Tough decisions to ensure a low-carbon world  

Seeing as though the SMH is doing such a good job lately with energy stories, I'll start off again with one of their articles on global warming policy (or its absence) in Australia.

There is a sense of total unreality in our public rhetoric. We are continually reminded we have never had it so good - the economy is doing splendidly, the stockmarket is booming and employment is at full stretch after 15 years of growth.

At the same time we are looking at the most serious issue to confront humanity in centuries - human-induced climate change - largely caused by the unsustainable energy consumption and exports on which our prosperity is based. After years of denial, we are beginning to accept this reality and seek solutions.

The biggest problem is the Australian coal industry. It has belatedly acknowledged that clean-coal technology and carbon sequestration are essential if coal combustion is to continue. So it is good to see more research funds being committed with the expansion of its Coal21 Fund.

However, the industry has been on notice for more than 20 years that these technologies would be needed if coal was to retain its "licence to operate", but it ignored this need until recently. Even now the research and development spending is minuscule compared with the challenge ahead.

Energy Bulletin notes:

Ian Dunlop was formerly a senior international oil, gas and coal industry executive. He chaired the Australian Coal Association in 1987 and 1988, the Australian Greenhouse Office Experts Group on Emissions Trading from 1998 to 2000 and was chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors from 1997 to 2001.

Grist has some comments on the BP / Rio Tinto announcement of "clean coal" plant for Perth - "Coal Is the Enemy of the Human Race".

Last week, oil giant BP announced a new "clean coal" partnership, and it's already spewing big plans. With Rio Tinto, the world's third-largest mining company, BP created Hydrogen Energy, a cleaner-energy venture. Just one hitch: they're gonna make hydrogen by burning fossil fuels, which produces carbon dioxide, which ends the world. So the companies will plunge huge amounts of money into "clean coal" operations that separate out the carbon, then bury it under the sea. (Note to future generations: We know, it's crazy. We tried to stop them.) BP already had two such projects in the works, in California and Scotland; the companies announced a third today, a $2 billion plant in Australia. "Projects such as these have the potential to help deliver the carbon emission reductions which companies and countries around the world are now seeking," says BP CEO Tony Hayward. And a BP VP told the press that the carbon will, as one outlet reported, "remain buried 'literally forever,' or for hundreds of years."

For you Perth residents looking forward to this clean coal plant being built and a whole lot of CO2 being pumped underground, here's the tale of "The Strangest Disaster of the 20th Century".

Here’s the story of how scientists unlocked the secrets of the worst natural disaster in the history of the West African nation of Cameroon… and what they’re doing to try and stop it from happening again.

On the morning of August 22, 1986, a man hopped onto his bicycle and began riding from Wum, a village in Cameroon, towards the village of Nyos. On the way he noticed an antelope lying dead next to the road. Why let it go to waste? The man tied the antelope onto his bicycle and continued on. A short distance later he noticed two dead rats, and further on, a dead dog and other dead animals. He wondered if they’d all been killed by a lightening strike – when lightening hits the ground it’s not unusual for animals nearby to be killed by the shock.

Soon the man came upon a group of huts. He decided to see if anyone there knew what had happened to the animals. But as he walked up to the huts he was stunned to see dead bodies strewn everywhere. He didn’t find a single person still alive—everyone in the huts was dead. The man threw down his bicycle and ran all the way back to Wum.


By the time the man got back to the village, the first survivors of whatever it was that had struck Nyos and other nearby villages were already stumbling into Wum. Many told tales of hearing an explosion or rumbling noise in the distance, then smelling strange smells and passing out for as long as 36 hours before waking up to discover that everyone around them was dead.

Wum is in a remote part of Cameroon, so it took two days for a medical team to arrive in the area after local officials called the governor to report the strange occurrence. The doctors found a catastrophe far greater than they could have imagined: Overnight, something had killed nearly 1,800 people. Plus more than 3,000 cattle and countless wild animals, birds and insects—in short every living creature for miles around.

The official death toll was recorded as 1,746 people, but that was only an estimate, because the survivors had already begun to bury victims in mass graves, and many terrified survivors had fled corpse-filled villages and were hiding in the forest. Whatever it was that killed so many people seemed to have disappeared without a trace just as quickly as it had come.

