Australia faces the 'permanent dry,' as does US  

Joseph Romm at Grist has a look at the droughts spreading across Australia and the United States.

The story of Australia's worst dry spell in a thousand years continues to astound. Last year we learned, "One farmer takes his life every four days." This year over half of Australia's agricultural land is in a declared drought.

How bad is it? One Australian newspaper is reporting:

Drought will become a redundant term as Australia plans for a permanently drier future, according to the nation's urban water industries chief ... "The urban water industry has decided the inflows of the past will never return," Water Services Association of Australia executive director Ross Young said. "We are trying to avoid the term 'drought' and saying this is the new reality."

Unless we take start leading on climate action soon, America faces the same fate: In April, Science published research that "predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest" -- levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California. What causes this climatic disaster?

According to the study, as the planet warms, the Hadley Cell, which links together rising air near the Equator and descending air in the subtropics, expands poleward. Descending air suppresses precipitation by drying the lower atmosphere so this process expands the subtropical dry zones. At the same time, and related to this, the rain-bearing mid-latitude storm tracks also shift poleward. Both changes in atmospheric circulation, which are not fully understood, cause the poleward flanks of the subtropics to dry.

And that is separate from recent research that finds "future reductions in Arctic sea ice cover could significantly reduce available water in the American west". With the Arctic melting at a stunning rate, the West is facing a double drought whammy from climate change.

The time to act is now.

Meanwhile the huge Gorgon LNG project off WA has received environmental approval, with the project including a Nyosian scheme to inject a massive amount of carbon dioxide under Barrow Island. How long it will remain there is unknown.

Chevron Australia is on the front foot in combating global warming after pledging to undertake the first large scale carbon dioxide geosequestration project in Australia, as part of its multi-billion dollar Barrow Island Gorgon gas development.

Chevron Australia general manager Colin Beckett said the project, to put carbon dioxide underground to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, will be larger than any other geosequestration scheme currently contemplated or in production. There are geosequestration projects in Algeria and Norway, but in Australia the only other effort in this area is being led by the Cooperative Research Centre in western Victoria. Chevron said its system would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 120 million tonnes over the life of the project, by injecting carbon dioxide 2.5 kilometres below the island.

The energy giant cleared the final stage of the approvals process for the mammoth liquefied natural gas (LNG) Gorgon project, as Western Australian Environment Minister David Templeman issued environmental approvals and imposed 36 conditions on the undertaking.

AP reports that Coca Cola is getting into plastic recycling in a big way. Next step bioplastics hopefully.

The Coca-Cola Co. will help build a $45 million plastics recycling plant in South Carolina and has set a goal of having every bottle it sells in the United States recycled or reused. The world's biggest soft drink company did not set a target date on Wednesday for when it would reach the 100 percent goal. It estimates about 10 percent of its plastic bottles are recycled now.

"Our vision for the future is that our packaging will no longer be seen as waste but as a valuable resource," Jeff Seabright, Coca-Cola (nyse: KO - news - people )'s vice president of environment and water resources, said at a news conference in Washington.

Coca-Cola will loan or invest $44 million in the plant project, which is a joint venture with Spartanburg-based United Resource Recovery Corp. The 30-acre plant, to be built in Spartanburg, S.C., would produce about 100 million pounds of food-grade recyclable plastic per year - the equivalent of nearly 2 billion 20-ounce Coca-Cola bottles, the company said.

The Washington Post has a report on WalMart's efforts to go green.

Daniel Sanker has traveled to the most chic cities -- London, New York, Los Angeles -- as founder of the shipping and logistics firm CaseStack. But his quest to create a more sustainable business is taking him to the home turf of a company that is virtually synonymous with suburban sprawl: Wal-Mart.

Two years ago, the world's largest retailer set out on a mission to change that reputation by promising to transform itself into an eco-friendly business. It set wildly ambitious goals to create no waste, be supplied by renewable energy and sell more sustainable merchandise.

Critics have dismissed the effort as a public relations stunt designed to draw attention away from Wal-Mart's controversial labor and health-care policies. How successful Wal-Mart will be at greening itself remains to be seen. But there is little question that it already is reshaping its own back yard.

A wave of start-ups developing the technology to help suppliers prove their green credentials has swept into this sleepy college town, half an hour from the company's headquarters in Bentonville. Sanker is looking at ways to improve fuel efficiency in shipping. Others are developing agricultural-based alternatives to petroleum or studying how electronics can function at higher temperatures, thereby cutting energy use. The University of Arkansas has established the Applied Sustainability Center at the campus here using a $1.5 million grant from Wal-Mart.

