Raj Patel of "Stuffed and Starved" reports that a state government in India is recommending local residents eat rats to avoid starvation (or "reduce dependence on rice" as they obliquely put it) - Let Them Eat Rats.
Back in the 1990's I lived in a place called Chung King Mansions (the last word being spectacularly inaccurate) in Hong Kong for a while, which had a small collection of Indian restaurants clustered around level 4, which was roughly the height of the surrounding rubbish mounds. My friends and I often used to speculate about the source of the meat hidden by large amounts of curry sauce, with the resident rat population frequently falling under suspicion. If our darkest fears were correct, I can't say the taste was all that bad...
I think what disturbs me about this Reuters news piece even more than the Let them Eat Mud story that I posted about mud cake consumption in Haiti, is that the government in Bihar, India, is actively promoting it.
Just to be clear. It's official government policy for people to eat rats. (The full story here and below.)
It's a useful case to ruminate over. What is it, after all, that's so appalling here? Clearly the idea of eating vermin is, by definition, distasteful, but what a culture decides is edible, and what is pestilent, isn't written in our DNA. As we used to chorus in Sociology 101: "it's a social construct". Some think pork is as dirty as rat. Some think that by renaming pigeons as 'squab', they'll taste better.
That people are eating rodents isn't the only thing that should turn our stomachs, though. The Bihari government endorsement of rat-eating is simultaneously a sign of defeat. They've given up on fighting poverty so that people can afford to eat. Given up on trying to protect the grain harvests with decent infrastructure. Given up, almost, on their people.
In a time of scarce resources and rising hunger, rat-eating becomes a handy technical fix. After all, what is rat-eating but a technology to increase nutrition and eliminate the use of pesticides and the need for secure grain storage?
And if we're appalled by this, and we should be, then how different is this from the logic that justifies Golden Rice? After all, doesn't golden rice become useful only when governments have resigned themselves to the fact that the only thing people can afford to eat is rice? That the healthcare system can't be resuscitated? That the best technology to fix the problem is one that doesn't address it?
Good news. Verdant Power is set to restart its groundbreaking renewable energy project in New York’s East River. The news suggests that this and other cities are emerging as centers of green energy innovation.
In 2006, I wrote about Verdant Power’s efforts to build what look like underwater wind mills in New York’s East River. The idea is simple: as water flows, it spins the turbines, making electricity.
But it’s been hard going for the startup. The site has had to undergo years’ worth of costly, meticulous environmental evaluation. So far, no deal breakers — the fish have steered clear. The real problem has been too much of a good thing. The river currents are more powerful — and energy rich — than Verdant’s design engineers anticipated.
Here’s why. The East River is really a tidal channel. Unlike a river that flows at a slowish, steady pace in one direction, the current in the East River ebbs and flows, reversing direction twice a day, and peaking at speeds much higher than most rivers. The current has torn apart two pilot installations. The first set of blades failed; then, with stronger blades in place, the pivoting machinery gave out.
Starting tomorrow, the engineers who watch over the test site from a converted shipping container (parked outside a supermarket they hope to soon be regularly powering), will start installing their third, even-more-ruggedized batch of turbines.
I’m really rooting for them, and hope the third time is the charm. As Jim Dwyer points out in a nice update on the project’s progress at the New York Times, the city is blessed with currents and winds surrounding every boro. Centuries back these were harnessed as the source of power, using dams and windmills. (The city’s seal has a classic Dutch windmill in its center.) And as Mayor Bloomberg recently pointed out, these resources should be the first we tap as the city seeks to build new sources of electricity generation.
No, that’s doesn’t mean super-sized windmills on top of the Empire State Builging — aesthetic concerns aside, it’s too costly to retrofit such a dynamic heavy structure on most buildings. But it could be smaller, lighter windmills tucked in where conditions are good. Check Marquiss Wind, a California based maker of rootop turbines and Hanbana Lab’s workshops to build rooftop wind devices(here and here), a wonderful NYC non-profit working to boost awareness of green energy in the city by installing it, developing new approaches and educating the community.
And Bloomberg’s vision will surely mean innovative hydropower technologies, like Verdant’s, in our waterways. It means solar panels on every building’s roof. And it means turbines on Staten Island’s Fresh Kills Landfill and in the windswept Atlantic waters south off Brooklyn and Queens. In Amsterdam, windmills are a scenic feature of the view from shore. In the U.S. Cleveland and Hull, Mass. are moving ahead to proudly place windmills near shore to supply local power and brand their cities as green.
Skeptics may think it unlikely for a green revolution to happen here before say, San Francisco. But uniquely for a city of any size, New York has a rule that most of its electricity must be locally generated. This is a smart, responsible rule that will make it more likely green energy is built here. The rule keeps politicians and voters honest about taking responsibility for decisions — and environmental impacts — that in many other cities can be put far off and out of site.
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began when a drought, caused by El Niño, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. While Lytton lived in imperial splendour and commissioned, among other extravagances, "the most colossal and expensive meal in world history", between 12 million and 29 million people died. Only Stalin manufactured a comparable hunger.
Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab. As Tony Blair's favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created the impression that he would do anything to please his master. Today he is the European trade commissioner. From his sumptuous offices in Brussels and Strasbourg, he hopes to impose a treaty that will permit Europe to snatch food from the mouths of some of the world's poorest people.
Seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people of Senegal comes from fish. Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it sustains a population that ranks close to the bottom of the human development index. One in six of the working population is employed in the fishing industry; about two-thirds of these workers are women. Over the past three decades, their means of subsistence has started to collapse as other nations have plundered Senegal's stocks.
The EU has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won't confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats. The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to west Africa. Since 1979 it has struck agreements with the government of Senegal, granting our fleets access to its waters. As a result, Senegal's marine ecosystem has started to go the same way as ours. Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from the country's waters fell from 95,000 tonnes to 45,000 tonnes. Muscled out by European trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997. ...
