While I'm a regular reader of both Technology Review and almost everything Viridian Pope Emperor Bruce Sterling writes, I must admit I'd missed this story - "The Interoperation" - in Tech Review recently. Until, that is, I came across it at Laurance Aurbach's "Pedshed". Here's his review (from which I also learnt that Laurance did the original design for the Viridian web site):

“The Interoperation” is a short story by Bruce Sterling, award-winning science fiction author and futurist. Sterling has always been one of the most canny and entertaining prognosticators of architectural futures, and this latest work does not disappoint. “The Interoperation” deftly and fondly sends up starchitecture, obsolescence, digitization, networking and the vagaries of fame. It explores the design process more deeply than his previous fiction. Like most works by Sterling, the story is shambling, episodic and lacking in coherent structure.

While Sterling has in the past been skeptical of Peak Oil and Kunstler’s Long Emergency thesis in particular, note that “The Interoperation” is set firmly in an imagined post-Peak Oil era. Travel is mostly by bike and train; cross country trips are rare; recycling is a pillar of the economy; and sustainability saturates business practices thoroughly.

The Costa Vista Motel was the first, last, and only building that Yuri Lozano had created as a certified, practicing architect. It had been “designed for disassembly,” way back in 2020. So today, some 26 years later, Yuri had hired the giant deconstruction-bot to fully reclaim the motel’s materials: the bricks, the solar shingles, the electrical fixtures, the metal plumbing. The structure was being defabricated, with a mindless precision, right down to its last, least, humble hinges.

…

Nowadays, Preston spent his lonely hours grooming architecture websites. There he gamely removed the moronic popular commentary and tried to drum up some intelligent interest in the doctrines of Arts & Crafts, Futurism, the modern movement, the postmodern movement, and New Urbanism.

These were architectural schemes that long-forgotten people had created with pencils on paper. No proper 21st-century person could tell these primitive notions apart. Still, some critic was bound to take a keen interest in such efflorescences of human genius, and it was bound to be some weedy obsessive like Preston Mengies.

…

The Church of Computer-Human Symbiosis was an aging group of California hacker cranks who had inherited the vast fortune of a vanished social-software company. They had long been Roebel’s ideal patrons, for they were crazily rich, all-forgiving, and incapable of judgment.

Over the decades, Roebel had built the cult an awesome set of monumental churches. His temples were top-end architecture glamour hits; glossy photo books about them weighed down coffee tables on six continents.

Nobody ever worshiped in the amazing churches Roebel had built, because the cult was too crazy and scary. Furthermore, the roofs leaked and all the utilities malfunctioned. Still, that didn’t much matter to the cultists. They were serenely indifferent to such earthly concerns, since they spent most of their waking lives playing immersive simulation games.

…

Yuri recalled that ClearWorks had been programmed by just one guy. It was the brainwork of a single geek, some embittered dissident from the early CAD business. The name of this lonesome genius was Greg Something, or Bob Something, or Jim Something, and he was the type of arrogant, self-aggrandizing, utterly unworldly, Unix-bearded software-genius figure who wanted to create a programmatic universe all by himself.

Greg-Jim-Bob had never managed that feat, but he’d managed to create ClearWorks. That program had become a legend among its users. All the cognoscenti and digerati and designerati vied to praise ClearWorks. Of course, nobody actually used it. If you gave people the tools that were perfect for their jobs, they’d have nothing to do but their jobs.

The whole secret of the network revolution was that it connected everybody, and it therefore caused everybody to do everybody else’s jobs.

…

Yuri had begun to sense the way the programmer thought. No geek from 30 years ago could ever think like a modern builder. Though he had a cunning intuitive arsenal of cool ways to assemble his sand, he lacked any cool ways to disassemble his sand.

It was as if he thought that real buildings went up in some Platonic cyberspace where gravity, friction, and entropy had never existed. Where the passage of the years was just an abstraction. The author of ClearWorks was pure geek, so he didn’t realize that when you meshed bits and atoms, you had to respect the atoms. Bits were the servants of atoms. “Bits” were just bits of atoms.

Bits came and went at the flick of a switch, but atoms had deep and dark and permanent physical laws. Atoms didn’t go away when you shut down the screen. When you lacked a responsible way to deal with the atoms, you were a menace to yourself and all around you.

The story draws from the Cradle to Cradle mindset and Bruce's vision of what we need to do to implement it - "the internet of things" (and the spimes and blobjects that inhabit it), described in his book "Shaping Things".

Bruce himself has a post at Beyond the Beyond - "The Last Time We Flunked Out At Sustainability" - on a Canadian art exhibiton called "1973: Sorry, Out of Gas".

Curated by Mirko Zardini, CCA Director and Chief Curator, with Giovanna Borasi, CCA Curator of Contemporary Architecture, the exhibition presents an unprecedented exploration of the architectural response to the 1973 oil crisis.

The exhibition 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas and its accompanying catalogue are the first to study the architectural innovation spurred by the 1973 oil crisis, when the value of oil increased exponentially and triggered economic, political, and social upheaval across the world. Featuring over 350 objects including architectural drawings, photographs, books and pamphlets, archival television footage, and historical artefacts, the exhibition maps the global response to the shortage and its relevance to architecture today.

The research and innovations of thirty years ago are of particular relevance in the context of contemporary concerns about diminishing energy resources. While influential at the time, much of the innovative work of architects, engineers, and activist groups of the period was forgotten once financial markets and energy distribution systems adjusted, and political focus diminished.

Today, however, a new sense of urgency is emerging, provoked by the reality of a deteriorating environment and a finite supply of fossil fuels. “It is of vital importance to consider the radical yet, in many cases, little-known work from the 1970s as architects today struggle to address similar issues,” said CCA Director and exhibition curator Mirko Zardini. “By providing insight on the forerunners of many contemporary approaches to sustainable living, the exhibition aims to increase public awareness and encourage contemporary research in the field.” ...

Kiashu has an interesting post at The Oil Drum looking at the potential for a peak oil inspired shift from what he terms "wasteful industrial society" to the "ecotechnic society" - "The Freezing Point of Industrial Society".

When will fossil fuel industrial society end?

When oil costs $240-$1,500 a barrel for several years.

One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the [railway] cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages... Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night... You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening... And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you...

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau

What was true in 1845 when Thoreau wrote that is not true today in the developed West, but is still true in the Third World. Fuel was still expensive enough that a journey of a day's walk taken by mechanical means was more expensive than a day's labour. Resources were more expensive than labour; now in the West labour is more expensive than resources, while in the Third World labour is still very cheap. But will it always be so?

This piece considers that industrialisation could only happen with cheap fuels, and by looking at the countries of the world, tries to figure out just how cheap fuel has to be before lots of people start using it – before a country can industrialise with fossil fuels. The flipside to this is seeing how expensive fuel must be before it deindustrialises. This then gives us a clue to if and when will industrial society will end. ...

Kiashu's post included a link to this article from Dave Dubyne at Language Matters - "Saving the Go-Go Juice" - which talks about how China already practices quite a bit on on-site recycling on construction sites.

Speeding down the brand new four-lane highway at 100 kilometres per hour, I saw plenty of farm workers harvesting heads of cabbage. In the western world a truck would follow the workers as they proceeded through the fields to collect the harvest, but here the truck stays parked and the produce is walked to the truck. Everything is brought to a central area. The truck stays in the same spot until full — engine off instead of idling and moving - and then heads to the wholesale market.

Harvesting, planting and fertilizing are all done by hand, with dozens of workers in each field at a time. Pesticides and fertilizers are applied by hand walking with a pack sprayer on the back, a completely manual pumping system. Irrigation is similar: workers load water into buckets of various sizes and carry it to the plants or pour it into the irrigation troughs. Again, most of the fuel usage is taken out of the farming process. I only ever saw tractors called tuo-la-ji - a two-wheeled machine doing work in place of humans - and that was plowing the fields.

As I was passing one of the millions of construction sites in China, I stopped to check out the Chinese style of demolition and re-cycling. One front-end loader is used to break the walls, foundations or unmovable pieces into smaller workable segments. The rest of the work is done by hand. Men and women with bamboo-handled sledgehammers break the cement, brick and tiles from the metal re-bar hidden side. The metals are removed on the premises, separated on premises and loaded onto various trucks waiting at the entrance of the construction site. Work is continually in progress, with pieces of various metals tossed into ever-growing piles of multi-colored scrap. Most striking was the pile of re-bar: It looked like a giant bird’s nest that could have comfortably accommodated two very large elephants.

Each truck collected different metals and scrap. One small pick-up truck was full of wires; another was full of pressure gauges and valves; yet another was full of aluminum window frames. The steel collection truck was loaded with pipes, re-bar and beams. All the while a continuous line of workers carried baskets of cement debris and metal-less chunks of bricks, heaving their contents into a waiting flatbed for non-metal debris only.

My immediate thoughts were to compare western-style demolition at a construction site and the amount of fuel each society uses to accomplish the same end result: to clear a lot for a new building. In the West, many more machines would be loading trucks with debris containing both metal and cement. That waste would be taken to a second location where it would be broken and separated. From there, after separation, the loads of cement debris and metal would be loaded onto separate trucks and delivered to their ultimate destination. Notice the difference? A Chinese construction site is the re-cycling factory.

Garbage collection is also something to behold. In the West we use trucks to roll through the city and collect rubbish from our individual homes, businesses and dumpsters. Here, it is done manually, as men and women move handcarts around the city using a flat-headed shovel to scoop up the trash. These filled carts can hold 25 to 50 kilos per load. When the carts are full, they are pushed or pulled to a central location where the rubbish is dumped into a waiting truck. In my neighborhood, a line of full trash carts snaked its way down the street to the collection site, mingling with buses and cars in the bicycle lane while waiting to unload.

