Warming And Peace  

The Christian Science Monitor has an article on an unpleasant intersection between global warming and fossil fuel depletion, noting Chile is turning to old foe Bolivia for natural gas supplies. On the positive side, its nice to see peace breaking out somewhere.

A South American cold snap is causing Chileans to pay up to four times more for heat and electricity, and could spur the government to speed reconciliation with its bitter – but gas-rich – foe, Bolivia, observers say. As temperatures dropped to near-record lows in recent weeks, neighboring Argentina has had to cut off some gas shipments to Chile in order to meet its own domestic demand.

Now, an increasingly disgruntled Chilean public is pressing the government to seek gas deals with other countries, including Bolivia. "I believe that we need to leave behind these historic feuds once and for all and start an open and frank dialogue with Bolivia," said Chilean senator Nelson Ávila after the latest round of gas cuts last month. "Bolivia has some of the largest natural-gas reserves on the planet, and we could easily benefit from them."

In 1995, Argentina promised a cheap, steady supply of natural gas to satisfy Chile's residential, industrial, and electricity-generating needs. Still, what was then perceived to be the cure-all to Chile's energy woes has since morphed into one of the country's biggest problems. Today, Chile imports nearly 100 percent of the commodity from its Andean neighbor. This winter's cold temperatures have exposed this dependency.

"Depending on Argentina is wishful thinking; they do not even have enough gas to meet their internal demands," Eduardo Frei, president of the Chilean Senate, told reporters recently.

In response to the shortages, many Chilean businesses, particularly electricity-generating companies, have reluctantly switched to diesel fuel. The situation reached a low point in June, the first month since the 1995 agreement that Chile used no natural gas to generate electricity. Diesel costs up to four times as much as natural gas and pollutes far more.

The consequences have been disastrous: electricity bills have risen sharply. Some industry analysts expect them to rise by as much as another 13 percent by winter's end. Additionally, Santiago, the country's capital and largest city, has experienced a sharp spike in air pollution, including its smoggiest day since 1999. ...

n spite of this sensitive history, relations between the two nations have thawed in the last year. Since Chilean President Michelle Bachelet and her Bolivian counterpart, Evo Morales, assumed their respective positions in 2006, officials from both countries have tried to boost dialogue and reconciliation.

The latest sign of rapprochement came last week, when Chilean Energy Minister Marcelo Tokman and Bolivian Hydrocarbon Minister Carlos Villegas met in Bolivia's capital, La Paz, to discuss energy integration. The two ministers discussed cooperation on geothermal energy at length. But they decided to put off detailed discussions about gas until a later date, which has not yet been set.

Chilean politicians and officials have spoken out in favor of the renewed dialogue. "I think that last Monday's meeting was a very important first step toward reconciliation," says Paula Vasconi, an official at Terram, a Chilean think tank that promotes environmental protection and sustainable development.

The Rodent has made a stunningly generous offer to Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, promising to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq if the Iraqi parliament continues to refuse to hand over Iraq's "undiscovered" oil to American oil companies. Given that its only a couple of months since Maliki said the US was welcome to withdraw their troops any time it feels like it, I imagine his response to Howard will be something like "don't let the door hit you on the way out". But for some reason I suspect this isn't meant to be a two way conversation...

JOHN Howard has demanded the Iraqi Government make faster progress towards resolving the country's political differences or face the prospect of a withdrawal of Australian troops and those of other Western nations.

The Prime Minister, in a blunt letter to his Iraqi counterpart Nouri al-Maliki, urges the Iraqi Government to speed the sharing of oil wealth among all sections of the Iraqi community, including the minority Sunni population. In the letter, sent last week, MrHoward warns that if the Iraqis fail to make progress, the public support for Australia's military deployment to Iraq may not be sustainable. The clear implication in Mr Howard's letter is that US public support would also falter without signs of substantial political progress in Iraq.

