Author: Big Gav

The Age has an article on the impending visit of climate change charlatan, Lord Monckton (actually Viscount, for those who care about obsolete aristocratic titles), citing Tim Lambert – Puzzle me this: climate change theory allows no ice age.

CHRISTOPHER WALTER, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, likes riddles. In 1999 he announced to the world that he had invented a puzzle made up of 209 irregular polygons and said he would pay £1 million to the first person to solve it. It was a brilliant marketing ploy and the mind-bending Eternity puzzle was a best-seller.

Two University of Cambridge mathematicians, with the aid of a custom-made computer program, solved it within months.

Lord Monckton was reportedly forced to sell his 67-bedroom mansion to pay the prizewinners. But six years later he claimed that he had been planning to sell the house anyway and the tale of his financial ruin was simply made up to sell more puzzles.

He has shifted his gaze from puzzles to climate change, and the riddle at the heart of his alternative climate-change theory looks, to the untrained eye, even more mischievous.

The theory relies on some superficially impressive mathematics. Though climate scientists immediately debunked his hypothesis when it was published in 2008, Lord Monckton is still the most prominent intellectual spokesman for the climate-change sceptic movement. …

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks that the effect of doubling the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere would make the world warmer by about 2.5 to 4 degrees. Most studies measure the change at about 3 degrees. Climate-change action is based on this consensus view.

Lord Monckton’s concept is based on the idea that the calculations have inflated the warming potential of greenhouses gases by about six times.

His theory was published in Forum on Physics and Society, the online newsletter of the American Physical Society.

It was not a peer-reviewed journal, so it was not subject to the normal level of scientific scrutiny that applies to original research, but it was enough to give the claim an initial veneer of credibility.

The argument Lord Monckton mounted has been painstakingly picked apart by several eminent climate-change researchers, but it was an Australian computer scientist, Tim Lambert, who helped collate many of the flaws on his website. ”A lot of the equations used to cover it up were right, but the argument was complete gibberish,” Mr Lambert said.

The hypothesis took the lowest possible range of carbon dioxide’s known warming effect on climate, multiplied it by the lowest possible effect of the various feedbacks that amplify the warming effect, to give a figure well below that shown by any observation.

One of the implications of the hypothesis was that, given what we know about climate, there could not have been ice ages in the past.

”The hypothesis is completely inconsistent with the observations,” said Professor Matthew England, the co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW.

”In science, the world isn’t wrong so the calculations must be wrong.”

The American Physical Society quickly started receiving complaints from its members about the piece, and a lengthy disclaimer was added to the piece saying the society did not endorse Lord Monckton’s findings.

However, the paper is still the core of the argument he will be promoting on his Australia tour.

TruthOut has a look at the nuclear power industry in the US – Meltdown, USA: Nuclear Drive Trumps Safety Risks and High Cost and Part II: Energy Department, NRC Back Nuclear, Ignore Industry’s Dirty Little Secrets.

The pro-nuclear Department of Energy is set to offer this month the first of nearly $20 billion in loan guarantees to a nuclear industry that hasn’t built a plant since the 1970s or raised any money to do so in years. But although the industry is seeking to cash in on global warming concerns with $100 billion in proposed loan guarantees, environmentalists, scientists and federal investigators are warning that lax oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) of the nation’s aging 104 nuclear plants has led to near-meltdowns along with other health and safety failings since Three Mile Island – including what some critics say is a flawed federal health study apparently designed to conceal cancer risks near nuclear plants.

All that is joined by the dangers and risks posed by at least 30 tons yearly of radioactive, cancer-causing, nuclear waste produced at each 1,000 megawatt plant; projected costs of $12 billion to $25 billion for any new plants (built largely through taxpayer support); and their ongoing vulnerability to terrorist attacks at sites like Indian Point, 35 miles from New York.

For instance, a meltdown of the two reactors at Indian Point, dubbed “Chernobyl on the Hudson,” could quickly kill nearly 50,000 people with radiation poisoning in a 50-mile radius and cause over 500,000 cancer deaths within six years, according to research by the Union of Concerned Scientists and other experts.

“Nothing’s changed,” said Paul Gunter, director of Reactor Oversight for the Beyond Nuclear reform group, about nuclear plants. “They’re still dirty, dangerous and expensive.”

Cleantech.com has a look at the state of play in the thin-film solar market – Paint, spray or ink it on.

Clean technology companies and researchers are coming up with all sorts of ways these days to spray, paint, and ink on their technologies. But are these new innovations ready to be pumped out in large quantities?

Burtonsville, Md.-based New Energy Technologies (OTCBB:NENE) announced a new milestone yesterday in a patent-pending technology for spraying solar coatings onto see-through glass windows, allowing power generation. Though it’s still early days for the new product, it could offer significant commercial production advantages for building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) over current thin-film technologies.

The key, as the company points out, is getting scaled up and fully developed (And protecting its IP.)

It joints a host of others pursuing similar paint-on solar compounds, including researchers at Swansea Unversity in the UK and a partnership between JA Solar and Innovalight.

Last week, a group of Japanese scientists claimed they’ve come up with a lithium polymer battery that can be made using only printing technology (see Japanese scientists advance printable battery tech). The new flexible, lithium polymer battery is considered to be applicable for solar batteries, flexible displays, or being attached to curved surfaces.

And last August, University of Texas at Austin researchers came out with a CIGS-based paintable solar cell technology that could help to increase efficiencies and decrease manufacturing costs (see Texas researchers look to unleash spray-on solar cell potential).

They achieved proof-of-concept producing solar cells using tiny nanoparticle inks that allow them to be printed like newspaper or painted onto the sides of buildings or rooftops to absorb sunlight.

Lowell, Mass.-based solar company Konarka Technologies announced in 2008 it successfully conducted the first-ever demonstration of manufacturing solar cells by using inkjet printing (see Konarka demonstrates inkjet printed solar cells). Just last month, the company launched a pilot project to integrate its branded Power Plastic solar panels into the non-load bearing exterior walls of buildings.

Technology Review has an article about a “copper-based catalyst helps turn the gas into antifreeze and household cleaners” – a useful form of carbon sequestration (on a micro-scale) – A New Way to Make Useful Chemicals from CO2.

