20% By 2020  

The SMH has an article on Australian energy company AGL advocating a national 20% renewable energy target for 2020. Not a bad starting point.

WIND, solar and other renewable energy should make up 20 per cent of power needs within 12 years if Australia wants to seriously cut the carbon emissions causing climate change, the head of the energy giant AGL said.

AGL's chief executive, Paul Anthony, is calling on the Prime Minister, John Howard, and the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, to set a renewable energy target of 20 per cent by 2020, a far more ambitious goal than either side has agreed to so far. "Look at the rest of the world," Mr Anthony told the Herald. "You can't effectively have a carbon abatement scheme without a very, very strong national obligation for renewable energy."

Mr Anthony's comments come as the major parties are examining targets for renewable energy in the lead-up to the federal election. For a decade, the Howard Government has resisted raising the mandatory national target for renewable energy above 2 per cent. Labor is expected to release its target soon.

Mr Anthony has been appointed chairman of the sustainable energy pressure group which is about to become the Clean Energy Council. His company has one of the largest retail energy businesses in Australia, with 3.6 million customers. He also criticised the Howard Government approach to a carbon emissions trading scheme, which is supposed to set a price on carbon from fossil fuels that are causing pollution.

While committed to a trading scheme by 2012, neither Mr Howard nor Mr Rudd will set national targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions until after the election. Without targets, the emissions trading scheme cannot operate. Mr Anthony said business was concerned that there was still so much confusion over how the scheme would work. "The piecemeal disclosure of the Government's thinking worries us," he said. "We are finding it difficult to understand the logic." Most concerning, he said, was the plan by the Government to auction some permits to emit greenhouse gases but give permits or exemptions to particular industries.

Questions were raised about AGL's commitment to renewable energy recently when it dropped its plans to build the Dollar Wind Farm in Victoria. Mr Anthony insisted this was simply because there were better sites elsewhere. "We've got a strong appetite for wind," he said, pointing to plans to build a $600 million wind farm at Macarthur in Victoria.

Mr Anthony said he believed Australia could economically make deep cuts in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

The SMH also reports that polls show the majority say no to more coal fired power.

MOST people in NSW favour renewable energy over coal to satisfy the state's electricity needs, a Newspoll survey to be published today has found. The poll, commissioned by Greenpeace, also found more than 50 per cent of people do not believe that the Premier, Morris Iemma, is doing enough to tackle climate change.

The poll of 334 people conducted by phone from August 24 to 26 showed 82 per cent of adult respondents did not want a new coal-fired power station built in NSW, with disapproval spread fairly evenly across age, gender and income groups.

The poll coincides with the deadline for submissions to the Government's Owen inquiry into electricity supply. Of the 72 public submissions, 29 rejected a new coal-fired power station, while 34 supported a greater role for renewable energy in the mix, in particular solar, wind, biomass and hot rocks, an analysis by the Nature Conservation Council of NSW has found.

A new coal-fired power station would emit millions of tonnes a year of additional greenhouse pollution and make it impossible for the Government to meet its own long-term greenhouse gas target of stabilisation of emissions at 2000 levels by 2025, said a Greenpeace energy campaigner, Ben Pearson. "At a time when greenhouse pollution levels need to be reduced, a new coal-fired power station would see them increase dramatically," Mr Pearson said.

The Age reports that South Australia has taken the unprecedented step of imposing fire bans in winter.

SOUTH Australian authorities have declared what is thought to be the state's first winter fire bans as the combination of potentially record high August temperatures and gusty winds forced emergency fire services onto full alert. Fire bans starting from midnight last night were declared in four areas, including the Adelaide Hills, which were ravaged in the 1983 bushfires, and areas of Eyre Peninsula, where in 2005 eight people lost their lives. ...

Mr Watts said soil dryness and drought combined with an unusual summer-style front contributed to the decision. He said there were no records to determine whether this was the first time fire bans had been declared in winter, but it was the first he knew of. "It is certainly a very rare event."

If the forecast temperature in Adelaide today of 28 degrees is exceeded by more than one degree, it would break the city's August record of 29 recorded in 1911, Bureau of Meteorology senior duty forecaster Allan Beattie said.

The system moving from South Australia and into Victoria is expected to bring winds ranging from 50 to 70 km/h, with some wind gusts reaching gale-force speeds of 120 km/h, which could spread spot fires or reignite burn-offs that were allowed at this time of the year. ...The underlying problem of drought also raised the risk of more severe bushfires as heavier fuel such as tree trunks, thick scrub and logs burnt more readily because they had dried out.

Technology Review has an article on Practical Fuel Cells for Electronics - a novel design could allow laptops to run 5 to 10 times longer.

A new scheme for creating a compact device that efficiently converts methanol into hydrogen could make it practical to incorporate fuel cells into laptop computers and other portable electronics. Such a device could allow a laptop to run for 50 hours and be recharged instantly by swapping in a small fuel pack.

