Author: Big Gav

Technology Review has an article on solar power mobile phone networks for remote areas – A 50-Watt Cellular Network.

An Indian telecom company is deploying simple cell phone base stations that need as little as 50 watts of solar-provided power. It will soon announce plans to sell the equipment in Africa, expanding cell phone access to new ranks of rural villagers who live far from electricity supplies.

Over the past year, VNL, based in Haryana, India, has reengineered traditional cellular base stations to create one that only requires between 50 and 120 watts of power, supplied by a solar-charged battery. The components can be assembled and booted up by two people and mounted on a rooftop in six hours.

One such station–dubbed a “village station”–can handle hundreds of users. Groups of such village stations feed signals to a required larger VNL base station within five kilometers. In turn that larger station, which is also solar-powered, relays signals to the main network. The village station can turn a profit even if customers spend on average only $2 a month on the service, instead of the $6 required to make traditional systems cost-effective, the company says.

“We’ve scaled down the cost, the energy, and the equipment so that almost anybody can deploy it,” says Rajiv Mehrotra, VNL’s CEO. “It lends itself to many business models that can serve the bottom of the pyramid,” a reference to the roughly 1.5 billion rural people who do not have access to electricity grids around the world.

Energy Matters has an article on the progress of smart grids in Australia – Australia A Smart Grid World Leader.

Australia has a habit of sparking innovation within its borders, only to see the talent behind it disappear overseas; then leaving us to play catch-up when the technology goes to market.

However, according to a report from Companies And Markets, Australia is now considered to be one of the world leaders in a technology to play a critical role in addressing how the world utilises energy in the future – smart grid development.

Smart Grid Australia last year received AU$100 million from the Federal Government for a National Energy Efficiency Initiative to develop a smart-grid energy network. The demonstration project combines intelligent grid technology with residential smart meters to enable greater energy efficiency and better integration of renewable energy sources, such as solar power and wind energy.

Companies And Markets states the most interesting aspect of the Australian smart grid demonstration project is that it is linked to the National Broadband Network (NBN) which it says clearly shows the trans-sector thinking the Australian government has embarked upon.

The USA Government has also dished out major funding for smart grids, awarding over USD$3.4 billion of matching grants for the development of smart grids. The funding will underpin more than $8 billion worth of intelligent energy technology projects and will provide a significant stimulus to growth of this sector.

No doubt, many other countries will be monitoring Australia and the USA’s progress in smart grid technology closely. Cities that hold more than one million people have increased from around 20 to 450 in the last century and this has created challenges for electricity infrastructure, with issues such as line loss seeing a great deal of electricity being lost “in transit” between power generation facilities and the end consumer or simply being wasted through the need to maintain spare capacity that is often never used.

An interesting piece of trivia from the report: According to New Zealand’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA), there is enough spare capacity in the national grid during off-peak times to allow recharging of all New Zealand’s cars and other light vehicles if these were replaced by electric vehicles.

Green “building” of the week from Inhabitat is this particularly ambitious seaborne design – The Gyre: A Floating Upside Down Eco Skyscraper.

The Gyre is essentially an inverted underwater skyscraper, diving down to a depth of 400 m (1,312 ft) and would be about the same height as the Empire State Building. Four arms extend from the center spire (1.25 km in diameter) and act to buoy the structure as well as create a safe inner harbor and port large enough to accommodate the world’s most titanic ships. The center tower starts off at 30,000 sq meters of space and each floor down gets progressively smaller, down to 600 sq meters. The total floor area of the entire structure is 212,000 sq.meters, or roughly 40 football fields.

Powered completely by renewable energy, the Gyre is an off-grid, zero emissions development. Vertical wind turbines would be mounted on the top of the radial arms, collecting wind off the ocean. Semi-transparent solar windows would be used as glazing on the entire structure and then solar panels would be used as shading on the pedestrian walkways up on top. Underwater turbines would generate power from water currents when anchored, and then they would act as thrusters for propulsion for when the Gyre was in motion. Additionally, rainwater would be harvested in the central vortex and collected into storage tanks at the bottom of the spire.

The Australian has the text of ex-opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull’s latest speech to parliament on global warming – its a shame he didn’t make more like this while he was leader – Why I support the ETS proposal .

