Spare Some Change For Clean Coal ?  

The local coal industry has taken the unusual step of putting some money into "clean coal" research, instead of their usual practice of asking for government handouts. They are also suggesting that other industries cough up - presumably they don't mean pwoer companies investing in clean coal plants if the technology ever works, but paying up right now to subsidise the miners. Some things never change...

Under political pressure over climate change, the coal industry has vowed to raise at least $1 billion to develop technology to curb greenhouse gases. The announcement increases by $700 million the funds producers have committed to clean coal technology. Both the federal government and Labor have put much store in the technology as a way of reducing emissions.

The Australian Coal Association said the $1 billion would be raised over 10 years by extending the $300 million COAL21 Fund. All black coal companies will contribute equally to the fund through a voluntary levy, which will continue indefinitely. "This should leave no doubt about the coal industry's intention to partner with state and federal governments on nationally significant clean coal projects," ACA executive director Mark O'Neill said.

Mr O'Neill called on power generators and other industries to share the costs of technological change.

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie this week threatened to increase mining royalties, claiming the state's industry had reneged on a deal to invest in clean coal.

Queensland Resources Council chief executive Michael Roche said $300 million of the industry technology fund would support a near-zero emissions project in his state. He did not specify if that would be Mr Beattie's flagship ZeroGen project near Rockhampton in central Queensland. The ZeroGen project involves the capture and storage of carbon emissions from coal to generate low emission electricity. ...

Federal Labor welcomed the clean coal fund, saying it showed the sector was serious about tackling climate change. "Australia has an abundance of coal and it is in our nation's interest to find ways of using this resource in an environmentally sustainable way," Labor spokesmen Chris Evans and Peter Garrett said in a statement.

Even the Australian Greens, whose leader Bob Brown has called for the industry's abolition within three years, backed the clean coal fund so government money could be spent developing renewable energy. "While it remains to be seen whether burying coal's pollution can be demonstrated to be safe, sustainable and economically viable, we welcome the move by coal corporations to invest a proportion of their own profits into this research," climate change spokeswoman Christine Milne said.

Not all her colleagues agreed. "Clean coal technology is a dangerous pipe dream," Green senator Kerry Nettle told reporters.

Technology Review has an article on "Solar Power at Half the Cost" - about a "new roof-mounted system that concentrates sunlight could cut the price of photovoltaics" from a company called Solient (what Gizmodo calls Solient Green).

A new mechanism for focusing light on small areas of photovoltaic material could make solar power in residential and commercial applications cheaper than electricity from the grid in most markets in the next few years. Initial systems, which can be made at half the cost of conventional solar panels, are set to start shipping later this year, says Brad Hines, CTO and founder of Soliant Energy, a startup based in Pasadena, CA, that has developed the new modules.

Concentrating sunlight with mirrors or lenses on a small area cuts the costs of solar power in part by reducing the amount of expensive photovoltaic material needed. But while concentrated solar photovoltaic systems are attractive for large-scale, ground-based solar farms for utilities, conventional designs are difficult to mount on rooftops, where most residential and commercial customers have space for solar panels. The systems are typically large and heavy, and they're mounted on posts so that they can move to track the sun, which makes them more vulnerable to gusts of wind than ordinary flat solar panels are.

Soliant has designed a solar concentrator that tracks the sun throughout the day but is lighter and not pole-mounted. The system fits in a rectangular frame and is mounted to the roof with the same hardware that's used for conventional flat solar panels. Yet the devices will likely cost half as much as a conventional solar panel, says Hines. A second-generation design, which concentrates light more and uses better photovoltaics, could cost a quarter as much. He says that a more advanced design should be ready by 2010.

The Soliant design combines both lenses and mirrors to create a more compact system. Each module is made of rows of aluminum troughs, each about the width and depth of a gutter. These troughs are mounted inside a rectangular frame and can tilt in unison from side to side to follow the sun. Each trough is enclosed on top with a clear acrylic lid. Inside each trough, a strip of silicon photovoltaic material runs along the bottom. As light enters, some of it reflects off the inside surface of the trough and reaches the strip of silicon. The rest of the incoming light is focused on the strip by a lens incorporated into the acrylic lid.

