Guy Rundle has an enjoyable swipe at "the right" in his latest Crikey column, noting they helped catalyse the Egyptian revolt years ago, when they invaded Iraq - Helping to form the resistance is the Right's legacy in Egypt

A week after the Egyptian uprising sent the Right into disarray, they appear to have regrouped somewhat more successfully than the leader they once favoured, Hosni Mubarak. In the final days of Mubarak's reign last week, the neocons suddenly remembered their conservative side, and started sounding like Edmund Burke.

Pundits who had greeted the chaotic looting and violence of the early days of the Iraq invasion with Donald Rumsfeld's insouciant remark -- "stuff happens" -- suddenly became wary of disorder and the mob, as a substitute for authority.

The early attempt to claim the uprising as a knock-on effect of the Iraq invasion died by and large died early, collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity, and most of the neocons at FIXED news and elsewhere switched to an obsessive fear of the Muslim Brotherhood, and an orientation of the whole region to the effect on Israel. "Meteor Will Destroy Earth -- Implications for Israel", will be the final Fox news headline.

The spuriousness of seeing the Egypt uprising as having any positive connection to the Iraq invasion is so multiple and ridiculous as to beggar belief, but it's probably worth briefly recapitulating. The Egyptian uprising was a popular grassroots uprising sparked by multiple events and conditions, organised by multiple networks of people, and involving a substantial self-regulation of force.

The Iraq invasion was an external invasion of one state by another, based on a spurious intelligence scare about WMD, and justified as a human rights intervention propter hoc. Even those who conceived it as that first and foremost had an utter indifference to any demonstrated will of the Iraqi people.

They were not different methods of achieving the same thing. They were utterly different types of things.

That difference came to the fore after the invasion, and of January 25 in Egypt respectively. After the Iraq invasion, social solidarity was zero -- there was simply a vacuum of order created by mass violence.

Into that vacuum rushed the genuinely nihilistic and individualistic -- thieves, looters and sectarians with scores to settle. Since the invading force was nihilistic as well -- with planning to protect the oil industry, while leaving the National Museum, whose collection contains the roots of around half the world's civilisations, to the wolves -- the invasion was a perfect void, filled with PR photo opportunities.

After January 25, protesters worked together not only to control outbreaks of armed violence, but also -- sometimes with the army -- to protect museums and libraries.

The utterly different character of the events has been so marked that the right has had to come up with a different angle. The one they've chosen -- as if all dribbling for the one bell -- is the question of "Arab democracy". This was the debate between neocons and realists as to whether democracy could "take root" in the Arab world, or whether its culture was inimical to the possibility.

The "realist" answer to this usually took a blatantly chauvinist form, muttering about Arab and Eastern dependency, etc, etc, conveniently ignoring the fact that democracy had been snuffed out by the West, in establishing the Shah, the Saud family and others as client rulers in the '40s and '50s. The neocon answer was, to quote the ever-wrong Mark Steyn, that Iraq would look like Connecticut in 18 months, and any doubts as to whether an imposed system could establish legitimacy was just racism.

The "Arab democracy" argument has returned as a way of trying to refute the argument that the left made at the time of the Iraq invasion -- that people can only meaningfully liberate themselves, and that the Iraq invasion actively prevented that.

That it did, there is no doubt. In 2005, the Bush administration made some noises about no longer tolerating autocracy. In 2006, Mubarak cancelled municipal elections, and banned presidential candidates other than he and his son. Concerned by the enthusiastic way in which the Muslim Brotherhood had taken up the notion of "no longer tolerating dictators", and facing chaos in Iraq, and Hamas in Gaza, they, well, this photo is from 2008.

Desperate to head this off, the right has tried to turn the Egyptian process into a neocon one. Thus Tom Heidi Switzer in The Drum, stages a debate between his conservative realpolitik self, and a "smug metropolitan" neocon buddy, the latter representing the only possible alternative interpretation. Melanie Phillips goes further suggesting that "the left are all neocons now", arguing that the only rationale for supporting a popular uprising (Egypt) and opposing an invasion (Iraq) is hatred of the US.

Phillips -- a pro-settler Zionist, climate-change sceptic, intelligent design advocate and proponent of the "MMR causes autism" theory -- wrote a hilarious blog post on The Spectator arguing that Obama had been "jaw-droppingly incompetent" in handling the matter and that his efforts had "backfired: at time of writing Mubarak is digging in his heels against this American pressure and is refusing to step down". It's particularly funny when you see the date: Thursday February 10. Barely 18 hours later, Mubarak was gone. Phillips was so incapable of seeing Muslims as agents of their own lives, it never occurred to her that Friday -- prayer day -- might bring a renewed pushback.

It's clear that no event will convince the Right that they need to look clearly at the world, without projecting their fantasies onto it. In the process over a decade, they've managed to discredit themselves across the Middle East and West Asia, to lose most of South America to the Left, and to see China spread itself deep into Africa through investment, while the US spent a trillion or two on futile wars.

Still the neocons did do one good thing in Egypt -- they helped the resistance form a few years ago. The group Kefaya ("Enough") that in turn formed many of the current uprising's leaders came together around 2003, protesting against the US invasion.

The ABC will be screening a segment from a Q&A at the Sydney Theatre Company feauturing Beyond Zero Emissions' Matthew Wright on Wednesday - Greening The Wharf.

Moderated by Tony Jones with panellists including The Hon. Bob Carr, Dr Zhengrong Shi, Graham Bradley and Sam Mostyn.

A 15 minute excerpt will run on 15 February on ABC1 TV as part of the Best of Big Ideas broadcast.

The full one hour will feature on ABC1 TV on Wednesday 16 February at 11am and will also be available through ABC online i-view.

BZE will also be featuring at the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne on the weekend.

Der Spiegel has an article on oil exploration in the Arctic - The Exorbitant Dream of Arctic Oil.

Two complete failures and one aborted test drill -- a miserable outcome. When Scottish company Cairn Energy published the preliminary results of its search for oil off the coast of Greenland last October, the firm's share price plunged 7 percent in one day. Its findings revealed not a trace of black gold. On the contrary: the company said it would have to write off costs totalling €180 million ($246 million).

And still, the Arctic fascinates oil and gas firms more than virtually any other region at the moment. Companies are hoping to tap massive, undiscovered reserves in this remote area that is free from the political instability plaguing other oil-rich parts of the world. The polar treasure was the subject of the conference "Arctic Frontiers" that began on Monday in the northern Norwegian town of Tromsö. Almost 1,000 visitors made the journey far beyond the Arctic circle to attend.

Cairn's oil exploration off the western coast of Greenland has attracted intense interest because it was the first such venture in years. It's unclear how many will follow, because the vast cost of drilling in the Arctic is likely to become evident in the coming years. This is made abundantly clear in unpublished interim findings by the US Geological Survey obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE. They refer to an area in the northeast of Greenland that had so far been regarded as a particularly promising location for oil exploration. Geologist Don Gautier and his research team examined what it would cost to search for oil in the East Greenland Rift Basins.

Scientists had previously estimated that the region could yield some 7.5 billion barrels of oil -- 1.2 trillion liters. But statistically, the likelihood of producing that amount is the same as failing to find even a drop. However, the geology of the area is interesting -- after all, on the other side of the Greenland Sea, along Norway's west coast, there are attractive oil reserves that have been bringing in billions of euros for the Norwegian government for decades. Greenland is hoping for a similar boom.

Significantly Lower?

But the amount of oil that can actually be pumped out of this region is likely to be significantly lower than previous estimates indicated, according to the latest findings. Assuming production costs of up to $100 per barrel, only 2.5 billion barrels of oil could be lifted, according to the USGS calculations -- and only with a 50 percent probability.

In order to reach further reserves, companies would have to spend much more. Even based on outlandish exploitation costs of $300 per barrel, only 4.1 billion barrels could be raised, with the same 50 percent probability. "And that is before paying a cent of tax or making any profit," says Gautier.

