The Australian reports that the local solar power industry is in a state of confusion about government policy regarding the sector, with the solar thermal power plant proposed for Queensland considered unlikely to go ahead - Solar sector held back by foggy energy policy.

The government is driving the solar industry to the point of exasperation because of the lack of clarity, constant changes, and delays in its policy for supporting large-scale solar development. The industry has already urged the government to rework its Solar Flagships program, after pointing out that the $1.5 billion scheme unveiled in May was ill-conceived, unworkable and simply wasn't enough to fund the 1000MW target.

That program, proudly unveiled by Rudd, was for four large-scale solar thermal and solar PV installations located in a single project that would be the largest in the world. But as this column pointed out in July, the idea of creating four 250MW projects was strategically suspect, locating them in a single location was technically impossible, and there was simply not enough money to match the megawatts. ...

The conference was addressed by Resources Minister Martin Ferguson, who again rejected feed-in tariffs. He pointed to the experience in Germany, where he said feed-in tariffs to support rooftop solar and the like had cost the country $1bn a year for less than 1 per cent of its energy needs. But the solar industry points out that was never the point of the scheme in a country with such lousy solar conditions. Germany now possesses the intellectual property and the manufacturing and export capacity that is expected to make it one of the three dominant global players in an industry that will be worth tens of billion dollars a year. It now has 50,000 employees in the solar industry. Australia, with the best solar conditions in the world, and the home of some of its best technological developments, has little more than 1000, and no manufacturing capacity to speak of. ...

Grimes says Australia had the chance to be a global leader in roof-top and small-scale solar photovoltaics, but lost it. "We are now a consumer of those products from Germany and China. Solar thermal is our one remaining opportunity for industry leadership. It's ours to capture or lose. Let's see if we can learn from history and do better."

The FT has an editorial supporting smart grid initiatives in the US - Smart Idea For US Energy Policy.

When President Barack Obama talks about his priorities, energy always comes high on the list, and with good reason. The plunge in oil prices may have reduced their political salience, but securing energy supplies and averting the threat of climate change are as important as ever. An idea at the heart of his programme is the creation of a “smart grid”: an electricity network that uses information technology to manage flows of power. The cost of such a grid would be enormous, but it would be money well spent.

The smart grid has become today’s equivalent of the “information superhighway”: a piece of trendy high-tech jargon. Yet that fashionability should not be allowed to obscure its merits. One of its strongest supporters is Steven Chu, Mr Obama’s energy secretary, and no one could accuse him of being a dilettante. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist, he has been serving on the electricity transmission sub-committee of America’s Energy Future, a research group backed by the national academies of science and engineering.

A smart grid would be a national asset comparable to the interstate highways launched by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s. It would make possible a huge increase in the use of renewable energy in the US, connecting up vast wind farms in South Dakota or solar arrays in New Mexico to the centres of population on the coasts. It would enable the network to manage the intermittency that is inherent to wind and solar power, balancing supply and demand when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. It would also cut the losses caused by transmitting electricity, and make the network more resilient to equipment failure, preventing blackouts.

Supported by “smart meters” – devices in the home that monitor energy use and can send and receive information – the grid can also cut consumers’ energy use. Trials in the US have suggested household electricity use can be cut by between 10 and 15 per cent. Those that generate their own power, for example with solar panels on their roofs, would also be able to sell any excess to the grid.

Mr Chu has suggested a national smart grid would cost up to $1,000bn. But with the US spending $400bn a year on electricity, a mere 10 per cent reduction in power use would cover the cost in 25 years. Rural electrification was one of the great, lasting achievements of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. It would be fitting, as well as a sound investment, if Mr Obama were to update that project for the 21st century.

Grist reports that Obama's first priority is likely to be economic stimulus via green infrastructure - Deep and long.

Incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, speaking to a gathering of CEOs and other business leaders:

Mr. Emanuel promised that a major economic stimulus would be "the first order of business" for Mr. Obama when he takes office Jan. 20. The focus of spending will be on infrastructure, specifically "green infrastructure," which he said would include mass transit, upgraded electricity transmission lines, "smart" electrical meters that allow consumers to save money by using electricity at off-peak hours, and universal broadband Internet access, which he said would encourage telecommuting.

This was in the context of broader comments in which Emanuel promised the administration would "throw long and deep," with an ambitious domestic policy agenda that includes a major push for universal healthcare, a cap-and-trade system, and tax reform.

On the downside, Cryptogon points to an LA Times article about an increasingly hawkish looking Obama cabinet that might back away from plans to leave Iraq (thus maintaining one major aspect of our current dysfunctional energy supply strategy) - Antiwar Groups Fear Barack Obama May Create Hawkish Cabinet.

Antiwar groups and other liberal activists are increasingly concerned at signs that Barack Obama’s national security team will be dominated by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views on other important foreign policy issues.

The activists are uneasy not only about signs that both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates could be in the Obama Cabinet, but at reports suggesting that several other short-list candidates for top security posts backed the decision to go to war.

“Obama ran his campaign around the idea the war was not legitimate, but it sends a very different message when you bring in people who supported the war from the beginning,” said Kelly Dougherty, executive director of the 54-chapter Iraq Veterans Against the War.

The activists — key members of the coalition that propelled Obama to the White House — fear he is drifting from the antiwar moorings of his once-longshot presidential candidacy. Obama has eased the rigid timetable he had set for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and he appears to be leaning toward the center in his candidates to fill key national security posts.

The president-elect has told some Democrats that he expects to take heat from parts of his political base but will not be deterred by it.

Aside from Clinton and Gates, the roster of possible Cabinet secretaries has included Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who both voted in 2002 for the resolution authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq, though Lugar has since said he regretted it.

“It’s astonishing that not one of the 23 senators or 133 House members who voted against the war is in the mix,” said Sam Husseini of the liberal group Institute for Public Accuracy.

TreeHugger has a post on a ne wplan to shift to a fully renewable energy economy - Energy [R]evolution Now! Greenpeace Outlines Renewable Energy & Climate Change Plan.

There are no shortage of plans coming out lately that lay out the path towards a green energy future: T. Boone Pickens, Google, Al Gore and others have weighed in on the issue. Now Greenpeace is calling for an Energy (R)evolution.

Put together in collaboration with the European Renewable Energy Council , the report outlines a way in which carbon emissions will peak by 2015 and decline thereafter, with emissions being 50% below 1990 levels by 2050, thereby keeping global temperature rise below 2°C. These are the steps that would need to be taken:

The text in bold comes from Energy [R]evoltion: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook; non-bolded text are my comments.

