Can Poo Save The Planet ?  

The Australian has a report on the upcoming summit of the WTO - no, not the World Trade Organisation: the World Toilet Organisation - and their plans to start making use of the resources that flow through their systems.

A CHEAP system to recycle human waste into bio-gas and fertiliser may allow 2.6 billion people in the world access to toilets and reduce global warming, an Indian environmental expert says.

Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of the Sulabh International Social Service Organisation, said his group planned to push the system at the seventh annual World Toilet Summit, to be held in New Delhi at the end of October. The organisation is dedicated to providing toilets to nearly 730 million people in India who lack them. "The Millennium Development Goals set in South Africa in 2002 aim by 2015 to cut by half the 2.6 billion people worldwide who lack toilets and provide them to all by 2025,'' Mr Pathak said at a briefing ahead of the summit.

He said India's contribution would be a toilet system that organically breaks down faeces into trapped bio-gas that could be burned to provide cooking fuel and electricity, and convert urine into fertiliser. "Now we want others to know about this technology which was recently installed at Kabul, Afghanistan, because it can help meet the Millennium Development Goals and reduce global warming.''

Founded in 2001 as a non-profit organisation, the World Toilet Organisation aims to make sanitation a key global issue and now says it has 55 member groups from 42 countries.

The Wall Street journal has a look at the progress of Tesla Motors and their forthcoming electric car. I like their proposed tesla slogan - "You can't kill an electric car you can't catch".

Tesla Motors is a car company that's both decades ahead of its time, and a year behind schedule. Soon, it will become clear which is more important to Tesla's long-term future, and the future of the disruptive ideas the company represents.

For those who somehow missed the blizzard of publicity that has swirled around this company for the past 18 months or so, Tesla (www.teslamotors.com) is a Silicon Valley start-up, bankrolled by some of the same people who brought you the Internet boom of the late 1990s. The company's stated ambition is to develop over the next several years a full array of electric cars. Tesla's fans -- many of them influential leaders of Silicon Valley's "clean tech" green-technology movement -- see Tesla as an icon of the broader effort to make big money by unshackling the U.S. economy from petroleum.

Tesla's first model will be a $98,000 electric roadster, developed around the architecture of a Lotus Elise, that uses 6,831 lithium-ion batteries similar to those used in laptop computers, a patented electric-motor system, and a highly sophisticated package of controllers and software to deliver an exotically attractive car that zaps from standstill to 60 miles per hour in under four seconds and can travel up to 245 miles on a single charge.

Tesla isn't planning any traditional advertising, but if it did, one slogan could be: "You can't kill an electric car you can't catch."

Tesla and its approach to electrifying the automobile may well redefine the car industry. But first, Tesla needs to actually deliver the car. That was once supposed to have happened by early this year. Now, company co-founder Martin Eberhard says, the first Roadsters should come off the Lotus assembly line in Britain sometime during the first quarter of 2008.

"Our plan is to ramp up very gently," he says. The run of cars produced during the first quarter of 2008 could be only about 50 vehicles, with a goal of building a total of about 600 cars in the 2008 model year. Tesla recently told potential customers that it can no longer guarantee delivery of 2008 models. Newcomers to the waiting list might well get 2009s. ...

The logistics of getting components produced in Thailand, Taiwan, and the U.S. to arrive at the right time at the assembly plant in England have proven challenging. To manage this effort, Tesla in September hired Michael Marks, former chief executive officer of contract manufacturing giant Flextronics International Ltd. to become its CEO, replacing Mr. Eberhard, who remained as president of technology.

"Silicon Valley engineers find it easy to think they know everything and Rust Belt companies don't know anything," Mr. Eberhard says. "More often than not the knee jerk reaction, that these guys (in Detroit) don't know what they are doing, is wrong."

That said, Mr. Eberhard says conventional car makers did get it wrong on electric vehicle technology in the 1990s and early years of this decade.

