It's not too late for climate  

The SMH reports that Tim Flannery thinks there is still time to take action on global warming and we need a carbon emission cost of around $50 per ton to make that happen.

Action on climate change should have been taken decades ago, but it's not too late to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, prominent Australian author and scientist Professor Tim Flannery said. Mr Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year, said climate change was now at a tipping point and the world could face dangerous climate change patterns this decade if current pollution levels persist. "If we continue polluting the atmosphere as we are we'll be at that point within a decade, so we don't have a lot of time to act," Mr Flannery said.

He told the One Planet - Leaving a Legacy forum here that to reduce the negative impact on the world's ecosystems, industrial emissions would have to be reduced. He said polluters should agree on a price to pay for the pollution they send into the atmosphere. "We need to agree locally on a price for that pollution in excess of $50 per tonne of carbon," he said. "If we set the price somewhere above that, the cleanest technologies will become cost effective and will meet rapid uptake in the market."

But he said emission reductions alone would not be enough. "We've left things too late. We should have acted 10 to 20 years ago on this issue," Mr Flannery said. He said it was not too late to set carbon prices, but global agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol also were important because they encouraged international dialogue around climate change.

Federal Labor's environment spokesman Peter Garrett told the forum the ALP supported a range of renewable energy sources, and reiterated the party's opposition to nuclear power. "Apart from nuclear, which we have a serious objection to, we're basically saying that there are a suite of potential and existing renewable energy sources which need to drive clean energy revolution in this country, to enable us to reduce our emissions," Mr Garret said. "In particular, we are not saying we should pick winners," he said. "We certainly have supported and think geothermal prospects are good. Solar as well has great prospects as does wind, wave and tidal."

Meanwhile Peter Costello has shown just how little he understands about the problem by recommending every Australian city have a desalination plant (related: Sydney Water bills rise likely to cover huge debt) as debate about what to do about the drought intensifies. If he was also recommending a switch to 100% clean energy then this may have some merit but as he is a coal buff he is just saying "feedback effects ? what are they ?".

THE Treasurer, Peter Costello, has declared his support for a desalination plant in every capital city ahead of a Federal Government announcement next week that will allow drought-affected farmers to earn more money away from the land.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, and the leader of the Opposition, Kevin Rudd, were talking up their support for farmers yesterday. Mr Rudd visited Walgett to announce a $60 million package to farmers to adjust to global warming. Mr Rudd's promise included scientists working with farmers to help them use drought resistant practices such as leaving the roots of plants in the ground after harvesting and extra funding for research into how climate change will affect pests. ...

Mr Costello said he thought a desalination plant in every capital city was a good idea. His comments were criticised by the Democrats leader, Lyn Allison, who emphasised the amount of energy needed to run desalination plants.

The SMh also has a look at Sydney water supplies - "Faced with a future when the rain no longer comes".

KERRY SCHOTT is a soft-spoken, polite, Oxford-educated government executive - and right now not a popular woman. This week, she had the unenviable task of telling every Sydneysider they would, in effect, be personally footing the bill to help the city adapt to global warming. As head of the government-owned Sydney Water, Schott is asking the average Sydney household to fork out an extra $275 a year for water from 2011. A big slice of that bill, $110, will be spent on the city's controversial desalination plant.

Like her political masters, Schott insists the desalination plant, which will supply at best 15 per cent of Sydney's water, is the city's insurance against running dry. While Sydney's population is inexorably growing and expected to reach 5.3 million by 2031, its water supply is shrinking. "People need to appreciate this is a real risk," Schott says. "We could have a situation where we are moving into permanently low rainfall in the catchment."

There is growing evidence this shrinkage in the water supply is linked, in part, to climate change. Increasingly, executives such as Schott are not only poring over financial statements, they are also combing scientific data - on dam levels, temperature rises and rainfall patterns.

Schott does not know whether climate change has contributed to this drought, the longest since Federation, or whether it contributed to the dramatic drop in Sydney dam levels to 34 per cent earlier this year. But she does know it's a real possibility.