This is one instance of the food colonialism that is again coming to govern the relations between rich and poor counties. As global food supplies tighten, rich consumers are pushed into competition with the hungry. Last week the environmental group WWF published a report on the UK's indirect consumption of water, purchased in the form of food. We buy much of our rice and cotton, for example, from the Indus valley, which contains most of Pakistan's best farmland. To meet the demand for exports, the valley's aquifers are being pumped out faster than they can be recharged. At the same time, rain and snow in the Himalayan headwaters have decreased, probably as a result of climate change. In some places, salt and other crop poisons are being drawn through the diminishing water table, knocking out farmland for good. The crops we buy are, for the most part, freely traded, but the unaccounted costs all accrue to Pakistan.
Now we learn that Middle Eastern countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are securing their future food supplies by trying to buy land in poorer nations. The Financial Times reports that Saudi Arabia wants to set up a series of farms abroad, each of which could exceed 100,000 hectares. Their produce would not be traded: it would be shipped directly to the owners. The FT, which usually agitates for the sale of everything, frets over "the nightmare scenario of crops being transported out of fortified farms as hungry locals look on". Through "secretive bilateral agreements", the paper reports, "the investors hope to be able to bypass any potential trade restriction that the host country might impose during a crisis".
Both Ethiopia and Sudan have offered the oil states hundreds of thousands of hectares. This is easy for the corrupt governments of these countries: in Ethiopia the state claims to own most of the land; in Sudan an envelope passed across the right desk magically transforms other people's property into foreign exchange. But 5.6 million Sudanese and 10 million Ethiopians are currently in need of food aid. The deals their governments propose can only exacerbate such famines.
None of this is to suggest that the poor nations should not sell food to the rich. To escape from famine, countries must enhance their purchasing power. This often means selling farm products, and increasing their value by processing them locally. But there is nothing fair about the deals I have described. Where once they used gunboats and sepoys, the rich nations now use chequebooks and lawyers to seize food from the hungry. The scramble for resources has begun, but - in the short term, at any rate - we will hardly notice. The rich world's governments will protect themselves from the political cost of shortages, even if it means that other people must starve.
Another George from the left, George Orwell, has recently taken up blogging. This is quite a feat given that he has been dead for some time, so the people trying to keep his memory alive are using his old diary entries - The Orwell Diaries.
Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO. Nonetheless, the stakes—and the opportunities—could hardly be higher, says Rattan Lal, a prominent soil scientist at Ohio State University. Researchers and ordinary farmers around the world are finding that even devastated soils can be restored. The payoff, Lal says, is the chance not only to fight hunger but also to attack problems like water scarcity and even global warming. Indeed, some researchers believe that global warming can be slowed significantly by using vast stores of carbon to reengineer the world’s bad soils. “Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root,” Lal says. “In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil.” ...
A black revolution might even help combat global warming. Agriculture accounts for more than one-eighth of humankind's production of greenhouse gases. Heavily plowed soil releases carbon dioxide as it exposes once buried organic matter. Sombroek argued that creating terra preta around the world would use so much carbon-rich charcoal that it could more than offset the release of soil carbon into the atmosphere. According to William I. Woods, a geographer and soil scientist at the University of Kansas, charcoal-rich terra preta has 10 or 20 times more carbon than typical tropical soils, and the carbon can be buried much deeper down. Rough calculations show that "the amount of carbon we can put into the soil is staggering," Woods says. Last year Cornell University soil scientist Johannes Lehmann estimated in Nature that simply converting residues from commercial forestry, fallow farm fields, and annual crops to charcoal could compensate for about a third of U.S. fossil-fuel emissions. Indeed, Lehmann and two colleagues have argued that humankind's use of fossil fuels worldwide could be wholly offset by storing carbon in terra preta nova.
Such hopes will not be easy to fulfill. Identifying the organisms associated with terra preta will be difficult. And nobody knows for sure how much carbon can be stored in soil—some studies suggest there may be a finite limit. But Woods believes that the odds of a payoff are good. "The world is going to hear a lot more about terra preta," he says.
Walking the roads on the farm hosting Wisconsin Farm Technology Days, it was easy for me to figure out what had worried Jethro Tull. Not Jethro Tull the 1970s rock band—Jethro Tull the agricultural reformer of the 18th century. Under my feet the prairie soil had been squashed by tractors and harvesters into a peculiar surface that felt like the poured-rubber flooring used around swimming pools. It was a modern version of a phenomenon noted by Tull: When farmers always plow in the same path, the ground becomes "trodden as hard as the Highway by the Cattle that draw the Harrows."
Tull knew the solution: Don't keep plowing in the same path. In fact, farmers are increasingly not using plows at all—a system called no-till farming. But their other machines continue to grow in size and weight. In Europe, soil compaction is thought to affect almost 130,000 square miles of farmland, and one expert suggests that the reduced harvests from compaction cost midwestern farmers in the U.S. $100 million in lost revenue every year.
The ultimate reason that compaction continues to afflict rich nations is the same reason that other forms of soil degradation afflict poor ones: Political and economic institutions are not set up to pay attention to soils. The Chinese officials who are rewarded for getting trees planted without concern about their survival are little different from the farmers in the Midwest who continue to use huge harvesters because they can't afford the labor to run several smaller machines.
Next to the compacted road on the Wisconsin farm was a demonstration of horse-drawn plowing. The earth curling up from the moldboard was dark, moist, refulgent—perfect midwestern topsoil. Photographer Jim Richardson got on his belly to capture it. He asked me to hunker down and hold a light. Soon we drew a small, puzzled crowd. Someone explained that we were looking at the soil. "What are they doing that for?" one woman asked loudly. In her voice I could hear the thought: MEGO.
When I told this story over the phone to David Montgomery, the University of Washington geologist, I could almost hear him shaking his head. "With eight billion people, we're going to have to start getting interested in soil," he said. "We're simply not going to be able to keep treating it like dirt."
It looks like the lads at Ziff Brothers (and others) and going to be disappointed in their hopes to try and produce shale oil in Queensland, with the state government banning developments for at least 2 years - Bligh says no to north Qld shale project.
