Author: Big Gav

John Michael Greer has an interesting post on the failure of the Illuminati dream (or conspiracy, depending on your viewpoint) and its modern era echo in the failure of the 1970’s systems thinkers (and their “Limits To Growth” manifesto) – The Political Ecology of Collapse, Part Two: Weishaupt’s Fallacy (via Energy Bulletin).

Nostalgia aside, there’s a lot to be learned from the rise and fall of appropriate tech in the 1970s, and one of its lessons bears directly on the theme of this series of posts. For many of the people involved in it back then, appropriate tech was the inevitable wave of the future; nearly everyone assumed that energy costs would continue to rise as the limits to growth clamped down with increasing force, making anything but Ecotopia tantamount to suicide. A formidable body of thought backed those conclusions, and the core of that body of thought was systems theory.

Nowadays, the only people who pay attention to systems theory are specialists in a handful of obscure fields, and it can be hard to remember that forty years ago systems theory had the same cachet that more recently gathered around fractals and chaos theory. Born of a fusion between ecology, cybernetics, and a current in contemporary philosophy best displayed in Jan Smuts’ Holism and Evolution, systems theory argued that complex systems — all complex systems – shared certain distinctive traits and behaviors, so that insights gained in one field of study could be applied to phenomena in completely different fields that shared a common degree of complexity.

It had its weaknesses, to be sure, but on the whole, systems theory did exactly what theories are supposed to do – it provided a useful toolkit for making sense of part of the universe of human experience, posed plenty of fruitful questions for research, and proved useful in a sizable range of practical applications. As popular theories sometimes do, though, it became associated with a position in the cultural struggles of the time, and as some particularly unfortunate theories do, it got turned into a vehicle for a group of intellectuals who craved power. Once that happened, systems theory became another casualty of Weishaupt’s Fallacy.

Those of my readers who don’t pay attention to conspiracy theory may not recognize the name of Adam Weishaupt; those who do pay attention to conspiracy theory probably “know” a great deal about him that doesn’t happen to be true. He was a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria in the second half of the eighteenth century, and he found himself in an awkward position between the exciting new intellectual adventures coming out of Paris and the less than exciting intellectual climate in conservative, Catholic Bavaria. In 1776, he and four of his grad students founded a private society for enthusiasts of the new Enlightenment thought; they went through several different names for their club before finally settling on one that stuck: the Bavarian Illuminati.

Yes, those Bavarian Illuminati.

There were a fair number of people interested in avant-garde ideas in and around Bavaria just then, and. before too long, the Illuminati had several hundred members. This gave Weishaupt and his inner circle some grandiose notions about where all this might lead. Pretty soon, they hoped,all the movers and shakers in Bavaria – not to mention the other microkingdoms into which Germany was divided at that time – would join the Illuminati and stuff their heads full of Voltaire and Rousseau, and then the whole country would become, well, illuminated.

They were still telling themselves that when the Bavarian government launched a series of police raids that broke the back of the organization. Weishaupt got out of Bavaria in time, but many of his fellow Illuminati were not so lucky, and a great deal of secret paperwork got scooped up by the police and published in lavish tell-all books that quickly became bestsellers all over Europe. That was the end of the Illuminati, but not of their reputation; reactionaries found that blaming the Illuminati for everything made great copy, not least because they weren’t around any more and so could be redefined with impunity – liberal, conservative, Marxist, capitalist, evil space lizards, you name it.

The problem with Professor Weishaupt’s fantasy of an illuminated Bavaria was a bit of bad logic that has been faithfully repeated by intellectuals seeking power ever since: the belief, as sincere as it is silly, that if you have the right ideas, you are by definition smarter than the system you are trying to control. That’s Weishaupt’s Fallacy. Because Weishaupt and his fellow Illuminati were convinced that the conservative forces in Bavaria were a bunch of clueless boors, they were totally unprepared for the counterblow that followed once the Bavarian government figured out who the Illuminati were and what they were after.

For a more recent example, consider the rise and fall of the neoconservative movement, which stormed into power in the United States in 2000 boldly proclaiming the arrival of a “new American century,” and proceeded to squander what remained of America’s wealth and global reputation in a series of foreign and domestic policy blunders that have set impressive new standards for political fecklessness. The neoconservatives were convinced that they understood the world better than anybody else. That conviction was the single most potent factor behind their failure; when mainstream conservatives (not to mention everybody else!) tried to warn them where their fantasies of remaking the Middle East in America’s image would inevitably end, the neoconservatives snorted in derision and marched straight on into the disaster they were making for themselves, and of course for the rest of us as well.