The figures are based on statistical calculations and should therefore be treated with caution. But they indicate that only a fraction of the oil and gas believed to be in the Arctic could likely be exploited at economically viable costs. Canadian companies have already found that out for themselves. They carried out major exploration projects in the 1970s but ended up sealing off even promising test drillings because commercial production would have been too expensive.

Technology Review has an article on Schneider Electric's "Le Hive" HQ in Paris, which serves as a test bed for their energy efficiency concepts - A Test Bed for Smart Buildings.

Traditional techniques such as adding insulation or window caulk can make buildings more energy efficient, but those strategies go only so far in reducing energy bills. Smart building systems linked to the smart grid offer a more comprehensive way to reduce consumption.

One company that has invested heavily in smart buildings is Schneider Electric, a 174-year-old French conglomerate that makes software and hardware for energy-efficient buildings. To test its own products, the company built a new headquarters campus near La Défense, the Parisian business district. Known as "Le Hive," the collection of interconnected buildings is a test bed for advanced sensor, measurement, analysis, and control technologies that promise to reduce the electricity bill for Schneider while proving to potential customers how powerful the technologies are.

Le Hive opened at the end of 2008, and it now holds more than 1,700 employees. There are no special energy-efficiency tricks embedded in the design of the building—it is typical of most new construction in Europe. The company wanted to use building systems to reduce energy consumption and not depend on expensive construction techniques that most building owners couldn't afford.

Schneider's goals for its headquarters were straightforward. The average electricity consumption of an office building in Paris is 400 kilowatt-hours per square meter per year. The European Union has directed that all buildings reduce consumption to 50 kilowatt-hours per square meter per year by 2030. Le Hive was meant to demonstrate that the path toward that goal can be quick and relatively painless. The company has reduced its headquarters' energy consumption from more than 300 kilowatt-hours per square meter to 65.

The Schneider system, dubbed EcoStruxure, started by collecting and analyzing data on the building's energy consumption patterns. Then a series of software and hardware components were installed, all of which can be controlled from a single interface such as a laptop or smart phone. In other words, the heating system, the air-conditioning system, the lighting management system, the security system, the fire control system, the surveillance system, the IT system, and the ventilation system (all of which used to be discrete systems with separate controls and dedicated technicians and managers) are all integrated into a single comprehensive building management system with a single point of control.

Next, RFID cards were distributed to every employee. Each card alerts a sensor system to where the employee is and adjusts the lighting and HVAC systems accordingly. A worker leaves his office for lunch, for instance, and the lights and air-conditioner in that office turn off immediately. He returns and the comfort settings he has requested kick right in. Other sensors turn the artificial lighting up or down in accordance with the available sunlight. Similarly, an automated window shading system adjusts itself in calibration with the cooling, heating, and lighting needs. If the blinds are open and sunlight is streaming in, then the lighting system dims by just the right amount to maintain a consistent environment.

McKinsey QUarterly has an article on how to "catalyze early adoption" of electric cars - The fast lane to the adoption of electric cars.

As more and more electrified vehicles hit the floors of car dealerships, conventional wisdom has it that the market won’t get moving without richer incentives and dense battery-charging networks.

Yet our research on demand for electric cars in very large urban areas1 shows that plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and battery-only electric vehicles could account for 16 percent of overall new-car sales in New York, 9 percent in Paris, and 5 percent in Shanghai by 2015. That’s true even with today’s financial incentives and limited public charging facilities.2

It’s not surprising that the market may take root in big cities: nowhere is the need for cleaner air and reduced carbon dioxide emissions more pressing, and nowhere else can you expect to find as many green-minded early adopters who will welcome a clean vehicle that takes them the short distances they need to go on one charge. These characteristics make large urban areas the ideal labs for the next phase of electric-vehicle development. Our research offers insights that can guide auto companies, battery makers, infrastructure providers, and city governments alike as they consider moving forward with this technology and the networks that support it.

Large markets are waiting to be served. We found big clusters of potential early adopters—30 percent of all car buyers in Shanghai and 20 percent in New York—who were distinguished by their green thinking and would consider buying an electric car.

For early adopters, the charging problem isn’t as big as it seems. Unlike other groups of car buyers in New York and Shanghai, early adopters were willing to adjust their driving and parking habits to own an electric car. In fact, they indicated that a dense public charging infrastructure would only modestly increase their interest in buying such cars and that they were willing to cope with more limited charging options. This attitude reduces the need for public investments in the start-up stage, though a broad plug-in infrastructure will no doubt be critical as electrified vehicles migrate to mass adoption in large cities and elsewhere.

This is also good news for automakers, which have the opportunity to overcome another major obstacle: battery limits. Since many drivers in large cities travel only short distances—to and from work, for instance—the near-term cost and duration of electric-car batteries is less of a problem there than it is elsewhere. Rather than offering only all-purpose electric vehicles, automakers can segment buyers according to their driving missions and develop attractively priced models with no more battery energy storage than many of their city drivers need.

Technology preferences vary between cities. Shanghai buyers overwhelmingly preferred plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, which can drive some 60 kilometers (about 40 miles) on one charge and then switch to a gasoline-powered engine. The reason is the large share of first-time car buyers in Shanghai who demand family-size cars with full functionality. In New York, though, small electric city cars—a type of battery-only vehicle that can go 60 to 90 kilometers on a full charge—turned out to be very popular ...

Consumer education is one such measure that will be critical for catalyzing both early and mass adoption. Forty percent of New York and Shanghai respondents said they didn’t know much about electric vehicles and many were anxious about driving-range limitations. Few knew that battery-powered cars are relatively quiet and can potentially accelerate faster than conventional ones. And more important, many weren’t aware that electric cars help drivers save money on both fuel and maintenance in the long run.

So what comes next? Highly motivated private users in large cities such as New York and Shanghai—along with other potential early adopters, such as drivers of inner-city delivery vans with fixed routes—will be key to the electric-vehicle market’s longer-term development. By tailoring early products to the needs of these segments, automakers can build a strong base of core buyers whose use will spread word of mouth and drive market momentum. This approach, if supported with targeted actions by national and city governments, power providers, and battery makers, could accelerate the mass production and broad adoption of electric vehicles.

The Climate Spectator has an article on Qantas' interest in jet fuel derived from algae - Oil and water.

Qantas last week announced the launch of its sustainable fuel strategy, a collaboration with San Francisco-based renewable energy group, Solazyme, to explore opportunities for algae-based sustainable aviation fuel. Qantas and Solazyme will work together over the next year to pursue potential for commercial production of Solazyme’s microbial derived aviation fuel, Solajet, in Australia. This latest move is part of the airline's long-term strategy to accelerate the commercialisation of 'drop-in' alternative jet fuels to help cut greenhouse gas emissions. Qantas already has a similar arrangement with the Solena Group for waste-based sustainable fuel.

In Australia, demand for aviation fuel is currently at about six billion litres a year, and Qantas’ Peter Broschofsky, who is coordinating the biofuels initiative as well as chairing the environment committee of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), says that $180 per gallon fuel in 2008 helped move the concept of lower cost, lower emission biofuels out of the too-hard basket. He also described how Boeing galvanised the industry behind the development of the Bio-SPK jet fuel specification, which most are predicting will be approved in the first half of 2011 and possibly late in the first quarter, says BiofuelsDigest. “Watch the flood,” Broschofsky predicted, “after the fuel is certified, interest will be at a fever pitch, and we want to get in ahead.”

As for the technology, according to Solazyme, it "allows algae to produce oil and biomaterials in standard fermentation facilities quickly, efficiently and at large scale." These can then be tailored for biofuel production, as well for the replacement for fossil fuels and plant oils. According to the company's website, a study undertaken in 2009 concluded that full lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from field-to-wheels for Solazyme's algal biofuel, Soladiesel, are 85 to 93 per cent lower than standard petroleum-based ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD).

The Guardian has a look at "Transition Town" poster child Totnes in the UK - Totnes: Britain's town of the future.