Queensland premier Anna Bligh has killed off a controversial $14 billion shale oil project in north Queensland. Ms Bligh cited the need to put the environment first as she quashed plans to start bulk sampling and exploration of the McFarlane deposit, 15km south of Proserpine.
The decision sparked a war of words between the mining lobby and Greenpeace, who campaigned against the development. Ms Bligh said she would not allow the environment to be put at risk while the technology for extraction of the resource was still not proven. "Our environment must come first," the Premier said. "That's why we are putting a 20-year moratorium on all mining activities, bulk sampling and exploration over the McFarlane deposit in the Whitsunday region."
Conservationists feared the project could affect tourism in the Whitsundays region, pollute the Great Barrier Reef and Goorganga wetlands, pose risks to health and disrupt local farming operations.
On Friday local state MP, Member for Whitsunday Jan Jarratt, publicly opposed the development. Mining would not have occurred for several years, if approved.
Shale oil is extracted from sedimentary rocks that contain solid combustible organic matter called kerogen. Under a heating process, the kerogen can be decomposed to release hydrocarbons that can be captured to produce synthetic crude oil and combustible gas.
Ms Bligh said the government would devote the next two years to researching whether shale oil deposits can be used in an environmentally acceptable way. In the meantime no new shale oil mines will be permitted anywhere in the state.
The Boston Globe has a look at some of the steps being taken to keep Oman producing oil for as long as possible - Thirst for oil feeds Oman innovation.
Sirens and air monitors surround the more-than-$1 billion oil installation rising off the flat, rock-strewn desert floor in Harweel oil fields in the 120-degree heat of Oman's interior.
Construction crews, mostly Indians and Pakistanis in once bright-colored coveralls washed out by the sun, lay out escape routes and raise airtight shelters intended to save the lives of oil workers if the sirens ever go off.
Far underground, below a mile-thick layer of salt, lies the oil that Oman's state-controlled petroleum company is seeking. It sits in a cloud of pressurized gases laced with hydrogen sulfide at concentrations that can kill in minutes.
In Saudi Arabia, Oman's neighbor, oil production still can be as easy as jamming pipe into the ground and pumping up the oil, or standing back to let it gush forth from the pressure of the reservoir.
But for Oman, "easy oil is over," said Khalid Jawad al-Khabouri, a petroleum engineer at the headquarters of Oman's state-controlled oil company in Muscat, the capital.
At Harweel and several of the country's complex, aging fields, Oman is going after oil the hard way. More than any country along the Persian Gulf, Oman provides a preview of the future of oil.
A sultanate of fewer than 3 million citizens, Oman has staked much of its future on evolving production techniques known as enhanced oil recovery. Geologists and engineers in the oil fields are employing many technologies also developing elsewhere in the Middle East, North America, and China.
The country has invested $4 billion to $6 billion in current enhanced oil recovery projects, said Khalifa al-Hinai, technical adviser to Oman's Oil and Gas Ministry.
Most of the techniques involve pumping some agent - steam and other gases, or chemicals including polymers and detergents - into a reservoir to encourage oil to flow.
Petroleum Development Oman, a consortium that includes Oman's government along with Shell, Total, and Partex oil companies, also is adopting in-situ combustion, which involves lighting fires within reservoirs to draw out the oil.
For Oman, the plunge into enhanced oil recovery is a necessity.
The world's other oil producers, even Saudi Arabia, will one day follow. With oil prices wedged above $100 a barrel this year, investors worldwide are sinking billions of dollars into enhanced oil recovery.
"The world has to," said Matt Simmons, an energy investment banker and a leading proponent of the argument that oil will run out sooner rather than later, in a telephone interview from the United States. "Because it's the last game going."
In the high-stakes battle between the oil industry and environmentalists over the image of Canada's oil sands, it appears a pair of multibillionaires beats a two-mouthed fish.
The week started out tough for oil sands producers, whose shares had been beaten down as crude prices skidded and projects suffered more cost overruns.
Three environmental groups quit a northern Alberta oil sands development advisory body that also includes government and industry representatives, saying it had lost legitimacy.
Then reports surfaced that children had reeled in a fish with two jaws from a lake downstream from where tens of billions of dollars worth of projects are pumping synthetic oil.
But by midweek, the mood changed. A stealth visit to Canadian Natural Resources' new Horizon oil sands mining project by two of the world's richest men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, overshadowed all.
The two-mouthed fish created a stir at the Keepers of the Water conference on the weekend at Fort Chipewyan, about 600 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.
Aboriginal communities downstream of the oil sands have expressed concerns about how industrial development is affecting the animals that they eat and their drinking water. Elders believe pollution is responsible for high cancer rates and other health problems in the region.
George Poitras of the Mikesew Cree said he quickly froze the fish and later put it on display for 20 minutes at the conference on a bucket of ice.
“It was important for the fish to be displayed at the conference to show people what we have been claiming all along,” Mr. Poitras said.
“People were in disbelief. Here they saw a fish that we suspect is very much linked to tar sands development and contamination of the Athabasca River. Our elders tell us that what happens to the animals and the fish is just a sign of what is going to happen to human life.”
A major new report has claimed that by 2020 all new cars sold will be hybrids of one form or another, and that battery technology will be commonplace in most cars.
The report, ‘Automotive 2020: Clarity Beyond the Chaos,’, written by IBM’s Institute for Business Value, is based on interviews with 125 anonymous car industry executives across 15 different countries.
The findings make it clear that the car industry is currently undergoing a period of radical and fundamental change. According to one respondent, an executive with a European car company, “In the next ten years, we will experience more change than in the 50 years before.”