Systems theory was a victim of the same fallacy. The systems movement, to coin a label for the heterogeneous group of thinkers and policy wonks that made systems theory its banner, had ambitions no less audacious than the neoconservatives, though aimed in a completely different direction. Their dream was world systems management. Such leading figures in the movement as Jay Forrester of MIT and Aurelio Peccei of the Club of Rome agreed that humanity’s impact on the planet had become so great that methods devised for engineering and corporate management – in which, not coincidentally, they were expert – had to be put to work to manage the entire world.

The study that led to the 1973 publication of The Limits to Growth was one product of this movement. Sponsored by Peccei’s Club of Rome and carried out by a team led by one of Forrester’s former Ph.D. students, it applied systems theory to the task of making sense of the future, and succeeded remarkably well. As Graham Turner’s study “A Comparison Of The Limits to Growth With Thirty Years of Reality” (CSIRO, 2008) points out, the original study’s baseline “Standard Run” scenario matches the observed reality of the last three and a half decades far more exactly than rival scenarios.

It’s not often remembered, though, that the Club of Rome followed up The Limits to Growth with a series of further studies, all basically arguing that the problems outlined in the original study could be solved by planetary management on the part of a systems-savvy elite. The same notions can be found in dozens of similar books from the same era – indeed, it’s hard to think of a systems thinker with any public presence in the 1970s who didn’t publish at least one book proposing some kind of worldwide systems management as the only alternative to a very messy future.

It’s only fair to stress the role that idealism and the best intentions played in all this. Still, the political dimensions shouldn’t be ignored. Forrester, Peccei, and their many allies were, among other things, suggesting that a great deal of effective power be given to them, or to people who shared their values and goals. Since the systems movement was by no means politically neutral – quite the contrary, it aligned itself forcefully with specific ideological positions in the fractured politics of the decade – that suggestion was bound to evoke a forceful response from the entire range of opposing interests.

The Reagan revolution of 1980 saw the opposition seize the upper hand, and the systems movement was among the big losers. Hardball politics have always played a significant role in public funding of research in America, so it should have come as no surprise when Reagan’s appointees all but shut off the flow of government grants into the entire range of initiatives that had gathered around the systems theory approach. From appropriate tech to alternative medicine to systems theory itself, entire disciplines found themselves squeezed out of the government feed trough, while scholars who pursued research that could be used against the systems agenda reaped the benefits of that stance. Clobbered in its most vulnerable spot – the pocketbook – the systems movement collapsed in short order.

What made this implosion all the more ironic is that a systems analysis of the systems movement itself, and its relationship to the wider society, might have provided a useful warning. Very few of the newborn institutions in the systems movement were self-funding; from prestigious think tanks to neighborhood energy-conservation schemes, most of them subsisted on government grants, and thus were in the awkward position of depending on the social structures they hoped to overturn. That those structures could respond homeostatically to oppose their efforts might, one would think, be obvious to people who were used to the strange loops and unintended consequences that pervade complex systems.

Still, Weishaupt’s Fallacy placed a massive barrier in the way of such a realization. Read books by many of the would-be global managers of the 1970s and you can very nearly count on being bowled over by the scent of intellectual arrogance. The possibility that the system they hoped to manage might, in effect, have been more clever than they were probably crossed very few minds. Yet that’s how things turned out; at the end of the day, the complex system that was American society had reacted, exactly as systems theory would predict, to neutralize a force that threatened to push it out of its preferred state.

The Juice Media has an interesting debate between Al Gore and Lord Monckton about global warming – Climate Coup – Lord Monckton rap battles Al Gore – Rap News.

Jamais at Open The Future has a post on the second biggest contributor to global warming – “black carbon” – None More Black.

An aerosol known as “black carbon,” a primary component in soot, looks to be a key driver of anthropogenic global warming in tropical locations around the world — most notably, in the Himalayan region.

…new research, by NASA’s William Lau and collaborators, reinforces with detailed numerical analysis what earlier studies suggest: that soot and dust contribute as much (or more) to atmospheric warming in the Himalayas as greenhouse gases. This warming fuels the melting of glaciers and could threaten fresh water resources in a region that is home to more than a billion people.

