Richard Branson is a master of creating publicity (usually involving some form of adventuring and/or a lot of scantily clad women). It is pleasing to see him using his talents for good, with his announcement that he will invest US$3 billion in renewable energy technology.

Sir Richard Branson is to invest $3bn (£1.6bn) to fight global warming.

The Virgin boss said he would commit all profits from his travel firms, such as airline Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains, over the next 10 years. "We must rapidly wean ourselves off our dependence on coal and fossil fuels," Sir Richard said.

The funds will be invested in schemes to develop new renewable energy technologies, through an investment unit called Virgin Fuels.

One of the UK's best known entrepreneurs, Sir Richard made the announcement in New York on the second day of the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual conference hosted by former US President Bill Clinton. Sir Richard, 56, said that transport and energy companies "must be at the forefront of developing environmentally friendly business strategies".

Dave Roberts attributes Branson's commitment to some moral leadership from Al Gore (and points to a video of Gore and Branson discussing the issue).

It's called moral leadership. Maybe you remember it from last century.

Sir Richard said his new commitment grew out of a visit to his London home a few months ago by former Vice President Al Gore ...

"You are in a position maybe to make a difference," Sir Richard said Mr. Gore told him. "If you can make a giant step forward other people will follow."

Crikey notes that while the Rodent refused to meet Al Gore while he was in town, Johnny is still going have to decide when to perform a policy backflip on global warming as most of the remaining stable of climate change deniers (ie. the loonier columnists in the Murdoch press) will likely be singing a different song shortly.

John Howard is a famously voracious consumer of media offerings, but as he contemplated today’s industrial relations backflip during the morning walk, his looming political crisis over climate change scepticism would have been front and centre.

The AFR’s influential Chanticleer columnist, John Durie, has been in New York all week talking to a range of people, including executives from News Corp. His lead item today again reiterated the huge backflip that Rupert has made in response to the carbon neutral policies pursued by his son James at BskyB and the presence of Al Gore at his recent Pebble Beach management conference.

Rupert is now completely on-song with the need for urgent climate change action and when that translates to editorial posturing by his Australian newspaper stable, the PM will have a huge political problem.

If that wasn’t enough to scare the world’s most laggard leader on climate change, Richard Branson popped up on the PM’s favourite breakfast program, Radio National’s Fran Kelly, after unveiling a pledge to invest $3 billion into renewable energy in front of Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch and Al Gore in New York.

Knowing that Howard would have been listening through his earpiece at 6.40am, Branson let fly at Australia’s head-in-the-sand approach and sought to isolate the fossil fuel industries which have so captured Federal Government environment policy. Branson’s airlines are big carbon emitters, so this is a big moment in the debate.

After refusing to see Gore during his recent visit, the PM has now agreed to watch An Inconvenient Truth. Surely that will be just be the first of many backflips that will extend his green credentials well beyond a pro-uranium policy.

It seems that science (in the form of the British Royal Society) has decided to return fire in the Republican war on science, with a strong compliant being issued about corporate funding of global warming denial kooks and think tanks (not to mention the truly underhanded antics of the tobacco industry). John Quiggin at Crooked Timber reports:

The war on science driven by a combination of Republican* ideology and corporate cash has been ably documented by Chris Mooney. Now, finally, science is striking back at one of the worst corporate enemies of science, ExxonMobil. As evidence of human-caused global warming has accumulated, leading energy companies like BP have seen the need to respond, with the result that industry groups like the Global Climate Coalition have broken down, leaving ExxonMobil to carry on a rearguard action through a network of shills and front groups. Now the company is finally being exposed by a major scientific organisation.

In an apparently unprecedented move, the British Royal Society has written to Exxon, stating that of the organization listed in Exxon’s 2005 WorldWide Giving Report for ‘public information and policy research‘, 39 feature:

information on their websites that misrepresented the science on climate change, either by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge, or by conveying misleading impression of the potential impacts of climate change

I haven’t found the list of organizations noted as engaging in misrepresentation yet, but from reports I’ve read they include the International Policy Network, the George C Marshall Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Reading the Exxon list, it’s easy to identify other consistently dishonest groups like the American Enterprise Institute, the National Centre for Policy Analysis, the Pacific Research Institute and so on.

In the letter, Bob Ward of the Royal Society writes:

At our meeting in July … you indicated that ExxonMobil would not be providing any further funding to these organisations. I would be grateful if you could let me know when ExxonMobil plans to carry out this pledge.

With rumors swirling about that Rupert Murdoch has also seen the light on this issue, some professional denialists could find themselves out of work before long.

The unequivocal tone of the letter leaves no room for ambiguity here. Either the Royal Society (along with the dozens of scientific organisations cited in the letter) is lying about Exxon, or Exxon and its front groups are lying about science.

Grist has an article from Bill McKibben on Bush's (long delayed) climate plan. Al Gore seems to have succeeded in making this a center stage issue for the coming elections.

After almost two decades of inaction, at long last America seems ready to start considering some kind of action to address global warming. With states setting conflicting standards, with the scientists announcing weekly updates on the speed and size of the approaching cataclysm, with shareholder activism starting to push business, and with green stirrings even from the evangelical wing of American Christianity, the time when the fossil-fuel lobby could get away with total obstruction may be passing.

Not too quickly, mind you -- yesterday's announcement from the White House that their new climate plan consists of a few billion dollars in odds and ends, mostly to help build a few reactors, was about as tiny a sop as one could imagine. Pressed for a moon-shot-style program to lift us toward renewable energy, the president offered a cherry bomb in a tin can.

His announcement was apparently designed to undercut Bill Clinton's call for international action on global warming this week. And it came a few days after Al Gore's truly landmark speech -- the missing reel from the end of An Inconvenient Truth -- in which he became the first major American politician to call explicitly for stringent carbon taxes. His plan to replace the payroll tax with a levy on fossil fuel might even make political sense.

But for the moment, it serves as a kind of starter pistol for the congressional battle. If the Democrats manage to pick up one or both houses of Congress in November's election, there will be a real chance to actually pass a law. That's an opportunity. And that's also an enormous danger, because if we lock into the wrong plan now, it may be years before we revisit the issue again. And years are what we don't have.

The temptation will be to simply pass something -- most likely some version of the McCain-Lieberman bill introduced years ago. But that bill was pretty feeble when it arrived (appreciated, but feeble), and the passage of time has made it clear that you might just as well pass a law mandating anti-global warming bumper stickers. Compared with what we've learned in the last three years about the speed of melting ice caps and glaciers, about the surge in monster storms, about the release of methane from the permafrost -- compared with all that, McCain-Lieberman isn't even lipstick on a pig. It's like nail polish on Godzilla. Clear nail polish.

By contrast, the legislation introduced by Henry Waxman in the House and Jim Jeffords in the Senate at least has targets with the right number of digits. It talks about 80 percent carbon reductions from 1990 levels by 2050, and about 20 percent renewables by 2020. It's not enough to meet the real-world minimum set out by NASA's Jim Hansen (that we reverse carbon increases worldwide in a decade), but its numbers might shock the system enough to give us a fighting chance.

Crikey has also wondered if this abrupt about face in climate policy was due to the inconvenient Gore juggernaut.

Rumours are swirling that an announcement from the Bush administration signalling a profound departure from past climate policy may be days away.

Will it be enough to send fossil fuel lobbyists in DC scrambling to update their résumés? Speculation ranges from the sort of middling policy that will succeed only in annoying just about everybody, to a radical program of emissions reduction that would draw a cautious smile from the sulkiest environmentalists and simultaneous howls of betrayal from conservatives. Time will tell.

It’s difficult to imagine a genuine conversion – if there’s an epiphany to be had, it will be a political rather than an environmental one. The governator’s siding with the Democrats on a bill to slash California’s emissions hasn’t helped matters – there’ll be no Christmas card from the misunderestimated Texan this year, unless it reads something like, "Hey Arnold – you sucked in Junior! How much you sellin’ that Humvee for?"

So is the policy shift a knee-jerk response to the inconvenient Gore juggernaut? No doubt the film has hit a chord of concern amongst a surprising proportion of the public, but there is bound to be renewed speculation about those scrupulously structured answers from Mr Gore to questions concerning his plans. Two years ago climate change would have seemed an unwise platform for a run at the presidency. Will this still be the case two years hence? Maybe it all hinges on the next hurricane season.

James Lovelock hasn't resiled from his prophecies of doom due to climate chaos - from this point of view the antics of Bush and Howard are pretty much irrelevant at this point (though personally I prefer to think the serious action can avert a major problem, particularly if we get a break from the sun).

As we've noted in the past, James Lovelock, the environmental scientist who discovered that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, and who proposed the Gaia Hypothesis that views terrestrial systems as a sort of self-regulating superorganism, sees a global warming apocalypse coming our way, and quickly. WaPo (via Billmon):

"It's going too fast," he says softly. "We will burn." [...]

"Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return." [...]

Lovelock's conclusion is straightforward.

To wit, we are poached.

He measured atmospheric gases and ocean temperatures, and examined forests tropical and arboreal (last year a forest the size of Italy burned in rapidly heating Siberia, releasing from the permafrost a vast sink of methane, which contributes to global warming). He found Gaia trapped in a vicious cycle of positive-feedback loops — from air to water, everything is getting warmer at once. The nature of Earth's biosphere is that, under pressure from industrialization, it resists such heating, and then it resists some more.

Then, he says, it adjusts.

Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean.

"There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover." [...]

Lovelock's radical view of global warming doesn't sit well with David Archer, a scientist at the University of Chicago and a frequent contributor to the Web site RealClimate, which accepts the reality of global warning.

"No one, not Lovelock or anyone else, has proposed a specific quantitative scenario for a climate-driven, blow the doors off, civilization ending catastrophe," writes Archer. [...]

What's perhaps as intriguing are the top scientists who decline to dismiss Lovelock's warning. Lovelock may be an outlier, but he's not drifting far from shore. Sir David King, science adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair, saluted Lovelock's book and proclaimed global warming a far more serious threat than terrorism. Sir Brian Heap, a Cambridge University biologist and past foreign secretary of the Royal Society, says Lovelock's views are tightly argued, if perhaps too gloomy. [...]

"I'm an optimist," [Lovelock] says. "I think that after the warming sets in and the survivors have settled in near the Arctic, they will find a way to adjust. It will be a tough life enlivened by excitement and fear." [...]

Lovelock was a prodigy, earning degrees in chemistry and medicine. In the 1950s he designed an electron capture machine, which provided environmentalist Rachel Carson with the data to prove that pesticides infected everything from penguins to mother's milk. Later he took a detector on a ship to Antarctica and proved that man-made chemicals — CFCs — were burning a hole in the ozone. [...]

[Says Paul Ehrlich,] "If Lovelock hadn't discovered the erosion of the ozone, we'd all be living under the ocean in snorkels and fins to escape that poisonous sun." [...]

How will our splendid Spaceship Earth so quickly become the oven of our doom? As we sit at his table in Devon, Lovelock expands on his vision.

It begins with the melting of ice and snow. As the Arctic grows bare — the Greenland ice cap is shrinking far faster than had been expected — dark ground emerges and absorbs heat. That melts more snow and softens peat bogs, which release methane. As oceans warm, algae are dying and so absorbing less heat-causing carbon dioxide.

To the south, drought already is drying out the great tropical forests of the Amazon. "The forests will melt away just like the snow," Lovelock says.

Even the northern forests, those dark cool beauties of pines and firs, suffer. They absorb heat and shelter bears, lynxes and wolves through harsh winters. But recent studies show the boreal forests are drying and dying and inducing more warming.

Casting 30, 40 years into the future, Lovelock sees sub-Saharan lands becoming uninhabitable. India runs out of water, Bangladesh drowns, China eyes a Siberian land grab, and local warlords fight bloody wars over water and energy. [...]

"We like to think of Hurricane Katrina, or a killer heat wave in Europe, as a one-off," he says. "Or we like to think that we'll come up with a technological fix." [...]

Today the environmentally conscious seek salvation in solar cells, recycling and ten thousand wind turbines. "It won't matter a damn," Lovelock says. "They make the mistake of thinking we have decades. We don't."

Of course, Bush and Rove would far rather that everyone be trembling in fear about the terrorist menace han worrying about global warming - so no doubt the next series of the Al Zarqawi show will be getting plenty of publicity (in spite of many poor reviews for the last series). The star of this season's show is apparently called Abu Ayyoub al-Masri. I'm not sure how rumours of the latest death of Osama Bin Laden (supposedly from French intelligence) fit into this (the right wing press is denouncing the claims, so presumably this isn't a story that Bush wishes to see propagated) - and presumably he won't be keen for people to dwell on the fact more American soldiers have died in Iraq than people died in the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq has purportedly appeared in a video as the executioner of a Turkish hostage - his first appearance since taking over the group in June - according to a statement posted with the recording on the internet.

The items were posted on Friday night just after Iraq announced that Ramadan would begin yesterday. The statement said the recording, the authenticity of which could not be independently verified, was "old", but gave no other indication about when it was made.

Abu Ayyoub al-Masri, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, assumed leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was slain in a June 7 US airstrike.

Three men masked in red and white scarves stand behind the hostage who is seated on the ground wearing a tan shirt. The one in the middle, believed to be al-Masri, reads a statement in Arabic, then the hostage, identified in Arabic subtitles as Murad Bujer from Ankara, reads a statement in Turkish.

After Bujer finishes, the militant in the middle shoots the now-blindfolded hostage three times in the head.

The scarves make it impossible to identify the three militants, however the statement accompanying the recording says the execution was performed by al-Masri.

Thom Hartmann wonders if much of the noise being made in the Republican debate about how much torture and big brother activity they will perform is just another form of distraction from George Bush's legal woes due to violating the Geneva convention (not to mention the Nuremberg principles). He also makes a link to the Karr / JonBenet Ramsay case (now released - please forgive the dubious source) - which I find interesting given my extreme cyncism about the timing of many media circuses.

