The federal government's proposed new "flood levy" to pay for cleaning up after the Queensland floods had a number of flaws (even ignoring the fundamental injustice of making regular taxpayers foot the whole bill leaving business untouched), chief among them the axing of a number of alternative energy programs.

The Greens (with support from GetUp) seem to have managed to block at least one of the cuts, with the "solar flagships" program getting a reprieve (the bill has passed the house of reps but still remains stuck in the Senate).

PM Gillard originally tried to claim the programs were unnecessary given her intention to put a cost on carbon emissions one day - given the governments failure to do this in its first term (and the general inadequacy of the CPRS bill they put forward back then) its unsurprising people want to keep the programs in place.

The ABC has a look at the issue - Gillard is gambling with her climate credibility.

AT HER RECENT NATIONAL Press Club address, Prime Minister Julia Gillard rationalised Labor's decision to cut its investment in renewable energy to fund the flood levy on the basis that these policies "are no longer necessary" with a carbon price. Last week, addressing the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, Gillard argued that "a carbon price will drive another sweeping technological revolution like Information Technology did in the 1980s and 90s."

Both cases reveal that those advising the PM grossly misunderstand climate and energy policy.

Nations with fast-developing renewable energy sectors are using policies like feed-in-tariffs (among other mechanisms) to drive investment. Feed-in-tariffs (FiT) in Spain, for example, have kick-started a domestic solar thermal industry. The Spanish engineering giant SENER has just completed its flagship concentrating solar thermal (CST) plant, and there are another US$20 billion worth of solar thermal projects in the pipeline.

Bizarrely, the Australian Prime Minister thinks that a carbon price alone will drive an economic boom comparable to the IT revolution even though pricing instruments did not kick-start those industries. "We didn't tax typewriters to get the computer. We didn't tax telegraphs to get telephones," the Breakthrough Institute's Michael Shellenberger is fond of saying. On the contrary, there was a long history of US government investment that helped nurture IT into the profitable sector that it is today.

Matthew Warren, chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, correctly notes that "many of the biggest technological 'leaps' forward and infrastructure projects in modern history have been underwritten by government. Typically these are large-scale investments with either big risks or long paybacks - or both." This is where the Gillard government needs to increase its focus. The government must craft policy that mobilises the investment needed for driving clean technologies down the cost reduction curve. "Relying on a carbon price alone," warns Warren, "is institutionalising market failure."

Gillard's narrow focus on a carbon-price is just the most recent example of a string of clumsy strategies. Since taking over the prime ministership from Kevin Rudd, Gillard announced and killed the 'cash for clunkers' program that was estimated to abate carbon at $394 per tonne. The now defunct program won't be missed. Similarly, the idea of a citizen's assembly was met with derision before being quietly replaced with the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee thanks to the influence of the Greens. Whether Gillard's climate policy gaffs were based on poor advice from outgoing chief-of-staff Amanda Lampe or for other reasons, the current government's approach to the climate crisis to date has been anything but prolific.

It's clear that PM Gillard has it backwards. She has been led to believe that carbon pricing alone is enough to decarbonise our economy, when in fact, it's carbon pricing that is the ultimate complementary measure. It will take a range of policies to drive renewable energy deployment, clean technology uptake, and energy efficiency improvements. This is the true consensus.

Gillard's carbon-price-only position is not only off the mark policy-wise, but out of step with even the most cautious voices in climate policy debates. The hitherto carbon price-focused Climate Institute has changed their tune - perhaps realising the inherent difficulty of explaining emissions trading to the public or the political liability of increasing energy prices. They concede that a carbon price "will not completely replace the need for public investment in developing clean energy technologies," adding that "… public investments are crucial to develop cleaner energy industries even with a price on pollution".

Politically speaking, the PM's decision to abandon public investment also misses the opportunity to rally people who support investment in renewable energy more than carbon pricing. GetUp's post-election survey showed that 83 per cent of over 33,000 members who participated strongly support investing in renewable energy. Given that renewable energy investment was the top ranked issue out of ten and carbon pricing last, Gillard's agenda makes for bad politics and bad policy.

Ross Gittins at the SMH also has an interesting column on the value of a carbon price versus additional programs to accelerate development of renewable energy sources - Carbon price is no fix-all.

Our wide brown land has always been subject to ''extreme weather events'' - droughts, floods, cyclones, bushfires and heatwaves. That's why no one can say the extreme events we've been suffering lately are a direct consequence of climate change.

But scientists have long predicted that one effect of global warming would be for extreme events to become more extreme, which is just what seems to be happening. So it would be a brave or foolhardy person who denied recent events had anything to do with climate change. And, certainly, the insurance industry, which keeps careful records of these events, is in no doubt that climate change is making things worse.
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All this being so, you'd expect it to strengthen our determination to get on with doing our bit to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Yet cuts in spending on climate change programs are one of the main ways Prime Minister Julia Gillard proposes to cover the cost of rebuilding public infrastructure in Queensland. The cuts will save almost $1.7 billion over four years, compared with the $1.8 billion the temporary tax levy will raise.

So what on earth is Gillard on about?

She says the key to it is her determination to deliver a carbon price. ''There is complete consensus that the most efficient way to reduce carbon is to price carbon. Some of these policies are less efficient than a carbon price and will no longer be necessary - others will be better delayed until a carbon price's full effects are felt,'' she says.

She's right that there's strong agreement among economists and others that the most efficient - that is, the least costly in terms of economic activity discouraged - way to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide is to build the cost of the damage done by the emissions into the prices of the emissions-intensive goods and services we produce.

This is the way to enlist market forces - our tendency to change our behaviour in response to changes in the prices we pay - in the service of the environment. It encourages us to find ways to reduce our emissions while giving us freedom to choose the ways that work best for us.

It also removes the price disadvantage suffered by the various forms of renewable energy because the prices of fossil fuels don't include the cost of the damage they're doing to the environment.

But, as the Australia Institute's Richard Denniss and Andrew Macintosh point out in a paper to be released today, imposing a price on carbon emissions won't solve the problems most of the affected climate programs were intended to tackle.

For instance, the cash-for-clunkers scheme and the Green Car Innovation Fund are designed to reduce emissions from cars. But the government's former emissions trading scheme specifically excluded petrol, and there's been no suggestion the new arrangements will include it.

The government plans to cut research into carbon capture and storage. But though raising the price of coal in Australia will provide some incentive for coal companies to continue pursuing clean-coal technology, they're unlikely to put in nearly as much money as the government was promising because the technology is not at all promising.

The government plans to cap or cancel various programs aimed at encouraging households to install solar panels. Again, it's doubtful whether raising the price of coal-based electricity will be sufficient to overcome the various impediments to better energy use in the home. So Gillard's claim that a price on carbon will remove the need for other measures to discourage emissions doesn't stand up.

But that's not to say she shouldn't be cutting back or getting rid of those particular measures. Most of them would be no loss. The cash-for-clunkers scheme is a hugely expensive way of encouraging a modest reduction in omissions. The green car fund is just a disguise for giving further help to car makers.

And the hope that the carbon dioxide emitted during the generation of electricity from coal could be captured and stored underground in a commercially viable way is probably a pipedream.

As for the schemes to encourage households to go solar, they've been far too generous, requiring the taxpayer to pay much too much for the reduction of emissions - up to $280 a tonne in the case of one scheme.

No, the disappearance of most of these programs will be no loss. But in claiming they will be made redundant by a carbon price, Gillard is trying to cover the government's embarrassment because most of them were introduced by Labor itself. And, as Denniss and Macintosh argue, she is inflating expectations about how much a carbon price could achieve. It may be the most important thing we need to do, but it's not the only thing.

Because market forces are powerful but far from perfect, the carbon price needs to be complemented by other measures. Getting rid of bad complementary measures is fine, but they need to be replaced by measures that are more cost effective.

And if Gillard is looking for cost savings to help pay for flood damage, she should start by getting rid of programs that actually subsidise the use of fossil fuels: the concessional taxation of company cars, the exemption from fuel excise for aircraft and natural gas and certain other tax concessions. Getting rid of those would not only help reduce emissions, it would save the budget more than $4 billion a year.

Jamie Walker at The Weekend Australian has an interesting article on the movement to the south of "Goyders Line" - the line that defines the limits of practical farming in South Australia.

See the link for an accompanying video. The ABC did a documentary on the history of Goyder's line last year as well.

An inch still means everything out here on Goyder’s Line. It can make a man or break him, realise his dreams or turn them to dust. An extra inch in the rain gauge will fill a paddock knee-high with wheat, washing away the bitter seasons and piled-up debt. That inch – 25mm – is what Kym Fromm lives for.

