Grist has a sobering look at the rapid expansion of the coal fired power industry in the US (which is being replicated in China and India) - how "merchant coal" is changing the face of America - which notes the dubious machinations of Peabody coal to keep people hooked on their product for as long as possible. Can you say "catastrophic global warming here we come" ?

From his rolling green soybean fields above a slow river in eastern Iowa, Don Shatzer looks out over the farm where he was raised, across land he and his neighbors have farmed all their lives. Below him are the garden beds where his wife Linda grows organic vegetables to safeguard the family's health, and the farm pond and beach he built for the grandkids. A few miles to the west lies the city of Waterloo, with a population of about 66,000. The sky is clear and the southwest wind sweet on a humid summer day.

Shatzer's land is some of the most fertile in North America, part of the fecund breadbasket on which a continent relies. And if New Jersey's LS Power wins the fight it has started, a 750-megawatt pulverized-coal electrical generation plant will sit right next door by 2011.

The Shatzers, along with a dedicated coalition of local citizens, have gathered 3,000 signatures on petitions against the proposed plant. They have lawn signs, car decals, a growing library of informational handouts for public meetings, and even a blog. The couple's whole lives are invested in this land. They say they have not yet begun to fight.

And they aren't alone. Across the nation, 153 new coal plants are currently proposed, enough to power some 93 million homes. Of those 153 proposals, only 24 have expressed an intent to use gasification technology, which offers a way to handle the large amounts of carbon dioxide produced by coal combustion. A recent report from the National Energy Technology Laboratory anticipates the construction of up to 309 new 500 MW coal plants in the U.S. by 2030. If NETL's projections are correct, U.S. coal-generation capacity will more than triple by 2010, with corresponding air pollution and greenhouse-gas increases.

Some of the 153 proposed coal plants will add capacity for existing public utilities. Others, like those by developers LS Power and Peabody, are speculative "merchant" coal plants, which ultimately intend to sell the power -- or even the plant itself -- to the highest bidder. Local need for power is not part of the calculations behind these merchant plants. The concept isn't new, but the voracious expansion plans are.

The David Holmgren / Richard Heinberg "Peak oil and Permaculture" tour seems to be generating plenty of publicity, with Heinberg getting a profile in today's Sydney Morning Herald and an interview on Radio National (there is also a related article in the Adelaide Advertiser).

Richard Heinberg is an unlikely latter-day Jeremiah. The contrast between this quietly spoken Californian college professor and accomplished classical violinist and his explosive message couldn't be more marked. Heinberg, who is embarking on an Australia-wide speaking tour, is a leading proponent of the "peak oil" theory.

Peak oil is shorthand for the premise that the amount of oil left for us to use has "peaked" (or is just about to peak). Once worldwide production begins to fall and with no corresponding decrease in demand, oil prices will skyrocket, leading to widespread chaos.

How bad will it be? If Heinberg is to be believed, the impending dislocation caused by the end of the oil era will be about as bad as it gets.

From global resource wars as oil-dependent economies battle for control of remaining resources to widespread famine caused by the slowdown in oil-dependent agribusiness, the picture he paints is nothing short of cataclysmic.

Reactions to his predictions vary. "I've got some pretty virulent hate mail," he says. "But I have to say I've got mostly thanks from people for alerting them to this. I'm a little surprised because the message is so dire that when people first encounter the information it is a bit traumatic. Some people have to go through a period of psychological adjustment. Maybe they are better off not knowing, I don't know."

The Asia Times has an article called "Russia spins global energy spider's web" which says that the West is being marginalised by the rise of resource nationalism in energy producers and that Russia is trying to be at the centre of a new energy cartel that is engaging with the rising economies of China and India rather than the West. It mentions neither the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation nor the "Asian energy grid" plan, but seems to reflect the same underlying ideas. I'm not sure how real this idea of a Russian-centric energy future is, but the possibility of the energy rich states concentrating exports to the East rather than West, combined with all the other issues I moan about here (oil depletion, global warming and the ever mounting costs of our resource wars) are enough to make me wonder just how stupid our leadership is. Surely moving away from oil has enough obvious benefits to the West as a whole that its time to ignore vested interests in the oil industry and military industrial complex...

Almost none of the world's oil and gas producers wants to be inordinately dependent on the US market any longer. Additionally, the steady rise of the powerful economies of Asia beckons oil and gas producers toward such lucrative markets that are politically cost-free, meaning they do not attach political demands and seek to interfere in the domestic affairs of the producing regimes, as does the US.

In virtually all cases, the interests of the West and of its multinational oil companies and big Western financial institutions are being minimized and/or pushed out as the global trend of nationalization, by one means or another, of the oil-and-gas sector picks up speed.

That is occurring in Russia, which has now surpassed Saudi Arabia as the world's largest exporter of oil, in Central Asia, the Middle East and in Latin America. Within virtually all such regimes the lines of separation between the top levels of political leadership and the directorship of key corporations and industries are not only blurred but are being obliterated. The multinational oil companies of the West are being marginalized as a direct result.

That is the case in Russia, where in many key areas of industry corporate directors are intimately tied to President Vladimir Putin, having formed a close association with him long before he became president, and many even hold key positions as upper-level Kremlin officials, or as government ministers. Not merely coincidentally, the key corporations the directors of which are so closely allied with Putin are often resources-based and are also those that are state-controlled businesses, with the Russian state holding controlling (51% or more) interests.

To varying yet alarming degrees, the resource-rich regimes around the globe are copying the Russian model. Resources-based corporate states with a profound political affinity for one another and a simultaneous collective disdain and even a hatred for US-led unipolar dominance are proliferating around the globe.

Resource-rich Russia's mounting global leverage with the world's other producing states and with the powerhouse economies of the East, and its profound political affinity with such producers and key consumer states, far outweighs the influence of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

How so? Russia is crossing the membership boundaries of OPEC to court its most powerful members and to conclude with them joint-venture agreements of huge consequence and importance for the future of global oil and gas exploration and production. The West is rapidly being pushed out of such ventures, or is being forced to take radical reductions in the size of its stakes, and is being left out entirely in many new ventures.

Instead, the world's producing regimes are increasingly entering key joint ventures between themselves and in very close cooperation with the powerhouse economies of the rising East, such as China. We are witnessing not merely the formation of some new oil-and-gas cartel with Russia at its center, but rather the formation of something that includes both producers and the key consumer states of the East in an ever more cohesive de facto confederation. This is dedicated to the achievement of strategic energy security for those within its clearly defined circle.
In the process, OPEC itself, as an entity, is being undermined and marginalized. Simultaneously, the West is being forcibly cast from the proverbial frying pan into the fire as something far more powerful, compelling and all-encompassing than OPEC is coalescing.

The ominous rise around the globe of the resources-based corporate state is accelerating. The implications for the West are enormous, yet such implications are only beginning to be understood. As noted above, such states are concluding rapidly increased numbers of strategic agreements among themselves for the joint exploration and production of oil and gas, and with the rapidly rising powerhouse economies of the East, such as China and India, for the private long-term supply of oil and gas.

The creation of such private pools of oil and gas for the consumption only by specific economic powers in the East and select economies of the West is also a new development that carries with it profound implications for the West.

Bruce Schneier has an excellent post up called "What the terrorists want" - and notes that our feeble minded politicians are giving it to them (he probably should have given "The Power of Nightmares" a nod too).

I'd like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

We're all a little jumpy after the recent arrest of 23 terror suspects in Great Britain. The men were reportedly plotting a liquid-explosive attack on airplanes, and both the press and politicians have been trumpeting the story ever since.

In truth, it's doubtful that their plan would have succeeded; chemists have been debunking the idea since it became public. Certainly the suspects were a long way off from trying: None had bought airline tickets, and some didn't even have passports.

Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers' perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they've succeeded.

Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that's basically what's happening right now.

Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists' actions, and increase the effects of their terror.

...

he implausible plots and false alarms actually hurt us in two ways. Not only do they increase the level of fear, but they also waste time and resources that could be better spent fighting the real threats and increasing actual security. I'll bet the terrorists are laughing at us.

Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn't engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn't write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn't use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we'd reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.

It's time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation -- and not focusing on specific plots.

But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show's viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer.

Past Peak notes that more neoconservative idiocy is sending a lot of Venezuelan oil China's way.

Policy Pete on Hugo Chavez:

So he likes Fidel, so what? This is business, not personal, as the Corleones used to like to say. The US just lost half a million barrels a day forever to the Chinese. Having managed to tick off every Muslim on the planet, it would have been expecting too much for an unsophisticated presidency to try to mend fences in the southern hemisphere. Why not anger everyone who will be supplying the marginal oil that the US will need pretty desperately in less than a decade? "We're imperious; you're the third world. We get to give you little lectures on Freedom and The Free Market, you get to ship us your crude."

While it is not impossible that this may be the right strategy for a secure US, more than a few foreign offices must be watching Washington with genuine puzzlement. Do the Americans really think that a policy aimed (unsuccessfully) at eradicating terrorists means the rest of the world will supply the US with its petroleum in gratitude?

It's going to be painful to live through, but the US is giving the world a pretty good object lesson on the futility of trying to dictate terms through intimidation and military force in a world that's becoming ever more fragmented, fluid, unconquerable, and ungovernable, at an ever-accelerating pace. Bullies get what's coming to them, in the end.

The White House thought the US was the new Rome. They thought they could dominate the world's oil producers by purely military means. Ain't working out too well. For the near term, world oil markets will stay open to the highest bidder and oil will continue to be fungible. But who is to say markets won't begin to break down when the oil picture gets more desperate. Oil producers will have opportunities to exert leverage beyond just getting a good price. We're giving a lot of people a lot of reasons to look for payback.

Past Peak also has a look at the drought in the US.

The US is currently experiencing one of the worst droughts in its history. The current drought hasn't reached Dust Bowl levels, but the demand for water is much greater today than it was in the 30s, so the consequences of drought are considerably more severe. Topeka Capital-Journal:

While the prolonged Dust Bowl droughts of the 1930s and droughts of the 1950s are considered the historically devastating dry periods in the United States, less severe events today can create enormous problems, [climatologist Mark] Svoboda said.

That is because population growth, particularly in Southwestern states like Nevada, puts a heavier strain on water sources during a drought.

"When a little drought comes along now, it can be very disruptive," he said. "The amount of water hasn't changed, but the demand has increased greatly. You don't need to have a drought of the '50s to have the impact of the '50s."

This all seems to be happening under the radar in areas that haven't been affected. There will be downstream consequences, however, as crops fail, food prices rise, farms go out of business, etc. Expect more of the same in years to come.

Ex MI6 chief Stella Rimington has been in town echoing Dick Cheney's 30 year war prayer (though at least she admits the whole concept is ridiculous). No talk of alternative approaches unfortunately - or any pointing out that the 30 year timeframe is roughly how long middle eastern oil will flow in large quantities.

TERRORISM in its current form is likely to continue for at least another generation, the first female director-general of the British intelligence agency MI5 has warned.

Stella Rimington, who headed the internal defensive arm of Britain's secret service for more than four years in the 1990s, said it was likely to take this long for politicians to make a difference.