1. Phase out all subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear energy

The phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies is sure to sit well with anyone with even a tinge of green in their thinking. Nuclear energy though has more supporters, but Greenpeace explains their nuclear energy position like this:

Although nuclear power produces little carbon dioxide, there are multiple threats to people and the environment from its operations. These include the risks and environmental damage from uranium mining, processing and transport, the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, the unsolved problem of nuclear waste and the potential hazard of serious accident. The solution to our future energy needs lies instead in greater use of renewable energy sources for both heat and power.

2. Internalize the external (social and environmental) costs of energy production through ‘cap and trade’ emissions trading

Though we may quibble about whether cap and trade or a carbon tax would be the better thing to do—and I’ll side with Jeffrey Sachs in saying that a carbon tax is probably the better route, though the two options aren’t mutually exclusive—this is something that should be applied to far more than simply energy production. The environmental externalities of all economic activity need to be internalized if we are to get any sort of handle on the conjoined problems of energy use increasing, global warming, population growth and natural resource depletion.

3. Mandate strict efficiency standards for all energy consuming appliances, buildings and vehicles

Are the only people not advocating higher fuel efficiency standards car manufacturers themselves?

4. Establish legally binding targets for renewable energy and combined heat and power generation

How these would be enforced should be carefully considered—if penalties are levied that decrease the ability of a utility to invest in renewable energy, when they’ve already failed to meet targets that might be counterproductive—but this is crucial.

5. Reform the electricity markets by guaranteeing priority access to the grid for renewable power generation

Very important, but also important is ensuring that the transmission capacity exists to move electricity from areas where it is most easily generated to where it is most needed.

6. Provide defined and stable returns for investors, for example by feed-in tariff programs

I’ll go out on a limb and say that we should have a national feed-in tariff program in the United States. Forget piecemeal net metering, feed-in tariff and other programs. It’s been shown on numerous occasions that feed-in tariffs are less expensive to administer and provide greater levels of market stability than do other renewable energy promotion schemes. In Germany its been shown that an effective feed-in tariff program spurs renewable energy deployment, with the costs being minimal on the consumer (in the range of $3 more per month for an average family).

7. Implement better labeling and disclosure mechanisms to provide more environmental product information

While most of the time we think of product labeling and consumer goods, it could also be applied to energy use. How about your electric bill containing a chart that shows exactly what source was used to generate your electricity and what sort of carbon emissions that created. Something easy to read, graphic. Cigarettes have warning labels, perhaps your electricity bill should as well.

8. Increase research and development budgets for renewable energy and energy efficiency

In times of economic hardship this may be easier said than done, but it must be done nonetheless. The costs of not doing so are too high. Remember that Nicolas Stern said back in 2006 that failing to act on climate change could cause economic hardship not seen since the Great Depression, with reductions in GDP in the range of 5-20%. You think the current round of financial turmoil is bad? Just wait until unchecked climate change and peak oil come at us.

The Australian has an interesting article from the editor of EcoInvestor Magazine, comparing the relative merits of the geothermal, coal seam gas and biodiesel sectors - Biodiesel a cautionary tale for investors.

Within the emerging clean energy sector there has been an enormous difference between the performance of the best sub-sector -- coal seam gas -- and the worst: biodiesel. The recent share market volatility may have accentuated the difference, but it has not caused it. The causes are government support, market forces and industry strategy.

The rise of coal seam gas (CSG) was apparent by early to mid 2007 but few could have known how high it would fly. Then in February this year, BG took a stake in Queensland Gas and soon after bid for Origin Energy. In June, Queensland Gas entered the S&P ASX 100 Index and last month it was joined by Arrow Energy. The latest quarterly rebalance also saw two junior CSG companies enter the S&P ASX 300 Index, bringing the number of pure CSG plays in the index to five, the highest ever.

In hindsight, it makes sense. Both the Queensland and federal governments have shown strong support for the emerging CSG industry. In Australia, it was not all that long ago that people were talking about the possibility of building a pipeline from WA's North West Shelf to eastern Australia to transport natural gas. Then the lucky country came good again and presto, gas on the eastern states' doorstep!

Demand for energy is also rising around the world and the world's leading gas companies have arrived to join the party. If that isn't enough, CSG is a low carbon fossil fuel. The result is that while global stock markets crashed, some CSG companies were among the few to rise.

It is a very different and sad story for biodiesel. Many biodiesel companies were caught up in the rush to cleaner fuel and listed, but along with their own mistakes the fundamentals of the sector failed them.

The government initially promised support, but against much advice and lobbying the Howard government withdrew it and the Rudd Government seems to have washed its hands of it. The prices of feedstock rose to uneconomic levels. They used food as feedstock. They had resistance from the dominant oil industry. Companies were overambitious and undercapitalised. And they blew the environmental angle by clear-felling tropical rainforests.

With government, suppliers, the oil industry, consumers, and environmentalists against them, they have suffered a terrible loss of capital and it remains to be seen if the sector can recover.

Like coal seam gas and biodiesel, geothermal is another emerging sector that has attracted a good number of companies to the ASX. But so far, it appears to share much more in common with coal seam gas. It does not seem to have any enemies, it is cleaner than gas and, if the technology is proven, which should happen soon, it will be able to provide significant baseload energy and thus have enormous growth potential. It has strong support from the large energy corporates and investors and, perhaps most importantly, it has strong federal and state government support.

The Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, recently said the geothermal industry has a significant role to play in securing Australia's energy future. "The potential of the geothermal industry in Australia is truly staggering. Geoscience Australia estimates that if just 1 per cent of Australia's geothermal energy was extracted, it would equate to 26,000 times Australia's total annual energy consumption," Mr Ferguson said.

A recent report for the Australian Geothermal Energy Association said that by 2020 the industry could provide up to 40 per cent of the Government's 2020 renewable energy target.

Not surprisingly, there is a lot happening in the sector.

The federal Government recently launched a $50 million geothermal drilling program to provide grants of up to $7 million on a matching basis to support the drilling of deep geothermal wells and proof-of-concept projects. The first round of applications closed at the end of September.

Earlier this year, the West Australian and Queensland governments opened large tracts of their states for geothermal exploration. This followed the recent start of exploration in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania, while commercialisation has been under way in South Australia for some time and is about to reach proof-of-concept stage.

Al Gore's speech yesterday was a masterpiece from my point of view - outlining most of the solutions to our energy issues (fixing and expanding the grids, energy efficiency, solar, wind, geothermal, electric cars etc etc etc) and many of the political factors involved (especially Iraq and the defenders of the status quo who took us there, and the culture war that has paralysed America).

Best of all (unlike "An Inconvenient Truth") he set an ambitious target for implementing the solutions - a switch to 100% renewable energy by 2020 for the United States (none of this 20% by 2020 nonsense that the weak-kneed keep offering up as a way forward) - something we should be attempting globally.