These comparisons reminded me of a time in Hawaii when I went to pick up a Peruvian friend to go surfing. As we pulled out of the parking garage, a landscaper was using a gasoline-powered blower to clean up the grass clippings. He laughed and said to me, “That’s American style: take a broom and put a motor on it.”

Links:

* Beyond The Beyond - Spime Watch: Automated Custom Manufacturing
* Beyond The Beyond - The Fuzzy Tail » SlideShare
* Beyond The Beyond - Indian intellectuals storm police headquarters, free colleagues. "Note: do not arm Communist party apparatchiks to repress grumpy peasantry. Use legal system, that is what it is there for."
* Open The Future - Village Greens. Jamais' take on Shellenberger and Nordhaus. Go and read it.
* Beyond The Beyond - Backlash Comparison: Who's Nuttier, Apple Fanatics or Ron Paul Enthusiasts?. Hmmm - I like Wired, but what they did to Al Gore in 2000 was unforgivable and they seem to be up to the same tricks with Ron Paul now. What gives ? That said, the contributions of some RP supporters in this and in a lot of other discussions do have a tendency to sound like the rantings of deranged maniacs (without the charm of genuinely gonzo writing), which isn't helping his cause much...
* Beyond The Beyond - Greenwater EcoMercs. "Greenwater. When you like your green activism in khaki green. It's a kind of Naomi Klein shock doctrine thing, only they kill the guys who don't hug trees.". Image below by Jamais Cascio - from his collection on Flickr.

The Age has an article on South Korea's tidal power ambitions (and some initial setbacks due to the strength of the current they are trying to tap) - "Tidal power turbines to generate a salty future for energy". Ocean power (wave, tidal and ocean current) is going to be one of the big 4 power sources in the future and some Asian countries like Korea and Taiwan seem to be putting significant effort into being the first to make use of it. Like geothermal energy, it has the potential to supply "baseload" power, thus confounding advocates of the "baseload fallacy" who claim renewables can't supply all our energy needs.

TWO separate accidents — one a mishap and the other, a major project gone awry — are playing major roles in shaping the development of tidal power in South Korea. Korea had planned to be the first nation to trial commercial-sized power generation from ocean currents, with the first of its pilot turbines in place at Uldolmok, in the country's south-west by the second half of this year.

Researchers at the Korea Ocean Research and Development Institute (KORDI) chose the site because it has flows up to 12 knots, believed to be among the fastest in Asia. "The purpose of the power plant is to do some experiments under the most severe conditions," said Yum Ki-dai, president of KORDI.

But picking so exacting a location has its perils. In the operation to install the one-megawatt pilot plant, one of the two tug boats involved lost control. Borne along by the powerful current, the barge carrying the 1000-tonne rig rammed into a bridge, closing half of it for three months, and setting the project back at least a year.

The experiment was intended to study the structural stability and efficiency of helical turbines, which adjust automatically to the changes in tidal flows. Experiments in the use of such turbines are also under way in Australia, with the Government-backed EnGen Institute testing a unit that may be suitable for use in the Port Phillip Heads, near Point Nepean.

Unlike wind and solar energy, ocean currents are regular, offering the potential to supply base-load electricity.

William Hollier, director of Melbourne's EnGen Institute, said while Korea offered a handful of sites suitable for ocean current power generation, Australia had many prospective locations, particularly in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. "There's sufficient energy there to generate enough hydrogen to meet all our transport needs and to generate enough electricity for the entire nation," Mr Hollier said.

The South Korean Government began researching tide and tidal current power in 2000, and researchers hope to have identified commercially viable technologies by 2010. Along with the Uldolmok pilot project, KORDI is also trying to improve the efficiency of more conventional barrage-type tidal power plants. The leading project involves building a power plant with a capacity of 240-260 MW at the entrance to Lake Sihwa by 2009, with another of as much as 520 MW being considered for Garolim Bay, both on the country's west coast.

The Miami Herald also has an article on plans to develop a tidal power project in the Florida Keys.

Douglas Bedgood recently stood on a defunct Henry Flagler railroad bridge, watching as the tide forcefully moved water from the Gulf of Mexico through a channel to the Atlantic Ocean. What he saw was untapped energy. Enough tidal power, he believes, to light and cool every residence and business in the Lower Keys.

To capture that power and convert it to electricity, Bedgood founded Florida Keys Hydro Power Research Corp. in July. The nonprofit is working to put underwater tidal turbine farms in the Keys' channels. ''People have been talking about this for a long time: Why not use the tides?'' said Bedgood, 65. ``But everybody was waiting for government or somebody else to do it. So it never got done.''

Bedgood, a massage therapist who has developed aquatic therapy devices and tried to build a wind farm in California in the 1970s, said his motive is green -- but not for the color of money: ``I want to do my part to save the planet.'' Two months ago, 25 engineers, politicians, government regulators and environmentalists crammed into his home on Love Lane in Key West to hear about the pioneering project. ''It may sound like a fairy tale, but it's too important for our environment not to try,'' said former Monroe County Mayor Shirley Freeman, chairman of Keys Hydro Power.

The goal: to clump enough turbines together -- at least 300 -- to create 160 megawatts of electricity while doing virtually no damage to the channel site or its marine life, part of Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. At peak usage, the Lower Keys uses 140 megawatts. ...

With skyrocketing oil prices, the Iraq war and global warming awareness, there's been a worldwide push to harness the clockwork power of the tides. ''There are 81 [tidal] technologies internationally being looked at, with 14 in the United States,'' said Sean O'Neill, president of the Maryland-based Ocean Renewable Energy Coalition. ``The potential is tremendous. But we have to get these projects into the water and get real data.''

The first turbine for commercial use, the SeaGen, is expected to be submerged in waters off North Ireland within months. ''We've got to get some momentum going in this country,'' said researcher Roger Bedard of the California-based Electric Power Research Institute. ``We've had government funding to investigate solar, geothermal, wind, biomass -- all the renewable technologies -- except ocean energy. Zero funding on ocean energy in the last 20 years.''

That may soon change. Earlier this month the Bush administration announced plans to tap into the ocean's potential as a source for alternative energy. There are currently some private U.S. projects, including one using the Gulf Stream at Florida Atlantic University. Last year, Verdant Power put the first test turbines into U.S. waters, in New York Harbor. ...

The evolving project has a Florida team that includes test turbine designer Kinetic Energy Systems of Ocala, turbine installers Ralco Atlantic of Key West, substation builder Power Consulting Associates of Gainesville and generator supplier Fisher Technologies of St. Petersburg.

While the tides are free, producing energy from them is not. Each turbine is expected to cost about $100,000. Bedgood said it will cost millions for the cable system and substation. To date, he has provided most of the financing for his end of the project, which he expects will cost about $15 million to get the first 10 turbines up and running. He's searching for private charitable contributors.

But ultimately, Bedgood thinks electricity from tidal power will be 25 percent cheaper to produce than from fossil fuels. ''The Florida Keys is a good place to try our first test,'' said Darwin Salls Jr., spokesman for Kinetic Energy Systems. ``It's a progressive place that is ready to lead the way to be energy free and a green community.''

The Web site for Bedgood's company is www.keyshydropower.com.

Renewable Energy Access has an article on a new Canadian tidal energy project - following in the footsteps of another project in the Bay Of Fundy - "Marine Current Turbines Installs Tidal Energy Turbines on Vancouver Island".

Marine Current Turbine (MCT) and BC Tidal Energy Corporation have signed an agreement to install at least three 1.2 Megawatt (MW) SeaGen tidal energy turbines in Vancouver Island's Campbell River by 2009. The agreement is the first step in a plan to develop larger tidal farms off British Columbia's coast, which the company says have a tidal energy potential of up to 4,000 MW. The announcement comes at the heels of Marine Current's agreement to develop a tidal power project in Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy, located on Canada's eastern seaboard.

"Working with our Canadian partners, MCT is in a very strong position to deploy its pioneering clean electricity generation technology on both sides of Canada. SeaGen is the first and only commercial scale tidal device ready for deployment anywhere in the world," said Martin Wright, Managing Director of Marine Current Turbines

Campbell River Mayor Roger McDonell added, "We have the resource at our doorstep. We have a mature and capable ocean industry and scientific community in British Columbia. The economic opportunity is still wide open in this exciting new energy sector. It means new jobs and green power that is as reliable and predictable as the tides."

Moving back to the US, the San Francisco Chronicle has an article on a new Californian gold rush: the rush to tap the potential power of the ocean - "Prospectors claim stretches of ocean, hoping to harness wave energy".

A new California "gold rush" is on - to stake out claims to prime stretches of ocean along the coast where prospectors hope to harness waves to produce energy.

No one's succeeded in producing wave power commercially in the United States, but the lure of future feasibility as a clean source of energy is spurring potential developers to claim prime wave sites. The latest entrant is Sonoma County, which is seeking to snare what would be the largest zone of coastal seawater ever reserved for wave energy on the West Coast.

The Sonoma County Water Agency plans this week to ask federal regulators for exclusive rights to study and develop wave-energy technology along the entire 41-mile county coastline, extending 12 miles out to sea, an expanse of about 490 square miles, said agency spokesman Cordel Stillman. The permit application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission follows a supervisors' vote approving the move Tuesday.

The holder of a FERC permit has exclusive rights to the claimed zone for three years for study and testing of the technology, and then may apply for a license to operate commercially. No operating licenses have been granted in the United States, and only one license application is pending - off the coast of Washington. "There's been a kind of gold rush going on for wave-energy projects," said Tim Anderson, spokesman for the Sonoma County Water Agency. The most sought-after location in North America has been on the West Coast, along Northern California, Oregon and Washington.

Prototypes have been demonstrated in some other parts of the world, including Scotland, Portugal, Denmark, Norway and Australia, though the technology is "still very much in the test phase," according to Margot Gerritsen, assistant professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford University.