"It could certainly last for a generation because the issues underlying it are so complex that it is going to take at least another generation to solve," Dame Stella said yesterday.

In Sydney to promote her latest novel, the veteran of 31 years in the secret service was also critical of the US-led forces' handling of the Iraq war.

"I think the idea of a 'war on terrorism' … is, in my view, a mistaken idea - you cannot fight a war on '-isms' and beliefs," she said, adding that overstating this angle inevitably led to the creation of more terrorists.

The Orwellian notion of perpetual war seems to be a favourite of the Rodent's - he's announced new plans to further expand our armed forces. It seems we're to follow the US lead and allow pretty much anyone who feels like joining to don a uniform. We aren't going to let go of East Timor either, it seems.

FEARS of a worsening security crisis in the region have prompted cabinet to approve a $10 billion defence boost which will give the army 2600 more troops.

Announcing two new battalions yesterday, the Prime Minister, John Howard, cited the near collapse of East Timor, ethnic strife in the Solomon Islands, coups in Fiji, a security force split in Vanuatu, and - to Port Moresby's annoyance - "the inherently unstable situation in Papua New Guinea".

The situation, bad for some time, had got worse, Mr Howard said. Australia faced "ongoing and, in my opinion, increasing instances of destabilised and failing states in our region". The world expected Australia to carry most of the military and police burden in its "patch".

Mr Howard is expected to announce today a near doubling of the Australian Federal Police international deployment group - including formation of a riot squad - to about 1000.

He acknowledged the challenge of expanding the army when recruitment was struggling to keep pace with attrition. The army is already 1000 under strength, and yesterday's 2600 is in addition to 1485 extra troops authorised last December.

The new spending, spread over more than a decade, will add to the $20 billion defence budget.

Mr Howard identified school cadets as a recruitment source, saying the fall-off in participation might assist. With less compulsion to join cadets, those who did were more likely to regard their experience as "the beginning of a lifetime of interest in the military", he said.

Young people would also be attracted by advertising that emphasised "traditional" military values, he said. To ease the army recruitment challenge, entry standards would be eased or, in Mr Howard's word, "modernised".

The Defence Minister, Brendan Nelson, confirmed army doors would no longer be closed to older, tattooed or overweight aspirants with histories of illicit drug use or asthma.

"Seeing the Forest" has a post on "Bush Purging NASA of Scientists".

Advisors Who Questioned NASA Priorities Leaving Agency:

Levy, a physics and astronomy professor as well as provost at Houston's Rice University, said the men's commitment to scientific research didn't jibe "with the kind of advice that the administrator and the chairman of the committee were looking for."

My source tells me there's more behind this story than is reaching the public yet,

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin yesterday read the riot act to the outside scientists who advise him, accusing them of thinking more of themselves and their research than of the agency's mission.

That's BUSH's NASA mission the Administrator is talking about, which is publicly said to be about Mars, but maybe is a lot more about weaponizing space.

David Brin doesn't like the look of "Karl Rove's Big Tent" (I enjoyed his writing when I was younger, but his blog posts are very hard for me to parse sometimes - hopefully any of you who click through have more luck - there is a good quote from Dr Strangelove at the end - he does seem to have the odd idea that the Democratic party are leftists though).

In an era when the vast American center is deeply unhappy and up for grabs, we can hear the same old failed melody. The lefties want us to “concentrate on our core values” instead of offering reassurance and hope to those vast millions in the middle -- a sense that they are appreciated and welcome and that their legitimate concerns will be heeded, when honest men and women retake power in this great land. They seem quite content to go along with Karl Rove’s Giggle. The lose-lose situation in which BOTH the far left and far right say:

“If you hold even one conservative view, that means you ARE a conservative...

...and thus, by self-identification, you will trend toward listening to Hannity and O’Reilly and take in even more of their big lies.”

A situation that radicals of both sides seem to like just fine.

Above all it is important to note that Karl Rove’s Big Conservative Tent is only for show!

In fact, very few of those American conservatives who have been lured inside ever received any actual policy benefit from the neocon revolution! Only a few small constituencies, the klepto-masters (of course), the crony no-bid contract parasites, some fundamentalist charities, and some loony Straussian warlords, have benefitted at all.

All the rest -- every other type of conservative -- from free-marketers to libertarians to efficiency freaks and budget balancers, all the way to nativist border-watchers -- all of them stew under Rove’s Big Tent, simmering and unhappy over a litany of betrayals, holding their noses against the stench, yet staying inside out of loyalty to that single word. “Conservative.”

That may be their fault, a flaw in personality, in courage, imagination and patriotism. Still, whose fault is it whenever some of them pokes their heads out, testing the wind... and the left helps to drive them back inside.

I know this hypothesis may anger some of you. If there is even a chance I am right, then it leads not only to blame-casting, but also to some interesting possible tactics for our campaign to retake America from those who want to impose a new feudal age.

...

But first, I just have to share the following from Russ Daggatt, who comments on the latest put-up “terrorist conspiracy” - having to do with a few pathetic losers aiming to smuggle volatile liquids onto planes:

”I can understand the existential threat posed by tweezers and corkscrews. But hand cream and lip stick? And WATER? We’re now supposed to be afraid of your basic H2O? But, then, I guess it is too bad Bush didn’t focus on the destructive threat from water earlier. After all, it was WATER that devastated New Orleans.

It appears that bubonic plague may be making a re-appearance, courtesy of global warming.

Climatic changes could lead to more outbreaks of bubonic plague among human populations, a study suggests. Researchers found that the bacterium that caused the deadly disease became more widespread following warmer springs and wetter summers.

The disease occurs naturally in many parts of the world, and the team hopes its findings will help officials limit the risk of future outbreaks. The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The bacterium Yersinia pestis is believed to have triggered the Black Death that killed more than 20 million people in the Middle Ages.

Bill McKibben has an elegant article on the plight of the honey bee in Orion magazine.

Honey is their fuel—a bee gets about 7 million flight miles to the gallon.

Bees pollinate more than ninety fruit, vegetable, nut, and seed crops—a third of the human diet in many countries.

And this, for budding writers: along with providing propolis (once employed in the varnishes that gave the great violins of antiquity their tone), beeswax (useful for candles), and honey (which tastes good), bees are a valuable source of metaphors. I mean, they are busy, they form hierarchies, they have division of labor, and despite their association with sweetness they sting. (See also: thorn on rosebush.) Bees also give each other directions by dancing, which is of less use for metaphor, in that you’d be hard-pressed to do it yourself.

But honeybees live their lives next to ours, and have ever since they were first domesticated about seven thousand years ago. And so when things go askew with our society, those problems can cross, quite literally, into the hive. Consider, for instance, the varroa mite, a microscopic parasite that can devastate a bee colony. It was, for many years, confined to regions of the world where it had long coevolved with bees, allowing them to develop a certain resistance. In the twentieth century it began to spread around the globe, however, and in the 1980s it got to Florida —no one knows quite how, but when every commodity on Earth is traded far and wide every day, such things happen. From there it infested hives the length and the breadth of the country, including those that were also being taken over by nasty hybridized African bees released by accident by Brazilian researchers. But that’s another story. Anyway, the varroa mites, following on the heels (perhaps not a very apt mite metaphor) of the less devastating but equally exotic tracheal mites, decimated all kinds of beehives, and threatened all kinds of crops. This spring almond growers in California were flying in beehives from Australia to service their $5 billion harvest. The National Academy of Sciences is apparently considering adding honeybees to the endangered species list. It is, more or less, a disaster of the kind that we’re becoming all too used to.

...

Kirk Webster’s secret—the way that he’s managed to produce hives that can now withstand the varroa mite—is to do pretty much what the mites did when faced with Apistan. He helps the few survivors meet each other, and through their interbreeding and the careful introduction of bees with natural resistance from other countries, he manages to produce hives with winter survival rates of 70 percent or greater. Even if some good organic controls emerge, he says, he probably wouldn’t use them. He claims his “varroa mites are much more valuable to me alive than dead,” helping cull the weakest bees.

Big beekeepers might have trouble emulating his approach because it’s labor-intensive. The whole point of American agriculture for the last century, after all, has been to produce more with fewer people, a process that has progressed about as far as it’s possible to imagine. And the rest of us will have trouble emulating his approach in our own lives, and in our civic life together—we’re as addicted to the quick fix, the stopgap, the shortcut as it’s possible to get. Fossil fuel, for instance, is the ultimate cure-all for us, solving every problem cheaply and easily. Our own CheckMite. Except that we’re going to raise the planet’s temperature five degrees this century unless we figure out how to do without it.

What Webster makes clear is that we’ve taken the wrong lesson entirely from the hive, picked the wrong metaphor. It’s industrious, like we are. But, with a little gentle help from beekeepers who understand how to undo some of our earlier mistakes, it’s also beautifully in balance. And that’s its real secret.

Also at Orion, a three part interview with Peter Matthiessen on "Our political environent" and an excellent summary of the debate over wind power called "Whither Wind" by Charles Komanoff (by and large I think its past time for any more debating the benefits of wind farms - the more wind power the better - it will take a lot of wind farm construction before the trade offs start to become relevant and we aren't any where near that point yet).

FIGHTING FOSSIL FUELS, and machines powered by them, has been my life's work. In 1971, shortly after getting my first taste of canyon country, I took a job crunching numbers for what was then a landmark exposé of U.S. power plant pollution, The Price of Power. The subject matter was drier than dust—emissions data, reams of it, printed out on endless strips of paper by a mainframe computer. Dull stuff, but nightmarish visions of coal-fired smokestacks smudging the crystal skies of the Four Corners kept me working 'round the clock, month after month.

A decade later, as a New York City bicycle commuter fed up with the oil-fueled mayhem on the streets, I began working with the local bicycle advocacy group, Transportation Alternatives, and we soon made our city a hotbed of urban American anti-car activism. The '90s and now the '00s have brought other battles—"greening" Manhattan tenement buildings through energy efficiency and documenting the infernal "noise costs" of Jet Skis, to name two—but I'm still fighting the same fight.

Why? Partly it's knowing the damage caused by the mining and burning of fossil fuels. And there's also the sheer awfulness of machines gone wild, their groaning, stinking combustion engines invading every corner of life. But now the stakes are immeasurably higher. As an energy analyst, I can tell you that the science on global warming is terrifyingly clear: to have even a shot at fending off climate catastrophe, the world must reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fuel burning by at least 50 percent within the next few decades. If poor countries are to have any room to develop, the United States, the biggest emitter by far, needs to cut back by 75 percent.

Although automobiles, with their appetite for petroleum, may seem like the main culprit, the number one climate change agent in the U.S. is actually electricity. The most recent inventory of U.S. greenhouse gases found that power generation was responsible for a whopping 38 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. Yet the electricity sector may also be the least complicated to make carbon free. Approximately three-fourths of U.S. electricity is generated by burning coal, oil, or natural gas. Accordingly, switching that same portion of U.S. electricity generation to nonpolluting sources such as wind turbines, while simultaneously ensuring that our ever-expanding arrays of lights, computers, and appliances are increasingly energy efficient, would eliminate 38 percent of the country's CO2 emissions and bring us halfway to the goal of cutting emissions by 75 percent.

