George Monbiot has a look at a talk by US energy secretary, Steven Chu, at the Copenhagen conference - US left behind in technological race to fight climate change.

I have just been watching the tragic sight of a fallen giant flailing around on its back like a beetle, desperately trying to turn itself over.

The occasion was a speech by the US secretary of energy, Steven Chu. He is, of course, a Nobel physicist, brilliant, modest, likeable, a delightful contrast to the thugs employed by the previous administration. But his speech was, in the true sense of the word, pathetic: it moved me to pity.

Yesterday afternoon in Copenhagen – where the UN climate talks are entering their second week – Professor Chu unveiled what would have been a series of inspiring innovations, had he made this speech 15 years ago. Barely suppressing his excitement, he told us the US has discovered there is great potential for making fridges more efficient, and that the same principle could even be extended to lighting, heating and whole buildings. The Department of Energy is so thrilled by this discovery that it has launched a programme to retrofit homes in the US, on which it will spend $400m a year.

To put this in perspective, four years ago the German government announced it would spend the equivalent of $1.6bn a year on the same job: as a result every house in Germany should be airtight and well insulated by 2025. The US has about 110m households; Germany has roughly 37m, and German homes were more energy-efficient in the first place. This $400m is a drop in the ocean.

Professor Chu went on to explain two amazing new discoveries: a camera which can see how much heat is leaking from your home and a meter which allows you to audit your own energy use. Perhaps thermal imaging cameras and energy monitors seem new and exciting in the US, but on this side of the Atlantic, though their full potential is still a long way from being realised, they've been familiar for more than a decade.

He thrilled us with another US innovation, a technology called pumped storage: water can be pumped up a hill when electricity is cheap and released when it's expensive. The UK started building its first pumped storage plant, Dinorwig, in 1974. Then he told us about a radical system for heating buildings by extracting heat from water: this must have been the one that the Royal Festival Hall used in 1951.

I'm sure these technologies have in fact been deployed for years in parts of the US. My point is that Chu appeared to believe that they represent the cutting edge of both technology and public policy.

The energy secretary explained that the US is now making "a very big investment" in developing and testing new components for wind turbines. The "very big investment" is $70m, which is what the US spends on subsidies and forgoes in tax breaks for fossil fuels every two days.

As if to hammer home the point that the Department of Energy seems to be stuck in a time-warp, and as if to highlight the sad decline of technological innovation in the US, Chu finished his talk with a disquisition on the beauty of the earth as seen by the Apollo astronauts.

What has happened to the great pioneering nation, the economic superpower which once drove innovation everywhere? How did it end up so far behind much smaller economies in boring old Europe? How come, when the rest of the developed world has moved on, it suddenly looks like a relic of the Soviet Union, with filthy, inefficient industries, vast opencast coal mines and cars and appliances which belong in the 1950s.

The SMH also has a bit of a rant by Monbiot - The rapacious will not give up without a fight

The Copenhagen climate summit is a battle to redefine humanity.

This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself.

The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. The summit's premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accommodation. No longer may we live without restraint, in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.

This is a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right.

The angry men cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. They accuse those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but know at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. ...

Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means.

There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Economic growth is the magic formula that allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.

While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow.

Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped.

Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil.

We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet.

For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators are still not serious, even about climate change. There's another great unmentionable here: supply. Most of the nation states tussling at Copenhagen have two fossil-fuel policies. One is to minimise demand, by encouraging us to reduce our consumption.

The other is to maximise supply, by encouraging companies to extract as much from the ground as they can.

We know, from the papers published in Nature in April, that we can use a maximum of 60 per cent of current reserves of coal, oil and gas if the average global temperature is not to rise by more than 2 degrees. We can burn much less if, as many poorer countries now insist, we seek to prevent the temperature from rising by more than 1.5 degrees. We know that capture and storage will dispose of just a small fraction of the carbon in these fuels.

There are two obvious conclusions: governments must decide which existing reserves of fossil fuel are to be left in the ground, and they must introduce a global moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Neither of these proposals has even been mooted for discussion.

And to close, the ABC has the long awaited debate between Monbiot and Australian climate pseudo-scientist Ian Plimer (who spends an amazing amount of time avoiding answering any direct question - maybe he used to be a politician) - Plimer, Monbiot cross swords in climate debate.

(embedded video removed as I can't make it stop playing automatically)

The Clean Energy Council reports that voters realise that renewable power is far superior to the nuclear alternative - Renewables trounce nuclear in Newspoll.

A Newspoll survey commissioned by the Clean Energy Council (CEC) has shown overwhelming public support for the government to focus its support on renewable energy - such as solar and wind - over nuclear power.

Given a choice between supporting the development of renewable energy sources and nuclear power, four out of every five people polled favoured the government giving greater priority to the development of renewables.

CEC chief executive Matthew Warren said the results show Australians want to see the development of renewable energy ahead of contentious options like nuclear.
“This confirms what we have thought for some time – you need to exhaust every other alternative before talking about nuclear energy as a climate change solution for Australia. The answers in this poll show that some people may express support for nuclear power in principle, but four out of every five people would prefer to see an effective renewable energy strategy as a priority.

“We need to see what renewable technologies can achieve over the next decade. Renewables have enormous potential, but we still have a lot of work to do to find out how much energy they can deliver and at what cost,” he said.

The Business Spectator has an article on cost blow outs at Woodside and Exxon LNG plants - Woodside launches $2.5bn equity raising.

Woodside's decision to tap investors comes after a cost blow-out of up to $1.1 billion at its Pluto LNG project because of slower construction work. ...

Woodside said in November that it would cover the Pluto budget blow-out via the debt markets, asset sales and underwriting of its dividends. The company also said at the time that it may boost its stake in the joint venture Browse project if it could not agree on a development plan with its partners.

The project is currently 82 per cent complete and on track to deliver first LNG shipments in 2011, with a production capacity of 4.3 million tonnes per year.

Pluto is now the second LNG project in the Asia-Pacific region to see costs rise – a trend that could also haunt the other Australian LNG projects. ExxonMobil Corp, which approved its LNG project in Papua New Guinea last week, has raised the forecast cost for the project by about 15 per cent to $15 billion.

The SMH reports the new hybrid Toyota Camry is rolling off production lines in Australia - Australia's first hybrid car arrives.

Australia's first locally-built hybrid production car rolled off the assembly line at Toyota's Altona Plant this morning.

The hybrid version of the Toyota Camry will go on sale early in the New Year, marking the beginning of a new, greener era for the local car industry.

All three local makers have committed to building more fuel-efficient cars over the next two years, with Holden scheduled to start production of a small car towards the end of next year and Ford to build a four-cylinder version of its Falcon from 2011.

