Euopre bound Viridian guru Bruce Sterling has been fairly quiet of late but he has managed to put out another Viridian note - this one looking at "LA Weekly"'s summary of global warming (or climate chaos, if you prefer the alternate description) in 2006 and then moving on to Tom Friedman's almost getting it rant on "petrolist" states. Unfortunately Tom, as usual, doesn't understand the concept of looking in the mirror when casting accusations around - he might find he's living in a "petrolist" state himself if he thought to consider the topic closely...

Bruce's sarcastic interjections are contained within ((( ))) markers.

(((A journalist from LA Weekly once cheerily told me, ‘We’re supported by porn, so we can say anything we want!’ They probably ought to be supported by televangelism, so they could call for the elected leader of Venezuela to be assassinated. In any case, this LA Weekly piece says plenty.)))

“Running Hot and Cold: A Dozen Weird Weather Moments
by JUDITH LEWIS

“Katrina turned the weather into the year’s biggest news event, as the natural world against which Bush has made war since 2000 decided to send back a return salvo.

“The storm quickly became a political portent for both ends of the spectrum, with Christian conservatives interpreting the supposed fetal shape of Katrina to be
a pro-life meteorological statement sent by a vengeful Lord to ravage the Gulf of Mexico, and the sane world noting apprehensively that hurricane season has been
worsening with steadily increasing ocean-surface temperatures. Bad as it was, the scientists added, 2005’s weather is just a taste of what’s to come.

Here’s the rest of the year in bad weather.

“1. 2005 was the hottest year on record. This year’s global average temperature topped the previous record, set in 1998.

“2. The Amazon River basin experienced its worst drought in recorded history.

“3. The National Climate Data Center (NCDC) reported that nine of the 10 warmest years in history have occurred in the past decade.

“4. Satellite monitoring in September revealed that the summer Arctic sea ice has shrunk as much as 40 percent since monitoring began in the late 1970s. At the current rate of decline, there will be no summer Arctic ice pack within two decades. (((If so, I wonder how many of this list’s readers will survive to witness that.)))

“5. Multiple studies showed that the higher average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the last decade are unprecedented over the past 2,000 years.

“6. Swiss and U.S. climatologists working in Antarctica built ‘EPICA Dome C,’ the longest ice-core record to date. Gas bubbles trapped in ice crystals record the
atmospheric compositions over time. From this, researchers reported that today’s levels of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, are higher now than at any time in the past 650,000 years.

“7. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that sea-surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico this summer were the highest since measurements began in 1890.

“8. The warm waters contributed to the year’s record-breaking hurricane season, with 26 named storms forming in the Atlantic. Fourteen became hurricanes, and Katrina, Rita and Wilma created an unprecedented triumvirate of category 5 storms. The NOAA also exhausted its pre-assigned list of storm names, and for the first time had to turn to the Greek alphabet. On the last official day in hurricane season, tropical storm Epsilon strengthened into a hurricane. (((This precedes Zeta, which fell to pieces today. I guess this means we can start over at “A” if January brings another tropical storm.)))

Link:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1479633

“9. Wilma played second fiddle to Katrina despite being the stronger storm. In Florida, Wilma was ‘the Big One’ they’ve been expecting for a century. It knocked out the power for weeks, and left a destruction path wider than any previous hurricane in the state. With a central ultralow pressure of 882 millibars, Wilma surpassed 1988’s Gilbert as the strongest hurricane on record.

“10. Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology reported in the May issue of Science that the long-term process of global dimming, a diminishing of the sun’s effects caused by an accumulation of particulate matter in the atmosphere, began to turn around in 1990. Since global dimming has a cooling effect, its decline could speed the effects of global warming. (((One really has to wonder what the hell is going on with that.)))

“11. Researchers on a scientific expedition in the Atlantic Ocean discovered that the strength of the current that drives the Gulf Stream == and bathes Britain and Northern Europe in warm waters from the tropics each summer == has slowed by 30 percent in just the past decade. Thought to be a consequence of global warming, the weakened current could trigger severe winters and cooler summers on both sides of the North Atlantic.

“12. Outlandish weather effects materialized all over the world. On July 26, 37 inches of rain fell in Mumbai, India’s financial center, during one 24-hour period. Four hundred thirty-eight people drowned or were buried in landslides in India’s highest recorded rainfall. A record 22 tornadoes hit Southwest Australia in May, causing the state’s most expensive natural disaster. In October, 78.9 inches of snow fell on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, nearly doubling the previous record of 39.8 inches, set in 2000.”


Source: New York Times

January 6, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

“The New Red, White and Blue
By Thomas L. Friedman

“As we enter 2006, we find ourselves in trouble, at home and abroad. We are in trouble because we are led by defeatists == wimps, actually.

“What's so disturbing about President Bush and Dick Cheney is that they talk tough about the necessity of invading Iraq, torturing terror suspects and engaging in domestic spying == all to defend our way of life and promote democracy around the globe.

“But when it comes to what is actually the most important issue in U.S. foreign and domestic policy today == making ourselves energy efficient and independent, and environmentally green == they ridicule it as something only liberals, tree-huggers and sissies believe is possible or necessary.

“Sorry, but being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue. It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. Living green is not for sissies. Sticking with oil, and basically saying that a country that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow incapable of innovating its way to energy independence == that is for sissies, defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded at home and abroad.

“Living green is not just a ‘personal virtue,’ as Mr. Cheney says. It's a national security imperative. “The biggest threat to America and its values today is not communism, authoritarianism or Islamism. It's petrolism. (((A neologism! Welcome to 2006!))) Petrolism is my term (((our Tom is ever the egoist))) for the corrupting, antidemocratic governing practices == in oil states from Russia to Nigeria and Iran == that result from a long run of $60-a-barrel oil. (((How great that he noticed the “curse of oil.”)))

“Petrolism is the politics of using oil income to buy off one's citizens (((Are you listening, Jack Abramoff?))) with subsidies and government jobs, using oil and gas exports to intimidate or buy off one's enemies, and using oil profits to build up one's internal security forces and army to keep oneself ensconced in power, without any transparency or checks and balances. (((Wait wait, I’ve got a genius “petrolist” idea == use the NSA to wiretap Americans who moan about gasoline prices!)))

“When a nation's leaders can practice petrolism, they never have to tap their people's energy and creativity; they simply have to tap an oil well. (((Yep!))) And therefore politics in a petrolist state is not about building a society or an educational system that maximizes its people's ability to innovate, export and compete. It is simply about who controls the oil tap.

“In petrolist states like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Sudan, people get rich by being in government and sucking the treasury dry == so they never want to cede power. In non-petrolist states, like Taiwan, Singapore and Korea, people get rich by staying outside government and building real businesses. (((I hope my Singaporean friends are enjoying this rare pat on the head from the NY Times.)))

“Our energy gluttony fosters and strengthens various kinds of petrolist regimes. It emboldens authoritarian petrolism in Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sudan and Central Asia. It empowers Islamist petrolism in Sudan, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It even helps sustain communism in Castro's Cuba, which survives today in part thanks to cheap oil from Venezuela. Most of these petrolist regimes would have collapsed long ago, having proved utterly incapable of delivering a modern future for their people, but they have been saved by our energy excesses. (((Unless they were selling us cocaine, in which case they were supported by our other excesses.)))

“No matter what happens in Iraq, we cannot dry up the swamps of authoritarianism and violent Islamism in the Middle East without also drying up our consumption of oil == thereby bringing down the price of crude. A democratization policy in the Middle East without a different energy policy at home is a waste of time, money and, most important, the lives of our young people. (((“Won’t somebody think of the children?” Hey, it’s the OLD people who die in droves in Greenhouse heat waves.)))

“That's because there is a huge difference in what these bad regimes can do with $20-a-barrel oil compared with the current $60-a-barrel oil. It is no accident that the reform era in Russia under Boris Yeltsin, and in Iran under Mohammad Khatami, coincided with low oil prices. When prices soared again, petrolist authoritarians in both societies reasserted themselves. (((Not to mention the new Venezuelan-Bolivian alliance == oil and cocaine, together at last.)))

“We need a president and a Congress with the guts not just to invade Iraq, but to also impose a gasoline tax and inspire conservation at home. That takes a real energy policy with long-term incentives for renewable energy == wind, solar, biofuels == rather than the welfare-for-oil-companies-and-special-interests that masqueraded last year as an energy bill.

“Enough of this Bush-Cheney nonsense that conservation, energy efficiency and environmentalism are some hobby we can't afford. I can't think of anything more cowardly or un-American. Real patriots, real advocates of spreading democracy around the world, live green.

“Green is the new red, white and blue.”

I like Mr Flat Earth's paragraph that read "It is no accident that the reform era in Russia under Boris Yeltsin, and in Iran under Mohammad Khatami, coincided with low oil prices. When prices soared again, petrolist authoritarians in both societies reasserted themselves."