Big car makers, led by General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp., responded to a California mandate in the late '90s by producing vehicles that were supposed to prove that electric vehicles could be affordable and oh-so-politically correct. Unfortunately, the GM EV1 and the electric Toyota RAV4 struck mainstream customers as geeky, slow and impractical.

"Electric cars had a terrible black eye," Mr. Eberhard says. As far as the general public was concerned, "they sucked and they were dead."

Tesla's Big Idea was to start with an electric car that appeals to the id, not the superego. From the start, Mr. Eberhard says he wanted a car that could outrun a Porsche in a 0-60 trial, and would go 250 miles on a charge. He says the production Roadster will hit the under four-second target for the 0-60 dash, and will get very close to the original goal on range.

More fundamentally, the Tesla Roadster is designed to ride the technology curve from the high end of the price ladder down -- the direction that has worked for most other forms of technological innovation from the VCR to the laptop.

But after the Roadster is launched, and the high-tech elite have shown off their status-defining 2008 models at Silicon Valley's finest restaurants and clubs, what can Tesla become?

Tesla so far has raised $105 million from venture-capital firms and Chairman Elon Musk, the PayPal founder who was a ground floor investor. That's a lot for a tech startup, but it's chump change in the auto industry, where car programs with century-old, conventional technology can easily cost $500 million to $1 billion.

"Our ambition is, one step at a time, to become a real car company," Mr. Eberhard says. Tesla plans to develop more practical and more affordable electric vehicles, expanding its potential revenue. But the time frame for that is now 2010, not 2009 as once proposed.

Last May, Mr. Eberhard told a Senate committee that the company's second model would be a $50,000 sedan built in New Mexico, followed by an even more affordable car. Now, Mr. Eberhard is cagier about exactly what Tesla's "White Star" model line will be, and exactly when it will appear. "We are deep, deep into that," he says. "We are planning on building (cars) in Albuquerque. It's possible we might want to do something different."

Tesla is named for Nikola Tesla, the godfather of alternating current and radio who nonetheless died poor, in part because his weirdness wound up obscuring his genius. In recent years, Tesla has become a patron saint of Silicon Valley.

But there's another ghost hovering over Tesla Motors -- one whose name Mr. Eberhard brings up before a visitor can get around to it: John DeLorean.

Mr. DeLorean, who died in 2005, was the charismatic General Motors executive who left GM after clashing with its stolid hierarchy, and who later founded a company to build what he called the "ethical sports car." The DMC-12, with its stainless steel body panels and gull-wing doors, was designed to appeal to wealthy enthusiasts with a taste for the exotic. But Mr. DeLorean's company collapsed in 1982, and he spent several years fighting and beating charges of drug dealing and fraud. The DeLorean company's failure is one of several examples of how hard it has been for upstarts to challenge the automotive oligarchy since World War II.

"What problem was DeLorean solving?" Mr. Eberhard asks in response to the inevitable question about how Tesla avoids DeLorean's fate. The DeLorean car, when it appeared, was not any better, in some ways not as good, as a Chevrolet Corvette that GM was offering for less money, he says. By contrast, Tesla is offering a product unlike any other. "Nobody produces a real electric car," he says.

What will define success for Tesla? Big car makers have tools, capital and experience in dealing with the harsh environment of the global auto market that Silicon Valley doesn't possess, even with its abundance of rich, smart technology visionaries and venture-capital firms. Mr. Eberhard says selling out isn't the plan, even though "we've been approached by many, many car companies."

"We are rolling everything we can back into growing the company," he says. "If we wanted to be a fancy sports car company, we could do that next year."

After Gutenberg has an update on the Norwegian THINK City electric car - "Tesla Thinking versus Think Testing".

When last we looked in on Jan-Olaf, we surmised that a hybrid drive train might be in the works for Think. At the time, there was some mention of other battery options being explored, now we know what they were.