Toyota plans to sell 10,000 hybrid Camrys a year - roughly a third of total Camry sales - and the Victorian Government has already committed to buy 2000 of them. Private buyers may be hard pressed to get their hands on the car, though, as Toyota insiders say fleet pre-orders for the car have been particularly strong.

The car will be more powerful than the existing Camry, thanks to its supplementary electric motor, but is expected to use less fuel than the smallest cars on our roads. It will use 30 per cent less fuel than a standard four-cylinder petrol Camry, or roughly 6 litres per 100km.

The Federal Government has committed $35 million to the project through its Green Car fund, which is also subsidising development of more fuel-efficient vehicles by Holden and Ford.

WorldChanging has a post on a new book about green chemistry - Elizabeth Grossman and the Green Chemistry Revolution.

Toxic chemicals are seemingly ubiquitous. Since everything on Earth is connected, chemicals intended for one use, in one product, can easily find their way into other things, like soil, air, water and bodies. Scientists have been trying to determine where toxic chemicals are ending up, and the results are shocking: Dangerous chemicals are even being found in the blood of newborn babies.

These alarming facts are what investigative journalist Elizabeth Grossman came across while researching her latest book "Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry." While writing her previous book on the afterlife of electronics, Grossman said she became increasingly disturbed by the the amount of chemicals that were being found in our consumer products. It all began when she wanted to know why the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was finding the exact same chemicals in polar bears, newborn babies and our food. After asking why, she began wondering if it was possible to do any better. Could products and the chemicals they are created from be made environmentally "benign by design"?

She decided to literally chase these dangerous molecules around the world in order to find out. Her research took her from the Arctic to the Great Lakes, to China's Pearl River Delta and numerous waste sites. It should be surprising that harmful chemicals were present at every site she visited, but it's not. What is unexpected though, is her hope. Grossman believes that there is a solution: green chemistry. Green chemists, writes Grossman, are redesigning the future and learning from nature to create new, non-harming chemicals and products.

Without green chemistry Grossman fears that we will be entering into a very dangerous world. Many of the chemicals she was chasing are endocrine disruptors, which have the ability to change our genetic makeup. They can mess with reproduction and lead to an increase in fat cells, which leads to higher rates of diabetes and slower metabolism. They have been shown to reduce sperm count and also mess with neurological function. Grossman said that without green chemistry we may end up "fat, stupid and impotent."

The ABC reports that exploration for geothermal energy in WA will get some government funding - Geothermal energy funding.

The Federal Government has awarded $7 million to a Western Australian company to conduct geothermal testing in Perth. Perth based company GRE Geothermal will aim to prove that geothermal energy is recoverable within the metropolitan area. ...

The Resources Minister Martin Ferguson says Geoscience Australia estimates that if just one per cent of Australia's geothermal energy was extracted, it could supply Australia's total energy requirements for 26,000 years.

Alan Kohler has a look at the intersection of the Copenhagen negotiations, America's ballooning deficit and the ever-expanding "war on terror" - America Is Being Outplayed. You have to wonder if all the money being poured into the Afghanistan (or Af/Pak, if you want to be trendy) hole is worth it - maybe all that drug money is as important as the oil in Iraq after all. While the article in The Observer should get the tinfoil crowd chattering, I don't think there is anything unusual historically in huge sums of drug money becoming "respectable" - a lot of old money in Britain and America had its origins in the opium trade into China after all.

Barnaby Joyce said in a wild interview with The Age last week that the United States might default on its debt soon. But was the L-plate shadow minister revealing a truth normally unspoken by those in authority?

No – the US is not about to default. Greece, yes; Japan, maybe. But the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency, which means America can service its debts for quite a while with the money it prints. Japan, don’t forget, had its crisis in 1989 and even now, 20 years later, has not defaulted, even though debt is 200 per cent of GDP.

But that doesn’t mean the US out of the woods – far from it.

If you print more money, inflation makes each existing dollar worth less. That’s not a problem at the moment because the US is only now just being pulled out of recession by government debt and money printing, so prices are not rising. In fact many commentators are more worried about deflation.

When countries have to choose between the impoverishment of hyperinflation and defaulting on their debts, they frequently choose default.

And while it is hard to imagine the US facing such a choice, it has certainly taken a few steps down that path. What’s more, it seems not only mired in debt but also in the expensive obligations of global leadership.

It is borrowing money to send 40,000 extra troops to Afghanistan to try to win a war from which it will gain no real benefit.

And now China is openly gaming the climate change conference in Copenhagen to further impoverish and encircle the United States.

China, the world’s largest carbon polluter, is now holding the Copenhagen conference to ransom. To get an agreement, the US will have to borrow more money and 'compensate' China and other developed nations for its own past emissions so that China can keep increasing its own pollution.

The combination of its military obligations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the looming obligation of financing action on climate change with massive subsidies to the developing world are crushing burdens for a government already in deficit this year to the tune of $US1.4 trillion. ...

In other words, as China screws America over climate change, it will be screwing it on the interest on its debt as the largest creditor, and watching from afar with its own massive military machine idle, while the US tries to defeat global terrorism using borrowed money.

Bond rates have more impact on the interest rates on consumer and business debt in the US than the Fed funds rate. The Federal Reserve is currently staying at 0-0.25 per cent to try to boost the economy. If bond yields rose next year it would more than offset the equivalent cash rate cut, but in any case the Fed can’t cut rates any more – it is 'zero bound'.

So a bond demand shortfall will make it even harder for the US to create the new 300,000 jobs a month that Paul Krugman says it needs.

The US is beleaguered, truly an empire at risk. And although China is happily turning the screws and using the opportunity to gain ascendancy, America is the author of its own misery.

Speaking of Barnaby Joyce and his talk of American debt default, Guy Rundle at Crikey has an article pointing out that his seemingly random set of beliefs is actually pretty consistent with a long held political tradition - Crazy Barnaby shooting from the heartland.

Wow — just when conservatives thought that the chaos was over, they get hit with the full force that is Barnaby. Last Thursday your correspondent was dozing lightly, trying to gather the wherewithal to get up, when Joyce came on the Jon Faine show (Bruce Guthrie in the chair).

Crazy Barnaby, conscious of his new responsibilities as a member of the shadow cabinet, was trying his best to rein in madhouse and the whole thing there now that he is omigod shadow finance minister — but this appeared to consist of belting out the same whackness in sombre and modulated tone, which made him sound like he was on Haldol.

“Australians are subject to huge grocery price inflation because of a lack of competition” he mumbled, lachrymose, “it’s the same with the banks, it may be necessary to break them up.”

OK, so I was sure as hell up now. Though the interview returned, inexplicably in my view, back to the sideshow of Westpac’s banana smoothie email, the shadow finance minister in the Liberal-National coalition had just called for the breaking up of Australia’s banks.

