BLDG BLOG is pondering reports that the Vatican is going solar powered.

As if tapping into a rival spiritual tradition, Pope Benedict XVI will soon become "the first pontiff to harness solar power to provide energy for the Vatican," according to the BBC. "The deteriorating cement roof tiles of the Paul VI auditorium will be replaced next year with photovoltaic cells to convert sunlight into electricity."

The BBC's all too short news item goes on to report that the Vatican "is considering placing solar panels on other buildings although St Peter's Basilica and other historical landmarks will not be touched."

But why not touch them ? Solar-powered cathedrals lining the bombed-out fields of Europe! How much more spiritually energizing can you get than plugging directly into that ongoing hydro-helium reaction in space? Teaching theology by the contained light of solar flares – astral disasters captured flashing, as power surges down consecrated halls of painted saints. Frescoes gleam. Christianity meets Mithraism in architectural form.

John 8:12 – I am the Light of the World – taken literally. In fact, the whole book of John is arguably about the solar power industry.

In any case, are solar panels the new stained glass windows?

The Australian reports that the Dalai Lama is calling for climate change action

THE Dalai Lama has called on Australians to help reduce the gap between rich and poor and make environmental consciousness a part of their daily lives. Tenzin Gyato, the 14th Dalai Lama, was speaking in Perth at the start of his 11-day tour of Australia, where he addressed a forum on sustainability and spirituality.

The exiled Tibetan leader told the crowd of several thousand people that humans wrongly think they can control nature when in fact humanity and the environment are interdependent. The very survival of the earth depended on mankind taking care of the planet, he said.

"Taking care of the environment should be part of our daily life," the Dalai Lama said. "Using cars, or using electricity, your water, every moment, keep in mind the preservation of energy and resources."

The Buddhist leader said the world's resources must be preserved for future generations. "The present generation has the moral responsibility to keep sufficient resources for future generations," the exiled Tibetan leader told the crowd of several thousand.

The Dalai Lama called on the media help raise public awareness of environmental issues, saying political leaders would then follow.

The Age has an article on "The Thunderous Sounds of Arctic Warming".

ATOP Greenland's Suicide Cliff, from which old Inuit women used to hurl themselves when they felt they had become a burden to their community, a crack and a thud like thunder pierce the air. "We don't have thunder here. But I know it from movies," says Ilulissat nurse Vilhelmina Nathanielsen, while walking through the melting snow. "It's the ice cracking inside the icebergs. If we're lucky we might see one break apart."

It's too early in the year to see icebergs crumple regularly, but the sound is a reminder. As politicians squabble over how to act on climate change, Greenland's icecap is melting faster than scientists had thought possible.

A new island in East Greenland is a clear sign of how the place is changing. It was dubbed Warming Island by US explorer Dennis Schmitt when he found in 2005 that it had emerged from beneath the ice.

If the icecap melts entirely, oceans would rise by seven metres. A total meltdown would take centuries, but global warming — which climate experts blame mainly on human use of fossil fuels — is heating the Arctic faster than anywhere else on Earth. Greenland, the world's largest island, is mostly covered by an icecap of about 2.6 million cubic kilometres which accounts for a 10th of all the fresh water in the world.

Over the past 30 years, its melt zone has expanded by 30 per cent. Now the cap loses 100 to 150 cubic kilometres of ice every year — more than all the ice in the Alps. "Some people are scared to discover the process is running faster than the models," said Konrad Steffen, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Greenland expert who serves on a US Government advisory committee on abrupt climate change.

In the past 15 years, winter temperatures have risen about five degrees on the cap, while spring and autumn temperatures increased about three degrees. ...

The SMH has a look at the Blackout threat to the eastern states.

EASTERN Australia could face blackouts because of the Howard Government's decision to hold off carbon trading until 2012, warns a sustainability investment specialist. Amanda McCluskey, a fund manager at Portfolio Partners and deputy chair of the Investor Group on Climate Change, said carbon trading needed to be introduced by 2010 at the latest to head off blackouts. Portfolio Partners has about $9 billion invested in Australian shares, including holdings in power generators Origin Energy and Babcock & Brown Wind, and other energy companies such as Woodside Petroleum.


Australia's electricity grid was already close to breaking point and climate change was starting to have an impact on the system. Australians simply could not afford to wait until 2012, Ms McCluskey said."The electricity grid is very stretched and the physical impacts of climate change are already starting to be felt as well," Ms McCluskey said. "With a lack of water, it means that many of the coal-fired power stations cannot run at full capacity and when we had the fires in Victoria, we saw the damage of infrastructure." Those physical impacts of climate change are starting to occur."

She said delaying emissions trading until 2012 would create even more investor uncertainty. "The longer you drag it out, even if it is only two years, it just further increases that uncertainty by the investors in power generation. Delaying it for two years doesn't make sense," Ms McCluskey said.

Oil price swings have tending to only be reflected in local petrol prices when they go up (peak oil or not, price action in recent years is very reminiscent of the oil and petrol price manipulations of the 1970's by the oil cartel) - the local regulator has finally gotten fed up and told the oil majors to drop petrol prices or else.

Petrol companies face naming, shaming, a likely community backlash and possibly tougher government regulation if they persist in keeping petrol prices too high, Australia's competition regulator said today.

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chairman Graeme Samuel said there was near overwhelming community outrage at high prices in the lead-up to the long weekend. He said the ACCC would move to shame fuel companies into meeting their own prices benchmark. "If they don't do it, then they cannot be at all surprised if governments around the country say we had better subject them to tougher, more stringent, more costly regulation," he told ABC radio. "The petrol companies themselves would not be oblivious to the fact that there is ... almost an overwhelming community concern."

The ACCC yesterday said the international price benchmark for Singapore Mogas 95 unleaded petrol had declined significantly in late May. Wholesale prices had dropped as a result, but the retail price at the bowser stayed high, reaching 143 cents a litre in some cities this week.

Mr Samuel said the companies insisted they were bound by international prices. He said the ACCC had told them their prices in Australia should go down when those in Singapore fell, but that had not been happening. "Lo and behold, we find that while the Singapore price has been declining significantly over the past week or so, guess what? The Australian price has not been declining at anything like the same rate," he said.

We've had some winter rain, though as usual, not in the dams.

Up to 68 millimetres of rain has already fallen on Sydney's upper North Shore over the last 24 hours. However, most of the storms are currently over the the Hunter region, but the Bureau of Meteorology said they will move south, dumping up to 100mm of rain in some areas. "We are expecting some good falls over the next couple of days," Bureau weather services manager Deryn Griffiths said. "I wouldn't be surprised if we were getting 100mm over the three-day period."

Little rain has fallen over the Warragamba catchment area, however, which supplies Sydney's water, but some is expected over the next two days.

A spokeswoman for the Sydney Catchment Authority said: "We've had less than one mil, but the rain is now moving in over the catchment. "We're expecting more rainfall over this weekend. If that's the case, any rain today will wet the catchment, and help with the inflows for further rain. Also, with Sunday being watering day, people won't need to water if rain continues this weekend.''

Jeremy Faludi at WorldChanging has a report from the BALLE Conference.

This past weekend I went to the 5th annual BALLE conference--that's the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. They're a network of groups throughout the US and Canada that works to promote local, socially responsible, and environmentally responsible businesses. I wasn't previously familiar with them, but one of the speakers described how big they are: they have over 15,000 member businesses worth over $30 billion--that's twice the market cap of Nike and Apple combined. We usually think of local businesses as small players on the economic stage, because the companies themselves are small and scattered; but organizations like BALLE can start to bring them together to exert a strategic influence on the market. They've certainly caused local economies to thrive where they've formed active chapters.

The conference had your usual slew of keynotes and break-out sessions, but here are a few highlights:

Van Jones, co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights was an amazing speaker. I can't remember the last time I was at a conference where the entire audience leapt to their feet in a standing ovation. He gave, as he put it, "the speech Al Gore would give if he were black," combining the oratory of a Baptist preacher with the rigor of a public intellectual. He works to bring together poverty-fighting groups and environmental groups to kill two birds with the same stone. He talked about how 2007 will be known as the tipping-point year, where the US returns to the hope of the 1960's; but now the hard part begins, because those who have been green "when green was freak, not chic" have to ramp up. It's easy to be on the margins and say you'd fix everything if you were in charge, but now that this movement is going from the fringe toward the center, we have the challenge of actually being in charge, and we need to use the opportunity to get things done. One of the challenges of rising to power is you have to decide who you bring with you and who you leave behind. Jones wants to make sure that no races or economic classes will be left behind, avoiding "eco-apartheid", not only because of the morality issues, but because a system like that won't work. As he put it, "an economy that is green for the top ten percent is just a speed bump on the road to disaster." Van Jones is a man to watch.

Our own Gil Friend moderated a panel on embedding sustainability and local-economy concerns in manufacturing firms. The fair-trade textile company Indigenous Designs described their challenges in getting adequate quality-control and scheduling for US markets by scattered fair-trade artisans in Ecuador, and some difficulties sourcing sustainable materials local to the artisans. The organic food company Nature's Path described their eco-industrial network aimed at achieving zero waste by closing resource loops within the local area, partnering with other businesses to find uses for waste streams. (e.g. food spills becoming cattle feed, food waste becoming parts of dog biscuits, etc.) Eco-paper seller New Leaf Paper (on whose paper the Worldchanging book was printed) talked about being in an industry that is fundamentally non-local, high-volume, low-margin, and trying to turn it into a greener, more local industry. They are shifting the paper industry not by owning paper mills themselves (which requires enormous capital), but by steering existing manufacturers to produce greener paper. The final audience question was notable in that it stumped the panel--how to get businesses to not have zero environmental impact, but to have positive environmental impact. The panelists speculated that although they don't have good answers now, hopefully once the things they are pioneering are status quo, there will be new ideas and ways of making that happen.

Don Shafter, executive director of BALLE, talked about the emerging concept of a "B-corporation": a category of company (like a "C-corporation" or an "S-corporation") that is private enterprise for public benefit (the "B" is for benefit). This is basically a way of formalizing what it means to be a social entrepreneur. As he said, 70% of the US economy is private enterprise, so if we want to make change effective, we need to repurpose the corporation. The motivation for the creation of the "B-corp" classification is threefold: First, though many socially responsible companies have been created in recent years, there is no market clarity--no definition to distinguish a truly socially & environmentally responsible company from a greenwashing one. Second, current corporate law almost prohibits a company from doing anything other than blindly maximizing shareholder profit; social and environmental returns do not have the same legal protection, much less a mandate; a different set of rules must be created that responsible companies will operate by. Third, the businesses that do prioritize social and eco-responsibility should join together as a market sector, so they can have more clout in the economy, both by acting together and being measured together.

