Tom Whipple's latest article in the Falls Church News Press takes a look at the natural gas situation in the US. He doesn't mention the huge LNG deal signed with Dubai, which would seem, to me anyway, to mean that the situation isn't quite as dire as he paints it (assuming the US$ holds up and a larger scale war or revolution doesn't break out in the middle east).

If you heat with natural gas, you must have noticed the price has been going up lately. Well, I have some bad news for you -- this is only the beginning. For the 62 million households heating with natural gas in the United States , the cost of home heating has doubled in the last few years and there is no end in sight.

Unlike the situation with oil and oil products, only a minimal amount of natural gas — around 2 percent of total consumption— is being brought to America in liquefied form by LNG tankers. Currently 83 percent of our consumption comes from our own gas wells and 15 percent comes by pipeline from Canada . The problem is that our domestic production is declining, the Canadians are becoming antsy about sending so much of a valuable resource to the US , and we are going to have to compete with an increasingly desperate world for cargos of liquefied gas.

There are some bright spots. There is talk of a pipeline to Alaska and more LNG compression plants are being built overseas, but these will take years to complete and will only ease the pain a bit, not solve the coming supply crunch. Although we continue to find new pockets of natural gas in the US , those that are being found are smaller and much more expensive to drill. The bottom line is that US natural gas consumption will drop one way or another. We will have rationing by price and there is little anybody can do about it.

In the wake of Three-Mile Island nuclear accident and growing concerns about air pollution, the US started building gas fired generating plants at a rapid pace. Currently 17 percent of our electricity is being generated by natural gas. Consumption by electric power plants nearly doubled in the last 15 years and over 25 percent of our annual natural gas consumption is used to make electricity. As matter of interest, only about 6 percent of the electricity used here in Virginia is generated by natural gas and is brought online only when needed to meet peak demand.

Gas for making electricity, however, is a problem that ultimately will take care of itself. As the cost of generating power by natural gas goes beyond the cost of other sources of energy, the power companies will switch to cheaper sources of fuel where possible, or pass on the increased costs to customers where they can't. This, in turn, will encourage serious conservation efforts so the net result will be less and less natural gas going to fire generating stations.

Woodside has announced a new strategy to try and get approval to deliver LNG to California called "OceanWay". Yesterday's TV news report made this sound like a done deal, though press reports were a little more realistic. There were earlier reports about the Bush administration working to " clear final barriers for the sale of Australian liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the US by the end of the decade".

Woodside, which abandoned a partnership with a US company to build a $US300 million ($400 million) offshore terminal on an old oil platform last year, now plans to convert its LNG to gas on a dedicated ship.

Rival BHP Billiton's $US600 million plan for the same market, Cabrillo Port, would instead use a floating terminal to heat the gas before sending it to shore via a pipeline.

BHP's plan has already faced several delays and fierce opposition from sceptical environmentalists but Woodside believes its bid to supply about 10 per cent of California's natural gas is environmentally superior and will ultimately succeed.

Chief executive Don Voelte and North American LNG director Jane Cutler met politicians and held a media conference yesterday in the state's capital, Sacramento, to announce the "OceanWay" plan.

The development timeline, location and cost of the project were not revealed yesterday but are expected to be made public next month. The company said the timeline would depend on whether the LNG was supplied by Woodside's Pluto field or its Browse field but OceanWay is unlikely to be active before 2010.

"The cost is not the major consideration here," Ms Cutler told the Herald yesterday. "What's really important is a contract that minimises the impact on the environment, addressing the concerns Californians have about permanent features … and LNG in close proximity to population centres."

Along with Woodside and BHP, several other companies have proposed building import terminals in California, although none has received final approval. Billions of dollars of gas exports are at stake and Ms Cutler said the market would probably support two terminals at most.

Woodside's advantage in gaining approval, she said, would be its solid track record of safely making more than 2000 LNG deliveries from the North-West Shelf project it operates in Western Australia.

Woodside has also been in the press over its expanding operations in Libya.

Woodside Petroleum Ltd is due to drill the first exploration well next month in a 194 mln usd hunt for oil beneath the desert sands and gulf waters of Libya, The Age newspaper reported citing company sources.

Libya had been off limits to Western companies due to sanctions imposed by the US and the United Nations in the 1980s and 1990s in response to terrorist activities.

The newspaper said Woodside, 34 pct owned by Royal Dutch Shell, is among the first back into the country, known for its big oilfields, following the sanctions being lifted in 2003.

It said Woodside's first exploration well is due to start late next month in a rapid-fire six-well program in the onshore Murzuq Basin, 1500 km south-west of Tripoli.

A separate seven well program will also be drilled in the onshore portion of the Sirte Basin on the other side of the country. Woodside is a 45 pct partner and operator with Repsol and Hellenic Petroleum.

The Age said Woodside has yet to detail the size of the oil targets it has identified beneath the Sahara's sand dunes, but its permits in the Murzuq and Sirte basins are very much in "elephant" country in oilfield terms.

There have also been reports of possible problems in Mauritania for Woodside (and ROC and Hardman) due to some potential untowardness of their relationship with the ex-energy minister.

Australia's biggest oil producer Woodside Petroleum Ltd is confident that the rumoured detention of Mauritania's former energy minister will not affect its operations in that country.

Woodside on Wednesday confirmed that its Chinguetti oil project, which is located off the Mauritanian coast, was still on track to produce its first oil next month.

Other exploration and development activities were also unaffected by the discussions, the company added.

Local media reports have speculated that the former Mauritanian minister for energy and petroleum has been detained in connection with agreements signed with foreign companies.

Woodside is at least partially responsible for the booming WA economy (and out of control Perth property market) - my visit over Xmas reminded me a bit of the tech boom (in a dry and dusty way) with oil and gas engineers all happily rolling in money and talking about setting up their own oil services companies.

Talk around town indicated that Woodside are planning on hiring 1200 people this year (which I imagine translates to a whole lot of hiring in the local - and offshore - service companies that do most of the actual work). The Pluto project already looks likely to go ahead and there seemed to be a lot of confidence that customers for gas from the Browse field will also be signed up in the next couple of months.

Presumably Pluto gas will end up being handled at the existing LNG plant at the Burrup that handles North West Shelf gas (via 2 new LNG trains). As I understand it design has begun and construction is expected to start in 2007 and will get up and running in 2010.

Browse, on the other hand, is far away from Karratha. One engineer I talked said the project would be similar in size to the North West Shelf. There is some speculation that an LNG plant in the Broome / Derby area won't get the go ahead, and that instead the gas would be piped undersea to Darwin (a rather large distance away) for processing there. (I'm not sure if he meant in the existing Conoco Philips LNG plant or if a new one would be built).

There was also some talk of a smaller field closer to Darwin in Australian waters being developed and the gas piped to Darwin, but I didn't catch the name and haven't noticed any press on this one.

The Sunrise project in the Timor sea is on hold despite a deal finally being agreed between Australia and East Timor over sharing of revenue from fields in the disputed area.

Having a lot of existing LNG plants in Darwin would no doubt make it much harder for any plant to be built in East Timor to process gas from Sunrise once the project finally goes ahead.

I also asked about Woodside's expansion in the Gulf of Mexico - no one seemed particularly concerned about hurricanes - and one person quipped that the GOM will run out of oil within 10 years anyway.

One final note on gas, AGL has signed a deal with Oil Search and ExxonMobil's PNG gas project which makes it seem very likely this will go ahead (and one Sydney firm will get to see a naked stockbroker running around the floor).

Changing the subject back to Darwin, I read an interesting article in "The Monthly" recently called "Lilypad of the Arafura" which looked at the evolution of Darwin from frontier town to somewhat bland northern city (which one resident described as "Canberra with palms"). The article talked a lot about the development of gas fields in the Timor Sea and the potential for Darwin to become the Australian equivalent of Aberdeen. It also looked at the build up of the defence forces in the area, with a lot of our operational capacity moving up from the south and leaving just the administrative functions back in the south.

The author pointed out that while the presence of the Navy and Air Force up there makes a lot of sense, its not quite as easy to understand why the Army is putting Abrams tanks up there, especially given that (1) we don't have any equipment capable of transporting them and (2) the terrain in nearby regions isn't exactly suitable for their use. He speculates that they are there for joint training exercises with US forces, who would then transport them to areas where they may be need, such as Iran. He also speculates that we are likely to see an American base in the Darwin area before too long - the "lilypad" of the Arafura sea.

The Independent gives their readers another introduction to the topic of peak oil.