CLIMATE change is the ultimate long-term problem. We have to make decisions today, bear costs today so that adverse consequences are avoided, dangerous consequences, many decades into the future.

Right now, both sides of politics are agreed that Australia should, regardless of whether any international agreement is reached, reduce our emissions by 2020 so that they equal a 5 per cent cut from 2000 levels.

But it is not enough to say you support these cuts, you must also deliver a strong, credible policy framework that will deliver them.

The transition from a high emission economy to a low emission one cannot be achieved without major changes to the way we generate and use energy and in the way we manage our landscape.

Decisions to build new power stations will involve tens of billions of dollars over the next few decades and a critical element in making those decisions is being able to form a view about the direction of carbon pricing.

This need for leadership and direction from government on carbon pricing was one that was apparent to the previous government. That is why in 2006 prime minister John Howard established the Emissions Trading Task Group, chaired by Peter Shergold, the secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. In 2007 the Howard government adopted its recommendation to establish an ETS in advance of and in order to promote a global agreement.

Plainly stated: in the absence of a clear carbon price signal either no investments will be made or investments will be made of new carbon-intensive infrastructure because they are more profitable in a world where there is no price on carbon.

The SMH thought the government wishes it could do as good a job explaining and defending the ETS – A dream Labor speech from the vanquished.

Fifteen words in we knew what sort of speech this would be. “Generations” is a great big Malcolm Turnbull word. Churchillian. “All of us here are accountable not just to our constituents but to the generations that will come after them.”

He was not going to trim. Though his party made sure his audience in the chamber was small, he might have been addressing thousands.

This was the old Turnbull with his odd way of leaning forward on his desk, fists clenched in the pose of a well-dressed gorilla.

After East Anglia, the Himalayan glaciers and the holiday glow cast by Lord Monckton’s tour, his message was blunt: “The planet is warming because of the growing level of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. If this trend continues, truly catastrophic consequences are likely to ensue . . .”

The Prime Minister doesn’t say that kind of thing. Nor does the leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, who earlier in the morning dragged the press corps to a shop in Queanbeyan to watch him iron a shirt and declare: “You cannot run a dry-cleaning business without using energy.”

Abbott had yet to stumble into Turnbull’s Great Big Dump on Everything. It seemed the member for Wentworth would be talking to utterly deserted Coalition benches. But then Petro Georgiou, Russell Broadbent and Joe Hockey materialised. They looked impassive, stunned.

Hockey listened to Turnbull’s crisp exposition of what had been party policy until 10 weeks ago, with eyes closed. Lucy Turnbull sat with a couple of members of her husband’s staff in the public gallery. All through the great rabbit warren of Parliament House, the speech was being monitored on closed circuit television.

Turnbull was not delivering a great farewell. This was a working speech, a selling speech, the kind of speech Labor supporters wish their leader would deliver.

Crikey quite liked the speech as well – Turnbull takes aim at Abbott’s climate plan, and doesn’t miss.

Former Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has demolished Tony Abbott’s climate action plan and backed the Government’s amended CPRS legislation in a long speech explaining his decision to cross the floor in support of the Government’s ETS bills.

Last week Tony Abbott launched a climate action plan that rejected any market-based emissions abatement mechanism in favour of $10b worth of handouts for businesses and farmers to reduce emissions. Turnbull rose in the chamber early this afternoon to speak on the Government’s CPRS bills, reintroduced as promised last week. Watched by colleagues Petro Georgiou, Russell Broadbent, Paul Fletcher and, interestingly, Joe Hockey, Turnbull tore apart the proposed plan as economically inefficient, environmentally ineffective and unable to meet the task of reducing Australia’s emissions by 5% by 2020.

After quickly discussing the need to address climate change, including that the 2000s had been the hottest decade ever after the 1990s and 1980s, Turnbull emphasised the similarity of the Government’s CPRS with the Howard Government’s intended CPRS, declaring that the bills were “as much the work of John Howard as it is of Kevin Rudd” and outlining why the Howard-era Shergold taskforce had rejected non-market approaches like regulation or subsidies to address climate change.