Michelle Long of Sustainable Connections (the Bellingham, Washington chapter of BALLE) described the transformation they caused in their region: In just a few years, 3/5 of the people in the city have changed their spending habits to prefer local goods and businesses, Bellingham city government buildings are running on 100% renewable power, and the city as a whole has switched to 11% renewable power. (Especially good, considering their goal was 2%.) What's more, there has been a 40% reduction in the price of green energy because of the greater usage. One point she made is that local economy movements can be a great laboratory for global change. It's both difficult and risky to make deep systemic changes to an enormous system like the global economy, but it is easy to change smaller-scale systems, and when a successful one emerges you can use its lessons on the larger scale.

One panel was on "Sustainable biodiesel", which I was happy to see, because it shows that alternative fuels are starting to become successful enough that we can take the next step and examine the true sustainability of them, and delineate the differences between bio-fuels that may not benefit people and the planet compared to those that will. For instance, the moderator was not a proponent of burning straight vegetable oil in cars because it has two problematic factors: it leaves a residue on the inside of engines (which damages the vehicle over time), and its emissions include burned glycerin whose chemical composition is similar to a pesticide. They mentioned that a certification standard is being developed by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy that will measure the sustainability of a biofuel, similar to LEED or FSC certification. It would give biofuel producers a score based on the energy return of the crop, the greenhouse emissions, not clearing virgin land to farm feedstock, local ownership of refineries, and other factors.

Paul Hawken talked about his new book, Blessed Unrest, a history of the environmental and social-justice movement which argues that this is the largest social movement in the history of humanity. He talked about how many people are waiting for a leader, like the Dalai Lama or Martin Luther King, to make the movement happen, but really the movement is already here, and we should be grateful that it is a movement with no one in charge. He said that of the million-plus organizations he's cataloged, 99% are about diffusing power rather than consolidating it, and are creating solutions rather than decrying problems. He sketched a history of the social justice movement over the last 70 years, and how many of the big names and big events we remember (like MLK) rose on the shoulders of smaller names and organizations you're never heard of. What he did not mention, but should have, is that a movement without leaders is far more robust than a movement with them--like the internet, killing or isolating a few nodes does not bring the whole network down. We should not even look for heroes, he said -- we should connect and collaborate with each other. Today.

EcoGeek has a post on "Uber-Eco-Towers: The Top Ten Green Skyscrapers.

Green skyscrapers offer so much for the average EcoGeek to drool over. Each one can contain hundreds of innovations that make the world a cleaner place, they build up, rather than out, and many of them are frikkin gorgeous.

Lucky for us, more and more eco-towers are popping up all the time. In fact, a symposium about greenscrapers called Mixed Greens: An International Survey of State-of-the-Art Sustainable Skyscraper Design just wrapped up last month in NYC.

Lucky for us, Jon Schroeder is on the case, and is bringing us the top ten green skyscrapers.

TreeHugger reports that Dirty Snow may be just as Bad as Greenhouse Gases in terms of causing global warming. As usual, the solution remains the same - switch to clean energy sources...

We may have been a little too hasty in laying all the blame for global warming squarely at the feet of greenhouse gases: UC Irvine scientists have discovered that dirty snow could account for over a third of the Arctic warming typically attributed to them.

“A one-third change in concentration is huge, yet the Earth has only warmed about .8 degrees because the effect is distributed globally,” said Charlie Zender, an associate professor of Earth system science at UCI and co-author of the study, which appears in the Journal of Geophysical Research. “A small amount of snow impurities in the Arctic have caused a significant temperature response there.”

Dirty snow arises from the soot that escapes from tailpipes, smoke stacks and forest fires to enter the atmosphere and then falls to the ground. While clean, white snow tends to reflect back heat into space and cause cooling, the dark surface of dirty snow causes it to absorb sunlight and thus results in warming.

“When we inject dirty particles into the atmosphere and they fall onto snow, the net effect is we warm the polar latitudes,” Zender said. “Dark soot can heat up quickly. It’s like placing tiny toaster ovens into the snow pack.”

According to Zender and his colleagues, dirty snow likely caused the planet's temperature to rise .1 to .15 degree over the past 200 years, accounting for close to 19% of the total warming experienced (.8 degree Celsius) during that time. Throughout that same period, the Arctic warmed by approximately 1.6 degrees, with some estimates showing dirty snow contributing as little as .5 to as much as 1.5 degrees (or up to 94% of the observed increase). The degree to which dirty snow caused increases in temperature was directly related to the number of forest fires every year.

The effect is even worse in some polar areas where impurities in the snow have led to enough melting to expose the underlying sea ice or soil that is much darker and thus more apt to absorb sunlight. This has resulted in polar temperatures rising by as much as 3 degrees Celsius during certain seasons. “Once the snow is gone, the soot that caused the snow to melt continues to have an effect because the ground surface is darker and retains more heat,” Zender said.

Zender thinks policymakers should approach this problem by focusing on reducing industrial soot emissions and switching over to cleaner fuels. Making new snow purer by cutting out impurities would cause an immediate cooling in temperatures.

TreeHugger also has a post on battery developments for GM's "Volt" car. Technology Review also has a post on the topic.

GM has awarded two contracts for the development of li-ion batteries for its E-Flex System. 13 companies submitted bids for the project, which is the basis for the Chevy Volt concept that caused quite a stir a while ago. From previous TH coverage;

“There are two things that make the Volt’s E-flex drive train noteworthy. First, it is a series hybrid, which means power is fed directly to the motor, not the battery. It can be plugged into a household electric socket and charged fully within about six hours. Completely charged it can drive roughly 40 miles on electricity alone. According to GM, more than 75 percent of Americans live within 20 miles of where they work, meaning the Volt would get them to the office and back on 100% electricity with no direct emissions.” ...

It’s clear that this is not a production deal, but more an R&D exercise. Denise Gray, GMs director of hybrid energy storage devices, said, ‘This technology is developing rapidly. These contracts are an opportunity to deeply understand the differing battery technologies before making a production decision.’

Rick Wagoner, Chairman and CEO of GM, said, ‘The signing of these battery development contracts is an important next step on the path to bring the Volt closer to reality. Given the huge potential that the Volt and its E-Flex system offers to lower oil consumption, lower oil imports, and reduce carbon emissions, this is a top priority program for GM.’

It's not a sign that Chevy Volt cars are to start emerging from factories - that's unlikely to happen in any real numbers until 2011. It is a good sign though. The money that GM is spending is likely to improve the quality of batteries that will be available for the vehicle. Even if GM doesn’t go ahead with production (which is unlikely considering all the positive press that the Volt concept created), then that knowledge will still be out there, enabling other manufacturers to go ahead with their own projects.

Reuters has a report on the disruptions caused by Cyclone Gonu in Oman.

Cyclone Gonu pummeled Oman on Wednesday, halting oil and gas exports for a second day and forcing thousands to flee the coast, but weakened as it moved through the Arabian Sea, a major route for Gulf oil shipments. ...

Cyclone Gonu disrupted shipping, pushing oil prices toward $71 a barrel on Wednesday, their highest in nearly two weeks.

An Oman-based shipper said Mina al Fahal, the only export outlet for the country’s 650,000 barrels per day of crude oil, remained shut for the second day on Wednesday as did the Sur terminal, which handles 10 million tonnes per year of liquefied natural gas exports. “Everything is shut down. The terminals will be shut at least until tomorrow,” the shipper told Reuters. “At around 4 p.m. (1200 GMT) it will get very severe in Muscat.”

Lieutenant Commander Marn Balolong, meteorologist and oceanographer on the USS Nimitz, which is in the Gulf, said it would be unsafe for ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz for the next 48 hours but predicted that they would probably speed up after that to get back on schedule.

The Union Of Concerned Scientists has a pragmatic assessment of Nuclear Power and Global Warming.

To address global warming, we need a profound transformation of the ways in which we generate and consume energy. The urgency of this situation demands that we be willing to consider all possible options for coping with climate change. In examining each option we must take into account its impact on public health, safety, and security, the time required for large scale deployment, and its costs.

While there are currently some global warming emissions associated with the nuclear fuel cycle and plant construction, when nuclear plants operate they do not produce carbon dioxide. This fact is used to support proposals for a large-scale expansion of nuclear power both in the United States and around the world.

It must be borne in mind that a large-scale expansion of nuclear power in the United States or worldwide under existing conditions would be accompanied by an increased risk of catastrophic events-a risk not associated with any of the non-nuclear means for reducing global warming. These catastrophic events include a massive release of radiation due to a power plant meltdown or terrorist attack, or the death of tens of thousands due to the detonation of a nuclear weapon made with materials obtained from a civilian-most likely non-U.S.-nuclear power system. Expansion of nuclear power would also produce large amounts of radioactive waste that would pose a serious hazard as long as there remain no facilities for safe long-term disposal.

In this context, the Union of Concerned Scientists contends that:

1. Prudence dictates that we develop as many options to reduce global warming emissions as possible, and begin by deploying those that achieve the largest reductions most quickly and with the lowest costs and risk. Nuclear power today does not meet these criteria.

2. Nuclear power is not the silver bullet for "solving" the global warming problem. Many other technologies will be needed to address global warming even if a major expansion of nuclear power were to occur.

3. A major expansion of nuclear power in the United States is not feasible in the near term. Even under an ambitious deployment scenario, new plants could not make a substantial contribution to reducing U.S. global warming emissions for at least two decades.

4. Until long-standing problems regarding the security of nuclear plants-from accidents and acts of terrorism-are fixed, the potential of nuclear power to play a significant role in addressing global warming will be held hostage to the industry's worst performers.

5. An expansion of nuclear power under effective regulations and an appropriate level of oversight should be considered as a longer-term option if other climate-neutral means for producing electricity prove inadequate. Nuclear energy research and development (R&D) should therefore continue, with a focus on enhancing safety, security, and waste disposal.

Open Democracy has an article on "Decoding nuclear nonsense" in the UK.

The argument over nuclear power in relation to Britain's future energy needs is set to intensify with the government's announcement of a five-month "consultation" on the issue on 23 May 2007 to accompany the publication of its white paper on energy policy. To avoid this consultation becoming the sort where the conclusions and the practical outcomes are decided by the host in advance, it is essential to begin by clearing away some of the myths that encrust the issue.

Here then is a provisional list of seven elements of the pro-nuclear case, which can be expected to have a full airing in the weeks ahead, along with their antidote: evidence and argument based on economic, political and environmental reality.

The first element in the nuclear myth-complex is the observation that the generators must be allowed to build new nuclear-power stations. This is an intentionally misleading statement. There is nothing to prevent anyone who wishes to build a nuclear-power station from doing so today. Except, that is, the economics. The reason no one is applying to build new nuclear-power stations is that there is no pressing need to do so at the moment. ..

