American Power  

After his recent passionate outburst, Alex at WorldChanging has given Michael Shellenberger the right of reply, with a piece called "American Power". Alex notes "I don't think it does, in fact, answer my central critiques, but I think it's a piece worth reading".

With Iraq and the "war on terror," the conservative movement has defined American power as unilateral military force. Progressives have not yet offered a counter-argument and story about American greatness that is capable of challenging the (neo)conservative one.

A new story of American Power begins by acknowledging what our country is great at: imagining, experimenting, and inventing the future. First we dream — and then we invent.

The time is ripe for progressives and environmentalists of all stripes to come together around American Power agenda for a major investment into clean energy. Not only is a large public investment crucial to bringing down the price of clean energy, an investment-centered agenda will serve the purpose of unifying Americans under a vision for energy independence and economic revitalization, one that will appeal to California and New England progressives and environmentalists and Midwestern Reagan Democrats alike.

Massive investments in clean energy offers a way of defining the source of American power around our capacity to dream better futures — and invent our way out of crises. Oil-funded terrorism, global warming, economic insecurity — these are challenges that America will overcome through our ingenuity and our capacity to reinvent ourselves every fifty years. ...

The Politics of Limits

The consensus today among climate scientists is that U.S. emissions must be reduced 80 percent by 2050 if we are stabilize emissions and avoid catastrophic climate change. But current regulatory approaches will result in modest, not deep, reductions in carbon emissions. That's because there simply do not yet exist the low cost, low carbon technologies that could be quickly brought to scale to replace carbon intensive energy sources. It is true that some strategies for reducing emissions, such as efficiency and conservation, can be scaled up immediately. But disruptive technologies like solar and carbon capture and storage — mass quantities of which will be required to deal with global warming — are still far more expensive than coal and gas.

Environmentalists suggest that setting some pollution limits and a price for carbon will be enough to move gradually — emissions reductions of just two percent per year — to achieve 80 percent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. But the price of carbon would have to be set at exorbitant levels for today's clean energy alternatives to become cost-competitive with coal, especially in China and the developing world, which will contribute 70 percent of new emissions between now and the middle of the century. And if action on global warming depends on voters and politicians accepting higher energy prices, there will — as we have seen — be very little action on global warming.

Recognizing that voters care more about the cost of energy than global warming, the policies under consideration in Congress would limit pollution so little that the price for carbon would be very low, around $7 to $10 per ton. At that price, firms required to reduce their emissions will invest in the least expensive emissions reductions possible, such as burning methane from landfills, purchasing forest land for carbon sequestration, shifting from coal to natural gas, or retrofitting power plants and buildings so they operate more efficiently. Private investment would not, for the most part, go to technologies like low-cost solar energy and carbon capture and storage, which are required to displace coal-based energy.

Meanwhile, China and India long ago rejected any approach to addressing climate change that would constrain their greenhouse gas emissions or their economic growth. For years, energy experts had expected that China would overtake the United States as the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter by 2025. It turns out that China will gain that distinction by the end of this year. The governments and the people of China and India are increasingly concerned about global warming, to be sure, but they are far more motivated by economic development, and to the extent that the battle against global warming is fought in terms of ecological limits rather than economic possibility, there’s little doubt which path these countries will take.

The only way the Chinese government will be able to substantially reduce its emissions is if the price of clean energy and carbon capture technologies come down enough to get within striking distance of the price of fossil fuels.

The dramatic and rapid breakthroughs in price and performance that we need will not be primarily driven by the private sector. Private firms will play an important role in bringing new technologies to market — and carbon pricing will play an important role in making market conditions more amenable to clean energy technologies. However, private firms will not make the large, long-term investments in R&D and deployment, nor can they create the public infrastructure (e.g., new transmission lines bringing wind power from rural areas to cities) needed for the new energy economy.

