Long-run rises have been most pronounced for commodities that are “in the ground”, like minerals and natural gas. Energy commodities especially have boomed, soaring by roughly 300% since 1950. Prices of precious metals have also risen, as have industrial ingredients like iron ore. In contrast, prices for resources that can be grown have trended downwards (see chart). The inflation-adjusted prices of rice, corn and wheat are lower now than they were in 1950. Although the global population is 2.8 times above its 1950 level, world grain production is 3.6 times higher.
Most of Australia's coal reserves will have to be left unburned if the world is to avoid catastrophic global warming, according to a major new report from the federal government's Climate Commission.
The report puts the key science advisory body on a collision course with some of the nation's biggest export industries, and marks the first time a government agency has endorsed calls for fossil fuel industries to be phased out because of their contribution to climate change.
Its findings mean that most of Australia's known coal, oil and gas reserves – many of which are already subject to minerals production licences held by companies such as BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto – must somehow be left alone if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change.
The Climate Commission acknowledged its conclusions were "sobering" and that the potential for economic disruption could be serious, but said there was no alternative if the world was to avoid dangerous climate change.
"How people react to this is up to the policymakers and governments, as well as investors," said Professor Lesley Hughes, co-author of the report The Critical Decade 2013 – Climate change science, risks and responses, to be released on Monday.
"It isn't our job to reconcile the politics of this with the science," she said. "We are simply presenting the facts as best we know them. Just because the facts may be unpalatable to some people doesn't make them any less important."
I was amused to see that sales of George Orwell's "1984" are up in the aftermath of the news about the NSA's PRISM program - Orwell's 1984 sales skyrocket post-US spy scandal. Given that Apple are part of the program it makes their long ago advertisements for the Mac kind of entertaining too (in a bleak way).
Big brother is watching -- sales of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 have skyrocketed in the wake of revelations of US government surveillance. The centennial edition of the novel surged 7005 per cent on Amazon, according to the online retailer's Mover and Shakers in Books page that monitors biggest gainers in sales rank compared to 24 hours ago.
Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute, cuts through the noise and identifies 12 technologies that could drive truly massive economic transformations and disruptions in the coming years. The report also looks at exactly how these technologies could change our world, as well as their benefits and challenges, and offers guidelines to help leaders from businesses and other institutions respond.
We estimate that, together, applications of the 12 technologies discussed in the report could have a potential economic impact between $14 trillion and $33 trillion a year in 2025. This estimate is neither predictive nor comprehensive. It is based on an in-depth analysis of key potential applications and the value they could create in a number of ways, including the consumer surplus that arises from better products, lower prices, a cleaner environment, and better health.
Google is known for putting its resources into some novel technologies like self-driving cars and wearable computing devices. Now, the Web giant is moving into yet another field—wind power.
After previously investing in the company, Google has agreed to acquire Alameda, Calif.-based green energy startup Makani Power. ...
Makani, which takes its name from the Hawaiian word for breeze, develops airborne wind turbines that are mounted on self-piloting flying wings tethered to the ground like a kite. Google will bring the Makani team into its secret "moonshot" research lab Google X, which produced Google Glass. "This formalizes a long and productive relationship between our two companies, and will provide Makani with the resources to accelerate our work to make wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels.
In a statement to PCMag on Thursday, Google confirmed the acquisition and said it's eager to bring Makani on board. "Creating clean energy is one of the most pressing issues facing the world, and Google for years has been interested in helping to solve this problem," Google X Director Astro Teller, said in the statement. "Makani Power's technology has opened the door to a radical new approach to wind energy. They've turned a technology that today involves hundreds of tons of steel and precious open space into a problem that can be solved with really intelligent software. We're looking forward to bringing them into Google[x]."
Makani said the timing of the acquisition "couldn't be better" since its so-called Wing 7 kite-power prototype just completed its first ever fully autonomous flight. The startup has said its wing-shaped high-altitude kite design can produce 10 times more energy than conventional turbines.
It was interesting that Glenn Greenwald's revelations in The Guardian about the NSA's "PRISM" total surveillance program popped up around the same time that the trial of Bradley Manning began (with the firestorm of coverage in the mainstream media prompting Cryptogon to wonder why they've piped up all of a sudden - by some random coincidence the Bilderberg conference is on at the moment - even "Enemy of the State" - one of my favourite movies - was on TV here this weekend).
On December 20, 2002, a Senate Intelligence Committee that included Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today one of the most vociferous critics of the so-called "surveillance state," came to the following conclusion in its official report on the mistakes that led to 9/11: The National Security Agency had harmed U.S. counterterrorism efforts that might have prevented that terrible day because of the agency's "failure to address modern communications technology aggressively."