[…] Nicknamed the “Third Pole”, the region in fact holds the third largest amount of stored water on the planet beyond the North and South Poles. But since the early 1960s, the acreage covered by Himalayan glaciers has declined by over 20 percent. Some Himalayan glaciers are melting so rapidly, some scientists postulate, that they may vanish by mid-century if trends persist. Climatologists have generally blamed the build-up of greenhouse gases for the retreat, but Lau’s work suggests that may not be the complete story.

He has produced new evidence suggesting that an “elevated heat pump” process is fueling the loss of ice, driven by airborne dust and soot particles absorbing the sun’s heat and warming the local atmosphere and land surface.

Globally, black carbon looks to be the second most-important warming agent after CO2.

Here’s the twist: much of the production of black carbon comes from the combustion of biofuels and diesel, the two leading “greener” fuel technologies.

Aerosols last for months in the atmosphere, as opposed to the decades that greenhouse gases can last. This is good, as it means that policies that reduce the production of black carbon can start showing positive results in a matter of weeks.

InfranetLab has an interesting post on the changing geography (and fish-ography) of the east African lake system – Wet Borders: Microslums and Meanders.

Migingo Island, home to some 300 residents, sits precariously within Lake Victoria along the watery border of Uganda and Kenya. Its undetermined origins declare that either: a) two Kenyan fisherman settled there in 1991, or b) a Ugandan fisherman also claimed to have settled there in an abandoned house in 2004. Regardless, since that time, the place has really taken off – becoming what one journalist called a microslum. Each successive year that the level of Lake Victoria decreased, the originally rocky tip exposed greater landmass to occupy. So, complicating matters is Lake Victoria’s rapidly receding lake. But why here, why such a precious outpost?

Its all about the perch, Nile perch. Fishing in Lake Victoria, one of the largest bodies of fresh water, is essential to some of the 30 million Africans that live within its reach. Nile perch was introduced here in the 1950s and has risen to become an essential part of the economy of Lake Victoria’s fishery. (The perch was so successful in rejuvenating the fishing economy here that it decimated nearly 350 native fish species to rise to the top of the chain.) This success means that in recent years the Nile perch populations have dwindled and many native species are thought to be recovering. But really the whole Nile perch story, which in a Jared Diamond-esque way utlimately leads to weapons, is epic enough to be a film in its own right.

Fishing supports an export industry in East Africa whose value is estimated at US$250 million annually. And the convenience of Migingo Island in this tightening economy (and shrinking ecology) has placed extreme presue on the island, with Ugandan police patrolling the waters and intercepting catch from Kenyan fisherman. A claim by several locals involved in the dispute has even lobbied that the fish are Kenyan because of which side of the border they breed on. Another strange claim is that the land belongs to Kenya but the water belongs to Uganda. And the dispute continues as on the island itself Ugandans and Kenyans exist within different ‘neighborhoods’ on this tiny acre of rock.

Kiashu at GWAG has a simple and easy to understand of the problem with nuclear power – Nukes are stupid.

“Hey, we’ve got a problem with our energy.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, we’re relying on fossil fuels. We’re burning a finite resource, it’s not like iron or something that we can recycle, once we burn it, it’s gone.”

“Hey, I’ve got the solution!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah! We’ll change to burning another finite resource!”

“Brilliant!”

“Even better, this finite resource is really hard to burn well and safely, so we’ll need the best and most conscientious engineers and inspection regime ever just to make sure hundreds of thousands of people don’t get killed.”

“Awesome! But isn’t there a problem with waste, which no-one in the world has ever managed to permanently store safely?”

“There is that. But some people have plans for breeder reactors. These take ordinary depleted uranium and turn it into plutonium – they make new fuel! So we’d end up with at least one hundred times more fuel than we have now.”

“But I thought that breeder reactors were unsafe and didn’t produce very much fuel anyway?”

“That’s all just greenie propaganda!”

“Not actual facts, then?”

“Okay it’s facts, but the new designs will be safe and efficient, honest!”

“Won’t there still be deadly waste, though?”

“Sure! But on the other hand, the waste from the burning process is also good to make weapons with, weapons which can kill millions in an instant. In an age of failing states, that’s just what we need!”