Joyce, as everyone knows by now, had only just got started. It was only when he called for a ban on investment by Chinese state-owned companies that Tony Abbott pulled him in. The conservatoriat has been in uproar ever since, with the Oz sternly admonishing the shadow finance minister and Paul Kelly delivering one of his headmasterly talks disguised as an article, to school captain Abbott. They’ve scrambled quickly, and come up with a response: this is shoot-from-the-lip Barney.

That’s a great solution — it has the appearance of being critical, while it’s actually nothing of the sort. Joyce may have an aleatoric way of putting things across, but the suggestion that he’s making it up as he goes along is bulldust. The trouble for the coalition is not that he says the first thing that comes into his mind — it’s that he’s speaking from the heart. And from the heartland.

The depth of historical knowledge in Australian political commentary is so appallingly low that I can well believe that many in the press gallery really believe that none of Barney’s stuff hangs together. When they judge someone as whacko because he professes a belief in capitalism and free enterprise, and a desire to break up the banks, you know that they are missing the coalition’s deep dilemma for want of a knowledge of the 20th century. So let’s look at the history (and some actual class analysis, big shout out to my bro J. Passant, aright? Word.)

Joyce’s thoughts — on everything from sports-only student unions to the defaulting of US debt — comes from a Right that is older than the recent neoliberal/neoconservative confection, and that is in many ways more inimical to the corporate/executive Liberal Party than is Labor. When the man from St George speaks, we hear a voice of rural Australia, and the urban petit-bourgeoisie — a voice like old music on a distant gramophone, saying things out of the 1920s and ’30s, because that is the last time that class was socially dominant.

Largely though not exclusively Catholic, barred from advancement by sectarian prejudice and class immobility, squeezed from below by the organised labour movement, the experience of shopkeepers, small farmers, tradesmen and the like tended to be one of isolated work life, family and then church as the only collective identity, an adherence to particular and symbolic social meanings — the cross and the flag — rather than abstract ones, a promise of hard-won frugal security that is also uniquely precarious, subject to the movement of forces over which they have not the slightest control.

With the Australian class system consolidating in the ’20s, and the Left becoming an international force, this class began to produce organisational expressions of its beliefs — the Country Party, the League of Rights, and the nascent Catholic Social Movements. For this class, the true society is one in which capitalism is largely bound within something else — the bonds of kin, religion, race and locality, as expressed in family businesses, local towns, etc.

These things are more important than abstract notions of rights, freedoms, philosophy, etc, and they generate a set of virtues — self-reliance, independence from experts, a disdain for larger processes or collectives. Market and state are a means to the end of keeping social relations frozen that way for ever, and there is no hesitation in using the latter, whether it is expressed through the Grain Elevators Board or the Commonwealth Censor.

Such attitudes effortlessly generate a belief in disaster, conspiracy, threat and sophiaphobia, as a multiple expression of a single great fear. That can easily be rolled over from real conflicts — with banks, that is — into the stuff we all joke about, such as a suspicion of water fluoridation. Fluoridation is a form of adulteration of the natural and given — just as is usurious interest or collective bargaining. The dominant way in which this sort of thinking proceeds is to collapse abstract and mass forces into particular and conspiratorial ones — thus conflict of and suspicion of finance capital is transferred into anti-Semitism, and capital’s pitiless rapacity becomes the character of The International Jew.

That, of course, is the title of League of Rights founder Eric Butler’s 1946 book, published at the start of Butler and the League’s half-century of tireless rural organising, often as entryist groups within the Country and then National Party. Butler once was asked what his greatest triumph was — “survival” he replied, and he was right.

Though he would complain about Pauline Hanson stealing his thunder, a map of League of Rights activity with an overlay of One Nation strongholds would show a pretty tight fit. And the themes — banks, China, etc — that Joyce is raising are coming straight from the League of Rights playbook (with the exception of anti-Semitism — there is no indication that Joyce is anti-Semitic).

Take Barney’s recent pronouncements on American debt levels, and the possibility that the country might default. Your correspondent has written at length about what a parlous state the US is in, in a manner largely hidden by consumption of ever-increasing levels of crap, but that problem is one of growing underdevelopment and low social investment. Default isn’t on the cards, because it would be the end of the global financial system — and of China’s markets. US debt will simply be restructured in whatever way keeps things circulating. Where would Barney get a crazy idea about default from?

From Eric Butler and the LOR — which, like all such organisations, adopted the “Social Credit” ideas of C.H. Douglas in the ’30s. Explaining Social Credit would take the whole of this edition of Crikey, but the short version is that Douglas thinks that many of our economic woes come from a radical misunderstanding of the nature of money, which has been allowed to float free of any measure of real social wealth, and autonomously dictate production levels.

For Douglas, stimulus packages such as those of Australia and the US are the worst possible answer because they generate cycles of “super-production”, leading to trade wars, which become real wars.

So when Barnaby Joyce talks about bank break-up, the rampaging Chinese state, a US default and a world currency, he’s not riffing — he’s elucidating the various aspects of a complete, consistent, and clearly long and deeply held philosophy, one that matches the preoccupations of his constituents and supporters. Climate change takes the place of fluoridation as a perversion of plain common-sense (“any man on the land will tell you that the weather goes in cycles”), inevitably expressing itself in plans for a new tax and One World government, being mooted at Copenhagen. It all fits together so well, how could it not be true.

This is much, much worse for the coalition than him being Crazy Barny, because it means that Tony Abbott is now offering us a potential finance minister whose political philosophy is drawn deeply from a tradition that believes finance per se to be the problem. Personally, I don’t have a problem with that — a lot of what Douglas said about overproduction, military spending and the drift to war seems spot on to me, but the ideas are going in the opposite direction not merely of neoliberal economics, but of the whole foundation of modern business and international commerce.

So Abbott has a big problem — trying for a gonzo, wild-west shadow cabinet, he’s allowed the League of Rights their greatest entryist triumph to date, even though Joyce isn’t a member of that group (or so we presume). Given what he’s said two weeks in, it seems unlikely that he’ll stop now. His belief in the things he talks about, and his conviction that he is representing the people from which he comes — both go far deeper than his affiliation to the National Party, much less the coalition.

Abbott will have to sack him eventually, which will seriously damage his leadership credentials, and the longer he keeps him in the centre of the shadow Cabinet, the more damage he can do to any sort of consistent message. Joyce’s elevation was an unbelievable screw-up, another gift to Labor from a leader whose neurological capacity for risk assessment has probably been damaged by his sustained endorphin addiction. If Abbott was lost in golden slumbers from his runner’s high, you can bet he’s awake and listening now.

Moving further out into the realm of conspiracy and collapse, prominent American movie reviewer Roger Ebert has an enthusiastic look at the Mike Ruppert based movie "Collapse" - Collapse.