What could have caused so many deaths in such a short span of time?

When word of the disaster reached the outside world, scientists from France (Cameroon is a former French colony), the United States, and other countries arrived to help the country’s own scientists figure out what had happened. The remains if the victims offered few clues. There was no evidence of bleeding, physical trauma, or disease, and no sign of exposure to radiation, chemical weapons, or poison gas. And there was no evidence of suffering or “death agony”: The victims apparently just blacked out, fell over, and died.

One of the first important clues was the distribution of the victims across the landscape: The deaths had all occurred within about 12 miles of Lake Nyos, which some local tribes called the “bad lake.” Legend had that long ago, evil spirits had risen out of the lake and killed all the people living in a village at the water’s edge. ...

The Age has an alarming article called "Can climate change get worse? It has.".

The world is now on track to experience more catastrophic damages from climate change than in the worst-case scenario forecast by international experts, scientists have warned. The research, published in a prestigious US science journal, shows that between 2000 and 2004 the rate of increase in global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels was three times greater than in the 1990s.

That is faster than even the worst-case scenario modelled by the world's leading scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, published over recent months, because the updated emissions figures were not available in time to be included.

The climbing emissions mean that average global temperatures are now on track to rise by more than four degrees this century - enough to thaw vast areas of arctic permafrost and leave about 3 billion people suffering from water shortages, including in Australia. And Australia's emissions from fossil fuels are increasing faster than the global average, growing at nearly twice the rate of the United States.

Senior CSIRO scientist Michael Raupach, who led the international research on accelerating global emissions, told The Age that the findings were "dreadful". "Emissions are increasing faster than we thought, which means the impacts of climate change will also happen even sooner than expected," said Dr Raupach, a co-chairman of the Global Carbon Project, based at the CSIRO in Canberra. "What this really highlights is the urgency of cutting emissions. It won't be easy, but we know that we have solutions available to us now to do that and that it can be done at a relatively small cost to the economy."

The jump in emissions since 2000 has been driven by increasing populations, growing global wealth, and greater than expected use of fossil fuels.

The paper found that none of the world's major rich or developing regions are "decarbonising" their energy supplies, by reducing demand or switching to less polluting energy, which spells trouble for international efforts to curb global greenhouse emissions. ... In assessing the same data for Australia, Dr Raupach found Australia's carbon emissions have grown at about twice the global average over the past 25 years, including about double the rate of emissions growth in the United States and Japan. ...

Back to the SMH, Rio Tinto are glowing about the prospects for uranium.

RIO TINTO chief financial officer Guy Elliott said uranium offered one of the company's "most exciting near-term growth stories" due to the nuclear fuel's rising price amid increased demand.

"Short-term market movements can open opportunities which may not be enduring but which offer substantial value as long as you are able to capture them," he told an investor seminar in London last night. "Rising long-term price trends also increase options."

Rio energy chief executive Preston Chiaro said record uranium prices of $US122 a pound had not deterred demand because the cost of uranium was a relatively small portion of the operating costs of nuclear power plants compared to coal-fired and gas-fired plants.

"Most major producers have had some production difficulties," he said. "The uranium market is expected to be tight until at least 2012 in part due to production shortfalls at existing operations."

Mr Chiaro said the uranium market was unlikely to return to surplus until BHP Billiton's expansion of Olympic Dam production to 15,000 tonnes a year from 4500 tonnes was completed in the middle of the next decade.

Rio wants to double production by 2010 and triple to about 20,000 tonnes a year by 2020.

The company is capitalising on the uranium boom by extending the life of its two operating mines, the Rossing operation in Namibia and the Ranger mine in the Northern Territory. Rio is examining plans to move to underground mining at Ranger as part of a push to extend the mine's life, which even with a pit extension under evaluation would otherwise cease in 2011. It is also in discussions with the local Mirarr people in an attempt to gain permission to develop the Jabiluka deposit. ...

The IHT has an article noting Climate change is putting nuclear energy into hot water.

Could climate change be the latest jinx on nuclear power?