In direct competition with the Kewet for the Scandinavian market, the second generation TH!NK City vehicle is among several electric city cars targeting the European market. The Norwegian electric car manufacturer certainly has experience in making and selling Battery-powered all-Electric Vehicles. The TH!NK city launched in 1999. While part of Ford, Think produced one of the largest fleets of electric vehicles in the world.

Autoblog Green has some breaking news. Ener1 and Th!nk have signed what currently is the largest contract yet for lithium-ion batteries. Jan-Olaf Willums, President and Chief Executive Officer of Think Global stated:

We are confident in EnerDel’s capabilities to deliver this safe, reliable and high energy battery system that will power the electric vehicle of the future. While this is the largest Lithium ion battery contract in the automotive industry to date, we expect demand for our vehicle and the resulting battery supply requirements to increase substantially from these levels.

Ener1 will deliver production prototypes to Think in March 2008. The second milestone will be delivery of pre-production parts (valued at $1.4 M) the following July. The contract with Think is the first, commercial, automotive venture for EnerDel, which plans to offer battery products for each of the major electric vehicle categories — HEV, PHEV and EV. “With a deal like this,” opines ABG reporter Linton, “other car companies are sure to come looking at Ener1’s technology.”

With governmental agencies willing to convert HEVs to PHEVs and more vendors will to sell kits for converting a Toyota Prius to a Toyota Plug-in HV, EnerDel could have a ready market. “We already noticed they seem to be working on a Prius in the lab,” reports Linton.

After reading the New York Times, The Naib fretted that a $2,500 car could be The End Of Us ALL. On the other hand, such countries are less in the grip of Big Oil than the United States. They will use whatever propulsion is cheap and available. Engines that Americans put on riding lawn mowers could become fuel sipping range extenders. For such low cost electric drive, electricity storage must be done cheaply.

All such development is none too soon, given the rumblings of the dragon’s stomach. Industry observers forecast the Chinese buying four million car in the next six years and sales of two million cars over the same period in India.

“Next fall, the Indian automaker Tata Motors is scheduled to introduce its long-awaited People’s Car, with a sticker price of about $2,500. Hot on its tail may be as many as half a dozen new ultra-affordable vehicles — some from the world’s leading car makers, including Toyota and Renault-Nissan.”

If manufacturers in China and India can figure out how to make small, cheap cars, then “they are expected to start exporting them to other fast-growing markets where the proportion of car ownership remains small — places like Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East.”

This blog recently noted that the Korean Ministry of the Environment had placed an order for 3,390 hybrids from Kia and Hyundai. Chinese car makers have large stakes in South Korean car making. It is a position from which they can began to compete with the likes of Honda and Renault-Nissan. And, everyone remembers the history of the Bug.

Tom Konrad at Alt Energy Stocks has an article on the post peak transportation system - Investing in Mode-Shifting: Preparing for a Peak Oil World (lots of links at the post itself).

Technology cannot save us

Technology will not save us from peak oil, but the invisible hand of economics will. It's easy to get excited about all the amazing new vehicles the world's car-makers are promising us. Even if we believe manufacturers' hype, the Cadillac SRX your neighbor bought last week will be on the road for at least a couple decades, and all the fuel saved by your next plug-in hybrid will not make up for the amount it guzzles.

I, and many others, believe that the Western World will soon have to cope with much less oil than we are accustomed to, without the ability to increase the efficiency of our vehicle fleet significantly in the near term. Since the oil supply available will not be increased significantly at any price, the result will be demand destruction: people will drive less. Even alternative fuels are limited by available feedstocks, and can only moderate the crisis. Yes, Americans have shrugged off $3 gas and are still driving like it's 1999, but when supply is constrained, the question becomes not: "Will $5 gas make people drive less?" but: "What price will gas have to reach to force people to drive less?"

I frankly don't know what price it will take to reduce oil consumption significantly, but I do know that whatever that price is, that is how much it will cost when we are confronted with reduced supply. There's little doubt in my mind that fuel prices will be high, and headed higher.