It may seem an unlikely place for a green revolution, far from such traditional environmental strongholds as Portland and Seattle, but local officials hope Fayetteville will become to sustainability what Detroit is to the automotive industry and the Silicon Valley is to technology. In fact, they've coined their own term for the vision: Green Valley. ...

Arkansas "is called the Natural State," said Tom Muccio, founder of BioBased Technologies, which manufactures agricultural-based chemicals that can replace petroleum in the production of plastic. "I think now we have the opportunity to really bring that alive."

"The environmental community is really focused on Northwest Arkansas," said Jonathan L. Johnson, executive director of the university's Applied Sustainability Center. "There's a huge experiment going on here."

Critics argue that the big-box model of retailing is inherently unsustainable because it eats up large tracts of land and forces customers to drive long distances to run errands. A report released last week by Wal-Mart Watch, which is funded by the Service Employees International Union, estimated that the retailer's new stores will use more energy than can be saved through its current programs.

But some suppliers and local officials say they think Wal-Mart is serious and that being green is key to winning new business from the retailer. Coody recalled attending the screening of "An Inconvenient Truth," the environmental documentary featuring former vice president Al Gore, at Wal-Mart's home office last summer. At the event, Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr. told the audience of suppliers that the company would consider environmental impact when choosing products to sell. The crowd grew visibly tense.

Tsar Vladimir has made a bit of a splash at the APEC summit with a big arms deal with Indonesia sitting uneasily with his deal to buy Australian uranium. The SMH takes a look at the squawking geopolitical chickens.

Crashing into the middle of this came Vladimir Putin, a bear at a picnic, a witch at the christening. The Russian came to Sydney from Jakarta. There, he formalised a deal to sell Indonesia submarines, tanks and aircraft worth more than a billion dollars.

The deal would give Indonesia a big strategic step-up. And it moves Indonesia away from the West and closer to the Russian sphere of influence. Japan immediately asked for an explanation. "Any country that makes such a big deal should explain why it's important for their security and how they assess the security situation around their country," the spokesman for Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mitsuo Sakaba, said in Sydney. "They should explain their intentions."

Under questioning at a press conference in Sydney yesterday, Mr Putin defended the sale: "These are legal and open transactions and they lead to no negative consequences in the world; they do not somehow disturb any balance."

Australian experts disagree. Dr Alexey Muraviev, a strategic affairs analyst at the Curtin University of Technology, said that despite the public assurances by Mr Putin and the Australian Government about the spectre of a regional arms race, and despite the submarines the Russians will sell Indonesia not being quite as good as Australia's Collins Class subs, the subs presented "a security challenge to the Royal Australian Navy". "It may certainly be a challenge to our anti-submarine warfare capabilities." Dr Muraviev says.

A former deputy secretary of defence and an internationally regarded strategic thinker, Paul Dibb, concurs. "The previous defence minister, Senator Robert Hill, ran down our hard-won anti-submarine warfare skills," he writes in an article in today's Herald. "This was based on the dangerous premise that all that mattered was the so-called war on terror and that regional submarine capabilities were minimal. "Well, we now have a region where China, India, Pakistan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and now Indonesia are modernising their submarine forces. So much for politicians with short-term vision."

Indonesia's naval capability is a first-order strategic concern because the Indonesian archipelago itself is a first-order strategic concern. The country sits astride one of the world's vital strategic shipping routes, the Strait of Malacca. A quarter of all global oil shipments pass through the strait, including most of the oil needed to fuel the Japanese and South Korean economies. About 40 per cent of Australia's exports pass through the strait.

Like the Suez and the Panama canals, the Malacca Strait is one of the world's primary strategic choke-points.

The Russian deal with Indonesia descends on the APEC summit table like a slammed fist. It reminds us that the Asia-Pacific is a region seething with rivalries. Thrusting great powers are competing for influence. Dozens of conflicting territorial claims remain unresolved. A competition for resources is accelerating. An arms race is afoot. Worse, a nuclear arms race is under way in the region. And the Asia-Pacific, unlike Europe, has no mechanism for dealing with these tensions.

While Europe has developed a system for sharing sovereignty and avoiding armed conflict, the basic impulse of the Asia-Pacific states is unchanged from the slogan that summarised Japan's national aims in the Meiji era 150-odd years ago: "Rich country, strong army."