I have no way of assuring you that the bleak version of the future outlined by Michael Ruppert in Chris Smith's "Collapse" is accurate. I can only tell you I have a pretty good built-in B.S. detector, and its needle never bounced off zero while I watched this film. There is controversy over Ruppert, and he has many critics. But one simple fact at the center of his argument is obviously true, and it terrifies me. ...

Ruppert is a man ordinary in appearance, on the downhill slope of middle age, a chain smoker with a mustache. He is not all worked up. He speaks reasonably and very clearly. "Collapse" involves what he has to say, illustrated with news footage and a few charts, the most striking of which is a bell-shaped curve. It takes a lot of effort to climb a bell-shaped curve, but the descent is steep and dangerous.

He recites facts I knew, vaguely. Many things are made from oil. Everything plastic. Paint. There are eight gallons of oil in every auto tire. Oil supplies the energy to convert itself into those byproducts. No oil, no plastic, no tires, no gas to run cars, no machines to build them. No coal mines, except those operated by men and horses.

Alternative energies and conservation? The problem is the cost of obtaining and using it. Ethanol requires more energy than it produces. Hybrid and battery cars need engines, tires and batteries. Nuclear power plants need to be built with oil. Electricity from wind power is most useful near its source. It is transmitted by grids built and maintained by oil. Wave power is expensive to collect. Solar power is cheap and limitless, but we need a whole hell of a lot more solar panels and other collecting devices.

Like I say, you do the math. Ruppert has done his math, and he concludes that our goose is cooked. He doesn't have any answers. We're passing the point of diminishing returns on the way to our rendezvous with the point of no return. It was nice while it lasted. People lived happily enough in the centuries before oil, electricity and steam, I guess. Of course, there were fewer than 6 billion of us. In this century, Ruppert says, there will be a lot fewer than 6 billion again. It won't be a pretty sight.

I'm not going to mention his theories about global warming, because that's a subject that inflames too many zealots. About peak oil, his reasoning is clear, simple and hard to refute.

The movie may well be worth seeing, but if your BS detector doesn't go off when listening to Mike talk, you probably don't have a functioning one (exercise for the reader - go back and read a few year's worth of "From the Wilderness" and see how many predictions Mike made with absolute assurance which turned out to be complete hokum).

The saga of Iraq's oil has made the press again, with international oil majors making major inroads into their goal of tapping Iraq's oil fields. The ABC reports on the auctioning off of production rights for some of the country's largest fields - Untapped oil fields auctioned in Iraq.

Iraq has completed its second international oil auction, awarding seven foreign firms the right to exploit some of the country's largest untapped oil fields. One of the biggest contracts was won by a consortium of Russia's Lukoil and and Norway's Statoil. Another went to Royal Dutch Shell and Malaysia's Petronas. ...

The Iraqi oil minister says the successful deals will boost the country's oil production by almost five million barrels a day, almost double the current production rate.

The BBC is headlining a greatly increased Iraqi oil production capacity -Iraq oil capacity 'to reach 12m barrels per day'.

Iraq's oil capacity could reach 12 million barrels per day (bpd) in six years, the country's oil minister says.

Hussein al-Shahristani told reporters in Baghdad that oil producers would not necessarily operate at full capacity, but would take into account demand. Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, has a capacity of 12.5m bpd.

Earlier, a joint bid by Russian and Norwegian oil firms won the contract for the "supergiant" West Qurna field, said to have reserves of 13bn barrels.

Lukoil and Statoil will get $1.15 a barrel and will work to raise output from West Qurna Phase 2, in the Basra region, to 1.8m bpd. In June, a winning bid to develop another Iraqi field received $2 a barrel.

On Friday, the contract to develop the 12.6bn-barrel Majnoon field in southern Iraq was won by a consortium led by Shell. It also pledged to increase daily production to 1.8m barrels, up from only 46,000.

Rights for the eastern Halfaya field, with 4.1bn barrels of reserves, went to a consortium led by the Chinese state oil company, CNPC.

Patrick Cockburn at The Independent reports that the Iraqi government is claiming that it isn't giving up control of the fields - Rush for Iraq's oil in defiance of bombers.

The profits for the oil companies will be limited under contracts now being agreed, but they have evidently decided to accept this to secure an entry ticket to a potential Iraqi oil bonanza.

"The second round of bidding represents a new era in the history of the Iraqi oil industry," said the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as he opened the auction. For once such hyperbole may be true because it will see foreign oil companies returning to Iraq en masse for the first time since oil was nationalised in 1972.

Iraqis are intensely suspicious that President Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003 was motivated by a plan to get hold of Iraqi oil. The government is intent on showing that it is not giving away control of Iraqi oil, the country's only asset. "The old way was in darkened rooms, behind closed doors," said Mr Maliki. "But today what is happening is clear to everyone."

The success of the oil auction is crucial to the future of Mr Maliki because present oil revenues, at around $60bn a year are only just enough to pay salaries and government expenses. There is little left for development and reconstruction of the economy, ruined by continuing conflict and sanctions since the start of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980. Critics argue that Iraq's own oil industry could have raised ouput by itself, but it is crippled by lack of money, organisation, equipment and personnel.

The Oil Ministry's strategy seems to have paid off. In the first auction in June only BP and China's CNPC were willing to accept a fee of $2 for each barrel of extra crude above a minimum production target produced in the super giant Rumaila, one of the largest oilfields in the world. But in recent weeks other big companies have followed suit. Mr Shahristani said: "They will not have a share of Iraqi oil, and our country will have total control over production."

The Guardian had an article before the auction wondering what it means for Iraq - Will oil empower or emasculate Iraq?.

The timing could not have been worse. On Tuesday afternoon, set against the sleek backdrop of a London hotel, the vice-chairman of Iraq's oil and gas committee, Abdul-Hadi al-Hassani, told the BBC that the time is right to invest in Iraq as the government has "gone from strength to strength".

A short distance across town, Sir John Scarlett, head of MI6 and gatekeeper to some of the precious "intelligence" that triggered the war, refused to confirm or deny the report that an Iraqi taxi driver was responsible for the "45 minutes" WMD claim.

While the future and the past of Iraq were being discussed in London, Baghdad was burning in the present, as fire engines were still dousing the smouldering car wrecks and the ambulances were still carefully collecting the remains of some of the 127 people who had been blown up in the co-ordinated blasts that hit the capital.

Despite the progress in reducing levels of violence, clearly Iraq remains a highly dangerous and significantly underdeveloped place. In the first six months of this year only 25,000 Iraqis returned to the country and 4.6 million Iraqis remain internally and externally displaced. In the past six years the country's scores on press freedom and corruption perception indexes have got worse. February's statistics showed only 20% of Iraqis have access to sewage and 45% clean water.

