanky period of bleakness way back in, say, 2003, when gas was (relatively) cheap and Bush's war was still being spun as some sort of righteous, WMD-justified love-in and the dour, global-warming-is-a-liberal-hoax Republicans controlled the sour American universe? It was a time when GM dealers couldn't sell the giant hunk of laughable penis compensation known as the Hummer H2 -- which was nominated that very year for North American Truck of the Year -- fast enough.

GM even went so far as to build ridiculous, theme park-like Hummer dealerships and to contract with special plants in Indiana to crank out America's ugliest, most dangerous, least environmentally friendly monster truck, and celebs and rappers and pro athletes and supermodels and senators and glitz wannabes of every ilk everywhere couldn't waste 50 grand on the horribly built, lunkish hunk of karmic contempt fast enough. Oh what a time it was.

Fast forward to right now. The Republican party is grumbling on the sidelines, kicked to the curb by their own impressive corruption and warmongering and excessive kowtowing to the extreme religious right. America feels slightly more wary, awake, a tad more environmentally aware, slightly more in touch with something resembling its soul. And the H2 -- essentially the emblem of all that is/was wrong with Bush's America -- the bloat, the recklessness, the false machismo and unchecked waste and bigger-is-better senselessness -- might very well end production entirely. Something, at long last, seem to be changing for the better. ...

TreeHugger has a terra preta post - charcoal seems to be the new black lately.

As hard as it may seem to utter "charcoal" and "green" in the same sentence (go on, give it a try), Johannes Lehmann and his colleagues would have you believe that charcoal, or as it's known by researchers in the field, "biochar," is the next big thing in the fight against global warming. In essence, Lehmann, an associate professor of crops and soil sciences at Cornell University, proposes that biochar, which is produced when biomass is baked in the absence of oxygen through a process called pyrolysis, be buried, or "sequestered," in the soil as an alternative approach to tackling climate change.

Results from his research indicate that not only does biochar sequestration keep carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere; it actually extracts the greenhouse gas and helps decrease atmospheric concentrations. Although burning wood waste or ethanol made out of corn is considered "carbon neutral" because the carbon dioxide released in the process will be reabsorbed by other plants (i.e. no net gain or loss barring the effects of deforestation and soil depletion), sequestration is considered a "carbon negative" process since there will be an actual net decrease in the carbon dioxide concentrations.

In an article he published in the latest issue of the journal Nature, Lehmann wrote that "Our calculations suggest that emissions reductions can be 12 to 84 per cent greater if biochar is put back into the soil instead of being burned to offset fossil-fuel use."

While not a new process (Lehman says its use goes back hundreds of years to the Amazon Basin), interest in biochar didn't pick up steam until just recently as the increasing focus on global warming by the world community pushed scientists and policymakers to find new, viable solutions. "Three years ago (biochar) was not considered (for sequestration), but now people are starting to. It's gaining momentum," he says.

Lehmann and his colleagues suggest that biochar could be mixed with topsoil in farming to remove the carbon from the crop's lifecycle, an effect that, when magnified over several countries, would result in a sharp reduction of atmospheric carbon. They argue that the technology is already available and that the pyrolysis process, which also produces biofuel in the form of bio-oil, could make biochar use an economically attractive proposition. "The biophysical benefits are now clearly spelled out and far enough advanced that economists can help to find opportunities to make it work," Lehmann said in a recent interview.

Cleantech Investing has some notes on investments in "demand response" - part of the smart grid future.

It would appear that the cat's out of the bag regarding energy efficiency/ smart grid technology, and particularly its subsector demand response. First, the successful IPO by Comverge (COMV), and now DR rival EnerNOC (ENOC) has made a similarly big splash in the public markets.

Both companies are venture-backed efforts in the DR space, so it's a good sign to venture investors that the public market exit option should be open to "boring" energy efficiency technologies going forward. It probably reflects a recognition of the strong economics presented by energy efficiency -- the best way to make a kilowatt-hour is not to use one in the first place (admittedly, we've been beating this drum for a while now, apologies for being repetitive). Hopefully these companies continue to provide strong comps going forward.