The report, a joint effort of the Senate committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, blamed "NSA's cautious approach to any collection of intelligence relating to activities in the United States, and insufficient collaboration between NSA and the FBI regarding the potential for terrorist attacks within the United States."
The Senate-House report said the NSA simply could not keep up with the explosion of information technology. "Only a tiny fraction" of the NSA's 650 million daily intercepts worldwide "are actually ever reviewed by humans, and much of what is collected gets lost in the deluge of data," the report said. In interviews at the time, then-NSA Director Michael Hayden explained why: The NSA, originally authorized to conduct monitoring only overseas, was effectively a Cold War dinosaur that was going "deaf" since its main mission of tracking "signals intelligence," known as Sigint, from the Soviet Union had ended.
"We have gone from chasing the telecommunications structure of a slow-moving, technologically inferior, resource-poor nation-state--and we could do that pretty well - to chasing a communications structure in which an al-Qaida member can go into a storefront in Istanbul and buy for $100 a communications device that is absolutely cutting edge, and for which he has had to make no investment in its development. That's what we've got to deal with," Hayden told me in an interview in mid-2002.
In congressional testimony leading up to that critical Senate-House report, Hayden explained the NSA had gone from tracking a relatively small number of Soviet communications pipelines -- microwave transmissions, for example, from Moscow to various ICBM bases -- to trying to keep up with billions of conversations on phones and emails in a world in which technological borders had been erased, and much of this traffic was now being routed through the United States. This huge new challenge was coming at a time when the super-secret agency had "downsized about a third of its manpower and about the same proportion of its budget in the '90s," the era of the so-called post-Cold War peace dividend, Hayden said in his testimony. "That's the same decade when mobile cell phones increased from 16 million to 741 million--an increase of 50 times. That's the same decade when Internet users went from about four to 361 million."
These perceived deficiencies, and the NSA's aggressive efforts to redress them since then, make up the real backdrop to the latest scandal that has engulfed Washington, this time over what appears to be a massive infringement of American civil liberties. And despite the outrage voiced by senators such as Wyden and other critics, the truth about what the NSA and intelligence and investigative community is doing is far more complex than the rhetoric might lead you to believe.
Most important of all, almost the entire U.S. government has been on board in promoting it.
After many struggles and failures in the last decade, the NSA did finally come up with new approaches to keeping up with the traffic. One such approach was the NSA's "PRISM" program, disclosed Thursday by The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper. The newspapers revealed that the NSA and FBI have set up a program to tap directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, "extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track one target or trace a whole network of associates," as the Post wrote. The program was reportedly set up in cooperation with the major companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.
Like many people around the world, I’ve spent the last 48 hours tracking, reading, watching, refreshing and barely sleeping, as a torrent of stories of total surveillance run by the National Security Agency have come to light through the US journalist Glenn Greenwald, published in The Guardian.
The leaks revealed total blanket phone call metadata (origin, length of calls, networks and connections) by the NSA, followed by the voluntary turning-over of mass amounts of data by private internet service providers and social media corporations — including Microsoft, Google, Skype and Twitter. Then came news that UK’s Government Communications Headquarters may have been illegal cribbing such data for its own ends. Finally, on the weekend, the leaker revealed himself, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, a systems operations operator for Booz Allen Hamilton and Dell, to whom the NSA subcontracted various tasks.
Snowden bobbed up three weeks after leaving Booz Allen Hamilton with 41 carefully chosen pages of dynamite memos. He holed up in Hong Kong, while releasing the memos to people he trusted. He initially approached The Washington Post, but they appear to have been furiously hedging their bets, as have all mainstream US media. He made the decision to reveal his own identity, in order that people could understand that a very ordinary — in the best sense of the word — person was behind it, and to make the intolerable nature of what was revealed to him clear.
The facts are clear enough: while accessing the content of phone calls on old tech lines is protected by limiting laws, no such limit holds on the ISP/social media giants, if they choose to comply with the government. Clients of these services — i.e. everyone — have already signed away their rights, in those huge documents you click “accept” to without reading. The NSA’s mega-data collection centre in Bluffdale Utah has come on stream, and it can collect and store all communicated data for decades. The files are multi-dimensionally searchable by programmes that learn as they go. The idea that the process will be drowned in cat videos is consoling and fanciful.
The PRISM programme represents the most far-reaching extension of power into the very texture and fabric of everyday life in history. Those on the hacker/cypherpunk side of things have realised for some years, many years, that this process was under way. Some of us have been aware of it for a couple of years. Now it has become general knowledge.
The policy and the practice is an extension and expansion by the Obama administration of a process begun in the Bush years, and with various antecedents, from the days when the internet began to vastly expand, carried by the web, in the early 90s. Snowden, who has worked in the NSA purview since 2009, has said that his actions, and the delay in them, arose in part from waiting to see if Barack Obama would take some action on the matter — and then a decisive disappointment when he didn’t.