To achieve that power switch entirely through wind power, I calculate, would require 400,000 windmills rated at 2.5 megawatts each. To be sure, this is a hypothetical figure, since it ignores such real-world issues as limits on power transmission and the intermittency of wind, but it's a useful benchmark just the same.

What would that entail?

The ABC's Lateline program had some interesting global warming related interviews this week - first some wise words from Ross Gelbspan on the global warming denial industry, then Queensland Premier Peter Beattie making all sorts of pathetic excuses on behalf of the local coal industry, which has the east coast state governments in its pocket it would seem.

TONY JONES: Indeed. In the story we've just seen the local scientist Jonathan Nott who's an expert in extreme climate events has been sort of a lone voice in that city of Cairns for a long time. He's been making this argument that terrible things could happen. People thought he was crazy and now they're starting to listen to him.

ROSS GELBSPAN: I'm glad people are starting to listen. It's interesting that since global warming really was established by the scientific community in the early '90s its first consequence is more extreme weather and that's been universally agreed upon, as the atmosphere warms we have more frequent heatwaves, we have more intense downpours, we get much more of our rain and snow in these severe downpours. We have more protracted droughts and much more intense storms and that's the first earmark of global warming, basically.

TONY JONES: Can I ask how you got deeply involved in this issue? You're not an environmentalist, are you? You've written you don't love trees, you tolerate them.

ROSS GELBSPAN: That's right. I really didn't get into this issue because of a love of nature. I personally got into this having been an investigative reporter because I found out that the coal industry was paying a handful of scientists in the US to say climate change isn't happening and I said, "If there's this cover-up going on, what are they covering up?" There went the next 10 years of my life. But basically you're right, the impulse that propelled me into this work has nothing to do with a love of nature. It really comes from a deeply-held belief upon which I based a 30-year career as a journalist that in a democracy we need honest information and in this case I found that very large interests were stealing our reality and I think, and I know in my bones from all my experience that really bodes very badly for the democracy. And as we've learned since it also bodes very badly for the planet.

TONY JONES: In fact, you've said, you've written, that the world was effectively blindsided by the pace of climate change. And I'm wondering if you actually believe that was a deliberate policy?

ROSS GELBSPAN: No, I don't believe it was a deliberate policy. I think there has been this resistance, but I also think that the scientific community in no way expected this to happen as quickly as it has. As you've said we've been blindsided by the speed with which this has taken place. Global warming wasn't even on the radar screen in the US until 1988, that's when the governments of the world formed the inter-governmentalpanel on global warming change. It's when we went before Congress to say global warming is at hand. A mere 18 years later we're being told we're either at, or beyond or approaching the point of no return. And that is way more quick, way more rapid than any of the scientists anticipated. Dr Paul Epstein at Harvard University said to me recently, we are seeing impacts now that we did not project to occur until 2085.

TONY JONES: Indeed the parameters of the debate have changed rapidly, too. It's not so long ago that the big coal-producing nations like Australia and the US refused to accept the idea of climate change. Now they both do in their official policy. The interesting thing is they have very different solutions. They have coal or fossil fuel solutions that they're putting forward to fix these problems. This is happening in Australia. The Australian Government believes it's possible to have cleaner coal, and also to have carbon sequestration. In other words, pump the carbon gas underground from these coal stations. Where do you see these technologies going?

ROSS GELBSPAN: Basically I see them as a real attempt to keep alive the fossil fuel component of our energy diet and I feel that's extremely wrong-headed and extremely destructive. First of all, you cannot clean the carbon out of fuel, you can clean the low-level air pollutants out of coal, but not take the carbon out of coal, otherwise it wouldn't burn. In terms of sequestration where you draw the carbon dioxide from power plants and try to bury it under ground, essentially I see that as a public works employment for companies like Bektel and Halliburton. But on a substantive basis there's no evidence that the carbon dioxide will stay down there and there is new evidence that the carbon dioxide once it's pumped into these receptacle areas underground produces toxic chemicals that erodes the limestone and sandstone that's supposed to be capturing it. It really strikes me as a way of avoiding what we need to do which is make a rapid transition to clean energy, to wind and solar and tidal and wave power and eventually to hydrogen and this is essentially an effort by the fossil fuel industry to stave off that inevitable transition.

Carbon Sink has been following the local debate over global warming and how to deal with it - recent posts on the topic include a less than impressed look at Peter Beattie on Lateline, Some scary global warming graphs, Ian Macfarlane is dangerous fool, and must be stopped and You gotta love Mungo.

Mungo MacCallum critiques the Howard government's petrol-pricing policy (reproduced in full from the Byron Shire Echo):

Once more John Howard’s opportunism, mendacity and humbuggery have come back to haunt him.

As petrol prices rise inexorably towards the $1.50 a litre mark and the public anger grows, our Dear Leader pleads for understanding: it’s all a matter of supply and demand, it’s because China’s demand for energy is insatiable, it’s because of hurricanes in America and instability in the Middle East (though not, of course, his war in Iraq), it’s an international problem and he’s really, truly, honestly not to blame.

He’d just love to bring the cost to the motorist down, he recognises it as his greatest problem, but there’s absolutely nothing he can do, fair dinkum cross my heart.

And people just don’t believe him. They don’t believe him because they know if they carry on loudly enough and for long enough that Howard will make the price come down, and the reason they know this is because it has all happened before. When the price rose at the beginning of 2001 there was a huge outcry, and the government, already somewhat spooked by unfavourable opinion polls, went into a flat panic. Not only did the bush receive a veritable cornucopia of fuel subsidies ranging from the easily rortable through the utterly inequitable to the frankly unworkable, but Howard knocked a sizeable chunk off federal government excise and abandoned the indexation of excise altogether.

This sent a firm signal to the industry that petrol was king and would continue to be king until it ran out altogether: there was to be no serious attempt to ration an increasingly scarce resource through the use of the market, and the search for alternatives was to be seen as an unnecessary frippery.

And if the message didn’t get through in 2001 it was heavily reinforced three years later when Howard offered a pre-election bribe of another $1.5 billion in subsidies both to off-road farm vehicles and to long-haul transport, a policy which became abbreviated as Cheap Diesel for Big Trucks. Just fill up at the nearest pump and don’t worry about the cost; the government will look after it.

But although the main beneficiaries of this squandermania were the farmers and the truckies, the message was clear to all motorists – indeed, to all consumers: if you just make enough fuss, if you hold your breath till you turn blue in the face and then scream and scream and scream till you’re sick, Johnny will buy you an ice cream. He’ll keep telling you no, but he doesn’t really mean it.

The problem is that this time he does mean it; he really has to. He simply can’t afford to lose any more of the excise; as he himself has pointed out, to cut the excise by even ten cents a litre would cost the budget around $4 billion a year and with the price of petrol likely to keep rising it would do very little political good. There are more profitable ways of spending $4 billion in the lead up to an election year (extra funds for political junk mail, for instance) and there have to be cheaper ways to divert the public’s attention.

It is probably too late to try and educate them to the fact that Australia has cheaper petrol than almost anywhere outside the United States and the middle east itself, or to tell them that they were silly to buy that huge four wheel drive gas guzzler just to drive the kids half a kilometre from the McMansion to the local private school: Howard has pandered to the greed of the electorate for far too long to start preaching restraint now.

The tokenism of a touch of ethanol in every tank appeals, once again, to the farmers but does almost nothing to reduce costs to the motorist and absolutely nothing to promote fuel conservation, which is the real problem. The subsidy for those who already overuse their vehicles to convert to gas is another piece of panic-driven economic nonsense: it will simply push up the price of gas (supply and demand again, Prime Minister) and in any case, the gas is to become subject to excise in a few years so the price will rise anyway. It is, after all, a by-product of the same crude oil from whichwe refine our petrol, and will run out at the same time.

Having posted some articles about crumbling infrastructure a fw days ago, I was interested to see WorldChanging predicting an investment boom in fixing the aforesaid crumbling relics of an age when public investment and planning for the future were considered a good thing.

We tend to ignore, even forget about the infrastructure which supports a contemporary developed world life. That holds doubly true for our sewers. This is too bad, as much of it is poorly designed, from an ecological perspective, and, especially in North America, much of it is decaying or groaning under the burden of its use.

Now, companies are lining up to cash in on the repair of crumbling infrastructure:

Because of these risks, EPA inspectors are aggressively monitoring and citing water systems -- mostly run by local governments or mom-and-pop operators, neither of which has the money to fund the upgrade of water systems. From its perch, the EPA estimates we need to spend $500 billion over the next 20 years. That’s $250 billion to replace pipes, tanks, valves and treatment plants in the water infrastructure, and $250 billion to upgrade the sewage system.

In short, we’re potentially at the start of a massive spending cycle -- always an interesting place for investors to hunt for long-term investment plays.

$500 billion is a lot of pipe. Perhaps its time to start re-imagining our options?

Also at WorldChanging, an update on Sweden's plan to be oil free by 2020.

"Fossil-fuel free by 2020." That was the amazing national goal announced by Prime Minister Göran Persson at the launch of the so-called "Oil Commission", an advisory body whose purpose is to chart a pathway to reach that goal.

In June, the Commission (the full title should be translated as "The Commission to End Oil Dependency by 2020", but the government translates it a bit erroneously as "The Commission on Oil Independence") released its first major report, with the nitty-gritty policy recommendations. To end its dependency on oil -- which is rather vaguely defined not as completely getting rid of the stuff, but dramatically reducing its use to the point where Sweden does not "need" oil anymore -- Sweden would need to do the following in just fourteen years:

• Increase energy efficiency throughout the entirety of Swedish society by 20%

• Reduce the amount of gasoline and diesel used in Swedish vehicles by 40-50% (with a combination of efficiency and a faster switch to renewable and biofuels)

• Reduce oil consumption in industry by 25-40%

• Eliminate oil completely in home and office heating systems

People familiar with energy issues generally can already guess how all this needs to happen: with a mixture of increased new and existing alternative/renewable fuel sources, efficiency technologies, and the policies to drive change in this direction. Fortunately, Sweden has plenty of each already, and plenty of room to develop them further.

Ross Gittins has a look at the economics of carbon taxes (the holy grail) in the "World fiddles while the planet burns".

CLIMATE change is getting to be like that old joke about the weather: everyone talks about it, but nobody does anything. Except that last week the state governments did propose to do something - which, they assured us, would neither cost us much nor do much to slow the economy's growth.

There wouldn't be many people left who still doubt the reality of global warming. According to a report by the CSIRO, Australian agriculture is likely to be affected by reduced rainfall, a greater likelihood of extreme weather events (droughts, floods, cyclones and storms), reduction in the quality of pasture and an increase in the populations of pests such as fruit flies, apple moths and ticks.

The CSIRO also predicts bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, possibly to the point of destruction, reduction of snow cover in the Australian Alps and loss of habitat for many species in northern and south-eastern Australia.