When it’s exposed to the elements, the surface of copper turns green because it reacts with oxygen. But now scientists have discovered a copper-based material with a surprising property: it reacts with carbon dioxide in air rather than oxygen. Though the reaction is not a practical way to remove large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it does provide an alternative new route, using a cheap, nonpetroleum feedstock, to make useful chemicals.

Researchers have been looking for such a material for a long time, taking a cue from plants, which use atmospheric carbon dioxide to produce a wide range of useful materials. But previous approaches have fallen short in a variety of ways. For example, they’ve required large amounts of energy and concentrated streams of carbon dioxide rather than the trace amounts found in air. One of the big challenges is that materials tend to preferentially react with oxygen, which is much more reactive than carbon dioxide and far more abundant. Oxygen makes up over 20 percent of the atmosphere, whereas there are only a few hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide.

With the new material, “the energy you need to put in is very low,” says Daniel DuBois, a senior scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA, who was not involved with the research. “And the fact that it will bind and reduce CO2 directly from the atmosphere is pretty startling. I wouldn’t have thought that you could do that.”

Yale Environment 360 has an article on the impact of global warming on the arctic – Arctic Tundra is Being Lost As Far North Quickly Warms.

During the summer of 2007, lightning strikes sparked five tundra fires on Alaska’s North Slope. Two of the fires — rare events north of the Arctic Circle — began in neighboring drainages, only a couple of days apart. That, in itself, might have gained the attention of tundra researchers. But the 2007 fire season would ultimately burn a record swath across the North Slope, while reshaping the way scientists think about the Arctic’s response to global warming.

Researchers have known for years that the Arctic landscape is being transformed by rising temperatures. Now, scientists are amassing growing evidence that major events precipitated by warming — such as fires and the collapse of slopes caused by melting permafrost — are leading to the loss of tundra in the Arctic. The cold, dry, and treeless ecosystem — characterized by an extremely short growing season; underlying layers of frozen soil, or permafrost; and grasses, sedges, mosses, lichens, and berry plants — will eventually be replaced by shrub lands and even boreal forest, scientists forecast.

Much of the Arctic has experienced temperature increases of 3 to 5 degrees F in the past half-century and could see temperatures soar 10 degrees F above pre-industrial levels by 2100. University of Vermont professor Breck Bowden, a watershed specialist participating in a long-term study of the Alaskan tundra, said that such rapidly rising temperatures will mean that the “tundra as we imagine it today will largely be gone throughout the Arctic. It may take longer than 50 or even 100 years, but the inevitable direction is toward boreal forest or something like it.”

With temperatures increasing across the Arctic, the Alaskan tundra as we know it could be gone before the end of the century, some scientists predict.
Dominique Bachelet, a climate change scientist at Oregon State University, forecasts that by 2100 tundra “will largely disappear from the Alaskan landscape, along with the related plants, animals, and even human ecosystems that are based upon it.” She made that prediction in 2004, and now says “the basic premise still holds, but the mechanism of change may be different than we thought.” Instead of long-term, incrementally complex changes caused by gradually warming temperatures, “extreme events will be the important triggers for change.” Hot-burning fires or slumping hillsides tied to melting permafrost could “clean the slate and allow new species to establish themselves,” Bachelet said.

The Edge has a talk with Wealth of networks author Yochai Benkler on the shortcomings of economic models based purely on (narrowly defined) self interest – THE END OF UNIVERSAL RATIONALITY (via P2P Foundation).

The big question I ask myself is how we start to think much more methodically about human sharing, about the relationship between human interest and human morality and human society. The main moment at which I think you could see the end of an era was when Alan Greenspan testified before the House committee and said, “My predictions about self-interest were wrong. I relied for 40 years on self-interest to work its way up, and it was wrong.” For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn’t encounter free software and you couldn’t encounter Wikipedia and you couldn’t encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren’t looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms. …

The big question I ask myself is how we start to think much more methodically about human sharing, about the relationship between human interest and human morality and human society.

There are lots of different disciplines where people have been doing work for a long time. In many cases, doing work that was peripheral during the period of the rise of selfish rationality. Really we’re talking about a period from about the 1950s until roughly now, when in economics, in political science, in law, in evolutionary biology, you got an increasing relative importance for explanations that depended on individuals acting in ways that maximize their returns, where their returns largely are assumed, though not universally, to be material with self-interest.

Game theory and mechanism design imagines people as acting with self-interest and guile. Political science builds models that are based on self-interested voters and self-interested Senators and self-interested Congressmen, each one trying to understand what is their interest. Is it to get elected again? Is it to maximize a particular position? And each time you build a system around this idea of individuals interacting, trying to maximize their own returns.

In evolutionary biology, for example, one thing that you saw was the rise of very sophisticated ways of explaining behavior that seemed to be altruistic, purely in terms that redounded to the benefit of the individual organism. This is where reciprocity becomes so important. What we see again throughout all of these different disciplines is that somewhere around the 80s in some places, like organizational sociology, somewhere closer to the 90s, if you talk for example about evolutionary biology and the resurgence of the possibility of multi-level selection and group selection where it’s not all reduced to the individual, there are also components that happen at the group level.

Certainly in the context of political science and the emergence of some studies of commons and common property regimes and collective actions — successful collective action models. In economics, we see a substantial work in experimental economics, like Ernst Fehr’s group in Zurich and Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis in Santa Fe, starting to do experiments that show that people deviate from selfish rationality. That people systematically and predictably behave in ways that are much more cooperative than would be predicted by the game theoretical impact.

You’ve got theoretical economists, like Roland Benabou, Jean Tirole, and Matthew Rabin, who begin to build quite sophisticated models that try to implement very different kinds of motivations, like even a sense of self image and a sense of ‘I’m okay’ relative to the world. (There is a beautiful study, for example, from two or three years ago about knowledge workers. (Bruno Frey and Margit Osterloh)) A sense of what’s normal and moral. A sense of what’s socially preferable. You begin to see even in economics in the ’90s and early ’00s, an increased salience and attention and major complications to(?) efforts to build much more sophisticated models of multiple motivations including pro-(Inaudible) motivations.

