I'll never be convinced that any sort of carbon trading scheme will be as effective as a straight carbon tax and compensating tax deductions / welfare payments for everyone, but I think Senator Cantwell is moving in the right direction with her latest proposal. The Economist reports - A refreshing dose of honesty.

On January 28th, America formally pledged to the UN that it would reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 17% (from what they were in 2005) by 2020. But there was a planet-sized catch. Meeting the target will depend on getting a climate bill through Congress, and that will be horribly hard. A bill to erect a cap-and-trade system to curb carbon-dioxide emissions squeaked through the House of Representatives last summer. But similar bills have stalled in the Senate, where nearly anything big needs a supermajority to pass.

Various obstacles block the way. First, Barack Obama has not yet decided what to do about health care, and he cannot wage two domestic wars at once. Second, cap-and-trade is a tough sell. An increasing number of Americans, like Mr Shimkus, doubt the science. The proportion who believe there is “solid evidence” that the earth is warming fell from 71% in 2008 to 57% last year. Among Republicans, disbelief is the norm: only 35% think there is solid evidence of warming, according to a Pew poll. The news that some climate scientists tried to muzzle dissenting voices has spread like the common cold on conservative blogs, fuelling widespread suspicion that global warming is an elaborate hoax. Many climate sceptics are furious. “My Carbon Footprint Will Fit Nicely in Your Liberal Ass,” reads a typical T-shirt. Even among Americans who believe in global warming, there is little appetite for tackling it. A hefty 85% told Gallup that the government should place a higher priority on fixing the economy, with only 12% saying the opposite.

Enter Maria Cantwell, the junior senator from Washington state. She is pushing a simpler, more voter-friendly version of cap-and-trade, called “cap-and-dividend”. Under her bill, the government would impose a ceiling on carbon emissions each year. Producers and importers of fossil fuels will have to buy permits. The permits would be auctioned, raising vast sums of money. Most of that money would be divided evenly among all Americans. The bill would raise energy prices, of course, and therefore the price of everything that requires energy to make or distribute. But a family of four would receive perhaps $1000 a year, which would more than make up for it, reckons Ms Cantwell. Cap-and-dividend would set a price on carbon, thus giving Americans a powerful incentive to burn less dirty fuel. It would also raise the rewards for investing in clean energy. And it would leave all but the richest 20% of Americans—who use the most energy—materially better off, she says.

Ms Cantwell’s bill is refreshingly simple. At a mere 40 pages, it is one-thirty-sixth as long as the monstrous House bill (known as “Waxman-Markey”, after its sponsors), which would regulate everything from televisions to “bottle-type water dispensers” and is completely incomprehensible to a layman. Instead of auctioning permits to emit, Waxman-Markey gives 85% of them away, at least at first. This is staggeringly inefficient: permits would go to those with political clout rather than those who value them most. No one is proud of this—Mr Obama wanted a 100% auction—but House Democrats decided that the only way to pass the bill was to hand out billions of dollars of goodies to groups that might otherwise oppose it. (There was plenty of pork left over for its supporters, too.) ...

Of all the bills that would put a price on carbon, cap-and-dividend seems the most promising. (A carbon tax would be best of all, but has no chance of passing.) Ms Cantwell has a Republican co-sponsor, Susan Collins of Maine, and says she is hearing positive noises from a few other Republicans, such as Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The most attractive thing about the bill is that it is honest. To discourage the use of dirty energy, it says, it has to be more expensive. To make up for that, here’s a thousand bucks.

Inhabitat has a look at an interesting window surface incorporating concentrating solar PV technology - CASE Solar Power Glass Energizes Any Building Facade.

Solar engineers have long sought to develop an energy-generating glazing that is as capable of producing power as it is easy on the eyes. The feat may just have been accomplished by The Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE), who have developed a concentrating solar system that is not only modern and attractive but extremely efficient and cost effective. The system is made up of rows of pyramid-shaped glass receptors that move with sunlight throughout the day, magnifying the incoming light and capturing it in a small photovoltaic cell located in the center of each pyramid.

CASE’s receptors can be fitted to existing buildings or built into new designs. The concentrating solar cells are strung on wires with tracking mechanisms that turn the receptors in the direction of the sun throughout the day. Since they are made from glass they are transparent and allow light to pass through windows, which makes them perfect for adding solar power to building facades while maximizing available daylight.

The glass pyramid shape actually serves to magnify light and increase the natural lighting inside a building while decreasing the need for artificial light. The design is also meant to capture thermal energy trapped inside the glass pyramids that is not converted into electricity to be used for heating and cooling systems.

Earth2Tech has a look at some smart grid design issues - Smart Grid Problem?: Smart at the Edge, Dumb In the Middle.

Too much intelligence at the edge of a network, and not enough in the middle, makes for a volatile network. That’s according to Ray Gogel, president and chief operating officer of the Current Group, quoted in a Forbes article this morning.

Gogel says a lot of the attention so far on the smart grid has been focused on “the edge” of the network — power generation and consumer energy consumption — and he’s worried that if there are too many nodes (renewable energy, smart meters) added at the edges of the network before the middle of the grid can catch up, in terms of intelligence, it will make for a volatile smart grid. The situation “scares utility people like myself,” he tells Forbes.

The point he makes is valid in terms of there being a lack of smart systems and software to control electrical functions deeper in the grid. That’s one of the reasons why utilities have been actively asking for software layers and applications that will help them manage that energy info within the network (for more on that see our GigaOM Pro article, subscription required). Warren Weiss, Managing Director of Foundation Capital, said at our smart grid event last week that these types of applications, particularly to help utilities intelligently manage renewable energy, are an untapped area for innovation. Gogel’s company Current not surprisingly makes technology to monitor and control electricity in the middle of the grid.

How “volatile” could the situation be? Electricity consumption and generation at the edges has to be tightly managed to make sure the grid doesn’t get overloaded in some areas or have blackouts in others. I remember at the Black Hat security convention, Mike Davis of security firm IOActive told me how turning on and off a large number of meters — say, 50,000 meters and 3 MW worth of electricity — could cause major problems for the stability of that section of the grid.

But in terms of the communication and computing portion of the smart grid (not the electrical control aspect, as moving and managing electrons is different than moving data) utilities and smart grid players are increasingly acknowledging that more intelligence at the edges of the network will actually be necessary. Eventually the smart grid — like broadband networks do — will have some sort of distributed model of computing “where automated decisions are made at the edge of the network but with some sort of supervisory control layer,” explained Andy Tang, senior director of the Smart Energy Web for PG&E at our smart grid bunker event. That distributed computing model will be quite different from the centralized mainframe model and point-to-point system that utilities largely have in place today, said Tang.

The process of adding more computing intelligence at the edges of the network will take many years. And I’m sure there will be a lot of debates amongst utilities about what their smart grid networks will look like.

The telecom and broadband industries have been debating whether intelligence of the network resides more in the edges, or in the core, for decades. In the late ’90s David Isenberg wrote a seminal article called Rise of the Stupid Network, in which he argued that intelligence is shifting to the endpoints and the data services and that the phone companies needed to evolve to that model in order to survive. Nowadays, however, the rise of cloud-computing and cheap/dumb netbooks raises new questions about where to place intelligence.