Scientific evidence indicates we can combat climate change if the world can achieve substantial reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases (mainly from burning fossil fuels) by the middle of the century.

The trouble is that to have much effect on global emissions we need almost all countries - and, certainly, all the big ones - taking part. Without the involvement of the US, China and India, nothing any individual country achieves will make much difference.

And the trouble with this is that, while ever the big three aren't on board, the rest of us have an excuse for not getting on with it.

Another problem is that, depending on how you go about it, achieving a big reduction in emissions could involve significantly higher costs to consumers and losses of economic growth and jobs.

The economic risks are heightened for Australia because we're such a big exporter of fossil fuels, particularly natural gas and coal, as well as that "congealed energy" known as aluminium. Were we to get tough with our energy-dependent export industries before other countries, we could simply drive them offshore.

...

So much for the Howard Government's scaremongering about how the scheme would lay waste the economy. Why are the costs so manageable? Because you're not pulling down power stations, you're just moving over time to reduce waste and adopt less polluting ways of producing power.

But would it be a smart thing to do? Well, it would get us started on a process of adjustment that could be a lot more painful if we waited until it was forced on us. It would give some degree of certainty to businesses considering new investments in the energy sector.

It would increase the incentive for people to find better technological solutions. Internationally, it would add to the momentum for progress, demonstrate our bona fides and strengthen our negotiating position.

The biggest doubt is whether the states could agree among themselves to actually do it. The scheme would be much better run by the Federal Government.

I fear that when the history of our times is written, John Howard will be judged to have worried far too much about terrorism and far too little about global warming.

Labor Environment spokesman Anthony Albanese has done a good speech on "The Energy Debate: Climate Change and Energy Options for Australia" to the Australian Centre for Science, Innovation and Society and the Menzies Foundation
at the University of Melbourne.

People used to say: “Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it”. That’s not true any more.

Humans have become a force of nature. We are changing the climate and affecting the weather.

Earlier this month, the journal Science published two startling pieces of research: Firstly, that Greenland’s ice sheets are melting three times faster than scientists have previously thought. Secondly, that Antarctica is failing to lock up increased moisture from climate change, resulting in a more rapid increase in sea levels than scientists have previously thought.

The truth is that governments cannot afford to be frozen in time while the world warms around us.

Almost daily, new scientific reports are shining the light on the shocking reality of climate change. From the North Pole to the South Pole, and everywhere in between, climate change is unfolding.

We have, as Al Gore has paraphrased Sir Winston Churchill, entered “a period of consequences”. The critical question is: can we enter a period of real solutions?

This is the great nation building challenge of the 21st Century:
• Avoiding dangerous climate change;
• Preparing our economy for a carbon constrained world;
• Getting our energy mix right;
• Ensuring we are world leaders in seizing the opportunities that this global challenge will bring.

Continuing on the local theme (lots of good content around this week), John Quiggin at Crooked Timber asks "Is Peak Oil here already ?" (with TOD's Prof Goose leading the peak oiler charge in the comments thread - there's a man who keeps a weather eye on his referrer logs).

There’s been a lot of discussion about claims that world oil output is going to reach a peak some time soon. If you look at the recent numbers, there’s a pretty good case to be made that world all output has already reached its peak at about 73 million barrels a day, a level reached in mid-2004, and sustained for the past two years.

Now there are lots of local factors that explain weak output in particular countries (not mentioning the War!). Still, if the claims made by those who think oil output can keep on growing were correct, I would have expected the massive increase in prices (from a brief low of $10/barrel and a medium-term price of $20/barrel in the late 1990s to $75/barrel today) to produce a substantial expansion in supply.

This argument is pretty robust to whether oil producers believe that there is plenty of oil (implying that prices will come down again) or not. If prices are going to come down, then there’s a strong incentive to pump more in the short term, use secondary recovery from depleted wells and so on. If prices are going to stay high, there’s a strong incentive to bring large new fields online, even if they are in high cost locations. As far as I can see, neither of these things is happening.

Supposing that oil output has peaked, the obvious point to be made is that Peak Oil isn’t so bad. Sales of Hummers are plummeting, apparently, and lots more people are using buses (at least in Brisbane). And of course, the less oil there is to burn, the easier it will be to stabilise CO2 emissions (though we can’t just rely on Peak Oil – apart from anything else, there’s almost unlimited coal in the ground, far more than we can burn without frying the planet in the process).

From the BBC's "Planet Under Pressure", via Past Peak:



I don't know if this has anything to do with global warming or not, but this tale reminded me a little of some Russian squirrel weirdness I noted last year - "The Psycho killer raccoons of Olympia" (hopefully MonkeyGrinder hasn't been conducting any strange experiments involving raccoon powered vehicles that has sent the beasties round the twist).

A fierce group of raccoons has killed 10 cats, attacked a small dog and bitten at least one pet owner who had to get rabies shots, residents of Olympia say.

Some have taken to carrying pepper spray to ward off the masked marauders and the woman who was bitten now carries an iron pipe when she goes outside at night.

"It's a new breed," said Tamara Keeton, who with Kari Hall started a raccoon watch after an emotional neighborhood meeting drew 40 people. "They're urban raccoons, and they're not afraid."

The war on science continues, with the latest battle taking place in the Vatican - this time the pope has sacked the papl astronomer for believing in evolution.

Pope Benedict XVI has sacked his chief astronomer after a series of public clashes over the theory of evolution.

He has removed Father George Coyne from his position as director of the Vatican Observatory after the American Jesuit priest repeatedly contradicted the Holy See's endorsement of "intelligent design" theory, which essentially backs the "Adam and Eve" theory of creation.

Benedict favours intelligent design, which says God directs the process of evolution, over Charles Darwin’s original theory which holds that species evolve through the random, unplanned processes of genetic mutation and the survival of the fittest.

But Father Coyne, the director of the Vatican Observatory for 28 years, is an outspoken supporter of Darwin’s theory, arguing that it is compatible with Christianity.

In an unwanted exhbit of synchronicity - having just started reading "Confessions of an economic hitman" and listened to John Pinchbeck talking to RU Sirius yesterday - I find RI is posting today on John Perkins and applied paraphysics in "Confessions of an Economic Shapeshifter"

There's a school of liberal American thought - one that serves a gated community - that says John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is about as deep as it gets. If there is a conspiracy, so that mindset goes, then it goes this far: the cheating of nations of their inheritance by persuading their rulers to take on massive developments contracted to US industry, paid for by enormous loans, that in turn become the weapon of indebtedness to buy a government's allegiance. The story Perkins tells in Hit Man is that of the privateering ruin of the world, coordinated by the deniable aegis of covert statecraft, and it's as good as it goes. But it's not Perkins' only story.

Perkins has written other books about his time spent in the wild places of the world, but they're the kind of books liable to embarrass the reader who thinks Hit Man is tell all. He's taken ayahuasca and seen the holy anacondas; discovered the power of dream and learned principles of shapeshifting from the shamans. In fact, "he is currently working with several major corporations to introduce the concepts of shapeshifting and tribal wisdom into the highest levels of executive thinking."

Sorry about the absence of posts - my main blogging machine has died, so I've lost a couple of half complete posts.

Hopefully the show will be back on the road shortly...

The Sydney Morning Herald has been calling the start of the housing crash this week, with fingers pointing at the Rodent for the combination of a real estate sector bloated by easy money and rising interest rates (and living costs) eating away the ability of some sections of the population to afford their mortgage payments (or, more frequently, their loans on speculative investment properties).

This isn't a widespread crash though - the inner ring suburbs of Sydney, particularly the better off ones, are showing no signs of dropping prices (the opposite in fact, if my experience of house hunting over the past 4 years, and particularly the last 6 months, is anything to go by). This is just one more symptom of the growing income gap between the well off and the less fortunate (though down here we are lucky enough, for now, that all boats have been rising - just some boats rise a lot faster than others).

The stagnant property market has taken a toll on a favourite Australian pastime: converting bricks and mortar into cash.

The boom in equity withdrawn from housing and used to boost superannuation, bolster share portfolios and buy cars, overseas holidays and plasma televisions has petered out, a report by the Reserve Bank says. "The strong growth in housing equity withdrawal over 2001 to 2003 contributed to strong growth in consumption relative to income (and a corresponding decline in the saving rate) over that period … [but] these trends have subsequently abated," a bank discussion paper published yesterday said.

Now many families who bought housing near the property market's 2003 peak are facing negative equity - the value of their home has fallen below the amount they borrowed to buy it.

The federal Opposition seized on revelations in the Herald yesterday that properties in St Clair, near Penrith, sold at the weekend for 42 per cent less than the previous sale in 2003. Labor's housing spokesman, Kim Carr, said hard-working families were being forced to abandon their dream of owning a home.

"Stretched beyond the limit by three interest rate rises, they are being forced to sell," he said. "Plummeting property prices mean that hard-working families are confronting the financial catastrophe of negative equity." Such a prospect may not be confined to Sydney's outer suburbs, Tom Western, a valuer and NSW president of the Australian Property Institute, said yesterday. "Anecdotal evidence suggests the market is slowing down in areas closer to the city, and not just in investment units," Mr Western said.

Billmon explained how housing bubbles tend to end recently in "Home is Where the Sink Hole Is"

Kevin Drum has a post that reminds me I haven't written anything about the housing bubble recently:

Here in paradise, the housing boom is over:

Southern California home sales fell to their lowest level in nine years last month as price appreciation continued to decelerate, data released Tuesday showed . . . .The figures could rev up the debate over whether the Southland's housing market will be able to navigate a "soft landing" that produces only moderate price declines, or face a brutal correction.

As Kevin notes, talk of a "soft landing" is one of the normal steps in a bubble addict's recovery program.

It goes something like this:

1.) We're not in a bubble. Prices are just recovering from years of underappreciation.

2.) It's a bubble, but it's a sustainable bubble because the fundamentals of the market have changed in the past decade. People need to recognize this. (Note: this stage is usually recognizable by an explosion in popularity of increasingly desperate and bizarre financing options.)

3.) Yes, growth is slowing, but we think we'll navigate a soft landing. It's absurd to think that housing in [fill in area where you live] will actually lose value.

4.) This is a disaster! Somebody better step in and do something! People are losing their life savings!

5.) Buyers have learned a permanent lesson this time. Homeowners need to accept the reality that the bubble of the past five years was a one-time fluke and we'll never see it happen again.

Rinse and (eventually) repeat.

These are actually the residential real estate versions of the more generic speculative cycle described by economist (and wise old man of the academic hills) Charles Kindleberger in his classic text Manias, Panics and Crashes.

The Real Deal points to an article by Paul Craig Roberts about the perils awaiting countries with gutted manufacturing sectors, large amounts of debt and inflated asset prices.

“American economists are yet to face up to the fact that offshoring high productivity, high value-added jobs that pay well and replacing them with waitresses and bartenders is a knife in the heart of the US economy. Charles W. McMillion of MBG Information Services reports that compensation is falling behind price rises and that the US economy has been kept afloat by consumers overspending their disposable incomes by drawing down their accumulated assets and going deeper into debt.