The letter displays Mr Howard's deep and growing frustration with the Maliki Government, which has suspended sittings of the Iraqi parliament for the whole of this month. With the federal election looming, it shows Mr Howard is under real political pressure on Iraq for the first time. The top-secret letter was transmitted electronically to the Australian embassy in Baghdad and hand-delivered to Mr Maliki's office by the Australian ambassador to Iraq, Mark Innes Brown. The hard copy was later sent in a secure diplomatic bag.

In the letter, Mr Howard urges Mr Maliki to move decisively on political reconciliation within Iraq, and outlines a number of measures he should take. ...

Mr Howard demands that the Iraqi Government use the opportunity provided by the US troop surge to take specific and speedy action. And he urges the passage of two critical pieces of legislation when the Iraqi Council of Representatives resumes its meetings next month. These are the hydrocarbon resources law and the new de-Baathification legislation.

The hydrocarbon law provides for the equitable distribution of Iraq's large oil wealth between the country's majority Shia and minority Sunni and Kurdish communities. This is regarded as a central element to any possible long-term communal reconciliation within Iraq.

How does the Australian get hold of all these secret documents ?

Got to give them credit for not mentioning once what the proposed oil law really means though - though I guess "share the wealth" does provide a little hint.

Meanwhile Murdoch stablemate The Times is continuing to beat the "new cold war" drum in "Arctic military bases signal new Cold War". While the merchants of death are no doubt licking their lips over all this I suspect the rest of us will be a lot better off if we ditch the oil habit ASAP.

Canada fired a warning shot in a new Cold War over the vast resources of the far North by announcing last night that it will build two new military bases in the Arctic wilderness.

A week after Russia laid claim to the North Pole in what is rapidly becoming a global scramble for the region’s vast oil and gas reserves, Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, said that Canada would open a new army training centre for cold-weather fighting at Resolute Bay, and a deep-water port at Nanisivik, on the northern tip of Baffin Island. The country is also beefing up its military presence in the far North with 900 Rangers.

“Canada’s Government understands that the first principle of Arctic sovereignty is use it or lose it,” Mr Harper said. The move comes a week after Russia planted a rustproof titanium flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole in a blatant attempt to stake a claim to the billions of tonnes of untapped energy resources believed to be under the Arctic Ocean.

The IHT reports that the Algerians are getting into the "deserts of gold" idea - "Beyond oil and gas, Algeria aims to tap vast sunbelt to export solar energy to Europe". They are thinking big too, aiming to eventually produce 4 times current global energy consumption. If you're waiting for "energy descent" to begin, you might be waiting for a long, long time...

It's a vision that has long enticed energy planners: solar panels stretching out over vast swaths of the Sahara desert, soaking up sun to generate clean, green power.

Now Algeria, aware that its oil and gas riches will one day run dry, is gearing up to tap its sunshine on an industrial scale for itself and even Europe.

Work on its first plant began late last month at Hassi R'mel, 420 kilometers (260 miles) south of Algiers, the capital. The plant will be a hybrid, using both sun and natural gas to generate 150 megawatts. Of that, 25 megawatts will come from giant parabolic mirrors stretching over 180,000 square meters (nearly 2 million square feet) — roughly 45 football fields.

Experts say it's the first project of its kind to combine gas and steam turbines with solar thermal input in a hybrid plant.

The plant should be ready in 2010, and the longer-term goal is to export 6,000 megawatts of solar-generated power to Europe by 2020, about a tenth of current electricity consumption in Germany.

Our potential in thermal solar power is four times the world's energy consumption so you can have all the ambitions you want with that," said Tewfik Hasni, managing director of New Energy Algeria, or NEAL, a company created by the Algerian government in 2002 to develop renewable energy.

The project is still at an early stage and faces daunting financial and technological obstacles. Solar power's supporters say it will take 10 years for it to become economically competitive, and while undersea cables to Sicily and Spain are planned for construction in 2010-2012, it isn't known who will finance them. But as the world grows increasingly anxious about climate change and dwindling fossil fuels, ideas that once sounded like science fiction are becoming ever more plausible.