On the surface, it seems the Republicans are having a debate about "wiretapping terrorists" and "harsh interrogation of prisoners." These frames about the current "rebellion" by McCain, Graham, Warner, et al, are today embraced by both the Republican Party and the mainstream media.

But the real issue is whether Republicans in Congress will trade the principles of democracy and the rule of law to keep George W. Bush and several of his colleagues out of jail, or whether they'll uphold the rule of law and American democracy while abandoning him to face the consequences of his illegal acts.

On June 29, 2006, in the Hamden Case, the US Supreme Court ruled that Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration had violated the Geneva Convention and other international treaties with regard to the treatment and prosecution of detainees in the so-called "war on terror."

The logic of the decision could subject Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and Rumsfeld - along with those down the chain of command who followed their orders - to prosecution as war criminals both in the United States and internationally. If they violated Common Article 3 and others of the Geneva Conventions, they could be subject to lengthy imprisonment in the US for violating US laws, as well as being brought before the United Nation's International Court of Justice at The Hague, the same as Slobodan Milosevic.

A hastily convened conference call by the Justice Department to discuss the ruling caused Brian Roehrkasse at the Department of Justice Public Affairs Office to comment to those on the call that "the Supreme Court's holding indicates the military commissions, as currently constituted by DOD, while robust in affording enemy combatants more process than this or any other country has ever afforded enemy combatants, are not consistent with current congressional statutes, especially the UCMJ and treaty provisions, Common Article 3."

A plain English translation would be close to: "The Supreme Court said we've broken US law, we've broken the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and we've broken the Geneva Conventions' Common Article 3."

About six weeks later, on August 17, 2006, Federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled in Detroit that George W. Bush and his administration had committed numerous felonies with regard to wiretapping American citizens without a legal warrant, including violating the FISA act (which carries a 5-year prison term as the penalty for each violation) and violating the Constitution (which carries impeachment as its penalty). Later in the day, the Department of Homeland Security facilitated the arrest in Thailand of John Mark Karr for killing JonBenet Ramsey, sweeping the story off the front page and out of the weekend news analysis shows, but the ruling is still there.

Hugo Chavez seemed to cause a bit of a stir at the UN this week, labelling Bush "The Devil" and complaining about his sulphurous stench, to the hilarity of many (though John "The Walrus" Bolton waggled his droopy mustache angrily afterwards and made all sorts of unlikely allegations about the state of democracy in Venezuela).

Amusingly, looking at today's Amazon book rankings Chomsky's tome is at #1 and #7 (with Frank Rich's "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina" coming in at #2).

BRANDISHING a copy of Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance", the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, has cemented his reputation as Washington's chief irritant with a fiery performance at the United Nations.

In a 15-minute address to the annual gathering of international leaders in New York on Wednesday, Mr Chavez said he could still "smell sulfur" left behind by the "devil", George Bush, who had addressed the chamber 24 hours before.

His speech, which veered between a rousing appeal for a better world and a florid denunciation of the United States, included the claim that the US President thought he was in a western where people shot from the hip.

Mr Chavez complained that his personal doctor and head of security had been prevented from disembarking at New York airport by US authorities. "This is another abuse and another abuse of power on the part of the devil," he said. "It smells of sulfur here, but God is with us and I embrace you all."

Many diplomats in the vaulted chamber laughed and clapped.

Mr Chavez went on to accuse the US of double standards on terrorism. "The US has already planned, financed and set in motion a coup in Venezuela, and it continues to support coup attempts in Venezuela and elsewhere," he said. "I accuse the American Government of protecting terrorists and of having a completely cynical discourse."

Coming just 12 hours after Washington's other nemesis the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had stood at the same spot and accused the US of hegemony and hypocrisy, Mr Chavez's colourful speech left senior Bush Administration officials exasperated.

Greg Palast has a long interview with Chavez up - its a bit of a puff piece but it does let him explain his policies in his own words to an English speaking audience I guess.

Q: How do you respond to Bush’s charge that you are destabilizing the region and interfering in the elections of other Latin American countries?

Chavez: Mr. Bush is an illegitimate President. In Florida, his brother Jeb deleted many black voters from the electoral registers. So this President is the result of a fraud. Not only that, he is also currently applying a dictatorship in the U.S. People can be put in jail without being charged. They tap phones without court orders. They check what books people take out of public libraries. They arrested Cindy Sheehan because of a T-shirt she was wearing demanding the return of the troops from Iraq. They abuse blacks and Latinos. And if we are going to talk about meddling in other countries, then the U.S. is the champion of meddling in other people’s affairs. They invaded Guatemala, they overthrew Salvador Allende, invaded Panama and the Dominican Republic. They were involved in the coup d’etat in Argentina thirty years ago.

Q: Is the U.S. interfering in your elections here?

Chavez: They have interfered for 200 years. They have tried to prevent us from winning the elections, they supported the coup d’etat, they gave millions of dollars to the coup plotters, they supported the media, newspapers, outlaw movements, military intervention, and espionage. But here the empire is finished, and I believe that before the end of this century, it will be finished in the rest of the world. We will see the burial of the empire of the eagle.

Q: You don’t interfere in the elections of other nations in Latin America?

Chavez: Absolutely not. I concern myself with Venezuela. However, what’s going on now is that some rightwing movements are transforming me into a pawn in the domestic politics of their countries, by making statements that are groundless. About candidates like Morales [of Bolivia], for example. They said I financed the candidacy of President Lula [of Brazil], which is totally false. They said I financed the candidacy of Kirchner [of Argentina], which is totally false. In Mexico, recently, the rightwing party has used my image for its own profit. What’s happened is that in Latin America there is a turn to the left. Latin Americans have gotten tired of the Washington consensus — a neoliberalism that has aggravated misery and poverty.

Q: You have spent millions of dollars of your nation’s oil wealth throughout Latin America. Are you really helping these other nations or are you simply buying political support for your regime?

Chavez: We are brothers and sisters. That’s one of the reasons for the wrath of the empire. You know that Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world. And the biggest gas reserves in this hemisphere, the eighth in the world. Up until seven years ago, Venezuela was a U.S. oil colony. All of our oil was going up to the north, and the gas was being used by the U.S. and not by us. Now we are diversifying. Our oil is helping the poor. We are selling to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, some Central American countries, Uruguay, Argentina.

Q: And the Bronx?

Chavez: In the Bronx it is a donation. In all the cases I just mentioned before, it is trade. However, it’s not free trade, just fair commerce. We also have an international humanitarian fund as a result of oil revenues.

Q: Why did George Bush turn down your help for New Orleans after the hurricane?

Chavez: You should ask him, but from the very beginning of the terrible disaster of Katrina, our people in the U.S., like the president of CITGO, went to New Orleans to rescue people. We were in close contact by phone with Jesse Jackson. We hired buses. We got food and water. We tried to protect them; they are our brothers and sisters. Doesn’t matter if they are African, Asian, Cuban, whatever.

Q: Are you replacing the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as “Daddy Big Bucks”?

Chavez: I do wish that the IMF and the World Bank would disappear soon.

Q: And it would be the Bank of Hugo?

Chavez: No. The International Humanitarian Bank. We are just creating an alternative way to conduct financial exchange. It is based on cooperation. For example, we send oil to Uruguay for their refinery and they are paying us with cows.

Q: Milk for oil.

Chavez: That’s right. Milk for oil. The Argentineans also pay us with cows. And they give us medical equipment to combat cancer. It’s a transfer of technology. We also exchange oil for software technology. Uruguay is one of the biggest producers of software. We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade. We believe in fair trade and exchange, not competition but cooperation. I’m not giving away oil for free. Just using oil, first to benefit our people, to relieve poverty. For a hundred years we have been one of the largest oil-producing countries in the world but with a 60 percent poverty rate and now we are canceling the historical debt.

Q: Speaking of the free market, you’ve demanded back taxes from U.S. oil companies. You have eliminated contracts for North American, British, and European oil companies. Are you trying to slice out the British and American oil companies from Venezuela?

Chavez: No, we don’t want them to go, and I don’t think they want to leave the country, either. We need each other. It’s simply that we have recovered our oil sovereignty. They didn’t pay taxes. They didn’t pay royalties. They didn’t give an account of their actions to the government. They had more land than had previously been established in the contracts. They didn’t comply with the agreed technology exchange. They polluted the environment and didn’t pay anything towards the cleanup. They now have to comply with the law.

Q: You’ve said that you imagine the price of oil rising to $100 dollars per barrel. Are you going to use your new oil wealth to squeeze the planet?

Chavez: No, no. We have no intention of squeezing anyone. Now, we have been squeezed and very hard. Five hundred years of squeezing us and stifling us, the people of the South. I do believe that demand is increasing and supply is dropping and the large reservoirs are running out. But it’s not our fault. In the future, there must be an agreement between the large consumers and the large producers.

Michael Klare has a new (and, as usual) article up, noting that there is only way way to end terrorism and instability across the middle east - taking oil out of the equation.

In his September 11 address to the nation, President Bush declared that the war against on terror is the “decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” pitting the ideals of Western civilization against a “perverted vision of Islam.” Bush is certainly correct that ideology plays a critical role in the war on terror and that this struggle cannot be won if Washington fails in the “battle of ideas” (which its abysmal record in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo is helping to ensure). But ideology is only part of the equation.

Just as significant, if far less acknowledged, is the relationship between oil and Islamic extremism. If it weren’t for our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, we wouldn’t project such a conspicuous and over-bearing presence in the Middle East—and it is this presence, more than anything else, that has generated the toxic anti-Americanism on which al-Qaida feeds. Doing better in the battle of ideas is not enough; if we ever hope to prevail in the war on terror, we must also remove oil from the strategic equation.

To fully appreciate the relationship between America’s oil dependency and contemporary Middle Eastern terrorism, it is necessary to know something about the historical trajectories of both. Prior to World War II, the United States had very little official presence in the Persian Gulf area—at that time we were self-sufficient in oil, and in any case were content to allow Great Britain to control the region. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt correctly surmised that the United States would eventually become dependent on imported oil as our domestic reserves were drained, and so he set out to establish American control over a major foreign source of supply—eventually selecting Saudi Arabia to assume this role.

On February 14, 1945, he met with King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud aboard a U.S. warship in the Suez Canal and forged an oil-for-protection arrangement under which the United States pledged to defend the Saudi royal family in return for privileged access to Saudi petroleum reserves. All else that has occurred in the Gulf, including 9/11, has followed from this fateful encounter.

To carry out the terms of the 1945 Roosevelt-Ibn Saud agreement, successive American presidents deployed an ever-larger U.S. military presence in the region and helped establish both the Saudi Royal Army and the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), responsible for internal security. The growing U.S. military presence was coupled with the growing presence of American oil companies, which helped turned Saudi Arabia into the world’s leading producer. With fields in most other parts of the world in decline—the United States reached its “peak,” or maximum sustainable output in 1971—production from the Persian Gulf became increasingly essential for the smooth operation of the global economy.

The conspicuous presence of American soldiers and oil company personnel in the Gulf area was not without its detractors, however. Many devout Muslims saw this as an unwelcome intrusion of non-believers in the Islamic heartland, and others saw it as a form of imperialism. America’s close association with Israel was also a source of irritation for many. Still, it was the British who first experienced the intractable wrath of Islamic militants: when state-controlled British Petroleum (BP) refused to cede control over its refinery at Abadan in southwestern Iran, the company’s vast Iranian assets were nationalized by Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1951 with strong support from the Muslim clergy. London responded to this perceived affront by persuading President Eisenhower to spearhead a coup against Mossadegh and to install the playboy Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, as the absolute ruler of Iran. The Shah, in turn, invited U.S. and British oil firms back into the country while suppressing the Shiite clergy, thus setting the stage for the Islamic Revolution of 1979-80 and all else that followed.

Speculation about a US invasion of Iran refuses to die, with the latest round prompted by Colonel Sam Gardiner and his musing that the US has already begun military operations (as per the Iraq invasion, where planning took place long before the "war on terror" had begun and military ops began well before the official sabre rattling reached its crescendo).

Past Peak notes that it is an error to try and apply the "Making Sense" filter when considering neocon policy towards Iran (though it might be worth considering the value of an "October Surprise" before the US elections).

Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner (via Billmon):

When I discuss the possibility of an American military strike on Iran with my European friends, they invariably point out that an armed confrontation does not make sense — that it would be unlikely to yield any of the results that American policymakers do want, and that it would be highly likely to yield results that they do not. I tell them they cannot understand U.S. policy if they insist on passing options through that filter. The "making sense" filter was not applied over the past four years for Iraq, and it is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to attack Iran.

Once again, we're confronted with a choice between two equally frightening possibilities. Either everything's going according to plan — they wanted chaos and civil war in Iraq and Iraq's eventual breakup into three easy-to-dominate statelets, and they wanted chaos in Afghanistan and, for example, the truly astonishing upsurge in heroin exports that's occurred there — or they're just completely clueless, applying the logic of the compulsive gambler: trying to recoup their losses by doubling and redoubling their bet. Either way, they're out of control, and American democracy looks like so much window dressing.

Ethan Heitner at Tom Paine says when it comes to Iran, he puts his money on war.

I made a bet with my friend over beer yesterday after work. “If the Republicans retain control of at least one house of Congress after the November elections, we will be bombing Iran within four months.” That puts us at early February. At stake is a melon shisha at our favorite shisha bar. And, you know, the assured death and suffering of innocents, the predictable backlash around the world, the continuing madness of life in Bush's America, the despair of the impotent antiwar movement, etc.