The world's first commercial deep-sea wave-energy device is expected to begin operating in Portugal within the next five months, said Uday Mathur, a specialist in new resource development for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. ...

Sonoma County's application will become the seventh pending wave-energy application for a segment of California coastline, according to FERC records. None has been granted. Oregon has seen four permits granted, with another three pending, according to FERC spokeswoman Celeste Miller.

FERC began seeing a large number of applications for what the industry calls "hydrokinetic" power in 2004, Miller said. Hydrokinetic refers to power generated by waves and water currents. Until about a year ago, the applications were mostly for harnessing underwater currents, such as tidal and ocean currents, not waves. The only FERC hydrokinetic permit granted in California is for an underwater turbine to be turned by tidal currents somewhere near Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay or just outside the bay. Still in the study stage, it is a joint venture by the city of San Francisco, PG&E and Golden Gate Energy Co. But in the past year, applications for wave-energy permits have been rolling in, Miller said.

Reilly said Sonoma County's water agency is filing for a permit because a public entity is in a better position to protect fisheries and marine habitats that could be affected by the wave machines, including their cables and huge concrete anchors. "Most of the prospective areas for wave arrays are right in the middle of gray whale migratory pathways," said Richard Charter, a representative of the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife. Wave-array anchors could also adversely affect local fisheries and alter seabed habitats, introducing artificial reefs that could draw predator fish that would feed on salmon smolts heading to sea. They could affect sand deposition, thus damaging beaches and seabed ecology, he said, adding that no adequate studies of the environmental impacts have been done.

Another potential problem emerged with last week's oil spill that spread from San Francisco Bay, Charter said. Not only would oil probably foul the wave machines and cables, but the arrays also would block skimmers trying to mop up oil. ...

Wave machines come in many forms, some resembling long segmented snakes or ribbon-like strands. Others resemble large buoys, while still others utilize columns of water or underwater pistons. And they still face technical challenges. A prototype, the AquaBuOY by Finavera Renewables of Canada, sank off the Oregon coast last month. When its premiere was announced just the month before, Finavera called it "the first installation of a wave energy converter of this scale off the west coast of North America."

In contrast, Stanford's Gerritsen said she is "in favor of tidal energy machines." Mathur of PG&E said studies are still under way on where a tidal-energy turbine might be deployed near the Golden Gate Bridge.

An assessment published in June by the Electric Power Research Institute of Palo Alto estimated a large potential "that could be credibly harnessed" for both wave and tidal energy, with wave energy alone equal to all the conventional hydropower produced in 2004, or about 6.5 percent of the total U.S. electric supply. The potential power from tidal and in-stream river currents would be about 3.5 percent of the 2004 national electricity supply, the institute estimated.

I'll close by pointing to a review of one of my favourite surfing books - Kem Nunn's "The Dogs Of Winter", which (along with his other book "Tapping the Source") managed to define how I view the Californian coast, even though my own travels along it a decade or so ago were entirely unlike the scenes described within.

Out of the blue Jack Fletcher, a former hot-shot surf photographer now surviving on hack work, cheap beer and muscle relaxants, gets a call from the surfing magazine he worked for back in his glory days. Assigned to photograph Drew Harmon surfing the remote reef known as 'Heart Attacks', the photographer can't quite believe his luck: both the surfer and the wave are the stuff of legend, and mean a ticket back into the big time.

With two young surf punks in tow, Fletcher heads off for the grim wilderness of Northern California, and the Indian territory where Harmon now lives with his half-mad wife Kendra, who roams the woods at night wearing the clothes of a murdered girl. This is not what Jack had expected, and things get worse.

To reach the fabled Heart Attacks and ride the winter waves Harmon, Fletcher and the punks must cross the tract of blasted headland known to the local Hupa, Yurok and Tolowan Indians as 'The Devil's Hoof'. When a child dies in an accident, the white men are blamed; the Indians, swearing vengeance, kidnap and brutalise Kendra, then set off to kill the surfers.

In this desolate wasteland the search for the perfect wave becomes a quest for survival, as events lead inevitably to their final, tragic climax.

One of those ideas that I like to imagine will turn into reality in future is what I once dubbed "Silicon Valley's War On Big Oil" - the technology industry realising that global warming and peak oil make the fossil fuelled energy industry a dinosaur ripe to be eaten by nimbler competitors, and setting to it with gusto.

Wired reports that Al Gore and John Doerr are becoming partners in each other's venture capital firms and are looking for opportunities in the clean energy sector.

Gore, Doerr & Joy is not a folk rock supergroup but an investment power trio with a common goal: To use market forces to stop global warming.

Former vice president Al Gore has become a partner in Silicon Valley's top venture capital firm, Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers. In return, John Doerr -- KPCB founder and early investor in Amazon, Google and Netscape -- has joined the advisory board of Gore's three-year-old green investment firm, Generation. And Bill Joy, the boy genius behind Sun Microsystems, Java and the latest generation of Unix operating systems, is a KPCB partner who established his cred as a techno activist by advocating limits on research in potentially dangerous technologies like genetic engineering.

Together, they're inviting all comers to submit eco-friendly business plans in need of capital.

The climate situation is so dire, and the investment opportunity so enticing, that the principals are determined to leave no possible solution unexplored. Doerr, who confessed his fear of climate change in an emotional presentation at last year's TED (technology, entertainment, design) conference, predicts that $200 million in KPCB capital will target global warming within a year, in addition to the $270 million currently allocated to environmental issues.

The alliance with Generation will help him figure out where to put the new money. The alt-fuels market is estimated to be worth $1 trillion, the global energy industry worth six times as much. All of which makes the new Green Revolution the new internet on Sand Hill Road. "It's going to be fun and wildly profitable, and really good for the planet. How can you not be excited about this?" says Joy. ...

Al Gore: If I could start up with a brief opening comment. We are announcing an international alliance between Generation Investment Management and Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. These two firms, in alliance, cover the full spectrum of the investment marketplace, and we’re asking entrepreneurs, innovators, investors and technologists around the world to send us their ideas, business plans and new technologies.

We have geared up to give a full and fair hearing to those ideas. Though we will, no doubt, make mistakes, we will pledge our best efforts to give a full hearing -- including to ideas and technologies that perhaps have been given short shrift in the past -- and we look forward to seeing many that have not yet seen the light of day.

We believe that Sir Nicholas Stern is right when he says, along with others, that there is an investment gap of up to 1 percent of world GDP over the next several decades that needs to be closed if we’re going to succeed in quickly developing a low-carbon economy. We’re very excited to have this chance to work together and bring these two world-class teams together.

Bill Joy: It’s widely recognized that we’re going to need to invest more, but we also need to buy things we can afford.

If we look at the technologies out there today, there’s a lot of things that can be profitably deployed. People can get a lot more efficient. But the scale of the problem is very large. We’re going to need new technologies to fully solve the problem.

Investing in new technologies and more rapid deployment of technologies that are farther along and sharing intelligence about the best way to allocate capital will yield not only good investment returns but also better results for the planet. That’s why we’re so excited to be working with Generation and Al Gore.

Wired News: So you’re inviting all comers to pitch you?

Gore: The tone of your voice conveys some question about the wisdom of this invitation.

WN: It does make me wonder how you’ll cope with the inevitable flood of –- how can I say it politely? Un-actionable ideas.

Gore: Between Generation and Kleiner Perkins, we’re already seeing 3,000 plans per year. So we have already developed the capacity for this review and we have scaled it up in anticipation of increased flow. And, of course, we recognize that there are a lot of proposals that should never see the light of day. But we also recognize that there are a lot of great ideas and technologies that have not been given adequate consideration and aren’t (given adequate consideration) because of the heavy subsidies for high-carbon technologies that are enormously profitable for incumbent enterprises. As the world shifts away from a high-carbon economy, we need to do a better job, all of us, in recognizing the new opportunities.

David Blood: The challenge that Bill Joy just outlined is an enormous challenge. We’re in the process of moving from the carbon-based economy to something different. It would be probable that that would undergo a change over the course of decades.

Our guess is -- given the challenges associated with climate change -- which transition is going to need to occur much more quickly. Over a 10-year period, possibly a five-year period.

So the need for entrepreneurship and creativity in ways we can’t even fathom, not only as investors or business people but across civil society, is so great that, in some ways, the call seems to be, we’re asking for a lot.

But it’s also symbolic, to say we need to take a different approach here. We need to have a total change of mindset. We need creativity. We need existing businesses to change -- entrepreneurs, capital markets professionals and public policy. ...

CNN Money reports that the US is still waiting to cash in on Iraq's oil. The talk about Iraq being able to produce 4 - 6 million barrels a day (under the right conditions) still understates the reality - fully exploited, Iraqi oil fields would be producing more than Saudi Arabia does today.

Iraqi lawmakers attempted earlier this year to pass a law governing the way oil contracts and revenues are managed. But the law got bogged down in parliament after Kurds objected to the greater control it gave the central government in allotting oil contracts and doling out royalties. The Iraqi public - and many lawmakers - also saw it as giving away the county's oil reserves to foreign firms.

Critics of the proposed oil law said it gave foreign firms control over production on individual fields and did not require them to hire Iraqi workers or share technology. "It really is a dream law for the companies," said Antonia Juhasz, a fellow at the research and advocacy group Oil Change International. "And privatization is not viewed as a good thing by most Iraqis."

But the law could impose high royalties, such as the 90 percent tax on oil profits in places like Russia and Libya, which would return most of the money to the Iraqi people. Some analysts say passing a national oil law and opening up the country to foreign firms is essential. ... But others say the Iraq national oil company could do the job themselves, given the resources to invest, renewed training overseas, and, of course, a more peaceful environment.