Ultimately the communications industries realized that certain levels of intelligence are needed in both areas, and there have been shifting trends for both. I think, for the data layer (not the electrical control portion), the smart grid industry will discover the same thing.

The Australian has an (not entirely informative) article on the possible licencing of an Australian pyrolysis technology to Indian Oil - Eden Energy soars on deal with Indian Oil.

SHARES in Perth-based tiddler Eden Energy rocketed more than 250 per cent under heavy trade this morning after announcing a non-binding deal with Indian giant Indian Oil Corporation.

Under a term sheet signed in India this week, the Delhi-based company will farm-in to the development of a new pyrolysis technology jointly conceived by Eden and the University of Queensland.

Eden said the research will focus on the “commercial potential of a form of carbon believed to be the strongest structural material known to man”. ...

Under the arrangement, Eden will purchase the University of Queensland’s 50 per cent stake in the patents and intellectual property developed by the project in exchange for shares in the energy company.

Eden will then transfer this interest to India Oil after it has up scaled the technology to a pilot plant stage.

The New York Times has an article on angst in the US about China's progress building clean energy industries - China Leading Global Race to Make Clean Energy.

China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year.

China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants.

These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.

“Most of the energy equipment will carry a brass plate, ‘Made in China,’ ” said K. K. Chan, the chief executive of Nature Elements Capital, a private equity fund in Beijing that focuses on renewable energy.

President Obama, in his State of the Union speech last week, sounded an alarm that the United States was falling behind other countries, especially China, on energy. “I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders — and I know you don’t either,” he told Congress.

The United States and other countries are offering incentives to develop their own renewable energy industries, and Mr. Obama called for redoubling American efforts. Yet many Western and Chinese executives expect China to prevail in the energy-technology race.

Reuters has a report on a small tidal power development in the UK - Norway's Hammerfest Strom gets UK tidal power grant.

Hammerfest Strom UK Ltd. has received 3.9 million pounds ($6.2 million) from Britain's Carbon Trust to build and test a one-megawatt (MW) tidal power generator off the Scottish island of Orkney, the company said on Tuesday.

The British arm of Norwegian tidal power developer Hammerfest Strom AS expects the tidal turbine to be fully operational by 2011.

After testing the new HS1000 turbine, the company will work with ScottishPower Renewables (IBE.MC: Quote, Profile, Research) to integrate it into a 10-MW tidal power farm in the Sound of Islay by 2012.

AFP has a report on an ongoing USGS survey of Afghanistan's natural resources - Afghan 'geological reserves worth a trillion dollars'.

Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest countries, is sitting on mineral and petroleum reserves worth an estimated one trillion dollars, President Hamid Karzai said Sunday.

The war-ravaged nation could become one of the richest in the world if helped to tap its geological deposits, Karzai told reporters. "I have very good news for Afghans," Karzai said. "The initial figures we have obtained show that our mineral deposits are worth a thousand billion dollars -- not a thousand million dollars but a thousand billion," he said.

He based his assertion, he said, on a survey being carried out by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), due to be completed in "a couple of months". The USGS, the US government's scientific agency, has been working on the 17-million dollar survey for a number of years, Karzai said.

While Afghanistan is not renowned as a resource-rich country, it has a wide range of deposits, including copper, iron ore, gold and chromite, as well as natural gas, oil and precious and semi-precious stones.

The BBC is reporting BP boss Tony Hayward is predicting peak oil by 2020 and peak demand before then - 'Unreasonable paranoia' about gas supplies.

The chief executive of BP has said there is 'unreasonable paranoia' about gas supplies to the UK. In a rare broadcast interview, Tony Hayward told Today presenter Evan Davis that it was "curious as to why there is so much concern about us becoming more reliant on imported gas".

He added that "there's a lot of gas available from many diverse sources," and said that in the past six months the UK had sourced supplies from countries including Norway, Algeria, Egypt and Trinidad. "It's a very sensible way to bridge between where were are today and where we all want to be in twenty or thirty years' time."

Mr Hayward also said that he expects the oil supply to peak in 2020, but that demand will hit a high before then.

The Guardian has a different take on Hayward's views, saying BP "never" expect supply to peak (predicting a big increase in production of oil from Iraq) but that demand will peak "after 2020" - did these guys listen to the same interview (!) - Tony Hayward: BP's straight-talking chief on evolution not revolution.

The straight-talking oil explorer, who is said to still enjoy the occasional triathlon, is an optimist and has little time for those who argue the world has passed, or is even approaching, peak oil supplies. "I personally – and BP – have never believed we will see peak oil because of supply. We always believed we would see peak oil because of demand. There will come a time – I believe it is beyond 2020 – when because of the changes in the energy portfolio, because of the drive for energy efficiency, because of the introduction of biofuels, demand for oil will peak."

There is plenty of oil in the world, he argues, not least in Iraq, where BP has staff working on the ground, even ahead of important political elections.

Hayward expects Iraq's oil production to grow from a couple of million barrels a day today to close to 10m, putting it on par with Saudi Arabia. This makes it "a big part of oil security for the world."

Once upon a time I used to have a slot called "Friday Night Fear Mongering" which I eventually abandoned as I became entirely disenchanted with the doomer community. While I'm still over the doomers, I kind of enjoyed this example from John Michael Greer (aka the Archdruid) looking through a particularly dark glass at the US economy - Endgame (I'm not sure if the title is a nod of the head towards Dennis Jensen, or just a coincidence).

A different reality pertains within the Washington DC beltway. Where states that fail to balance their budgets get their bond ratings cut and, in some cases, are having trouble finding buyers for their debt at less than usurious interest rates, the federal government seems to be able to defy the normal behavior of bond markets with impunity. Despite soaring deficits, not to mention a growing disinclination on the part of foreign governments to keep on financing the same, every new issuance of US treasury bills somehow finds buyers in such abundance that interest rates stay remarkably low. A few weeks ago, Tom Whipple of ASPO became the latest in a tolerably large number of perceptive observers who have pointed out that this makes sense only if the US government is surreptitiously buying its own debt.

The process works something like this. The Federal Reserve, which is not actually a government agency but a consortium of large banks working under a Federal charter, has the statutory right to mint money in the US. These days, that can be done by a few keystrokes on a computer, and another few keystrokes can transfer that money to any bank in the nation. Some of those banks use the money to buy up US treasury bills, probably by way of subsidiaries chartered in the Cayman Islands and the like, and these same subsidiaries then stash the T-bills and keep them off the books. The money thus laundered finally arrives at the US treasury, where it gets spent.

It may be a bit more complex than that. Those huge sums of money voted by Congress to bail out the financial system may well have been diverted into this process – that would certainly explain why the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have stonewalled every attempt to trace exactly where all that money went. Friendly foreign governments may also have a hand in the process. One way or another, though, those of my readers who remember the financial engineering that got Enron its fifteen minutes of fame may find all this uncomfortably familiar – and it is. The world’s largest economy has become, in effect, the United States of Enron.

Plenty of countries in the past have tried to cover expenses that overshot income by spinning the presses at the local mint. The result is generally hyperinflation, of the sort made famous in the 1920s by Germany and more recently by Zimbabwe. That I know of, though, nobody has tried the experiment with a national economy in a steep deflationary depression, of the sort that has been taking shape in America and elsewhere since the real estate bubble crashed and burned in 2008. In theory, at least in the short term, it might just work; the inflationary pressures caused by printing money wholesale could conceivably cancel out the deflationary pressures of a collapsing bubble and a contracting economy – at least for a while.