Totnes hosts an increasing number of Transition pilgrims who want to see what's going on, and, says Brangwyn, "People have different expectations. We're not going to make big visual changes overnight. Transition is ground up, it's about people doing the work for themselves. So the culture has to change first.'

I look for visual signs of change regardless. Walking through town, the most obvious is the 74 photovoltaic panels on the roof of the civic hall. I wander down an alleyway in the centre of town to observe some gardens belonging to householders who were previously too busy or lacking the green fingers to make them productive. They are now little engines of town-centre production, part of the Transition Network's garden-share scheme run by Lou Brown.

"I began the project because I spent a long time in rented accommodation wandering around the town with my husband, coveting bits of garden," says Brown. "We have up to 30 gardeners across 16 gardens producing a lot of food. A quarter to a fifth generally goes to the garden owner. Kale, flowers, beetroot, you name it, it gets grown. Obviously this is great for developing local food resistance, particularly because we have a shortage of allotments in Totnes and a big waiting list. The allotment society is trying to find new land all the time, and the garden share is like a seedbed for some growers while they are waiting."

I find resident Steve Paul delighted with his ten 1.85 kW photovoltaic panels, bought through Transition's Street Scheme. "I've already avoided 0.55lb of carbon this morning," he says, checking the monitor. One notable aspect of Transition Town Totnes is that you find renewables on perfectly normal housing. Last year the Transition Street Programme was one of 20 projects to win funding from the Department of Energy and Climate Change. It invited streets to get together to change behaviour, improve energy efficiency and then to install renewable energy systems. What's more it provided quantifiable data: more than 500 households became part of the scheme, 70% were households on a limited income, and every household cut their carbon by an average of 1.2 tonnes, saving £600 a year.

Not everything has gone as swimmingly. A local currency is central to the Transition plan. "Think of a leaky bucket," explains Brangwyn. "Any time we spend money with a business that's got more links outside the community than in it, we leak money from the local economy. What local currency does is allow that wealth to bounce around in that bucket. We've barely touched the surface of systems that will benefit the local economy. We don't just need our own pound note but a credit union, electronic means of transaction, a time bank." And although you can detect a certain fondness for the Totnes pound note on the local high street, it hasn't been as successful as Transition currency in Lewes, Brixton and Stroud. There's still work to be done.

But Hopkins reckons TTT is still ahead of schedule. "When I wrote The Transition Handbook (published in 2008) I was working up to the Energy Descent Plan, a sort of blueprint for the development of any community. But we did that in Totnes a year ago. So strictly speaking we've finished and we can pack up and go home feeling good about ourselves. But that was just the beginning. The aim of Transition is to try to relocalise the economy where it's happening, and be a catalyst for that process of intentional relocalisation."

There is a fine line between making residents aware of initiatives such as the Transition Street Project and haranguing them until they sign up. Transitioners seem of the opinion that the latter would be fruitless; the drive needs to come from the community to join up. So at the moment it is perfectly possible to visit Totnes and not be aware it's a Transition Town at all. But that will inevitably change. Local councillors already report that when they introduce themselves at national conferences and say "from Totnes", other delegates comment, "Ah, Transition Town Totnes." Word is spreading.

Hopkins is keen to stress that this is very different to David Cameron's interpretation of localism, devolving power from central government. "It doesn't mean putting a big fence up around Totnes and not letting anything in or out. It doesn't mean Totnes will be making its own laptops and frying pans. But it means in terms of food, building materials, a lot more of that can be done locally. Which in turn makes the place much more resilient to shocks from the outside."

And funnily enough Transition principles seem to appeal to politicians. As the Guardian journalist Madeleine Bunting put it, in May 2009: "If you want to catch a glimpse of the kinds of places outside the political mainstream where that new politics might be incubated, take a look at the Transition movement. Ed Miliband… was one of the first to spot its potential… and last year The Transition Handbook came fifth in MPs' lists of summer reading… The Transition movement is engaging people in a way that conventional politics is failing to do." But what of David Cameron's coalition government? "I think Transition could be part of a genuine Big Society," says Hopkins, "but only where initiatives really give power and assets to the community."

The great plan in Totnes included the planting of 186 hybrid nut trees around town. You can just walk around and help yourself to free nuts, which can only help community cohesion. But John Crisp, a local farmer who in his spare time heads up Transition Town's new Food Hub project, is keen to point out that the vision extends beyond nuts and that, come April, Totnesians will be able to order their weekly shop online and collect it on a Saturday from the local school. "This is an initiative that connects local farmers to Transition, automatically engaging us with the farming community, of which I am one. And consumers get to buy local produce at prices comparable to those at the supermarket. Our overheads are so small that while shops and supermarkets charge a 30-40% mark up, we'll be at 10%. Meanwhile we give producers a fair return for their produce – more than they would get anywhere else."

More change is coming. Totnes Renewable Energy Society (TRESOC), an offshoot of TTT, has two applications in for wind turbines on nearby Kingsbridge hill and recently issued shares so Totnesians will be able to power-down, saving their own energy. And the TTT has designs on the old Dairy Crest building near the station as part of its bid to get more assets into community ownership.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance has an article on falling prices for wind turbines - Wind turbine prices fall to their lowest in recent years.

Prices have dipped below €1m per MW for the first time since 2005, according to the latest edition of Bloomberg New Energy Finance's Wind Turbine Price Index

London and New York – Increasing scale, improved efficiency and over-capacity among wind energy hardware manufacturers have combined to push the average price of onshore wind turbines below €1m ($1.36m) per megawatt.

The fourth issue of Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s Wind Turbine Price Index shows that fierce downward pressure on prices has continued in recent months in all parts of the world. Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyzed confidential data provided by 28 major purchasers of wind turbines. The sample includes more than 150 undisclosed turbine contracts, totaling nearly 7GW of capacity in 28 markets globally – with a main focus on Europe and the Americas.

Dropping turbine prices may be uncomfortable for manufacturers, but it is good news for project developers and it further improves the cost-competitiveness of wind energy compared with gas and coal. The main conclusions of the analysis are:

• Global turbine contracts signed in late 2010 for delivery in H1 2011 and H2 2011 display very aggressive pricing, with average values at €0.98m/MW ($1.33m/MW). This is a 7% decrease compared to contracts signed in 2009 (€1.06m/MW) and 19% down from peak values in 2007-08 (€1.21m/MW).

• The decrease in the Wind Turbine Price Index is partly driven by a larger proportion of US based contracts compared to the previous issue of the Index (July 2010), but pricing remains aggressive in all parts of the world.

• Low-priced power-purchase-agreements in markets with exposure to electricity prices – rather than fixed feed-in tariffs – seem to have put further pressure on turbine contracts: Italy, the UK and the US all display average pricing well below €1m/MW for contracts signed in 2010 for delivery in H2 2011. The US presents the lowest pricing of all markets so far with values averaging $1.27m/MW (€0.93/MW).

• All manufacturers covered by the survey have displayed aggressive pricing, including several contracts for leading ("Tier 1") manufacturers – in some cases below €0.90m/MW ($1.22m/MW).

• The cost of electricity generated from wind is now at record lows: several projects in high resource areas (US, Brazil, Sweden, Mexico) display a levelised cost of energy – excluding the impact of subsidies but after including the cost of capital and maintenance – below EUR 50/MWh ($68/MWh). This compares to current estimated average costs of $67 per MWh for coal-fired power and $56 per MWh for gas-fired power.

Todd Woody at Grist has a post on projected electric car sales in the US - Report: U.S. in fast lane to put 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015.

When President Obama in his State of the Union address called for 1 million electric cars to be on the road by 2015, skeptics scoffed. But in a report [PDF] released Tuesday, the Department of Energy basically said no worries. We've already arrived at our destination.

That optimism comes from automakers' existing projections of how many electric cars they expect to produce over the next five years.