Mode Shifting will save us

When it comes to drastically reducing oil use, the only short-term option is mode shifting: Carpooling, Biking, Public Transport, and Walking. Westerners, and especially North Americans are typically very resistant to mode shifting because our cities are designed for cars. Public transit is slow and unpleasant, and walking or biking are seen as downright dangerous. Ironically, even before oil prices rise, mode shifting has gigantic societal benefits in terms of cost, health, and safety [.pdf], and can be encouraged with market based fixes such as congestion pricing, parking cash outs, and Pay as You Drive auto insurance.

But it will be painful

In some places, these fixes are happening, but in far too many they are not or are too slow. This is because of a classic chicken-and-egg problem: public transit mostly slow and uncomfortable because most people who vote drive cars, while most people drive cars because public transit is slow and inconvenient. There certainly are exceptions, and far sighted cities like my own Denver are engaged in rapid build-outs of public transportation. When the majority of voters are forced out of their cars by higher fuel prices, the public will demand a massive increase in such investments everywhere, but not until the realization slowly dawns that gasoline prices are high and rising, and public transportation and biking and walking is not just for the poor. It can also be a virtuous cycle: Where levels of biking and walking are higher, bicycle and pedestrian safety is greater.

The sooner we realize that we are not going to be able to cling to our cars forever, the sooner we can start readying our cities for the transition, and the less painful that transition will be. It also means that investors with the foresight to invest in mode-shifting industries today will be able to benefit from the trend sooner.

Sectors to Consider

It is possible to invest directly in some of the market fixing strategies that encourage public transit, but the companies involved tend to be small and private (or both.) I prefer established companies which already have profitable businesses that will simply become more profitable when people take up new modes of transport. The three sectors which have drawn my attention are manufactures of bicycles, light rail, and busses, and component makers for each.

Californian activist Van Jones has been getting a lot of press lately - most recently featuring in Thomas Friedman's column in the NYT - "The Green Collar Solution".

Van Jones is a rare bird. He's a black social activist in Oakland, Calif., and as green an environmentalist as they come. He really gets passionate, and funny, when he talks about what it's like to be black and green:

"Try this experiment. Go knock on someone's door in West Oakland, Watts or Newark and say: 'We gotta really big problem!' They say: 'We do? We do?' 'Yeah, we gotta really big problem!' 'We do? We do?' 'Yeah, we gotta save the polar bears! You may not make it out of this neighborhood alive, but we gotta save the polar bears!' "

Mr. Jones then just shakes his head. You try that approach on people without jobs who live in neighborhoods where they've got a lot better chance of getting killed by a passing shooter than a melting glacier, you're going to get nowhere — and without bringing America's underclass into the green movement, it's going to get nowhere, too.

"We need a different on-ramp" for people from disadvantaged communities, says Mr. Jones. "The leaders of the climate establishment came in through one door and now they want to squeeze everyone through that same door. It's not going to work. If we want to have a broad-based environmental movement, we need more entry points."

Mr. Jones, who heads the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, which helps kids avoid jail and secure jobs, has an idea how to change that — a "green-collar" jobs program that focuses on underprivileged youth. I would not underestimate him. Mr. Jones, age 39 and a Yale Law School grad, exudes enough energy to light a few buildings on his own.

One thing spurring him in this project, he explained, was the way that the big oil companies bought ads in black-owned newspapers in California in 2006 showing an African-American woman filling her gas tank with a horrified look at the pump price. The ads were used to help bring out black votes to defeat Proposition 87. That ballot initiative proposed a tax on oil companies drilling in California, the money from which would have gone to develop alternative energy projects. The oil companies tried to scare African-Americans into thinking that the tax on the companies would be passed on at the pump.

"The polluters were able to stampede poor people into their camp," said Mr. Jones. "I never want to see an N.A.A.C.P. leader on the wrong side of an environment issue again."