Then I biked over to Camp Democracy to hear Ray McGovern be much less optimistic. He brought up this weekend's Time magazine article that revealed a “Prepare To Deploy” order has been given to “a submarine, an Aegis-class cruiser, two minesweepers and two minehunters,” to Iran's eastern coast. McGovern thinks there are 50-50 odds on a military strike on Iran before the elections. The orders call for the naval vessels to be ready to leave port by October 1. According to McGovern, that makes the end of October prime-time for striking. “An October surprise par excellance ,” he says.

To be fair, there is another credible explanation: “Such orders may in the short term have more to do with planning to prevent possible effort by Iran to close the straits of Hormuz, in the event of sanctions,” as security and foreign policy correspondent Laura Rozen points out. An entirely less paranoid reading of Bush's current weakness and inability to engage in military action these days is expressed by Robert Dreyfuss on TomPaine.com today.

But I found Bush's speech at the U.N. yesterday less reassuring than Robert Dreyfuss did. Bush's statements directed to the Iranian people clearly show he still buys into one of the key premises of neocon plans to attack Iran—that the Iranian people would somehow support such a strike and that regime change, not nuclear disarmament is the true goal we should keep in mind:

The greatest obstacle to this future is that your rulers have chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation's resources to fund terrorism and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, Col. Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force officer who has taught strategy at the Air Force college, the Naval College and the National War College, has just published a lengthy analysis called "The End Of Summer Diplomacy" of military options against Iran and Bush's possible strategies leading up to a massive bombing run. He makes a number of excellent points, the most provocative and noteworthy being that it has already begun . News reports place American and Israeli commandos inside Iran since the summer of 2004. He points out correctly we were bombing Iraq months before we went to the United Nations asking for permission to invade.

Gardiner doesn't think that the diplomatic track that Bush has publically endorsed since at least this spring is in good faith, which is no shocker, but he makes the further point that sanctions against Iran will not weaken the regime, but will likely make it stronger, as Iranians rally around their besieged government. And this is what the war planners want:

If the experience of 1979 and other sanctions scenarios is a guide, sanctions will actually empower the conservative leadership in Iran. There is an irony here. It is a pattern that seems to be playing out in the selection of the military option. From diplomacy to sanctions, the administration is not making good-faith efforts to avert a war so much as going through the motions, eliminating other possible strategies of engagement, until the only option left on the table is the military one.

Matthew Yglesias has some rumors to pass on that should chill us even with the possibility they are being discussed: the idea of using tactical nukes in a first-strike against Iran.

Grist reports that Arnold Schwarzenegger has sold his Hummers in "I Know What You Did With That Last Hummer".

Had your doubts that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) was walking his green talk? Oh, he's walking all right -- the guv has sold his eight Hummers. It was Schwarzenegger who originally convinced then-manufacturer AM General to make a version of the hulking vehicles for the civilian market, and in 1992 he was the first person to buy one. But friends, he's a changed man. In other Greenernator news, Schwarzenegger palled around yesterday with a fellow high-profile green Republican, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. While visiting a hydrogen fuel-cell research firm in Silicon Valley, Schwarzenegger talked up California's soon-to-be-signed greenhouse-gas-cutting bill, while Bloomberg trumpeted new climate and sustainability goals for his city. Both men were eager to separate themselves from the Republican residing in the White House, but were effusive about each other: Bloomberg said he was "a fan" of Schwarzenegger, and Schwarzenegger upped the ante, saying of Bloomberg, "He's my soul mate. He's the man."

Arnie has generally been considered a friend of BHP's bid to build an LNG terminal offshore from Malibu, but this venture now appears to be doomed.

BHP Billiton faces another barrage of public comments - and more delays - in its push to build a controversial $US800 million ($1 billion) liquefied natural gas terminal off the Californian coast.

A week after Hollywood stars, led by former James Bond star Pierce Brosnan, asked Malibu residents to join them in opposing the project, authorities have put more regulatory hurdles in front of BHP.

Earlier this year, it was thought the company could receive final approval as soon as this month from California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the latest setback means a decision seems unlikely to be made this year.

New entrant into the Australian biodiesel market Axiom Energy has scored a trial with trucking company Linfox.

RENEWABLE fuel company Axiom Energy has opened its $36 million initial public offering (IPO) and entered into a trial arrangement of its biodiesel fuels with trucking company Linfox.

Axiom is offering about 51.5 million shares at 70 cents each in an attempt to raise the $36 million.

Axiom intends to use the money to fund its first project based at Toll Geelong Port, for which it has secured a 20 year lease with logistics firm Toll Holdings Ltd .

The plant could make up to 150 million litres of biodiesel a year, which could be made from renewable plant oils and animal fats, helping tap into the 15 billion litre-a-year diesel market, Axiom said.

The company said it already had a strong pre-registration response from the majority of previous applicants for its withdrawn $37.6 million IPO in 2005, which had been oversubscribed.

A spokesperson for the Fox family, which owns Linfox, said they believed the logistics industry needed to play a more active role in tackling carbon emissions, and that biodiesel would play an integral part of this.

Tima has an article on efforts to create a green revolution in Africa called "Seeds of Hope" which looks at the challenges posed by soil degradation.

Walk through countless small villages in sub-Saharan Africa, and you will find the same scene repeated again and again: women bent over double, hoeing scrawny plants in dirt packed so hard it's tough to imagine anything ever growing in it. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent over the past half-century trying to do something about the region's crushing poverty, but the situation remains desperate. Rural Africa is hollowing out, unable to feed itself, let alone supply food to the continent's rapidly growing megacities.

In this context, the Gates and Rockefeller foundations announced last week their plan to spend $150 million over the next five years to boost agricultural productivity on the continent. The initial investments will go to developing hardy seed varieties of regionally appropriate crops, creating markets for the distribution of those seeds and educating a new generation of African plant scientists. It's a back-to-basics approach that avoids gambling on shortcuts. But to be successful the new initiative--dubbed the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa--will very soon have to address two equally pressing issues: the need for widespread use of chemical fertilizers to replenish exhausted soil and some sort of system to ensure greater participation of women--who perform the bulk of the work on Africa's farms.

Action is urgently needed. More than 80% of African soil is seriously degraded, and in many areas it is on the verge of permanent failure. For centuries, farmers survived by clearing new land for each season's plantings and allowing old fields to lie fallow and replenish their nutrients. But the continent's fourfold increase in population since the 1950s has forced farmers to grow crop after crop on the same fields, draining them of all nourishment. Do that for a long enough time, and the physical nature of the soil changes. It becomes so tightly compacted that it can't hold water or let roots spread. "Eventually you get to the point where even weeds won't grow," says Gary Toenniessen, director of food security at the Rockefeller Foundation. "Just adding fertilizer back doesn't help. You actually have to replace the soil." The loss of productive land has driven farmers to clear ever more marginal areas, including forests and hillsides, for agriculture.

Fertilizer has a bad reputation among environmentalists in the West because pollution from runoff can be such a problem. But replenishing Africa's soil before it's too late--and thus decreasing the amount of land that has to be dedicated to agriculture--is probably one of the most practical ways of protecting wildlife habitats and reducing erosion. And new micro-dosing techniques, in which a capful of fertilizer is applied to the roots of a plant, minimize the flow of chemicals into rivers and streams.

Many African countries that used to subsidize fertilizers stopped under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, forcing farmers to return to subsistence practices. Today farmers in sub-Saharan Africa use about 7 lbs. of fertilizer per acre, compared with 75 lbs. in South America, 87 lbs. in North America and 91 lbs. in South Asia.

Business Week has an article on the solar resurgence in Silicon Valley (though solar stocks have suffered somewhat as the oil price has drawn back a little bit).

"We all realize that green is gold," Guardino said. "Venture capitalists are betting with their wallets that cleantech will play a significant role in Silicon Valley."

So many valley companies, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are rushing into the burgeoning solar industry that it's inviting comparisons to the early expansion of the microchip industry more than two decades ago.

"If there's anywhere in the world that can push the envelope on solar, it might very well be Silicon Valley," said Clean Edge co-founder Ron Pernick.

But the valley's rush to solar isn't without risk. The solar industry must first bring down costs significantly to persuade homeowners and businesses to install solar systems onsite rather than just buy electricity from the local utility.

The industry also faces a worldwide shortage of polysilicon created by the rapid expansion of solar. This year, for the first time, the solar industry is expected to consume more silicon than the computer chip industry.

Some valley solar startups are moving beyond silicon. Miasole of San Jose and Nanosolar Inc. of Palo Alto are developing thin-film solar cells made from alternative materials like copper and selenium. Nanosolar has raised $100 million in venture funding and plans to build what it says will be the world's largest solar-cell factory.

Solar still generates far less than 1 percent of the world's electricity supply, but it has grown by more than 40 percent annually over the past five years, according to Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

"The solar industry is the next great high-tech industry," Resch said. "Our estimate is that within 10 years solar will be the lowest cost option for electricity in the U.S."

State governments from Arizona to New Jersey are creating programs to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and expand use of carbon-free energy such as wind and solar.

California hopes to overtake Germany and Japan as the world's largest solar market with its "Million Solar Roofs" program, which provides $3 billion in rebates to consumers who install rooftop panels. The state's landmark global warming legislation, which seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent over the next 14 years, is also expected to dramatically expand the market for solar power.

Technology Review has an article on gnerating power from Not-So-Hot Geothermal sources.

A large share of the geothermal resources suitable for power generation--those with temperatures higher than 300°F--are deep underground, beyond the reach of current technology. Lower-temperature resources, which are common across the United States, are generally used for heating, but could be a bountiful source of power as well, if researchers were able to find an economical way to convert them into electricity.

Engineers at the United Technologies Research Center (UTRC), a unit of United Technologies based in East Hartford, CT, say they have developed a low-cost system that can utilize low-temperature geothermal resources. The technology could be particularly useful in generating electricity from waste hot water generated at oil and gas wells.

The UTRC power plant can be thought of as a reverse cooling system, and the new turbine is essentially a refrigerator compressor running backwards, Biederman says. Instead of using power to create a temperature difference, like a refrigerator does, it converts a temperature difference into electricity.

The company is now testing a unit at a remote hot springs resort 60 miles northeast of Fairbanks, Alaska. Biederman expects a commercial power plant to be ready by early next year, after they've tested the reliability of the demonstration system.

According to him, the system could utilize the large amount of hot water pumped out of the ground at oil and gas wells. In Texas alone, more than 12 billon barrels of water are produced from wells. Oil companies usually discard the waste water by re-injecting it into the earth; but they could use it to generate electricity. Biederman is planning to set up demonstration projects at oil and gas wells in Texas and Nevada next year.

Alex at WorldChanging has a post on energy efficiency called "Energy rebounds and amplifications" - noting its important to aim for amplifation of energy efficiency and avoid rebound effects.

Increased energy efficiency is an obvious good, allowing us to do more of the things we want to do at less cost and with a smaller ecological footprint. But it turns out that for a variety of reasons, people rarely merely implement improved energy efficiency and get on with their lives. Instead, one of two things often happens: either they end up again using more energy (their energy use "rebounds"), or the start down a path where they use even less energy (their energy efficiency is "amplified"). As Future Currents puts it:

When people save money by improving energy efficiency, or by cutting back their energy use, they have more money to spend. How they spend this money influences whether there is a rebound or an amplification effect, and the size of that effect. For example, if someone spends the money they saved on buying lots of aluminium, which is produced with large amounts of electricity, the rebound effect may be so large that total energy use goes up. However, if that person invested their money into further energy efficiency improvements, the savings would be amplified. Within this spectrum, goods and services vary considerably in the amount of energy needed to provide them. ...Energy use is still growing in many countries despite improvements in energy efficiency.

To use concrete examples, let's say that two people, Ms. R and Ms. A, have both decided to save energy and have taken the big basic steps one does -- replacing their light bulbs with compact florescents, buying energy efficient appliances, putting electronics on power strips to avoid vampire power drains, checking their homes' insulation and the like. Both will usually see significant savings. It's what they do next that makes all the difference.

Ms. R decides that she's been good, and money's looking flush, so she's going to get rid of her efficient little car and buy that SUV she's always secretly wanted. As a result, her gas use skyrockets, and, in fact her total energy could potentially even go up compared to what she was using before she began. This is rebound.

Ms. A, on the other hand, decides that she likes saving money on energy efficiency, and decides to use the extra money she has on buying a zero energy home, knowing that it will, over time, save her even more money though increased energy efficiency. This is amplification.

Since one of our big goals has to be increasing our energy intensity -- getting richer faster using less energy -- figuring out how to encourage more amplification and less rebound is pretty important.

Dave Roberts at Grist has a look at the idea that the falling oil price is being manipulated for political reasons - and decides probably not.

As you probably know, gas prices -- which peaked in August with a national average just over $3 -- are falling. Some optimists think the national average could drop below $2 by the end of the year.

This autumn also happens to mark the U.S. mid-term congressional elections.

Hmm ... [strokes chin, adjusts tinfoil hat] ... is something fishy going on here? Is Big Oil colluding with Big GOP to dampen voter discontent and preserve a Republican majority?

Well, no. Not by lowering gas prices, anyway. And if they tried it, it probably wouldn't work.

As Jerome a Paris explains over on dKos, the recent downturn in prices is fairly predictable based on market forces. Margins are too thin, and taxes too fixed, for any particular player to have the power to manipulate prices in the short term. Once upon a time OPEC could have done it by flooding the market with crude, but they don't have sufficient reserves to pull that kind of trick any more.

Anyway, as Brendan Nyhan points out, the strength of correlation between gas prices and the ruling party's approval rating is vastly overstated anyway.

I'm afraid if Republicans want to game the mid-terms, they're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: by starting a war.

Steve at Deconsumption has an update on his "Timeline for the Unfolding Crises" which also considers the oil price movement - at a rather more paranoid level than mere suspicions of Republican shenanigans.

