The Sorcerer's Apprentice  

The Guardian has a look at China's latest great leap forward - "As glaciers melt and rivers dry up, coal-fired power stations multiply".

On a bad day - which can be hundreds in a year - the ancient city of Linfen in the northern province of Shanxi is environmental hell. Named by the World Bank last year as having the worst air quality on Earth, its 3.5 million people more often than not choke on coal dust; its soil and its rivers are covered with soot, and its Buddhas are blackened and shrouded in a toxic mist.

The cause is Linfen's 196 iron foundries, its 153 coking plants, its unregulated coalmines, tar factories, steelworks and domestic homes, all of which burn cheap, easily accessible brown coal.

Shanxi is the centre of China's vast and growing coal industry, which was pinpointed yesterday by Dutch government scientists as the major culprit, along with the cement industry, in the country's sudden surge to the top of the world's league of greenhouse gas emitters.

In the last six years, the Chinese coal industry, with reserves put at more than 1 trillion tonnes, has doubled production to more than 1.2bn tonnes a year. The country is now building 550 coal-fired power stations - opening at the equivalent of two a week - and in the five years to 2005, electricity generation rose 150%.

But while the Chinese economy has tripled in size in a decade, it has been at the expense of carbon dioxide emissions, which were yesterday put at more than 6.2bn tonnes in 2006, compared to nearly 5.8bn tonnes for the US.

China is well aware of its impact on climate change. Its Himalayan glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate, its deserts are encroaching on cities in the north-west, and rivers are drying up as a result of temperature rises and over-exploitation. According to the Worldwatch Institute thinktank in Washington, Chinese air pollution from coal-burning cost its economy more than $63bn (£31bn) in 2004, or roughly 3% of GDP.

But China argues that even with its surging economy, it is a relatively minor villain. The carbon footprint of the average Chinese last year was only a quarter of an American, or half that of a Briton.

China's first national plan on climate change, put together after two years of preparation by 17 government ministries, follows western countries in setting ambitious domestic targets to improve energy efficiency by 20% by 2010 and to raise the share of renewables - such as wind and hydropower - to 16% by 2020. However, more than a year into the energy plan, it is proving hard to implement. For another 10 to 20 years, the most populous country on Earth is expected to continue its supercharged growth, then to plateau for a decade or so, before making reductions. ...

TreeHugger has some thoughts on a post at The Oil Drum asking if energy use makes you happy. One quibble - the idea that there is not enough energy to go round (for 6.5 billion people now or 9 billion people in the future) is simply wrong. There is a vast amount of available energy if we choose to harness it - go and do the sums...

The Oil Drum has a thoughtful article on whether energy use makes you happy. There are 6.5 billion people on this planet, and not enough energy to go around. When people discuss peak oil, and the changes that will ensue, it’s assumed that we will need to find new energy sources to replace it. However, the article looks at peak oil ‘from a broader context: the necessity and purpose of continued increases in demand for energy. What is it all for, if not to make us happy?’

The article contains quite a lot of interesting statistics, including a study that compares GNP to the average happiness of countries’ occupants. The basic result is that money, and therefore consumption and products, makes you happier to a point, but after that point does very little. It’s summed up nicely by this quote, “When you buy your 5th car, does that make you anything close to as happy than when you bought your first? (does it really make you happy at all, or is it like opening the fridge at midnight?). Is the 10 million dollar in the bank 10 times better than the first? Do we buy the 50th pair of shoes because we need them, or we need the feeling we get from buying them?”

Do we really need to be stripping the Earth of resources as quickly as we are, in order to keep everyone happy, even considering how many people are balanced on top of it? Even if the answer is yes, then it would appear that an even distribution of energy use would up the global happiness average considerably. Of course, that all seems rather obvious and intuitive when you say it like that. It’s interesting to see that conspicuous consumption is pointless, but quite another to convince people to give away all but a few of their millions for the greater good

The BBC has a report on efforts to stop Planktos' geoengineering experiment off the Galapagos.

Seeding the oceans with iron filings is known to create plankton blooms that can absorb significant quantities of carbon dioxide. But environmentalists say the effects of such an experiment on the Pacific ecosystem have not been properly researched.