The thing to note about both companies and their competitors is that they will need to continue to build an ecosystem of smart grid/ energy automation technologies in order to support their growth. DR services are gaining acceptance by major utilities (and no less importantly, their governing Public Utility Commissions). But right now, most DR services (speaking only about all such providers overall) entail literally picking up a phone or paging or emailing a facility manager, who then individually turns down power usage (or turns on a backup generator) during the period of the "event." It's a relatively low-tech ESCO-like approach that will need to become more automated over time in order to access more than early adopter markets. I would expect a period of some consolidation -- both horizontal and vertical -- as the freshly-capitalized DR industry seeks to put together a truly integrated, comprehensive, tech-enabled service offering for utility customers.

Other deals:

* Solar thermal electric technology developer Sopogy has raised a $2.3mm Series A led by Tradewinds Capital, according to the CEO. The company, which is based in Hawaii, is targeting their products at both centralized and rooftop installations. ...

Some more interesting snippets from Cleantech Investing here in "Arch Rock and Ice Energy" - I like the Woolsey quote on hydrogen and Bill Joy's quote about global warming driving more investment than the internet did (see the original for lots of links).

* Arch Rock, which is developing hardware and software for wireless sensor systems, announced a $10mm insider round this week.

* Ice Energy, which uses ice-based air conditioners to shift energy usage from peak periods to non-peak periods (freeze the ice at night, use it to cool a building during the day) raised a $25mm round of financing.

* VentureWire reported that AdaptivEnergy, which is developing piezoelectric devices for applications like thermal management and fuel cells, signed a development agreement with the CIA's In-Q-Tel -- and is seeking a $5-10mm venture round.

* It's not really a venture investment, but it's interesting to note Google.org gave a $200k grant to CalCars.org.

Lots of conference updates to discuss:

* It's perhaps the most-blogged cleantech conference ever. The first Austin Clean Energy Venture Summit was oversubscribed, and has gotten rave reviews. Tech Confidential wrote a series of blog posts (see here, here, here and here). There were quite a few good articles by Martin LaMonica and Michael Kanellos on News.com. A nice little column can also be found here. But I thought the best review of sorts was a text message I got on my cell phone from a colleague on-site: Grt conf down here. Woolsey said govt move twd fmly car hydrogen fuel cells "stupidest thing govt has done in energy policy ever." That was the complete message, beginning to end... Anyway, sounds like many kudos to Joel Serface and his team on a solid event.

* Also getting a lot of coverage was the latest Cleantech Venture Forum in Frankfurt, thanks in part to Bill Joy's declaration that "A global response to climate change will spur a bigger business revolution than the internet." A lot more detail on his remarks can be found here, and Wired's blog has their perspective as well. Speaking of the Cleantech Group, they've taken a very interesting step in backing a joint venture to launch a cleantech business park in China.

* Last week in Pasadena, California, the Clean Innovation Conference 2007 took place as well -- sounds like it was yet another strong, oversubscribed cleantech event.

Sectoral updates:

* Lots of talk recently about the solar market. Mark Coker writes about another new solar startup, Signet Solar -- interestingly, this one is 100% dependent upon Applied Materials' equipment, and not any proprietary technology. And solar moves one more step toward commoditization... Joel Makower has the story about Wal-Mart's recent RFP for solar on 340 store rooftops -- and their subsequent pull-back to covering only 22 locations... And here's a BusinessWeek article on the current state of play in solar... Finally, is there a Chinese solar company out there that isn't IPOing?

O'Reilly has announced some of the speakers for the upcoming Energy Innovation conference.

The 21st Century's challenge is affordable energy. As pollution and scarcity drive up the costs of energy, clean energy production and efficient consumption become economically sensible. Smart grids, net-zero houses, plug-in cars, and clean coal are just a few of the technologies showcased at the O'Reilly Energy Innovation Conference. Join us as we spotlight the practical solutions we can deploy today that promise not just a future but a successful one.

Three themes will run through the conference: (1) the need for hard numbers to gauge the efficiency and economics of the technologies; (2) the gains to be made from networked devices, producers, and consumers; and (3) the need for engineering and physical breakthroughs at all levels.