Fuel cells powered by methanol or another liquid fuel have long been held up as a solution to the ever-growing energy demands of portable electronics. But fuel cells that convert methanol directly into electricity are bulky. Fuel cells that run on hydrogen gas are much more compact, but the hydrogen, unlike liquid fuel, takes up too much space.

An ideal compromise would be a system that uses a hydrogen fuel cell but stores the hydrogen in liquid form as methanol until just before it's needed. The hydrogen would be freed in a series of steps in a fuel processor that include heating the fuel to vaporize it, heating water for steam reforming, and further reactions for removing carbon monoxide. But the challenge has been to make them both small and efficient.

Technology Review also has a profile of another of this year's TR35 - Xudong Wang and his technology for harvesting vibrational energy.

When Xudong Wang finished his PhD in materials science at Georgia Tech at the end of 2005, he knew he had a good thing going. He opted to stay put in the lab of Zhong Lin Wang (no relation), sure that he and his lab mates were close to creating a new ­nanotech-based generator--an invention they felt could change the future of nanotechnology.

His risk paid off earlier this year when Science published a paper he coauthored, describing a novel device that converts ultrasonic waves--high-frequency mechanical vibrations--into electricity. The tiny device turns out a steady 0.5 nanoamperes of current that engineers may one day be able use to power implantable biosensors, remote environmental moni­tors, and more. "It's a very cool concept," says Peidong Yang, a nanowire researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. "Vibrational energy is everywhere." If Wang's devices can harness it cheaply, "the impact could be big," Yang says.

The generator is the culmination of several remarkable advances made by Wang since he arrived in ­Z. L. Wang's lab from China in 2002. Others had made nanowires of zinc oxide (ZnO), a versatile optical, semiconductor, and piezoelectric material, but the production process typically left them tangled like spaghetti­. Many prospective uses of nanowires, however, require that they form an orderly array. By 2004, Xudong had found a way to use gold to catalyze the emergence of an organized forest of wires from a vapor of zinc oxide dust.

While Xudong was finishing up his PhD, Z. L. Wang and Jinhui Song, another graduate student in the lab, showed that they could generate a tiny electric current by bending individual ZnO nanowires with the tip of an atomic force microscope. Still, to make practical energy harvesters, the researchers needed a way to collect energy from thousands of nanowires flexing simultaneously.

They began with one of Xudong Wang's miniature ZnO forests, grown atop an electrode made from gallium nitride, sapphire, or a conducting polymer. Xudong capped this with a second electrode made of platinum-coated silicon and studded with parallel rows of tiny peaks and trenches, like lines of saw teeth. He then used ultrasound waves to vibrate the electrodes. The motion squeezed the two electrodes together, causing the nano­wires between them to flex and generate a current; the current flowed through the platinum coating and into an external circuit.

Forbes has a special on "The Sunshine Economy".

Solar power is the ultimate alchemy, using what's free to create something valuable. Over the next 25 years solar is expected to be the fastest-growing alternative source of electric energy. But it is complex, expensive magic and has burned many entrepreneurs and investors in the past. With clean power in great demand, and fresh capital coming in from governments and capital markets, the solar economy is again humming with new materials, ideas, designs and business plans. Solar now meets only a 0.1% sliver of our electricity needs, but opportunities for growth and invention, as this year's E-gang members show, are bright. ...

From the Forbes special - an interview with Applied Materials CEO Michael Splinter - "Seeking The Light".

Michael Splinter was raised on the most powerful incantation in the tech industry, Moore's Law, which roughly holds that computing power per dollar doubles every two years. During his 20 years at Intel Splinter saw this law deliver exponentially better products and profits.

Now, as chief executive of Applied Materials, the biggest pick-and-shovel maker for the semiconductor and flat-panel display industries, Splinter, 56, wants to forge a sunny-side-up version of Moore's Law. "Can we, with our customers, drive down the cost per watt of photovoltaics?" Splinter asks. "We've got to."

Currently photovoltaics cost $2 to $3 per watt to build, down from $22 in 1980. Splinter thinks he can help drive the cost of solar to under $1 a watt. At that price, even after adding a dollar or two per watt of installation costs, solar power would rival grid-delivered fossil fuel power. (Bear in mind that watts here are measured at midday peaks. Even in California an installation rated at 1 kilowatt will produce only 1,600 kwh a year.)

Ambitious enough to be on Intel's shortlist of future chief executives, Splinter leaped at the chance to run his own show at Applied in 2003. The growth in solar captured Splinter's attention early on. Slowdowns at computer chip makers, who buy nearly all of Applied's equipment, hit hard. The $9.2 billion (revenue) company has a price-to-earnings ratio below that of Kraft Foods.

The solar cell manufacturing industry for years made do with hand-me-down tools from the computer chip industry. But last year solar cell manufacturers bought more silicon wafers than chipmakers--and solar's demand for wafers is growing three times as fast as demand from the rest of the electronics industry. Applied will likely hit $400 million in contracts for solar manufacturing gear by year-end; Splinter wants $1 billion by 2009.