"The production capacity of EV models announced to enter the U.S. market through 2015 should be sufficient to achieve the goal of one million EVs by 2015," the report states, noting that 1.6 million hybrids like the Toyota Prius have been sold over the past six years.

If the estimates bear out, 1.2 million electric cars will hit the highways by 2015. That's about 10 percent of current annual automotive sales. But those rosy numbers includes some big figures from startup companies like Fisker Automotive that have yet to roll a single production vehicle off the assembly line.

According to the Energy Department, Fisker expects to sell 195,000 of its forthcoming Nina plug-in hybrid by 2015, along with 36,000 Karma high-end sports sedans. And Think, the Norwegian electric carmaker, says it'll sell 57,000 of its urban runabout in the United States within four years. The Chevrolet Volt, which you can buy now if you live in certain cities, would account for nearly half the projected sales of electric cars in 2015.

On the other hand, those estimates don't count a number of automakers that say they will or are likely to introduce electric cars in the coming years, depending on how the market shakes out. Among them: Chrysler, China's BYD, Coda, Honda, Mitsubishi, Hyundai, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Volvo.

Which raises a question: Did the president set his sights too low if it'll be so easy to get a million EVs on the road by 2015?

It's always hard to forecast the market for an expensive new technology like the electric car, but the short answer is, probably.

The Energy Department cites studies showing that if battery production goes from 10,000 to 100,000 units a year, battery costs will decline 30 percent to 40 percent. And the report notes that electric vehicles' overall lower operating costs appeal to corporate fleet purchasers that buy in bulk.

Its hard to find optimistic posts out in the peak oil wilds, so I liked this one from Bob Waldrop - 12 reasons why I remain optimistic.

Here are twelve reasons why I remain optimistic in spite of all the bad news and scary stories. I am not in denial about the bad news, nor do I think we shouldn’t note and comment upon the situations coming upon us, but I also think that it’s important to keep such things in perspective.

1. Reality is very complex. . . . and there are limits to what we can know. I don’t understand why the system didn’t collapse 30 years ago. I don’t understand why the US and Russia did not have a massive nuclear war. As much as I want to be a “know-it-all”, my lack of understanding is a commentary on the limitations of my observation and knowledge. We can’t see all the details of our threats and how they interact to create a dysergistic downwards spiral. . . but we also can’t see all the details of the solutions at play, and how they interact to mitigate dysergy/dystopia. Complexity theory is, well, complex, but one thing that is evident is the ability of seemingly small and insignificant actions to have far-reaching effects (cf the “butterfly effect”).

2. The mainstream media report a distorted version of reality from the perspective of the ruling authorities. While there are occasional exceptions to the rule, the mainstream media are as dominated by our ruling authorities as the media of the old Soviet Union. Perhaps the primary difference is that our mainstream media are controlled by various factions of ruling authorities, so what we are getting as “news” is actually arguments among the ruling authorities. Why is this good news? Because we know it is so, and it’s not just “we” as in “those actively concerned about sustainability”. Mainstream news media credibility is low and getting lower all the time.

3. We have a “sidestream” media that tells us the rest of the story. A million flowers of hope are blooming out there, but you will only find them by looking for them in the sidestream media. They won’t be fed to you on the evening national news.

4. The powers that be are not nearly as smart and omnipotent and omniscient as they want everyone to believe they are. Here again, a good example is the old Soviet Union. Their ruling elites had massive state resources at their control. They could literally do anything they wanted with their natural and economic resources. The Soviet Union had a well-established system of terror complete with concentration camps to compel obedience. Yet, the day came when the inherent contradictions of their system overwhelmed them, and they collapsed of their own stupidity, greed and venality. In our present situation, the evidence is abundant that the various factions of our powers that be are as clueless as the Romanoffs in 1917 or the French aristocracy in the late 18th century. We are full-on in the middle of a classical case of imperial over-reach, and as it is said, those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them. Our aristocracies are not learning from the mistakes of history, so they are repeating them, and that means that they are doomed. They have been weighed in the balances and found wanting, their days are numbered, their kingdoms will be divided and given to others.

5. We have a dense and robust civil society system that provides an alternative source of authority and direction as an alternative to the powers that be. While certainly some parts of that civil society are core members of various factions of our ruling authorities, there is a tremendous amount of non-ruling authority organizational activity at play in our system. The historical tragedy of the Soviet collapse is that they had no civil society to step into the breech and point the way to a better future, so they got stuck with a form of gangster capitalism that is slowly evolving back to a Soviet-style political tyranny. In our situation, as the establishment crumbles, alternative structures are being created all around us. We are learning what we need to do right now, before major crisis/collapse comes upon us. That gives us the opportunity to possibly stage a managed recovery, and to mitigate the risk of outright collapse.

6. We have the internet. The internet and its quick and ubiquitous global connections is a structure whose invention is as much a turning point in history as was the creation of the first printing presses, and for many of the same reasons. I am a nobody, a pissant Oklahoma rednecked peasant with an education and an attitude, yet every year, more than a million people from 108 different countries find their way to one or more of my websites and download an average of three pages of information, and this has been going on for years. My printable flyers alone have been downloaded more than 150,000 times. And there must be ten million or more folks just like me, using the internet to organize, agitate, activate, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Consider the phenomena associated with Wikileaks. One tyrant has already been deposed, and more are reportedly at risk, all because of the bravery of one soldier in the trenches of the Middle East, and the distributed internet structure of the Wikileaks organization. That’s inspiration!

7. We know more about the actual details of living more sustainably. We are recovering from the almost complete collapse of the generational transmission of cultural knowledge and wisdom of the past 100 years, and are advancing our knowledge of how to live more sustainably at a rapid pace. As new ideas are tested, they spread very quickly across the globe. China now has CSAs, the sidestream media reported this week. The design discipline of permaculture offers a growing body of theory, knowledge, and praxis regarding the design of human habitations and systems that care for people, care for the planet, and have a care for the future.

8. We know about our approaching threats — peak oil, climate instability, economic irrationality, and their associated consequences. We can see them coming and people worldwide are taking action to adapt, avert, mitigate, stop, slow down, repair, recover. All of these issues are players in the public debate. And while it remains true that these issues and our response to them are hotly contested by powerful ruling factions, the fact that they are being contested at all is a triumph of the ability of civil society to place something on the table and force a hearing. That is the first step to structural change for the better.

9. Despite the best efforts of ruling authorities, the fact remains that structures of economics and governance can grow from the ground up and replace existing systems. Even as we speak, a new “super-structure” is being grown, spreading organically with the tenacity of Bermuda grass, utilizing rhizomes, runners, and abundant self-seeding. Every time an organic garden is planted. . . a food cooperative is organized. . . a CSA gets started. . . a permaculture class is taught. . . a family voluntarily decides to limit their consumption . . . a new structure is started to replace the collapsing ruins of the old, indeed, these are structures that will protect us from being caught amidst the falling debris of the old.

10. Much has been made of the possibility of Black Swan Events that can cause major systemic problems. But since we are speaking of random events in complex processes, we can also think about the potential for White Swan Events that can drive major progress for the structures of sustainable living that we are all involved with. A recent example of a White Swan Event is the Wikileaks event. The collapse of the Soviet Empire was another such a White Swan Event. With the Soviet Union’s rapid demise, the forces of goodness and wisdom were not organized enough to have a significant impact on the direction of subsequent events. But with Wikileaks, the situation is completely different. One tyrant has already been deposed, and more may be on that list as the situation develops.

11. The credibility of the existing system is at an all-time low. All over the globe, the corruptions and oppressions of ruling factions are being exposed, in detail, with chapter and verse, in often glittering technicolor. Tens of millions of people trusted the stock market and lost everything. They trusted the real estate market and lost everything. They trusted the corporation they worked for, and they got laid off. They trusted the academic system and bought a useless degree at a high price. One of the early steps to fundamental change is that people come to understand that their existing systems are failing them, indeed, that they are being exploited by their existing systems in order to enrich and benefit others. That’s happening right now, 24/7/365, and that process has increasing velocity.