Other key conclusions are that:
* Battery technology will be ubiquitous in just over a decade, with automakers and their suppliers focusing much of their R&D efforts on the electronics and software required to integrate them into vehicles. * Investment in biofuels will continue, although the technology “must undergo rapid evolution for global application and proliferation.” * Ethanol from corn and other food crops is a dead end, but cellulosic ethanol “has the potential to see widespread acceptance.” * Traditional fossil fuels will make up only around two thirds of the market by 2020, while average vehicle CO2 emissions will fall to 97 g/km, seven grams less than the current generation Toyota Prius. * Although hydrogen fuel-cells “remain a viable alternative,” even the optimists don’t expect them to comprise more than a small fraction of vehicles in 2020.
With hybrid and electric vehicles currently making up only around 3 per cent of the market, the report’s predictions regarding the growth of electric and hybrid vehicles may seem to some to be ambitious or overly optimistic. However, there are clear signs that interest in alteratively powered cars is exploding. Moreover, recent months have seen a series of announcements by major car companies including GM, Ford, Honda, BMW-Mini, VW and Daimler, highlighting their intention to sell hybrid, plug-in hybrid or all-electric cars in the near future.
"This is one of my favorite charts: A comparison of the distance a car can drive based on either of the following forms of energy, each produced on 100m x 100m of land (2.5 acres). How come that biofuel does not really cut it? Electric cars are about four times more energy efficient than fuel based cars, no matter whether they are based on biofuel or other fuel. This is because any fuel engine mostly creates heat and thus wastes the majority of the available energy units. Combine this with plants not being very efficient solar energy harvesters relative to semiconductor based solar electricity, and the result is this huge difference."
"I for one have vowed that the Prius I bought six years ago will have been the last fuel powered car I’d buy in my life. Presently, it is baking in the sun all day while I’m at work. My future all-electric car would charge up while idling under a solar carport."
Russian oil output growth is unlikely to exceed 2.2% next year and will slow to under 1% by 2011, the government said today, confirming earlier forecasts of a slowdown in production growth.
Falling oil production in Russia has become a major concern for the government, which relies heavily on export revenues.
The Kremlin quoted the Economy Ministry's updated forecast for Russian economic development to 2011 as saying oil output could this year reach 492 million tonnes, or 9.85 million barrels per day, almost flat from 491.5 million tonnes, or 9.87 million bpd, in 2007. This year, a leap year, has one extra day.
Under the Economy Ministry's optimistic scenario, oil production is expected to rise to 503 million tonnes in 2009 but growth would then slow to just 0.8% year-on-year in 2011, reaching 518 million tonnes, a Reuters report said.
Last month, the Finance Ministry announced similar forecasts of oil production growth in the period. The Economy Ministry's scenario forecasts no production growth at all
Today, as part of our Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative, Google.org announced more than $10 million in investments and grants in Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) technology. EGS expands the potential of traditional geothermal energy by orders of magnitude. The traditional geothermal approach relies on finding naturally occurring pockets of steam or hot water. The EGS process, by comparison, replicates these conditions by fracturing hot rock, circulating water through the system, and using the resulting steam to produce electricity in a conventional turbine.
EGS has the potential to provide clean renewable electricity 24/7, at a cost cheaper than coal. The ability to produce electricity from geothermal energy has been thought exclusive to locations such as California and Iceland. However EGS could allow us to harness the heat within the earth almost anywhere. To see see the massive size of the US geothermal resource accessible by EGS, check out our Google Earth layer. For more on EGS, watch [the] video [below], featuring Dr. Steve Chu, Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Dr. Jefferson Tester, professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and lead author of a major recent study on EGS.
Our EGS partners to date include:
* AltaRock Energy: $6.25 million investment to develop innovative technologies to achieve significant cost reductions and improved performance in EGS projects * Potter Drilling: $4 million investment in two tranches, to develop new approaches to lower the cost and expand the range of deep hard rock drilling, a critical element to large-scale deployment of EGS * Southern Methodist University Geothermal Laboratory: $489,521 grant to improve understanding of the size and distribution of geothermal energy resources and to update geothermal mapping of North America
Working with Geodynamics, one of the world's leading EGS development companies, we modeled Geodynamics' first 50 MW system at the Cooper Basin in SketchUp, Google's 3D modeling technology. To see how EGS works, check out the animation of the SketchUp model or download it.
Australia is sitting on an "inexhaustible" source of energy, scientists say - and they're not talking about coal. "Hot rocks" energy is being touted as the latest solution to climate change. Australia's first hot rocks power station moved a step closer on Wednesday when the federal government launched a $50 million fund to commercialise the technology. Resources Minister Martin Ferguson said Australia's first hot rocks power plant could be built within four years.
USING just 1 per cent of Australia's so-called "hot rocks" supply could produce 26,000 times the amount of energy that is now used each year. The figures, compiled by Geoscience Australia, were such a surprise to the office of the Minister for Resources, Martin Ferguson, that staff had them checked six times before releasing them. "The potential of the geothermal industry in Australia is truly staggering … It provides clean baseload power and is potentially a very important contributor to Australia's energy mix in a carbon-constrained world," Mr Ferguson said.
Geothermal energy could supply as much as 5 percent of Australia's electricity requirements by 2020 with an investment of about A$12 billion ($10.4 billion), helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions, an industry group said.
Producing power from underground heat could provide a maximum of 2,200 megawatts of continuous generating capacity by 2020, the Australian Geothermal Energy Association said today in an e-mailed statement, citing a study by economic modeling firm McLennan Magasanik Associates. That would be up to 40 percent of the nation's 2020 target for renewable energy use.
Geodynamics Ltd. and Petratherm Ltd. are among companies seeking to tap super-hot granites lying as deep as 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) underground in South Australia state to produce low- emissions electricity. Twenty-three companies will invest more than A$701 million in geothermal exploration in the state in 2002-2013, the South Australian government said this month.
``This report highlights that the Australian geothermal energy industry has a potentially significant contribution to solving Australia's long-term climate change challenges,'' Gerry Grove White, chairman of the group, said in the statement.
The cost of generating power from geothermal sources is expected to decline to become the cheapest form of renewable energy by 2020, the study found.