Applied intends to trim the industry's costs in four ways: boost solar factory throughput, improve the productivity of every tool, cut materials costs by using photovoltaic materials more sparingly and raise solar cell efficiencies. Splinter has already spent close to $1 billion to hire hundreds of people for his solar group, buy two small thin-film equipment makers and invest in a silicon wafer firm in California.

Also at Forbes a look at the new solar thermal power plant in Nevada - "Light And Heat".

Thirty-five miles southeast of Las Vegas is a 280-acre shining oasis on a parched desert plain: the power plant called Nevada Solar One. Every two minutes its 220,000 giant glass mirrors, lined up in perfect rows, rotate imperceptibly with a barely audible click, tracking the sun's path across the sky. Solar One, which went online in June, is the first solar thermal power plant built in 16 years and produces 64 megawatts of electricity during the peak midday hours, enough to power 14,000 Nevada homes.

Solar One wouldn't be there if not for the doggedness of Gilbert Cohen, the French-born engineer who runs the operation on behalf of Spanish conglomerate Acciona Solar Power. He has devoted his entire 30-year career to solar thermal energy, a century-old idea that was dismissed as quixotic in the early 1990s, after oil and gas prices collapsed. With fossil fuels once again expensive, Cohen's facility with the technology is in demand. "I don't remember taking any vacations in the last 20 years," says Cohen.

Photovoltaic panels use the sun's photons to make electrons hop around, producing electrical current, while solar thermal uses photons to move whole molecules--that is, to produce heat. Since it requires a lot of land and copious sunlight, in the U.S. it makes sense only in sunbaked deserts. The biggest solar thermal plant ever built is in the Mojave Desert of California and generates 80 megawatts. (The biggest single photovoltaic installation produces 12 megawatts.) Solar thermal power prices range from 11 cents to 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, making it more expensive than natural gas generation at its lowest price, around 7 cents, but less expensive during peak hours.

The Guardian has a report from John Vidal on agrofuels and "the looming food crisis".

Land that was once used to grow food is increasingly being turned over to biofuels. This may help us to fight global warming - but it is driving up food prices throughout the world and making life increasingly hard in developing countries. Add in water shortages, natural disasters and an ever-rising population, and what you have is a recipe for disaster.

The mile upon mile of tall maize waving to the horizon around the small Nebraskan town of Carleton looks perfect to farmers such as Mark Jagels. He and his father farm 2,500 acres (10m sq km), the price of maize - what the Americans call corn - has never been higher, and the future has seldom seemed rosier. Carleton (town motto: "The center of it all") is booming, with $200m of Californian money put up for a new biofuel factory and, after years in the doldrums, there is new full-time, well-paid work for 50 people.

But there is a catch. The same fields that surround Jagels' house on the great plains may be bringing new money to rural America, but they are also helping to push up the price of bread in Manchester, tortillas in Mexico City and beer in Madrid. As a direct result of what is happening in places like Nebraska, Kansas, Indiana and Oklahoma, food aid for the poorest people in southern Africa, pork in China and beef in Britain are all more expensive.

Challenged by President George Bush to produce 35bn gallons of non-fossil transport fuels by 2017 to reduce US dependency on imported oil, the Jagels family and thousands of farmers like them are patriotically turning the corn belt of America from the bread basket of the world into an enormous fuel tank. Only a year ago, their maize mostly went to cattle feed or was exported as food aid. Come harvest time in September, almost all will end up at the new plant at Carleton, where it will be fermented to make ethanol, a clear, colourless alcohol consumed, not by people, but by cars.

The era of "agrofuels" has arrived, and the scale of the changes it is already forcing on farming and markets around the world is immense. In Nebraska alone, an extra million acres of maize have been planted this year, and the state boasts it will produce 1bn gallons of ethanol. Across the US, 20% of the whole maize crop went to ethanol last year. How much is that? Just 2% of US automobile use.

"Probably hasn't looked any better than it looks right now," Jerry Stahr, another Nebraskan farmer, told his local paper recently.

Jagels and Stahr are part of a global green rush, one of the greatest shifts that world agriculture has seen in decades. As the US, Europe, China, Japan and other countries commit themselves to using 10% or more alternative automobile fuels, farmers everywhere are rushing to grow maize, sugar cane, palm oil and oil seed rape, all of which can be turned into ethanol or other biofuels for automobiles. But that means getting out of other crops.

The scale of the change is boggling. The Indian government says it wants to plant 35m acres (140,000 sq km) of biofuel crops, Brazil as much as 300m acres (1.2m sq km). Southern Africa is being touted as the future Middle East of biofuels, with as much as 1bn acres (4m sq km) of land ready to be converted to crops such as Jatropha curcas (physic nut), a tough shrub that can be grown on poor land. Indonesia has said it intends to overtake Malaysia and increase its palm oil production from 16m acres (64,000 sq km) now to 65m acres (260,000 sq km) in 2025.

