Ending The Oil Era  

Energy Bulletin has an interview with the ubiqitous James Woolsey from The Futurist on bringing the oil era to a close.

Futurist: What obstacles stand in the way of Western nations, particularly the United States, reducing their dependency on foreign oil?

James Woolsey If you remember, we got interested in alternative fuel firms like the Synfuels Corporation in the late seventies and then in 1985, the Saudi’s dropped the oil down to $5 a barrel and bankrupted the Synfuels Corporation. The good news is that they bankrupted the Soviet Union, too, but they certainly undercut alternative fuel efforts. People got interested in alternative fuels again in the early nineties, then in the late nineties, oil dropped down to $10 a barrel and people lost interest, again. One of the things that we have to do is make sure that this rollercoaster effect can’t happen again.

Some people think it will be much more difficult in the future because the Saudi Arabian oil fields could be peaking, if not now then soon. We will also have huge demand, not only from the West but from India and China as they start to produce middle classes that drive cars. So the Saudis might not be able to drop the price to five or ten dollars a barrel by turning on their excess capacity, but they might be able to drop it to $20 per barrel. Most of the better of these alternative fuels are only really viable, (as far as we can see) if oil is say $35 per barrel or more. The one that’s viable even below that is electricity, because off peak, overnight electricity in many parts of the United States sells for between two to four cents per kilowatt hour. That is the equivalent to about a penny a mile driving where as gasoline is in the range of ten to 20 cents a mile at today's price. However much the Saudis might be able to drop the price of oil by turning on excess capacity, I doubt if they would be able to undercut off peak electricity in price.

But one way to ensure that is to make sure some of these other fuels, such as diesel from waste and cellulosic ethanol or butanol, have a chance to develop without the Saudis bankrupting them. We also need a different structure for subsidies. Today, ethanol is being subsidized even though it doesn’t need to be with oil that’s $60-$70 per barrel. What we might do is say, no subsidies unless oil drops to say $40 dollars a barrel. You start with small subsidies and then the subsidies get larger as the price of oil goes down. Now, most people are not forecasting oil to go below $40 a barrel now, so this might be an easier thing to implement. It would essentially be an insurance policy against the Saudis doing what they did in ‘85 and what happened again in the late 1990s.

Let me return to the potential for hybrid technology in cars, particularly plug-in hybrids. There’s nothing to keep a car from being both a hybrid and a flexible-fuel vehicle, sometimes it's driving all electric, sometimes it’s driving as a hybrid, and it may be that instead of the liquid fuel part of its energy being supplied by gasoline, it might be supplied by e-85 ethanol whether it’s butanol or renewable diesel. My Prius today gets just under 50 miles per gallon, but if that were to become a plug-in Prius, with six times the capacity battery, and I could drive it about twenty miles before it goes into its regular hybrid mode, then I could get a little over 100 miles per gallon.

Now, if the liquid fuel that I’m using were e-85, because the hybrid is also a flexible fuel vehicle, I would getting over 500 miles per gallon of petroleum product. That is not all that far off because we know how to make e-85. It’s on sale at several hundred stations in the United States. We know how to make flexible fuel vehicles; we’ve got millions on the road. We know how to make hybrids, and, at least in California, people are already upgrading hybrids to be plug-in hybrids, so none of this requires a Manhattan project to invent something entirely new; it’s a matter of getting things into production that we already essentially understand how to do.

Futurist: What effect do you think energy independence might have on other nations, particularly nations that export a great deal of oil, most specifically Iran and Nigeria?

James Woolsey Well, they will have to get work. The first thing I would do with any country that says, ‘Oh my goodness, our economy is going to be ruined if we can’t sell oil,' is I would take them to visit Israel. Israel now has a GNP per capita of $18,000 a year even though Israel is on some of the poorest land in the Middle East and has essentially no oil or gas whatever. What they do, unlike a lot of these other countries, is allow women to educate themselves; they pay attention to technology; they invest. It may well be the case that Iran or Saudi Arabia, or even countries in other parts of the world like Russia who depend heavily on exporting expensive oil, would have to get to work the way the Israelis have, the Japanese have, and other countries with minimal natural resources have who have built modern societies with highly educated and industrious people.