"They don't need investment by big oil companies," said James Placke, a senior associate at Cambridge Energy Research Associates who specializes in the Middle East. "They need to fix the present oil infrastructure." Placke said war, lack of investment, and a shortage of properly trained technicians is leading to production declines of 200,000 barrel per day a year. Under the right conditions, he thinks the national oil company could produce four million barrels a day in five or six years time.

Kurt at Resource Insights has a post noting "None dare say it was for oil". Presumably he means no one in a position of power or influence. I've said it a million times, as have many others.

It must have seemed puzzling to many when the Bush administration put a full court press on former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan recently after the release of his memoir. In it Greenspan wrote that the administration had gone to war in Iraq over oil. That's hardly a blockbuster. The search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had ended in failure. The connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda had long since been debunked. And, any hope of establishing a stable democracy in Iraq had already been dashed by the wildly incompetent execution of the war.

WMD, the al Qaeda connection and the introduction of democracy in Iraq had all been at various times justifications for the war. One would think that under such circumstances a competent public relations adviser would have counseled the administration to just let Alan Greenspan's assertion pass. After all, the former central banker would soon be completing his book tour, and then he would fade from the news. Why respond, when doing so would only fan the flames?

But the counterattack came quickly on the Sunday morning talk shows and in the White House press room. Under bombardment from the administration Greenspan quickly "elaborated" on his views in order to deflect the return fire.

All of this could be seen as a relatively minor dustup over what is now broadly believed by the American public to be at least one of the major reasons for going to war. But, the assertion that the military mission in Iraq is primarily a raiding party for oil is more than just an embarrassment to the administration. Naturally, the collapse of the other justifications for the war led to a more widespread acceptance of this assertion. But, even more important, this assertion has implications which, if discussed and properly understood, would thunder through the public mind.

Admitting that the invasion of Iraq was about oil opens the door to a very troubling conversation. If the invasion was about oil, then it must mean that the supply of imported oil was somehow threatened. The supply could be threatened, of course, for two reasons: 1) Someone was threatening it, in this case Saddam Hussein, or 2) something was threatening it, possibly depletion. ...

This is something of a false dichotomy of course - if we aren't at the peak oil point yet (or if Bush and Cheney don't believe we are) then it could be for the same reason we've always invaded Iraq - controlling the oil.

The Atlantic Free Press says the mainstream Democrats (not pointing the finger honest folk like Kucinich) are complicit in the oil grab - "The Treason of the Mainstream Democrats".

The “War on Terror” is a conscious and ingenious masquerade for the geostrategic pursuit and control of Middle Eastern oil and gas resources. The facts place this beyond dispute. Mr. Bush’s claim of “taking the fight directly to the terrorists…and the states that harbor them” was yet one more intentional deception, as subsequent events fully demonstrated. In Afghanistan the state was overthrown instead of apprehending the terrorists—Osama bin Laden remains at large—and in Iraq, when we invaded, there were no terrorists at all. But today both “states” are fitted with puppet governments and dotted with permanent U.S. military bases in close proximity to their hydrocarbon assets.

Only the Bush Administration continues to natter about a bogus “War on Terror.” Others are more candid:

o Republican Senator Senator Charles Hagel: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.” (Speaking at Catholic University, 9/24/07)

o Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in his book The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World: “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”


o Democratic Senator Jon Tester: “We’re still fighting a war in Iraq and people who are honest about it will admit we’re there over oil.” (Associated Press, 9/24/07)


o General John Abizaid, retired CENTCOM commander: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.” (Speaking at Stanford University, 10/13/07)

The criminal fraudulence of the “War on Terror” is fully documented (see http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/63632/ ), but the contemporary press has been derelict in failing to expose the mega-lie and publicize it. The mainstream Democrats are equally derelict in ignoring it. ...

Why can’t the mainstream Democrats speak sublime truth to demonic power? Doing so, they claim, would be too “divisive” and jeopardize the party’s success in next year’s election.

This strategy is politically suicidal. A Democratic sweep in 2008 grows dimmer every day.

The rank-and-file Republicans who continue to believe Mr. Bush’s lies about the “war on terror” will not vote for a Democrat. The rank-and-file Democrats who see through the lies are increasingly enraged by the insipid waffling of their mainstream candidates. And roughly half the American people don’t bother to vote at all, repelled by the tawdry attack ads and negativity of bitterly partisan, superficial, sophomoric, and issue-avoidance politicking.

If the mainstream Democrats do nothing to change this, they will wind up where they’re headed—disappointed and defeated in 2008—and they will deserve it. Only by exposing and acting on the truth about the war can they change any Republican minds, regain the support of disenchanted Democrats, and attract the politically inert, indifferent Americans. A new style of politics needs badly to be engaged, one that is dedicated not merely to winning elections, but to a genuine concern for truth, for justice, for the rule of law, and for integrity in public service.

The most direct and honorable way of invoking such a style is by impeaching George Bush and Richard Cheney. Never in our history have the high crimes and misdemeanors been so flagrant, and the people of our country know it.

Yes, Congressman Kucinich sought with a “member’s privilege” motion to initiate an impeachment proceeding on the floor of the House of Representatives. But Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer moved immediately to kill the initiative, only to be thwarted by a Republican trick. Finally Nancy Pelosi, desperate to avoid a floor debate, managed to have the matter referred to the Judiciary Committee—where Chairman John Conyers has been sitting on the original bill since last April. The giving of aid and comfort to the enemies will, seemingly, continue.

That line about not being there for the figs isn't bad.

"The Walrus" has an article by Linda McQuaig on candidate Kucinich - "Mission Not Yet Accomplished" - and his accurate take on the Iraq war and its oily underpinnings.

There’s a reason I’m chasing Kucinich — and it’s essentially the same reason he’s no more likely to win the Democratic nomination than Miss Saudi Arabia is to be the next Miss Universe. Kucinich has been speaking out about a rather remarkable set of developments going on inside Iraq. Amid all the death and mayhem, the Iraqi government is under intense pressure from Washington to implement a proposed new law that would begin the process of parcelling out Iraq’s vast undeveloped oil reserves.

In the Western media, the proposed law has generally been described as an “oil revenue–sharing law” — that is, a law that sets out how Iraq’s potentially massive oil revenues will be split among its warring ethnic factions, the Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. But the law is actually about much more than that. It’s also about creating a legal framework for foreign investment in Iraq’s oil sector, thereby potentially reviving a dominant role for big multinational oil companies — a role they’ve been excluded from since a powerful wave of oil nationalism swept the Middle East in the 1970s and left the region’s bounteous reserves in the hands of national governments. Ultimately at stake is who will end up as chief beneficiaries of the immense treasure trove of black gold stored beneath Iraq’s sand: the country’s 27 million largely destitute citizens, or the owners of the wealthiest corporations on earth, otherwise known as Big Oil.

Dennis Kucinich suspects it’s going to be the latter, and he’s been trying to draw attention to what he calls “one of the biggest heists in the history of the world.” One clue that he may be on to something is the very high priority the Bush administration, with its notoriously close ties to Big Oil, is attaching to the Iraqi oil law. In May 2007, Vice-President Dick Cheney made a trip to Baghdad, and, as media reports indicated, his central message was the urgency of passing the oil law.

Yet Kucinich has had no luck stirring up opposition on this front in Washington. Even his efforts to get his fellow Democrats onside against the administration’s apparent attempt to privatize Iraq’s oil has been met with indifference, even hostility. Despite the unpopularity of the war, Democrats have been hugely reluctant to level accusations that hint at a nefarious US motive in connection with Iraq’s oil.

So even as powerful US and British oil companies sit poised to take control of the largest unharvested oil bonanza left on earth — with some 165,000 US troops standing helpfully by — the watchdogs on Capitol Hill and the media seem uninterested. The elephant stands knee deep in oil in the middle of the room, attracting no more attention than Dennis Kucinich in the halls of the Rayburn building. The Bush administration may have botched just about everything it’s touched in connection with its misadventure in Iraq, but it has pulled off one master stroke: it has somehow managed to banish to the margins of public debate any suggestion that it has ever cast a covetous eye on Iraq’s oil.

Reuters reports that the Iraqi parliament is still avoiding handing over the oil.

Iraq's political leaders are in intensive talks to resolve lingering disputes over a draft law that will decide control of the world's third-largest oil reserves, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Sunday. ... Maliki said the bill, which will provide a legal framework for foreign firms to do business in Iraq, had since been sent back to cabinet for more talks to iron out the disputes. The prime minister said there was still disagreement over the exploration of undeveloped fields and production-sharing agreements, as well as contracts that had already been signed with some foreign companies.

Oh yeah - the "undiscovered" oil - I was wondering when they'd get around too quibbling about who decides which bits haven't been "discovered" yet.

The Dallas Morning News points out that Iraq's troubles have pushed oil costs up - the result of "a war gone awry". I guess that's one possible interpretation...

The spike in oil prices shaking the U.S. economy right now is something of a self-inflicted wound stemming from a war gone awry.


An oil drilling rig is installed at the Taq Taq Operating Co. in Iraqi Kurdistan. Iraq's oil production has been crippled since the start of the war, amounting to one of the biggest disruptions in world oil supplies since World War II, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Bush administration officials predicted Iraqi oil production would soar after Saddam Hussein was gone, to levels of 6 million barrels a day or more, and that Iraq would be able to rebuild with its own oil revenues. Instead, Iraqi oil production remains in the doldrums – 2.2 million barrels a day, below pre-war levels of 2.7 million barrels – because of a rat's nest of sabotage, theft and mismanagement so stark that oil is paying for insurrection rather than reconstruction. "Our people, we are living on a sea of oil but we're facing a very big crisis in all of Iraq, not only in Kirkuk," said Mayor Abdul Rahman Mustafa. "We have the shortage and the crisis of the fuels."