Iraq's oil unions are striking in an attempt to influence the proposed laws handing over Iraq's oil reserves to foreign companies.

Iraqi oil workers, marginalized while a law to govern the oil is drafted and debated, are firing a warning shot by going on strike.

The Iraqi Pipelines Union released a statement Monday that it shut down two 14-inch oil and gas products pipelines inside the country in protest against the law and working conditions they want changed. The statement, released by a number of ally groups outside the country, said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki needs to make good on an agreement on the demands reached May 16 or face more work stoppage.

The Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, an umbrella group of more than 26,000 oil-sector workers, including the Basra-based IPU, is demanding better working conditions, salaries, land promised them and lower fuel prices. And most importantly, they want to join the debate over the law that will govern Iraq's vast oil reserves ...

Craig at Celsias has some comments on the lead up to the G8 meeting in Germany.

We stand on the eve of the 33rd Group of Eight summit meeting (formally known as the Group of Seven before Russia subscribed in 1997). Although this year’s Group of Eight (G8) summit in Heiligendamm, Germany has yet to begin, the last week’s pre-emptive strikes from protesters in nearby Rostock have caused it to hit the headlines already. Some question whether the inability of international leaders to listen doesn’t provoke violent outbursts, and yet others say the provocation of violence by security forces is part of a plan to marginalise legitimate gripes.

Whether the protests have any effect on putting pressure on the world leaders or not, recent scientific studies certainly should. This last month has seen a few alarming scientific reports come to the fore:

* Southern Ocean Nears CO2 Saturation Point
* Global warming ‘is three times faster than worst predictions’
* Arctic melt worse than predictions

Presently, world governments are, at the very best, struggling to come to a united course of action to tackle the low to mid-range forcasts of this year’s IPCC reports - reports that have, themselves, been softened and ‘tweaked’ by political interventions. The scientific reports above give some evidence that perhaps even the IPCC’s high water mark, as it were, has been underestimated - or, at least, under-reported….

The Guardian has a look at the foolishness that is reviving the cold war. Well - foolish for those who don't make money out of arms races and wars anyway...

Will history tell us we were fools? We worried about the wrong war and made the wrong enemies. In the first decade of the 21st century the leaders of America and Britain allowed themselves to be distracted by a few Islamist bombers and took easy refuge in the politics of fear. They concocted a "war on terror" and went off to fight little nations that offered quick wins.

Meanwhile these leaders neglected the great strategic challenge of the aftermath of cold war: the fate of Russia and its mighty arsenals, its soul tormented by military and political collapse, its pride undimmed. They danced on Moscow's grave and hurled abuse at its shortcomings. They drove its leaders to assert a new energy-based hegemony and find new allies to the south and east. The result was a new arms race and, after a Kremlin coup, a new war. Is that the path we are treading?

When Keynes returned from Versailles in 1919 he wrote an attack on the treaty that ended the first world war. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace he warned that punishing Germany and demanding crippling reparations would jeopardise Europe's stability and the building of German democracy. He confronted politicians, on both sides of the Atlantic, puffed up with the vanity of victory and convinced that the German menace had been laid to rest. He was right and they were wrong.

For the past six years Washington's whirling dervishes have reduced Anglo-American foreign policy to a frenzy of bullying hatred of anyone to whom they take a dislike. One half of this neoconservative agenda is heading for the rocks, American dominance in the Middle East following a stunning victory over a Muslim state. But the other half is alive and well, pushing ahead with the missile defence system bequeathed by the Reagan administration.

This so-called star wars is militarily unproven and, with the end of the cold war, of no apparent urgency. But it is astronomically expensive and, as such, has powerful support within America's industry-led defence community. When Dick Cheney was finding George Bush a defence secretary in 2000, Donald Rumsfeld's chief qualification was his enthusiasm for space-based defence. Hence America's 2002 renunciation of the anti-ballistic missile treaty. Hence the installation of defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, in defiance of what was promised to Russia at the end of the cold war. Hence Rumsfeld's frequent jibes against old Europe in favour of "new".

Vladimir Putin's reactive threat this week to retarget his missiles at west Europe was reckless and stupid. Just when nuclear disarmament is again a live issue and his old enemy, Nato, faces defeat in Afghanistan, he tossed red meat to the Pentagon (and Whitehall) hawks. He strengthened the case for a new British Trident and encouraged an arms race that he knows his own country can ill afford, just as it can ill afford to send Europe frantically seeking alternative energy supplies.

Yet nations do not always act rationally, especially those with authoritarian rulers. Putin's belligerence was the predictable outcome of a western diplomacy towards Russia whose ineptitude would amaze even Keynes. Nato's dismissal of Moscow's approach for membership, like the EU's similar cold shoulder, wholly misunderstood Russian psychology. The loss of its east European satellites was not just a loss of empire but revived age-old border insecurity. The pretence that Rumsfeld's installations, which could be placed anywhere, were aimed at "rogue states such as North Korea" was so ludicrous that only Tony Blair believed it.

There was a moment after 1990 when Russia was weak, immature and unstable, and longed for the embrace of friendship. Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, even Blair in his pre-poodle phase, understood this. Neither side had an interest in reviving the cold war. Under Bush this has been replaced by an assumption that he should somehow dictate the terms of Russia's conversion to capitalism and democracy, even as western leaders cringingly paid court to the dictators of Beijing. This undermined Moscow's internationalists and played into the hands of Putin's hard-liners. It was repeated in Bush's speech in Germany yesterday.

Putin is throwing down a gauntlet not to the west so much as to his own Kremlin successors. He is warning them never to trust the west. To him it remains incorrigibly imperialist, hypocritical in its global morality and unreliable in its treaties. So he is telling them to cause mischief with oil and gas. Deny help over Iran and Kosovo. Stay armed and on guard.

And some raw links to finish off with:

SMH - Labor To Test Firms' Carbon Offset Claims
SMH - Good oil On Carbon trading Needed Now
SMH - Coke To Cut Water Use
SMH G8 Protestors Make Their Point
The Age - Attack Of The Killer Bees
The Oil Drum - Cyclone Gonu Thread 3
The Oil Drum - Relocalization: A Strategic Response to Climate Change and Peak Oil
Energy Bulletin - The peak oil crisis: Twin problems
Our Finite World - Corn-based ethanol: Is this a solution?
TreeHugger - You Got Bacteria in My Gas: Engineering Microbes to Make Hydrocarbons
WorldChanging - Eye on Mali: Jatropha Oil Lights Up Villages
Philadelphia Inquirer - Give blood and maybe win a supply of fuel
Cryptogon - Morgan Stanley’s 3-Alarm Sell Signal (and Congratulations are due)
Cryptogon - OPEC Squirms on Biofuel Threat
Cryptogon - Los Angeles: Driest Ever
Bangor Daily News - US Failing To Support Our Soldiers
The Liberty Papers - Ron Paul On Tucker Carlson
The Spoof - ExxonMobil to buy US Military for $100 Million-trillion
Word of the day (from ESPN) - nerdcore.

Energy Bulletin has a roundup of carbon trading news, which includes the most colourful phrase I've seen today - "The Bored Whore of Kyoto". In the same roundup - "Offset or Off Put? The carbon offset market report: Carbon Neutral Watch – Corporates, Consultants And Credibility" from the Total Environment Centre, "Emissions plan hurts households, but not big polluters" from the SMH and "Heavy polluters to be outed in states' plan" from The Age.

One thing is clear from all of these - if you must implement cap and trade instead of the carbon tax option I tend to prefer (with matching tax cuts and tax simplification elsewhere), then you need to be vigilant issuing permits and auction them off transparently, not just hand them out in vast numbers to government cronies...

Nothing drove home Russia's place in the growing pollution-trading business better than what one carbon finance guy told me at a conference last month sponsored by Gazprom and the World Bank. We were on drink number three or four at the reception when he dropped the green pretense and came clean.

"I don't know if climate change is caused by burning coal or sun flares or what," said the Moscow-based carbon cowboy. "And I don't really give a shit. Russia is the most energy inefficient country around, and carbon is the most volatile market ever. There's a lot of opportunity to make money." ..

The purpose of the Gazprom/World Bank event was to introduce Russia to these Kyoto-era carbon suitors, and to educate local industry about how best to profit from the growing trade in carbon credits. Because what's climate change about if not profit? The global market for carbon reduction credits is worth more than $20 billion and booming. The business bustles at the heart of "market-friendly" Kyoto.

Carbon trading is basically a loophole -- a "flexible mechanism" in Kyoto-speak -- that allows developed nations continue with business as usual while claiming to address the climate crisis. Because most industrialized Kyoto signatories won't sacrifice short-term economic growth to cut emissions at home -- best accomplished by mandatory absolute cuts accompanied by a draconian carbon tax -- Kyoto lets them instead make efficiency investments in places like Russia and China, where it's cheaper to reduce CO2 and where there's plenty of low-hanging fruit. How many tons of CO2 countries save abroad equals how many carbon credits they get toward meeting their own national targets. Targets that they are in reality missing, in some cases by a wide margin. ...

Dave Roberts at Grist reports that Europe is to reform their carbon trading system.

This is extremely heartening:

Europe is moving toward making significant changes to its emissions-trading system that could force large polluters to pay for most, if not all, permits to produce climate-changing gases, European officials said Monday.

Although the European carbon-trading arrangement is considered to be among the world's most functional, the countries that administer it acknowledged in a meeting during the weekend in Essen, Germany, that the system had flaws, including a government credit allocation plan that allows companies to profit by lobbying for additional pollution permits.

According to a statement, the governments of the European Union plan to ask the European Commission to propose modifying the current framework, known as cap and trade, by including auction and benchmarking components that would reduce corporate influence over pollution permits after 2012, when a crucial period of the present system expires.

"Though it has been a success, we have undergone a steep learning curve, and we have seen some windfall profits being made by power companies," said Barbara Helfferich, a spokeswoman for the European environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas.

"We are considering auctioning up to 100 percent of credits," she said, and would seek to determine whether there should be a mandatory level of auctioning. The commission is to complete its review this year.

The post-2012 changes might give the European Commission greater power to impose overall caps on national governments. At present it must approve the allocations that each member country makes for its biggest polluters.

Meanwhile, the U.S. plans to have 18 months of meetings to form some "aspirational goals."

David Reevely at The Eco Libertarian is exploring "The libertarian argument for government-mandated carbon markets". He also talks about cap and trade versus carbon taxes and the idea that the weakness of a carbon tax is that its very difficult to pick the correct rate.

Personally I've always viewed carbon taxes as having one mandatory feature - they are raised every year, and this is made very clear to market participants up front. The idea of a carbon tax is to eliminate carbon emissions, and the way to do that is to make them completely uneconomical and thus encourage rapid investment in clean alternatives...