While this may be marginally better for carbon emissions and energy security, it is proving horrendous for food prices and anyone who stands in the way of a rampant new industry. A year or two ago, almost all the land where maize is now being grown to make ethanol in the US was being farmed for human or animal food. And because America exports most of the world's maize, its price has doubled in 10 months, and wheat has risen about 50%.

The effect on agriculture in the UK is price increases all round. "The world price [of maize] has doubled," says Mark Hill, food partner at the business advisory firm Deloitte. "In June, wheat prices across the US and Europe hit their highest levels in more than a decade. These price hikes are likely to trigger inflation in food prices, as processors are forced to pay increased costs for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat."

The Guardian also reports that The great global coal rush puts us on the fast track to irreversible disaster.

The dirtiest fossil fuel of all is on the resurgent, dressed in climate-friendly garb. We'd be wise not to flirt with it.


One much-overlooked story surely deserves a lot more attention: what may soon be known as the new coal rush, and developments so at odds with the imperatives of climate change that they suggest a fast track towards irreversible disaster. ...

No end of faith is focused on the coal industry's shiniest silver bullet: carbon capture and storage (CCS), whereby billions upon billions of tones of CO2 will one day be pumped underground.

Talk to the advocates of CCS and you soon bump up against a weird kind of public relations that somehow combines evangelistic hype with all kinds of qualifications. They cite a handful of pilot schemes (which, just to soothe green hearts, often aim at using CO2 to release untapped oil and gas reserves), though the volumes involved are for now trifling. Even on the most optimistic projections, CCS won't become viable on any convincing scale until well after 2030, and how much additional energy would be required to put the technique into worldwide practice remains a mystery. Whether it will be economically workable is another matter, not least for the countries whose room for manoeuvre is far less than that of the industrialised west. One UN study has estimated that obliging the coal-fired power industry to embrace CCS could push up the cost of the electricity it produces by anything between 40% and 90%. ...

The essential point is this. Carbon capture might have some appeal as a means of managing the emissions of a coal industry that could thereby be slowly scaled down, but it is currently being transformed into the justification for a hair-raising level of expansion. Besides, as things stand, the vast majority of the world's coal-fired newbuild - including those power stations due to be constructed in the US - will not even be CCS compatible.

So, faced by a world apparently gone coal-mad, what to do?

New Scientist has a look at our ecological footprint in " Fred's Footprint: Measuring our global impact".

My ecological footprint is large. So probably is yours. But can we measure it objectively? Not just our carbon footprint, which is all the rage just now, but our entire impact on the planet.

Some scientists are trying to do just that. They are the people who from time to time warn that we are using the resources of 1.2 planets and will need two planets by 2050. Obviously we are only actually using the resources of one planet right now. So what exactly do they mean?

I asked Mathis Wackernagel, director of the Global Footprint Network and one of the gurus of the business. He calculates the average citizen on the planet needs 2.2 hectares of productive croplands, pastures, wetlands, forests and coastal fishing grounds to get by, compared with the 1.8 hectares per head that the planet has available.

So, he says:

We are harvesting trees faster than they can regrow; taking nutrients from soils faster than they can be replenished; depleting fish stocks faster than they can restock; and emitting carbon dioxide into the air faster than nature can reabsorb it. Overshoot will ultimately liquidate the planet's ecological assets.

Of course, the rich world is largely to blame. Europe's global footprint is currently 4.7 hectares per person, roughly twice its productive land area. Worse still, says Gorn Dige, a footprint analyst at the European Environment Agency: "Europe's share of the world's resources is rising even as our share of the world's population is falling."

But the footprint of Europeans looks small compared with Australians and Canadians, who require between 7 and 8 hectares each, and Americans at 9.7 hectares. At the lower end, the Chinese require around 2 hectares, and Indians 0.7 hectares.

So far, so scary. And the footprint gurus have a good line in amazing stats. My favourite is that the average North American home has so many devices that, to produce the same lifestyle in Roman times, they would have required 6000 slaves – cooks, minstrels, ice-house keepers, woodcutters, nubile women with fans, and many more.

But the numbers are shaky as well as scary. Delve into the data and you discover that about half of humanity's calculated global footprint is for carbon-dioxide emissions. This is measured as the amount of land you would have to plant with trees to soak up the carbon from those emissions. But, of course, we are not doing that, so the gas is actually accumulating in the atmosphere, warming us up. The calculation is only a crude surrogate for real ecological impacts.

A second – and I think bigger – problem is that the calculations assume it takes as much land to grow a tonne of grain or some other crop, wherever you are in the world. So their measure of your footprint says nothing about your eco-efficiency. It gives your loaf of bread the same footprint whether the wheat is grown on farms yielding 2 tonnes a hectare or 20 tonnes. Applied strictly, footprint analysis could be an incentive not to become more eco-efficient.

Some people say that countries with land areas big enough to sustain their footprints, like the Australians and Canadians, should be seen as good guys – even if they are major consumers. I don't buy that. We are all global citizens now.