It looks like UCG schemes aren't just confined to Australia - Technology review has an article on a venture in Canada - Getting Power From Coal Without Digging It Up.

Converting coal in the ground directly into clean-burning gases could have huge environmental benefits--not the least of which would be the avoidance of destructive mining operations. The problem is, technology for underground coal gasification is still in its early stages.

Now the government of Alberta says it will give C$285 million ($271 million) to a coal gasification project by Calgary-based Swan Hills Synfuels that involves the deepest-ever operation to generate power from coal--without digging it up.

Previous demonstrations of the technology have turned coal seams as deep as 1,000 meters below the surface into clean-burning gas. In contrast, Swan Hills Synfuels' C$1.5 billion project proposes to reach down 1,400 meters. Working at that depth could lessen the threat of groundwater contamination from the smoldering decomposing coal. "We've got 800 meters of rock--a lot of it impermeable--between us and freshwater aquifers," says Swan Hills president Doug Shaigec.

What's more, if the technology can get at deeper layers of coal, it could allow access to much more of the fossil fuel, says Julio Friedmann, who is carbon management project leader for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

When the project starts up in 2015, Swan Hills hopes to generate 300 megawatts of power from its coal gas while selling over 1.3 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. The CO2 could be used by oil producers and ultimately stored in oil wells. This could result in the storage of 10 to 20 million tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2020. That would help Alberta meet its 2020 goal for carbon capture of 25 to30 million tons per year, according to a report last month from an alliance of Canadian industrial firms.

The British are also looking to ramp up their carbon dioxide emissions, in their case looking to coal reserves under the North Sea - North Sea coal to be burnt underground.

Vast coal deposits lying deep beneath the North Sea will be burnt in situ to generate up to 5 per cent of Britain’s energy needs, under new plans approved by the Government last week.

The UK Coal Authority has awarded licences to Clean Coal, an Anglo-American company, to develop five offshore sites for a technology called Underground Coal Gasification (UGC).

The method, which has not been used on a commercial scale in the UK, although it is widely used in Australia [BG: this is a gross exaggeration], taps the high energy content of coal while doing away with the costly and labour-intensive need to mine it first.

Rohan Courtney, a former director of Tullow Oil who is chairman of Clean Coal, said that the potential for the technology was enormous. “There are enormous amounts of coal lying beneath the North Sea which have never been accessed,” he said. “This technology is going to open up the industry again in the UK.”

The sites approved for use stretch up to 10km offshore from Sunderland, Grimsby and Cromer on the shores of the North Sea, Canonbie, near Annan in Dumfries and Galloway on the other side of Scotland, and Swansea Bay, outside the entrance to the Bristol Channel. The combined coal reserves are estimated to be at least one billion tonnes, equivalent to more than one sixth of all the coal consumed in an average year around the world. Global consumption of coal is about 5.8 billion tonnes a year. Total consumption in the UK is about 80 million tonnes a year.

The New York Times reports that the Swiss have decided that building geothermal energy projects requiring fracturing of rock under towns is a little too scary for them - Quake Threat Leads Swiss to Close Geothermal Project.

A $60 million project to extract renewable energy from the hot bedrock deep beneath Basel, Switzerland, was shut down permanently on Thursday after a government study determined that earthquakes generated by the project were likely to do millions of dollars in damage each year.

The project, led by Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was suspended in late 2006 after it generated earthquakes that did no bodily harm but caused about $9 million in mostly minor damage to homes and other structures. Mr. Häring is to go to trial next week on criminal charges stemming from the project. On Thursday, he did not respond to messages asking for comment.

The findings are a serious blow to the hopes of environmentalists, entrepreneurs and investors who believe that advanced geothermal energy could substantially cut the world’s use of emissions-causing fossil fuels. The report comes as the United States Energy Department is preparing its own review of the safety of a closely related project, by a start-up company called AltaRock Energy, in the hills north of San Francisco.

The AltaRock project is the Obama administration’s first major test of advanced geothermal energy. Like the Basel project, AltaRock’s plan is to drill miles underground, fracture hot bedrock and circulate water through it to generate steam. The Energy Department began its review after an article in The New York Times in June raised questions about whether AltaRock had been forthcoming about the earthquakes set off by the fracturing in Basel. The AltaRock project has also been plagued with technical problems.

Scientists said on Thursday that because the Swiss report focused narrowly on the Basel project and also contained positive findings, it would not prove fatal to advanced geothermal energy as a whole.

For example, while the report concluded that residents of Basel would have felt from 14 to 170 earthquakes over the 30-year life of the project, few if any of those earthquakes would be likely to cause bodily harm, according to an English summary of the report provided by Rudolf Braun, the Swiss scientist who led the work.

Transmaterial has a post on a new use for mycellium as a bonding agent - Mycobond.

Mycobond is a mycological bio-composite that can be used in a wide variety of applications. Instead of conventional manufacturing processes, Mycobond uses mycelium—which is essentially the root system of a mushroom—to transform loose aggregates into strong composites. This process can be varied by using different species of fungus and mixtures of aggregates in order to make a composite with an optimal density, strength, appearance, and performance for the specific application.

Additionally, Mycobond represents a low-embodied-energy manufacturing process as the material self assembles at room temperature and pressure in the dark. Furthermore, Mycobond upcycles resources like rice hulls, cotton burrs, and buckwheat hulls that are otherwise thrown away, transforming them into valuable products, including rigid board insulation and protective packaging buffers.

the SMH has a bevy of global warming related articles - first a prediction that this year will be the hottest in recorded history - Scientists tip 2010 as hottest yet.

HE past six months have been Australia's warmest winter-spring period on record and it is likely next year will set global temperature records.

Scientists predict that, whatever the outcome at Copenhagen, Australia must adapt to unprecedented heatwaves.

David Jones, the head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, said yesterday that claims by sceptics the planet was cooling were wrong.

Every decade in Australia for the past 70 years had been getting warmer, and this decade has been the globe's warmest so far.

''Clearly global warming hasn't stopped, and it's warming in our backyard,'' said Dr Jones, who was speaking in Melbourne after the release of the World Meteorological Organisation's annual climate statement on Tuesday night.

Apart from temperature records, which have been criticised by sceptics amid the stolen email affair, heating was evident from sea-level rises, disappearing snow and shrinking sea ice, he said. ''The climate system's having the final say.''

Dr Jones said an El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean - linked to hotter, drier conditions in Australia - would have an effect on the world's climate next year. ''There is a significant probability next year will be the globe's warmest year on record.''

The past decade has been the warmest decade too - Past decade the warmest since records began in 1850.

THIS year has been the third-hottest on record in Australia, and is ranked as the fifth-warmest globally.