Following up on her post from last week concluding that the idea of a carbon tax is fatally flawed (her post is here, my thoughts are here), economist Lynne Kiesling is responding to questions about how she can be both an avid free-marketer and an advocate of a government-mandated and -designed market in carbon emissions.

It’s a good question. The beauty of markets is supposed to be that they arise naturally. At their best, without distortions or created by either governments or monopolists with undue power, free markets just let individuals figure out what’s best for themselves, by themselves. When two rational parties enter into an exchange freely, they both come out of it better off. In the end, everybody goes home either happy or fully cognizant of what he or she has to do to become happy. And all this just… happens. Such markets are, in a play on words that pleases me, organic.

So what the heck are free-marketers doing calling for the government to set up markets in carbon?

Kiesling’s answer is great:

Many of what we think of as the most free and most capitalist of our market institutions, such as financial exchanges, involve elaborate contracts and laws enforcing those contracts. This legal context determines the rules by which we exchange; the context and the rules form the market institution. The quality of that institution and its variation across places or across time can affect how much exchange actually occurs, and how much net benefit is created through exchange. Even in free markets, the market institution is carefully designed, although in most organic markets the design process is a very distributed one, building upon centuries of legal precedent and experience, so it doesn’t look like it’s highly designed or deliberate.

The problem is that in markets coming out of regulation or in markets that have never existed before, the market institution has to be designed in less-than-organic circumstances. That’s the hard part, because it introduces a political dimension to the design of market institutions that is not present in more organic situations, because there are special interests in the status quo and special interests in the future setup, all trying to influence the design of the rules in the market institution.

It ain’t easy, and everybody wants to get their fingers into it to poke in special holes for their own benefit. If they get to, the thing won’t work. Protecting carbon markets and related environmental measures from that kind of interference may be where rigorous, unbending free-marketers can make their biggest contribution to the environmental movement.

Inhabitat has a bunch of posts on sustainable architecture and clean energy in Asia - ECO-ARCHITECTURE IN ASIA, SHANGHAI GOING GREEN WITH WIND POWER, SHANGHAI to Build Hydrogen Fuel Cell Infrastructure and Shanghai’s Underground Park (which seems to have gone missing unless you are reading via RSS).

The green building movement in Asia may be lagging behind the U.S. and Europe, but it is slowly gaining momentum. Today’s Wall Street Journal features a piece that highlights eco-architecture projects taking shape in Asian cities across Thailand, China, Hong Kong and Singapore. One project is Ocean One, a 91-story beachfront residential high-rise in the Thai resort town of Pattaya.

Designed by Australia-based firm Woods Bagot, the building (set to be completed in 2010) will be the first eco-friendly high-rise and tallest building to be built in Thailand. Energy efficient appliances will save residents as much as 30% on electricity bills and up to 80% of the water used will be recycled for toilets and then treated for use outdoors. “A highspeed elevator will zip visitors to an observation deck, generating enough electricity as it descends to light the deck at night. Solar panels on the roof of an adjacent commercial building will power shops and restaurants.” Excess energy will even be fed into Thailand’s electricity grid.

Other eco-friendly high-rises in Asia include the residential homes in Bang Na (a suburb of Bangkok) which feature special roofs that absorb minimal heat and increase ventilation and Orchard towers in Hong Kong which use a water-recycling system to collect rainwater to water gardens and wash floors. More buildings in Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City and Shanghai are in the works.

Inhabitat also has a post on the GLOBAL ECOLOGY RESEARCH BUILDING at Stanford.

When the Global Ecology Research Center at Stanford University required a new headquarters, they decided to build a facility to reflect their current research priorities: biodiversity, water use and climate change. Designed by EHDD Architecture, the result is a beautiful building which has been named as one of the American Institute of Architects top ten green projects of 2007.

So, what has this building achieved in terms of sustainability? Well, for starters, the building uses recycled materials as much as possible throughout the entire structure. The facade of the building is made out of timber, which was obtained from old wine tanks, from the wineries nearby. The use of this material meant that no paints or sealants was required due to the tight-grained nature of the hardwood, which had the added benefit of giving the building a nice warm feel to it. The concrete used in the construction uses fly-ash as an additive, as well as gravel remnants and recycled boulders for gravel to increase its recycled content, and reduce its carbon footprint. Even the tables used in the workstations come from recycled materials, having been obtained from the previously unused doors from a separate project by the builder.

The Ecology Research Center has all the features that you would expect from a building of this nature. The interior spaces are all illuminated naturally during the day, thanks to the narrowness of the design. All the paints, finishes and carpets in the building are of low VOC content. The mild California climate allows for most of the workspaces to be naturally ventilated with all the windows, including the clerestory, being operable by the occupants. ...

Sydney mayor Clover Moore says it is time to imagine a Sydney of the future.

What sort of city do we want Sydney to be by 2030? Who will be living and working here? How should the streets look and feel? How will we get around the city and how should the city work? Above all, how do we make sure that Sydney has a future that is at once prosperous, liveable, equitable and environmentally sustainable? The answers depend on what we do now.

Just as previous generations had the imagination and daring to think for the future, giving us a rail network, the Harbour Bridge and an Opera House nominated as a "wonder of the world", so we now have the duty and opportunity to think - and act - boldly for the benefit of future generations, and for the advancement of our city.

Environmental imperatives alone mean that we need to rethink the way we build, operate and live in our cities. But they also present unparalleled opportunities to re-imagine our cities, to make them cleaner, more accessible, richer, more interesting, efficient and more uplifting places to be.

The City of Sydney has launched Sustainable Sydney 2030 to imagine the kind of city we want this to be within the next generation. Importantly, it will also provide the road map that will get us there. At the end of the process we will have a vision for our Sydney of the future and a series of projects and programs to help achieve that vision.

This is a collaborative project that requires input from all sectors of our community. We will speak to residents, workers, businesses and visitors as well as Australian and international experts.

It comes as our thoughts of the future are challenged by catastrophic predictions of global warming. Climate change needs to be addressed now. We know that Sydney's environmental footprint is equivalent to 49 per cent of NSW. If we continue as we are, by 2031 it will have reached 95 per cent of NSW - unsustainable for Sydney, for NSW and for the nation.

It is a time when Sydney's economic activity is healthy but under challenge from competition from other cities in our region. It is a time when we are already grappling with population and congestion pressures, and planning of large new urban renewal developments such as Green Square, the Broadway brewery site and East Darling Harbour.

The old "either/or" dichotomies can no longer apply. The great cities of the 21st century will protect their unique character and heritage while setting the highest standards for new developments. They will accommodate greater numbers of people in better environments and, above all, they will be economically competitive while being environmentally sustainable. ...

Deep Sea News has a list of ways to reduce plastic consumption.

# No plastic grocery bags. Obviously the easiest one and the one you already know about. Ask for paper at the supermarket. Better yet take your own bags. I like the ECOBAG made from 100% recycled cotton (double bonus) for its durability and size. Amazon has them for $8.99 a piece which is still a bet hefty. Alternatively, most supermarket chains now offer reusable bags near thier checkouts.

# No plastic "poop" bags. Biobag offers a lot of great products. One of the best, if your a dog owner like me, is the 100% biodegradable dog waste bag. You can pick up a pack of them at Amazon for $6.99.

# No plastic trash bags. But what about my trash bags? Biobag also offers a tall kitchen bag, so you are quickly running out of excuses. They come in 3 gallon and 13 gallon size. You can get them at Amazon here.

# No plastic produce bags. How do keep my pound of bean sprouts, my pound of tomatoes, and lettuce separate? Luckily Evert-Fresh makes a produce bag that is reusable, non-petroleum based, and may actually keep produce fresher longer. I personally love the packaging with the women so happy to be holding a basket of nature's finest. You can buy them at Amazon here.

# No plastic silverware. You work lunchroom is chock-o-block full of plastic utensils. You could take your own for starters. I know but you don't want to give up that spork? I don't either. Luckily, we don't have to. Vargo makes a lovely field-rated titanium spork avialable at Amazon. My only complaint you can't get a leather holster for it. Additionally, you could get your company to switch to Biocorp's compostable cups, utensils, plates, etc. The utensils are made up of cornstarch and surprisingly are amazing sturdy. Biocorp makes it easy for you to order online.

# No plastic cup or cup lids. I love coffee! Sorry for the personal revelation but I really do. The downside all those cups and plastic lids I generate from a Starbucks visit. A Christmas or two ago my mother-in-law bought me an Oxo coffee mug. Yes mother-in-laws can be nice and helpful. This bad-boy is field rated (the mug not my mother-in-law although she is tough). The Oxo Good Grips Travel Mug is the Pinzgauer of mugs. Once the top is on the thing is 100% leakproof even after dropping it. Hot beverages, like coffee, stay warm, like surface of the sun warm, for at least a 5-6 hours. The price is steep, $18.99 at Amazon, but well worth the cost.

# No plastic water bottles. You really don't want to be drinking out of plastic anyway. Plastic leaches bisphenol A, a well known endocrine disrupter. Your thinking I use a Nalgene so I'm good. Only if you use one the "old school" opaque white pliable polycarbonate bottles. Klean Kanteen, a great small company, makes a stainless steal alternative. You can purchase them online and the company also supports the Breast Cancer Fund (double bonus).

Grist would like to kill the inaccurate meme that powering the world with solar energy would take up a lot of land.

Can we please, once and for all, stop decrying solar energy for being too area-intensive? See, for example, the oft-cited statistic that to power its economy, the U.S. would need "10 billion meters, squared, of land." America isn't exactly short on square meters, and awfully sunny ones at that. But 10 billion square meters sounds a lot bigger than it really is.

10,000 square kilometers (100km x 100km) form a square you could drive around entirely, at legal highway speeds, in four hours. (Less if you speed.) 10,000 square kilometers is also roughly one-fortieth the area that the human species has already occupied for hydroelectric reservoirs -- all to produce, according to the IEA, 15 percent of current global electricity demand. (This certainly overstates the efficiency of large dams, which do not produce 100 percent of the world's hydroelectric power.)

Get that? For vastly less space than we already consume for the pittance we get from hydroelectric dams, we could power the world. Space is not the limiting factor -- and soon enough, cost won't be either. Which will leave mulish stupidity the remaining roadblock.

"The Future Of Things" has a look at a 125 Miles per Gallon Toyota Prius.

The Pennsylvania based Lithium Technology Corporation recently demonstrated a new type of "plug-in" Toyota Prius hybrid car. The new model is based on advanced lithium iron phosphate battery which allows the hybrid car to travel up to a distance of 125 miles per gallon of fuel – making it possibly the most efficient mass-produced car in the world.