Yet when this third-generation farmer looks out of his home’s dirt-streaked windows, beyond the sunburnt sheep and crop stubble he’s turned them loose on, towards a horizon that shimmers in the heat, he wonders what’s going on with the line. It was the one thing people thought they could count on in an unpredictable land. It was supposed to be immovable, a fixture among the dancing whirlwinds and blown hopes of the early settlers, whose ruined homesteads dot the countryside. Fromm’s not so sure: inch by inch, year by year, the line seems to be closing in.

If this is climate change at work, he ponders, it won’t leave him all that much of a future. The past two disastrous seasons confounded all his experience of cropping in South Australia’s drought-prone Mid North. “Everything happened back-to-front,” he sighs, nursing a coffee in his leathery hands. “The rain came in summer when we didn’t need it, it was dry all winter, and what was left of the crop got burned off when the northerlies started up in spring. Crazy stuff, mate, even for this country.”

The implications go far beyond his 2000ha property near Pekina, on George Goyder’s famous “line of reliable rainfall”, three hours’ drive from Adelaide. For more than 140 years this line has marked the limit of possibility for broadacre farming in the nation’s driest state. The colonial surveyor-general was undoubtedly a man ahead of his time. In the 1860s, he mapped where crops could be grown and where they could not. The debate he unleashed has never been more passionately argued than it is today, as drought and global warming raise new concerns about how intensively marginal agricultural lands should be worked, if at all.

The questions echo across the land, through the towns and cities, all the way to the marbled halls of federal Parliament. Are some growers simply in the wrong place, on country that can no longer sustain them? Could advances in farm practices and new crop varieties be their salvation? Or is the fight already lost (in which case, why should taxpayers throw good money after bad by subsidising them)?

Goyder’s answer, all those years ago, was to partition South Australia along what turned out to be the 10 inch (254mm) isohyet. (An isohyet is a line drawn on a map connecting points that receive equal rainfall.) It was an astonishing feat. With limited climate data he followed the rainfall contour on horseback, tracking the tell-tale break in the landscape where eucalypt forest and native grasslands gave way to sparse saltbush country. For every mile ventured beyond the line, rainfall was said to drop by an inch, until it became so low there was no point doing the arithmetic.

People set out to try to prove Goyder wrong by farming beyond the line. Few succeeded. Being on the safe side of the line – as 51-year-old Fromm is, if barely – instilled confidence that drought and disastrous seasons could be endured.

No longer. The reality of climate change has swept away the certainties of Goyder, feeding into wider concern that rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns will push vast tracts of marginal agricultural land past the point of viability. In the worst-case scenarios developed by South Australia’s Research and Development Institute and CSIRO, the line will shift south, rolling over Fromm’s dusty fields, perhaps all the way to the vineyards of the Clare Valley, about 120km distant.

Nearly everyone seems to have a theory about where the line will end up, and what that means for hardscrabble farming. Fromm is holding on – just. In 2006, he lost his entire crop. Last year was even more devastating, because for a while he had dared to believe the worst was over. Good rains in January 2007 were followed by a soaking in May, persuading him to go for broke and plant an extra paddock. Then, nothing. For a second successive year the winter rains failed.

Meticulously, he diarised the whole sorry saga. Fromm stabs a meaty finger at the entry for August 31, 2007: “Windy, 33 degrees,” he declaims, “hottest winter’s day I’ve had.” A scorching northerly began blowing on October 5 – the barley had “gone off” and the wheat was severely stressed. By the end of the month temperatures had hit 40 degrees. “Really bad,” he noted on the 27th, “Severely windy … dust everywhere.” Eventually he brought in a crop, but it was too meagre to retrieve the season. Despite near-record wheat prices he wound up $50,000 further in debt. “We had a 10 per cent chance of it going bad and, guess what, it did,” he says, draining his coffee, a long, sweaty afternoon’s work on the tractor beckoning. What he desperately needs is a return to something like normal conditions this year. If he loses another crop, he doesn’t know what will happen. Truth be told, no one really does. ...

Increasingly, the anecdotal evidence is backed by hard, scientific fact that the changed conditions are beyond any known seasonal variations. Last year was the hottest and among the driest on record in the bottom half of the continent. Southeastern Australia has missed out on the equivalent of a full year’s rainfall over the past decade, and nowhere has been worse affected than the Mid North of South Australia. What rain did fall came at the wrong time for farmers: the Bureau of Meteorology’s 2007 climate statement confirmed that last June-July was abnormally dry, and the spring was even worse, yielding hardly a sprinkle of rain when the crops needed it most.

The bureau’s head of climate analysis, David Jones, says it could be time to accept that the drying of the southern half of the continent is permanent. If so, cropping on the margins of Goyder’s Line will take place in drought conditions that might never fully break. “Perhaps we should call it our new climate,” Jones says. NSW’s mean temperature was 1.13 degrees above average in 2007, the equivalent of the state moving 150km closer to the equator.

Peter Hayman, of South Australia’s Research and Development Institute, who has been modelling potential shifts in the line, has used CSIRO data to factor in a rise in temperatures of up to 1.5 degrees by 2030, and up to five degrees by 2070. Rainfall patterns, however, are much harder to predict. “Most of the models are consistent about a drying trend, but the extent varies,” Hayman says. The bleakest forecast is for rainfall in the region to decrease by up to 50 per cent by 2070. In that event, the line would shift to Clare, destroying vast tracts of agricultural land. He is careful to point out, however, that this is by no means a certainty.

Climate change is lengthening southern Australia’s dry, hot summer, reducing winter rain, and that is what appears to be causing the line to move. By Hayman’s calculation, 10 per cent less rain would push the Orroroo section of the line south by 20km. With a 30 per cent drop in rainfall, the distance blows out to 43km; at 50 per cent it is at Clare, nearly halfway to Adelaide. Rainfall is not the only concern, either. Rising temperatures will produce more intense heatwaves, compounding the threat to crops. ...

The BBC has a report on the American Geophysical Union's latest statement, calling for a 50% cut in carbon emissions.

The world's climate is "clearly out of balance and is warming", the world's largest society of Earth and space scientists has said in a statement. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) warned that changes to the Earth's climate system were "not natural". Changes in temperature, sea level and rainfall were best explained by the increased concentration of greenhouse gases from human activities, it added.

The union called for carbon emissions to be cut by more than 50% by 2100. It is the first time the AGU has updated its policy position on climate change since 2003, when it called for a concerted worldwide study to understand how the Earth would change as a result of climate change.

The revised statement has gone further, stating that the changes to the planet's climate system were "best explained by the increased atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activities in the 20th Century".

The AGU Council, which adopted the updated position, said that a sustained research effort involving many of its members had strengthened the scientific understanding of the impacts of climate change. It warned that the world faced a tough challenge over the coming 50 years: "Even the lower limit of impending climate change - an additional global mean warming of 1.0C (1.8F) above the last decade - is far beyond the range of climate variability experienced during the past 1,000 years. "Warming greater than 2.0C (3.6F) above 19th Century levels is projected to be disruptive, reducing global agricultural productivity, causing widespread loss of biodiversity, and - if sustained over centuries - melting of much of the Greenland ice sheet."

If the 2C rise was to be avoided, the AGU said, net annual emissions of carbon dioxide had to be cut by at least 50% by the end of the century.

The BBC also reports on the accelerating deforestation of the Amazon, courtesy of the worldwide demand for biofuels and soaring food prices.

The Brazilian government has announced a huge rise in the rate of Amazon deforestation, months after celebrating its success in achieving a reduction. In the last five months of 2007, 3,235 sq km (1,250 sq miles) were lost.

Gilberto Camara, of INPE, an institute that provides satellite imaging of the area, said the rate of loss was unprecedented for the time of year. Officials say rising commodity prices are encouraging farmers to clear more land to plant crops such as soya. The monthly rate of deforestation saw a big rise from 243 sq km (94 sq miles) in August to 948 sq km (366 sq miles) in December.

"We've never before detected such a high deforestation rate at this time of year," Mr Camara said. His concern, outlined during a news conference in Brasilia on Wednesday, was echoed by Environment Minister Marina Silva. Ms Silva said rising prices of raw materials and commodities could be spurring the rate of forest clearing, as more and more farmers saw the Amazon as a source of cheap land.

Open The Future points to an Architecture 2030 view of what global warming means for coastal cities.



JCWinnie at After Gutenberg has a look at James Hansen's new book "Censoring Science".