Futurist: In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (March 30, 2006), Milton Copulos remarked, "Without Oil, our economy could not function, and therefore protecting our sources of oil is a legitimate defense mission, and the current military operation in Iraq is part of that mission." To what extent do you agree with that statement, and to what extent do you think protecting our energy sources factors into foreign and military policy?

James Woolsey I agree with it a little bit, but if all we needed was the oil the simple thing to do would have been to buy it from Saddam Hussein, he was perfectly willing to sell it. If he hadn’t been an absolutely terrible dictator who was responsible for the deaths of close to two million people over the last two decades, this war would never have been contemplated. We’ll always have to have substantial armed forces, we would still need them if the majority of our oil came from domestic sources. Up until the 1970s, world oil prices were effectively set by the Texas railroad commission but the United States had a very substantial armed forces. We didn’t start having armed forces when we started importing a lot of oil. ...

Woolsey also features in the star studded cast at the Rocky Mountain Institute's 25th anniversary. I never quite know what to make of Mr Woolsey - he seems to be associated with almost every interesting organisation going, from the thoroughly good (RMI and the North American Hemp Growers), to the ambiguous (the fascinating Arlington Institute and the would-be constructors of Big Brother at Booz Allen Hamilton) to the thoroughly evil (Project For A New American Century). Still - if he's going to encourage ridding ourselves of oil dependency, even couched in bellicose nationalist terms, I think I'll refrain from criticism.

After 25 years of challenging conventional thinking and leading the field in cutting-edge research and consulting in areas such as energy use, building design, transportation, sustainable communities, and security, RMI is hosting a celebration of its past and future work.

RMI 25: Celebrating Solutions promises to be both an inspirational, motivational, and fun event. To date, confirmed luminaries include our Master of Ceremonies Thomas Friedman (NY Times columnist), as well as John Abele (Boston Scientific), Ray Anderson (Interface, Inc.), Majora Carter (Sustainable South Bronx), Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia), Jesse Fink (Mission Point Capital Partners), Hal Harvey (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation), Paul Hawken (author), Bill Joy (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), Dean Kamen (DEKA Research & Development), Clare Lockhart (The Institute for State Effectiveness [ISE]), Christine Loh (Civic Exchange, Hong Kong), James Murdoch (British Sky Broadcasting), Julia Novy-Hildesley (Lemelson Foundation), Jeff Seabright (Coca-Cola), Rob Walton (Wal-Mart), Lin Wells (The Pentagon), and R. James Woolsey (VP Booz Allen, former CIA Director).

RMI 25: Celebrating Solutions kicks off with the RMIQ lecture "A Convenient Truth: Profitable Business-Led Climate Solutions" followed by an all-day Symposium on Friday with panel discussions featuring our luminaries. We will then move to Molly and Tom Bedell's Peace Ranch in Basalt for a Gala Reception, Dinner and Dancing. The highlight of Friday evening's program will be the discussions led by Thomas Friedman with Amory Lovins and our other top luminaries.

The Age has an article on a Designer bug that holds the key to endless fuel - coming out of Craig Venter's labs. I quite liked the term "Microbesoft" in here - and they start to broach the subject of the risks of these sorts of bacteria getting loose and turning the organic world into oily goo...

THE US scientist who cracked the human genome is poised to create the world's first man-made species, a synthetic microbe that could lead to an endless supply of biofuel. Craig Venter has applied for a patent at more than 100 national offices to make a bacterium from laboratory-made DNA. It is part of an effort to create designer bugs to manufacture hydrogen and biofuels, as well as absorb carbon dioxide and other harmful greenhouse gases. ...

The J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, is applying for worldwide patents on what it refers to as Mycoplasma laboratorium based on DNA assembled by scientists. When asked whether the world's first synthetic bug was thriving in a test tube, Dr Venter said: "We are getting close." The Venter Institute's US Patent application claims exclusive ownership of a set of essential genes and a synthetic "free-living organism that can grow and replicate" that is made using those genes. To create the synthetic organism his team is making snippets of DNA, known as oligonucleotides or "oligos", of up to 100 letters of DNA. ...

The Canadian ETC Group, which tracks developments in biotechnology, believes that this development is more significant than the cloning of Dolly the sheep a decade ago. On Wednesday, ETC spokesman Jim Thomas called on the world's patent offices to reject the applications. He said: "These monopoly claims signal the start of a high-stakes commercial race to synthesise and privatise synthetic life forms. Will Venter's company become the 'Microbesoft' of synthetic biology?" A colleague, Pat Mooney, said: "For the first time, God has competition. Venter and his colleagues have breached a societal boundary, and the public hasn't even had a chance to debate the far-reaching social, ethical and environmental implications of synthetic life."