Ready for the energy revolution? It's already here. Here are just a few of the speakers, the topics, and the sessions at the Energy Innovation Conference that will be leading the way to a brighter, more sustainable future:

John Davenport, CEO, Fiberstars
Lighting the Way: Fiber Optics as an Efficient Alternative to Traditional
Lighting Systems
Spotlight on accent lighting. Davenport explains how replacing traditional lighting systems with fiber optics, commercial buildings can save up to 80% more while improving the quality of light in today's office buildings.

Michael Dvorak, Stanford University
Unlocking Low and Zero Carbon Energy Resources From the Dakotas
Big wind meets clean coal. Dvorak will present findings on how combining clean-coal (CC) power plants with large wind farms can utilize high-voltage DC transmission lines to bring these untapped resources to large urban load centers around the US.

Tom Gage, CEO/President, AC Propulsion
Transportation Without Petroleum
The time is right for commercially viable plug-in hybrid automobiles. Gage addresses new developments in battery technology, power and control functions, and innovative thinking on the part of utility companies including vehicle-to-grid resources.

Bruce Nordman, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Energy Efficiency and Digital Networks
The bad news: computer networks are enormous consumers of power. The good news: intelligent uses of technology promise savings of billions of dollars in the U.S. each year. Nordman will describe the current efforts underway to evolve network architectures and standards toward energy efficiency.

Sunil Paul, Spring Ventures
How to Break Into Cleantech
How will technology and capitalism solve environmental, climate change, and energy sector problems? Serial entrepreneur Sunil Paul, founder of Bright Mail and Freeloader, will lead a panel of investors and entrepreneurs as they explain how to make the transition to cleantech.

Terry Swack, CEO, Clean Culture
Clean Coal? An Oxymoron: the Great Debate
Swack will present the debate on clean coal technology, carbon trade offs, the future of energy and mining.

Peter Williams, CTO, Big Green Innovations, IBM
Intelligent Utility Networks
Meet the smart grid. Advanced metering infrastructures, IP-enabled equipment, the integration of Distributed Energy Resources, advanced software systems, information modeling, and analytics are all part of smarter utility network. Williams will explain how new technologies can help power companies take advantage of an ever-increasing and distributed supply and demand environment while reducing the carbon footprint of their customers.

Energy Innovation will also feature keynotes from industry leaders including:
- Vinod Khosla, Partner, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers
- Dan Kammen, Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL)
- Paul B. MacCready, AeroVironment, Inc

More speakers, sessions and keynotes are being added to the program daily.

See the full roster on the web site: http://www.energyinnovation.com/pub/w/59/speakers.html

Jeff Atwood has a post on the move toward energy efficient computer power supplies, with Google leading the way (given that modern data centres consume an enormous amount of power, this is especially important for huge server farm owners but is also important to implement across the vast number of devices individuals own as well).

If you're Google, or any other company building out massive datacenter farms, cheap hardware is a strategic advantage. It means you can build larger and larger datacenters for less money. Computers may be smaller and cheaper than ever, but they still require electricity to operate. You now have a new problem. The electrical power used to drive all that free hardware you've amassed becomes your greatest expense:

Over the last three generations of Google's computing infrastructure, performance has nearly doubled, Barroso said. But because performance per watt remained nearly unchanged, that means electricity consumption has also almost doubled.

If server power consumption grows 20 percent per year, the four-year cost of a server's electricity bill will be larger than the $3,000 initial price of a typical low-end server with x86 processors. Google's data center is populated chiefly with such machines. But if power consumption grows at 50 percent per year, "power costs by the end of the decade would dwarf server prices," even without power increasing beyond its current 9 cents per kilowatt-hour cost, Barroso said.