Long regarded with suspicion because of radioactivity, nuclear power suddenly has a revived image, thanks to the idea that many more plants could be built without worsening global warming. Unlike power plants fired by coal and natural gas, nuclear fission produces no carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

But there is a less well-known side of nuclear power: It requires great amounts of cool water to keep reactors operating at safe temperatures. That is worrying if the rivers and reservoirs which many power plants rely on for water are hot or depleted because of steadily rising air temperatures.

If temperatures soar above average this summer - let alone steadily increase in years to come, as many scientists predict - many nuclear plants could face a dilemma: Either cut output or break environmental rules, in either case hurting their reputation with customers and the public.

Governments and the energy industry are just starting to grasp the vulnerabilities of water-hungry power plants. If the complications prove serious in countries where inland sources of water are growing scarce, where seafront nuclear stations are unwelcome or impractical and where alternative cooling technologies are too expensive, it could take the bloom off of nuclear as a source of clean energy and leave it more unclear than ever where sizable new power supplies might come from.

"We're going to have to solve the climate-change problem if we're going to have nuclear power, not the other way around," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who is with the Union of Concerned Scientists."As the climate warms up, nuclear power plants are less able to deliver," he said.

BLDG BLOG has some great pictures of some nuclear reactors being destroyed (you can also watch on YouTube - and the comments are entertaining if you want to see just how entrenched 911 conspiracy theories are in the general culture).

The BBC posted a short photo-spread today that looks at the implosion of four cooling towers at the Chapelcross nuclear power station, in Scotland, where the UK used to produce weapons-grade plutonium. "The towers were brought down in 10 seconds, generating an estimated 25,000 tonnes of rubble," we read.

Dow jones reports the Iraqi parliament is still resisting the grab for the greatest prize of all (via Energy Bulletin).

Iraq's Vice President Tariq Al Hashimi said Sunday he opposes a draft oil law that is crucial to Iraq's future because it gives too many concessions to international oil companies and the country's regions. "We disagree with the production sharing agreement," Al Hashimi told Dow Jones. "We want foreign oil companies but not with big privileges."

Iraq's government is locked in debate over the draft oil law that must be approved by the country's parliament. Parliament in Baghdad could take two months before to approve the legislation, Al Hashimi said. International oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc, BP Plc and ConocoPhillips are awaiting the legislation that will set a framework for licensing access to Iraq's vast oil reserves, estimated to be the world's third biggest.

Richard Heinberg's latest newsletter is called "Iran: Now We Know"

MuseLetter for March this year, titled, “Iran: We Will Know Soon,” was a summary of the information available at the time regarding the likelihood of a US or Israeli air attack on Iran’s nuclear research facilities-an attack that many informed commentators and analysts have considered very likely.

The most recent news on this score is very good. It appears that efforts to ramp up US military presence in the region in preparation for an attack-or at least to put hard pressure on Iran during upcoming negotiations over the fate of Iraq-have been undermined by none other than George Bush’s nominee to head Central Command (CENTCOM), Admiral William Fallon. According to an article by Gareth Porter in Asia Times Online on May 17, (www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IE17Ak03.html) Fallon “expressed strong opposition in February to an administration plan to increase the number of aircraft-carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf from two to three and vowed privately that there would be no war against Iran as long as he was chief of CENTCOM, according to sources with access to his thinking.”

At the same time, US policy and rhetoric toward Iran seem to have moderated. Porter suggests that this shift “away from increased military threats and toward diplomatic engagement,” for which “no credible explanation has been offered by administration,” may have resulted from Fallon's resistance to deploying the carrier task force.

It looks as though the world has dodged a very nasty bullet, at least for now. ...

Joel Makower has a look at the question "is there a green business bubble ?".

Such questions are understandable, albeit misguided. The world of green business appears to have come out of nowhere to grace the cover of every major magazine, business and otherwise, not to mention scads of other stories on inside pages. Where stories about business and environmental issues used to appear sporadically in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other major publications, they are now daily fare, with sometimes as many as a half-dozen news stories, feature articles, and opinion pieces in a single daily edition.