The speech is online now.

It was interesting that one of the people he thanked for attending was the Libertarian candidate for President - hopefully the libertarians are all starting to get on board with the idea of market based solutions to global warming and peak oil.

From The New York Times' review - Gore Calls for Carbon-Free Electric Power.

Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that Americans must abandon electricity generated by fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts. “The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” Mr. Gore said in a speech to an energy conference here. “The future of human civilization is at stake.”

Mr. Gore called for the kind of concerted national effort that enabled Americans to walk on the moon 39 years ago this month, just eight years after President John F. Kennedy famously embraced that goal. He said the goal of producing all of the nation’s electricity from “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” within 10 years is not some farfetched vision, although he said it would require fundamental changes in political thinking and personal expectations.

“This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative,” Mr. Gore said in his remarks at the conference. “It represents a challenge to all Americans, in every walk of life — to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”

Although Mr. Gore has made global warming and energy conservation his signature issues, winning a Nobel Prize for his efforts, his speech on Thursday argued that the reasons for renouncing fossil fuels go far beyond concern for the climate.

In it, he cited military-intelligence studies warning of “dangerous national security implications” tied to climate change, including the possibility of “hundreds of millions of climate refugees” causing instability around the world, and said the United States is dangerously vulnerable because of its reliance on foreign oil. ...

Mr. Gore said the most important policy change in the transformation would be taxes on carbon dioxide production, with an accompanying reduction in payroll taxes. “We should tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said.

The former vice president said in his speech that he could not recall a worse confluence of problems facing the country: higher gasoline prices, jobs being “outsourced,” the home mortgage industry in turmoil. “Meanwhile, the war in Iraq continues, and now the war in Afghanistan appears to be getting worse,” he said.

By calling for new political leadership and speaking disdainfully of “defenders of the status quo,” Mr. Gore was hurling a dart at the man who defeated him for the presidency in 2000, George W. Bush. Critics of Mr. Bush say that his policies are too often colored by his background in the oil business.

A crucial shortcoming in the country’s political leadership is a failure to view interlocking problems as basically one problem that is “deeply ironic in its simplicity,” Mr. Gore said, namely “our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels.”

“We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet,” Mr. Gore said. “Every bit of that’s got to change.”

And it can change, he said, citing some scientists’ estimates that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth in 40 minutes to meet the world’s energy needs for a year, and that the winds that blow across the Midwest every day could meet the country’s daily electricity needs.

More at the FT - Gore seeks 100% green energy.

Energy Bulletin has a transcript of the speech.

Jerome Guillet has a run down of how the solution could be implemented at TOD, focussing primarily on wind power, which is his area of expertise (I think he greatly understates the potential for solar in the time frame available) - Gore sets goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2020.

Al Gore has made a major speech in Washington this morning, setting out an ambitious goal for the USA to produce all of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2020. I thought I'd comment on the technical feasibility of the plan, and the underlying economics of such an endeavour.

The short answer is: while 100% is probably unrealistic, it's not unreasonable to expect to be able to get pretty close to that number (say, in the 50-90% range) in that timeframe, and it is very likely that it makes a LOT of sense economically. ...

For the simplicity of this discussion, I will focus on wind, given that it presents a bigger challenge on the intermittency front (which the inclusion of solar can only help improve), and that it would drive the ecohnomics of such a plan given its larger scale deployment.

The main questions, of course are as follows:
1) is it technically feasible to build the requisite capacity within 12 years?
2) what will it cost, and what will it mean for power prices?
3) how can the intermittency issue be dealt with?

Technical feasibility

To get 2,000 TWh of electricity from wind, roughly 800GW of wind power capacity would be needed, considering that windfarms would get an annual production equivalent to 2,500 full hours (a pretty conservative estimate, given that the existing wind farms are closer to 3,000 hours today). 800GW is roughly equal to 30 times the currently installed capacity (which should reach about 23GW at the end of this year) and 100 times the capacity installed in 2008 (expected to be close to 8,000MW, after 5,000MW were installed in 2007).

To build 800 GW in 12 years would require a significant increase in annual installations - but actually not an unrealistic one. ...

Altogether, the plan would require boosting investment in wind production capacity to about $100-150 billion per year, a significant number but hardly one that would require a complete retooling of the US economy. With a stable regulatory framework (presumably provided if this were made a national priority) and guaranteed demand (which could come via very simple mechanisms, like a feed-in tariffs, ie mandatory purchases by local utilities at regulated rates), there is absolutely no reason to doubt that this could be done.

I'll address the requirement to boost the grid separately below.

Wind power economics are quite simple: most of the levelised production cost per MWh comes from the initial investment. It is thus naturally sensitive to investment costs, and even more so to financing costs, both of which are determined at the time of construction. Once a windfarm is built, its production costs are essentially set for the rest of its operating life, ie 20-25 years. The fixed nature of its cost base makes it a difficult bet in a deregulated universe, where prices can swing wildy (including to low prices that can be insufficient for the windfarm to service its debt burden, thus the requirement for feed-in tariffs or similar mechanisms to guarantee a floor to wind electricity). But such fixed prices make wind a great proposition at times of increasing oil&gas costs: wind power prices will NOT increase even if oil & gas or coal prices continue to go up, as is quite possible.

Thus wind power is a wonderful hedge against future energy prices. And given that today it already costs less than power from a ges-fired plant (the plants that typically drive the price of electricity on wholesale markets), it is both competitive and likely to remain so in the coming years.

And given the cost structure of wind, a very simple way for government to support wind at very little cost would be to provide funding for the sector at low interest rates. One big advantage of government is its ability to borrow at lower rates - indeed, government sets the lowest rates that are by the rest of the economy. By passing on its low cost of funding to wind developments, the final cost of wind power could be lowered significantly, and passed on to consumers (banks would still be required to hold onto operational and other risks linked to wind production, they would just get cheaper funding for that specific purpose, which the'd have to fully pass on to projects. Germany has successfully used such a mechanism for years).

Studies in Germany and Denmark show that wind power lowers wholesale prices by 30 to 70% when wind blows, and that the overall savings for consumers far outstrip the cost of guaranteeing to wind producers a regulated tariff. Ironically, the more wind power there is in the system, and the lower the wholesale marker price will be most of the time, which means that the regulated tariff remains a necessity to ensure that wind producers are able to pay off the debt linked to their initial investment. But that regulated tariff is known, is realtively low, and,again, will not need to increase over time, thus ensuring to consumers similarly stable retail prices. ...

Overall, network operators with actual wind experience seem confident that a combination of additional investment, smart grid management, and maintaining available (but not using much) a large gas-fired capacity can make it possible to cope with large amounts of wind power in the system.

