The Peakist

Dozens of factories that turn corn into the gasoline substitute ethanol are sprouting up across the US, often in places hundreds of miles away from where corn is grown, the New York times reports:

“Once considered the green dream of the environmentally sensitive, ethanol has become the province of agricultural giants that have long pressed for its use as fuel, as well as newcomers seeking to cash in on a bonanza. The modern-day gold rush is driven by a number of factors: generous government subsidies, surging demand for ethanol as a gasoline supplement, a potent blend of farm-state politics and the prospect of generating more than a 100 percent profit in less than two years. The rush is taking place despite concerns that large-scale diversion of agricultural resources to fuel could result in price increases for food for people and livestock, as well as the transformation of vast preserved areas into farmland. (more…)

In Monday’s Guardian, Larry Elliott, the economics editor, wrote a long piece on how the “knock-on effects of slower US growth will be felt in every corner of the globe,” the “day of reckoning” for the US debt binge may be delayed but is “now inevitable”. What was significant about the piece, however, was that Elliott stepped outside of the hegemonic thinking of mainstream economists to ask whether, on ” the brink of ecological catastrophe, we ought to lose our fixation with growth and concentrate on self-sufficiency and sustainability instead”. The Guardian may be a left liberal paper but for an economist to question the raison d’etre of growth is to put themselves about as left field as you can get. We need a radical shift in economic thinking towards a form of steady state, sustainable economy and this piece is a welcome recognition of that in the mainstream media. (more…)

Fred Pearce reports: MANY governments, including some that claim to be leading the fight against global warming, are harbouring a dirty little secret. These countries are emitting far more greenhouse gas than they say they are, a fact that threatens to undermine not only the shaky Kyoto protocol but also the new multibillion-dollar market in carbon trading. (more…)

The US Supreme Court decided on Monday to hear a case that will bring climate change and the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions before the court for the first time.
The case could force the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate CO2 emissions from cars and other mobile sources. “That’s a big deal, because [the Supreme Court] rarely ever grants a review,” says Richard Lazarus, professor of law at Georgetown University in Washington DC and co-counsel for the plaintiffs in the case. The Supreme Court only agrees to hear about 1% of roughly 8000 petitions it receives each year. “It means that they think it’s a very important issue and they need to review it now,” he adds. (more…)

The New York Times looks at some technological fixes to global warming:

In the past few decades, a handful of scientists have come up with big, futuristic ways to fight global warming: Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Their proposals were relegated to the fringes of climate science. Few journals would publish them. Few government agencies would pay for feasibility studies. Environmentalists and mainstream scientists said the focus should be on reducing greenhouse gases and preventing global warming in the first place.

But now, in a major reversal, some of the world’s most prominent scientists say the proposals deserve a serious look because of growing concerns about global warming. (more…)

Electricity-generating tidal lagoons located in the Severn Estuary could provide an economically attractive and environmentally acceptable way of supplying up to 7% of England and Wales’s electricity consumption with low-cost, low-carbon electricity.
There are a large range of potential environmental and economic benefits and disbenefits associated with siting lagoons or the proposed Severn Barrage in the Estuary. However, initial comparisons strongly suggest that lagoons could be significantly less extensive and environmentally damaging and more cost effective and powerful than the Barrage. Lagoons would not directly impound the ecologically highly valuable inter-tidal areas of the Estuary. (more…)

The Guardian reports “BP has joined forces with one of Europe’s biggest food groups to build what they claim will be Britain’s largest “green” petrol plant using sugar beet from East Anglia. The move, designed to kickstart a much larger programme involving hundreds of millions of pounds of investment, comes as environmental campaigners declare war on the UK’s largest traditional power plant, Drax.” (more…)

Biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel can significantly reduce global dependence on oil, according to a new report by the Worldwatch Institute, released in collaboration with the German Agencies for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and Renewable Resources (FNR).

Last year, world biofuel production surpassed 670,000 barrels per day, the equivalent of about 1 percent of the global transport fuel market. Although oil still accounts for more than 96 percent of transport fuel use, biofuel production has doubled since 2001 and is poised for even stronger growth as the industry responds to higher fuel prices and supportive government policies. “Coordinated action to expand biofuel markets and advance new technologies could relieve pressure on oil prices while strengthening agricultural economies and reducing climate-altering emissions,” says Worldwatch Institute President Christopher Flavin. (more…)

Michael T. Klare, Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and the author of “Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum”  puts Iran in  great power context:
” For months, the American press and policy-making elite have portrayed the crisis with Iran as a two-sided struggle between Washington and Tehran, with the European powers as well as Russia and China playing supporting roles. It is certainly true that George Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are the leading protagonists in this drama, with each making inflammatory statements about the other in order to whip up public support at home. But an informed reading of recent international diplomacy surrounding the Iranian crisis suggests that another equally fierce — and undoubtedly more important — struggle is also taking place: a tripolar contest between the United States, Russia, and China for domination of the greater Persian Gulf/Caspian Sea region and its mammoth energy reserves.
(more…)

Tim Flannery debunks the idea that hydrogen is going to provide us with the fuel of the post-oil energy regime:

“TO PEOPLE IN THE PETROCHEMICAL and motor vehicle businesses, the solution to the climate change problem lies in ascending a metaphorical staircase of fuels, which, at each step, contains an ever diminishing amount of carbon.