That last point is an interesting question - where do you draw the line for determining whether or not you are consuming unsustainably ?Your own property ? Your state / province ? Your country ? The whole world ? I guess the "resource nationalism" movement effectively decide it is national boundaries that count whereas globalisers (both neoconservative "grab whatever you can from wherever you can" types and the "global citizens" of the left) would argue that its the whole world that counts.

The Daily Reckoning has some thoughts by Bill Bonner on "Marxism for the rich" (in the form of taxpayer funded financial bailouts for large financial organisations who made unwise loans or investments in paper backed by unwise loans).

Reading the paper, we discovered that the Dow took a biggish hit on Tuesday. It is still not clear what the stock market intends to do. We'll just have to wait to find out.

But anyone who would put money into US stocks, generally, deserves what he gets . Stocks have gone nowhere for the last seven years. That means they are still expensive. The correction that is coming hasn't yet come. Which means, it hasn't yet gone either. Our guess is that the next seven years will be even worse than the last seven...as the correction finally does its work.

Our money is still on gold to save the day...at least for those who have turned to the precious metal as a form of wealth insurance. Remember, gold can't be printed out of thin air - and it will always hold value. And what's this...the yellow metal is up on weaker dollar sentiment today? Seems like now is as good a time as any to pad your portfolio with gold...

Oh...and here's an interesting item. Remember, the present economic system is not capitalism...it's a kind of Marxism for rich people...in which the elite make the profits while the losses are redistributed, shared throughout the entire population like Mao jackets and influenza. The genius of the present system is that it dupes the masses into thinking they are capitalists, making it possible for the speculators and hustlers to offload their risks onto them.

You can see how it works by looking at the mortgage industry. Lenders make a profit by writing mortgages...the mortgages get sold on, repackaged, and bought up by hedge funds, insurance companies, and even pension plans. There are more than a trillion dollars worth of CDOs around and about. No one knows exactly who loses money when they go bust because the downside has been socialised...spread to the masses. In the old days, the banker who provided the mortgage loan would have taken the loss when it went bad. Not today. Now, it's likely to be a retired teacher in Anaheim...and millions of other make-believe 'investors' just like him.

Likewise, the LBO mavens make a fortune in fees. Ultimately, their creations are taken up by the lumpeninvestoriat . Again, the dealmakers and speculators take their profits...and then the risk of inevitable loss - when the stock goes down - is borne by average investors.

And when the speculators get in trouble, the feds rush to their aid with liquidity - more cheap money.

But wait, the problem at the heart of the economic system is not a lack of credit...it's that too much easy credit has loaded too many people and too many deals with too much debt. More credit just postpones the inevitable loss...which, as we've been saying, will not be suffered by the capitalists who caused it...but by the masses.

Barack Obama wrote in the Financial Times recently that it's time to rescue the masses from their mortgages. He's got a plan worthy of a leading presidential contender. He says he'll impose fines on the bad lenders...and give the money to the good voters (oops...we mean, the good homeowners). Just what you'd expect. A safety net for everyone.

The ratio of houses-to-be-sold to those sold, has risen to its highest level in 16 years. Foreclosures continue to rise. And now credit card defaults are rising too.

But here's some good news:

"WASHINGTON (AP) - Five years into a national economic recovery, the share of Americans living in poverty finally dropped.

"The nation's poverty rate was 12.3 percent in 2006, down from 12.6 percent a year before, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. Median household income increased slightly, to USUS$48,200."

Hey, wait a minute. We've been reporting that Americans are getting poorer. How could there be fewer poor people? Something is wrong here.

And here it is, in the next paragraph:

"Individual earnings dropped for both men and women in 2006, but more members of each household worked, resulting in the overall increase in household income, said David Johnson, chief of the Census Bureau's Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division.

"The numbers provided some good economic news at a time when financial markets have been rattled by a slumping housing market. But they were tempered by an increase in the number of Americans without health insurance, from 44.8 million in 2005 to 47 million last year."

Wait a minute again...how is it good news that people are earning less money...but working harder and longer in order to keep up household income? Here's a suggestion that will double household income - the Joneses can move in with the Smiths...the Newtons and Smallskys can combine households too. Hey...presto...greater household incomes.

Le Monde Diplomatique has an interesting interview with Noam Chomasky - "Democracy’s invisible line" - while Bill Bonner is arguing our system isn't real capitalism, Noam is arguing the Soviet Union wasn't real socialism. I think its worthwhile keeping Lord Acton's maxim in mind when thinking about any system of government - whatever utopian ideology you come up with will inevitably be corrupted when put into practice, so put as many checks and balances in as possible and don't rely on everyone doing the "right" thing...

DM: Let’s start with the media issue. In the May 2005 referendum on the European constitution, most newspapers in France supported a yes vote, yet 55% of the electorate voted no. This suggests there is a limit to how far the media can manipulate public opinion. Do you think voters were also saying no to the media?

NC: It’s a complex subject, but the little in-depth research carried out in this field suggests that, in fact, the media exert greater influence over the most highly educated fraction of the population. Mass public opinion seems less influenced by the line adopted by the media.