As the oil price nudged above $64 a barrel yesterday on heightened concerns about disruption to supplies from Iran and Nigeria, a small group of geologists, economists and commodity traders was meeting in London to consider a more fundamental question: when will the world begin to run out of oil?

That moment is known as "peak oil" - the point at which production stops increasing and goes into inexorable decline. Some commentators believe that moment may be as little as two years away, some reckon we do not need to worry for another 20 years and some think the peak of production is so far in the distance that it is pointless to even try to put a timescale on it.

But one thing that all shades of opinion are agreed on is that when peak oil does happen, its impact on the world economy - and the consumer lifestyles so many of us take for granted - will be profound. Chris Skrebowski, the editor of the Energy Institute's Petroleum Review, believes peak oil will occur in 2008, at which point the world will move into "a land without maps where we are all likely to be poorer".

The Age's economics editor, Tim Colebatch, takes a look at the Australian government's inaction on global warming. Strangely enough, like most other educated followers of the issue, he thinks carbon taxes are a good idea too.

If the scientists are right, global warming will become the most important issue facing us this century. So far, the trends suggest they are right. The world's weather is getting hotter, more volatile. What is the world doing about it?

The responses vary. But by and large, governments and companies are going about business as usual, with some low-cost amelioration measures at the fringe. There are exceptions, but on the whole, there is little sense that we are facing a long-term crisis requiring radical changes.

Last week saw a stunning example. To back up the Government's Asia Pacific summit on climate change in Sydney, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics produced a report estimating that, based on heroic assumptions about new technology being invented and implemented, its projected level of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 could be reduced by 23 per cent. Good news!

But ABARE did not feel it necessary to tell us what those projected levels are. Only one graph let the secret out: even with this best-case scenario it projects, global emissions of greenhouse gases would more than double by 2050. Instead of heating up the planet by emitting about 8 billion tonnes a year of carbon dioxide equivalent, mankind would fry it by emitting 17 to 18 billion tonnes a year.

Bear in mind that Environment Minister Ian Campbell, backed by leading scientists, has warned that the world needs to reduce emissions by 50 to 60 per cent to stabilise the climate. ABARE is projecting that by 2050 global emissions will be four to five times higher than the level Senator Campbell says is needed. That is simply alarming.

The same day in Washington, the Worldwatch Institute released its annual State of the World report for 2006. It estimated that if China and India were to match even Japanese and European levels of resource use, they would consume the world's entire annual supply of oil and mineral resources. The soaring oil and resource prices of 2004 and 2005, are "a preview of the future".

"It is clear that the current Western development model is not sustainable," the institute's director, Christopher Flavin, concludes. "We therefore face a choice: rethink almost everything, or risk a downward spiral of political competition and economic collapse."

I vote for rethinking almost everything. But governments and businesses, with some exceptions, do not work that way.

What do we need to do? Let's move beyond the argument over whether we should sign the Kyoto Protocol, or merely comply with it. What we need is a realistic policy within Australia that is commensurate with a problem that, as Campbell says, threatens to become a disaster.

First, dump the complacency and self-congratulation. The Australian Greenhouse Office estimates that even with all the measures taken to reduce them, greenhouse emissions from energy use will rise 70 per cent between 1990 and 2020, while industrial emissions will rise 75 per cent. Total emission growth would be held to 23 per cent only by one-off changes in land use, which are now behind us. Admit the problem, and come up with policies appropriate to the scale of it.

Second, we need a policy structure that gives markets and households a strong incentive to reduce their use of energy, both by changing their behaviour and by investing in energy-saving technology. There is a simple, logical way to do it - tax carbon emissions.

A tax on carbon could be offset by cuts in other taxes. Or the funds raised could be used to subsidise research, development and installation of energy-efficient technology, from a solar water heater to a pilot plant of new technology for generating electricity. Or we could do both. It need not make us poorer, and it will make our children richer...

Crikey today led in with some speculation about the impact of the unfolding Iraq oil-for-food scandal here in Australia, which seems to have the government in a spot of bother - unless this is just some sophisticated propaganda campaign run by the American wheat industry to try and grab Australia's wheat exports to Iraq (anything is possible of course but I'd rate that unlikely).

Although it's highly premature to suggest that Wheatgate is about to become the Howard government's Watergate, the signs are beginning to look ominous. As Hugo Kelly writes in Crikey today, "it's clear the Government is facing major – major – trouble," with reliable sources suggesting the existence of a number of "smoking cables and emails" floating around DFAT which, we understand, have found their way into the hands of the federal Opposition.

Apart from the duplicity, illegality, immorality and stupidity of an Australian government organisation paying the biggest bribe of all the bribes paid to Saddam Hussein's regime, if it all turns out to be true then what on earth would it say about the stated reasons for Australia's participation in the invasion of Iraq?

Reasons that were articulately outlined in John Howard's Address to the Nation on 20 March, 2003 – which included assertions that Iraq possessed "weapons of mass destruction ... which even in minute quantities are capable of causing death and destruction on a mammoth scale"; that Iraq is run by an "appalling regime"; that Iraq "has long supported international terrorism"; that "Saddam Hussein pays $25,000 to each family of Palestinian suicide bombers who wreak ... murderous havoc"; that "I passionately believe that action must be taken to disarm Iraq"; that while "there are many dictatorships in the world ... this is a dictatorship of a particularly horrific kind"; and that "our argument is with Saddam Hussein's regime."

That's the same regime, it now appears, that was enriched by the Australian Wheat Board to the tune of some $300 million between 2000 and 2003. Which raises this rather tricky question for the government: did it know one of its instrumentalities was paying large bribes to a "dictatorship of a particularly horrific kind" at the same time as it was attacking the very same "appalling regime"?

This is how the Prime Minister ended his Address to the Nation in March 2003: "This has been a very difficult decision for the Government but a decision which is good for Australia's long term security and the cause of a safer world. Good night."

Good night, and good luck.

Crikey also has a piece saying that "Lovelock's doomsday prediction is counterproductive".

Jim Green, national nuclear campaigner for Friends of the Earth, writes:

I must admit to considerable scepticism when I hear James Lovelock's name (yesterday, editorial & item 9). His work on the Gaia Theory – and the interdependence of ecological systems – is important and interesting. But it's not particularly original. His fame owes more to his simplistic conception and presentation of complex phenomena.

The anthropomorphism of his 'Mother Earth' theory has probably also helped to popularise it. And he has a poetic turn of phrase – "Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe" – which attracts mystics and repels his academic colleagues in equal measure.

In his latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock is almost, but not quite, so pessimistic as to have lost interest in efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions and thereby to reduce the impacts of climate change. We can hope that climate sceptics such as Mark Steyn are right, pray that Lovelock's doomsday scenario is wrong, but public policy must be guided by the weight of scientific opinion which holds that climate change is happening and that its adverse effects will become more apparent in the coming decades.

Few if any scientists would argue that the situation is hopeless and that climate change abatement measures are pointless. Therefore, we should assume that concerted efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions will be worthwhile and must be pursued.

Stripped of its extreme pessimism and the mystical language, Lovelock is saying this: the adverse effects of climate change are already apparent and will only get worse, so we need to adapt to climate change in addition to making ongoing efforts to reduce emissions. There's nothing new there.

Recently, the ALP released a policy recognising the need to address the problem of climate refugees. The Howard government has also put more emphasis on climate change adaptation in recent years, but it's no more than a cynical manoeuvre to distract attention from its failure to get serious about reducing greenhouse emissions. The government refuses to recognise or resettle climate refugees.

In reality, the government is doing little to avoid climate change or adapt to it. Last week's Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate conference was typical. The government promised $25 million for renewable energy – enough to build one wind farm. The government's record on renewable energy is disgraceful – abolishing the Energy Research and Development Corporation in 1997-98, withdrawing funding from the Co-operative Research Centre for Renewable Energy in 2002, and refusing to extend the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target, to name but a few examples.

As for Lovelock, my main problem with him is that his proposal for a nuclear 'solution' to climate change, which has attracted mountains of publicity, is so intellectually vacuous. For example, he claims that less than 50 people were killed by the Chernobyl disaster, but all the scientific estimates put the death toll in the thousands or tens of thousands. Lovelock wants high-level nuclear waste in the basement of his home to provide heating and for food irradiation, and he insists it is a serious proposal. Suffice to say that he is a self-declared eccentric.

The BBC reports that the Iran situation is posing a dilemma for China given its dependency on Iranian energy exports. The war drums seem to be beating louder and louder to me - and the oil and gold markets both seem to be predicting trouble ahead. I can't imagine Russia or China supporting any sort of formal UN action against Iran at this stage - but I can imagine another oil shock if Iranian exports are halted - either by them or because sanctions are applied. Only 2 months until the oil bourse is due to open...