12. We — that is to say, people concerned about peak oil, climate instability, economic irrationality — are everywhere. The United States has about 186,000 election precincts, each with an average of about 1600 people. Does anyone doubt that within the overwhelming majority of those little “villages” there are people intentionally involved with sustainable living? No, I don’t have a mailing list handy, but I think this claim is likely true. If a crisis occurs, whether it be a Black Swan or White Swan, or simply the fact that unsustainable systems by definition do not continue indefinitely, we are in position to get there the firstest with the mostest, with knowledge, organizing ability, and successful examples. The fact that we are not nationally organized to do this doesn’t mean squat. Indeed, a national organization would likely get in the way of effective and rapid action. Change is created one neighborhood at a time, by the people who live there. This is why I don’t worry about the fact that 100 million people have not signed up for sustainable living. As event unfold, there will be a morning when a hundred million and more wake up and decide they need to do something different. Our historical task right now is to get ready for that crisis awakening. When people are ready to storm the Bastille, organizers will be critical, and that’s our job. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and if we who embrace goodness, beauty, and wisdom don’t get there the firstest with the mostest, someone else will, and we might not like what results thereafter.

So, as it turns out, it’s not over until its over, and in spite of all the tumult and rage, I remain an unreconstructed optimist about how this will play out over time. I doubt I will see this process to its conclusion, but the strong foundations being laid right now will serve us well in the earthquakes of the future.

TED has a talk from Naomi Klein on the "extreme risks" we are taking with our energy sources - Naomi Klein: Addicted to risk.

The NZ Herald has an article on the slow progress of a tidal power project in NZ - Tidal power station for Kaipara approved.

More than half a billion dollars will be spent on sinking tidal power turbines to the seabed of the Kaipara Harbour after the approval of New Zealand's first tide-driven power station.

But the Environment Court has set conditions of consent for the project after a year of mediation among four objectors.

The key requirement for applicant Crest Energy is two years of environmental monitoring and evaluation and starting with only three turbines.

The company wants to sink up to 200 turbines off the harbour mouth in a $600 million plan to harness the swift tidal flow to power homes from Albany to Cape Reinga.

It appealed to the court in 2008 when Northland Regional Council allowed only 100 turbines to be sunk.

Alex Steffen has emerged from his post-WorldChanging hibernation with a new blog called "Planetary Thinking". One new post of interest looks at the future of our cities - Landscape Urbanism, New Urbanism and the Future of Cities.

I think that any attempt to see the systems around us more clearly adds value. That said, one of our biggest problems is that in the developed world (but most especially in North America) we have a tendency to mistake the wrapping for the mechanism. We tend to think too much about how a place looks and feels, and far too little about what actually drives the systems within it.

American cities, especially, are the apices of vast networks of material and energy flows that reach literally around the entire planet. The impacts of our every day lives radiate out in all directions, from the atmosphere to the ocean depths, from distant forests to melting ice caps. Those impacts are planetary, gigantic in aggregate and unsustainable in nearly every particular. Most of those impacts we will never see. And the biggest impacts of all are generated by our auto-dependence, our over-consumption, our sprawling land-use and our bloated and poorly designed homes.

Walkability, transit-orientation and green building all reduce those invisible impacts. In discussing these, New Urbanism is excellent. The problem I have with New Urbanism is a lack of ambition — something that feels like an unwillingness to face the actual scope, scale and speed of the changes we need, and to really push the boundaries of urban form. Too much New Urbanist rhetoric feels to me to be locked in a debate from the 80s that assumes suburbanization is the norm, is here to stay and needs only modification.

If we take planetary boundaries seriously, we need to be reducing the unseen impacts of our lives by something like 95% in the next couple decades. That’s a big task, and it’s made more important by the economic and social vulnerability built into our current systems and their reliance on long, complicated supply chains, limited nonrenewable resources and a stable climate.

Bright green cities — able to offer prosperity with 5% of the impact using far more rugged systems — will not be had by tinkering. We need serious changes in land use, big investments in infrastructure, new innovations in design and technology, and new approaches to how urban life is lived. We simply can’t get there with home retrofits, electric cars and backyard gardening. The physics don’t pencil.

Some of changes needed will take, I believe, weaving biomimetic systems into the city: making our infrastructure and places work in such a way that they demand less from nature. But we’re never going to make car-dependent suburban sprawl sustainable through changes in landscape: the amount of good we can do within the boundaries of those places will never eliminate, much less make up for, the damage done elsewhere to support them. No amount of permaculture in the backyard will fix the melting of the ice caps caused by a lifetime of driving and dwelling in extremely inefficient low-density systems.

The future of cities, I think, involves high-density, high-innovation cities meshed through with extranatural systems, systems that reduce the need for inputs and decrease the toxicity and wastefulness of outputs, helping to stabilize natural systems around cities. Those systems and the landscapes they define may look nothing like natural rivers, forests, farms — but that’s okay.

Because one of the biggest problems with urban debates these days — and it’s a problem I fear Landscape Urbanism contributes to, rather than addresses — is that we continue to mistake that which looks green for that which is sustainable. We dress up disastrous land-use and voraciously wasteful urban systems in gardens and greenery, and end up with a Potemkin sustainability.

New Urbanism, more hardcore urbanists have long charged, can end up being just “sprawl in drag.” Landscape Urbanism, unless it addresses the physics of underlying systems (transportation, housing, manufacturing), threatens to be just “sprawl in a pretty green dress”.

I’d like to see a whole different approach, one which starts from the scope, scale and speed of the changes we know we need to make, and backcasts from that transformation as the basis of any sound urban thinking. Planetary urbanism.

That’s a task that will take all the smarts we have, in every discipline.

CleanTechnica reports a new geothermal power plant has come online in Nevada - New Geothermal Power Plant Shows What the U.S. Can Do About Climate Change.

A new 15 megawatt, utility scale geothermal power plant has just come online in Jersey Valley, Nevada.The project is significant because according to its host company, Ormat Technologies, it was the only utility-scale geothermal plant to be completed in the U.S. within the past year or so. Geothermal is reliable, renewable, clean energy produced right here in the U.S., and it’s not subject to global market fluctuations or political turmoil overseas — say, shouldn’t we be building these things at a rate of more than just one per year?

Geothermal energy from the new plant in Nevada will be purchased by NV Energy, which already has an extensive geothermal energy portfolio dating back to the 1980′s. The portfolio currently includes 400 MW and the company expects to give it a big bounce up to 570 MW in the near future. That’s just one utility company, and it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the U.S. potential. The Department of Defense recently estimated that the geothermal potential on U.S. military facilities alone is a cool 926 gigawatts. Along with massive new wind power projects and solar installations, geothermal could play a significant role in our domestic energy future.

The Climate Spectator has a post on a NSW shopping mall that is installing an "organic waste management system" called the "Hungry Pig". While it sounds like it will only be used for composting, you'd think biogas production and cogeneration would be a worthwhile addition as well - Fair Enough.

Erina Fair – the shopping centre on the NSW central coast co-owned by GPT Group and Lend Lease-managed Australian Prime Property Fund Retail – is set to recycle 250 tonnes of waste (the equivalent to 20 garbage trucks, apparently) as part of its effort to meet a 'zero net waste' goal. In what Lend Lease is describing as a world first, Erina Fair will install an on-site organic waste management system that uses in-vessel aerobic composting technology. The Australian-developed "Hungry Pig" technology could potentially recycle up to 40 per cent of the centre’s total food waste, transforming it into organic compost, to be used on the landscaped grounds of the centre and donated to local schools.

“The important aspect of the technology is that all the size reduction of food waste and mixing occurs inside the composting chamber, so there is no spillage or mess that would otherwise attract pests or cause odour,” said Angus Campbell from the Recycled Organics Unit, which has worked closely with Erina Fair to develop a system that meets the centre’s waste management needs. “The current capacity of the facility is five tonnes of food waste per week but we plan to expand this to manage the centres waste disposal costs and to further increase environmental benefit,” he said.