While a goal of 100% of carbon-free electricity is probably unrealistic, it therefore seems possible to get pretty close to that, especially if nuclear and hydro are included in the mix. A plan that announced a specific goal of 40-50% of wind-generated electricity by 2020 and 10-20% of solar, with the appropriate feed-in mechanisms, demand guarantees for manufacturers and investment in the grid would therefore be realistic, make economic sense, and fulfill two major strategic goals: reduce carbon emissions, and lower fossil fuel demand.

The Guardian has an article by John Vidal on proposed government initiatives on clean energy (whether or not anything actually eventuates is an open question, given the UK's pitiful track record) - Revealed: UK's blueprint for a green revolution. It also sounds pretty heavy handed, with too much talk of "forcing" people to do certain things. Just impose a carbon tax, hand it back in the form of income tax cuts and subsidies for public transport and urban renewal and be done with it says I.

Also by John Vidal - Wind power to drive green revolution.

One in four British homes could be fitted with solar heating equipment and 3,500 wind turbines could be erected across Britain within 12 years as part of a green energy revolution to be proposed by the government next week.

The long-awaited renewable energy strategy, a copy of which has been seen by the Guardian, will say Britain needs to make a £100bn dash to build up its clean power supply if it is to reach its EU-imposed target of producing 15% of the country's energy from renewable sources by 2020.

The UK could cut its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 20% and reduce its dependency on oil by 7% within 12 years if it conducts the massive overhaul of energy production and consumption outlined in the strategy document, according to the government.

But at a time of mounting consumer anger over rising fuel prices, it also concedes that greening Britain's power supply will push up energy bills and increase fuel poverty.

The proposals include:

· New powers to force people to improve the energy efficiency of their homes when they renovate them;
· A 30-fold increase in offshore wind power generation;
· New loans, grants and incentives for businesses and households;
· An area the size of Essex to be planted with trees and other crops to produce biomass energy;
· Forcing people to replace inefficient appliances such as oil-fired boilers.

Although the proposals are contained in a consultation document, the government has committed to hitting the 15% target and ministers accept most of the measures will have to be introduced to achieve it.

Stuff.co.nz has a great statement from the NZ Energy Minister responding to the gas industries whining that NZ should use gas for its power instead of renewables - "NZ Minister of Energy rejects gas lobby claims" (a topic I previously discussed here).

Energy Minister David Parker says the oil and gas industry claim that renewable electricity will be more expensive than the gas fired electricity future the gas industry prefers is wrong. “In fact the steep rise in electricity prices that consumers have faced in the last decade has been caused mainly by the rise in gas and coal prices that have forced up the cost of fossil fuelled thermal electricity. To suggest that NZ gas prices will buck that recent history, and the overseas trend of increasing oil and gas prices, is optimistic and wishful thinking from a lobby group whose interest lies in selling more gas.”

“It is also undeniable that current and announced new investments by electricity generators prove that they think our renewables are cheaper. They are currently building geothermal and wind power – putting their money on the line. New Zealand has an abundance of renewables. We used to have 90% renewable generation in New Zealand. We can get back there by 2025, by building about 175 MW of renewable energy each year. This year alone we’re building around 300 MW. This shows the target is well within grasp. Of course with renewables, once built, their fuel is free. Wind and geothermal steam don’t go up in price. The same can’t be said of gas. The latest push by the gas lobby to increase gas usage and decrease renewables would also increase NZ’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

The New Statesman has an article on "How Britain could be supplying Europe with green electricity". Unfortunately its wallowing far behind countries like Germany and Spain in reality.

It may not feel like it on a gusty grey day in Rhyl, but this country is blessed. Take a boat out into the choppy waters off the North Wales coast, and you can see why. Thirty bright white turbines spin continuously just five miles off the coast, producing enough electrical power to supply 40,000 homes with clean, green energy. The wind and waves seem limitless and powerful - and they are. If the UK had been more aggressive and far-sighted in developing renewable energy, we would already be exporting green electricity and wind turbines to Europe and further afield.

In renewable energy terms, we would be the Saudi Arabia of Europe. A full 40 per cent of the continent's wind blows across British shores, enough to meet all our energy needs and more. But instead of leading the world in renewable energy and at the same time cutting carbon emissions, the UK languishes close to the bottom of the European clean energy league. Just 2 per cent of our energy comes from renewable sources and the rest from dirty, climate-changing fossil fuels. This is the legacy of years of contradictory policies, conflicting priorities, ideological pig-headedness and government incompetence.

It's a story that shames Britain.

A good place to start is the government's Low Carbon Buildings Programme (LCBP). This was launched in 2006 to provide grants to householders wanting to instal renewable generation technologies - from solar panels to small hydro schemes - on their properties. Ministers acknowledge that micro-generation could play a big part in our clean energy future, and that turning homes into mini power stations is good for energy security, household income and the environment. But what actually happened? Instead of kick-starting a whole new market sector, the government starved it of funds. A measly £12.7m was allocated, with a monthly cap. On the first day of each month all the available grants were snapped up within hours.

This stop-start approach led to frustrated householders and cash-strapped solar installation companies, many of which began to go bust. The number of grants given for solar hot water systems fell by half last year, and the number for micro wind turbines by two-thirds. For ground-source heat pumps, while 100 grants were made in the last three months of 2006, the equivalent number for 2007 was zero. For electricity, we managed to put only 270 solar panels on British roofs last year, while Germany installed 130,000.

Gordon Brown, first as chancellor, and now as Prime Minister, has successfully ensured that it makes no financial sense whatsoever for householders to invest in generating their own energy renewably. If you put up a solar photovoltaic panel in this country, you do it for altruistic reasons only: at present, you are guaranteed to lose money hand over fist. ...

This catalogue of failure has not only been bad for the climate, it has been bad for business. Britain might once have led the world in wind turbine development. But with no domestic market, production moved elsewhere, and today most turbines installed in this country are imported from Denmark. The leader in solar power is not Britain but Germany, which has pioneered a lucrative export industry in solar photovoltaic cells. In China, too, solar manufacturing is big business: the country's second-richest man leads a solar energy company. This is an energy sector which saw growth last year of roughly 40 per cent, and has attracted tens of billions in venture capital. None of that came to Britain. Instead of creating a brand new industry and thousands of jobs, British-based renewables companies have been going out of business.

Wind should already be our biggest single power source. The BWEA estimates that wind could generate 27 per cent of our electricity by 2020, which, combined with other renewables, could easily meet our EU-assigned target of 15 per cent renewable energy by 2020. Instead, wind accounts for just 1.5 per cent of UK electricity generation today (the equivalent figure in far less windy Denmark is 20 per cent, for Spain 8 per cent and Germany 5 per cent). That 1.5 per cent could be ramped up very quickly if the planning system worked in favour of renewables. According to the BWEA, 220 windpower projects are currently stuck in planning. If all received immediate consent, they could generate 9.3 gigawatts of electricity, enough for an estimated 5.25 million households. If the 39 projects that were refused planning permission last year had instead been allowed it, they could have provided power for 750,000 households, and prevented the emission of three million tonnes of CO2. (Anti-wind campaigners need to recognise their moral liability for these climate-changing emissions.)

While 39 projects were refused planning permission, just 26 projects went ahead. This year, we are level-pegging: seven wind applications have been approved and six refused. It can now take ten years for a windfarm project to get approved and built, and another five for it to get a grid connection (unlike in other countries, renewable generators here have to pay for their own grid connections). This does not look like a country on the fast track to a clean energy future. Indeed, power companies such as E.ON are pro posing to invest billions in hugely polluting coal power plants instead.

The government has proposed to reform the planning system to make it easier for windfarms to get the go-ahead. Environmentalists and conservationists are opposed to the reform, however, for the good reason that it would also make it easier for new motorways, power stations and airports to gain approval, and stifle local democracy in the process.

A greener government might have focused on reforming the planning system for renewable energy projects, gaining support from greens and electricity generators alike. Instead, in its enthusiasm for aviation and nuclear power, the government has bundled windfarms into a planning policy package that will be opposed by almost all. A missed opportunity.

There is some good news. The 1000MW London Array - which will generate enough power from wind for a quarter of London's households - has been given the go-ahead. Several other major projects are under way, and this year the UK will overtake Denmark as the largest offshore generator in the world. The UK also still leads in marine renewables (wave and tidal stream power). With 30 marine technology developers headquartered here, compared to only 15 in the rest of Europe, the UK is able to put its offshore operational skills learned from North Sea oil - now in long-term decline - to good use. At the end of last month the world's largest conference on wave and tidal stream energy, Marine 08, was held in Edinburgh. Tidal power would address the intermittency question: what to do when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Tidal power is predictable. Wave power is also more dependable. The more sources of energy we can call on, the less vulnerable we will be to losing power in any one sector.

Yet in marine renewables, too, the government has risked Britain losing its competitive edge. The world's first commercial-scale wave-generating array, while built by a UK-based company, is being launched off the Portuguese, not the British, coast. And, mirroring the disaster of the Low Carbon Buildings Programme, the Marine Renewables Deployment Fund - supposed to support the fledgling sector with capital grants and other financial aid - has a tiny budget and a cap per project of £9m, far too little for any British design to make it past the prototype stage into commercial production. Once again, we are wasting a historic advantage.

With the right policy levers pulled, we could in the not-too-distant future be generating 20 per cent of all our electricity out at sea using wave and tidal power, and far more from onshore and offshore wind. We could lead the world in a new manufacturing sector and generate thousands of new jobs. We could have a zero-carbon electricity grid as early as 2030. We could also lead the world in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

But, for this to happen, the government will need to admit that its policies have been a cala mitous failure and put clean energy at the top of its long-term agenda, before it is too late.

The Huffington Post has a good little article on Ron Paul's views on energy policy (get out of the way of alternative energy) and his neoconservative foes in the Republican party who prefer to fight endless wars over oil.

Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) recently gained fame for breaking one-day online donation records, but he's still considered an underdog by many because of his single-digit polling and arguably radical views on a variety of issues. For one thing, he supports an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, a position that seems more at home with the Democrats these days. So why is he up there, debate after debate, standing out from the likes of Huckabee and Romney and McCain? Why isn't he trying to fit in if he wants to win the primary? Is he even a Republican?

He told me he is--just not the same kind as the rest of them.

"I think their definitions are different," he said. "Today, the Party has been taken over by a group called neoconservatives, and I don't believe they're really conservative. I think they're really liberal in the modern sense of the word--they're big spenders, they believe in entitlements, they believe in military adventurism."

Paul certainly doesn't believe in "military adventurism." He articulated an anti-preemption stance, geard toward avoiding another inextricable, Iraq-like conflict in the future. And unlike some politicians, he usually acts in accordance with his stated philosophy. For example, he was one of only six Republicans in the House to vote against the Iraq War Resolution.

"The traditional conservative--which the Republicans used to be--did not advocate aggressive war, usually got our country out of the wars such as after Korea and Vietnam..." he said. "We've done exactly the opposite. And because I'm a strict constitutionalist, this has separated me from the other candidates."

Some have called Ron Paul an isolationist, in part because of his views on foreign aid and the use of military force. He strongly disagreed with the association.

"I'm the last thing from an isolationist," he said. "An isolationist is a protectionist--they want to build walls around their country. They may want to bring troops home, but they also want to close the door for trade and travel and the spreading of ideas, and that's quite different. The Founders, I think, had it right when they said, 'Trade with people, be friends with people, but don't get involved in their internal affairs and don't get involved in entangling alliances,' and you'd be a lot less likely to fight people that you're trading with than if you have protectionist measures and sanctions on countries [like] we do today."

He added: "The same individuals who claim I might be an isolationist are the ones who are putting sanctions on countries like Iran and Iraq and Sudan, and yet the trade might stop us from fighting. I, for instance, think we should be trading with Castro, rather than putting sanctions on Castro, because it didn't do any good--after 40 or 50 years, it hasn't helped us a bit."

Finally, Paul believes that the United States should not be entirely dependent on other nations for its energy.

"I think the most important thing is to let the market set the price of energy and get out of the way of alternative energy," he said. "We've been interfering with the development of nuclear energy for 30 or 40 years. We don't develop any new nuclear power plants, but then at the same time we take money and we subsidize alternative fuels such as ethanol, which nobody's ever proven is an economically feasible alternative. So the most important thing is to recognize that the government bureaucrats and politicians have no idea what is the best alternative fuel, but if the market pushes the price of oil up, then people are going to say, 'Hey, they're running out of oil! And oil is now $200 a barrel, we better do something,' and the market's going to come up with the best alternative."

These goals may seem ambitious, but Paul is conservative about what he could accomplish unilaterally, stressing that he would need to rely on congressional support that a mandate, in the form of his successful election to the presidency, would grant him.

"You could [unilaterally] change the foreign policy and bring troops home and save a lot of money. And you could start repealing executive orders that have been so onerous. And you could refuse to enforce laws that are put on the books through regulations and by court orders or executive orders. So you could be discreet in what you enforce, but to really, really have the big changes, yes, you have to work and develop a consensus on what you're trying to do."

After his recent passionate outburst, Alex at WorldChanging has given Michael Shellenberger the right of reply, with a piece called "American Power". Alex notes "I don't think it does, in fact, answer my central critiques, but I think it's a piece worth reading".