Now oil prices have been declining for couple months now, but still I didn't actually think about the above statement until just recently. Up to now I figured the price correction we've been seeing was just a trading phase, perhaps even an orchestrated pre-election gambit to pacify the voters a bit. Certainly the markets were entitled to a counter-trend correction, and when markets change their course the media is always ready to parrot whatever flimsy excuse they can find to intellectually support what was already happening just fine without one. These kind of after-the-fact justifications are really just background noise, and good traders learn to "fade the noise" and stick to the underlying fundamentals.

But that isn't what I was alluding to when I made the above comment. What I was outlining was my belief that following an initial, preparatory phase in which the realization of our peak-oil situation begins to dawn on our society, we should eventually encounter a significant backlash of sorts--an intentional, reactionary counter-attack against this awakening which aims at undermining the message on a fundamental level. Of course such an attack can only seek to fly in the face of reality altogether, since it has no other choice. And if this kind of subversive action is to happen at all, it must occur sometime after our situation has become generally apparent, but before it has become distinctly undeniable. It would of course be media-driven, and would specifically strive to strengthen the very cultural illusions which are in jeopardy: "The whole crisis-show is over, folks. Move along with your lives just as they were before." A desperate head-fake. A short-lived turning-point in the larger crisis whereby the media is not simply grasping at straws to explain what the markets are doing anyway, but actually attempting to feed into society the misinformation needed to keep the game going a little longer...

Resource Investor's "Peak Oil Passnotes" column thinks there is a rather more prosaic explanation for oil price movements - the absence of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico - maybe its time for some tinfoil theories that HAARP is being used to steer them away this year :-)

When a commodity or a stock moves fast we tend to get very excited. We hope to discover whether or not it has made some kind of quantum leap or is just part of a long term trend. So what the heck is happening to crude oil? Is this a slip? A correction? Or gigantic profit taking? Or none of the above?

Since we last wrote this column oil has continued its most excellent nosedive, actually breaching the $60 at $59.80 intraday this week. Just six weeks ago it was busting out at $78 and everyone – this commentator included – thought it was only a matter of time before $80 oil arrived.

We did also think that before it hit $80 there could well be a pull back, $64 maybe, $62 possibly. But the recent declines have been savage. There are many factors that have precluded this fall in price but one that most people have forgotten – amidst Iran, the UN and Hugo Chavez – is the end of the effect from Katrina.

The effects of Katrina lasted a long time. In the first three months of this year they were still heavily in evidence. Damaged refineries sat along the Gulf of Mexico coast, it exacerbated the flood of cash that came back into the market following the Christmas bonus season.

The tightness in the supply of gasoline to the U.S. was compounded through the year to June. It hung around until summer picking up other items like Iran, Lebanon and so on. But sitting high in people’s mind was that the effect of Katrina, plus the cost of the repairs, could be thrown away by another hurricane season like the one in 2005.

Almost a year from the formation of Katrina, tensions in the oil market reached their highest. Oil was busting its gut on August 8th and 9th. Many people had almost assumed that hurricanes were going to come crashing through on top of all the problems that existed. But they did not.

On a tinfoil note, Steve at Deconsumption is also recommending some new 911 conspiracy videos on the "controlled demolition" of the world trade center (I don't have a view on WTC 1 and 2, but I still fail to understand why WTC 7 collapsed - perhaps I should watch the videos - which would require more free time than I have unfortunately). Jeff at RI remains dubious about collapse theories (even if he has a million other theories about 911).

"9/11 Mysteries - Demolitions" was launched on Google Video on 9/11/2006, just a week and a half after I noted that the 9/11 Truth Movement seemed to have acquired a renewed force in recent months, and was fast becoming a rallying point for anti-establishment passions of all kinds. I think this social renewal is worth making note of, and that it can be attributed to two things.

One is that the formerly disorganized and disbursed 9/11 Truth Movement of old--the one that even Michael Ruppert finally lamented was a dead horse that could run no more--has now done what it's most stauch advocates have long been pleading for it to do, and found it's center of gravity around one fundamental point: the questionable "collapse" of the three WTC buildings. And I suspect that's an effective and fitting place to circle the wagons, because it's a nexus that resonates with a great many people on a very visceral level. I can still to this day recall the absolute mystification I had while watching events unfold on that fateful day that the collapse of not just one but both towers had happened so "perfectly". Several of the people I stood with throughout that morning remarked how it seemed like we were watching a Hollywood movie. I can even remember wrestling with the suspicion that perhaps the singular and strange "beauty" to these collapses might hint there really were perhaps some kind of higher forces behind them. Of course I never stopped to imagine there might actually be lower forces at work...

And the other factor that's most significantly responsible for the reawakening of the 9/11 Truth Movement is the development of services like YouTube and Google Video. I don't think anyone can argue anymore that, at bottom, we as a society give our attention much more readily to things which are presented to us in TV form. Indeed it's been acknowledged long ago that the highly centralized "control of the airwaves" is the primary reason why our world has so quickly become so monoculture--and "monoculture", as every permaculturalist is aware, is defined as a sustained battle against Nature. In this respect, unless the "establishment" can come up with an even more enticing way to communicate with people, internet video may very well be the "killer app" needed to usher in a truly global cultural revolution.

There are reports from Europe that ships could now sail all the way to the North Pole - raising speculation that the fabled northeast passage (and presumably Captain Cook's Northwest Passage) will soon open up.

European scientists voiced shock as they showed pictures which showed Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole itself.

The satellite images were acquired from August 23 to 25 by instruments aboard Envisat and EOS Aqua, two satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Perennial sea ice -- thick ice that is normally present year-round and is not affected by the Arctic summer -- had disappeared over an area bigger than the British Isles, ESA said.

Vast patches of ice-free sea stretched north of Svalbard, an archipelago lying midway between Norway and the North Ple, and extended deep into the Russian Arctic, all the way to the North Pole, the agency said in a press release.

"This situation is unlike anything observed in previous record low-ice seasons," said Mark Drinkwater of ESA's Oceans/Ice Unit.

"It is highly imaginable that a ship could have passed from Spitzbergen or Northern Siberia through what is normally pack ice to reach the North Pole without difficulty."

Spitzbergen is one of the Svalbard islands, which are Norwegian.

Drinkwater added: "If this anomaly continues, the Northeast Passage, or 'Northern Sea Route' between Europe and Asia will be open over longer intervals of time, and it is conceivable we might see attempts at sailing around the world directly across the summer Arctic Ocean within the next 10 to 20 years."

I'm still unable to put together a proper post, but I though this Grist article on the Al Gore bandwagon as it gathers momentum was worth posting (though I hope to emit a long rant on various topics including Chavez branding Bush "The Devil", natural gas prics and hedge funds, the is-it-on / is-it-off invasion of Iran and the latest republican pro-torture campaign shortly - along with a deluge of global warming pieces).

Standing against a stately backdrop of American flags -- gone were the flashy visuals that usually accompany his climate speeches -- Gore projected a decidedly more somber and serious persona than the exuberant, almost giddy character we've seen pumping his fists and cracking jokes as he roared around the world on his climate lecture circuit. It was a persona that, if you squinted just right, seemed almost ...

Yes, presidential. Indeed, Gore's protestations that he has no intention of becoming a 2008 presidential contender have been getting weaker. Add to that the recent news that Gore will be publishing a book next May entitled The Assault on Reason -- a meditation on the ineptitude of political leaders paralyzed by their "unwillingness to let facts drive decisions" -- and it's enough to drive the media to distraction.

Little wonder, then, that rumors have begun to circulate that the White House may announce a major new climate policy in order to steal Gore's gathering thunder. (If Karl Rove can convince Bush to turn on his buddy Michael Crichton, you know the Republican Party senses shifting winds.)

Despite its formality, Gore's speech focused on uplift: "Many Americans are now seeing a bright light shining from the far side of this no-man's land that illuminates not sacrifice and danger," he said, "but instead a vision of a bright future that is better for our country in every way -- a future with better jobs, a cleaner environment, a more secure nation, and a safer world."

With the exception of a mention at the outset of yet more evidence of rapidly melting polar ice caps, the speech focused entirely on solutions. In fact, it was an exhaustive laundry list of dozens of such solutions, with no shortage of wonky detail, and peppered with assurances to the tune of, "This is a major source of hope!"

Many we've heard before: so-called stabilization wedges, as outlined by Princeton professors Stephen Pacala and Rob Socolow, which would solve the climate crisis with an array of existing technologies; the "25 x '25" proposal from the agriculture community, which would dramatically expand the use of biofuels and renewable energy; increasingly affordable and effective solar panels, wind turbines, and green architecture; "flex-fuel, plug-in, hybrid vehicles" that can run on gasoline, biofuels, and electricity; and a decentralized electricity grid with smaller generators located closer to the points of use.

...

Some unexpected, outside-the-box proposals popped up as well. One he has been advocating "for the last 14 years," he said (to the surprise of many who remember no such proposal in, say, the 2000 campaign), would eliminate all federal payroll taxes -- Social Security and unemployment compensation included -- and replace the revenue with a pollution tax on CO2. "The overall level of taxation would remain exactly the same," explained Gore. "It would be, in other words, a revenue-neutral tax swap. But instead of discouraging businesses from hiring more employees, it would discourage businesses from producing more pollution."

He also proposed a new Carbon Neutral Mortgage Association -- a wonky idea redeemed by a cute nickname, "Connie Mae" -- to help finance more efficient buildings and eventually zero-energy, zero-emission architecture. Builders often bypass efficient features like thicker insulation and better windows, Gore noted, because these investments elevate construction costs on the front end, even though they pay for themselves within a few years. "It should be possible to remove the purchase-price barrier for such improvements through the use of innovative mortgage finance instruments," he said.

The universe has been unkind to me the past couple of days, so no posts for a couple more days - I am refilling the link bucket occasionally though.

Google's philanthropic (if that is the right word for a for-profit organisation) arm Google.org has announced that one of its ventures will involve the production of a plug-in hybrid car with the goal of "reduce dependence on oil while alleviating the effects of global warming".

So well done to Larry and Sergey (and whoever else was involved in this decision) - while it will no doubt be a good business to be in over time its still encouraging to see the tech industry plunging in and trying to solve the most important problems of our time. Further comment can be found at Grist and TreeHugger.

The ambitious founders of Google, the popular search engine company, have set up a philanthropy, giving it seed money of about $1 billion and a mandate to tackle poverty, disease and global warming.

But unlike most charities, this one will be for-profit, allowing it to fund start-up companies, form partnerships with venture capitalists and even lobby Congress. It will also pay taxes.

One of its maiden projects reflects the philanthropy’s nontraditional approach. According to people briefed on the program, the organization, called Google.org, plans to develop an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline.

The philanthropy is consulting with hybrid-engine scientists and automakers, and has arranged for the purchase of a small fleet of cars with plans to convert the engines so that their gas mileage exceeds 100 miles per gallon. The goal of the project is to reduce dependence on oil while alleviating the effects of global warming.

WorldChanging has a post called "Viridian Redux" that reprints Bruce's original Viridan Manifesto.

The environmental movement can be boring, strident, depressing; this is why I never quite became an environmental activist despite my initial interest and commitment in the sixties. It struck me as too burlap and granola. It felt reactionary (despite the great calendars). I think Bruce Sterling found himself in a similar quandary when, after researching Heavy Weather, he realized there was a significant climate problem. Who was going to take it on? Certainly not the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Conservancy, organizations cycling cash and promoting the great outdoors but not equipped to generate real soltuions to a problem like global warming. And certainly not the U.S. and other governments, whose attitudes are reflected by the Murray Hamilton character in the movie "Jaws." Lifesaving solutions are fine, but they have to wait til the tourist season is past.

Sterling figured design movements like futurism and dadaism had been effective in disrupting the lazier aspects of our consciousness and perception and driving new ways of thinking about the world and its problems, so he started the Viridian Design movement, beginning with the Manifesto of January 3, 2000

We have a worldwide environmental problem. This is a truism. But the unprecedentedly severe and peculiar weather of the late 1990s makes it clear that this problem is growing acute. Global warming has been a lively part of scientific discussion since at least the 1960s, but global warming is a quotidian reality now. Climate change is shrouding the globe in clouds of burning rain forest and knocking points off the GNP of China. Everyone can offer a weird weather anecdote now; for instance, I spent a week this summer watching the sky turn gray with fumes from the blazing forests of Chiapas. The situation has been visibly worsening, and will get worse yet, possibly very much worse.

Society has simply been unable to summon the political or economic will to deal successfully with this problem by using 20th century methods. That is because CO2 emission is not centrally a political or economic problem. It is a design and engineering problem. It is a cultural problem and a problem of artistic sensibility.

New and radical approaches are in order. These approaches should be originated, gathered, martialled into an across-the-board cultural program, and publicly declared -- on January 3rd

WorldChanging is one spinoff from the Viridian work, which continues apace at http://www.viridiandesign.org/.

It's worthwhile to reread the Viridian agenda at the end of the manifesto... which I duplicate here, encouraging comments and suggestion from today's perspective – six years later, post 9/11, post Katrina.

The Media

Today. Publishing and broadcasting cartels surrounded by a haze of poorly financed subcultural microchannels.

What We Want. More bandwidth for civil society, multicultural variety, and better-designed systems of popular many-to-many communication, in multiple languages through multiple channels.

The Trend. A spy-heavy, commercial Internet. A Yankee entertainment complex that entirely obliterates many non-Anglophone cultures.

The Military

Today. G-7 Hegemony backed by the American military.

What We Want. A wider and deeper majority hegemony with a military that can deter adventurism, but specializes in meeting the immediate crises through civil engineering, public health and disaster relief.

The Trend. Nuclear and biological proliferation among minor powers.

Business

Today. Currency traders rule banking system by fiat; extreme instability in markets; capital flight but no labor mobility; unsustainable energy base

What We Want. Nonmaterial industries; vastly increased leisure; vastly increased labor mobility; sustainable energy and resources

The Trend. commodity totalitarianism, crony capitalism, criminalized banking systems, sweatshops...