Erina Fair also plans to use a $652,000 grant it was recently awarded by the NSW government to install water harvesting systems that would reduce the centre’s annual water usage by more than 15 per cent. It has also installed LED lighting in its car park and emergency exits that will improve lighting efficient by up to 90 per cent in refit areas.

Technology Review has an article on the potential for vertical axis wind turbine designs to be used for floating offshore wind power - A New Twist on Floating Wind Power.

Wind turbines attached to floating buoys can harness stronger, more sustained winds in the open ocean. But the floats now used for such deep-water installations may prove prohibitively expensive because the buoys needed to keep them above water are enormous. Now a project in France is turning the turbine design on its head for what developers hope will be a low-cost alternative.

French oil and gas engineering company Technip and wind-power startup Nenuphar recently announced Vertiwind, a two-megawatt wind turbine that they plan to float in Mediterranean waters by the end of 2013. The project employs a turbine with a main rotor shaft that is set vertically, like a spinning top, rather than horizontally, as in a conventional wind turbine.

The benefit of the vertical-axis design is that it lowers the turbine's center of gravity. Vertiwind's design stands 100 meters tall, but places the generator, which weighs 50 tons, inside a sealed tube beneath the turbine's rotating blades, 20 meters above the sea. This makes the turbine less top-heavy, allowing for a significantly smaller flotation system, which would extend only nine meters below the surface of the ocean.

In contrast, a horizontal-axis turbine with the same power output and blades also reaching 100 meters high would need its generator to be 60 meters above the sea. A buoy built by Technip for a 2.3 megawatt horizontal-axis floating turbine prototype, owned by the Norwegian energy company Statoil, extends 100 meters below the surface.

"You save a lot of material" with a vertical axis, says Stephane His, vice president of biofuels and renewable energy at Technip. "But more than that, you ease the process of installing the machine itself."

Technip and Nenuphar plan to build two vertical-axis turbines with a power output of two megawatts each, one onshore and one offshore, at a cost of $28 million. The figure is still significantly more than shallow-water turbines fixed to the seafloor (which cost around $5 million per megawatt) but much less than the approximately $70 million spent on construction of the prototype owned by Statoil for construction, deployment, and ongoing research.
By pursuing a vertical-axis design, Vertiwind is using technology that was all but abandoned for onshore wind power more than a decade ago. Vertical-axis designs, which are inherently low to the ground, usually cannot compete with taller h

The latest Wikileaks energy related revelation (US embassy cables: Saudi oil company oversold ability to increase production, embassy told) has prompted some slightly exaggerated reports about the views of ex-Aramco exploration head Sadad al-Husseini, most of which should have been familiar to peak oil observers for some time - Saudi oil reserves may be overstated by up to 40%, US cables reveal.

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300 billion barrels - nearly 40 per cent.

The price of oil has soared in recent weeks to more than $US100 a barrel due to global demand and tensions in the Middle East. Many analysts expect the Saudis and others in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries would pump more oil if rising prices threatened to choke off demand.

However, Sadad al-Husseini, a geologist and former head of exploration at the Saudi oil monopoly Aramco, told the US consul-general in Riyadh in November 2007 that Aramco's 12.5 million barrel-a-day capacity, needed to keep a lid on prices, could not be reached.

According to the cables, which date between 2007 and 2009, Mr Husseini said Saudi Arabia might reach an output of 12 million barrels a day in 10 years but before then, possibly as early as 2012, global oil production would have hit its highest point. This crunch point is known as ''peak oil''.

Mr Husseini said at that point Aramco would not be able to stop the rise of global oil prices because the Saudi energy industry had overstated its recoverable reserves to spur foreign investment. He argued that Aramco had badly underestimated the time needed to bring new oil on tap.

One cable said: ''According to al-Husseini, the crux of the issue is twofold. First, it is possible that Saudi reserves are not as bountiful as sometimes described, and the timeline for their production not as unrestrained as Aramco and energy optimists would like to portray.'' It went on: ''Abdallah al-Saif, current Aramco senior vice-president for exploration, reported that Aramco has 716 billion barrels of total reserves, of which 51 per cent are recoverable, and that in 20 years Aramco will have 900 billion barrels.

''Al-Husseini disagrees with this analysis, believing Aramco's reserves are overstated by as much as 300 billion barrels. In his view once 50 per cent of original proven reserves has been reached … a steady output in decline will ensue and no amount of effort will be able to stop it. He believes that what will result is a plateau in total output that will last approximately 15 years followed by decreasing output.''

Joules Burns at Satellite O'er The Desert thinks the fuss is largely unfounded - Much Ado About Wikileaks.

It seems some Saudi diplomatic missives have turned up in the trove of documents that is Wikileaks, and there are claims that Sadad al-Husseini, a former Vice President of Saudi Aramco, was heard dissing the prospects of his former employer. But if you actually read the relevant wikileak, it becomes clear that the Guardian journalist misinterpreted the wikileaked cable -- which perhaps misquoted Al-Husseini. ...

It's clear to me that he is just disputing the notion that Saudi has 700+ billion barrels of "reserves" claimed by the other SA talking head:

Abdallah al-Saif, current Aramco Senior Vice President for Exploration and Production, reported that Aramco has 716 billion barrels (bbls) of total reserves, of which 51 percent are recoverable.

The only thing of real interest here is that Al-Husseini distanced himself from "peak oil" while seeming to agree with it. But is was only a matter of time before someone would ask al-Husseini to confirm his views on this, and he indeed claims that he was misinterpreted. ...

There is still much to be skeptical about with regards to the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia, and I am one of many who have questioned the claims of Saudi Aramco in light of their actions. For example, they always magically seem to "discover" as much oil as they produce each year such that their reserves never decrease. However, there is no bombshell in this particular wikileak in terms of how much oil they have left.

The SMH reports that Australia's carbon emission profile (and economy) remain dependent on the coal and gas industries - Australia admits CO2 emissions will balloon.

AUSTRALIA'S climate change policies will lead greenhouse gas emissions to balloon out of control in the next few years, the federal government says in an annual report to the United Nations.

Instead of the 5 to 25 per cent cut being offered by the government, the nation would pump out 24 per cent more carbon dioxide by 2020, the Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet, said, using the data to make the case again for a price on carbon. ...

Mr Combet said the national emissions data, to be published today, show that Australia needs to cut at least 160 million tonnes of greenhouse gases from its ledger on an annual basis before 2020 to make even its minimum 5 per cent target. "Clearly more needs to be done, and that's why we need a carbon price soon,'' he said in a statement. "While there is a warning in this report, it is important to remember that it is not too late for us to act.''

The government's projections take into account the renewable energy target, which aims to generate one fifth of electricity from non-fossil sources by 2020, and some energy efficiency measures, but no future emissions trading scheme.

"At some point the government will have to confront the reality that its energy policy and climate policy are on a collision course, with ever-growing investment in coal, gas and coal-seam gas undermining any moves to turn our economy around,'' the Greens senator Christine Milne said.

SP at The Oil Drum ANZ has completed his series of posts on the special edition of The Australian Planner (Vol 47:4) which looked at planning responses to peak oil - Public Planning and Policy Post Petroleum – PIA Finale.

This is the final in my series of rough reviews of the special edition of The Australian Planner (Vol 47:4).

To recap, the first few articles (The Shorter PIA – Australian Oil Vulnerability, Shorter PIA NO. 2) summarized the current position of Australian cities and used scenarios to explore the likely impacts of oil depletion. Later articles explored the possible role of cycling (Cycling over the peak - PIA NO.3), the effect of oil depletion and urban development on children, mobility and society (Where do the children play? PIA NO. 4) and the role of planning and governance at all political levels (Transurbanization – PIA NO.5).

The first paper below picks up the story from an earlier article (Petroleum depletion scenarios for Australian cities).