The European Union this year set a mandatory target of producing 20 percent of its energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020, and there are also big political imperatives in play.

In Algeria's case, exporting solar power through undersea cables would add flesh and bone to the idea floated by Nicolas Sarkozy, France's new president, of a "Mediterranean Union" that would bind Europe and North Africa closer together. The Algerian program is part of a broader reassessment of green technologies by countries that owe their wealth to oil and gas. Algeria, population 33 million, remains heavily dependent on oil and gas exports, which earned it about US$54 billion (€39 billion) last year.

"Until now all the oil-producing countries under the lead of Saudi Arabia did everything to torpedo renewable energies," said Wolfgang Palz, chairman of the independent World Council for Renewable Energy, speaking on the sidelines of an international conference on renewable energy in Algiers in June. "This is really a big change now because with all this talking about the limitations of conventional resources," oil-producing countries "feel obliged to do something," he said.

Algeria seems an obvious source of solar power. Africa's second largest country is more than four-fifths desert, with enough sunshine to meet Western Europe's needs 60 times over, according to estimates cited by Algeria's energy ministry. "The solar potential of Algeria is huge, enormous, because solar radiation is high and there is plenty of land for solar plants," said Eduardo Zarza Moya, who works on solar power for Spain's public energy research center, CIEMAT. "The price of the land is low, it's cheap, and there is also manpower."

Computing Magazine has an article on heat conversion chips that could be used to make computers more energy efficient. The article is vague but it sounds like this is based on the Seebeck effect (the opposite of the Peltier effect).

Eneco, a US-based chip development firm that claims to have developed a "solid state energy conversion/generation chip" capable of turning a proportion of heat energy directly into usable electricity, has claimed that it is in talks with both Dell and Apple about how the technology could be used in laptops and other devices.

Speaking at a presentation to potential investors in London, chief executive Dr Lew Brown said that the new chip is small, lightweight, quiet and capable of producing up to 20 amps of current. "It'll suit any portable device and is also very scalable and long lived as there are no moving parts," he added

He added that both Dell and Apple are interested in using the chip in their laptops to extract heat generated by microprocessors, convert it to electricity and use it to power cooling fans. Harnessing waste electricity in this manner could help improve battery life and enhance processor performance, according to Brown.

The chip, which generates electricity when one side is heated, could have a myriad further uses in IT and in other spheres where energy is lost through waste heat, according to Brown. Primarily Eneco envisages the technology being used to replace car alternators and harness waste heat in industrial facilities.

GeoDynamics has announced (pdf) that they are about to commence drilling their Habanero 3 geothermal energy well in outback SA.

THE world is watching Australia's geothermal industry as an exciting form of renewable energy, federal Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane says.

Mr Macfarlane told the hot rocks energy conference in Adelaide the geothermal industry was growing quickly with 27 companies involved in hot rocks exploration. "Our vast untapped geothermal energy resources could ultimately pay big clean energy dividends for Australia,'' Mr Macfarlane said. "We can turn Australia into the world's laboratory for geothermal technology and all eyes are on us to see what we can achieve.''

Yesterday, exploration company Geodynamics said electricity generated by hot rocks buried kilometres underground could feed the national grid within three years. The company said its Habanero 3 well, near Innamincka in South Australia's far north, was on schedule to start commercial production by 2010. Geodynamics expect to begin drilling Australia's first commercial-scale hot rocks well within a week.

The SMH has a look at Germany's world leading PV solar industry - "Germany thinks big as it taps into the sun".

A VAST Soviet military training base located under the often sullen grey skies of former communist East Germany is an unlikely new hub for the world's burgeoning solar energy industry. Part of the 28,000-hectare Lieberose training ground is to be transformed into what will be the world's biggest solar plant. Once open in 2009, it will help propel the country to the forefront of the international sun-power revolution.

Germany was now home to the largest concentration of solar manufacturing plants anywhere in the world, said the chief of the German Solar Industry Association, Carsten Kornig, this week. In the long-term a third of the country's energy for heating and a quarter of the generation of electricity would be produced from solar plants sited near consumers, he said.