Computer hardware costs may be approaching zero, but power costs are fixed-- or rising. The thirst for power in the face of increasingly large datacenters has driven Google to build datacenters in out-of-the-way places where power costs are low:

Google, for example, has watched its energy consumption almost double during the past three generations of upgrades to its sprawling computing infrastructure. It recently unveiled a major new datacenter site in a remote part of Oregon, where power costs are a fraction of those at Google's home base in Silicon Valley. But cheap power may not be enough. Last year, Google engineer Luiz André Barroso predicted that energy costs would dwarf equipment costs -- "possibly by a large margin" -- if power-hungry datacenters didn’t mend their ways. Barroso went on to warn that datacenters' growing appetite for power "could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet."

Google doesn't just build their own servers. They build their own power supplies, too:

The power supply to servers is one place that energy is unnecessarily lost. One-third of the electricity running through a typical power supply leaks out as heat, [Holze] said. That's a waste of energy and also creates additional costs in the cooling necessary because of the heat added to a building.

Rather than waste the electricity and incur the additional costs for cooling, Google has power supplies specially made that are 90% efficient. "It's not hard to do. That's why to me it's personally offensive" that standard power supplies aren't as efficient, he said.

While he admits that ordering specially made power supplies is more expensive than buying standard products, Google still saves money ultimately by conserving energy and cooling, he said.

Google wants to extend that same efficiency outside their datacenter to your home PC. The three page Google whitepaper High-efficiency power supplies for home computers and servers (pdf) outlines how and why:

At Google, we run many computers in our data centers to serve your queries, so energy conservation and efficiency are important to us. For several years we've been developing more efficient power supplies to eliminate waste from power supplies. Instead of the typical efficiencies of 60-70%, our servers’ power supplies now run at 90% efficiency or better, cutting down the energy losses by a factor of four.

We believe this energy-saving power supply technology can be applied to home computers, too. So we’ve been working with Intel and other partners to propose a new power supply standard. The opportunity for savings is immense — we estimate that if deployed in 100 million PCs running for an average of eight hours per day, this new standard would save 40 billion kilowatt-hours over three years, or more than $5 billion at California’s energy rates.

Amnesty International has delivered a harsh but fair assessment of the Rodent, declaring him a fear monger who "thrives on myopic and cowardly leadership" and comparing him to Robert Mugabe and George Bush. The story seemed to get a substantial rewrite during the day - I suspect someone was not pleased. And when you rank about 40th in the world in terms of press freedom you can't expect press stories to remain static throughout the day. The Australian also has a column on the vast waves of taxpayer money being wasted on government propaganda campaigns. Johnny used to criticise Paul Keating for this sort of thing (and I used to strongly agree with him back then) but in this as in everything else, his hypocrisy knows no bounds...

Prime Minister John Howard has robustly defended his government against claims by Amnesty International that it is as divisive as Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's regime. The human rights pressure group has accused Mr Howard of portraying asylum-seekers as a threat to national security.

In a report released overnight, it also criticised Australia's role in the war on terror and its treatment of female victims of violence.

Amnesty secretary-general Irene Khan said the fear generated by leaders such as Mr Howard "thrives on myopic and cowardly leadership". Ms Khan lumped Mr Howard in with Mr Mugabe, US President George W Bush and Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir in a paragraph about leaders who used fear to suit their political agenda.

The SMH also has an article by George Monbiot - Too much at stake to let climate-change sceptics bluff the world - continuing his efforts to debunk "The Great Global Warming Swindle". Monbiot appeared on Lateline tonight, arguing with buffoon Andrew Bolt. Tim Flannery also made an appearance and talked about the global warming -> drought -> lack of water for coal fired power stations -> rising energy prices feedback loop.

Were it not for dissent, science, like politics, would have stayed in the Dark Ages. All the great heroes of the discipline - Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein - took tremendous risks in confronting mainstream opinion. Today's crank has often proved to be tomorrow's visionary.

But being one thing does not always lead to being another. Being a crank does not automatically make you a visionary. There is little prospect, for example, that Dr Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang, the South African health minister who has claimed that AIDS can be treated with garlic, lemon and beetroot, will one day be hailed as a genius.

The problem with The Great Global Warming Swindle, which the ABC plans to screen and which caused a sensation when it was broadcast in Britain earlier this year, is that to make its case it relies not on visionaries, but on people whose findings have been proven wrong. The implications could not be graver. Thousands of people could be misled into believing there is no problem to address.

