green with a gun

Time for a double dissolution election

2009-06-24T02:53:00.001-07:00

Senator Fielding says there's no such thing as global warming.

The Labor federal government is trying to pass a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Basically, it's a carbon trading scheme in principle, and a carbon gifting scheme in practice - the biggest polluters will get free permits, and the funds raised from the sale of the other permits will be used to subsidise petrol, natural gas and coal to ensure that consumers don't end up with higher prices. Now, the whole point of any trading scheme or tax is to raise the price so that people seek alternatives. If fossil fuels become more expensive, wind and solar and taking a walk look more attractive. So if you ensure the prices stay the same, well then it's just another way of handing cash to big companies and squashing small companies.

Anyway, the Government lacks a majority in the Senate. To pass anything, they need either the support of the Opposition (Liberal-Nationals), or else the Greens plus the two independents. One of the independents is this bloke Fielding. Fielding represents Family First, a front party for the Christian fundamentalists the Assembly of God, your basic god-bothering fruit loops, playing with snakes, speaking in tongues and all that. He's a Senator from Victoria. He got in by accident: we have a funny system where we vote preferentially, numbering who we want from 1 to 150 (or however many Senate candidates there are).

Most people don't write all the numbers in, and just put a "1" in the party box, their vote then goes however that party says. Once they establish who first gets in, they start looking at everyone's 2nd preferences, then their 3rd, and so on. It's a bit like the decathlon - if you come (say) 3rd in every event, you win the decathlon overall. Well, Fielding got in because the major parties put the Greens last, and each-other second-last, and him in the middle. So while only 1.8% of people actually voted for Fielding, he was one of the six Senators elected.

The major parties aren't making that mistake again.

Now, if legislation is rejected unamended by the Senate a few times, the government can say "double or nothing!", ask the Governor General to dissolve both Houses of Parliament and call fresh elections. Then, assuming they win government, they have a joint sitting of the two Houses and force it through.

I think the CPRS is a load of bollocks, and a complete waste of time, yet another corporate handout. But it'd be an excellent chance to get rid of Fielding. Let's get rid of the fucking fruit loop and get someone with some more hearty breakfast food for brains instead.

Get up, keep running

2009-06-02T18:56:00.000-07:00

Looking around at how people come to my blog, I found this interesting article, the one stone challenge. (By "stone" she means the old Imperial measurement of 14 pounds, or 6.3kg, in this case a stone of CO_2e.) Essentially it's a watered-down emissions reduction programme, but with more things to keep track of. Praise to Emily for being pointed in the right direction, not so much praise for the slow pace she recommends. Like many Westerners, I think perhaps she doesn't appreciate the urgency of the problem. It's hard to - it's not in our interests to really understand it.

If you enjoy accounting so much, then you can try the Carbon Account Challenge.

In this, carbon dioxide is the backing for a new currency, the Carbon (¢). Your allowed emissions are treated as an "income". You can earn more income from planting trees and harvesting food. If you are a truly profligage Carbons spender today, perhaps you could take four months to reduce to the current Western average, ¢1,000. Then reduce this by ¢10 every month until you reach the world average spending, ¢300. After that you reduce it by ¢5 per month until you reach the safe level of ¢100 a month.

So you take 4 months to get to the Western average; then 70 months, almost six years, to get from the Western to the world average. Then you take 40 months, three and a half years, to get from the world average to a safe level. In all, in nine and a half years you've gone from profligate wasteful spending of Carbon to a level the world could sustain forever.

People generally take 2-5 years to completely change their lifestyle. In 2-5 years you can move to a new country and learn a new language, get married and have children or get divorced, find a new home and be well-settled in, get a new qualification and a new career, become depressed and suicidal, get deadly cancer and go through chemotherapy, go from being grossly obese to a bodybuilding champion, and so on.

So you ought to be able to make significant changes in your carbon-spending lifestyle in almost ten years. I double the time because you often have to drag a reluctant family along, and a lot of it depends on having the available infrastructure around, like buses and trains and decent food and wind power available from retailers, and that often takes longer than individual changes. You can get all that with moving house or workplace and lobbying local government, and do it within ten years. If you can't, well it's not that you can't it's just that you're not trying. Ten years.

As Emily says, small steps do take you towards a far goal. However, I'd say that one stone is a bit too small a step. It becomes a token effort we know is useless, like Earth Hour.

The thing is that all these carbon calculations are not terribly precise. Maybe my coal-fired station is a bit worse than yours, so that I only get 4kWh for a stone compared to your 7kWh. Maybe my beef is grass-fed instead of grain-fed so it farts less.