Underpinned by generous government subsidies, the number of jobs in the sun-power sector is predicted to double to 90,000 over the next five years. The renewable energy industry is evidently gaining strength as concerns about global warming and high oil prices increase.

Despite heavy cloud cover during about two-thirds of Germany's daylight hours, the rapid development of the sun-power sector means the country has become the world's leader in generating solar energy. It produces 55 per cent of the world's photovoltaic energy from solar panels. Indeed, the small Black Forest town of Freiburg alone generates almost as much solar photovoltaic power as the whole of Britain.

Germany now builds about half of the world's installed solar panels and is leading the way in solar technology. Research and development investment is expected to top €100 million ($161.67 million) this year. In a sense, the renewable energy drive is a new chapter in an environmental revolution in a country that already has stringent recycling laws for products and waste.

The country is also now in the process of phasing out nuclear energy, a push led by the former Social Democrat-Green party coalition. Although solar power generates just 3 per cent of the country's total energy, the Government plans to raise the renewable energy sector's overall contribution to the energy mix from 13 per cent to 27 per cent by 2020.

The SMH also has a look at the economy of the leaders in wind power - Denmark - who I'm forced to admit demonstrate that social democrats can run an economy just as well as relatively laissez faire types - and they are better at clean energy production and being able to do stuff beyond digging up dirt and shipping it out of the country. Hopefully we'll become a bit more dynamic once we are rid of the aging and dishonest Rodent.

Imagine this: a country where virtually all workers belong to a union. They are covered by collective agreements, not individual contracts. They have high minimum wages and generous welfare benefits. Government spending and taxes are also high. Such a country would be an economic basket case, no? It would be uncompetitive, lack dynamism, and suffer high unemployment.

That is what 11 years of the Howard Government has taught us to expect, and Rudd Labor is not inclined to disagree. In the me-tooism that has afflicted Australian politics, it seems everyone is an economic conservative.

But just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, so there is more than one way to produce a dynamic economy.

Denmark should be a basket case, our Princess Mary's presence notwithstanding. It is burdened by the full catastrophe: unions, welfare and taxes. Instead it is the fourth most competitive economy in the world as ranked by the World Economic Forum. It is beaten only by those well-known examples of rapacious capitalism, Switzerland, Finland and Sweden, and is ahead of the US, ranked at No. 6. In this survey of global competitiveness based on hard data and a survey of 11,000 business leaders, Australia is ranked a respectable 19 out of 125, marked down for its failure to move "beyond simply using technology developed elsewhere".

Denmark exports expensive, high-quality products. It has had years of low unemployment, low inflation, respectable growth and productivity rates. In all these measures it rivals the US, and also runs a budget surplus. Its GDP per capita is a few thousand dollars less than in the US but its workers put in shorter hours and yet are among the world's most prosperous. It runs a very open economy, is highly dependent on trade, and has had trade surpluses for 20 years. ...

Links:

* Peak Oil Passnotes - Is 'Peak Oil' Postponed?
* Jeff Vail - Losing our Balance? Some Predictions.... An expanded version of his earlier post, this time at TOD.
* The Scotsman - Wind turbine whining unwarranted
* Clean Break - What's old is new again with wind power
* Energy Bulletin - Climate Earth
* AP - Did global warming cause NYC tornado?
* Freeman Dyson - Heretical Thoughts About Science And Society. Some intelligent (and non ideological) global warming denial. Plus I like heretics.
* Toronto Star - Algae prompt nuclear reactor shutdown. Global warming is bad news for nuclear power.
* Global Public Media - Bart Anderson on The Reality Report
* Wired - Citing Four-Day Old Surveillance Law, Bush Seeks Dismissal of Lawsuit Challenging NSA Spying
* Anthropik - Everything You Need to Know about Rudy Giuliani
* Cryptogon - DailyKos and the CIA. Do people make these sorts of speeches just to tease conspiracy theorists ?