Beijing's initial reaction to news that Iran was breaking its deal with the EU3 was to express its concern, but immediately reaffirm its commitment to multilateral negotiations. Since then, the diplomatic temperature has increased dramatically but China has refused to change its position.

Officials have repeated the Chinese government's view that the best way forward is to restart the EU3 diplomacy with Iran, despite the fact many in the West are now dismissing it as exhausted. China's work behind the scenes seems to be focussed on trying to keep the diplomacy alive.

China's most obvious interest is energy. Three years ago, when Iran was already supplying 13 per cent of China's oil needs, the two governments signed a major deal which included Chinese development of Iranian oil fields. It is a source of supply of growing importance for China - one it doesn't want disrupted by politics.

China also has a deeply-engrained reluctance to takes sides with the US against a fellow non-Western nation. Much of its current energy-driven diplomacy is on forging political alliances which exclude the West and are faithful to Chinese principles of non-interference in each other's internal affairs.

Apparently the Corsi-Ruppert abiotic oil vs peak oil talk radio mud wrestle has now been staged, with the radio audience apparently feeling Corsi had the better of the matchup. One listener comments:

Corsi's main argument - "we'll never run out of oil because we never have" - was and is inherently flawed. At the same time, I'm surprised Ruppert didn't go after him about it when given the opportunity. Corsi talked his way around the issue and the fact that the audience deemed his side the winning one showed that this was the case.

I have more supporting arguments, but I'll explain those in my book. You should buy it.

Al Gore has delivered another good speech, this one looking at the need to restore the American constitution and the rule of law in the US - one more casualty of our shared fossil fuel dependency.

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens-Democrats and Republicans alike-to express our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger.

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the "most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on "large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States." The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program "without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection."

WorldChanging has a post on a smart grid experiment in the US Pcific Northwest.

The US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in cooperation with Whirlpool and IBM, has embarked on a year-long experiment in smart power distribution called GridWise -- and it could prove to be the sign that a revolution is at hand.

Smart grids and distributed energy are central to the bright green energy model. By decentralizing power generation and adding digital intelligence to the power network, we can build an energy infrastructure that's more flexible, better able to take advantage of renewable energy technologies, and more resilient in times of crisis. Groups as diverse as the Pacific Gas & Electric utility and Greenpeace UK support the concept, and an increasingly robust set of technologies make it possible to monitor and control how one uses -- and produces -- electricity.

The GridWise project connects 300 homes in the cities of Yakima, Washington and Gresham, Oregon to a new intelligent power network combining real-time monitoring of consumption and pricing, Internet-based usage controls, and appliances able to respond to power grid signals indicating problems by temporarily reducing energy use; this smart grid will be coupled with a distributed generation microturbine network. If all goes as planned, the result will be decreased demand on the utility and lower cost for the consumers. This will increase both the stability and the efficiency of the power grid.

The cornerstone of the GridWise project is the concept of "demand response" -- automation allowing customers to reduce or shift consumption during times of peak demand or higher prices. This automation shows up in both web-accessible usage controls and "smart appliances" able to both display power consumption information and respond to power network instability by cutting back on use for a few seconds or minutes. PNNL researchers believe that only 30% of a power grid's customers need to have such smart appliances to make a substantive difference in both demand and grid performance. Although only 300 households will be involved in this experiment, researchers are confident that GridWise will become a standard part of the regional power grid.

Elsewhere on the US West coast, California is further expanding its solar power programs. Its a shame Australian politicians on LNG terminal lobbying trips to California don't pick up some hints about the future of power generation while they are there.

The California state public utilities commission has approved the California Solar Initiative, a massive new program to support the expansion of solar power in the state, USD$2.8 billion going for incentives for solar power retrofits and USD$400 million going for incentives for adding solar to new construction. At USD$3.2 billion over 11 years, this puts California second only to Germany in investment in solar power. The plan's passage is the direct result of an outpouring of public support. According to Renewable Energy Access, the plan will lead to...

...the installation of approximately 3000 MW of solar energy, roughly the power equivalent of six large natural-gas fired power plants. [...] public support for the plan was repeatedly mentioned as a critical factor in bringing this plan to the CPUC. Over the last three months, 50,000 people have written to the California Public Utilities Commissioners to ask them to pass a long-term solar rebate program - more public comment than the CPUC has received on any issue they have ever considered, including the 2001 energy crisis.

WorldChanging also has posts on the Norwegian seed vault idea (which they then extend to a cool plan for a "backup" of civilisation - though I'm not so sure about the siting of this on the moon - just make lots of copies and scatter them around the planet) along with one on developments in biodiesel from algae - both of which I've mentioned recently.

It's a bit staggering to think on this kind of scale. This isn't just a warehouse for seeds in the off-season; the Norwegian seed vault is explicitly a project meant to be used only in the face of civilization-threatening catastrophes. Less-encompassing seed banks have already helped to restore agriculture in areas torn by decades of conflict. This bank will help to restore agriculture globally after planetary-scale disasters.

Seeds aren't all we need to have backups for. Right now, everything that we know as a species, everything we believe as individuals, everything that we are as a global civilization could be gone in an instant. Human civilization could fall victim to an uncharted asteroid crashing into the Earth, pandemic disease (natural or otherwise), or even global chaos from the worst-case peak oil scenarios; by having our civilization and all that we know in just one place -- the Earth -- we are extremely vulnerable. Engineers refer to this as a "single point of failure" problem: the loss of a single element dooms the entire system. Good engineers try to avoid these sorts of problems whenever possible. Right now, the Earth is our single point of failure.

Here is my overly-ambitous proposal, one that makes the Norwegian seed vault look lazy: we need to create an "off-site backup" for human civilization. We should create a backup of everything that we, as a world, know and believe. This would include everything from scientific knowledge to oral histories, proprietary research to genetic maps, great religious texts to comic books. Everything. This would become an ongoing, living record of who we are as a global civilization. Once collected (which would undoubtedly take a generation or more), the backup must be updated regularly to keep it complete. And it must be someplace off-site, someplace not vulnerable to being damaged or destroyed along with the original.

When I say that the backup would need to be "off-site", I mean somewhere off of Earth. Our Moon is a good candidate for such a backup. It's easy to get to (relatively speaking) and not vulnerable to the sorts of erosion one finds in a world with an atmosphere and active geology (the footsteps of the Apollo astronauts, for example, will last millions of years). Solar power could provide more than enough power for the facility, and the site would be visible from everywhere on Earth.

Such a project would have some extraordinary benefits, even before any disaster hit. Compiling that much data over what would likely be a very long term would require research into novel storage technologies. Concerns about media format, translation, and data compression would be confronted, along with seemingly intractable issue of copyright. The Off-Site Backup project would force us to answer many (if not most) of the critical questions of the digital age.

But the most important benefit would be that the Off-Site Backup Project would allow human civilization to rebuild after the unthinkable happens -- and it does happen. We've written repeatedly about the possibility of a major asteroid strike, and other overwhelming crises -- from the collapse of La Palma causing a tsunami that would wipe out the east coast of the Americas to massive "supervolcanos" -- are all too possible. In many respects, we're lucky that humankind has lasted as long as it has.

Always On has a brief note on the recognition of the need for alternative energy sources by the major Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists.

I had a front row seat at the Churchill Club's 8th Annual Top Trends Debate Thursday night in Palo Alto.

Part forecast of the future and part roast, venture luminaries John Doerr, Steve Jurvetson, Roger McNamee, Joe Schoendorf, and Ann Winblad promoted their views of tomorrow.

When the program started, John Doerr was first to make his prediction. Effectively, what he said was "Green is Good," or specifically, he took the words from Tom Friedman, "Green is the New Red, White, and Blue."

The classic investment opportunity exists where there is a problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. Whether oil prices are $60 or $20, the fundamental problem is that there is a finite amount of oil. It's also a fact that oil pollutes our environment in a way that's not sustainable.

A price of $60 a barrel provides obscene cash flow to bad guys in bad places who will use that wealth to make the world a worse and more dangerous place.

The issue isn't: "Should we drill for oil in Alaska or not?" (having been to Alaska, my vote is "yes" in that Alaska is so vast, nobody is going to notice drilling on the small area proposed). The real issue is: "How do we create a sensible long-term energy plan?"

Alternative energy such as wind, solar, and hydro are key to this as are fuel cells and biomass. Wind farms currently can provide enough energy for 1.6 million homes. By 2020, it will be ten times that number.