The film's main contention is that the rise in global temperatures is caused not by greenhouse gases but by changes in the sun's activity. It is built around the premise that in 1991 the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen discovered that recent temperature variations on Earth coincided with the length of the cycle of sunspots: the shorter they were, the higher the temperature. Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the finding was the result of incorrect handling of data. The truth is the opposite: temperatures have continued to rise as the length of the sunspot cycle has increased. ...

NASA's Peak Enginner has a post at Peak Oil Design on "11 Incontrovertible Truths of Oil Production and Peak Oil Arguments". I'd disagree with the contention that wealth is finite, but the other arguments are sound.

At NASA, we frequently have to step back and retreat to the last recognizable common ground on technical issues. If we hope to expand the dialogue about Peak Oil, we must do the same. Below are what I consider uncontroversial, solid facts related to energy and oil production. While several of these statements may appear ridiculously obvious to those who are in any way familiar with oil production, we must begin the discussion at the least common denominator -- the bare facts on which everyone can agree. If you are unfamiliar with the basic arguments of Peak Oil, I encourage you to explore these resources.

Please provide feedback on whether you agree or disagree with this list and we’ll see if starting from common ground will allow a wider audience to collectively develop more meaningful ideas about Peak Oil mitigation.

1. Oil must be found before it can be produced.

No commodity can be exploited if its existence is unknown. No oil can enter production if it is undiscovered. An absence of discovery therefore yields a future absence of production.

2. Oil must be produced before it can be used.

No commodity is useful if it is not brought to a useful state. Oil reserves are useless if they are not transformed into a usable product. Oil reserves are therefore of no use until they are brought to the surface, refined, and moved to the point of desired use.

3. On the scale of the lifetime of our current civilization, oil is a finite resource.

Any energy source is finite given the appropriate amount of time. The sun will eventually exhaust its nuclear fuel, but over the course of a human lifetime (or even the human species’ lifetime) solar energy will not be depleted. Oil production will peak within the lifetime of our current civilization. There is no position in the debate (including abiotic oil proponents) which disagrees with this point. Oil is renewable on the scale of the Earth’s lifetime, but our species would likely be extinct before oil reserves can be replenished.

4. If demand for oil is higher than the available supply of oil, not everyone who desires to use oil will have the option.

A fundamental economic principle: when demand exceeds supply, a shortage exists. Some who want to use oil will not have the option. The usual moderator for this situation is an increase in price.

5. Petroleum products have the highest energy density of any portable energy storage medium.

There are no known alternatives that match the energy density of products derived from fossil fuels.

6. The current economy would suffer if the cost of energy increased by a large percentage.

There are no suggestions that increases in energy costs improve the quality of the economy. There are major disagreements on the effects of high energy costs on the economy.

7. In a closed system, growth of any kind must eventually stop.

This is a founding principle of any scientific study, be it physics, chemistry, biology, or economics. If we take the earth as a closed system, then all growth must, at the very least, reach a maximum at some point: oil production, wealth, population, and so forth. Our choices determine when and how growth stops.

8. All known alternative energy sources currently have higher initial investment requirements than does oil.

Solar energy, wind energy, nuclear energy, coal-to-liquids, and others present a high cost-per-Watt than oil energy. This does not take into account the total life cycle costs, in which alternatives like solar and wind become among the most cost-effective energy sources.

9. Replacing the current oil-based infrastructure requires time.

Another fundamental principle of all science: going from point A to point B requires a finite amount of time. There is argument over how much time is required to replace our existing infrastructure.

10. Replacing the current oil-based infrastructure requires money.

A key to economic theory: a desired action can not be realized without applying an amount of currency. The amount and sources of funding are up for debate.

11. Replacing the current oil-based infrastructure requires energy.

In order to restructure our energy system, we must expend energy to manufacture replacement technology. This further reduces the amount of energy available after an infrastructure replacement.

Can retreating back to these key points allow us to renew open discussions about the risks and probabilities of oil depletion? Perhaps these bare-bones facts will encourage more people to investigate the available data on their own and develop their own conclusions. We can all agree that energy deeply affects our lives, but there are far too few people exploring the possibility of a world with less available energy.