In the Carbon Account Challenge, these inaccuracies come out in the wash, in that however inaccurate the particular figures, over time you'll see if the trend in spending is generally up or generally down. That's a bit harder if you've got 157 things to keep track of.

The other issue is that Emily's presented it as "carbon saved." But the problem is not how much carbon we're saving, rather how much we're spending. If I drink ten Guinesses tonight, it will not help my head tomorrow that I said "no" to two more. Ten was nine too many. It's easier to keep track of the drinks I did have than the drinks I might have had but didn't. I cannot "save" drinks, I either drink them or I don't.

Likewise, we cannot "save" emissions. If (say) 1,000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide will turn our planet into misery, that we "saved" 10,000 billion tonnes won't matter. All that matters is the emissions we make. We have to get them down, and fast. It may be too much or too hard, but we've not any choice.

Once in the Army I saw that when blokes fall down on a cross-country run, a corporal or sergeant comes along and kicks them in the guts until they get up and keep going. Lying there gasping, you have a choice: you can lie there being kicked, or you can get up and keep running. Most get up and keep running.

That is overly brutal and people shouldn't do that to each-other, but that's what the Earth is doing to us. Hurricane Katrina, the Black Saturday bushfires, the Bangladesh cyclone, drought in Australia and the Sahel - the Earth is kicking us in the guts and saying, "get up, keep going."

We can lie there in airconditioned comfort and in our SUVs munching on our burgers, and keep getting kicked in the guts by global warming. Or we can switch it off, get out and walk and find a decent meal, and keep running. It's shitty and hard and unfair but we have no choice. As you can see from my carbon account in the sidebar, I'm overspending, so I understand the difficulties. But it's no-one's fault but my own. I take responsibility for my actions and inactions both.

It's also a social justice issue. As Sharon Astyk likes to relate, one Bangladeshi man was interviewed after a flood. He said, "I am told that the flood happened because of greenhouse gases and global warming. But I swear to you, I have never owned a single lightbulb."

We're being kicked in the guts, but they're being kicked in the balls.

Get up, keep running. You have ten years to get there. Hurry up.

Being green and spending green

2009-05-25T17:10:00.000-07:00

or, the trouble with rooftop solar

This article, which also appears at TheOilDrum:ANZ, looks at domestic solar power in Australia, asking: is it worth it?

It does not talk about large-scale solar systems, but focuses on grid-connected solar photovoltaic cells on a home's rooftop. The article looks at it from the perspective of the one who actually decides whether or not to install it: the homeowner. It may or may not be worthwhile from the point of view of society as a whole, but at present the decision is up to the person who owns the house. This article came about from my own research as my household, here in Melbourne, considered getting a rooftop solar photovoltaic system. In the end we've decided not to.

There are several things to consider: vanity, society, systemic, security, environmental, and financial. But first some background.

BACKGROUND
Photovoltaic cells convert light to electricity. Obviously, they produce electricity only when there's sunlight, and more or less depending how high the sun is in the sky and how overcast it is.

Photovoltaics produce a direct current which can go straight to recharging batteries, or to devices which use direct current like any battery-driven device, some specially-designed refrigerators, etc. Most household appliances use alternating current. Thus, with the solar PV must come an inverter, which changes the direct current to alternating so that the household appliances can use it.

In a stand-alone system, such as is found in outback Australia, the house isn't connected to the electricity grid, and so they have banks of batteries to store the energy generated during the sunny days. In a grid-connected system, the house draws power from the grid normally, but the electricity from the cells goes to the grid, too. In practice, the cells generate more electricity than the household uses during hot afternoons, and the house draws from the grid the rest of the time. The standard installation for a grid-connected system includes the solar panels, the inverter, and a new electricity meter; it does not include batteries.

The major obstacle to widespread use of photovoltaics is the cost. A grid-connected 1kW system might be around A$17,000 all-up. Various federal and state governments have offered rebates and encouragement to lower this cost; these will be discussed in the "finances" section. Apart from ordinary politics, the purpose of these is to ease the peak load. If a region normally uses at most (say) 1,000MW of power, but then on a hot summer's afternoon uses 1,500MW, the region must have 1,500MW of capacity in its power plants, or buy the energy in from another region. As well as the expense of new power plants or energy importing, the various power lines have to be tougher, too, so this means more infrastructure and maintenance, etc. That's a lot of expense and hassle for what might only be 7 days a year when that peak capacity is needed. Enter photovoltaics - they produce the most power at the same time as the peak demand.