James Lovelock has caused quite a stir with his prophecy of climate chaos doom. Hopefully he is wrong about the inevitability of impending disaster and we do still have the ability to change our ways (once the current generation of Australian and American political leaders vanish into the dustbin of history anyway) before the situation does become irretrevably bad.

Crikey comments on the benighted state of the global warming debate in the pages of our national Murdoch daily "The Australian", which seems to think for some inexplicable reason that Mark Steyn isn't a demented misanthrope and has something meaningful to say on the subject (instead of identifying him as the member of a shrinking lunatic fringe).

Crikey also notes that the word "conservative" was supposed to mean risk averse. That's the old meaning of the word of course, before it was replaced with "corrupt, zealous ideologue who refuses to acknowledge reality".

The state of the world's environment is complex, critical and contentious enough without needing to turn it into a political or ideological issue. Yet according to The Australian, the debate about global warming is being sensationalised by "environmental activists" for whom it is "an article of green faith that the world's climate is changing for the worse." And according to one of that newspaper's climate collaborationists, columnist Mark Steyn, climate change is "the new buzz phrase" created by "Kyotocrats" who "are, literally, a church, and under the Holy Book of Kyoto their bishops demand that the great industrial nations of the world tithe their incomes to them."

What, then, to make of the views of James Lovelock, a distinguished environmental scientist, who says in today's London Independent that the world has "already passed the point of no return for climate change" and that "civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive." Thirty years ago, Lovelock worked out that the earth possessed a "planetary-scale control system" which kept the environment "fit for life." Dubbed Gaia, the theory argues that the Earth System contains "myriad feedback mechanisms" which in the past have acted together to keep the Earth much cooler than it otherwise would be. Now, however, they'll "come together to amplify the warming being caused by human activities such as transport and industry through huge emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide." And the results of damaging the living planet's "ancient regulatory system" are likely to "accelerate uncontrollably."

Who is right and who is wrong? Lovelock or Steyn? The Australian or the New Green Weekly? Well, unlike most other political or ideological debates, this one has dire consequences if the conservatives have got it wrong. Surely this is an issue where taking the benefit-of-the-doubt approach is the truly conservative path, even if conservatives aren't the ones taking it.

Lovelock's column does contain some real estate investment tips for those paying attention - sell Britain and buy Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia...

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 percent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilization is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent. On these British Isles, we are used to thinking of all humanity and not just ourselves; environmental change is global, but we have to deal with the consequences here in the UK.

Unfortunately our nation is now so urbanized as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from overseas.

We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.

I'm never sure of the wisdom of saying "you're all going to die" to the world at large and not providing some sort of carrot for people to change their ways - maybe he genuinely believes we are all doomed, but if thats the case, why not just shut up about it and go off and enjoy yourself somewhere ?

Moving on to a less grim analysis of events, Henry Thornton quotes the weekend Financial Review on the impact of global warming on Australia's economy, which points out that relying on fossil fuel exports is going to leave us in a sorry way as the world abandons them in the coming years and we find out that an economy based on being Asia's quarry (which still can't afford the goodies we want right now) is just a house of cards.

David Bassanese in the weekend fin discusses a longer term threat - global warming. "Global warming could wreak havoc with Australia's coasts, not to mention agriculture. Meanwhile, our energy-importing customers will aggressively seek ways to cut reliance on fossil fuels. To maintain our leading status as an energy exporter, Australia should be in the vanguard of these efforts - not resisting them. Or we'll be left behind, like today's change-resistant pharmacists."

Crikey also has an interesting post from the inventor of the Sunball on the lack of government support for clean technologies like solar power.

Greg Watson, inventor and solar power expert, writes:

By eliminating solar PV rebates, the federal government is saying to the vast majority of Australians who want to generate their own electricity on their rooftops: DON'T. This is basically denying their legal right to decide who they buy their electricity from – and that includes themselves if they want to generate their own.

My company has developed the SunBall, which won the ABC New Inventors 2005 People's Choice Award against 123 other inventions. It generates electricity on rooftops at a much lower cost than electricity bought from the grid. We have been trying to get the Australian Greenhouse Office to tells us what testing they need us to put the SunBall through to qualify for rebates and allow us a level playing field against less efficient and more costly flat panels.

After about six months of attempted discussions the AGO is no longer answering our emails.

This action and the elimination of the solar PV rebate seem to suggest the government is not interested in giving people their rights to get power from their own rooftops and to reduce their electricity bills. I would hope this is not an attempt to protect fossil fuel suppliers, electricity generators, electricity distributors or electricity retailers profit margins.

In a world where, almost every day, another state or country announces leading edge rebate programs for solar rooftop installations, it seems strange that here in Australia we're going back to a fossil fuel-based economy and walking away from all the wider benefits that solar can bring such as reduced hot summer network peak demands.

We live in a strange world.

And while I'm linking to Crikey, here's their view on the moves towards impeaching George Bush.

Without Watergate, the Clinton impeachment would have been unthinkable. Although Nixon was brought down by a bipartisan majority, the Republican Party suffers from collective amnesia about its role, and has come to regard his fall as a Democrat political assassination. Hence much of the bitterness of the Clinton era.

But the failure of Clinton's impeachment in turn made future impeachments less likely. No president will be at risk for a long time unless they actually deliver their opponents a smoking gun.

Yet that is what George W Bush seems to have done. His unapologetic admission to wiretaps of US citizens without warrants, in apparently clear violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, has put impeachment back on the agenda, however tentatively. As John Dean, Watergate conspirator and whistleblower, put it before Christmas, he is "the first president to actually admit to an impeachable offence."

This week, The Nation carries a long article by Elizabeth Holtzman, who was a Democrat member of the Judiciary Committee that voted Nixon's impeachment, presenting the case for impeaching Bush. Yesterday former vice-president Al Gore called for the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the wiretapping affair. And Sunday's New York Times editorial, without mentioning the "i" word, used unusually strong language to condemn the president:

The administration's behaviour shows ... how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.

So why is Bush so set on a course that has revived a previously taboo subject? It's not as if FISA warrants were hard to get; they can be applied for retrospectively, and it's said that out of many thousands of applications only four have ever been turned down. Maybe Bush is using the wiretaps to spy on political opponents, although as yet there is no evidence of that.

More likely, the administration just wants power for its own sake. That, after all, is what governments do. As Holtzman says, "it may well be that the warrantless wiretap program has had much more to do with restoring the trappings of the Nixon imperial presidency than it ever had to do with protecting national security.

And to close, a joke:

President Bush met with all the former secretaries of State and Defense for advice on Iraq. This is quite a change. This is the first time Bush has listened to anybody. Well, if you don't count the wiretaps. — Jay Leno

I'm never quite sure if William Engdahl should be filed under "parahistory" or not - but he does write some interesting stuff on oil geopolitics. Here is his take on the Russia-Ukraine gas game .

Putin is many things but he can’t be accused of being passive in the face of strategic threat to Russian national interests. Moscow moved swiftly last summer to exploit a growing rift between Uzbekistan and Washington, and the result was a ban by Uzbekistan of US military overflights and use of its airbase, a right that had been granted by President Karimov after September 2001 to get Uzbekistan into the ‘good’ side of the US War on Terror. Relations between Uzbekistan and Moscow today are very close, including in military mutual defense agreements. That rapprochement dealt a major blow to the Washington encirclement on the Eurasian space of both Russia and China.

The next move in this complex geopolitical power chess game will be in Ukraine where Yushchenko faces parliamentary elections in March. Discontent with his lack of progress on the economy had given him very low poll ratings. Some Russian experts believe Putin is playing hardball with Yushchenko to remind Ukraine voters where their energy security lies, i.e. not with Yushchenko and his Western friends, but with Moscow. Russia regards a NATO Ukraine inside the EU as a ‘strategic threat’ to put it mildly.

The Gazprom Ukraine ‘compromise’

By ending the dispute so swiftly, with a doctored compromise, Putin made his point, and he immediately reassured edgy West European gas importers that Gazprom never intended to cut their gas, only the uppity Ukraine’s.

Under the terms of the new deal, Gazprom will sell the gas which Ukraine receives, but in a devious way. It will be sold for $230 thousand cubic meters (tcm) to an Austrian trading company, Rosukrenergo. Rosukrenergo is in turn owned by Gazprom and the Austrian Raifeissen Investment AG. Then Rosukrenergo simultaneously buys gas from Turkmenistan for $50 a tcm. The two are ‘mixed’ and Ukraine’s Naftogas buys the final gas for a price of $95 tcm. Both sides can claim ‘victory.’