WorldChanging also points to Nature Magazine's Energy Technology Compilation.

The most pressing technological problem facing the world is uncoupling the provision of energy from the production of carbon dioxide. Developed countries no longer need to increase their energy use in order to increase the size of their economies, but developing countries do. And yet to add more carbon dioxide to the Earth's atmosphere is to increase inexorably the chances of climatic chaos.

To highlight this issue Nature is assembling a suite of feature articles and associated material which will outline the promises and, where necessary, the pitfalls of new energy technologies. From mainstream possibilities like the expansion of nuclear power to more offbeat subjects such as microbial fuel cells and schemes for combining biofuel with fertiliser manufacture, this regularly updated Nature web focus will provide a comprehensive overview of the energy landscape.

Most of the "Nature" content is paywalled, but they do have free access to an article on the solar renaissance in silicon valley.

The Sun provides Earth with as much energy every hour as human civilization uses every year. If you are a solar-energy enthusiast, that says it all. No other energy supply could conceivably be as plentiful as the 120,000 terawatts the Sun provides ceaselessly and unbidden. If the tiniest fraction of that sunlight were to be captured by photovoltaic cells that turn it straight into electricity, there would be no need to emit any greenhouse gases from any power plant.

Thanks to green thoughts like that, and to generous subsidies from governments in Japan and Germany, the solar-cell market has been growing on average by a heady 31% a year for the past decade (see chart, below). One of the most bullish industry analysts, Michael Rogol, sees the industry increasing from about US$12 billion in 2005 to as much as $70 billion in 2010. Although not everyone predicts such impressive growth, a 20–25% annual rise is widely expected. The market for shares in solar-energy companies is correspondingly buoyant.

And yet in the projections of energy supply made by policy analysts and climate wonks, solar remains so marginal as to be barely on the map at all. At the moment, the world's total installed solar cells have a capacity of about five gigawatts. That looks small compared with almost 400 gigawatts for nuclear power and much more than 1,000 gigawatts for coal. And that's before taking into account the fact that solar cells do not produce electricity at their peak rating all the time. Even within the world of renewables, solar is dwarfed by wind power and hydroelectricity, simply because the technology is much more expensive. And expert opinion does not expect growth in the field to change the picture very much: a 25% annual growth in installed capacity for the next 15 years would still see solar photovoltaics producing just 1% of the world's energy.

Reconciling the solar-cell industry's optimism with global indifference is basically a matter of perspective. Seen from the viewpoint of a small industry, solar's recent decade of expansion is indeed extraordinary. But even heady growth is not enough to spur a radical overhaul of energy infrastructure when you start such a long way behind your competitors. So, although no one doubts that solar electricity will become cheaper in the future, few expect it to do so fast enough to force radical change.

Few worldwide, that is. In California's Silicon Valley, the corridor of land along the southwest side of San Francisco Bay, the outlook is more optimistic. Home first to the semiconductor boom and then to the Internet boom, the valley is perhaps the most fertile environment for new technologies in the world. As well as an extraordinary density of successful technology-based companies, it boasts world-class research universities, abundant capital, and a cultural fixation on getting to the future first and making money from it. The dot.com bust of 2000 did relatively little to dent the valley's fundamental strengths and attitudes; instead, it left the area's entrepreneurs and venture capitalists looking for somewhere else to put their millions.

'Cleantech' of all sorts, from water purification to biofuels, is currently the place they want to be. In 2005, $1.6 billion in venture capital went into cleantech, a growth of 35% year on year according to the Cleantech Venture Network, an umbrella group. The high-profile venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers is putting $100 million of its latest $600-million investment fund into cleantech start-ups. Bill Joy, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who used to be chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, says that the firm will look at perhaps 1,000 different cleantech ideas in the next year. And amid all these opportunities, photovoltaics seem to resonate most with Silicon Valley's history and culture.

.
The Age has an article on a visiting scientist warning that Australia may miss the solar power boom.

Australia faces missing out on a booming solar energy industry in the next three years unless it regulates to create the environment for business to invest in it, a visiting Greenpeace campaigner says.

Dutch engineer Sven Teske, who has specialised in solar photovoltaics (PV) for 10 years, says the technology worldwide is now in a transition phase between a niche market and mainstream.

"Basically, within the next two or three years, it will be decided if and who is leader of that industry," Mr Teske said. "Right now, it's a competition between Japan, Germany and the US."

Mr Teske, who works mostly in Amsterdam and Berlin but has also been involved in campaigns in China and Israel, will release a Greenpeace and European PV Industry Association report which says the market in PV cells and modules is booming, with a sustained growth rate of almost 40 per cent over the past 10 years.

The report projects, on current growth rates, that more than 3.2 million people worldwide will have jobs connected with solar power by 2025.

TreeHugger has an interview with noted peak oil and global warming writer Jeremy Leggett, who is also CEO of Solarcentury.

eremy Leggett has been described by Time Magazine as "one of the key players in putting the climate issue on the world agenda." He is the CEO of Solarcentury, the UK’s leading supplier of solar photovoltaic systems and equipment. Prior to setting up Solarcentury he was an award-winning scientist, oil-industry consultant, and Greenpeace campaigner. His first book, "The Carbon War", has been described by the Sunday Times as "the best book yet on the politics of global warming." His second book "Half Gone" is now available via Amazon, previewing the looming global energy crises, while signposting a safe exit opportunity. He is a director of the world's first private equity renewable energy fund, Bank Sarasin's New Energies Invest AG and serves on the UK Government's Renewables Advisory Board. He has been a prominent critic of central government’s energy policies; you can read Jeremy’s blog in the news section of Solarcentury’s website. In this brief interview he shares his thoughts on energy descent, the future of solar, the importance of efficiency, and the UK government’s support, or lack of support, for micro-generation.

TreeHugger: You have written about the looming energy crisis in your book “Half Gone”. To what extent do you believe this crisis can be averted by forward thinking policies today?

Jeremy Leggett: I think on balance that diminishing oil supply will happen so fast after the peak that no combination of energy technologies will be able to close the gap with demand. If the peak is later rather than earlier, say 2010 instead of tomorrow, then we may have a chance if we launch sustained Manhattan and Apollo project equivalents on renewables and efficiency.

TH: Many local authorities in the UK are beginning to mandate that new buildings derive a percentage of their energy from on-site solar or other renewables. What are the chances of central government adopting such forward-thinking measures across the country?

JL: Central government behaves in a way that encourages the conspiracy theorists who say that minimal support for microrenewables is a precondition for a nuclear renaissance. I no longer trust government in its rhetoric. I look to local government for leadership.

Jeff Vail notes that OPEC has abandoned production quotas - a signpost of the arrival of peak oil if the behaviour of the earlier generation of oil cartel, the Texas Railroad Commission, is any guide - especially given the rapid fall in oil prices recently, which wouldn't normally encourage a cartel to abandon a quota system.

"[OPEC's President and Nigerian Oil Minister Edmond] Daukoru said: There is no quota, no, either up or down."

This is a significant move away from the previous 28 million barrel per day quota. While it is largely recognized that the quota has had no meaning for some time now, its formal abandonment is significant. The same action by the Texas Railroad Commission (the Texas oil & gas regulatory body) in the early '70's is viewed, with the benefit of historical hindsight, as the turning point signifying a peak in oil production.

In my opinion, interesting times are ahead. I don't see any catastrophic collapse or similar events in the next few years, but I do think that at current prices there now is a historical buying opportunity for oil.

Mobjectivist has an update to oil shock model following the recnet much ballyooed GOM oil discovery.

I have waited for data corresponding to something like the recent deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GOM) find for a while. This discovery has the right elements of right-wing business hyperventilation and media overkill to make a significant point -- namely that in the greater scheme of things, contributions such as Jack 2 and its siblings remain insignificant for our future global oil production outlook.

Industry analysts estimate that the GOM discovery could add 5 to 15 gigabarrels of oil to our reserve. In terms of the oil shock model, the discovery provides an additional stimulus to that model's world estimate. Putting the two together and using the optimistic value of 15 GB, the new out-year estimate appears below. (Recall that the oil shock model uses a stochastic estimator, so the new curve provides a probability view of expected production and ultimate depletion).

Mobjectivist has also collected some world depletion model curves from Khebab and added an oil shock overlay.

Khebab has aggregated a bunch of world peak oil predictions on to a single graph and posted the results to TOD. I added the data points from my oil shock model from last year to his plot below:

The oil shock model sits right dab in the middle of the other pessimistic estimates, nearly matching Staniford's median logistic model in the out years.

If you're in the mood for looking at a whole lot of depletion graphs, Roberto Canogar at GraphOilogy has a stunning array of individual country graphs up called "The Hubbert Parabola".



Past Peak points to an interview with Henry Groppe, the "Dean of Energy Analysts".

Groppe, whose name rhymes with copy, has no crystal ball but does claim to see the future and has, in fact, an excellent record on long-term energy forecasts, according to people in the industry.

"We are entering an unprecedented event in world economic history," he said. Oil production is straining to meet demand at a time when China and India are developing huge consumer classes relatively overnight, and hundreds of millions more people will have vastly increased demands for energy.

In the future, he said, "perhaps the biggest geopolitical conflicts will involve the U.S. against the rest of the developing world, including China and India, over oil."

Groppe sees oil hovering in a range of no less than $55 to $65 a barrel for the next 10 years and likely much more because unforeseeable political unrest and weather will drive prices up.

He has hung his hat — he always wears a hat when outdoors — for more than 50 years at Groppe, Long & Littell, a firm that has, he says, "successfully forecasted every change of direction [in the oil markets] in the last 30 to 40 years."

His clients have included Shell Oil Co., Chevron Corp. and Apache Corp.

"He has as deep and broad an understanding of the global energy picture as anybody on the planet," said Donald Evans, former secretary of commerce under President George W. Bush and CEO of the trade association Financial Services Forum. "He has been directionally correct on energy prices since I have known him."

"Historically, he's been very accurate," said Gary Petersen, a partner at EnCap Investments, a firm that manages money for major U.S. institutions with investments earmarked for the oil and gas business.

Peterson described Groppe as "a senior statesman for the industry." [...]

Working with others, he is playing a key role in establishing the Energy Institute at the University of Texas, which will have a mission of fostering research to develop a sustainable energy supply. The institute is in the formative stage, pending final approval. [...]

He and his partners at Groppe, Long & Littell rely on research they've gathered since 1955.

His energy views are not shared by the U.S. Department of Energy, which forecasts that production will continue to rise during the next 24 years.

To avoid a global crisis, Groppe thinks that Americans should use the next 10 years, a time in which production output is expected to peak, to transition into new energy-usage habits.

"We must rely more on nuclear power and alternative energy supplies and use all energy more efficiently," he said.

He is no fan of ethanol, which he calls "pure farm-bloc subsidy." The energy spent on producing it is greater than the output, he said, "not to mention depletion of the topsoil."

Some analysts said that after U.S. military action, oil production in Iraq would rise, but Groppe predicted instability, disruption and lower oil production for at least eight years.

Crikey has a good roundup of the shrinking tribe of global warming deniers in Australia - hopefully a species that will soon be extinct (or t least confined to a few obscure insane asylums). They forgot to include the crazed rantings of "flamboyant" TV and radio jock Alan Jones, who was frothing away about the global scientific conspiracy on national TV on Friday morning.

Al Gore stepped off his jet and straight into a torrent of abuse from our nation's leading global warming sceptics this week.

But the majority of scientists in Australia believe that reasonable debate about the substance of global warming ended some time ago. What remains at issue is potential rates of change and the scale of destruction, a problem many have moved onto addressing. But even in the most optimistic scenarios, the news is not good.

Which means the doubters are starting to reduce to a small, exclusive clique. Crikey has compiled an unofficial membership list of the Global Warming Sceptics Club -- meet the commentators who don't see what all the fuss is about:

William Kininmonth – Recently wrote an op-ed for The Australian entitled "Don't be Gored into going along." Former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation. Author of Climate Change: A Natural Hazard (Multi-Science Publishing Co, 2004), which was launched by the Lavoisier Group (see below), a group closely associated to the mining industry.

The Lavoisier Group – Founded in 2000 by Ray Evans, then an executive at Western Mining Corporation (WMC), who was also involved in founding the HR Nicholls Society and the Bennelong Society. Their website states: "We are of the view that the science behind global warming policy is far less certain than its protagonists claim..."

Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of The Australian: Some recent editorials on global warming include "It's not the end of the world" and "An inconvenient cost", which did concede that "Gore successfully challenges the thesis that global warming is a part of a cyclical weather pattern rather than a man-made phenomenon" but said "the frustration of Mr Gore's film is that he fails to grapple with the real cost of tackling climate change..." The paper recently earned the ire of one of the world's leading science magazines, Scientific American, which accused The Oz of misrepresentation and "topspin" for its report "Science Tempers Fears on Climate Change."

Terry McCrann – News Ltd business writer, his latest column on global warming entitled "Al Gore's Day After Tomorrow sequel" jokingly suggested a tax on flatulence.

Andrew Bolt – In "Bulled by a Gore." the Herald Sun columnist labels Gore "one of the worst fact-fiddling Green evangelicals..." Made an impression on the recent News Ltd Pebble Beach conference by heckling Gore about his doco. Crikey understands that Herald Sun editor Peter Blunden rejected an offer of an interview with Gore after the Gore camp refused to be interviewed by Bolt...

The Observer reports that the US is being accused of covert operations in Somalia. Surely not.

Dramatic evidence that America is involved in illegal mercenary operations in east Africa has emerged in a string of confidential emails seen by The Observer. The leaked communications between US private military companies suggest the CIA had knowledge of the plans to run covert military operations inside Somalia - against UN rulings - and they hint at involvement of British security firms.