Given all of this, it's odd that environmentalists ever viewed global warming as fundamentally similar problem to things like smog in L.A., acid rain, and the hole in the ozone, much less one that won't be hard to fix. Granted, both problems are consequences of human pollution. But whereas dealing with the ozone hole required a simple, inexpensive chemical substitute, global warming demands a totally different way of producing energy. We were able to fight smog without replacing oil. We dealt with acid rain without dismantling our power plants. And we will phase out ozone-depleting chemicals without affecting any of our energy sources. But to deal with global warming, we will need an almost entirely new energy infrastructure — one that will first require the creation of an almost entirely new politics. ...

Today we launch a new campaign called "American Power," one aimed at persuading Congress to generate the $30 billion annual investment we need to make clean energy as cheap as possible, as quickly as possible. American Power will provide a vital peacetime role for the military. Just as the Department of Defense guaranteed the nascent market for silicon microchips in the 1960s, bringing the price down from $1,000 to $20 per chip in just a few years, the Pentagon must today do the same with silicon solar panels.

There are no silver bullets when it comes to energy, but solar panels, like microchips, have their own kind of "Moore's Law": the price of solar comes down roughly 20 percent every time production capacity is doubled. Experts say that for a total cost of $50 to $200 billion, we could bring solar panels down to the price of natural gas or even goal. It might be the best $200 billion ever spent by the U.S. military.

Our new book, Break Through, is a call for a new positive politics, one that puts a vision of a better world — not ecological apocalypse with its view of humankind's sins against nature — at the center. At the very moment when we find ourselves facing new problems, new social and economic forces are emerging to confront them. Internet-empowered grassroots activists, high-tech entreprenuers, and the new creative class may become the force behind a new politics of possibility.

Policy-wise, we should make big investments into clean energy and take action to restrict greenhouse gases. But in our politics — and our vision for the future — we will be in a far stronger position if we put this energetic definition of American Power at the center. ...

The good news is that, at the very moment when we find ourselves facing new problems, from global warming to the insecurity born from globalization, new social and economic forces are emerging to overcome them. High-tech businesses and creative "knowledge workers" may become a political force for big clean energy investments. And Democrats and progressives, looking for a positive vision every bit as big and bold as the war in Iraq is negative and awful, could put this new vision of American power to work for the good of the world.

Amory Lovins has no doubt outraged more than a few people with some of the quotes in this article by The Daily Green - "Why Global Warming and Peak Oil are Irrelevant". I guess I'll go off and start a LOLcat blog then. Seriously though, while I like Lovins' ideas about radical efficiency, I'm not convinced in a world where coal remains the cheapest source of power (for the time being) that we can beat either global warming (especially) or peak oil unless they take a lot longer to have a serious impact than many people currently envisage. I am hopeful that his remark that we will ditch our need for oil before it runs out is true however.

Peak Oil is a “distraction” and global warming? Well, global warming will take care of itself.

It’s the bottom line, stupid.

Amory Lovins makes these arguments, (without actually calling you stupid, and with a breathtaking whirlwind of statistics that he has — miraculously — cached in his brain) in the course of explaining why the energy source of the future is clean and limitless.

Because it’s no energy at all.

Lovins, the winner of the 2007 Leadership Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics and the executive director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, calls it “radical efficiency.” He’s used it to transform Wal-Mart from an environmental villain into a pioneering green innovator, improving its bottom line substantially in the process. He’s applied it to the U.S. military to save lives on convoy lines (a very important bottom line), since the safest way to transport fuel in a war zone is to eliminate the need to transport all that fuel. Lovins and the team at the Rocky Mountain Institute have applied radical efficiency to help redesign more than $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors.

Here’s the trick of radical efficiency: Math.

“Efficiency,” Lovins told an audience at Popular Mechanics’ Breakthrough Conference today at the Hearst Tower in New York City, “is cheaper than fuel.”

Saved money is earned money, which is why Lovins works with corporations to improve their bottom lines by radically improving energy efficiency with simple, and very available, technology and techniques. Once one company has converted, others follow.

In the case of Wal-Mart, the largest corporation in the world’s “demand pull” is inspiring its suppliers to improve their energy efficiency — by virtue of that age-old motivation, the economic survival instinct. In the case of microchip manufacturers, when one learns to make a chip more cheaply by saving energy in production, the others must follow.