So, given this definition of a petrolist state - was it a coincidence that high oil prices in the early 90's found George HW Bush, Dick Cheney and James Baker running the US administration ? While the subsequent oil price bust had Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Madeliene Albright running the show (not a lot of oil industry connections amongst that lot) ? Then lo and behold, oil prices start rising again and the US finds itself with George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice wandering the halls of the White House ? Hmmm....

Sydney certainly had a hot start to the year, with a record 44 degrees greeting me when I arrived back home - the Herald calls this "a searing preview of greenhouse life". On the other hand, I had been over in the normally scorching Western Australia which just experienced its coldest December ever (the average max temperature in Perth in December is normally about 29 degrees, but this year was around 24 degrees - a pretty sizable variation). I still managed to get sunburnt on numerous occasions though.

Sydney can expect more of the searing temperatures that fanned fires, stopped trains, disrupted air travel and blacked out suburbs on New Year's Day, according to CSIRO global warming projections. On average, Sydney experiences temperatures above 35 degrees three days a year. That could double by 2030 and rise to as many as 18 days by 2070.

That would put more pressure on the city's infrastructure and increase heat-related health risks, said the chairman of the Climate Institute, Clive Hamilton. "CSIRO projections indicate that Australian cities can expect a doubling in the number of very hot days in coming decades and drought conditions to become the norm, yet the relentless growth in carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels in Australia has gone unchecked," Dr Hamilton said yesterday.

In the past 200 years large amounts of greenhouse gases released by land clearing and burning of fossil fuels have trapped more heat in the atmosphere and warmed the planet.

According to CSIRO projections, it will not just get hotter in Sydney. There will be less rain, but winds will be stronger and extreme weather events such as floods and hailstorms will be more frequent. And if hot days fall during the working week rather than at weekends or on public holidays the city's electrical infrastructure will face greater difficulties than those experienced on the weekend.

The Rodent's chief headkicker Bill Heffernan got partly burnt out during by one of the bushfires generated by the hot weather - maybe we'll start to see a change of tune on global warming coming out of Canberra (but I won't hold my breath).

John McCain has been in town as well to have a chat about Iraq and global warming - the Herald's report reads like a slightly reworded government press release though - and the nuclear power PR campaign continues unabated....

A potential contender for the Republican nomination in the 2008 US presidential election, John McCain, has visited the Prime Minister, John Howard, in Sydney to discuss Iraq and climate change. Senator McCain, who also held a meeting yesterday with the Environment and Heritage Minister, Ian Campbell, expressed a "strong view" that nuclear power needed to be a part of the American response to the problems of climate change. Senator Campbell said Senator McCain was fascinated to know the direction Australia was taking in a post-Kyoto world in dealing with climate-change issues.

The senior Republican's visit precedes next week's important inaugural meeting in Sydney of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate - the US-led alternative to the Kyoto Protocol. The US and Australia have refused to sign the United Nations-backed protocol. It also comes amid a growing domestic debate on the future of nuclear power in Australia as an alternative to fossil fuels. Several Howard Government ministers have advocated the use of nuclear energy as one way to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The foreign ministers and environment and industry ministers from the six countries involved in the partnership - the US, Japan, China, India, South Korea and Australia - are expected to attend the two-day summit. The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, will be among them.

The climate-change partnership, first announced at the Association of South-East Asian Nations regional forum in Vientiane last July, aims to generate discussions between the six developed and developing nations about using and sharing technology to cut greenhouse emissions.

Government sources say that at the first meeting, which starts in Sydney tomorrow week, countries will be expected to generate ideas and plans will be made for initiatives. Several private industry representatives from each of the countries involved have also been invited to participate in the summit.

Senator McCain has had a strong interest in climate change, and has advocated different views on some occasions to the US President, George Bush, earning him a reputation as a maverick.

The Vietnam War veteran, who is a supporter of the US's war in Iraq, also told Mr Howard in a 45-minute meeting that there was "still a distance to go in Iraq", a spokesman for the Prime Minister said.

In peak oil news, James Kunstler is forecasting doom and destruction will commence this year. More than a few commenters point out that he has been wrong about this before and that very few peak oil modellers (not even Colin Campbell) predict that the peak was achieved last year. While he is forecasting imminent depression, the bursting of the housing bubble, the collapse of the airline and auto manufacturing industries, war with Mexico and various other horrors, he is "allergic to conspiracy theories" about attacks on Iran, to which a few commenters countered with this German report.

Surprisingly (to me anyway, having happily detached from the news flow for a few weeks, other than reading the execrable local Perth paper which doesn't present any risk of troubling anyone's brain with any news whatsoever), there is quite a bit of chatter around on the Iran topic. Stirling Newberry at Daily Kos has a look at Iran and a number of other energy related issues, including the Russian's shutting off the gas flow to to the Ukraine (not very effectively, as they have to rely on the Ukrianians not siphoning off gas that is meant to flow further along the pipeline to western europe, which the Ukrainians of course aren't cooperating with).

The march of Iran to deterrent state status are prompting "use it or lose it" pressures for preventative - that is aggressive - strikes against Iran and its atomic weapons program, as Iran declares that it has a right to enrich Uranium on its own soil. The Ukraine-Russia gas stand off escalates as Russia accuses Ukraine of stealing Natural gas. In Iraq insurgent threats keep a major refinery shut down in Iraq.

On this, the first working day of the New Year, we are already getting a good stiff taste of the running theme of 2006. If 2004 and 2005 saw resource inflation, 2006 is the year when resource rich countries begin using those resources as weapons, and resource poor countries begin taking aggressive steps to secure resources. The current world market approach to energy is going to break down, as more and more nations are forced to jostle for position.

Somewhere in the next two years it will dawn on the American public that we live in the pre-war, not post-war, era, and that Iraq was a foreshock.

For reasons outlined before, an attack against Iran is unlikely at this time - the danger zone begins in July and runs through late October - because that is the point where a spike of popularity and power will be necessary for Bush, if it seems he is going to lose the Congress. The next danger zone is next year, as he needs to reframe the debate should he lose congress. However, before there are large airstrikes, there must be an escalating campaign of crowding Iranian airspace, in hopes that a pilot will give the US an excuse for further action.

But the larger picture needs to be looked at.

SW made an interesting point in the comments (one I've noted before, but I like to belabor the obvious for new readers and those who miss some of my rantings) - the deluge of lies we've all been subjected to is now a large part of the problem - and until people face up to reality we'll never be able to have a proper debate in any of our so-called democracies about the right course of action (in my view running a real democracy requires a population that is aware of the issues and the facts surrounding them so that they can make informed decisions. I'm not sure what the correct description is for countries full of people that are by and large uninformed and periodically allowed to vote while being subjected to various fear campaigns by the major political parties).

Stirling noted that "the other part of this is saddam - everyone in power knew that it was becoming impossible not to buy oil from iraq, which meant giving him money, which no one trusted him not to spend on WMD.", to which SW noted "To my way of thinking that was the primary crime of the Cheney administration. The fact that they felt compelled to pathologically lie about the reasons for their actions. Even today serious people treat it like it is a mystery. The lies are clear, but what was the true reason?

Jesus Christ on Roller Skates!

They got themselves into this mess because they insist on publicly denying the reality of depletion. Yet their entire middle east foreign policy is based on that reality.

If they would have tried to treat the electorate like adults and simply pointed out that the shrinking pool of crude oil was going to create a situation where either Iraq's resources were developed, enriching a dangerous madman, or we were headed for crude oil shortages, or we had to find some way to remove him from power, world events would have generated public opinion and pressure that would have made the first gulf war coalition look like tea party.

It's the lie piled on top of lie that has gotten them into this mess."

Jeff Vail also takes a look at Iran in his glimpse into the crystal ball for 2006, speculating that US military weakness in the middle east may not be as great as those interpreting Mr Murtha's comments may suggest.

Iran: With the US military drawing down to perhaps less than 50,000 troops (more likely 80,000) by the end of 2006, along with the drawdown of some forces from Europe and South Korea, the US military will surprise many pundits with a reconstituted expeditionary capability.

Equally important will be the forces that are not withdrawn from Iraq but are freed up for internal re-deployment (preventing the notification that is a de-facto result of re-deployment overseas from the US). All of which leads directly to a discussion of Iran and Syria.

An almost unending stream of commentators have theorized that the US will attack Iran in March of 2006. Not at all likely--that's too early--but by the end of the year it will be certainly within the realm of possibility. Which demands a brief analysis of what kind of an attack that might be. A ground invasion is simply impractical--the terrain, size and population of Iran are vastly different from that of Iraq. Of course, the hubris of the current US administration is such that it can't entirely be ruled out--it just isn't very likely.