As a solar concentrating system, this design has a few drawbacks. Because the troughs are mounted close together, they shade each other during parts of the day, decreasing the total amount of electricity produced. They can also only track from side to side, which makes it impossible for them to follow exactly the arc of the sun across the sky. This second problem will be addressed in the second-generation design, in which each trough will be divided into sections, each of which can pivot from side to side and also up and down.

"Information Liberation" made it to the top of the reddit rankings today with an article pointing out there have been "No Organic Bee Losses".

"Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. She has twice run for a seat in Ottawa's House of Commons, making strong showings around 5% for Canada's fledgling Green Party. She is also leader of the provincial wing of her party. In a widely circulated email, she wrote:

I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies.

Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site at Here, Michael Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page:

Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I'm happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won't hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.

This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I've gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren't aware, and I wasn't for a long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I've measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three dimensions instead of one, it produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells.

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support?

The Guardian has a report on a Peruvian Amazon tribe suing oil giant Occidental Petroleum (via Celsias).

Members of an indigenous tribe from the Peruvian Amazon sued the oil giant Occidental Petroleum yesterday in California’s superior court, alleging that the company knowingly put the health of the Achuar people at risk and damaged their habitat.

The claim alleges that over the course of three decades Oxy, as it is known, engaged in “irresponsible, reckless, immoral and illegal practices” in an “unchecked effort to profit from Amazonian oil”. It adds: “These practices were below accepted industry standards, prohibited by law, and Oxy knew they would result in the severe contamination of water and land.”

… While the Achuar live below Peru’s $64 (£32) per month national poverty line, Occidental is one of the world’s biggest oil companies. Its revenue for 2004 was $11.37bn, while its chief executive, Ray Irani, was the second highest paid CEO in the US last year, receiving £160m.

… Andrés Sandi Mucushua, a tribal representative, said: “My people are sick and dying because of Oxy. The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests.”

… A report released last week claimed that Occidental dumped “an average of 850,000 barrels per day of toxic oil by-products … directly into rivers and streams used by the Achuar for drinking, bathing, washing and fishing, totalling approximately 9bn barrels over 30 years”. The report, compiled by environmental and human rights groups in the US and Peru, states that Occidental “knowingly employed out-of-date practices … and used methods long outlawed in the US, and in violation of Peruvian law”

The SMH reports that the Ten-year global warming window is closing. They also have an article on a previous period of warming caused by a couple of giant oceanic burps (what caused the burps is still unknown).

CLIMATE change may have passed a key tipping point that could mean temperatures rising more quickly than predicted and it being harder to tackle global warming, research suggests.

Scientists at Bristol University say a previously unexplained surge of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere in recent years is due to more greenhouse gas escaping from trees, plants and soils. Global warming was making vegetation less able to absorb the carbon pollution pumped out by human activity.

Such a shift would worsen the gloomy predictions of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned last week that there is less than a decade to tackle rising emissions to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

The prediction came as an equally stark warning was issued that global warming was contributing to increased conflict over dwindling resources.

At the moment about half of human carbon emissions are re-absorbed into the environment, but the fear among scientists is that increased temperatures will reduce this effect. Wolfgang Knorr, a climate researcher at Bristol, said: "We could be seeing the carbon cycle feedback kicking in, which is good news for scientists because it shows our models are correct. But it's bad news for everybody else." Measurements of carbon dioxide in samples of air show a sharp increase since the turn of the century, with unusually high levels in four of the past five years. The spike does not seem to match the pattern of increased emissions from fossil-fuel burning, and can only be partly explained by natural events such as fires and weather phenomena including El Nino.

The SMH also reports that the end of the latest El Nino should break the drought if past patterns are repeated. If not, irrigators are in trouble.

THE drought's crippling grip should be broken by August. If not, the country will be in deep trouble. A Bureau of Meteorology analysis of El Ninos, blamed for bringing drought to eastern Australia, has revealed a striking pattern that should boost the hopes of farmers and city residents nervously watching dam levels.