The difficulty, of course, is that pumping the money supply fixes the symptoms of economic failure without treating the causes, and in every case I know of, governments that resort to it end up caught on a treadmill that requires ever larger infusions of paper money just to maintain the status quo. Sooner or later, as the amount of currency in circulation outstrips the goods and services available to buy, inflation spins out of control, the currency loses most or all of its value, and the economy grinds to a halt until a new currency can be issued on some sounder basis. In 1920s Germany, they managed this last feat by taking out a mortgage on the entire country, and issued “Rentenmarks” backed by that mortgage. In the wake of the late housing bubble, that seems an unlikely option here, though no doubt some gimmick will be found.

It’s crucial to realize, though, that this move comes at the end of a long historical trajectory. From the early days of the industrial revolution into the early 1970s, the United States possessed the immense economic advantage of sizeable reserves of whatever the cutting-edge energy source happened to be. During what Lewis Mumford called the eotechnic era, when waterwheels were the prime mover for industry and canals were the core transportation technology, the United States prospered because it had an abundance of mill sites and internal waterways. During Mumford’s paleotechnic era, when coal and railways replaced water and canal boats, the United States once again found itself blessed with huge coal reserves, and the arrival of the neotechnic era, when petroleum and highways became the new foundation of power, the United States found that nature had supplied it with so much oil that in 1950, it produced more petroleum than all other countries combined.

That trajectory came to an abrupt end in the 1970s, when nuclear power – expected by nearly everyone to be the next step in the sequence – turned out to be hopelessly uneconomical, and renewables proved unable to take up the slack. The neotechnic age, in effect, turned out to have no successor. Since then, for most of the last thirty years, the United States has been trying to stave off the inevitable – the sharp downward readjustment of our national standard of living and international importance following the peak and decline of our petroleum production and the depletion of most of the other natural resources that once undergirded American economic and political power. We’ve tried accelerating drawdown of natural resources; we’ve tried abandoning our national infrastructure, our industries, and our agricultural hinterlands; we’ve tried building ever more baroque systems of financial gimmickry to prop up our decaying economy with wealth from overseas; over the last decade and a half, we’ve resorted to systematically inflating speculative bubbles – and now, with our backs to the wall, we’re printing money as though there’s no tomorrow.

Now it’s possible that the current US administration will be able to pull one more rabbit out of its hat, and find a new gimmick to keep things going for a while longer. I have to confess that this does not look likely to me. Monetizing the national debt, as economists call the attempt to pay a nation’s bills by means of a hyperactive printing press, is a desperation move; it’s hard to imagine any reason that it would have been chosen if there were any other option in sight.

What this means, if I’m right, is that we may have just moved into the endgame of America’s losing battle with the consequences of its own history. For many years now, people in the peak oil scene – and the wider community of those concerned about the future, to be sure – have had, or thought they had, the luxury of ample time to make plans and take action. Every so often books would be written and speeches made claiming that something had to be done right away, while there was still time, but most people took that as the rhetorical flourish it usually was, and went on with their lives in the confident expectation that the crisis was still a long ways off.

We may no longer have that option. If I read the signs correctly, America has finally reached the point where its economy is so deep into overshoot that catabolic collapse is beginning in earnest. If so, a great many of the things most of us in this country have treated as permanent fixtures are likely to go away over the years immediately before us, as the United States transforms itself into a Third World country. The changes involved won’t be sudden, and it seems unlikely that most of them will get much play in the domestic mass media; a decade from now, let’s say, when half the American workforce has no steady work, decaying suburbs have mutated into squalid shantytowns, and domestic insurgencies flare across the south and the mountain West, those who still have access to cable television will no doubt be able to watch talking heads explain how we’re all better off than we were in 2000.

Those of my readers who haven’t already been beggared by the unraveling of what’s left of the economy, and have some hope of keeping a roof over their heads for the foreseeable future, might be well advised to stock their pantries, clear their debts, and get to know their neighbors, if they haven’t taken these sensible steps already. Those of my readers who haven’t taken the time already to learn a practical skill or two, well enough that others might be willing to pay or barter for the results, had better get a move on. Those of my readers who want to see some part of the heritage of the present saved for the future, finally, may want to do something practical about that, and soon. I may be wrong – and to be frank, I hope that I’m wrong – but it looks increasingly to me as though we’re in for a very rough time in the very near future.

The ABC has a report on a small wave power plant proposed for South Australia - Feedback sought on wave plant impact.

A $5 million wave-energy plant off South Australia's Eyre Peninsula is a step closer, with public comment being invited on its environmental impact. Wave Rider Energy hopes to install the plant 800 metres offshore from Elliston.

The company's managing director, Christian Gerlach, says it is hoped federal approval for the project can be secured in March. He says the plant would be built in Adelaide and towed to Elliston early next year.

Green Building of the week from Inhabitat is this South Korean design for a dome style environmental centre - South Korea Unveils Stunning Eco Dome Environmental Center.

The National Ecological Institute of South Korea recently released plans for a large-scale nature reserve complete with an incredible series of eco domes, an education center, and an environmental think-tank. Designed by SAMOO, the Ecorium Project will be a striking environmental center comprising thousands of acres of open space in addition to greenhouses and a visitor center. Much like the Eden Project in the UK, the Ecorium Project will serve to educate people about nature, and provide a space for study of the world’s eco-systems and how best to protect them.

Inhabitat also has a post on a Norwegian tourism design concept - Norwegan Turbine City Could Be The Next Big Eco-Tourist Attraction.

Turbine City is a way to “spin” turbines in a new light for people who might think of them as unappealing eyesores, and could attract tourists, sailors, offshore oil-workers and others to see the beauty of wind farms with their own eyes. Plus, it makes a lot of sense to have the structures perform double duty as both energy harvesting devices and a place for people to find shelter and enjoyment.

To be located in Stavanger, Norway, Turbine City would also be self-sustaining in terms of power, needing just 1MW (from 8MW turbines) to run. Since Norway is somewhat (in)famous for its production of oil, Turbine City could also help gain the country some fans in the clean and alternative energy arenas.

The SMH has an article on the Australian energy system - now and what it could be - Handicapped by 19th-century technology.

Renewable energy is the fastest growing power source in the world, and already generates baseload electricity on the scale of utilities. Large solar thermal plants with heat storage can dispatch power around the clock every day of the week regardless of whether the sun is shining, and make handsome profits during demand peaks.

Wind power is being installed on scales that dwarf Australian grid requirements. These and other clean energy technologies are replacing coal on modern grids. While Australia continues to throw money at 19th-century technologies, Spain, China, the US and others are charging ahead with zero-emissions power generation, and creating export markets.

Spain consumes about as much electricity as Australia, though its population is about twice as large. Like Australia, Spain is blessed with strong, consistent sunshine, and it uses this attribute to ensure energy security. Already it has built 24-hour baseload solar plants, using molten salt to store heat which is then used to create steam and turn turbines. It started with Andasol 1, a 50MW plant, and has now completed two similar projects. More than 1,800MW of projects are under construction and the government has just approved another 2,440MW for their feed-in tariff scheme for construction over the next three years.