More likely would be some kind of airstrikes aimed at Iran's nuclear facilities--by either the US or Israel. While there seems to be the kind of political will necessary to carry out such an attack in Israel, it isn't very likely to succeed. The Iranians just bought enough top-of-the-line Russian SA-15 surface-to-air missile systems to provide excellent point defense of their nuclear facilities--even some defense against cruise missiles and GPS-guided bombs. They'll take delivery beginning this Spring.

Despite the rusty nature of Iran's Shah-era air force (Vietnam-era US fighters like the F-4 and older Soviet models), they also have been long rumored to have the Russian-built SA-10 system, which makes US Air Force planners wince. More significantly, however, is the political fall-out of a potential attack.

It's my opinion that Israeli long-term interests would not be served by an airstrike, even if it successfully derailed the Iranian nuclear program for several years, as it would build resolve to finally get a bomb AND use it. US "interests" (by which I mean the current administration's), however, might be better served by such airstrikes, as it could create an environment of instability regarding Iran that would pressure early-adopters to shy away from Iran's euro-denominated oil bourse that opens this March. Which, of course, leads us to a discussion of oil...

Parahistorian Wayne Madsen is one of those theorists who has been predicting a US invasion of Iran for a long time now, and he's still going. His latest (very long) effort even includes the somewhat bizarre assertion that the surprise recent move of Burma's capital to a small unfinished town 200 miles north of Rangoon is due to the fear of nuclear fallout from destroyed Iranian nuclear facilities getting caught up in the monsoon and being dumped on the city by the rains (which sounds pretty far fetched even for him, but I like the level of imagination involved).

Intelligence indications and warnings abound as Bush administration finalizes military attack on Iran.

Intelligence and military sources in the United States and abroad are reporting on various factors that indicate a U.S. military hit on Iranian nuclear and military installations, that may involve tactical nuclear weapons, is in the final stages of preparation. Likely targets for saturation bombing are the Bushehr nuclear power plant (where Russian and other foreign national technicians are present), a uranium mining site in Saghand near the city of Yazd, the uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, a heavy water plant and radioisotope facility in Arak, the Ardekan Nuclear Fuel Unit, the Uranium Conversion Facility and Nuclear Technology Center in Isfahan, the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, the Tehran Molybdenum, Iodine and Xenon Radioisotope Production Facility, the Tehran Jabr Ibn Hayan Multipurpose Laboratories, the Kalaye Electric Company in the Tehran suburbs, a reportedly dismantled uranium enrichment plant in Lashkar Abad, and the Radioactive Waste Storage Units in Karaj and Anarak.

Other first targets would be Shahab-I, II, and III missile launch sites, air bases (including the large Mehrabad air base/international airport near Tehran), naval installations on the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea, command, control, communications and intelligence facilities. Secondary targets would include civilian airports, radio and TV installations, telecommunications centers, government buildings, conventional power plants, highways and bridges, and rail lines. Oil installations and commercial port facilities would likely be relatively untouched by U.S. forces in order to preserve them for U.S. oil and business interests.

...

European intelligence sources also report that the recent decision by Putin and Russia's state-owned Gazprom natural gas company to cut supplied of natural gas to Ukraine was a clear warning by Putin to nations like Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Moldova, France, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Bosnia, Serbia, and Germany that it would do the same if they support the U.S. attack on Iran. Gazprom natural gas is supplied, via pipelines in Ukraine, from Russia and Turkmenistan to countries in Eastern and Western Europe. The Bush administration charged Russia with using gas supplies as a "political tool."

Putin has additional leverage on Western Europe since former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder accepted an appointment to the board of a joint Russian-German North European Gas Pipeline Consortium that is controlled by Gazprom. The pipeline will bring Russian gas to Scandinavia, Germany, Netherlands, and Britain, giving Putin additional leverage over Washington in Europe.

Southeast Asian intelligence sources report that Burma's (Myanmar's) recent abrupt decision to move its capital from Rangoon (Yangon) to remote Pyinmana, 200 miles to the north, is a result of Chinese intelligence warnings to its Burmese allies about the effects of radiation resulting from a U.S. conventional or tactical nuclear attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. There is concern that a series of attacks on Iranian nuclear installations will create a Chernobyl-like radioactive cloud that would be caught up in monsoon weather in the Indian Ocean.

Low-lying Rangoon lies in the path of monsoon rains that would continue to carry radioactive fallout from Iran over South and Southeast Asia between May and October. Coastal Indian Ocean cities like Rangoon, Dhaka, Calcutta, Mumbai, Chennai, and Colombo would be affected by the radioactive fallout more than higher elevation cities since humidity intensifies the effects of the fallout. Thousands of government workers were given only two days' notice to pack up and leave Rangoon for the higher (and dryer) mountainous Pyinmana.

So what is going to happen ? I sure as hell don't know.

Chaging tack, the Guardian has a report on the steady conversion of arable land worldwide into cropland (and into urban areas) - another limit to growth slowly hoving ominously into sight.

New maps show that the Earth is rapidly running out of fertile land and that food production will soon be unable to keep up with the world's burgeoning population. The maps reveal that more than one third of the world's land is being used to grow crops or graze cattle.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison combined satellite land cover images with agricultural census data from every country in the world to create detailed maps of global land use. Each grid square was 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) across and showed the most prevalent land use in that square, such as forest, grassland or ice.

"In the act of making these maps we are asking: where is the human footprint on the Earth?" said Amato Evan, a member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison research team presenting its results this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

The current map shows a snapshot of global land use for the year 2000, but the scientists also have land use data going back to 1700, showing how things have changed.

"The maps show, very strikingly, that a large part of our planet (roughly 40%) is being used for either growing crops or grazing cattle," said Dr Navin Ramankutty, a member of the Wisconsin-Madison team. By comparison, only 7% of the world's land was being used for agriculture in 1700.

The Amazon basin has seen some of the greatest changes in recent times, with huge swaths of the rainforest being felled to grow soya beans.

"One of the major changes we see is the fast expansion of soybeans in Brazil and Argentina, grown for export to China and the EU," said Dr Ramankutty.

This agricultural expansion has come at the expense of tropical forests in both countries.

Meanwhile, intensive farming practices mean that cropland areas have decreased slightly in the US and Europe and the land is being gobbled up by urbanisation.

The Alternative Energy blog has a post on Alternative Energy Grants in Australia, which looks at a few interesting projects, including another geothermal energy project in South Australia from Scope Energy, which they hope to expand to a 1000MW plant (to put this in perspective, South Australian peak demand today was 1500MW and reached 2400MW last week on an exceptionally hot day).

From geothermal power to better batteries, millions have been spent on alternative energy research in Australia, according to Rod Myer writing for The Age.

The AUD $23 million (approximately $17 million) spent by the Australian Federal Government under the first tranche of its $100 million (US $73m) pledge to aid the alternative energy sector has highlighted innovations by local companies to cure Australia's fossil fuel addiction.

Two companies funded under the Renewable Energy Development Initiative (REDI) have developed a no-emissions alternative for base-load generation. Geodynamics received $5 million to help develop its geothermal electricity plant near Innamincka in the north of South Australia. Scope Energy, another betting its future on geothermal energy, received $3.9 million to help with development. Its principal, Roger Massey-Greene, says the grant will help finance a drilling program of 500-metre deep holes to prove up its resource. Scope plans to open a 50-megawatt plant, but Mr Massey-Greene says he hopes to see this expand to 1000 MW in the longer term.

Scope has a geographic advantage, he believes. Its site is near Millicent, in the south-east of South Australia, meaning it is close to transmission lines and the population centres of Melbourne and Adelaide. "We expect the cost to be very competitive with combined-cycle gas power plants," Mr Massey-Greene said.

Scope's geothermal technology will tap hot water heated deep in the earth and run it through a heat exchanger to generate electricity. Mr Massey-Greene likens this process to a "fridge operating in reverse".

Geodynamics' system will pump water through hot rocks and use the resulting steam to generate power. Scope's wells will be as deep as 4.5 kilometres. The technology that Scope is planning has been in use at a plant in Italy that has operated for 101 years, Mr Massey-Greene said.

Stage one of the plant is expected to cost $4 million per megawatt to construct, compared with about $750,000 for a combined-cycle gas plant. "But we have no fuel costs," Mr Massey-Greene said. Geothermal plants run at an output of about 98 per cent of rated capacity. Mr Massey-Green believes geothermal power has a great future. In New Zealand it provides 7 per cent of power needs and this could rise to as much as 15 per cent. Some in the market believe that Scope will float in the first half of 2006.

Melbourne-based Katrix will use its $811,000 REDI grant to further develop its new fluid expander that may enable solar energy to be harnessed for electricity. Founder Attilio Demichelli says the expander, which does the job of a turbine, will allow solar thermal power to be adapted for small-scale use far more cheaply than photovoltaic systems.