Using his little center in Oakland, Mr. Jones has been on a crusade to help underprivileged African-Americans and other disadvantaged communities understand why they would be the biggest beneficiaries of a greener America. It's about jobs. The more government requires buildings to be more energy efficient, the more work there will be retrofitting buildings all across America with solar panels, insulation and other weatherizing materials. Those are manual-labor jobs that can't be outsourced.

"You can't take a building you want to weatherize, put it on a ship to China and then have them do it and send it back," said Mr. Jones. "So we are going to have to put people to work in this country — weatherizing millions of buildings, putting up solar panels, constructing wind farms. Those green-collar jobs can provide a pathway out of poverty for someone who has not gone to college."

Let's tell our disaffected youth: "You can make more money if you put down that handgun and pick up a caulk gun."

Remember, adds Mr. Jones, "a big chunk of the African-American community is economically stranded. The blue-collar, stepping-stone, manufacturing jobs are leaving. And they're not being replaced by anything. So you have this whole generation of young blacks who are basically in economic free fall." Green-collar retrofitting jobs are a great way to catch them.

To this end, Mr. Jones's group and the electrical union in Oakland created the Oakland Apollo Alliance. This year that coalition helped to raise $250,000 from the city government to create a union-supported training program that will teach young people in Oakland how to put up solar panels and weatherize buildings.

It is the beginning of a "Green for All" campaign (greenforall.org) that Mr. Jones — backed by other environmental activists like Majora Carter from Sustainable South Bronx — is launching to get Congress to allocate $125 million to train 30,000 young people a year in green trades.

"If we can get these youth in on the ground floor of the solar industry now, where they can be installers today, they'll become managers in five years and owners in 10. And then they become inventors," said Mr. Jones. "The green economy has the power to deliver new sources of work, wealth and health to low-income people — while honoring the Earth. If you can do that, you just wiped out a whole bunch of problems. We can make what is good for poor black kids good for the polar bears and good for the country."

Bruce Sterling's latest edition of "Arphid Watch" has a look at the "very spimey" Intelligent Sensor Network. This is the infrastructure you build the "internet of things" on which helps enable full cycle Cradle to Cradle manufacturing which in turn eliminates our dependency on digging up ever greater quantities of stuff to feed into our manufacturing systems (just in case you we were wondering if it was on topic).

Link: www.rfidwizards.com - RFID Middleware is Extinct. The Intelligent Sensor Network is Born..

Page 1 of 8 (((I just read all 8 pages; very spimey.)))

Written By Louis Sirico with brilliant contributions from Carlos Arteaga and Tony Woods

"RFID Middleware is not a long term solution".

It has taken me some time to muster the nerve to publicly proclaim what many experts in the RFID industry have whispered behind closed doors for years. This should be a little less surprising as several big name providers have recently dropped out of the market. Yet, now that I have published this bold announcement, I'm left with the enormous task of backing it up and describing the evolutionary process that has taken place.

"Let me start by clarifying what I mean by RFID middleware. Forrester Research defines RFID middleware as "Platforms for managing RFID data and routing it between tag readers or other auto identification devices and enterprise systems." What is unfortunate is that many RFID middleware applications were developed with a premise that the universe revolves around RFID data. These in-a-box applications were meant as quick fixes for encoding and printing a RFID label that's slapped on a pallet, and then reading tags as they pass through a portal.

"These applications are really Band-Aid-ware. If you have a small, pilot project fenced off in the corner of your warehouse they're fine to show a proof-of-concept, but once you enter the real world, RFID data must be integrated with all your other devices, not just routed to them. Once implementers tried to do more than a simple process, they started running into limitations that have slowed adoption of a technology that has incredible value when put into operation correctly.

"In order to understand why RFID middleware is dying off, the industry must change its perception of RFID altogether. Which leads to my second bold proclamation:

"A RFID reader is actually a sensor and it needs to be treated as one...."