For those of us who have been toiling in these fields for a long time, the greening of business is viewed as an "overnight success story" that was twenty years in the making.

Given our society's microscopic attention span, and the apparent need of the media to deflate trends they've helped pump up, coverage of green business would seem likely headed for a fall. And that might indeed happen, for any number of reasons. From the public's perspective, this would make it seem like the greening of business was yet another cynical fad that's now faded into the woodwork.

Such perceptions aside, the topic isn't going away any time soon. Here, in no particular order, are ten reasons why I think the greening of business will be an enduring issue for years to come, regardless of the media's attention span:

1. The problems aren't getting any better. This is fairly obvious, especially if you've seen The Movie. The environmental movement, it's been said, is rapidly morphing into the climate movement, and there's a parallel shift taking place on the business side. The motivations may be different -- for activists, climate has become a rallying cry that gives disparate groups a singular focus; for companies, it's about the need to squeeze efficiency out of every operational nook and cranny while reducing risk and enhancing image -- but the upshot is the same: Until the climate problem is under control, it will be Job One, environmentally speaking, inside most companies. And as concern, regulation, and market-based mechanisms to address climate change ramp up, this will be a key business focus for a long, long time.

2. The political will is finally emerging. Again, climate is the reason. In the U.S. and elsewhere, political leaders are realizing that this isn't a topic that will go away; indeed, it is gaining steam and could even be a focus of the 2008 U.S. election. That could increase public scrutiny of how company lobbyists are pressing for favorable treatment, and some of this pressure could come from companies otherwise seen as "leaders" in corporate climate action, leading to activist charges of greenwashing or worse. If there's evidence of a parade of public concern over climate change, politicians will certainly want to get in front of it, and companies may end up finding that there's simply no longer enough lobbying money to buy their way out of the problem -- or, better still, not enough politicians willing to be bought.

3. Consumers are waking up. This remains to be seen, of course, but there are encouraging signs that the American public is finally ready to vote with their pocketbooks, choosing greener products, or products from companies perceived to be green leaders. One thing is certain: the pipeline of greener products from household brands is filling up. We'll see a new wave of green product introductions starting later this year, including some from companies that haven't previously been in the green marketplace. If their products catch on, that pipeline could become a gusher.

4. The supply chain is gaining power. Wal-Mart, which is pushing its 60,000 suppliers to perform all sorts of sustainability somersaults, is one big reason, but they're hardly alone. Corporate and institutional buyers of everything from carpets to car parts are looking upstream for solutions, asking suppliers to, variously, reduce packaging, eliminate hazardous materials, use more organic or biobased ingredients, and take other measures to "green up" their products and operations. That's moving some markets toward cleaner production methods far faster than any mass consumer movement could.

5. The environment has become a fiduciary issue. The past twelve months has seen an almost weekly stream of stories and reports from large financial institutions -- banks, insurance companies, and investment houses -- talking about the risks of climate change, toxics, and other environmental issues to shareholders. And shareholders, especially pension funds and large faith-based institutional investors, are starting to hammer hard on companies to acknowledge, reduce, and report on their risk profiles in these areas.

6. The bar keeps moving. One theme of my presentations lately is the question, "How good is good enough?" Simply put, it bemoans the lack of standards or general agreement on what constitutes a "green business." That lack of standards frustrates many companies' efforts to be seen as "good guys"; instead, they never seem to be good enough. But there may be an upside to the lack of definitions: With no standards, the bar is free to drift continually higher. And that seems to be what is happening. For example, as more companies claim some form of carbon neutrality, the value of carbon neutral as a marketing claim becomes increasingly devalued. And as the bar rises, laggard companies, even if fully compliant on the regulatory front, are finding themselves further and further behind, from a reputational perspective.

7. Companies are moving beyond "sustainability." Given the rising bar, it would follow that companies are continually innovating, and that the cutting edge moves increasingly farther out. Within the next two years, it would not surprise me if being a "sustainable" company was no longer seen as a leadership goal. The real leaders will have focused their sights on being restorative -- for example, not being merely carbon neutral, but being carbon negative, taking more carbon out of the atmosphere than they put in.