International economic sanctions, war damage dating to the early 1980s and a failure to invest in the oil industry had made a mess of things well before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. But the crippling of Iraq's oil production since the start of the war amounts to one of the biggest disruptions in world oil supplies since World War II, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Without this disaster, oil prices would be much lower today, said David Kirsch, a former State Department energy analyst who now manages oil market intelligence for PFC Energy consultants in Washington. "If not for the war, we'd have cheaper oil, and more of it," he said. ...

Ashti Hawrami, minister of natural resources with the Kurdistan regional government in northern Iraq, estimates oil theft averages 300,000 barrels a day – worth about $8 billion a year. Nearly all of this oil is diverted from the south to organized crime syndicates operating in the Persian Gulf. "We have to cut out the smuggling nonsense," he said. "I am supposed to have 17 percent of that" for the Kurdistan regional government. "How do I get my money?"

Bad management has also played a role.

The gigantic Kirkuk field has produced for 50 years and still holds more than 9 billion barrels of oil. It was damaged under Saddam Hussein's last years in power when he ordered more oil than engineers could deliver without using techniques that robbed years from the productive life of the reservoir. Iraqis pumped thick, greasy fuel into the field to pressure more oil out of the ground, but the remaining crude oil became harder to recover.

Finally, there was widespread alarm among Iraqis and the political left around the world that the war would lead to a carve-up of Iraq's oil among big U.S.- and British-based international oil companies. "There was no recognition that Iraqi notions of sovereignty were tied up with oil, and Iraqis would not want to see wholesale privatization," said Mr. Kirsch.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made news recently by writing in his memoirs, "I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows – that the Iraq War is largely about oil."

President Bush and others in his administration have repeatedly denied oil was a motive. But the war came at a time when there was growing concern worldwide about surging demand for gasoline and other fuels in fast-growing nations like China and India, as well as in the United States. The bulk of Iraq's 115 billion barrels of proved reserves (some oil consultants say there is probably twice that amount) were kept out of the market by U.N. economic sanctions. ...

In 2003, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz testified before Congress that Iraq had so much oil it could rebuild out of its own pocket. "It has one of the most valuable undeveloped sources of natural resources in the world. And let me emphasize, if we liberate Iraq those resources will belong to the Iraqi people, that they will be able to develop them and borrow against them," he said. "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon," he added.

Iraq is an OPEC member subject to the cartel's rules about production and prices, but OPEC has left Iraq without a quota for many years because of its economic weakness. In the months before the U.S.-led invasion, there were meetings at the White House and Pentagon to decide how to put Iraq's oil industry back on its feet once Saddam Hussein was gone. The Halliburton Co., Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, was chosen to come in behind U.S. troops to restore production in southern Iraq.

As U.S. forces were nearing Baghdad, Mr. Wolfowitz said, "The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 [billion] and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years" – an estimate that suggested oil production of 6 million barrels a day or more.

Links:

* UPI - Iraqi Kurds give oil deals to own oil firm
* Oil Change International - Iraq: Exposing the Corporate Agenda
* New York Times - The Coup at Home
* Globe And Mail - How many billion barrels in Saudi Arabia ?
* George Monbiot - Biofuels Could Kill More People Than the Iraq War. George really doesn't like biofuels - and the Swaziland example really doesn't look very good.
* The Guardian - Iraqi fighters 'grilled for evidence on Iran'
* Youtube - Ron Paul On Face The Nation, Veteran's Day 2007. "I think our policy on Iran is the threat. ... We have 700 military bases in 130 countries - we should bring the troops home".
* Cryptogon - US Official: Privacy Is a Soviet Style Bureaucracy That Knows Everything About You
* Mises.org - Freedoms and Foes.

H.R. 1955 is an absolute attack on the freedom of speech. Not only does it assault my right to question government, it also assaults the right of ardent Marxists to speak their minds. So, I am at a loss at both ends.

You see, I value the ability to speak as much as the ability to read nonsense from those such as the writers and curators over at Marxists.org. Should H.R. 1955 become law, no longer will I be able to read articles like "Trotsky or Deutscher? On the New Revisionism and Its Theoretical Source" from James P. Cannon, Fourth International, Winter 1954. The logical gymnastics of such articles will be gone from the web. A very sad day indeed.

I do not fear the idiocy of Cannon and his fellow travelers. But I do fear the agenda of those who proudly strut the halls of DC, American flag pin displayed loudly on lapel or blouse.

These folks aren't simply debating historical and epistemological positions, they are conspiring to subvert the remaining vestiges of Liberty and Property. They are not some group of fanatic windbags. No, they are modern day Brownshirts fighting over whose match ignites the Reichstag -- the Constitution.

The freedom of speech is about to be turned on its head. Fight H.R. 1955 as if it's your life. For without Liberty, your life is no longer yours anyway.

Solar Power Rocks has a great graph comparing energy research expenditure in the US to the cost of the Iraq war.

These figures are in millions. The source for energy R&D expenditures is from the National Council for Science and the Environment.

Though the war in Iraq now costs about $120B a year, two authors (one a Nobel prize winner) estimates the total cost of this war exceeds 2 Trillion Dollars:

“Accrued liabilities for U.S. federal employees’ and veterans’ benefits now total $4.5 trillion. Indeed, our debt for veterans’ health and disability payments has risen by $228 billion in the past year alone…The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the interest payments on the money borrowed to finance the Iraq war will total $264 billion to $308 billion.”

That $2,000,000,000,000? Well, that amount of money could’ve built solar thermal plants here that would have provided energy for 2/3rds of our nation’s energy demand.

Links:

* AlterNet - How to Build a Local Energy Economy
* Houston Chronicle - Seadog: The wave of the future?
* The Morning Call - More landfills turning trash byproduct into electricity
* Raw Story - Congressman Kucinich writes letter to Judiciary Committee head supporting impeachment of Vice President Cheney
* New York Times - The Web Finds Ron Paul, and Takes Him for a Ride
* Cryptogon - Wave Power Attracts Investors
* Cryptogon - Like it or Not, $100 Oil Forces New Energy Policy on U.S.

The Fond Du Lac Reporter has an article on a Wisconsin farmer turning cheese manufacturing waste into biofuel.

What will the fuel of the future look like and where will it come from?

Prepare for a variety of fuels from many sources, says Wisconsin entrepreneur Joe Van Groll whose start-up renewable energy company produces both ethanol and bio-diesel without a single corn kernel or soybean in sight. The Grand Meadow Energy LLC near Stratford trucks in waste from surrounding cheese plants and raw canola oil from a nearby farm. "There is no one silver bullet," Van Groll said in a press release. "The silver bullets are already out there — taking waste streams and turning them into profit centers."

Van Groll bought the Grand Meadow Coop cheese plant when it closed more than three years ago, converted it and with $29,000 from the state's Agricultural Development and Diversification grant program, began testing what is now a trade secret. Today, customers buy a license to use the yeast-based technology he developed with help from the grant.

As concerns about the environmental and societal impact of corn-based ethanol rise, he lists the advantages of his method. "I don't use energy; I put it back on the grid. I don't slurp up water; I purify and recycle it. I don't push up food costs; I dispose of waste," he said.

Van Groll is a 13-year veteran of the state's cheese industry, and his process focuses on permeate, a by-product of cheese making. But Van Groll says the technology can be used on a variety of waste streams and he sees no end in sight to its application. His technology now turns what he refers to as "a messy problem" into a profit center for cheese plants. He buys permeate, blends it with a customized yeast culture, and produces pure alcohol ethanol. He does so at about a quarter of the cost of producing corn-based ethanol.

Two months ago, he began blending the ethanol with raw canola oil to make biodiesel. He uses the biodiesel to power a generator that produces electricity for his plant and plans to sell excess energy back to the power company. Producing two renewable fuels gives him the option of choosing which market is offering the best return. He also sells dried yeast, a byproduct of the process, for livestock feed.

The Age has an interesting article by Paul Cleary on the resource curse (or "Dutch disease") and how it is impacting Austrlia - "Mining boom could bust us: The Paradox Of Plenty".

The long-term challenge facing Australia is variously called the "resource curse", the "paradox of plenty" or the "Dutch disease". This is when an influx of income from resource wealth drives up the exchange rate and inflates the domestic economy, making the country less internationally competitive and thereby crippling its long-term prosperity.

The opening of the fiscal floodgates by the Howard Government in recent years, and by both major parties in this election, follows the resource curse script to the letter. This has led to higher inflation and interest rates, in turn driving up the exchange rate and making the country less competitive. And the fiscal stimulus rolled out in this campaign can be expected to do more of the same.

The resource curse is usually found in developing countries, but as former US Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan explained in his recent book, The Age of Turbulence, the phenomenon was first identified in Holland, when revenue from North Sea oil flooded into the country.

"How is it possible that a super-abundance of natural resources — oil, gas, copper, iron ore — would not significantly add to a nation's production and wealth? Paradoxically, most analysts conclude that, particularly in developing countries, natural resource bonanzas tend to reduce rather than enhance living standards," he writes. "[It] takes the form of an economic affliction nicknamed the 'Dutch disease'. Dutch disease strikes when foreign demand for an export drives up the exchange value of the exporting country's currency."

Despite Australia having such an abundance of natural resources, few policy analysts or private sector economists have sought to draw attention to the resource curse, which has hampered Australia's development from the very beginning. The Federal Treasury, for example, does not attempt to measure the stock of Australia's natural resources subject to development plans — which could in fact be measured — when putting together the national balance sheet.

The absence of any policy response to the resource curse is all the more surprising when there are practical models that have been implemented in other countries, most notably Norway, which in 1995 established a "Petroleum Fund" (now known as the Government Pension Fund). More recently, East Timor adopted the model in full — with some additional transparency measures — for the management of its revenue from the Timor Sea. In Norway's case, all the tax revenue from its North Sea oil resources flows directly into the offshore fund which invests in government bonds and blue-chip equities. The government then draws on the fund.