Which is why peak oil doesn’t matter. If oil runs out next year, or in the next decade, that will matter less than the rise of competitive sources of energy in the marketplace. Petroleum will go the way of whale oil, which in 1850 was the world’s fifth largest industry, Lovins said. That powerful industry lasted precisely until coal-based oils provided a cheaper alternative to the common lighting fuel. You don’t hear much about whale oil anymore. “Whalers were astounded,” Lovins said, “when they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales.”

He sees the same irrelevance in global warming, at least as a catalyst to inspire a change in the fuels burned by the world’s economic engine. He sees efforts to persuade federal governments and international bodies to set limits on carbon dioxide as misguided. China, currently the world’s top polluter of greenhouse gases, will persuade itself to go green because it makes economic sense, and provides a competitive advantage, he said.

Unless, that is, U.S. business, with a little help from Lovins, does first.

“Corporations rule the world,” Lovins said. “How would you have them do it?”

TreeHugger reports on "lazy disks" - energy efficient data storage devices.

Practicality abounds in IT shops these days; first, we had the realization that 99.9 uptime was good enough for most business applications, preventing us from overspending on hardware. Now several vendors have taken this thinking into the data storage arena, and it's reducing costs and energy consumption dramatically. That's good, because power consumption for data storage will exceed that of all other equipment by next year.

The technology is called MAID (massive array of inactive disks), a rather oxymoronic name. But the technology is sound; it's based on the simple idea that the majority of data doesn't need to be accessed immediately. For example, data that experiences high activity (e.g. real time stock quotes) would require high performance storage, but data that does not experience high activity (e.g. the 1997 corporate report) can reside on lower performance and more power efficient storage. MAID takes advantage of this and turns disks off that are not in use, then powers them back on when an application needs access to dormant data. Think of it as a giant spare closet filled with stuff that you only use occasionally like winter clothes, suitcases, unicycle, etc.

Savings are big - coupled with removing duplicate data (the typical organization may have between 10 and 30 copies of the same data) , a MAID can reduce data storage energy consumption by as much as 50 percent. That's good news for data centers, most of which are already at capacity, and increasingly legislated.

The Economist has a look at a new way of collecting solar energy in "Heat from the street".

SOMETIMES, the simplest ideas are the best. To absorb heat from the sun efficiently—to use it, for example, to heat water—you need large, flat, black surfaces. One way to do that is to construct those surfaces specially, on the roofs of buildings. But why go to all that trouble when cities are full of black surfaces already, in the form of asphalted roads?

This was the thought that occurred ten years ago to Arian de Bondt, an engineer who works for a Dutch building company called Ooms. Eventually, Dr de Bondt persuaded his employers to follow it up. The result is that their headquarters in Scharwoude is now heated in winter—and also cooled in summer—by a system that relies on the surface of the road outside.

The heat-collector itself is a circuit of connected water pipes. Most of them run from one side of the street to the other, just under the asphalt layer. Some, however, dive deep into the ground.

In summer, when the surface of the street gets hot, water pumped through the pipes picks up this heat and takes it underground through one of the diving pipes. At a depth of about 100 metres lies a natural aquifer into which a series of heat exchangers have been built. The hot water from the street runs through these exchangers, warming the groundwater, before returning to the surface via another pipe. The aquifer is thus used as a heat store.

In winter, the circuit is changed slightly. Water is pumped through the heat exchangers to pick up the heat that was stored during summer. This water goes into the Ooms building and is used to warm the place up. After performing that task, it is pumped under the asphalt and the residual heat it carries helps to keep the road free of snow and ice.

That is not the end of the story. By now the water has been cooled to near freezing point, and it is once again sent underground—this time through a different pipe to a second aquifer. Here, another set of heat exchangers is used to cool the groundwater. This store of cold water is then used in summer to keep the Ooms building cool in exactly the same way that the store of heat is used in winter to keep it warm.

The result is cheap heating in winter and cheap cooling in summer.

Medialens has a look at some of the woeful mainstream media reporting on the proposed Iraq oil law - "Oil Laws - Colonising Iraq’s Economic Prize".