In organizational sociology, in management science, you look — Toyota production system was the big ah-ha moment, when Toyota came to the U.S. for the first time and created the first NUMMI plant in GM’s Fremont plant in the early ’80s. All of the stories that used to be “oh it’s Japanese culture, it’s something completely different, it’s not about us,” were flipped. One of the worst performing GM plants in 1980 closes down, opens up two years later under Toyota management, almost the entire same employees said the entire union leadership. Within a couple of years it becomes the most productive plant in the U.S.

Who knows what the situation is now, but as of the numbers last year, it continued to be one of the three most productive plants in the U.S. Same people, same industry, very different organizational structure built a lot less on hierarchy, a lot less on precise specification of exactly what everybody needs to do. Much more on teamwork, much more on supporting normative commitment to innovation, to process innovation. And still relatively very constrained. It is the automobile industry.

We’re not talking about high-tech industries. But there you have a very different orientation in terms of setting up the motivation and relationships among workers, between workers and management. You move from having 70 process engineers on the floor telling each employee exactly what to do, to having none. And having the teams have a lot of autonomy on how they do things.

REW has an article on India’s plans for solar power – India Approves Solar Implementation Plan.

The first part of a three-phase programme that could see 220 GW of new solar capacity installed in India has been approved, according to a statement from Gauri Singh, joint secretary to the government of India.

Following on from the country’s National Action Plan on Climate Change, the so-called Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) aims to see solar energy technologies in the country to achieve grid parity by 2022 as well as establish India as a global leader in solar energy.

Phase 1, now approved, will span the remaining period of the 11th Plan and first year of the 12th Plan, up to 2012-2013. Phase 2 will cover the remaining four years of the 12th Plan from 2013-2017 and the 13th Plan from 2017-2022 will be deemed as Phase 3.

Approving the targets, the government intends to foster 1000 MW of grid-connected (33 kV and above) solar plants, 100 MW of roof top and small solar plants connected to the low tension/11 kV grid and 200 MW of capacity equivalent from off-grid solar applications in the first phase of the Mission, till March, 2013.

Inhabitat reports that micro-wind turbines are starting to be seen on corporate buildings – Adobe Headquarters Installs 20 Vertical Axis Wind Turbines.

Eventually, we’ll be squeezing renewable energy out of every possible source we can – especially from rooftops in urban areas. Adobe Systems is at the forefront of this trend, having just installed building integrated wind turbines atop its headquarters in downtown San Jose, CA. Their 20 new Windspire vertical axis turbines are affixed on the 6th floor of the parking garage of their office complex, which also happens to be LEED certified. The electricity generated from the turbines will eventually power an electric vehicle charging station in the garage below as well as the famous San Jose Semaphore!

Mariah Power is the maker of the Windspire, which weighs about 650 lbs, stands 30 feet tall and has a rating of 1.2 kW. Adobe installed 20 of these turbines around its employee basketball court at the top of its parking garage. Surrounded on either side by two Adobe office towers, a wind tunnel effect is created above the garage and gets average wind speeds of 14 mph. Adobe and Mariah Power expect that each of the turbines will generate about 2,500 kWh annually, totaling up to 50,000 kWh for the whole system.

The Guardian reports that methane emission from Siberia are accelerating – Arctic permafrost leaking methane at record levels, figures show.

Scientists have recorded a massive spike in the amount of a powerful greenhouse gas seeping from Arctic permafrost, in a discovery that highlights the risks of a dangerous climate tipping point.

Experts say methane emissions from the Arctic have risen by almost one-third in just five years, and that sharply rising temperatures are to blame.

The discovery follows a string of reports from the region in recent years that previously frozen boggy soils are melting and releasing methane in greater quantities. Such Arctic soils currently lock away billions of tonnes of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, leading some scientists to describe melting permafrost as a ticking time bomb that could overwhelm efforts to tackle climate change.

They fear the warming caused by increased methane emissions will itself release yet more methane and lock the region into a destructive cycle that forces temperatures to rise faster than predicted.

Paul Palmer, a scientist at Edinburgh University who worked on the new study, said: “High latitude wetlands are currently only a small source of methane but for these emissions to increase by a third in just five years is very significant. It shows that even a relatively small amount of warming can cause a large increase in the amount of methane emissions.”

Global warming is occuring twice as fast in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth. Some regions have already warmed by 2.5C, and temperatures there are projected to increase by more than 10C by 2100 if carbon emissions continue to rise at current rates.

Palmer said: “This study does not show the Arctic has passed a tipping point, but it should open people’s eyes. It shows there is a positive feedback and that higher temperatures bring higher emissions and faster warming.”

The change in the Arctic is enough to explain a recent increase in global methane levels in the atmosphere, he said. Global levels have risen steadily since 2007, after a decade or so holding steady.

The new study, published in the journal Science, shows that methane emissions from the Arctic increased by 31% from 2003-07. The increase represents about 1m extra tonnes of methane each year. Palmer cautioned that the five-year increase was too short to call a definitive trend.

The Guardian also has an article from George Monbiot on a “national outpouring of idiocy” in Britain in the wake of the recent cold snap – Britain’s cold snap does not prove climate science wrong.

It’s as predictable a feature of the British winter as log fires and roasting chestnuts: a national outpouring of idiocy every time some snow falls.

Here’s what Martyn Brown says in today’s Express:

As one of the worst winters in 100 years grips the country, climate experts are still trying to claim the world is growing warmer.

There’s a clue as to where he might have gone wrong in that sentence: “country” has a slightly different meaning to “world”. Buried at the bottom of the same article is the admission that ” … other areas including Alaska, Canada and the Mediterranean were warmer than usual.” But that didn’t stop Brown from using the occasion to note that “critics of the global warming lobby said the public were no longer prepared to be conned into believing that man-made emissions were adding to the problem.”

The ability to distinguish trends from complex random events is one of the traits that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. It is also the basis of all science; detecting patterns, distinguishing between signal and noise, and the means by which the laws of physics, chemistry and biology are determined. Now we are being asked to commit ourselves to the wilful stupidity of extrapolating a long-term trend from a single event.

The Express would have us return to the days in which the future course of human affairs could be predicted by solar eclipses and the appearance of comets. It has clearly made a calculated decision in recent months that climate scepticism plays to its readership – and therefore shifts papers – just as the daily drip-feed of conspiracy theories about Princess Diana and Madeleine McCann has done in the past.