However, Dr Venter did ask a panel of experts to examine the implications of creating synthetic life. His institute convened a bioethics committee to see if its plans were likely to raise objections. The committee had no objections but pointed out that scientists must take responsibility for any impact their new organisms had if they got out of the lab. The organisms can be designed to die as soon as they leave laboratory conditions.

Dr Venter announced the project to build a synthetic life form in 2002. In theory, by adding functionalised synthetic DNA, the bacterium could be instructed to produce plastics, drugs or fuels. Dr Venter's institute claims that its stripped-down microbe could be the key to cheap energy production. The patent application claims an organism that can make either hydrogen or ethanol for industrial fuels.

The Independent is still following the peak oil debate, with an article on "A world without oil".

Scientists have criticised a major review of the world's remaining oil reserves, warning that the end of oil is coming sooner than governments and oil companies are prepared to admit.

BP's Statistical Review of World Energy, published yesterday, appears to show that the world still has enough "proven" reserves to provide 40 years of consumption at current rates. The assessment, based on officially reported figures, has once again pushed back the estimate of when the world will run dry.

However, scientists led by the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre [ODAC], say that global production of oil is set to peak in the next four years before entering a steepening decline which will have massive consequences for the world economy and the way that we live our lives.

According to "peak oil" theory our consumption of oil will catch, then outstrip our discovery of new reserves and we will begin to deplete known reserves.

Colin Campbell, the head of the depletion centre, said: "It's quite a simple theory and one that any beer drinker understands. The glass starts full and ends empty and the faster you drink it the quicker it's gone."

Dr Campbell, is a former chief geologist and vice-president at a string of oil majors including BP, Shell, Fina, Exxon and ChevronTexaco. He explains that the peak of regular oil - the cheap and easy to extract stuff - has already come and gone in 2005. Even when you factor in the more difficult to extract heavy oil, deep sea reserves, polar regions and liquid taken from gas, the peak will come as soon as 2011, he says. ...

The Age is also beating the peak oil drum, with "Petrol problems about peak oil, not snake oil".

It's time for Canberra and Spring Street to face the facts on transport.

IF YOU think petrol is expensive at $1.34 a litre, how will you feel if it is around $2.60 a litre without any adjustment for inflation by 2015? That is when Melbourne's third public-private partnership toll road connecting the Eastern Freeway with the western suburbs via tunnel is expected to be completed.

It is not a question that seems to have lodged in the collective brain of politicians in Canberra or Spring Street who want to make political capital out of motorists' perceptions that high prices are due to price-gouging by the oil cartel.

The real reason petrol prices are high is because crude oil is $74 a barrel compared to $35 a barrel in 2004. The price of crude is high because world demand is beginning to outstrip supply. World discovery of oil peaked in 1964 and has been declining ever since. The most likely production scenario is for an annual decline in world production of 2 to 3 per cent, so that world oil production will fall to about 1990 levels by 2020. In Australia, oil production peaked in 2001.

According to the Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas: "High prices are the market signal that we urgently need transport and city planning that will reduce our oil dependence. Suggesting that high oil prices are temporary misleads the public and allows governments to delay difficult decisions."

The Victorian political and business establishment is in denial. The case against the east-west link in particular, and increased oil dependence in general, is made in the submission by the Institute for Sensible Transport (IST) to Sir Rod Eddington's inquiry into the tunnel link.

IST argues that outer suburban communities, with poor access to rail and bicycle infrastructure, are likely to be hardest hit by petrol price rises. The submission develops a number of inter-related themes: "Reduced car use … reduces congestion, lowers fuel bills, reduces emissions and encourages physical activity. Melbourne's resilience to the emerging challenges of peak oil, climate change and sedentary lifestyle diseases (such as obesity) will be considerably strengthened by moving to a less automobile-dependent society."

The policies the IST supports include major rail extensions in the outer suburbs, expanding the bicycle network and connecting it to train stations, congestion pricing to discourage car use in the CBD, high-occupancy vehicle lanes on freeways and elimination of the Fringe Benefit Tax for motor vehicles that subsidises 40 per cent of peak-hour car travel.