I watched "Crude" on the ABC tonight (video available online at the link) which was quite a well done history oil oil and explanation of peak oil - all the usual culprits were featured - Hubbert, Deffeyes, Campbell, Leggett, Sonia Shar etc, many of whom I'd never seen on TV before.

There was also a Catalyst Special on people tackling climate change in Australia (obviously the Rodent isn't one of them). I couldn't find a transcript or video (maybe it will appear later) but while I was poking around I noticed this Catalyst segment from last month on Melbourne's new green Council House building CH2 (video at the link).

Dr Graham Phillips: Here’s that environmentally friendly building I mentioned before. It’s called the CH2 building. It’s here right in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD and it’s been inspired by Mother Nature herself.

Narration: Like flower petals, CH2’s energy-conserving shutters for example, open and close following the sun.

CH2 is an example of a new movement in architecture called bio-mimicry..buildings that mimic nature to reduce their impact on the environment.

Professor Rob Adams: The world woke up in 2007 to global warming and basically said we’ve got a problem.

Mick Pearce: We have to move very quickly. We’ve got about 10 years or something before we get catastrophic climate change. 40% of total energy consumed is consumed by operating buildings – 40%!

Narration: The problem with modern city buildings is that they’re big glass boxes that burn a lot of energy - by design. Something must be done, decided Melbourne City Council chief designer Rob Adams.

Professor Rob Adams: I’m ashamed to say, I’m an architect and have been for 30 years. We’ve sort of lost the art of common sense design when we went into the modern movement. We had the ability of new technology and air conditioning and we could go for these groovy glass boxes and we sold them to ourselves as well as our clients. We actually forgot about the building we grew up in that eves over the windows protecting the glass and that had a bit of mass in them to cool them down. We’re relearning our profession.

Narration: Rob decided to employ alternative architect, Mick Pearce. For the last three decades Mick’s been designing buildings in Africa, and has developed a new design philosophy.

Mick Pearce: We need to make buildings work with nature and not fight against Nature.

Dr Graham Phillips: And you think at the moment buildings tend to fight against nature.

Mick Pearce: They do, yes. They more or less say we can defeat nature.

Narration: Ch2 works with nature even in its details. To stay cool…smaller windows are at the top where there’s plenty of sunlight. The windows get progressively bigger going down, where there’s less light.

But termite mounds were one of Mick’s big inspirations.

Mick Pearce: Well here we have two beautiful examples.

Dr Graham Phillips: They’re beautiful aren’t they.

Mick Pearce: They’re buildings. They’re enormous – compared to the termites. Much bigger than anything we’ve built for our comparative size.

Narration: Termite mounds achieve something quite remarkable with climate control. Outside, temperatures rise above 40 degrees and plunge below zero at night. Inside it’s always a steady 30 degrees or so.

Mick Pearce: In other words they’ve found an air-conditioning system that works without a power station. They use the sun and the wind.

Narration: Mick was inspired to cool buildings the termite way, using the stack effect. The heat generated by the living creatures inside the termitary warms the air, which then rises. It escapes through vents at the top of the mounds, and cool air rushes in at the bottom to replace it. This stack effect is nature’s air conditioning and Mick copied it.

In CH2 rising warm air from the offices escapes through vents on the roof, hidden in the electricity-generating wind turbines.

This natural cooling is supplemented with another low-energy system. ...

Commenter SP points out one for the hydrogen fans (who don't number James Woolsey in their ranks) from PlosOne "High-Yield Hydrogen Production from Starch and Water by a Synthetic Enzymatic Pathway"

Background

The future hydrogen economy offers a compelling energy vision, but there are four main obstacles: hydrogen production, storage, and distribution, as well as fuel cells. Hydrogen production from inexpensive abundant renewable biomass can produce cheaper hydrogen, decrease reliance on fossil fuels, and achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions, but current chemical and biological means suffer from low hydrogen yields and/or severe reaction conditions.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Here we demonstrate a synthetic enzymatic pathway consisting of 13 enzymes for producing hydrogen from starch and water. The stoichiometric reaction is C6H10O5 (l)+7 H2O (l)→12 H2 (g)+6 CO2 (g). The overall process is spontaneous and unidirectional because of a negative Gibbs free energy and separation of the gaseous products with the aqueous reactants.