(((This is the part I like best:)))

"Each sensor needs to be associated with a location. A sensor can be anywhere and its location can be stationary or moving. That’s why a Location Processing System or LPS is required. The location of a fixed position sensor can be determined simply by performing a look-up in the LPS (e.g., the bar code reader is at work area 12.)

"Here are some examples of how the location of a sensor can be determined:

• Real time location systems (RTLS) that use Wi-Fi (802.11 based), Ultra-Wide Band (UWB), or similar;
• Global Positioning Systems (GPS);
• Imaging – processes digital images from cameras;
• Acoustic – systems that use sound waves;
• Location markers – associate a RFID tag with a position. When the tag is read, you know the approximate position of the RFID reader

"Each of these methods of location has there own Position Engine (PE) for determining location. Some intelligent sensors even have one or more location engines built-in.

"Since the methods of determining location can vary, the LPS should not only be able to use position engines, but also be able to automatically switch between them. For Example, at a facility with an 802.11 based RTLS inside and GPS outside. This allows you to combine the location information from different areas or facilities and monitor them in a central location. Besides, if the LPS cannot support different position engines, then how will it support future technologies yet to come?"

The Australian reports that Russia now seems to be getting close to guaranteeing Iran's security, which if true would make a US attack unlikely unless someone was determined to kick off world war 3. In response, Bush says we may just get that war anyway. And that Putin is the new Hitler.

Russian President Vladimir Putin forged an alliance with Iran overnight against any military action by the West to destroy the country's nuclear ambitions. A summit of Caspian Sea nations in Tehran agreed to bar foreign states from using their territory for military strikes against a member country.

Mr Putin, the first Kremlin leader to visit Iran since the Second World War, insisted that the use of force was unacceptable. "It is important ... that we not only not use any kind of force but also do not even think about the possibility of using force," he told the leaders of Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

The declaration of the five states did not specify a particular threat. Rumours have long circulated, however, that the US is seeking Azerbaijan's permission to use airfields for possible military action to stop Iran developing a nuclear bomb. ...

The Tehran declaration strengthened Moscow's hostility to any attempt at a military solution. It also offered support for Iran by asserting the right of any country that has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to develop peaceful nuclear energy "without discrimination". Tehran insists that its nuclear programme is purely for civil purposes to generate electricity.

The summit was called to try to settle the status of the Caspian among the five states that border the sea. Iran and the former Soviet Union shared it equally but there has been a 16-year dispute over mineral rights since the emergence of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan as independent states in 1991.

The leaders failed to reach agreement on dividing the seabed, which is believed to hold the world's third-largest reserves of oil and gas. They agreed to meet again in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, next year.

Links:

* Always On - Where the Green VCs are Betting
* After Gutenberg - More BEVs and GO-HEVs in Norway?
* Tom Whipple - Peak Oil Review - October 15th, 2007
* Energy Bulletin - Russian Oil - a Depletion Rate Model estimate of the future Russian oil production and export
* The Australian - Oil prices head for $US100 a barrel
* WSJ Energy Roundup - White House 'Very Concerned' About High Energy Prices. Where is a good cartoon when I need one...
* Business Week - Fuel Worries Drag on Airlines
* The Australian - Woodside cuts oil production forecast
* The Australian - Santos hails move to lift share cap
* The Australian - ERA uranium output dips in Q3
* The Australian - Hope for uranium exports to India
* The Australian - Clean coal system for Chinese plant.
* The Times - China's rising living standard cranks up resource competition. Gets the award for the most disingenuous, short sighted and hypocritical article I've read this year.
* TomDispatch - The Coming Collision in Sudan
* WSJ Informed Reader -Not All Acts Of God Are Acts Of God/
* Beyond The Beyond - Mystery Electronic Warfare Scheme Blanks Israeli Satellite TV
* Cryptogon - David Kelly: Secret Knife Evidence Points to Murder