Brown is by no means alone in his idiocy. On Sunday, the Telegraph and the Mail published almost identical articles; one by Christopher Booker, the other by his long-term collaborator, Richard North. Both claimed that the Met Office had predicted a mild winter, and that it had made this prediction because it has been “hijacked” by a group of fanatics – led first by its former chief executive Sir John Houghton, now by the current boss Robert Napier – who stand accused of seeking to to corrupt forecasts to make them conform to their theories on climate change.

If this story were true, it would be huge: the UK’s official weather forecasting service is deliberately changing its forecasts to make them fit a political agenda. It would also be fantastically stupid, as forecasts can always be checked against delivery. Booker and North offer no evidence to support this humongous conspiracy theory, just a load of unrelated facts cobbled together in the usual fashion.

The SMH reports that the GM Volt is also headed for Australia – First drive: Chevrolet Volt.

With an innovative plug-in electric car set-up, the Chevrolet Volt could have as much of an impact on General Motors as it does on the planet.

The Chevrolet Volt may not be able to save General Motors financially but it could restore its reputation for engineering quality and vision and is a viable yet flawed small car proposition.

A first drive this week around the lumpy concrete streets of GM’s Warren technical centre in the suburbs of decayed, deteriorating Detroit is a cause for rejuvenated hope at a company in bankruptcy just a few months ago.

The Volt – which will be sold in Australia wearing a Holden badge from 2012 – is a plug-in electric car with an innovative twist. While its front wheels are always driven by electricity, a 1.4-litre petrol engine generates power for a powerful lithium-ion battery pack when required.

GM calls it a range extender, but it’s effectively a miniature onboard power station or generator. It means the end of the range anxiety that bedevils electric cars. When the battery pack runs low the petrol engine will ensure it won’t run out, guaranteeing a fuel-tank-like 500km range.

Want to refuel? Then top up the fuel tank just likes a normal small car. Or be new age and plug in to a powerpoint overnight to replenish the battery pack.

“It’s the only electric vehicle that can be your only vehicle,” was how the Volt’s chief engineer Andrew Farah summed it up.

The SMH also reports that Citroen will be selling a rebadged Mitsubishi MiEV – Citroen plugs in to electric craze.

Citroen has unveiled its re-badged version of the Mitsubishi I MiEV electric car ahead of its public debut at the Brussels Motor Show.

The battery-powered C-ZERO is a sister car to the Peugeot iOn that debuted at the Frankfurt motor show last September. Both cars are built on the Mitsubishi platform.

The ‘zero’ suffix stands for zero fuel use, zero carbon emissions, zero decibels from the electric powerplant.

The 47kW motor is powered by lithium-ion batteries, and produces 180Nm of torque. According to Citroen, the batteries can be charged using a household socket, while a higher voltage electricity supply will charge the batteries to 80 per cent in just 30 minutes. A single charge will be good for range of 130km.

WorldChanging has a post on expanding the Transit Oriented Development concept – New Energy Hubs: Transit-Oriented Development Meets District Energy.

Advanced community design models are emerging to provide some of the greatest opportunities for reducing fossil fuel use, climate-disrupting emissions and traffic congestion, while also offering affordable, high-quality lifestyles.

Envision living in a community that offers an abundance of local shopping, services and entertainment. The community is focused on a mobility center well connected to the region with transit and vanpools. The need to drive to work and other destinations is minimized. When you do drive, it is in an electric vehicle charged at your house or a fast charge station located in the mobility center park-and-ride.

Coming from work you stop by a mobility center kiosk to pick up groceries and other items ordered on line. You come home to a super-efficient residence with a smart management system that has adjusted temperatures in anticipation of your arrival. Hot water that heats your home and comes out of your shower head is delivered from a local plant that uses both ground heat and biogas.

Electricity that powers your home and charges your vehicle is generated at the plant and a neighborhood solar array mounted at the park-and-ride. Power is delivered by a smart grid that manages local power generation and sends any surplus around the city. The smart grid also communicates with buildings and electric vehicles to optimize grid operations, saving ratepayers on power costs.

This is a vision for a New Energy Hubs, a comprehensive community development model that meshes transit-oriented developments (TODs) with emerging energy technologies. Deploying advanced transportation and energy concepts in one geographically defined location provides synergistic benefits, making for the most effective use of energy and resources.

Technology Review reports that Tesla are partnering with Panasonic to supply long life lithium ion batteries – Tesla to Use High-Energy Batteries from Panasonic.

Tesla Motors, the maker of high-performance electric vehicles, is working with Panasonic, the battery and consumer electronics giant, to develop its next generation of batteries. The partnership is intended to help Tesla lower the cost of its batteries and improve the range of its vehicles.

Last month Panasonic announced two high-energy batteries for electric vehicles. These new batteries store as much as 30 percent more energy than its previous lithium-ion batteries, and this increased storage could, in theory, increase a vehicle’s range by a similar amount, thereby addressing one of the main problems with electric cars. Tesla’s Roadster currently has a range of 244 miles and takes three and a half hours to charge with a special charger.

The other major challenge with electric vehicles is the cost of the battery packs. Tesla isn’t announcing the potential cost savings with future batteries, but JB Straubel, Tesla Motor’s chief technology officer, says battery costs have been steadily declining at about 8 percent a year.

Tesla plans to incorporate Panasonic’s cells into its battery packs, and will work with Panasonic to develop cells fine-tuned for use in cars, Straubel says. To do this, Tesla will draw on data gathered from the 1,000 cars it has made so far, which have been driven for over a million miles. Tesla currently gets its batteries from a variety of manufacturers.

Todd Woody at Grist has a report on interest in solar thermal power (and eSolar in particular) in China – China powers the global green tech revolution. More at The New York Times.

Forget Red China. It’s Green China these days—at least when it comes to making big renewable deals.

eSolar power plant. eSolar power plant. Friday night, a Chinese developer and eSolar of Pasadena, Calif., signed an agreement to build solar thermal power plants in the Mongolian desert over the next decade. These plants would generate a total of 2,000 megawatts of electricity. It’s the largest solar thermal project in the world and follows another two-gigawatt deal China struck in October with Arizona’s First Solar for a massive photovoltaic power complex. Altogether, the eSolar and First Solar projects would produce, at peak output, the amount of electricity generated by about four large nuclear power plants, lighting up millions of Chinese homes.