Suddenly, the "new security agenda" dominating APEC, while still important, looks decidedly thin. The old security agenda is stridently and aggressively alive.

China is a rising great power, with a booming economy and a vast thirst for resources. It has territorial disputes with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, among others, all with overlapping claims on the oil-rich seabed of the South China Sea.

These disputes are dormant but unresolved. The South China Sea was the scene of 13 resource-related military clashes in the 1990s, nine of which involved China.

Beijing has since adopted a more conciliatory posture, but in the meantime it is investing in a big defence build-up.

Professor Michael Klare of Hampshire College, Massachusetts, and author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, argues: "As with the Persian gulf and the Caspian Sea, the South China Sea harbours all of the ingredients for a major military confrontation."

The Pentagon's annual report on China's military, published in May, said its pursuit of weapons strategies "is expanding from the traditional land, air, and sea dimensions … to include space and cyberspace.

"The expanding military capabilities of China's armed forces are a major factor in changing East Asian military balances; improvements in China's strategic capabilities have ramifications far beyond the Asia-Pacific region," it added. China is working on aircraft carriers to project power far beyond its shores.

Partly in response, the other great rising power, India, is building new aircraft carriers and creating a big new eastern naval base.

And on top of this comes a recrudescence of assertive Russian nationalism. In February, Putin made a declaration that many likened to a new Cold War: "Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper-use of force in international relations - military force. Primarily the United States has overstepped its national borders, and in every area."

Furious at a US plan to position NATO missile defence bases in former Soviet bloc states, Putin is asserting Russian power anew, fuelled by a booming economy which, this year, is growing at 7 per cent on a torrent of oil revenues.

Putin, in the first visit to Australia by any Russian or Soviet leader, is turning to Canberra as part of his newly assertive engagement in Asia. He arrived by plane yesterday and headed straight for talks with Howard where the pair signed a uranium export deal valued at $1 billion a year.

It followed his deal with Jakarta, in which Russia will invest in Indonesia's production of oil, gas and bauxite while selling the Indonesians submarines, tanks and helicopters. This was regarded widely as an overt move by Russia to reassert itself in the region.

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone has an article on "The War Party" - the sorry tale of the Republican torture brigade and the road to the next US election.

Quietly and miserably, like an anxious mother tiptoeing away from an autistic child who has fallen asleep with his helmet on, the Republican Party continues its hopeless search for a viable nominee while backpedaling from its own disaster in Iraq. The candidates, all of them -- I exclude here Congressman Ron Paul, who is an uninvited guest to this ball -- are fourth-rate buffoons. ...

In the face of the awesome political catastrophe that has befallen the Republican Party in the form of George W. Bush, the response of its new leaders has not been to re-examine their perverted values, their vicious tactics or even their position on Bush's singularly idiotic and supremely characteristic policy mistake, the Iraq War. Instead, the party is closing its eyes and trying, Dorothy-like, to wish its way back to Kansas, back to the good old days of mean-spirited, blame-the-darkies politics of Newt Gingrich, a time when electoral blowouts could be won by offering frightened Americans a chance to pull a lever against gays, atheists and the collective rest of onrushing modern reality.

Links:

* TreeHugger - Orbiting Space Power Systems Would Convert Sunlight into Laser Beams
* Grist - 15 Green Buildings
* The Oil Drum - Sixth Annual ASPO Conference – Cork, Ireland
* Iraq Oil Report - Iraq Oil Report. Blog from a UPI energy reporter on the Iraqi oil law. It will be interesting to see how much of the full picture it includes.
* AFP - Iraq seeks oil output of six million bpd within decade
* The Atlantic - Ghawar: Running Dry - The world’s most essential oil field may be in decline
* Rigzone - Congo Wants to Jointly Exploit Oil-rich Lake with Uganda
* Groovy Green - Amtrak Quietly Posts Fifth Straight Year of Record Ridership
* The Guardian - The Days of Cheap Food Are Over say suppliers as ingredient costs soar. "Superstore groups prepare to stomach higher prices because of far east demand and biofuel incentives"
* Village Voice - A Patriotic Act
* Huffington Post - The Shock Doctrine: "No Logo" Author Releases Controversial Short Film
* BBC - Saving Private Lynch story 'flawed'. 'Fabricated' would be another word for it.
* BBC - Girl, 4, asked to remove 'hoodie'. The war on terror continues.
* SMH - APEC tyranny at Bondi
* SMH - Jailed for jaywalking