Gazprom also agreed to pay a 50% higher Transit Fee to Ukraine for its pipeline route through Ukraine to Europe, a fee of $1.60 instead of $1.06 per tcm per 100 kilometer. As well, both parties will settle in dollars not in the form of gas.

The West was caught in a dilemma in opposing the Gazprom price demand of $230. First, as it was only half the ‘market’ price, showing some restraint on Gazprom’s account. Second, because Western organizations from the WTO to the IMF to the Washington Bush Administration have been demanding Gazprom begin selling its gas in Eastern Europe at ‘market’ prices and not at a ‘subsidized’ price. Ukraine is far the largest Eastern Europe gas customer of Gazprom.

Significantly enough, on January 5 US Energy Secretary Sam Bodman told US companies they should not be discouraged from investing into the Russian energy sector merely because of the Ukraine dispute, adding that the dispute had not undermined his confidence that Russia was a good place to invest. ‘We continue to encourage our companies to explore opportunities with Russia,’ he added. Washington clearly has a larger agenda in the region. So too does Putin, and the two agendas are manifestly divergent.

The swift settlement of the Ukraine gas dispute, as well as the details of the compromise, in which Ukraine de facto pays what it offered before the cut-off, suggests what Yushchenko claimed. It was not an issue of commercial policy. It was and is an issue of power politics, Russian power geopolitics.

Its real focus is how Putin perceives the danger posed by an ever-more-ambitious USA foreign policy in Eurasia and what he can do to contain that threat. It’s clear the cut-off was intended to send a sharp signal to Kiev: don’t get any cute ideas of joining NATO and becoming a part of a hostile alignment to Russia. Here the US build -up of potential war threat against Iran also figures into the Kremlin calculus.

Moscow’s military muscle shows

On December 26, as most of the West was distracted in Holiday cheer, the Russian military activated a new fleet of Topol-M missiles. The new generation weapon is capable of fitting a nuclear warhead, as well as changing trajectory to foil an enemy interception device such as the current generation of US anti-missile defense weapon.

This was no small act of macho bravado. General Nikolai Solovtsov, commander of Russian Missile Forces simultaneously announced the mobilization of a new battalion for the Topol-M missiles. The missiles have a 1 megaton impact, some 75 times the Hiroshima A-bomb of 1945. Solovtsov is an outspoken critic of the US decision to forge ahead with its anti-missile defense, which is a Rumsfeld priority. The Russian general announced that the Topol-M was, ‘capable of piercing any missile defense system,’ and was immune to electromagnetic blasts used by current US missile defenses. For military experts that is impressive.

Russia announced it has also formed 20 new nuclear missile units, its largest increase of nuclear spending since the 1962 Cuba Missile Crisis.

Meanwhile, The Times is saying that we need to "Find a couple of spare planets or face global oil war".

THE world faces the real threat of a new conflict over oil as China competes with existing world powers for scarce resources to feed its growing economy, according to a report published today.

The State of the World 2006, released by the Worldwatch Institute, says that last year China became the second- largest importer of oil, after the US, while consuming 26 per cent of the world’s steel, 32 per cent of rice production,

37 per cent of cotton and 47 per cent of cement. China is set to become the world’s largest carmaker in the coming decade.

While environmentalists are concerned about the impact on the world’s climate and the drain on its resources, strategists fear that the competition for energy, particularly oil, could destabilise the planet. According to the report, China was nearly self-sufficient in oil in the mid-1990s. But over the past decade its consumption has doubled and it has now overtaken Japan as the second-largest importer of oil, with 3.2 million barrels a day in 2004.

It predicts that if the economies of China and India continue to grow at their current rate, the world will not be able to produce enough oil to meet demand by 2050, when consumption will have grown from the current 85 million barrels a day to 200 million barrels. “Few geologists believe that output will reach even half those levels before beginning to decline,” the report says.

As a result China is already looking for new oil suppliers from Siberia to Sudan, often dealing with notorious regimes, such as the junta in Burma. Of even greater concern is the possibility that open conflict could break out between nations competing for resources or trying to protect their supply lines, such as key trade routes, currently patrolled by the US Navy.

The report draws the parallel between Japan in the 1930s and China today. It recalls that it was Japan’s inability to secure its oil supplies from South-East Asia that prompted its entry into the Second World War. Today Beijing is strengthening its Navy to protect its energy supplies, shipped at great distances from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

Reports from Nigeria say that Shell is considering evacuations from their oil fields in the delta.

Royal Dutch Shell is considering evacuating all its workers from swamp areas in the western side of Nigeria's delta where militants have staged four attacks in five days, a senior industry source has said.

The impact of such a move on Shell's 380,000 barrel-a-day oil output from the Warri region was unclear, the source said because evacuation did not always mean halting production. About three-quarters of the Warri region's output is from the swamps where militants gain easy access to production platforms by boat, he said.

Shell, the largest oil producer in Nigeria, pulled out about 330 workers from four platforms in the swamps after a militant attack on the Benisede flow station in which at least six people died.

The Energy Blog has an update on Biodiesel from Algae processes.

A Cristian Science Monitor article gives an update to the Greenfuels Technologies Corporation CO2 mitigation/algae production system. Geenfuels process, invented by MIT scientist Issac Berzin, grows algae in clear plastic tubes placed in the exhaust stream of emissions from power plants. The CO2 in the exhaust plus photosynthesis grow the algae which absorbs the CO2 and nitrous oxide in the exhaust stream. The algae then can be harvested and used to produce biodiesel and the remaining solids can be further processed to produce ethanol.

The company has received $11,000,000 in venture capital financing since the last report. A field trial at an undisclosed power plant is underway. Next year, GreenFuel expects two to seven more such demonstration projects, scaling up to a full production system by 2009. Technology to produce ethanol from the residue is new. Berzin estimates that just one 1,000 MW power plant could produce 40 million gallons of biodiesel and 50 million gallons of ethanol a year. Such a facility would require a "farm" of 2,000 acres of algae growing tubes. There are about 1000 power plants in the U.S. with enough acreage for a "farm."

GreenShift Corporation has licensed a competing CO2 mitigation/algae production system from Ohio University. They claim that their system requires a smaller footprint because their tubes can be taller and have more surface area. GreenShift is also building a series of biodiesel plants which could process their algae and has a process to convert ethanol waste to biodiesel.

The Herald has an article called "A power station in every home" which looks at some of the obstacles hindering wider take up of solar power in the suburbs.

While delegates to the inaugural meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate were rubbing their foreheads in Sydney last week, not everyone was waiting for the Government's lead on climate change. At ground level, individuals are finding personal solutions.

"We are doing home renovations and extensions, and we are going to invest so much in our house, I thought we should invest in free power too," dela Russo says. But she also concedes she feels great instead of guilty using so much power to cool down the stuffy, weatherboard cottage. And nowadays, when she stares out of the train window on her way to work she doesn't just see the same blank expanse of baking surburban rooftops, she sees wasted opportunities for solar power.

Bob Crooks covered much of the roof of his Northbridge home with photo-voltaic panels three years ago because, he says: "The sun is there and it's free - if you are prepared to make the initial outlay. But I was also making a bit of a statement. I wanted to reduce my own contribution to greenhouse gases."

Last year was Australia's hottest on record and summer peak power demands now exceed winter peaks, mainly because of the consumer stampede towards residential air-conditioning. More than 60 per cent of Australian dwellings are now air-conditioned, compared with 33 per cent in 1994. And last month was Australia's sunniest on record; an average of 10.4 cloud-free hours of sun a day were recorded in December.

But for the 900,000 or so air-conditioners bought a year only 1300 or so homeowners Australia-wide invest in photo-voltaic systems. Australia has about 30,000 solar buildings, in the main in remote areas with no access to the power grid, and most solar use is for hot water, now installed in about 4 per cent of homes.

Solar power seems like a logical power solution, especially for western Sydney where hectares upon hectares of rooftops could be turned into mini-power generators. Since 1950 Sydney's population has doubled, but its power consumption has increased 12-fold, pushing the grid close to collapse, especially on summer afternoons when the air-conditioners all kick in at once.

Australia's overwhelming reliance on coal-fired power stations means growing electricity demand is translating directly into increasing greenhouse gas emissions, a fact clearly laid out in the tonnes of CO2 per household on the back of power bills.

Grid-connected solar systems mean homeowners can effectively sell their power by (sunny) day and buy it back at night, cutting electricity bills or doing away with them altogether and reducing or erasing their own environmental footprint.