Katrix is developing units in which solar energy will heat refrigeration fluid that will run through an expander linked to a generator to produce power. The expander is cheaper than a miniature turbine to build and has a number of advantages, including its ability to take gas or steam at 22 atmospheres (twenty two times atmospheric pressure) back to one atmosphere in one step.

Katrix projects that in the Californian market — once government subsidies are factored in — its system will return its cost to consumers in two to three years, compared with 15 years for photovoltaic systems. Mr Demichelli, a private investor, and inventor Yannis Tropalis have invested over $3 million in the technology in three years.

Origin Energy received $5 million to help develop its facilities for manufacturing solar cells using photovoltaic sliver technology. The technology will cut the cost of solar cells by reducing silicon usage by up to 90 per cent. Silicon is the most expensive part of a solar cell. Origin says it costs $11,000 to fit a house with a one-kilowatt unit. This would take 20 years or more to pay itself off. However, as power prices rise and production costs fall, this payback time will be cut.

James also has an interesting post on China up as well.

China is to spend billions on alternative energy and many times more on oil and coal.

Tim Johnson of Knight Ridder reports that barely a dozen years ago the country didn't need deep-sea oil ports, massive tank farms and a brawny foreign policy to procure oil in far-flung spots.

Today, China is an oil-guzzling dragon with a voracious thirst, much like the United States. Supertankers stretching three football fields in length now wait to enter China's deep-sea ports.

The busiest oil terminal is at Ningbo on the East China Sea. Shipping records show that in November, supertankers arrived there from Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iran, Yemen, Equatorial Guinea, Angola and Congo to feed a craving that's helped drive up crude oil prices, rattle global politics and put China and the United States at odds in some of the world's most unstable regions.

China's thirst for oil has emboldened Iran and complicated the refugee crisis in Sudan. With its economy growing at a 9 percent annual rate, China is also courting many of America's oil suppliers, including Canada and Venezuela.

Increasingly, the United States and China are throwing elbows as global rivals for energy. The tussle could get more aggressive if the two nations can't manage to co-exist in the global energy contest.

"We've got to start those discussions before the race for oil becomes as hot and dangerous as the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union," Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said in a Nov. 30 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. "If we let it go, this could end up in real military conflict, not just economic conflict." It is interesting to note that this "race for oil" is framed as a zero sum game in which one country wins and another loses. An alternative would be international cooperation to maximise energy efficiency, minimise pollution and radically increase renewable energy.

Compared with the United States, which consumes 25 percent of the world's annual oil output, China burns only 6 percent of the world's production. Yet its energy use is rising steeply.

Finally, Sweden is seeking to become completely oil independent, which is a goal the rest of us should aspire to.

With the creation of the newly established National Commission on Oil, Sweden -- along with a number of other European nations -- hopes to find an avenue to achieve its independence from oil by 2020.

The government held a hearing Tuesday to address petroleum challenges and use of energy from renewables.

"As the founding co-chairmen of the Peak Oil Caucus of the United States House of Representatives, we are writing to commend you and the government of Sweden for the December 13, 2005 hearing about peak oil by the newly established National Commission on Oil Independence," according to a letter obtain by United Press International from Roscoe Bartlett, R-MD, and Tom Udall, D-NM, to Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson late Monday.

"The National Commission on Oil Independence appointed by the government of Sweden is creating a model effort for the world in partnership with the private sector," the two congressmen wrote. "These types of partnerships will lead to greater innovation in energy efficiency and alternatives to contribute to achieving the goal of energy independence from oil."

One of the commission members, Volvo Trucks, partnered with American businesses such as Maryland-based Mack Truck, Inc., developer of the gas electric hybrid powertrain and deliverer of a prototype refueler to the U.S. Air Force, Congressman Bartlett's office told UPI.

Sweden is not alone. Iceland is completely energy independent. Denmark, Austria, and Sweden are generating more than 20 percent of their energy from renewables.

This month's "Big Issues for 2006" edition of Future Edition from the Arlington Institute takes a look at both global warming and peak oil as key issues for the coming year (linking to LATOC as their introduction to peak oil for the uninitiated, which I'm not entirely sure is a good idea - no disprespect to Matt of course).

The text for this newsletter doesn't appear to be online yet, so I'll quote the relevant sections below.

I’d like to send along to you my best wishes for 2006. It really is a cliché, but it is kind of amazing how time flies. It doesn’t seem very long ago that we were working very hard getting ready for the turnover of the century, wondering what might happen if there was large-scale computer failure. Now we have another set of equally important issues that are moving off the horizon into our near-term field of concern.

For a number of years now here at The Arlington Institute we have been talking about the increasing rate of change and the growing significance and implications of the big issues on our global horizon. From our point of view, we’re now watching it all happen – big, accelerating change with more potential wild card surprises.

The best books that I’ve read that discuss the technological drivers of the change is Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology and Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution : The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human. Both are very important overviews of where we’re going in terms of modifying ourselves. The first two chapters of Kurzweil alone are worth the cost of the book. I highly recommend them both.

Although technology is clearly one of the major change drivers that we are living with, it is not the only one – by any means. The changing climate has extraordinary near-term potential implications for all of us who live on this planet. Last year Walter Cronkite wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer that “Global warming is at least as important as gay marriage or the cost of Social Security. And if it is not seriously debated in the general election, it will measure the irresponsibility of the entire political class. This is an issue that cannot, and must not, be ignored any longer.” If you do not remember the debate on global warming, you are forgiven, because it has never taken place.

The lack of US governmental interest and concern for effectively confronting this issue is convincing growing numbers of people that they cannot presume that the government will fulfill their obligation to provide for the national security of the country in this instance and initiate policies to effectively offset the clear trend and develop contingencies for possible climate shift. Let me recommend two recent sources in this regard.

The New York Times had a very good December book review by Bill McKibben called The Coming Meltdown that serves up the magnitude of the issue and how climate change (particularly rapid climate change) is so huge in its implications that it is hard to effectively comprehend the potential scope of the problem. If you think Katrina was bad, wait until the climate rapidly changes and among other things, food doesn’t grow where and how it used to.

This is not a farfetched idea. Whitley Streiber has written about a scenario where the rapidly warming arctic surface air (the subject of McKibben’s review) that has been held down by the denser cold artic upper air masses, suddenly rises – like warm air does – and a huge amount of frigid air displaces it at the surface and sweeps down from the pole, initiating a mini ice age . . . in a matter of months.

It seems to me that another issue that has the same architecture – common structure – as climate change is peak oil. The notion that we are rapidly approaching the point in time where we will begin, for the first time, to extract less and less of the energy source that has fundamentally fueled the industrial revolution (i.e. that life that most people reading this enjoy) is profound in its implications.

The problem is that the demand, driven by population growth and economic development of countries like the U.S. and China, continues to expand rapidly even though the supply suddenly starts to decrease. Like climate change this is a very fundamental factor (energy) that defines our options for living on this planet. The notion that the most important energy source in the world for which there is no clear alternative would rapidly start to go away, is enough to keep thoughtful people up late at night writing scenarios of doom.

They’re doing that, of course. If you’re not familiar with the peak oil issue, you should be. Here’s one of quite a few sources that are painting the pictures that will remind you of Y2K scenarios.

There are those, of course, who say we will keep finding cheap oil and that the peak is decades away. But if they’re wrong (and so far, the trends appear to be against them) then the whole world could be on the verge of a major shift that, absent the rapid integration of a new global energy source, could be quite painful.

Rapid climate change and peak oil are so big that they have the fundamental requirement that you need to be working on an alternative long before the actual event takes place or things come unraveled rather fast. To give you a sense of that, check out this study by SAIC for “a government agency” outlining three different scenarios based upon actively responding to peak oil twenty years before the peak, ten years before, and at the time of identifying the peak. The bottom line is that if you don’t actively start to put in place alternatives two decades before the peak, the underlying infrastructure and economies are very badly damaged. It is catastrophic if you wait until the peak is obvious. It’s the same for rapid climate change.

There are big, deep forces at play here, committed to changing the way humans live on this earth. Lindsey Grant, former deputy assistant secretary for environment and population affairs at the State Department and National Security Council staffer has written a very persuasive little tome called The Collapsing Bubble: Growth and Fossil Energy. Grant writes things like, “World population quadrupled in one century, a change so astonishing that it has altered – or should have altered – our assumptions as to the human connection to the rest of the planet.” He put together his own projection on how energy and population might interact in the U.S. in the coming half century which is shown below.



You can see that he presumes that oil peaks about now and that coal takes over as the major fuel supporting our economy until the coal peaks about 2075 and then everything comes apart. I think it is interesting think about how the use of coal might (or most likely might not) expand so quickly to take up the slack from the petroleum peak.