Subtitle: Sex, Mercedes driving lawyers and a rubber chicken, what more could you want?

It has been a while since this blog made mention of the muzzling of scientific concern over climate change. James Hansen again is talking about the censoring of science. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York had the honor of being the lead author of “Dangerous human-made interference with climate.

The point I emphasized is that overreaching by the Executive Branch, trying to make government science submit to political command and control, is a threat to our democracy, and, as a result, a threat to the planet. The scary part about this story is that seeds have been sown, and a playbook has been codified (although not written!), that will make the situation much worse unless the American public recognizes the problem and makes an issue of it. This is a bi-partisan problem – and neither party is trying to fix it. It is remarkable how wimpish Congress has become in accepting subjugation to the Executive Branch, contrary to designs and intents of our Founding Fathers.

Congressional testimony.

Do you know that before a government scientist testifies to Congress his/her testimony is typically reviewed and edited by the White House Office of Management and Budget? When I asked for a justification, I was told that a government scientist’s testimony “needs to be consistent with the President’s budget”.

Huh? There have never been any budget numbers in my testimony or in the testimony of most scientists. And OMB’s editing of the scientific content is invariably designed to make the testimony fit better with the position of the political party in power (yes, it is a bi-partisan problem). Where is it stated or implied in the Constitution that the Executive Branch should have such authority? (Actually, does the Constitution not vest control of the purse strings to Congress?) Why does not Congress get incensed about this and fight back?

Offices of Propaganda.

The Public Affairs Offices (PAOs) of science agencies have become mouthpieces for the Administration in power. This, too, is a bi-partisan problem. Top people in the Headquarters Offices of Public Affairs can and often are thrown out in a heart-beat when an election changes the party in control of the Executive Branch.

The Executive Branch has learned that the PAOs can be effective political instruments and, with some success, they are attempting to turn them into Offices of Propaganda, masters of double-speak (“clean coal”, “clear skies”, “healthy forests”…) that would make Orwell envious.

Again it is a bi-partisan problem, the control of PAOs being exercised by top political appointees who are replaced rapidly with a change of administration. It is these political appointees that are the problem – the career civil servants at the NASA Centers, e.g., are professionals of high integrity, as are most people at Headquarters.

One may wonder: why doesn’t the media object to this situation? I believe that I learned the reason: it is encapsulated in the phrase “that’s hearsay!”. I heard that phrase over and over again in 2004 after I stated publicly that NASA press releases were being spirited from NASA HQ to the White House for either editing or “deep-sixing”, when they concerned “sensitive” topics such as global warming. Even NPR did not seem to want to touch that story unless there were multiple pieces of proof on paper.

The phrase “that’s hearsay” seems to make the media folks quake in their boots, doubtless because of the threat of a lawsuit. That probably explains why the New York Times stories about censorship of scientists at NASA that came out in early 2006 became a story about a low-level 24-year-old, who then “resigned”. Reporters, New York Times included, knew that the problem went much higher, but instead of focusing on the threat to democracy, it became too-much an amusing story about a renegade trying to reverse scientific understanding of the “big bang”, etc.

The actual story is made crystal clear in the new book “Censoring Science” by Mark Bowen (author of “On Thin Ice”, a gripping, albeit long, story about Lonnie Thompson’s quest for ice cores from alpine glaciers). Bowen gets insiders at HQ and elsewhere to provide extensive information, most of it “on the record”, about how PAO works to cover its tracks (“Gretchen, don’t e-mail me on this!” There are some heroines in this story, middle level people who refused to comply with orders from political appointees that they recognized as being inappropriate.) By the way, I gave Bowen some long interviews and documentation (and my mug is on the book jacket), but I have no financial interest in the book.

The scary part of this story is that PAO political appointees are learning how to cover their tracks. The picture that Bowen presents is one in which PAO political appointees can communicate directly with the White House. One has to wonder, if the Administrator objected to the PAO political appointee activities, how long would it be before he was on the soup line?

As the tracks are covered better and better, it is as if we have a shadow government organization controlling information that the public receives.

How to fix it?

There is an article “Freedom of Speech in Government Science” in the current, Issues in Science and Technology, Winter 2008, pages 31-34, by David Resnik. Presumably, Resnik is well-intentioned, but I take vehement exception to one of his bottom lines. The article sounds fine for the most part, but keep in mind the common technique of telling you ten things that are true followed by slipping in the whopper, the very questionable point or conclusion concerning the main point of interest.

“…when a government scientist communicates with the media, the public (or even journalists) may mistakenly assume that the scientist is speaking for the government, when he or she is expressing only a personal opinion. If the scientist expresses an opinion that goes against official policy, this can creates (sic) confusion in the public mind. To minimize confusion and to enable an administration to convey consist (sic) policy messages, it is appropriate to allow public relations officers to review a government scientist’s communications with the media.”

Perhaps I am taking his statement out of context, but he seems to mean review the statement before it is made. This is where we need the Mercedes-driving lawyers (http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/distro_Lawlessness_070927.pdf) to help us. What Resnik is saying, which PAO would latch onto in a heartbeat, consists of “prior restraint”, as he suggests review prior to a testimony or statement being made, not correction after the fact by the government. If prior approval for scientific opinions are required, a scientist does not have a snowball’s chance in Hades of providing his unadulterated opinion on a “sensitive” subject.

This is true regardless of which party is in power. The most horrific experience that I ever had with NASA PAO was in 2000 during a Democratic administration when I tried to get a press release through on “Global warming in the twenty-first century: An alternative scenario”, which emphasized the importance of non-CO2 climate forcings. After umpteen iterations, I threw in the towel.

Resnik suggests that the best way to safeguard free speech in government science is for a scientific organization, such as the American Association for the Advancement for Science (AAAS), to designate a committee or group to focus on these issues. That may do some good, but by itself it will do little.

The presumption of democracy is that the public is informed, honestly informed. Government scientists work for the tax payer and should be allowed to report their research results without political interference. Elected officials can use scientific information as they see fit – they must consider all factors in making policies, not just scientific data. But they should not be allowed to torque the scientific data, or choose what information is allowed to be presented and what information is “deep-sixed.” Such filtering, which is a recipe for bad decisions and poor management, has never been as intense as in the past several years, in my opinion.

The main problems could be fixed as follows:

1. (1) Public Affairs Offices should be staffed by career professionals protected by civil service rules, not headed by political appointees,
2. (2) The practice of the White House OMB reviewing scientific testimony should be dropped.

These changes would be simple to make, they would allow the public to be better informed, the government would have a more complete picture for making decisions, the tax payers would get their money’s worth. So why doesn’t it happen?

Because, when a new Administration comes in they say “Hey, now WE can control the Offices of Propaganda (even though they consider them offices of their enlightened truth) and make OUR administration look good!

What is needed is a bi-partisan agreement that these changes would be in the interest of the nation. But it is just not going to happen unless the public gets involved. Politicians do not give up instruments of political power AFTER an election that they have won, unless they made an unambiguous promise before the election. We should be asking the candidates for President “will you make these two specific changes, to take the politics out of scientific reporting?”

And, then, we must check to see that the changes are made when a new administration takes over.

Hansen concludes by recommending Bowen’s “Censoring Science” (Dutton, 2008), for an exposition on the relation between the threat to our democracy (in Texan, pronounced do-re-mi) and the threat to our planet, admitting that Bowen does a better job than his (Hansen’s) 2006 treatise, “Swift Boating, Stealth Budgeting, & Unitary Executives“.

He closes with a query, “Would you believe that the current head of NASA PAO had a senior position in the Southern Company, the second largest holding company of coal-burning utilities in the United States?

“Naw, just kidding.”

“Or am I?”

“Read the book.”

The SMH has a gloomy look at climate change in Australia and the possibility that the drought is permanent.

IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation's most senior weather experts warned yesterday. "Perhaps we should call it our new climate," said the Bureau of Meteorology's head of climate analysis, David Jones. He was speaking after the release of statistics showing that last year was the hottest on record in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and the ACT.

NSW's mean temperature was 1.13 degrees above average. "That is a very substantial anomaly," Dr Jones said. "It's equivalent to moving NSW 150 kilometres closer to the equator."

It was the 11th year in a row NSW and the Murray-Darling Basin had experienced above normal temperatures. Sydney's nights were its warmest since records were first kept 149 years ago. "There is absolutely no debate that Australia is warming," said Dr Jones. "It is very easy to see … it is happening before our eyes."