Conclusions

Enzymatic hydrogen production from starch and water mediated by 13 enzymes occurred at 30°C as expected, and the hydrogen yields were much higher than the theoretical limit (4 H2/glucose) of anaerobic fermentations.

Significance

The unique features, such as mild reaction conditions (30°C and atmospheric pressure), high hydrogen yields, likely low production costs ($~2/kg H2), and a high energy-density carrier starch (14.8 H2-based mass%), provide great potential for mobile applications. With technology improvements and integration with fuel cells, this technology also solves the challenges associated with hydrogen storage, distribution, and infrastructure in the hydrogen economy.

SP's take on it:

I dislike the phrase "The future hydrogen economy offers..." as if this is a forgone conlcusion.

You will note in equation 1 {C6H10O5 (l)+7 H2O (l)→12 H2 (g)+6 CO2 (g).} that the process still produces CO2 so how exactly this is "carbon neutral" escapes me.

I think their "economic analysis" is totally flawed relying as it does on comodiites currently produced via "underpriced" fossil fuels.

I think you can guess that grinding up Rabbits (see image) and subsequent treatments are not exactly low energy processes... I'm not sure, but i suspect that isolation of these enzymes relies on density gradients in high speed centrifuges (but I could be wrong).

Of course techno-philes/techno-optimists might argue that we could genetically engineer a bacterium that produced all 13 enzymes and produce hydrogen when fed starch. I think we can agree that should such a hypothetical bacterium escape (and it would) it would potentially decimate plant populations.

And, like Plan B-ethanol, are we still going to turn over land to the production of more starch/sugar crops.

SP also pointed to a webcam on Lake Nyos in response to yesterday's post. I'm not sure what is more amazing - the CO2 fountain they built or the fact there is a webcam trained on it.

The fountain is self generated by CO2 degassing... as the bubbles expand they become bouyant lifting water and in the process dragging more water in at the bottom, which being disturbed (by turbulance) in the pipe makes the process largely self sustaining.

This is has been installed to prevent a build up of dissolved CO2 at depth which might explosively degass (at it did in 1986 killing ~2000 people) when disturbed by tremors or landslips.

I suggest a shorter name. Either "The cult of Nyos" or simply "Nyosians".

The guys at the WSJ Energy Roundup have looked at the plan to make all New York taxis hybrids and ask "What Would Travis Bickle Do ?"".

This is relatively old news, having been announced this morning on the Today show, but Energy Roundup couldn’t resist commenting on the fact that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants the city’s entire fleet of 13,000 taxi cabs to be hybrids within five years, up from 375 now.

“There’s an awful lot of taxicabs on the streets of New York City obviously, so it makes a real big difference,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “These cars just sit there in traffic sometimes, belching fumes; this does a lot less. It’s a lot better for all of us.”

The only thing Energy Roundup wants to know is: Will Robert De Niro be driving a hybrid in the Taxi Driver sequel?

For the traditional Ron Paul segment, rumour has it he is going to appear on The Daily Show and maybe The Colbert Report.

And to close, here's a story from the guy who does the morning surf report for Aquabumps on a "Dolphin Circus" - wish I'd been down at Bondi yesterday...

I've been shooting Bondi for a good part of 8 years now. No medal please. But how unlucky is this... 15 minutes after I finished shooting yesterday a huge school of fish (large Salmon) rocked into the bay. I've seen aerial shots of the school - I am talking a pack 40 metres wide in front of the pav. Moments later (at exactly 7:45am) 200 dolphins charged the bay cornering the fish in the south end. Bondi Lifeguard Dino calling it "best ever". Airborne dolphins everywhere...stopping traffic on Campbell Parade...a freak spectacle at Bondi...and I don't have a shot to show you. Sorry. But thanks for the 1000 emails and phone calls...it's like that old saying "should have been here earlier later buddy"...next time. next time.