Energy Bulletin points to a debate starting at The Economist on whether or not "breakthrough innovations" are required to solve the energy crisis. My view is that we don't really need any "breakthroughs" - just incremental advances on todays technology and wide scale deployment.
Starting tomorrow The Economist Online Debate Series is starting a two-week long online, Oxford-style debate on solving the world’s energy crisis. Since this topic is highly relevant to you and readers of Energy Bulletin, we wanted to give you and your readers an early invite to participate and be heard alongside notable experts and debaters in this intellectually stimulating, global conversation.
Would you be interested in supporting the discourse on this topic by posting about this debate and your response to our proposition on your blog? To help out, we’ve included a preview of tomorrow’s opening statement by moderator and Economist correspondent, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran.
The proposition is:
“This house believes that we can solve our energy problems with existing technologies today, without the need for breakthrough innovations.” What do you think? Will the reduction of global energy consumption be enough to sustain current fossil fuel reserves? Or should all efforts be directed toward discovering new technologies that broaden the world’s energy portfolio?
In his opening statement, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran details both the Pro and Con arguments. Joseph Romm, Pro expert and Senior Fellow at the Centre for American Progress argues that “the world must deploy staggering amounts of low-carbon energy technology as rapidly as possible.” The Con argument made by Peter Meisen, President of Global Energy Network Institute argues that a “design science revolution is required.” Do you agree? Is it more important to support conservation or innovation? Given that both efforts are currently being explored in parallel, where should the center of gravity lie?
Joseph Romm and Peter Meisen will dispute the topic tomorrow in opening posts followed by rebuttals (August 22) and closing statements (August 27). A winner will be determined by popular vote and announced on August 29.
Additionally, the following guest participants are scheduled to post their one-time statements:
• August 20 – Michael Eckhart, President, American Council on Renewable Energy • August 21– Katie Fehrenbacher, Founding Editor, GigaOM’s Earth2Tech • August 25 – Makito Takami, Chief representative of Washington DC Office, New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) • TBD – Mujid Kazimi, Director, MIT’s Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (CANES)
It seems strange to me that the GENI representative is arguing the "con" case, given that Bucky identified most of the solution decades ago - and the parts that aren't quite there yet (electric cars, smart grids, home scale energy storage) are good things to have, but not absolutely mandatory to solve our energy problems.
Buckminster Fuller, visionary engineer of the 20th century, would challenge his audiences: “There’s no energy shortage; there’s no energy crisis; there’s a crisis of ignorance.”
With oil at more than $100 a barrel, carbon dioxide at 383 parts per million (ppm) and rising, China adding a coal-fired plant every week, and continuing Middle East tensions, Bucky’s statement seems almost flippant. We will argue that he was right.
A bit of history frames the discussion. Mankind has had access to electricity for only 130 years. In just over a century, we have extended transmission lines, providing refrigeration and lighting to 5 billion people around the world. This extraordinary feat elevated three-quarters of humanity out of the daily toil experienced by pre-Edison generations. NASA’s “Earth at Night” map highlights this world of prosperity, yet 24% of humanity still lives in the dark. More than one and a half billion people spend their days in repetitive labour and subsistence farming, fetching water and wood every day simply to survive. There are two worlds—the fortunate who have electrical energy, and the poor who do not.
Ironically, the choices we made to achieve our unprecedented prosperity may bring about our downfall. In 1950, there were 2.5 billion people and a global economy of $7 trillion. In just 6 decades, we are now 6.7 billion with a $66 trillion gross world product. The burning of fossil fuels in the first half of the 20th century had a relatively small ecological footprint. Today, the consequences of energy use are felt in every wallet, on each continent, coastline and in our shared atmosphere.
We are addicted to fossil fuels. Coal and natural gas fire two-thirds of all power production and nearly all transportation uses petroleum. Nature isn’t making any more oil, gas or coal, while the IEA forecasts energy demand will increase 50% by 2030. Business-as-usual is a recipe for disaster—for the global economy and our environment.
When asked about solving difficult societal problems, Bucky Fuller would seek new tools that make the old problem obsolete. Regarding energy issues, he posed a more expansive question: How can we provide the quality-of-life needs for everyone in a manner that is environmentally sustainable for our planet? The premier strategy from this investigation: clean electricity for all. Sounds good, but is it possible?
Scarcity of energy is a myth that persists in society, because our fixation remains on fossil fuels. Yet the resource potentials of solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, biomass and ocean energies are abundant far beyond our needs. The winds of the American plains are sufficient to power all the electrical demand of the United States, and solar radiation from just 3% of the world’s deserts could power all global demand. There is no shortage of renewable energy on our planet! While annual growth rates of 20-40% for geothermal, wind and solar are promising, their share of the energy pie remains less than 3%.
Critics state that renewable energies are intermittent—the sun isn’t always shining and the winds don’t always blow—and we need reliable electricity every second. The critical infrastructure that solves this is high-voltage transmission. The interconnected grid acts as the freeway for electricity from generator to user, and it is already built throughout the developed world. Today, bulk transmission can deliver power far beyond political boundaries, with over 100 nations trading electricity for mutual benefit. Interconnected grids enable load levelling, economic exchange of power, system reliability and emergency back-up options. Long-distance transmission allows us to tap remote renewable energy resources, sometimes located in neighbouring nations, and to feed clean electricity throughout the network.
In my coal to liquids in Australia post a few months ago I rated the chances of a development in northern South Australia as low. The SMH has a report today that the chances have improved greatly with Chinese firm CNOOC indicating an interest in the project - Chinese oil firm targets coal-to-liquids. Just what SA needs - another coal fired power plant...
A subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned oil giant has thrown its weight behind an ambitious, $3 billion coal-to-liquids (CTL) project planned for South Australia.
Australia-focused energy minnow Altona Resources Plc, which is listed on London's Alternative Investment Market, has signed an in-principle agreement with CNOOC (Beijing) Energy Investment Co Ltd to cooperate in the development of Altona's Arckaringa project in SA. The project includes a 10 million barrel per year open cut mine and a 560 megawatt power plant.