Is China the new California, the engine powering the green tech revolution?

Yes and no. When it comes to technological and entrepreneurial innovation, Beijing lags Silicon Valley (and Austin, Boston, and Los Angeles)—for now. But as a market, China is likely to drive demand for renewable energy, giving companies like eSolar the opportunity to scale up their technology and drive down costs.

[We’ll pause here to state the obvious: China’s investment in renewable energy and other green technologies is miniscule compared to the resources devoted to its continued building of coal-fired power plants and efforts to secure dirty oil shale supplies in Canada and elsewhere.]

“All the learning from this partnership will help us in the United States,” Bill Gross, eSolar’s founder and chairman, told me. “I think as soon as the economy improves in the rest of the world and banks start lending, there will be a lot of competition in the U.S. and Europe. But, until then, China has the money and the demand.”

In a one-party state, a government official saying, “Make it so,” can remove obstacles to any given project and allocate resources for its development. Construction of the first eSolar project, a 92-megawatt power plant, in a 66-square-mile energy park in northern China, is set to begin this year

“They’re moving very fast, much faster than the state and U.S. governments are moving,” says Gross, who is licensing eSolar’s technology to a Chinese firm, Penglai Electric, which will manage the construction of the power plants. Another Chinese company will open and operate the projects.

For the past two-and-a-half years in California, meanwhile, the state’s first new solar thermal power plant in two decades has been undergoing licensing as part of an extensive environmental review process. The goal is to maximize production of carbon-free electricity from BrightSource Energy’s 400-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System project in the Mojave Desert while minimizing its impact on fragile ecosystems.

The end game begins Monday in Sacramento at a public hearing where BrightSource will face off with environmental groups that argue the project will harm the imperiled desert tortoise and destroy the habitat for a host of plants and animals.

In contrast, it was only six months ago that executives from Penglai Electric first contacted eSolar as they scoured the world for a technology to use in that nation’s first big foray into solar thermal power.

China leads the world in production of photovolatic panels like those found on residential and commercial rooftops, but the country has had little experience with solar thermal technology, which uses arrays of mirrors called heliostats to heat a liquid to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.

China might be making headlines but there is still a steady trickle of new solar project announcements from the US – Solar project proposed north of Reno.

A large solar energy project is being proposed by Vidler Water Co. on up to 1,000 acres north of Reno. Project backers say construction could start next year and be phased in over the next 10 to 15 years if approved by county and regional officials, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported. The proposed 100-megawatt farm would be among the largest in the nation, officials said.

Nevertheless, US cleantech investment has dropped from the previous year;s boom levels – Clean Technology Investing Slips, but Could Be Worse, Report Finds.

In a flurry of deal making bolstered by government subsidies for renewable energy, venture capitalists invested $5.6 billion in green technology companies worldwide in 2009, according to a preliminary report released Wednesday by the Cleantech Group and Deloitte.

That represents a 33 percent drop from the $8.5 billion invested in 2008, a reflection, the report said, of the global economic downturn. But the overall amount of venture capital fared much worse, retreating to 2003 levels, according to the report, whereas clean technology investments were on track to match 2007 levels.

“In 2009, clean-tech went from a niche category to become the dominant category in venture capital investing,” said Dallas Kachan, managing director of the Cleantech Group, a San Francisco market research and consulting firm. “Clean-tech continued to outpace software and biotech.”

The report’s preliminary survey showed that there were 557 deals in the clean technology space in 2009, compared to 567 deals in 2008 and 488 in 2007.

Solar companies secured $1.2 billion in 2009 — 21 percent of the total and the largest share of venture funding. The biggest deal of the year also went to a solar company, Silicon Valley’s Solyndra, which raised $198 million at the same time it secured a $535 million federal loan guarantee to build a solar module factory.

The NZ Herald has an enthusiastic article on a form of “fusion (known as Aneutronic fusion) – Fusion breakthrough a magic bullet for energy crisis ?.

A Florida based research team, however, may have found a solution to the world’s energy woes that could provide a clean and near limitless supply of energy in as little as a decade.

Global energy production and consumption is a complex beast and many nations remain heavily reliant on a lethal mix of oil and coal, both of which are finite, and have huge impacts on the environment.

While there is much conjecture on just how long oil and coal reserves will last, the stark reality is that they will both eventually run out.

In the 1950s, many thought atomic energy would allow humanity to dodge the energy crisis, with newly nuclear fission reactors providing an affordable and near limitless supply of energy.

More recently however, incidents such as the Chernobyl meltdown, the growing pile of incredibly toxic nuclear waste and the spectre of rogue nations manufacturing weapons- grade plutonium have taken the shine off nuclear fission.

With the energy requirements of developed nations continuing to grow, and developing nations gaining a serious appetite for energy consumption, demand will soon outstrip supply, and many predict that massive economic and social impacts are probable.

Thankfully, a new type of nuclear fusion energy generation technology holds the potential to provide a cheap and clean source of energy without toxic radioactive waste or the environmental impacts of oil or coal.

Unlike nuclear fission, where the nucleus of an atom is split to release energy, nuclear fusion uses the same process as our sun and works by fusing atoms together to release of large amounts of energy.

Nuclear fusion generates energy leaving little to nothing in the way of by-products, and uses fuels that are plentiful but far less dangerous than the uranium used with conventional nuclear fission reactors.

Whilst physicists have generated nuclear fusion reactions, doing has involved creating the earthbound equivalent of a small star, which in turn has required ultra-strong magnetic fields to contain superheated gases many times hotter than the surface of the sun.

Unfortunately, doing so has tended to consume almost as much energy as was being generated by the fusion reaction. Creating a nuclear fusion reactor that is commercially viable and able to output surplus energy beyond sustaining its own reaction was thought to be at least 20-30 years away.

Thanks to work being done by a group of physicists at the University of Florida, all things fusion related could however be set to change in as little as a decade.

Where conventional fission reactors use uranium which can be refined to make nuclear weapons, the University of Florida’s concept uses hydrogen and an isotope of boron called Boron 11, both of which are abundant on earth and can’t be used to make atomic weapons.