The only uncertainty now was whether the changing pattern was "85 per cent, 95 per cent or 100 per cent the result of the enhanced greenhouse effect". "There is a debate in the climate community, after … close to 12 years of drought, whether this is something permanent. Certainly, in terms of temperature, that seems to be our reality, and that there is no turning back. "Last year climate change became very evident in south-eastern Australia, with South Australia, NSW, Victoria, the ACT and the Murray-Darling Basin all setting temperature records by a very large margin," he said. Some areas were "getting closer to 1.5 to 2 degrees above what we were seeing during early parts of the 20th century."

Australia as a whole had a mean temperature 0.67 degrees above average last year, making it the nation's sixth-warmest year. NSW and the Murray-Darling Basin experienced their seventh consecutive year of below-average rain. Dr Jones said the statewide rain statistics would have looked even worse had it not been for heavy falls along the coast.

Sydney had its wettest year since 1998, receiving 1499 millimetres, well above the long-term average of 1215. While much of it was coastal, rain that did fall across the state fell at the wrong time for farmers, soaked into drought-parched soils or evaporated during scorching days.

Widespread falls across NSW in June were followed by very dry spells in August, September and October. "Very good rainfall in December across south-eastern Australia has been followed, since about Boxing Day, by quite extreme heat in Victoria, southern NSW and most of southern Western Australia," Dr Jones said.

Tim Flannery is saying that greenhouse gas levels are now 'dangerously high'.

Australia's greenhouse gas emissions have already exceeded worst-case scenario projections, a leading scientist says. Acclaimed author and scientist Tim Flannery said results of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesis report, due for release next month, show that since 2005 Australia has already been producing the amount of greenhouse gases expected a decade away.

"What (the report) says is we already stand a risk of unacceptable climate change and that the need for action is ever more urgent," Professor Flannery told ABC television. "We thought we would be at that threshold within about a decade ... but the new data indicates that in about mid-2005 we crossed that threshold. As of mid-2005 there was about 455 parts per million of what's called carbon dioxide equivalent, and that's a figure that's gathered by taking the potential of all 30 greenhouse gases and converting them into carbon dioxide potential."

Prof Flannery said carbon dioxide levels were the most worrying, accounting for about 75 per cent of the greenhouse gases, but others - such as nitrous oxide, methane and HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons) - were also concerning. "What we've all been hoping is that we can avoid dangerous climate change and that's the sort of climate change that's very large scale and rapid and irreversible," Prof Flannery said. "We haven't done the homework right in terms of converting the potential of those greenhouse gases in the past into the CO2 equivalent ... but also we have really seen an unexpected acceleration in the rate of accumulation of CO2 itself and that's been beyond the limits of projection ... beyond the worst-case scenario."

Prof Flannery said the report should drive political debate on climate change and further highlight environmental scientific research. "We are already at great risk of dangerous climate change - that's what the new figures say," Prof Flannery said. "It's not next year, or next decade; it's now."

Thomas Homer Dixon has an op ed in The New York Times on A Swiftly Melting Planet.

THE Arctic ice cap melted this summer at a shocking pace, disappearing at a far higher rate than predicted by even the most pessimistic experts in global warming. But we shouldn’t be shocked, because scientists have long known that major features of earth’s interlinked climate system of air and water can change abruptly.

A big reason such change happens is feedback — not the feedback that you’d like to give your boss, but the feedback that creates a vicious circle. This type of feedback in our global climate could determine humankind’s future prosperity and even survival.

The vast expanse of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean always recedes in the summer, reaching its lowest point sometime in September. Every winter it expands again, as the long Arctic night descends and temperatures plummet. Each summer over the past six years, global warming has trimmed this ice’s total area a little more, and each winter the ice’s recovery has been a little less robust. These trends alarmed climate scientists, but most thought that sea ice wouldn’t disappear completely in the Arctic summer before 2040 at the earliest.

But this past summer sent scientists scrambling to redo their estimates. Week by week, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported the trend: from 2.23 million square miles of ice remaining on Aug. 8 to 1.6 million square miles on Sept. 16, an astonishing drop from the previous low of 2.05 million square miles, reached in 2005.

The loss of Arctic sea ice won’t be the last abrupt change in earth’s climate, because of feedbacks. One of the climate’s most important destabilizing feedbacks involves Arctic ice. It works like this: our release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases around the planet causes some initial warming that melts some ice. Melting ice leaves behind open ocean water that has a much lower reflectivity (or albedo) than that of ice. Open ocean water absorbs about 80 percent more solar radiation than sea ice does. And so as the sun warms the ocean, even more ice melts, in a vicious circle. This ice-albedo feedback is one of the main reasons warming is happening far faster in the high north, where there are vast stretches of sea ice, than anywhere else on Earth.

There are other destabilizing feedbacks in the carbon cycle that involve the oceans. Each year, the oceans absorb about half the carbon dioxide that humans emit into the atmosphere. But as oceans warm, they will absorb less carbon dioxide, partly because the gas dissolves less readily in warmer water, and partly because warming will reduce the mixing between deep and surface waters that provides nutrients to plankton that absorb carbon dioxide. And when oceans take up less carbon dioxide, warming worsens.

Scientists have done a good job incorporating some feedbacks into their climate models, especially those, like the ice-albedo feedback, that operate directly on the temperature of air or water. But they haven’t incorporated as well feedbacks that operate on the atmosphere’s concentrations of greenhouse gases or that affect the cycle of carbon among air, land, oceans and organisms. Yet these may be the most important feedbacks of all.

Global warming is melting large areas of permafrost in Alaska, Canada and Siberia. As it melts, the organic matter in the permafrost starts to rot, releasing carbon dioxide and methane (molecule for molecule, methane traps far more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide).

Warming is also affecting wetlands and forests around the world, helping to desiccate immense peat bogs in Indonesia, contributing to more frequent drought in the Amazon basin, and propelling a widening beetle infestation that’s killing enormous tracts of pine forest in Alaska and British Columbia. (This infestation is on the brink of crossing the Canadian Rockies into the boreal forest that extends east to Newfoundland.) Dried peat and dead and dying forests are vulnerable to wildfires that would emit huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere.

This summer’s loss of Arctic sea ice indicates that at least one major destabilizing feedback is gaining force quickly. Scientists have also recently learned that the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, appears to be absorbing less carbon, while Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating rate.

When warming becomes its own cause, we might not be able to stop extremely harmful climate change no matter how much we cut our greenhouse gas emissions. We need a far more aggressive global response to climate change. In the 1960s, mothers learned that the milk they were feeding their children was laced with radioactive material from atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons and that this contamination could increase the risk of childhood leukemia. Soon women organized themselves in the tens of thousands to demand that nuclear powers ban atmospheric testing. Their campaign largely succeeded.

In response to the new dangers of climate change, we need a similar mobilization — of mothers, of students and of everyone with a stake in the future — now.

The IHT has a look at the new frontier opened up in the Arctic courtesy of the rapidly melting planet - noting the quest for new energy supplies is becoming tougher.

For a quarter-century, energy executives were tantalized by vast quantities of natural gas in one of the world's most inhospitable places - off Norway's northern coast, beneath the Arctic Ocean. Bitter winds and fierce snowstorms lash the region, located 90 miles, or 145 kilometers, from the country's shoreline. The sun disappears for two months a year. No oil company knew how to operate in such a harsh environment.

But Norway has finally solved the problem. The other day, on an island just offshore, a giant yellow flame illuminated the sky here. It was just a temporary flare for excess gas, but it signaled a new era in energy production.

Across the bay from this small fishing village, where reindeer wander the streets, one of the world's most advanced natural gas plants is coming to life. Within weeks, natural gas will start crossing the ocean in specially designed ships, feeding into the pipeline network for the eastern coast of the United States. Before Christmas, furnaces in New York and stoves in Washington will be burning the fuel. It will be the first commercial energy production from waters north of the Arctic Circle.

As global demand soars and prices climb, energy companies are going to the ends of the earth to find new supplies.

In Kazakhstan, petroleum engineers are braving wild temperature swings in the shallow waters of the Caspian Sea to tap the biggest oil discovery of the past 30 years. They are drilling wells six miles deep in the Gulf of Mexico. And on the island of Sakhalin, in eastern Russia, they have drilled horizontal wells through miles of rock to produce oil from a stretch of ocean beset by giant icebergs.

But as the industry extends its reach, the quest is becoming more arduous. The cost of producing new oil and gas is rising fast, and companies are plagued by worsening delays. Drilling rigs are scarce. Engineers, geologists, and petroleum specialists are in critically short supply. And the politics of oil and gas are getting trickier, with hydrocarbon-rich countries demanding a bigger share of the revenues and growing angry about project delays that postpone their payments.