Rainfall figures going back 100 years in Sydney's catchment area show an alarming long-term pattern. While dam levels shot up to 60 per cent after the big June rains this year, Bureau of Meteorology experts warn against being lulled into a false sense of security.

"Long-term average rainfall is almost irrelevant for Sydney water storages [the dams]," explains bureau climatologist Blair Trewin. "What really matters is that they depend on a relatively small number of 'extreme' events" - in other words, the big downpours of more than 200 millimetres like those that fell in June.

Before 1992, in a key part of the Warragamba catchment, Moss Vale, there was one of these events on average every 15 months. From 1992 till June this year, there was just one such event in 15 years - the flood of 1998. Apart from that year, Trewin says, there has been almost a complete lack of the those extreme events. June was the first time in seven years when a downpour in Moss Vale cracked the 200-millimetre mark.

When Sydneysiders reflect on the desalination plant in the future, attention will no doubt turn to whether it was a cruel act of God that dam levels reached 34 per cent just seven weeks before a state election or whether it was a lucky turn of events forcing the Iemma Government into action. Having decided that the plant would be built only if dam levels reached 30 per cent, Iemma hit the yes button on February 6, when the levels were at 34 per cent. By then, the levels were dropping half a percentage point every week. There were fears dam levels could hit 30 per cent on or around election day and the Government would be caught napping.

The election campaign was framed as a referendum on desalination versus recycling after the then Opposition leader, Peter Debnam, came up with his own proposal to have sewage water available to recycle and put in the drinking water supply from Prospect Reservoir, should dam levels fall. The Greens and environmental groups also vigorously fought the desal option, arguing for a combination of recycling, rainwater tanks and conservation. ...

The new Water Utilities Minister, Nathan Rees, says he is convinced the desalination plant will save Sydney's water supply and is a necessary expensive evil. Rees says he was convinced after becoming minister and reviewing all the evidence. The clincher, he says, is that it is the one measure the Government has that is independent of rainfall. Rees reflects a government philosophy that we must now adapt to climate change. But with Iemma also ploughing ahead with coal exports and plans for a new power plant, fuelled either by gas and coal, his Green critics accuse him of turning his back on tackling the causes of global warming, including his own state's soaring greenhouse gas emissions.

The Premier was reminded of the urgency of this task at a lunch this week with the former US vice-president, Al Gore. Speaking to Iemma and a room full of Labor dignitaries and business figures, Gore warned them in blunt terms about the new data on the melting of the north polar ice caps that could result in its disappearance in the next 23 years.

With that will come warming oceans and more severe climate-change risks. The scientific advice, he said, is that global warming "is like a freight train coming at our kids".

The Oil Drum has the latest roundup of oil production numbers assembled by the tireless Khebab.

Executive Summary:

1. Broad revision (from 1980 to 2004) by the EIA this month but not significant in amplitude.
2. Monthly production peaks are unchanged:
1. All Liquids: the peak is still July 2006 at 85.54 mbpd (up 0.11 mbpd), the year to date average production in 2007 (6 months) is 84.28 mbpd (up 0.02 mbpd), down 0.07 mbpd from 2006 for the same period.
2. Crude Oil + NGL: the peak date remains May 2005 at 82.09 mbpd (up 0.01 mbpd), the year to date average production for 2007 (6 months) is 81.20 mbpd (down 0.04 mbpd), down 0.06 mbpd from 2006.
3. Crude Oil + Condensate: the peak date remains May 2005 at 74.30 mbpd (up 0.15 mbpd), the year to date average production for 2007 (6 months) is 73.23 mbpd (up 0.14 mbpd), down 0.25 mbpd from 2006.
4. NGPL: the peak date is still February 2007 at 8.03 mbpd (down 0.21 mbpd), the year to date average production for 2007 (6 months) is 7.97 mbpd (down 0.18 mbpd), up 0.19 mbpd from 2006.
3. Decline in crude oil + condensate continues: June 2007 estimate for crude oil + condensate is 72.82 mbpd compared to 73.11 mbpd one year ago and 73.92 mbpd two years ago.
4. Average forecast: the average forecast for crude oil + NGL based on 13 different projections (Figure above) is showing a kind of production plateau around 81 +/- 4 mbpd with a decline after 2010 +/- 1 year.