What appears to have been a passivity on the part of Obama with regard to a practice in place changes the meaning and character of his presidency substantially. In writing about him over the years, I’ve noted that any belief that he would substantially alter the projection of US power was an illusion; any candidate was applying for a dual position of President and emperor; supporting the former did not preclude attacking the latter’s policies.
But of course that has always been, to some degree, a false dichotomy. The empire reaches back into the Republic. With PRISM, that process is totalising; the space of the Republic has been squeezed to near-zero. To the surprise of many, that does not seem to have overly disconcerted the US public, with support for the NSA’s policies polling at 56% to 41%. Not too much should be made of that — the US has become such a news desert in many areas that many people are at this stage, simply not aware of the breadth of PRISM and other programmes.
But the revelation of these programmes has thrown the US state into disarray, and had the same effect on its institutional politics. The state elite’s determination to push into every area of life is driven not merely by a desire to avoid terror attacks of the latter type, but in response to challenges from states such as China, which highlight their vestigial constitutional limits, and the general expansion and extension of technical power and possibility, from standard high-tech to biological engineering.
What this historical process should prompt is a renegotiation of state and social power on a global scale. What it is prompting instead is a paradoxical attempt by states to extend their power further into everyday life than they hitherto been, just as that process becomes one that is unwinnable, save by explicit and visible tyranny. In the meantime, it is stretching state power to the point where its legitimacy cracks in the middle. Since that middle runs through the heart of decent people, loyal to their society and humanity, it produces whistleblowers willing to take the ultimate risk.
The ramifications of this are manifold, to be explored in these pages by many writers in the weeks to come. But for the moment one crucial point needs to be made: this process is ramrodding one of the most serious recombinations of politics in recent decades, or perhaps longer. This is happening most substantially in the imperial centre of the US — now little more than a contradiction with a flag — but it will spread elsewhere.
On the Left it is happening in reasonably orderly fashion, along old faultlines — between a core, statist Left which cleaves ever closer to an unlimited national security state, and a dissident Left which has always resisted it. Such centre-left support for the national security state draws, distortedly, on the communalist core of Leftism — the idea that standing for the nation is standing for the collective, no matter how distorted. Thus California leftists like Senator Dianne Feinstein have no problem finding themselves aligned with John McCain, Bill Kristol and a whole bunch of others, in what is basically a centrist, totalising, national security party. The dissident Left can detach from its partial attachment to that Left, without too much confusion.
Meanwhile on the Right, they’re going f-cking nuts. I say that with no more than a dash of schadenfreude — you take your pleasures where you find them — but more as an analysis of what’s likely to happen. That the Republican Party would split on this issue is unsurprising; that it would split down the middle of its Tea Party/libertarian Right is an extraordinary thing to behold.
Thus Rand Paul is now promoting a Supreme Court challenge to the NSA in such a way that would gain the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, the CounterPunch left, and hundreds of other groupings. The national security Right is now arguing that they will have to marshal a figure like Ted Cruz to challenge Rand Paul in the nominations.
Apple has released its environmental report and, among other interesting things, it now states that is uses 100% renewable energy for its data centers and 75% for its needs overall, up from 35% in 2010. The end goal is 100% renewable energy use for all of the company's energy needs. Its likely that not all that clean energy will not be produced on site, Apple won't turn into a energy utility company, but the equivalent amount would be purchased from other sources and used on the grid, so the end result would be the same (energy is fungible, after all).
Of particular interest is the Maiden, North Carolina, data center (which mostly hosts iCloud stuff). It was designed from the ground up to be very energy efficiency and has earned LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
Apple writes:
In 2012, we completed construction on the nation’s largest end user–owned, onsite solar photovoltaic array on land surrounding the data center. This 100-acre, 20-megawatt (MW) facility has an annual production capacity of 42 million kWh of clean, low-carbon, renewable energy. And we’re currently building a second 20-MW solar photovoltaic facility on nearby land that should be operational in late 2013. In addition, we’ve built an onsite 10-MW fuel cell installation that uses directed biogas and provides more than 83 million kWh of 24/7 baseload renewable energy annually — it’s the largest non-utility fuel cell installation operating anywhere in the country. All told, Apple will be producing enough onsite renewable energy — 167 million kWh — to power the equivalent of 17,600 homes for one year.* These power sources are connected to the local energy grid and not only displace other dirtier forms of electricity that otherwise would have been used, but their environmental benefits are used only by Apple and are in addition to any locally mandated renewable energy requirements.
The SMH has an article opining that prospects for US shale oil production are fading - US shale boom starts to fade.
For the past three years, the boom in the US shale oil industry has outstripped all expectations. Production surged far faster than any forecasts; drillers raced to secure space in new pipelines to get their crude to market. Now, at the periphery, that may be changing - at least for a while.