Industry executives say their ability to keep up with global demand is badly strained. "We're facing bigger risks and bigger difficulties when we go into new frontier regions," said Odd Mosbergvik, a senior manager at the Norwegian state energy company, Statoil Hydro. "But this is why the oil industry is for big boys. It's a big gamble."

The industry's new reach is shifting the economics of energy extraction. According to a recent study, discovery and development costs - a leading indicator for the industry - tripled between 1999 and 2006, to nearly $15 a barrel. Last year alone, companies spent $200 billion developing new energy projects worldwide, according to the study by two consulting firms, John Herold and Harrison Lovegrove. That sum is bigger than the economies of 147 countries.

These higher costs mean the industry needs higher energy prices to finance new projects. They are also constraining its ability to expand quickly.

"As the CEO of a major oil company told me, 'This is an industry in crisis masked by high prices,' " said J. Robinson West, chairman of PFC Energy, an oil industry consulting firm in Washington. "There are no easy barrels left. The only barrels are going to be the tough barrels."

The IHT also has an article on the Carbon Disclosure Project.

On the sidelines of the UN climate conference in New York this week, hundreds of corporate investors and executives gathered to hear researchers pitch the Carbon Disclosure Project and to report its new results. The project is a brilliant plan to prod large companies to cut emissions, but it may take more than a good sell to get businesses to seriously buy in.

The mood at the event, held at Merrill Lynch headquarters was upbeat, inspiring, luxurious even, with fresh croissants and comfy sofas. Former President Bill Clinton was the keynote speaker, exhorting the corporate audience to see the profit potential in going green. "I think this will be an economic boom," he said. "I hope I've persuaded you that it's good economics as well as good for the future of our children." Sustainability, Clinton said, could be "economic salvation."

From an environmental perspective, Clinton's inspirational speaking was needed, since the results of the latest Carbon Disclosure Project were, in fact, exceedingly mixed.

But first, a quick introduction to this clever five-year-old project: Each year a group of environmentally minded institutional investors has sent a voluntary "Carbon Disclosure" survey to hundreds of the world's largest companies, asking for information about how much CO2 they put into the atmosphere, and if they have a plan to reduce it.

The group has grown dramatically since its inception in 2002, so that now it is harder to ignore. This year, the query was sponsored by 315 financial corporations that manage $41 billion, including heavyweights like Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and American International Group.

The idea is that if investors ask for information about companies' carbon footprints, it would be a powerful incentive for corporations to reduce pollution and their contributions to global warming.

The Economist has an article on climate policy and how game theory, in the form of the prisoner's dilemma, can be applied to the problem to punish the recalcitrant - Playing games with the planet.

AT ANY given summit on climate change, it is never long before some politician declares how “urgent” or “vital” or “imperative” it is to stop the planet from overheating. And yet few governments are willing to tackle the problem by themselves. In practice, what these impassioned speakers usually mean is that it is urgent—no, vital!—no, imperative!—for all countries but their own to get to grips with climate change.

That is natural enough. After all, all countries will enjoy the benefits of a stable climate whether they have helped to bring it about or not. So a government that can persuade others to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions without doing so itself gets the best of both worlds: it avoids all the expense and self-denial involved, and yet still escapes catastrophe. The most obvious free-riders of this sort are America and Australia, the only rich countries that refuse to put a limit on their emissions. But they are far from being the only offenders: most poor countries, too, are keen to palm the responsibility for curbing global warming off on rich ones, and to continue to grow and pollute as much as they like.

The problem, of course, is that if everyone is counting on others to act, no one will, and the consequences could be much worse than if everyone had simply done their bit to begin with. Game theorists call a simplified version of this scenario the “prisoner's dilemma”. In it, two prisoners accused of the same crime find themselves in separate cells, unable to communicate. Their jailers try to persuade them to implicate one another. If neither goes along with the guards, they will both receive a sentence of just one year. If one accepts the deal and the other keeps quiet, then the turncoat goes free while the patsy gets ten years. And if they both denounce one another, they both get five years.

If the first prisoner is planning to keep quiet, then the second has an incentive to denounce him, and so get off scot-free rather than spend a year in prison. If the first prisoner were planning to betray the second, then the second would still be better off pointing the finger, and so receive a five-year sentence instead of a ten-year one. In other words, a rational, self-interested person would always betray his fellow prisoner. Yet that leaves them both mouldering in jail for five years, when they could have cut their sentences to a year if they had both kept quiet.

Pessimistic souls assume that the international response to climate change will go the way of the prisoner's dilemma. Rational leaders will always neglect the problem, on the grounds that others will either solve it, allowing their country to become a free-rider, or let it fester, making it a doomed cause anyway. So the world is condemned to a slow roasting, even though global warming could be averted if everyone co-operated.

Yet in a recent paper, Michael Liebreich, of New Energy Finance, a research firm, draws on game theory to reach the opposite conclusion. The dynamics of the prisoner's dilemma, he points out, change dramatically if participants know that they will be playing the game more than once. In that case, they have an incentive to co-operate, in order to avoid being punished for their misconduct by their opponent in subsequent rounds.

The paper cites a study on the subject by an American academic, Robert Axelrod, which argues that the most successful strategy when the game is repeated has three elements: first, players should start out by co-operating; second, they should deter betrayals by punishing the transgressor in the next round; and third, they should not bear grudges but instead should start co-operating with treacherous players again after meting out the appropriate punishment. The result of this strategy can be sustained co-operation rather than a cycle of recrimination.

Mr Liebreich believes that all this holds lessons for the world's climate negotiators. Treaties on climate change, after all, are not one-offs. Indeed, the United Nations is even now trying to get its members to negotiate a successor to its existing treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Many fear that the effort will collapse unless the laggards can be persuaded to join in. But the paper argues that rational countries will not be deterred by free-riders. They will continue to curb their emissions, while devising sanctions for those who do not.

The Kyoto Protocol already embodies some of these elements. Countries that do not meet their commitments, for example, are supposed to be punished with a requirement to cut their emissions more sharply the next time around. But Mr Liebreich argues that there should also be sanctions for rich countries that refuse to participate, and stronger incentives for poor countries (which are exempted from any mandatory cuts) to join in. Rather than trying to craft an agreement that is agreeable to all, the more enthusiastic countries should simply press on with a system to which recalcitrant ones could later accede.

The global regime on climate change, Mr Liebreich believes, should also be revised more frequently, to allow the game to play itself out more quickly. So instead of stipulating big reductions in emissions, to be implemented over five years, as in Kyoto, negotiators might consider adopting annual targets. That way, co-operative governments know that they cannot be taken advantage of for long, whereas free-riders can be punished and penitents brought back into the fold more quickly.

There are flaws in the analogy, of course. In the real world, governments can communicate and form alliances, which makes the dynamics of the game much more complicated. And governments may not act consistently or rationally. Most observers, for example, assume that America's policy on global warming will change in 2008, along with its president. And most countries' willingness to act is presumably linked to the severity of global warming's ill effects. If things get bad enough, then with any luck everyone will play the game.

Links:

* Energy Justice Network - The Myth Of Clean Coal
* Minneapolis Star Tribune - Websites to visualize social issues
* Virtual Hosting Blog - Green Hosting: 11 Carbon Neutral Hosting Alternatives
* Reuters - Egypt plan to green Sahara desert stirs controversy
* The Energy Blog - USDA Suggests High Oil Prices May Push Up Food Prices More Than Biofuels
* The Oil Drum - Photovoltaics: From Waste to Energy-maker. Inteersting post from the Engineer poet on producing polycrystalline silicon from the waste produced by phosphate mining.
* Business Week - Solar's Day In The Sun
* CNN Money - Big Utilities Interested In Big Solar
* Business Standard - Sun struck: Jharkhand villages get water, light through solar power
* SMH - Commuters happier chained to the wheel. Which is why we need green cars.
* SMH - BHP's troubled Atlantis field pumps first oil. Genghis Khan is also up and running and Neptune starts in December.
* Vancouver Sun - Documenting the ravages of big oil in Ecuador
* IHT - Kurdish regional government defends its oil deals
* Forbes - Is Big Oil Losing The Race For Iraq?
* Korea Times - Grand Theft Iraq
* San Jose Mercury News - Novelist Wallace Stegner wrote story of Aramco in 1955 - Full version now published for first time. More related links at Energy Bulletin.
* Daily Telegraph (UK) - Roberrt Gates - The man who stands between US and new war in Iran
* Bangkok Post - Trouser snake kills Cambodian man. From Dave Robert's monster weekend link roundup. "Don't worry - it's nothing a drink can't fix".
* Daily Mail - Eat my pork, feel my fork. More from Dave.

