I've got a "best of" list of posts up at TOD ANZ - The Best Of TOD ANZ.

The Oil Drum recently published a "Best Of" list of posts - these are the best from TOD ANZ writers :

Big Gav

Concentrating On The Important Things - Solar Thermal Power
While we spend a lot of time talking about traditional energy sources based on depleting resources that are extracted from the ground, I think its important to remember that the fastest growing sources of energy are solar and wind, and that these will never run out.

Tapping The Source: The Power Of The Oceans
A post examining the use of artificial islands to collect wind, wave, ocean current and solar power in the tropics, along with a more unusual energy source - harnessing the difference in water temperatures between the warm surface and the cold depths using a technique called OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion).

Geothermal Energy: Geothermia
Crossposted from my blog Peak Energy as the subject of geothermal power has cropped up in the comments a few times lately.

Floating Offshore Wind Power
An update on a post I did last year on the potential for floating offshore wind power, which looked at a number of different prototypes at various stages of development.

The Limits To Scenario Planning
A review of some common misconceptions about the Limits to Growth book.

Iraq's Oil: The Greatest Prize Of All
In this post I'll outline why I believe that Iraq probably has the world's largest oil reserves - or, as Daniel Yergin once said of the middle east, it is "the greatest single prize in all history".

Natural Gas In Australia - How Long Will It Last?
In this post I have a look at how much gas Australia has and how long it will last under a variety of scenarios.

Coal Seam Gas In Australia
In this post I look at recent events in the gas industry and what they mean for Australian gas production in future.

The Hydrogen Economy and Peak Platinum
A comprehensive review of the issues involved in the "hydrogen economy".

Hubbert: King Of The Technocrats
In this post I explore the Technocracy movement and Hubbert's role in it

Locabucks: Are local currencies a way to escape the liquidity trap?
I look at the concept of local currencies (or "locabucks" as I'm now dubbing them), an idea which has its roots in the Great Depression as a mechanism for escaping the liquidity trap - and thus might be relevant again in the not-too distant future if present trends continue.

Terra Preta: Biochar and the MEGO Effect
In this post I have a look at modern day techniques to produce terra preta (often called biochar or agrichar) which have the potential to increase soil fertility, generate energy and sequester carbon all at the same time.

Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path
A review of Buckminster Fuller's last work, Critical Path.

Is It Time For a 4 Day Working Week?
In this post I look at various proposals to reduce the amount of time we spend at work, as a way of addressing energy, environmental and other issues facing us.

Peak Oil And The Tea Party Movement
In this post I have a look at the boost this (peak oil) is likely to give to populist politics and some of the possibilities for addressing this.

David Clarke

The Failure of Networked Systems: The Repercussions of Systematic Risk Revisited
Cascading collapse and why the corporate drive towards increasing efficiencies could be driving our interacting networked systems towards this mode of collapse.

The Networking of Resource Production: Do the Networks Give us Warnings when They are About to Fail?
The flaw in the techno-cornucopian dream: Modeling why and how a networked resource-extraction system fails.

kiashu

The Freezing Point Of Industrial Society
This piece considers that industrialisation could only happen with cheap fuels, and by looking at the countries of the world, tries to figure out just how cheap fuel has to be before lots of people start using it – before a country can industrialise with fossil fuels. The flipside to this is seeing how expensive fuel must be before it deindustrialises. This then gives us a clue to if and when will industrial society will end.

Phil Hart

Meet Trev: A two-seater renewable energy vehicle
I believe there is instead a bright future for a spectrum of 'micro' electric vehicles, from battery powered bicycles up to compact size cars, including this new concept car named Trev (Two-seater Renewable Energy Vehicle).

International Energy Agency calls 'Peak' on OECD Oil Demand
In World Energy Outlook 2009, the International Energy Agency seems to have dropped a bombshell that has been quietly (and politely) ignored.

The Economics of Volatile Oil Prices
Considering the fundamental nature of oil supply and demand provides a coherent explanation not just for the rapid rise in oil prices, but also the dramatic fall.

The 2008 IEA WEO - Oil Reserves and Resources
Despite significant changes, the 2008 IEA report still relies on inflated estimates of reserves from OPEC countries, overplays the contribution of reserves growth due to technology and predicts the reversal of a decades long trend of declining oil discoveries.

Oil, House Prices, Credit? Three parts of the same story
The long forgotten 'oil crisis' of just a few months ago has been replaced by a full blown 'credit crisis' - related events that represent the unravelling of half a century of unsustainable trends in oil consumption and debt.

High-Tech Hitchhiking
Could a hitchhiking scheme for the iPhone era work in practice and change attitudes to hitching a ride?

How Technology Increases Oil Production
How can you double something and still have ten times less than you started with? The answer to this question will help us reassess claims that advances in oil field technology will postpone the peak in global oil production.

Oil Reserves: Where Ghawar goes, the rest of OPEC follows
In May 2007, the work of Stuart Staniford and Euan Mearns culminated in a new and unprecedented assessment of oil reserves in Ghawar, the world's largest oil field. This article combines their assessment with additional information sources, to produce a revised estimate of reserves in Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC countries.

Bloomberg has a report on large car company interest in small scale lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles - Toyota Adopts Tesla Laptop Battery Strategy for Electric Cars.

Toyota Motor Corp., Daimler AG and Bayerische Motoren Werke AG are turning to laptops for a cheaper way to power their electric cars -- and their sales.

Automakers are testing packs of lithium-ion batteries assembled by Silicon Valley startup Tesla Motors Inc. costing less than bigger, car-only batteries favored by General Motors Co., Nissan Motor Co. and Mitsubishi Motors Corp. A pack of 6,831 cylinder-shaped cells made by Panasonic Corp. powers Tesla’s $109,000 Roadster sports car for up to 245 miles per charge.

The car industry will help lithium-ion battery makers more than triple sales to 5 trillion yen ($60 billion) in a decade from 1.5 trillion yen in the year ending in March, according to Sanyo Electric Co., the world’s biggest maker of the batteries. Rechargeable consumer-electronics batteries benefit from an economy of scale that may help cut manufacturing costs and sticker prices in the nascent electric-car industry, said Koji Endo, a Tokyo-based analyst at Advanced Research Japan.

“It may lead to the total component cost of an electric car getting lower than that of a gasoline car,” Endo said. “As the cost lowers, there’ll be more likelihood that retail prices of electric cars will drop.”

EV prices are higher than three-quarters of the autos now sold, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, with GM’s Chevrolet Volt selling for $41,000 and Nissan’s Leaf for $32,780. Electric vehicles cost about twice as much to produce as gasoline-engine cars because the batteries are so expensive, according to consultant Frost & Sullivan Inc.

Sales of EVs and hybrids, including plug-in models, will reach about 954,000 worldwide this year, or about 2.2 percent of all car sales, J.D. Power and Associates, an industry forecaster in Westlake Village, California, estimated in October.

Government subsidies may help boost sales of plug-in hybrids and EVs to 9 percent of auto sales in 2020, Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimated last month.

Panasonic, the majority shareholder in Sanyo, is the main supplier of lithium-ion cells to Tesla and last month bought a $30 million stake in the Palo Alto, California, company. Toyota and Daimler also own Tesla stakes.

Bloomberg reports that Moody's are bearish about Australian natural gas and coal seam gas LNG projects following the recent cost blowout at Woodside's Pluto project - Australian LNG Projects to Face ‘Serious Challenges’.

Australia’s liquefied natural gas industry faces “serious challenges” such as labor shortages that may force energy companies to delay, merge or cancel their projects, Moody’s Investors Service said.

Moody’s cited Woodside Petroleum Ltd.’s announcement on Nov. 30 that its Pluto LNG venture would cost A$900 million ($889 million) more and start about six months later than previously forecast. The increased cost “is symptomatic of Australia’s resource boom,” Saranga Ranasinghe and Ian Lewis, analysts at Moody’s, wrote in a report dated yesterday.

“While credit negative for Woodside, the cost overruns at Pluto also hold negative implications for the rest of Australia’s energy industry,” and its A$150 billion of proposed investments, the Sydney-based Moody’s analysts said. ...

“These are serious challenges,” the report said. “While we have a favorable view of the long-term LNG demand, these operating challenges will mean that some of Australia’s planned LNG projects will not proceed as currently anticipated. Whether that will lead to the merger of some projects, or to their outright cancellation, remains to be seen,” it said.

Grist has an article on the progress of plastic solar cells - Fantastic solar plastic breakthrough.

One of the holy grails of solar power has been to create very thin plastic solar cells that could be attached to just about anything to generate electricity -- windows, awnings, bus shelters.

You can find very low-powered flexible panels embedded in backpacks and small solar chargers, but the challenge has been to increase the efficiency of such photovoltaic cells. Now a company that has spent years developing an organic solar technology, Konarka of Lowell, Mass., says its "Power Plastic" has set a new record, achieving a 8.3 percent efficiency rate in converting sunlight into electricity. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory certified the efficiency rating.

"This unsurpassed NREL certification opens new doors for the commercial production of cost-effective, efficient electricity for numerous large scale applications," Howard Berke, Konarka's chief executive, said in a statement.

Now, 8.3 percent is less than half the efficiency of a conventional crystalline silicon photovoltaic panel like those found on residential rooftops. But it's a notable achievement for a solar cell that uses organic molecules to generate electricity. The great promise of organic molecules is that they can be produced at far less cost than standard silicon solar panels, but the low efficiency of organic photovoltaics has limited their use. ...

A couple of years ago, a Konarka executive showed me just how portable and easily installed photovoltaic plastic can be. He pulled a roll of solar modules out of a briefcase and unfurled them on a table. Within a few minutes they were powering a lamp.

If you happen to be in San Francisco, you can spot Power Plastic modules at bus stops. The modules are embedded in the wave-shaped red roofs of the bus shelter and power its lights, as well as Wifi routers for web-surfing passengers.

The city plans to solarize 300 bus stops, which would generate 43,000 kilowatt-hours a year.

Now that's fantastic plastic.

Phil Hart has a post at TOD ANZ on the Montara oil spill enquiry - Montara Oil Spill: "A failure of sensible oilfield practice".

While BP's deepwater spill in the Gulf of Mexico was worldwide news for months, the worst incident of its kind in Australia in August 2009 also leaked for 74 days before the well could be brought under control. Yet in Australia media interest was muted after the first few days and most people even here would have forgotten that it ever happened. Nobody seems to care if you don't have a household name like BP?

An inquiry was completed in August 2010, but the report has only now been released along with the Government's response.

Some Background

Wikipedia: The Montara oil spill was an oil and gas leak and subsequent slick that took place in the Montara oil field in the Timor Sea, off the northern coast of Western Australia. It is considered one of Australia's worst oil disasters. The slick was released following a blowout from the Montara wellhead platform on August 21, 2009, and continued leaking until November 3, 2009 (in total 74 days), when the leak was stopped by pumping mud into the well and the wellbore cemented thus "capping" the blowout.

The West Atlas rig is owned by the Norwegian-Bermudan Seadrill, and operated by PTTEP Australasia (PTTEPAA), a subsidiary of PTT Exploration and Production (PTTEP) which is in turn a subsidiary of PTT, the Thai state-owned oil and gas company was operating over on adjacent well on the Montara platform. Houston-based Halliburton was involved in cementing the well.

The Montara field is located off the Kimberley coast, 250 km (160 mi) north of Truscott airbase, and 690 km (430 mi) west of Darwin. Sixty-nine workers were safely evacuated from the West Atlas jackup drilling rig when the blowout occurred

The Incident

Having worked in the industry, my impression was that most operators are working pretty hard to prevent accidents like this. The inquiry suggests that is not the case, with the Thai operator in this case failing to meet the most basic requirements for safe drilling:

The Inquiry has been asked to determine what caused the Blowout. In this context, the Inquiry has found that at the time the H1 Well was suspended in March 2009, not one well control barrier complied with PTTEPAA’s own Well Construction Standards (or, importantly, with sensible oilfield practice). Relevantly, the 9⅝” cemented casing shoe had not been pressure tested in accordance with the company’s Well Construction Standards, despite major problems having been experienced with the cementing job. In particular, the cement in the casing shoe was likely to have been compromised as it had been substantially over‐displaced by fluid, resulting in what is known as a ‘wet shoe’. None of this was understood by senior PTTEPAA personnel at the time, even though the company’s contemporaneous records, such as the Daily Drilling Report (DDR), clearly indicated what had happened. The multiple problems in undertaking the cement job – such as the failure of the top and bottom plugs to create a seal after ‘bumping’, the failure of the float valves and an unexpected rush of fluid – should have raised alarm bells. Those problems necessitated a careful evaluation of what happened, the instigation of pressure testing and, most likely, remedial action. No such careful evaluation was undertaken. The problems were not complicated or unsolvable, and the potential remedies were well known and not costly. This was a failure of ‘sensible oilfield practice 101’.

As at April 2009 when the H1 Well had been suspended and the West Atlas rig had departed from the Montara WHP to undertake other work, not one well control barrier in the H1 Well had been satisfactorily tested and verified, and one barrier that should have been installed was missing. In other words, the H1 Well was suspended without regard to PTTEPAA’s own Well Construction Standards or sensible oilfield practice.

When the West Atlas rig returned to the WHP in August 2009 it was discovered that the 13⅜ ” PCCC (pressure containing anti‐corrosion caps) had never been installed. The absence of this PCCC had resulted in corrosion of the threads of the 13⅜” casing and this, in turn, led to the removal of the 9⅝” PCCC in order to clean the threads. This was viewed by PTTEPAA personnel as a mere change of sequence that simply involved bringing forward the time of the removal of the 9⅝” PCCC. PTTEPAA’s Well Construction Manager, Mr Duncan, took a positive decision not to reinstall the 9⅝” PCCC. This meant that, according to PTTEPAA’s operational forecast and drilling program, the H1 Well would have been exposed to the air without any secondary well control barrier in place for some 4 to 5 days, with sole reliance on an untested primary barrier (the cemented 9⅝” casing shoe) that had been the subject of significant problems during its installation.

After the 9⅝” PCCC had been removed, the H1 Well was left in an unprotected state (and relying on an untested primary barrier) while the rig proceeded to complete other planned activities as part of batch drilling operations at the Montara WHP. The Blowout in the H1 Well occurred 15 hours later.

It seems that Halliburton who performed the cement job were aware there was a problem, but the operator accepted it anyway:

Despite the fact that the Halliburton cementing report clearly showed that the casing shoe could not be regarded as having barrier integrity, the report was ‘signed off’ by Mr Treasure (PTTEPAA’s senior on‐rig representative) later in the evening on 7 March 2009, with a handwritten annotation ‘good job well done’.

[And from the detailed section of the report:]

The extraordinariness of this state of affairs need not be laboured. It suffices to reproduce the following evidence given by Mr Treasure.

Q. To someone who’s familiar with this document, it’s not a matter of missing the words. I want to put to you that a person who would ordinarily see this document would know, without a second glance, that this was not a normal situation; correct?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. That there had been a problem experienced; correct?
A. Yes.
Q. And that that problem hadn’t been resolved; correct?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. So in this document was all the information, I want to put to you, that anyone in your position needed to realise that a problem had occurred and had not been resolved; correct?
A. Correct.
Q. In the clearest of terms; correct?
A. It was obvious, yes.
Q. Well, it can’t be any clearer. What else do you think Mr Doeg (Halliburton) should have done to make it clearer to you?
A. There’s nothing else he could do, is there?

Let's recap:

In summary, as at April 2009 when the H1 Well had been suspended and the West Atlas rig had departed from the Montara WHP to undertake other work, not one well control barrier in the H1 Well had been satisfactorily tested and verified, and one barrier that should have been installed was missing. In other words, the H1 Well was suspended without regard to PTTEPAA’s own Well Construction Standards or sensible oilfield practice.

The Findings

The inquiry did not mince words:

In essence, the way that PTTEPAA operated the Montara Oilfield did not come within a ‘bulls roar’ of sensible oilfield practice. The Blowout was not a reflection of one unfortunate incident, or of bad luck. What happened with the H1 Well was an accident waiting to happen; the company’s systems and processes were so deficient and its key personnel so lacking in basic competence, that the Blowout can properly be said to have been an event waiting to occur. Indeed, during the course of its public hearing, the Inquiry discovered that not one of the five Montara wells currently complies with the company’s Well Construction Standards. Indeed, so poor has PTTEPAA’s performance been on the Montara Oilfield, the Inquiry considers it is imperative that remedial action be instituted.

They didn't even do a good job after the incident:

The Inquiry considers that the manner in which PTTEPAA approached the National Offshore Petroleum Authority (NOPSA), the NT DoR and the Inquiry itself provides further evidence of the company’s poor governance. PTTEPAA did not seek to properly inform itself as to the circumstances and the causes of the Blowout. The information that it provided to the regulators was consequently incomplete and apt to mislead. Its dealings with this Inquiry followed a similar pattern.

The Inquiry recommends that the Minister for Resources and Energy review PTTEPAA’s licence to operate at the Montara Oilfield. At this juncture the Inquiry has little confidence in PTTEPAA’s capacity to apply principles of sensible oilfield practice.

The Northern Territory is too small to manage the regulation and oversight of the oil industry, and a new national regulator has been recommended - this would seem well overdue!

The Northern Territory has also contended that ‘at all material times prior to the [Blowout], the Territory appropriately administered the licence area within which the Montara Wellhead Platform is located’. The Inquiry has no hesitation in rejecting this contention.

and again..

The Inquiry is of the view that nothing should detract from the primary responsibility of PTTEPAA to ensure well integrity. However, the Inquiry finds that the NT DoR’s regulatory regime was totally inadequate, being little more than a ‘tick and flick’ exercise.

By way of example, when PTTEPAA submitted an application to suspend the H1 Well utilising PCCCs rather than a cement plug, it received preliminary approval in 30 minutes. However, as the Inquiry heard from the manufacturers of the particular PCCC used, they were not intended to be used as barriers against a blowout. In this respect, the information that had been conveyed to the NT DoR was seriously deficient. However the NT DoR, which had no real prior experience with PCCCs, gave almost immediate approval for their use.

As the report states, regulation of the Australian oil industry needs a complete overhaul to prevent wildcat operators like this creating more 'accidents waiting to happen'. I am personally amazed that an oil company as bad as this exists and they were allowed to operate here in Australia, a country that is normally seen as modern and highly regulated.

Let's hope the report into the BP spill is not as damning as this!

The Globe And Mail has one of the worst articles I've read on energy in the mainstream media - now wonder much of the newspaper business is going down the drain - North America: The new energy kingdom. After proclaiming US oil production had reached an all time record and declaring the US is well on the way to energy independence and becoming an LNG exporter to China, they somewhat quietly published a little correction later, noting that current US oil production is actually half that of the record reached around 40 years ago. Its all very well to be an energy optimist, but this sort of lunacy really muddies the debate for no useful purpose that I can determine.

The American Petroleum Institute reports that the United States produced more crude oil in October than it has ever produced in a single month, “peak oil” or not.

This reversal of trend helps explain why U.S. domestic production for the year will be 140,000 barrels a day higher than last year (which was 410,000 barrels a day higher than 2008). Although the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says U.S. production will decline next year, who knows?

Could these numbers reflect the beginning of the end for U.S. dependence on Mideast oil? Well, in fact, they could be. As Forbes magazine publisher Steve Forbes optimistically asserted the other day, the whole world is “awash in energy.” ...

Correction: U.S. domestic crude oil production reached 5.5 million barrels a day in October, half the production of the U.S. “peak oil” high in 1970. Incorrect information was published in this online and in the print versions of this column.

The Oil Drum announced a few changes recently - as part of this TOD ANZ has moved home - Welcome To TOD ANZ.

As part of the recent changes announced at The Oil Drum, the regional satellite sites such as TOD ANZ have been closed, bringing to an end an interesting 3 year period.

As a result, we are shifting operations from the main TOD site to a Blogger hosted environment and looking to expand the contributor base and provide a more regular stream of information than has been the case in recent months.

We'll still be accessible via the original URL (anz.theoildrum.com) as well as the new one (todanz.blogspot.com). Old content will remain available as well, with a "best of" set of links being added to the sidebar in the near future.

The initial group of contributors are :

aeldric - David Clarke has worked as a consultant analyst for almost 30 years, spending the last 15 years consulting mainly in IT. David has owned and sold an IT startup, but now prefers the pampered life of a manager in the corporate world. He has close friends in the energy industry and blames them for introducing him to Peak Oil, and bursting his happy bubble.

Big Gav - Gav studied Engineering at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Since then he has travelled widely and worked in the oil and gas, power generation, defence, technology and banking industries. He has been blogging about peak oil since 2004 at Peak Energy (Australia) and is probably the most prolific example of a techno-optimist in the peak oil world.

Phil Hart - Phil studied Materials Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne before spending five years with Shell UK Exploration and Production. He worked on two new North Sea oil and gas field development projects before joining the Brent field maintenance team as a corrosion engineer. In late 2006, Phil returned to Melbourne and is an active member of the Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil. He has provided briefings to local government, fund managers and other businesses and presented on the issue at community events and local oil industry forums.

SP - SP has been a long time reader and part time contributor or commentator to Energy Bulletin and TOD-ANZ. He frequently annoys Gav by posting items of possible interest for Peak Energy. SP is an environmental scientist (of sorts) who recently completed his PhD: his ignorance now comes with qualifications. After a brief flirtation with doomer nihilism, he now tries to entertain a more hopeful and optimistic outlook - mostly. SP currently resides somewhere on the Indonesian Archipelago.

Crikey has a pair of articles on Wikileaks and Julian Assange. The first from Guy Rundle - WikiLeaks … diplomacy out the door and instead, talk of execution.

Sir Richard Dalton, one of the UK’s leading diplomats of the past 30 years, has slammed the United States government for demanding that its diplomatic representatives to the UN spy on UN diplomats and staff, and engage in criminal acts such as stealing their credit card numbers.

Dalton’s comments come on another extraordinary day in which WikiLeaks revelations put the position of Bank of England governor Mervyn King at risk, and WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange condemned the issue of an Interpol alert for him as “worthy of [Stalin police chief] Lavrenty Beria”.

Speaking at a panel discussion at London’s Frontline Club, Dalton was unequivocal on the UN spying fiasco. “I think the diplomats who received those instructions should have returned them and refused them”, the former ambassador said. He added that while he believed that diplomatic secrecy should be preserved, WikiLeaks and news outlets had no choice but to publish the material once it was passed to them.

Dalton, who served as the UK’s first ambassador to Libya after the resumption of diplomatic relations, and as ambassador to Iran until last year, also rejected the charge that the cables show nothing new, arguing that there’s a difference between suspecting and knowing, and that the cables were of clear import.

Dalton was rebutting claims by former US under-secretary of state for public diplomacy Colleen Graffy, who argued that the cables should never be presented raw to the general public, who would not have the ability to understand their meaning, and should rely instead on journalists and others to contextualise them. Graffy, who was in the state department during the period that the practice of spying on the UN was first mooted, refused to deny that the US had broken international treaties and law by the practice, arguing only that “all nations spy”.

The statements came as the WikiLeaks Cablegate stories continued to set the news agenda across Europe and the US. Tonight’s release setting out in detail the belief of US and other diplomatic representatives that Russia is not merely a state with a lot of Mafias, but that the state and organised crime have simply merged, with Robert Gates, US defence secretary, quoted as saying that “Russian democracy has simply disappeared; it is an oligarchy run by the secret services”.

Again the establishment shills within journalism rushed to deride the release as “nothing we didn’t already know”, Vladimir Putin thought it worth so little attention that he held a global press conference, and did an interview with Larry King, in which he suggested that WikiLeaks was being fed misinformation as part of a bait-and-switch conspiracy.

That would suggest a complex operation, but that’s probably what your mind turns to if, as the cables suggest US diplomats believe, you regularly poison your opponents with radioactive material in London restaurants.

London was the scene of another WL-inspired showdown, when cables revealed that Bank of England governor Mervyn King strongly lobbied the incoming conservative government to impose a harsh deficit reduction program, while at the same time telling those who would listen that he thought that Cameron and Chancellor Osborne were lightweights. The intervention broke convention and King’s explicit rules for his subordinates against becoming involved in policy — rules he imposed on centre-left staff most insistently.

The continued tide of revelations, and the fact that there is no end in sight — WikiLeaks has released just 600 of the 250,000 cables spoken of, and it is unclear whether or not these are part of a much larger drop of up to three million cables — has prompted US figures to new heights of seething violence.

Bill O’Reilly, an alleged journalist/commentator on Fox, has called for the “execution” for treason of whoever leaked the files to WikiLeaks, while Sarah Palin suggested that Julian Assange should be hunted down like Osama bin Laden — which he sort of is, i.e. not — and also charged with treason, a tough thing for a US court to hang on an Australian citizen. Mike Huckabee has lined up with executors, while Assange has been slated for execution by the Canadian deputy prime minister. No, I don’t know either.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, a lot of that hostility appears to be coming from the professional journalist fraternity, judging by the other questions at the Frontline Club last night. One expected the standard line from Graffy — that this had a “chilling” effect on diplomatic discourse, etc, but the weird thing was that the bulk of the questions came from journos who seemed to have some beef with WikiLeaks.

“Is this irresponsible?” said one. “Why isn’t WikiLeaks encouraging competition?’ said another. “Is WikiLeaks displacing field journalism?’ “Is redaction an admission of earlier guilt?’ “How will people understand these cables without context?’ “Has WikiLeaks betrayed Bradley Manning?’ and on and on.

It’s not that some of these questions weren’t fair or pertinent — it’s that the whole evening was taken up with a palpable anxiety by journalists, and a hostility from those who rely on political connections and inside knowledge, that the rules of the game were changing, and that there were new players.

That takes a bit of getting used to. Halfway through the evening, someone announced that WikiLeaks had been denied access to Amazon servers, a service it was using for excess demand. Graffy crowed that the site was down. Checking it afterwards, it was clearly not (though parts were bouncing back), as was the case with the last half-dozen reports of WL being decisively hacked.

Whether they can stay up for ever remains to be seen. That question is becoming more pertinent for Assange as well, currently — according to WikiLeaks rep Kristinn Hrafnsson in an undisclosed location outside London somewhere, so probably not in the UK at all.

Interpol has a issued a “red” notice of locate and trace, in relation to the Swedish warrant compelling Assange to present himself for questioning on the r-pe accusations that go back to August, and result from complaints to police by two former s-xual partners that Assange would not consent to an STI test.

Through his lawyer, Assange reiterated that he had been given leave to exit Sweden during the investigation, had been in contact with the prosecutor’s office, and that they had refused several possible interview dates.

The red notice leaves a danger that Assange could be detained in the UK for extradition, and possibly served with charges by the US government — which can be enacted near-automatically, under the one-way UK-US extradition treaty negotiated by Tony Blair.

Should the US find a way to charge him, Assange could face decades in prison — although the murderous tone of mainstream right-wing American discourse at moment suggests they have other measures on their mind, a thuggishness that has been implicit in much of their discourse for a long while now. The times are anything but diplomatic.

And the second from Assange's lawyer, noting that all the talk about "rape" in its usual sense is complete nonsense - the issue being talked about in Sweden simply amounts to Assange not having taken a STD test after consensual s-x - Assange lawyer speaks.

Apparently having consensual s-x in Sweden without a condom is punishable by a term of imprisonment of a minimum of two years for r-pe. That is the basis for a reinstitution of r-pe charges against WikiLeaks figurehead Julian Assange that is destined to make Sweden and its justice system the laughing stock of the world and dramatically damage its reputation as a model of modernity.

Sweden’s Public Prosecutor’s Office was embarrassed in August this year when it leaked to the media that it was seeking to arrest Assange for r-pe, then on the same day withdrew the arrest warrant because in its own words there was “no evidence”. The damage to Assange’s reputation is incalculable. More than three quarters of internet references to his name refer to r-pe. Now, three months on and three prosecutors later, the Swedes seem to be clear on their basis to proceed. Consensual s-x that started out with a condom ended up without one, ergo, the s-x was not consensual.

For three months Assange had been waiting in vain to hear whether media statements by and for the two female “victims” that there was no fear or violence were going to be embellished so the charges might be carried forward due to greater seriousness. Such statements would stop a r-pe charge in any Western country dead in its tracks. R-pe is a crime of violence, duress or deception. You can r-pe someone by deluding them into thinking you are someone else or by drugging them or by reason of their young age but essentially it’s a crime of violence.

The women here are near to and over 30 and have international experience, some of it working in Swedish government embassies. There is no suggestion of drugs nor identity concealment. Far from it. Both women boasted of their celebrity connection to Assange after the events that they would now see him destroyed for.

That further evidence hasn’t been confected to make the charges less absurd does Sweden no credit because it has no choice in the matter. The phenomena of social networking through the internet and mobile phones constrains Swedish authorities from augmenting the evidence against Assange because it would look even less credible in the face of tweets by Anna Ardin and SMS texts by Sofia Wilén boasting of their respective conquests after the “crimes”.

In the case of Ardin it is clear that she has thrown a party in Assange’s honour at her flat after the “crime” and tweeted to her followers that she is with the “the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing!”. Go on the internet and see for yourself. That Ardin has sought unsuccessfully to delete these exculpatory tweets from the public record should be a matter of grave concern. That she has published on the internet a guide on how to get revenge on cheating boyfriends ever graver. The exact content of Wilén’s mobile phone texts is not yet known but their bragging and exculpatory character has been confirmed by Swedish prosecutors. Niether Wilén’s nor Ardin’s texts complain of r-pe.

But then neither Arden nor Wilén complained to the police but rather “sought advice”, a technique in Sweden enabling citizens to avoid just punishment for making false complaints. They sought advice together, having collaborated and irrevocably tainted each other’s evidence beforehand. Their SMS texts to each other show a plan to contact the Swedish newspaper Expressen beforehand in order to maximise the damage to Assange. They belong to the same political group and attended a public lecture given by Assange and organised by them. You can see Wilén on the YouTube video of the event even now.

Of course, their celebrity lawyer Claes Borgström was questioned as to how the women themselves could be essentially contradicting the legal characterisation of Swedish prosecutors; a crime of non-consent by consent. Borgström’s answer is emblematic of how divorced from reality this matter is. “They (the women) are not jurists”. You need a law degree to know whether you have been r-ped or not in Sweden. In the context of such double think, the question of how the Swedish authorities propose to deal with victims who neither saw themselves as such nor acted as such is easily answered: You’re not a Swedish lawyer so you wouldn’t understand anyway. The consent of both women to s-x with Assange has been confirmed by prosecutors.

Proposed reforms of Swedish r-pe laws would introduce a test of whether the unequal power relations between the parties might void the sincerely expressed consent of one party. In this case, presumably, the politically active Ardin, with experience fielding gender equity complaints as a gender equity officer at Uppsala University, had her will suborned by Assange’s celebrity. The prosecutor coming as she does from a prosecution “Development Unit” could achieve this broadening of the law during Assange’s trial so he can be convicted of a crime that didn’t exist at the time he allegedly committed it. She would need to. There is no precedent for it. The Swedes are making it up as they go along.

A great deal more damning evidence is yet to be revealed about what passes for legal process in Sweden, such as Assange’s lawyers having not received a single official document until November 18, 2010 (and then in Swedish language contrary to European Law) and having to learn about the status of investigations through prosecution media announcements but make no mistake: it is not Julian Assange that is on trial here but Sweden and its reputation as a modern and model country with rules of law.

Science Daily has a look at the impact of biofuel production on water quality in the Mississippi river - Biofuels Production Has Unintended Consequences on Water Quality and Quantity in Mississippi.

More water is required to produce corn than to produce cotton in the Mississippi Delta requiring increased withdrawals of groundwater from the Mississippi River Valley alluvial (MRVA) aquifer for irrigation. This is contributing to already declining water levels in the aquifer. In addition, increased use of nitrogen fertilizer for corn in comparison to cotton could contribute to low dissolved oxygen conditions in the Gulf of Mexico.

These are some of the key findings from a study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to assess water quality and quantity in the Mississippi Delta, in relationship to biofuels production.

"Because corn uses 80 percent more water for irrigation than cotton, exchanging corn for cotton will decrease water-levels," according to Heather Welch, USGS Hydrologist and author of this USGS Report. Declining water levels in the MRVA aquifer are particularly significant in the Mississippi Delta, where the infiltration of rainfall to replenish the aquifer is low. "This is a low flat area. When it does rain, much of the precipitation is lost through evapotranspiration and to streamflow, so the rainwater never reaches the aquifer," explains Welch.

In 2006, the U.S. Department of Energy Biomass Program implemented the Biofuels Initiative. The initiative calls for the replacement of 30 percent of gasoline levels by ethanol by 2030 and the reduction of ethanol costs to prices competitive with gasoline by 2012. In the Mississippi Delta, implementation of this initiative resulted in a 47-percent decrease in the number of acres dedicated to producing cotton, which resulted in a corresponding 288-percent increase in corn acreage in the region from 2006 to 2007.

PhysOrg has an article linking recent recessions with declines in the EROI of major fuel sources - Declining energy quality could be root cause of current recession.

Many economists have pointed to a bursting real estate bubble as the initial trigger for the current recession, which in turn caused global investments in U.S. real estate to turn sour and drag down the global economy. King suggests the real estate bubble burst because individuals were forced to pay a higher and higher percentage of their income for energy—including electricity, gasoline and heating oil—leaving less money for their home mortgages.

In economic terms, the quality of the nation's energy supply is referred to as Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI). For example, if an oil company uses a 10th of a barrel of oil to drill, pump, transport and refine one barrel of oil, the EROI for the refined fuel is 10.

"Many economists don't think of energy as being a limiting factor to economic growth," says King, a research associate in the university's Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy. "They think continual improvements in technology and efficiency have completely decoupled the two factors. My research is part of a growing body of evidence that says that's just not true. Energy still plays a big role."

In a paper published this November in the journal Environmental Research Letters, King introduced a new way to measure energy quality, the Energy Intensity Ratio (EIR), that is easier to calculate, highly correlated to EROI and in some ways more powerful than EROI. EIR measures how much profit is obtained by energy consumers relative to energy producers. The higher the EIR, the more economic value consumers (including businesses, governments and people) get from their energy.

When King plots EIR for various fuels every year since World War II, the graphs indicate two large declines, one before the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s and the other during the 2000s, leading up to the current economic recession. There have been other recessions in the U.S. since World War II, but the longest and deepest were preceded by sustained declines in EIR for all fossil fuels.

EIR is proportional to EROI, meaning they rise and fall together, but the basic data behind the EIR calculations come out annually as opposed to every five years for EROI. EIR also gives insight into different parts of the supply chain such as at the refinery or at the gas pump, which are harder to study with EROI.

King's analysis suggests if EIR falls below a certain threshold, the economy stops growing. For example, in 1972, EIR for gasoline was 5.9 and in 2008 it was 5.5. During times of robust economic growth, such as the 1990s, EIR for gasoline was well over eight. Compare that to some estimates of EROI and EIR for corn ethanol of around one, and it's clear why corn ethanol has been widely criticized as a low quality energy source.

To get the U.S. economy growing again, King says Americans will have to produce and use energy more efficiently. That's essentially what the U.S. did after the last energy crisis by raising fuel efficiency standards for cars, increasing use of natural gas for electric power generation and developing new technologies such as Enhanced Oil Recovery to coax more oil out of the ground.

The Business Spectator has an article by Andrew Leonard looking at some of the implications of the upcoming Wikileaks dump of data from a large American bank - Can WikiLeaks tame Wall Street?.

Forbes magazine is making a very big deal of a declaration by WikiLeaks maestro Julian Assange that sometime early next year, "a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out."

"You could call it the ecosystem of corruption," he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. "But it's also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that's not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they're fulfilling their own self-interest."

Strangely, despite devoting thousands of words to a blossoming war between the technologists seeking to provide the private sector with leak-proof security systems and the information-wants-to-be-free revolutionaries personified by Assange, reporter Andy Greenberg's original story had two big holes. First, he missed Assange's assertion last year, published by ComputerWorld, that he was sitting on five gigabytes of data liberated from Bank of America, which puts that institution at the top of the list of likely exposure suspects. But more important, Greenberg doesn't devote much attention to what a world in which big corporations cannot keep the lid on their internal communications and deliberations sealed would look like.

There seems little doubt that that world is coming. Whatever you think of the ethics or legality of such involuntary disclosure, or regard Assange as a noble whistle-blower or rank terrorist, there's no getting around how easy it is to dump vast amounts of information into the public domain in the era of portable hard drives and ubiquitous Net access. From the dawn of the computer age, information has become ever harder to control, and there's no sign of that changing any time soon. Quite the contrary, as proven by the current flurry of WikiLeaks diplomatic cables released.

But what will it mean, practically speaking? Ideally, greater transparency is supposed to improve market efficiency. So if, say, a data dump on a big bank revealed the corruption at the heart of that institution's operations, it would be punished by the market, perhaps to the point of going out of business. In the interview with Forbes, Assange goes so far as to assert that "one or two" big banks may collapse as a result of WikiLeaks revelations.

Could Julian Assange achieve what a global financial meltdown failed to accomplish? Perhaps, if the information is fresh enough and reveals financial problems previously unknown. Or maybe there will be juicy material that gets plugged immediately into the proliferating investor lawsuits raking over dubious securities trade of the last decade.

But that's all after the fact. The more interesting question is to wonder whether the threat or certainty of eventual exposure has any kind of prophylactic effect on behaviour. For example, would the financial crisis have played out any differently if we could have read every e-mail or text written by Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch mortgage bond traders during the hot and heavy days of the housing boom?

The SMH has an article on plans to expand the use of cogeneration in the City of Sydney - Sydney to go it alone as power producer.

SYDNEY will become the first Australian city to start weaning itself off coal-fired electricity, with the business district and much of the inner city preparing to switch to small, gas-driven power plants in the next 20 years.

The City of Sydney master plan, to be published today by the lord mayor, Clover Moore, will identify 15 ''low carbon zones'' based on trigeneration plants that create electricity and also generate heat and cold for airconditioning.

The switch could save up to $1.5 billion in state government spending on new infrastructure for bringing power from coal-fired plants, a report commissioned by the council said.

A ''decentralised'' power network for Sydney would be driven by gas, but the Herald understands plants would be capable of being driven by forms of biogas created from plant matter and sewage, as part of the council's ultimate goal of making the city centre carbon neutral by 2050.

With work on the new network expected to start within two years, the plan will increase demand for gas extraction, and possibly require new pipelines. ''NSW has sufficient known reserves of gas to meet anticipated needs,'' a spokesman said.

The plan will call for 360 megawatts of electricity from trigeneration by 2030, which would cut the city's greenhouse gas emissions by up to 26 per cent. ...

Most of the power plants would be just a few metres wide and power a city block or a cluster of buildings.

The council commissioned the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney to look at the potential benefits of the trigeneration plan.

Its report found there was potential to save $200 million in extra costs to upgrade the current electricity network before 2020, rising to savings of $1 billion by 2030. In addition, the power generated in the city would offset $500 million worth of energy the state government proposed to generate at two new coal-fired power plants.

The WSJ has a look at tidal power news in the UK - Tidal-Power Project Ebbs in U.K..

Tidal power has been hailed by some as the wave of the future. But in the United Kingdom, the shifting tides of public policy threaten to leave it high and dry.

Puns aside, last month, the U.K. government withdrew its support for one of the world's most ambitious renewable-energy projects—a $24 billion tidal barrage across the Severn Estuary that potentially could have generated as much as 5% of the U.K.'s electricity. The British government said a two-year feasibility study determined that the project would actually cost about $54 billion, and it couldn't justify public funding of such a high-cost, high-risk project.

But there was another factor weighing against the project: its environmental impact. Though the barrage—which would stretch across the estuary and function a bit like a hydroelectric dam—was pitched as a clean technology, green groups argued it would destroy marsh and mud flats used by thousands of birds, and block the migration routes of fish. The government agreed.

"Harnessing the huge tidal power of the Severn has to be right, but it cannot be right to trash the natural environment in the process," says Martin Harper of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a U.K. charity.

While many people believe the government's decision is a death blow to the project, the private consortium behind the barrage, Corlan Hafren Ltd., has vowed to proceed without government support.

The barrage isn't the first renewable-energy project to run afoul of environmentalists. That may be why interest is growing in the U.K. in another type of marine power that draws fewer objections from green groups: tidal-stream energy. Experts have said 15% to 20% of current U.K. electricity demand could ultimately be met by wave and tidal-stream energy, where turbines are placed in fast-flowing currents or tidal steams and powered by the moving water in much the same way moving air powers windmills.

SeaGen, the world's first commercial tidal-stream generator, operates in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, an inlet chosen for its extremely fast tidal current. Marine Current Turbines Ltd., the company behind SeaGen, also is working with a unit of the German utility RWE AG on a tidal-energy farm in North Wales. By the end of the decade, they plan to have major tidal farms off Scotland's Pentland Firth—an area often described as the Saudi Arabia of marine energy—and off the northern Irish coast.

While coal seam gas operators on the east coast are finding resistance growing from farmers wanting to protect their land, The Australian reports that Woodside is hitting headwinds on the west coast as well, with labour costs for their Pluto natural gas project rising rapidly - Pluto delayed as costs soar: Woodside.

The company's new $14 billion cost estimate is $900m to $1.3bn higher than its November estimate last year of $12.7bn to $13.1bn. ...

Tapping fields containing 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, Pluto is Woodside's most important development project.

Related sales to Asian utilities stand to boost its revenue considerably and it is one of few LNG developments to come on line globally in 2011.

Construction of Pluto has been delayed by industrial action from construction workers over their accommodation arrangements and crane drivers over pay, as Australia's resource-driven economy continues its robust growth.

Woodside in November hiked its cost estimate for Pluto by 6 per cent to 10 per cent after experiencing a shortage of skilled workers.

The company today stuck to its 2010 annual production forecast of 70 million-75 million barrels of oil equivalent, adding production is expected in the middle of that range.

Production in 2011 is expected at 63 million-66 million BOE plus 5 million-9 million BOE from Pluto, creating a wide target of 68 million-75 million BOE.

Grist has a look at one minor Wikileaks revelation about US efforts to promote GMO crops in Africa - Wikileaks: State Dept. wants intel on African acceptance of GMOs.

The Wikileaks release of U.S. State Department classified diplomatic cables may be problematic, but it has been quite a trove of information on the workings of our diplomatic corps. For the most part, the dump has confirmed things that we already knew about U.S. policy -- and that seems to be the case regarding the one mention of agricultural policy in these thousands of emails and documents (no doubt there are more) to which I was alerted.

Buried deep in a document that outlines priorities for intelligence gathering in the African "Great Lakes" countries of Burundi, the Republic of Congo, and Rwanda is a list (for the most part, very reasonable) of what the State Department would like to know about the region's agricultural policy. Things like government policies on food security and food safety top the list, for example, along with information on the impact of rising food prices in these countries. Agricultural yield statistics, infrastructure improvements, data on deforestation and desertification, water issues, and invasive species are included as priorities for "reporting" as well.

But also getting its own line item on the intel priority list is this:

Government acceptance of genetically modified food and propagation of genetically modified crops.

Sigh.

Tom Philpott has reported on the State Department's biotech-loving science adviser Nina Federoff and her industry ties -- and certainly USDA Chief Tom Vilsack believes that genetically modified foods are an answer to world hunger. So this revelation hardly counts as a surprise. But it's still a shame to see that our spymasters are actively engaged in efforts to make the world safe for Monsanto. Aren't there better things for them to do?

The SMH has an article on the cost of nuclear power - Nuclear power 'failing' price test.

NUCLEAR energy will be more expensive than most forms of renewable energy by 2020 according to a paper by the University of NSW energy expert Mark Diesendorf.

The paper, to be given at a solar industry conference in Canberra today, finds the cheapest renewable energy sources – including landfill gas, onshore wind, conventional geothermal and hydro – are already cost-competitive with conventional nuclear energy power plants.

By 2020, offshore wind farms, solar thermal and solar photovoltaics are all projected to be less expensive than nuclear energy.

Dr Diesendorf, the deputy director of the Institute of Environmental Studies, said the cost of building a nuclear power plant has risen rapidly since 2002, from more than $US2000 per kw of generation capacity installed, to about $US7400 per kw.

The latest capital cost translates to about US15¢ per kwh of electricity generated, which is projected to rise to about 20¢ per kwh over the next decade, if costs continue to rise at current rates.

The figures do not count subsidies for nuclear energy such as loan guarantees, land acquired for buffer zones around reactors or decommissioning costs.

By comparison the study cites big falls in the capital cost of onshore wind power last year, from $1900 per kw to $1700 per kw, and in solar from $7000 per kw to $5120 per kw (and as low as $3000 for utility-scale projects).

None of the projections assume a carbon price.

Dr Diesendorf said the cost of nuclear energy was rising because the industry was "not expanding".

Nuclear's share of global power generation had fallen from 17 per cent in 2001 to 14 per cent last year with the main growth coming from China, Russia, India and South Korea.

Only two reactors were under construction in western countries – in Finland and France – and both were over-time and over-budget.

FastCompany has a look at a new axis of evil forming in Colorado, looking to exploit shale oil - Boogeymen Trifecta: Murdoch Allies With Oil Company, Cheney.

Rupert Murdoch is one of the world's best known media barons and may or may not be a bud to Steve Jobs. But as hype swelled around his iPad digital project, The Daily, Murdoch was also investing in an Israeli-American oil shale company with ties to Dick Cheney. Can his legendary business savvy help out an upstart oil firm?

Oil shale may be the answer to worries about peak oil, but it is highly expensive to extract and has a high ecological cost.

Lord Jacob Rothschild and Murdoch just purchased a joint 5.5% stake in Genie Oil and Gas Inc., a division of the IDT Corporation. The equity stake purchase by Murdoch and Rothschild is worth approximately $11 million. Genie is a new face in the energy market; the company just launched this summer.

Murdoch is slated to join Genie's advisory board. Other members include:

* American Shale Oil CTO Alan K. Burnham
* Former Vice President Dick Cheney
* Genie chairman and Midland, Texas mayor Wes Perry
* Former Exxon Mobil executive vice president Eugene A. Renna
* Allan Sass, former president and CEO of Occidental Oil Shale
* Hedge fund investor and philanthropist Michael Steinhardt
* Stephen M. Trauber of UBS Investment Bank
* Harold Vinegar, former chief scientist at Royal Dutch/Shell

American Shale Oil is a joint venture between IDT and French firm Total S.A.

Public statements by both Genie and their investors have stressed the firm's American and Israeli (read: non-Arab, non-Iranian, non-Venezuelan) roots. According to a statement by Murdoch, “I believe Genie Energy's technologies and vast shale oil licenses have real potential to spur a global, geo-political paradigm shift by moving a major portion of new oil production to America, Israel, and other western-oriented democracies.” Murdoch also said that “Covering and distributing news has been my life's work […] If Genie's effort to develop shale oil is successful, as I believe it will be, then the news we'll report in the coming decades will reflect a more prosperous, more democratic, and more secure world.”

Perry was even more explicit, stating that “Both America and Israel have significant shale oil reserves. It’s difficult to overstate their potential to improve our respective economies and national security. […] Genie Energy is developing the technologies America and Israel want to make rapid progress toward energy independence, while IDT Energy is poised for continued growth in the consumer market. I’m very excited to work with their management team to help meet the energy needs of the U.S. and Israel for decades to come.”

Genie is currently working on two oil shale exploration projects in the United States and Israel.

In Colorado, Genie is involved in American Shale Oil's extraction testing project in Colorado's Green River Formation. The Green River Formation is the largest oil shale deposit in the world and is believed to contain anywhere between 1.2 and 1.8 trillion barrels of oil. Much of the oil is currently inaccessible; however, even the currently accessible amount of 800 billion barrels in Green River exceeds Saudi Arabia's explored oil reserves. American Shale Oil is one of four companies that was given a tender to develop the Green River Formation; the firm's portion of Green River is believed to contain 10 billion barrels of oil.

WorldChanging has announced they are closing up after 7 interesting years. I don't think the site was ever quite the same after Jamais Cascio departed, but for years it was one of the best places to go on the internet - Thank You for Seven Years of Worldchanging.

We have some news.

Seven years ago, Alex Steffen and Jamais Cascio started Worldchanging with the intention of providing access to the tools, models and ideas for building a better future. They wanted to push the concept that solutions-based thinking could transform the debates about sustainability and social innovation. With a scrawny little blog, a brilliant crew of fellow travelers and a lot of moxie, an initial group of us set out to change how people think about (and prepare for) the future.

Since then, Worldchanging has published almost 12,000 essays, articles, blog posts and "quick changes." We've put out a bestselling book (which has been translated into French, German and other languages). We've had roughly eight million unique readers, and reached tens of millions more with our ideas through talks, interviews in the media and so on. We've had a major impact on the debate, introducing a whole bunch of new ideas and moving forward some entirely new discussions. Many Worldchanging writers have become leading voices in important planetary conversations. We've coined a number of phrases, not least the idea of bright green environmentalism. We've won awards, earned critical acclaim and, if our mail is to be believed, offered some optimism and inspiration to a number of bright, idealistic people.

But all things change, and so it happens with Worldchanging. The organization is taking steps to close its doors and dissolve as a 501c3 nonprofit organization by the end of 2010. It is our goal to see the archive of work here maintained, though the form of that archive is still uncertain.

Why is this happening? Worldchanging readers were generous over the years and an important part of our ongoing operations, but we were never able to secure major foundation support, so Worldchanging relied most heavily on income generated from Alex Steffen’s speaking engagements (Alex gave more than 400 talks over the past five years) and the Worldchanging book. The strenuous travel schedule it takes to deliver that many talks, though, was unsustainable, both personally for Alex and in terms of the impact it had on Worldchanging’s ability to develop new work. It was clear we needed a new model if we were going to stay in operation.

Early this year a new board was brought on to reshape the organization and pursue a more traditional nonprofit development model (based more on grants, gifts and major fundraising drives), with many new board members recruited in just the last few months to help us re-imagine operations and launch these new plans. Unfortunately, despite everyone’s best efforts (and a successful October event), funding ran out before such a transformation could happen. Given the financial realities we faced, the board and staff have agreed that it is time to bring Worldchanging to a close as gracefully as possible.

Grist points to an interesting bike lock concept - The most secure bike lock in the world.

Guy Rundle at Crikey has some more pontifications about the impact of Wikileaks on the modern world - The GFC, Wikileaks collide … and the world just shifted.

As the WikiLeaks cablegate (WL-CG) revelations continue to roll out, the mood of defiance grows in Ireland, with calls for “default”, for an immediate election, or for a citizens assembly coming from ever wider quarters. The euro has failed to lift on the market, suggesting that the vicious austerity package, has failed to convince. Down the road in Trafalgar Square, in the first snow of the year, the students are fighting a running battle with the cops, who are trying to kettle them around Nelson’s column. Interpol has issued a warrant for Julian Assange, based on the warrant issued by the Swedish courts on r-pe allegations.

The European Commission is investigating monopoly price fixing practices by Google, showing surprising backbone. The spotlight is on China, after WL-CG revelations that China had expressed the wish that Korea be reunified under Seoul. Now, joining revelations that the Arab world wants a strike on Iran, is confirmation that the US knows of official Saudi funding links to al-Qaeda, and that the US feels that Pakistan is a larger problem than Afghanistan in the propagation of terror.

President Karzai — dubbed inept and credulous in cables — pardoned five heroin traffickers who were caught with more than 250 kilograms of the stuff en route to the streets of the West. The US began moves to charge Assange under the Espionage Act, and the Australian government is dutifully looking for something to charge him with too.

In the House of Commons, the Lib-Dems are in chaos, preparing to abstain from a vote hiking up tuition fees after pledging to oppose it before the election, with talk of defections from the party. Revelations in the WL-CG cables that PMs Brown and Cameron unsuccessfully attempted to make a deal to avoid the extradition of Garry McKinnon, an autistic kid who hacked into unprotected US security networks, and is facing decades in jail under the one-way extradition treaty signed by Blair.

The revelation has dealt another small but visible blow to the special relationship. And the UK “put in place” measures to shield the US during the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War. According to WL-CG. And Portugal has announced, in the past 15 minutes, that its banks may fail.

Clearly something is under way, a larger shift than can be explained merely by the individual occurrences, substantial as they are. Two massive processes have come into collision — the second wave of the global financial crisis, breaking strongly in Europe, hitting WikiLeaks’ rolling wave of information storms, changing the relationship between state and power. The transformation of the relationship between four elements — states, nations, information and economy — has been categorical, and even if it recedes in the next few days (which it is unlikely to), it will not retreat back to the status quo.

Something has happened, and it is worth trying to work out what, while it is going on.

Taken at the broadest structural level, one could say this — a series of crucial shifts going back 30 years have now come together in a manner that has pitched the global power system into a potential crisis of legitimacy. In the early 1980s, global financial transactions — hitherto substantially bound within states — began to be extended internationally in real time, due to greater use of information technology as “virtual” markets, and then the only arena in which transactions took place.

The Reagan and Thatcher victories detached economy from state politically, deregulating finance. The transition from the EEC to the EC/EU detached state structures from nation, translating them into a European super-state. The spread of the internet in the late ’80s and ’90s changed the relationship of information to state, making it materially impossible to regulate information flows via old means of censorship and control.

With the global financial economy dictating terms to the superstates in the late ’90s — Glass-Steagall was repealed at the same time as the euro was launched — and using the global net as both its medium, and domain for creation of new assets, the nations, the ethni rallied around increasingly crude expressions of solidarity, increasingly with a religious charge.

The most brutal expression of this was 9/11, and the state responded by trying to regain some of the power it had since given up to information and economy. By now it was too late. The new culture, subjectivity and legitimacy of the cybersphere implicitly undermined the state. WikiLeaks is theorisation and operationalisation of that moment, which is an act of (collective) thought, and a changed material reality.

The autonomous processes of a global economy, operating at the hyperspeed — effectively light speed — of an autonomous global information system, eventually came apart, and the debris rained down on the nations. The Greeks, the Irish, the Portuguese, maintaining a sense of community separated from the state were initially powerless. The states — the EU and the US — had a relationship only to the economy, not to the nation, and promptly bailed out the former at the cost of the latter, stealing their life, to pay off debt.

At this point, with the legitimacy of state and economy at historic lows, the three major blows of WikiLeaks have decisively shifted the power relationship between information on the one hand, and state/economy on the other. From the other end, the nations are rebelling. “Peoples of Europe, rise up” the Greek Communist Party’s slogan hung from the Acropolis chimes with WikiLeaks material and categorical challenge to the very fabric of state power, as expressed in the notion of “inviolable diplomatic communication”.

In Europe, oft dismissed as the old dead world, but really the cutting edge of the world-island, it will only take one crucial challenge from the nations — a citizens challenge to state power in Ireland, for example — to join the two up, in an equally dynamic fashion. Assange’s announcement, in Forbes magazine, that WL may do a Wall Street document dump next effectively closes the circle.

You can feel the change in the air, read it in every report. The more that the fused political-media-administrative elite try to write it off as “entertaining anecdote” while at the same time mobilising state power to destroy the organisation, the more they reveal that something has happened. The old process of leaks — a document here and there — only served to reinforce the idea that the state had an unquestionable right to control information, and that there could be no other way to organise society or create law.

That legitimacy has had a fatal crack put it in. The whole question of who should know what has been put into play. There will be reversals, but we’re used to those. As I may have mentioned, something is happening.