A report by the World Meteorological Organisation, published last night, concluded that the decade from 2000 to 2009 was the warmest since instrumental climate records began in 1850.

In 2009, only the United States and Canada experienced conditions that were cooler than average. ''Given the current figures, large parts of southern Asia and central Africa are likely to have their warmest year on record,'' the report said.

Published as world leaders gathered in Copenhagen to consider climate change, it highlights extreme weather conditions around the globe this year, including three ''exceptional heatwaves'' in Australia, China's worst drought in 50 years and the wettest October in the US in 115 years.

Andy Pitman, co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, said this year should have been a cool year because of low solar activity and a recent La Nina weather event. ''The fact it ranked in the top 5 since 1850 is actually frightening,'' he said.

This year's heatwaves in NSW, Victoria and South Australia also did not bode well for next year, Professor Pitman said.

And finally, a look at the "climategate" affair - Climate emails: a dirty war swirls around 'swindle'.

The wall of noise plays into the hands of the vested interests who want to see nothing done. It is used to frighten people whose jobs depend on digging coal or smelting steel.

It has helped deliver a political landscape in Australia, unique in the developed world, where the leader of a major party can now base its climate change policy on the belief that the world seems to be getting cooler.

This, in turn, has taken the pressure off the Government's own questionable climate change policy.

Climate science may be complicated, but it's not rocket science. It is in the public domain, open to informed scrutiny, and it has been there for decades. The self-styled climate sceptics movement - not a term climate scientists approve of - has had ample opportunity to debunk arguments that the world can no longer ignore.

We know that carbon dioxide, some other gases and water vapour trap heat from the sun in the atmosphere. We know this because it can be measured, and replicated in lab experiments. We know that the warming trends we have detected are closely correlated with the rising carbon dioxide content. The computer models used to predict future climate change scenarios take these simple concepts and some other variables, such as solar activity, into account. The reason we know that these models work is that we can model past climate scenarios using the same criteria and match the results up against the existing temperature records. If your model starts with the conditions we know to have been present in the year 1900, and produces the conditions we know to have existed through the 20th century, it is a fair bet it works.

Even if climate models are discounted as evidence, direct observation of the natural world adds to an already compelling case.

We know that the ocean is struggling to absorb carbon dioxide content because we can measure it, and measure its effects on marine life. We can measure the extent of decline in Arctic and Antarctic ice, rising sea levels and melting glaciers. We can measure changes in forests and deserts. We can measure these results against the level of warming that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere leads us to expect, and they match.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded it is 90 per cent certain that the current cycle of climate change is being driven by human activity. It's fifth assessment report, discussed overnight in Copenhagen, will further bolster the evidence. Few scientific theories approach this level of certainty.

EcoGeek has a post on a wave power project in Oregon - Oregon Wave Project Under Way.

A project to build the country's first wave power station off the coast of Oregon is finally moving forward. Wave power company Ocean Power Technologies just signed a contract with Oregon Iron Works to start building 10 buoys, with the first one to be deployed a year from now off the coast of Reedsport.

This project will test the capabilities of the buoys in the area before the company goes forward with a 200-buoy project nearby. Within two years all ten buoys should be deployed and generating power for PNGC Power, the utility that is purchasing all that clean energy. The system will have a capacity of about 1.5 MW and OPT expects to sell the power for about 15 cents/kWh.

The ABC has a report on a new pilot geothermal energy project in Victoria - Vic Govt funds new geothermal project.

The Victorian Government has allocated $25-million for exploration associated with a new geothermal energy project at Anglesea, in the state's west. Geothermal energy used heat from subterrannean rocks to produce clean energy.

The Resources Minister, Peter Batchelor, says the project could become the site of Victoria's first geothermal energy plant. "We'll have the possibility of building a geothermal demonstration plant very close to the existing electricity grid," he said. "It will mean that we'll have the largest demonstration geothermal project in Victoria, and one that can be connected to the grid."

The Energy Collective has a post by Marc Gunther on a new and relatively cheap electric car from the US - An (almost) affordable electric car.

The other day, I took a spin around your nation’s capital in what is being touted as the first affordable electric car that will find its way onto America’s roads.

Not, it’s not the Chevy Volt, the Nissan Leaf, an import from BYD or Tata or a down-scaled Tesla. It’s the Coda, the product of a southern California startup with an unusual business model and some big-name investors.

My chauffeur was Kevin Czinger, Coda’s hard-charging CEO (no pun intended), about whom more in a moment. Czinger wants to build Coda Automotive into an American car maker that looks more like Apple or Dell than GM, Ford or Chrysler.

Coda’s impressive array of backers includes Hank Paulson, the former treasury secretary and CEO of Goldman Sachs; Thomas “Mack” McLarty, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, whose family owns auto dealerships; John Bryson, the former CEO of Edison International; and Tom Steyer, the well-respected founder of Farallon Capital Management.

Czinger isn’t as well known but his pedigree includes degrees from Yale (where he starred on the football team) and Yale Law, and stints at Goldman Sachs, Bertelsmann and Webvan. “I’m doing this,” Czinger says, “because I think it’s absolutely critical that we reduce our dependence on foreign oil and don’t destroy the planet earth.”

Standing in the way of his goal is the problem confronting everyone in the electric car business: How to make a powerful battery at a price that won’t put the car out of the reach of most buyers. That, Czinger says, has been the focus of Coda. “All of our R&D and all of our capital expenditures went into the battery system,” he says. “We finally have the chemistry we need.” Coda developed the battery and owns the intellectual property.

To keep costs down, Coda will make the batteries in China through a joint venture with a state-owned company, Tianjin Lishen, which makes lithium ion batteries for cell phone companies. The vehicles will also be assembled in China by a firm called Hakei Automobile Group, which will manufacture the chassis as well.

Mitsubishi are trying to drum up some support for their rather expensive little Miev electric car in Australia too - Mitsubishi champions $10,000 electric-car subsidy.

Japanese car maker Mitsubishi wants the Federal Government to reward buyers who opt for the company's new electric car.

An electric vehicle buyer would be recompensed around $10,000 if the Federal Government accepts a subsidy scheme proposed by Mitsubishi Australia.

But whether the scheme is accepted or rejected by the Rudd Labor government, Mitsubishi will press ahead with its plan to be the first major brand to sell an EV in Australia, planning to launch the plug-in i-Miev in 2010.

Mitsubishi Motors Australia president Rob McEniry said "it would be an absolute shame" if government did not accept the scheme, which will be formally presented early in 2010.

"If it means the customer has to pay more and we have less cars in Australia then so be it, but we will bring the car in."

The i-Miev is already on limited sale in Japan, is homologated for sale in Australia and has been demonstrated here previously.