When fusion reactions occur in the heart of a star such as our sun, atoms are subject to intense heat and pressure which stops the atoms from repelling each other, allowing them to fuse.

To date, experimental fusion projects have largely been focused on generating intense heat so they can fuse, and containing the super hot gases from this reaction consumes most if not all of the energy being produced by the fusion reaction.

The University of Florida have taken a different tack, by putting hydrogen and boron fuel into an accelerator that fires them towards each other at incredibly high velocities. When the hydrogen and boron 11 atoms smash into each other, they fuse, producing fast moving helium nuclei whose motion is converted into electricity.

This new process is clean, highly efficient and most important of all, simple. The output of the new reactor is electricity with its by-product being the same helium gas used to make voices squeaky and party balloons float, so there’s no toxic radioactive waste to dispose of.

Initial calculations also show that this new type of fusion generation could produce clean electricity at similar levels but far more cheaply than oil or coal.

I recently watched a BBC documentary on the state of play in fusion research called “How to build a star on Earth “, which was reasonably interesting.

In the US, a different approach known as inertial fusion is being perused at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California and the Z-Machine in New Mexico. If Iter is like a conventional power station burning fuel for days or weeks at a time, the inertial projects share more in common with the combustion engine.

NIF blasts tiny pellets of deuterium-tritium fuel with a single 500-trillion-watt laser beam. This is a big number; about 1,000 times the power consumption of the United States.

This gargantuan short-lived laser pulse causes the fuel pellet to collapse and detonate, producing a mini-star for a fraction of a second.

The Z-machine takes a different approach, channelling half a trillion watts through a spider’s web of hair-thin wires surrounding the fuel pellet. The result is much the same: a big crunch known as a Z-pinch and the birth of a star.

If a steady stream of mini-stars can be created, then a power station could be constructed. The Z-machine has already achieved fusion in a test run, and NIF hopes to follow in its footsteps in 2010. The challenge will then be to smooth the rough edges of the technology in order to mass-produce economically viable, reliable power stations.

This is no mean feat, but there seems to be no fundamental reason to doubt that it is possible.

When fusion is mentioned, a common reaction in some circles is to say, “It’s always 30 years away, so let’s not invest too heavily”.

In fact, the fusion engineers of 2009 are speaking of building the final generation of experimental reactors now.

If they succeed, Iter and her sisters should be capable of putting electricity on to the grid some time in the early 2030s. This long-term and final solution to the energy crisis depends of course on sustained public investment at current or preferably significantly increased levels.

This is a challenge that I believe we must confront now, and not tomorrow. At some point in the future, we will generate our power by nuclear fusion; there is simply no other way to deliver the trillions of watts needed to make life comfortable for all the citizens of our planet.

To this statement nobody objects. The question is therefore not “if” but “when”, and it is my view that the “30 years away” argument simply doesn’t wash.

John F Kennedy used to tell a story about a French general who asked his gardener to plant a tree. “What’s the rush?” replied the gardener. “It will take 30 years to grow.”

The general looked him in the eye, and said in an urgent tone: “Thirty years? Then you had better plant it immediately.”

The FT points to a new peak oil (or “peak demand”) fund operated by some guys called Beetle Capital Partners, who predict we are about to enter a period of “creative destruction in which new policies and new entrepreneurs will radically transform the vast complex of energy-related industries” – Peak oil demand funds.

“The world is now headed towards economic conditions that will entail not only cyclical but structural change: a damaged financial sector, an overstretched consumer base, rising energy prices, and shortages of food, water and other natural resources so severe that they could heighten global and regional tensions. These factors, combined with new external ones like carbon pricing, all point to one thing: a crisis of confidence in growth.”

Technology Review has an article on China’s growing high speed rail network – China’s High-Speed-Rail Revolution.

China has begun operating what is, by several measures, the world’s fastest rail line: a dedicated 968-kilometer line linking Wuhan, in the heart of central China, to Guangzhou, on the southeastern coast. In trials, the “WuGuang” line trains (locally built variants of Japan’s Shinkansen and Germany’s InterCity Express high-speed trains) clocked peak speeds of up to 394 kilometers per hour (or 245 miles per hour). They have also recorded an average speed of 312 kph in nonstop runs four times daily since the WuGuang’s December 26 launch, slashing travel time from Wuhan to Guangzhou from 10.5 hours to less than three.

WuGuang’s speed blows away the reigning champion: France’s TGV, which runs from Lorraine to Champagne and averages 272 kph. It also bests China’s first high-speed train, the Beijing-to-Tianjin trains that average 230 kph, as well as Shanghai’s magnetically levitated airport shuttle trains that can hit 430 kph but average less than 251 kph.

Rail experts say the builders of the new WuGuang line deserve more bragging rights than the trains’ European and Japanese designers.

“The high-speed rail technology implemented in China is not that much different from the TGV, Germany’s ICE, and the Shinkansen,” says Rongfang Liu, a rail expert at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. What is notable, she and others say, is that unlike many high-speed lines that repurpose older tracks, this one was designed from the ground up for very high-speed operation over hundreds of kilometers. Bridges and tunnels, as well as the concrete bed beneath the track, have been designed to safely rocket passengers around, through, or over the natural and man-made obstacles that would otherwise force the trains to slow down.

Plenty more speedy lines are coming in China under an ambitious build-out initiated in 2006 by China’s Ministry of Railways, and accelerated with government stimulus funds. A two-trillion-yuan ($293 billion) plan envisions 16,000 kilometers of dedicated high-speed rail lines connecting all of China’s major cities by 2020. The first East-West segment–a link from Xi’an to Zhengzhou–could begin operating as early as this month, and work is underway to extend the Beijing-Tianjin line southward to Shanghai by 2012. WuGuang, meanwhile, is expected to expand northward to Beijing and South to Hong Kong by 2013. “Over the next five years there’ll be more high-speed rail added in China than the rest of the world combined,” says Keith Dierkx, director of IBM’s Beijing-based Global Rail Innovation Center.