We are led to believe that Western societies are free and open. In many respects this is true: freedom of speech and the right to protest still exist, albeit within ever-tighter constraints. At root, however, much of what we see and hear in the corporate media has been shaped by money, power and greed. What passes for vibrant public debate is often a sham.

Some media professionals are aware of this, but they keep their heads down and stick to the narrow job requirements demanded of them. But many journalists cannot, or will not, grasp the notion that there are serious limits to news reporting and debate; limits that are set by powerful interests in society. The very possibility is viewed as an affront to journalistic pride and hard-bitten common sense.

A few journalists, however, are very well aware of the boundaries. They consciously seek to exploit occasional gaps in the corporate news blanket smothering reality, and to point the public to facts and perspectives that discomfit the powerful.

The issue of Iraq's oil illustrates the standard problem: incessant repetition of a state-approved script, with tiny instances of solidly critical reporting. Discussion of any possible relationship between the invasion of Iraq and the US-UK thirst for oil - both as a hydrocarbon resource and as a strategic tool for dominance - is close to taboo. If raised, the topic is swiftly dismissed as 'conspiracy' talk.

It was only last month that news media reported the bombshell dropped by Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve:

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." (Bob Woodward, 'Greenspan Is Critical Of Bush in Memoir,' Washington Post, September 15, 2007)

After that remarkable line from his new book was made public, Greenspan rapidly backtracked. He "clarified" that he was talking about "security" and that oil was "not [...] the administration's motive." (Bob Woodward, 'Greenspan: Ouster Of Hussein Crucial For Oil Security,' Washington Post, September 17, 2007). The media's attention has since moved away from such dangerous ground. Instead, safe territory on Iraqi oil is defined by terms such as 'investment', 'stability', 'reconciliation' and 'equitable sharing of resources.'

The basis for such discourse was established before the invasion in 2003, when we were relentlessly told that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction had to be rooted out and 'stability' brought to the region. The doctrine of reconciliation and democracy was reaffirmed when George Bush gave a speech in January 2007 in which he set out 'benchmarks' to measure Iraq's 'progress'. Bush proclaimed a noble aim for the Iraqi government, with US support:

"To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis."

Bush also pledged that: "military and civilian experts [will] help local Iraqi communities pursue reconciliation, strengthen the moderates and speed the transition to Iraqi self-reliance. And Secretary [Condoleezza] Rice will soon appoint a reconstruction coordinator in Baghdad to ensure better results for economic assistance being spent in Iraq." ('"The Most Urgent Priority for Success in Iraq Is Security," Bush Says,' New York Times, January 11, 2007)

Thus, the approved framework of oil revenue 'sharing', underpinning Washington's 'reconciliation' among Iraqis, was decreed by the US president. And indeed this is the line followed in the bulk of corporate news reporting. Consider the following typical examples.

A Financial Times editorial hails a "national reconciliation package" to include "a law governing the country's oil and gas industry" and "directed at [...] discord between Iraq 's ethnic and confessional groups." (Leader, 'The irreconcilable. As deadlines pass, time is running out for a political solution in Iraq,' Financial Times, June 7, 2007)

The Times notes the guiding "principle that all oil revenues should be divided between the Iraqi regions". (Carl Mortished, 'Western oil major's bid marks breakthrough for troubled Iraqi industry,' The Times, August 23, 2007)

Ian Black, Middle East editor of the Guardian, writes of a raft of measures designed to tackle Iraqi debt relief. These include "a revenue-sharing oil law", drafted with the help of that well-known benefactor, the World Bank. (Black, 'Rice breaks the ice with Syria , but not Iran,' The Guardian, May 4, 2007)

The 'anti-war' Independent writes of "redistributing the cash [oil revenues] to the regions - which the new oil law states must be done in proportion to regions' populations". (Saeed Shah, 'Foreign companies in scramble for 10 new Kurdish oil contracts,' The Independent, March 23, 2007)

Steve Negus, Iraq correspondent of the Financial Times, even makes the classic journalistic mistake of taking government "hopes" at face value:

"The US hopes the oil law will reassure Sunnis that they will still receive a solid share of national oil export revenues under a new political order dominated by the Shia majority." (Negus, 'Iraqis try to curb pressure on US to quit,' Financial Times, September 10, 2007)

To date, no oil law has been approved by the Iraqi parliament despite extraordinary pressure from the US and UK governments. Sticking to the approved line, the FT's Andrew Ward writes of "oil revenues [...] being distributed equitably to the provinces, in spite of the failure to pass a national oil law". (Ward, 'Little political progress, White House admits,' Financial Times, September 15, 2007) ...