Interest in CTL, which involves converting coal into liquid hydrocarbons, is growing amid concerns about "peak oil". ...
He said the project would provide a major new source of base load power and diesel to SA, "which has a significant looming power deficiency and currently imports all of its distillate requirements".
Oil production has begun falling at all of the major Western oil companies, and they are finding it harder than ever to find new prospects even though they are awash in profits and eager to expand.
Part of the reason is political. From the Caspian Sea to South America, Western oil companies are being squeezed out of resource-rich provinces. They are being forced to renegotiate contracts on less-favorable terms and are fighting losing battles with assertive state-owned oil companies. And much of their production is in mature regions that are declining, like the North Sea.
The reality, experts say, is that the oil giants that once dominated the global market have lost much of their influence — and with it, their ability to increase supplies.
“This is an industry in crisis,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, the associate director of Rice University’s energy program in Houston. “It’s a crisis of leadership, a crisis of strategy and a crisis of what the future looks like for the supermajors,” a term often applied to the biggest oil companies. “They are like a deer caught in headlights. They know they have to move, but they can’t decide where to go.” ...
The new oil order has been emerging for a few decades.
As late as the 1970s, Western corporations controlled well over half of the world’s oil production. These companies — Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Total of France and Eni of Italy — now produce just 13 percent. Today’s 10 largest holders of petroleum reserves are state-owned companies, like Russia’s Gazprom and Iran’s national oil company.
Sluggish supplies have prompted a cottage industry of doomsday predictions that the world’s oil production has reached a peak. But many energy experts say these “peak oil” theories are misplaced. They say the world is not running out of oil — rather, the companies that know the most about how to produce oil are running out of places to drill.
“There is still a lot of oil to develop out there, which is why we don’t call this geological peak oil, especially in places like Venezuela, Russia, Iran and Iraq,” said Arjun Murti, an energy analyst at Goldman Sachs. “What we have now is geopolitical peak oil.”
Reuters reports that there are some political manoeuvrings in Brazil over the profits likely to be obtained from Petrobras's offshore finds (when they are eventually developed) - Brazil's plans to control oil could cause delays. Note that Brazil may soon join OPEC.
The Brazilian government's plan to take greater control over huge new oil discoveries will face obstacles in Congress and could delay its ambitions to become a global oil player, experts said on Thursday.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wants to change the structure of oil control to give the government more funds for social welfare and education while reducing the power of state-owned oil firm Petrobras and its partners. "Some think that the oil is for Petrobras. The oil is for the union," Lula said on Thursday at an event in the Amazon state Para.
In neighboring Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez has tightened controls over oil to fund social projects. But in Brazil the plan could face a long battle in Congress. "The debate in Congress won't be easy, it's a debate over trillions (of dollars)," Ideli Salvatti, Senate leader for the ruling Workers' Party, told Reuters.
Petrobras shook the oil world last November when it discovered a deposit with estimated reserves of 5-8 billion barrels, the world's second-biggest find in 20 years. Other reserves thought to exist in the area could vault Brazil from 17th to 10th among world oil producers. The government has said it plans to join The Organization of Petroleum of the Exporting Countries (OPEC).
In February of last year, with the newly born Democratic Congress still waiving its little arms and spitting up mucus, Dick Lugar (the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and Joe Biden (the committee’s nominally Democratic chairman) introduced the "NATO Freedom Consolidation Act". Like its predecessors, the bill authorized the President to immediately begin treating the Ukraine and Georgia as full-fledged NATO allies in all but name – with weapons sales, military advisors, etc. Senate cosponsors included Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and, naturally, John McCain (R-POW).
Also like its predecessors, the bill was whisked through both houses of Congress with about as much deliberation as a resolution praising the Future Farmers of Benton County for their fine showing at the Iowa State Fair – with no hearings, no debate, no roll call votes. President Bush signed it into law on April 9, 2007. The White House put out an official statement marking the occasion. It was one sentence long.
And so, with an absolute minimum of democratic process, the United States of America committed its full prestige and power (if not, just yet, a legally binding guarantee) to the defense of the two former Soviet republics, even though the Russians have repeatedly stated that they regard NATO membership by either country as a direct threat to their own vital security interests. As others have already noted, this is as if China had unilaterally announced a military alliance with Mexico and Cuba. Actually it’s worse: Imagine the US reaction if China announced a military alliance with Mexico, after which the president of Mexico started dropping public hints about taking New Mexico back – by whatever means necessary. (And if that comparison seems unnecessarily paranoid, consider the history of Russia in the 20th century. Even paranoids have real enemies.)
A careful search of Nexus and Google reveals that the number of stories appearing in the pages of major US newspapers and magazines, or on the wires of major American news services, taking note of this fateful decision, equals exactly one: a brief item out of UPI’s Moscow bureau, warning of the Russian reaction. The Georgian and Ukranian press, on the other hand, gave the new law saturation coverage – encouraged by their respective governments, both of which issued official statements describing their future NATO admissions as, in effect, done deals.
The Russians also reacted. Just a few days after the NATO Freedom Consolidation Act was introduced in the Senate, President Putin gave a speech in Munich that was widely reported as his harshest attack to date on America for its allegedly aggressive and hegemonic designs. The New York Times and US government officials (which is a somewhat redundant expression) both professed shock over Putin’s language – without once mentioning the congressional provocation that triggered it.
But there was just one problem: NATO admission for the Ukraine and Georgia was most emphatically not a done deal. Despite all the pressure from the Cheney Administration (which, we now know, was being played hard by pro-Georgian lobbyists, including John McCain’s current campaign manager) the French and Germans stuck to their position in the run up to last April’s NATO summit in Bucharest.