High-speed rail is seen as a clean way to boost the expansion of China’s transportation system, according to Dierkx. Dedicated lines will help meet rail demand, which is expected to more than triple to five billion passengers per year by 2020. And building these lines is seen as preferable to further expanding reliance on imported oil for automobiles and airplanes. Dierkx says dedicated high-speed rail should also improve freight transportation by easing congestion on conventional rail lines.

Building fast lines requires civil engineering works on a massive scale. WuGuang has 625 bridges with a combined length of 362 kilometers, and 221 tunnels with a combined length of 177 kilometers, contributing to a total construction cost of 116 billion yuan ($17 billion). The 1,300-kilometer Beijing-to-Shanghai line will cost an estimated 221 billion yuan–more than the Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric project.

China has also commissioned the first segment of a large-scale HVDC link from Yannan to Guangdong, connecting inland hydro-power to coastal consumers – Siemens puts world’s first 800-kV high-voltage direct-current link into operation in China.

In late December 2009, Siemens Energy and the utility China Southern Power Grid put into operation the first pole of a HVDC system of enormous scale and magnitude: With a transmission capacity of 5000 megawatts (MW) und covering a distance of more than 1400 kilometers the Yunnan-Guangdong high-voltage direct-current transmission system (HVDC) recently is the world’s most powerful of its kind implemented. At the same time it is the first HVDC link operating at a transmission voltage of 800 kilovolts (kV). Siemens is thus setting new benchmarks in energy-efficient transmission of ecofriendly electricity. Commissioning of the second pole and thus startup of the entire system is scheduled for mid-2010.

The New York Times’ Green Inc blog has an interview with Google’s green energy guy Bill Weihl, talking about their investments in clean energy and their focus on solar thermal power, enhanced geothermal power and high altitude wind power – Q&A: Google’s Green Energy Czar.

Q. Google’s stated aim with regard to energy is to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. How did you arrive at this particular goal?

A. We’ve learned that a small team of smart people with basic technical expertise and the freedom to really innovate can do something quite remarkable, and we wanted to see if that really could be true for alternative energies. One of the keys there is the freedom to go after a really aggressive goal, and so we set a goal of making renewable energy cheaper than coal – it’s a very simple, kind of audacious and crazy goal.

Coal is the energy source of about half the electricity we consume in the U.S. and is responsible for about 82 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in the electricity sector, so until you’ve done something about the emissions coming from coal, you’ve made only a tiny dent.

Putting a price on carbon can help level the playing field, but to actually deploy renewables to the extent that we stop burning coal, I believe that’s only going to happen if they can compete economically without any substantial price on carbon or substantial subsidies, because I don’t think that people will tolerate that. I hope they will; I would be willing to pay that extra cost, but I can afford it. There are lots of people in the developing world who probably would say, I’m not going to pay that.

So that’s why we took as our direct goal that we’re aiming for, let’s make renewables cheaper than coal, and let’s make that happen as quickly as we can.
Q. Which technologies do you think are most likely to beat coal?

A. There are three areas we’re looking at: concentrated solar thermal, enhanced geothermal and high-altitude wind.

On the concentrated solar side, we’ve invested in two companies: eSolar and BrightSource, both of which are working on power tower platforms where a field of swiveling mirrors reflects sunlight toward a central tower with a receiver.

We’re doing some internal R&D work on the mirrors — things that eSolar and BrightSource aren’t looking at and really shouldn’t be looking at: they don’t need to take the risks to explore these kinds of designs and materials.

We’re also looking at the receiver and turbine technology, looking at some ideas about going to higher temperatures which just from a thermodynamic point of view can give you higher efficiency. But again, I think these are things that both eSolar and BrightSolar are interested in, and if we’re successful with the R&D we’re doing, they would be natural places to pick it up and start to deploy it.

Enhanced geothermal is based on the idea that pretty much anywhere on earth, if you drill deep enough, it’s hot. If it’s hot enough and you have the right kind of rock, then you inject water and cycle that water through the system, and it produces energy from steam just like a normal hydrothermal reservoir.

One really nice thing about enhanced geothermal is that it’s base load power: the fuel’s always there, whereas for solar and wind, sometimes the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow and you can’t produce any energy. So we think enhanced geothermal is very promising, and we’ve invested in AltaRock Energy and Potter Drilling. It has a ways to go before it gets to be really cost-competitive with coal, and it might never quite get there, but it’s got a big upside.

The other one that we’re looking at is high-altitude wind — ways to capture the stronger and steadier winds that are at 500 or 1,000 or 2,000 meters high, or potentially even up in the jet stream. Internally, we’ve been looking at taking traditional wind turbines and putting them on much taller towers so you can get to much stronger steadier winds. Today, with the way people build towers, it would cost a lot more to go up to 200 meters compared to the usual 80 meters. We’ve been looking at some ideas that would let you go up and build a turbine at 200 meters at very little extra cost. If that pans out, it would be a way to knock 20 or 30 percent off the cost of wind, and wind is pretty close to the cost of coal today.

We’ve also invested in a company called Makani Power that is doing high-altitude wind using an airborne platform. They’ve been looking at using a kite or a wing under autonomous control, where the wind pulls the kite out and you change the angle of attack so you can wheel it back in at less cost than the energy would make going out. The other approach is to use some kind of wing with propellers on it and the generators on the wing. So you’re flying a kite through the wind and it’s making the propeller spin so it’s acting like a wind turbine, and then you have to get the power down the cable back to the ground. There are other companies in that space with some similar ideas.

VentureBeat reports that Google has also created a new energy trading subsidiary – Google applies to buy and sell energy — is a Googley utility imminent?.

Mere days after Google launched its own phone, the Nexus One, it has come out with another big announcement: the creation of Google Energy, a subsidiary that it will use to buy and sell electricity on federally-regulated wholesale energy markets. Could it have plans to launch its own utility? Could you one day be buying your electricity from American’s favorite search engine instead of PG&E?

So far that seems unlikely. Yes, Google is applying to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the ability to buy and sell electricity, but it doesn’t plan to market it to the general public. Rather, the company seems to want to lower its own energy costs by buying it on the wholesale market; and it has been very vocal about greening its power mix by buying electricity generated by renewable sources (it already derives power from rooftop solar panels at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, but this is only a small sliver of what it uses every day).