The Gemasolar project is the shining light of the Spanish boom in baseload solar power. This solar thermal plant has created 1500 jobs and will operate at 60 to 100 per cent of maximum turbine output for up to 90 per cent of hours each year. Very low maintenance shutdown requirements allow this efficiency, far greater than coal-fired power generators in NSW. When the turbine is idle, heat is bled off the ''cold'' 290-degree salt storage tank to keep the turbine seals warm, allowing fast starting - as seen in the best hydro and gas plants. This capacity for baseload and fast-start ''dispatchable'' power generation places the Gemasolar plant among the highest-value electricity plants, a fact not lost on investors.

This solar generation capacity is in addition to Spanish wind power. Wind turbines supply 11 per cent of Spain's electricity demand, and this will more than double to 25 per cent by 2020. Another 6000MW of wind power is approved for installation in the next three years. That is just shy of three plants the size of the Bayswater power station near Muswellbrook, with all the jobs but no emissions.

Spain is phasing out coal and nuclear, and the companies that built the nuclear plants have re-tooled to build solar thermal plants with heat storage. These companies did not want to own the nuclear plants they built, but they have set up investment vehicles to own solar thermal plants.

Compared to the 10 years it takes to get a nuclear plant up and running, solar thermal plants with 24-hour baseload capacity have construction times as short as nine months, so such projects are not exposed to the same political, industrial and financial risks as nuclear plants. Envisaging a lucrative market for their solar infrastructure and expertise, the Spanish anticipate a healthy return on any subsidies for these technologies.

In China, solar hot water and photovoltaic (PV) panels have had huge commercial success. Maintenance-free evacuated tube solar hot water systems were developed in Australia. They are cheap - each tube wholesales for less than $5 and a system for a family costs less than $500. More than 50 million Chinese households now enjoy unlimited, free hot water from such systems.

China produces solar PV panels on a huge scale, and is the leading manufacturer of this technology for domestic rooftops. This triumph also owes much to Australian innovation, and to Australian governments' failure to support the industry on home soil.

The University of NSW solar PV team is the world leader in its field and holds the global efficiency record for ordinary silicon cells. Much of the technology in China, particularly from the leading company, Suntech, leverages off this Australian innovation.

The Chinese were also ahead of the game when the global financial crisis hit. Their government moved quickly to arrange for government buildings to purchase surplus industrial output. This meant the billions of dollars Chinese companies had invested in PV plants were not wasted when demand suddenly fell.

This is in stark contrast with the situation in Australia. Melbourne's Solar Systems has proven commercial success in displacing diesel in diesel/solar hybrid power generation for remote aboriginal communities. Solar Systems, a leader in its field, was unable to generate operational revenue and was forced into administration in August. With a bit of Chinese-style foresight, the Rudd government could have created a pipeline of projects for remote area power systems dependent on diesel. This would have been a responsible use of stimulus funds, and assured the company remained viable and ready for the boom after the global financial crisis.

Chinese wind power blows us away, too. A total of 30,000MW of wind power was planned to come online by 2020, but this target will be met early this year. China is now planning for 150,000MW of wind power by 2020, and again it is likely that this will be achieved much earlier.

Within the 150,000MW wind power target is the ''Three Gorges of Wind'' project. Named after the world's biggest engineering project, the Three Gorges dam, it will produce 70,000MW at seven large sites and twice as much electricity as the Three Gorges Dam, but cost half as much. The Three Gorges of Wind will produce about the same amount of electricity as the electricity grid on Australia's eastern seaboard.

Denmark obtains 20 per cent of its electricity from wind, and this will increase to 50 per cent by 2025. Wind turbines from the 1980s will be replaced with new models that are 30 times larger and much more efficient in a wide variety of wind conditions.

NSW alone is 19 times larger than Denmark. It has about the same population and experiences as much wind in any given place. Our national electricity grid extends from Tasmania and South Australia to far northern Queensland. With such a massive resource over a vast area, wind power can make a large contribution to Australian energy security.

Australia continues to rely on wasteful 19th-century technology. In periods of low demand, such as the dead of night, our antiquated coal-fired power stations throw energy away by blowing steam.

In Germany, policy decisions have boosted renewable energy sales and provided the environment for a high-tech manufacturing industry. This is despite the fact that, under often-grey northern skies, PV panels installed in Germany may produce 50 to 65 per cent less energy over their lifetime than equivalent panels in Australia. German households and businesses will add up to three gigawatts (GW) of photovoltaic generation by the end of this year, bringing the national total to eight GW. That is 86 per cent of the entire Hunter Valley generating capacity.

Planning authorities in the US are also swamped with plans for wind and solar thermal power. More than 97,000MW of solar thermal projects are seeking approval from the US Bureau of Land Management. In the south-west of the country, the bureau is doing a study that would speed up development of more than 100,000MW of right-of-way sites (degraded government lands) for solar thermal plants. There go another 38 Bayswater equivalents. An underdeveloped grid is the main obstacle to the expansion of wind power in the US, but President Barack Obama has announced a huge modernisation plan.

I'm not sure why I find myself watching Chris Monckton's travelling circus of climate charlatanry, but I'm not the only one - Crikey reports on the rapt reception he is getting amongst the more conservative segments of the older generation (the only youngish people paying attention are the LaRouchies, trying somehow to deal with the cognitive dissonance of echoing the Viscount's message while simultaneously claiming global warming is a genocidal plot cooked up by the British aristocracy) - Monckton’s Melbourne meeting: a gathering of men in Richie Benaud blazers.

One shouldn’t imply that the CEC was representative of the huge crowds attending Monckton’s tour. That would be unfair. The LaRouchites were much younger, for a start.

Inside Monckton’s Melbourne meeting, most of the attendees looked like Ian Plimer. It was a gathering of men in Richie Benaud blazers, sometimes accompanied by silver-haired wives, dressed up as if for a night at the opera.

Naturally, the attendees didn’t believe in evil plots led by the Royal Family. In fact, they seemed, if anything, distinctly anglophile, in that Old-Australia-RSL-club kind of way. They’d come, after all, not to listen to Chris Monckton but rather to the “Third Viscount of Brenchley”, a man who was touring not “Australia” but (his slide informed us) the “Commonwealth of Australia”, a distinction that, in context, seemed to matter rather a lot. It was a crowd who saw nothing strange in a priest kicking off proceedings with the Lord’s Prayer, nor in the heraldic crest that adorned every overhead, a grisly emblem with a crown hovering majestically above a portcullis.

John Howard battlers, for the most part: the old, the white and the angry. That anger — and it was palpable — provides a potential constituency for Tony Abbott, and perhaps even a large one. When a picture of Kevin Rudd flashed on the screen, the hostility was immediate and unfeigned.

Later, the Viscount asked rhetorically: “Do we want an emissions trading scheme?”

“No!” came the shout. “No!”

Could supporters of the ETS — by its nature, an unhappy negotiated compromise — muster the same passion in its defence? One very much doubts that Penny Wong, these days, attracts roaring crowds.

The deep outrage felt by climate sceptics, their sense of facing a fundamental attack on their way of life, provides Abbott, at the very least, with a pool of active supporters: highly motivated people to hand out how-to-vote-cards, make phone calls, attend meetings.