The bureau's National Climate Centre has identified 20 El Ninos - the sustained warming of large areas of the central and eastern tropical Pacific - that have brought drought to the Murray-Darling Basin in the past 107 years. "In all 20 cases," says a bureau report, the demise of the El Nino was followed by "a period of sustained above-normal rainfall … no later than the following winter [June-August]". ...

But if the long-term pattern is broken, and significant rain does not fall by August, south-eastern Australia would be facing "a disaster, particularly for irrigators". "Then we'd be in unexplored territory," Dr Trewin said. Such an "extreme event … would obviously have a major impact on the public debate" over climate. "It would be unprecedented. The impact on water availability would be severe in the Murray- Darling Basin."

Dave Roberts at Grist has an interesting piece on the perils of coal to liquids from a global warming point of view and the unfortunate support Barrack Obama is giving to this horrible means of producing liquid fuels. So much for the view of some peak oilers that peak oil is a good thing from a carbon emissions point of view...

The LA Times has a long story about the growing conflict over coal-to-liquid (CTL) fuel. This is the most important paragraph in the piece, though it is inexplicably buried at the bottom:

A new study has concluded that turning coal into liquid fuel yields 125% more carbon dioxide than producing diesel fuel and 66% more than gasoline. If the carbon dioxide is captured and permanently stored, liquid coal emits 20% more greenhouse gas than diesel but 11% less than conventional gasoline, according to the study to be released next week by Argonne National Laboratory, a research arm of the Energy Department.

In plain English, this means that best case scenario -- all new CTL plants are accompanied by CO2 sequestration facilities -- you come out with a fuel that's barely better on greenhouse-gas emissions than gasoline.

With regard to global warming, the very best we could do with CTL is stay on the same disastrous trajectory we are on now. Does that sound like something that deserves taxpayer subsidies?

Yes, if your job depends on remaining in the good graces of the coal industry:

A bipartisan group of lawmakers, including one presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), is pushing to provide federal loan guarantees, tax breaks and other subsidies to spur the production of fuel from coal.

If that's not enough to sour your Obamamania, get a load of this:

Obama, who is sponsoring separate legislation to cap carbon dioxide emissions, said his support for coal fuel depended on finding a way to remove the greenhouse gases emitted in production.

"If it is used simply to compound the problem of greenhouse gases, then it's not going to be a credible strategy," he said.

The bill does not require that the fuel be produced without increasing greenhouse gas emissions, though it does offer tax incentives to encourage the use of technology that captures carbon dioxide.

Let's review what we know:

1. To slow or stop global warming, we need to drastically reduce the emissions from the transportation sector.
2. CTL would increase emissions from the transportation sector, unless every CTL plant was accompanied by a (massively expensive, technically unproven) CO2 sequestration facility, in which case it would keep emissions on their present course.
3. The bills being proposed to funnel taxpayer subsidies to the coal industry for CTL do not require that they be accompanied by CO2 sequestration facilities.

The coal industry has done more than any other to degrade our atmosphere and threaten our future. Now coal barons want to further degrade the atmosphere by creating liquid fuel. And Barack Obama wants taxpayers to pay them to do it.

This CTL issue is a clear dividing line for legislators. Are you serious about global warming -- about our collective future, and our kids' future -- or are you more concerned with the parochial corporate interests of your home state?

Montana's Jon Tester has chosen to be serious about global warming. Obama has made a different choice.

Coomenter zacaroni follows up:

Politicians and leaders in the business world would be wise to listen to visionaries like Amory Lovins and William McDonough. Why frantically search for new solutions to our energy crisis (like coal) when all that's really needed is a revolution in the way we design things (and perhaps a slight change in our lifestyles)?

Inventors, engineers and designers have proved that the technology works, and that it is economically feasible. And now there's a big market for it. All that's needed is for people in power, like Obama, to stand behind it. Too bad he's got his head stuck in the coal bucket.

Maybe he would see things differently if he saw this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ1dECu5sSc

Grist also has a note on a Canadian bureaucrat in trouble for leaking a document about climate change.