Yesterday, the argument goes, it was coal, today it’s oil, and tomorrow it will be natural gas, with Nirvana being reached when the global economy makes the transition to hydrogen—a fuel that contains no carbon at all. (more…)

BP promised yesterday to spend $500m (£285m) establishing a dedicated energy laboratory aimed at using the emerging knowledge from bioscience to find greener car fuels. The company hopes the study of living organisms will also provide ways of improving the recovery of oil, as well as opening up more opportunities for coal bed methane and carbon sequestration.

Lord Browne, chief executive, said he had started talks with leading universities in Britain and the US that could host what will be known as the BP Energy Biosciences Institute. “The world needs new technologies to maintain adequate supplies of energy for the future. Bioscience is already transforming modern medicine and we believe it can bring immense benefits to the energy sector,” he said.

The initiative was given a muted welcome by environmental campaign group Greenpeace, which said there were wider worries about biofuels and land use. Doug Parr, chief scientist, said: “This is good but it’s not in itself any kind of answer. BP can’t do everything on its own. It’s up to governments and legislators. Biofuels can compete for land use against biomass and cause deforestation in areas like Brazil.” Source

China will be the next superpower: already it’s in competition with the US over resources. Martin Jacques argues history will judge the invasion of Iraq to have been the moment when the geopolitical decline of the US, following the end of the cold war, first became manifest. (more…)

“Oil has literally made foreign and security policy for decades…it…provoked the division of the Middle East after WW1; aroused Germany and Japan to extend their tentacles beyond their borders; the Arab oil embargo; Iran vs Iraq; the Gulf War. This is all clear.”

Bill Richardson, U.S. Secretary of Energy, 1999

“[The invasion of Iraq]… has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.”

Donald Rumsfeld, Nov 2002

“Let me deal with the conspiracy theory that this is somehow to do with oil. There is no way whatever if oil were the issue that it would not be infintely simpler to cut a deal with Saddam.”

Tony Blair to the House of Commons, 2003

“Every single empire, in its official discourse has said that is it not like all the others. That its circumstances are special , that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.”

Edward Said

Kevin Phillips is a former Republican strategist, (chief analyst on Nixon’s 1968 campaign) now bitterly opposed to the house of Bush and the religious right’s power in the
Republican Party. In his magisterial work “American Theocracy: the peril and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the 21st century” (2006) Phillips argues
that every empire has been brought down by a combination of imperial over-reach , militant religion, ballooning debt and diminishing resources. Each of the modern world
powers depended on its leading command of an emerging energy technology regime – the Dutch water and wind power, the British coal and the US oil. And each
develops inertial forces that mitigate against it dominating the next historically emergent energy regime (such as the US built environments dependence on cars). For Phillips
it is not simply that American empire depends on oil, rather:

“…The Bush administration knew that the peak oil crisis probably posed strategic dangers far beyond those publicly acknowledged. The dollar’s role as the world’s reserve
currency was also tied to oil”. [p.69]

“…a final decision to invade Iraq seems to have been made in early 2001, for reasons that had been mounting since 1997. During the election year and 2001, five political
and policy end games – all felt by important constituencies to be pressing or even desperate [were] underway in what was historically an extraordinary convergence.” (more…)

In recent months Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have sought to rebrand “the war on terror” as the epochal “Long War.” Presumably “the war on terror” has been going on long enough, and Osama bin Laden, the ‘Goldstein’ of the philo-semitic US right, has been ‘escaping justice’ long enough that the neo-cons think the US public is ready for a perceptual shift. What was, immediately post 9/11, branded as circling the wagons and raising a posee is now explicitly being touted as the Cold War for the New American Century. The once proud, freedom-loving anti-Soviet mujahideen of Afghanistan are today’s fanatical enemies of freedom, bent on destroying the West out of sheer hatred of our liberal values and taking over the world - “We have always been at war with East Asia”. (more…)

The Oxford Research Group has just published a report on the fundamental threats to global security -”Global Responses to Global Threats - Sustainable Security for the
21st Century”. Firstly, I’m interested to see the trope of “sustainability” migrating into the discourse of security - albeit as a conscious move on the part of the authors. The
principal aim of the report is to provide a different security paradigm to the “war on terror”. The authors write:

“Current security policies assume international terrorism to be the greatest threat to global security, and attempt to maintain the status quo and control insecurity through
the projection of military force. The authors argue that the failure of this approach has been clearly demonstrated during the last five years of the ‘war on terror’ and it is
distracting governments from the real threats that humanity faces.”

And indeed the Guardian highlights the piece with the headline “Climate change a bigger security threat than terrorism, says report.” On one level it is a strange world we live in
when a literate national newspaper finds in news worthy to report that things on the scale of the shut down of the North Atlantic conveyor are more dangerous than car
bombs; on another level it’s a strange world when we have to recognise the intimate interconnectedness of the two. (more…)