Lithium Technology Corporation (LTC) announced that its' new lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) technology might be incoporated in hybrid cars expected to arrive in the market in 2008-2009. The Toyota Prius demonstrated by LTC was also equipped with a "plug-in" capability which allows it to recharge using conventional power sources (such as a power outlet in the owner's garage). Currently there are no "plug-in" capable cars on the market but special conversion kits are available and a small number of people are already using them to recharge their hybrid vehicles.

Although the new long range "plug-in" Toyota Prius might prove to be even more popular than its current version (which since the launch of its second version in 2004 has sold over 200,000 units worldwide), it is still very far from breaking the world record for the longest drive per gallon of fuel. This record was recently broken by a prototype car built by a team from St. Joseph La Joliverie University in France, which set an astonishing record of 7,148 miles per gallon of fuel (3,039 km per liter).

"Green Options" has a post on a visit to Bentonville's "Sam's Club".

Thursday's media event was jam-packed with activities, starting with a tour of Bentonville's Sam's Club. Opened in September 2006, this store was a far cry from the one I remember going to with my parents years ago: as opposed to looking and feeling like a warehouse (which it basically was), the Bentonville store was bright and inviting.

A big part of that feel comes from some of the eco-friendly elements the company built into the store. For instance, the ceiling is arrayed with 54 skylights, and artificial lighting is equipped with sensor dimmers that adjust to the amount of sunlight coming in. The walls are painted white to enhance the light, and even the flooring was chosen for its light reflection. LED lighting is used in refrigeration units. I couldn't get an exact figure on the amount of energy the store saves (because it's so new, I was told), but am guessing it's significant.

We also got to take a look at recycling efforts in the store. We saw a "super bale," a compressed package of recyclable materials that is sent to a processing plant for separation and recycling. Wal-Mart and Sam's Clubs efforts to recycle materials from deliveries to the stores has been so successful that they now sell recycled materials back to their suppliers. Our tour guides made it very clear: the company is interested in "doing well by doing good," and they presented this as a prime example.

We also saw a display for "Students for Recycling," a joint effort between Sam's Club, Aquafina, and Keep America Beautiful. The campaign challenges schools around the country to hold collection drives for PET bottles. Prizes are awarded to the fifty schools that collect the most material, and all of it will be turned into backpacks that will be distributed "to students who are making a difference in their communities." Last year's "Recycle the Warmth" effort converted the bottles into fleece jackets that were given to needy children in communities that participated in the drives.

During the tour, I got a chance to spend a few minutes chatting with Doug McMillon, president and CEO of Sam's Club, about other sustainability initiatives. He told me, for instance, that he's given his buyers a "25% challenge": he wants a quarter of the purchases they make from vendors to be products that are, in some way, sustainable. When I asked him how this is tracked, he made it clear that it wasn't a matter of buyers having to document these purchases on a ready-made check-off list; rather, the company is working with these employees to educate them on what constitutes a sustainable product. Currently, these employees and others are being encouraged to read Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce, and Daniel C. Esty's and Andrew S. Winston's Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage. McMillon made it clear that he wants to educate and empower his employees, rather than dictate sustainability to them. Because Sam's Club is a source of supplies for so many small businesses, McMillon also noted that there are opportunities available to educate the wider business community on the benefits of "going green."

When I signed up for the tour, my initial thought was "Ho hum... a tour of Sam's Club." I certainly left feeling better about what's happening with these retail centers. Of course, I couldn't also help but feel a bit overwhelmed by the rows and rows of merchandise, a feeling that stayed with me at our next stop, the new Bentonville Supercenter. The question that's always stayed with me as I've talked with the folks at Wal-Mart: is it possible to for a company that's making its billions off of such a wide range of low-priced goods to really work towards sustainability? While I'm impressed by the company's efforts, I'm not going to try to answer that question now; rather, I'll have more thoughts on that as I write more about last week's events. I certainly invite you to share your ideas and opinions, though.

The SMH says that analysts are predicting uranium prices will rise to US$200.

URANIUM spot prices could reach $US200 a pound within the next two years, buoyed by a shortfall in supply and increasing investment in the nuclear fuel by speculators, according to Macquarie Bank.

The price, which hit $US125 a pound in mid-May, will probably average $US125 a pound this year, rising to $US135 next year, Macquarie said in a report. RBC Capital Markets, UBS and producers Rio Tinto and SXR Uranium One are among those also forecasting further gains.

Uranium prices had jumped 12-fold since early 2003, underpinned by a shortage, concerns over future production and a lack of investment in new mines, Macquarie said. Efforts to limit emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels had bolstered demand for uranium for power generation.

"In the near term, with the market expected to remain in significant deficit in 2007-08, risk on the supply side and growing speculative interest, it is hard to see what could prevent spot prices going higher," Macquarie analysts Max Layton and John Moorhead said. "We would not be surprised to see prices move up to around $US200 a pound over the next two years."

Global uranium supply fell last year as a gain in secondary supplies from dismantled nuclear weapons failed to offset a fall in mine production.

The IHT has an article by De Beers' Nicky Oppenheimer saying that Africa is "No more the 'hopeless continent'".

Two years ago, in the run-up to the Group of 8 summit meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, the Commission for Africa advocated increased aid as a silver bullet for Africa's development. Africa was still the "hopeless continent," a "scar on the conscience of the world," according to the host of the summit.

Since Gleneagles, economic growth in Africa has averaged over 5 percent annually - a step up from the dismal 1980s and 1990s when it managed little over two percent. And the number of conflicts is an exact corollary of the continent's better economics - down by two-thirds from a peak of 12 in the late 1990s. But this improvement is not the result of aid. Much of the extra aid flowing to Africa is not new money; it is money saved on debt relief, and it has been slower in coming and with more strings than expected. The international agenda has moved on, too. Interest in Africa has cooled as Iraq, Afghanistan and global warming have heated up.

Yet Africa is succeeding - not in spite of the international community's apathy or unreliability, but because of it. It has forced African countries to become more self-reliant and to take responsibility. It has marked out the reformers from the laggards and the performers from the spectators.

Simple solutions, like more aid, will never work for Africa. The continent is infinitely complex and increasingly diverse. You will find both homespun successes and entrenched failures.

Africa remains one of the most food-insecure parts of the world. Two hundred fifty million Africans live in urban slums today, a figure expected to double by 2020. The continent accounts for nearly two-thirds of global HIV-AIDS cases. Less than one-quarter of those living in sub-Saharan Africa have access to electricity. Agricultural production is now just one-third of Asia's levels, after parity 50 years ago. The figures are depressing. Yet what is remarkable - and largely ignored - is how Africa is moving forward despite these endemic problems.

I would cite five main reasons for this.

First, there have been two momentous governance shifts in Africa over the past 15 years - democracy and liberal economic reform. Twenty-five years ago, there were just three African democracies: Botswana, Senegal and Mauritius. Today more than 40 African countries hold regular multi-party elections. Some are far from perfect, but in the fight against political complacency and despotism, the right side is winning.

A second reason concerns the emergence of China and other new players, including India, Russia and Brazil, as forces for economic change on the continent.

China's rising profile in Africa is perhaps the most significant development for the continent since the end of the Cold War. China's (and Asia's) industrial pre-eminence means that African development is unlikely to come from high-volume manufacturing. A combination of natural resource exploitation, agricultural self-sufficiency and high-value agro-exports, and the expansion of its unique range of service industries, including tourism, would therefore seem to be the most likely and rewarding growth path for many African states.

To get there Africans must know what they want - from beneficiation deals to technology and skills transfer - and can realistically achieve when they enter into foreign investor partnerships.

The arrival of China as a major African player also challenges the supremacy of the Western aid-development model. In 2005, China committed more than $8 billion in lending to Nigeria, Angola and Mozambique - a year when the World Bank spent $2.3 billion in all of sub-Saharan Africa. Today Chinese companies are winning about half of all state-funded public works contracts in Africa. No wonder China's trade with Africa has increased in just six years from $10 billion to $55.6 billion last year. ...

It sounds to me like a lot of African economic growth is down to the Chinese and others investing to try and gain access to resources. Time has an article on Africa's Oil Dreams (though they may well be nightmares if history is any guide).

Seismic tests have suggested that São Tomé and Principe, two tropical rocks off the coast of West Africa with a population of 199,000, might be sitting on billions of barrels of oil. For the last few years, the islands have been buzzing with the hope that it will make millionaires of them all and transform a nation where the average annual income is $390. "This is a very poor country," says Luis Alberto Praxeres, executive director of São Tomé's National Petrol Agency. "Oil could solve all our problems."

It hasn't done so yet. In January this year, Chevron said it had not found enough oil to make a well economically viable at the first of its two drill sites off São Tomé. Exxon Mobil, too, has said that it will not, for now, be pursuing exploration off the island, though it retains its drilling rights there. Praxeres, however, still dreams his dreams, and his little country continues to attract a stream of oil-fevered visitors from overseas: this year alone, officials have arrived from the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Japan. But even if São Tomé and Principe were sitting on as much oil as Saudi Arabia, there would be no guarantee that the black gold would deliver happiness and prosperity to its people. On the contrary, if history is any guide, vast caches of oil can cause developing nations as many problems as they solve.

São Tomé and Principe is part of a string of countries on the Gulf of Guinea, the right angle in Africa's west coast, which is the oil industry's new El Dorado. By some estimates, Africa holds 10% of the world's reserves, but that figure belies the importance West Africa has already achieved as a source of energy. According to Poisoned Wells, a new book on African oil by Nicholas Shaxson, an associate fellow with international affairs institute Chatham House in London, the U.S. imported more oil from Africa than from the Middle East in 2005, and more from the Gulf of Guinea than from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined. Nigeria, the giant of the region, supplies 10-12% of U.S. oil imports. "There's a huge boom across the region," says Erik Watremez, a Gabon-based oil and gas specialist for Ernst & Young. "Exploration, drilling, rigs, pipes. It's exploding." Ann Pickard, Shell's regional executive vice president for Africa, agrees: "The Gulf of Guinea is an increasingly important place."

Indeed, says Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, West Africa is "only going to get hotter. It has the location and the resources; the technology is now there to develop them; and companies from all over the world want to be in on the action." Rising demand from India and China and worries over instability in the Middle East have fueled higher oil prices, and those in turn have precipitated a new scramble for energy — oil rigs worldwide now have to be rented a year in advance. There are several reasons why the Gulf of Guinea is a key focus of this rush. African oil is high quality, with a low sulfur content that requires little refining to get it to the pump. The Gulf is relatively close to the U.S., cutting shipping costs to the world's biggest oil consumer, and most of the reserves are out to sea — which means there's no need to construct pipelines through different nations to get the stuff to market. Equally important: unlike some other oil-rich countries, African nations welcome foreign companies to their oil fields, as there are no indigenous African oil majors. In his 2007 book Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil, John Ghazvinian, a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, explains the euphoria like this: "African oil is cheaper, safer and more accessible, and there seems to be more of it every day ... No one really knows just how much oil might be there, since no one's ever really bothered to check."