The Telegraph reports that the company will begin dumping 100 tonnes of iron filings this month in a 100 sq km area off the Galapagos from its ship, the Weatherbird II, a US-flagged vessel.

Environmentalists say the plan may violate both the London Convention, set up to regulate dumping at sea, and the US Ocean Dumping Act. Jim Thomas, chief executive of Canada-based environmental group ETC Group, said: "The overwhelming scientific conclusion based upon the numerous governmental and intergovernmental experiments is that iron seeding is risky and may only temporarily sequester carbon dioxide - leaving the CO2 below the surface just long enough for private geo-engineers to cash their cheques." ETC Group has asked the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to launch an immediate and full investigation into Planktos' ocean dumping activities.

Russ George, the chief executive of Planktos, told the Telegraph: "How could this be illegal?" He added that if concentrations were as low as were involved in this case, then no permit was needed. "We are in the ecosystem restoration business. To portray us as money grabbing greedy capitalists is a perversion of the truth.''

The Huffington Post has a post on "Dysfunction Junction: How the New Energy Bill Adds Fuel to a Bloomberg Candidacy". Just beware of the alligators when you try to drain the swamp...

To put this modest increase into perspective, automakers have already managed to comply with much tougher mileage standards all over the world, including 46 mpg in Japan and 44 mpg in Europe. And that is what they are doing today, not 13 years from now.

Nevertheless, Detroit is still fighting progress tooth and nail. Automakers originally were sticking to their guns and pushing for no increase at all but, after finally seeing the writing on the wall, are now desperately trying to water down the already watered down CAFE provision in the energy bill currently under debate. And they are getting help from a group of lawmakers that includes Michigan's two Democratic Senators, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow. They are pushing a compromise amendment that would require cars to get 36 mpg by 2022, while allowing trucks and SUVs to continue lagging behind, required only to get 30 mpg by 2025.

It's modern politics at its worst. Instead of embracing a big idea that is long overdue and seizing a moment of national consensus on one of the biggest issues of the day -- energy independence -- Levin, Stabenow, and their cohorts are giving in to the lobbyists and the special interests that have defined Washington for decades now. It should come as no surprise that Levin and Stabenow have been major recipients of auto industry largess -- Levin taking in $104,000 from Big Auto since 2001, and Stabenow pocketing over $115,000 from automakers, auto dealers, and auto worker unions.

According to Stabenow, the proposed mileage increase "doesn't do anything to help us." Which makes me wonder: which "us" is she referring to -- the American people or the auto industry?

Either way, she's dead wrong. It goes without saying that raising fuel standards would be good for the American people. (As Southwest Airlines chairman Herb Kelleher, a member of SAFE, put it: "We concluded that the overall dependence of the United States on oil was a great vulnerability, and by continuing it we were helping the people who opposed us.") But it would also be good for Detroit.

For far too long, Washington has been an enabler of the auto industry's refusal to get with the times. Detroit missed the boat on hybrid technology and so many other innovations because, instead of forcing auto makers into corporate rehab to clean up their act, our leaders in Washington have acted as a dysfunctional parent -- not only turning a blind eye to Detroit's wild ways but actively encouraging it by creating outrageous loopholes like the one that allows buyers of extra-large gas-guzzling SUVs to take extra-large deductions on their taxes. It would be like Lindsay Lohan's mom leaving a vial of crack on her daughter's pillow at night.

Washington needs to adopt a zero tolerance policy for Detroit -- and for business-as-usual political maneuvers like the one Levin and Stabenow are attempting.

It's behavior like this that could fuel a "drain the swamp" candidacy like Bloomberg's.

Over the past few years I've received plenty of unusual emails - a few of them asking for advice on raising venture capital for various energy related schemes, a subject on which I don't have much useful knowledge. While I've observed a few VC rounds at startup companies I've worked with, I've never been involved in the process myself and don't really know how the process works - however onetime Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has some interesting insights in a pair of blog posts on the truth about venture capitalists. My one experience with someone working in the industry (a mere "entrepreneur in residence" as opposed to someone doing the actual investing) was an interview at Benchmark Capital in London a few years ago. The guy managed to spend the first 55 minutes of the interview fielding an endless stream of calls on his mobile phone, while I enjoyed the view from the boardroom and helped myself to the contents of the fridge. When he finally stopped yapping I told him he had 5 minutes left - he gave me his pitch then got about 1 question in before I told him his time was up and demanded twice my usual rate if he wanted to hire me, which resulted in a pleasingly unhappy and baffled expression on his face as I left him to it. I really hate people who answer their phones during meetings...