This led to another flurry of activity by the congressional expansion lobby. In January of this year, another resolution was introduced, again demanding that NATO open its doors to the Ukraine and Georgia. This time the list of cosponsors included Biden, McCain and Joe Lieberman – as well as both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It was passed by unanimous consent. And when the NATO summit nonetheless elected to pass on the Ukrainian and Georgian applications (promising, vaguely, to revisit the issue at a later date) the Demopublicans quickly came back with yet another resolution blasting the Russians for a long list of alleged violations of Georgian sovereignty and praising the NATO summit for "stat[ing] that the Republic of Georgia will become a member of NATO" – when, in fact, the summit had made no such promise. Up is down. Black is white.
Blank Checks and Bounced Ones
Looking at this dreary legislative record (which reads like something out of the old Supreme Soviet) is it any surprise Georgia’s president felt he had a virtual carte blanche from America to challenge the Russians – up to an including the use of military force in a disastrous bid to reconquer South Ossetia? Why would he think otherwise – that is, until the moment when he discovered that America had written him a check it had no real intention of honoring?
There's not much more to say - except that it’s a pretty strange world where the sworn goal of US diplomacy is to put the country in a situation where it may have to go to war with another nuclear power (or back down ignominiously) to defend the sanctity of borders drawn by Josef Stalin and Nikita Krushchev. Leaving aside the raving hypocrisy (Kosovo, Iraq) it’s an alarming sign that the national security and foreign policy elites of this country – in both parties; and not just among the lunatic neocon fringe – are totally out of control. British analyst Anatol Levin (one of the more perceptive of the realists) describes it a case of "profound infantilism":
In the United States, the infantile illusion of omnipotence, whereby it doesn’t matter how many commitments the United States has made elsewhere—in the last resort, the United States can always do what it likes.
Personally, I see it more as a case of the bureaucratic imperative run amok: The national security state is doing exactly what it was designed to do, but without any of the external checks and counterbalances that existed during the Cold War – the war it was originally created to fight. The domestic political system, meanwhile, has atrophied to the point where it’s simply an afterthought – a legislative rubber stamp needed to keep the dollars flowing. With no effective opposition, the machine can run on autopilot, until it finally topples off a cliff (as in Iraq) or slams into an object (like the Russian Army) that refuses to get out of the way.
And that, ultimately, is the most depressing thing about this story: Even after the fiasco in Iraq, the bloody failure in Lebanon, the downward spiral in Afghanistan and, now, the futile posturing in Georgia, there’s absolutely no evidence the US foreign policy elite is inclined to moderate its ambition to re-organize the world along American lines. Nor is there any sign the political class (including, unfortunately, Barack Obama) is rethinking its lockstep support for that agenda. The voters, meanwhile, don’t seem to care much one way or another – as long as gas doesn’t get too expensive and the military casualties aren’t too high (or can be kept off the TV). If anything, it looks like bashing the Russians is still good politics, if only for the nostalgia value.
If you caught Andrew Bacevich on Bill Moyer’s show the other night, you may have noticed that his biggest complaint was not that US foreign policy is misguided and destructive (although he clearly thinks it's both) but that it is being conducted in a democratic vacuum -- despite all the florid rhetoric about promoting democracy. We may still go through the motions of a republican form of government, Bacevich says, but the fabric has gotten pretty thin: or, in the case of our national revival of the Great Game in the Caucasus, damned near invisible.
How long before it tears completely?
The Washington Post's "PostGlobal" edition has an opinion piece touching on the same issues Billmon does, and raising the "gas OPEC" subject again, which I haven't seen for a while - Russia Positions Itself As Global Economic Player.
This split was also evident at the last NATO summit in Bucharest a few months ago. The U.S. proposed that Georgia and Ukraine become members, but Europeans partners pointedly avoided an unnecessary ruckus with Russia and came back with a polite, lukewarm "definite maybe" postponement of the matter.
Simply put, the Europeans -- united with one foreign policy and a combined GDP greater than that of the U.S. -- are not in a mood to put up another Berlin Wall or Iron Curtain made of imported suspicions against Russia. The last was European, but this one is an American argument and Europe is best served by stepping aside. This generation of Europeans consider Russians distant, unfamiliar cousins and Russia as a land of opportunity. As such, they search for commonalities and a spirit of live and let live -- entente cordiale. No one wants to make enemies or engage in an unnecessary clash born of an imaginary picture as depicted by American politicians: some sort of dark or "evil," anti-freedom and anti-democratic force.
Concurrently, Americans are taking the Georgian issue to an unnecessary level. It either a lazy fallback to old methods instead of an effort to look reality in the eye, or alternatively it is fodder for elections in U.S.A. where retail mileage can be drawn from replicating the cold war. It can serve Senator McCain and his militarist background as an heir to President Bush and it serves the current occupants of the White House to divert genuine attention from hard economic realities, massive budget deficits, private debt and the mortgage fiasco at home. And it is not a surprise to know that Mr. Randy Scheunemann (of the lobbying firm Orion Strategies in Washington) is both the chief foreign policy advisor to Senator McCain and, according to filings of the U.S. Department of Commerce, a registered lobbyist for the government of Georgia. But the recent push for freedom fries in the Caucasus turned out to be a modern day version of the failed Bay of Pigs rescue with Georgians waiting for Americans to parachute in and rescue the lot. Alas Secretary Rice went to Tbilisi to push the Georgians to accept the cease fire that was an EU initiative (mediated by France as its the present rotating president).
President Bush has chosen abrasive bully tactics in the 21st century to lecture Russia about what is good for her. Summits and discussions at a table are cast aside in some sort of muscle flexing which fabricates a new dividing line and polarizes Russia against Bush's version of the "free world". Russia has seen the deck stacked against it: The planned missile defense system in Poland and in the Czech Republic is a manifest affirmation of America's reassessment of its policy towards Russia and a relapse to pre-1990 years. Talk about stripping Russia's seat from the G-8 also plays to the tune of Senator McCain's pet project of kicking Russia out of the group of industrial economies.