“Sounds great! When can we start?”

“Well, first we must get official approval, and push the official approval over the protests of the public, for some reason those idiots are against it.”

“Can’t think why.”

I believe in democracy. That’s why I propose that people should get to vote on what power source they want in their backyard. Because in the end, whether it’s objectively a good or bad idea, if that’s what the people want then they should get it. For some reason, those in favour of nuclear and fossil fuels never support my idea for a vote. I wonder why?

Austria, 1978 – in a referendum the Austrians voted 50.5% against nuclear power. They had 1 reactor under construction, plans to finish it off were not set aside until after Chernobyl.

Sweden, 1980: 12 reactors, they voted to “keep the 12 reactors in operation, but to shut them down at a later date by taking into consideration the welfare of the country and its economic development and the supply and demand of power in Sweden.” They have closed down 2. Basically they built up other sources and found they enjoyed all that extra electricity (they now have about 25,000kWh per capita annually, twice the US and three times Germany or Denmark).

Italy, 1987 – in a referendum the people voted to abolish nuclear power in their country, closing the three power plants which had in any case been closed since Chernobyl. They’re still closed, but Italy does not scruple to buy nuclear-generated electricity from France.

Japan, Maki, 1996 – residents of the town voted 60% to refuse land for building a reactor. Plans to build it there were dropped.

Taiwan, Yenliao, 1994 – residents voted 96.2% against two reactors in their region. Plans to build them there were dropped.

Switzerland has had many referenda on nuclear energy, with all voting to keep it or not phase it out.

Thus, it can be fairly said that of all the countries and regions in the world where citizens have been given a choice about nuclear energy, only the Swiss have chosen to have it. All the others given a choice have rejected it. But most countries have never bothered to ask their citizens. I wonder why?

AP has an article on Monsanto’s business practices – Monsanto seed business role revealed.

Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.’s business practices reveal how the world’s biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.

With Monsanto’s patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.

Declining competition in the seed business could lead to price hikes that ripple out to every family’s dinner table. That’s because the corn flakes you had for breakfast, soda you drank at lunch and beef stew you ate for dinner likely were produced from crops grown with Monsanto’s patented genes.

Monsanto’s methods are spelled out in a series of confidential commercial licensing agreements obtained by the AP. The contracts, as long as 30 pages, include basic terms for the selling of engineered crops resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, along with shorter supplementary agreements that address new Monsanto traits or other contract amendments.

The company has used the agreements to spread its technology — giving some 200 smaller companies the right to insert Monsanto’s genes in their separate strains of corn and soybean plants. But, the AP found, access to Monsanto’s genes comes at a cost, and with plenty of strings attached.

For example, one contract provision bans independent companies from breeding plants that contain both Monsanto’s genes and the genes of any of its competitors, unless Monsanto gives prior written permission — giving Monsanto the ability to effectively lock out competitors from inserting their patented traits into the vast share of U.S. crops that already contain Monsanto’s genes.

Monsanto’s business strategies and licensing agreements are being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice and at least two state attorneys general, who are trying to determine if the practices violate U.S. antitrust laws. The practices also are at the heart of civil antitrust suits filed against Monsanto by its competitors, including a 2004 suit filed by Syngenta AG that was settled with an agreement and ongoing litigation filed this summer by DuPont in response to a Monsanto lawsuit.

PSFK has a post on a new bike wheel design from MIT – MIT’s ‘Copenhagen Wheel’ Revolutionizes Biking

MIT researchers have debuted the ‘Copenhagen Wheel‘ — a revolutionary new bicycle wheel that uses technology to transform any bicycle into a platform for individual behavioral change. The ‘Wheel’ is revolutionary because it allows riders to collect, track, and share data, helping them to visualize the impact their biking has on their local environment, personal health, and social life every time they pedal.

The ‘Wheel’ uses Bluetooth, kinetic energy, sensors, and mobile phones to achieve the following:

* Storing kinetic energy created when a rider brakes for later use when a rider is traveling uphill or when traveling long distances
* Uses a series of sensors and Bluetooth to connect to smart phones, which can be mounted on the handlebars, to monitor speed and distance, directions, proximity of fellow friends riding and even air pollution data
* Collects ‘Green Miles’ — similar to frequent flier miles — based on behavior beneficial to the environment

As described by Assaf Biderman, associate director of the ‘Copenhagen Wheel,’ the project is part of a move towards the use of connected and smart infrastructure to make personal and community life better:

“The Copenhagen Wheel is part of a more general trend: that of inserting intelligence in our everyday objects and of creating a smart support infrastructure around ourselves for everyday life. For example, the Wheel has a smart lock: if somebody tries to steal it, it goes into a mode where the brake regenerates the maximum amount of power, and sends you a text message. So in the worst case scenario the thief will have charged your batteries before you get back your bike.”