Essentially, the country can spend the real interest on its natural resources long after the oil resources have been exhausted. The fund is designed so that Norway can transform a non-renewable resource into a financial asset that will last forever. Importantly, Norway avoids the pitfalls of natural resource wealth by parking the money offshore. Instead of driving up the exchange rate and making the country less competitive, the revenue simply drives up the value of the fund.

Former prime minister Paul Keating recently referred to the floating exchange rate as the "shock absorber" for the economy; a sudden inflow of export earnings was absorbed by the exchange rate rather than flooding the domestic economy. But Norway has taken a quantum leap forward; its shock absorber is the petroleum fund and it reaps the benefit of oil wealth by increasing the nation's assets rather than diminishing competitiveness. After launching in 1995, Norway's fund is now worth 1800 billion krone ($A363 billion), and expected to double by 2010.

Australia's much vaunted Future Fund cannot be compared with the Norway fund, although it could be transformed to help Australia deal with the "curse". At present the Future Fund is only designed to address future liabilities from unfunded public service pensions. Its recent annual report shows that about half of its new investment went into Australian shares. In effect, the Future Fund is also helping to bid up the exchange rate.

The Future Fund should be collecting the proceeds of the resources boom and putting this money offshore. This could be achieved by imposing a levy on all resource projects which would be deducted from the tax already paid by resource companies.

But if Australia was really serious, all resource-based taxation would be paid into the fund and then drawn down by the Government at a sustainable rate. This way, Australia could truly benefit from the resource boom without crippling the rest of the economy and undermining its long-term prosperity.

CNN has a report on the CEO's of ConocoPhilips and BP hinting that the peak oil point is approaching - "Big Oil CEOs Point To Constraints On Supply Growth".

Pointing to a variety of political and technological constraints on energy investment, chief executives at two oil giants Thursday highlighted systemic limitations on the growth of the supply of oil, implying that there will be high oil prices for at least the medium term.

ConocoPhillips (COP) Chief Executive James Mulva had earlier told a New York financial conference that he doubted that world oil producers would be able to meet forecast long-term energy demand growth. The International Energy Agency, the energy watchdog for western economies, has projected 2030 world oil demand of 116 million barrels a day. But *Mulva said he doesn't believe oil supply will ever exceed 100 million barrels a day*. He didn't offer a price forecast. "Demand will be going up, but it will be constrained by supply," Mulva said. " I don't think we are going to see the supply going over 100 million barrels a day and the reason is: Where is all that going to come from?"

BP's Hayward, by contrast, spotlighted improved recovery rates as a possible source of significant new production growth. "We are very very early" in developing and applying new technologies to improve recovery from existing oil fields, he said. BP has been able to boost recovery at some Alaska oil fields 60% by employing sophisticated drilling and production methods. Overall, Hayward said "about half" the world's oil has been recovered, but he implied that significant improvement is possible on a broader scale. "The biggest source of new oil will come from increasing recovery," he said.

Jerome a Paris at The Oil Drum has more on this and on an FT interview with the IEA's chief economist - "Peak oil: BP, Conoco CEOs say it's here - also IEA's Fatih Birol really freaks out".

After the CEO of Total (the French oil major) last week, two more CEOs of an oil major came out this Thursday to give stark warnings that mean that peak oil is happening right now. In addition, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (the IEA), one of the main cheerleaders of the "there's more than enough oil" camp until now, is giving an extraordinarily pessimistic interview in the Financial Times, following the recent publication of their latest World Energy Outlook. ...

But moving on to CEO n°2, that of BP, the British oil giant:

[BP plc (BP) Chief Executive Tony] Hayward said "about half" the world's oil has been recovered, but he implied that significant improvement is possible on a broader scale. "The biggest source of new oil will come from increasing recovery," he said. Although BP has increased the oil price it uses to test whether energy investments are economical, Hayward rejected the idea that oil prices have shifted permanently into a higher trading range - along with the notion that the world has hit peak oil production.

Despite "rejecting the notion" of a peak in production, he is nevertheless the first senior oil executive, to my knowledge, to say that "half the oil" being gone - something which is usually considered to happen at pretty much the same time as peak production (although the two are not necessarily simultaneous). Even with enhanced recovery techniques, no country has been able to increase its maximum production once the peak had been reached - starting with the US and the North Sea region, where oil companies have had all the liberty to use all the most sophisticated techniques.

So yes, it is a pretty huge deal that the BP CEO says that half the oil is gone.

But, in a way, this is almost small beer compared to the various bombs dropped by IEA chief economist Fatih Birol in his interview with the FT. The interview is very long, but well worth reading in its entirety. I'm providing a few quotes below, but for those of you that arre finding this diary long already, here's the quick summary:

* we are beyond peak oil in the non-OPEC world;
* OPEC officially has lots of reserves - but we don't really know;
* even if they make all the investment plans announced are made and are on time, we'll still have a gap of 12.5mb/d (more than 10% of overall demand) by 2015; we now officially need to beg OPEC to invest more;
* oh, and by the way, that's the smaller of the two energy-related problems we have: climate change is a lot worse.

The French nuclear power industry keeps a close eye on uranium suppliers - not to mention those who write about nuclear power and uranium mining - hi guys. This is somewhat understandable in view of how dependent France's energy security is on uranium suppliers, but no doubt has implications for those uranium suppliers in terms of the resulting temptation for the French to meddle with their internal affairs (though hopefully they won't ever try to take this to the level the US has in Iraq). TreeHugger has a post on Canadian uranium exports and the potential for some of these to be diverted for internal use - processing the Alberta Tar Sands (something I've long criticised but which will no doubt go ahead anyway). From "France Recolonizing Northern Canada For Uranium".

The potential irony of this story lies in the fact that France gets most of its electricity from nuclear plants. That historic and ongoing circumstance allowed France to label itself a 'low carbon society'. Viewed from a life cycle perspective, starting with uranium extraction, benefaction, and processing, the green nuclear dream loses some of the appeal, however.

For most of the last 20 years the price of uranium has hovered between $10 and $20 per pound. But beginning in 2004, driven by demand around the globe for new nuclear power plants, it has risen dramatically, peaking at $136 per pound in June 2007. By August, it was back to $90, still high enough to encourage at least 20 companies to spend more than $30-million this year exploring about 40 properties in the North.

Port Radium, Vancouver-based Alberta Star is searching in what’s known as the Hornby Bay basin, one of the North’s two hotspots. The other is the Thelon basin between Baker Lake, Nunavut and the NWT border. (There’s a little exploration going on in the Yukon, too, in the Wernecke Mountains 200 kilometres north of Keno.)

The most advanced uranium project in the North is in the Thelon basin, and belongs to Areva Resources Canada, a subsidiary of France’s state-owned nuclear giant Areva Group. The Kiggavik-Sissons project, about 80 kilometres west of Baker Lake is a deposit that has been explored since the 1970s. A proposed mine was stopped by popular protest in the early 1990s.

But Areva opened a full-time office in Baker Lake last year and would appear to be winning the war for public support.

Here is the link to the Areva Canada statement about C02 emissions reductions stemming from uranium mining.

Existing nuclear plants [in Canada] avoid the emission of 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, emissions that would occur if fossil fuelled plants had produced the same electricity." Eighteen nuclear power plants provide about 15 percent of Canada's electricity and make a significant contribution to reducing greenhouse gas and other emissions.

It seems from this statement that Canadian mined uranium will fuel Canadian nuclear power plants. Given that "Canada is the world's largest producer of uranium," however, it would seem likely that there will be export to European and other customers. But that may be a temporary thing. Enter the Alberta Tar Sands.

The future encompasses includes this fact (bold font is our addition):

From about 2003 various proposals have been made to use nuclear power to produce steam for extraction of oil from Alberta's northern oils and (tar sand) deposits and electricity also for the major infrastructure involved. At present a lot of natural gas is used - up to 30 cubic metres per barrel of oil. With projections of three million barrels per day by 2016, a great deal of gas is used and the cost exposure is increasing dramatically. In fact, Canadian natural gas is inadequate to supply the anticipated expansion in oil sands output and its use has major CO2 implications which are creating public concern - about 20% of the energy in the oil is required to produce it and about 80kg of CO2 per barrel is released.

This seems to be the status of Nuclear Powered Tar Sands Oil Extraction in Canada as of 2007:

In March 2007 the House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources recommended that no decision should be taken on the use of nuclear energy for Canada's oil sands until the "repercussions of this process are fully known and understood". Their report estimated that a reactor of some 600 MW capacity could supply a processing plant producing 60,000 barrels of synthetic crude oil per day. Hence almost 20 such reactors would be needed to meet the production growth planned to 2015, when Canadian output from oil sands is forecast to reach three million barrels per day. Smaller reactors, with capacities of some 100 MW, could be more suitable for individual projects, given the limitations of supplying steam over more than 25 km.

Tom's latest Dispatch on our resource wars for oil is out - "William Astore, If We Lose Iraq, You're to Blame".

You know there's trouble ahead when Iraq, in its present state, is the good news story for Bush administration policy. While various civilian and military officials from the President on down have been talking up "success" in Iraq and beating the rhetorical war drums vis-à-vis Iran, much of the remainder of the administration's foreign policy in what the neocons used to call "the arc of instability" began to thoroughly unravel.

In the Horn of Africa, U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops are bogged down in a disastrous occupation of the Somalian capital, harried by a growing Islamist insurgency. Despite endless shuttle diplomacy by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the administration's Middle East peace conference, to be held at Annapolis, is already being dismissed as a failure before the first official invitations are issued. Meanwhile, the Turks are driving the administration to distraction by threatening to invade and destabilize the only moderately successful part of the new Iraq, its Kurdish region (while the Iraqi government in Baghdad calls on Iran for help in the crisis).