News from two of the country's less developed shale plays in Colorado and Ohio last week offer a reality check for the wave of euphoria that has washed across the industry. The stumbles mark a break from the past few years, when nearly every new project was an overnight success and output grew and grew.
On Thursday, Ohio, home to the Utica shale, finally released annual data on 2012 production that showed the state pumped less than 700,000 barrels of oil from its shale wells -- barely enough to fill a small oil tanker. North Dakota's Bakken shale pumps more than that every day. Even state officials said it the result was "lower than initially estimated."
The day before, NuStar Energy LP had said it would shelve a plan to reverse a pair of underused refined products pipelines to ship crude from Colorado's Niobrara shale oil play to Texas. It failed, twice, to garner enough commitments from potential customers to justify investing in the conversion. Neither development was a surprise to industry experts, and both were likely affected by extenuating circumstances.
A growing preference for rail shipments likely dimmed interest in long-term commitments to use NuStar's pipeline. Ohio's shale may yet offer up large volumes of liquid gas and condensate, if drillers can find new ways to coax it out.
Yet taken together they offered a sign that the flush of enthusiasm and rush of investment that piled into shale fields from one coast to the other has hit a curve.
While the basic technologies of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling was enough to coax an unexpected gusher of oil from shale rock in many regions, these more challenging seams may require incremental innovation to unlock.
In case you didn’t catch it, investment house Credit Suisse had a wonderfully informative conference call for their clients last week on how they see the future of the shale revolution that has engulfed the oil patch in the last decade and become hyper-active especially in the last several years.
Among the bank’s conclusions: shale is a vital component of current US production which is growing at a huge clip — CS sees as much as 10 million b/d of US oil production in the next several years, up from 6.5 million b/d last year. CS also noted consistently improving well results from big plays such as the Permian Basin in West Texas and Bakken Shale in North Dakota.
Moreover, it’s not only the upstream that is exploding, but also companies that supply the technologies to eke out more oil in less time. Even ancillary services are exploding, such as technologies that can treat and dispose of water — a crucial component of well fracturing. And all this will require many billions of investment dollars into a shale economy still years away from the mature development stage.
But one other thing Credit Suisse said, which echoes the sentiments of many in the industry, was that it was “skeptical” a new large field on the order of the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas would happen. The Eagle Ford is one of the most prolific shale fields which boasts an estimated 943,000 b/d of liquids production and is forecast to produce 1.6 million b/d by late 2018. Instead, Credit Suisse said existing areas with “stacked” pay targets — i.e., layered formations –are better bets right now.
When you consider how far industry has come in the last five years alone, it seems almost reactionary to make such a statement. And Credit Suisse is far from alone in that view: many executives share it — even from top shale producers.
Five years ago, the Eagle Ford Shale hadn’t even been discovered, at least not officially. Although a few companies were out there quietly working the field, it was Petrohawk Energy that announced a gas find there in October, 2008. By that time, other shale fields had already been discovered — the Haynesville in Louisiana, a gas field; the Bakken oil field in North Dakota; and of course, the granddaddy of them all, the Barnett in North Texas which sparked the widespread move by operators to shale exploitation in the early 2000s, although the field’s first wells were drilled in the early 1980s.
In this post I present the results from dynamic simulations using the typical tight oil well for the Bakken as recently presented by the North Dakota Industrial Commission (NDIC), together with the “2011 average” well as defined from actual production data from around 240 wells that were reported to have started producing from June through December 2011.
The use of the phrase “Typical Bakken Well” by NDIC as shown in Figure 01 is here believed to depict what is to be expected from the average tight oil well.
The results from the dynamic simulations show:
If the “Typical Bakken Well” is what NDIC recently has presented, total production from Bakken (the portion that lies in North Dakota) should have been around 1.1 Mb/d in February 2013.
Reported production from Bakken by NDIC as of February 2013 was 0.7 Mb/d.
Actual production data shows that the first year’s production for the average well in Bakken (North Dakota) presently is around 55% of the “Typical Bakken Well” presented by NDIC.
The results from the simulations anticipate a slowdown for the annual growth in oil production from Bakken (ND) through 2013 and 2014.
...
The production developments in Bakken and other tight oil plays are very much a function of monthly additions of producing wells, developments in well productivity, decline rates (for the growing population of “older” producing wells), development in costs, strategies deployed by the companies for development of their acreage, adequate infrastructure and not least the developments/expectations for the oil price.
As proponents of green energy go, Samuel Yang and Ben Waters could hardly be less alike.
Samuel Yang, dubbed by the Chinese media the ''godfather of solar energy'', is a Buddhist vegan who befriended solar scientists while studying economics at Macquarie University in Sydney. He returned to China to found four of the largest solar photovoltaic companies in the world.
Ben Waters, director of Australia's sustainable business strategy for General Electric, sings in church choirs and, as a Hobart schoolboy, brooked bullying by opposing the Franklin River dam. He arrived at the giant corporation after years maintaining F/A-18 fighter jets.
GE's Ben Waters believes the Coalition might not scrap carbon tax. Photo: James Alcock
Both Yang and Waters, though, share similar visions for the future of energy: the shift from large-scale, fossil-fuel power plants has to happen if we are to limit global warming, and the pace of the transition will surprise even supporters.
Of the two, Yang is arguably more of a revolutionary. As chief executive of Shanghai-listed Hareon Solar Technology, Yang is in the midst of a battle for survival in an industry that has soared about 50 per cent annually since 2002. Two of Yang's start-ups, JA Solar and Suntech, are among Chinese companies flooding global markets with low-cost solar PV. Suntech is also fending off creditors.
''This overcapacity is normal for any new industrial technology,'' Yang says on a visit to Melbourne this week. ''Solar technology is always advancing fast … and some companies will drop out.''
PV prices in Australia are now below 90¢ per watt, down as much as two-thirds in a couple of years. About one in eight Australian homes now have solar panels, and Yang says penetration rates could rise to 80 per cent in coming years given Australia's high electricity prices, ''such wonderful sun'', and the likely arrival of even cheaper solar PV and later low-cost batteries.
Yang won't say how much further prices will fall but any pause in the decline is likely to be temporary. Even the threat of European tariffs for alleged dumping is dismissed. ''It's a silly childish game,'' Yang says. ''I believe it won't last long.'' Yang bets European leaders will be wary of sparking a trade war with the growing Chinese market and losing jobs linked to the spread of cheap Chinese products. Yang's focus, though, is to expand his company into energy production itself. ''We have to invest in solar farms,'' he says. ''We should become energy suppliers.''
US industrial conglomerate GE, about 125 years old and worth about $250 billion, has investments in many industries but becoming a big power generator is not yet a priority. A major equipment supplier to fossil fuel industries such as coal and coal seam gas, GE also rivals Denmark's Vestas as the world's biggest producer of wind turbines. ''We're energy agnostic,'' Waters says. ''We want to be involved in the energy sector of the future and we're transitioning our business accordingly into distributed power, into renewables, into smart grids and energy storage.''
The spread of tri-generation, with plants generating heat, cooling and power to local precincts, is among GE's target businesses. The company is in talks with Queensland universities for campus-wide energy supplies and for Springfield, southeast of Brisbane, which will see its population surge five-fold to 100,000 over the next two decades.
The shift to locally supplied energy, potentially much more efficient to operate and with lower carbon emissions, means less future demand for power from the National Electricity Market. Power consumption from the NEM has been in decline for four years, and the loss of demand from aluminium smelters and other manufacturers - including Ford factories in Victoria from 2016 - is likely to see that trend continue.
GE, CSIRO and some 40 key power industry players are thrashing out future scenarios for the electricity sector. The Future Grid Forum, which includes an assessment of how the network can accommodate a much higher share of renewables over the next decade, will release its report in October - after the federal election.
Waters directs GE's ecomagination division in Australia, and chairs Sustainable Business Australia - which puts him at odds with firms opposed to a carbon price. GE imposed internal controls on carbon since 2005 and cut its footprint by 30 per cent since.
One of the things I've been doing over the past 6 months (while I've left this blog to fend for itself) is watching a couple of TV series (I hardly ever watch TV but I've found lately that good quality TV seems to have eclipsed movies in some ways and being able to download them makes watching them much more convenient) - namely Game of Thrones (like everyone else) and Breaking Bad.
It was good to see the concept of "how much is enough ?" getting some time in series 5 of Breaking Bad - I'm going to miss Walt when the series concludes later this year.
George Monbiot (flaky as he is) also has some ruminations on whether there ever is "enough" when it comes to money - Enough Already.
“I never did anything for money. I never set money as a goal. It was a result.”(1) So says Bob Diamond, formerly the chief executive of Barclays. In doing so he lays waste to the justification his bank and others (and their innumerable apologists in government and the media) have advanced for surreal levels of remuneration: to incentivise hard work and talent. Prestige, power, a sense of purpose: these are incentives enough.
Others of his class – Bernie Ecclestone and Jeroen van der Veer (the former chief executive of Shell) for example – say the same(2,3). The capture of so much wealth by the executive class performs no useful function. What the very rich appear to value is relative income. If executives were all paid 5% of current levels, competition between them (a questionable virtue anyway) would be no less fierce. As the immensely rich HL Hunt commented several decades ago, “money is just a way of keeping score.”