The emails, dated June this year, reveal how US firms have been planning undercover missions in support of President Abdullahi Yusuf's transitional federal government - founded with UN backing in 2004 - against the Supreme Islamic Courts Council - a radical Muslim militia which took control of Mogadishu, the country's capital, also in June promising national unity under Sharia law.

Evidence of foreign involvement in the conflict would not only breach the UN arms embargo but could destabilise the entire region.

Islamo-fascism is one of those meaningless phrases (used instead of the correct term "islamic fundamentalism") that gets my goat - so I was glad to see that Jeff Vail is having none of this doublespeak, mostly from the mouths of genuine fascists, either.

Islamo-Fascism. The latest talking point issued from the Bush administration, something straight out of "Triumph of the Will." This isn't exactly the most timely response (well, nothing on this blog has been especially timely of late), but I hope to address the issue in a manner that has not yet been covered by the mainstream media.

Consider for a moment, what is the point of making the painfully consicous effort to parade about a "new and improved" phrase such as "Islamo-Fascism"?? Is it more descriptive, something new and helpfull in the public understanding of Salafi Jihadism (because an understanding of that phrase, however accurate, requires a greater attention span than can be realistically expected of "the public" at this point)? The phrase's proponents would certainly like to suggest that this new phrase has some greater explanatory power. But therein lies the falacy of "Islamo-Fascism."

Put simply, this is classical symbolic translation, something that I have discussed with regard to American "Patriotism" in Love Your Nation-State. Basically, some agreed upon "good" quality of a nation, such as freedom, is associated with a symbol, such as a flag. Then, through symbolic translation, the flag can now be held up as a substitute for some underlying, actual freedom, and the actual freedom can be conveniently dispensed with. "Islamo-Fascism" is similar in many respects. "Fascism," as a word reminiscent of a mythology (mostly, admittedly, quite deserved) that has been built up in popular culture about war-time attrocities and abuses of Hittler's Germany, is a symbol to which much negative sentiment has been effectively attached. This symbol, when attached to the modifier "Islamo-" serves to attach that negative sentiment to a current enemy.

This much is rather obvious, but the logical fallacy that seems to be passing unseen is that the new term Islamo-Fascism ONLY expands upon our existing understanding ofSalafi Jihadism to the extent that the former FALSELY attributes characteristics to the latter. To the degree that the public can be educated about the attrocities and abuses of Salafi Jihadists, and hence to the extent that the new label is accurate, they have already incorporated understanding of those abuses and attrocities into their understanding of the Jihadist phenomenon before the addition of the new symbolic language. Therefore, the only value added by the actual articulation of this new "Islamo-Fascism" label is falsity--it is the association in the public perception of attributes and attrocities of Nazi Fascists that are in fact not accurate when attributed to Salafi Jihadists. And it is in that sense that labels such as "Islamo-Fascism" are the purest of propaganda--they serve no purpose but deception. Leni Riefenstahl would be proud.

Speaking of Nazis, while I was away in Western Australia being devoured by sandflies, I read a slightly obscure book called "Himmler's Crusade", which looked at a number of SS expeditions sent to explore Tibet in the 1930's and the subsequent activities of the expeditioners during World War 2. The author seems to have been motivated to write the book after producing a documentary series on Atlantis myths and becoming frustrated at the weaving of these into various "Aryan" supremacist and new age memes (there seems to be a large subset of particularly dubious conspiracy theories that fit into this category that I leave well alone).

While I don't have time to write a decent review, it did touch on a number of intriguing subjects (above and beyond the sheer bizarreness of the Third Reich and Himmler and his numerous weird obsessions).

Worth checking out if you are interested in Tibet (and the game between China and the British Raj), the infighting in Germany in the 1920's (I never knew there was a "Soviet" republic in Bavaria for a brief time in 1919 for example, or about various browshirt armies like the "Freikorps" that extinguished it), the religious undercurrents of Nazism (more around the occult aspects that the SS followed - see Wewelsburg Castle and "The Spear of Destiny", which generates all sorts of strange tales, for a flavour of this - than the "New Christianity" peddled to the masses) or some of the medical atrocities performed in the concentration camps.

From the Amazon review:

Why would the leader of the Nazi’s dreaded SS, the second-most-powerful man in the Third Reich, send a zoologist, an anthropologist, and several other scientists to Tibet on the eve of war? Himmler’s Crusade tells the bizarre and chilling story one of history’s most perverse, eccentric, and frightening scientific expeditions. Drawing on private journals, new interviews, and original research in German archives as well as in Tibet, author Christopher Hale recreates the events of this sinister expedition, asks penetrating questions about the relationship between science and politics, a nd sheds new light on the occult theories that obsessed Himmler and his fellow Nazis.

Combining the highest standards of narrative history with the high adventure and exotic locales of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Himmler’s Crusade reveals that Himmler had ordered these men to examine Tibetan nobles for signs of Aryan physiology, undermine the British relationship with the ruling class, and sow the seeds of rebellion among the populace. Most strangely, the scientists–all SS officers–were to find scientific proof of a grotesque historical fantasy that was at the center of Himmler’s beliefs about race.

Set against the exquisite backdrop of the majestic Himalayas, this fast-paced and engaging narrative provides new and troubling insight into one of the strangest episodes in the history of science, politics, and war

I'll close with Alex from WorldChanging on the conflict diamond trade and how to fight it (a tricky task where these seem to be an alternative currency in the mercenary - ooops, sorry - I mean private security - industry) - "Blood Diamonds, Transparency and the Emerging Power of Global Citizen Action".

Diamonds, like barrels of oil, are worth cash money everywhere, and, again like oil, the international trade in diamonds has destabilized whole regions and promoted criminal regimes. They have helped fuel the genocidal Congo wars and kept Angola in chaos. They are intimately tied to the black market in weapons. Terrorists even traffic in them to finance their plots. And these "blood diamonds" are sold in large numbers, by the billions of dollars, on the diamond bourses of Antwerp and other cities.

This is a classic example of a place where our choices -- buying a diamond to catch the eye of one's intended, for instance -- fuel destruction and suffering in far-off lands, but where the connection is kept hidden from us by secretive corporations. When it comes to most commercially available diamonds, it is almost impossible to know if your dollars are funding the enslavement of children or the murder of entire villages. There's simply no way of knowing in many retail outlets.

London's Global Witness wants to change all that. They're bound and determined to end the trade in blood diamonds -- and the methods they've been using illustrate the growing power of international advocacy networks to change the world.

People increasing demand global transparency. Corporations which behave opaquely not only magnify the damage they do to their reputations if they're caught acting unethically, but increasingly raise the odds that they will be caught. As William Gibson says:

"It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future... will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did."

Diamond merchants depended on a veil of secrecy about the origins of their stones to protect them from the consequences of their trade. Global Witness realized that if it could tear down that veil, consumers would react with horror and disgust to the reality they saw, so GW began with awareness-building tactics familiar since the Abolition movement: lobbying, letter-writing, the issuing of reports. But it wasn't until their 1998 report, A Rough Trade, that their impact began to be felt.

...

Not only are concerned citizens around the world more connected to each other, in a movement-as-network sort of way, they're also getting better at convincing their fellow citizens to pay attention. Bloggers, for instance, have become integral to the human rights movement, while small bits of viral video can reach millions in days -- and the tools for producing them are spreading rapidly. (All of this, by the way, plays into the recent moves by repressive governments to stifle Net freedom and is why all of us should care about the freedom to connect.)

And these international advocacy networks are growing in reach and sophistication. One sees this in the One Campaign and in the growing availability of tools to help citizens act effectively as networked observers. Already, anti-sweatshop campaigns have not only forced change in multinationals' practices, but have actually raised working standards in non-multinational owned shops as well, according to the UN.

It would be easy, and foolish, to overstate the victories here. After all, Antwerp is still awash in blood diamonds. Torture, extra-judicial arrest and secret imprisonment are now routinely practiced by several nations which once were strong advocates for human rights. China censors the Internet. People are still dying by the thousands in Sudan, the DRC and elsewhere.

But it would also be wrong to underestimate the power of the trend here, or precisely how much influence informed and connected citizens can actually exert today, or how much that leverage could grow.

Yesterday, my friend and I walked the grounds of the Dachau concentration camp, outside of Munich, where the Nazis murdered at least 30,000 people. It was a clear, crisp sunny Bavarian day, which somehow magnified the horror of the place. And what stood out for me most was that the camp was run for a dozen years, and was still a shock to Americans when it was liberated. Many people, Americans and Germans alike, either didn't know or were allowed to be complacent in the face of knowledge of exactly how monstrous the Nazis were. The victims of Dachau -- socialists, homosexuals, prisoners of war, Jews -- died invisible to the world, just as the victims of Darfur do today.

Burke said that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing. Perhaps today we should change it to read all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people see nothing -- and more eyes are opening now than ever before.

Chevron's much ballyhooed announcement of a largish find in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico called "Jack 2" seems to be getting almost undivided attention in the peak oil world this week. I'll start with Byron King at Whiskey and Gunpowder on "Chevron conquers the rock".

Among other things, the Los Angeles Times has reported that to drill the Jack #2 well and conduct the follow-up testing, Chevron paid $216,000 a day to lease Transocean Inc.'s Cajun Express drilling rig. Do the math: That is almost $80 million per year just to rent the rig. Geologists, geophysicists, petroleum engineers, drill bits, pipe, mud, wireline services, helicopter rides and all the rest come extra. And that is if you can obtain the necessary equipment and skilled personnel in an industry that is experiencing critical shortages of both. Looking forward, the rental rate for the Transocean rig will rise to $460,000 a day from 2007-2010 (not quite $170 million per year). In essence, the bigger the rig, the higher the day rate. So this deep-water drilling effort takes some serious money. Only deep pockets need apply.

...

Neither Chevron nor its partners have described the quality of the oil or gas, sulfur content, or the oil-to-gas ratio of the reservoirs. However, the implication is that the reservoirs are oil-dominant. Oil from other deep Tertiary formations in the Gulf has tended to be of heavy grade, with up to about 4% sulfur content. Not terrible, but not so great, either.

The Jack #2 well is remote from all existing subsea oil-gathering pipelines, so moving any oil to shore poses a major logistic problem. Chevron and Devon have held discussions with the U.S. Minerals Management Service concerning the possibility of using floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessels. If the facility, when productive, produces associated natural gas, then that too will present a handling problem. MMS frowns on "flaring" natural gas (just burning it off at the end of a long boom), so any production-associated gas could be used to power the production platform, or it might have to be reinjected into the rock formations.

Early-stage figures on field development in the vicinity of Jack #2 are yielding cost estimates of $80-120 million per well drilled, plus as much as $1.3-1.5 billion for subsea facilities. Again, only deep pockets need apply.

By way of comparison, Chevron's Tahiti project, located elsewhere in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, will begin producing in 2008 and carries a $3.5 billion price tag. Tahiti will produce an estimated 125,000 barrels per day, thus carrying an up-front price tag of $28,000 of capital expenditure per barrel of oil equivalent produced per day. In another Gulf of Mexico project, Chevron's Blind Faith project will cost an estimated $1 billion and yield an estimated 30,000 barrels per day, for a capital expenditure of $33,000 per barrel of oil equivalent produced per day.

This is quite a contrast to the historically adjusted cost of capital expenditure for shallow-water, shelf development in the Gulf of Mexico, which is about $1,000 per barrel of oil equivalent produced per day. In other words, deep-water development may be 30 times as expensive as shallow-water offshore development. That is what I call "oil patch sticker shock."

...

And it is critical that Chevron has conquered the rock just now, because mankind is in the process of crossing its own significant peak. The rock is fighting back.

As I mentioned above, and as frequent Whiskey & Gunpowder readers certainly know by now, mankind is entering upon the backside of Hubbert's curve. Global oil production is on the verge of entering the phase of irreversible decline.

For many years, cumulative worldwide oil extraction and depletion has exceeded new oil discovery by a wide margin. So the fact that Chevron has drilled, tested, and completed Jack #2 does not nullify Peak Oil. Jack #2, in fact, demonstrates a key element of the Peak Oil thesis. That is, that the "easy" oil is gone. Mankind has been drilling it up, lifting it out of the ground, and burning it into heat and vapor for the past 147 years. The oil that mankind will lift from the earth in the future, on the far side of Peak Oil, will be in faraway places, in harsh climates, under excruciatingly difficult conditions, deep down, heavy, sour, and overall expensive.

MonkeyGrinder comments that the surge of peak oil denial after the Chevron announcement simply proves that
some people know jack.

Following the personalities and trends of oil in the news, a few things have become clear.

For one, while there is a subculture of people for whom the concept of peak oil has meaning, ranging from permaculture folk to one Michael Lynch, it is still a background meme, something that exists below the active conciousness of western culture. Peak oil is an idea to argue over at cocktail parties or to spray paint on a train trestle.

That said, there is an industry response to the observed reality of peaking oil, (or more precisely, the peaking of oil reservoirs that can be produced at useful rates).

The response is identical to that directed at climate change and global warming. Deny, prevaricate, lie. Attack scientists.

Buy time.

Of course, in these latter days, oil industry interests are grudgingly acknowledging climate change, and even suggesting that governments of the world take action.

Seventeen years late.

Tom Whipple's latest column in the Falls Church News Press is called "The Peak Oil Crisis: Hyping Jack No. 2".

A few, mostly financial journalists, took the announcement as an opportunity to disparage the idea of imminent peak oil. These writers are aware that should world oil production go into decline within the next decade the world’s economy would be in a lot of trouble, not to mention the credibility of those who make a living by forecasting decades of growth ahead. Therefore, they eagerly accepted the dubious premise that this one test proves that plenty of oil can be found by drilling deeper so long as oil prices remain high enough to support the costs of ultra-deep oil production; advanced technology is used to the fullest; and environmental restrictions are lifted. Several pronounced peak oil a dead issue.