Considering the volume of greenhouse gas emissions produced by Google and its many energy-intensive data centers, the company is going to have a hard time achieving its goal of carbon neutrality. But buying more affordable, cleaner energy could give it the leg up it needs to actually become the first IT company to pull it off.

The SMH has an article on the potential for a clean energy revolution in the US – In the wind: America’s drive towards clean technology.

ROOSEVELT transformed the US during the Great Depression by introducing Social Security, building dams, roads and an electricity network; Eisenhower gave the US its interstate highway system, transforming the economy and cementing the car in the fabric of American life. Microsoft, Apple, Netscape and Google turned the US of the late 20th century into the leader in the information economy.

Now Barack Obama, facing the steepest downturn since FDR’s time, wants to transform America into a green machine, a nation that leads the world in technology and manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, technologies to make the electricity grid more efficient and long-life batteries.

Can the US, the land of the internal combustion engine and the McMansion, where bigger is always better, really become a green economy? Can it catch up to Germany, Denmark, Spain and even China, which have been fostering green technology for years? And can the US achieve Obama’s dream without passing a scheme that puts a price on carbon?

There are plenty of evangelists for the new green economy despite the outcome at Copenhagen, which left the world well short of a binding commitment to lower global emissions.

In California, the venture capital industry, having weathered some tough times over the past 12 months, is roaring back to life and ”clean tech” is hot.

”I am more bullish about this than ever,” says Steve Westly of Westly Group, a venture capital fund that is backing the electric car company, Tesla. ”We have seen some stunning innovation in California and in China,” he says, adding that China is now the leader in clean tech. ”But most people don’t realise how quickly these technologies are coming.”

The parallel, says Westly, is the mobile phone market. The first mobile phones cost $3000 and weighed 3.2 kilograms. Now they are 95 per cent cheaper and weigh almost nothing. He believes it will not take long before solar reaches ”grid parity” – when a kilowatt of solar power can be produced for the same cost as conventionally generated power – and at that point the technologies will ”go through the ceiling”, he says.

The argument is similar with electric cars. Tesla, the company that Westly has backed, has produced its first all-electric Tesla roadster, which goes from zero to 100 km/h in 3.9 seconds. But it comes with a hefty $US100,000 ($A110,000) price tag. Tesla is now working on a more economical family vehicle, which Westly believes will take the US car industry by storm.

Clive Hamilton has an article at Crikey reporting on the imminent arrival in Australia of climate charlatan Chris Monckton – Viscount Monckton of Brenchley’s over-egged CV.

When he arrives on our shores later this month Viscount Monckton of Benchley will be greeted as a saviour by local climate change deniers. He will be chaperoned by Ian Plimer, and Monckton’s sponsors, engineer John Smeed and his friend, retiree Case Smit, are hoping for big things. He’s already booked on Alan Jones’s show; I’m guessing Andrew Bolt is drafting an encomium to the English lord; and it’s a sure thing that The Australian will give over its opinion pages to him. …

One thing’s for sure, Monckton — the “high priest” of climate scepticism soon to tour Australia — does not lack self-belief. His significance on the world stage is enough for him occasionally to forget himself and rewrite his biography.

He has claimed to be a member of the House of Lords (well, he once tried to become one), to be a Nobel Laureate (he wrote a letter to the IPCC which won a Nobel Prize, a connection close enough for him to commission his own gold Nobel prize pin), to have single-handedly won the Falklands War (he persuaded the British Army to use germ warfare on the Argies), and to have invented a cure for Graves’ disease, multiple sclerosis, influenza, food poisoning, and HIV.

In principle, over-egging one’s qualifications ought not to invalidate one’s arguments, but why are we not surprised that his statements about climate science have been debunked as amateurish, confused and full of school-boy howlers?

But the real fun starts with his politics. Here he is three months ago in a bravura performance before the Minnesota Free Market Institute:

So at last the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace … now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world.

You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He will sign anything … in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, your prosperity away forever.

So you see, Obama is in on it; after all, his Democrat party believes in “the tyrannical, anti-democratic system of command economy administration that we in Europe would call Communism, or Fascism, or International Socialism”.

It is tempting to scoff at the simple-minded mid-west Americans who lap up these fairy stories, until we remember that Senator Nick Minchin believes them too.

Monckton travels the world alerting anyone who will listen to the secret plan for a United Nations world government, referring to it as the “New World Order” the term of choice of American wingnuts and televangelists like Pat Robertson whose 1991 book of that name uncovered a conspiracy by Wall St, the Federal Reserve and various others to create a world government serving the Antichrist.

The Viscount can see the extreme left lurking everywhere; not only at the heart of the environment movement, but in the corridors of EU head-quarters (“a tyranny ruled by the unelected Kommissars”) and the scientific establishment itself, characterising the venerable Royal Society as “a mere Left-leaning political pressure-group”.

It was perhaps at the Copenhagen conference last month that Lord Monckton’s eccentricity reached its zenith. He described the entire conference as “a sort of Nuremburg rally”, including “the Hitler Youth marching in and breaking up meetings”.

If you’re wondering how the Copenhagen conference could be a conspiracy to impose communist world government and at the same time be populated by Hitler Youth, Monckton reminds us that “of course the Hitler Youth was also left-wing and green”.

The Viscount even made a point of confronting the Hitler Youth, whom he found lurking at a conference stall masquerading as bright-eyed environmentalists. One of them took exception to being called Hitler Youth, explaining that he is Jewish and his grandparents escaped the Holocaust.

Still, in a spirit of healthy debate the young man offered Monckton his card so as to engage in a follow-up discussion. Monckton would have none of it, retorting: “I do not take the cards of the Hitler Youth.” (Watch it and weep on YouTube.)

There is much more one could say about Monckton — for him Zimbabwe will always be Rhodesia and he has argued that blood tests should be compulsory for all, with those found to have the HIV virus locked away for life — but it feels cruel to go on. …

Lord Monckton concedes that he is used to looking like an absolute prat, which explains why in Britain moderate conservatives keep their distance. The Spectator’s Rod Liddle– himself sceptical about global warming — describes him as “a swivel-eyed maniac”.

Monckton and his associates are to climate scepticism what black-clad anarchists are to the anti-globalisation movement, except that the Moncktonians are no longer just embarrassing parasites on the body of sceptical thought but have colonised the host entirely.