TreeHugger has a post on "Everything You Wanted to Know About Peak Oil" that points to one of Matt Simmons' inspiring powerpoint packs...

Paul Kedrosky points us to a powerpoint presentation given by Matthew Simmons, an investment banker specializing in the oil industry, to a recent conference of investment advisors. It is everything that Seth Godin says a powerpoint presentation shouldn't be; the ugliest template MicroSoft could develop and far too many words. It is also 54 slides that lay out the future of fuel clearly and comprehensively- demand is young, supply is old, infrastructure is rusting, suppliers are less and less friendly.

Simmons' best hope: Conservation is highest quality new energy supply. See the whole show at ::Simmons & Company

The Guardian reports that "Massacres and Paramilitary Land Seizures Are Behind the Biofuel Revolution" in Colombia.

Armed groups in Colombia are driving peasants off their land to make way for plantations of palm oil, a biofuel that is being promoted as an environmentally friendly source of energy.

Surging demand for “green” fuel has prompted rightwing paramilitaries to seize swaths of territory, according to activists and farmers. Thousands of families are believed to have fled a campaign of killing and intimidation, swelling Colombia’s population of 3 million displaced people and adding to one of the world’s worst refugee crises after Darfur and Congo.

Several companies were collaborating by falsifying deeds to claim ownership of the land, said Andres Castro, the general secretary of Fedepalma, the national federation of palm oil producers. “As a consequence of the development of palm by secretive business practices and the use of threats, people have been displaced and [the businesses] have claimed land for themselves,” he said. His claim was backed up by witnesses and groups such as Christian Aid and the National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia.

The revelations tarnish what has been considered an economic and environmental success story. The fruit of the palm oil tree produces a vegetable oil also used in cooking, employs 80,000 people, and is increasingly being turned into biofuel.

“Four years ago Colombia had 172,000 hectares of palm oil,” President Alvaro Uribe told the Guardian. “This year we expect to finish with nearly 400,000. Four years ago Colombia didn’t produce a litre of biofuel. Today, because of our administration, Colombia produces 1.2m litres per day.” Investment in new installations would continue to boost production, he added.

However the lawlessness created by four decades of insurgency in the countryside has enabled rightwing paramilitaries, and also possibly leftwing rebels, to join the boom. Unlike coca, the armed groups’ main income source, palm oil is a legal crop and therefore safe from state-backed eradication efforts.

Farmers who have been forced off their land at gunpoint say that in many cases their banana groves and cattle grazing fields were turned into palm oil plantations. Luis Hernandez (not his real name) fled his 170-hectare plot outside the town of Mutata in Antioquia province nine years ago after his father-in-law and several neighbours were gunned down. When he and other survivors were able to return recently, they found the land was in the hands of a local palm producer.

“The company tells me that it has legal papers for the land, but I don’t know how that can be, as I have land titles dating back 20 years,” said Mr Hernandez. He suspects palm companies collaborated with the paramilitaries. “I don’t know if there was an official agreement between them, but a relationship of some sort definitely exists.”

Technology Review has an article on a startup called LS9 who are looking to create biofuels using bacteria. Commenter SP recently raised the risk of cellulose hungry bacteria escaping into the wild and reducing the world's plant life to oily goo in short order. Wouldn't make a bad plot for a Michael Crichton novel - and it would be based on slightly better science than his conspiracy theories about global warming.

The U.S. Department of Energy has set a goal of replacing 30 percent of gasoline used in the United States with fuels from renewable biological sources by 2030, and President Bush has made ethanol production a priority. So it is hardly surprising that some biotech startup companies are positioning themselves to take advantage of an anticipated booming market for biofuels.

While much of the focus is on ethanol, LS9, of San Carlos, CA, is using the relatively new field of synthetic biology to engineer bacteria that can make hydrocarbons for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Hydrocarbon fuels are better suited than ethanol to existing delivery infrastructure and engines, and their manufacture would require less energy. To make biological production of hydrocarbons a reality, the company is bringing together leaders in synthetic biology and industrial biotechnology.

LS9 is at a very early stage: the company was formed in 2005, but its existence was announced only this winter. It plans to engineer microbes to incorporate gene pathways that other microbes, plants, and even animals use to store energy. Other startups, such as Amyris, of Emeryville, CA, and SunEthanol, of Amherst, MA, are also trying to use synthetic biology to develop microorganisms that produce biofuels. Stephen del Cardayre, a biochemist and LS9's vice president for research and development, says LS9 believes it is the first company to create microbes that produce and excrete hydrocarbons.

Now the company is working to customize the rate of production and the products themselves. "We certainly have gone beyond what we think anybody else was even thinking of doing" in terms of producing hydrocarbons from microbes, says George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and one of LS9's two founders. The other is Chris Somerville, professor of plant biology at Stanford University.

The company has $5 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, of Menlo Park, CA, and Flagship Ventures, of Cambridge, MA. Its acting CEO, Douglas Cameron, is former director of biotechnology research at Cargill and chief scientific officer at Khosla Ventures. Flagship CEO Noubar Afeyan cautions that no one can tell the extent to which any biofuel will displace fossil fuels. "That is a subject of great debate and great prognostication," he says. "The opportunity is so large that I don't have to believe in much more than a few percentage points of market penetration for it to be worth our investment."

The company is looking for areas where synthetic biology's potential to produce specific types of molecules will pay off. This could mean making high-performance jet fuel, Afeyan says, or it could mean creating gasoline that has no pollution-causing sulfur content. Beyond custom-developing hydrocarbons, LS9 foresees licensing its technology. In particular, the company might someday forge agreements with ethanol producers, whose manufacturing plants could be put to more profitable and efficient use making hydrocarbon fuels.

LS9 is counting on the fact that ethanol is not really the best biofuel. Del Cardayre notes that ethanol can't be delivered through existing pipelines. It also contains 30 percent less energy than gasoline, and it must be mixed with gasoline before being burned in conventional engines. LS9's fuels would have none of these disadvantages. What's more, LS9's fuels might be produced more efficiently than ethanol. For example, at the end of ethanol fermentation, the mixture has to be distilled to separate ethanol from water. LS9's products would just float to the top of a fermentation tank to be skimmed off. Overall, the LS9 process consumes about 65 percent less energy than today's ethanol production, the company says. ...

A Helsinki group has produced a great Google Maps mashup that plots the GPS position of buses over a map of all the local bus routes - just the sort of thing to make using public transport easier - especially if you live in a country with excellent web access from mobile phones (which is what you'd expect in the home of Nokia). Mind you - on my last visit to Helsinki I found it was one of those perfect cities for bike riding - however that was in mid-summer...

While bike use is both popular and encouraged in Amsterdam it appears to be rather less in favour in New York.

Around 9 p.m. last Wednesday, Robert Carnevale got an emergency call from his girlfriend. Police had showed up on his block of East 6th Street, between 1st and 2nd avenues. They were cutting the locks off bicycles chained to street signs, Caroline Dorn told him.

Carnevale, who owns three bikes himself, raced back to find what's become known as Operation Bike Raid in full swing. Sparks from the NYPD's circular saws arced through the night. Police, some in plainclothes, were piling cycles by the dozen in a heap on the sidewalk. Carnevale says he ran up and down the street, buzzing all the doors to alert his neighbors. People who live nearby were trying to claim their bikes.

At first Carnevale took still pictures, then he switched the digital camera into video mode. He approached the plainclothes lieutenant who seemed to be in charge and asked for his name. Carnevale says the officer gave his name, but got annoyed when asked to spell it. "You got my name," the officer says on the video. "I did you a favor. . . . Now I'm going to lock you up."

And he did, sending Carnavale to the pokey for 22 hours on a charge of disorderly conduct. The cop also rang up Carole Vale, a nurse who happened by and asked for an explanation. Vale spent 13 hours in a cell, on the same count.

In addition to the two arrests, the NYPD collared about 15 bikes. Officers, some in plainclothes, loaded bikes into unmarked black vans. "Why is domestic spying being used on non-polluting transportation?" asked Time's Up director Bill DiPaola at a press conference today.

The G8 conference is about to begin, with 16000 police herding the same number of protestors.

A multinational coalition of protesters will today begin their bid to physically prevent world leaders from gathering at the G8 summit despite widespread criticism of violent tactics during growing demonstrations in Germany.

Water cannons, riot vans and 16,000 police officers - one per protester - last night fanned out around the Baltic resort of Heiligendamm to end the protests.

More than 1,000 people were injured on Saturday in Rostock, the nearest city, in some of the most violent protests seen in postwar Germany. The authorities are desperate to avoid a repeat of the violence that marred the 2001 G8 in Genoa, where a student was shot dead by police.

As 8,500 people yesterday marched in Rostock in favour of "global freedom of movement and equal rights" - one of a series of themed protest days in the run up to the summit's opening tomorrow - hundreds more were in camps just outside the seven miles of steel and barbed wire fencing guarding the G8 venue. ...

Police said more than 400 officers and 520 demonstrators were hurt after a peaceful rally turned violent in Rostock on Saturday night.

Officers blamed the violence on 2,000 militants known as the "black block" - black-clad hooded and masked youths who attacked police lines. Forty-nine people were arrested yesterday.

Grist also has a look at the protests and the counterproductive effect the black block is having - although they admit the prospect of conflict does tend to raise the adrenaline levels for everyone.

My one experience of this sort of atmosphere was in Nairobi a decade ago, where I was unlucky enough to be in town during a week of riots against then President Moi. My first day there I found myself walking down a utterly deserted city street one minute and the next facing thousands of angry protestors running towards me, pursued by an even angrier mob of soldiers and police who were beating the hindmost protestors to within an inch of their lives (and beyond, in the case of a few unfortunates). Miraculously, both groups parted like the red sea as they ran past the point where I stood transfixed and passed by leaving meh unscathed - there's something to be said for simply pretending things aren't happening when you find yourself in a situation where you can't think of any useful course of action to take.

A couple of days later I found myself nearby when another spontaneous riot started and got a taste of tear gas (not recommended) before I managed to move away. I'm clearly not destined to be an anti-globalisation protestor as my first instinct in this situation was to flee for the nearest McDonalds - which was actually the best move in the circumstances as it was locked up and heavily guarded, but they let whitey's like me come in for shelter. The friend I was travelling with at the time had been gassed before, years earlier, in South Korea and said that the locals had developed quite a "riot culture" there - apparently the buzz in the air in these situations is quite addictive once you get used to it. Perhaps the "black block" (assuming they are genuine protestors) are just a weird tribe of adrenaline junkies...