As the week wore on however, knowledgeable geologists and petroleum engineers began to question all the euphoria. First they noted that the Jack No. 2 test was not conducted on a single oil field that might contain 15 billion barrels oil. Rather, it was one test of a well in a zone that extends for hundreds of miles under the Gulf of Mexico. Whatever producible oil the zone contains will likely be found in numerous smaller deposits.

A number of wells have already been sunk in the Lower Tertiary. Some were dry holes and a few struck oil bearing rock, which may have the potential to produce oil profitably. So far, only a handful of these exploratory wells have struck deposits of light oil, which may be possible to produce. Others have struck thicker oils that may be impossible to extract from extreme depths at acceptable rates.

What seems to be turning up in the deeper waters of the Gulf are a series of smaller oil fields — some of which may someday be profitable to produce and some of which probably won’t. Extrapolating this situation to a major new discovery that will delay the onset of peak oil is clearly a reach.

To extract oil from 20,000 feet below the surface, where the pressures run to 20,000 pounds per square inch (psi) and the temperature of the oil is in the order of 200 degrees centigrade, is going to be a major technical challenge. Wells drilled to these depths will cost in the range of $100 million each. To drill and set in place the production equipment for The story broke the morning after Labor Day, when the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page piece reporting that Chevron along with two partners had announced the results of a major oil production test in the Gulf of Mexico. The partners Chevron, Statoil, and Devon Energy ran the test on a well known as Jack No. 2 that was drilled last year in the Lower Tertiary zone of the Gulf of Mexico. This zone is about 80 miles wide, 300 miles long and is located about 175 miles off shore. The well was unusual in that it went to a depth of 28,000 feet and the drilling began under 7,000 feet of water.

The Oil Drum has a comprehensive look at the discovery, summarised at The Energy Blog.

With the successful test drilling of Jack-2 in the ultra deepwater Gulf of Mexico, there has been a media blitz proclaiming the good news. The "peak oil" theory is under attack. Business Week's September 7, 2006 article Plenty of Oil--Just Drill Deeper The discovery of reserves in the Gulf of Mexico means supply isn't topping out, is one of the most blatant attacks which the OD refutes point by point with the following conclusion: Business Week's assertion that really, really ultra-deepwater production from offshore regions like the LTGOM will "tip the balance of supply and demand in the long term" globally is unwarranted speculation.

Three of of their points that are consistent with my views and which I consider very important are :

1) US petroleum production averaged 5.093/mbd in the first 7 months of 2006. Assuming a generous future decline rate of about 5% for the US as a whole, production will be 4.149/mbd in 2010, a net decline of 0.944/mbd. Future production from the LTGOM might be 0.500/mbd sometime after that. If we add production from fields like Chevron's Tahiti, which is expected "to have a maximum daily production of 125,000 barrels", then it is reasonable to expect that Gulf of Mexico production will be a wash—declines will be offset six to eight years from now in the best case.

2) The current "peak oil" bashing going on in the media is more an indication of underlying concerns about the long term supply situation, not a refutation of peak oil theories. Those concerned about global oil depletion have never said that the world is running out of oil in the near-term or denied that advanced technology can increase recoverable reserves.

3) Rather than indicating continued abundance in oil supply, such measures may be viewed more accurately as indicating the great lengths oil producers must go to in order to find more oil to meet the world's insatiable demand. The "low-hanging fruit" is gone and so is the era of the cheap oil. Ultimately, this is the meaning of the Jack-2 test well and hopes for production from the Lower Tertiary of the Gulf of Mexico.

Past Peak also comments on the discovery.

A reader emailed to complain that I haven't posted anything on Chevron's announced discovery of a significant deepwater oil/gas field in the Gulf of Mexico. So let's look at it.

Some skepticism is called for. In March, Mexico announced discovery of a Gulf of Mexico oil field with the potential to yield 10 billion barrels. By July, it turned out that the field was a modest natural gas find equivalent to less than 1% of the original 10 billion barrel figure. Oops.

According to Energy Bulletin, Mexico's original announcement may have been politically motivated to pressure Mexico's parliament, which was soon to vote on the budget for PEMEX (the Mexican national oil company) and possible expansion of its drilling rights.

Here in the US, coincidentally enough, Congress is about to take up a bill that would "end a 25-year bipartisan moratorium on coastal drilling". (Newsday) Coincidentally or not, the timing of Chevron's announcement is great news for the people who want offshore drilling opened up.

But let's assume the announcement turns out to be on the level. And let's assume it comes in at the midpoint of their announced potential — i.e., at 9 billion barrels. How much oil is that? Enough to supply the world for 3 to 4 months. Nothing to sneeze at, but not the answer to our problems. Best case, it will be years before the newly discovered field is producing at a substantial rate. The world's not going to stand still in the meantime. Demand will continue its exponential growth as long as there's enough supply available. Meanwhile, most of the world's important oil fields are already in decline.

Peak oil is not the end of oil. It's the beginning of the end of oil. It's the end of cheap oil. Deepwater oil isn't cheap. World oil discoveries peaked over 40 years ago, but oil will continue to be discovered. It just won't be discovered quickly enough to offset decline.

Or look at it another way. It's great that Chevron found oil five miles below the surface of the Gulf. But why are they even looking for oil five miles below the surface of the Gulf, considering the enormous additional cost involved? It's because all the easy oil was discovered long ago. This is exactly what peak oil looks like: increasingly expensive scrambling for the last remaining reservoirs of oil on the planet.

See also Energy Bulletin, Mobjectivist and Jeff Vail.

EXTRA: Oil Discovery Saves Civilization!
For 35 days.

In 2013.

Except for decline in other fields.

Maybe.

The huge news today is that Chevron, Norway's Statoil, and Devon Energy have jointly discovered our collective salvation in the "Jack 2" deepwater oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. CNN, Fox, and ABC have all been carrying this as the top story all day.

MSNBC and CBS have relegated it below the much more significant story of the Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin's death--where it belongs.

Before we discuss conspiracy theories of why this news is coming out now, let's first look at the facts in the absence of cable-news hype. This larger field, of which Jack 2 is just a small part, may someday yield between 3 and 15 billion barrels of recoverable crude. It won't even start to produce oil until 2013, if everything goes according to schedule. Then, it (the entire tertiary GOM zone) may eventually produce 400,000 barrels per day. That's about how much Mexico's Cantarell field declined in production this year. And how much it will decline next year. And the year after. Ultimately, 3 billion barrels of oil will fuel the world--at current consumption levels--for about 35 days.

Did I forget to mention? Chevron first confirmed Jack 2's viability in 2004. They've known all along the expected size of the field's reserves, and this figure has long been part of Peak Oil calculations. In fact, the 6000 barrel per day flow rate of the test well was finalized and published in May of this year. There is absolutely no new information about this event to surface in the past three months. So why all the hype now?

One theory--and I should be the first to admit that I cannot prove motive or intent here--is the upcoming November election.

Jeff follows up this thoery with a more detailed post called "Brainstorming on Oil Price Manipulation" - I guess its a reasonable enough theory, though the mainstream explanation (falling oil and metals prices are based on expectations of a US economic slowdown or recession due to the rapidly slowly housing market) is sound enough (but not sound enough to make me ignore a good conspiracy theory).

While on holiday I went to a visit a friend who designs subsea gear for a living and got to watch a few disaster videos of what happens when things go wrong, which was quite entertaining except when I had money in the companies involved (as remediating failures is rather expensive). My wife asked him when he thinks the peak will be and he basically echoed the Chevron line - "we'll just keep going deeper - peak oil is their problem", indicating the kids playing in the backyard.

Al Gore has been in town promoting "An Inconvenient Truth" and has gained quite a lot of publicity for both the film and his stance against the Iraq war. The best interview I noiced was with Kerry O'Brien on the 7:30 Report - he also went on the Andrew Denton show "Enough Rope".

KERRY O'BRIEN: In his powerful documentary - in Australian cinemas this week - which describes global warming as the greatest crisis the world has ever faced, Al Gore introduces himself as the man who used to be the next president. The man who was Bill Clinton's vice-president for eight years is referring to the 2000 presidential election in which George W Bush took the prize, but only after the US Supreme Court ruled 3-2 in his favour. Al Gore may yet run again in 2008 or even the election after that, but he spent much of the past five years on a sophisticated lecture tour around the United States, presenting compelling arguments about what lies ahead on climate change. And Australia is one of his targets. That mission has culminated with the documentary and a book called, An Inconvenient Truth. He's here on a promotional visit, and I spoke with him in Sydney yesterday.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Al Gore, given the date, I'd like to reflect, first up, on September 11. Looking beyond the emotional wrench of such a shocking event, the loss of life, the grief of families and friends, what price has America paid for September 11?

AL GORE, FORMER US VICE-PRESIDENT: I believe that in the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush did a terrific job in rallying the country initially. I think he was wise to go into Afghanistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda gang. But after those decisions, I think what came later has been proven to be a series of mistakes. I think we should have continued to pursue Osama bin Laden, instead of withdrawing troops and diverting them to Iraq. I think the evidence has borne out the warnings of the time that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and, therefore, the decision to focus all the energy and anger - all of it justifiable - on the wrong target - at least wrong insofar as it was believed by some to be connected to 9/11 - that was a mistake. And, I think, from that mistake, other difficulties have flowed. And some of the goodwill that helped America in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was dissipated.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Are you one of those who believes that America's involvement in Iraq has actually assisted the recruiting of terrorists?

AL GORE: Well, it seems to have.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You opposed that war...

AL GORE: I did.

KERRY O'BRIEN: ..in Iraq. You made a series of speeches about it before President Bush made the decision to go in. But whether you were right to argue that or not it can't be reversed now, so, should America extricate itself reasonably quickly or stay on indefinitely?

AL GORE: Well, if that's the choice then we should clearly, in my view, extricate ourselves as quickly as possible, but it's not that simple because even though I felt that it was a serious strategic mistake to go into Iraq - and, incidentally, I supported the first Gulf War - circumstances were entirely different. But even though this one was a mistake, we still - now that we're there - bear the moral responsibility for taking care not to make the situation even worse in the manner of our leaving. Insofar as we do, now, clearly seem to be right in the middle of a civil war it's questionable what good comes from staying, other than to avoid a catastrophic worsening of the potential for all-out civil war by an ill handled withdrawal. But withdraw we must, because it gets worse with each passing day. So taking care to withdraw and doing it while mindful of our obligations there, that's one thing; but getting out of there as quickly as possible, I think, is imperative.

...

AL GORE: That's the only one that could be deemed comparable but human civilisation could survive, could have survived a nuclear exchange between the superpowers. The consequences would, of course, have been so devastating. But what is unique about the climate crisis is that it could end all human civilisation. It will not - I'm convinced because I'm certain that we will act in time - but if we allow the melting of the polar caps, if we allow the radical reorganisation of the earth's environmental system, then those conditions that were favourable to the emergence of the human species and to the development of the human civilisation could well be lost and people could be driven from the areas that we now populate toward the pole-ward areas, and there are few of them.

AL GORE (EXCERPT FROM 'AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH'): We have the ability to do this. Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that, with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive. We can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands. We just have to have the determination to make them happen. Are we going to be left behind as the rest of the world moves forward? All of these nations have ratified Kyoto. There are only two advanced nations in the world that have not ratified Kyoto, and we are one of them; the other is Australia.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Our Prime Minister, John Howard, says that he's accepted that global warming is real and does represent a challenge, but says he's sceptical about a lot of the more gloomy predictions. He wouldn't be alone in that view, would he?

AL GORE: He's increasingly alone in that view among people who've really looked at the science. He also said, in that same interview, that he wants to know about the science. Well, that's why I would urge him to see the movie. The scientific community has endorsed the validity of the science in the movie. All of the living climate scientists in my country were asked to comment. Of those who responded to our Associated Press that you know, 100 per cent of them said, "He's got it right, the science is right". So look at the facts. The so-called " gloomy predictions" are predictions of what would happen if we did not act. It's not a question of mood. It's a question of reality. And, you know, there's no longer debate over whether the earth is round or flat, though there are some few people who still think it's flat, we generally ignore that view because the evidence has mounted to the point where we understand that it shouldn't be taken seriously. And that is the case with the consensus view of the National Academy of Sciences in Australia, in the United States and every advanced country, with the international group, an unprecedented body of 2,000 scientists in 100 countries who've worked for 20 years, each year coming with a new version of their consensus. It never changes on the central points that I communicate in this movie and in this book. But look at what's at risk here in Australia. You have an advanced civilisation ingeniously built in the driest inhabited continent on the planet. You have such low water availability on average already. That particular quality is most affected by global warming and, as predicted, you now have growing water shortages in Brisbane, here in Sydney, in Canberra, in the west, in Perth. The water availability is really one of the biggest dangers. You have greater fires, increasing every decade. The Great Barrier Reef is being killed by the warming of the temperatures, also by the acidification of the oceans purely from all the millions of tonnes of CO2 dumped there by all of us worldwide every single day. 70 million tonnes per day. Stronger storms, category 5 cyclones. You had a couple of them this March and April. All of these things are predicted to get worse still until we turn the earth's thermostat down, which means reducing the pollution that's causing it to go up.

KERRY O'BRIEN: What do you say to the argument made by some in Australia that, on the one hand, we have a lot to lose economically by trying to move away from coal-based energy, but on the other hand, we could cut our emissions substantially at some pain and still have no impact on the planet's problem because unlike America, our total contribution to global warming is tiny?