McMillion reports that according the Bureau of Economic Affairs, households outspent their disposable incomes by 1.5% in the second quarter of this year, a rate of dissaving equaled only by the depression year of 1933.

McMillion also reports that recent BLS data indicates that 25 states have lost manufacturing jobs year over year and that 25 states have lost jobs in the information sector.

Little wonder that permits for new private housing are down 20.5% year over year and that new housing starts are down 13.3% year over year. What will we do with the millions of illegal Mexicans when construction jobs dry up?”

Analysis: John’s suggestion for jobs for college grads time frame 2008-2012, Soup line server, pawn shop worker, 11B straight leg infantry in perpetual war on terrorism, TSA robot.

Jeffrey at Graphoilogy has a look at trends net oil exports and the implications for housing prices.

I thought that it would be interesting to compare the decline since December in world crude + condensate production to the decline in production from the top 10 net oil exporters (based on the 2004 list of top exporters).

As of the May, 2006 EIA numbers, the world is down 1.3% since December, an annual decline rate of 3.1% per year, but the top 10 oil exporters are down 3.0%, an annual decline rate of 7.2%.

Note that consumption is growing quite rapidly in most of the exporting countries, and note that in most cases domestic consumption is satisfied before oil is exported. In the captioned article, I showed, using my "Export Land" model, how a 25% drop in oil production and a 20% increase in consumption (over a five year period) would lead to a 70% drop in net oil exports.

I estimate that net oil exports from the top exporters are probably down by 4% to 5% (over a five month period), an annual decline rate of as much as 12% per year, which suggests that exports from the top exporters are falling about three to four times faster than world oil production is falling

As I have been relentlessly pointing out, I think that we are looking at a series of bidding cycles for declining net oil export capacity, with the oil going to the high bidders and with the losers having to reduce consumption. Leanan, on The Oil Drum, has documented several case histories of poorer countries having to reduce consumption. Soon, the developed and rapidly developing countries will be bidding against each other, instead of bidding against regions like Africa.

However, we are beginning to see clear signs of stress here in the US, among poorer households and among financially overstretched homeowners. Consider some recent numbers from the 8/21/06 issue of Barron's.

"The No-Money-Down Disaster" Lon Witter, Guest Column, 8/21/06 Barron's
Summary:

* 32.6% of new US mortgages and home equity loans in 2005 were interest only, up from 0.6% in 2000
* 43% of first-time home buyers in 2005 put no money down
* 15.2% of 2005 buyers owe at least 10% more than their home is worth
* 10% of all home owners with mortgages have no equity in their homes
* $2.7 trillion dollars in loans will adjust to higher rates in 2006 and 2007

...

I believe that vast expanses of American Suburbia are going to become virtually abandoned in the years ahead. Alan Drake has noted that a good deal of suburbia was so poorly constructed that a lot of it is biodegradable. Alan has outlined how we can go back to what we used to have: electric trolley cars connected to electric light rail lines.

...

The US is not Switzerland, but Alan Drake has described how Swiss per capita oil consumption in the Second World War was about 0.15% of current US per capita oil consumption. They did it primarily by electrifying their transportation system.

I propose a sort of triage operation: "tiny" homes and multifamily housing along electric mass transit lines. In my opinion, it is the only way that we can preserve some semblance of a civilized society. The suburbs are, by and large, a lost cause.

The numbers are interesting (partiularly the Siss oil consumption figure) but I think the imminent demise of suburbia is being overly exaggerated in peak oil circles.

Transport usage patterns will shift, but houses (even McMansions) last a long time, and people will continue to live in them and catch buses (or rail transport, in cities that are willing to invest in infrastructure) to work instead of driving SUVs once fuel prices get high enough. I believe businesses and people will slowly migrate to locations which are mutually convenient - if you can walk, ride a bike or catch public transport to work, declining oil production won't seem like such a catastrophic event - it might even make you healthier. I think they key (and unkown factor) is how fast these transitions need to be made.

On a related note, Energy Bulletin pointed to an article by David Holmgren on Retrofitting the suburbs for sustainability.

But there were problems with the suburban dream and the resulting rush of young families to “nappy valleys” on the city fringes, notably “urban sprawl”. As the suburbs spread, they displaced important agricultural activities such as the market gardening and dairy farming that formerly provided fresh foods with minimal need for transport. Not only did public infrastructure become increasingly poorly used, but the disproportionate rush to build roads and sell more Australian cars led to a general decline in the use of public transport – leading eventually to the phenomenon we see today, that our suburbs are designed for cars not people.

Along with “sprawl” has developed an increasingly dysfunctional economic situation. We see speculative inflation of land values, capital invested unproductively, declining household (non-monetary) production of food and “backyard industry”, and a massive rise of consumer addiction based on rising household debt.

Large areas of our cities have become “dormitory suburbs”. The average household size is declining while ever-larger homes are increasingly empty during the working day. Their blind windows look out onto streets empty of people (but all too often filled with cars). There is an alienating lack of community resulting, ultimately, in increased crime and fear.

The conventional responses to this situation are familiar to us all. The first is a change of planning regulations to encourage increasing density, promoting smaller housing blocks in new developments, dual occupancy infill development, and medium-density redevelopment of older areas.

I can't remember the last time I saw a report on an oil or gas project not having a cost blowout - the mostly bad news flow for Oil Search continues the trend, with the SMH reporting Oil Search's PNG gas project blows out.

Oil Search Ltd says the cost of developing the Papua New Guinea gas project could pass the $5 billion mark.

Managing director Peter Botten said the capital expenditure for the project could go past $5 billion, up from current estimates of around $4.5 billion. "It ranges from the low $4 (billions) to the low $5 billions," Mr Botten told reporters and analysts. "There is a lot more engineering work to get that number right."

Mr Botten said the project was still on track for an investment decision to be made this year despite concerns about the ownership structure for the pipeline portion of the project. "We are endeavouring to close a range of commercial issues which will see this project move forward in the short term," he said. "We have seen substantial interest in the ownership of what we believe is a key quality asset."

He said if the pipeline did not go ahead it could send the cost gas in the eastern states higher. "Without this pipeline moving forward there will undoubtedly be an increase in energy pricing in the eastern markets," Mr Botten said.

The gas resources in PNG would still be developed even if the pipeline to Australia did not go ahead, but Mr Botten said he favoured the pipeline option.

Bloomberg is predicting energy price rises of 20% (an admirably restrained number) as more pipelines follow BP's example in Alaska and fall apart due to age and lack of maintenance.

BP Plc's shutdown of the largest U.S. oil field may be the first of many, as decaying pipelines threaten to add 20 percent to energy prices in the next decade.

``We'll look back on this event as the Pearl Harbor Day in energy,'' said Matthew Simmons, chairman of energy investment bank Simmons & Co. International in Houston. The chance that the leaks and corrosion found at Prudhoe Bay by BP, Europe's second- largest oil company, are an isolated occurrence is ``zero,'' said Simmons, who's writing a book on aging oil infrastructure.

A growing minority of analysts, oil executives and government officials say the current system for producing and transporting crude will be unable to deliver the energy needed in the next 10 years. Repairs and replacement of pipes, valves and refineries will help push oil to $93 a barrel by 2015, from around $70 today, says Barclays Capital analyst Kevin Norrish in London, the most accurate price forecaster in a survey by Bloomberg News last year.

Internal corrosion is the biggest reason for pipeline spills in the U.S. this year, causing 16 percent of all accidents through Aug. 9, according to U.S. Department of Transportation's Office of Pipeline Safety. Since 1990, the portion of oil lost because the inside of a pipe has been eaten away has grown to 78 percent from 4.7 percent, with 68,624 barrels spilled this year, the agency said.

London-based BP's admission that some pipes in Prudhoe Bay hadn't been inspected internally for corrosion in more than a decade was ``incredible,'' said oil analyst Charles Maxwell at Weeden & Co. ``They are in deep trouble.'' BP may face criminal charges in the U.S. over an oil spill in Alaska in March, which prompted inspections that found the Prudhoe Bay corrosion.

Repair of the oil production facilities built in the 1970s is part of the $6 trillion that needs to be spent by 2030 to meet global oil and gas needs, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

Record oil prices are encouraging producers throughout Europe and the U.S. to keep old rigs running, rather than shut them down. BP's leaky pipeline, built to last 25 years, is now in its 29th year. The average pipeline in the U.S. is about 50 years old, according to NACE International, formerly the National Association of Corrosion Engineers.

``What we have is an entire generation of oil infrastructure that more or less came on stream at the same time,'' said Deborah White, an analyst at Societe Generale in Paris who helped plan the Prudhoe Bay field development in the 1970s. ``It's now all of a certain age, fragile, and can't be pushed quite as hard.''

Oil pipelines aren't the only pieces of infrastructure that are running down - the Boston Globe reports that the sewers are also corroding.

As bad as they are, the corroding Alaskan oil pipelines in the news are far from the worst in America -- though you might never know that from recent headlines, and as I found out in the media aftermath of the pipeline shutdown.

As head of a company that repairs more oil, water, and sewer pipes than any other firm, I found myself talking to print and electronic reporters from across the country who wanted to know the inside story of the Alaskan pipes. Some were just a tad disappointed when I reminded them that the pipeline was shut down because of potential problems, not actual ones. And the pipeline would probably be back in service within a few months, and crude oil prices were already headed back down.

The oil pipes received a lot of attention. But remember this: No one died. No one got sick. No pristine land was despoiled. It will cost us some money.

But only a few people are talking about the broken pipes that really hurt our environment, get people sick, cause people to die, and cost even more money than oil pipeline shutdowns.

We are talking about sewer pipes, of course. Even the worst Alaskan oil pipe is in better shape than your average city sewer pipe, including cities like Boston, where the first sewer system was installed in the 1800s and the harbor is still recovering from decades of dumped sewage. Say what you will about oil spills, but they are usually small and in remote places where damage to human life, property, and wildlife is minimal. I've seen enough of both to know this: Crude oil is much cleaner and less toxic than sewage. And oil spills are a lot less common. Yet oil gets all the ink, while sewage escapes scrutiny.

Pipelines (along with toll roads, airports and other pieces of peak oil vulnerable infrastructure) are a big favourite of investment funds down here managing retirement money - something I suspect may turn out badly for many retirees at some point.

As governments run away from providing either retirement savings or national infrastructure, I guess it's inevitable the retirement funds end up owning the infrastructure. It is, in fact, the modern realisation of a Marxist dream … apart from the fees, that is.

The bid by Commonwealth Bank-owned Colonial First State for the Victorian gas distributor GasNet yesterday is just another small step in an unstoppable global trend. For example, the bidding for Thames Water in the UK also got under way yesterday, and the bidders are all fund managers (including the ubiquitous Macquarie Bank).

Colonial will put GasNet into one of the wholesale infrastructure funds that it packages and sells to pension funds. It's already got the Hazelwood power station in there, as well as a jet fuel pipeline at Somerton and some gas pipes in the UK. There is plenty of this going around - last year, Industry Funds Management bought Pacific Hydro. Macquarie Bank kicks the tyres of everything. Hey - come to think of it, why isn't Macquarie bidding for GasNet?