Take the eventuality of a war against Iran. Three-quarters of Americans think the United States should stop its military threats and concentrate on reaching agreement by diplomatic means. Surveys carried out by western pollsters suggest that public opinion in Iran and the US is also moving closer on some aspects of the nuclear issue. The vast majority of the population of both countries think that the area from Israel to Iran should be completely clear of nuclear weapons, including those held by US forces operating in the region. But you would have to search long and hard to find this kind of information in the media.

The main political parties in either country do not defend this view either. If Iran and the US were true democracies, in which the majority really decided public policy, they would undoubtedly have already solved the current nuclear disagreement. And there are other similar instances. Look at the US federal budget. Most Americans want less military spending and more welfare expenditure, credits for the United Nations, and economic and international humanitarian aid. They also want to cancel the tax reductions decided by President George Bush for the benefit of the biggest taxpayers.

On all these topics, White House policy is completely at odds with what public opinion wants. But the media rarely publish the polls that highlight this persistent public opposition. Not only are citizens excluded from political power, they are also kept in a state of ignorance as to the true state of public opinion. There is growing international concern about the massive US double deficit affecting trade and the budget. But both are closely linked to a third deficit, the democratic deficit that is constantly growing, not only in the US but all over the western world.

DM: When a leading journalist or TV news presenter is asked whether they are subject to pressure or censorship, they say they are completely free to express their own opinions. So how does thought control work in a democratic society? We know how it works in dictatorships.

NC: As you say, journalists immediately reply: “No one has been exerting any pressure on me. I write what I want.” And it’s true. But if they defended positions contrary to the dominant norm, someone else would soon be writing editorials in their place. Obviously it is not a hard-and-fast rule: the US press sometimes publishes even my work, and the US is not a totalitarian country. But anyone who fails to fulfil certain minimum requirements does not stand a chance of becoming an established commentator.

It is one of the big differences between the propaganda system of a totalitarian state and the way democratic societies go about things. Exaggerating slightly, in totalitarian countries the state decides the official line and everyone must then comply. Democratic societies operate differently. The line is never presented as such, merely implied. This involves brainwashing people who are still at liberty. Even the passionate debates in the main media stay within the bounds of commonly accepted, implicit rules, which sideline a large number of contrary views. The system of control in democratic societies is extremely effective. We do not notice the line any more than we notice the air we breathe. We sometimes even imagine we are seeing a lively debate. The system of control is much more powerful than in totalitarian systems.

Look at Germany in the early 1930s. We tend to forget that it was the most advanced country in Europe, taking the lead in art, science, technology, literature and philosophy. Then, in no time at all, it suffered a complete reversal of fortune and became the most barbaric, murderous state in human history. All that was achieved by using fear: fear of the Bolsheviks, the Jews, the Americans, the Gypsies – everyone who, according to the Nazis, was threatening the core values of European culture and the direct descendants of Greek civilisation (as the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote in 1935). However, most of the German media who inundated the population with these messages were using marketing techniques developed by US advertising agents.

The same method is always used to impose an ideology. Violence is not enough to dominate people: some other justification is required. When one person wields power over another – whether they are a dictator, a colonist, a bureaucrat, a spouse or a boss – they need an ideology justifying their action. And it is always the same: their domination is exerted for the good of the underdog. Those in power always present themselves as being altruistic, disinterested and generous.

In the 1930s the rules for Nazi propaganda involved using simple words and repeating them in association with emotions and phobia. When Hitler invaded the Sudetenland in 1938 he cited the noblest, most charitable motives: the need for a humanitarian intervention to prevent the ethnic cleansing of German speakers. Henceforward everyone would be living under Germany’s protective wing, with the support of the world’s most artistically and culturally advanced country.

When it comes to propaganda (though in a sense nothing has changed since the days of Athens) there have been some minor improvements. The instruments available now are much more refined, in particular – surprising as it may seem – in the countries with the greatest civil liberties, Britain and the US. The contemporary public relations industry was born there in the 1920s, an activity we may also refer to as opinion forming or propaganda.

Both countries had made such progress in democratic rights (women’s suffrage, freedom of speech) that state violence was no longer sufficient to contain the desire for liberty. So those in power sought other ways of manufacturing consent. The PR industry produces, in the true sense of the term, concept, acceptance and submission. It controls people’s minds and ideas. It is a major advance on totalitarian rule, as it is much more agreeable to be subjected to advertising than to torture.

In the US, freedom of speech is protected to an extent that I think is unheard of in any other country. This is quite a recent change. Since the 1960s the Supreme Court has set very high standards for freedom of speech, in keeping with a basic principle established by the 18th century Enlightenment. The court upholds the principle of free speech, the only limitation being participation in a criminal act. If I walk into a shop to commit a robbery with an accomplice holding a gun and I say “Shoot”, my words are not protected by the constitution. Otherwise there has to be a really serious motive to call into question freedom of speech. The Supreme Court has even upheld this principle for the benefit of members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In France and Britain, and I believe the rest of Europe, the definition of freedom of speech is more restrictive. In my view the essential point is whether the state is entitled to determine historical truth and to punish those who contest such truth. If we allow the state to exert such powers we are accepting Stalinist methods. French intellectuals have difficulty admitting that they are inclined to do just that. Yet when we refuse such behaviour there should be no exceptions. The state should have no means of punishing anyone who claims that the sun rotates around the earth. There is a very elementary side to the principle of freedom of speech: either we defend it in the case of opinions we find hateful, or we do not defend it at all. Even Hitler and Stalin acknowledged the right to freedom of speech of those who were defending their point of view.