Concluding Remarks - Not About Oil, Of Course!

The real agenda behind Iraq's oil – the striving by powerful states, particularly the US, for strategic control of the resource-rich Middle East - has been all but ignored by the corporate media. When the truth is glimpsed, it is waved away as very much a secondary aim trailing behind the noble commitment to 'democracy'. As one Cambridge academic noted in the Financial Times:

"The war in Iraq is not, of course, about oil. Coalition troops are there to advance democracy and to protect the innocent. But the consequences for the world's energy markets of an unresolved conflict in a country that holds the world's third largest accumulation of oil reserves cannot be ignored." (Nick Butler, director of the Cambridge Centre for Energy Studies at the Judge Business School, 'Iraq needs an "oil for peace" deal,' Financial Times, September 12, 2007)

What is routinely missing from the corporate news media is historical context shedding light on Washington's real, rather than stated, motivations. Of central and long-standing relevance is the 1945 US State Department description of Saudi Arabian energy resources as "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history". Undiscovered oil fields in Iraq could well boost that country's reserves to 300 billion barrels, even more than in Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the whole of the Gulf region has long been considered "probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment." (Cited in Noam Chomsky, 'Hegemony or Survival', Hamish Hamilton, London, 2003, p.150)

Based on copiously-documented historical evidence, Noam Chomsky writes of US power:

"The basic missions of global management have endured from the early postwar period, among them: containing other centers of global power within the 'overall framework of order' managed by the United States; maintaining control of the world's energy supplies; barring unacceptable forms of independent nationalism; and overcoming 'crises of democracy' within domestic enemy territory." (Ibid., p.16)

But these truths, necessary for any public understanding of world affairs, are deemed too 'radioactive' to be carried by the corporate media.

Links:

* WSJ Energy Roundup - Of Algae, Nukes and Bicycles
* Cosmos - Nano-layered plastic sheet is strong as steel. "Made out of clay and a non-toxic glue similar to that used in school classrooms, the material is cheap, biodegradable and requires very little energy to produce, said Kotov: 'It's as green as you can imagine.'"
* TreeHugger - Biomimicry: Nacre Inspires Transparent Strong As Steel Plastic
* After Gutenberg - Elephant Grass Fueled Thermoelectric Power Plant
* Bruce Sterling - Wattson
* After Gutenberg - Solar Power 2007
* WorldChanging - Will Saving the Polar Bear Save the Arctic Ice?
* WorldChanging - Google Transit: Mapping the Future of Bicycling, Walking, and Transit
* Transition Culture - Patrick Holden, Peak Oil, Local Food and Transition.
* The Australian - Beach confident of oil migrating west. Fossicking for the last oil in the Cooper Basin.
* The Australian - Oil and Gas Council warns of costly greenhouse decisions. Costly to them. The APPEA lives in a bizarre fantasy world where gas fired power is clean, cheap and abundant. It may be cleaner than coal, but it doesn't compete with wind, solar, geothermal or ocean energy in that dimension, and it is becoming both scarcer and more expensive. There are better uses for gas than burning it in power stations.
* New Zealand Herald - US energy expert attacks airlines' bid to fly more Kiwis. Richard Heinberg in New Zealand.
* SMH - Jimmy Carter calls Cheney a 'disaster' for US
* New York Times - Marines Press to Remove Their Forces From Iraq
* New York Times - Supporters of Gore Lead a Movement That Lacks a Candidate
* News And Policy - Ron Paul Ups the Ante on the Iraq War at Republican Debate: Says He Will Not Support the GOP Nominee if He Fails to Commit to Immediate Withdrawal of Troops
* SMH - Kirby in stinging attack on fellow High Court judges
* Washington Post - Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs.