I'm a bit worn out tonight so this will just be a minimal post with no organisation or insight (no sarcastic comments please) - the links are all good though.

If you're looking for data points to try and support the collapse and dieoff school of thought, then the place to start is Africa. Energy Bulletin points to a Wall Street Journal article on the impact of high oil prices on Guinea. What about all that oil in the Gulf of Guinea you ask ? Well - I don't think much of it will make its way into the local economies - but in any case the country of Guinea isn't actually anywhere near the Gulf of Guinea (though the oil rich nation of Equatorial Guinea is - here endeth the geography lesson).

Every couple of days, nurses at the Donka Hospital here scoop up the premature babies from their incubators. They rouse their mothers from sleep, lay the infants on the women's bellies and pile blankets on mother and child.

Doctors call this the "kangaroo method" -- a way to keep the babies warm enough so that they don't die during the long blackouts that plague this rundown West African port. Soaring fuel prices have forced the government to ration power across the city, and the hospital can't afford to run its oil-fired back-up generator.

"We can't keep it fueled up," says Mamadou Baldé, director of the hospital's infant-care ward, over the wail of sick babies. "The power outages are becoming more frequent."

The impact of today's energy crunch on the poor is plain in rich nations such as America: Expensive gasoline and soaring heating bills make a hard life harder. In impoverished countries such as Guinea, where per capita income is just $370 a year and surging gasoline prices have helped spark bloody riots, the energy shock has become a matter of life and death.

My recent debate with John in the comments on the topic of how long Australia's east coast gas reserves will last focussed on coal seam methane as the deciding factor (but I haven't seen a conclusive estimate of much coal seam methane we actually have).

Orion magazine has a look at the impact of coal bed methane extraction in the US.

When the light of early morning shines on the red-ribboned mesas of western Colorado's Garfield County, and the Colorado River shimmers like a silver snake on the move, it's easy to see why the rural people who live here say they cling to this place. Then the light catches one of the hundreds of gas wells newly set upon the land, intimating a more complex story.

Deep underneath the county's dry sagebrush plateaus and irrigated farmland—and 250 miles north of Aztec, New Mexico—lies the Piceance (pronounced pee-awnce) Basin, home to an estimated 40 trillion cubic feet or more of recoverable natural gas, sandwiched between layers of sandstone and coal. Running beneath a quarter of the county's 1.9 million acres, the basin rolls west off the Rocky Mountains down to the desert country of northwestern Colorado. One of America's richest sources of natural gas, the Piceance holds enough gas to power the nation at current consumption rates for around two years. As the price of methane—a primary component of natural gas—has quadrupled in recent years, energy companies have sprinted here to drill rock and capture gas.

There are more than 3,200 gas wells in Garfield County, most drilled in the last five years; in the next eight years, gas companies pursuing coal bed methane and other forms of natural gas plan to drill 10,000 more. Drill rigs rising 75 feet into the sky dot the craggy edges of mesas and the wide valleys that ring once quiet towns with names like Rifle and Silt. Miles of new roads crisscross the land. Three-acre dirt pads that hold condensate tanks, sumps, and wells carve brown scars into the green sloping hillsides. Straight, three-hundred-foot-wide swaths cleared of juniper and aspen trees indicate where underground pipelines carry gas as far as California. Garfield County officials don't even know how many miles of new roads and gas pipeline exist in the area, so quickly have they been laid.

Garfield County is a microcosm of a natural gas boom exploding throughout the country. The Bush administration says that finding energy at home is critical to reducing foreign imports and ensuring national security; last year, state and federal agencies throughout the country issued 36,827 gas well drilling permits, a 78 percent increase from 2002. To date, drilling companies have leased 36 million acres of federal public land, encompassing 88 percent of known natural gas reserves.

The sort of industrial energy development now evident along the Colorado River isn't, however, limited to public land. Although people here may own the fee title to land where they build their homes, if a drilling company owns or leases the gas down below, it can build a road and a well pad—generally covering around five acres altogether—on that private property in order to extract the gas. Across the West, this version of property rights has come as a gut-wrenching surprise to uncounted numbers of Americans. Literally uncounted; no tallies appear to exist concerning how many people have had their lives disrupted in this manner.

After a well is drilled, an oil service company may inject—under great pressure—water, sand, and a mixture of chemicals that include carcinogens such as benzene, arsenic, and lead into the well. This "hydraulic fracturing," or "frac'ing," cracks the rock in which the gas is trapped in small pockets, and allows the gas to flow toward the well and to the surface. Up to 30 percent of fracturing fluids remain underground, according to studies conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency and by the oil and gas industry. How much "30 percent" is remains a mystery, as does the injection fluid's exact recipe—all that information is proprietary to the gas companies. These residual toxic fluids may then seep into the surrounding soil, groundwater, and water wells. Industry spokespeople consistently say there's no proof such pollution has ever occurred, an assertion based on the fact that no state oil and gas commission has ever found a definitive example of frac'ing impacting public health—but then, none of these state agencies nor the EPA has ever directly studied the connection. No evidence has been found, but no one has looked.

Orion also has an article on a serious problem facing our society - righteousness.

AS A SOBER ADDICT and addictions therapist, I understand addiction as a likely outcome of the intersection of human nature and human cleverness. We are filled with longings and ingenious at devising shortcuts. These attributes have contributed to our spectacular evolutionary prominence—and have set us up to become a plague species. Intoxicated with our seemingly boundless powers, humans are "drunk behind the wheel," endangering ourselves, and large sections of our intricately interwoven biosphere, as we willfully careen along. At bottom, addiction is the mistaken conviction that we can fulfill our longings—that, in the language of the heroin addict, we can "fix" ourselves—through some form of control, through willful manipulation. This belief system not only saturates our personal lives and behaviors; it is the defining orientation of our present-day culture.

Because addiction is so ubiquitous, the path of sobriety can evoke the circus VW that endlessly produces clowns. You stop drinking alcohol only to find that you're addicted to marijuana. Or sex. Or food. Or anger. Or nicotine. Or work. Or all of the above, and more. So what is a poor addict to do? You can't realistically address all of these at once. The standard pithy advice from those experienced in sobriety goes like this: deal with the addiction that's killing you the fastest.

From a global perspective, then, the question is, which addiction is setting us up for disaster fastest? There are plenty of candidates, some glaringly obvious, like weapons of war. Or nationalism. Or oil—even George W. Bush vaguely glimpses that one. But my nominee, hands down, is the feeling of righteousness.

Like alcohol, which is the most epidemic of the chemical addictions, the sense of righteousness is endlessly versatile. It can become fuel for a rapacious crusade, or a comforting wrap into which we snuggle for affirmation and reassurance. This emotional fix is endlessly enticing, insidiously corrupting, and charged with such compelling authority that we can become willing to die—or kill—in its thrall.

At this point you may conjure images of terrorists piloting planes into skyscrapers or blowing up buses—rabid fanatics bent on vengeance. Or the Timothy McVeighs and Theodore Kaczynskis: alienated, forlorn figures stewing grimly in righteous vitriol. As with addiction in general, people prefer to think of the problem as involving others—not themselves.

William Grieder has a look at Milton Friedman's "cruel legacy".

Now that the economists and their camp followers have mourned and celebrated the life of Milton Friedman, allow me to kick a little dirt on the icon. Without question, Friedman was the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century, as his admirers claim. What they do not say is that he was also the most destructive public intellectual of our time.

Friedman actually failed as a scientific economist but succeeded as a moral philosopher. His greatest scholarly accomplishment -- his monetarist theory of how to regulate money and credit -- was intellectually flawed at its core and collapsed when the Federal Reserve tried to follow it. The central bank wisely discarded Friedman's money-supply approach before it did more damage. It is now a forgotten relic at the Fed.

Friedman's broader argument--that a society should be governed by self-regulating markets instead of big government--did better but also did not lead to the utopia he promoted. His "free market" faith has produced instead the very thing Friedman regularly denounced: a bastardized system of interest-group politics that serves favored sectors of citizens at the expense of many others. Enterprise and markets were indeed set "free" of government regulation, but big government did not go away (it grew bigger). Only now government acts mainly as patron and protector for the largest, most powerful interests--the same ones that demanded their liberation.

Instead of serving the broad general welfare, government enables capital and corporations to feed off the taxpayers' money and convert public assets into private profit centers, shielded from the wrath of any citizens trying to object. If that is what Friedman really had in mind, he should have said so.

His most profound damage, however, was as a moral philosopher. He championed an ethic of unrelenting, unapologetic self-interest that effectively pushed aside human sympathy. In fact, humans' responsibility to one another has been delegitimized--portrayed as an obstacle to the hardheaded analysis that maximizes returns. Friedman explained: "So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no, they do not."

Pay no attention to the collateral consequences. Your only obligation is to the bottom line. Friedman's message was highly appealing--he promised people a path to freedom--but it triumphed, ultimately, because it served the powerful forces of capital over labor, economic wealth over social concerns. Government was indeed failing on many fronts, especially inflation, and liberalism had no answer.

Friedman's answer was alluringly simple. Get rid of government.

The Washington Post has an article on Japan's declining population - which will be an interesting case study for those who think that human population growth is bound to continue exponentially upwards forever, thus causing collapse (and also for those who think that capitalism can't survive in the absence of economic growth).

Japan has embarked on a path no developed nation has ever followed -- of sustained and inexorable population decline.

Japan won't be alone, of course. Italy, Russia, South Korea and many others also will get smaller. The United States is the exception among advanced nations, and not only thanks to immigration; its overall birth rate is higher, too.

But Japan, which shrank by about 21,000 last year, is in the forefront, and so everyone else will be watching. Does population decline inevitably sap vitality and doom a country to genteel poverty? Or is there some way out?

"Japan is the leader, so it's important for Japan to show success," says Hitoshi Suzuki, a cheerful senior researcher at Daiwa Institute of Research, who pronounces himself "not so worried" -- so not worried, in fact, that last year he wrote "Population Decline is Not Something We Need to Fear."

But why not? For a population to hold steady, every woman must give birth on average to 2.1 children. When the birthrate drops below 1.5 and stays there for any time, it's almost impossible to recover, given the momentum of demographics. Below 1.3 is considered "lowest-low." China is at 1.7 and dropping. Japan last year clocked in at 1.25.

As a result, Japan's population, now about 128 million, is expected to fall to about 100 million by mid-century. Big deal, you might say. Wasn't Japan happy enough 50 years ago, when it blew through the 100 million mark on the way up?

Yes, but it was a very different 100 million then. In 1965 there were 25 million children in Japan, 67 million people of working age and 6 million senior citizens. In 2050 there will be 11 million children, 54 million potential workers and 36 million people 65 and over. No one knows whether such a society can maintain a spirit of innovation, or how its capitalists will adapt to a shrinking market. There will potentially be a lot more dependents for every productive worker.

Jeff Vail has a post on the ongoing march of energy mercantilism.

Just over a year ago I wrote about the New Energy Mercantilism, the set of geopolitical phenomena emerging as nations realize that, in the future, there will not be enough energy to go around to sustain projected demand. A market-economy solves this problem by increasing the price of energy until demand inelasticity is overcome and the energy is allocated to where the market says it is most valuable. Mercantilism, rather than trying to distribute shares of the pie more efficiently, aims to lock down as large a share of the pie as possible for your own needs.

A year later, it is clear that mercantilism is on the march.

Joseph Stroupe has written a fascinating article in Asia Times Online about the rise of energy mercantilism. Specifically, he outlines the mechanism by which nations like China, Russian, and India are embracing the mercantilist approach. All three nations are rapidly moving toward an energy market dominated by long-term, bi-lateral supply contracts. This might not sound like a major change, but consider that today energy is supplied to high-liquidity trading bourses where the person willing to pay the most gets the energy.

This is significant for two reasons: 1) it ensures that everyone around the world pays roughly the same price for energy (after transport costs are accounted for), and 2) it reduces the ease for deploying the "oil weapon" through an embargo because such action has very dispersed effect--holding 4 million barrels of Iranian oil per day off the free markets increases the price for everyone, forcing your enemies and allies to bear the diminished effects. Long-term, bi-lateral supply contracts (where, for example, Angola commits to supply China with 200,000 barrels per day of crude oil at $60/barrel for the next 10 years) fundamentally alter this dynamic. First, by locking in future energy prices (at quantities far higher than can be achieved on the futures exchanges), everyone will not pay the same price for oil in the future. Second, by exiting the open market through such contracts, the precsion-targeting of future oil embargos increases dramatically. Increasingly, significant portions of China and India's energy supplies are being locked into such long-term, bi-lateral contracts, as are the majority of Russian gas shipments to Western Europe.

As a result, much less of the world's energy needs are being met through freely-traded market instruments. It is especially significant when we consider who remains primarily dependent on the free market for their energy supplies: the US, Western Europe, and Japan. As traditional and swing producers (who's production is expected to decline rapidly over the coming years) begin to export less oil to the open exchanges, the price impact on the "West" will be diproportionate. Similarly, the "West's" vulnerability to oil embargos will increase dramatically. Participants in bi-lateral agreements will not be exposed to the same risks to their supplies--they can always resort to the market exchanges to make up for shortfalls (though at higher prices), but the reverse is not true--the "West" cannot quickly resort to bi-lateral agreements to guarantee supplies in times of crisis.

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Jeff Vail also has some notes on Robert Harris talking about Rome's 9/11 and then moves on to analysis of James Bond as a jihadi trying to resurrect the British Empire. I also noted an article about the Rome vs the pirates episode in the New York Times a few months ago.

I heard a fascinating interview this morning on NPR with Robert Harris, author of "Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome." You can listen to it online here. Harris talks about his new book, Imperium, which is a work of historical fiction set amidst the developing Empire in Rome. Most fascinating was the historical research that Harris discussed. Did you know that one of the key events in the fall of the Republic was a pirate attack against the Roman port of Ostia? These stateless groups had the gaul (no pun intended!) to do what no organized state could and attack Rome right at its heart. The smoke rising from the flaming port of Ostia could be seen from the hills of Rome. Roman citizens, shocked that they could be attacked right at the heart of their realm, were easy pickings for opportunistic politicians. Records suggest that one speach actually included the phrase (in the context of convincint other nations to assist in combating the threat from pirates) "either you are with us or you are our enemy." General Pompey exploited this environment of fear to ram through the Senate new laws essentially stripping the populace of many of their substantive rights and paving the way to Empire. By the time Julius Caesar gained power (asserting dictatorial powers to save the Republic for the people, despite the common assumption to the contrary), momentum was too great to reverse the slide to Empire.

Harris also talks about the historical importance of the study of the Fall of the Roman Republic from the perspective of the leadership of the British Empire at its zenith. Which brings me to something of a tangent: James Bond. Ian Flemming's famous spy was, essentially, a literary reaction to the decline of the British Empire (Query: what was the cultural/literary/spiritual reaction to the fall of the Roman Empire, or the transition from Republic to Empire?? Christianity?). James Bond was someone who's very existence countered the gathering impotence of Britania. And after the Suez Crisis, when it was blatantly clear to all that the British Empire was not merely teetering on the brink, but that it was actively spiraling downward, Flemming's plots became more and more unbelievably fantastical.

TreeHugger wonders if the solar industry can revive the US manfacturing sector. This is one of the big positives of the clean energy model - lots of relatively high tech industries are required everywhere - rather than simply transporting energy from far flung locations to pollute your local environment.

Perhaps not all by itself, but, according to the Washington Post, the production of solar panels for homes and businesses has proven itself a job-creator. BP Solar, for instance, plans to double capacity in its Frederick, Maryland, plant, which will mean the creation of 70 new jobs. In the three years since launching the solar service company SunEdison in Washington, DC, owner Jigar Shah has hired 150 people. While neither of these examples illustrate a widespread rebirth of some American manufacturing industries, the ongoing market demand for solar panels could mean expanding opportunities for workers who've had to trade high-paying jobs for less appealing (and worse paying) employment in the service sector.

If the death squads roaming Baghdad are still part of the Salvador Option then this latest report is even more stomach churning than usual. But as someone (perhaps John Robb) once said, the doors of controlled chaos may now be shut and we're into uncontrolled chaos...

Revenge-seeking militiamen seized six Sunnis as they left Friday prayers and burned them alive with kerosene in a savage new twist to the brutality shaking the Iraqi capital a day after suspected Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad's main Shiite district.

Iraqi soldiers at a nearby army post failed to intervene in Friday's assault by suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia or subsequent attacks that killed at least 19 other Sunnis, including women and children, in the same neighborhood, the volatile Hurriyah district in northwest Baghdad, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

Most of the thousands of dead bodies that have been found dumped across Baghdad and other cities in central Iraq in recent months have been of victims who were tortured and then shot to death, according to police. The suspected militia killers often have used electric drills on their captives' bodies before killing them. The bodies are frequently decapitated.

But burning victims alive introduced a new method of brutality that was likely to be reciprocated by the other sect as the Shiites and Sunnis continue killing one another in unprecedented numbers. The gruesome attack, which came despite a curfew in Baghdad, capped a day in which at least 87 people were killed or found dead in sectarian violence across Iraq.

In Hurriyah, the rampaging militiamen also burned and blew up four mosques and torched several homes in the district, Hussein said.

Residents of the troubled district claim the Mahdi Army has begun kidnapping and holding Sunni hostages to use in ritual slaughter at the funerals of Shiite victims of Baghdad's raging sectarian war.

TreeHugger has a post on how WiiConnect24 ensures vampirism, which undoes some of the good work Ninentendo put into energy efficiency in the Wii box itself. Obviously slaying the "standby" energy vampire is going to be harder than some people imagine.

Tivo and its various media centre equivalents are also going to have the same problem - you "need" to leave them on 24 hours a day for them to do their "job". I think the way around this is to turn the devices on for limited periods while they do their downloads for the day (and while you are using them obviously) - easy for the WiiConnect service but not so easy for the Tivo et al which are dependent on the TV schedule. This problem would get solved when the dominant mechanism for grabbing content becomes downloads rather than recording broadcast transmissions - hopefully the day TV shows are disseminated via BitTorrent to most people isn't too far away.

One of Nintendo's biggest accomplishments with the new Nintendo Wii is its extremely low power consumption. During gameplay, the device uses only 17 watts, less electricity than a compact fluorescent light bulb (not including the display.) The Wii uses at least ten times less power than either the PS3 or the Xbox 360.
However, the Wii has been marketed along with an online service from Nintendo called WiiConnect24. This service encourages users to keep their Wii's on all the time, while delivering them services like free games, firmware updates, news, and some social networking.

The problem is that WiiConnect24 prevents the Wii from having a true power-save standby, and keeps the device on all the time. Initial reports show the Wii using about 10 watts of power in standby mode, five times that of the XBOX 360 and ten times EU recommendations.

The only solution, of course, is to unplug your Wii at the source, thus not making as much use of the WiiConnect24 service. Not since the first generation of gaming systems has there been such an efficient in-home system. After all that work to ensure plenty of performance without a lot of power, WiiConnect24 seems like a short-sighted move by Nintendo.

TreeHugger also has a post on new advances in solar lighting - another example of passive solar and how it can enable large reductions in energy usage.

The most efficient use of solar power is lighting. Sunlight is already light, no energy is lost in conversion to or from electricity. Thus the success of windows and the more moderate success of skylights. But What if you need the light to get somewhere not directly connected to the outdoors. What if there's three feet of insulation between your wall and the outside, as there probably should be.

You could use expensive fiber optics to move the light around, as we've seen at Treehugger before. Or you could just shunt the light into a highly reflective pipe, and pipe the light into your house. Light pipes are not a new thing, but advances in inexpensive, extremely reflective materials have recently made them more viable. The people at Solatube, for example, seem to have a really great system going.

The cap of the light pipe redirects light straight into the tube no matter where the sun is, and then their proprietary reflective pipe transports the light into the interior will relatively little loss of light. At the end of the tube, a refractive lens or mirror spreads the light through the interior of the building. Their system has already been installed in factories, warehouses, retail stores and homes across America. No word on cost per installation, though I imagine it varies pretty widely. I sure would like to have one in this basement office.

The Australian has a reasonably good article on the psychology of peak oil called "Head for the hills - the new survivalists".

While everyone responds to peak oil (and the limits to growth in general) in a different way, its worth noting that very few people (if any) can do the survivalist thing successfully and in the long run you need to come up with solutions that work on a larger scale than just your own immediate environment. That said its still worthwhile minimising your own dependency on resources coming in from elsewhere - one of the most interesting reader emails I've ever received was from a family in Canada who had been reading for a while and decided to go off and build a small village in outback Quebec which they were farming based on permaculture principles. I was more than a bit impressed when I received this note out of the blue one day with pictures of the houses and barns they'd built and their draught horses etc. While this approach isn't practical for everyone (and I've noted before I think that dense cities are the future for most of us) its certainly a good thing for those who are resourceful enough and attracted by that lifestyle.

I'll also note that the "second great depression" scenario is but one option to consider for peak oil - a huge "dirty energy" boom is another - as is a huge "clean energy" boom (along with urban and industrial reconfiguration) - and I think people are best advised to work towards the latter - never forget - "the economy" is a matter of confidence (and perception) as much as anything.

Peter Ward surveys the shrivelled seedlings in his vegie patch after a hot wind has blown in from the desert, and he knows there's a long way to go. He didn't move out to the dry country east of the Adelaide Hills a decade ago to survive any sort of Armageddon. He, his wife Sue and their children were going to produce boutique olive oil, but the day after ABC TV's Catalyst program ran a story about peak oil in November last year, Ward went out and bought a motorbike.

He researched it some more and decided that while oil was in no danger of running out soon, when production started to decline the flow-on effects through society would be massive, as the price of everything skyrocketed, interest rates rose calamitously and industrial farming faltered. There would be shortages.

The Wards knew life would be hard in their low-rainfall district. The ruined chimney of the original soldier settler on their 8ha block is testament to that. But they reasoned it would be harder in the suburbs - a decision complicated by Sue's encroaching multiple sclerosis.

They began stockpiling enough food to last up to six months. They've found it difficult figuring out how to manage the stockpile so that nothing goes off. And they're still remembering things they will need. Just the other day they realised they hadn't stored any toothbrushes.

Gardening took on a sudden urgency. "We've played with vegie gardening over the years. It sounds romantic and it never works ... The bugs eat the plants, you put seedlings in and there's a hot day and they all die. Or you get too much of something ... everybody groans when you bring another zucchini in. You've been eating them for three weeks solid. So knowing how to grow a good range of vegetables, growing them at the right time, and keeping them alive, is a pretty skilful thing.

"We feel that if we're three years away from the start of the difficult times, that three years is a very important time to practise. And particularly when you look at our vegie plot you'll see we need a lot of practice."

They have a paddock full of 10-year-old olive trees. They hope to use the olive oil to barter for other goods. They hope their neighbours, all on several thousand hectares of cropping land, will run a few dairy cows whose milk they can trade. They have some young fruit trees surviving in the septic run-off and Ward has built a shade shelter for his five precious avocado trees to protect them from the desert wind.

"I can't stress enough, once you decide there's a problem, you need to get cracking," he says in his refined South Australian accent. "We have time - but once things get tough, that's a bad time to be moving. The problems are likely to be both getting to the supermarket, and also getting produce to the supermarket, because most of the stuff in the supermarket has been shifted a jolly long way."

They have started trying to shop fortnightly, but found even that difficult. "It should be simple but it just isn't. This just-in-time mentality is so ingrained now. And it's all based on the availability of cheap oil transport."

Ward tries not to dwell on the more dire scenarios and what would happen if hungry hordes started to pour over the hill from Adelaide. He's thought about buying a gun for the rabbits, which might also be used for defence. "But I'm not skilled with it, I'd probably shoot myself rather than any intruder. And it's an unpleasant thing to think about." Their son James, 24, who is building a petrol/pedal bicycle which he hopes will get 150km to the litre, is doing a PhD on groundwater hydrology. But when he finishes that, he plans to do a DipEd and become a school teacher. He's not the only "peaknik" to take this career path.

Dr Shane Simonsen, 28, formerly a research scientist at the ANU working on plant defence mechanisms, has also packed it in for a DipEd. "I think we're heading for what is going to look like an economic depression, so I'm looking for a more stable form of employment," Simonsen says. "In the Great Depression, three out of four people kept their job. So you just have to pick the right kind of job."

He has bought a 1ha block with his parents in Queensland's Sunshine Coast hinterland. "We're going to put in an orchard and vegie patch and derive at least some of our food from that. Anything that requires transport and refrigeration is going to become a lot more expensive and less accessible. This is just a small buffer. "I've had to have a hard look at what we're doing and realise that I would do it regardless of whether peak oil was happening or not. The survivalists who run off into a bolt-hole and wait for the end to come, you can't live like that. Even if solar or free energy or fusion comes along and everything keeps motoring along, I'd be perfectly happy with the way I've decided to go."

Dr Dan Kortschak, 35, has been published in Nature for his work on the genetics of coral evolution, but he has also dropped out of the glamour end of science to become a high school teacher. Living just 2km from the heart of Adelaide, in Maylands, he has three pushbikes for different jobs, including a recumbent trike with a large trailer for carting gardening equipment and building materials. He now grows all his fruit and vegetables in his backyard, doesn't eat meat because of the transport costs, and survives each week on about $50 of groceries for him and his dog.

He lived in Nepal for a while, promoting permaculture (self-sustaining) farming. "I live luxuriously compared to people there. You look at an eco--footprint calculator and I'm still above what would be a sustainable level if everyone were to do it. Which is scary, because most people wouldn't want to live the way that I live."

...

American Andi Hazelwood and her Australian husband, Dean, met and married in a whirlwind trans-Pacific internet relationship in 1997. They were living in Atlanta, Georgia, in early 2004 - she was producing radio ads, he was an internet development manager - when they heard about peak oil. "Literally that day, and once we realised there was no argument for this not happening, we started realising we needed a plan. It was either Australia or America and the options in America weren't as good."

They moved to the Burnett region of southern Queensland because they could afford a block there without going into debt and because Dean had family in the state. "When we told people we were going to quit our jobs, move to the bush and grow vegies, they're just like, 'What? Why in the world would you do that?' People think we're crackpots and people ask 'What are you going to do if there is some magic solution and there's no problem?' And our answer is we've built our own house on a piece of property bought and paid for, we're growing our own food and only having to work part time. What's the problem?"

They arrived in November 2005 and have set about building a strawbale house, planting a garden, buying solar panels and a composting toilet. Hazelwood has also set up a group, Relocalisation Works in the Burnett Inland, one of many such groups popping up worldwide, with the ambition of weaning the district off oil. A big ask in an area with a lot of distance between everywhere, but the most basic step would be to get local producers to sell locally rather than trucking to Brisbane and having the goods trucked back by a supermarket chain.

When I tell her how some of the "peakniks" I'd spoken to didn't want to be named for fear of becoming magnets to the unprepared when things went wrong, she didn't seem overly concerned. "My thought is that if you're actually making the effort to make things better for the community as a whole instead of just yourselves, then it's foolish for people to try to target you ... we're relying on the goodness of people."

While researching this story, I spoke to 18 people who were changing their lives in preparation for big trouble up ahead. Not one of them sounded like a nut job - not to me, anyway. Five of them were scientists, three were engineers and five were in IT.

They weren't treechangers or seachangers, although sometimes they might have portrayed themselves as such so as not to look like loons. I sure hope they're wrong, but in the months that this story was in gestation, I bought two chooks and planted some fruit trees. Hey, it can't hurt.

Public Opinion points to an article in The Age about the nuclear debate and the "false choices in energy" on offer.

The political message from the Howard Government Climate is that only nuclear power can save us from global warming. It looks as nuclear power will be over-subsidised and under-scrutinised while other more promising and more rapid responses to climate change will be neglected whilst the greenhouse gases that they could have averted continue to pollute the skies.

Ric Brazzale makes some good points in an op-ed in The Age. He makes the obvious point that, as the focus of the Government's nuclear taskforce was narrowly on nuclear power, so it excluded consideration of clean energy sources, such as renewable energy, gas-fired generation and energy efficiency. So we had a a false choice — between nuclear energy and coal — as if no other large-capacity power options were available. As we know this is a false choice as we have solar power, wind power, bioenergy, geothermal "hot rocks", energy efficiency, solar water heating and natural gas. That undercuts nuclear power being a magic bullet answer to climate change.

The Stern Report and the Government's nuclear taskforce a carbon price signal is essential for greenhouse gas reduction and for investment in the development and deployment of zero and low-emission technologies.Brazzale says that the flaw of the taskforce is:

We don't need to wait 15 to 20 years to build nuclear power stations.More importantly, we don't have 15 to 20 years to wait to build them.As Stern observed in his recent report: "There is a high price to delay. Weak action in the next 10 to 20 years would put stabilisation even at 550 ppm (parts per million) carbon dioxide beyond reach — and this level is already associated with significant risks."

And he adds that it is possible to address this lag because:

Australia already has an abundance of zero-emission renewable and low-emission energy technologies. They could be deployed en masse tomorrow and begin to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. This would be instead of our waiting 15 or 20 years for a nuclear power station to be built.

The "Asia Sentinel" has an article on "The Rising Dragon’s Environmental Disaster".

Its nose-curling stench hits you even before you see the floating carpet of green algae and a dense matting of water hyacinth. Once a beauty spot praised by poets, Dianchi Lake, around Kunming, the capital of subtropical Yunnan province shows the cost to China of its frantic growth.

“There are fewer fish and they keep getting smaller. They don’t taste good either.” complains fisherman Gong Gaoling. When he was growing up, the waters were crystal clear and there were 57 types of fish and shrimp to catch. Now, half of the species have vanished altogether and just six are worth catching.

“When I was young you could swim in it and see the stones at the bottom,” he said. Now the bottom has poisonous sediment of cadmium, arsenic and lead, three feet thick which can only be removed by dredging.

Where ever you go in this beautiful landscape that borders Burma, Thailand and Vietnam, you find a heartbreaking legacy of environmental mismanagement and the prospect of worse damage to come. Kunming has spent over US$2 billion on efforts to clean up the lake but it is still too toxic to drink, and nowhere near meeting the country's minimum quality standards.

The industrial hub of a poor province with 42 million people, Kunming has around 5,000 industrial plants, pouring effluent into the lake. For years, the municipal government would order, time after time, the worst polluters to shut down.

“They just pretend, I can hear them when they secretly open again, sometimes at night,” Mr. Zhong scoffed. Many factories are still using machinery dating from the 1950s to produce chemical fertilizers or to process tine and phosphorous.

And until the first waste water plant was built in 1990, Kunming pumped ninety percent of the city's waste water directly into the lake untreated. Around 254 million cubic meters of wastewater is discharged into Dianchi Lake every year.
Major cities across the country are grappling with just the same threats as Kunming and water is only one facet of a crisis which, if unchecked, could overwhelm the whole modernization project. Its origins can be traced to a mixture of inherited problems and new ones but in both cases the root causes are political.

The environment poses one of the gravest threats to the political stability of the country because lays bare for all to see the failure of the political system. The environmental protest movements and failures like the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant spurred the downfall of the Soviet system in the 1980s. It is remarkable that so far nothing similar happened in China because the failures are as painfully evident here. Disputes over pollution are one of the chief reasons for the rapid growth of grass roots protests in China.

Australian oil and gas company Santos continues to have problems in Indonesia - first mudslides now exploding gas pipelines.

SANTOS'S Indonesian woes have taken a devastating turn, with its multi-million-dollar mud flow disaster linked to a massive gas explosion which has killed at least eight people.

The explosion in the state-owned Pertamina East Java gas pipeline near Surabaya yesterday also injured 16 people and at least three more were missing. The explosion occurred near Santos's troubled part-owned Banjar Panji-1 well, which has been the site of a disastrous, and continuing, mud flood since May.

Experts have been struggling to stop a mud leak believed to have been caused by a drilling incident at the exploratory gas well - 18 per cent owned by Santos - in May. Millions of cubic metres of hot mud have spewed from the site, flooding more than 400 hectares, swallowing eight entire villages, hectares of rice paddy fields and numerous factories in East Java, and displacing 12,000 people.

Last night's gas explosion, which sent a fireball 500 metres into the air, was believed to have been triggered when the East Java gas pipeline cracked under pressure, authorities said.

Santos is also considering the future of the once promising but now problematic Jeruk field off Indonesia as reserves appear closer to 50 million barrels than earlier fevered predictions of 250+ million barrels.

The future of Santos Ltd's Jeruk oil discovery in offshore Indonesia is in doubt, after the Australian energy company again downgraded its reserves and said it was considering whether to continue with its development.

The news capped off a difficult week for Santos during which a massive gas explosion occurred near one of its exploration wells in Indonesia, killing at least thirteen people. The explosion was thought to be linked to a multi-million dollar mudflow disaster at the site. Santos said that the upside recoverable oil resource for Jeruk, in which it has a 40.5 per cent stake, was likely to be under 50 million barrels.

Meanwhile, a little south in the Northern Territory, some of the fallout of Johnny's obsession with radioactivity seems to be settling on the local population - however the territory government is denying the Ranger uranium mine is to blame for a much higher incidence of cancer around Kakadu.

THE Northern Territory Government has rejected any link between Australia's largest uranium mine and higher levels of cancer among Aboriginal people living nearby. The disturbing findings are part of a preliminary discussion paper into the health affects of Energy Resources of Australia's (ERA) Ranger mine, which is surrounded by the world heritage-listed Kakadu National Park.

The NT Government says the cancers found in nearby Aboriginal communities are of the type caused by lifestyle and not radiation. However the Commonwealth's peak indigenous research body, which commissioned the report, says its discovery of a near doubling in the overall cancer incidence rate, compared to other areas of the territory, is a cause for “serious concern”. It wants an investigation into a possible link with the mine.

“There is an excess of cancer in the Aboriginal communities of the Kakadu region,” says the leaked report from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies (AIATSIS).

The Winnipeg Free Press has an article containing predictions of significant jumps in oil and gas prices coming over the northern winter.

CONSUMERS who have been feeling warm and fuzzy about falling oil prices had better brace themselves for a blast of cold air, according to one of Canada's leading oil and natural gas authorities.

Josef Schachter, president and chief investment officer of Calgary-based Schachter Asset Management Inc., said the recent swoon in oil and natural gas prices is temporary, spurred on by earlier forecasts of a warmer-than-usual North American winter and high inventories. But with Old Man Winter beginning to settle in and U.S. inventories of crude oil, heating fuel and jet fuel dwindling rapidly in recent weeks, oil prices are about to start heading back up again, he predicted in an interview yesterday. Schachter, who is in Winnipeg today to address a Jory Capital Inc. investment forum, said he expects oil prices to dip a little lower over the next week or two, to between US$54 and $57, then rebound to about $65 by the end of December and to more than $70 by February. "We're still in the bull cam," he added. "We believe the average price will be $70 next year, compared to $66 or $67 this year."

Oil prices climbed above $60 a barrel Tuesday amid temporary trouble with an Alaskan pipeline and a couple of U.S. refinery outages. Energy traders were also buying ahead of the weekly U.S. oil inventory report, which is released Wednesday. Analysts are expecting it to show that U.S. supply of gasoline and distillates -- which include heating oil and diesel fuel -- dropped last week.

While higher oil and natural gas prices mean higher pump prices and high heating bills for consumers, Schachter maintained they're necessary to ensure there'll be ongoing oil and gas exploration and development taking place in Canada. "We're not running out of oil, we're just running out of cheap oil," he said, noting it costs big money to access natural gas reserves that are deep in the ground and to extract oil from the sea and from the northern Alberta tar sands.

Our oil war in Iraq is taking an ever higher toll on the local populace.

Funeral processions began on Friday for the more than 20 people who were killed by car bombs and mortars in Baghdad's largest Shiite district.

Hundreds of men, women and children beat their chests, chanted and cried as they walked beside vehicles carrying the caskets of their loved ones.

The rest of Baghdad remained under a 24-hour curfew aimed at stopping widespread sectarian violence in the capital.

But Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, himself a Shiite, ordered police to guard the processions carrying victims of Thursday's attacks by Sunni Muslim insurgents in Sadr City to Najaf, the holy Shiite city where they will be buried.

"God is great. There is no God but Allah. Mohammed is the messenger of Allah," many of the mourners chanted, as they beat their chests while walking through the Sadr City slum alongside the slow moving the cars and minivans carrying the wooden caskets tied to the rooftops.

Some of the men and women repeatedly touched the sides of the vehicles or the caskets in an effort to say a final farewell to their relatives or friends.

Once the processions reached the edge of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad, the cars and minivans left most of the mourners behind for the 150-kilometre drive south to Najaf, a treacherous journey that passes through many checkpoints and areas controlled by Sunni militants in Iraq's so-called "Triangle of Death."

In the well-coordinated attack, Sunni insurgents blew up five car bombs and fired mortars in Sadr City, killing 202 people and wounding 252 in a dramatic attack that sent the US ambassador racing to meet with Iraqi leaders in an effort to contain the growing sectarian war.

I noticed this picture of the relative price of liquids from Gizmodo on Reddit today.



Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to be keen to throw his weight around lately, with his hardball negoitations over gas supplies to the EU now spilling over into other areas - which looks like it might be prompting the revving up of a (quite possibly well deserved) demonisation campaign in the western media. Russia is going to be an interesting situation to watch in the coming years - an underpopulated, extremely resource rich region in a planet starting to hit the limits to growth - and with enough nuclear weapons to defend itself.

Russia announced a ban on all European meat imports from January 1 as a dispute with Poland engulfed the rest of the European Union yesterday. The move by President Putin, which has cast a shadow over an EU-Russia summit in Finland today, came after Poland blocked trade talks between Brussels and Moscow.

Although the summit will still go ahead, the Poles insisted on their right to act over the Russian refusal to accept their meat. In return, President Putin raised the stakes by saying that Russia also had concerns about Bulgarian and Romanian meat and would turn away all imports from the EU until these were addressed.

Sticking points

Meat Poland says cost of Russian meat blockade is €1 million a day and vetoes EU trade talks. Russia announces ban on EU meat

Energy Europe wants access to Russian gas but President Putin refuses to open the mahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.bold.gifrket

Human rights President Putin rejects reproof from Europe of large number of contract killings in Russia

Georgia EU has raised concerns over Russian treatment of pro-Western Georgian Government

Iran Russia may use Security Council veto to stop sanctions against Iran over nuclear issue

Putin has also been in the news flow around the mysterious poisoning of a Russian dissident in London.

The poisoned Russian spy breathed defiance at the Kremlin as the effects of a mystery cocktail pushed him towards his death last night.

“I want to survive, just to show them,” Alexander Litvinenko said in an exclusive interview given just hours before he died.

Too weak to move his limbs and visibly in great pain, the former Russian intelligence officer suggested that he knew he may not win his struggle against the lethal chemicals destroying his vital organs. But he said the campaign for truth would go on with or without him. “The bastards got me,” he whispered. “But they won’t get everybody.”

…

He also managed a joke at his own expense, suggesting that his poisoning was proof that his campaign against the Kremlin had targeted the right people. “This is what it takes to prove one has been telling the truth,” he said. He was referring to allegations he made in a book, The FSB Blows up Russia, which accuses the Russian security services of causing a series of apartment block explosions in Moscow in 1999 that helped to propel Mr Putin into the presidency.

There is no shortage of tinfoil on this topic as The Times illustrates above - with the Moscow apartment bombings (and perhaps the later theatre massacre) being viewed by tinfoil types as the Russian equivalent of 9/11.

To me, Putin is a mirror image of Bush / Cheney in many ways - a living demonstration of why you shouldn't allow people from the intelligence apparatus to move into the political realm (and I'm talking more about HW Bush here) - there is no longer anyone watching the watchmen, and we all know where that eventually leads....

Litvinenko chose an auspicious week to get assassinated, given that the anniversaries of the deaths of Robert F Kennedy and JFK occurred this week.

Rigorous Intuition managed to combine the RFK assassination (subject of a very interesting BBC documentary this week) with the that of the Russian and some extremely creepy tales about Mr Putin.

Earlier this week, BBC's Newsnight reported the findingsof Shane O'Sullivan's study of photographs and videotape from LA's Ambassador Hotel the evening of Robert Kennedy's assassination. He discovered the unaccounted for presence of three senior veterens of CIA covert ops: Gordon Campbell, George Joannides and the notorious David Sanchez Morales. All three had served at the agency's massive anti-Castro (and later, anti-Kennedy) Miami station, JM/Wave. (Campbell as deputy directory, Joannides as head of psychological operations, and Morales as operations chief.)

This was no security detail. In 1968 presidential candidates were responsible for their own safety, the agency had no official domestic jurisdiction, and it hated the Kennedys and dreaded what Bobby might do - these three in particular. In 1973 Morales launched into a drunken tirade with friends that ended, "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard." O'Sullivan asks Wayne Smith, a former State Department official who knew Morales well and corroborated his identity, whether Morales might have been covertly protecting Kennedy. Smith laughs, saying he was the "last person" for the job, and remembers Morales ranting at a Buenos Aires cocktail party in 1975 that Kennedy "got what was coming to him."

Morales, incidentally, died suddenly several weeks before he was scheduled to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, a couple of years after his mobbed-up confederate John Rosselli failed to appear because he was otherwise hacked to pieces and floating in a steel drum off the coast of Miami. Cause of death was a "supposed heart attack," so described to Gaeton Fonzi in The Last Investigation by Morales' close friend Ruben Carbajal. The evening of his death in retirement in Arizona, Morales had told him "I don't know what's wrong with me. Ever since I left Washington I haven't been feeling very comfortable." He'd become somewhat disillusioned with his former paymasters, and had described them to Carbajal as "the most ruthless motherfuckers there is, and if they want to get somebody, they will. They will do their own people up." His wife refused an autopsy. "I think the government took good care of her," said Carbajal.

And then there's the likely radiological poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, former KGB/FSB counter-terrorist officer and author of Blowing Up Russia, an important account of 1999's false flag apartment bombing campaign that anchored authority for the as-yet unelected Vladimir Putin. A statement from the FSB implies that Litvinenko is not important enough to bother killing, adding "The man got sick. I would like to wish him early recovery."

Though I wonder whether something Litvinenko wrote a few months ago, after Putin impulsively kissed a boy on his belly, might have raised his Kremlin profile as a "person of interest." From last July 5 (and thanks to a reader for the link, which is found now only in cache): The Kremlin Pedophile...

I also noticed a few tinfoil people commenting on the fact that CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley both died on the same day that JFK did (though according to the Wikipedia profiles both had long standing illnesses).

I'm not really sure what the supposed connection is here beyond the dates, but both Lewis and Huxley turn up in all sorts of conspiracy theories themselves - Lewis mostly on account of the warnings of a fascist new world order embedded in his book "That Hideous Strength" and Huxley, well, for all sorts of things - but I guess traditionalist tinfoil on "drugs and the counterculture as the vehicle for an occult new world order" might best describe it. So I guess the "fascist new world order" theme is the common thread linking the 3. I'm not sure how the quote below reconciles with tinfoil theories about Huxley introducing LSD into the US though - however its getting late and I'm not up to ploughing through a large heap of conspiracy writings trying to work it out...

In 1960, Huxley himself was diagnosed with cancer and in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the utopian novel Island, and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" at the Esalen institute which were foundational to the forming of the Human Potential Movement. He was also invited to speak at several prestigious American universities and at a speech given in 1961 at the California Medical School in San Francisco, Huxley warned: "There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it." This idea was based on his 1932 novel, Brave New World, and echoed by contemporary writer J. B. Priestley in his 1954 novel, The Magicians.

Crikey has an article which notes that the recent review the suitability of nuclear power for Australia completely missed the point and points to the Energy Science group who are looking to create a clean energy future.

Given its origins and the composition of its panel, the Switkowski nuclear report is in some respects surprisingly downbeat.

It supports uranium mining and nuclear power, rejects uranium conversion and enrichment, and all but ignores the original requirement to investigate the "business case" for establishing a repository accepting high-level nuclear waste from overseas. It stresses that nuclear power could be competitive only if a substantial carbon tax is imposed.

The narrow terms of reference set by the federal government have restricted the panel to a study of nuclear power, not a serious study of energy options for Australia. A panel with broader range of expertise and a less limited brief could have been asked to explore the impact of carbon tax and other policy measures on energy demand. From that it could have tackled the most effective means by which that demand can be met, and greenhouse emissions reduced, taking into account all the energy options, costs, timeframes, waste, safety and other relevant issues.

While the Switkowski panel was prevented from asking key questions, there's no reason for the rest of us to avoid them. A body of existing research indicates that the objectives of meeting energy demand and reducing greenhouse emissions can be met with a combination of renewable energy and gas to displace coal, combined with energy efficiency measures, without recourse to nuclear power.

For example, a study by AGL, Frontier Economics and WWF Australia published in May 2006 finds that a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation in Australia can be achieved by 2030 at the modest cost of $0.43/week per person over 24 years. The Australian Ministerial Council on Energy published a report in 2003, Towards a National Framework for Energy Efficiency, which concludes that "consumption in the manufacturing, commercial and residential sectors could be reduced by 20–30% with the adoption of current commercially available technologies with an average payback of four years."

A detailed study, A Clean Energy Future for Australia, by Hugh Saddler, Richard Denniss and Mark Diesendorf, identifies methods by which a 50% reduction in greenhouse emissions from stationary energy can be achieved by 2040.

Also at Crikey, a post on the difficult situation faced by the coal miners union (with the usual anti-environment spin from Christian Kerr).

Everyone remembers the successful way the Government played wedge politics with the members of the forestry division of the CFMEU at the 2004 poll. What will happen next year with the CFMEU and coal miners?

Unlike the newer mineral developments that run on a fly-in, fly-out basis, much of Australia’s coal industry is developed. Centres of population have grown up around it. And like other older, established industries, it’s unionised.

Miners, unions and politics have long been inextricably linked. Miners have been seen as providing the muscle of the labour movement. The CFMEU is a very powerful union. And it wants to stay this way. Last week it released a climate change discussion paper. It has a concise summary: "The world needs Australia’s coal. But emissions from its use are contributing to climate change. They must be substantially reduced."

Good intentions come cheap. Clean energy doesn’t.

The CFMEU has some interesting ideas. It is buying up significant parcels of shares in the coal industry. "We need to solve the climate change problem and the coal companies have got a big role to play," the president of the mining division Tony Maher told the ABC last week. "They make a fortune out of it and they've got to position themselves, or be positioned by others into part of the solution instead of the problem." "I'm honest with our members," Maher said. "I say look, if we don't solve this climate change thing we don't have any job security so we've got to fight really hard to get it solved."

The union’s discussion paper says: "The CFMEU Mining and Energy Division has a responsibility to protect and advance the interests of its members, most of whom work in the coal mining industry. Indirectly we have a responsibility to the quarter of a million Australians, mostly in regional areas, who rely on the coal industry for a large proportion of their livelihood."

Renewable Energy Access has an article on mass energy storage using Vanadium batteries - one of the keys to the renewable enegry / smart grid future.

The vanadium-based Flow Battery from VRB Power Systems, Inc. is proving that mass storage for intermittent resources such as wind and solar is achievable, according to the company's CEO Tim Hennessy.
"It's been the engineer's dream for many years to be able to catch the lightning bolt -- to catch large amounts of power and to store it," said Hennessy, speaking on RenewableEnergyAccess.com's Inside Renewable Energy podcast. The Flow Battery, said Hennessy, is one of the answers to that dream. The solar and wind industries are often criticized for their inability to store huge amounts of electricity. But the Flow Battery is changing that. VRB Power recently signed a deal with Tapbury Management to supply a 1.5-megawatt (MW) storage system for the Sorne Hill wind farm in Donegal, Ireland.

The VRB-ESS is particularly beneficial.. through its ability to "inventory" electricity, allowing for the optimal match of supply and demand....and is characterized by having the lowest ecological impact of all energy storage technologies."

Scheer argues that the reason why many still think renewable energy cannot replace fossil and nuclear power is because those working in these industries have made efforts to propagate the notion. Furthermore, a largely unsuspecting public seldom differentiates between a vested interest and an independent expert. Scientists and industrialists, dependent on nuclear and fossil fuel industries for their livelihoods, shun evidence that suggests a total shift to renewable energy is possible."

"Permaculture reflections" has a post on "passive cooling" - using the power of the sun to cool your building (picked up from the front page of Reddit today, which was a surprising place to find it).

If you happen to live in an area that depends on a lot of electricity, and you’re finding electricity to be rather expensive...or would rather wisely eliminate as much of that expense as possible so you could spend your hard earned money on other things, then you need to be looking for ways to reduce or eliminate your electrical use as much as possible. Where can we cut our electric bills?

We’ve all heard of changing our lightbulbs to the new and improved warm fluorescents (no, they no longer turn your skin green). Of course, we can shut off our lights when we’re not in a room, shut off all electrical appliances we aren’t actually using. After all, there’s really no need to have all the lights on in the house, the stereo blazing and the TV on with no sound while we browse the internet. Those kinds of things are easy to see, and cutting back on them does a lot of good. But a large portion of the energy going into a household is actually used for heating and cooling rooms, food and beverages.

Even if you think you’re rich enough to waste your money on electricity, you still need to be concerned about emergency situations when the power companies stop giving you what you need. If you lived through the LA blackouts as I did...then you know what I mean. Believe it or not...there are a number of free and effective ways to nip your electrical cooling bill in the bud while also be prepared for power-outages.
We can consider passive solar cooling and air-conditioning. Please note that we are not talking about the use of photovoltaic solar panels, those are active solar devices. I’m talking about passive solar cooling. A lot of people have trouble imagining that the hot summer sun, can actually cool your house, but it can. The second law of thermodynamics is our best friend, and it works endlessly for free (or at least as long as the sun exists).

Another one I came across at Reddit is this little article on our number one source of oxygen - algae - the most important organism on the planet.

On a recent fossil collecting trip a friend asked, "What do you think is the most important organism on the Earth?" She knew full well I would answer, "Humans!" since we are the masters of our domain and without rival in the animal world (are we good or what?).

She was a bit surprised, and gave me the "Are you nuts?" look, when, without hesitation, I answered, "No doubt about it... hands down the most important organism on this planet is marine algae."

"Algae?!?," she said.

"Yes, Algae," I answered. "Do you want an explanation or are you going to take my word on this?" I asked.

"Let me think about it and I'll get back to you on that one," she said. As we continued our hunt for shark's teeth, whale bones, and anything else we could find, she finally broke down. "I don't get it. We can change the world in so many ways…..what has algae done?

"Very simple," I said. "Algae allows us and almost every other organism you can think of, living or dead, to be here."

Suddenly, she got that look. You know, the one you get when that light bulb in your head clicks on….bing, there it is! "Ah, oxygen, right?"

"Correctomundo!" was my very scientific reply.
It is estimated that between 70% and 80% of the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced by marine plants . Nearly all marine plants are single celled, photosynthetic algae. Yup, that's right, good ol' scum on the pond…green gak…..slip slimein' away. Even marine seaweed is many times colonial algae

Renewable Energy Access has an article on the silicon shortage (I've seen conflicting reports on this shortage and how long it is expected to last - has anyone seen a definitive study showing fabrication capacity now and in the future ?).

SCHOTT Solar, Inc. issued a notice to its employees at its solar wafer and module manufacturing plant in Billerica, Massachusetts, that the facility may have to close down because of inadequate supplies of silicon. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notifications (WARNs), which were issued last Thursday, are required under federal law for manufacturing facilities with more than 200 employees. The WARNs said that the plant could close within 60 days.

According to Marc Roper, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at SCHOTT Solar Inc., the decision to issue the WARNs was entirely related to the company's inability to lock up enough silicon for cell production. Roper said that SCHOTT had no intentions of pulling out of the U.S. photovoltaic (PV) market. "This is all about the silicon supply situation. It is definitely not related to any consideration of the market in the U.S.," said Roper. If the plant closes, SCHOTT Solar, Inc. will keep its headquarters in Roseville, California, and continue shipping modules into the country from its European facilities.

The Google video of fusion scientist Robert Bussard looking for investors was also noted by Ran Prieur (who doesn't seem to believe in permalinks - or complete archives - unfortunately).

Bussard is a highly respected physicist who spent most of his life working on the Tokamak, a donut-shaped fusion device that served as a way for physics researchers to get massive government funding with no chance of actually developing fusion power and thereby destabilizing society. Finally Bussard saw that it wasn't going to work, and started looking at the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor, a smaller, simpler device invented in the 1930's. It uses an electric field to hold the ions at high density for fusion, and it generates the electric field by concentrating electrons with a magnetic field. If you use hydrogen and boron as fuel, there's no radiation or radioactive waste -- the only product is helium.

He got funding from the sinister DARPA, on the condition that he couldn't publish anything. After 12 years, just exactly when they got the device working, the funding was cut! And he gave this talk to drum up new investment.

Now, the collapsists are going to say, "It'll never work. It's too late to convert the energy infrastructure. Roving gangs!" But it does work. The physics is solved, and now it's just a matter of engineering and politics. For much less than the cost of a sports stadium, a city could integrate these things into existing power plants and use fusion to make the steam for electricity.

At the other extreme, the techno-utopians are saying, "Woo-hoo! Space travel! All problems solved!" But of course more energy has never solved any problems except a small fraction of the problems it has created. And on an even deeper level, techno-utopia is based on the false assumption that satisfaction of desires is a good use of tools.

Adam from Energy Bulletin also has some comments:

Although any untested technology, currently without funding, is at best not going to have much global impact for a couple of decades, so if it does work, it is too late to avoid at least a temporary energy peak. Which I can't help but feel is a good thing in some ways, as we are facing any number of limits to growth, of which peak energy -- while frightening in its implications -- is less malign than overwhelming polution, sea-death, extreme freshwater shortages etc. We need to begin having less negative impact on the planet and more energy, even if the energy source itself is relatively clean, might make our overall impact worse. That said if we could replace coal tomorrow I'd be all for it.

Technology Review has an article on advances in "thermal rectifiers".

Scientists have been precisely controlling electric current for decades, building diodes and transistors that shuttle electrons around and make computers and cell phones work. But similarly controlling the flow of heat in solids stayed in the realm of theoretical physics--until now.

Alex Zettl and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), have shown that it is possible to make a thermal rectifier, a device that directs the flow of heat, with nanotubes. If made practical, the rectifier, which the researchers described in last week's Science, could be used to manage the overheating of microelectronic devices and to help create energy-efficient buildings, and it could even lead to new ways of computing with heat.

Whenever fusion gets raised as something that may actually be practical in the medium term, I always find my mind straying to Jeff Vail's "fear of fusion" - its "pharoah maker" potential.

Time again to raise the issue of Peak Oil: an honest psychological self-evaluation shows that I most certainly take pleasure in a certain degree of pessimism. That said, when confronted with the s.p.e.ct.r.e of Peak Oil, I'm MUCH more afraid of one of the possible solutions to peak oil: fusion. There is a very real (though my grossly underinformed guess is that it is very small) chance that once of the variety of fusion energy programs actually bears fruit. The European/Japanese bid currently underway in the south of France may even bear fruit while it's still possible to implement a global fusion-powered hydrogen economy. While this kind of Star-Trek utopia is attractive to many, I'm concerned about how centralized and "ownable" fusion technology will be. Is there any reason to believe that the fusion-energy-world system will be any less hierarchal, intensifying and uneven than the current Petro-energy-world system? Is it a coincidence that a recent article in Joint Forces Quarterly (by John M. Amidon, LtCol, USAF) was titled "America's Strategic Imperative: A "Manhattan Project" for Energy". A country that controls Fusion power in a post-peak-petroleum world will wield far more power than the US did with it's exclusive atomic armory after WWII.

So I will admit that I am more than a little eager to see the peak of oil come and go. Because when it does, if nothing else, it will prevent the development of a fusion, a modern "Pharo Maker" as i've written about before in "Energy, Society & Hierarchy."

Coincidentally, take a look at the cover graphic on Amidon's JFQ article. Despite what the caption says, the cover graphic is one of the offshore Gas & Oil terminals in the al-Faw complex. It was one of the least-publicized operations of the Iraq War, but the very first land operation was a seizure of two of these platforms, as well as three other key oil infrastructure installations in al-Faw by a Seal Team 3 and the Royal Marines' 40th Commando Brigade.

James Hansen is the subject of a detailed article at The Oil Drum Europe on climate change and peak oil. Hansen is something of a fan of "clean coal" and carbon sequestration unfortunately (though in his favour he does want to bulldoze all the existing dirty coal plants) and is of the view that peak oil helps towards mitigating global warming - as long as we don't fall into the tar sand trap (along with shale oil and coal-to-liquids).

The dominant forcing now at work is human CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

When looking forward things became interesting, Hansen suggesting it is feasible to contain CO2 emissions, chiefly because the reservoirs of oil and gas are limited.

Figure 6 indicates the potential carbon contributions from oil and gas. This, coupled with the decay of CO2 emissions means that the combustion of remaining oil and gas aren’t critical to climate change.

The problem lies squarely with Coal. Hansen’s plan for dealing with coal?

* Sequester CO2 at new coal power plants after 2012/2022 in developed/developing countries
* Bulldoze Coal Power Plants without sequestration during 2025-2050
* Stretch oil/gas via slowly increasing carbon tax, avoiding use of non-conventional fossil fuels, permitting time to develop non-CO2 technologies.

What Hansen is saying is that the remaining oil and gas can be burnt whilst limiting atmospheric CO2 to ~450ppm and incremental temperature increase to only 1°C, which really should be the limit unless we want to live on a very different planet. The challenge is that the oil and gas combustion use most of the 450ppm limit, the key therefore is CO2 sequestration or abstinence from coal and unconventional fossil fuels.

This was confirmed in the Q&A session. I asked Hansen his opinion on oil peak within a decade and impacts of peak oil on climate change. He replied that he expects to see oil peak within 20 years as we would have passed the 50% point by then adding, in that case we can probably live with the CO2 emissions from oil without hitting 450ppm. However he did stress the point that we have to start emphasising conservation and efficiency by taxing emissions otherwise we will start squeezing oil/gas from unconventional sources such as shale oil and tar sands. That is something we absolutely can not afford to do.

Our long hot summer has begun here, with bushfires causing blackouts in the city yesterday (the haze and smell of smoke combined with 39 degree temeperatures made leaving the office yesterday afternoon a rather ghastly experience too).

A SMALL grassfire underneath power lines in Sydney's west blacked out 30,000 homes, plunged Parliament House into darkness twice and triggered major interruptions to the energy grid yesterday as the city sweltered in 40 degree temperatures.

As the afternoon heat caused huge demand for electricity, power failures were felt in dozens of city offices. Computers had to be shut down and some office workers were stranded in lifts for more than an hour. The events unravelled while a smoky haze from Blue Mountains bushfires smothered the city and pushed temperatures up to 40 degrees at Sydney Airport. It also halted Parliament just an hour after the Premier, Morris Iemma, insisted his Government had the nation's best record of reliable supply of electricity.
Figures from the National Electricity Market Management Company show energy demand across NSW spiked just after 3pm, soaring to almost 12,500 megawatts, as thousands of Sydneysiders switched on airconditioners.

Ex Shell chairman Lord Oxburgh has an article on global warming and the undiginified position adopted by global warming deniers in Online Opinion.

The debate over whether human beings are changing the Earth’s climate for the worse is over - we certainly are. The question now is “how should we respond?”

Some may choose to deny climate change and bury their heads deeply in the sand. Unfortunately that inelegant posture prevents them from seeing the opportunities that lie ahead. But even among those who accept climate change some may try to persuade us that all is doom and gloom and that our only future is to wear hair shirts and live in caves. Indeed that might happen, but only if we fail to take determined action now. I believe that there is a third way.

We have to respond to climate change with a double strategy - we have to take precautions against the climate changes that are coming our way. In other words we have to adapt.But we also have to attack the causes of climate change - we have to maintain our standard of living while not pouring into the atmosphere the greenhouse gases that we now know to be the root cause of climate change. In other words we also need to mitigate the causes of climate change.

Mitigation involves concerted action by everyone because everyone produces greenhouse gases; but the lead will have to be taken by the richer countries of the world. Adaptation will be at a local level because different places will experience climate change differently.

One frightening strategy for adaptation is geoengineering / (re) terra-forming. Both Boston.com and Wired have articles on this today.

today some of the country's leading minds in science, history, and economics will gather in a closed session organized by NASA and Stanford University to discuss researching such a strategy -- a subject long taboo in environmental circles because so much could go wrong. Some fear it would be seen as a quick fix, replacing the need to reduce fossil fuel emissions, but others contend that the world needs an emergency plan in case global warming triggers a catastrophe, such as a break up of the Greenland ice sheet and massive flooding in coastal regions.

"Is it better to let polar bears go extinct and let the ice sheets melt? Is it worse to inject some aerosols into the stratosphere that could deflect some sunlight?" said Ken Caldeira , a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, which is hosting the two-day meeting.

The idea is called geoengineering: using technology to tinker with the Earth's delicate climate balance. Many scientists doubt it is possible. Even those who have studied the idea worry about the possible misuse of their research.

Those scientists who believe it could work point to the eruption of volcanoes in which masses of particles have deflected sunlight and reduced global temperatures by an average of 0.9 degrees.

Caldeira, who conducted various models of geoengineering while at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the past decade, said he is "philosophically opposed" to the use of geoengineering without first reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But he said his modeling shows the idea works.

"We found that if you blocked 20 percent of the sunlight over the Arctic Ocean, it would be enough to restore sea ice," he said. "That would be blocking 1/300th of the entire sunlight hitting the Earth, but focusing it on the Arctic would prevent the ice from melting."

The notion of tinkering with the Earth's climate is not new, dating at least to 1839, when James Espy , who would become the United States' first meteorologist, tried to produce rain using updrafts from large fires, said James R. Fleming , a professor of science, technology, and society at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Fleming is researching climate change this year at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington

Fleming said militaries have long wanted the power to manipulate climate, and that worries him in relation to geoengineering

"This seems to be a relatively heroic response to climate warming, but it does have the possibility of getting out of hand," without controls over who could use the technology, Fleming said.

Tha Australian government is providing a $60 million subsidy to the "sweep it under the carpet" method of global warming mitigation - carbon sequestration.

Conservation groups have criticised the Federal Government for helping to fund the world's largest carbon capture and storage project off the Western Australian coast. The proponents of the $15 billion Gorgon gas project on Barrow Island, off the Pilbara coast, plan to inject 3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide underground each year.

The Federal Government has contributed $60 million towards the carbon capture program, which is expected to cost $850 million in total. Environment Minister Ian Campbell says the technology will play a significant role in fighting global warming. "About 25 per cent of all of the carbon dioxide emissions in Australia could be stored this way," he said.

But WA Conservation Council spokesman Chris Tallentire says he is concerned about the potential environmental impact. "It's an unproven technology at this scale and it could see massive leakages," he said.

Tom Paine has an article on "Big oil subsidies and Africa".

As the United Nations discussions on climate change drew to a close in Nairobi, Kenya, last week, Secretary General Kofi Annan faulted policymakers worldwide for a “frightening lack of leadership” in confronting this crucial global issue. According to the just-released Stern Report, climate change is “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen,” and it will have massive costs for the global economy. Some of the underlying reasons for this market failure are the perverse incentives and signals created by subsidies to the oil industry.

As world leaders continue to search for solutions to the global problem of climate change, our public funds continue to flow into the pockets of the oil industry. Yet, oil is playing a major role in many of the most urgent problems facing humanity today. Volatile oil prices are putting serious stress on many of the world's most impoverished countries and threatening to deepen the debt crisis. Oil is triggering and exacerbating conflict around the world and is all too often associated with human rights abuses and state-sponsored repression. Pollution associated with the production, transportation, processing and burning of oil is also taking a tremendous toll on human health and is responsible for undermining the livelihoods of many local communities and the well-being of sensitive ecosystems. These problems are now joined by the growing crisis of climate change.

Oil and climate change complicate debt and poverty in already impoverished countries. Soaring oil prices are undermining the benefits of limited debt cancellation in many of the world’s most impoverished countries, particularly those that are oil importers. For example, the estimated cost of Tanzania’s oil imports rose from $190 million in 2002 to $480 million this year—for the same amount of oil. In comparison, debt cancellation is expected to only free up about $140 million for Tanzania in 2006. Furthermore, this cancellation doesn’t even touch on the debt held by large private banks in London, Paris and New York. At the same time, oil companies are raking in record profits, with ExxonMobil reporting profits of $4.7 million an hour in July 2006.

Climate change will hurt the poor, too. Christian Aid in the United Kingdom has estimated an astonishing 182 million people in sub-Saharan Africa alone could die of diseases attributable to climate change by the end of the century. Floods, famine, drought and conflict all resulting from climate change could threaten the existence of millions more worldwide.

Despite these warnings, the U.S. government, along with publicly-supported international institutions, continue to protect the interests of private investors, whether they are oil companies or Wall Street banks that profit from the oil industry’s activities.
Since 1992, the publicly-backed World Bank has provided more than $5 billion in subsidies to the oil industry, while devoting only five percent of its energy budget to clean, renewable energy sources.

Joel Makower at WorldChanging has a look at Milton Friedman and corporate social responsibility.

Friedman concluded:

"The difficulty of exercising 'social responsibility' illustrates, of course, the great virtue of private competitive enterprise -- it forces people to be responsible for their own actions and makes it difficult for them to 'exploit' other people for either selfish or unselfish purposes. They can do good -- but only at their own expense."

We know better now. For example, we understand that ignoring environmental and social issues can be bad for business. Companies that pollute their local communities risk poisoning their customers. Ignoring the state of the local school system risks depleting the pool of qualified workers. Abusing workers risks higher turnover and training costs, not to mention greater difficulty attracting the most qualified candidates.

It's never that simple, of course. In a globalized world, companies are free to exploit or pollute a local community, then move on to the next place. Unfettered markets and exploitation-friendly tax schemes reward companies for acting in their own interests in the name of economic growth and competitiveness. So, Friedman's philosophy still reigns supreme.

Friedman's philosophy is far from universally shared, even in the business community. In 1979, for example, Quaker Oats president Kenneth Mason, writing in Business Week, declared Friedman's profits-are-everything philosophy "a dreary and demeaning view of the role of business and business leaders in our society." Wrote Mason: "Making a profit is no more the purpose of a corporation than getting enough to eat is the purpose of life. Getting enough to eat is a requirement of life; life's purpose, one would hope, is somewhat broader and more challenging. Likewise with business and profit."

Mason went on:

"The moral imperative all of us share in this world is that of getting the best return we can on whatever assets we are privileged to employ. What American business leaders too often forget is that this means all the assets employed -- not just the financial assets but also the brains employed, the labor employed, the materials employed, and the land, air, and water employed."

He urged readers to "encourage, not evade, discussion of those problems that arise when the activities of business conflict with the needs and concerns of society."

But these were largely just well-intentioned words. Action, and even discussion, on some of these issues would be decades in coming. Even when it did take place, the discussion involved only big companies. The social responsibility of smaller firms is just now entering the conversation.

Richard Branson has called for the break up of News Corp because of its anti-democratic influence in the UK (and elsewhere).

RICHARD BRANSON, founder of the Virgin group, has called for an all-party review of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, claiming it should be broken up to preserve democracy in Britain.

In his second attack since the Murdoch-controlled British Sky Broadcasting swooped on Britain's ITV network, paying £940 million for a 17.9 per cent blocking stake, Sir Richard said: "All of us know governments are scared stiff of Murdoch. If The Sun, The Sunday Times, The Times, Sky, the News of the World - just to name a few of the things that Murdoch owns - all come out in favour of a particular political party, the election is likely to be won by that particular party.

"If you tag on ITV to that as well, basically we've got rid of democracy in this country and we might as well just let Murdoch decide who is going to be our prime minister."

He said Mr Murdoch had given an insight into his power in a recent interview when he was quoted saying that, when he visits England, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair compete to have breakfast with him. "Why are they competing to have breakfast with this person? Because he has such influence."

Simon Jenkins has some notes on Rupert's current poodle at Number 10 and the paranoid delusions he is suffering in the deserts of Afghanistan.

What is it about a desert that drives men mad? On Monday morning the prime minister stood on the Afghan sand and said: "Here in this extraordinary piece of desert is where the fate of world security in the early 21st century is going to be decided."

Tony Blair was talking to soldiers he had sent to fight the toughest guerrillas on earth for control of southern Afghanistan. He told them: "Your defeat [of the Taliban] is not just on behalf of the people of Afghanistan but the people of Britain ... We have got to stay for as long as it takes."

The prime minister's brain has clearly lost touch with reality. Even under the Raj there was no conceivable way Britain could conquer and hold the arc of territory to which Blair was referring. It stretches from the Persian Gulf through Iranian Baluchistan and Afghanistan to Pakistan. No central government has come near to controlling this region, and its aversion to outside intervention is ageless and ruthless, currently fuelled by the world's voracious appetite for oil and opium. But it poses no threat to world security.

The sole basis for Blair's statement is Mullah Omar's hospitality to the fanatic, Osama bin Laden, at the end of the 1990s. As we now know, this was never popular (an Arab among Pashtuns); after 9/11, when the Taliban had collaborated with the west over opium, either Bin Laden would eventually have had to leave or the Tajiks would have taken revenge for his killing of their leader, Sheikh Massoud. Even the Pakistanis were on his tail. Either way, Talib Afghanistan was no more a "threat" after 9/11 than were the American flying schools at which the 9/11 perpetrators trained.

So what is Blair getting at? He once confessed to his hero, Roy Jenkins, that he regretted not having studied history at Oxford. He never spoke a truer word. The concept of world security as holistic and vulnerable to incidents such as 9/11 is nonsensical. Politics is not a variant of the Gaia thesis, in which each component of an ecosystem depends on and responds to every other. There is no butterfly effect in international relations. For want of a victory in Helmand, the Middle East is not lost, nor for want of victory in the Middle East is western civilisation lost.

This is as well, since Blair's resumed war in Afghanistan is clearly not being won. We know from the former army chief Lord Guthrie that Blair, despite promising to "give the army anything it takes", has refused the extra troops and armour needed by the pathetically small expeditionary force of 7,000 in Helmand. He has already had to switch tactics from winning hearts and minds to American-style "search and destroy", blowing up villages with 1,000lb bombs (as we saw on TV last week). British commanders are describing "successes" in terms of enemy kills. They should recall that Victorian officers in the Punjab were told that such boasts would be treated as a sign of failure, not success. Such killings infuriated the population and presaged revenge attacks. Has the British army learned nothing?

Blair has not been able to persuade his Nato allies in Europe of his apocalyptic world-view. The use of the word terrorism to imply some grand military offensive against the west may sound good in White House national security documents and Downing Street speeches. But terrorism is not an enemy or an ideology, let alone a country or an army. It is a weapon, like a gun or a bomb. It is not something that can be defeated, only guarded against.

Nor can terrorism ever win. Blair's flattering reference to it was in reality to al-Qaida and to the Islamist jihadism whose cause he has so incessantly advertised. As the American strategist Louise Richardson points out in What Terrorists Want, al-Qaida has not the remotest chance of defeating the west or undermining its civilisation. Only a deranged paranoid could think that.