Without mentioning the new Coalition plan or Abbott by name, except with an indirect reference to “as we have seen in recent days”, Turnbull attacked a subsidies-based approach, warning it was “a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a vast scale… a slippery slope that can only result in higher taxes and less effective abatement.” As a Liberal, Turnbull said, he supported a market based solution that allowed businesses and consumers to determine the most effective means of reducing emissions. A price signal was critical in order to drive the large-scale transition of the Australian economy necessary for lower emissions.

“In the absence of a clear carbon price,” Turnbull said, “no new investment will be made or investment will be made in new carbon intensive infrastructure.”

Turnbull also took aim at soil carbon, which would under the Coalition scheme provide most of the reductions needed to ostensibly meet the 5% target. As leader he had supported soil carbon, Turnbull said, and he believed it had great potential, but much work needed to be done before it could play a significant role. Moreover, its benefits would be more easily obtained through an ETS, and he had negotiated amendments to the CPRS that would allow exactly that. He quoted one biosequestration expert who said he supported soil carbon initiatives but was “horrified by the prospect of a fund from which public servants hand out money to grow trees.”

Joe Hockey was one of the few shadow ministers to turn up to watch the speech, but his lethargic and depressed appearance has tongues wagging – Where did Joe’s mojo go?.

The contrast, as Kevin Rudd invariably says, was stark. Joe Hockey sat slumped on the seat nearby, gazing up at the Reps chamber ceiling, while Malcolm Turnbull explained why he would be voting for the Government’s CPRS bills.

The body language, surely, was deceiving. Turnbull might have appeared forthright, aggressive even, as he expertly articulated the case for the CPRS far, far better than anyone from the Government ever had – particularly when, in three short sentences about how each recent decade had been hotter than the previous one, he demolished the myth of global cooling promoted by the likes of Tony Abbott.

But Turnbull was alone, reading — if the Press Gallery commentary is correct — the last rites over a political career wrecked on a point of principle, offering only a glimpse of what might have been had he ever mastered his many faults and coupled his undoubted brilliance with a more consultative and reflective style.

But Hockey remains Shadow Treasurer, a key part of the Coalition economics team, under a leader polling better than Turnbull ever did, perhaps a mere 2-3% away from achieving his career goal of Treasurer.

So, Joe, why the long face?

It might possibly be that Hockey was envious that he could never give a speech as good as that, for Turnbull’s speech was, instantly, a classic of Australian politics. So what if it was delivered to a near-empty chamber? Its content was scintillating.

Australian politicians don’t do soaring rhetoric or great oratory and there was none of that in Turnbull’s speech, but there was an intellectual rigour and cold, hard refusal to countenance bullshit that is sadly lacking in modern politics (and, in truth, much of Turnbull’s own period as leader).

No politician, from any party, has ever nailed the case for action on climate change so succinctly, and no politician — and certainly not Kevin Rudd — has ever come close to explaining so clearly why a market-based mechanism is preferable. And in his comprehensive demolition of the Abbott plan — all delivered without mentioning Abbott or the details of the plan, or anything that could be construed as personal criticism — Turnbull has not merely provided the Government with perfect soundbites, but with perfect talking points for its own use.

In fact, it did Hockey great credit that he showed up for the speech when it might have been easier to stay away and try to ignore what was happening. Only he, Russell Broadbent and Petro Georgiou were there for all of it. But Hockey has been in a funk since the leadership spill and what was commonly agreed to be his poor handling of it.

And to close, John Quiggin has a look at the path to delusion that the Liberal Party has followed – Send in the clowns.

It’s hard to believe that, three months ago, Australian national politics was (primarily) a contest between two broadly normal political parties. The government was running well ahead, but open to criticism for having talked a lot and done relatively little. The opposition was excessively keen on the maxim ‘the first duty of an opposition is to oppose’, and the alternative policies it proposed were neither as detailed as they might be, nor entirely consistent, but that has always been true of oppositions. Although a change of government in 2010 looked unlikely, there was nothing to suggest that such an event would be a disaster if it happened.

That could not be said today. The government is much the same as before, but the opposition has become a clown show, happy to do or say whatever comes to mind, either to chase votes, secure the support of its base or simply to muddy the waters enough that they have a chance to win in the resulting confusion.

Most obviously, we have an opposition leadership that embraces delusional beliefs on climate science. That would be bad enough if delusion could be confined to denial of the validity of science, but such isolation is not possible. Instead, delusionism is pervading everything the Liberal and National parties do and say.

First up, there are the personnel changes, with the replacement of Turnbull by Abbott, the rise of Minchin to the position of kingmaker and, most absurdly, the appointment of the ‘authentic’ but innumerate Barnaby Joyce as finance spokesman. Of the leadership team, only the marginalized Julie Bishop gives any indication of being connected to the real world. In the key economics portfolios, only Joe Hockey rises to the level of mediocrity, and he’s pretty much discredited by his vacillation during the leadership spill.

Then there’s the shift from ‘scepticism’ (the belief that thousands of scientists have simply got it wrong in ways that can easily be detected by armchair critics) to the kind of full-scale conspiracy theory exemplified by Lord Monckton’s claim that NASA crashed its own satellite to prevent it revealing the data that would disprove AGW theory. While the conspiracy theory has the merit of being more coherent and plausible, it paves the road to absolute craziness (again, see Lord Monckton). Of the leading figures in the Opposition, Minchin and Joyce are overt conspiracy theorists, and Abbott is willing to go along with idea. And whereas the conspiracy theorists were willing to undermine Turnbull throughout his leadership, any remaining pro-science Liberals (with the exception of Turnbull himself and the departing Judith Troeth) are keeping very quiet.

Unsurprisingly, this combination of delusion and incompetence is reflected in the opposition’s response to the government’s climate change policy. Naturally, the ‘science’ is pure wishful thinking, based on a willingess to count highly speculative gains from increased soil carbon as the primary line of policy response. But the economics is far worse – even the advocates of soil carbon don’t claim it can be done in the zero-cost fashion claimed by the opposition. More generally, since the opposition plan amounts to picking some winners, and throwing public money at them, it’s obvious from first principles that it must be more expensive than the government’s ETS.

But of course this doesn’t matter. No one, not even the opposition themselves takes the plan seriously – it’s simply there to meet the political necessity to have a supposed plan to refer to.

Finally, and most seriously, there is the embrace of the reality-free talking point approach that characterises the delusionist commentariat as a whole. Someone like Andrew Bolt is not acting out of character when recycles discredited delusionist talking points on a daily basis. His general approach to politics is no better. And, as the blogosphere has shown (as an archetypal example, see Glenn Reynolds) the longer you are immersed in this point-scoring, talking-point approach to political debate, the more distant becomes any connection to actual reality.

The Australian reports that Woodside and its partners have picked a location for the Browse LNG plant – Browse JV selects James Price Point for LNG site: Woodside.

WOODSIDE Petroleum said the joint venture partners in the Browse project have agreed to develop a liquefied natural gas plant at James Price Point in the north west of Western Australia.

There had been disagreement between the project partners on the best site for the plant, so the decision to choose James Price Point is a positive development for Woodside and the project.

The federal and Western Australian state governments had imposed a deadline for the partners to select a development concept within 120 days of December 2 as a condition of retaining leases associated with the project.

Yale Environment 360 has a look at Africa’s disappearing glaciers – In the Mountains of the Moon, A Trek to Africa’s Last Glaciers.

I am hiking through a moss-draped forest more than 10,000 feet above sea level in the Rwenzori Mountains in western Uganda, not far from the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The trail ahead is steep as a ladder and slippery with mud, and every few minutes my guide and I stop to rest.

Most people who come to this part of Africa do so for its wildlife, especially the endangered mountain gorilla. I have made the journey for another reason. I am looking for a glacier.

In the popular imagination, glaciers and Africa intersect at one location: Mt. Kilimanjaro, the iconic dormant volcano that rises from the grasslands of Tanzania and whose shrinking snowcap has become a symbol of climate change.

But there are glaciers in steamy Uganda, too, hidden in the eaves of jagged 16,000-foot peaks that are lost in the clouds most of the year. And these glaciers have a climate change story to tell, too — one that scientific research suggests better reflects the impact of global warming than the fading snows of Kilimanjaro.

But their story is also nearing its close. In just two decades, scientists expect the Rwenzori glaciers — as well as Africa’s few other remaining ice fields — to be gone. Kilimanjaro has already lost 84 percent of its ice since 1912, and what’s left is not expected to last more than a couple of decades. The Lewis glacier on Mount Kenya is also expected to wink out soon.

That prognosis comes as no surprise to my guide, a local Bakonjo tribesman named Baluku Josephat, who has guided climbers through the Rwenzori range since 1982 and has seen the consequences of global warming firsthand.

“If you go to Mount Baker,” he says, referring to a massive, ship-like peak in the center of the range where glaciers have already melted, “you can now go without crampons. It was not that way in the past. Now people just walk over rocks.”

Technology Review has an article on making information about free parking spaces available, allowing people to waste less time and fuel hunting for somewhere to leave their cars – Finding a Parking Space Could Soon Get Easier.

Anyone who’s driven in a crowded downtown knows that parking can mean almost endless circling in the hunt for a space close to your destination. Now engineers at Rutgers University in New Jersey have combined simple ultrasonic sensors, GPS receivers, and cellular data networks to create a low-cost, highly effective way to find the nearest available parking space.

The Rutgers researchers say that making detailed parking data widely available via Web-based maps or navigation systems could alleviate traffic congestion by allowing travelers to decide whether to park in a central garage, hunt for street parking, or choose another mode of transportation in advance. If drivers choose street parking, it could help by suggesting parking spaces to users through a navigation device or cell phone.

The team, led by assistant professors Marco Gruteser and Wade Trappe, mounted ultrasonic distance sensors on the passenger-side doors of three cars. Using data collected over two months as the drivers commuted through Highland Park, NJ, the researchers developed an algorithm that translated the ultrasound distance readings into a count of available parking spaces that was 95 percent accurate. By combining this with GPS data, they also generated maps of which spaces were occupied and which were open that were over 90 percent accurate.

Traffic congestion is a huge problem nationwide, particularly in downtown areas. A study by Transportation Alternatives, a New York City transportation advocacy group, found that up to 45 percent of the traffic in Manhattan is generated by cars circling the block looking for parking. In 2006, Donald Shoup, a professor in the department of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, calculated that, over the course of a year, vehicles looking for parking in one small business district of Los Angeles burned 47,000 gallons of gasoline and produced 730 tons of carbon dioxide. The problem is so serious that some cities, such as San Francisco, have invested millions of dollars in “smart parking infrastructure”–systems that detect the presence of vehicles in parking spots using fixed sensors installed into the asphalt or in parking meters.

TreeHugger has a post on using graphene for energy efficient lighting – Move Over OLEDs: Scientists Create Cheap, Fully Recyclable Lighting Material.

Swedish and American researchers have just developed a fully recyclable lighting component with what Science Daily is terms a “new super material”: graphene. Graphene is both inexpensive to produce and is 100% recyclable, and could be used to create glowing wallpaper made out of plastic–much like )LEDs could. But graphene appears to improve on OLEDs in some very big ways . . .

As you know, we’ve been big fans of the very efficient, long-lasting Light Emitting Diodes and Organic LED technology. But as Science Daily notes, there are still problems:

Today’s OLEDs have two drawbacks — they are relatively expensive to produce, and the transparent electrode consists of the metal alloy indium tin oxide. The latter presents a problem because indium is both rare and expensive and moreover is complicated to recycle.

Researchers believe they’ve found a solution by creating an organic light-emitting electrochemical cell (LEC) with the transparent electrode made of the “carbon material graphene.” Graphene is used instead of conventional metal electrodes–and since everything in an LEC, including the graphene, can be created from liquid solutions, they will be able to be produced through a printing process. This makes them much more efficient–and much less expensive–to create en masse than OLEDs. Researchers involved in the project say that graphene paves the way for cheap production of plastic-based lighting, perhaps for the first time.

The Times has an article on oil exploration in the Falkland Islands – Oil hunters invade the Falklands.

For two months a sky-blue tug boat has been puttering across the Atlantic dragging a 14,400-tonne oil rig.

It has been slow going — about 6mph — but this week the odyssey will end when it delivers the rig, called Ocean Guardian, to its destination just north of the Falkland Islands.

It will be a big occasion. Twelve years have passed since oil companies last went prospecting round the Falklands, 300 miles off the coast of Argentina.

All but one of the half-dozen wells that were drilled by Shell and others in the 1998 campaign showed signs of oil. In those days, though, the oil price was hovering around $10 a barrel, making it uneconomic to develop fields in such a remote location.

There was cheaper oil elsewhere. Talk of production also angered Argentina, which disputes Britain’s ownership of the islands, with protesters mobbing Shell forecourts.

More than a decade on, several things have changed. The oil price is seven times what it was — Brent crude closed at $70.55 on Friday. Drilling technology has developed in leaps and bounds. And it is becoming harder to find fresh reserves, pushing explorers into new regions in the hope that there may yet be another big find or two (see panel on right).

In the past few months investors have handed over more than £250m to four London-listed firms that are trying their luck in the Falklands.

“This is one of the most anticipated drilling campaigns of the year,” said Paul Wheeler, managing director at Jefferies International, the investment bank. “Last time they tried there were five wells that had oil or gas shows. The basins around the Falklands merit further exploration and this will be a fascinating few months.”

The region is one of a handful that has come back in vogue after years of being ignored. Later this year Cairn Energy, the FTSE 100 company, will drill the first new wells in more than a decade in the icy waters off the coast of Greenland.

Stuart at Early Warning has a rather unorthodox review of James Cameron’s “Avatar” – Avatar and the Unabomber.

Let’s start with the political viewpoint of the movie. When I watched it the first time, I was amazed that I was watching a major Hollywood movie with such a radical message, expressed so overtly. The movie doesn’t go in for a lot of moral ambiguity: it’s really clear that Sully, Trudy, Grace and the Na’vi are the good guys, who we are expected to view as moral and heroic. Meanwhile, Quaritch and Parker Selfridge are the bad guys, who we are expected to see as in the wrong. Let’s break down a bit what the moral rules are behind the behavior of the characters. I took away the following points:

* It’s wrong to desecrate natural beauty in order to get natural resources (the bulldozers destroying the Tree of Voices are clearly in the wrong in the movie’s moral universe).
* It’s wrong to displace native people in order to get natural resources (even Parker is shown shaken and uncertain of himself at what is required to get the Na’vi away from their Home Tree).
* Native people are more spiritually advanced and morally better than civilized people (the main arc of Jake’s spiritual growth in the movie is to become one of them).
* If civilized people do, nonetheless, come to desecrate the natural environment and take the resources, native people are justified in violently resisting that effort (this is what the Na’vi do, and we are encouraged to root for them).
* If you, as a member of the civilized society, find yourself in the position of being part of such a resource extraction effort, the morally correct thing to do is turn traitor to your own society and help the native people in their violent resistance (the moment when Trudy says “I didn’t sign up for this shit” and turns her guns on her own side).
* Civilization is destroying all other life on the Earth (the movie reports that Earth is no longer a green planet by 2154).

(I should stress before I go on that I’m not saying Cameron believes these things in everyday life, but those are the moral rules he sets up in the universe of Pandora for storytelling purposes).

If you want to place this viewpoint on the contemporary political spectrum, I think you have to go out past liberal democratic environmentalists, past the Green Party, past Earth First, and out to the Earth Liberation Front. …

That’s from the Unabomber’s manifesto. We put him in jail because he started killing technologists, stating as his reason that he hated industrial society and wanted to return to a more natural and free state of humanity. He was less successful in the execution than Jake/Trudy/Grace and the Na’vi – who actually succeed in ejecting Parker and Co. from Pandora – but it seems to me that the moral logic is exactly the same. Nature good, technology bad, violent opposition justified.

So, you might want to stop a minute and ask yourself: how exactly does Cameron get mainstream American audiences to root for the Unabomber side in this conflict?
That’s quite a trick, isn’t it?

No, STOP before you skim over this point. I really want you think about it: do you approve of the Unabomber’s actions? If not, but you liked the movie, do you know how Cameron got you to root for that side?

Stated quite so baldly, and stripped of the dressing of stunning CGI and exciting action sequences, I think it’s clear that the movie’s moral position is a rather extreme and absolutist position. Extracting resources from the natural environment and turning them into tangible wealth or capital – houses and their furnishings, wagons/cars, workshops/factories/offices is what civilizations do. It’s not an accidental or optional feature of civilization that could easily be dispensed with if we were only a little more reasonable. Instead, it’s absolutely basic to the nature of the beast. Ever since the Natufians started building houses and farming wild grasses, through the Sumerians irrigating the Mesopotamian plains, and the Romans deforesting the Italian countryside and mining Britain, to our modern extraction of all manner of metals and fossil fuels from the earth, cutting of forests for timber, and farming of most of the best soils on the planet, civilizations have extracted resources and done so in ever increasing quantities.

I guess this is one way of looking at it (though maybe a mature civilisation gets over this behaviour and adopts cradle-to-cradle manufacturing systems and quits the extraction business for good).

You could view the basic moral of these tales through a libertarian lens too – the Na’vi “own” their natural world and the interloping Americans have no right to steal their private property at gunpoint – they aren’t necessarily paid up members of the ELF…

The Guardian reports that Richard Branson hasn’t forgotten the trouble the last oil price spike caused his transport businesses and is warning about another shock – Branson warns that oil crunch is coming within five years.

Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an oil crunch within five years.

The founder of the Virgin group, whose rail, airline and travel companies are sensitive to energy prices, will say that the ­coming crisis could be even more serious than the credit crunch.

“The next five years will see us face another crunch – the oil crunch. This time, we do have the chance to prepare. The challenge is to use that time well,” Branson will say.

“Our message to government and businesses is clear: act,” he says in a foreword to a new report on the crisis. “Don’t let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did.”

Other British executives who will support the warning include Ian Marchant, chief executive of Scottish and Southern Energy group, and Brian Souter, chief executive of transport operator Stagecoach.

Their call for urgent government action comes amid a wider debate on the issue and follows allegations by insiders at the International Energy Agency that the organisation had deliberately underplayed the threat of so-called “peak oil” to avoid panic on the stock markets.

Ministers have until now refused to take predictions of oil droughts seriously, preferring to side with oil companies such as BP and ExxonMobil and crude producers such as the Saudis, who insist there is nothing to worry about.

But there are signs this is about to change, according to Jeremy Leggett, founder of the Solarcentury renewable power company and a member of a peak oil taskforce within the business community. “[We are] in regular contact with government; we have reason to believe their risk thinking on peak oil may be evolving away from BP et al’s and we await the results of further consultations with keen interest.”

The issue came up at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos where Thierry Desmarest, chief executive of the Total oil company in France, also broke ranks. The world could struggle to produce more than 95m barrels of oil a day in future, he said – 10% above present levels. “The problem of peak oil remains.”

Chris Skrebowski, an independent oil consultant who prepared parts of the peak oil report for Branson and others, said that only recession is holding back a crisis: “The next major supply constraint, along with spiking oil prices, will not occur until recession-hit demand grows to the point that it removes the current excess oil stocks and the large spare capacity held by Opec. However, once these are removed, possibly as early as 2012-13 and no later than 2014-15, oil prices are likely to spike, imperilling economic growth and causing economic dislocation.”

Skrebowski believes that Britain is particularly vulnerable because it has gone from being a net exporter of oil, gas and coal to being an importer, and is becoming increasingly exposed to competition for supplies.

Egoli has a snippet on a WA company looking to extract coal seam gas – Resource Wrap: 08 February 2010 – WSA, SIR, WGP, ACB.

Westralian Gas and Power Limited (WGP) said it has obtained the final approval necessary to commence its new coal seam gas drilling program at the Kaloorup Road Prospect near Busselton. The company said Bunbury Drilling Company would immediately begin constructing an access road and a drilling pad. WGP said the commencement of drilling marks the completion of a long-term and detailed exploration program, which began in the area in 2004. The company said interest in the area was reinforced by local landowner stories of gas being found during BHP coal exploration in the area in the 1970s. WGP said the original report compiled in 1974 by BHP was pieced together, confirming the local stories of gas under pressure coming from the well.

I’m not sure any campaign featuring Tony Abbott in his budgie smugglers is a good idea, but GetUp are trying to embarrass him over his policies on global warming – What’s wrong with Abbott’s Climate plan?.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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