Magentic Cooling Milestone  

Physorg has a report an a very low power refrigeration technology.

The first milestone in magnetic cooling has been achieved. Between 5 and 10 degrees of cooling – this was the success criteria for the first milestone in a project involving magnetic cooling at Risø National Laboratory – Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

And the figure is currently at 8.7°C – this means that a refrigerator at room temperature (20°C) can be cooled to almost 11°C. Of course, this is not quite enough to keep the milk cold, but the project’s test setup also has only the one objective of conducting research in different materials, varying operating conditions and the strength of the magnetic field.

“The setup is not the largest of its type, but the most important thing is that it ’s easy to exchange parts in the machine. With the knowledge that we gain along the way, we will ultimately be able to build the very best magnetic cooling system,” explains Christian Bahl, a postdoctoral student attached to the project for one year.

How is a magnetic field used for cooling?

Magnetic cooling technology exploits the fact that when a magnetic material, in this case the element gadolinium, is magnetised, heat is produced as a by-product of entropy. The principle of entropy is that there will always be a constant amount of order/disorder in a substance. When the magnet puts the substance in “order”, it has to get rid of the excess disorder – and this becomes heat. Conversely, when the magnetic field is again removed, the substance becomes cold.

The heat is transferred to a fluid that is pumped back and forth past the substance inside a cylinder. The end that becomes cold will be located inside the refrigerator and the warm end will be outside.

The SMH has an article on secretive ultracapacitor company EEStor - Texas Startup Says It Has Batteries Beat.

Millions of inventions pass quietly through the U.S. patent office each year. Patent No. 7,033,406 did, too, until energy insiders spotted six words in the filing that sounded like a death knell for the internal combustion engine.

An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries," meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline. By contrast, some plug-in hybrids on the horizon would require motorists to charge their cars in a wall outlet overnight and promise only 50 miles of gasoline-free commute. And the popular hybrids on the road today still depend heavily on fossil fuels.

"It's a paradigm shift," said Ian Clifford, chief executive of Toronto-based ZENN Motor Co., which has licensed EEStor's invention. "The Achilles' heel to the electric car industry has been energy storage. By all rights, this would make internal combustion engines unnecessary." Clifford's company bought rights to EEStor's technology in August 2005 and expects EEStor to start shipping the battery replacement later this year for use in ZENN Motor's short-range, low-speed vehicles. The technology also could help invigorate the renewable-energy sector by providing efficient, lightning-fast storage for solar power, or, on a small scale, a flash-charge for cell phones and laptops.

Skeptics, though, fear the claims stretch the bounds of existing technology to the point of alchemy. "We've been trying to make this type of thing for 20 years and no one has been able to do it," said Robert Hebner, director of the University of Texas centre for Electromechanics. "Depending on who you believe, they're at or beyond the limit of what is possible."

[BG: But you might have made more progress with military levels of funding instead of academic quantities]

EEStor's secret ingredient is a material sandwiched between thousands of wafer-thin metal sheets, like a series of foil-and-paper gum wrappers stacked on top of each other. Charged particles stick to the metal sheets and move quickly across EEStor's proprietary material. The result is an ultracapacitor, a battery-like device that stores and releases energy quickly.

Batteries rely on chemical reactions to store energy but can take hours to charge and release energy. The simplest capacitors found in computers and radios hold less energy but can charge or discharge instantly. Ultracapacitors take the best of both, stacking capacitors to increase capacity while maintaining the speed of simple capacitors.

Hebner said vehicles require bursts of energy to accelerate, a task better suited for capacitors than batteries. "The idea of getting rid of the batteries and putting in capacitors is to get more power back and get it back faster," Hebner said. But he said nothing close to EEStor's claim exists today.

For years, EEStor has tried to fly beneath the radar in the competitive industry for alternative energy, content with a phone-book listing and a handful of cryptic press releases. Yet the speculation and skepticism have continued, fueled by the company's original assertion of making batteries obsolete _ a claim that still resonates loudly for a company that rarely speaks, including declining an interview with The Associated Press.

The deal with ZENN Motor and a $3 million investment by the venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which made big-payoff early bets on companies like Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., hint that EEStor may be on the edge of a breakthrough technology, a "game changer" as Clifford put it. ZENN Motor's public reports show that it so far has invested $3.8 million in and has promised another $1.2 million if the ultracapacitor company meets a third-party testing standard and then delivers a product. Clifford said his company consulted experts and did a "tremendous amount of due diligence" on EEStor's innovation.