But there are two decisive, connected issues - price and community attitudes.

For a basic one-kilowatt start-up system, the dela Russos paid more than $14,000, and received a rebate of about $3700 through the Australian Greenhouse Office. That's only enough extra power to cut their bill by 30 or 40 per cent. Crooks paid more than $40,000 for a much larger system capable of producing all his electricity, but qualified for almost $14,000 in subsidies before rebates were reduced in 2003.

Australia's electricity is among the cheapest in the world and NSW enjoys some of the cheapest power in Australia. This means solar grid-connect systems won't realistically pay for themselves for decades.

MonkeyGrinder points out there is a lot of "do as I say, not as I do" in the air.



MonkeyGrinder and Bart at Energy Bulletin have also noted the problem with prolonged peak oil blogging - it does tend to burn you out after a while (especially given that we all seem to do it as a night time hobby rather than a day job).

A couple of us at Energy Bulletin have been feeling the same way: the web is awash with articles on peak oil and climate change. It's impossible to keep up with it all. How can we best focus our efforts -- and not burn out?

While the structure adopted by Energy Bulletin, The Oil Drum and PeakOil.com (multiple editors and contributors) is one way of coping with the problem, it obviously isn't quite enough - but perhaps its just a matter of getting a larger pool of editors at a given site.

The other alternative (which was implemented during one design iteration of the much missed Flying Talking Donkey) is to build a single page view of the latest peak oil news from selected sites by integrating their RSS feeds into one portal style interface. This version of FTD included about 10 key sites into his single page portal which I thought worked really well. I don't think that design required any ongoing maintenance either, so presumably it could be resurrected on Blogger and then just left in place - then when individual sites take a break you don't really notice and no one needs to spend any time on a coordinating role. How about it Tim ?

And to close, MonkeyGrinder also notes that our future may hold green ham and eggs rather than Dr Suess' complementary vision of breakfast...

De Smog Blog has a good summation of the waste of time that was the recent Asia Pacific Climate Summit by Ross Gelbspan (via Grist).

The signals preceding today's meeting of the Asia-Pacific climate summit are ominous. The principals – U.S., Australia, Japan, India, South Korea and China – have made clear in advance that they reject any mandatory timetables for reducing greenhouse gases.

They have invited 120 industry observers – primarily from oil and coal interests – to provide input – while locking out environmental organizations whose voices traditionally have provided valuable corrections at other international climate meetings. The U.S. and Australia acknowledge they will be recruiting other countries into the APAC group. That, in turn, will dilute if not completely negate those countries’ commitments to the United Nations under the Kyoto Protocol. And they will be promoting a host of technologies designed not to pacify our inflamed climate but to provide a facade of acceptability for the continued use of coal, the most climate-destabilizing of all fuels.

This gathering is the latest manifestation of the Bush Administration’s six-year campaign to undermine and marginalize the UN and its mission of promoting a more sustainable and equitable world. It is also profoundly anti-democratic in its drive to put the world’s great energy companies in charge of the world’s climate policies. There is no argument that the current goals of the Kyoto Protocol are inadequate, judged against the demands of nature.

For one example, nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1995 and the planet is heating at a rate faster than any time in the last 10,000 years. But, judged by the history of human political achievements, the Protocol provides a groundbreaking framework to bring the nations of the world together in a common project to rewire the planet with clean energy. That is not what will emerge from the APAC summit. Given the input of companies like Peabody Energy, Rio Tinto and Chevron, the summit will be promoting a batch of sleight-of-hand, short-term technological fixes.

Clean coal technology, with its reliance on hugely expensive geo-engineering projects like mechanical carbon sequestration, basically represents a full-employment act for companies like Bechtel and Halliburton. These projects are also wasteful in the extreme. Given their huge pricetags, the same amount of money would generate far more electricity per dollar were it to be spent on constructing windfarms. A real “pro-technology pro-growth” initiative would center on a worldwide project to replace every coal-burning generating plant, every oil-burning furnace, every gasoline-powered car with clean, climate-friendly energy technologies.

The construction and installation of windmills, solar panels and tidal power devices, coupled with the construction of an infrastructure for a hydrogen economy, are far more labor intensive than the extraction of coal and oil (which are heavily automated). There are, to be sure, problems with the Kyoto framework. Its goals are too modest and its timetable too slow to match the escalating pace of climate change. But given the flexibility built into the Protocol’s design, it will be easy, when the time comes, for delegates to increase the targets to match the scope and urgency of the threat.

As several oil company presidents have said off the record, any meaningful effort to avert climate chaos requires the governments of the world to impose binding and enforceable timetables and goals on the energy industry. That sentiment was echoed publicly by executives of some of America’s largest utilities including Cinergy Corporation – as well as by the investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs. And that approach is at the heart of the Kyoto Protocol. By contrast, the real agenda behind the APAC summit involves a new framework—the emergence of a global corporate state whose goals are determined by short-term profit calculations rather than an authentic concern for our common future or our common planet.

Grist also had some comments on the summit.

The U.S. and Australia today marked the end of the Asia-Pacific climate summit in Sydney by pledging $127 million to support technology projects that would lower greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate activists derided the commitment from the two big polluters as laughably small; the Kyoto Protocol, which both the U.S. and Australia have spurned, is expected to result in up to $12 billion being spent on clean-technology projects in developing countries by 2012. Enviros also say much of the newly announced funding will go to propping up dirty energy industries rather than promoting clean power sources like solar.

The U.S. and Australia, for their part, contend the world should trust big business to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions without any strong government regulations. Said U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, "The people who run the private sector ... also have children and grandchildren, and they too live and breathe in the world and would like [climate change] dealt with effectively." Despite all evidence to the contrary.

To a certain extent Bodman is right - I'm sure most power company execs would be more than happy to build clean tech power plants instead of coal fired ones. But as long as coal is the cheapest option they are forced by the market to build coal fired plants. The solution ? Make the cost of coal reflect the cost of global warming - impose carbon taxes now and I'm sure most companies will start doing the right thing. But Bush and Howard have absolutely no intention of letting that happen unfortunately (and I'm sure history will judge them very harshly for this).

The problem with Australia being a large exporter of both coal and uranium is that the whole debate here is being framed (correctly incorrectly) as a choice between "clean" coal and nuclear power (which is reflected in a lot of state politics depending on which resource they have more of), as this article in the Herald demonstrates.

At the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate meeting in Sydney this week, the focus was on initiatives the six member countries could adopt to reduce their production of greenhouse gases.

Nuclear power was one topic at the forefront, as the US, Japan, South Korea, India and China all operate nuclear power plants - and are planning to build more to help tackle the issue of climate change. Australia, never having built a nuclear power plant, is clearly the odd one out.

The nation's lack of a nuclear power industry might seem curious to foreigners when Australia possesses more uranium than any other country - although it has large reserves of other energy sources such as coal and natural gas, and a small population.

Despite its large trade deficit, Australia mines a relatively low proportion of its uranium reserves, meaning it isn't milking the export market as much as it could.

It's not due to lack of interest from mining companies, which view Australia as a dream destination because of its stable political system, skilled workforce and abundant natural resources.

Rather, it's restrictive Australian government policy - at both the federal and state level - that has so far prevented most of the country's uranium from being mined.

Under the Coalition Government, federal policy has changed, but all state Labor premiers except South Australia's Mike Rann oppose mining uranium, in part because of Labor's long opposition to it.

The policy has forced local miners to look overseas for viable projects.

Take Perth's Paladin Resources. Instead of mining or even closely studying one of its deposits in Western Australia, it will start production at its Langer Heinrich project in Namibia this year. And next on its list is a deposit in Malawi, one of the world's poorest and most corrupt nations.

Paladin managing director John Borshoff is upfront about why his company is developing its first projects abroad. Countries in southern Africa are "less politically hostile" than Australia, he says. "I know that sounds ironic," he's quick to add.

Borshoff has a point. WA's premier, Dr Geoff Gallop, is adamant no uranium mining will be allowed in his state while he remains in office - and his current term lasts until 2009.

"In terms of uranium mining, I'm the premier. We took this policy to the election [last year]," Gallop told the Herald."Our uranium will stay in the ground in Western Australia."

...

Redport chairman Richard Homsany certainly believed change was coming when his company invested in Lake Maitland. "I think at the moment there is enormous pressure to re-examine that [WA] policy on uranium mining," he said in April. "One cannot ignore the fact it is a clean fuel." Neither, in the current climate, can it be ignored that Australia is home to 41 per cent of the world's economic uranium reserves and the world's biggest uranium mine, BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam.