There are other systemic issues that are not being effectively addressed which promise to scuttle our economic ship if we don’t do something pretty different, pretty fast. In this country there’s social security and our other big problem, health care costs. General Motors appears to be a vulnerable to be bought by someone like Toyota in part because they have a $65 billion unfunded health care obligation, mostly for retired employees. As former Colorado governor Richard Lamm says in The Brave New World of Health Care: “No trees grow to the sky and no element of the U.S. national budget can grow at over twice the rate of inflation. Yet that is the rate of growth of health car during my professional lifetime.” Lamm’s book is full of provocative but solid policy suggestions for dealing with the future of health care. It’s a great place to not only understand the problem but to find potential solutions.

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So to put it far less elegantly than Dr. O’Hara does, if we keep doing what we have been doing, we will keep getting what we have been getting . . . so we need to be about seeing this world in new and different ways that allow us to behave differently. That’s the only way that we’ll be able to effectively deal with the extraordinary change that is working its way toward us.

My hope is that you and far more or your and my friends begin to seriously understand this in the coming months. As the SAIC study says, there comes a time when no matter how well meaning our activities are, there just isn’t enough time left to influence the future that is exploding in front of us.

I'm going to be offline for the next 2-3 weeks, so if you are looking for peak oil and related news then the "Essential Peak Oil" links to the right are the place to go.

Given that the festive season is approaching, I may as well launch into a brief rant about one toxic meme which appears around this time of year and is becoming increasingly annoying - the one which goes something like "such and such a group is trying to abolish Christmas".

While most of the TV coverage here this week has been concentrating on race riots and gang violence, the morning news still managed to get a few segments in on this theme, based on the extremely flimsy pretence of one grumpy person in Queensland who wrote to the local school complaining about them referring to Christmas too often in in the school newsletter.

So is this worthy of multiple segments on the national news ? I wouldn't think so but it appears this sort of nonsense (its not like people complaining about Christmas are easy to find, let alone in any danger of getting it abolished) is just anther facet of the culture war that Bismark launched so long ago (although it was called Kulturkampf back then).

Thom Hartmann wrote about this last year, and I've seen quite a few bloggers commenting on it this week as well - check out Digby,
Seeing the Forest, Scrutiny Hooligans, Ron Beasley and Past Peak for various examples.

Just another example of why wingnuts should be exiled to the fringes of society - you should never let the opportunistic and paranoid grab control of any sort of power, lest they end up getting to the same stage of the culture war the Germans eventually reached.

I'll close with a quote - and wish you all of you who've been reading my rantings this year a Happy Christmas or Hanukkah or Holidays or Winter / Summer Solstice festival...

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
~ H. L. Mencken, "Women as Outlaws"

Speculation continues to mount about the impact of natural gas shortages in the US this winter. The resulting high prices mean that its likely that the poor and industries that can't pass on cost increases will be the ones who bear the brunt of the problem.

Falling gasoline prices make it easy to believe the nation has seen the last of the energy woes that swept in behind this year's Gulf Coast hurricanes. But they don't fool an unemployed woman on the Crow Indian Reservation, using the electric oven to warm her house on increasingly crisp Montana nights because her natural-gas heat has been cut off. For brickyard workers in Mill Hall, Pa., unemployment looms after the holidays, because it will be too expensive to fire the clay kilns this winter. And one retiree in a mobile home in Millinocket plans to take her asthma medication once daily instead of three times as prescribed, to save money to pay the kerosene bills that will soar in Maine's bitter cold.

With the season's first snowfall hitting the Northeast last week, it is becoming apparent that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita did far more to the nation's energy equation than spoil Labor Day vacation drives. The storms upset the already precarious balance of the nation's supply and demand for fuel. So much Gulf of Mexico oil and natural gas production remains in disarray that even with a mild winter, Americans face a Big Chill: astronomical heating bills--on average, 38 percent higher than last year's record costs for natural gas and 21 percent higher for oil.

Triple threat. That means hundreds of closed factories and enormous hardship for low-income and working poor families, who can expect scant federal government help. And if bitter cold rides in on Mother Nature's coattails, extraordinary measures will be needed to keep energy flowing, particularly in the Northeast, as natural-gas shortages spill over into oil and electricity supplies. "We pray for warm weather. We have a prayer chain going," says Diane Munns, an Iowa regulator who is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. "People are talking not just about high prices but actual shortages."

Adds Matthew Simmons, a prominent Houston energy investment banker, who has warned of a new era of scarcity: "We're headed into a winter that could be a real winter of discontent."

It is not just about money. Damage to rigs, pipelines, and processing facilities means a shortage of natural gas, the fuel that heats 52 percent of U.S. homes. The industry says 2.3 billion cubic feet per day, or 23 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's natural-gas production, will be offline through March. But even before the deadly storms struck, the country was consuming more natural gas than it produced and prices were at record highs.

Looking on the bright side, if oil and gas consumption is reduced, there is no chance North Americans will be succumbing to the smog the way people are in Tehran.

Bill Totten has a post up on the crisis facing car manufacturers like Ford and General Motors. While he blames "capitalist diehards" for this crisis, I think he should perhaps look at the examples of Toyota and Honda and contrast the styles of the different corporations. To a certain extent this seems to be an example of survival of the fittest - Ford and GM failed to look into the future and are paying the price, while the likes of Toyota have recognised the need to produce cleaner, more fuel efficient vehicles and are reaping the benefits. Some capitalists are better than others it would seem.

General Motors, the corporation that came to symbolize the United States in the 1950s, is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Delphi Corporation, an auto parts manufacturer that GM spun off a few years ago, declared bankruptcy at the beginning of October, making it the biggest bankruptcy in the history of the auto industry. Ford is in similar straits; slumping sales in North America have forced it to announce plans to close plants and lay off thousands of employees.

In the era of cheap and abundant oil GM and Ford dominated the top industries in both the US and the world. There are various reasons why these two companies are now in crisis, but here I will focus on how difficult it will be for them to recover.

First, over half of the automobiles sold recently in America have been SUVs. These vehicles guzzle gasoline and pollute the environment horribly. Yet for several years both Ford and GM have focused on manufacturing these automobiles because they could sell them at high prices and reap huge profit margins. It will not be easy for these companies to adjust to high oil prices by converting their manufacturing facilities to produce less expensive cars yielding much thinner profit margins. If oil prices continue to remain high, consumers will continue to turn away in increasing numbers from SUVs, leaving GM and Ford the last players in a rapidly shrinking market.

Last year 77% of US consumption was financed by borrowing as spendthrift Americans mortgaged their homes to pay for consumer goods and services. Both the Federal Reserve and Freddie Mac say that nearly one-third of American consumption has been financed by such borrowing over the past decade.

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High energy costs are affecting not only the inefficient auto and airline industries, but also have begun having an impact even on moderately efficient rail and large-scale distribution systems. As the brief (150 year) period that depended heavily on abundance of cheap fossil fuel ends, many aspects of our economy and our very lives inevitably will be affected by high and rising energy costs.

As is clear from looking at GM and Ford, the most important objective of private industry in the US is maximization of profit, immediate profit, for stockholders and for executives charged with achieving that objective. This is the ideology of America's capitalist diehards. When costs rise, the first steps taken by US capitalists is to reduce expenses by cutting wages and benefits, and to transfer the costs to consumers through higher prices while, of course, shirking their own share of society's tax burden off on those same workers and consumers.

The crisis facing the American auto industry - alongside war and prison, the very symbol of the United States - has profound significance for Japanese, both as workers and consumers of corporations addicted to the shaky US market and as subjects of an oligarchy whose only policies seem to be meekly obeying American commands and blindly aping American ways.

Elsewhere, Vietnam is considering cutting crude oil and coal exports, while Thailand is looking to build more hydropower and coal fuelled power plants to reduce their dependence on diesel.

An oil pipeline between Kazakhstan and China is now open - the first pipeline to export Kazakh oil that does not go via Russia.

Kazakhstan and China have inaugurated a 1,000km-long (620-mile) oil pipeline to supply Kazakh oil to energy-hungry western China. It will eventually export oil to feed China's booming economy from huge reserves around the Caspian Sea.

Kazakhstan wants to become one of the world's top oil exporters in the next decade or two.

Construction began last year on the pipeline from Atasu in central Kazakhstan to Alashankou on the Chinese border. It should be fully operational by the middle of next year, providing a new source of oil for China to develop its western Xinjiang region.

Eventually another pipeline will link up with this one from the Caspian region in west Kazakhstan, where the huge new Kashagan oilfield is being developed.

With the help of Western oil companies, Kazakhstan has doubled its production to more than a million barrels a day since the collapse of the Soviet Union. That puts it among the world's top 20 oil producers now, but Kazakhstan has ambitions to triple this amount in the next decade or two.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has warned of an energy crisis in Africa and urged other governments to prioritise the use of renewable energy.

The WorldWatch Institute's magazine for January is devoted to the subject of Peak Oil.