With Iraq and the "war on terror," the conservative movement has defined American power as unilateral military force. Progressives have not yet offered a counter-argument and story about American greatness that is capable of challenging the (neo)conservative one.

A new story of American Power begins by acknowledging what our country is great at: imagining, experimenting, and inventing the future. First we dream — and then we invent.

The time is ripe for progressives and environmentalists of all stripes to come together around American Power agenda for a major investment into clean energy. Not only is a large public investment crucial to bringing down the price of clean energy, an investment-centered agenda will serve the purpose of unifying Americans under a vision for energy independence and economic revitalization, one that will appeal to California and New England progressives and environmentalists and Midwestern Reagan Democrats alike.

Massive investments in clean energy offers a way of defining the source of American power around our capacity to dream better futures — and invent our way out of crises. Oil-funded terrorism, global warming, economic insecurity — these are challenges that America will overcome through our ingenuity and our capacity to reinvent ourselves every fifty years. ...

The Politics of Limits

The consensus today among climate scientists is that U.S. emissions must be reduced 80 percent by 2050 if we are stabilize emissions and avoid catastrophic climate change. But current regulatory approaches will result in modest, not deep, reductions in carbon emissions. That's because there simply do not yet exist the low cost, low carbon technologies that could be quickly brought to scale to replace carbon intensive energy sources. It is true that some strategies for reducing emissions, such as efficiency and conservation, can be scaled up immediately. But disruptive technologies like solar and carbon capture and storage — mass quantities of which will be required to deal with global warming — are still far more expensive than coal and gas.

Environmentalists suggest that setting some pollution limits and a price for carbon will be enough to move gradually — emissions reductions of just two percent per year — to achieve 80 percent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. But the price of carbon would have to be set at exorbitant levels for today's clean energy alternatives to become cost-competitive with coal, especially in China and the developing world, which will contribute 70 percent of new emissions between now and the middle of the century. And if action on global warming depends on voters and politicians accepting higher energy prices, there will — as we have seen — be very little action on global warming.

Recognizing that voters care more about the cost of energy than global warming, the policies under consideration in Congress would limit pollution so little that the price for carbon would be very low, around $7 to $10 per ton. At that price, firms required to reduce their emissions will invest in the least expensive emissions reductions possible, such as burning methane from landfills, purchasing forest land for carbon sequestration, shifting from coal to natural gas, or retrofitting power plants and buildings so they operate more efficiently. Private investment would not, for the most part, go to technologies like low-cost solar energy and carbon capture and storage, which are required to displace coal-based energy.

Meanwhile, China and India long ago rejected any approach to addressing climate change that would constrain their greenhouse gas emissions or their economic growth. For years, energy experts had expected that China would overtake the United States as the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter by 2025. It turns out that China will gain that distinction by the end of this year. The governments and the people of China and India are increasingly concerned about global warming, to be sure, but they are far more motivated by economic development, and to the extent that the battle against global warming is fought in terms of ecological limits rather than economic possibility, there’s little doubt which path these countries will take.

The only way the Chinese government will be able to substantially reduce its emissions is if the price of clean energy and carbon capture technologies come down enough to get within striking distance of the price of fossil fuels.

The dramatic and rapid breakthroughs in price and performance that we need will not be primarily driven by the private sector. Private firms will play an important role in bringing new technologies to market — and carbon pricing will play an important role in making market conditions more amenable to clean energy technologies. However, private firms will not make the large, long-term investments in R&D and deployment, nor can they create the public infrastructure (e.g., new transmission lines bringing wind power from rural areas to cities) needed for the new energy economy.

Given all of this, it's odd that environmentalists ever viewed global warming as fundamentally similar problem to things like smog in L.A., acid rain, and the hole in the ozone, much less one that won't be hard to fix. Granted, both problems are consequences of human pollution. But whereas dealing with the ozone hole required a simple, inexpensive chemical substitute, global warming demands a totally different way of producing energy. We were able to fight smog without replacing oil. We dealt with acid rain without dismantling our power plants. And we will phase out ozone-depleting chemicals without affecting any of our energy sources. But to deal with global warming, we will need an almost entirely new energy infrastructure — one that will first require the creation of an almost entirely new politics. ...

Today we launch a new campaign called "American Power," one aimed at persuading Congress to generate the $30 billion annual investment we need to make clean energy as cheap as possible, as quickly as possible. American Power will provide a vital peacetime role for the military. Just as the Department of Defense guaranteed the nascent market for silicon microchips in the 1960s, bringing the price down from $1,000 to $20 per chip in just a few years, the Pentagon must today do the same with silicon solar panels.

There are no silver bullets when it comes to energy, but solar panels, like microchips, have their own kind of "Moore's Law": the price of solar comes down roughly 20 percent every time production capacity is doubled. Experts say that for a total cost of $50 to $200 billion, we could bring solar panels down to the price of natural gas or even goal. It might be the best $200 billion ever spent by the U.S. military.

Our new book, Break Through, is a call for a new positive politics, one that puts a vision of a better world — not ecological apocalypse with its view of humankind's sins against nature — at the center. At the very moment when we find ourselves facing new problems, new social and economic forces are emerging to confront them. Internet-empowered grassroots activists, high-tech entreprenuers, and the new creative class may become the force behind a new politics of possibility.

Policy-wise, we should make big investments into clean energy and take action to restrict greenhouse gases. But in our politics — and our vision for the future — we will be in a far stronger position if we put this energetic definition of American Power at the center. ...

The good news is that, at the very moment when we find ourselves facing new problems, from global warming to the insecurity born from globalization, new social and economic forces are emerging to overcome them. High-tech businesses and creative "knowledge workers" may become a political force for big clean energy investments. And Democrats and progressives, looking for a positive vision every bit as big and bold as the war in Iraq is negative and awful, could put this new vision of American power to work for the good of the world.

Amory Lovins has no doubt outraged more than a few people with some of the quotes in this article by The Daily Green - "Why Global Warming and Peak Oil are Irrelevant". I guess I'll go off and start a LOLcat blog then. Seriously though, while I like Lovins' ideas about radical efficiency, I'm not convinced in a world where coal remains the cheapest source of power (for the time being) that we can beat either global warming (especially) or peak oil unless they take a lot longer to have a serious impact than many people currently envisage. I am hopeful that his remark that we will ditch our need for oil before it runs out is true however.

Peak Oil is a “distraction” and global warming? Well, global warming will take care of itself.

It’s the bottom line, stupid.

Amory Lovins makes these arguments, (without actually calling you stupid, and with a breathtaking whirlwind of statistics that he has — miraculously — cached in his brain) in the course of explaining why the energy source of the future is clean and limitless.

Because it’s no energy at all.