Edward Tapamor at Peak Oil Passnotes has some comments on his perception of the need for some of the old school peak oil movement to change tack to remain relevant as the subject becomes more widely understood.

If we think of peak oil as a subject in itself, rather than a subset of general discourse about oil and energy, then we can see it has been around for something approaching 100 years. After World War One there was sustained and popular debate about the prospect of the U.S.’s valuable resource running out. After all there was no more to be found and it was going to be too expensive anyway.

This debate has been repeated a few times since then, most notably in the 1970s, but it has never been stronger than it is now. Nor has it attracted such a wide range of people willing to discuss it.

The basics of peak oil are in fact quite simple. Under the present, failing, economic system scarcity breeds profits. Thus peak oil presents opportunities for those who control resources and powerful people, powerful nations and institutions rarely give away their golden goose. That the consequences may be painful for weaker people like you and me matters not.

Secondly there is the scale of the problem. That is if the world is consuming around 85 million barrels per day of oil - and demand is set at the very least to remain constant - one has to bring on stream around 3.4 million barrels per day of oil, each year and every year, just to stand still. That is a big task in the present day environment and is exacerbated by the first problem, the fact that scarcity breeds profits.

Unfortunately for the world, it appears to be – at least – stepping onto a plateau of global production that will only be altered by economics. In other words it is only recessions that can dampen demand, reduce costs and allow the oil industry to ‘catch up’ by bringing capacity on stream when demand is low. The oil industry is banking on a recession to do just that.

But sadly for the oil industry a few items have changed. Populations in producer countries, such as the poor people who live under the heel of the U.S. client state in Saudi Arabia, are growing in numbers. They will inevitably consume more energy. Then of course there is the wildcards of China and India. Even with a recession demand in those countries will continue to grow.

So following on from the meeting of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) in Eire recently it is time for the peakers to get their act together. ASPO must cement itself as a credible, reasoned organisation. Not one that publishes fascist-eugenicist rants and calls anyone who diverts from the line a “cornucopian”.

It must have a global focus and structure, not one splintered and focussed upon individuals such as Colin Campbell. Nice man though he is – apart from that publication which was very worrying - he cannot hope to cement a global debate on peak oil. His treatment of Fatih Birol at the ASPO Berlin meeting was a disaster and dampened any reasoned debate. Kjell Aleklett, Jean Laherrere, Baquis and many others must also stand down, move aside.

ASPO must also take its place as part of a debate about the energy future. Not the bringer of all truth to the ignorant masses. It must be the OPEC of peak oil, with rotating nations’ organisations heading up debate. It must learn to debate with its enemies, with the industry. It must learn the art of persuasion, not ridicule, not conspiracy and be part of a world that accepts peak oil as part of energy supply issues. Not as a reason to write self promoting, self aggrandising books.

It is time for the new wave of peakers to take the stage. And they are there. Waiting.

After Gutenberg has a report on the Rocky Mountain Institute's efforts to design Plug In Hybrid Electric Vehicles from the ground up, in the wake of (somewhat inconsistent) foot dragging from the big manufacturers.

Felix Kramer1 relays word of RMI (Rocky Mountain Institute) PHEV Exploratory Project: a multi-year process of designing and producing a new PHEV from the ground up.

Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder / chief scientist, Amory Lovins, have had an incalculable impact on the way we think about technology and society. From "negawatts" to "natural capitalism" and "tunneling through the cost barrier," RMI specializes in changing the way we look at energy, efficiency and our infrastructure.

RMI has put together what Kramer describes as “an exceptional automotive consulting group” led by John Waters. An engineer with experience in business development, Waters long background in the battery world includes stints at EnerDel, Delphi, and Electronic Data Systems (he led the battery design programs for GM’s EV1 and Electric S-10).

Originally part of RMI’s transportation consulting team, the PHEV now is working with Alcoa, Johnson Controls, Google, and the Turner Foundation to explore the possibilities of bringing a lightweight, fully functional PHEV to the US market. As this effort unfolds, various technologies and market strategies will be explored and developed.

The PHEV team will focus research on:
* Battery, motor, engine, and control technologies
* Optimized vehicle platform characteristics (i.e., aerodynamics, lightweighting, rolling resistance)
* Various market penetration scenarios
* Enterprise structures

RMI views the work of the PHEV as complementary and essential to its overall effort in shifting the current energy supply and energy use infrastructures to fully integrated systems. These new energy systems will leverage sustainable energy (e.g., wind, solar, hydro, etc.) and integrate vehicle-to-grid and building-to-grid scenarios. This is part of RMI’s "Smart Garage" methodology whereby whole system energy solutions can be realized through the integration of users to the overall energy system, thereby providing radical breakthroughs in energy savings and emission reduction.

Recently, RMI was one of the six organizations receiving grants from Google.org’s RechargeIT project. Kramer notes that RMI is renown for its technical depth and its initial partnerships. “In addition to the publicly-announced startups (Fisker, Visionary Vehicles, Venture Vehicles),” notes Kramer, “we can expect to hear from a few other such efforts in the near future.”

It is the impression of this blog that such initiative is occurring because of foot-dragging from the car makers. While there has been considerable hyperbole and puffery about reducing vehicle weight, there also has been a general reluctance to shift away from the heavy equates to quality paradigm. The RMI PHEV Exploratory Project is an example of leadership; someone will demonstrate to the car companies how to shift the paradigm. As previously noted, the argument for the use of lightweight advanced-composite structures to lessen oil consumption is basically one of physics; a lighter vehicle means less energy is required, which in turn could allow for the application of smaller power plants that consume less fuel and produce fewer emissions.

While much lighter, the Hypercar is designed for safety. Not only is the composite shell stronger than steel, the concept car includes an inner crashbox modeled after those used by formula race cars. Further safety features are the inclusion of crushable / shock-absorbing material plus front and side airbags.

A light weight, safe vehicle is a major accomplishment, and, yet the initial concept was bothersome since it stuck with propulsion that over time still contributed a significant amount of green house gases. A similar situation is the incongruous efforts by General Motors to use clean, renewable solar energy for an infrastructure that continues to produce gas guzzling, polluting transportation, or efforts by Ford to incorporate cradle to cradle design in its infrastructure and products while funding efforts to resist the reduction of particulate matter in diesel fumes that correlates to asthma and other respiratory illness, particularly in youth and the elderly.

Now that the banana farmers have gone back to the CADM, such development mean more than a theoretical hope that the entire body of an electric powered hypercar could be made of low-cost, environmentally-benign materials and serve as a repository for energy storage from 1) the Grid, 2) local energy production and 3) regenerative processes afforded by the power electronics of the vehicle.

After Gutenberg also has some further comments on solar thermal power, particularly in the MENA area.

From Renewable Energy Access1 we learn that “harnessing the sun’s energy falling on just 6,000 square kilometers of desert in North Africa would supply energy equivalent to the entire oil production of the Middle East of 9 billion barrels a year.” The German Aerospace Center made this estimate based upon the power generated by solar thermal electric power plants “of between 50 and 200 MW in size in different locations across North Africa.”

The study calculated that solar thermal power plants could supply 68 percent of North Africa’s as well as Europe’s electricity by 2050. Cables to transmit electricity from North Africa to Europe have already been built under the sea.

Who knows, staff at the center might even appreciate the United Arab Emirates using the billions acquired for their oil to develop new, renewable energy sources.

In any case, such a report comes at a time when significant development of CSP (Concentrating Solar Power) is underway in Spain. As previously noted, SyV (Sacyr-Vallehermoso), one of the largest Spanish infrastructure corporations, is undertaking three solar power plants in Spain with a total capacity of 150 MW and a total overall investment of $890 million. An estimated $500 million will go to the supplier of the technology. Solel parabolic trough thermal technology has been responsible for continuous production of utility scale power in California’s Mojave Desert over the last twenty years.

The RE article used the German proposal as a way to mention Flabeg, “a German-based manufacturer of parabolic trough mirrors for solar thermal power plants. The company recently developed a mirror that can reflect 93 percent of the sun’s rays.” Flaberg wants to sell high precision mirrors, which can concentrate the solar power onto an absorber tube with a diameter of 70 mm or less, in the solar thermal power plant market arising in Spain and North Africa.