But whether he can turn that constituency into a majority is a very different question. For while Lord Monckton eschewed, for the most part, the wraparound jumper craziness of the CEC, he nonetheless strayed regularly into X Files territory. Copenhagen, he explained, represented an attempt to impose world government by bureaucratic coup d’etat.

He put on a Nazi accent. The real plan at Copenhangen was, he said, all about “the New Vorld Order!”

Indeed, the fascist jackboot seemed to have already come down on poor old England, which was now ruled by “commissars” (a word he repeated several times) from the European Union.

“We in Britain are no longer free.” His voice turned mournful. “I know what it feels like to lose my democracy. Make sure you don’t let your democracy go so cheaply.”

In some respects, this kind of black helicopter nuttiness might have seemed like an add-on to the main message but in other ways it was central. For Monckton was there to explain that there was no climate crisis at all. The temperature was falling, not rising. The sea ice was just fine. So, too, the Eurasian snow cover and the Antarctic ice and the hurricanes and the polar bears. They were all as right as rain, and there were graphs and charts and formulas to prove it.

And that, of course, raised a second question, one that necessarily haunts climate sceptics. If, as Monckton said, the majority of scientists are scandalously and incompetently wrong about global warming, why does the scientific community go along with the charade? What about the media and the political mainstream? Why aren’t they embracing the truth?

The answer doesn’t automatically involve a conspiracy but it certainly marches you a long way that direction. You’d think that a researcher who could allay the world’s fears about global catastrophe would be crowned with laurels. But, no, apparently not. Someone must be getting to the scientists, forcing them to toe the party line. Someone is making sure that the journalists don’t dare speak out. Why, it’s probably the same people who turned Britain into a dictatorship without anyone noticing!

You can see the difficulty for Abbott.

The attendees at the Monckton performance might seem, at first, the traditional pillars of the Liberal Party, an organisation that’s always done well with old, comfortable, white folks. But there’s a big difference between Menzies’ people and Monckton’s people.

Once upon a time, the Liberal Party, an organisation temperamentally suited, after all, to hierarchy, accorded an almost royal deference to Big Science. Menzies presided over an Australia that wondered at atom splittings and Sputnik launchings, and not in the sceptical sense of that word but with genuine awe, with the mysteries expounded by clipboard-carrying oracles understood as evidencing the remarkable advances of the modern age.

Under Howard, however, the party embraced a populist anti-elitism, in which the instincts of ordinary folk always trumped the hoity-toity pronouncements of over-educated know-it-alls. Throughout the culture wars, the high falutin’ elitists in their inner-city apartments, those whining postmodernists confounding the common sense of you and me and the bloke next door, were a perennial punching bag for the Liberals and their mouthpieces.

The climate debate thus arrived with an oppositional script already well-prepared: on the one hand, the fancy-dancing, silver-tongued scientists and ideologues, with their incomprehensible graphs and statistical charts; on the other, the hard-working traditional Australians forced to feel bad about SUVs and air travel by self-righteous scolds.

Slapping down some scientific poindexter became, then, a reflexive defence of values associated with the ’50s, even as it manifested an attitude to the research establishment that Menzies would have found incomprehensible.

Right-wing populism is neither new nor confined to Australia. As a political tactic, a demagogic anti-elitism was imported from the US where it served Republicans for decades, and accordingly it’s in the US where the consequences can be seen to their fullest. George Bush might have been the fortunate son of a political dynasty but his political career centred on a “just folks” persona in which Bush, a brush-cutting Texan cowboy, fronted as the kind of guy with whom you could have a beer — in contrast with, say, John Kerry, who’d undoubtedly clear the entire bar by, like, talking about politics and stuff.

As a touchstone for electability, the “would I go drinking with this man?” test was, of course, spectacularly insane: a moment’s thought would suggest that proving yourself affable company for alcoholics would not, in and of itself, qualify you to control a nuclear arsenal. Nonetheless, it won Bush two elections and, in the process, shifted the way that the US — and hence the world — thought about power and politics. For, whatever other promises he may have reneged upon, as President, W remained true to an anti-intellectual populism. He was a man with a swagger, an avowed non-reader, a Decider who did his deciding by gut rather than by brain. The political consequences of a presidency ruled by a stomach might be increasingly apparent from New Orleans to Baghdad, but, as Charles Pierce argues in his book Idiot America, the implications for science are even worse.

“If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress,” he writes, “we have done so by moving empirical debate into the realms of political, cultural and religious argument, where we all feel more comfortable because there the Gut truly holds sway. By the rules governing those realms, any scientific theory is a mere opinion and everyone’s entitled to those. Scientific fact is as mutable as a polling sample.”

If your instinct tells you that climate change is a fraud cooked up by leftists still angry about the fall of communism, well, who or what could convince you otherwise? As Pierce points out, the populist disdain for authority means that everyone is an expert — and thus no one is. Worse, in a debate centred on gut feelings, real knowledge becomes a manifest disadvantage, a palpable signifier of inauthenticity. You trust some wingnut blogger precisely because they’re not a research scientist — that’s why they can speak so freely!

Monckton’s supporters might protest that, actually, his tour was all about science. There were graphs, there were charts, there were statistical analyses.

Well, of course there were. But you can’t actually do science that way, can you! How many people in the Sofitel audience knew what a Stefan-Boltzmann Equation called itself when it was at home? Not so many, one presumes — but we all knew how to hiss demonstrably when an outraged Monckton revealed that, throughout the 1600-page UN report of 2007, there was no mention (not one!) of said equation. (It was, one presumes, crowded out by all the plans for a world government!)

You might think that Monckton should be publishing his equations and graphs to the peer-reviewed literature, the traditional route for challenging a scientific paradigm. Ah, but he can’t, because the journals and the university and the other government-funded institutions prefer to foster apocalyptic projections rather than the arguments of a man who says the environment’s just peachy the way it is. Why? Well, now we’re back to interesting theories about commissars and the collapse of democracy and the rest of it.

Abbott thus faces a ticklish dilemma. On the one hand, the deniers bring a passion that an Opposition sorely needs. On the other hand, the climate sceptics teeter on the verge of overt hostility to the very establishment that the Liberal Party needs to win over. Populists, after all, despise and mistrust not only greenies and EU commissars but Big Media and Big Business.

The Liberal Party, well, not so much.

John Howard managed — most of the time — to present himself simultaneously as a populist and a man of the establishment. Perhaps Abbott can do the same. But it doesn’t seem likely, at least partly because the rhetorical tenor of the sceptics has grown so shrill.

One of the crusty old fogeys meeting the Lord was Opposition Leader Tony Abbott (though I would have thought that given a number of his fellow travellers also have plenty of conspiracy theories about Catholics he might steer clear) - Abbott to the lunatic fringe: it’s OK, I’m one of you.

Tony Abbott met with conspiracy theorist Chris Monckton yesterday at lunchtime, but Abbott wouldn’t allow photographers to record the meeting or publicly comment on what was discussed.

Meeting this shabby character is contemptible and reflects poorly on Abbott’s fitness for high office. There are, after all, plenty of Australian skeptics and denialists out there to meet, plenty of men and women who share Abbott’s view that climate science is crap. We’ve produced quite a few of them.

Despite Ian Plimer or Bob Carter lacking any credentials in climate science, at least they can mount a pseudo-scientific case against global warming. But Abbott decided to meet this low-rent Lyndon LaRouche from London. Worse, refusing to allow the meeting to be photographed shows thorough cowardice. If he’s happy to meet this “swivel-eyed maniac”, as one conservative called Monckton, he should be happy to be photographed shaking his hand.

But forget the moral outrage: this was savvy politics. Abbott has sent a clear signal to the right-wing fringe groups and One Nation-types that have drifted away from the party over the last two years: he’s their man, he shares their values. When they talk about shoring up the base, this is what they mean, pulling those voters out of the “Other” camp in polling, where they’re lodged with Family First and socially-conservative parties, and back into the Liberal column.

It didn’t require being photographed with Monckton – the lunatic fringe will know he met him. It will be all over their blogs and in their email networks. Finally, they’ll think, someone important is listening to us.

Being photographed with Monckton might have sent the wrong single to mainstream voters, because Monckton’s a risk, prone to coming out with potentially ridiculous statements that Abbott would have to distance himself from. Like interning people with HIV, for example, (although apparently Monckton has invented a cure for that).

So best to keep it on the quiet, out the media, because the media loves visuals and stories don’t get one-tenth as far without them. A job well done.

TomDispatch has an article on the future of Iraq's oil - Michael Schwartz, Will Iraq's Oil Ever Flow? .

Iraqi oil, too, has been a focus of Washington’s unremitting ambition tempered by failure. Long before the cost of the war began to lurch toward the current Congressional estimate of $700 billion, the idea of using oil revenues to pay for the invasion had vanished, as had the idea of quadrupling production capacity within a few years. The hope of doing so someday, however, remains alive. Speculation that Iraq’s production could -- in the not too distant future -- exceed that of Saudi Arabia may still represent Washington’s main strategy for postponing future severe global energy shortages.

Even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the secretive energy task force Vice President Cheney headed was tentatively allocating various oil fields in a future pacified Iraq to key international oil companies. Before the March 2003 invasion, the State Department actually drafted prospective legislation for a post-Hussein government, which would have transferred the control of key oil fields to foreign oil giants. Those companies were then expected to invest the necessary billions in Iraq’s rickety oil industry to boost production to maximum rates.

Not so long after U.S. troops entered Baghdad, the administration’s proconsul, L. Paul Bremer III, enacted the State Department legislation by fiat (and in clear violation of international law, which prohibits occupying powers from changing fundamental legislation in the conquered country). Under the banner of de-Baathification -- the dismantling of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni ruling party -- he also fired oil technicians, engineers, and administrators, leaving behind a skeleton crew of Iraqis to manage existing production (and await the arrival of the oil giants with all their expertise).

Within a short time, many of these pariah professionals had fled to other countries where their skills were valued, creating a brain drain that, for a time, nearly incapacitated the Iraqi oil industry. Bremer then appointed a group of international oil consultants and business executives to a newly created (and UN-sanctioned) Development Fund of Iraq (DFI), which was to oversee all of the country’s oil revenues.

The remaining Iraqi administrators, technicians, and workers soon mounted a remarkably determined and effective multi-front resistance to Bremer’s effort. They were aided in this by a growing insurgency.

In one dramatic episode, Bremer announced the pending transfer of the control of the southern port of Basra (which then handled 80% of the country’s oil exports) from a state-run enterprise to KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company Vice President Cheney had once headed. Anticipating that their own jobs would soon disappear in a sea of imported labor, the oil workers immediately struck. KBR quickly withdrew and Bremer abandoned the effort.

In other Bremer initiatives, foreign energy and construction firms did take charge of development, repair, and operations in Iraq’s main oil fields. The results were rarely adequate and often destructive. Contracts for infrastructure repair or renewal were often botched or left incomplete, as international companies ripped out usable or repairable facilities that involved technology alien to them, only to install ultimately incompatible equipment. In one instance, a $5 million pipeline repair became an $80 million “modernization” project that foundered on intractable engineering issues and, three years later, was left incomplete. In more than a few instances, local communities sabotaged such projects, either because they employed foreign workers and technicians instead of Iraqis, or because they were designed to deprive the locals of what they considered their “fair share” of oil revenues.

In the first two years of the occupation, there were more than 200 attacks on oil and gas pipelines. By 2007, 600 acts of sabotage against pipelines and facilities had been recorded.

After an initial flurry of interest, international oil companies sized up the dangers and politely refused Bremer’s invitation to risk billions of dollars on Iraqi energy investments.

After this initial failure, the Bush administration looked for a new strategy to forward its oil ambitions. In late 2004, with Bremer out of the picture, Washington brokered a deal between U.S.-sponsored Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and the International Monetary Fund. European countries promised to forgive a quarter of the debts accumulated by Saddam Hussein, and the Iraqis promised to implement the U.S. oil plan. But this worked no better than Bremer’s effort. Continued sabotage by insurgents, resistance by Iraqi technicians and workers, and the corrupt ineptitude of the contracting companies made progress impossible. The international oil companies continued to stay away.

In 2007, under direct U.S. pressure, virtually the same law was reluctantly endorsed by Prime Minister Maliki and forwarded to the Iraqi parliament for legislative consideration. Instead of passing it, the parliament established itself as a new center of resistance to the U.S. plan, raising myriad familiar complaints and repeatedly refusing to bring it to a vote. It lies dormant to this day.

This stalemate continued unabated through the Obama administration’s first year in office, as illustrated by a continuing conflict around the pipeline that carries oil from Iraq to Turkey, a source of about 20% of the country’s oil revenues. During the Bremer administration, the U.S. had ended the Saddam-era tradition of allowing local tribes to siphon off a proportion of the oil passing through their territory. The insurgents, viewing this as an act of American theft, undertook systematic sabotage of the pipeline, and -- despite ferocious U.S. military offensives -- it remained closed for all but a few days throughout the next five years.

The pipeline was re-opened in the fall of 2009, when the Iraqi government restored the Saddam-era custom in exchange for an end to sabotage. This has been only partially successful. Shipments have been interrupted by further pipeline attacks, evidently mounted by insurgents who believe oil revenues are illegitimately funding the continuing U.S. occupation. The fragility of the pipeline’s service, even today, is one small sign of ongoing resistance that could be an obstacle to any significant increase in oil production until the U.S. military presence is ended.

The entire six-year saga of American energy dreams, policies, and pressures in Iraq has so far yielded little -- no significant increase in Iraq’s oil production, no increase in its future capacity to produce, and no increase in its energy exports. The grand ambition of transferring actual control of the oil industry into the hands of the international oil companies has proven no less stillborn.

Over the years since the U.S. began its energy campaign, production has actually languished, sometimes falling as much as 40% below the pre-invasion levels of an industry already held together by duct tape and ingenuity. In the Brookings Institution’s latest figures for December 2009, production stood at 2.4 million barrels per day, a full 100,000 barrels lower than the pre-war daily average.

To make matters worse, the price of oil, which had hit historic peaks in early 2008, began to decline. By 2009, with the global economy in tatters, oil prices sank radically and the Iraqi government lacked the revenues to sustain its existing expenditures, let alone find money to repair its devastated infrastructure.

As a result, in early 2009, Maliki’s government began actively, even desperately, seeking ways to hike oil production, even without an oil law in place. That, after all, was the only possible path for an otherwise indigent country with failing agriculture in the midst of a drought of extreme severity to increase the money available for public projects -- or, of course, even more private corruption.

Phil at TOD ANZ has a post on a new South Australian produced electric vehicle - Meet Trev: A two-seater renewable energy vehicle.

Major auto companies are now close to introducing their first electric vehicles onto the market. But in many cases these new vehicles are as big and heavy as their gasoline powered brethren, and consequently burn just as much energy even though they take it from batteries rather than a fuel tank. I’m not convinced that helps us very much.

I believe there is instead a bright future for a spectrum of 'micro' electric vehicles, from battery powered bicycles up to compact size cars, which I’ve mentioned briefly before in 'How Big is Your Bicycle'. Here I want to feature a new concept car, named Trev (Two-seater Renewable Energy Vehicle) developed initially by a team of staff and students at the University of South Australia.

ComputerWorld has a report on a smart grid initiative in Victoria - Victoria pushes for $100m Smart Grid cash.

The Victorian State government has thrown its support behind the Frankston Smart Grid, Smart City project in an effort to secure up to $100 million in Federal Government funding.

The funding, part of the National Energy Efficiency Initiative, aims to support a single Australian state in its testing of new energy saving technologies.

Victoria’s bid, the Smart Grid, Smart City in Frankston, is being led by power companies United Energy and Jemena, energy retailer AGL and consulting and technology services company Accenture.

According to the Victorian government, if successful, the Smart Grid, Smart City program will reshape the way power is used and delivered to 10,000 Frankston residents.

“Neighbourhood solar panels could supply a local street with power in times of high energy demand, such as a hot summer’s day, while software allowing homes to store electricity for air-conditioning in batteries would also be tested,” Victorian energy and resources minister Peter Batchelor said in a statement. “Some households would be able to control home appliances remotely, with trials of mobile phone and internet applications allowing people to turn appliances on and off no matter where they are.”

The New York Times has an article on China's efforts to build a smarter grid - China’s Smart Grid Investments Growing.

China’s overall federal stimulus investments in smart grid projects will surpass the United States’ in 2010, according to a forthcoming market research report — though not on a per capita basis.

The Chinese government will spend $7.3 billion dollars in the form of stimulus loans, grants and tax credits compared to $7.1 billion by the United States government, according to analysis done by Zpryme, a market research firm in Austin, Tex.

“They’ve got a strong economy to push forward,” Jason Rodriguez, director of research at Zpryme, said of China’s smart grid push.

Smaller countries like France and Great Britain, the analysis found, will spend less than $300 million each of stimulus funding on smart grid projects, though Mr. Rodriguez noted that both countries are “already more advanced in smart grid infrastructure than the U.S.”

“They have double the amount of smart meters,” he said.

Meanwhile, a number of American companies, including General Electric, IBM and Hewlett Packard have entered the Chinese smart grid market, hoping to cash-in on some of the investments.

Stuart Staniford has a look at how the various types of alternative sources of liquid fuels fared during the last oil price spike - Biofuels: the Biggest Supply Response to the 2000s Oil Shock.

There are four kinds of liquid fuel alternatives to crude oil in actual commercial production at the present:

* Biofuels - ethanol and biodiesel, primarily from food crops around the world
* Tar Sands - synfuel and bitumen, primarily from Canada
* Gas-To-Liquids (GTL) - from South Africa, Malaysia, and increasingly Qatar
* Coal-To-Liquids (CTL) - primarily from South Africa, but just starting in China

In this piece, I summarize some research I've been doing to look at how each of these sources responded to the oil price increases of 2005-2008. Two sources, GTL and GTL, haven't shown any particular price sensitivity to date and are at low levels. Tar sands growth has shown modest price sensitivity but mainly appears to be growing on its own internal dynamics. Biofuel production growth appears to be extremely oil price sensitive, and increased the fastest and reached the largest volume in response to the mid-to-late 2000s oil shock. I have argued in the past that there are structural reasons for this: given the comparatively low capital requirements and small plant size of biofuel plants, they can respond much faster to episodes of high oil prices than can the other sources, all of which tend to involve larger, slower-to-build, more capital intensive plants. This has important implications for food and land prices in future oil price shocks. Food prices are likely to rise quickly and markedly in response to oil shocks, public policy permitting.

In the rest of the piece, I'll briefly survey the statistics I have for each fuel source, and then draw conclusions about the overall situation.

The Australian opposition has announced a rather skeletal new policy on climate change, opting to promote a scheme based entirely on government investment. Its amazing what climate policy can do - the Greens are the economic rationalists now and the conservatives are advocating a quasi-socialist "solution" (albeit an entirely ineffective one). Crikey has a summary - Abbott’s answer to climate change: ERF.

It’s hard to pass judgement on the Coalition’s direct action climate package announced by Tony Abbott this afternoon, because quite how it will work is either unclear, or yet to be announced.

How will the whole package be funded? Well, that’s for later.

Who will oversee this multi-billion dollar fund? That’s for later.

How will it ensure money is well spent? Later.

How will it deliver a 5% reduction in emissions? Well, there’s nothing to indicate it will, but Tony Abbott boasted of consulting with a huge range of industry and environment groups and produced a sheaf of endorsements from them saying the plan could achieve a 5% cut. On closer examination, the endorsements turned out to be industry groups who stand to benefit directly from the fund, like soil carbon companies, coal seam gas energy companies and the National Association of Forest Industries.

Where will all these trees – 20 million of them – be planted? Well, in urban forests or marginal farming land, depending on who you asked, but there was confusing talk from Abbott of also putting electricity wires underground.

How is this a “market mechanism” when the Government will pick the projects? Abbott talked about building a bridge.

What will happen if the rest of the world agrees to higher emissions targets? Well, that’s actually a matter for Kevin Rudd, says Abbott.

In truth, the Abbott fund proposal is a great idea. We should be investing more in carbon-reduction projects, and Abbott is proposing to invest directly in some emerging technologies like algal synthesis.

But the idea that this is going to get us within cooee of a 5% reduction on our emissions with a growing economy and growing population is complete nonsense, regardless of what any self-interested industry might say. There is simply no system here for restraining or slowing our growing carbon emissions. The Coalition has proposed one of the few carbon abatement mechanisms that is even worse than the Government’s CPRS.

John Quiggin has a post on the state of play with climate policy - The circuit breaker.

The Greens have proposed a carbon tax as an interim measure to begin cutting carbon emissions. Although there are strong reasons to favor an emissions trading scheme over a carbon tax in the long run, I think it’s time to look seriously at this option. Here a few points in no particular order.

* since the price of carbon is initially capped under the CPRS, it’s just like a carbon tax in the short run

* the way to dispel public fear of a new tax is to bring it in. Look at capital gains tax and GST, both the subjects of highly successful election scare campaigns (in 1980 and 1993 resp) and both now uncontroversial.

* the capture of the political right by delusionism is now irreversible, as can be seen from the embrace of the obviously loony Lord Monckton. There’s no chance, now or in the foreseeable future of a deal with these guys. In particular, the version of the CPRS negotiated with Turnbull and briefly supported by the majority of Coalition members is unsalvageable in every respect. There’s no way the deal can be modified enough to get Liberal support now, and on the other hand it’s too much of a dog’s breakfast to take to a double dissolution.

* The Greens will almost certainly regain the balance of power in the Senate after the next election. Much as the government dislikes it, they are going to have to rely primarily on deals with the Greens to get legislation through in future. They might as well start dealing now.

In general terms, the government lost control of the debate with the defeat of the Turnbull compromise ETS last year, and has done nothing to regain it. Turning up with the same discredited compromise in February makes no sense at all. This is a time for firm action, not more delay.

Quiggin also has a post on climate quack "Lord" Monckton - My response to Monckton’s conspiracy theory.

Australia is currently enjoying a visit from Lord Christopher Monckton, a former education adviser to Margaret Thatcher, who is here to warn us that the climate change negotiations are a plot to destroy the global economy and impose a communist world government. The plot, according to Monckton is led by President Obama and supported by Kevin Rudd, who are, it seems, communists who ‘piled into the environmental movement after the fall of the Berlin Wall’.

In an interview with Alex Jones, host of the conspiracy-theoretic radio/TV show Prison Planet, Monckton attributed the plot to a ‘“deliberate desire to control population by killing people in large numbers deliberately if necessary”. His co-speaker, Ian Plimer, assented to similar views on the same program.

It might be thought that such views should be enough to consign Monckton to the lunatic fringe. But his conspiracy theory has received enthusiastic endorsement from large sections of the media including such prominent commentators as Andrew Bolt and Janet Albrechtsen (though Albrechtsen later backed away a little).

And Monckton doesn’t lack political support. Opposition Senate Leader Nick Minchin echoed his views a couple of months ago, saying ‘”For the extreme Left [global warming] provides the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, to sort of deindustrialise the Western world … you know the collapse of communism was a disaster for the Left, and … they embraced environmentalism as their new religion. ’

The Lavoisier Group, founded by former Labor Finance Minister Peter Walsh asserted that the Kyoto Protocol represented the greatest threat to Australia’s sovereignty since that posed by Japan in 1942.

It is, then, necessary to make a serious assessment of the claim that Kevin Rudd, Barack Obama and the United Nations are engaged in a communist conspiracy to destroy the global economy and seize world power, as asserted by Monckton, Minchin, Walsh and others.

One problem with the theory is that the chosen instrument, a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme, seems grossly inadequate to the task of destroying the economy. Even without the massive exemptions loaded in to the Rudd government’s CPRS, an emissions trading scheme with full auctioning might be expected to raise about $10 billion a year, or 1 per cent of GDP over the next decade. By comparison, the GST raises over $40 billion. No credible economist suggest that the economic impact will be more than marginal.

Even if the world can manage a comprehensive agreement to reduce carbon emissions to near-zero levels by 2050, the best estimates suggest that the economic effect will be to reduce the level of GDP by a few per cent.

An even more puzzling aspect of conspiracy-theoretic claims is that part-time nature of the conspiracy. Most of the time conservatives like Bolt and Minchin treat Rudd as an ordinary political opponents, attacking him for being indecisive and more concerned with spin than substance.

But if Rudd is engaged in a conspiracy to destroy the global economy and institute a communist world government, surely this fact should drive any analysis of his economic policy, health care and so on. Full-time conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones are at least consistent. In the same program as his interview with Plimer, Jones explained how the Obama Administration’s apparently modest health care reforms are actually a genocidal plot.

The Guardian reports that the (lame duck) British Government is calling on people to ignore the "siren call" of the lunatic fringe - Ed Miliband declares war on climate change sceptics.

The climate secretary, Ed Miliband, last night warned of the danger of a public backlash against the science of global warming in the face of continuing claims that experts have manipulated data.

In an exclusive interview with the Observer, Miliband spoke out for the first time about last month's revelations that climate scientists had withheld and covered up information and the apology made by the influential UN climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which admitted it had exaggerated claims about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

The perceived failure of global talks on combating climate change in Copenhagen last month has also been blamed for undermining public support. But in the government's first high-level recognition of the growing pressure on public opinion, Miliband declared a "battle" against the "siren voices" who denied global warming was real or caused by humans, or that there was a need to cut carbon emissions to tackle it.

"It's right that there's rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that's there," he said.

"We know there's a physical effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to higher temperatures, that's a question of physics; we know CO2 concentrations are at their highest for 6,000 years; we know there are observed increases in temperatures; and we know there are observed effects that point to the existence of human-made climate change. That's what the vast majority of scientists tell us." ...

The danger of climate scepticism was that it would undermine public support for unpopular decisions needed to curb carbon emissions, including the likelihood of higher energy bills for households, and issues such as the visual impact of wind turbines, said Miliband, who is also energy secretary.

If the UK did not invest in renewable, clean energy, it would lose jobs and investment to other countries, have less energy security because of the dependence on oil and gas imports and contribute to damaging temperature rises for future generations. "There are a whole variety of people who are sceptical, but who they are is less important than what they are saying, and what they are saying is profoundly dangerous," he said. "Every­thing we know about life is that we should obey the precautionary principle; to take what the sceptics say seriously would be a profound risk."

GreentechGrid has a post on PG&E’s 300 megawatt Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) Project - Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES): Part 2.

According to EPRI's energy storage expert, Rich Lordan, "CAES (Compressed Air Energy Storage) is going to be important." (EPRI is the Electric Power Research Institute). ...

Hal LaFlash, Pacific Gas & Electric's Director of Emerging Clean Technology Policy, spoke on an energy storage panel last week and added a few more pieces of the storage puzzle as it is seen by a major utility. PG&E is looking forward to exploring the 300 megawatt CAES project in Kern County.

Hal pointed out that we're going to need help managing the 4,500 megawatts of new wind coming online in California in 2012 from the Tehachapi Pass Wind Project.

Mr. LaFlash noted that there is already 1,200 megawatts of pumped hydro storage in the mountains above Fresno and that it is "an essential element of the grid in California."

The U.S. DOE and PG&E are still working on the details and site information on the Kern County project.

According to a recent presentation by PG&E Senior Director Andrew Tang, the 300 megawatt - 10 hour plant is suitable for California’s porous rock formations and has a 5-year development lead time for:

* Economic and geotechnical analysis
* Core drilling
* Siting, permitting and construction

Note the "porous rock formation" remark made by Tang. The few CAES projects to date have used salt domes, but there is now a movement towards storing the compressed air in a porous rock structure. According to LaFlash, "These structures are used every day for natural gas storage." Hal also mentioned that natural gas is only cycled a few times a year, while CAES energy storage will be cycled daily. That could present some technical challenges.

Investigations by EPRI indicate that up to 80 percent of the U.S. has geology suitable for CAES. A single 300 megawatt CAES plant would require 22 million cubic feet of storage space -- enough to store eight hours’ worth of electricity.

Cleantech.com reports that Better Place has raised $350 million of new capital - Better Place $350M deal bested by Airtricity.

It's one of the largest venture capital deals in the history of cleantech, as the company itself described it, but it isn't the largest.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Better Place today announced in a press conference that it secured $350 million in a series B round led by HSBC Group that values the company at $1.25 billion. ...

While a large round, the largest deal on record to date in cleantech was a follow-on round to Europe's Airtricity, according to Cleantech Group data available to clients.

In the third quarter of 2006, investors put the equivalent of $394,835,000 USD into the Dublin, Ireland-based company, banking on the company's wind farm projects.