This week's hottest eco-scandal comes from Canada. For real! Where else would Mounties descend on a federal office to arrest an anarchist-leaning, punk-drumming bureaucrat for allegedly leaking a climate document to activists and the press? We swear on our stack of Celine CDs: this happened Wednesday at the Environment Canada office in Ottawa. Jeff Monaghan, 27, who's worked at the agency for four years, was released but still may face charges; yesterday, he described the arrest as a "witch hunt" and an attempt to "bully public servants whom [the agency], in a paranoid fit, believe are partisan and embittered." Monaghan did not admit to leaking the draft, which confirmed Canada's plan to abandon the Kyoto Protocol, but he didn't so much deny it, and spoke about the need for "real action" on climate change. He called the charges against him "an extension of a government-wide communications strategy pinned on secrecy, intimidation, and centralization." And our little Canada-loving hearts broke.

The Australian media jellyfish has reared up on its hind tentacles (stealing a phrase from Billmon) and complained about the erosion of free speech and the relentless weakening of freedom of information laws. The Gold Coast Bulletin adds that we are headed down the "dark path to a secret state.

Rival media companies are putting aside their differences to make a stand on what they say is a decline in press freedom in Australia. Murdoch-owned newspaper publisher News Limited is leading an industry-wide initiative aimed at arresting what it says is a perceived slide in the freedom of speech.

The scheme will incorporate an "audit" of the state of free speech in Australia, the results of which will be presented to the federal government.

More details of the plan will be revealed on Thursday by News Ltd chief executive John Hartigan and the chief executives of other leading media organisations. They include Fairfax's David Kirk, the ABC's Mark Scott, Austereo's Michael Anderson, who is also the chairman of Commercial Radio Australia, and Julie Flynn, of Free TV Australia.

The journalists' union and other media organisations are also supporting the initiative. The show of unity had been inspired by a growing sense of unease in the media, said News Ltd spokesman Greg Baxter. "The media industry is getting together because it is deeply troubled about the state of free speech in Australia and the gradual erosion over many years of the right to free speech and the ability of the media to keep Australians fully informed," Mr Baxter said.

News Ltd CEO John Hartigan said that we are now a lightweight democracy - I wonder if he would be willing to shoulder some of the blame for this, given that all the Murdoch press's anti-terror hysteria over the past few years helped the Rodent pass his sedition laws and bring in the age of secret trials to Australia...

News Limited's John Hartigan said no one had yet been appointed to conduct the review, but the media coalition hoped the report would influence politicians at “a crucial time”. “It’s falling at a time… when it’s going to be in a period of decision making,” Mr Hartigan said. “Within the next four or five months… will be a crucial period of time.”

The audit will target anti-terrorism legislation, sedition laws, suppression orders and Freedom of Information.

Mr Hartigan said when compared to media laws in other countries, Australia was “a lightweight democracy”. “New Zealanders can be trusted with information, but for some reason we can’t.”

The GC Bulletin also points out that our level of press freedom is now lower than in Bulgaria and Bolivia.

"Press freedom is one of the most important expressions of freedom. Even politicians who feel the lash of the media from time to time understand that, in great democracies, that is part of the price you pay to maintain a vigilant, effective and functioning democracy" -- former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney

WE wish it were otherwise, but Mr Mulroney's sentiments sadly do not sit well in the once-great democracy of Australia.

Press freedom has been limited so badly in Australia by governments and courts in recent years that we now sit below Bulgaria, Bolivia and Costa Rica in the world rankings of press liberty. We have been consigned to such a low level by politicians -- federal and state, Liberal and Labor -- who effectively have created two Australian societies within the one land.

The general public, including the press, have been put beyond the pale in the true sense of the phrase. Like the pales or borders around enclaves that bottled up minorities in Russia or kept the English separated from the Irish in Ireland centuries ago, the walls of secrecy erected by politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats in Australia gives special protection and privilege to a select few.

So obvious are these enclosures of information, impervious to invasion by the media, that the nation's major media companies yesterday banded together to demand that federal and state governments ease some of the 500 separate prohibitions which lock away the facts from the Australian public.