The company is set to deliver 210,000 of the high precision mirrors to the 50 megawatt (MW) solar thermal power plant Andasol II, in Spain—the biggest in Europe—by the end of June 2008… Flabeg has already equipped the 50 MW Andasol I solar thermal plant with 210,000 RP 3 mirrors.

Flaberg is using the precision of their reflectors as a selling point. The author of the article, Jane Burgermeister, states that one of these 50 MW solar power plants can generate an estimated, “5 million kilowatt-hours more of electricity for every extra 1 percent of sunlight that is collected by solar mirrors.” (One would assume that estimate is based upon the expected lifespan of the installation.)

Optical characteristics are critical to design, manufacturing, operation and maintenance of the solar field, particularly with the required to build a utility-scale solar thermal electric power plant. There is a trade-off because of cost. (See 2007 National Renewable Energy Laboratory report on estimations of material costs2. The report compared polished aluminum, thin mirrored glass and silvered polymer film coated aluminum, all of which can make use of recycled materials.) Not only must developers consider reflective ability, but also congruency with design of the support structure and durability over the expected life of the facility. Some prefer metal reflectors because of their lower cost.

Vinod Khosla, an advocate for and investor in solar thermal electric power, has noted that “worldwide, the electric power industry creates 40 percent of total carbon emissions, and electricity use is rapidly growing.” Large-scale, affordable sources of clean power are needed “to meet the dual challenges of economic growth and carbon constraints.” Khosla also has advocated for development of the interconnected electricity system between regions, power brokers, etc. Sophistication in power generation needs to be equaled by elegance in distribution for CSP to be effective.

RE commentator Hussain Alrobaei reminds its readers that MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) is one of the principle regions around the globe that benefits from a higher solar radiance.

There will be a significant market for producing solar electricity under the ideal meteorological conditions in the sunbelt countries of the MENA and transferring part of this electricity to Europe. As proposed recently by the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation, concentrating solar thermal power stations in MENA could be used for export electricity to Europe as well as for providing regional freshwater from combined thermal desalination of sea water [1,2]. The electricity produced in CSP plants can be used for domestic needs and export, as well as for additional desalination of sea water through reverse osmosis (RO), if required. The design of such combined solar power and desalination plants can be flexibly adapted to any required size and need. CSP plants can be designed from 5 MW to several 100 MW capacity [3]. Therefore, in the future European mix of energy sources for power generation, CSP can serve to cover base load, intermediate load or peaking load and even to compensate the fluctuations of PV and wind power.

One of the organisations pushing for the development of North African solar energy resources is TREC (the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation initiative), which was initiated by the Club Of Rome, with the motto "Clean Power From Deserts".

The Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC) is an initiative that campaigns for the transmission of clean power from deserts to Europe. Since it was founded in 2003 by The Club of Rome, the Hamburg Climate Protection Foundation and the National Energy Research Center of Jordan (NERC), it has developed the DESERTEC Concept and researched it in cooperation with the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Now TREC is making this concept a reality in cooperation with people in politics, industry and the world of finance.



The DESERTEC Concept of TREC is to boost the generation of electricity and desalinated water by solar thermal power plants and wind turbines in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and to transmit the clean electrical power via High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission lines throughout those areas and as from 2020 (with overall just 10-15% transmission losses) to Europe.

The technologies that are needed to realise the DESERTEC concept are already developed and some of them have been in use for decades. Several studies by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) confirm the viability of this concept and the usefulness of realising it very soon.

The SMH reports that the latest US Climate change conference has been branded a failure.

The White House-sponsored climate change conference, which ended today, has been labelled a failure by one of Australia's most powerful commentators on the environment. Don Henry, executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, said Australia needed to stop copying the US position on climate change immediately.

"It is disappointing the conference has not delivered,'' Mr Henry said. ''(US) President Bush is still resisting setting binding targets or commitments on greenhouse gas emissions. "He wants the flexibility of voluntary targets. "The US is the world's biggest climate laggard and are holding up global action on climate change.''

Mr Henry said Mr Bush's climate change policies were "disastrous'' and Australia had to "disconnect'' itself from them. "More than any other country on Earth we should tackle this issue seriously with our water supplies at risk and the Great Barrier Reef,'' he said. "At the conference every developed country has taken on board binding targets and every developing country has committed to cleaning up their economy and set long-term aspirational goals. "The only two that have not are Australia and the US who have not ratified the Kyoto Protocol and stand out like sore thumbs.''

Tom Paine has a post predicting that as Bush's reign of terror comes to a close, the atmosphere is in further danger from cloud of toxic lame duck executive decisions.

If this week's revelations by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., are any indication, it's going to be an ugly time for breathers during the last 16 months of the Bush administration. And it could be a boom time for special interests seeking to cash in before the President heads off to the ranch.

Possible deals are in store for coal, cars, and a variety of smokestack industries - a veritable "onslaught" as my friend, John Walke of the National Resources Defense Council puts it.

Usually we can only guess how these deals are cut behind the scenes. But Waxman provided a rare glimpse of Bush administration skullduggery as he released the results of an investigation of furtive administration attempts to sandbag a request by California to enforce its landmark greenhouse gas emission standards for motor vehicles.

The California standards are extraordinarily important because more than a dozen other states have adopted or plan to adopt them.

The car companies have launched an all-out war to kill the standards. In one key battleground, a federal judge in Vermont recently upheld that state's version of the standards despite a ferocious attack by the auto industry, which basically claimed the California/Vermont standards would put them out of business. ...

Waxman's investigation makes it appear as if the fix is in to kill California's request simply to satisfy one special-interest polluter. And that doesn't bode well for other key administration decisions to be made in the coming months regarding pollution requirements for coal-burning power plants, mining, fuels and other matters. To cite one shocking example, an EPA official noted last week that the administration is likely to promote the notion of making liquid fuel from coal as part of its answer to the Supreme Court decision on global warming - even though doing this likely would make global warming even worse!

One thing is certain: the polluters have really bulked up to deal with the Bush final days. The two key architects of air pollution policy for the Bush Administration — Jeffrey Holmstead and William Wehrum — have both gone through the proverbial revolving door to law firms that represent electric power companies and other big polluters. (Holmstead to Bracewell Giuliani, Wehrum to Hunton & Williams.)

They are very smart fellows and will probably do a great job representing their clients. But that may not be the best news possible for the rest of us who can't afford to hold our breath for 16 months.

Distibuted manufacturing of uniquely identifiable and locatable objects is one of those emerging fields I think will help us to omplement full cradle to cradle manufacturing techniques and to put problems like peak oil behind us - this is one of Bruce Sterling's favourite topics (usually tagged with words like spime or blobject) these days, and TreeHugger reports he has made a movie on "Downloadable Designs".

Bruce Sterling has not only written the book on downloadable designs (called Shaping Things), He made the movie too!

According to Putting People First", The future will see a new kind of object — we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable — that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term “spime” for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production.

Last night Sterling showed an amazing video in Italy; you can see it :: Here

Bruce himself reports that the "Climate Crisis Is Stirring Brain-Eating Amoeba". Another horror from down under...

(((I don't make the news, I just blog it, folks....)))

Link: Arizona Boy Dies Of Rare Infection - Local News Story - KPHO Phoenix.

"This is definitely something we need to track," said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational water-born illnesses for the CDC. "This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better," Beach said. "In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases."

Though infections tend to be found in southern states, Naegleria has been found almost everywhere in lakes, hot springs, even some swimming pools. Still, the CDC knows of only several hundred cases worldwide since its discovery in Australia in the 1960s. The amoeba typically live in lake bottoms, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment. Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose -- say, by doing a cannonball off a cliff -- the amoeba can latch onto the person's olfactory nerve.

The amoeba destroys tissue as it makes its way up to the brain. People who are infected tend to complain of a stiff neck, headaches and fevers, Beach said. In the later stages, they'll show signs of brain damage such as hallucinations and behavioral changes. Once infected, most people have little chance of survival.....

I included a couple of links about the evolution of social entrepreneurship in a post a week or so ago, including one to grassroots loan broker Kiva, which is the subject of an article in today's SMH - apparently they have been so successful raising money lately that there is a shortage of firms to lend to.

Last month I became a financier, or, to be more specific, a microfinancier. I lent $50 to Saitia Teropika in Samoa. I've never been to Samoa or met Teropika, but I know she's 37 years old and has nine children. I know the money is to help her buy seeds and pesticides to expand her market garden.

I know all this because of an innovative organisation called Kiva, which supports charity in the form of zero-interest business loans. It does this by using a website to link people in the First World to people in the Third. Founded in 2005 by an American couple, Matt and Jessica Flannery, it is a fascinating use of the internet.