As per my usual contrarian stances here, I'd note that big freeway extensions are actually good from a PO point of view, not bad.

Once you've stopped squawking with outrage, consider this: (1) Freeways (except when heavily congested) enable much smoother traffic flow, which is fuel efficient compared to driving on regular, traffic light infested roads. (2) Cars aren't going to disappear - they are going to become hybrid, then all electric, (3) These are good things, because lots of electric cars are needed to provide V2G energy storage services for the emerging smart grid - and the smart grid is the thing that will demonstrate the whole "baseload" fallacy for what it is - pure nonsense - and thus allows us to switch to 100% clean energy.

Speaking of electric cars, AutoBlogGreen has a post on a new British electric car.

Another British specialist car maker has popped up with a new electrically driven sports car. With styling that looks like a Jaguar from the front, a more recent TVR from the rear and a Marcos in profile, the new Lightning GT is set to be powered by Altairnano's Nanosafe batteries. The all new chassis uses aluminum honey comb and composite in its construction.

A three model lineup is planned that includes a luxury model, a lightweight sport version that goes 0-60 in under four seconds and an extended range model that can run 250 miles on a charge. Lightning is using Hi-Pa Drive wheel motors from PML Flightlink with a combined output of 700hp

Right now the company is taking orders with production expected to start in 2008. The Lightning press release is after the jump. As soon as we get some more information from Lightning we'll pass it along.

Low emission vehicles are also starting to appear, like Honda's fuel efficient diesels.

Japanese carmaker Honda Motor Co. said Wednesday it plans to introduce vehicles with low-pollution, fuel-efficient diesel engines in Japan and North America within the next few years. Honda hopes to launch the clean diesel vehicles "as soon as possible" in Japan, said spokesman Yoshiyuki Kuroda, adding that the company will make a decision within the next three years. He said Honda also aims to introduce the engine in North America within the next two years, as previously announced. ...

The vehicles emit 20 percent less carbon dioxide than petrol-powered ones and substantially reduce emissions compared with conventional diesel cars. ... Although hybrids, which run on a mix of petrol and electricity, consume less fuel, the new Honda vehicles are expected to be comparable in terms of fuel costs because diesel is about 15 percent cheaper than petrol (gasoline), the Nikkei said.

Inside Greentech has an article on United technologies Combined Heat and Power cells - "UTC finds new tricks for old dogs" (and a big hello to my longtime readers there).

Competitors boast systems with larger capacities, but fifteen years after introducing one of the first stationary fuel cell power systems, UTC Power is still making sales. This week, the venerable supplier, a division of United Technologies (NYSE: UTX), announced that Hilton New York, a 1,980-room hotel in downtown New York City, completed the rigging of one of its 200 KW PureCell™-branded commercial fuel cell power systems.

Nearly three times more energy efficient than the electric grid when used in combined heat and power applications, the company claims, the fuel cell system is to operate without combustion to continuously provide power and domestic hot water for hotel operations.

Fueled by natural gas, the PureCell—roughly 10 feet by 10 feet by 18 feet—combines hydrogen fuel and oxygen from the air to produce electricity, heat and water. For every year the hotel uses the fuel cell, "it will reduce nitrogen oxide emissions equivalent to the removal of 145 cars from the street and create the same environmental benefits as planting 160 acres of forest," according to UTC.

The company says it's been working for several years with Hilton on integration options for fuel cells and combined cooling, heating and power systems to reduce greenhouse emissions and utilize energy more efficiently while providing back up power to the hotel for critical systems. ...

STCWA points to an article in The Independent on tidal power in the UK.

"There is," as Shakespeare put it, "a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune." The exhortation by Brutus to his fellow assassins in Julius Caesar is echoing around Whitehall in the wake of the fall of another all-powerful leader. This may be the moment, senior ministers say, to capitalise on one of Britain's greatest assets, the 45ft tide that races through the Severn estuary, making it the second best place in the world - after Canada's Bay of Fundy - to harness tidal energy.

By building a barrage, they hope to be able to meet a large chunk of Britain's electricity needs from a single renewable, reliable source. It is just one of a number of clean energy technologies they want to employ to keep the lights on, while cutting back the pollution that causes global warming.