The has a look at ambivalence in Greenland about oil and gas exploration beginning as the ice disappears - "Greenland to World: "Keep Out!"".

long before Russia planted a metal flag in the sea floor beneath the North Pole last month, Greenland had been eyeing its own potential reserves of oil and gas surrounding the island. Shrimp processing is the biggest contributor to the territory's GDP today, but big oil could offer a much shorter path to self-reliance. In September, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Denmark's Dong Energy joined the ranks of those who have been looking for oil off Greenland's west coast, and last month the U.S. Geological Survey released an estimate that an area off Greenland's northeast coast could yield the equivalent of 31.4 billion barrels of oil, gas and gas liquids. If those barrels materialize, it would make northeast Greenland the 19th largest oil and gas reserve out of 500 in the world. No one has struck black gold in Greenland's waters yet, but foreign investment is gaining momentum.

What happens when they find it is another matter. Right now, Greenland and Denmark have 50-50 rights to profits from Greenland's natural resources. Securing full rights to administer the oil, gas and minerals harvested from their land and water has been a recurring theme among Greenlanders who want greater sovereignty, but talks about whether the territory will take over sole rights are currently stalled. And in August Denmark sent a crew of some 40 scientists on a technically unprecedented mission to explore whether a ridge beneath the North Pole was geologically linked to their territory. (If it is — if the ridge is an extension of their continental shelf and, therefore, an extension of the country's coastline — it could mean legal rights to a greater chunk of the sea for Denmark.) "I'm sure that the foreseeable easier access to the North Pole and potential oil in those areas is a tremendous focus of the Danish politicians," says Jakobsen. He says the talks, part of a commission's report that's due out about increasing Greenland's autonomy, are held up because Danish and Greenlandic politicians "can't agree" on who's going to get what from this potential oil and gas.

But harvesting whatever Greenland's icy waters may yield — not to mention the resources under the polar cap — is a long way off. The sea ice is still too thick in most places to access reserves that may or may not exist, and the technology to drill in these inhospitable conditions is not there yet. "If anybody has reached anything, we haven't heard about it," says Mr. Steen Ryd Larsen, who heads the department in charge of Greenland in the Danish Prime Minister's office. "And if somebody reaches the resources, it would be another decade before it generates income. It's not just around the corner."

For some independence-minded Greenlanders, that's just fine. The thought of big nations finding yet another vested interest in their landscape isn't universally thrilling in Greenland, which has been a strategic military outpost for the U.S. and Denmark since the Cold War. Inuit hunters were displaced when the American military set up camp at the Thule Air Base on the island's northwest shore in the 1950s, and Inuit hunters were the first to be exposed when a B-52 carrying hydrogen bombs crashed near the base in 1968. "We are fragile, both in terms of the climate crisis and because of the military buildup in the Arctic," says Aqqaluk Lynge, president of Inuit Circumpolar Conference Greenland. Things don't always work out for small, oil-rich countries with indigenous populations, he says. "Every night I pray they don't find oil and gas in Greenland."

Yahoo News has an opinion column noting access to oil is the bedrock of US middle east policy (which should read "control of oil").

Should the United States invade a foreign country for its oil?

If that question were posed in a poll, the vast majority of Americans would no doubt answer with a resounding "no." We're the good guys in the world, spreading democracy, freeing the oppressed, opposing tyrants. We wouldn't invade a sovereign country strictly out of a selfish lust for its resources, would we?

Of course we would. We've already supported coups, sent armies and invaded at least one country to protect our access to petroleum. In his newly published memoirs, Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, put that uncomfortable truth front and center with his thoughts on the invasion of Iraq. "I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows -- the Iraq war is largely about oil," he wrote.

Indeed, he believed it was a good idea. He told The Washington Post that, in conversations with the White House, he supported the invasion. "My view is that Saddam, looking over his 30-year history, very clearly was giving evidence of moving toward controlling the Straits of Hormuz, where there are 17, 18, 19 million barrels a day" moving through.