What is clear is that neither Russia or China are going to fall into this trap laid by President Bush. They consider the false choice of "responsible nations" and "free" nations to be contradictory for a country that has long preferred friendships with dictators outside Europe. Russia has long contemplated a payback for the breakup of Yugoslavia, subsequent support for an independent Kosovo, the missile shield system in Poland and the Czech Republic and pesky setups in Georgia and Ukraine. America's opposition to letting the International Monetary Fund help Russia during her financial problems in the early 1990s and the go-it-alone Afghanistan episode of NATO's fight against global terrorism, which excluded Russia, all confirmed Russia's suspicions.
America has been busy with old-fashioned territory grabs and the eastward crawl of NATO towards Ukraine and Georgia, aiming for relatively modest oil reserves in the Caspian region. However, Russia has been nursing a modern global strategy that leaps over borders. Russia has cut landmark deals with former and potential American clients: weapon sales to Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Venezuela are the first of their kind. Sales of gas via a new trans-Siberia gas pipeline to northern China and talks of a "gas OPEC" with Iran, Algeria and others is another that towers over the pseudo-democratic ideas of Georgia. Border demarcation of the North Pole (with purported reserves of more than 90 billion barrels of oil-- twelve times the amount in the Caspian region), nuclear power deals with India and Iran and direct under-sea gas pipelines to Germany, Turkey and south-eastern Europe (bypassing the Ukrainian chokehold on Russian gas lines to Europe) are other moves on the multi-dimensional chess board -- all as Russia is simply keeping cool and amusing itself with the much hyped, but failed mission of Tony Blair as the chief negotiator of the Middle East Quartet, of which Russia is a member. From the Russian perspective, all options are on the table!
One interesting theory about the Georgian debacle is that it was engineered as part of the McCain election campaign - Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy ?.
Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?
Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser.
Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Technology Review has announced their "TR35" list of young innovators, with Tesla Motors' JB Straubel leading the way.
Powered by batteries and an electric motor, the Tesla Roadster isn't bound by the limits of old-fashioned gas-burning engines. At its top speed of over 120 miles per hour, it remains in its first and only gear.
Straubel doesn't come close to 120 miles per hour today. Since the car can accelerate to 60 miles per hour from a stop in just under four seconds, "you get caught up to traffic pretty fast," he says, easing off the accelerator. "It kind of spoils you." It's easy to see why this powerful alternative to gas-guzzling internal-combustion engines (see Hack, "Tesla Roadster", September/October 2008) has generated such remarkable excitement.
Straubel, more than anyone else, is responsible for the car's impressive acceleration. The Roadster is the first production model from Tesla, which was founded to mass-produce high-performance electric cars. The car's carbon-fiber exterior and aluminum frame, which make it visually appealing but keep it light, are based on designs from British automaker Lotus. Straubel and his hand-picked team, however, engineered the car's brains, muscles, and guts--the electronic controls, electric motor, and battery pack that enable the Roadster to beat many of even the quickest gas-powered cars off the starting line.
Electric cars are best known for their environmental benefits: they produce no harmful emissions, and they're so efficient that they reduce total carbon emissions even if the electricity used to recharge them comes from power plants that burn fossil fuels. But Straubel's achievements capitalize on another, less appreciated advantage. Gas engines deliver their peak torque--the key to acceleration--only within a limited range of engine speeds. Keeping the engine in its optimal range requires a convoluted system of gears and clutches, and acceleration is still compromised. Electric motors, however, deliver maximum torque from a standstill up through thousands of revolutions per minute. That makes it possible to use a transmission with just one or two speeds--and it makes electric cars more responsive than gas-powered ones. Yet most electric vehicles haven't reaped the full benefit of their torque advantage, says Marc Tarpenning, one of Tesla's founders. That's because they have typically been underpowered, partly in an effort to make them as inexpensive as possible. Straubel set out to change that.
When most people think of hydro-electric power they probably think of large dam projects such as China’s Three Gorges Dam, India’s dams on the Narmada River , or closer to home (at least to my home) the Hoover Dam. Perhaps needless to say, big hydro-electric projects like this can generate a great deal of power, but there are significant environmental trade offs.
A less environmentally intrusive way to develop hydro power is known as run-of-river hydro—skip down if you’re unfamiliar with how this works—and more of this is just what’s being planned for British Columbia. Plutonic Power and GE Financial Services have signed a memorandum of understanding that will have the two developing 1000 MW of run-of-rive hydro-electric capacity.
At a total cost of approximately USD 4-billion, the Upper Toba Valley Project will consist of of three sites totaling 120 MW, while the Bute Inlet Project will consist of 18 sites for 900 MW of capacity.
GE will contribute $70 million for a 50% stake in the Upper Toba Valley Project; $650 million for a 60% interest in the Bute Inlet Project.
Both projects are being submitted for BC Hydro’s Clean Power Call, which is part of British Columbia’s greater goal of having at least 90% of the province’s electricity come from clean or renewable sources by 2016.
Technology Review has an article on efficiency improvements for multicrystalline silicon solar panels - More-Efficient Solar Cells.
By changing the way that conventional silicon solar panels are made, Day4 Energy, a startup based in Burnaby, British Columbia, has found a way to cut the cost of solar power by 25 percent, says George Rubin, the company's president.
The company has developed a new electrode that, together with a redesigned solar-cell structure, allows solar panels to absorb more light and operate at a higher voltage. This increases the efficiency of multicrystalline silicon solar panels from an industry standard of about 14 percent to nearly 17 percent. Because of this higher efficiency, Day4's solar panels generate more power than conventional panels do, yet they will cost the same, Rubin says. He estimates the cost per watt of solar power would be about $3, compared with $4 for conventional solar cells. That will translate into electricity prices of about 20 cents per kilowatt-hour in sunny areas, down from about 25 cents per kilowatt-hour, he says.
Other experimental solar technologies could lead to much lower prices--indeed, they promise to compete with the average cost of electricity in the United States, which is about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. But such technologies, including advanced solar concentrators and some thin-film semiconductor solar cells, probably won't be available for years. Day4's technology could be for sale within 18 months, the company says.
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