On Wednesday, the Government will publish the next stage of its long-awaited energy White Paper. Until now, debate has focused on whether this will lead to the construction of more nuclear reactors, following Tony Blair's repeated insistence that these hold the key to combating climate change. But the nuclear debate has masked the beginnings of what some experts are calling a renewable energy revolution - the potential scale of which has shocked even Whitehall mandarins.

The revolution is being driven largely by legally binding targets for renewable energy agreed by European leaders in March, to help bring global warming under control. At the time, Tony Blair - who had helped to get them agreed - boasted that they were "groundbreaking, bold and ambitious".

He was not wrong. The targets are much more ambitious than the UK renewable electricity plans set out in Wednesday's White Paper and will mean that they have to be scaled up. Few people - least of all the politicians who agreed the European targets - have fully thought through their implications. And the reality is only now beginning to dawn.

Under the EU agreement they have promised, like other European governments, to meet 20 per cent of national energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020. That seems stretching enough. But because of the difficulty of running cars and heating homes on renewables, most of this target is going to have to be met from the energy used to generate electricity. Experts say that will mean boosting the renewable share of the nation's power from the present 4 per cent to 35 per cent in less than 13 years.

At the same time it is becoming clear that building enough nuclear power stations to replace those that will be taken out of service through old age in the next decade is going to be much harder than the outgoing Prime Minister fondly believed. At present they generate 19 per cent of our electricity: by 2020 this could be as low as 5 per cent unless new ones are built.

But constructing atomic power stations is expensive and slow, and has a history of mammoth time and cost overruns. Investors are not rushing to take up the opportunity, and Gordon Brown has made it clear that there will be no subsidies.

With the changeover at No 10 both the plans and the rhetoric are changing. Ministers are determined to keep the nuclear option open, knowing it may be needed, but are placing their hopes in energy saving and renewables, both of which feature heavily in the White Paper.

They are concentrating on three main options - the Severn barrage, another form of tidal energy being already tried out off the Devon coast, and windpower. Energy experts reckon that by 2020 about a fifth of the country's electricity will need to come from wind farms with about another tenth coming from hydroelectric power and tidal power. Wavepower - though potentially a huge resource - is lagging behind.

The advantage of the tides is they rise and fall like clockwork. The Severn barrage - proposed by a consortium of six leading companies, banded together in the Severn Tidal Power Group - would let the water in as it rose, and release it through sluices to power some 216 turbines as it fell - generating about 5 per cent of Britain's electricity.

A similar barrage - some 36 times smaller - has been generating electricity without a hitch at La Rance, Brittany, for three and a half decades. The problems, rather, are environmental. The huge structure would dramatically change the ecology of the estuary: nearly a fifth of Europe's ringed plover and 7 per cent of its Bewick swans rely on the Severn.

Environmentalists back an alternative proposed by Tidal Electric - a series of lagoons, the first of which would be built in Swansea Bay. These would not alter the estuary and might even provide new wildlife havens. Preliminary studies suggest they could provide more energy, and be built faster - but more work needs to be done.

The Government's second tidal power project is far less controversial. A pilot tidal stream power scheme - using a giant submarine windmill whose blades are slowly turned to generate power by the ebbing and flowing tides - is already in operation off Lynmouth in Devon. Senior Government sources believe that arrays of them - installed off Scotland and Northern Ireland, in the Channel Islands and off Portland Bill - could provide at least as much electricity as the barrage. ...

More links:

GristMill - Global Warming Envy
The Australian - Santos proposes carbon storage hub at Moomba. And who will pay for a couple of thousand kilometres of corrosion resistant pipes ? Hmmm "partial federal funding" - sounds like us taxpayers get to cough up for it. Those Nyosians really love a handout...
WSJ Energy Roundup - T Boone Pickens Has Wind And Is Retaining Water
Cleantech Blog - Cleantech Media Juggernaut is NOT Slowing Down
Jerusalem Post - Israel: Much interest, but little investment in cleantech
Roscoe Bartlett - Commemorating Admiral Rickover's 1957 speech on energy
STCWA - Ireland on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
STCWA - South Korea joins rush to build ever taller buildings
Miami Herald - Beijing dispatches energy-saving cops
New York Times - Putting Energy Hogs in the Home on a Strict Low-Power Diet. "the Department of Energy estimates that in the average home, 40 percent of all electricity used to power home electronics is consumed while the products are turned off"
Technology Review - Longer Life for Organic Fruit. And it uses less energy too.
Entropy Production - Coal Liquification Mandates Higher Electricity Prices
Grist - We Propose They Give Everyone a Pony - Senate begins to debate energy bill
Grist - Obama qualifies his support for coal-to-liquid fuel
Sun Sentinel - Nuclear Power: Millions could have been better spent
CSR Asia - Thailand to build first nuclear plant. Fools.
Equilibri.net - Palestine: Gas reserves and the national energy system
Reuters - Scientists to Canada: clean your dirty snow
The Village Voice - Dome and Doomer
The Australian - Iraq surge a failure
Thomas Barnett (Esquire) - The Americans Have Landed: The Story Of Africa Command. Quick - grab the oil before the Chinese do - these citizens of The Gap don't need it...
MediaChannel.org - Online News Will Overtake Television News Within Five Years
Cryptogon - Tony Blair Calls for Media Regulation to Contain Pernicious Conspiracy Theories
Cryptogon - FBI Terror Watch List ‘Out of Control’
Cryptogon - NSA, AT&T and the NarusInsight Intercept Suite

Today, EFF released unredacted court documents related to the ATT/NSA intercept case.

I don’t know how to express this in a way that fully conveys my utter astonishment that these documents are publicly available in their entirety. If there is a more riveting and technically revealing account of recent NSA IP intercept operations out there, I’d like to know about it.

This is arcane information. It will not be easy for laypeople to understand. But… For those of you who want names, model numbers, techniques, and locations all related to how, IN FACT, They are watching EVERYTHING we are doing online, this is it.

The only reason this is public is because Mark Klein, an ATT engineer who participated in building the secret NSA infrastructure, outed it. There can be no idiotic commentary about “conspiracy theories” or “paranoia” with this. These are court documents containing information provided under penalty of perjury by an eye witness and participant in the operation. The expert analysis provided by J. Scott Marcus–which was just unsealed today—is, quite literally, shocking. For those of us who just knew this was happening, but couldn’t put our fingers on how, well, now we know.

I’ve followed publicly available information on NSA for about fifteen years and I’ve never seen anything like this. The capabilities of this system are awesome and terrifying.

When you read J. Scott Marcus’ analysis, it will become very clear to you why NSA and ATT wanted that thing sealed. Oh my, that is a good one.

So, how does NSA do it?

A company called Narus has developed the NarusInsight Intercept Suite: a purpose built network surveillance system that is capable of analyzing (in real time) ALL of the data passing through the largest network nodes in existence. This system is capable of applying sophisticated targeting rules to the traffic, as well as recording entire, individual sessions for later analysis. According to the Narus website:

These capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Narus partner products offer the ability to quickly analyze information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules. When Narus partners’ powerful analytic tools are combined with the surgical targeting and real-time collection capabilities of Directed Analysis and Lawful Intercept modules, analysts or law enforcement agents are provided capabilities that have been unavailable thus far.

How many nodes?

Unknown, but according to Mark Klein in his Declaration in Support of Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction:

In the course of my employment, I was required to connect new circuits to the “splitter cabinet” and get them up and running. While working on a particularly difficult one with another AT&T technician, I learned that other such “splitter cabinets” were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.

That, in a nutshell, is the system that’s keeping an eye on us. It sits between the large peering nodes where different carriers’ networks come together. It searches for traffic based on tasking provided by NSA, captures it and phones it home over a private IP based optical carrier link. Where is that data winding up? Yesterday we saw information on the National Security Analysis Center, which might become the repository for the longer term storage of the information that is captured from this and other surveillance operations.

Are They building electronic dossiers on as many of us as they can? I don’t know, but it sure looks that way.

Wouldn’t you love to know what that thing was actually looking for? Which websites get you thrown on a permanent shit list? Which books? Which phrases? ...

Word of the day is "Pollaganda", which describes an example of the corruption of predictive markets I talked about in "The Shockwave Rider" - in this case, rigging opinion polls in an effort to drag public support along. It currently seems to be heavily used by groups opposing the Bush-Kennedy immigration amnesty bill in the US (one of those polarising topics which seems to create wedges through all parts of the political spectrum, a little like the vexed topic of population amongst various green shadings).

Past Peak is back from holiday, so I'll close with a Bush joke.

Paris Hilton is behind bars, but still no word on Osama. — David Letterman