Lovins, the winner of the 2007 Leadership Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics and the executive director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, calls it “radical efficiency.” He’s used it to transform Wal-Mart from an environmental villain into a pioneering green innovator, improving its bottom line substantially in the process. He’s applied it to the U.S. military to save lives on convoy lines (a very important bottom line), since the safest way to transport fuel in a war zone is to eliminate the need to transport all that fuel. Lovins and the team at the Rocky Mountain Institute have applied radical efficiency to help redesign more than $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors.

Here’s the trick of radical efficiency: Math.

“Efficiency,” Lovins told an audience at Popular Mechanics’ Breakthrough Conference today at the Hearst Tower in New York City, “is cheaper than fuel.”

Saved money is earned money, which is why Lovins works with corporations to improve their bottom lines by radically improving energy efficiency with simple, and very available, technology and techniques. Once one company has converted, others follow.

In the case of Wal-Mart, the largest corporation in the world’s “demand pull” is inspiring its suppliers to improve their energy efficiency — by virtue of that age-old motivation, the economic survival instinct. In the case of microchip manufacturers, when one learns to make a chip more cheaply by saving energy in production, the others must follow.

Which is why peak oil doesn’t matter. If oil runs out next year, or in the next decade, that will matter less than the rise of competitive sources of energy in the marketplace. Petroleum will go the way of whale oil, which in 1850 was the world’s fifth largest industry, Lovins said. That powerful industry lasted precisely until coal-based oils provided a cheaper alternative to the common lighting fuel. You don’t hear much about whale oil anymore. “Whalers were astounded,” Lovins said, “when they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales.”

He sees the same irrelevance in global warming, at least as a catalyst to inspire a change in the fuels burned by the world’s economic engine. He sees efforts to persuade federal governments and international bodies to set limits on carbon dioxide as misguided. China, currently the world’s top polluter of greenhouse gases, will persuade itself to go green because it makes economic sense, and provides a competitive advantage, he said.

Unless, that is, U.S. business, with a little help from Lovins, does first.

“Corporations rule the world,” Lovins said. “How would you have them do it?”

TreeHugger reports on "lazy disks" - energy efficient data storage devices.

Practicality abounds in IT shops these days; first, we had the realization that 99.9 uptime was good enough for most business applications, preventing us from overspending on hardware. Now several vendors have taken this thinking into the data storage arena, and it's reducing costs and energy consumption dramatically. That's good, because power consumption for data storage will exceed that of all other equipment by next year.

The technology is called MAID (massive array of inactive disks), a rather oxymoronic name. But the technology is sound; it's based on the simple idea that the majority of data doesn't need to be accessed immediately. For example, data that experiences high activity (e.g. real time stock quotes) would require high performance storage, but data that does not experience high activity (e.g. the 1997 corporate report) can reside on lower performance and more power efficient storage. MAID takes advantage of this and turns disks off that are not in use, then powers them back on when an application needs access to dormant data. Think of it as a giant spare closet filled with stuff that you only use occasionally like winter clothes, suitcases, unicycle, etc.

Savings are big - coupled with removing duplicate data (the typical organization may have between 10 and 30 copies of the same data) , a MAID can reduce data storage energy consumption by as much as 50 percent. That's good news for data centers, most of which are already at capacity, and increasingly legislated.

The Economist has a look at a new way of collecting solar energy in "Heat from the street".

SOMETIMES, the simplest ideas are the best. To absorb heat from the sun efficiently—to use it, for example, to heat water—you need large, flat, black surfaces. One way to do that is to construct those surfaces specially, on the roofs of buildings. But why go to all that trouble when cities are full of black surfaces already, in the form of asphalted roads?

This was the thought that occurred ten years ago to Arian de Bondt, an engineer who works for a Dutch building company called Ooms. Eventually, Dr de Bondt persuaded his employers to follow it up. The result is that their headquarters in Scharwoude is now heated in winter—and also cooled in summer—by a system that relies on the surface of the road outside.

The heat-collector itself is a circuit of connected water pipes. Most of them run from one side of the street to the other, just under the asphalt layer. Some, however, dive deep into the ground.

In summer, when the surface of the street gets hot, water pumped through the pipes picks up this heat and takes it underground through one of the diving pipes. At a depth of about 100 metres lies a natural aquifer into which a series of heat exchangers have been built. The hot water from the street runs through these exchangers, warming the groundwater, before returning to the surface via another pipe. The aquifer is thus used as a heat store.

In winter, the circuit is changed slightly. Water is pumped through the heat exchangers to pick up the heat that was stored during summer. This water goes into the Ooms building and is used to warm the place up. After performing that task, it is pumped under the asphalt and the residual heat it carries helps to keep the road free of snow and ice.

That is not the end of the story. By now the water has been cooled to near freezing point, and it is once again sent underground—this time through a different pipe to a second aquifer. Here, another set of heat exchangers is used to cool the groundwater. This store of cold water is then used in summer to keep the Ooms building cool in exactly the same way that the store of heat is used in winter to keep it warm.

The result is cheap heating in winter and cheap cooling in summer.

Medialens has a look at some of the woeful mainstream media reporting on the proposed Iraq oil law - "Oil Laws - Colonising Iraq’s Economic Prize".

We are led to believe that Western societies are free and open. In many respects this is true: freedom of speech and the right to protest still exist, albeit within ever-tighter constraints. At root, however, much of what we see and hear in the corporate media has been shaped by money, power and greed. What passes for vibrant public debate is often a sham.

Some media professionals are aware of this, but they keep their heads down and stick to the narrow job requirements demanded of them. But many journalists cannot, or will not, grasp the notion that there are serious limits to news reporting and debate; limits that are set by powerful interests in society. The very possibility is viewed as an affront to journalistic pride and hard-bitten common sense.

A few journalists, however, are very well aware of the boundaries. They consciously seek to exploit occasional gaps in the corporate news blanket smothering reality, and to point the public to facts and perspectives that discomfit the powerful.

The issue of Iraq's oil illustrates the standard problem: incessant repetition of a state-approved script, with tiny instances of solidly critical reporting. Discussion of any possible relationship between the invasion of Iraq and the US-UK thirst for oil - both as a hydrocarbon resource and as a strategic tool for dominance - is close to taboo. If raised, the topic is swiftly dismissed as 'conspiracy' talk.

It was only last month that news media reported the bombshell dropped by Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve:

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." (Bob Woodward, 'Greenspan Is Critical Of Bush in Memoir,' Washington Post, September 15, 2007)

After that remarkable line from his new book was made public, Greenspan rapidly backtracked. He "clarified" that he was talking about "security" and that oil was "not [...] the administration's motive." (Bob Woodward, 'Greenspan: Ouster Of Hussein Crucial For Oil Security,' Washington Post, September 17, 2007). The media's attention has since moved away from such dangerous ground. Instead, safe territory on Iraqi oil is defined by terms such as 'investment', 'stability', 'reconciliation' and 'equitable sharing of resources.'