On the other hand, for all of coal's environmental ills, Australia's cheap and plentiful supply of the fossil fuel will last the nation hundreds of years.

Coal is also the reason there is a ban on uranium mining in Queensland - its premier, Peter Beattie, believes exporting uranium would undermine its lucrative coal industry. "There are countries which have to choose between sources for their power stations," says Beattie's spokesman, citing Italy as an example. "He [Beattie] is not going to encourage the nuclear industry."

And apart from coal, there are other energy options in Australia. Power stations fuelled by natural gas are a possibility, based on large reserves of coal-seam gas and conventional on- and offshore natural gas in Australia and Papua New Guinea, although much of Australia's gas is sold at high prices for export. Still, Queensland is busy building coal-seam gas power stations to meet environmental targets.

But although nuclear energy has lower emissions than coal - or even natural gas - the costs of building a nuclear power plant are daunting. An International Energy Agency report found the cost per kilowatt of building a modern nuclear reactor would be around $US2000 ($2650), compared with $US1200 for coal and $US500 for gas.

...

Nuclear weapons proliferation is another major issue. Australia does not allow the sale of uranium for weapons purposes and uranium proponents argue that strict international safeguards are effective, but WA's Gallop disagrees.

"The last time there was a major expansion of the nuclear industry there was a proliferation of nuclear weapons, and I have no reason to think the same thing wouldn't happen again," he says. "Added to that, you have the new terrorist threats."

Radioactive waste disposal is another problem - and a daunting one for WA voters. In 1998, the plan of the US company Pangea Resources to build a nuclear waste dump in the state came to public notice after a UK environmental group aired a corporate video touting the project.

After widespread opposition, the WA Parliament passed a bill that made it illegal to dispose of radioactive waste in the state without specific approval. But Gallop worries that if he allows uranium mining, his state will become "part of the nuclear fuel cycle" and will be obliged to accept waste.

So despite the use of nuclear power in developed countries such as the US, Canada, France and Japan, Australia has long been regarded as hostile to uranium and nuclear power.

It wasn't always that way. For a time, it looked like Australia would join the nuclear club, both for energy and weapons purposes. The local history of uranium goes back to the 1940s. The Rum Jungle mine in the Northern Territory, owned by the government and operated by Consolidated Zinc (now Rio Tinto), was used to provide fuel for the UK's nuclear weapons arsenal, and South Australia was used as a testing ground for those missiles.

On Australia Day in 1958, the UK provided Australia with its first nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, and by 1969 there were plans for a nuclear power plant at Jervis Bay, NSW.

At that time, the Liberal prime minister John Gorton wanted to leave open the possibility of producing nuclear weapons and refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But after widespread protests, Gorton's successor, fellow Liberal William McMahon, canned the Jervis Bay project in 1971.

...

Mark Wheatley, an Australian who serves as a director of Toronto-listed SXR Uranium One, says his company listed in Canada in 1997(as Southern Cross Resources) because at the time "there was simply no support for uranium exploration and development in Australia". SXR, formed last month through the merger of Southern Cross and South Africa's Aflease Gold and Uranium, is fortunate that its Honeymoon project is in South Australia rather than 90 kilometres away in Broken Hill, as there is a blanket ban on uranium exploration in NSW.

Having gained nearly all of the needed regulatory approvals, the $US30 million Honeymoon project could be up and running in 18 months, but was delayed by the uranium price in 2004, given the relatively small size of the project. When a study was done last year, uranium was trading at around $US25 a pound. With the spot price at $US36.25, and many analysts believing it will rise further, the board has approved further development expenditure to gather the extra data required to support a development decision, which could come as early as the first half of this year.

Being in South Australia is definitely a plus, with the Rann administration looking favourably on uranium mining. Prospectors get government grants to help fund exploration, and the environment is so cordial that the Australian division of French nuclear giant Cogema plans to move its headquarters from Perth to Adelaide. "Adelaide, in five years' time, I think, is going to become a real centre of activity for uranium in Australia," says SXR's Wheatley.

Back in WA, however, large projects owned by mining giants BHP and Rio - both of which might well be economic at today's high uranium prices - are stalled indefinitely in the face of Gallop's opposition.

For a time, Rio Tinto had looked set to proceed with its Kintyre project in WA. It proved up a substantial reserve base and installed a pilot plant to investigate how to process the ore. But development of the 35,000 tonne deposit was stalled in 1997 because of the low uranium price. The site was decommissioned and rehabilitated in 2002. Now prices have risen, the possibility of development is "academic", a Rio spokesman says, due to Gallop's ban. But he says Kintyre is a good project that the company plans to retain - meaning Rio seems hopeful of a change in policy.

BHP faces different issues with the Yeelirrie project in WA, which it picked up with the $9.2 billion acquisition of WMC Resources earlier this year (along with Olympic Dam). At 52,000 tonnes, Yeelirrie is Australia's second largest unmined source of uranium behind Jabiluka's 163,000 tonne resource base.

In the 12 years to 1983, WMC and partner Esso spent $35 million planning Yeelirrie as an open cut mine, but plans were withdrawn after Labor instituted its Three Mines policy in 1984. WMC instead decided to focus on mining the 1.5 million tonne resource base at Olympic Dam, by far the world's largest uranium deposit.

Gallop's Government revoked Yeelirrie's WA mining agreement last year, and a BHP spokeswoman said her company's focus regarding uranium mining was "squarely on Olympic Dam and its expansion".

I never cease to be amazed that anyone in their right mind can oppose a well sited wind farm. Even Robert F Kennedy Jr has fallen into this trap.

A long-simmering disagreement within the environmental community over a plan to build a massive wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., is now boiling over into a highly public quarrel.

The four-year-old battle started heating up last summer when Greenpeace USA staged a demonstration against well-known eco-activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's been an outspoken opponent of the proposal for a 130-turbine wind-power project in Horseshoe Shoal, a shallow portion of Nantucket Sound south of Cape Cod. Kennedy -- a senior attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council and a pioneer in the waterway-protection movement -- was on a sailboat for an event with the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, which opposes the wind project. A Greenpeace vessel cruised up alongside with a banner that read, "Bobby, you're on the wrong boat" -- a stunt that was part of a larger Greenpeace campaign pressuring Kennedy to change his mind on the development.

In mid-December, Kennedy, wanting to explain his position to critics and the public at large, published an impassioned op-ed in The New York Times in which he argued that the wind farm would mar a precious seascape, privatize a publicly owned commons, and damage the local economy.

That, in turn, prompted about 150 environmental advocates -- including global-warming authors and activists Bill McKibben and Ross Gelbspan, Bluewater Network founder Russell Long, and youth leader Billy Parish -- to circulate a letter asking Kennedy to reconsider his position. "We are, simply put, in a state of ecological emergency," it read. "Constructing windmills six miles from Cape Cod, where they will be visible as half-inch dots on the horizon, is the least that we can do."

Bill McKibben isn't too impressed by this display of NIMBYism and writes of his displeasure.

I'm by nature a conflict avoider too -- if you're thinking of cutting in line at the supermarket, you couldn't ask for an easier mark than me. But twice last week I acted in ways entirely out of character. I signed a letter criticizing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for his New York Times op-ed opposing the big Cape Wind project. And I wrote a few paragraphs disparaging the most powerful of my local environmental groups, the Adirondack Council, for the way they'd worked on clean-air issues. Both criticisms were respectful -- I am my mother's son -- but they were also stern. I wouldn't have enjoyed being on the receiving end of either one (though a lifetime of book writing does tend to inure you to bad reviews).

They were also, at some level, divisive. In both cases, you could truthfully say I was willing to inflict a little damage on an important part of the environmental movement. It doesn't mean, I hope, that I'm growing a mean streak. I think it means something else: that the environmental movement is reaching an important point of division, between those who truly get global warming, and those who don't.

By get, I don't mean understanding the chemistry of carbon dioxide, or the importance of the Kyoto Protocol, or something like that -- pretty much everyone who thinks of themselves as an environmentalist has reached that point. By get, I mean understanding that the question is of transcending urgency, that it represents the one overarching global civilizational challenge that humans have ever faced. That it's as big as the Bomb.

Do I think Bobby Kennedy Jr. is a bad environmentalist? No, I think he's a great environmentalist. I've heard him convert 400 Republicans at one fell swoop in the auditorium of my Adirondack high-school gym. Hell, by helping establish the Hudson Riverkeeper, the guy added a whole new class of words to our vocabulary -- now there are baykeepers and airkeepers and summitkeepers. He's sued and written and organized with passion and prowess. But his op-ed on Cape Wind, with its (risible) fear that the windmills might be heard ashore, showed that he hadn't quite understood just how critical the need to get the U.S. off fossil fuels really is.