I find it distressing to have to discuss such issues two centuries after Voltaire who, as we all know, said: “I shall defend my opinions till I die, but I will give up my life so that you may defend yours.” It would be a great disservice to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust to adopt one of the basic doctrines of their murderers. ...

DM: Critics tend to lump you together with the anarchists and libertarian socialists. What would be the role of the state in a real democracy?

NC: We are living here and now, not in some imaginary universe. And here and now there are tyrannical organisations – big corporations. They are the closest thing to a totalitarian institution. They are, to all intents and purposes, quite unaccountable to the general public or society as a whole. They behave like predators, preying on other smaller companies. People have only one means of defending themselves and that is the state. Nor is it a very effective shield because it is often closely linked to the predators. But there is a far from negligible difference. General Electric is accountable to no one, whereas the state must occasionally explain its actions to the public.

Once democracy has been enlarged far enough for citizens to control the means of production and trade, and they take part in the overall running and management of the environment in which they live, then the state will gradually be able to disappear. It will be replaced by voluntary associations at our place of work and where we live.

DM: You mean soviets?

NC: The first things that Lenin and Trotsky destroyed, immediately after the October revolution, were the soviets, the workers’ councils and all the democratic bodies. In this respect Lenin and Trotsky were the worst enemies of socialism in the 20th century. But as orthodox Marxists they thought that a backward country such as Russia was incapable of achieving socialism immediately, and must first be forcibly industrialised.

In 1989, when the communist system collapsed, I thought this event was, paradoxically, a victory for socialism. My conception of socialism requires, at least, democratic control of production, trade and other aspects of human existence.

However the two main propaganda systems agreed to maintain that the tyrannical system set up by Lenin and Trotsky, subsequently turned into a political monstrosity by Stalin, was socialism. Western leaders could not fail to be enchanted by this outrageous use of the term, which enabled them to cast aspersions on the real thing for decades. With comparable enthusiasm, but working in the opposite direction, the Soviet propaganda system tried to exploit the sympathy and commitment that the true socialist ideal inspired among the working masses.

DM: Isn’t it the case that all forms of autonomous organisation based on anarchist principles have ultimately collapsed?

NC: There are no set anarchist principles, no libertarian creed to which we must all swear allegiance. Anarchism – at least as I understand it – is a movement that tries to identify organisations exerting authority and domination, to ask them to justify their actions and, if they are unable to do so, as often happens, to try to supersede them.

Far from collapsing, anarchism and libertarian thought are flourishing. They have given rise to real progress in many fields. Forms of oppression and injustice that were once barely recognised, less still disputed, are no longer allowed. That in itself is a success, a step forward for all humankind, certainly not a failure.

An old Mother Jones article on organic farming and government bureaucracy called "No Bar Code" showed up at the top of Reddit this week (also noted by Kevin at Cryptogon in "Joel Salatin and Polyface Farms").

I might never have found my way to Polyface Farm if Joel Salatin hadn’t refused to FedEx me one of his chickens.

I’d heard a lot about the quality of the meat raised on his “beyond organic” farm, and was eager to sample some. Salatin and his family raise a half-dozen different species (grass-fed beef, chickens, pigs, turkeys, and rabbits) in an intricate rotation that has made his 550 hilly acres of pasture and woods in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley one of the most productive and sustainable small farms in America. But when I telephoned Joel to ask him to send me a broiler, he said he couldn’t do that. I figured he meant he wasn’t set up for shipping, so I offered to have an overnight delivery service come pick it up.

“No, I don’t think you understand. I don’t believe it’s sustainable—‘organic,’ if you will—to FedEx meat all around the country,” Joel told me. “I’m afraid if you want to try one of our chickens, you’re going to have to drive down here to pick it up.”

This man was serious. He went on to explain that Polyface does not ship long distance, does not sell to supermarkets, and does not wholesale its food. All of the meat and eggs that Polyface produces is eaten within a few dozen miles or, at the most, half a day’s drive of the farm—within the farm’s “foodshed.” At first I assumed Joel’s motive for keeping his food chain so short was strictly environmental—to save on the prodigious quantities of fossil fuel Americans burn moving their food around the country and, increasingly today, the world. (The typical fruit or vegetable on an American’s plate travels some 1,500 miles to get there, and is frequently better traveled and more worldly than its eater.) But after taking Joel up on his offer to drive down to Swoope, Virginia, to pick up a chicken, I picked up a great deal more—about the renaissance of local food systems, and the values they support, values that go far beyond the ones a food buyer supports when he or she buys organic in the supermarket. It turns out that Joel Salatin, and the local food movement he’s become an influential part of, is out to save a whole lot more than energy.