8. More companies are telling their stories. It's no longer good enough for companies to be quiet and humble on things green. That doesn't necessarily mean they should be needlessly boastful, especially if it's not in their nature to do so. But doing the right thing and keeping it quiet is less of an option these days. Customers -- both consumers and business customers -- want green heroes, companies they feel are setting the pace. Companies holding on to the belief that walking more than talking can insulate them from criticism will find that the risks of being overly exposed may be outweighed by the risks of being seen as a laggard. Expect green advertising and marketing campaigns to mushroom in the coming months.

9. Clean technology is changing the game. The clean-tech boom (which, indeed, may be a bubble unto itself) is making it easier and cheaper for companies to transform their products, processes, and performance to use more renewable energy, biobased or lightweight materials, and fewer toxic ingredients. Given that some of the most promising, game-changing technologies are only just now reaching their intended markets, we are on the cusp of a new generation of clean-tech products and services. As they roll out, whether from startups or mega-conglomerates, they'll enable a wide range of new green products, services, and business opportunities.

10. There's money to be made. That's the real bottom line: The environment is now being seen increasingly as a potential value-add, not merely a cost to be minimized. Hence, green leaders are emerging throughout companies, not just in the environmental departments, as forward-thinking entrepreneurs (and intrapreneurs) identify and exploit new ways to leverage green thinking into new products and markets. As the number of success stories moves beyond hybrid automobiles and organic foods to include other categories products and services, green will be seen as a more "normal" part of the marketplace.

Cleantech Investing considers the same question (via AltEnergyStocks):

Two vital facts to keep in mind (and which the general media coverage most often loses sight of, it seems):

1. There is a big difference between public market investment trends and venture capital investment trends.

Yes, for obvious reasons the two markets are often somewhat linked. But the public market is open to many more retail investors, is focused on near-term (quarter to quarter) results, and operates within the context of benchmarks like the S&P 500 (8.2% average annual returns over the past 10 years).

Whereas the venture capital market is open to a different pool of private investors, is a market of long-term (multi-year) investments, and operates within the context of high hurdle IRRs (~20% average annual returns over the past 10 years). Different returns requirements will drive different valuations.

2. There is no single "cleantech" sector. It is multiple sectors.

A solar cell looks nothing like a fuel cell which looks nothing like a desalination unit, etc. "Cleantech" as a buzzword is often criticized as being too broadly defined. That breadth also means that the technologies covered by cleantech VCs aim for different markets, compete with different incumbent approaches/ commodities, are produced in entirely different ways, etc. In other words, Cleantech (a/k/a "greentech", "environmental tech", etc.) is actually a collection of numerous separate investment sectors, under a common investment thesis around looming natural resource scarcity. ...

One last note for today's column... The Lux Research report has provided a wealth of useful data and smart analysis, and looks to be pretty valuable. One statement I would quibble with, however, was from the press release:

"...There’s no way that more than a fraction of the 930 energy start-ups operating worldwide can possibly succeed."

Define "succeed"? And define "fraction"? Venture capital is necessarily investing at a risky stage where companies will fail. That's true of all VC sectors whether they are evidencing bubbles or not. Furthermore, "success" shouldn't be defined by high-profile Google-esque exits -- only about 10-20% of all venture-backed companies IPO, for example. The majority of successful venture exits are industry trade sales as part of ongoing sectoral consolidations, at reasonable valuations.

When you consider the enormous magnitude of the energy market worldwide, and the many incumbent sectors that are ripe for creative destruction... It's not a stretch to argue that, yes, a significant share of the venture-backed portion of those startups (hopefully the VCs aren't picking a random sample from the overall pool of available investments) will grow and find successful exits in some form.

GE has decided to sell its plastics business to Saudi Arabia. I suspect a lot of the petrochemical industry will migrate to the middle east as hydrocarbon reserves elsewhere dry up.

General Electric agreed Monday to sell its plastics division for $11.6 billion to the largest public Saudi Arabian company, Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, known as Sabic. The deal for the GE division, which has 11,000 employees in 20 countries, is one of the largest yet by Sabic. The Saudi company prevailed in a sometimes crowded race, with other top bidders including Basell, the Dutch plastics maker, and Apollo Management, the U.S. private equity firm led by Leon Black. ...