If you dress head to foot in black, set cars on fire, launch stones and beer bottles at police, and brave hand-to-hand scuffles amid clouds of tear gas with choppers thundering overhead, best bet is you'll make the evening news. Which is too bad, because in the case of Saturday's late-afternoon riots in Rostock, the images of unrest have obscured and altered what most of us adults would have called the real story.

I say adults because the couple of thousand sullen-eyed, peach-fuzz-faced rabble-rousers who formed the Black Bloc averaged, say, 20 years old. Middle-class adolescents still living at home with mom and dad, the young anarchists weren't the ones who'd spent thousands of hours organizing the Alternative Summit that's running counter to the official G8 meeting, which starts Wednesday in nearby Heiligendamm. They didn't arrange Bono's concert here; nor did they coordinate the peaceful blockades against G8 delegates arriving at Rostock airport; nor set up large-scale encampments around the city; nor promote dozens of lectures and workshops on subjects ranging from immigration and agriculture to militarism, feminism, and global energy strategy.

In short, the Black Bloc lacked the legitimacy to turn a peaceful, well-planned protest into mayhem -- yet that's exactly what they did. But let's look at it another way; by admitting, for example, that some of us -- OK, many of us -- go to demonstrations like these nursing the secret hope that things might turn a little rowdy. The hope of feeling, beyond all the costumes, music, and speeches, a greater whiff of excitement. Of being somehow in the fray.

I went to Rostock, I confess, with some pretty big expectations. The media had so fixated on the G8 Summit -- from criticism of the seven-mile-long fence built to keep out protesters to speculation about Chancellor Angela Merkel's standoff with President George Bush over his last-minute climate policy proposal -- that the demonstration against it had to be sensational, right? ...

All the big NGO players were represented -- WWF, Oxfam, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth -- as were the vast array of antis: anti-racists, anti-capitalists, anti-fascists, anti-G8s, anti-about everything you could get your hands on. The wavy, rainbow-colored sea of signs, balloons, and placards -- "Down with the G8," "Stop Privatization," "International Solidarity" -- reflected the position stated simply on one flier: "The world shaped by the dominance of the G8 is a world of war, hunger, social divisions, environmental destruction, and barriers against migrants and refugees."

Despite the tensions and global concerns prompting the march, up until 3 p.m. the mood was still bright. Heading toward the harbor where concerts were already under way, the protesters continued their relaxed march, by the tens of thousands, in what looked from a distance like a slow, musical, serpentine dance. But the anxious buzz of helicopters overhead was mounting. The green-clad cops were encroaching. Then suddenly, somewhere out of view, a provocation occurred. Instants later, acrid, dense, gray gas filled the streets.

Bodies started running. Police units multiplied, emerging from all corners of the city and sprinting in neat lines toward the harbor where the flare-ups were taking place. There was something epic about the scene: on the waterfront, under the port's looming cranes, with sirens wailing, music blaring, giant banners and balloons bobbing, the sky threatening rain, and the authorities with their armored vehicles threatening injury. ...

The Alternative Summit organizers had tried very hard, and almost with success, to show the orderly and thoughtful face of the anti-globalization movement. But what they, and what we all, now have to ask ourselves might be this: If those late-afternoon images of chaos and confrontation hadn't occurred -- if the estimated 80,000 protesters had marched peacefully, vocally, and jubilantly to the demonstration's conclusion as planned -- would the world have even noticed?

It may be, in fact, that the anarchic, violent spirit is already so embedded in the anti-globalization movement that it has become unthinkable for a G8 protest to conclude otherwise.

This spring, in recent weeks especially, the German government seemed to be almost purposefully stoking the public's anger in the build-up to the summit. After police raided many activists' homes and offices for information last month, it became known that the collection and use of "scent samples" to track down suspected agitators, a method practiced by the secret police in the former East Germany, was suddenly back in vogue.

Fanning the public's paranoia, an administrative court ruled last Thursday that demonstrators would not be allowed to come within a four-mile zone of the razor-wire-topped fence that has been erected around Heiligendamm. "The German government has militarized security levels as though they wanted to build a new wall and close themselves in," said an indignant Renate Künast, Germany's Green Party chair. The decision overturned a lower court's ruling that protests could be banned within 200 meters of the security fence, which was built specifically to protect the Kempinski Grand Hotel, where the G8 leaders are scheduled to meet, but not around the entire town. Noting that security costs for the event topped $130 million and that more than 16,000 police officers have been engaged (the largest deployment in Germany since World War II), lawyer Carsten Gericke said the court's unconstitutional ruling marked "a black day for freedom of assembly in Germany."

Now I am wondering, as I think back to the cramped train ride Saturday morning when the energy in the air was so palpable but also so peaceful, whether the violence that day might have been foreseen -- and if so, how it could have been prevented. When tens of thousands of people are able peacefully to amass and speak, sing and dance with many voices -- and ultimately with one -- it is a testament to the power and the potential of democracy. But unless we decide clearly, and discover a way to steer our fellow black-clad protesters into the non-violent fold, their actions will continue to define the anti-G8 agenda: fighting, rather than talking about the issues that matter to us most. After all, our heads of state and their policies may still pose our best chance of staving off the serious long-term effects of climate change.

Digby has a look at some confusing coverage of Rudy Giuliani in the New York Times.

Hey, remember that fawning Giuliani article in the New York Times a week or so back? Quite a few of us wrote about it, including yours truly, wondering whether we were going to be in for another round of GOP candidate worship from the NY Times. Considering the ongoing front page obsession with the Clintons' sex lives and the dearth of critical front page stories on Giuliani, it isn't really all that absurd to surmise that the Times may be getting ready to do a re-run of the egregious 2000 campaign coverage in which Kit Seelye consistently portrayed Al Gore as a mendacious circus freak while Frank Bruni wrote gushing article after gushing article about George W. Bush's puckish-yet-masculine regular guyness. Anyone who thinks that didn't have an effect on the campaign needs to ask themselves why they call it the paper of record.

One of those who wrote about the Times article was Mediabloodhound and waddaya know? He got a response in his comments from the writer of the piece, Michael Powell: ...

I think I am a fairly sophisticated reader of the news, and usually don't have any problem understanding satire, "irony-immune" blogger or not. But regardless of my own shortcomings, there's a reason why Billmon called it Pravda on the Hudson: we have to spend way too much time these days deciphering the news pages as if they are a bunch of ancient druid runes. I spend hours here and at other blogs trying to read between the lines and figure out what these reporters "really mean" because the conventions of modern journalism are so arcane that you have to be some sort of insider or psychic to know what the hell is actually going on. Just as I can't understand why I have to try to interpret why certain anonymous sources might be saying saying certain things and who they might be and what their real agenda is, I can't for the life of me figure out why the news pages should be a place for reporters to demonstrate their satirical writing gifts --- and then be upset when people are confused by the context. ...

Let's say that the joke is obvious to all the smart people who know Michael Powell and they understand that Giuliani is actually a quasi-fascist phony. The problem is that this isn't a joke to the Republicans. They really do applaud him wildly when he says he wants more torture and fear mongers shamelessly about terrorists coming to kill us all in our beds. They LIKE this stuff and a "real" tough guy whose lunatic personality is just an act is exactly what they are trying to portray. Perhaps it's just coincidence that the first layer of Powell's cake and the Giuliani campaign's strategy mesh so well at this particulkar moment, but nonetheless, I'm sure they are very, very pleased that the liberal NY Times is once again advancing the exact narrative they want them to, ironically or not. They know very well that the purveyors of conventional wisdom turn their "irony squigglies" on and off as it pleases them --- and it's obvious that disciplined Republican daddy figures are highest on their list of preferred leadership styles.

After years of terribly unfair, irony-free, coverage of Democrats (and fluffy campaign coverage of Bush that would make Entertainment Tonight cringe with embarrassment) the Times will have to excuse some of us for not being terribly reassured when a clever writer explains that we need to wait for another eight or nine months to see the more "complex" layers of the cake. These narratives are being set right now and experience shows that they will not be "complex" at all: Hard/Soft, Daddy/Mommy, Leader/Loser. ...

Ron Paul's new web site is up and he is looking for supporters. He also seems to be starting to generate some solid support (as well as dominating online as usual) leading in to the primaries. Somewhat weirdly, he is the subject of an article in "Dissident Voice", asking if Paul is "A Texan You Can Trust ?".

20. NOT A CHICKEN HAWK.

Unlike Dick Cheney, George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, Paul served in Vietnam for duty… not booty. He knows the costs: when they’re worth paying and when they’re not. That makes him a credible candidate to put an end to the war in Iraq.

“As an Air Force officer serving from 1963-1968, I heard the same agonizing pleas from the American people. These pleas were met with the same excuses about why we could not change a deeply flawed policy and rethink the war in Vietnam. That bloody conflict, also undeclared and unconstitutional, seems to have taught us little despite the horrific costs.”

— “We Just Marched In (So We Can Just March Out),” April 17, 2007

“Why is it that those who never wore a uniform and are confident that they won’t have to personally fight this war are more anxious for this war than our generals?”

– “Questions That Won’t Be Asked About Iraq,” September 10, 2002

19. HAS FOUGHT FOR SOMETHING

– for human life. As a medical doctor, he can actually do something besides shuffle paper and grease palms, which makes him an all but extinct species in the Beltway jungle. And while his training puts him squarely in the science-based community, he’s also a genuinely religious man who has the trust of social conservatives. People deserve hard science from principled people like Paul, not soft twaddle from front men for vested interests. Both a strong libertarian and a social conservative, he just might have the credibility to shape the issues in a way that’s rational and sensitive to rights.

“The bottom line is that mental health issues are a matter for parents, children, and their doctors, not government… It is important to understand that powerful interests, namely federal bureaucrats and pharmaceutical lobbies, are behind the push for mental health screening in schools. There is no end to the bureaucratic appetite to run our lives, and the pharmaceutical industry is eager to sell psychotropic drugs to millions of new customers in American schools. Only tremendous public opposition will suffice to overcome the lobbying and bureaucratic power behind the president’s New Freedom Commission.”

– “Don’t Let Congress Fund Orwellian Psychiatric Screening of Kids,” January 31, 2005.


18. KNOWS OPEN BORDERS DON’T MIX WITH WARFARE-WELFARE

“We’re often told that immigrants do the jobs Americans won’t do, and sometimes this is true. But in many instances illegal immigrants simply increase the supply of labor in a community, which lowers wages.”

“The Immigration Question,” April 4, 2006.

“… immigration may be the sleeper issue that decides the 2008 presidential election.”

“More importantly, we should expect immigrants to learn about and respect our political and legal traditions, which are rooted in liberty and constitutionally limited government.