The City of Copenhagen is currently considering placing the first order and even thinking of using bicycles retrofitted with the Copenhagen Wheel to replace city employee cars as part of the City’s goal to become the world’s first carbon-neutral capital by 2025.

As a multi-year victim of the British transport system I find the idea of clean, new fast trains running on UK tracks almost inconceivable – but as its not April 1st I’ll assume this story from Inhabitat is true – High-Speed Javelin Trains Arrive in the UK.

This week the UK joined the ranks of many other European countries as it unveiled its first domestic high-speed rail service. The 140 mph Japanese-built Javelin trains will be slightly more expensive to ride than their slow-poke counterparts, but they will drastically cut down on journey times.

For example, a train ride from London to Ramsgate is reduced from 81 minutes to half an hour, and an Ashford to London trip is cut down from over an hour to 37 minutes. Such time-saving trips come at a price–a 7.3% increase in the case of some off-peak fares. But hopefully, the short trips times will still be attractive enough to dissuade commuters from driving.

Eventually, Britain’s high-speed rail network will expand even further. Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently announced a $32 billion investment in railway infrastructure, and a North-South high-speed rail network is planned in the coming years.

Technology Review has an article on solar powered desalination in Canada – Sun-Assisted Desalination.

A Canadian startup has built a pilot desalination plant in Vancouver that uses a quarter of the energy of conventional plants to remove salt from seawater. The process relies on concentration gradients, and the natural tendency of sodium and chloride ions–the key components of salt–to flow from higher to lower salinity concentrations. If the system can be scaled up it could offer a cheaper way to bring drinking water to the planet’s most parched regions while leaving behind a much lower carbon footprint than other desalination methods.

“We’ve taken it from a benchtop prototype to a fully functional seawater pilot plant,” says inventor Ben Sparrow, a mechanical engineer who established Saltworks Technologies in 2008 to commercialize the process. “The plant is currently running on real seawater, and we’re in the final stage of expanding it to a capacity of 1,000 liters a day.”

Today most desalination plants are based on one of two approaches. One is distillation through an evaporation-condensation cycle, and the other is membrane filtration through reverse osmosis. But both options are energy-intensive and costly.

Saltworks takes a completely different approach based on the principles of ionic exchange. The process begins with the creation of a reservoir of seawater that is evaporated until its salt concentration rises from 3.5 percent to 18 percent or higher.

The evaporation is done in one of two ways: either the seawater is sprayed into a shallow pond exposed to sunlight and dry ambient air, or seawater is kept in a large tower that’s exposed to waste heat from a neighboring industrial facility. The second approach is used in the commercial-scale plant. The concentrated water is then pumped at low pressure into the company’s desalting unit along with three separated streams of regular seawater. At this point the most energy-intensive part of the process is already over.

George Monbiot has a look at a talk by US energy secretary, Steven Chu, at the Copenhagen conference – US left behind in technological race to fight climate change.

I have just been watching the tragic sight of a fallen giant flailing around on its back like a beetle, desperately trying to turn itself over.

The occasion was a speech by the US secretary of energy, Steven Chu. He is, of course, a Nobel physicist, brilliant, modest, likeable, a delightful contrast to the thugs employed by the previous administration. But his speech was, in the true sense of the word, pathetic: it moved me to pity.

Yesterday afternoon in Copenhagen – where the UN climate talks are entering their second week – Professor Chu unveiled what would have been a series of inspiring innovations, had he made this speech 15 years ago. Barely suppressing his excitement, he told us the US has discovered there is great potential for making fridges more efficient, and that the same principle could even be extended to lighting, heating and whole buildings. The Department of Energy is so thrilled by this discovery that it has launched a programme to retrofit homes in the US, on which it will spend $400m a year.