EEStor's founders have a track record. Richard D. Weir and Carl Nelson worked on disk-storage technology at IBM Corp. in the 1990s before forming EEStor in 2001. The two have acquired dozens of patents over two decades.

Neil Dikeman of Jane Capital Partners, an investor in clean technologies, said the nearly $7 million investment in EEStor pales compared with other energy storage endeavors, where investment has averaged $50 million to $100 million. Yet curiosity is unusually high, Dikeman said, thanks to the investment by a prominent venture capital group and EEStor's secretive nature. "The EEStor claims are around a process that would be quite revolutionary if they can make it work," Dikeman said.

Previous attempts to improve ultracapacitors have focused on improving the metal sheets by increasing the surface area where charges can attach. EEStor is instead creating better nonconductive material for use between the metal sheets, using a chemical compound called barium titanate. The question is whether the company can mass-produce it.

After Gutenberg has a post on SolFocus and their Concentrating Photo Voltaic Module.

The Green Wombat1 reports on the progress made by Silicon Valley solar start-up SolFocus to finance an expansion of its new Madrid-based operation. Spain is a hotbed of solar activity,” says Todd Woody, “due to a ‘feed-in tariff‘.”

As this blog previously has noted, there has been fast growth in solar power and other renewable energy, e.g., wind, where providers are guaranteed a price above market rate by governments that want to encourage greater integration of renewable energy sources into the power grid.

SolFocus has a proprietary CSP (Concentrating Solar Power) strategy. Mirrors arrayed in panels focus the sun’s rays on solar photovoltaic cells. A principle advantage of the concentrating optics is that a much smaller solar cell can be used. There is a cost savings since the prices have risen with the growing demand for solar and a shortage of pure silicon. The use of a low cost, non-imaging optics also can make more practical the application of more expensive, advanced, high-efficiency solar cells that use either a single silicon crystal or multi-junction semiconductors.

Even though SolFocus has yet to bring a product to market, $52 million was raised recently, “including $27.2 to finance the expansion of its new Madrid-based operation. The Mountain View company, which now has raised a total of $84 million.”

MSNBC has a look at a very fuel efficient catamaran design.

Pity the fisherman or sailor who staggers on deck in the morning and through bleary eyes sees a giant water spider, legs akimbo and buzzing ominously, coming at him. No cause for alarm, however. It's just Proteus, a so-called Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel designed for everything from military uses to biological studies, ocean exploration and sea rescue. The spindly catamaran is so efficient that it can travel 5,000 miles — farther than across the Atlantic — on one load of diesel fuel.

Daniel Basta, director of the National Marine Sanctuaries for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, said the lightweight, low-cost and modular craft is well suited to scientific and environmental purposes using technology that is itself smaller and less cumbersome. "Proteus will be able to launch and recover automatic vehicles, do remote vehicle operations, it will be tested for standard dive support operations, putting instruments on the bottom, collecting data — all the things that we currently do in one form or another, but most likely more cheaply, effectively and probably better." ...

Ugo Conti, an Italian-born engineer and oceanographer who designed Proteus, was aboard a chartered harbor cruise boat during his creation's star turn on Thursday. Conti and his wife, Isabella, are the co-founders of Marine Advanced Research, Inc., a Silicon Valley-based firm that built the Proteus for about $1.5 million, she said. The craft rides on metal and fabric pontoons that have hinges and shock absorbers to flex with the motion of the waves, which helps it to skim over the water at a maximum speed of 30 knots (34.5 mph).

CNN has a report on bee colony collapse disorder - the latest theory is that imported Australian bees infected US bee colonies with a virus that they had no resistance to. Ooops - sorry about that.

A virus found in healthy Australian honey bees may be playing a role in the collapse of honey bee colonies across the United States, researchers reported Thursday.

Colony collapse disorder has killed millions of bees -- up to 90 percent of colonies in some U.S. beekeeping operations -- imperiling the crops largely dependent upon bees for pollination, such as oranges, blueberries, apples and almonds. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says honey bees are responsible for pollinating $15 billion worth of crops each year in the United States. More than 90 fruits and vegetables worldwide depend on them for pollination.

Signs of colony collapse disorder were first reported in the United States in 2004, the same year American beekeepers started importing bees from Australia. The disorder is marked by hives left with a queen, a few newly hatched adults and plenty of food, but the worker bees responsible for pollination gone.