Kiva (the word is Swahili for "unity"), in San Francisco, deals with potential borrowers through 68 microfinance companies in the Third World. These "field partners" charge the borrowers interest and take responsibility for identifying responsible entrepreneurs, disbursing the loan, collecting repayments and giving lenders periodic updates on how the business is going.

The concept has been a modest hit in America. So far $US11 million ($12.5 million) has been lent by 119,000 people. When I visited the website this week to look for a second business to fund, I found a message possibly unique in the history of charity: "Due to a recent surge in support ignited by viewers of the Oprah Winfrey Show, the Today Show, and readers of President [Bill] Clinton's newly released book Giving, there is currently a shortage of businesses in need of loans. The www.kiva.org staff and our field partners are working overtime to get more businesses on the website."

But it's not just Americans who are involved. Contributors to Saitia Teropika's $750 loan also come from Germany, Singapore, Finland, Canada, Italy and Taiwan, and there are several Australians. Lenders can create a profile on the site and put up their photo and some personal details: this is charity for the MySpace generation.

Common Dreams has an article from Ray McGovern on Bush, Oil and Moral Bankruptcy.

It is an exceedingly dangerous time. Vice President Dick Cheney and his hard-core “neo-conservative” protégés in the administration and Congress are pushing harder and harder for President George W. Bush, isolated from reality, to honor the promise he made to Israel to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.On Sept. 23, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned pointedly:

“If we escalate tensions, if we succumb to hysteria, if we start making threats, we are likely to stampede ourselves into a war [with Iran], which most reasonable people agree would be a disaster for us…I think the administration, the president and the vice president particularly, are trying to hype the atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq.”

So why the pressure for a wider war in which any victory will be Pyrrhic-for Israel and for the U.S.? The short answer is arrogant stupidity; the longer answer-what the Chinese used to call “great power chauvinism”-and oil.

The truth can slip out when erstwhile functionaries write their memoirs (the dense pages of George Tenet’s tome being the exception). Kudos to the still functioning reportorial side of the Washington Post, which on Sept. 15, was the first to ferret out the gem in former Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan’s book that the Iraq war was “largely about oil.”

But that’s okay, said the Post’s editorial side (which has done yeoman service as the White House’s Pravda) the very next day. Dominating the op-ed page was a turgid piece by Henry Kissinger, serving chiefly as a reminder that there is an excellent case to be made for retiring when one reaches the age of statutory senility.

Dr. Kissinger described as a “truism” the notion that “the industrial nations cannot accept radical forces dominating a region on which their economies depend.” (Curious. That same truism was considered a bad thing, when an integral part of the “Brezhnev Doctrine” applied to Eastern Europe.) What is important here is that Kissinger was speaking of Iran, which-in a classic example of pot calling kettle black-he accuses of “seeking regional hegemony.” What’s going on here seems to be a concerted effort to get us accustomed to the prospect of a long, and possibly expanded war.

Don’t you remember? Those terrorists, or Iraqis, or Iranians, or jihadists…whoever…are trying to destroy our way of life.

The White House spin machine is determined to justify the war in ways they think will draw popular support from folks like the well-heeled man who asked me querulously before a large audience, “Don’t you agree that several GIs killed each week is a small price to pay for the oil we need?”

The Bush policy toward the Middle East is at the same time consistent with, and a marked departure from, the U.S. approach since the end of World War II. Given ever-growing U.S. dependence on imported oil, priority has always been given to ensuring the uninterrupted supply of oil, as well as securing the state of Israel. The U.S. was, by and large, successful in achieving these goals through traditional diplomacy and commerce. Granted, it would overthrow duly elected governments, when it felt it necessary-as in Iran in 1953, after its president nationalized the oil. But the George W. Bush administration is the first to start a major war to implement U.S. policy in the region.

Just before the March 2003 attack, Chas Freeman, U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia for President George H.W. Bush, explained that the new policy was to maintain a lock on the world’s energy lifeline and be able to deny access to global competitors. Freeman said the new Bush administration “believes you have to control resources in order to have access to them” and that, with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. is uniquely able to shape global events-and would be remiss if it did not do so. This could not be attempted in a world of two superpowers, but has been a longstanding goal of the people closest to George W. Bush.

In 1975 in Harpers, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger authored under a pseudonym an article, “Seizing Arab Oil.”

Blissfully unaware that the author was his boss, the highly respected career ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, committed the mother of all faux pas when he told a TV audience that whoever wrote that article had to be a “madman.” Akins was right; he was also fired.

The Huffington Post has an article on John Dean and his alienation from the Republican tribe - "From Nixon to Bush to Giuliani--"Much, Much Worse"".

John Dean knows something about White House abuse of power. He wrote a bestseller in 2004 on the Bush White House called Worse Than Watergate. In a recent interview I asked him what he thinks of that title now. Now, he replied, a book comparing Bush and Nixon would have to be called Much, Much Worse.

"Look at the so-called Watergate abuses of power," he said. "Nobody died. Nobody was tortured. Millions of Americans were not subject to electronic surveillance of their communications. We're playing now in a whole different league."

And how does Bush compare with the Republicans seeking to succeed him? "If a Rudy Giuliani were to be elected," Dean said, "he would go even farther than Cheney and Bush in their worst moments."

What about the rest of the pack? "I'm very concerned about the current attitude in the Republican party," he said. "However there are candidates on the Republican side who are not quite as frightening as Giuliani." When I asked who he had in mind, he laughed and said "Ron Paul." He conceded that "there's no chance he's going to be president."

Dean's new book is Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches. It's a massively documented and thorough indictment, arguing that, over the last 30 years, Republicans have broken or ignored laws, rules, and the Constitution. He's especially critical of the growth of presidential power under Bush II, and what he calls the "corruption" of the courts by "radical conservatives."

I asked Dean to imagine the moment when Bush leaves office on Jan. 20, 2009, presumably to be replaced by a Democrat, presumably Hillary -- will it then be possible to say "our long national nightmare is over"? Dean replied with one word: "Yes." He quickly added, "I do feel strongly that the Republicans have so abused the law and embedded so many people within the system, within the executive branch, that's it's going to take a couple of terms of Democratic presidents before you have people there who are representing the American people." Does that mean he is supporting Hillary? "She's obviously the one the other Democrats have to beat," he said, "but I don't take any position."

How then would he describe his political position? He says in his new book that he's left his "former tribe" - does that make him a Democrat today? "It doesn't," he replied. "I carry water for nobody. My only interest is being an honest information broker about what's happening. I have no agenda other than explaining - and being shocked at my former tribe."

"I've had invitations to become involved with Democrats," he added, "and have turned them all down. I'm an independent. That happens to be the largest group of voters in the country today - we're about 40 per cent strong."

Links:

* Scientific American - Sunny Outlook: Can Sunshine Provide All U.S. Electricity?
* CSP Today - First Forum On Concentrating Solar Thermal Power To Take Place In Seville
* Europa Rapid - Energising Europe: A real market with secure supply
* WorldChanging - Taking Public Transit: The Most Effective Route to Cutting Carbon. Or even better, walk or ride a bike...
* Alt Energy Stocks - Visual Comparison of Alternative Transportation Fuels
* Alt Energy Stocks - Visual Comparison of Electricity Generation Technologies
* Brisbane Courier Mail - Global food shock real, says former Nats leader
* TreeHugger - The 100 Mile Café: More for the Locavore
* TreeHugger - The Exxon FIles: The Denial Continues
* Andrew Leonard - Don't cry for Saudi Arabia
* Huffington Post - New Rule: Stop Saying Iraq is Another Vietnam, it's Another Enron. I wonder how Ken Lay is doing these days.
* New York Times - Pressure to deal with Blackwater mounting
* The Nation - Congress Quietly Approves Billions More for Iraq War. Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich and Russ Feingold (+ 12 other Democrats in the House) vote against.
* NY Post - Bloomberg: Insurgents In Iraq Like Americans Who Fought British. How indiscreet - I thought we were liberating them from tyranny.
* Lancaster Intelligencer Journal - Ellsberg Calls for Actions to Prevent War with Iran
* Democracy Now - Bolivian President Evo Morales on Indigenous Rights, Climate Change, Iraq, Establishing Diplomatic Relations with Iran, Che Guevara's Legacy and More
* Beyond The Beyond - Germans Take to the Streets. "Liberty instead of fear !".
* Common Dreams - The Internet: Our Last Hope for a Free Press
* LRC Blog - What Really Happened on the Ferry From Mackinac Island?