A lot of people have opinions about venture capital -- the pros and cons of VC, whether or not to take VC, which venture capitalists to take money from, how to get VCs to invest in your company, whether VCs are seasoned risk-taking professional investors or psychotic entrepreneur-hating sociopaths, etc.

Often these opinions are based on one individual's specific personal experience with venture capital, and often based on someone's negative experience -- as is often the case, people who have negative experiences are more motivated to tell others than people who have positive experiences.

With that in mind, I will try to provide my hopefully broad perspective on the topic.

I'll just say up front that I don't think my point of view on this is any more valid than that of any of my fellow entrepreneurs -- everyone's experience is different, and this is definitely a topic where reasonable people disagree.

My experience with venture capital includes: being the cofounder of two VC-backed startups that later went public (Kleiner Perkins-backed Netscape and Benchmark-backed Opsware); cofounder of a third startup that hasn't raised professional venture capital (Ning); participant as angel investor or board member or friend to dozens of entrepreneurs who have raised venture capital; and an investor (limited partner) in a significant number of venture funds, ranging from some of the best performing funds ever (1995 vintage) to some of the worst performing funds ever (1999). And all of this over a time period ranging from the recovery of the early 90's bust to the late 90's boom to the early 00's bust to the late 00's whatever you want to call it.

I'm starting to understand why I don't have any hair left.

The most important thing to understand about venture capitalists is that they are in business to do a very specific thing.

They raise a large amount of money -- often $100 million or more -- today, in order to invest in a series of high-risk startups over the next small number of years -- usually 3 to 4 years.

The legal lifespan of the fund is usually 10 years, so that's the absolute outer limit on their investment horizon.

They generally intend, and their investors generally expect, to have the returns from those startups flow back within the next 4 to 6 years -- that's their realistic investment horizon.

Within that structure, they generally operate according to the baseball model (quoting some guy): "Out of ten swings at the bat, you get maybe seven strikeouts, two base hits, and if you are lucky, one home run. The base hits and the home runs pay for all the strikeouts."

They don't get seven strikeouts because they're stupid; they get seven strikeouts because most startups fail, most startups have always failed, and most startups will always fail.

So logically their investment selection strategy has to be, and is, to require a credible potential of a 10x gain within 4 to 6 years on any individual investment -- so that the winners will pay for the losers and in the timeframe that their investors expect.

From this, you can answer the question of which startups should raise venture capital and which ones shouldn't.

Startups that have a credible potential to be sold or go public for a 10x gain on invested capital within 4 to 6 years of the date of funding should consider raising venture capital.

Most other startups should not raise venture capital. This includes: startups where the founders want to stay private and independent for a long time; startups where there's no inherent leverage in the business model that could result in a 10x gain in 4 to 6 years; and startups working on projects with a longer fuse than 4 to 6 years. ...

Marc also has a look at his top 10 science fiction writers of the last decade.

We are blessed so far this decade with an amazing crop of new science fiction novelists.

Writing in a variety of styles, this crew is arguably more insightful, more interesting, higher intensity, and bolder than many (but not all!) of their predecessors -- and in my view revitalizing the genre at a time when more new technologies that will radically reshape all our lives are incubating and percolating than ever before.

So, taking nothing away from authors like David Brin who have long been established and continue to produce top-notch work, here are my nominations for the top 10 new science fiction novelists of -- more or less -- the decade, plus one bonus.

And, they're not all British.

Charles Stross

Stross, in my opinion, is first among equals -- the single best emerging talent with several outstanding novels in various styles under his belt and hopefully many more to come. ...

Richard Morgan

Morgan writes outstanding, page-turning, highly inventive military- and detective-flavored hard science fiction set in turbulent worlds where hard men are faced with hard challenges. ...

Alastair Reynolds

Reynolds is the real deal -- doctorate in astrophysics and former staff scientist at the European Space Agency -- and writes as if Robert Heinlein knew a thousand times more about science and completely lost his ability to write for warm characters. While Reynolds' work is cold and dark -- almost sterile -- in human terms, he operates on a scale and scope seldom seen, and everything he writes is grounded in real advanced theoretical physics. Highly recommended for anyone who likes large-scale space opera and big ideas. ...