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently landed in Tehran and brazenly indicated that any U.S. attack on Iran would be considered an attack on Russia. He then convened a local "mini-summit" and formed a regional Caspian Sea-based alliance with Iran and three energy-rich former SSRs of the departed Soviet Union implicitly directed against the United States and its local allies. On the day Secretary of State Rice announced new, tough sanctions against the Iranians, Putin commented pointedly: "Why worsen the situation by threatening sanctions and bring it to a dead end? It's not the best way to resolve the situation by running around like a madman with a razor blade in his hand."

Meanwhile, one country to the east, the resurgent Taliban has, against all predictions, just captured a third district in Western Afghanistan near the Iranian border -- and, as the most recent devastating suicide bomb indicates, attacks are spreading north. And then, of course, there's the President's greatest ally in the Muslim world, Pakistan's ruler Pervez Musharraf.

Remember Bush's nightmare scenario, the one that guaranteed a surefire "preventive" attack from his administration: an autocratic and oppressive ruler with weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear ones, presiding over a country that functionally offers a safe haven for terrorists? Well, that's now Pakistan, whose security forces are busily jailing hundreds of lawyers, while the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and extremist Islamists, well armed and backed by their own radio stations broadcasting calls for jihad, are moving out of safe havens in the tribal areas along the Afghan border and into Pakistan proper to fight. And there's essentially nothing the administration can do, except mouth platitudes and look the other way. As Paul Woodward of the War in Context website has pointed out: When it comes to nuclear Iran and nuclear Pakistan, we have been living in "a Through-the-Looking-Glass world where nuclear weapons that do exist are less dangerous than those that can be imagined." Now, not much imagination is needed at all.

Strangely, from Ethiopia to Pakistan, despite all the signs, all the predictions, the Bush administration, as far as we can tell, expected none of the above. How often can it be caught off guard by the consequences of its own decisions and actions? Eternally, it seems.

The possible collapse of the President's foreign policy across the entire arc of instability was first written about by the always prescient Juan Cole at Salon.com. He commented that, "like a drunken millionaire gambling away a fortune at a Las Vegas casino, the Bush administration squandered all the assets it began with by invading Iraq and unleashing chaos in the Gulf." And he ventured a prediction: "The thunder of the bomb [that blew up as former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returned home] in Karachi and the Turkish shells in Iraqi Kurdistan may well be the sound of Bush losing his ‘war on terror.'" Over at TPM Café, Todd Gitlin was the first to offer a wry, if grim, suggestion, as he considered Bush's "failure to crush the Taliban & Co." from Tora Bora 2001 on. "Talk about dominos," he wrote. "How about this for a Democratic slogan: Who Lost Pakistan?"

With the price of crude oil threatening to hit $100 a barrel and prices at the pump surging over $3 a gallon domestically -- while, on the nightly news, experts mutter about oil at $150 a barrel and gas at $4 a gallon by next summer -- a meltdown might be in the works. Invaded and occupied Iraq, like some festering sore, remains at the heart of this spreading disaster, the end of which is nowhere in sight. The U.S. military, the sole instrument with which Bush's top officials and his neocon followers imagined they could launch their "expeditionary" sorties around the globe, as if they were so many nineteenth-century British imperialists, has proved incapable of responding to such an essentially political situation. The President might as well be using a hammer to ward off gnats. No wonder, as retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and historian of early twentieth century Germany William Astore makes clear, the military and right-wing politicians are already preparing their own exit strategies in the form of stab-in-the-back explanations of what happened. ...

Links:

* WorldChanging - Costa Rica and New Zealand on Path to Carbon Neutrality
* Grist - Wind power installations set to soar 63 percent in US this year
* WSJ Energy Roundup - Blowing in the Wind
* WSJ Energy Roundup - Ask a Wind-Power Lawyer
* Grist - Strip Tease: On power strips
* Cape Argus - South African cities need to change lanes as oil runs dry
* IHT - Indonesia's blames western nations for deforestation, demands compensation
* Huffington Post - News Alert: If You Love Renewable Energy, It's Time to Freak Out. Never expect too little from the jellyfish.
* WorldChanging - From State-Based Sovereignty Towards Bright Green Governance.
* Dave Roberts - Did you know the word 'gullible' isn't in the dictionary?
* Cryptogon - Vaccine Causes AIDS/HIV Related Infection that Spreads Through the Body via Common Cold Virus

Technology Review has an article on startup company Kior which has developed a process for creating "biocrude" directly from biomass.

Dutch biofuels startup Bioecon and Khosla Ventures have launched a joint venture called Kior, which will commercialize Bioecon's process for converting agricultural waste directly into "biocrude," a mixture of small hydrocarbon molecules that can be processed into fuels such as gasoline or diesel in existing oil refineries. The process, Kior claims, boasts numerous advantages over other methods of producing biofuels: it could prove relatively cheap, relies on a nontoxic catalyst, taps into the present fuel-refining and transportation infrastructure, and produces clean-burning fuels that can be used in existing engines.

Biofuels are widely seen as a key stepping-stone on the path from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, particularly for transportation. Their use could also reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But ethanol, the most widely produced biofuel, contains little energy compared with gasoline or diesel. And a great deal of energy goes into its production: growing the grain from which it is fermented, distilling it, and transporting it. Many biofuels boosters have pinned their hopes on finding ways to produce ethanol from cellulose, the tough polymer that makes up much of plant stems and wood. In practice, though, cellulose must be broken down into simple sugars before it can be fermented into ethanol or converted into synthetic gas and turned into fuels. Despite three decades of research, these remain difficult, expensive, and energy-intensive processes that are not yet commercially viable. Additionally, recent research shows that ethanol, which is highly volatile, may actually exacerbate smog problems when it evaporates directly into the air instead of burning in vehicle engines.

The way to make cellulosic biofuels viable, says Bioecon's founder, Paul O'Connor, is to use catalysts to convert biomass into a hydrocarbon biocrude that can be processed into gasoline and diesel in existing petroleum refineries. After decades developing catalysts for the petroleum industry, O'Connor started Bioecon in early 2006 to develop methods for converting biomass directly into biofuels. His first success is a catalytic process that can convert cellulosic biomass into short-chain hydrocarbons about six to thirteen carbon atoms long. Khosla Ventures agreed to provide an undisclosed amount of series A funding to spinoff Kior in order to commercialize the process. Vinod Khosla, founder of the venture fund, believes that converting biomass into liquid transportation fuels is key to decreasing greenhouse-gas emissions and compensating for dwindling petroleum reserves. Khosla is funding a number of biofuels startups with competing technologies and says that Kior's approach is unique. "They have some very clever proprietary catalytic approaches that are pretty compelling," he says. "They can produce relatively cheap crude oil--that's attractive."

The most effective method of converting biomass into fuel requires subjecting it to high temperatures and high pressure to produce synthetic gas, or syngas. In the presence of a catalyst, the syngas reacts to produce fuels such as ethanol or methanol (used as an additive in biodiesel). But this is a costly process that often results in a product that is too low quality to be used as fuel without further processing. And catalysts able to withstand the high temperature of the syngas are expensive and frequently toxic.

Attempts to produce fuel by directly exposing agricultural cellulose to a catalyst have had little success because most of the cellulose is trapped inside plant stems and stalks. O'Connor says that while the Bioecon researchers are developing new catalysts, their "biomass cracking" process is the real breakthrough. Using proprietary methods, they have been able to insert a catalyst inside the structure of the biomass, improving the contact between the materials and increasing the efficiency of the process. While O'Connor won't go into details, he says that the most basic version of the technique might involve impregnating the biomass with a solution containing the catalyst; the catalyst would then be recrystallized. "What we're doing now is improving the method to make it easier and cheaper," O'Connor says. ...

Steve Deutch, a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, says that the little information Kior has released about its process is plausible enough, but that until the details are available, the company's claims are "not really possible to evaluate." The main challenge for Kior, or anyone working on cellulosic fuels, Deutch says, is to develop a process simple enough to bring close to the sources of biomass--farms. "Collecting biomass and getting enough of it in one place to make a difference is a problem in the biomass world," Deutch says. "Trucking costs can become exorbitant. You want to preprocess it at the farm and then ship a high-density, high-energy intermediate to processing plants."

Xinhua reports that China is about to commence mass production of maglev wind power generators.

Construction began on the world's largest production base for magnetic levitation (maglev) wind power generators in central China on Monday. The Guangzhou-based Zhongke Hengyuan Energy Technology Co. Ltd. invested 400 million yuan in building the base for the generators, from which it expects a yearly revenue of 1.6 billion yuan. The base will produce a series of maglev wind power generators with capacities ranging from 400 to 5,000 watts in the first half of 2008, said a company statement.

The maglev generator co-developed by the company and Guangzhou Energy Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences is expected to create new opportunities for harnessing wind power in low-wind-speed areas, as it can utilize winds with starting speeds as low as 1.5 meters per second.

The problem of the traditional wind turbines was that they require high wind speeds to start, because of the friction caused by their bearings, said Li Guokun, chief scientific developer of the new technology. The frictionless maglev generator would cut the operational expenses of wind farms by up to half, keeping the overall cost of wind power under 0.4 yuan per kilowatt-hour, said Li.

Jeremy Faludi at WorldChanging has a "Green Computing Update" - "Part 1: Data Centers".

It's been a while since we've done a comprehensive article on green computing. So much is happening in this industry that it won't all fit into one article. With this first update, I'll focus on data centers; next week's second update will focus on green personal computers, components, and services.

Before getting started, though, it must be said that greening the computer industry is touching off an unprecedented level of cooperation and information-sharing among companies, government, and laboratories. The Server Specs blog recently interviewed industry consultant Deborah Grove, who said it was unlike anything she'd seen in 24 years in high tech. "There is increased transparency... Executives are offering up what worked and what didn't work instead of everybody having to reinvent the wheel," said Deborah. "It's tangible in the sense of better products... Organizations are taking on the responsibilities that they can deliver on -- not worrying about turf, just trying to get the job done."