The White House sent out legions of officials to object to Greenspan's comments, but he isn't the only person making that argument. Scores of liberal activists have made it. So have more than a few prominent conservatives. In "American Theocracy," former GOP political strategist Kevin Phillips wrote bluntly, "Oil abundance has always been part of what America fights for, as well as with."

Think about it. What other reason does the United States have for its deep involvement in the Middle East, an unstable region full of despots, hostile to democracy and friendly to jihadists? That's why the United States pushed Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991 -- to prevent a subsequent invasion of oil-rich Saudi Arabia. While several agendas converged to drive the war wagon to Baghdad in 2003, the critical factor -- indeed the cause that underpinned all others -- was protecting U.S. access to Middle East oil reserves.

Iraq and terrorism have dominated the presidential campaign so far, but none of the major candidates -- Democrats or Republicans -- has emphasized a plan to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Without such a policy, this country won't be free of the Middle East anytime soon. If we remain addicted to oil, we will have to continue to coddle autocrats (the House of Saud, for example) and send troops to the Middle East. That, in turn, will further inflame a region already hostile to our interests.

President Bush had an unprecedented opportunity to help us end our petroleum dependence in the weeks and months following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when Americans were prepared to make sacrifices for their security and for their country. With the political capital he had at the time, he could have imposed a steep tax on gasoline. The costs would have increased inflationary pressures, and Americans would have grumbled. But we would have adjusted. And we would have bought less gas.

That moment has been lost. Instead of demanding sacrifices from all of us, the president made fighting terrorism seem easy, imploring Americans to support their country by going shopping. His dismissiveness merely cemented a view that most of us wanted to believe already: Fighting terrorists wouldn't require anything from most of us.

Don't be fooled. The petroleum wars are just beginning. As China and India grow wealthier, more of their citizens indulge in the Western-style consumption patterns that burn vast amounts of fossil fuels. And their consumption is growing at the same time that some experts are predicting that petroleum reserves are close to their peak and will begin to decline soon.

Links:

* Inside Cleantech - Statkraft, SCA to build 2.8TWh of wind generation in Sweden. "The $2.4 billion venture will pump out more than three times the current wind power in that country."
* Reuters - Wal-Mart selling own brand of energy efficient CFLs
* Technology Review - Seawater Magnesium Combustion Using Solar Powered Lasers. It seems magnesium it the element in seawater that burns when you add some energy. The critical quote "What is needed now is a total-efficiency budget for the entire system - there are much simpler ways of generating hydrogen using sunlight, such as by employing solar cells to split water using electrolysis".
* MarketWire - W2 Energy Inc. to Test Algae as a Feedstock in Biomass Reactor
* BBC - Ice withdrawal 'shatters record'
* SMH - Pressure US to accept Kyoto: Gore
* SMH - Mammoth find as thawing Siberia yields a fortune fuelled by fossils
* Sunshine Coast Daily - Group has plan if oil crisis starts to bite here
* Times Argus - Mexico becoming one of world's more dangerous countries
* After Downing Street - Kucinich - I've Said For 5 Years This War Is About Oil
* BBC - Bittern boom in East Anglian Fens
* SMH - There is nowhere to hide in Sydney
* Time - Getting Outraged Over MoveOn. "The fuss over this MoveOn.org ad is something else: it is the result of a desperate scavenging for umbrage material. When so many people are clamoring for a chance to swoon that they each have to take a number and when the landscape is so littered with folks lying prostrate and pretending to be dead that it starts to look like the end of a Civil War battle re-enactment, this isn't spontaneous mass outrage. This is choreography."
* Harpers - A Politicized Military
* Past Peak - Blackwater Un-Banned In Iraq
* AP - Iraq: Blackwater guards fired unprovoked at crowd
* Cryptogon - Feds Investigating Blackwater USA for Selling Weapons to Iraqi Insurgency
* Grist - Knowing as little as possible: a candidate competition
* John Dean - Why Authoritarians Now Control the Republican Party: The Rise of Authoritarian Conservatism
* Past Peak - President Creepy. "Thank you for the privilege of serving today"
* Past Peak - Today's Bush Joke
* Prison Planet - Kissinger Admits Iran Attack Is About Oil. Some toxic tinfoil wrapped around a small kernel of truth.