Our most important task is to focus on effectively patrolling our borders. With our virtually unguarded borders, almost any determined individual – including a potential terrorist – can enter the United States. Unfortunately, the federal government seems more intent upon guarding the borders of other nations than our own. We are still patrolling Korea’s border after some 50 years, yet ours are more porous than ever.”

– “Immigration and the Welfare Stare,” August 9, 2005.

This is not xenophobic; it’s common sense in most countries in the world.

17. UNDERSTANDS THE NEED TO REIGN IN THE EXECUTIVE.

Paul is very clear on the importance of the separation of powers and the need for checks and balances in the government and he’s spoken out time and again for strengthening the power of Congress.

“…why not try something novel, like having Congress act as an independent and equal branch of government? Restore the principle of the separation of powers, so that we can perform our duty to provide checks and balances on an executive branch (and an accommodating judiciary) that spies on Americans, glorifies the welfare state, fights undeclared wars, and enormously increases the national debt. Congress was not meant to be a rubber stamp. It’s time for a new direction.”

– “Searching For a New Direction,” January 19, 2006.

He’s also stood up against corrupt federal programs like the “war on drugs”:

“We have promoted a foolish and very expensive domestic war on drugs for more than 30 years. It has done no good whatsoever. I doubt our Republic can survive a 30-year period of trying to figure out how to win this guerrilla war against terrorism.”

“The drug war encourages violence. Government violence against nonviolent users is notorious and has led to the unnecessary prison overpopulation. Innocent taxpayers are forced to pay for all this so-called justice. Our eradication project through spraying around the world, from Colombia to Afghanistan, breeds resentment because normal crops and good land can be severely damaged. Local populations perceive that the efforts and the profiteering remain somehow beneficial to our own agenda in these various countries.”

— “War on Terror? It’s as Bad as the War on Drugs,” October 30, 2001.

16. GETS VOLUNTARY SELF DEFENSE ...
15. SUPPORTS DECENTRALIZATION CONSISTENTLY ...
14. KNOWS THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM IS BROKEN ...
13. WILL DECREASE TAXES ...
12. BACKS SOUND MONEY AND OPPOSES TAXATION BY INFLATION ...
11 UNDERSTANDS THE REAL REASON WHY THE POOR ARE BEING SQUEEZED. ...
10. STANDS UP FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES AND PRIVACY ...
9. KNOWS CURRENT ENTITLEMENT PROGRAMS ARE BANKRUPT ...
8. HAS THE TECHNICAL SAVVY TO DEAL WITH HEALTHCARE ...
7. OPPOSES CORPORATE SUBSIDIES ...
6. WILLING TO LOOK FOR OIL IN OTHER PLACES BESIDES THE MIDDLE EAST ...
5. BELIEVES THE US GOVERNMENT SHOULD GOVERN THE US, NOT THE WORLD ...
4. STANDS UP TO BIG BROTHER ...
3. IS RIGHT ABOUT TERRORISM ...
2. IS RIGHT ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR ...
1. IS RIGHT ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS ...

Ex Marine Adam Kokesh has survived a chickhawk character assassination attempt and avoided being dishonoraably "re-discharged".

A US military panel has recommended a marine be involuntarily discharged after he was pictured at an anti-war protest dressed in desert fatigues. Marine Corporal Adam Kokesh was accused of misconduct. The military bans the unauthorised wearing of uniforms. But the 25-year-old insisted that as his name tag and military emblems were removed he had done nothing wrong.

The three-person board said Cpl Kokesh should lose the honourable discharge status he had already been granted. Instead, the board recommended he should receive a general discharge under honourable conditions, one step below an honourable discharge

Cpl Kokesh, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, appeared at the Washington demonstration in March.

Investigators recommended he be discharged under "other-than-honourable" conditions, but the panel opted for a middle road, meaning he would keep all of his benefits. "This is a non-punitive discharge," Colonel Patrick McCarthy, chief of staff for the mobilisation command, said. "What that means is he is not dishonourable, and he's only kind of honourable, so in effect, the board picked the safe route," Cpl Kokesh's lawyer Mike Lebowitz said. Marine Captain Jeremy Sibert, speaking at the hearing, said military personnel can be punished if their civilian behaviour "directly affects the performance of military duties and is service-related".

The protest was held to mark the fourth anniversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Cpl Kokesh said he would appeal against the board's recommendation. "I'm standing on principle and we're going to contest this on principle. It's not going to go away," he said.

Anti-Iraq war activist Cindy Sheehan appears to have given up, deciding the situation is hopeless. I suspect a real (ie. effective) anti-war movement won't get going for another 8 years or so _ and it will probably take a draft to really energise it. Hopefully by then the clean energy industry (and the industries afflicted by global warming) will be big enough and angry enough to topple big oil once and for all. Meanwhile the Iraqi parliament is asking for the occupation to end. For some reason I don't think thats what Cheney means by "democracy"...

I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such “liberal blogs” as the Democratic Underground. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the more milder rebukes.

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

...

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most. ...

Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.

Lots of entertaining tinfoil about tonight - I'll start with the SF Gate reporting moss circles.

Scientists are scratching their heads over strange patterns cropping up on moss-covered logs in parks in the region. Biologists first discovered symmetrical, bulls-eye patterned bare patches on liverworts, a plant closely related to moss, growing on fallen pine trees in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park last winter.

While biologists first thought snails were to blame, a closer look showed a lack of zigzag patterns, which would have suggested snail feeding patterns. Other scientists have speculated millipedes may be to blame, but tests remain inconclusive. And a few weeks ago a biologist from the U.S. Geological Survey found similar growths on cliff faces — not pine logs — in the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area on the Kentucky-Tennessee border northwest of Knoxville.

Similar patterns, resembling miniature crop circles etched into the soft green liverworts, have been observed in arctic regions of Greenland and Canada, but never as far south as the Smokies, which straddle the North Carolina-Tennessee border.

Prison Planet is complaining about the mainstream media ignoring this year's Bilderberger meeting.

Number of mainstream U.S. news outlets that reported on Paris Hilton over the past week: 10,000+

Number of mainstream U.S. news outlets that reported on a meeting of nearly 200 of the world's most powerful people this past weekend; Less than a handful.

The Bilderberg Group meeting, an annual conference at which the consensus for future global policy is provably manifested, again passed by with barely a mention on behalf of America's corporate media. ...

Wired's "Threat Level" takes a look at the latest manifestation of the terrorist menace - the "deluded losers" who wanted to blow up JFK airport.

Over the weekend, federal officials, relying on the undercover work of a convicted drug dealer, indicted four men who were allegedly plotting to destroy a airline fuel pipeline leading to JFK airport in New York City. The alleged mastermind, Russell Defreitas, an American citizen who once worked at JFK as an employee for an airline with extensive ties to the CIA, tried to get funding from a radical Islamic Trinidad and Tobago-based group called Jamaat al Muslimeen (JAM). JAM led an aborted coup in 1990 and is reported to have ties to the now-reformed Muammar al-Gaddafi.

In fact we were almost just all killed and the economy brought to its knees, according to the overblown scaremongering of the prosecuting attorney, as reported by the AP.

“The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable,” U.S. Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf said at a news conference, calling it “one of the most chilling plots imaginable.”

But if you actually read the supposedly indictment (.pdf), it's pretty clear these were a bunch of jackasses who would have a hard time putting together a multi-subway line trip to Yankee Stadium, let alone blowing up a fuel tank inside airport gates. It's also pretty clear that blowing up the fueltanks would have been pretty spectacular, it would not have been catastropic. Moreover, their plotting was so bad that a Guyananese parliament member told the plotters to use Google Maps instead of their own shoddy surveillance video and to stop carrying around their surveillance video on a hard drive. Add to that this Newsday profile about Defreitas -- which shows that the mastermind of the alleged plot was itinerantly homeless and sold incense on street corners in New York.

It's just like nearly every other plot that has been uncovered since 9/11 in America. Basically, its yet another group of deluded losers having Walter-Mitty-Meets-Osama-bin-Laden daydreams. I'm not arguing that they shouldn't have been arrested, only that the folks in charge are blowing this story up to justify their budgets. ...

And to close, Kevin at Cryptogon (taking what would seem to be a - well deserved - swipe at Jay Hanson) with "The Power Crisis Mythology, the 40% Efficient Solar Cell and the Cost of the War in Iraq".

Spectrolab, Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing, has developed a solar cell technology that has a conversion efficiency of 40.7%. They accomplished this with a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The annual budget of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory: $210 million

The cost of America’s war in Iraq per day: $300 million

The U.S. spends more on the war in Iraq in one day (about $300 million) than it does on the ANNUAL BUDGET for the primary government laboratory that is tasked with renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. As absurd as that is, a recipient of a grant from this lab has developed a 40% efficient solar cell.

What if that lab had the funding equivalent of what the U.S. is spending on the war over a period of two or three days?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The energy scarcity argument, on its own, is like the American dream: you’d have to be asleep to believe it.

Top soil depletion: Yes.

Water scarcity: Yes.

Energy scarcity: Yes, by design.

My guess is that the clean energy technology will become ubiquitous after the kill off phase has thinned out the herd by a few billion people. In the meantime, keep thinking that there are no solutions to the global power crisis… Even if the purpose of that idiotic meme is to help make kill off look more like die off. ...

Just links tonight...

End of an era as last pit pony dies
Coal Mining Reserves - a cautious note

Times are changing in the coal trade, and while April marked the end of one era (the last pit pony in the UK died), on the other had we have the renewed interest, and debate over, the use of coal as a source of liquid fuels for a variety of vehicles, including aircraft. So I thought it worth trotting out some more facts that might help put the current (and future) situations in context. (Plus we haven't had a Techie talk in a bit).

The late Bob Stefanko has written that the Great Dismal Swamp is probably the best current place that represents the type of conditions under which, back in Carboniferous times (about 355 to 290 million years ago) the various vegetative fragments fall into the water, and are slowly compressing to form a layer of peat. The peat layer in the swamp is about 7 ft thick, which would convert to about 20 inches of coal. The swamp is slowly sinking, allowing the vegetative mat to continue to deepen and slowly built to a greater thickness. Back in the Carboniferous he noted that the speed at which the layers formed was likely about twice that at which the current Swamp is growing, and that, due to the different levels of pressure required to form them, it would have taken about 160 years to lay down what is now a 1 ft thick layer of lignite; 260 years for a foot of bituminous, and about 490 years for a foot of anthracite. Since it is more worthwhile to mine thicker coal, and eight-feet is a nice working height, this would have required about 2,100 years of steady growth to lay down the layer of vegetation that formed the Pittsburgh seam in Pennsylvania. The original areas over which these forests and swamps grew were vast, and the cycles of deposition grew as the land distorted, with multiple seams being deposited in some cases, and a single thick seam in others. But how has it survived? How much is really there, and how much can we actually produce?
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