Although no one knows for sure when oil production will "peak," nearly everyone in the January/February issue of World Watch magazine's Peak Oil Forum agrees that the age of oil will end—and the time to start transitioning to alternatives is now. While industry representatives such as Red Cavaney of the American Petroleum Institute argue that failure to develop "the potentially vast oil and natural gas resources that remain in the world" will have a high economic cost, others, such as Worldwatch Institute's Christopher Flavin, argue that "the current path—continually expanding our use of oil on the assumption that the Earth will yield whatever quantity we need—is irresponsible and reckless."

A lack of transparency in the world oil market makes assessing oil reserves a guessing game, with figures in official oil reports often based as much on politics as geology: nearly three-quarters of the world's oil is controlled by state-owned companies, whose reserve figures are never audited. "We know that oil production will peak within our lifetime, we are pretty sure that market prices will not anticipate this peak, and we know that not having alternatives in place at the time of the peak will have tremendous economic and social consequences," says Robert K. Kaufmann, an energy economist at Boston University. "Doing too little now in the name of economic efficiency will appear in hindsight as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."

While some proponents of "peak oil" like to proffer doomsday scenarios, the Peak Oil Forum participants highlight the opportunity to engage human ingenuity as one resource that won't peak. "Unless we believe, preposterously, that human inventiveness and adaptability will cease the year the world reaches the peak annual output of conventional crude oil, we should see that milestone…as a challenging opportunity rather than as a reason for cult-like worries," says Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba.

While we will never wake up to the headline, "World Runs Out of Oil," says Kaufmann, before production declines to very low levels, the peak will mark a point of no return that will affect every aspect of modern life. "As oil becomes dearer," writes Smil, "we will use it more selectively and more efficiently, and we will intensify a shift that has already begun." Says Flavin: "Roughly $30 billion was invested in advanced biofuels, giant wind farms, solar manufacturing plants, and other technologies in 2004, attracting companies such as General Electric and Shell to the fasting growing segment of the global energy business."

RealClimate has a post on "Understanding Methane Hydrates" (also explained in a less densely technical way at WorldChanging).

As bad as the more obvious effects of global warming may be (e.g., drought, rising sea levels, and the like), the less-well-known effects are the ones that could prove the most worrisome in the long run. Take frozen methane, for example. We've discussed the role of methane in climate change before -- it's 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2, but cycles out of the atmosphere far more quickly. The major risk from methane comes from large amounts being released in a relatively short period. Such large amounts exist frozen beneath the Siberian permafrost and deep in the oceans.

RealClimate explores in some detail today just how the frozen methane could melt, and what the result could be if it does so. The situation, as RealClimate sees it, could be disastrous, but there's still a great deal more research that needs to be done.

WorldChanging also has a post on "Regulations and Business Strategy" which looks at the benefit to business of cutting their carbon emissions.

Do motivations matter? Last week's BusinessWeek looks at the growing trend of large companies moving to cut their carbon footprints, not out of any concern for the environment or the planet's future, but out of fear of being caught flat-footed by regulations that they see as inevitable. Financial analysts and (in particular) insurers drive this, making it clear to corporate leaders that the more they work now to cut down on greenhouse emissions, the better off they'll be when governments begin to act.

We've covered this trend before, but it's clearly accelerating. And what's especially interesting is that some of the early-moving companies are beginning to find out that -- much as we've long contended -- working to reduce their carbon footprint doesn't hurt their bottom-line, but instead improves it.

TreeHugger has some interesing posts on BMW developing a Steam/Gas Hybrid Engine and Smart Power Strips (which I'm sure Odo will appreciate).

The BBC reports that 2005 was warmest ever year in northern hemisphere.

While traffic is trending down as the holiday season approaches (and my posting frequency and depth drops) the logs have had plenty of interesting visitors this week - lots of them are regulars I've commented on previously but I was pleased to see that the US House of Representatives is interested in efficient LED lightbulbs (hopefully they'll set a good example to us all for a change) while someone at the US Senate's Seargeant At Arms is curious about the link between Senator Inhofe and peak oil (I don't think he's known for talking about the subject, but maybe he has a conspiracy theory he can trot out in front of a committee one day helped along by a compliant fiction author). Plus the Federal Reserve Board seems to have become semi-regular lately (possibly because I've speculated about M3 a few times but maybe its just another lunch break peak oil blog watcher)...

WorldChanging has a look at the scenario planning work being done on "Peak Oil in Ireland" by FEASTA and Vivid Logic. I like the closing phrase on the "dark eschatology" of most peak oil conversation (one to add to the apocaphilia and terriblisma canon).

I can think of few better topics for scenario-based analysis than peak oil. The mechanism (decline of petroleum production levels) is straightforward, but the timeline is highly uncertain; plausible results range from disastrous to transformative, with little chance that just ignoring the problem is the best path; it's arguably quite sensitive to technological development; and its impact will be felt at both the micro level of individual households and the macro level of global politics.

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Energy Scenarios Ireland is compelling, detailed and -- like every scenario project -- wrong. As the ESI site notes, no government will be as aggressively interventionist as the Enlightened Transition scenario, nor as hands-off as the Localisation scenario. Moreover, these scenarios make some assumptions that many of us, myself included, would disagree with, including global warming having little impact other than stormier weather through 2050, and no radical leaps in technologies related to energy, manufacturing or agriculture. Of course, given the level of uncertainty in those issues, they'd have to have their own scenario workshops.

But the goal of scenario projects is not to predict the future, it's to give the present-day a way to analyze decisions. What strategies would be robust across more than one scenario? What would make the bad scenarios worse, and what could we do now to soften their blow? The truism of scenario planning is that none of the worlds will be completely accurate, but the real future will contain recognizable elements of them all. In the case of the Energy Scenarios for Ireland, the underlying purpose is even simpler: to catalyze public discussion of the issue of peak oil. FEASTA and Vivid Logic aren't declaring to the Irish public "this is what will happen," they're saying "here are some examples of what might happen, what can we do about it?"

I think this is a tremendously useful strategy for introducing the peak oil concept to a larger audience. As I've expressed before, the apocaphile tendency among some peak oilers tends to shut off discussion by declaring that we're doomed, and that's final. Instead, an approach that says "here is a range of outcomes, and they're heavily dependent upon our choices" is both more accurate and more attractive. I strongly encourage people involved in the peak oil debate undertake their own scenario workshops; information about how the process works can be found here.

The Energy Scenarios Ireland project is still a work-in-progress, and will be worth returning to in the weeks and months to come. This is a discussion that will become more heated as we get closer to the peak, and projects like ESI will help us focus on solutions. I applaud efforts to bring illumination and choice to a debate that is far too often a kind of dark eschatology.

Wired reports on the latest scramble for subsidies and the investment funds of the scientifically illiterate.

Move over, Ben Franklin. Todd Livingstone has a plan to solve the energy crisis by capturing huge amounts of energy from lightning.

The idea itself is not new. But Livingstone, an inventor and electronics technician from Boston -- the town where Benjamin Franklin was born 300 years ago next month -- has added a unique twist. Using lasers to capture lightning bolts, he wants to channel them through a large tank of water, producing near-limitless amounts of hydrogen.

Multiple cloud-to-ground and cloud-to-cloud lightning strikes streak the sky during a nighttime thunderstorm. Todd Livingstone's small-scale prototype uses a Leiden jar and a Van de Graaff generator to demonstrate how he proposes to use lightning to produce hydrogen.

The implications, says Livingstone, are "mind-boggling." Put up a network of lasers in a lightning-prone area like Florida, he says, convert that energy into hydrogen, "and we could create more energy than the world needs."

Livingstone has a small-scale prototype of the system and a patent application on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He's busy negotiating with potential investors.

There's only one problem. His system, according to knowledgeable scientists, probably won't work any time soon. So far, at least, lasers can't capture lightning.

Livingstone isn't the only person with a scheme to save the world through hydrogen. The last two years has seen a boom in hydrogen investment. In 2003, President Bush announced that the federal government would invest $1.2 billion into hydrogen over the next five years. General Motors has said it is spending at least a billion dollars on hydrogen and fuel-cell technologies, and companies like BP, Chevron and Shell are also making significant investments.

All that money has spawned a gold rush of inventors, all seeking the mother lode of cheap hydrogen. There's plenty of fool's gold in the dash for the moolah, and marvelous hydrogen inventions are shaping up as the perpetual-motion machines of a new age.

"Eighty percent or more of the ideas that come directly to us violate the laws of physics," says Patrick Serfass, a spokesman for the National Hydrogen Association.

Grist has some links to a couple of interesting posts at Daily Kos.

Check out the collective efforts by Kossacks to develop "A Blueprint for U.S. Energy Security." They're on their fourth draft, and it's really shaping up into an impressive piece of work. I would quibble with a few details, and with the excessive focus on command-and-control regulation, but my one broad criticism is that they've ended up with a kind of melting pot of every single progressive energy idea on the planet.