Mitsubishi has put the cost of the plug-in i-Miev at AUS$70,000, an exorbitant price for a five-door mini-car, but reflective of the cost of its expensive lithium-ion battery pack.

Slideshare has an interesting presentation on how to reduce pollution (and fuel consumption) by the global shipping industry (estimating almost 3 million barrels per day of oil could be saved - Container Ship - How to reduce effect on Climate and Pollution.

Container Ship - How to reduce effect on Climate and Pollution

View more documents from Glenn Klith Andersen.

The SMH has an article on a proposal for Indonesia to dramataically increase the use of geothermal power, one of the key elemenets in the Desertec Asia plan - Indonesia plans carbon tax, geothermal push.

AS AUSTRALIA battles over an emissions trading scheme, Indonesia is set to release its draft climate change policy, which would establish a carbon tax, set up geothermal energy projects and protect forests.

The potential carbon tax, part of Indonesia's ''green paper'' on climate change, would apply to the combustion of fossil fuels and start at $9 a tonne of carbon dioxide, rising 5 per cent in real terms per year until 2020.

The tax could be coupled with cuts to subsidies for coal and oil-generated power, in an attempt to promote clean energy in the one of the world's fastest-growing economies. ...

Indonesia will also develop a detailed plan to tap the country's huge geothermal potential - which represents 40 per cent of the world's hot-rock resources. The geothermal strategy is aimed at partially offsetting a 7 per cent increase in energy demand every year.

The plan includes a geothermal tariff, in which the Government subsidises the purchase of clean energy by electricity retailers.

Crikey has an article from Guy Rundle trying (in rather tortured English) to explain the how a "green" leftist (not the only type of green, I might add) is different to an old school "red" marxist and how conservatives don't seem to understand either of them - Rundle: on Minchin, the green movement and Marxism.

Argues Kerr, there’s no doubt that the radical left moved holus-bolus into the environmentalist movement in the late ’80s and ’90s, Kerr argues, noting the entrist push into the 1984 Nuclear Disarmament Party by the then Socialist Workers Party (later DSP) among others.

More acutely, Kerr sounds a note of caution: though environmental issues are a real problem, they’re ultimately a business problem, a question of cost — and people really believe that climate change is happening.

Pari passu, the upshot of this is, let’s create a conspiracy about the conspiracy — regard the whole green movement as communism by other means, but let the lumpensuburbatariat think that you really care about the issue.

By now, the whole issue has become so live, that it’s worth disentangling it a little — if only because it throws light on the Liberal Party’s separation from the mainstream.

Everyone knows, or should, that the Communist movement — the Old Left — wasn’t anti-industrial in the slightest. It’s about as wrong a definition as you can get.

The whole aim of Communist movements within capitalist countries was to build a movement within the industrial working class — and thus the growth and expansion of that class was vital to its task. In Communist countries, industrial development was vital to standing against the capitalist world.

Left, Old Left, New Left … by the 1960s Communist Party dominance of the left was starting to slide, as a more civilisational critique of industrial and organisational humanity came to a head — including our impact on nature. Silent Spring, One Dimensional Man, DeSchooling Society, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Steal This Book, Growing Up Absurd, The Dialectic of Sex, and a hundred others suggested implicitly and otherwise that the Old Left was part of a monolithic system of growth and alienation, whose victory would do nothing to solve humanity’s deepest problems.

Lord, by the time that official Communist parties had taken onboard this wider critique, they were irrelevant — and they often remained highly critical of much of its efflorescences. David “Burnout” Burchell fits well into The Oz’s op-ed page because as a CPA intellectual and editor in the ’70s and ’80s, a lot of his role was to hold back much of the “New Left” tide, both its macro-civilisational critique and its micropolitics of non-hierachical participatory organisation and frikkin face painting. He’s a grumpy sod, because those people were most of the readers of ALR, which he edited.

In Michin and Kerr’s account, the accurate part is that a section of the Marxist left — the Trotskyist “far left” groups — began to see the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, as places for entry, activity and recruitment. Within the far-left there was keen debate about the dangers of “movementism” — of getting sucked into the actual cause, rather than building the party. “Far left” groups remained scrupulously agnostic about what form a socialist society would take — but their insistent motif was that environmental destruction was caused by the profit motive (often rendered rather unmarxistally as “greed”), and lack of social control of the economy.

Seen thus, a section of the Green movement was Marxism by other means. But it’s more complicated than that. Because Minchin, Kerr and others can give no credence to the Marxist argument about capitalism — that it must expand endlessly, and at ever greater velocity just to keep going, that the idea of a stabilised capitalism is an illusion of the pre-Marxist classical economists who thought of it as an eternal structure (hidden beneath centuries of bondage) — they can’t credit the possibility that left wing people would work in either a Marxist organisation or a Green one, because they believe the criticism to be correct.

Now, you would have to say that not only is there a strong case for this, but also that many people believe it — that our way of life, especially if it were generalised to all six billion people — would simply choke the planet dead. Many people aren’t prepared to actually change their life at this stage — which is why useless activities such as personal recycling are devised, to give the illusion of action — but hypocrisy is not the worst of vices.

Understand this clearly — more people now believe the Red-Green hypothesis, that capitalism is a system testing us to destruction in its current form, than go with the idea that it is some empty charade of communism by other means. The idea that it’s merely a “business problem” is one they’re increasingly rejecting, at least in thought.

To put it plainly, that group includes a lot of Liberal voters, and a high majority of Labor voters. None of them want to live in grass huts, but the idea that factors other than business will have to be brought into global economic calculus is one that appeals to them — including fairly radical schemes to make the electricity grid two-way with clean domestic power generation, relocalisation of parts of the economy, and drawing areas of life out of the commodity cycle. Ideas that are Green and, in a way, vaguely communistic.

Seriously, it’s early days for all that. But it will grow and grow — and voters will assess parties on their seriousness about addressing the deep problems of global growth, not in advancing cheap kludges that give the sense of appeasing a fringe.

The trouble for Minchin, Kerr and co is that they won the battle at one level — the privatisation of the economy — while culturally the new left prevailed in terms of a sense of what life is about. Now that the right’s victory delivered us a global financial crisis, the new left’s critique of its illusions is still there, and growing stronger by the day.

Beyond Zero Emissions has an interview with the CEO of New Zealand wind turbine manufacturer Windflow - Beyond Zero interviews Geoff Henderson of Windflow.

Geoff Henderson: I decided back in ’76 really to get into wind power. One of the contributing things I remember was one of my school mates had actually done a summer course on renewable energy at I think the University of Sydney, and he came back with some interesting information about the relative merits of solar and wind and so on. And I remember out of that that the basic flux(?) available, the solar resource, is of the order of a few hundreds watts a square metre of land area taken on a year-round basis, that very sunny places can have an average flux of 400 watts a square metre.