The virus identified in the healthy Australian bees is Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) -- named that because it was discovered by Hebrew University researchers. Although worker bees in colony collapse disorder vanish, bees infected with IAPV die close to the hive, after developing shivering wings and paralysis. For some reason, the Australian bees seem to be resistant to IAPV and do not come down with symptoms.

Scientists used genetic analyses of bees collected over the past three years and found that IAPV was present in bees that had come from colony collapse disorder hives 96 percent of the time. But the study released Thursday on the Science Express Web site, operated by the journal Science, cautioned that collapse disorder is likely caused by several factors.

TreeHugger wonders if Switchgrass' Days Are Numbered ? as the best option for sustainable biomass / biofuel production.

Move over, switchgrass: there are some new grasses in town gunning for your biofuel crown. Researchers at the University of Northern Iowa's Tallgrass Prairie Center (TPC) are looking at ways to use the state's mixed prairie plantings as a source of renewable energy — as biomass to produce ethanol or to burn for electricity. "When you hear about biomass, you usually hear only about switchgrass, but we're looking at using prairie plants including wildflowers," said Dave Williams, manager of TPC's Prairie Institute.

A study conducted this past year by David Tilman, an ecology professor at the University of Minnesota, had demonstrated the potential for polycultures of multiple grass, prairie and wildflower species to serve as an alternative to switchgrass in producing ethanol. Tilman and his colleagues found that, in addition to producing more than twice the biomass than single-species planting (not less than 238% more than switchgrass), multiple-species plantations restored biodiversity, grew on degraded land and — perhaps most importantly — could be carbon negative. Biofuels derived from this source could also store up to 51% more energy per acre than corn.

Because Tilman's study was only conducted on small, hand-weeded parcels of land, researchers at the TPC plan on expanding its scope to make the results applicable to local farmers, who commonly use hundreds of acres. Daryl Smith, the director of the TPC, believes that using the multiple species plantings on sandy, marginal agricultural land could yield several benefits, not least of which would be reducing soil erosion and creating better habitats for wildlife.

The researchers are particularly interested in seeing how the prairie grass stands sustain harvest — in other words, if they will need to be burned down less or if certain parts of the stand will only need to be harvested every year in rotation. They will also convert the plantings into pellets and cubes to examine their potency as a new source of fuel. The TPC will collaborate with Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU) to test how much electricity could be generated by burning large amounts of the biomass.

Smith estimates that 100 acres of the mixed prairie plantings could provide enough fuel for an 8-hour test burn at one of CFU's facilities. Bill Dotzler, a state senator who helped the TPC gain the necessary initial funding, is hopeful about their potential: "You almost get a trifecta with this --- you clean the streams, you provide habitat for pheasants and other wildlife and you produce an alternative fuel ... It's not going to be the whole answer, but I think burning the native plants could be an important part of the whole puzzle."

Clean Break has a post on the Icelandic invasion of the US geothermal energy market (if you ever get the chance, go and have a swim in the "blue lagoon" outside Reykjavik's main geothermal power station). Jim at The Energy Blog also has a post on this.

Scandinavian financial services and investment giant Glitnir opened its New York office today, which will be headquarters to its U.S. subsidiary Glitnir Capital Corp.

Why the heck is this significant or worthy of a post? Part of the reason Glitnir is setting up shop in the United States is because of what it considers "America's huge geothermal energy potential." And it's all baseload, baby.

The way this Icelandic investor sees it, the U.S. has the potential for a six-fold increase in its installed geothermal capacity, which would double existing global capacity. "Glitnir estimates that investments of $9.5 billion (U.S.) are required in projects currently under development, and that further $29.9 billion are needed between now and 2025 to develop and harness future resources," according to a company release. Obviously, Glitnir wants to apply its experiences from Norway and Iceland (an established geothermal superpower, you could say) and neighbouring countries to opportunities in the United States, and is prepared to inject a large part of the necessary capital. ...

Reuters reports that Glitnir plans to spend $1 billion on U.S. geothermal energy projects over the next five years, what it considers to be about 10 per cent of a market that it brands the "sleeping beauty of sustainable energy." In a different press release, the company seems to expand its interest to the larger North American market -- i.e. Canada as well. "We see a considerable geothermal energy potential in 82 countries worldwide -- including the USA and Canada," said Arni Magnusson, managing director of Glitnir Global Sustainable Energy. ...

The bottom line is that it's exciting to see some major money flowing to this area, backed by experience and know-how (keep in mind we're also seeing folks like Khosla investing in this area). Geothermal promises to be an important slice -- along with solar PV, solar thermal, wave energy, wind and hydroelectric -- of the overall clean energy needs of the continent.