As an exercise in visualization and planning, it's great, but if this is going to be picked up as an actual proposal, it's in dire need of some editing. Some tough choices need to be made. There's no way, in today's political climate -- or any I can foresee -- that this country is going to be able to process 20 major pieces of legislation all at once. Especially since for each one there's going to be a major lobbying push against it by entrenched powers.

Grist also takes a look at the revival of the nuclear power industry.

Most of us know what torture it is to be a wallflower, so it's hard not to feel at least a slight frisson of sympathy for the nuclear industry. Once considered "most likely to succeed," this promising power source found itself stumbling in the 1970s. It was bad enough after Three Mile Island in 1979 -- particularly when Jane Fonda got to work in The China Syndrome. But this wallflower status was taken to an altogether different level in 1986, in the wake of an event whose ongoing repercussions will provide some of next year's great news hooks.

After Chernobyl, nuclear folk worldwide found themselves not just wallflowers, but actively disinvited wherever people came together to dance around the subject of sustainable energy. It was rather like Cinderella's coach and horses turning back into something a lot more mundane. And when the ill-fated Chernobyl site was shut down for good in 2000, some critics hailed the closure as the beginning of the industry's end.

Was it? Hardly -- and not just because of the high-level waste that will undoubtedly outlive our civilization by several hundred thousand years. In fact, this industry that was once consigned to the corner seems set to become the belle of the business world's ball.

The sheer horror of the statistics that will no doubt be rolled out in 2006 would give even a nuclear engineer pause. Take thyroid cancer, normally a rare disease, with just one in a million children falling victim; a third of children who were younger than four when exposed in the main Chernobyl fallout zone are thought likely to develop the disease. In Belarus -- where 60 to 70 percent of the fallout landed, contaminating some 25 percent of the country's farmland and forest -- nearly 1,000 children have come down with thyroid cancer, compared to seven in the 10 years before the accident.

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Ultimately, the swing factor in determining our energy future may not be the Lovelocks or the anti-nuclear activists of this world, but China. If Hollywood ever makes China Syndrome 2, it's conceivable that the story line would be about Chinese engineers helping to save the planet from melting down. While Western power producers continue to favor slight tweaks on conventional large-scale reactor designs -- and as a result will likely keep trying to shoehorn their big-footprint feet into environmentally constrained shoes -- China is different. With a fast-growing appetite for energy and a serious dislike of the idea of being in thrall to anyone else for access to said energy, China is beginning to develop a taste for a very different form of nuclear technology.

Get ready to hear a lot more about "pebble-bed modular reactor" designs, either as a stepping stone or as an ultimate destination. First developed in Germany, the technology is winning growing support in countries like South Africa and France. These reactors are, among other things, a fifth the size of conventional reactors, much less capital-intensive, and much less prone to meltdowns. For countries that fear overdependence on the West, they also have the added advantage that they don't need Western-style fuels or refueling services. In short, they have all the makings of a potential Cinderella story.

Richard Rainwater's tale in Fortune is probably the most entertaining of the day - even billionaires can get a bad case of peak oil fear. Of course, its a bit easier to insulate yourself from some of the prospective problems if you can afford a fully fledged self sufficient rural retreat (and presumably some people to guard it if your worst nightmares are realised). Anyway - if this wasn't just a way of pumping up the oil price then good on him for taking the risk of looking a bit nutty.

Richard Rainwater made billions by knowing how to profit from a crisis. Now he foresees the biggest one yet.

Richard Rainwater doesn't want to sound like a kook. But he's about as worried as a happily married guy with more than $2 billion and a home in Pebble Beach can get. Americans are "in the kind of trouble people shouldn't find themselves in," he says. He's just wary about being the one to sound the alarm.

Rainwater is something of a behind-the-scenes type—at least as far as alpha-male billionaires go. He counts President Bush as a personal friend but dislikes politics, and frankly, when he gets worked up, he says some pretty far-out things that could easily be taken out of context. Such as: An economic tsunami is about to hit the global economy as the world runs out of oil. Or a coalition of communist and Islamic states may decide to stop selling their precious crude to Americans any day now. Or food shortages may soon hit the U.S. Or he read on a blog last night that there's this one gargantuan chunk of ice sitting on a precipice in Antarctica that, if it falls off, will raise sea levels worldwide by two feet—and it's getting closer to the edge.... And then he'll interrupt himself: "Look, I'm not predicting anything," he'll say. "That's when you get a little kooky-sounding."

Bill McKibben reports on "Why the Montreal climate summit was too painful to watch".

I've been to climate meetings in locales that stretch from Kyoto to The Hague, Mexico City to the Maldives. It would have been awfully easy to get in the old hybrid and drive two hours north to Montreal for the big climate-change confab that wrapped up this weekend -- if nothing else, it's a city I love deeply. But I couldn't bring myself to do it in the end. I knew it was going to be too painful to watch.

Too painful because, as it has since the issue first emerged, the United States was the one blocking progress. Thirteen long years ago, in 1992, as he was setting out for the Rio de Janeiro summit that launched the international negotiations on global warming, the first President Bush announced that he might be willing to talk about such things, but "the American way of life is not up for negotiation." That was tragedy; by now it's descended into farce.

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these are the years when we desperately need to be making progress. Eventually even we will have no choice but to start doing something about climate change. But each new issue of Science and Nature makes it clear that the important time is now -- that the climatic tipping point is nearer than we thought. More to the point, each passing year brings China and India further along their development path, using precisely the same raw material -- coal -- that we used to build our wealth. Five years ago, with incredible effort and investment, we might have nudged that trajectory in a very different direction; but last year, China added 65 gigawatts to its electric grid, twice as much as all of New England. And as that happens, the U.S. and China become each other's perfect excuse for inaction. "We won't do anything until China does." "How can we be expected to do anything if the U.S. won't even act?" Carbon dependent and co-dependent.

I guess the short version of the article is (excuse my language) "we're all fucked".

In more positive news, Grist also has a piece on energy efficiency in New York City.

With demand for electricity steadily increasing but no room for new power plants, New York City is making pioneering strides in energy efficiency; even famously eco-conscious burgs like Seattle and Portland are taking notice. New York has switched over more than 11,000 traffic lights and walk signals to light-emitting diodes that use 90 percent less energy than conventional fixtures. It's replaced more than 180,000 energy-hogging refrigerators in public housing with much more efficient models.

The city is now legally required to purchase only the most energy-efficient cars, air conditioners, and copy machines; soon, computers will join the list. And Gotham's got one of the biggest fleets of hybrid busses in the country, as well as some of the first hybrid taxis. "Eventually what happens here starts to happen around the country," says the Natural Resources Defense Council's Ashok Gupta. "The market that New Yorkers provide is clearly an important factor in moving the rest of the country."

Joel Makower at WorldChanging has a column that talks about something that I like to point out occasionally - the driving force behind our adoption of efforts to mitigate global warming may be the insurance industry - once they start passing on the costs of this problem to people and companies, the need to abandon fossil fuel consumption will become apparent to us all (and eventually to our benighted governments).

If government policies won't lead to aggressive action on climate change, maybe the insurance industry will.

It seems to have gone largely unreported in the U.S., but in the past week, two developments have shaken the largely staid world of insurance. On Tuesday, preliminary estimates released by the Munich Re Foundation at the international climate conference in Montreal found that world has suffered more than $200 billion in weather-related economic losses over the past year, making 2005 the costliest year on record.

Just days before, 20 leading U.S. investors urged 30 of the largest publicly-held insurance companies in North America to disclose their financial exposure from climate change and steps they are taking to reduce those financial impacts. The group cited the enormous risks that insurance companies face from escalating losses caused by extreme weather events and the financial risks and opportunities associated with climate change.

The recent talks in Montreal on the follow on treaty to replace Kyoto enabled our Environment Minister - Senator Campbell, who has recently shown some signs of understanding the problem - to indulge in some stupid politicking (although he did come up with a colourful quote, predicting the "heat death" of the world if we don't do something). While I understand the government's problem - we have a large current account deficit and coal is a major export earner for us (and I imagine coal mining companies are welcome donors to Liberal party coffers), it seems that sticking our heads in the sand and chanting "clean coal will save us" is a pretty pathetic way of remaining in denial, as well as being likely to cost us in the long run - both in terms of becoming a pariah amongst developed nations and lagging behind the rest of the world in adopting clean technologies, which means we'll be paying for technology from overseas instead of giving local industry a chance to develop. There's nothing I detest more than deliberately shortsighted people - although his bizarre attempt to paint wind as "old technology" and coal as "new technology" must deserve some sort of prize for newspeak.

The world would be condemned to a "hot death" if it did not pursue so-called clean coal technologies and attempts to tackle global warming should not come at the expense of economic growth, according to federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell. He also said there was no real upside into pumping more money into old technologies such as wind turbines.

Senator Campbell yesterday welcomed a decision by the 157 countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change to begin a new round of negotiations to cut greenhouse gas emissions. However, he did not budge from Australia's decision to continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels, such as coal.