Most analysts quickly homed in on Sabic, because of its access to Saudi Arabia's vast petroleum supplies. After all, it was the ever-rising cost of benzene, a petroleum derivative and a crucial raw material for plastics products, that had sucked the profitability out of the unit for GE. A company like Sabic, with an inexpensive and inexhaustible supply of benzene, could far more easily turn a profit.

Technology Review has an article of some strange hybrid between corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol - "Cheaper, Cleaner Ethanol from Biotech Corn".

The genetically-modified plants break down their own cellulose, making it possible to use waste biomass to produce ethanol.

Researchers have genetically engineered transgenic corn plants that produce enzymes that can turn their leaves and stems into sugar by breaking down cellulose. The plants could lower the cost of creating ethanol from these sources, making such biofuel more competitive with that produced from corn kernels, the primary source of ethanol in the United States today.

Cellulosic sources of ethanol, such as waste biomass and switchgrass, are attractive because they are cheap and abundant. But converting cellulose, a complex carbohydrate, into sugars that can be fermented to make ethanol is more expensive than converting the starch in corn grain into sugar: breaking down the cellulose typically requires expensive enzymes extracted from genetically engineered microbes.

Now Mariam Sticklen, professor of crop and soil science at Michigan State University, and her colleagues have genetically engineered corn to produce the same enzyme that the transgenic microbes produce. The plant-grown cellulase could save about 30 to 50 cents per gallon of ethanol produced, Sticklen says.

Key to Sticklen's advance was engineering the corn so that the enzymes would not break down cellulose while the plants were still alive. Part of the solution was to use an enzyme found in bacteria that live in hot springs. The enzyme is only active at high temperatures--higher than those that a plant's cells would reach while it is alive. As a result, the enzyme remains dormant until it is heated to about 50 ºC.

Sticklen's transgenic corn is "one of several promising approaches to address the central obstacle impeding establishment of a cellulosic-biofuels industry: the absence of low-cost technology to overcome the recalcitrance of cellulosic biomass," says Lee Lynd, professor of engineering and biology at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, NH. But he adds that in-plant production of enzymes comes with its own challenges. ...

For those of you in Oz, ABC will be showing their documentary Crude on Thursday. There is an interview with the producer here.

From the food on our tables to the fuel in our cars, crude oil seeps invisibly into almost every part of our modern lives. It is the energy source and raw material that drives transport and the economy. Yet many of us have little idea of the incredible journey it has made to reach our petrol tanks and plastic bags.

Coming in the wake of rising global concerns about the continued supply of oil, and increasingly weird weather patterns, Crude spans 160 million years of the Earth's history to reveal the story of oil; from its birth deep in the dinosaur-inhabited past, to its ascendancy as the indispensable ingredient of modern life.

Filmed on location in 11 countries across five continents, the program's award-winning Australian filmmaker Richard Smith consults the leading international scientific experts to join the dots between geology and economy and provide the big-picture view of oil.

Crude takes a step back from the day to day news to illuminate the Earth's extraordinary carbon cycle and the role of oil in our impending climate crisis. Nearly seven billion people have come to depend on this resource, yet the Oil Age that began less than a century and a half ago, could be over in our lifetimes.

In a somewhat bizarre move, FoxNews has a column defending Ron Paul (albeit written by a guy from Reason) which probably won't please some of their foaming fascists on staff.

But let's get back to Rep. Paul. After last week's debate, reaction to Paul from pro-war types was swift and severe. The head of the Michigan GOP demanded he be excluded from future debates.

Several activists have called for him to be purged from the Republican Party (given what the GOP stands for these days, perhaps that's not such a bad idea). One former staffer declared Paul an "embarrassment" and announced he'd challenge Paul for his seat in Congress.

This is all patently absurd. Actually, it's offensive. No one knows precisely what morbid formula inspired the Sept. 11 attacks. Most likely, it was some mix of U.S. foreign policy exacerbating radical Islamists' already deep-seeded contempt for Western values.

But to suggest that we shouldn't even consider that our actions overseas might have unintended consequences is, frankly, just ignorant. And to attempt to silence anyone who says otherwise as outside the bounds of civilized debate is doubly ignorant.