AL GORE: Well first of all I think that the old argument that you have to choose between the environment and the economy has been discredited over and over again. The polluters always say, "Oh no we can't put our pollution because it will hurt the economy," but, in fact the opposite is usually true. The American automobile companies have made that argument for years and the government policy makers listened to them and kept the standards ridiculously low and now the companies are near bankruptcy because the consumers want to buy the more efficient less polluting cars that are coming from Japan and Asia and from Europe, and so the old phrases, "Be careful what you pray for" should be amended to, "Be careful what you lobby for". The Stone Age did not end because of a shortage of stones and the fossil fuel age will not end because of a shortage of fossil fuels. It will end when we find something better. And we have found something better. And the leading-edge businesses are substituting renewables and conservation and efficiency. They're getting not only less pollution as a result, but more consumers, more jobs, better and cheaper products.

Crikey also noted that the Murdoch press (in the UK at least) has now given up the global warming denial game and admitted "we were wrong" (word from on high hasn't reached the Oz yet unfortunately).

"Too many of us have spent too long in denial over the threat from global warming. The evidence is now irresistible: Searing summers and dry winters in the UK; increasingly frequent tornados and hurricanes worldwide; the shrinking Arctic ice cap."

The voice of Al Gore? Nope. Try Rupert Murdoch. The excerpt is from the editorial in yesterday's London Sun. Last week we pointed to James Murdoch and his growing influence on the News Ltd stable when it came to climate change, but The Sun's backflip is something else entirely. The paper acts as Rupert Murdoch's megaphone -- and now The Sun is saying it was wrong:

Only the severity and immediacy of the threat is open to debate. This week The Sun will present the evidence and suggest how every one of us can help.

This is not just a backflip for Murdoch, it's a double pike with twist. It's safe to say that this paper is Rupert without the quote marks, and this week it's running a massive campaign entitled "Go Green with The Sun."

There's suggestions on how to go green, "20 wacky green facts", a tiny picture of Al Gore ("Al Gore ... he's a bore no more") under the headline "You HAVE to see this film" and a call for an "eco-basher tax."

But it looks like Murdoch's global warming memo got lost at the branch office and never made it to The Oz -- today's editorial, "An inconvenient cost" reads:

The problem, according to Dr Lomborg, Danish author of The Sceptical Environmentalist, is that even if you accept the warming thesis, today's best climate models show immediate action will do little good. The Kyoto Protocol is designed to cut industrial nations' CO2 emissions by 30 per cent of what they would have been in 2010, and by half in 2050. Yet even if every country adhered to the protocol's rules through this century, Dr Lomborg asserts, the change would have slowed global warming by just six years in 2100.

CleanTech blog has an interesting post on some comments by Shell CEO John Hofmeister.

Hofmeister made some interesting comments at a private reception and at a luncheon at the City Club:

* World oil supply at 85 million barrels per day was barely exceeding world oil demand at 85 million barrels per day. Although he didn't say so explicitly, Hofmeister certainly implied that the 85 million barrel per day production level was going to be very difficult to increase -- certainly from existing production fields, and maybe even if all untapped opportunities were pursued. Is 85 million barrels per day as good as it gets? In other words, if you believe that "peak oil" production is rapidly approaching, his comments did little to dispel your belief.
* Oil prices are thus high for legitimate reasons, but oil prices are higher than Shell would like. Clearly, Shell feels the heat from the public and politicians for the huge profits that they are generating these days. Hofmeister claims that Shell would like to see oil prices in the $30-40/barrel range -- enough to earn good profits, but not so high that customers complain so loudly (or -- heaven forbid! -- start consuming less fuel).
* World oil demand growth is being driven by China and India...and US SUVs. He indicated that the shift to SUVs caught the experts by surprise. This was the first time I'd ever heard an oil company executive almost "blame" US automakers and the public for being so gluttonous. This thought was further embellished later by noting that...
* It is "immoral" that the US consumes so much energy, far in excess of its world share of population. Hofmeister got his facts wrong (he said the US represented 8% of world population, when it's more like 4%), but he was right to indicate that the US accounts for 25% of world energy demand. He said that the US really ought to change its habits of energy consumption -- but didn't go so far as to suggest that US policy-makers had an obligation to do anything about it. Hofmeister noted that high oil prices are already having a salubrious effect on demand ("A lot of people are parking their RVs"). OK, fair enough, but that alone won't cut our energy consumption by 80+%. Does he really think we'll significantly reduce our energy consumption to more in line with our population without someone making us do it via some kind of regulation? Yeah, right.
* Climate change is in fact happening, and that carbon emissions from energy consumption is a significant contributor. Well, it was encouraging for Hofmeister to not weasel on that one. Hopefully, eventually, that message will be heard and understood by all of his employees, his competitors and his customers. It amazes me that there are still so many Luddites who aren't there yet.
* Energy independence for the US is not only not achievable, it's not even a good idea. Hofmeister's point is that trade is global, and that it's not necessarily bad that the US imports at least some of its energy requirement. He did go on to say, however, that importing 62% of oil requirements is very bad for the US. Thank goodness he didn't use this observation as an excuse for punching holes in ANWR, at least partly because he sees that...
* There are lots of opportunities for unconventional oil production. While he noted Shell's involvement in the Alberta tar sands and the Orinoco reserves in Venezuela, Hofmeister went on at length about Shell's involvement in new technology development to recover oil from the massive (1+ trillion barrel) shale resource in the US Rocky Mountains. Shell's technology involves using downhole electric resistance heaters to "bake" the oil out of the rock in-situ. Theirs is not the only in-situ shale recovery technology under development -- see, for instance, Independent Energy Partners' geothermic fuel cell approach, which I believe has more economic merit -- but their active and public involvement in shale, and expectation that it is a viable resource at ~$30/barrel, is important to take seriously.
* With 100 years of operation in the Middle East, Shell would like to operate in Iraq, but is not present there because they will not put their employees in an unsecure situation, in a country with no rule of law. While Hofmeister steered clear of political views, his observation that "respect among and between peoples is currently lacking" was both a reserved understatement and a pretty clear signal that Shell is not optimistic about the situation there for the foreseeable future.
* Shell is committed to alternative energy, as they see themselves as an energy provider to humans for the indefinite future, rather than an oil and gas company. He noted Shell's activity in ethanol (mainly focused on second-generation "cellulosic" ethanol rather than first-generation corn/sugar based ethanol, which he didn't seem enthusiastic about), wind and solar energy as areas for growth. In particular, he defended Shell's recent decision to exit its active photovoltaics (PV) business in favor of R&D in copper indium diselenide (CIS) thin-film PV because of limited future economic/cost improvement potential in the now mature crystalline-silicon technology. I agree wholeheartedly.

Well heeled doomer surivavlist types might find this marketing campaign for the "Ultimate Secure Home" in Colorado enticing.

The world's largest wind farm (for the moment) is in - you guessed it - Texas.

FPL Energy, LLC, a subsidiary of FPL Group had completed 662MW of the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Texas making it the largest wind farm in the world as of the end of August.

When the last phase of the project is complete later this month, the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center will have a total capacity of 735MW. The Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center is comprised of 291 GE 1.5MW wind turbines and 130 Siemens 2.3MW wind turbines spread over nearly 47,000 acres in Taylor and Nolan County, Texas. The first phase of the project consisting of 213MW was completed in late 2005; phase two consisting of 223.5MW was completed in the second quarter of 2006; and, phase three consisting of 299MW, of which 225MW are already operational, is expected to be completed by the end of September.

I was somewhat amused to note Channel 10 put on a 911 conspiracy movie called "In Plane Site" to mark the 5 year anniversary (I didn't watch it, but I think this was the first in the genre, based on the French book casting doubt on the hole in the Pentagon and whether or not it is possible it was made by a jumbo jet). The Australian naturally got its knickers in a knot about this, and managed to combine the topic with some peak oil denial as well - maybe they are trying to be the opposite of Oil Empire.

While I've yet to reach a conclusion on which is the correct 911 story (and probably never will) I do enjoy RI's never ending series on the subject (which started long ao with "The Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11" - the most recent installments are " License to Spin" and "The Clown at Midnight").

PERHAPS one might have expected nothing better from the network that brought us Big Brother Uncut, but on Saturday night Channel10 broadcast the so-called documentary 9/11: In Plane Site, which is a calculated insult and defamation of the American people and the victims of September 11.

Ten's major shareholder, Mr Izzy Asper of CanWest, should sack the programming director of Channel 10 for broadcasting this barking-mad conspiracy program, which claims that all American political parties, officials, airlines and news networks were collaborators in a plot to murder their fellow citizens, over 3000 innocent people, including some of our countrymen, Australians.

Are there no standards we can expect from Channel 10?

Have they no sense of shame for trying to kill again the memory of those cruelly murdered five years ago by al-Qa'ida? Can you imagine the reaction if a US network produced a similar broadcast about the murders of Australians in Bali?

I am sure I share the contempt and derision of the Australian people and its parliament for this abominable act of bad taste by Channel 10 on the eve of the September 11 anniversary.

Questioning 9/11 seems to be a common theme - with Paul McGeogh writing in the Herald:

Just who is the enemy of the US becomes more complicated by the day, especially as Americans try to wrap their heads around the emergence of Tehran as a regional power in the Muslim Middle East, at a time when the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have reignited the Sunni-Shiite schism that is at the heart of Islam?

Bush and Rumsfeld now hector a non-specific entity they call the "Islamofascists". But who are they - the Shiite-controlled Government of Iraq, which, nominally at least, is a US ally but also increasingly an ally of Iran and is dependent for political support on murderous militias? Or are they the mad mullahs of Tehran, who also are Shiite? Or are they the West-friendly Sunni House of Saud, which controls Saudi Arabia's huge oil wealth and has for decades funded the propagation of the virulent Wahabi strain of Islam that underpinned the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda? And what of Washington's other ally, Pakistan? Does the distribution of nuclear know-how and parts to rogue states or the provision of shelter to al-Qaeda fugitives make it Islamofascist?

Billmon also had a bit to say about 9/11 and the decline of an empire.

What I've learned (from 9/11, the corporate scandals, the fiasco in Iraq, Katrina, the Cheney Administration's insane economic and environmental policies and the relentless dumbing down of the corporate media -- plus the repeated electoral triumphs of the Rovian brand of "reality management") is that the United States is moving down the curve of imperial decay at an amazingly rapid clip. If anything, the speed of our descent appears to be accelerating.

The physical symptoms -- a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin memorial hastily erected in a vacant lot -- aren't nearly as alarming as the moral and intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair, leaving America with an opposition party that doesn't know how (or what) to oppose, a military run by uniformed yes men, intelligence czars who couldn't find their way through a garden gate with a GPS locator, TV networks that don't even pretend to cover the news unless there's a missing white woman or a suspected child rapist involved, and talk radio hosts who think nuking Mecca is the solution to all our problems in the Middle East. We've got think tanks that can't think, security agencies that can't secure and accounting firms that can't count (except when their clients ask them to make 2+2=5). Our churches are either annexes to shopping malls, halfway homes for pederasts, or GOP precinct headquarters in disguise. Our economy is based on asset bubbles, defense contracts and an open-ended line of credit from the People's Bank of China, and we still can't push the poverty rate down or the median wage up.

I could happily go on, but I imagine you get my point. It's hard to think of a major American institution, tradition or cultural value that has not, at some point over the past five years, been shown to be a.) totally out of touch, b.) criminally negligent, c.) hopelessly corrupt, d.) insanely hypocritical or e.) all of the above.

It's getting hard to see how these trends can be reversed. Maybe they can't (which would explain why all empires, at least so far, have eventually declined and fallen.) In the past I've used the economic concept of market failure to describe the process whereby dissident voices and uncomfortable views are gradually weeded out of the "marketplace of ideas," allowing errors to go uncorrected, lies to go unchallenged (or ignored) and ideological orthodoxy to calcify into self-delusion:

Watching the punditocracy spin its ideological wheels these days, it's hard not to be reminded of the later years of the Soviet Union -- a nation dedicated to proposition that the marketplace of ideas should never be allowed to clear. As the system declined into senility it, too, became increasingly detached from reality. Soviet pundits and academic ideologues churned out reams of bad ideas and stupid policies. Soviet Krauthammers advised the Politburo to invade Afghanistan. ("It will be a cakewalk.") Soviet [James] Glassmans told it to crank up the central planning. ("Traditional capitalist measures of valuation mean nothing.")

When the public discourse on Edward R. Murrow's old network consists of Katie Couric introducing Rush Limbaugh's buffoonish views, you know the intellectual and ideological rot is well advanced -- maybe not quite as far as the Soviet Union in the '80s, but getting there. One of my favorite books about the Soviet collapse was titled "The Age of Delirium" which I think perfectly captured the progressive insanity of a system that could no longer even understand, much less believe, its own lies. I think of that book practically every time George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld open their mouths in public.

Some time ago, back when I still had comments on this blog, a jihadi sympathizer left a note on one of my posts bragging about his movement's success in taking down the Soviets -- just as the armies of the Prophet succeeded in taking down the Persian Empire. The new Rome (that is, us) would be next, he boasted.

At the time I thought it was daft -- exactly the kind of thing a crazed religious fanatic would say. But these days I'm not so sure. The jihadis in Afghanistan didn't really take down the Soviet empire -- they just delivered a very hard punch to a giant that was already falling. Looking at the state of America five years after 9/11, it no longer seems completely implausible that the same thing might one day be said of us.

This is not, I know, the most inspiring way to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the event that essentially kicked off the new American century -- which at this point seems unlikely to last even a decade. If you want the standard patriotic rhetoric (hallowed ground, blessings of democracy, forward strategy for freedom, etc.) you'll have no trouble finding it elsewhere. There's no shortage of the stuff today (whitehouse.gov is a good place to start). But I personally don't think the record of the past half decade (or the current condition of Ground Zero) really justifies that kind of self-serving, self-justifying pablum.

Do you?

I'm off to get some sun and loaf on a riverbank somewhere for a while.

Back in 2 weeks...