Ken MacLeod

MacLeod is incredibly creative -- his imagination is second to none -- and he's a superb writer. Many of his books have political overtones that may or may not interfere with your ability to enjoy them. Sometimes MacLeod seems to think that socialism is going to work a lot better in the future than it did in the past. But if you can get through that, his novels certainly qualify as dizzyingly inventive and frequently rewarding. ...

Peter Hamilton ...
John Scalzi ...
Neal Asher ...
Chris Moriarty ...
Peter Watts ...
David Marusek ...

Bonus: Vernor Vinge

Vinge, a retired San Diego State Univeristy professor of mathematics and computer science, is one of the most important science fiction authors ever -- with Arthur C. Clarke one of the best forecasters in the world.

First, if you haven't had the pleasure, be sure to read True Names, Vinge's 1981 novella that forecast the modern Internet with shocking clarity. (Ignore the essays, just read the story.) Fans of Gibson and Stephenson will be amazed to see how much more accurately Vinge called it, and before Neuromancer's first page cleared Gibson's manual typewriter. Quoting a reviewer on Amazon:

When I was starting out as a PhD student in Artificial Intelligence at Carnegie Mellon, it was made known to us first-year students that an unofficial but necessary part of our education was to locate and read a copy of an obscure science-fiction novella called True Names. Since you couldn't find it in bookstores, older grad students and professors would directly mail order sets of ten and set up informal lending libraries -- you would go, for example, to Hans Moravec's office, and sign one out from a little cardboard box over in the corner of his office. This was 1983 -- the Internet was a toy reserved for American academics, "virtual reality" was not a popular topic, and the term "cyberpunk" had not been coined. One by one, we all tracked down copies, and all had the tops of our heads blown off by Vinge's incredible book.

True Names remains to this day one of the four or five most seminal science-fiction novels ever written, just in terms of the ideas it presents, and the world it paints. It laid out the ideas that have been subsequently worked over so successfully by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. And it's well written. And it's fun.

So what? Well, he's done it again. Vinge's new novel, Rainbows End (yes, the apostrophe is deliberately absent), is the clearest and most plausible extrapolation of modern technology trends forward to the year 2025 that you can imagine.

Stop reading this blog right now. Go get it. Read it, and then come back.

I'll wait.

It's that good.

We'll see how things turn out, but I would not be the least bit surprised if we look back from 2025 and say, "I'll be damned, Vinge called it", just like we look back today on 1981's True Names and say the same thing.

He better write a sequel.

True Names wasn't as good as "The Shockwave Rider" though (with my review now mysteriously missing from the Google search results even though it was in the top 5 last week).

I haven't read any science fiction lately but I did read John Le Carre's "Absolute Friends" this week which I quite enjoyed, even though it tended toward the polemical for much of the last quarter of the book. It does make you wonder how many old school spooks are jaded by the events of the past 7 years or so. From one of the reviews at Amazon:

ABSOLUTE FRIENDS is perhaps John le Carré's most elegant construct in some time. By its conclusion, it also reflects the author's anger against America's and Britain's overt justification for their current involvement in Iraq, i.e. as the front line in the war against Muslim terrorism. I doubt if it will be preferred bedtime reading for George Dubya or Tony Blair, just as CONSTANT GARDENER wouldn't find favor with pharmaceutical company CEOs.

The hero of the story, and its ultimate patsy, is Edward "Ted" Mundy, born in Lahore of a British officer in the Indian Army and a native nursemaid to an aristocratic English family on the very night that the Raj formally splintered into India and Pakistan. Ted's mother dies during childbirth. His father, the "Major", subsequently joins the new Pakistani Army, but is eventually sent back to England in disgrace after striking a brother officer. Over the decades, the younger Mundy plays cricket, drops out of Oxford, becomes a Berlin anarchist, is expelled from West Germany, and becomes a minor functionary in the British government and an MI-6/Stasi double agent. Then, after German reunification, Ted fails as an English language teacher in Heidelberg, becomes a tour guide at one of Mad King Ludwig's castles in Bavaria, and meets his final destiny as an apparent Muslim sympathizer who's fallen in love with a Turkish ex-prostitute. Mundy's largely directionless life is characterized by a lack of entrenched commitment to anything political, and, like a leaf, is blown from cause to cause by girlfriends, wife, mistress, intelligence handler, circumstance, and, above all, his "absolute friend" Sasha, a stateless, radical visionary/philosopher/anarchist, whom Ted originally meets during his youthful anti-establishment period in West Berlin.