To put this in perspective, four years ago the German government announced it would spend the equivalent of $1.6bn a year on the same job: as a result every house in Germany should be airtight and well insulated by 2025. The US has about 110m households; Germany has roughly 37m, and German homes were more energy-efficient in the first place. This $400m is a drop in the ocean.

Professor Chu went on to explain two amazing new discoveries: a camera which can see how much heat is leaking from your home and a meter which allows you to audit your own energy use. Perhaps thermal imaging cameras and energy monitors seem new and exciting in the US, but on this side of the Atlantic, though their full potential is still a long way from being realised, they’ve been familiar for more than a decade.

He thrilled us with another US innovation, a technology called pumped storage: water can be pumped up a hill when electricity is cheap and released when it’s expensive. The UK started building its first pumped storage plant, Dinorwig, in 1974. Then he told us about a radical system for heating buildings by extracting heat from water: this must have been the one that the Royal Festival Hall used in 1951.

I’m sure these technologies have in fact been deployed for years in parts of the US. My point is that Chu appeared to believe that they represent the cutting edge of both technology and public policy.

The energy secretary explained that the US is now making “a very big investment” in developing and testing new components for wind turbines. The “very big investment” is $70m, which is what the US spends on subsidies and forgoes in tax breaks for fossil fuels every two days.

As if to hammer home the point that the Department of Energy seems to be stuck in a time-warp, and as if to highlight the sad decline of technological innovation in the US, Chu finished his talk with a disquisition on the beauty of the earth as seen by the Apollo astronauts.

What has happened to the great pioneering nation, the economic superpower which once drove innovation everywhere? How did it end up so far behind much smaller economies in boring old Europe? How come, when the rest of the developed world has moved on, it suddenly looks like a relic of the Soviet Union, with filthy, inefficient industries, vast opencast coal mines and cars and appliances which belong in the 1950s.

The SMH also has a bit of a rant by Monbiot – The rapacious will not give up without a fight

The Copenhagen climate summit is a battle to redefine humanity.

This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself.

The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. The summit’s premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accommodation. No longer may we live without restraint, in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.

This is a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right.

The angry men cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. They accuse those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but know at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. …

Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means.

There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Economic growth is the magic formula that allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.

While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow.

Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped.

Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it’s only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil.

We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet.

For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators are still not serious, even about climate change. There’s another great unmentionable here: supply. Most of the nation states tussling at Copenhagen have two fossil-fuel policies. One is to minimise demand, by encouraging us to reduce our consumption.

The other is to maximise supply, by encouraging companies to extract as much from the ground as they can.

We know, from the papers published in Nature in April, that we can use a maximum of 60 per cent of current reserves of coal, oil and gas if the average global temperature is not to rise by more than 2 degrees. We can burn much less if, as many poorer countries now insist, we seek to prevent the temperature from rising by more than 1.5 degrees. We know that capture and storage will dispose of just a small fraction of the carbon in these fuels.

There are two obvious conclusions: governments must decide which existing reserves of fossil fuel are to be left in the ground, and they must introduce a global moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Neither of these proposals has even been mooted for discussion.

And to close, the ABC has the long awaited debate between Monbiot and Australian climate pseudo-scientist Ian Plimer (who spends an amazing amount of time avoiding answering any direct question – maybe he used to be a politician) – Plimer, Monbiot cross swords in climate debate.

(embedded video removed as I can’t make it stop playing automatically)

The Clean Energy Council reports that voters realise that renewable power is far superior to the nuclear alternative – Renewables trounce nuclear in Newspoll.

A Newspoll survey commissioned by the Clean Energy Council (CEC) has shown overwhelming public support for the government to focus its support on renewable energy – such as solar and wind – over nuclear power.

Given a choice between supporting the development of renewable energy sources and nuclear power, four out of every five people polled favoured the government giving greater priority to the development of renewables.

CEC chief executive Matthew Warren said the results show Australians want to see the development of renewable energy ahead of contentious options like nuclear.
“This confirms what we have thought for some time – you need to exhaust every other alternative before talking about nuclear energy as a climate change solution for Australia. The answers in this poll show that some people may express support for nuclear power in principle, but four out of every five people would prefer to see an effective renewable energy strategy as a priority.

“We need to see what renewable technologies can achieve over the next decade. Renewables have enormous potential, but we still have a lot of work to do to find out how much energy they can deliver and at what cost,” he said.