Anyway, back to the Big Picture: super funds were given the ability to tax (via the superannuation guarantee levy) so like the Federal Government they now have more money than they know what to do with.

Infrastructure gives them a splendid way to match long-term liabilities with long-term assets that give an internal rate of return greater than the growth in obligations to pay retirement benefits, and there's plenty of it around because governments don't want to know about it any more.

Dave Roberts points to a presentation by Robert Hirsch at the nternational Peak Oil and Gas Conference in Pisa, Italy. Apparently Mr Hirsch is so focussed on peak oil anti-solutions that he'll have us frying in global warming hell instead.

For peak oil geeks, the Hirsch Report is a document of near-Biblical significance. It was written by Robert Hirsch at the behest of the Department of Energy, and published in 2005.

It's disappointing, then, to hear what Hirsch personally recommends as a response to peak oil. Over at Transition Culture, Rob Hopkins reports on a talk by Hirsch at the (ongoing) International Peak Oil and Gas Conference in Pisa, Italy:

What he basically argued was that we need to plan for keeping all the US's cars on the road, so how can we do that? By using the fuels that are technically feasible to bring onstream in time for the peak, such as coal to liquids and the tar sands, at a cost of $1 trillion per year, this could be done, so we need to get on with it.

I confess to being flabbergasted at the insanity of this proposal.

As Hopkins says, this is what you get when you take peak oil very seriously and global warming (or sustainable culture generally) not very seriously at all. I suspect Hirsch's thinking is closer to the norm than the exception in the halls of power

I'm not sure I've seen anyone in peak oil circles suggest we'll all be riding oxen to work in the future (except possibly for that French peak oil TV show), but resource Investor is pooh-poohing the idea anyway.

Brent crude had broken up past the WTI by August 7th as supplies of Brent became constrained by declines and increasing seasonal demand, pushing up past its historically higher-priced relative. The price was spurred by a number of reasons, not of which were crystal clear. One being the Israeli attack on Lebanon, others being the problems in Nigeria and the first signs of the difficulties for BP at Prudhoe Bay.

At the time we pointed out that although significant these events were underpinned by the - now seemingly age old - supply cushion absence. As there was no supply cushion the market had driven itself into hysteria. The Prudhoe Bay outage was not that significant although it was not helpful. Lebanon did not produce oil even though indirectly the invasion was about energy being a proxy war between the U.S. and Iran. Nigeria was going on the same as it has been in recent months.

Brent boomed up to an all time record of $78.64 intraday and $78.30 at the close with the WTI chipping in at a healthy $77.05 at the end of trading.

Now just 10 days or so later Nigeria actually seems to have got worse, armed men stormed a bar in Port Harcourt (who calls a bar Goodfellas in a place like that?) although the short-term outage at Nembe Creek of around 180,000 barrels per day has been restored. Meanwhile the Lebanon situation is still not really impacting oil and its supply. BP on the other hand has managed to keep somewhere around half of its Prudhoe Bay output online, even so you will note that is a loss of some 200,000 barrels per day. A loss is after all a loss.

Yet we are seeing the WTI hit exactly $70 intraday, some seven dollars off its high in around eight days active trading. Brent is around $72. A big, big move to the downside.

There is one other reason, Goldman Sachs. They are not excited about the new gasoline contract for - cough - reformulated gasoline blendstock for oxygenate blending or RBOB. New regulations in the U.S. have meant that RBOB is replacing methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) in gasoline. Sachs are not about to risk a load of cash on this new contract so they have simply stopped playing.

The result of such a big player leaving the table is that there is no liquidity - or relatively little - in the gasoline market. This has pulled down the price of gasoline which has impacted on the price of crude. So the combination of events, Lebanon ceasefire, Prudhoe Bay, staying half-online, Nembe Creek being repaired and RBOB illiquidity have stuck a knife in the gut of the oil price. Then we hear stuff like this.

"Some of the factors and disruptions that helped drive us to very high levels have been resolved now," according to a statement by from Eoin O'Callaghan at the French bank BNP Paribas.

No they have not.

Lebanon is not resolved, Nigeria is not resolved, Prudhoe Bay and BP's general behaviour is not resolved, Iran is still awaiting the outcome of its nuclear enrichment programme and demand is still healthy. What has happened is the market has seen a great time to take a big chunk of profits. A breather. That is all.

If we were smart guys we would open a book on the first “Oil Makes Dramatic Surge” headline. No doubt you will see it in the next sixty days. We will be told all the stories about collapse, markets imploding, frenetic activity on the trading floor and ‘peak oil freaks’ will be telling us to ride Oxen to work. Then we will do the same dance all over again. Isn't energy great?

Japan Focus has an interesting article on the competition between Japan and China over oil in Africa - starting with Libya.

While Japan until recently has almost ignored Africa as an energy-resource supplier, China has been aggressively pursuing oil and gas interests in Africa. Japan and China are the world's No 3 and No 2 oil consumers, respectively. And they are both hungry for energy to feed their economies, the world's No 2 and No 4, respectively, in terms of gross domestic product.

Japan imports almost all of its oil, nearly 90% of which comes from the Middle East. Deeply concerned about energy security at a time of stubbornly high global oil prices and a global rush for oil and other energy resources, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) recently released a new long-terms strategy aimed at ensuring stable oil, gas and other energy-resource supplies.

The New National Energy Strategy calls for, among other things, strengthening relations with resource-rich countries, securing energy resources abroad through the fostering of more powerful domestic energy companies, and boosting to 40% by 2030 from the current 15% the ratio of "Hinomaru oil", that is oil developed and imported through Japanese domestic producers.

METI chief Nikai Toshihiro announced recently that Japan will send a high-powered mission, including the head of the METI-affiliated Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, to Libya to strengthen bilateral ties in energy and other areas. Libya, with an estimated 39 billion barrels of oil, has the world's ninth-largest reserves.

Last October, Japan scored a coup in its oil diplomacy. Five Japanese enterprises won international tenders to acquire the rights to develop a combined six oil blocks in Libya. The deals marked the first oil-exploration concession ever given to Japanese firms in Libya.

Japan is also eyeing interests in oilfields in the rest of Africa. The government sent a fact-finding mission of officials from oil developers, trading firms and engineering firms to Mauritania and Chad early this year. Mauritanian Petroleum and Energy Minister Mohamed Aly visited Tokyo recently and met with Nikai. The two ministers agreed to cooperate in developing oil resources in the northwestern African country. Nikai pledged to send a high-level private-public mission to Mauritania soon, led by the head of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy.

Japan also views as promising the development of oilfields in other African countries such as Equatorial Guinea and Ivory Coast.

And to close, Boing Boing points to a blog about the end times called Signs of Witness. I was expecting some sort of christian rapturist version of a doomer mailing list, but it seems to be rather tongue in cheek.

Signs of Witness is a blog that covers news about religious people claiming that certain events and phenomena are evidence that the world is about to end. It's excellent entertainment, and a little scary.

Crooked Timber has put up a John Podhoertz rant on our glorious triumph in Iraq for the natives to deliver a thrashing to.

I must confess to being puzzled by the amazing spread of the idea that the Bush Doctrine has indeed failed the test of Iraq. After all, Iraq has been liberated from one of the worst tyrants in the Middle East; three elections have been held; a decent constitution has been written; a government is in place; and previously unimaginable liberties are being enjoyed. By what bizarre calculus does all this add up to failure? And by what even stranger logic is failure to be read into the fact that the forces opposed to democratization are fighting back with all their might?

Surely what makes more sense is the opposite interpretation of the terrible violence being perpetrated by the terrorists of the so-called “insurgency”: that it is in itself a tribute to the enormous strides that have been made in democratizing the country. If this murderous collection of diehard Sunni Baathists and vengeful Shiite militias, together with their allies inside the government, agreed that democratization had already failed, would they be waging so desperate a campaign to defeat it? And if democratization in Iraq posed no threat to the other despotisms in the region, would those regimes be sending jihadists and material support to the “insurgency” there?

Reader Jeffrey Kramer detects a bolshevik note in the Pod's ravings.

I must confess to being puzzled by the amazing spread of the idea that Communism has indeed failed the test in the U.S.S.R. After all, Russia has been liberated from one of the worst tyrants in Europe; dozens of elections have been held, with the government winning resounding mandates each time; the constitution is a thing of beauty; and previously unimaginable rights and privileges are being enjoyed by the workers. By what bizarre calculus does all this add up to failure? And by what even stranger logic is failure to be read into the fact that the forces opposed to socialism are fighting back with all their might?

While Andrew Edwards ponders what the Podosaurus would make of Somalia's experiment in building a free market economy without any state intrusion.

I must confess to being puzzled by the amazing spread of the idea that Anarchism has indeed failed the test in the Somalia. After all, Somalis have been liberated from one of the worst tyrants in Africa and previously unimaginable privileges and freedoms are being enjoyed by those who now live unconstrained by the limits of a state. Why would people think simply that the massive violence is evidence of failure? Is not a better interpretation that the bitter struggles of warlords are caused by their fear of the success of Anarchism? Isn’t their attempt to seize power and form a state evidence that they are afraid of how successful the lack of a state has been?

Elsewhere in the mists of neoconservatism, another blundering fool has managed to be proved wrong in a very short space of time (thats the problem with trying to predict the near future, especially when you are forecasting apocalypse), with Iran failing to launch its (mythical) nuclear weapons at the (far from defenceless when it comes to nuclear weapons) Israelis. To be fair, they still have about 10 hours or so to go though, so he may yet be proved right.

It seems that Iran is going to attack Israel today, 22 August, with nuclear weapons, and initiate World War III, as famous Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis explains in his recent Wall Street Journal editorial.

"...confrontation seems to be looming between a nuclear-armed Iran and its favorite enemies, named by the late Ayatollah Khomeini as the Great Satan and the Little Satan, i.e., the United States and Israel," the professor says.
Click here to find out more!

"A direct attack on the US, though possible, is less likely in the immediate future. Israel is a nearer and easier target, and [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad has given indication of thinking along these lines."

Naturally, this would result in a catastrophic attack on Iran. As for why the Iranians might wish to commit genosuicide, Lewis explains that they're just funny that way: "The threat of direct retaliation on Iran is...weakened by the suicide or martyrdom complex that plagues parts of the Islamic world today, without parallel in other religions, or for that matter in the Islamic past."

Besides, it's been ordained by scripture. "In Islam, as in Judaism and Christianity, there are certain beliefs concerning the cosmic struggle at the end of time - Gog and Magog, anti-Christ, Armageddon - and for Shiite Muslims, the long awaited return of the Hidden Imam, ending in the final victory of the forces of good over evil, however these may be defined. Mr Ahmadinejad and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced."

The professor has read between the lines, and discovered the optimum date for the end of human civilization. "This year, August 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel, and, if necessary, of the world."

On the bright side, there's no better time for saying goodbye to the world than just as the mainstream press is gearing up to inundate us with speculation regarding the death of JonBenet Ramsey, from broadcast locations in Boulder, Colorado. That we will be spared Greta Van Susteren's daily musings about what might or might not have happened, surely, must prove the existence of a loving and merciful God.