I take everything Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes with a large grain of salt, so with that in mind, here is a new column at the UK Daily Telegraph looking at the Tunisian and Egyptian crises and declaring "the first food revolutions of our Malthusian era have exposed the weak grip of authoritarian regimes in poor countries that import grain, whether in North Africa today or parts of Asia tomorrow" - Egypt and Tunisia usher in the new era of global food revolutions.

Events have moved briskly since a Tunisian fruit vendor with a handcart set fire to himself six weeks ago, and in doing so lit the fuse that has detonated Egypt and threatens to topple the political order of the Maghreb, Yemen, and beyond.

As we sit glued to Al-Jazeera watching authority crumble in the cultural and political capital of the Arab world, exhilaration can turn quickly to foreboding.

This is nothing like the fall of the Berlin Wall. The triumph of secular democracy was hardly in doubt in central Europe. Whatever the mix of aspirations of those on the streets of Cairo, such uprisings are easy prey for tight-knit organizations – known in the revolutionary lexicon as Leninist vanguard parties.

In Egypt this means the Muslim Brotherhood, whether or not Nobel laureate Mohammed El Baradei ever served as figleaf. The Brotherhood is of course a different kettle of fish from Iran’s Ayatollahs; and Turkey shows that an ‘Islamic leaning’ government can be part of the liberal world – though Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan once let slip that democracy was a tram “you ride until you arrive at your destination, then you step off." ...

The surge in global food prices since the summer – since Ben Bernanke signalled a fresh dollar blitz, as it happens – is not the underlying cause of Arab revolt, any more than bad harvests in 1788 were the cause of the French Revolution.

Yet they are the trigger, and have set off a vicious circle. Vulnerable governments are scrambling to lock up world supplies of grain while they can. Algeria bought 800,000 tonnes of wheat last week, and Indonesia has ordered 800,000 tonnes of rice, both greatly exceeding their normal pace of purchases. Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Bangladesh, are trying to secure extra grain supplies.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said its global food index has surpassed the all-time high of 2008, both in nominal and real terms. The cereals index has risen 39pc in the last year, the oil and fats index 55pc.

The FAO implored goverments to avoid panic responses that “aggravate the situation”. If you are Hosni Mubarak hanging on in Cairo’s presidential palace, do care about such niceties?

France’s Nicolas Sarkozy blames the commodity spike on hedge funds, speculators, and the derivatives market (largely in London). He vowed to use his G20 presidency to smash the racket, but then Mr Sarkozy has a penchant for witchhunts against easy targets.

Energy Bulletin has an article linking the Tunisian and Egyptian unrest to oil depletion, global warming and food prices - The great unravelling: Tunisia, Egypt and the protracted collapse of the American empire.

In many of these countries, certainly in both Tunisia and Egypt, tensions have simmered for years. The trigger, it seems, came in the form of food shortages caused by the record high global prices reported by the FAO in December 2010. The return of high food prices two to three years after the 2008 global food crisis should not be a surprise. For most of the preceding decade, world grain consumption exceeded production – correlating with agricultural land productivity declining almost by half from 1990-2007, compared to 1950-1990.

This year, global food supply chains were again “stretched to the limit” following poor harvests in Canada, Russia and Ukraine; hotter, drier weather in South America cutting soybean production; flooding in Australia, wiping out its wheat crops; not to mention the colder, stormier, snowier winters experienced in the northern hemisphere, damaging harvests.

Climate Change

So much of the current supply shortages have been inflicted by increasingly erratic weather events and natural disasters, which climate scientists have long warned are symptomatic of anthropogenic global warming. Droughts exacerbated by global warming in key food-basket regions have already led to a 10-20 per cent drop in rice yields over the last decade. By mid-century, world crop yields could fall as much as 20-40 per cent due to climate change alone.

But climate change is likely to do more than generate droughts in some regions. It is also linked to the prospect of colder weather in the eastern US, east Asia and northern Europe — as the rate of Arctic summer sea-ice is accelerating, leading to intensifying warming, the change in atmospheric pressure pushes cold Arctic air to the south. Similarly, even the floods in Australia could be linked to climate change. Scientists agree they were caused by a particularly strong El-Nino/La-Nina oscillation in the Tropical Pacific ocean-atmospheric system. But Michael McPhaden, co-author of a recent scientific study on the issue, suggests that recently stronger El-Ninos are “plausibly the result of global warming.”

Energy Depletion

The global food situation has been compounded by the over-dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, consuming ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food energy produced. The problem is that global conventional oil production has most likely already peaked, having been on an undulating plateau since 2005 — and forecast to steadily and inexorably decline, leading to higher prices. Although oil prices dropped after the 2008 crash due to recession, the resuscitation of economic activity has pushed up demand, leading fuel prices to creep back up to $95 a barrel.

The fuel price hikes, combining with the predatory activities of financial speculators trying to rake-in profits by investing in the commodity markets, have underpinned worldwide inflation. Just as in 2008, the worst effected have been the poorer populations of the South. Thus, the eruption of political unrest in Egypt and elsewhere cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the context of accelerating ecological, energy and economic crises — inherently interconnected problems which are symptomatic of an Empire in overstretch, a global political economy in breach of the natural limits of its environment.

Post-Peak Egypt

Indeed, Egypt is particularly vulnerable. Its oil production peaked in 1996, and since then has declined by around 26 per cent. Since the 1960s, Egypt has moved from complete food self-sufficiency to excessive dependence on imports, subsidized by oil revenues. But as Egypt’s oil revenues have steadily declined due to increasing domestic consumption of steadily declining oil, so have food subsidies, leading to surging food prices. Simultaneously, Egypt’s debt levels are horrendous — about 80.5 per cent of its GDP, far higher than most other countries in the region. Inequality is also high, intensifying over the last decade in the wake of neoliberal “structural adjustment’ reforms — widely implemented throughout the region since the 1980s with debilitating effects, including contraction of social welfare, reduction of wages, and lack of infrastructure investment. Consequently, today forty per cent of Egyptians live below the UN poverty line of less than 2 dollars a day.

Due to such vulnerabilities, Egypt, as with many of the MENA countries, now lies on the fault-lines of the convergence of global ecological, energy and economic crises — and thus, on the frontlines of deepening global system failure. The Empire is uncrumbling. The guarded official statements put out by the Obama administration only illustrate the disingenuous impotence of the U.S. position.

TomDispatch has a new article by Michael Klare dubbing the unrest "Resource Revolts" (as opposed to "Resource Wars") - Resource Revolts.

Get ready for a rocky year. From now on, rising prices, powerful storms, severe droughts and floods, and other unexpected events are likely to play havoc with the fabric of global society, producing chaos and political unrest. Start with a simple fact: the prices of basic food staples are already approaching or exceeding their 2008 peaks, that year when deadly riots erupted in dozens of countries around the world.

It’s not surprising then that food and energy experts are beginning to warn that 2011 could be the year of living dangerously -- and so could 2012, 2013, and on into the future. Add to the soaring cost of the grains that keep so many impoverished people alive a comparable rise in oil prices -- again nearing levels not seen since the peak months of 2008 -- and you can already hear the first rumblings about the tenuous economic recovery being in danger of imminent collapse. Think of those rising energy prices as adding further fuel to global discontent.

Already, combined with staggering levels of youth unemployment and a deep mistrust of autocratic, repressive governments, food prices have sparked riots in Algeria and mass protests in Tunisia that, to the surprise of the world, ousted long-time dictator President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his corrupt extended family. And many of the social stresses evident in those two countries are present across the Middle East and elsewhere. No one can predict where the next explosion will occur, but with food prices still climbing and other economic pressures mounting, more upheavals appear inevitable. These may be the first resource revolts to catch our attention, but they won’t be the last.