THE SMH editorial says that the gags are getting tighter - and both major parties are to blame.

FREEDOM of information has become a term of which George Orwell's Ministry of Truth would be proud. It was not always so. Malcolm Fraser, who introduced the first freedom of information laws in 1982, had earlier declared the electorate should have the greatest possible access to information. "How can any community progress without continuing and informed and intelligent debate? How can there be debate without information?" But the state and federal laws which he and others introduced in good faith contained a Trojan horse: the procedure by which governments can legally suppress information. That procedure was meant to be used for exceptions, but exceptions have become the rule. The State Government, for example, has recently rebuffed Herald requests for information on which hotels attract crime, and what repairs our state schools need. This information is in no way sensitive - unless you are a politician.

Other powerful forces also militate against the right to know. Journalists face jail for refusing to reveal sources in court. The Family Court conducts its business in a cone of silence. Anti-terrorism laws have tied a large, tight gag around reporters' mouths. Even if those are special cases, and we believe they are not, courts more generally are now more willing - far too willing - to grant litigants' or defendants' requests for anonymity. Defamation laws are still abused to stifle the truth. Justice dispensed in secret used to be regarded as an emblem of tyranny. Not in Australia. As a society we are acquiescing bit by bit, suppression order by suppression order, to standards of freedom rejected as oppressive three centuries ago.

This automatic preference for concealment means Australia's record on press freedom is a national disgrace. The latest index published by Reporters Without Borders puts us in 35th place, behind South Korea and Namibia, and alongside such bulwarks of democracy as Bulgaria and Mali. Politicians from all sides are guilty. They may parrot cliches about freedom of information when in opposition; in government they obey the instinct of the powerful to gag and to ban.

Opposition leader Kevin Rudd is promising to be more open if Labor wins government. Hopefully this is one political promise that is kept.

The Howard government has abused protection laws to strangle the flow of public documents requested by journalists, federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd says.

If he wins the election later this year, Mr Rudd has pledged a Labor government will be more open when government material is requested under freedom of information laws. "Let me say this in clear cut terms, I believe the government has used and abused freedom of information laws and I believe it has gone too far and we need to start pushing it back in the other direction," Mr Rudd told reporters.

I'll close with a an apocaphiliac movie review from the SMH for "28 Weeks Later".

England has been producing a lot of zombies lately, and a fair amount of apocalypse. I can't recall so many ravening face-eaters, sunken-eyed neck-biters and various headless, armless and legless ghouls since the grand old cheesy days of Hammer Horror in the '70s. There's a new barmy army out there and they didn't come to play rugger.

This new era began about four years ago with the worldwide success of 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle's extremely unsettling tale of a blood-born virus that turned people into killers in 20 seconds. Shaun of the Dead took the mickey quite successfully soon after and there were strong elements of an apocalyptic future (if not strictly zombies) in Children of Men, my choice for best film of 2006. ...

The original film had a kind of Gaian moral spine: the chimps were deliberately infected and tortured in an immoral experiment and the great British public paid the price. The new film takes the story more towards obvious political allegory. ...

Strictly speaking, the ragers in the first movie weren't zombies or undead - just angry people with a great need to bite fresh meat. At the start of the sequel, they have bitten everything that breathes and then starved to death. A few uninfected survivors have been picked up and a UN force led by the US has begun the process of reconstruction. About 500 people have been allowed back into Britain but they are quarantined on the Isle of Dogs, in the Thames, and strictly forbidden to enter London. The streets are full of the dead; their bodies are slowly being collected and burned.

The parallels with Baghdad are hard to miss. There are American military choppers in the air and snipers on the rooftops. The protected area is even called the "green zone". The GIs talk with that mixture of profanity and aggression that has become the norm in films about American soldiers abroad. ...

Quite what political point Fresnadillo is making I wasn't sure. As awful as it is to watch the massacre, it's hard to see what else the US forces could do to stop the outbreak. It may be that the message has been kept deliberately fuzzy, so as not to deter the American audiences who made the first film so successful. In fact, it's quite possible to read it as a defence of what the US is doing in Iraq, rather than a criticism, although I doubt that's what's intended.