Crikey reports that New South Wales may be about to privatise its power generation utilities.

The reports this week that NSW is about to privatize electricity retailing coincide with a move by many states in the US to return to regulation from an experiment with competition.

The Australian Financial Review on Tuesday said a report by Professor Tony Owen to the State Labor Government recommended the billion-dollar sale of the retail power giants Integral Energy, EnergyAustralia and Country Energy. Professor Owen was also expected to recommend the sale or long term lease of the State owned electricity generating companies Macquarie Generation and Delta Electricity.


The New York Times on Tuesday reported that more than a decade after the drive began to convert electricity from a regulated industry into a competitive one, many states are rolling back their initiatives or returning money to individuals and businesses. "The main reason behind the effort to return to a more regulated market is price" the paper said. "Recent Energy Department data shows that the cost of power in states that embraced competition has risen faster than in states that had retained traditional rate regulation."



Of the 25 states, and the District of Columbia, that had adopted competition, only one, California, is even talking about expanding market pricing. In Ohio, politicians, utilities, their customers and consumer groups are negotiating how to end competitive electricity pricing, while Virginia has repealed its law.

This American experience is sure to be used by the trade unions which are opposing the sales in NSW.

Christian Kerr at Crikey can see the writing on the wall for the Rodent (as can the otherwise witless Janet Albrechtsen at The Australian) - his days are numbered, and he's been done in by his own mindless authoritarianism. Its time for a schism on the right. Kerr predicts Howard might quit next week.

Janet Albrechtsen is young, bright – and provides the perfect demonstration of exactly how John Howard has got himself into his poll pickle. "Now he must go," she says.

Why? Janet doesn’t really go there. She probably can’t. She’s part of the problem, too. But the answer is clear. John Howard is in the state he is in because he has favoured conservatism over liberalism. John Howard conservatism has pulled the Liberal Party down. John – and Janet – have been off fighting the culture wars. Populist authoritarianism has been a powerful weapon for them. But populist authoritarianism denies liberalism.

John and Janet have ignored economic and personal freedom, and despite all their hectoring on social issues, have denied individuals responsibility over their own lives. The nanny state has flourished like never before under John Howard. Howard has created a big taxing, big spending government that takes our money and spends it on the bleeding obvious – wasting millions, for example, to tell us the children need supervision on the internet.

His big taxing government has taken people’s money off them to use for social engineering and political pork barrelling. It worked a storm for a while, but as last week's Galaxy Poll showed with its questions on taxation and the surplus, voters have realised that the money being stuck in their pockets was taken from those very same pockets in the first place. Conservatives like Albrechtsen have turned a blind eye to Howard’s tax and bribe policies – and these are proving to be his undoing.

Tom Engelhardt has an excellent article on the "Empire Of Stupidity".

The President's Vietnam speech was a clever historical montage, if you assume that no one remembers anything about the past. As it happens, almost every line of the speech has since been analyzed, attacked, and dismembered by critics, pundits, and historians who do remember. But in all the commentary, one line -- perhaps the most striking -- slipped by uncommented upon. And yet it was the line that offered an entry ramp onto the royal road to understanding what exactly has changed in our country over the post-Vietnam decades, not to speak of the seven-plus years from hell of the Bush administration.

Here's what the President said to applause from the assembled vets:

"I'm confident that we will prevail. I'm confident we'll prevail because we have the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known -- the men and women of the United States Armed Forces."

Let's stop on that breathtaking, near messianic claim for a moment. Try, as a start, putting it in the mouths of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or even Richard Nixon, no less Gerald Ford. Or try imagining Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of a great civil war that would indeed lead to the emancipation of the slaves, saying something of the sort; or Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general who had led a great "crusade" -- it was his word of choice for the title of his memoir -- to free Europe in World War II but would be the first to warn of a "military-industrial complex" as his presidency ended.

Past American presidents might perhaps have spoken of the "greatest force for human liberation" as being "the American way of life" or "the American dream," or American democracy, or the thinking of the Founding Fathers. But it took a genuine transformation in, and the full-scale militarization of, that way of life, for such a formulation to become presidentially conceivable, no less to pass unnoticed, even by fierce critics, in a speech practically every word of which was combed for meaning.

Now, read the speech again and you'll see that the line in question wasn't simply passing blather for an audience of vets, but a thematic summary of the thrust of the whole address, of, in fact, the very vision the Bush administration and supporting neoconservatives carried into office. Much has been said about the Christian fundamentalist nature of the administration, but if that had truly been the essence of these last years, the President would have identified Jesus Christ as that "greatest force."