The basis for such discourse was established before the invasion in 2003, when we were relentlessly told that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction had to be rooted out and 'stability' brought to the region. The doctrine of reconciliation and democracy was reaffirmed when George Bush gave a speech in January 2007 in which he set out 'benchmarks' to measure Iraq's 'progress'. Bush proclaimed a noble aim for the Iraqi government, with US support:

"To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis."

Bush also pledged that: "military and civilian experts [will] help local Iraqi communities pursue reconciliation, strengthen the moderates and speed the transition to Iraqi self-reliance. And Secretary [Condoleezza] Rice will soon appoint a reconstruction coordinator in Baghdad to ensure better results for economic assistance being spent in Iraq." ('"The Most Urgent Priority for Success in Iraq Is Security," Bush Says,' New York Times, January 11, 2007)

Thus, the approved framework of oil revenue 'sharing', underpinning Washington's 'reconciliation' among Iraqis, was decreed by the US president. And indeed this is the line followed in the bulk of corporate news reporting. Consider the following typical examples.

A Financial Times editorial hails a "national reconciliation package" to include "a law governing the country's oil and gas industry" and "directed at [...] discord between Iraq 's ethnic and confessional groups." (Leader, 'The irreconcilable. As deadlines pass, time is running out for a political solution in Iraq,' Financial Times, June 7, 2007)

The Times notes the guiding "principle that all oil revenues should be divided between the Iraqi regions". (Carl Mortished, 'Western oil major's bid marks breakthrough for troubled Iraqi industry,' The Times, August 23, 2007)

Ian Black, Middle East editor of the Guardian, writes of a raft of measures designed to tackle Iraqi debt relief. These include "a revenue-sharing oil law", drafted with the help of that well-known benefactor, the World Bank. (Black, 'Rice breaks the ice with Syria , but not Iran,' The Guardian, May 4, 2007)

The 'anti-war' Independent writes of "redistributing the cash [oil revenues] to the regions - which the new oil law states must be done in proportion to regions' populations". (Saeed Shah, 'Foreign companies in scramble for 10 new Kurdish oil contracts,' The Independent, March 23, 2007)

Steve Negus, Iraq correspondent of the Financial Times, even makes the classic journalistic mistake of taking government "hopes" at face value:

"The US hopes the oil law will reassure Sunnis that they will still receive a solid share of national oil export revenues under a new political order dominated by the Shia majority." (Negus, 'Iraqis try to curb pressure on US to quit,' Financial Times, September 10, 2007)

To date, no oil law has been approved by the Iraqi parliament despite extraordinary pressure from the US and UK governments. Sticking to the approved line, the FT's Andrew Ward writes of "oil revenues [...] being distributed equitably to the provinces, in spite of the failure to pass a national oil law". (Ward, 'Little political progress, White House admits,' Financial Times, September 15, 2007) ...

Concluding Remarks - Not About Oil, Of Course!

The real agenda behind Iraq's oil – the striving by powerful states, particularly the US, for strategic control of the resource-rich Middle East - has been all but ignored by the corporate media. When the truth is glimpsed, it is waved away as very much a secondary aim trailing behind the noble commitment to 'democracy'. As one Cambridge academic noted in the Financial Times:

"The war in Iraq is not, of course, about oil. Coalition troops are there to advance democracy and to protect the innocent. But the consequences for the world's energy markets of an unresolved conflict in a country that holds the world's third largest accumulation of oil reserves cannot be ignored." (Nick Butler, director of the Cambridge Centre for Energy Studies at the Judge Business School, 'Iraq needs an "oil for peace" deal,' Financial Times, September 12, 2007)

What is routinely missing from the corporate news media is historical context shedding light on Washington's real, rather than stated, motivations. Of central and long-standing relevance is the 1945 US State Department description of Saudi Arabian energy resources as "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history". Undiscovered oil fields in Iraq could well boost that country's reserves to 300 billion barrels, even more than in Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the whole of the Gulf region has long been considered "probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment." (Cited in Noam Chomsky, 'Hegemony or Survival', Hamish Hamilton, London, 2003, p.150)

Based on copiously-documented historical evidence, Noam Chomsky writes of US power:

"The basic missions of global management have endured from the early postwar period, among them: containing other centers of global power within the 'overall framework of order' managed by the United States; maintaining control of the world's energy supplies; barring unacceptable forms of independent nationalism; and overcoming 'crises of democracy' within domestic enemy territory." (Ibid., p.16)

But these truths, necessary for any public understanding of world affairs, are deemed too 'radioactive' to be carried by the corporate media.

Links:

* WSJ Energy Roundup - Of Algae, Nukes and Bicycles
* Cosmos - Nano-layered plastic sheet is strong as steel. "Made out of clay and a non-toxic glue similar to that used in school classrooms, the material is cheap, biodegradable and requires very little energy to produce, said Kotov: 'It's as green as you can imagine.'"
* TreeHugger - Biomimicry: Nacre Inspires Transparent Strong As Steel Plastic
* After Gutenberg - Elephant Grass Fueled Thermoelectric Power Plant
* Bruce Sterling - Wattson
* After Gutenberg - Solar Power 2007
* WorldChanging - Will Saving the Polar Bear Save the Arctic Ice?
* WorldChanging - Google Transit: Mapping the Future of Bicycling, Walking, and Transit
* Transition Culture - Patrick Holden, Peak Oil, Local Food and Transition.
* The Australian - Beach confident of oil migrating west. Fossicking for the last oil in the Cooper Basin.
* The Australian - Oil and Gas Council warns of costly greenhouse decisions. Costly to them. The APPEA lives in a bizarre fantasy world where gas fired power is clean, cheap and abundant. It may be cleaner than coal, but it doesn't compete with wind, solar, geothermal or ocean energy in that dimension, and it is becoming both scarcer and more expensive. There are better uses for gas than burning it in power stations.
* New Zealand Herald - US energy expert attacks airlines' bid to fly more Kiwis. Richard Heinberg in New Zealand.
* SMH - Jimmy Carter calls Cheney a 'disaster' for US
* New York Times - Marines Press to Remove Their Forces From Iraq
* New York Times - Supporters of Gore Lead a Movement That Lacks a Candidate
* News And Policy - Ron Paul Ups the Ante on the Iraq War at Republican Debate: Says He Will Not Support the GOP Nominee if He Fails to Commit to Immediate Withdrawal of Troops
* SMH - Kirby in stinging attack on fellow High Court judges
* Washington Post - Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs.