Author: Big Gav

The SMH reports that the increased mandatory renewable energy target being proposed for Australia is likely to have minimal cost to consumers and win multi-partisan support in Parliament – Power bills will not bear cost of clean power boom.

A RENEWABLE energy scheme before the Federal Parliament will drive $14 billion of clean power investment by 2020 according to new modelling, but the head of the Climate Change Department has warned that Australia still cannot meet its promised emission reduction targets without a broad price on carbon.

Modelling released by the government yesterday shows the new renewable energy target – which requires 20 per cent of energy to be sourced from renewables by 2020 – will increase the average household power bill by $41 a year. The scheme amendments before the Parliament will be responsible for just $2 of that.

The modest price rises mean it is likely the changes will pass with bipartisan support, as the original renewable energy target legislation did, allowing billions of dollars of renewables investment to begin.

TomDispatch has an article asking “Will the Obama Administration Allow Shell Oil to Do to Arctic Waters What BP Did to the Gulf?” – BPing the Arctic ?.

Unfortunately, as you’ve already guessed, I’m not here just to tell you about the glories — and extremity — of the Alaskan Arctic, which happens to be the most biologically diverse quadrant of the entire circumpolar north. I’m writing this piece because of the oil, because under all that life and beauty in the melting Arctic there’s something our industrial civilization wants, something oil companies have had their eyes on for a long time now.

If you’ve been following the increasing ecological devastation unfolding before our collective eyes in the Gulf of Mexico since BP’s rented Deepwater Horizon exploratory drilling rig went up in flames (and then under the waves), then you should know about — and protest — Shell Oil’s plan to begin exploratory oil drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas this summer.

On March 31st, standing in front of an F-18 “Green Hornet” fighter jet and a large American flag at Andrews Air Force Base, President Obama announced a new energy proposal, which would open up vast expanses of America’s coastlines, including the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, to oil and gas development. Then, on May 13th, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed a victory to Shell Oil. It rejected the claims of a group of environmental organizations and Native Inupiat communities that had sued Shell and the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to stop exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic seas.

Fortunately, Shell still needs air quality permits from the Environmental Protection Agency as well as final authorization from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar before the company can send its 514-foot drilling ship, Frontier Discoverer, north this summer to drill three exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea and two in the Beaufort Sea. Given what should by now be obvious to all about the dangers of such deep-water drilling, even in far less extreme climates, let’s hope they don’t get either the permits or the authorization.

On May 14th, I called Robert Thompson, the current board chair of Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL). “I’m very stressed right now,” he told me. “We’ve been watching the development of BP’s oil spill in the Gulf on television. We’re praying for the animals and people there. We don’t want Shell to be drilling in our Arctic waters this summer.”

As it happened, I was there when, in August 2006, Shell’s first small ship arrived in the Beaufort Sea. Robert’s wife Jane caught it in her binoculars from her living-room window and I photographed it as it was scoping out the sea bottom in a near-shore area just outside Kaktovik. Its job was to prepare the way for a larger seismic ship due later that month.

Since then, Robert has been asking one simple question: If there were a Gulf-like disaster, could spilled oil in the Arctic Ocean actually be cleaned up?

He’s asked it in numerous venues — at Shell’s Annual General Meeting in The Hague in 2008, for instance, and at the Arctic Frontiers Conference in Tromsø, Norway, that same year. At Tromsø, Larry Persily — then associate director of the Washington office of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, and since December 2009, the federal natural gas pipeline coordinator in the Obama administration — gave a 20-minute talk on the role oil revenue plays in Alaska’s economy.

During the question-and-answer period afterwards, Robert typically asked: “Can oil be cleaned up in the Arctic Ocean? And if you can’t answer yes, or if it can’t be cleaned up, why are you involved in leasing this land? And I’d also like to know if there are any studies on oil toxicity in the Arctic Ocean, and how long will it take for oil there to break down to where it’s not harmful to our marine environment?”

Persily responded: “I think everyone agrees that there is no good way to clean up oil from a spill in broken sea ice. I have not read anyone disagreeing with that statement, so you’re correct on that. As far as why the federal government and the state government want to lease offshore, I’m not prepared to answer that. They’re not my leases, to be real honest with everyone.”

A month after that conference, Shell paid an unprecedented $2.1 billion to the MMS for oil leases in the Chukchi Sea. In October and December 2009, MMS approved Shell’s plan to drill five exploratory wells. In the permit it issued, the MMS concluded that a large spill was “too remote and speculative an occurrence” to warrant analysis, even though the agency acknowledged that such a spill could have devastating consequences in the Arctic Ocean’s icy waters and could be difficult to clean up.

It would be an irony of sorts if the only thing that stood between the Obama administration and an Arctic disaster-in-the-making was BP’s present catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

WorldChanging has an article on green buildings, looking at the practice of “commissioning,” in which an engineer monitors the efficiency of a building from its design through its initial operation, in order to reduce long-term energy usage by buildings – Commissioning: In Pursuit of the Truly Green Building.

In a different world, it could be a reality television show — “Buildings On Trial,” with a street-savvy engineer going into skyscrapers, factories, offices and other commercial buildings to find the dumb mistakes that make them waste energy and produce a disproportionate share of the nation’s global warming emissions.

And in almost every case, even new buildings proudly displaying a LEED “green building” plaque by the front door, the engineer would come back out with a list of energy hog culprits: Here’s the ventilation system fan installed backwards, so it blows full force into another fan blowing in the right direction. Here’s the control system set up so heating and cooling systems both work at once, like driving with your feet on the brakes and the accelerator at the same time. Here are the stuck dampers that prevent the building from drawing on outside air when the temperature is right.

Such mistakes are commonplace even in the best buildings — and often costly. In one case, says Dave Moser of Portland Energy Conservation, Inc., an Oregon nonprofit, it cost a building owner $5,000 to fix stuck dampers — and cut $50,000 off the annual energy bill. In a case of simultaneous heating and cooling at an 85,000-square-foot academic building, a minor programming fix cost almost nothing and saved $100,000 a year in wasted energy, according to Mark Miller of Strategic Building Solutions, a Connecticut company.

The business of finding and fixing these mistakes is called “building commissioning,” a term borrowed from the standard naval practice of commissioning a new ship with sea trials to determine whether it’s fit for service. People started doing roughly the same thing with non-residential real estate in the mid-1990s, as buildings with computer-controlled systems became almost as complex as ships at sea. Commissioning frequently involves no more than a few weeks of testing out systems. But in the most complete form, the commissioning agent works with architects in the design stage, to help save money by specifying properly sized energy systems, then follows the building through construction, trains the operating staff, and tracks energy performance in different seasons through the first year of operation. Older buildings now also go through retro-commissioning, in search of improved efficiency.

But if you imagine that real estate developers must be lining up for this service — if only to save money, or determine whether they are getting the building they paid for — you would be mistaken. Even now, well under 5 percent — and probably closer to 1 percent — of new commercial buildings actually go through the process. Projects seeking certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (or LEED) program, managed by the U.S. Green Building Council, can earn extra points by going through “enhanced” commissioning. But they’re only required to do “fundamental” commissioning — a sort of commissioning-lite, potentially performed not by a third party, but by an “independent” employee of the construction manager whose contractors made the mistakes in the first place.

And yet building commissioning is “arguably the single-most cost-effective strategy for reducing energy, costs, and greenhouse gas emissions in buildings today,” according to a 2009 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. If applied to the nation’s entire non-residential building stock, including retro-commissioning of older buildings, it would yield $30 billion in potential energy savings every year by 2030, the study projects, and avoid 340 million tons of global warming emissions annually. To put the latter number in perspective, other studies project that the United States is now on a path to increase global warming emissions by more than a third, up to 9.7 billion metric tons a year by 2030. Roughly 35 percent of emissions come from heating, cooling, and providing electric power for buildings and homes, split evenly between commercial and residential. So building commissioning is hardly the only remedy required. But the potential savings ought to make it one of the most attractive.

Why isn’t it more popular? A lot of developers, and even some building efficiency experts, have simply never heard of commissioning. Others have gotten turned off, says Glenn Hansen of Portland Energy Conservation, Inc., by early experiences in which “a fairly junior engineer” would go through a building checking off boxes on a clipboard. In a 2008 study by the New Buildings Institute, the energy performance in many LEED-certified “green” buildings was actually worse than in the average conventional building, probably because inexperienced people doing “fundamental” conditioning had failed to detect problems.

Reuters reports that BP has another problem on its hands, this time in Alaska – BP-owned Alaska oil pipeline shut after spill.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, partly owned by BP, shut down on Tuesday after spilling several thousand barrels of crude oil into backup containers, drastically cutting supply down the main artery between refineries and Alaska’s oilfields.

The accident comes at a difficult time for BP — the largest single owner of the pipeline operator, holding 47 percent — as it struggles to plug a gushing Gulf of Mexico oil well.

The shutdown followed a series of mishaps that resulted from a scheduled fire-command system test at Pump Station 9, about 100 miles south of Fairbanks, said Alyeska Pipeline Service Co, the operator of the 800-mile oil line.

The power outage triggered opening of relief valves, causing an unspecified volume of crude oil to overflow a storage tank into a secondary containment. There were no injuries, but the approximately 40 people at the work site were evacuated, Alyeska spokeswoman Michele Egan said.

North Slope oil producers have cut their flow into the pipeline’s Prudhoe Bay intake station to 16 percent of their normal rates, Egan said. There is enough storage capacity to allow the line to be shut down for 48 hours as long as producers maintain the 16 percent flow rate, she said.

It is unclear how long the shutdown will last.

AFP has a report on geothermal energy potential in Japan – Japan could be geothermal energy leader: US expert.

A prominent US environmentalist said Wednesday Japan should focus on developing geothermal energy, saying the volcanic island-nation could become the global leader in the field.

“Japan could make geothermal energy the centre of its new energy economy just as the US or China will make wind the centre of theirs,” Lester Brown, president of the US-based Earth Policy Institute, told a news conference.

“There are no leaders in the world today in this field. There is no industrial country in the world that now has a well established geothermal industry” Brown said at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan.

Japan, located at the crossroads of four tectonic plates and on what is known as the “Pacific Ring of Fire” and dotted with volcanoes, is one of the world’s most quake-prone countries.

If Japan can launch full development of geothermal energy technology, “it would not only lower carbon emissions in Japan, but it would also give Japanese industry the potential for playing a leading role in developing the world’s geothermal energy resources.” he said.

Brown noted that demand for the technology will grow in other geothermal-rich countries located on tectonic faultlines such as Indonesia and the Philippines in Asia as well as Chile, Peru and Colombia in South America.

“This is an opportunity for Japan to move to the centre stage in an area where it is richly endowed,” he added.

Japan makes use of hot springs as a resource for tourism, but geothermal energy only accounts for 0.3 percent of its energy mix, and the country relies heavily on imports of oil and other resources.

Kiwis (and Icelanders) might find Lester’s claim that no industrial country has an established geothermal industry a bit insulting. The NZ Herald has a report on their latest power station to open – Geothermal power station opens early.

Contact Energy’s $100 million geothermal power station Tauhara One, near Taupo, has been finished three weeks ahead of schedule.

Contact managing director David Baldwin today said the 23-megawatt (MW) station, which would provide enough baseload renewable energy for about 23,000 homes, was also finished under budget. …

Contact is seeking consents for a 250MW Tauhara Two geothermal power station through a board of inquiry process and advancing development of its consented 220MW Te Mihi power station.

The SMH has an article on the resignation of former leader Malcolm Fraser from the Liberal party, on the grounds it is no longer liberal, having become thoroughly infected with the disease of conservatism – ‘Leftie’ Fraser leaves party that left him. Crikey has more.

In resigning from the Liberal Party, Malcolm Fraser could well invoke the line that Ronald Reagan used to explain why he quit the Democratic Party – “I didn’t leave the party, the party left me.”

Since the end of his prime ministership 27 years ago, the Liberals have moved a long way to the right, leaving Fraser increasingly angry and isolated in the party he once led.

The prime minster who was attacked by Labor as being a granite-faced arch-conservative in the 1980s was in January derided by the Liberals’ Sophie Mirabella as a “frothing-at-the-mouth leftie.”

The surprising thing about Fraser isn’t that he resigned in disgust.

Accusing John Howard of being “inhumane” with asylum seekers and Tony Abbott of being guilty of “pure Hansonism,” the surprise is that he kept his membership so long.

The closest the Liberal Party has come to revisiting the liberalism of Fraser was its brief flirtation with that other Malcolm, Turnbull.

Turnbull lost the leadership in a clash over support for an emissions trading scheme to deal with climate change.

In this, Turnbull had Fraser’s full support.

Fraser last October endorsed a call by 40 scientists calling on the Government to make “every effort” to cut carbon emissions and lead global negotiations.

When did the Liberals tear down Turnbull and replace him with Tony Abbott? December 1 last year. When did Fraser quit the party? In December. This is no coincidence.

Since the fall of the Fraser government, the Liberals have moved to the right in every major realm of policy. …

The Iraq war particularly rankled with Fraser: “A good ally doesn’t just go along with whatever Americans want, and I am sure that George Bush senior and his colleagues agree with me,” he said in 2007.

“In some important quarters in America, we are held in contempt for being George W. Bush’s puppy dog.”

Ecoseed has an article on Singaporean efforts to develop a cleantech industry in the country – Singapore ramps up clean energy R&D investment.

The Singapore Economic Development Board (E.D.B.) will spend about 680 million Singapore dollars ($483.3 million) to build a clean technology ecosystem over the next five years as part of the country’s plan to become a global research and development hub.

The fund is expected to establish a more conducive environment for innovations in research, test-bedding and commercialization that will advance Singapore’s solar industry.

The board allocated 350 million Singapore dollars of the total investment to develop the country’s clean energy sector, with a focus on solar energy. Having a tropical climate, Singapore is a prime location for companies that wish to enter the Asian solar market.

Suntech Power, for instance, intends to expand its operations in the country because of the strong government support and exceptional technology capabilities. Bosch Group also opened its new headquarters in Singapore to better manage its newly acquired companies in Southeast Asia.

In addition to its linkages to leading Asian solar markets, Singapore has the capabilities to manufacture solar wafers, cells and modules, which will give the country a head start in the solar industry, the board said.

MNN has a look at how much offshore wind power could have been built for the amount of money spent on the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster – Offshore oil vs. offshore wind … who wins?.

In my fact-digging on the now sunken Deepwater Horizon oil rig, I came across a stat about the construction and operational costs of BP’s failed rig which was to tap an estimated 7 billion barrels of oil from two recent oil discoveries (the Kaskida and the Tiber) over a 25-year period. According to Morningstar analysts (who published a study back in March), the projected investment for both wells was between $8 billion and $12 billion U.S.

So that got me thinking, just how much offshore wind could be bought for the equivalent $12 billion investment? My back of the envelope calculations were enlightening. Here we go …

1. What is the cost of offshore wind power?

We have a good comp in the form of Alpha Ventus, a 12-turbine project off the shores of Germany which was recently completed. The project was the first of its kind and as might be expected, it ran over budget. According to Spiegel, the total project cost $282 million (it was estimated at just under $200 million) which includes upkeep costs over 25 years. Alpha Ventus is a 60 megawatt array, enough to power about 50,000 U.S. homes or 550 million kilowatts of electricity per year (a typical U.S. home uses 11,000 kilowatts).

2. How many turbines can $10 billion buy?

Projecting that the next few big offshore projects will drop in price as manufacturing and grid infrastructure improves, let’s say a 60 megawatt project will go for $200 million. Divide that by $12 billion and you get sixty 60-megawatt wind projects, or about 33 billion kilowatts of power capacity per year.

3. How many electric cars does that power?

A typical American drives 12,000 miles per year. The latest plug-in electric vehicles (like the much-anticipated Tesla Sedan) use about 370 wH’s per mile. The typical U.S. driver would need 12,000 x .37 = 4,440 kilowatts per year. Divide 33 billion by 4,440 kilowatts and you get about 7.4 million electric vehicles that could be powered each year by a $10 billion wind investment.

4. How many cars could Deepwater Horizon have fueled?

44 gallons of gasoline are made from each barrel of crude. Deepwater Horizon was to produce 7 billion barrels of crude over its 25 year life span. 7 billion x 44 = 308 billion gallons of gas divided by 25 years = 12. 3 billions gallons of gas per year. Let’s say as cars become more efficient the average U.S. car goes up to a 26 mpg average. 26 mpg x 12.3 billion = 320 billion miles. Divide that by our 12,000 mile national average and you get 26.7 million gas cars per year from the $10 billion offshore drilling investment.

5. What’s the end cost for the consumer?

You can see why as a nation we like oil so much … it yields about 3-4 times more transportation power per dollar invested. But it’s important to note that the cost of gasoline for the end-user is considerably higher than electricity. In the end the consumer pays dearly for all that convenient fossil fuel. Right now gasoline is about $3 per gallon and the typical car gets 22 mpg. So the typical gasoline mile costs us about 13.6 cents or $1,632 per year (oil). Grid electricity is about 10 cents per kilowatt, so one mile on electricity costs only 3.7 cents, or $444 per year (wind). If you figure that 7.4 million Americans would be saving $1,188 per year, that is about $8.8 billion going back into the U.S. economy rather than into the grubby hands of foreign oil companies like BP.

6. What if you factor in environmental costs?

Now if we start factoring in the massive cleanup costs, it changes the game significantly. Current estimates are putting the BP cleanup bill at $22.6 billion. This figure will be matched (at least) by U.S. taxpayers in the form of government assistance programs. So that puts the total estimated Deepwater Horizon pricetag at $55 billion ($10B + $22.5B + $22.5B), assuming it’s even possible to clean up the spill at all.

7. Comparing apples and lemons …

As a comparison exercise, let’s say that instead of sinking on Day 1, the Deepwater Horizon sunk halfway though its lifespan. It would have powered 13.4 million cars at a cost of $55 billion … about $4,100 per car (oil). Our wind turbines would have powered 3.7 million cars at $10 billion or about $2,700 per car (wind). Since “windspills” have never been known to cause any impact whatsoever and oil spills are quite frequent (according to NOAA in one sample year alone there were 257 oil spills) this seems more than a fair comparison and puts wind in the lead, both from the perspective of investment and consumer spending.

Of course, this sad little number game will never make up for the incalculable losses to the fishing industry, the tourist industry, the health of wetlands, the survival of wildlife, the carcinogens that are now leaking into the water systems of Gulf residents — all things for which BP will never pay. We, the American people however, will pay those prices for a very, very long time to come.

You get my drift … it is time to change the way we think about offshore energy resources and start switching to safe, clean wind power.

The CSM has an article on a deal between Toyota and Tesla Motors, “in which Tesla will buy a defunct Toyota plant in California, and Toyota will purchase $50 million of Tesla stock” – Will Tesla-Toyota deal help repair Toyota’s public image?.

In a move that may provide a spark for the electric automobile industry, Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, is teaming up Tesla Motors Inc, the makers of the only highway-legal all-electric car in the United States.

The companies announced a deal yesterday in which Tesla will buy a defunct Toyota plant in California where it will produce the model S, an electric sedan slated for 2012.

Toyota, meanwhile, will buy $50 million worth of Tesla stock, and the two companies announced Thursday that they will work together to develop new electric vehicle technologies and refine manufacturing methods.

In this symbiotic business deal, Tesla will likely benefit from direct knowledge of Toyota’s economy of scale and links to a vast supplier base.

Toyota, for its part, might get a boost in its competition with other carmakers over the growing environmentally friendly vehicle marketplace. Tesla’s advanced lithium-ion batteries, for example, might steer the way for Toyota as the Japanese automaker looks to replace the older nickel-metal hydride units found in its hybrid Prius.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange continues to get a high profile in the local press, with the SMH having another look at the organisation this weekend – The secret life of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

He has spent the best part of the past six months in Iceland, he says. And the next six months? ”It depends on which area of the world I’m needed most. We’re an international organisation. We deal with international problems,” he replies.

Assange mentions four bases, but names only two. The one in Iceland and another in Kenya, where he has spent a lot of time, on and off, in the past couple of years.

The Kroll report, released on Wikileaks, reportedly swung the Kenyan presidential election in 2007.

When he’s in the country, Assange lives in a compound in Nairobi with other foreigners, mainly members of NGOs such as Medecins Sans Frontieres. He originally went to Kenya in 2007 to give a lecture on Wikileaks, when it was up and running. ”And ended up staying there,” I suggest encouragingly.

”Mmmm.”

As a result of liking the place or …

”Well, it has got extraordinary opportunities for reforms. It had a revolution in the 1970s. It has only been a democracy since 2004 … I was introduced to senior people in journalism, in human rights very quickly.”

He has travelled to Siberia. Is there a third base there?

”No comment. I wish. The bear steak is good.”

Why did he go to Georgia?

”How do you know about that?”

I read it somewhere, I reply. It was a rumour. ”Ah, a rumour,” he says.

But he did go there? ”It’s better that I don’t comment on that, because Georgia is not such a big place.”

Living permanently in a state of exile, which can become addictive, means that you always have the sharp eye of the outsider, I suggest.

”The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence,” Assange replies.

“You’re not swept up in the trivialities of a nation. You can concentrate on the serious matters. Australia is a bit of a political wasteland. That’s OK, as long as people recognise that. As long as people recognise that Australia is a suburb of a country called Anglo-Saxon.”

Could he ever live in one place again? A brief silence. ”I don’t think so,” he says finally.

”I don’t see myself as a computer guru,” he remarks at one point. ”I live a broad intellectual life. I’m good at a lot of things, except for spelling.”

At one point, thinking about some of the material leaked on Wikileaks, I ask Assange how he defines national security. ”We don’t,” he says crisply. “We’re not interested in that. We’re interested in justice. We are a supranational organisation. So we’re not interested in national security.”

How does he justify keeping his own life as private as possible, considering that he believes in extreme transparency?

”I don’t justify it,” he says, with just a hint of mischievousness. ”No one has sent us any official documents that were not published previously on me. Should they do so, and they meet our editorial criteria, we will publish them.”

Assange isn’t paid a salary by Wikileaks. He has investments, which he won’t discuss. But during the 1990s he worked in computer security in Australia and overseas, devised software programmes – in 1997 he co-invented ”Rubberhose deniable encryption”, which he describes as a cryptographic system made for human rights workers wanting to protect sensitive data in the field – and also became a key figure in the free software movement.

The whole point of free software, he comments, is to ”liberate it in all senses”. He adds: ”It’ s part of the intellectual heritage of man. True intellectual heritage can’t be bound up in intellectual property.”

Did being arrested, and later on finding himself in a courtroom, push him into a completely different reality that he had never thought about – and eventually in a direction that eventually saw him start thinking along the lines of a website like Wikileaks, that would take on the world?

”That [experience] showed me how the justice system and bureaucracy worked, and did not work; what its abilities were and what its limitations were,” he replies. ”And justice wasn’t something that came out of the justice system. Justice was something that you bring to the justice system. And if you’re lucky, or skilled, and you’re in a country that isn’t too corrupt, you can do that.”

In another life, Assange might have been a mathematician. He spent four years studying maths, mostly at Melbourne University – with stints at the Australian National University in Canberra – but never graduated, disenchanted, he says, with how many of his fellow students were conducting research for the US defence system.

”There are key cases which are just really f—ing obnoxious,” he says.

According to Assange, the US Defence Advance Research Project Agency was funding research which involved optimising the efficiency of a military bulldozer called the Grizzly Plough, which was used in the Iraqi desert during Operation Desert Storm during the 1991 Gulf War.

”It has a problem in that it gets damaged [from] the sand rolling up in front. The application of this bulldozer is to move at 60 kilometres an hour, sweeping barbed wire and so on before it, and get the sand and put it in the trenches where the [Iraqi] troops are, and bury them all alive and then roll over the top. So that’s what Melbourne University’s applied maths department was doing – studying how to improve the efficiency of the Grizzly Plough.”

Assange says he did a lot of soul-searching before he finally quit his studies in 2007. He had already started working with other people on a model of Wikileaks by early 2006.

There were people at the physics conference, he goes on, who were career physicists, ”and there was just something about their attire, and the way they moved their bodies, and of course the bags on their backs didn’t help much either. I couldn’t respect them as men”.

His university experience didn’t define his cynicism, though. Assange says that he’s extremely cynical anyway. ”I painted every corner, floor, wall and ceiling in the ‘room’ I was in, black, until there was only one corner left. I mean intellectually,” he adds. ”To me, it was the forced move [in chess], when you have to do something or you’ll lose the game.”

So Wikileaks was his forced move?

”That’s the way it feels to me, yes. There were no other options left to me on the table.”

Wikileaks, he says, has released more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined.

”That’s not something I say as a way of saying how successful we are – rather, that shows you the parlous state of the rest of the media. How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It’s disgraceful.”

Where does Assange see Wikileaks in 10 years? “It’s not what I want the world to be. It’s what I want the rest of the world to be,” he replies.

Jamais Cascio at Open the Future has a post (revived from 2006)on the ethics of futurism – OtF Core: Ethical Futurism.

Futurists — including scenario planners, trend-spotters, foresight specialists, paradigm engineers, and the myriad other labels we use — have something of an odd professional role. We are akin to reporters, but we’re reporters of events that have not yet happened — and may not happen. We are analysts, but analysts of possibilities, not histories. We’re science fiction storytellers, but the stories we tell are less for entertainment than for enlightenment. And, much to our surprise, we may be much more influential than we expect. …

As I see it, then, where business professionals are responsible to the client and their various stakeholders, foresight professionals are responsible to the future.

Here’s what I think that means:

It means that the first duty of an ethical futurist is to act in the interests of the stakeholders yet to come — those who would suffer harm in the future from choices made in the present. This harm could come (in my view) in the form of fewer options or possibilities for development, less ecological diversity and environmental stability, and greater risks to the health and well-being of people and other species on the planet. Futurists, as those people who have chosen to become navigators for society — responsible for watching the path ahead — have a particular responsibility for safeguard that path, and to ensure that the people making strategic choices about actions and policies have the opportunity to do so wisely.

From this, I would argue for the following set of ethical guidelines:

An ethical futurist has a responsibility not to let the desires of a client (or audience, or collaborator) for a particular outcome blind him or her to the consequences of that goal, and will always informs the client of both the risks and rewards.

An ethical futurist has the responsibility to understand, as fully as possible, the range of issues and systems connected to the question under consideration, to avoid missing critical potential consequences.

An ethical futurist has the responsibility to acknowledge and make her or his client (audience, collaborators) cognizant of the uncertainty of forecasts, and to explain why some outcomes and consequences are more or less likely than others.

An ethical futurist has the responsibility to offer unbiased analysis, based on an honest appraisal of sources, with as much transparency of process as possible.

An ethical futurist has the responsibility to recognize the difference between short-term results and long-term processes, and to always keep an eye on the more distant possibilities.

Futurists perform a quirky, but necessary, task in modern society: we function as the long-range scanners for a species evolved to pay close attention to short-range horizons. Some neurophysiologists argue that this comes from the simple act of throwing an object to hit a moving target. Chimpanzees and bonobos, even with DNA 98% identical to our own, are simply unable to do so, while most humans can (at least with a bit of experience). It turns out that the same cognitive structures that let us understand where a moving target will be may also help us recognize the broader relationship between action and result — or, more simply, how “if” becomes “then.”

I’m not sure how many futurists recognize the weight of responsibility that rests on their shoulders; this is an occupation in which attention-deficit disorder is something of a professional requirement. But when we do our jobs well, we can play a pretty damn important role in shaping the course of human history. It’s incumbent upon us, then, to do our jobs with a sense of purpose and ethics.

TomDispatch has a new article from Michael Klare, looking at the problems associated with chasing ever-harder-to-extract oil – The Oil Rush to Hell.

Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources. Make no mistake: we’re entering the danger zone. And brace yourself, the fate of the planet could be at stake.

It may never be possible to pin down the precise cause of the massive explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20th, killing 11 of its 126 workers. Possible culprits include a faulty cement plug in the undersea oil bore and a disabled cutoff device known as a blow-out preventer. Inadequate governmental oversight of safety procedures undoubtedly also contributed to the disaster, which may have been set off by a combination of defective equipment and human error. But whether or not the immediate trigger of the explosion is ever fully determined, there can be no mistaking the underlying cause: a government-backed corporate drive to exploit oil and natural gas reserves in extreme environments under increasingly hazardous operating conditions.

The New Oil Rush and Its Dangers

The United States entered the hydrocarbon era with one of the world’s largest pools of oil and natural gas. The exploitation of these valuable and versatile commodities has long contributed to the nation’s wealth and power, as well as to the profitability of giant energy firms like BP and Exxon. In the process, however, most of our easily accessible onshore oil and gas reservoirs have been depleted, leaving only less accessible reserves in offshore areas, Alaska, and the melting Arctic. To ensure a continued supply of hydrocarbons — and the continued prosperity of the giant energy companies — successive administrations have promoted the exploitation of these extreme energy options with a striking disregard for the resulting dangers. By their very nature, such efforts involve an ever increasing risk of human and environmental catastrophe — something that has been far too little acknowledged.

The hunt for oil and gas has always entailed a certain amount of risk. After all, most energy reserves are trapped deep below the Earth’s surface by overlying rock formations. When punctured by oil drills, these are likely to erupt in an explosive release of hydrocarbons, the well-known “gusher” effect. In the swashbuckling early days of the oil industry, this phenomenon — familiar to us from movies like There Will Be Blood — often caused human and environmental injury. Over the years, however, the oil companies became far more adept at anticipating such events and preventing harm to workers or the surrounding countryside.

Now, in the rush to develop hard-to-reach reserves in Alaska, the Arctic, and deep-offshore waters, we’re returning to a particularly dangerous version of those swashbuckling days. As energy companies encounter fresh and unexpected hazards, their existing technologies — largely developed in more benign environments — often prove incapable of responding adequately to the new challenges. And when disasters occur, as is increasingly likely, the resulting environmental damage is sure to prove exponentially more devastating than anything experienced in the industrial annals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Deepwater Horizon operation was characteristic of this trend. BP, the company which leased the rig and was overseeing the drilling effort, has for some years been in a rush to extract oil from ever greater depths in the Gulf of Mexico. The well in question, known as Mississippi Canyon 252, was located in 5,000 feet of water, some 50 miles south of the Louisiana coastline; the well bore itself extended another 13,000 feet into the earth. At depths this great, all work on the ocean floor has to be performed by remotely-controlled robotic devices overseen by technicians on the rig. There was little margin for error to begin with, and no tolerance for the corner-cutting, penny-pinching, and lax oversight that appears to have characterized the Deepwater Horizon operation. Once predictable problems did arise, it was, of course, impossible to send human troubleshooters one mile beneath the ocean’s surface to assess the situation and devise a solution.

Drilling in Alaska and the Arctic poses, if anything, even more perilous challenges, given the extreme environmental and climatic conditions to be dealt with. Any drilling rigs deployed offshore in, say, Alaska’s Beaufort or Chukchi Seas must be hardened to withstand collisions with floating sea ice, a perennial danger, and capable of withstanding extreme temperatures and powerful storms. In addition, in such hard-to-reach locations, BP-style oil spills, whether at sea or on land, will be even more difficult to deal with than in the Gulf. In any such situation, an uncontrolled oil flow is likely to prove lethal to many species, endangered or otherwise, which have little tolerance for environmental hazards.

The Illawara Mercury reports the Oceanlinx wave power generator at Port Kembla has suffered a mishap – $5m Port Kembla wave generator wrecked.

A $5 million wave energy project off Port Kembla is facing ruin after it broke free from its moorings and crashed into rocks in rough seas.

The barge-like prototype, one of the first of its type in the world, snapped free of pylons 150m offshore about 1.30pm and was swept into the eastern breakwall, where it was grounded last night. …

Fears were held for the safety of the barge overnight, with a heavy swell and 4m waves expected. The rough seas are expected to ease from midday today. …

A spokesman for the project’s Sydney-based developer, Oceanlinx, said there were more than double the required mooring lines in place to ensure its safe operation. “The unit was safely disconnected from the power grid and efforts are now underway to retrieve the unit from the breakwater.”

It will be a blow to Oceanlinx, which had been keen to prove the project was commercially viable. The wave-to-energy barge, known as the Mk3, was at the forefront of marine renewable technology and has operated for four years.

Inhabitat has a post on the latest iteration of the Oyster wave power generator – New Oyster 2 Wave Power Generator Unveiled This Morning.

Basically it works like this. The Oyster 2 is anchored to the seafloor about half a mile off shore. Near-shore waves pound against its frame and engage the hinge mechanism. The hinges engage two hydraulic pistons that are connected to hydroelectric plants onshore. Essentially the Oyster turns offshore wave power into onshore water power. The first prototype Oyster 1 was installed and tested in the summer of 2009 and Aquamarine Power used information from that test to vastly improve their design. The Oyster 2 is simpler in design, has fewer moving parts, generates 250% more electricity and is easier to maintain.

A lot of issues developing in the offshore wave power industry have to do with the cost of installation versus the amount of energy extracted. It seems that the Oyster design solves this problem by replacing conventional turbines with hydraulic pistons to create the energy onshore instead of out in the waves. Three Oyster 2s will be deployed and connected to the grid in the summer of 2011 at the European Marine Energy Centre in Scotland. These Oyster 2 farms sound like a productive — and adorable — addition to the renewable energy market.

Technology Review has an article on “devices that make ice at night to replace air-conditioning during times of peak power demand” – Using Ice to Cool Down the Grid.

Over the next few weeks, a consortium of municipal utilities in California will begin retrofitting government offices and commercial properties with systems that use ice made at night to replace air-conditioning during the day. It’s part of a pilot program for the devices, which are built by Windsor, CO-based Ice Energy. If widely deployed, they could reduce fuel consumption by utilities by up to 30 percent and put off the need for new power plants.

The first devices will be installed on about two dozen city-owned buildings in Glendale, CA, under the plan being coordinated by the Southern California Public Power Authority. Over the next two years, the 11 participating utilities will install 1,500 of the devices, providing a total of 53 megawatts of energy storage to relieve strain on the region’s electrical grid. The project is the first large-scale implementation of Ice Energy’s technology.

Each Ice Energy device is designed to make ice overnight, when demand for electricity is low, using a high-efficiency compressor to freeze 450 gallons of water. Around midday, the cooling mode kicks in, and the device shuts off the building’s regular air conditioner for a six-hour cycle. It pipes a stream of coolant from the slowly melting block of ice to an evaporator coil installed within the building’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning blower system. Once the ice is melted, the air conditioner returns to normal operation. Brian Parsonnet, Ice Energy’s chief technology officer, says the Ice Bear can cut a building’s power consumption by 95 percent during peak hours on the hottest days.

Cutting demand for electricity during peak hours reduces the need to build new power plants. It also allows utilities to rely on their most efficient power plants, says Ronald Domitrovic, a senior project manager for electric utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute. He says that when utilities fire up their “least efficient, oldest, and least desirable” generating resources to meet peak demand, every increment of increased power on the grid sends costs surging, whether one is talking fuel costs, greenhouse gas emissions, or service reliability. However, at night, utilities draw on their most efficient power plants, which use less fuel than power plants used only during peak hours. The utility also saves energy at other points in the grid–for example, cooler power lines at night transmit electricity more efficiently.

Domitrovic says systems that use ice or cold water on a large scale to provide cooling for campuses and large buildings have “been around for some time.” But he says these are usually “expensive one-off units, designed specifically for the building,” and that the smaller modular thermal storage systems that Ice Energy provides “can be deployed with relative simplicity” to serve one- or two-story commercial buildings. Ice Energy says that cooling units housed at distributed sites can be networked, presenting utilities with a resource that can be dispatched as needed to help manage demand on the grid.

The Guardian has an article on Google’s interest in a geothermal energy technology company called Potter Drilling – Google-funded hot rock ‘water’ drill could reduce cost of geothermal energy.

A novel drill that is inspired by a jet engine and uses super-heated water to carve through rock could help make clean energy from underground rocks more economically viable, according to its backers at Google.

Potter Drilling is part-funded by Google.org – the internet search giant’s philanthropic arm – and wants to use its technology to develop geothermal energy, which involves tapping the energy from hot rocks deep in the Earth.

Geothermal energy is seen by environmentalists as a vast potential source of clean, carbon-free energy if it can be tapped efficiently. Traditional methods drill into the Earth and use naturally occurring underground pockets of steam or hot water in order to make clean electricity.

A report (pdf) by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that tapping just 2% of the potential resource from so-called enhanced geothermal systems between 3km and 10km below the surface of continental USA could supply more than 2,500 times the country’s total annual energy use.

Geothermal projects in countries from Australia to Iceland and Germany already generate thousands of megawatts of electricity. Geothermal power plants can be used as baseload electricity because they are usually productive for more than 90% of the time, compared with 65%-75% for fossil-fuel power plants. They also produce virtually no greenhouse gas emissions.

Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) allow the traditional techniques to be applied almost anywhere. By drilling deep into the Earth (where rock temperatures can reach more than 200C) and pumping water into the hole, the underground hot rocks fracture, thus allowing the water to circulate and heat up. The hot water comes back to the surface and is then used to drive turbines and produce electricity.

“EGS could be the killer app of the energy world,” said Dan Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives for Google.org, when its funding was first announced for Potter Drilling. “One of the attractive aspects is that it’s baseload, it’s 24-hour power and that’s a nice complement to solar and wind, which are intermittent sources. If you can put all three of these technologies together, we’re going to have a much more attractive green electricity mix.”

Ross Gittins has an article in the SMH on ecological debt – Prosperity cannot be paid forever by maxing out our green credit.

The most thought-provoking comment I’ve seen on the budget came from Senator Christine Milne of the Greens. ”Every Australian knows,” she said, ”that if you have two credit cards, it is very bad management to pay off your debt on one of them by racking it up on the other.” The budget ”pulled down the national economic debt, but it continued the process of racking up our ecological debt”. …

When we run down our non-renewable resources (as we’re hoping to do at a much faster rate with the return of the resources boom), nowhere does this show up as a cost or reduction of our assets. When we continue to deplete renewable resources at a rate much faster than they can renew themselves, nowhere does this show up as any kind of negative.

When we continue pumping our waste back into the environment – including greenhouse gases, but also other air and water pollution, garbage and human waste – at a faster rate than it can absorb, nowhere is this recorded as a cost.

GDP, our great de facto measure of progress, counts the short-term benefits from all this exploitation, but ignores its long-term costs. So Milne is right: we have been paying off our economic credit card by racking up debt on our environmental credit card.

But as the still-unfolding global financial crisis reminds us, you can get away with racking up debt only for so long. And with the environment the day of reckoning has already started to dawn. Lift your head from the economic statistics and you see rising average temperatures, the clearing of native forests, the destruction of habitat, the decline in fish stocks, the damage we’ve done to the Murray-Darling and other river systems and the degrading of our soil.

So far we’ve managed to keep the economy separate from the environment, but we won’t get away with that much longer. Why not? Because, in the words of a former US senator, ”the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment”.

The economy exists within the natural environment and is dependent on it. Logically, you could have the natural world without an economy – that is, without human activity – but you couldn’t have an economy without a natural world.

We can go for a period running our economy at the expense of the environment – plundering its natural resources on one hand, pumping out our waste on the other – but eventually we start to get feedback. The despoiled and depleted ecosystem begins to malfunction, with serious consequences for the continued functioning of our economy.

We get a lot more extreme (and thus expensive) weather events, a rising sea level forces us to move back from the coast, we start running out of native forests and some mineral resources and fossil fuels (making energy and fertiliser a lot dearer), we see the destruction of international tourist attractions such as the Great Barrier Reef,

we have to move agriculture north to where the rain is, but the elimination of fish stocks and degradation of soil makes food production a lot harder and more expensive the world over.

How did we get into the mindset that allowed us to take the environment for granted? Well, mainly it’s because economic activity is simply more visible than the environment. And because, until relatively recently, we could plunder the natural world with impunity.

But also because we’re wedded to a way of thinking about (and measuring) the economy that, because it has changed little in the past 150 years, simply ignores the environment. Because at the time global economic activity was so small relative to the huge natural world, it made sense for the early economists to treat the environment as a ”free good” – something so plentiful it comes without cost.

But with the human population having more than trebled since 1927 and the global standard of living also having risen considerably, it’s no longer sensible to treat the environment as an ”externality”.

We need a new economic model – and a new way of measuring progress – that recognises the centrality of the environment to our wellbeing and keeps recording and reminding us when we charge things up on our environmental credit card, as Rudd has just done.

Glenn Greenwald has a post on reports that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has had his Australian passport confiscated – WikiLeaks founder has his passport confiscated.

This is a reminder that one can’t run around exposing the secrets of the most powerful governments, militaries and corporations in the world without consequences (h/t):

The Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks had his passport confiscated by police when he arrived in Melbourne last week.

Julian Assange, who does not have an official home base and travels every six weeks, told the Australian current affairs program Dateline that immigration officials had said his passport was going to be cancelled because it was looking worn.

However he then received a letter from the Australian Communication Minister Steven Conroy’s office stating that the recent disclosure on Wikileaks of a blacklist of websites the Australian government is preparing to ban had been referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

Last year Wikileaks published a confidential list of websites that the Australian government is preparing to ban under a proposed internet filter — which in turn caused the whistleblower site to be placed on that list.

The Australian document was so damaging because the Australian government claimed that the to-be-banned websites were all associated with child pornography, but the list of the targeted sites including many which had nothing to do with pornography. That WikiLeaks was then added to the list underscores the intended abuse.

Forcing Assange to remain in Australia would likely be crippling to WikiLeaks. One of the ways which WikiLeaks protects the confidentiality of its leakers and evades detection is by having Assange constantly move around, managing WikiLeaks from his laptop, backpack, and numerous countries around the world. Preventing him from leaving Australia would ensure that authorities around the world know where he is and would impede his ability to maintain the secrecy on which WikiLeaks relies.

Secrecy is the crux of institutional power — the principal weapon for maintaining it — and there are very few entities left which can truly threaten that secrecy. As the worldwide controversy over the Iraqi Apache helicopter attack compellingly demonstrated, WikiLeaks is one of the very few entitles capable of doing so and fearlessly devoted to that mission. It’s hardly surprising that those responsible would be harassed and intimidated by governmental agencies — it’d be far more surprising if they weren’t — but it’s a testament to how truly threatening they perceive outlets like WikiLeaks to be.

Cnet has an article on a new smart grid pilot in Japan – Mitsubishi plugs in smart-grid pilot project.

Mitsubishi Electric on Monday said it will invest about $76 million in a smart-grid project, part of a companywide push into equipment for modernizing the electricity grid.

The company will create two installations–a residential-size building and a commercial facility–which will have on-site power generation through photovoltaic panels and local energy storage with rechargeable batteries. The flow of energy will be managed and optimized by power electronics and smart meters to test the performance of the equipment.

Mitsubishi Electric said the projects are part of a corporatewide push to supply smart-grid technologies for the electric power industry and meet global demand for low-carbon energy.

In one experiment, Mitsubishi Electric will set up a mini-power station built around a four-megawatt solar array. It will include equipment, such as switches and smart meters, to manage the flow of energy and a battery.

The residential-scale system will feature a 200-kilowatt photovoltaic array with a home energy-management system, which uses a smart meter and network-connected appliances.

The Green Left Weekly has an article looking skeptically at the gas industry’s claims it is a transitional fuel towards a low carbon future – Natural gas: transition fuel or greenhouse menace?

Say what you will about coal, but at least it stays where it’s put. On its way to the user, coal doesn’t gush from the rail trucks, spreading itself through the atmosphere and warming it at about 70 times the rate of carbon dioxide.

Natural gas is different. A new draft study provides evidence that, in the US, enough natural gas leaks into the air to give gas-fired electricity, megawatt-hour for megawatt-hour, a bigger greenhouse impact than electricity from good-quality steaming coal.

This news will be unnerving for the many people who point to natural gas as a relatively clean alternative to other fossil fuels. Conventional wisdom has been that a state-of-the-art natural gas power plant can produce electricity with barely 30% of the carbon dioxide emissions of a typical brown coal plant, and less than half of those for black coal.

The modest climate impact of natural gas, however, applies only from the point where the gas is burnt. In the study mentioned above, Professor Robert Howarth of Cornell University in the US examines the fuel’s broader effects. “The most recent data I could find for the US (from 2006)”, Howarth reports, “suggest a leakage rate from the oil and gas industry of an amount of methane equal to 1.5% of the natural gas consumed.”

Methane, with the chemical formula CH4, makes up about 87% of natural gas after various contaminants have been removed.

Howarth’s figure of 1.5% is consistent with data from various sources including the US Environmental Protection Agency. He acknowledges that his estimate has a large margin for error, since leaks in the gas industry are not well monitored. But 1.5%, he contends, is a conservative figure, and US government scientists and gas industry officials quoted in the New York Times on October 14 last year agree that the real amount is almost certainly higher.

If Howarth is anywhere near correct, suggestions by some environmentalists that natural gas can act as a “bridge” for a low-carbon transition from coal-fired power to renewable power fall by the wayside.

Howarth’s premises are not uncontroversial. To calculate the warming impact of methane, he uses the figure of 72 times the global warming potential, per volume, of carbon dioxide. This is the impact over the first 20 years after the methane reaches the atmosphere. The figure usually cited for the warming potential of methane is 25 times that of carbon dioxide, measured over 100 years.

Howarth’s choice here is the correct one. The figure of 72 times is appropriate to the key danger which natural gas leaks pose to the environment: their ability, due to their short-term greenhouse potency, to help trigger quick-acting “positive climate feedbacks”.

In the atmosphere, methane reacts with oxygen to form water and carbon dioxide. After seven years, half of the methane is gone, and after 20 years little remains. But a big pulse of the gas, its effects amplified by quick-acting feedbacks, could within a few years raise temperatures to the point where they exceeded natural “tipping points”. The climate would then “flip” to a new, hotter state.

One such positive feedback is seen in the impact of greenhouse gases on Arctic permafrost. Warming in the Arctic causes permafrost to melt, and in the oxygen-poor conditions of the resulting swamps, bacteria turn organic matter into methane — which warms the environment still further.

Methane in the atmosphere is now at about two-and-a-half times the level in 1750. It now accounts for about 20% of the warming effect of all long-lived greenhouse gases. From 1998, concentrations of methane stopped rising for a period, perhaps due to the drying of tropical wetlands.

The last two years, however, have seen levels trend upward once again. As well as reflecting the amounts of methane now bubbling from Arctic swamps, this renewed rise may stem from a boom in the extraction — and leaking — of natural gas.

Over the next 20 years, a big expansion of natural gas production could help bring about the methane pulse that humanity should be dreading.