The desire for advancement along this scale appears to be insatiable. In March Forbes magazine published an article about Prince Alwaleed, who, like other Saudi princes, doubtless owes his fortune to nothing but hard work and enterprise. According to one of the prince’s former employees, the Forbes global rich list “is how he wants the world to judge his success or his stature.”(4) The result is “a quarter-century of intermittent lobbying, cajoling and threatening when it comes to his net worth listing.” In 2006, the researcher responsible for calculating his wealth writes, “when Forbes estimated that the prince was actually worth $7 billion less than he said he was, he called me at home the day after the list was released, sounding nearly in tears. ‘What do you want?’ he pleaded, offering up his private banker in Switzerland. ‘Tell me what you need.’”
Never mind that he has his own 747, in which he sits on a throne during flights. Never mind that his “main palace” has 420 rooms. Never mind that he possesses his own private amusement park and zoo and, he claims, $700 million worth of jewels. Never mind that he’s the richest man in the Arab world, valued by Forbes at $20bn, and has watched his wealth increase by $2bn in the past year(5). None of this is enough. There is no place of arrival, no happy landing, even in a private jumbo jet. The politics of envy are never keener than among the very rich.
This pursuit can suck the life out of its adherents. In Lauren Greenfield’s magnificent documentary The Queen of Versailles, David Siegel, “America’s timeshare king”, appears to abandon all interest in life as he faces the loss of his crown(6). He is still worth hundreds of millions. He still has an adoring wife and children, he is still building the biggest private home in America. But as the sale of the skyscraper that bears his name and symbolises his pre-eminence begins to look inevitable, he sinks into an impenetrable depression. Dead-eyed, he sits alone in his private cinema, obsessively rummaging through the same pieces of paper, as if somewhere among them he can find the key to his restoration, refusing to engage with his family, apparently prepared to ruin himself rather than lose the stupid tower.
To grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is reconfigured. The welfare state is dismantled. Essential public services are cut, so that the rich may pay less tax. The public realm is privatised, the regulations restraining the ultra-wealthy and the companies they control are abandoned, Edwardian levels of inequality are almost festishised. Politicians justify these changes, when not reciting bogus arguments about the deficit(7,8), with the incentives for enterprise they create. Behind that lies the promise or the hint that we will all be happier and more satisfied as a result. But this mindless, meaningless accumulation cannot satisfy even its beneficiaries, except perhaps, and temporarily, the man wobbling on the very top of the pile.
The same applies to collective growth. Governments today have no vision but endless economic growth. They are judged not by the number of people in employment, let alone by the number of people in satisfying, pleasurable jobs, not by the happiness of the population or the protection of the natural world. Job-free, world-eating growth is fine, as long as it’s growth. There are no ends any more, just means.
In their interesting but curiously incomplete book, How Much is Enough?, Robert and Edward Skidelsky note that “Capitalism rests precisely on this endless expansion of wants. That is why, for all its success, it remains so unloved. It has given us wealth beyond measure, but has taken away the chief benefit of wealth: the consciousness of having enough. … The vanishing of all intrinsic ends leaves us with only two options: to be ahead or to be behind. Positional struggle is our fate.”
One of my yearly traditions is to go and see the Banff Mountain Film Festival. I found this year's set of movies a little repetitive (much as I like Alex Honnold climbing, Russ Sturges paddling and Danny MacAskill doing tricks on his mountain bike I've seen their stuff plenty of times before) - there were a few interesting films though.
The overall winner was a pair of Australian dudes wandering around Antarctica (less successfully than a random norwegian guy it must be said) - Crossing The Ice.
Aussie adventurers James Castrission and Justin Jones embark upon a perilous 2275km journey across Antarctica in a race to become the first people to man-haul their way from the icy continent's rim to the South Pole and back, completely unassisted. In the past, a handful of hopefuls have attempted the feat, but none have succeeded. Dragging their food and supplies across the unforgiving landscape, in temperatures as low as -40°C, the pair experiences the peaks and troughs of being alone and unsupported in one of the harshest environments on Earth. Their journey heats up when they discover their record attempt is in jeopardy; there's a Norwegian on the ice. He's more experienced, he's tackling same route, and he has a head start.
This dog had me (and most of the audience) laughing out loud - Lily Shreds Trailside.
Every serious mountain-bike rider needs a mascot, and Lily the Jack Russell Terrier is on the road to becoming just that. As the star of this film, Lily leaves only dust behind her as she does what she loves best: chasing bikes. Hot on the tail of a rider carving out new lines in Utah, USA, Lily clears a double jump, attempts a wall ride and ultimately, proves that downhill mountain-bike trails were not only made for wheels; paws can do the trick as well.
And lastly, the landscape at the bottom of the Grand Canyon held a lot of novelty value for me - Last of the great unknown.
One of the last places in the American West left to be explored, the Grand Canyon is an immense landscape filled with sweeping vistas. Almost unfathomable in scale, its vast wilderness is home to a labyrinth of concealed tributaries that hide some of the region's most remarkable formations. Led by Richard Rudow, who has clocked up some 70 first descents in the Grand Canyon, a team of seasoned canyoners ventures deep inside these slots to locations where no humans have set foot before.
The Guardian has an essay arguing (unusually for something printed in a newspaper) that reading news is bad for you - News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier. Up to a point I'd agree - though I'd say it depends where you get your news from and how your interpret it....
In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.
As construction begins on a ground-breaking wave energy project in Perth, a report has been released which emphasises the huge untapped energy potential lying off Australia’s coastlines.
According to the Marine Nation 2025 report, released this week, Australia’s oceans could produce billions of dollars’ worth of clean energy in the form of electricity generated by wave power. The report says an initial assessment has identified world-class wave energy resources along the western and southern coastline, and valuable tidal energy resources in the North West of Australia.
Marine Nation 2025 was prepared by the Federal Government’s Oceans Policy Science Advisory Group and highlights the enormous potential of Australia’s oceans, as well as the challenges and opportunities involved with managing our vast maritime resources.
The report comes on the eve of the commencement of the Perth Wave Energy Project, which is due to begin next month. Located at Garden Island, near Perth, the project will start delivering green energy to the grid in 2014. The project will be Australia’s first commercial wave energy project connected to the electricity grid. An associated wave-powered desalination plant will be a world first.
A CSIRO study released last year revealed that ocean waves have the potential to power a city the size of Melbourne by 2050. CSIRO’s Ocean renewable energy: 2015-2050 report said Australia’s ocean waves could supply about 10 per cent of Australia’s electricity by the middle of this century.
The world may not often be very interested in Greenland but it is fascinated by what lies beneath it. As the country’s ice cap melts, hidden mineral wealth is coming tantalisingly within reach. The country’s riches include “rare earth” metals that are essential in the production of many electronic devices, from electric-car batteries to television screens. Metals such as cerium (used in glass manufacturing) and yttrium (which goes into electronic displays) are among those that are hidden under the ice. Many rare earths are not as scarce as their misleading name suggests, but they are scattered thinly and can be difficult to extract. In Greenland they are often mixed up with uranium, which under the country's current laws is illegal to mine. Most of the precious metals therefore remain underground. ...
Should Ms Hammond’s plans go ahead, and Greenland manage to ramp up its extraction of rare earths, it could deliver a jolt to the market for the valuable metals. At the moment rare-earth supply is dominated by China. In recent years China has restricted its exports of rare earths, citing environmental concerns. Extraction of the metals is dirty and dangerous, and stories of poisoning are common. But some see an ulterior motive in China’s cutbacks: by controlling the supply of high-value materials, China can also control their use in finished products. That could help it in its broader strategy to move from low- to high-value manufacturing. If Greenland becomes a big supplier of those same minerals, China’s grip on the market could loosen, and prices around the world may fall. Polar politics therefore matter to many more than the 57,000 people who live in Greenland.
Presenting his book, "2052", Jorgen Randers starts with a bold statement: "I will not tell you what the future could be, but what the future will be". You would think that this shows quite a bit of hubris but, if you follow Randers' reasoning, you'll see that he has a point.
Randers is one of the authors of the famous "The Limits to Growth" report to the Club of Rome. Published in 1972, the book caused quite a stir and was widely misinterpreted as a prophecy of doom. It wasn't so and, in his talk, Randers summarizes what he and the others did. They didn't make any prophecy but, rather, they created a 'fan' of 12 different scenarios for the future of the world up to 2100. Some of these scenarios involved decline and collapse of the economy, some involved stabilization and prosperity. Whether one or the other set of scenarios would unfold depended on whether humankind made the right or the wrong choices in dealing with pollution, resource exploitation, and population growth.
One problem with the "The Limits to Growth" was that the authors never specified by what mechanisms humankind could develop the consensus necessary to make the right choices, which all involved some sacrifices in the short term. After 40 years of work, Randers has arrived to a conclusion: there are no such mechanisms. The right choices were not made and never will be.
Today, Randers says, there is no more a fan of good and bad scenarios: there is only one; and it is not pleasant. It can only be the decline of our society, constrained by overpopulation, declining resource availability, and widespread damage caused by pollution and climate change. The start of the decline may come earlier or later; collapse may be faster or slower, but the shape of the future is determined.
Randers maintains that there is a simple way to describe the reasons that are taking us to this unpleasant future: people always make the choice that involves the least costs in the short term. The problem is all there: as long as we always choose the easiest road, we have no control on where we are going.
Imagine you are lost in a forest. Would you think that always choosing the easiest path in front of you could take you home? But this is what we are doing: even though we should know that this is not the way to go where we would like to be. We are unwilling, for instance, to invest in renewable energy as long as fossil fuels are even slightly less expensive and we can neglect their external costs in the form of pollution and climate change. But this choice is based on short term consideration and it will cause us terrible long term damage.
Why are we unable to do better? Here, Randers proposes that "short-termism" is deeply ingrained in people's minds and is reflected in our democratic decisional system. He has been accused to be against democracy, but he maintains that he has nothing against democracy: the problem is that democracy is the result of human short-termism. He makes the example of an enlightened politician who decides to introduce a carbon tax. Soon, voters discover that the carbon tax is making gasoline and electricity more expensive. As a consequence, that politician won't be re-elected. It is simple and it happens all the time.
Of course, you might object that if the public were to be educated about climate change, then people would accept a carbon tax - actually they would clamor for it. Maybe; but Randers is skeptical. He says that he has spent decades of his life training generations of decision-makers in sustainability and ecosystem science. And he has seen those trained generations taking exactly the same wrong decisions that the previous, untrained, generations were taking.
Human nature is difficult to overcome. Randers recounts how he and his colleagues had been discussing about the size of a natural disaster that would wake the public to the reality of ecosystem destruction. Then Hurricane Katrina came and, later on, Sandy. Both where disasters as big as they can be. But they fell flat as wake up calls: the public didn't react. Today, three Americans out of eight still think that global warming is a hoax.
I'm reading up on the economics of power outages at the moment, and I stumbled across the graph above in this National Wildlife Federation analysis. It shows the number of power outages caused by non-weather related factors, and weather related factors (from 1992-2010 in the US). There has been a material increase in both categories, but much more so in the weather related problems.
A humbling map of real-time wind patterns in Tornado Alley
"Wind Map" is a stunning interactive datavisualization that presents wind patterns across the continental U.S. in real time. Picture above is what it looked like last night at 10:59 CDT, in the aftermath of yesterday's devastating Oklahoma tornado."
Hong Kong based Reignwood Group and U.S. aerospace company Lockheed Martin have announced plans to build an Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) electricity generating plant off the coast of China to power a planned resort community. Lockheed Martin is to build the facility and run it, while the Reignwood Group will be building the resort community that is to use the power generated. The new plant is expected to produce 100 percent of the power needs of the community.
OTEC plants generate electricity by taking advantage of the difference in water temperature at different ocean depths—warm surface water is used to boil a fluid (one that has a low boiling temperature such as ammonia) that in turn drives a turbine. Cold water brought up from below cools the liquid causing it to once again liquefy allowing the process to repeat over and over. To date, few such plants have been built due to the large expense involved in transporting cold water up from below. The new plant to be built off the coast of southern China will be a pilot project designed to not only supply electricity to the new resort community, but also to serve as a learning environment, helping lead the way to more efficient, and hopefully cheaper plant designs.
The rising cost of building liquefied natural gas plants in Australia, where energy workers earn the highest salaries in the world, is forcing developers out to sea in search of billions of dollars in savings.
Exxon Mobil plans to use the world's largest ship to turn gas into liquid at an offshore field, eliminating the need for investment in pipelines and port facilities. Woodside Petroleum is studying sea-based technology since ditching plans this month for an onshore plant for its Browse project off Western Australia.
After starting work on $175 billion in LNG terminals on land, developers are considering more than $80 billion in floating projects to keep Australia competitive with suppliers in North America and East Africa.
''A lot of people have been saying Australian LNG is now over, it's going to be priced out of the market by US LNG exports and competition from Canada and East Africa,'' said Citigroup analyst Mark Greenwood. ''In our view, we are going to see continued investment in Australia, just a different sort.''
The engineering challenges are massive. Shell's Prelude vessel, vying to be the first floating LNG facility in the world, will be as long as the Empire State Building and six times the weight of the largest aircraft carrier. Exxon proposes a vessel spanning 495 metres, or seven metres longer than the Shell plant.
Australian oil and gas workers earn about $160,000 a year on average, 35 per cent more than employees in the US and almost double the global average, according to a survey this year by recruiting company Hays and Oil and Gas Job Search.
Floating LNG may be almost 20 per cent cheaper than building a project on land for Woodside and its partners in the Browse project, including Shell. Using three offshore vessels to produce the gas would cost an estimated $35 billion, compared with a cost of $43 billion for a new development on land, John Hirjee, an analyst for Deutsche Bank, wrote in an April 12 report. That's a cost of $2.92 billion per million metric tonnes of output for a floating LNG project producing 12 million tonnes a year, compared with a $3.58 billion cost for a conventional plant.
Of the 90 million tonnes a year of new projects that need to be approved globally in the next three years to satisfy LNG demand by the end of the decade, as much as a third may come from proposed floating LNG plants and expansions of onshore developments in Australia, he said.
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