In the face of that need, even possible damage to the livelihoods of commercial fishers is distinctly secondary. If someone were proposing to erect a giant blender in Nantucket Sound so yachtsmen could obtain frozen margaritas more conveniently, then Bobby would be right to object, and the rest of us would go along with him. Instead, they're talking about the nation's first big offshore wind complex, one that would in effect allow residents of Cape Cod to use electricity nine months of the year without emitting a single carbon atom.

If we had decades to burn, then he'd also doubtless be right that there's a better site for the thing, and a nicer developer. There's always a better site and a nicer developer. But in the real world, according to Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have at most 10 years to reverse this trend. Which means we have to do everything quickly -- hybrid cars and solar panels and compact light bulbs and local food and tree planting. And windmills, lots and lots of windmills, just like off the shores of Europe.

Both the Herald and the Financial Review had prominent articles talking about oil prices rising over US$70 as tensions mount over Iran's nuclear program.

Crude oil in New York traded near a three-month high amid concern about Iran's nuclear program and oil production cuts in Nigeria.

Iran, which accounts for almost 5 per cent of global output, resumed research on uranium reprocessing this week, risking United Nations sanctions. That may limit the investment Iran needs to raise oil production.

Royal Dutch Shell's venture in Nigeria shut 10 per cent of the country's output as violence swept through the Niger Delta oil-producing region.

"People are finding it hard to sell because of the situations in Iran and Nigeria," said Naohiro Niimura, vice-president of derivative products at Mizuho Corporate Bank in Tokyo. "If Iran is punished with sanctions, then the market will go much higher."

Crude oil for February delivery was at $US63.77 a barrel, down US17c, in after-hours electronic trading in Singapore after earlier reaching $US65.05 in New York, the highest intra-day price since October 4.

A Bloomberg survey of 42 analysts showed 25, or 60 per cent, said prices would rise next week, the most bullish response since March.

Antonio Szabo, chief executive of Houston-based consultant Stone Bond Technologies, said that with political tensions high in the Middle East, prices were likely to go "slightly above $US70 a barrel" in the weeks ahead.

The US, Germany, France and the UK have called for the International Atomic Energy Agency to hold an emergency meeting to refer the dispute with Iran to the UN Security Council. Iran could face censure or sanctions.

Moving across the border from Iran, Billmon reports on the increasingly unbelievable propaganda war being waged in Iraq.

Fans of Paddy Chayefsky's incredibly prophetic '70 satire Network may remember the The Mao Tse-tung Hour -- the terrorist-of-the-week reality show produced by his fictional UBS news division:

Diana: Look, we've got a bunch of hobgoblin radicals called the Ecumenical Liberation Army who go around taking home movies of themselves robbing banks. Maybe they'll take movies of themselves kidnapping heiresses, hijacking 747's, bombing bridges, assassinating ambassadors. We'd open each week's segment with that authentic footage, hire a couple of writers to write some story behind that footage, and we've got ourselves a series.

Given that Paddy's dark vision of the future of broadcast journalism has since become the programming bible for an entire generation of cable news executives, I guess it's no great surprise that the Mao Tse Tung Hour has also reached the little screen -- but in Iraq, not the U.S., and suitably updated to reflect both modern political realities and the rise of the Internet.

Iraqi blogger Nibras Kazimi (a neocon fan of Ahmed Chalabi, but also an increasingly disillusioned witness to Iraq's "democratization:") tells the story at his blog, Talisman Gate...

Billmon also has a very low key demonstration about the old joke about how to tell when a politician is lying - look for when his lips are moving...

omPaine has an interesting column on the new China-India energy pact.

What better to shake Washington out of its strategic tunnel vision than a new alliance over oil between the world's two most populous countries? An article that appeared last night in the Financial Times states that, "China and India, the world’s two fastest-growing energy consumers, on Thursday set aside long-standing rivalries and agreed to co-operate in securing crude oil resources overseas."

That's a strategic bombshell. It's also a major opportunity.

First the story. China and India have been busy over the past few years attempting to secure oil fields and other energy assets for their domestic or state-owned oil companies. China, for instance, has secured a major deal to develop Alberta 's tar sands oil deposit, a deposit which places Canada above Iraq in terms of recoverable reserves. It has sealed deals in Africa, notoriously with fellow human rights violator Sudan. India has sealed major energy deals with Iran but, as reported in the FT, "lost out to Chinese rivals in the race to acquire fields in Angola, Nigeria, Kazakhstan and Ecuador." China, of course, was recently rebuffed by the U.S. Congress in its attempt to buy Unocal.

Faced with a market in which politics—be it the U.S. Congress or OPEC or Hugo Chavez—have an equal if not greater influence on price as economics, the two have agreed to coordinate their efforts to secure energy resources. The plan is modeled on their recent joint deal in Syria. India and China will essentially work together to secure their energy resources without unnecessarily bidding up the price of those resources. In other words, the Indians and Chinese have agreed to a consumer's cartel representing 2.3 billion potential consumers.

The significance of the alliance is hard to understate. India and China represent the two leading sources of increased oil demand globally. Each have enormous populations that are entering the modern economy at breakneck speed. As these populations increase their per capita income, they demand products and services that require higher and higher amounts of energy—particularly oil for the new cars their citizens want to drive.

Both the Indians and the Chinese are feeling the pressure of diminishing oil discoveries and flatlined oil production at a time when expansion of their domestic economies is rapidly increasing demand for energy.

It is clear is that this pact escalates the global competition for oil. Yet it does so in a fairly sophisticated way. The two nations have agreed to distort the market rather than continue to compete and lose to global market imbalances (India 's concern) or nationalistic politics (China 's).

At the same time, the deal demonstrates that neither China nor India can, or have an interest in attempting to, secure access to oil through military means, as the British did through World War II and as the United States has done since. This pact is not a military alliance. However, strategic resources have a long and bloody history of attracting military protection, and none less than energy. If this pact does not produce results and if the balance between oil production and demand continues to weaken, we may in the future see an Asian equivalent of the Carter Doctrine.

Here in Washington, however, this news offers leading strategic advisers and their political clients a perfect moment in which to change the strategic narrative—a false narrative—which has been imposed on America since the attacks of 9/11.

In Washington, the conventional storyline is still that nuclear terrorism is the single greatest threat to the United States and should therefore be the center of our national security strategy. As Col. Larry Wilkerson pointed out earlier this week, that assessment is wrong. And it has been since September 12.

This new alliance offers message-makers the out that they have been missing. Ever since the White House starting hyping its war on terror to a scared and underinformed American public as an existential conflict comparable to the World War II or the Cold War, politicians have refused to say otherwise. Now, with the failure in Iraq palpable, the arrogation of power so obvious, and now the rise of a real strategic challenge evident, it is time to change the story.

And yet, dangers lurk. The administration has released slides from its forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review that place an enormous priority on preparing to deter the rise of a future "near peer" superpower. In other words, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is salivating at the prospect of a rising China (and the massive weapons budgets such a foe would require).

To rush into the breech claiming China and India are the new grand strategic threat is to play into Rumsfeld's hands. It would also hasten the economic disaster that lies just over the horizon. Rather, it is time for really big-picture thinking to figure out just how we can prevent the increasing competition over oil to turn into a strategic threat that destroys the American economy, doing to America what we did to the Soviets. That will require a new grand strategy that bridges our economy and our foreign policy.

The time to start is now.

TomPaine also has a look at the internal political games being played in Iran.

Why is Iran 's new president going out of his way to provoke the United States, Israel and Europe with his brinkmanship over Iran's nuclear program and repeated denial of the Holocaust?

Many commentators have put the international posturing of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad down to inexperience and incompetence. But it would be foolish to underrate a man who has survived the hurly-burly of Iran's Islamic revolution and one of the bloodiest conflicts of the past quarter century (the Iran-Iraq war, where Ahmadinejad served as a Revolutionary Guard commander) to emerge in his 40s as post-revolutionary Iran's first non-clerical president.

The signs are that Ahmadinejad's rhetoric, both on Iran's civil nuclear program (which the West fears is a cover for plans to produce nuclear weapons) and on Israel, is deliberate and calculated. Like much of his political maneuvering since he unexpectedly won last year's presidential elections, Ahmadinejad's international gestures are probably designed with one principle aim in mind: to ensure political survival in the power struggle that is now underway at the heart of Iran's fragmented power structure.