Not that a distinction need be made, but this administration's primary fundamentalism has been that of born-again militarists, of believers in the efficacy of force as embodied in the most awe-inspiring, high-tech military on the planet. This was the idol at which its top officials worshipped when it came to foreign policy. They were in awe of the idea that they had at their command the best equipped, most powerful military the world had ever seen, armed to the teeth with techno-toys; already garrisoning much of the globe (and about to garrison more of it); already on the receiving end of vast inflows of taxpayer dollars (and about to receive staggeringly more of the same); already embedded in a sprawling network of corporate interests (and about to be significantly privatized into the hands of even more such corporations); already having divided most of the globe into military "commands" that were essentially viceroy-ships (and about to finish the job by creating a command for the "homeland," NORTHCOM, and for the previously forgotten, suddenly energy-hot continent of Africa, AFRICOM.

In the wake of September 11, 2001, these fundamentalist believers in the power of One to twist all other arms on the planet managed to add a second Defense Department -- the Department of Homeland Security (with its own "-industrial complex") -- to the American agenda; they passed ever more draconian laws curtailing American rights in the name of "homeland security"; they went remarkably far in turning what was already an imperial presidency into something like a Caesarian commander-in-chief presidency; they presided over a far more politicized Defense Department (whose commanders today speak out, while in uniform, on what once would have been civilian political matters); they initiated far more sweeping means of government surveillance at home; they opened offshore prisons, giving their covert intelligence operatives the possibility of disappearing just about any human being they cared to target and their interrogators permission to use the most sophisticated kinds of torture. In short, they presided over a striking increase in the state's coercive powers, as embodied in a single, theoretically unrestrained commander-in-chief presidency and the first imperial vice-presidency in American history. (Of course, from the Reagan "revolution" on, the American conservative movement that first took power over a quarter of a century ago never meant to throttle the state, only the capacity of the state to deliver any services except "security" to its citizenry.)

How distant now is the American moment when a peacetime U.S. Army could still exist as a minimalist force (as between the two world wars or even, to some extent and briefly, after the demobilization of World War II). Similarly, it is no longer possible for American politicians of either party to imagine any region of the globe as not part of our national security sphere or not an object of our attentions, not to say our duty, if push comes to shove (or far earlier), to intervene or make war. As a name, Bush's Global War on Terror was no more meant as blather than that "greatest force for liberation the world has ever seen."

By the time the top officials of this administration and their various neocon backers arrived in power in 2000, they had already fallen deeply in love with the all-volunteer U.S. Armed Forces and the semi-militarized land they were about to inherit. They fervently believed their own propaganda about what such a military could accomplish in the world, despite the cautionary lessons of history stretching from Vietnam back to what the Catholic peasants of Spain, the Sunni fundamentalists of their moment, did to Napoleon's vaunted armies of occupation. (They would, of course, hardly be the first ruling group to mistake their own propaganda for reality.)

Like all fundamentalist believers, like their eternally "resolute" President, in the face of the flood of disasters the Big Muddy of reality has delivered to their doorstep, they remain undeterred -– at least, those who are left. Changing their minds was never an option, though they might indeed still opt to double-down their bets and launch an attack on Iran before January 2009.

They truly believed that when you wrapped the flag of American exceptionalism, of American goodness, around the U.S. military, you would have the greatest force for liberation on the planet. Of course, they defined "liberation" in a way that coincided exactly with their desires for remaking the world. Hence, whenever democratic elections didn't produce the results they wanted, they simply rejected the results. In the bargain, they were convinced that, wielding that "greatest force," they could reshape the Middle East to their specifications, establish an unassailably dominant position at the heart of the oil heartlands of the planet, roll back the Russians even further, cow the Chinese, and create a Pax Americana planet. From their fervent unipolarity, they would, in fact, help to give premature birth to a newly multipolar world. ...

A chasm, unimaginable when the U.S. still had a citizen's army, has emerged between American society and a military increasingly from the forgotten towns of the rural hinterland (as the lists of the dead regularly remind us) and new immigrant communities, an all-volunteer military that has become ever less like the public it defends, ever more mercenary (as huge "quick-ship" bonuses are used to attract the reluctant "volunteer") and ever more privatized. These days, the U.S. military and the vast mercenary legions of private contractors who accompany them to war are beginning to take on something of the look of the Roman imperial legions in that empire's last years when they were increasingly filled with Goths and other despised "barbarian" peoples from the empire's frontier regions.

As David Walker, U.S. Comptroller and head of the nonpartisan Government Accounting Office, pointed out recently, the American government has also, in a remarkably short period of time, taken on the look of a faltering imperial Rome with "an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government." And imagine -- it was only a few years ago that neocon pundits were hailing the U.S. as a power "more dominant than any since Rome." Think instead: The Roman Empire on crack cocaine.

Looking back, it will undoubtedly be clear, if it isn't already, that, with the adherents of the cult of force at the helm of the ship of state, the world of fantasy took over and, even in imperial terms, what resulted was an empire of stupidity, hustling headlong down the slope of decline. That's often the way with blind faith, with anything, in fact, that prevents you from actually taking in the world as it is. ...

When, finally -- 2010, 2012? -- we do pack up, head home from the Iraqi dead zone, and try to forget, it surely won't be as easy as it was 30-plus years ago (and, as the inability of our rulers to eradicate the "Vietnam syndrome" from their own brains indicates, it wasn't so easy even then). Whether or not, as the President claims, the crop of "terrorists" he's helped to grow will "follow us home," something will certainly follow us home. After all, when the troops return, if they do, they will return to a "superpower" that, in population life expectancy, has plunged from 11th to 42nd place in only two decades, and, in infant mortality terms, now ranks well below many far poorer countries.

Of course, by then, the President, Vice President, and those true believers still left in his administration will undoubtedly have entered the true American Green Zone, the one where a lecture to an audience of admirers can net you 75,000-100,000 greenbacks; where your story, no matter who writes it for you, will be worth millions; where your "library" can be a gathering place for "scholars"; and the "institute" you sponsor, a legacy recreating locus. It's a zone in which the accountant, not accountability, rules.

In the meantime, we live with all the pointless verbiage, the "debate" in Washington, the "progress reports," and the numerology of death, while the Bush administration hangs in there, determined to hand its war off to a new president, while the leading Democratic candidates essentially duck the withdrawal issue and the bodies pile ever higher.

It's important to remember, however, that there was once quite another tradition in America. Whatever our country was in my 1950s childhood, Americans were still generally raised to believe that empire was a dreadful, un-American thing. We were, of course, already garrisoning the globe, but there was that other hideous empire, the Soviet one, to point to. Perhaps the urge for a republic, not an empire still lies hidden somewhere in the American psyche.

Let's hope so, because one great task ahead for the American people will be to deconstruct whatever is left of our empire of stupidity and of this strange, militarized version of America we live in. We can dream, at least, that someday we'll live in a world where one Defense Department is plenty, where militarized corporations don't have endless battlefields on which to test their next techo-toys, where armies are for the defense of country, not to traipse the world in a state of eternal war, and victory is not vested in imperial conflict on the imagined frontiers of the planet, but in "progress reports" concerned with making life everywhere better, saner, and more peaceable.

Links:

* After Gutenberg - A re-awakening of solar power in Australia?
* The Energy Blog - Laddermill Energy Kites Demonstrated
* AP - Orangutans squeezed by biofuel boom
* WSJ Energy Roundup - There’s Uranium in Them Thar Hills
* WSJ Energy Roundup - Ocean 1, Anadarko 0
* TreeHugger - Rugby World Cup Goes Green
* TreeHugger - Calls and Cheers for Green Chemistry
* The Guardian - Getting the balance wrong: The BBC's decision not to air Planet Relief on the grounds of impartiality is a joke.
* The Age - Heavy metal leaves major port in a storm. Last year's Esperance bird dieoff mystery solved - lead poisoning.
* Herald Sun - APEC? OPEC? Thanks Austria. Dubya at his incoherent best. Where the f*** am I ? He even got lost leaving the stage.
* BBC - Most people 'want Iraq pull-out'. Where does the 23% of people who think we should stay come from ? I know one person who is in favour of the occupation. One.
* Alternet - Ron Paul: "All We're Doing In Iraq Is Saving Face"
* Think Rink - Ron Paul Wins 2nd FOX News Debate Despite Ridicule, Opposition
* AOL News - Why Does Fox News Hate Ron Paul?
* Vanity Fair - Going After Gore. Why did the liberal media hate Al Gore and support George Bush ?
* Vint Cerf - Al Gore and the Internet
* The Guardian - China flexes muscles of its 'informationised' army and Chinese Army sets sights on targets in space and cyberspace. See the related section on "Titan Rain" in The Shockwave Rider.