In Joel’s view, the reformation of our food economy begins with people going to the trouble and expense of buying directly from farmers they know—“relationship marketing,” the approach he urges in his recent book, Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer’s Guide to Farm Friendly Food. Joel believes that the only meaningful guarantee of integrity is when buyers and sellers can look one another in the eye, something few of us ever take the trouble to do. “Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?”

Joel, who describes himself as a “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer,” speaks of his farming as his “ministry,” and certainly his 1,000 or so regular customers hear plenty of preaching. Each spring he sends out a long, feisty, single-spaced letter that could convince even a fast-food junkie that buying a pastured broiler from Polyface Farm qualifies as an act of social, environmental, nutritional, and political redemption. ...

I was hearing, in other words, the same stew of food fears and food pleasures (and food memories) that has driven the growth of the organic food industry over the past 20 years—that, and the satisfaction many Polyface customers clearly take in spending a little time on a farm, porch-chatting with the Salatins, and taking a beautiful drive in the country to get here. For some people, reconnecting with the source of their food is a powerful idea. For the farmer, these on-farm sales allow him to recapture the 92 cents of a consumer’s food dollar that now typically winds up in the pockets of processors, middlemen, and retailers.

I asked Joel how he answers the charge that because food like his is more expensive, it is inherently elitist. “I don’t accept the premise,” he replied. “First off, those weren’t any ‘elitists’ you met on the farm this morning. We sell to all kinds of people. Second, whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that, with our food, all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.” ...

Though you do begin to wonder who is truly the “realist” in this debate, and who the romantic. We live, as Berry has written, in an era of “sentimental economics,” since the promise of global capitalism, much like the promise of communism before it, ultimately depends on an act of faith: that if we permit the destruction of certain things we value here and now, we will achieve a greater happiness and prosperity at some unspecified future date. As Lenin reputedly put it, in a sentiment the WTO endorses in its rulings every day, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

Perhaps it is no accident that sentimental communism foundered precisely on the issue of food. The Soviets sacrificed millions of small farms and farmers to the dream of a collectivized industrial agriculture that never managed to do what a food system has to do: feed the nation. By the time of its collapse, more than half of the food consumed in the Soviet Union was being produced by small farmers and home gardeners operating without official sanction on private plots tucked away in the overlooked corners and cracks of the crumbling Soviet monolith. George Naylor, an outspoken Iowa corn and soybean farmer who heads up the National Family Farm Coalition, has likened the rise of alternative food chains in America to “the last days of Soviet agriculture. The centralized food system wasn’t serving the people’s needs, so they went around it. The rise of farmer’s markets and CSAs [community supported agriculture, the name for farms that offer weekly boxes of produce on a subscription basis] is sending the same signal today.” Of course, the problems of our food system are very different—if anything, it produces too much food, not too little, or too much of the wrong food. But there’s no question that it is failing many consumers and producers, who together are finding creative ways around it. ...

ON MY LAST DAY ON THE FARM, a soft June Friday afternoon, Joel and I sat talking at a picnic table behind the house while a steady stream of customers dropped by to pick up their chickens. I asked him if he believed the industrial food chain would ever be overturned by an informal, improvised movement made up of farmer’s markets, box schemes, metropolitan buying clubs, Slow Foodies, and artisanal meat-processing plants. Even if you count the Organic Supermarket, the entire market for all alternative foods remains but a flea on the colossus of the industrial food economy, with its numberless fast-food outlets and supermarkets backed by infinite horizons of corn and soybeans.

“We don’t have to beat them,” Joel patiently explained. “I’m not even sure we should try. We don’t need a law against McDonald’s or a law against slaughterhouse abuse—we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.

“And make no mistake: it’s happening. The mainstream is splitting into smaller and smaller groups of like-minded people. It’s a little like Luther nailing his 95 theses up at Wittenberg. Back then it was the printing press that allowed the Protestants to break off and form their own communities; now it’s the Internet, splintering us into tribes that want to go their own way.”

Shame I didn't come across that one earlier as it would have fitted into The Shockwave Rider quite well...

Links:

* TED Blog - Bill McDonough, Reel to Reel
* Technology Review - Saving power In Handheld Devices
* Transition Culture - The Rise and Fall of Sea Levels and Civilisations.
* BBC - Ireland hotting up, says report. "The Irish climate is heating up almost twice as fast as the rest of the world".
* Grist - NOAA: Greenhouse gases drove near-record U.S. warmth in 2006
* Tom Whipple - The peak oil crisis: the quiet time
* Newsweek - Taxing the Super Rich. Warren Buffett is still complaining he pays less tax than his secretary.
* AP - Full Court Access Urged For Guantanmo Detainees
* Wired - Point, Click ... Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates
* ACLU - The Freedom to Read Online. Without big brother recording every single URL you visit.