If you get stung by a hornet, it makes sense to see if there's a hornets' nest near your home and, if there is, to exterminate it. It doesn't make sense to forge out looking for hornets' nests anywhere you can find them, smacking them with sticks. You're bound to get stung again.

It also makes sense to see if there's something you're doing that's attracting hornets, like perhaps storing perfume by a window. None of this suggests you deserved to be stung; it only means you're rationally looking at what caused you to be stung in the first place and trying to prevent it from happening again.

Those who find Rep. Paul's foreign policy vision fringe-like or crazy would do well to read what other libertarian non-interventionists were saying before the Iraq war began. They were remarkably prescient. Some even predicted a Sept. 11-like attack years before it happened. For example:

— The Cato Institute's Gene Healy: "After our quick victory, and after the "Arab street" fails to rise, you're going to hear a lot of self-congratulation from the hawks. But the fallout from this war is likely to be long-term, in the form of a protracted and messy occupation, and an enhanced terrorist recruitment base."

— Ted Galen Carpenter, also of Cato: "The inevitable U.S. military victory would not be the end of America's troubles in Iraq. Indeed, it would mark the start of a new round of headaches. Ousting Saddam would make Washington responsible for Iraq's political future and entangle the United States in an endless nation-building mission beset by intractable problems."

Now contrast those forecasts — both made before the war — with predictions from the war's architects:

— Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
— Vice President Dick Cheney: "I don't think it would be that tough a fight."
— White House economic advisor Glenn Hubbard: "Costs of any [Iraq] intervention would be very small."
— OMB Director Mitch Daniels: "The United States is committed to helping Iraq recover from the conflict, but Iraq will not require sustained aid."

It's striking just how right people who think like Ron Paul were before the war, and how incredibly wrong those now piling on him were. And yet Paul Wolfowitz was promoted to head the World Bank; Dick Cheney is still vice president; and Mitch Daniels is the governor of Indiana.

The people who were wrong were rewarded. And they go right on mocking the people who were right.

Keith Olbermann has a graphic demonstration (not for the queasy) of what the waterboarding technique all the other Republican candidates support looks like:



Paul himself is noting correctly that "The majority of Americans are with me".

'Dark horse' presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) believes that "that the majority of Americans are with me," regarding his harsh insurgent attacks on President Bush's Iraq policies.

During CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer host John King asked Paul a hypothetical question, in reference to the war in Iraq: "If China took back Taiwan today, you say go to the Congress, or does the president not have the authority as commander in chief?"

"Absolutely he does not have the authority," Paul said. "Where does he get it? You can't go to war without Congressional approval. And that's not a threat to our national security. That's something internal affairs. Why should we send hundreds of thousands of Americans to die in a civil war?"

Paul added, "I mean, are we over in Russia right now over Chechnya? I mean, it wouldn't make any sense. Did we go to war over Hong Kong?". "We should follow the Constitution and the advice of the founders," Paul continued. "Don't go looking for dragons to slay. I mean, why should we go and provoke and look for trouble? We should talk to people, negotiate, be diplomatic and trade with people."

Paul also blasted criticism that he isn't "Republican enough." "I support the Republican platform better than any other candidate, I am convinced of," Paul insisted. "Take out the platform. They're for less government. They're for personal liberty. We ran on our program in 2000 for a humble foreign policy."

Paul asked incredulously, "How can anybody say I'm not Republican? I'm the most conservative member of the Congress. I vote for the least amount of spending and the least amount of taxes, and they say I'm not Republican enough?" "I mean, why don't you challenge that side rather than challenging me and feed into the frenzy that say get rid of the reporter, get rid of the person delivering the information rather than dealing with the information," Paul added. "Non-intervention is a real political victory. We cannot win as Republicans next year if we just continue to dig our heels in, send more men and women over there to die on a policy that has failed."

Paul said that "Republicans are scared to death to face up to the truth. And my job is to make them face up to it and show them that the majority of Americans are with me, not with the current foreign policy that we're following."

And to close, the weirdest video of the day (via William Gibson) :