Put simply, global consumption patterns are now beginning to challenge the planet’s natural resource limits. Populations are still on the rise, and from Brazil to India, Turkey to China, new powers are rising as well. With them goes an urge for a more American-style life. Not surprisingly, the demand for basic commodities is significantly on the rise, even as supplies in many instances are shrinking. At the same time, climate change, itself a product of unbridled energy use, is adding to the pressure on supplies, and speculators are betting on a situation trending progressively worse. Add these together and the road ahead appears increasingly rocky.

Joe Rom at Climate Progress says "Food prices were driven up by extreme weather and high oil prices" - Egyptian and Tunisian riots were driven in part by the spike in global food prices.

Political unrest has broken out in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and other Arab countries. Social media and governmental policies are getting most of the credit for spurring the turmoil, but there’s another factor at play.

Many of the people protesting are also angry about dramatic price hikes for basic foodstuffs, such as rice, cereals, cooking oil and sugar.

Food priceThat’s from the NPR story today, “Rising Food Prices Can Topple Governments, Too.”

This summer’s extreme global weather raised fears of a “Coming Food Crisis,” as CAP’s John D. Podesta and Jake Caldwell warned in Foreign Policy: “Global food security is stretched to the breaking point, and Russia’s fires and Pakistan’s floods are making a bad situation worse.” Earlier this month I discussed how, in fact, “Extreme weather events helped drive food prices to record highs.” Back then, experts were worried about food riots. Now they are happening.

The anti-science, pro-pollution crowd are going flat-earth over this post because I point out that leading political experts say the Middle East rioting is driven in part by the dramatic rise in food prices, which the agricultural experts say is driven in large part by oil prices and the extreme weather we’ve seen in the last few months. Of course, the climate science experts have been saying for a while now that the extreme weather is driven in large part by human emissions — see Terrific ABC News story: “Raging Waters In Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming” and Munich Re: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.” See also Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” — NYT: “Russia Bans Grain Exports After Drought Shrivels Crop” I have some more comments on this at the end, but the analysis as written here stands.

The Washington Post reported on the connection between food prices and Tunisian violence in mid-January, in a piece headlined, “Spike in global food prices contributes to Tunisian violence” ...

The question is why specifically now have the Egyptians and Tunisians rioted after decades of anti-democratic rule? Certainly one can ignore the experts and say that it is a complete coincidence that the rioting occurred as food prices hit record levels — in spite of the fact that the last time there was this kind of rioting globally food prices were at record levels, which is precisely why experts were predicting that record hide food prices would lead to riots. Now the question is, why are food prices are at record levels? Again, reality pretty much speaks for itself here. Extreme weather is a major contributing factor — and our top climate scientists say global warming has contributed.

Robert Fisk has a jaundiced look in The Independent at the Tunisian uprising and figures we'll have another dictator in place before too long - The brutal truth about Tunisia.

For I fear this is going to be the same old story. Yes, we would like a democracy in Tunisia – but not too much democracy. Remember how we wanted Algeria to have a democracy back in the early Nineties?

Then when it looked like the Islamists might win the second round of voting, we supported its military-backed government in suspending elections and crushing the Islamists and initiating a civil war in which 150,000 died.

No, in the Arab world, we want law and order and stability. Even in Hosni Mubarak's corrupt and corrupted Egypt, that's what we want. And we will get it.

The truth, of course, is that the Arab world is so dysfunctional, sclerotic, corrupt, humiliated and ruthless – and remember that Mr Ben Ali was calling Tunisian protesters "terrorists" only last week – and so totally incapable of any social or political progress, that the chances of a series of working democracies emerging from the chaos of the Middle East stand at around zero per cent.

The job of the Arab potentates will be what it has always been – to "manage" their people, to control them, to keep the lid on, to love the West and to hate Iran.

Indeed, what was Hillary Clinton doing last week as Tunisia burned? She was telling the corrupted princes of the Gulf that their job was to support sanctions against Iran, to confront the Islamic republic, to prepare for another strike against a Muslim state after the two catastrophes the United States and the UK have already inflicted in the region.

The Muslim world – at least, that bit of it between India and the Mediterranean – is a more than sorry mess. Iraq has a sort-of-government that is now a satrap of Iran, Hamid Karzai is no more than the mayor of Kabul, Pakistan stands on the edge of endless disaster, Egypt has just emerged from another fake election.

And Lebanon... Well, poor old Lebanon hasn't even got a government. Southern Sudan – if the elections are fair – might be a tiny candle, but don't bet on it.

It's the same old problem for us in the West. We mouth the word "democracy" and we are all for fair elections – providing the Arabs vote for whom we want them to vote for.

In Algeria 20 years ago, they didn't. In "Palestine" they didn't. And in Lebanon, because of the so-called Doha accord, they didn't. So we sanction them, threaten them and warn them about Iran and expect them to keep their mouths shut when Israel steals more Palestinian land for its colonies on the West Bank.

There was a fearful irony that the police theft of an ex-student's fruit produce – and his suicide in Tunis – should have started all this off, not least because Mr Ben Ali made a failed attempt to gather public support by visiting the dying youth in hospital.

For years, this wretched man had been talking about a "slow liberalising" of his country. But all dictators know they are in greatest danger when they start freeing their entrapped countrymen from their chains.

And the Arabs behaved accordingly. No sooner had Ben Ali flown off into exile than Arab newspapers which have been stroking his fur and polishing his shoes and receiving his money for so many years were vilifying the man. "Misrule", "corruption", "authoritarian reign", "a total lack of human rights", their journalists are saying now. Rarely have the words of the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran sounded so painfully accurate: "Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again." Mohamed Ghannouchi, perhaps?

Of course, everyone is lowering their prices now – or promising to. Cooking oil and bread are the staple of the masses. So prices will come down in Tunisia and Algeria and Egypt. But why should they be so high in the first place?

Algeria should be as rich as Saudi Arabia – it has the oil and gas – but it has one of the worst unemployment rates in the Middle East, no social security, no pensions, nothing for its people because its generals have salted their country's wealth away in Switzerland.

And police brutality. The torture chambers will keep going. We will maintain our good relations with the dictators. We will continue to arm their armies and tell them to seek peace with Israel.

And they will do what we want. Ben Ali has fled. The search is now on for a more pliable dictator in Tunisia – a "benevolent strongman" as the news agencies like to call these ghastly men.

And the shooting will go on – as it did yesterday in Tunisia – until "stability" has been restored.

No, on balance, I don't think the age of the Arab dictators is over. We will see to that.

Kevin at Cryptogon seems to be thinking along the same lines, quoting some Zbigniew Brzezinski for a the big picture - Tunisians Drive Leader from Power in Mass Uprising.

I’m not particularly sure of what actually happened in Tunisia. I’d like to think that the Tunisian people won’t go on to “freely elect” some U.S. puppet in the future, after throwing out the dictator who ran the place for over the last 23 years.

Come on, Kevin, why piss on the parade?

At times like this, it’s generally a good idea to keep a copy of The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives by Zbigniew Brzezinski handy:

As the imitation of American ways gradually pervades the world, it creates a more congenial setting for the exercise of the indirect and seemingly consensual American hegemony. And as in the case of the domestic American system, that hegemony involves a complex structure of interlocking institutions and procedures, designed to generate consensus and obscure asymmetries in power and influence. American global supremacy is thus buttressed by an elaborate system of alliances and coalitions that literally span the globe.

…

American supremacy has thus produced a new international order that not only replicates but institutionalizes abroad many of the features of the American system itself.

He writes that two steps are required for the, “Formulation of American geostrategy for the long-term management of America’s Eurasian geopolitical interests.”

First, to identify the geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause a potentially important shift in the international distribution of power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them; and to pinpoint the geopolitically critical Eurasian states whose location and/or existence have catalytic effects either on the more active geostrategic players or on regional conditions;

Second, to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above, so as to preserve and promote vital U.S. interests, and to conceptualize a more comprehensive geostrategy that establishes on a global scale the interconnection between the more specific U.S. policies.

In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.

In this context, “democracy” needs to be an insidious sham that serves U.S. national interests. It makes for better public relations than ugly dictatorships.