"Coal and fossil fuels will still be a part of the future needs of the world in 80 years' time," Senator Campbell told The Age en route to Australia from the climate change negotiations in Montreal.

"You have to do renewables … but if you don't focus on cleaning up fossil fuels you are condemning the world to a hot death," Senator Campbell said. He said evidence that burning fossil fuels was changing the world's climate was becoming "irrefutable" but "the fact is we want strong economic growth … people want secure jobs".

Australia and the US have refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, pushing instead for voluntary agreements. Last week Senator Campbell claimed Kyoto was almost buried and that other countries were realising Australia was right not to join.

However, nearly every industrialised nation agreed on Saturday to engage in talks aimed at producing a new set of binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions that would take effect from 2012.

MOF has a post on the talks called "Emissions Accomplished" which notes our ingloroius spin attempts and has a brief quote from Bill Clinton showing Senator Campbell how it should be done.

International climate talks in Montreal: U.S. Delegation Walks Out. The U.S. and Australia are blocking any Kyoto successor. A decent press roundup with a debug of the Australian spin is in this WaPo World Opinion.

Flying in an ex U.S. president on short notice was a bit of a stunt, but of course it didn´t change anything:

"I think it's crazy for us to play games with our children's future," Mr. Clinton said. "We know what's happening to the climate, we have a highly predictable set of consequences if we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we know we have an alternative that will lead us to greater prosperity."

But maybe this gave a realistic impression:

The National Environmental Trust distributed custom-printed noise-making rubber whoopee cushions printed with a caricature of President Bush and the words "Emissions Accomplished."

Grist has a couple of interesting posts on the topic - "As the World Spurns - U.S. attacked on three fronts for obstructing climate action" and "Let's Take This Slow on the Road - Campaign by right-wing U.S. group aims to derail E.U. climate policy" which looks at a campaign to try and white-ant the effort to do the only thing which may work in the long run - enforceable caps on emissions which get reduced over time rather than wishful thinking and hot-air communiques.

American lobbyist Chris Horner is trying to convince major European companies to join a campaign against the Kyoto Protocol and any future such strategies to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases -- but he's not making much headway. Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the right-wing Washington think tank known for arguing against the scientific consensus on global warming -- and getting lots of funding from ExxonMobil. He's been talking to Ford Europe, German mega-utility RWE, and other E.U. firms in hopes of forming a coalition of companies, journalists, academics, and others to promote opposition to greenhouse-gas emissions caps -- similar to an industry-backed anti-Kyoto effort in the U.S. during the late 1990s. "I don't know why it's surprising [I have lobbied European companies]," he told the Independent. "What is surprising to me is why it's not working." Both Ford Europe and RWE say they don't back Horner's plan.

Elsewhere the BBC reports that the Inuit are sueing the US over their climate policy (and its resultant effects on the Inuit and other arctic inhabitants, with arctic ice rapidly disappearing).

TreeHugger has a report than Leonardo DiCaprio's latest project is a Global Warming film called "11th Hour".

Leonardo DiCaprio is teaming up with Tree Media Group to produce a documentary about global environmental issues. TMG is a production company formed with the mission to use media to support and sustain civil society. The feature length film, 11th Hour focuses on global warming and solutions to the climate change crisis. The movie is set to be released in Fall of '06.

WorldChanging has an interesting post called "Energy Efficiency and Intensity", which notes some positive trends in US carbon emission. For some reason the cynic in me wonders how much of this is attributable to US heavy industry and manufacturing moving offshore and the local economy becoming more dependent on service industry jobs. Home loan flipping is probably a bit less energy intensive than making cars.

Carbon dioxide output from the United States will peak and then begin to fall in just a few years, according to the numbers derived by John Whitehead at the Environmental Economics blog. The reason is that carbon intensity -- the amount of carbon produced per dollar of GDP -- is dropping at a rate faster than GDP is growing. At the current pace of intensity reduction, CO2 output in the US will peak in 2008, and begin a gradual decline thereafter. (We previously discussed carbon intensity here.)

This is good news for a number of reasons, not least that it suggests that the current biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect could, with a bit more effort, achieve a far more dramatic reduction in CO2. How to do this is a mainstay of discussion at WorldChanging; here's a look at some of the numbers underlying these options. CO2 intensity is a function of two components: the energy required per dollar equivalent of GDP (or use efficiency of energy); and the CO2 output per MW equivalent of energy (or carbon efficiency of energy). By taking a closer look at the data, we can see which one has mattered more -- and which could stand some improvement.

WorldChanging also has a post up on Google Transit, which makes life easier for people trying to work out how to get around (in Oregon anyway - hopefully this one quickly spreads to attain worldwide coverage).

One of the biggest obstacles to people using public transportation is learning how the system works--where to go, when to go, etc. Any transit agency worth its salt has trip-planning tools available online, but they generally suffer from poor-to-horrible interfaces, due to lack of development money. This keeps riders away due to confusion. Even if a good system exists in one city, it is always different from that of another city, and newcomers won't know where to find it. Having transit trip-planning data readable and presentable by a clean, easy-to-understand, universal tool will make a big difference. It looks like that's starting to happen.

Google now does public transit. At least, it does for Portland, Oregon.

For those who can't get used to the idea of public transport (or don't have access to any) TreeHugger has a spot on the new Camry hybrid that Toyota will be releasing shortly. TreeHugger also has a post on "Flexible, Ultra-Thin Solar Panels for Hybrids" which would help improve hybrid mileage even further.

One peak oil related note - the Narcosphere (which isn't the most mainstream of sources, though Google Alerts is happy enough to report its output) has pointed out that Latin America's oil production is past its peak (although this data is from the ASPO and doesn't include Venezuelan heavy oil).

Latin America’s production of conventional oil reached its peak during the last decade and is now in a process of inexorable decline, according to data released by ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas.

Considering all of Latin America, ASPO’s data points out that the region reached its oil production peak in 1998, while the peak of oil discovery came in 1977. Normally, any oil producing region, be it a single field or an entire continent, reaches its peak production rate some time after discoveries reach their maximum. ASPO’s data is consistent with that methodology.

While the data relies on public sources and is subject to rounding, ASPO claims that its compilation is a useful tool to determine the general oil production trend. Latin America’s oil deposits are depleting at a rate of 3.3% per annum, according to the data.

Taken together, Latin American countries produce approximately 7.5 million barrels of oil per day. ASPO estimates that the region held 192 billion barrels before exploration began, of which 110 billion have been extracted so far.

The leading producer, Mexico, produced in 2004 about 3.5 million barrels per day and had an annual depletion rate of 5.0%. Venezuela produced about 2 million barrels per day with an annual depletion rate of 3.2%

Earlier this year various publications, including the Mexican daily La Jornada, reported that Mexico’s biggest oil field, the supergiant Cantarell in Campeche Sound, had reached its production peak.

And to close, I may as well mention this weekend's ugly events from Sydney's southern beaches. Crikey's Stephen Feneley wonders if our new anti-terror laws will be invoked against those responsible (the rioters, not the tabloids and talk show hosts):

It seems those anti-terror laws were passed just in the nick of time. All those cosmopolitan elites who said we didn't need laws against the incitement of racial violence should be hanging their heads in shame over their skinny decaf lattes today in the wake of the outbreak of Skip-on-Leb violence on Sydney's beaches. How shameful that anyone could have questioned the Attorney General's determination to rush these laws through Parliament.

The awful violence at Cronulla and Maroubra was proof of the threat posed to our democracy by evil forces (in this case pissed white Cronulla home-boys) determined to stir up hatred against people for no other reason than their suspected ethnicity or religion. No doubt federal authorities – armed with the new anti-terror laws and with the full backing of Mr Ruddock – will move swiftly to track down and prosecute the malevolent ringleaders responsible for sending those text messages that drew the rioting yobs to the beach yesterday afternoons.

I am joking of course. It's unlikely Ruddock would want the laws used in this case, although it might have been different had those text messages originated from a mobile belonging to someone of middle-eastern appearance. Even though the anti-incitement provisions of the legislation are ideally suited for this event, it's a safe bet no one in the Government ever thought a situation would arise where the wrong-doers would fit the profile of Howard battlers.

Before Paul Sheahan of the Sydney Morning Herald accuses me of turning a blind eye to the behaviour of people he refers to as Lebanese gangstas, I am not excusing violence perpetrated by anyone. The people who beat up on the lifeguards at Cronulla on the previous weekend should be caught and prosecuted.

However there seems little doubt that the incitement of yesterday's violence was the the work of people who regard themselves as true blue Aussies. This kind of white-bread fundamentalism wasn't in the Ruddock/Howard script when they whipped up hysteria about the threat lurking within our midst in order to justify their stupid and contemptible laws.

Dark clouds ahead ?