And so we prepare to meet Him with joy and gratitude.

Even though though the JonBenet case is simply a horrible crime perpetrated years ago in a foreign country, our media can't seem to find anything better to report on either ("news" having changed meaning over the last decade or so), so I've had to add another topic to the list of things I ignore.

The supposed criminal who has sparked this media circus (well - he certainly seems to be a freak and one guilty of numerous other crimes) doesn't seem particularly likely to actually be guilty - even the tabloid papers here soon followed the tinfoil world's immediate reaction (Xymphora called bullshit within hours of the first report). RI has managed to weave the ugly story into the evolving web of unpleasantness they have been constructing.

Alex Steffen at WorldChanging has an excellent and - given the news flow this week - pertinent essay on why sustainability, not terrorism, should be our real security focus (though I'd class the Cato-ites as borderline libertarian, with an unfortunate tendency towards conservatism and corporate Libertarianism).

The Cato Institute (a conservative thinktank) has released an outstanding paper, A False Sense of Insecurity, which makes the point that in any rational assessment, terrorism is really just not that big of a threat to the average person. For instance, about as many Americans have been killed by terrorists as have been "killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts." Whatsmore, many WMD threats are overblown and largely preventable. Indeed, with exhaustive research, the authors can conclude that:

Assessed in broad but reasonable context, terrorism generally does not do much damage.

The costs of terrorism are often the result of hasty, ill-considered, and overwrought reactions.

A sensible policy approach to the problem might be to stress that any damage terrorists are able to accomplish likely can be absorbed, however grimly. While judicious protective and policing measures are sensible, extensive fear and anxiety over what may at base prove to be a rather limited problem are misplaced, unjustified and counter productive.

We, especially those of us in the U.S., have been kept in a panic state for the last five years, told constantly that not only is terrorism an immediate threat to ourselves and the ones we love, but that it is a danger to our very civilization. The result has been both that terrorists have been more successful in spreading terror and that authoritarian politicians have taken the opportunity to reduce government transparency and citizen oversight and erode protections for human rights and democratic process.

It also hasn't made us one lick safer, since, while we've been freaking out, fighting an unjustified war and pouring money into the terrorism porkbarrel, we've essentially ignored very big, well- documented threats, from the climate crisis to the weakening of the global public health system and the rise of epidemic disease to the destruction of New Orleans.

War with Iran still seems to be on the cards, with Past Peak pointing to the selling of the "Noble Cause". I've noticed the war drums are still beating steadily, with every mention of the still simmering Israel-Lebanon conflict in the media including a reference to Iran - and we've got the next showdown at the UN over the Iranian nuclear program at some point in the next week or so).

As Greenwald points out, this passage is noteworthy for its complete disdain for democracy. The population may be tired, with "low blood-sugar", but that "counts not at all". The President is The Decider, and since 9/11 Bush is, in fact, more than a President. Greenwald:

The 9/11 attacks justify all of this because it made the President something more than a President; it made him a Great Cause. As Gerson puts it, after recounting his most melodramatic 9/11 memories: "Starting in those days, I felt not merely part of an administration, but part of a story; a noble story." Nothing as lowly or ephemeral as public opinion is going to impede this "noble story," driven by this great man with his mission of overarching moral imperatives. In many ways, that is the Bush presidency in a nutshell.

Greenwald (an attorney) says the White House clearly believes it has the power to go to war with Iran without the approval of Congress or anyone else. Greenwald:

I have written before that the administration's theory of executive power almost certainly means that they believe they have the right to initiate a war on Iran even without any declaration of war or any other form of Congressional approval. Indeed, they would be empowered to do so even in the face of Congressional opposition. Groups such as the Heritage Foundation have made clear that in the wake of 9/11, there can be no limits on the President's decision-making powers with regard to the use of military force.

As Greenwald points out, Gerson's essay is significant because of Gerson's status as a Bush insider and confidant. This is no rant from a Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, or Ann Coulter. I think we have to assume it's part of a PR campaign to soften us for an attack that's probably already in the works. We're being fed a steady diet of accusations against Iran — nukes, Iraq IEDs, Lebanon and Hezbollah — just as we were regarding Iraq (WMD, etc.). You'd think there'd be greater media skepticism this time around, but you'd be wrong.

Past peak also has a look at why the IDF didn't fare well in Lebanon (and why the US isn't faring well in Iraq) in "Brutality corrupts".

Tom Segev, writing in Haaretz, suggests some other hypotheses. The most interesting of these is "the internal connection between the quality of the IDF's functioning in Lebanon and the occupation and the oppression in Gaza and the West Bank." Segev:

There is a generation of soldiers whose main military experience involves the oppression of the Palestinian population in the territories; they have not been trained for real war.

Like the chief of staff, the soldiers of the occupation have developed infinite arrogance. Every private is a king in the territories: If he so wishes, he allows a Palestinian to go through the roadblock; if he so wishes, he orders him to remove his pants. The power of the occupation has implanted a profound contempt for the Palestinians in many soldiers, and this is the essence of their experience as soldiers.

The Palestinian terror and its suppression have also granted legitimacy to a very serious systematic undermining of the Palestinians' human rights. The expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from their homes, as though it were permissible routine, was carried out in this spirit as well. As opposed to the past, there was almost no protest in Israel...

Actions have consequences. Chickens come home to roost. Brutality blunts and weakens the perpetrator. If you act like oafish goons, before long you become oafish goons. You forget who you were before.

Israeli brutality vis-a-vis the Palestinians is bad enough, but what the US is doing in Iraq is far worse. The impact on our national character is already being felt. The longer we continue, the more hideous the consequences will be. Call it karma, if you like, or just call it psychology. But one way or the other, we will pay.

Bart at Energy Bulletin had some interesting comments on Grist's piece "The Priest and the Prophet"

From my reading of Jensen, he is not a "planner of a future sustainable society" as author Charles Shaw claims, but rather a fiery prophet of industrial civilization. I'd argue that the permaculturalist and related movements have a counter-culture vision of sustainability that is much more solid and defined.

I think Charles Shaw erred by defining the sustainability movement as being a one dimensional axis bounded at one end by a patrician led "green industrial revolution" and at the other by a primitivist "engineered collapse". I'd tend to characterise it as at least 2 dimensional (much as I'd characterise the political landscape), with the top right quadrant [free market / centralised] containing the greenwashed transnationals (GE, Walmart, BP etc), the bottom right [free market / decentralised] containing those advocating viridian style solutions - including McDonough's "cradle to cradle" industrial system, the upper left [centrally planned / centralised] containing those who advocate a government led move towards sustainability - maybe advocates of the various oil depletion protocols fit in here, and the lower left [encouraged / welcomed collapse of industrial civilisation] containing the eco-anarchist / primitivist / "deep ecologist" crowd - with Jensen fitting into this quadrant (presumably the recent RU Sirius show examining John Zerzan and the question Is Civilization A Mistake ?" explores this line of thinking, though I haven't listened to it yet).

In a related vein, permaculture activist Toby Hemenway asks Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?. I guess the permaculture movement doesn't fit neatly into my matrix defined above - they may perhaps be better representatives for the lower left quadrant [now cooperative / decentralised rather than collapsist] with the collapsists moved out to a dimension of their own.

Jared Diamond calls it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”(1) Bill Mollison says that it can “destroy whole landscapes.”(2) Are they describing nuclear energy? Suburbia? Coal mining? No. They are talking about agriculture. The problem is not simply that farming in its current industrial manifestation is destroying topsoil and biodiversity. Agriculture in any form is inherently unsustainable. At its doorstep can also be laid the basis of our culture’s split between humans and nature, much disease and poor health, and the origins of dominator hierarchies and the police state. Those are big claims, so let’s explore them.

Permaculture, although it encompasses many disciplines, orbits most fundamentally around food. Anthropologists, too, agree that food defines culture more than our two other physical needs of shelter and reproduction. A single home-building stint provides a place to live for decades. A brief sexual encounter can result in children. But food must be gotten every day, usually several times a day. Until very recently, all human beings spent much of their time obtaining food, and the different ways of doing that drove cultures down very divergent paths.

Anthropologist Yehudi Cohen (3) and many subsequent scholars break human cultures into five categories based on how they get food. These five are foragers (or hunter-gatherers), horticulturists, agriculturists, pastoralists, and industrial cultures. Knowing which category a people falls into allows you to predict many attributes of that group. For example, foragers tend to be animist/pantheist, living in a world rich with spirit and in which all beings and many objects are ascribed a status equal to their own in value and meaning. Foragers live in small bands and tribes. Some foragers may be better than others at certain skills, like tool making or medicine, but almost none have exclusive specialties and everyone helps gather food. Though there may be chiefs and shamans, hierarchies are nearly flat and all members have access to the leaders. A skirmish causing two or three deaths is a major war. Most of a forager’s calories come from meat or fish, supplemented with fruit, nuts, and some wild grain and tubers.(4) It’s rare that a forager will overexploit his environment, as the linkage is so tight that destruction of a resource one season means starvation the next. Populations tend to peak at low numbers and stabilize.

Agriculturists, in contrast, worship gods whose message usually is that humans are chosen beings holding dominion, or at least stewardship, over creation. This human/nature divide makes ecological degradation not only inevitable but a sign of progress. ...

Lester Brown has an article on "America's Eco-Refugees" in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

Those of us who track the effects of global warming had assumed that the first large flow of climate refugees would likely be in the South Pacific, with the abandonment of Tuvalu or other low-lying islands. We were wrong.

Interestingly, the country to suffer the most damage from a hurricane is also primarily responsible for global warming. The first massive movement of climate refugees has been that of people away from the Gulf Coast of the United States.

Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in late August 2005, forced a million people from New Orleans and the small towns on the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts to move inland either within their state or to neighboring states, such as Texas and Arkansas. Although nearly all planned to return, many have not.

Unlike in previous cases, when residents typically left areas threatened by hurricanes and returned when authorities declared it was safe to do so, many of these evacuees are finding new homes. In this respect, the U.S. hurricane season of 2005 was different. Record-high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico surface waters helped make Hurricane Katrina the most financially destructive hurricane ever to make landfall anywhere.

...

The experience with more destructive storms in recent years is only the beginning. Since 1970, the Earth's average temperature has risen by one degree Fahrenheit, but by 2100 it could rise by up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

More destructive storms are an early manifestation of global warming. The longer term risk is that rising temperatures will melt glaciers and polar ice caps, raising sea level and displacing coastal residents worldwide. The flow of climate refugees to date numbers in the thousands, but if we do not quickly reduce CO2 emissions, it could one day number in the millions.

Don Voelte at Woodside is making the (in my mind highly unlikely) prediction that oil prices will eventually return to U$40 per barrel. I guess in a deep enough recession that might be true - but thats not a pleasant prospect.

Woodside Petroleum boss Don Voelte says world oil prices will return to reasonable levels of about $US40 a barrel, but it won't happen any time soon.

The chief executive of Australia's biggest independent oil and gas producer said demand for the resource, with prices soaring in recent months, plus disruptions to supply and world-wide tensions, would keep prices up probably until next year.