Deborah's largely referring to the Green Grid, a consortium of industry leaders (like AMD, Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, and others who are normally competitors) to share data and strategies for greener data centers. Green Grid's membership also includes the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (better known as PG&E), and it recently announced a collaboration agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Data Centers

Data centers (also called server farms) are where companies like Google or Amazon or internet service providers locate the hundreds or thousands of computer servers that provide their online services. As Worldchanging's Joel Makower has written before in a couple great articles, data centers use massive amounts of electricity; large ones can use megawatts of power, with each square meter using as much power as an entire average US home. According to a Tech Target white paper on green computing, "Data centers consume 1.5 percent of the total electricity used on the planet."

It's not just the computers themselves that use all this power: the combined heat output of all these servers, hard drives and network gear is so large that massive air conditioning is required to keep it all from overheating. "Cooling is about 60 percent of the power costs in a data center because of inefficiency," said Hewlett Packard executive Paul Perez in Data Center News. "The way data centers are cooled today is like cutting butter with a chain saw." Cooling capacity is often the limiting factor of how big these systems can be -- I've talked with more than one engineer whose data center facility sat half empty or more; even though there was plenty of room for more servers, the building's air conditioning was maxed out.

How can data centers get greener?

Lawrence Berkeley Labs has published a white paper titled Best Practices for Data Centers. Researchers measured 21 facilities and recommended strategies that they found most successful. These include several HVAC (air conditioning) improvement strategies, water cooling, efficient power supply and conversion, and on-site power generation. Other useful design strategies the paper does not mention are virtualization and "blade" servers. A paper at GreenIT titled Greening the Data Center: A 5-Step Method actually lists many more than five strategies, similar to those suggested by the LBL, but a bit newer and written for the layman. One step specifically emphasized is getting to know your facilities managers, as they are the ones who know about your HVAC system and energy bills. CIO.com also has a list of six strategies, including not letting your cabling block the flow of your air conditioning system, and moving power and cooling systems outside the data center -- even outside the building. ...

TreeHugger's quote of the day comes from Jonathan Porritt on Saving Our Seeds.

The number of people out there today seriously worried about the health of all the plants and seeds on which modern agriculture depends must be very limited, and the number of people actively campaigning to protect them vanishingly few. ... Of the Earth's 250,000 plant species, only 200 are cultivated for food on any serious scale.

Even more extraordinary, the vast majority of the world's food comes from just 20 crops, in just eight plant families. Most of these monocultures are dangerously vulnerable to diseases (both old and new), pest infestations, and a rapidly changing climate.

Yet the "genetic pool" on which plant breeders might need to draw to build resistance and adaptability is being constantly eroded as older, non-commercial varieties disappear. ...

[S]eed banks can only do so much in this massive salvage operation. The seeds they store need to regularly germinated, otherwise they too die. The best way of maintaining an active and vibrant seed bank is to ensure that farmers (and gardeners) are planting out those 'land races' and rare varieties of plants which are now so endangered.

More often than not, that sets small-scale, subsistence farmers (on whom this kind of "active conservation" depends) in conflict with the juggernaut of industrialised, intensive agriculture."

The FT reports that Brazilian oil company Petrobras has made a large offshore find in the Atlantic. Apparently the proven reserves are only about 700 million barrels, so its not huge in the grand scheme of things.

Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras unveiled on Thursday a giant crude reserve, sending its shares soaring and prompting the government to withdraw 41 oil blocks from an upcoming auction in a bid to keep potential natural resources out of foreign hands. ”This is about preserving the country’s sovereignty, while maintaining the auction with areas that are not linked to the discovery,” cabinet chief Dilma Rousseff said at a news conference, explaining the decision to pull blocks linked to the find from a concessions auction on Nov. 27-28.

Petrobras made Brazil’s largest oil find at great depth in the subsalt cluster at the offshore Santos basin field called Tupi. The crude is 28 API grade, unusually light for Brazil. Petrobras said tests allowed it to estimate recoverable reserves of between 5 billion and 8 billion barrels -- about half Brazil’s existing proven reserves. Company officials said commercial production could begin in five to six years. A pilot project should start in 2010 or 2011 with an aim to gradually reach an output of 100,000 barrels per day.

The Age has a new article by Kenneth Davidson on climate policy - "The major parties' green credentials are off the rails".

A fixation with road transport compromises climate change policy.

RUDD Labor's green credentials are slipping. And you don't have to look far for the reasons. Until Labor produces interim greenhouse gas targets for 2020, and policies to match, the promise of a 60 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 just remains so much hot air.

On the ALP's election website there were 29 transport policy promises — 27 involved specific pledges for road funding totalling $8.3 billion and two "vision" statements on shipping and rail in speeches by shadow transport minister Martin Ferguson in July and August.

These speeches don't commit a dollar expenditure or give even an indication of the roles shipping and rail might play in achieving greenhouse targets. Nor do they mitigate the double whammy of peak oil (which is driving world oil prices towards $100 a barrel) and Australia's "oil squeeze" as declining domestic production and rising demand will push oil self-sufficiency from a present 84 per cent to 20 per cent in the next two decades.

Gilles d'Aymery at Swans has an article on "The Inexorable March Into Iran: The American People's Forgivable Irresponsibility", predicting a likely strike on Iran between February and April 2008.

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

—Hermann Wilhelm Göring in a conversation with Dr. Gustave M. Gilbert, Nuremberg, April 18, 1946 (see Nuremberg Diary, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, June 1947, ISBN 0374223519 - pp. 278-279).

Unfathomably, Iran tops the chart of all the countries viewed by the American people as the biggest threat to the U.S., ahead of the perennial culprits -- China, Iraq, and North Korea, soon to be rejoined by the old scarecrow of yesteryears, Russia. If Iran develops the bomb, the American people in their overwhelming majority believe that Iran will attack Israel, Europe, or the United States. They further believe that Iran will provide terrorist organizations with some sort of nuclear device to attack the U.S. Not surprisingly, a majority of likely voters support a military strike against Iran and believe it will happen before the end of the Bush administration on January 20, 2009. But no worries, 30 senators have signed a letter telling Mr. Bush he had no congressional authorization to attack Iran, and the administration steadfastly repeats that the president wants diplomacy to work with the help of our friends and allies. The corporate media, meanwhile, keep ringing the alarm bells -- the Iranians are coming, the Iranians are coming! -- and the antiwar forces, or what remains of them, are increasingly being muffled by the forces of Law and Order.

First and foremost it should be noted that as abundantly explained in "Propaganda: Then and Now" (Swans, November 12, 2001) propaganda does indeed work. "Propaganda means repetition and more repetition!" Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda in Nazi Germany, used to say. "Nuclear Holocaust," "World War III," "Israel wiped off the map," "mushroom clouds," "the new Hitler," "this is 1938," "state-sponsor of terrorist organizations," "killing American troops through proxy militias," "arming and training the terrorists," "irrational mullahs," "islamofascists," "financing and training Hezbollah and Hamas," and all combinations therein repeated ad nauseam on cable and network news programs, in the written press, the blogosphere, the Congress, and in hundreds of position papers from countless think tanks right, left, and center. Even the humanitarian hordes are on board to defend women's rights and freedom of the press; supposedly, the anarcho-libertarian left is falling back on their sempiternal "neither-nor" position that they used so fruitfully with Milosevic and Saddam Hussein: Neither Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nor the U.S. It looks eerily like the fall of 2002 all over again.

It may be disappointing to observe the American people being taken for another wild destructive ride, but in their defense, that's all they hear. Göring was right on mark, "it is always a simple matter to drag the people along." That the people have turned against the Iraq War, yet 41 percent still "believe" that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was behind 9/11, ought to be viewed as simple forgivable irresponsibility. They don't know because they are not being told (or are actually being fed falsehoods and disinformation), aren't naturally curious, and are quite possibly the most insecure people on the surface of the globe. Fear is the common denominator of the American psyche all the way back to the first colonies in the 1700s and the birth of the nation. Enemies are always looming behind dark, dangerous, smoky clouds to take their life, liberty, and pursuit of [material] happiness away from them. Imbued with a sense of innate goodness, permeated by pseudo-religions, infused with the conviction that America is the best country in the world, any dissenting views or oppositions are inevitably deemed a sign of evil. Evil roams the world, envious of our freedoms and way of life, always seeking to destroy America, the last best hope on planet Earth. Our god-given right, besides going to the Mall, is first and foremost to defend ourselves against the dragons that wish to set us afire, with or without the help of our ever-changing friends and allies. ...

Links:

* The Oil Drum - Peak Oil in the Mainstream Business Press
* Energy Bulletin - Young Daniel Yergin as peak oil activist (book review)
* Sustainable Energy Blog - Palm Oil to CO2 disaster
* Cleantech.com - Cash flows into solar power and biofuel
* TreeHugger - Office Building Lit By 100% LED Light
* Cleantech.com - Range Fuels' Mitch Mandich breaks ground in cellulosic ethanol
* Green Car Congress - University of Alberta Team wins iGEM Prize for Bioengineering E. Coli to Produce Butanol. Revenge of the Butanerds.
* SMH - Solar panels for the roof -- worth it or not?
* The Age - Drought hits rice industry
* Science Daily - Geothermal Energy Exploration: Deep Drilling For 'Black Smoker' Clues
* TreeHugger - Neurosis River: Coal Power & Wastewater Create Toxic Fish
* The Last Whale - No Humane Way to Kill a Whale: Tim Winton
* The Age - It's the Seinfeld election: Latham
* Cryptogon - Arraignment and Federal Indictments for Bernard Kerik, Close Giuliani Associate and Botched Nominee to Head Department of Homeland Security