As with any le Carré offering, all of which compulsively stress character and plot development, the reader seeking action and thrills need not open the cover. To my mind, the author's greatest triumphs were the two George Smiley novels, TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY and SMILEY'S PEOPLE, both of which were made into superb television miniseries by the BBC and starring Alec Guinness in the title role. Here, Mundy, in his own way, is as engaging a protagonist as Smiley. However, I must ultimately knock-off a star because I, while no uncritical supporter of George Dubya and his Iraqi venture, somewhat resent being presented with an entertainment opportunity that becomes, in the end, simply a vehicle for the author to grind an ax, albeit cleverly done. ...

Links:

The Age - Oil up on Nigerian trouble, hurricanes in US and the 'driving season'
The Australian - Nigerian troops storm oil plant
The Age - MacBank, B&B face off in US energy market. Strangely they are focusing on gas fired power stations. Is North America going over a "natural gas cliff" or not ? Anyone got a good graph of production trends over the past few (and coming few) years ?
The Age - NSW gas over demand forces load shedding
The Australian - Award for turning waste food into gas
The Australian - PM to report cities facing less water
The Age - Stormwater is a much better option than desalination
The Age - Melbourne's dam levels begin slow rise — at last
SMH - Higher dam levels be damned: state pushes desalination. Sydney dam levels have jumped back to the level of 3 years ago over the past week.



David Roberts (Grist) - Time to put the notion of 'energy independence' to bed. Its not independence that counts - its resilience."The things we need to do to fight global warming will increase resilience and cut GHG emissions. Pursuing energy independence via coal will do neither."
Past Peak - Senate Votes To Raise CAFE Standards
AP - Big oil companies spared tax hikes. For the moment.
New York Times - Colin Fletcher, 85, a Trailblazer of Modern Backpacking, Dies
Grist - Farewell, complete walker.. Killed by car culture.
WorldChanging - Dubai's Burj al-Taqa: A Zero-Energy Tower in the Desert
WorldChanging - Sustainable Development and Social Well-Being
Tom Whipple (Falls Church News Press) - Peak oil crisis: approaching the cliff
MoneyWeek - How Peak Oil went mainstream. Is Matt Drudge the new prophet of peak oil ?
TransMaterial - CarbonCast. Lightweight, high insulation concrete.
TreeHugger - Follow Your Nose... to the Pollutants. Human bloodhounds in China.
San Francsico Bay Guardian - Green City: A wiser Earth movement. The Paul Hawken tour continues.
TreeHugger - WISER Earth: User Created Directory of 'the Largest Movement on Earth'
Wessex Institute of Technology - DESIGN & NATURE 2008: Fourth International Conference on Comparing Design in Nature with Science and Engineering. Biomimicry conference coming up in sunny Portugal. If you find yourself in Lagos, make sure you drink a few "Hair Of the Buffalo".
Reason - Hawks and Hogs: Why no one dares attack the waste in defense spending
Reason - Gitmo Gone ?. "Mitt Romney's "Double Gitmo" plan just got a lot less likely.".
AFP - Bush's approval rating plunges to new low. Most disliked president ever ?
Keith Olbermann - Dick Cheney: Above The Law (also at the NYT). "There may be a bright side to this: If Cheney wants to assert that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch,” that means he’s not entitled to executive privilege, right? I want those energy task force minutes!!". Arrrr, there be treasure maps there, me hearties...
Bruce Schneier - Direct Marketing Meets Wholesale Surveillance. Just wait until they mash this up with Google Earth - every pet owner on the planet will be deluged with direct mail marketing.
Cryptogon - Arizona Wants to Expand DNA Database to Include Those Arrested, not Just Convicted. Next they'll start chipping people with RFID implants.
Cryptogon - Bush, Senate Head for Showdown on Domestic Spying. Security theatre ?