"I'd say at least for the rest of this year, probably into next, what you see is what you'll get," Mr Voelte told ABC TV. "(But) I do predict oil to come back down I think in a reasonable level. "I think the area we have to prepare for is about $US40 a barrel, somewhere in that range."

...

Asked whether the company would like to exit the troubled Chinguetti project in Mauritania in Africa, where a dispute with the government has led to commissioning issues, Mr Voelte said: "We're not at that point at this point."

He said in the first half, Woodside had made just under $100 million in earnings before interest and tax on the project - which has so far cost it more than about $700 million - and it was a very profitable business.

Mr Voelte also said the company's upcoming Pluto and Browse developments would each more than double Woodside's LNG resources. The Pluto development, off Western Australia's northwest shelf, was given board approval for a $192 million front end engineering and design study last week.

"Our present projections is that the cash flow that spins off it (Pluto) because of our high equity, will be equal to or nearly equal to, the money we make off our northwest shelf or even greater than in the future years to our northwest shelf," he said. "So impact-wise to our company, we'll be more than doubling our company in LNG resources."

He said the LNG market was currently strong, a situation expected to continue until about 2012/2013, and the company was trying "to capture Browse and Pluto inside that window".

Asked how large the company could get, Mr Voelte said: "There are people out there that project that by 2015, we could be, if we develop Pluto and Browse on top of our northwest shelf, that excluding national oil companies, we could be the second largest producer of LNG in the world."

A review of Oliver Stone's "World Trade Centre" points out the surprisingly large number of Americans who think Iraq had something to do with 911 - one more victory for propaganda over reality I guess.

As of early 2005, according to a Harris poll, 47% of Americans were convinced that Saddam Hussein actually helped plan the attack and supported the hijackers. And in February, 2006, according to a unique Zogby poll of American troops serving in Iraq, "85% said the U.S. mission is mainly ‘to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks'; 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was ‘to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.'"

The Big Lie, first coined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf,was made famous by Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Third Reich. The idea was simple enough: Tell a whopper (the larger the better) often enough and most people will come to accept it as the truth. During World War II, the predecessor of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, described how the Germans used the Big Lie: "[They] never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

Doug Newman asks "Is it just me, or does anyone else feel the vise grip tightening ?". Apparently Mike Ruppert, who seems to have freaked out entirely now, felt some sort of vice tightening as he has now fled the US and landed, possibly temporarily, in Venezuela. I may be being a bit harsh here, but I fail to see why the US government would bother killing a professional conspiracy theorist who runs a web site - its not like they aren't a dime a dozen, and its not like they have any significant impact on most of the population. The mass media serves its purpose - and that leaves individuals, by and large, to say whatever they feel like (whistleblowers and people with genuinely sensitive inside information are another matter of course).

In the case of Ex Parte Milligan in 1866, Supreme Court Justice David Davis wrote: "The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism."

The anarchy of which Justice Davis wrote was that of unrestrained power. When you let people do whatever they want, you get Woodstock. When you let governments do whatever they want, you get Auschwitz.

So what do we do about terror? Simple. Get out of the superpower business. Stop trying to run the whole world. When you have troops in 130 countries, is it any wonder that so many people hate you? Bring the troops home. Use your military to defend your shores and borders and be done with it.

It is hard for a lot of Americans, blinded as they are by hubris, to understand, but most of the world does not want our way of life. And the more bombs we drop, the more they will hate us.

As Pat Buchanan has stated, "To Islamic peoples, whether the Crusaders come in the name of God or in the name of democracy, they are still Crusaders." And they want the Crusaders gone. Buchanan has also stated that, "The price of empire is terror. The price of occupation is terror. The price of interventionism is terror."

Terrorists do not "hate us for our freedom." They hate our relentless meddling in the internal affairs of their nations. The problems of the Arab world are not America's to fix. So let us quit trying to fix them.

The people who have no problem with the advancing police state are many of the same people who so harshly criticized France for not joining America in invading Iraq in 2003. France had a terrorist problem at one point. And then they pulled out of Algeria.

George Monbiot's recent piece " The Generals’ War" suggests Israel's invasion of Lebanon was just another example of the use of the "Power of Nightmares".

The evidence I presented last week suggests that the soldiers planning this assault envisaged an operation lasting for three weeks. They would storm into Lebanon, eliminate Hizbullah and storm out again. Since the attack began, Israel has been pressing for someone else – the “multinational force” – to patrol southern Lebanon on its behalf. Though the government is incapable of learning from 1996, it still seems to remember the lesson of May 2000, when the Israeli armed forces discovered than an occupation of southern Lebanon was impossible to sustain. I have not been able to find any evidence that Ben-Gurion’s successors contemplated annexation. Even Ariel Sharon, who engineered Menachem Begin’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, envisaged not a land grab but the establishment of a puppet government and the destruction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, in the hope that the West Bank – not southern Lebanon – could be incorporated into Israel. This is not an attempt to seize more territory.

But you cannot read any account of Israeli politics without being struck by the extraordinary domination of the generals. We are familiar with military dictatorships. But Israel is unique in being a military democracy(5). An electoral system much fairer than our own repeatedly places the country in the hands of warriors, and sometimes (I am thinking of Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon) war criminals. Even when civilians are elected, they are pushed around by the generals. To sustain their position, the warrior chiefs seek to ensure that Israel is constantly on the verge of war. As Moshe Dayan observed, military retaliation is a "life drug". Avi Shlaim summarises Dayan’s argument thus. “First, [retaliation] obliged the Arab governments to take drastic measures to protect their borders. Second, and this was the essence, it enabled the Israeli government to maintain a high degree of tension in the country and in the army”.

The warriors in Israel have almost always been empowered by armed action. Even while planning the biggest political disaster in Israeli history – Suez – Ben-Gurion was able to depose his peace-seeking foreign minister, Moshe Sharett. Their interests are best served by escalation, however inappropriate. After the latest attack on Lebanon began, the generals demanded to intensify it. At the cabinet meeting of July 27th, when it had already become clear that the assault was turning into a strategic and political disaster, they insisted that they be allowed to mount a full-scale ground offensive.

Who loses from this war? The people of Lebanon and northern Israel, of course, and maybe – one day – the rest of us. The civilians in the Israeli government, perhaps including Ehud Olmert. But not Hizbullah, who are now proclaimed as heroes in Muslim nations across the Middle East. Not Bush or Blair, for whom every attack by terrorists – even those motivated by opposition to their policies – is a further vindication of their war on terror. And not the Israeli Defence Forces. Faced with emboldened enemies, they can demand more resources and greater powers. The generals did not intend to lose, but even this disaster has done them no harm. It has made the Israeli people less secure, and therefore more inclined to vote for those who promise to defend them.

On a tinfoil note, the enigmatic "Sploid" has now ceased publishing - and while its not a site I ever bothered reading I did enjoy this little note on the UK terror alerts and the head of the secret police in the US, Michael Chertoff, who really looks the part.

Michael Chertoff -- who many say looks just like an undead version of Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin -- says the United States needs more constant surveillance of everybody so he can lock up more "possible terrorists."

It's just the latest outrage from an administration desperately trying to turn last week's phony terrorist scare into justification for more fascist laws before the bogus scare is completely forgotten by Americans.

"It's not like the 20th century, where you had time to get warrants," the little totalitarian said Sunday on one of those political talk shows.

"We've done a lot in our legal system the last few years, to move in the direction of that kind of efficiency. But we ought to constantly review our legal rules to make sure they're helping us, not hindering us."

Chertoff, who presided over the horrific drowning of more than 1,500 citizens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is very excited about the opportunity to put anybody in jail for no reason at all.

While the White House and the administration's henchmen in Congress rush to pass new laws that will make everyone a potential terrorist and Halliburton builds the new concentration camps that will soon hold hundreds of thousands of "political prisoners," Chertoff is pursuing a two-pronged assault on Americans.

First, his goons at airports around the nation are methodically getting Americans "comfortable" with constant fear, harassment and intimidation. Second, his outrageous public statements are intended as a "trial balloon" to see just how much the White House can get away with.

The lack of outrage over Chertoff's latest insane proclamations will be used as "proof" that the administration can move ahead with the next phase of canceling the "g-ddamned piece of paper" known as the U.S. Constitution.

Proving the "U.K. terror plot" was manufactured fearmongering, U.S. airports have already been told the "threat level" has been reduced to the usual constant hysteria rather than the top-level hysteria enacted last week.

And I'll close with one more piece of tinfoil, this one from a recent post at RI about the evolution of the Belgian component of Operation Gladio - commenter starroute claims:

Reinhard Gehlen was largely responsible for setting up NATO's intelligence structures in the late 40's and 50's, including the stay-behind/Gladio groups, which is why they were dominated by old fascists.

(Although the germ of the idea seems likely to have originated with Allen Dulles, who spent World War I as a young State Department punk in Switzerland, working with Slavic nationalists who were looking to throw off the yoke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)

Gehlen retired as head of the German Intelligence Bureau in 1968, and around that same time -- there being no Communist yoke in Western Europe to throw off, and not much chance of one developing -- Gladio got reoriented towards Strategy of Tension operations, intended to destabilize left-wing governments in general.

General Limnitzer was another figure closely involved with Allen Dulles and the creation of the stay-behind networks. (I believe it was something posted here last week that got me looking into Lemnitzer.)

Lemnitzer went from stay-behind to plotting Operation Northwoods in 1962, then became supreme commander of NATO from 1963-69 (during Gehlen's final years), and did a final turn in the middle 70's with the Committee on the Present Danger -- a group which was pivotal in George H.W. Bush's creation of an alliance among the CIA, the crazy anti-communist generals, and the fledgling Neocons.

Alexander Haig served as supreme commander of NATO just a few years after Lemnitzer, from 1974-79. He and Kissinger are alleged to have started directing funding to Gladio by 1973, when Haig was Nixon's chief of staff. There are also claims that both of them, as well as Bush, were involved with P2.

Gladio reached its climax of activity in 1978-81, coinciding with the end of Haig's period at NATO, his involvement in the Reagan-Bush presidential campaign, and his brief but infamous period as Reagan's Secretary of State.

There is a very tight line of development here -- with Dulles, Lemnitzer, and Gehlen at one end and Bush and Haig at the other -- that suggests a single directing vision among a small group of individuals over a period of 30 years.

It's what's happened since then, though, with things apparently spinning out of control, as in Belgum, that raises real questions of who, if anyone, is now running the show -- and what their motivations may be.

This reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a part Italian friend who is visiting Europe at the moment. He isn't bothering to visit the italian side of his family while he is up there, and when I asked why, he said that they are a bit odd, being old style fascists from the 1930's. The reason for not visiting was not so much beacuse they were once fascists - he pointed out (correctly) that this was very common at the time, but that they are bitter and twisted about everything because in the post war period they had most of their land taken by the government (on which an airport was then built) and that their few remaining buildings had been surrounded by a train line and a freeway with an expressway built over the top of the main house.

So it would seem the far authoritarian right isn't as all-powerful as some conspiracy theories would have it...