And by contrast, wind power, you can get the same or higher flux(?) 5.00min, but in warps(?)5.05min per square metre of vertical space, and therefore inherently the wind power uses a lot less land area than any of the other forms of solar. And I know this sounds a bit dry and boring and technical, but that is actually a very fundamental reason why wind power is the most economic form of renewable energy and has had the highest growth rate over the last 20-30 years.

So that the wind resource is huge – New Zealand of course is beautifully positioned in the Roaring Forties and I believe we will get most of our new electricity generation out of wind power over the next few decades. In some years – in the last ten years – wind power has actually been 100 per cent of new generation already. We’ve had no other new power stations going on but we’ve had 100 or 200 megawatts of wind power going in. ...

Scott Bilby: And your flagship technology to take you there is what you call the Windflow 500 Turbine. Can you tell us, you know, give us some basic specs to just to start off with that wind turbine, but also, what is it that sets it apart from other turbines. Why have you chosen that type of turbine?

Geoff Henderson: ,Sure. It’s a 500 kilowatt rating, 33-metre rota diameter with a hub height of about 30 metres which means that the top of the blade is about – when it goes through the top of its arc is about 46 metres above ground level, so less than 50 metres high. That’s enough for about 200 households at a very windy site, or 100 households at least. And given that our footprint is about a two-and-a-half metre diameter monopile concrete foundation now puts it in perspective the amount of power that we can get out of this turbine.

The two main technologies that set us apart are the two-bladed teetering rotor and the torque limiting gearbox, both of which come out of my time in the UK working for Wind Energy Group which was the leading R&D contractor to the UK Department of Energy, and the torque limiting gearbox was my contribution and my invention and that works with a two-bladed or a three-bladed windmill, and gives you some real torque control and electrical advantages as well.

The two-bladed teetering was something that I learnt over in the UK – became a convert to, having had a background in three-bladers prior to that. It does really work and it enables a lighter machine.

So, to summarise the commercial advantage, we’re coming in at about half the weight of comparable European three-bladed machines. So we’re using half the Earth’s resources if you like, tones of steel and concrete and other materials per unit of output. We’ve got less environmental impact in terms of earth works and road works and so on and my, the perspective that I’ve always taken on this is that I’m trying to get wind power going in New Zealand primarily, it’s the windiest country in the world so you’ve got to have tough turbines, but we’re also very much an unsubsidised environment in New Zealand, especially since the 1980s with the Rogernomics years. Subsidy has become a dirty word in New Zealand and in that lean and mean economic environment we have to make something that’s fundamentally cost effective.

George Monbiot has a look at the effort to try and discredit global warming science - The Real Climate Scandal (with supporting data here - case studies).

Even if you were to exclude every line of evidence which could possibly be disputed - the proxy records, the computer models, the complex science of clouds and ocean currents - the evidence for manmade global warming would still be unequivocal. You can see it in the measured temperature record, which goes back to 1850; in the shrinkage of glaciers and the thinning of sea ice; in the responses of wild animals and plants and the rapidly changing crop zones.

No other explanation for these shifts makes sense. Solar cycles have been out of synch with the temperature record for 40 years(1). The Milankovic cycle, which describes variations in the earth’s orbit, doesn’t explain it either. But the warming trend is closely correlated with the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The impact of these gases can be demonstrated in the laboratory. To assert that they do not have the same effect in the atmosphere, a novel and radical theory would be required. No such theory exists. The science is not fixed - no science ever is - but it is as firm as science can be. The evidence for manmade global warming remains as strong as the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer or HIV to AIDS.

The third observation is the contrast between the global scandal these emails have provoked and the muted response to 20 years of revelations about the propaganda planted by fossil fuel companies. I have placed on my website four case studies, each of which provides a shocking example of how the denial industry works(2).

Two of them are drawn from Climate Cover-Up, the fascinating, funny and beautifully-written new book by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore(3). If every allegation it contained could not be traced back to leaked documents (I have checked all the sources), their findings would be unbelievable. Nothing exposed by the hacking of the Climatic Research Unit’s server is one tenth as bad as the least of these revelations.

When I use the term denial industry, I’m referring to those who are paid to say that manmade global warming isn’t happening. The great majority of people who believe this have not been paid: they have been duped. Reading Climate Cover-Up, you keep stumbling across familiar phrases and concepts, which you can see every day on the comment threads. The book shows that these memes were planted by PR companies and hired experts.

The first case study I’ve posted reveals how a coalition of US coal companies sought to persuade people that the science is uncertain. It listed the two social groups it was trying to reach: “Target 1: Older, less educated males”; “Target 2: Younger, lower-income women” and the methods by which it would reach them. One of its findings was that “members of the public feel more confident expressing opinions on others’ motivations and tactics than they do expressing opinions of scientific issues.”(4)

Remember this, next time you hear people claiming that climate scientists are only in it for the money, or that environmentalists are trying to create a communist world government: these ideas were devised and broadcast by energy companies. The people who inform me, apparently without irony, that “your article is an ad hominem attack, you four-eyed, big-nosed, commie sack of shit” or “you scaremongers will destroy the entire world economy and take us back to the Stone Age” are the unwitting recruits of campaigns they have never heard of.

The second case study reveals how Dr Patrick Michaels, one of a handful of climate change deniers with a qualification in climate science, has been lavishly paid by companies seeking to protect their profits from burning coal(5). As far as I can discover, none of the media outlets who use him as a commentator - including the Guardian - has disclosed this interest at the time of his appearance. Dr Michaels is one of many people commenting on climate change who presents himself as an independent expert while being secretly paid for his services by fossil fuel companies.

The third example shows how a list published by the Heartland Institute (which has been sponsored by Exxon) of 500 scientists “whose research contradicts man-made global warming scares”(6) turns out to be nothing of the kind: as soon as these scientists found out what the institute was saying about them, many angrily demanded that their names be removed. Twenty months later, they are still on the list. The fourth example shows how, during the Bush presidency, White House officials worked with oil companies to remove regulators they didn’t like, and doctor official documents about climate change.

In Climate Cover-Up, in Ross Gelbspan’s books The Heat is On and Boiling Point; in my book Heat and on the websites DeSmogBlog.com and exxonsecrets.org, you can find dozens of such examples. Together they expose a systematic, well-funded campaign to con the public. To judge by the comments you can read on this paper’s website, it has worked.

But people behind these campaigns know that their claims are untrue. One of the biggest was run by the Global Climate Coalition, which represented ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, the American Petroleum Institute and several big motor manufacturers. In 1995 the coalition’s own scientists reported that “the scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”(7) The coalition hid this finding from the public, and spent millions of dollars seeking to persuade people that the opposite was true.