There are some rebates for wind and other forms of generation at the domestic level, but since most of Australia's population lives in relatively sunny and dry areas, the focus of efforts so far has been on solar.

VANITY
If you're a person with a greenish tint around the edges, it'll feel good to have solar panels on your roof. What the SUV or iPhone is to the yuppie, solar panels are to the greenish middle-class. I don't see anything wrong with this, if we did nothing for ego and image, we'd be a much grubbier-looking people. It's a statement of who you are and what you believe is important, and it feels good. Part of making a statement is having somebody listen - society.

SOCIETY
Between fossil fuels running short and their extraction and burning causing various kinds of harm to the world we live in, whether civil war in Nigeria and Iraq or global warming, it's plain that we can't keep burning so much of the stuff forever, and eventually we must burn none at all. However, people are reluctant to accept this. In physics, inertia is the tendency of an object to keep moving at the same speed and in the same direction as it was going unless it's acted on by an outside force. Societies have a kind of inertia, it can take quite a bit to make them change.

We ought not to overestimate this, however. As Solnit writes in "Revolutions per minute",

"Sex before marriage. Bob and his boyfriend. Madame Speaker. Do those words make your hair stand on end or your eyes widen? Their flatness is the register of successful revolution. Many of the changes are so incremental that you adjust without realizing something has changed until suddenly one day you realize everything is different. [...]

"Although we typically associate revolution with the sudden overthrow of a regime, the Industrial Revolution was an incremental change in everyday life and production that began a little over two centuries ago and never ended. [...]

"The fantasy of a revolution is that it will make everything different—and regime-changing revolutions generally make a difference, sometimes a significantly positive one—but the making of differences in everyday practices is a more protracted and incremental and ultimately more revolutionary process."

The idea that we must burn less fossil fuels today, and one day we will not burn any fossil fuels at all is a radical idea. It's so radical that many people say it's impossible, insisting that easy oil reserves are sitting around waiting to be discovered, that we must await some technological breakthrough to use renewables in any significant way, that we'd have to "live in caves" to do it, or that if we even try to do without fossil fuels there'll be a "dieoff", or that it can be done in principle but we don't have enough time and the attempt to build the infrastructure will be the final burst of carbon dioxide that pushes us over the edge into catastrophic global warming.

The social benefit of having solar panels on your roof thus becomes clear: it makes the radical seem ordinary. If you walk along a street and half the houses have the blue shiny panels on them, it's hard to keep thinking change is impossible. They start to seem rather mundane - boring, in fact. When the radical seems ordinary, we stop objecting to it and standing in its way, and usually claim we supported the idea all along. If I want to effect social change in the direction of let's burn less stuff, solar panels on my roof seems good.

SYSTEMIC
As noted earlier, power generation and grid capacity must be kept at a level which can match the highest demand placed on it, even if that demand only shows up a few days a year and is normally much less than that. That's a lot of expense and hassle. Here in Melbourne we've experienced a failure of generation and grid capacity to meet demand, suffering blackouts of a few days as large supply lines or power substations went down from overheating, leading to mass train cancellations and many other disruptions.

In Australia, peak demand happens at the same time as peak generation of rooftop solar. Thus domestic rooftop solar seems a good solution to the problem of our hot days, as it lessens the demand on the large power stations and the grid as a whole. It has a systemic benefit - helping prevent the system from breaking. Of course there is a cost to this, but already we pay taxes to help the system as a whole avoid breaking, at least in this case we'd be choosing exactly what our money goes on.

SECURITY
In 1998 alone, Melbourne lost natural gas supplies for about two weeks, the Auckland CBD lost electricity for some five weeks, and Sydney's water supply became undrinkable. There are many other cases of interruptions to supply due to poor maintenance of infrastructure in our region. It seems reasonable to expect that in a decade of living in a home, we may lose supply of a single utility for up to 28 days, and of all three utilities for 2-7 days. Thus, it seems prudent to have your own gas bottles, water tanks and electricity supply that can keep you going for one to four weeks, though obviously at much reduced consumption.

Unfortunately, a grid-connected system on its own does not improve our electricity security. We have to have a battery system for that, and it's not a standard installation, costing about another $2,000. More in the "finances" system.

ENVIRONMENTAL
The greenish Westerner wants to live relatively lightly on the Earth, to have the least impact they can while still having a decent standard of living. Here in Victoria, we have the dubious distinction of having the dirtiest power station in the industrialised world at Hazelwood, built from 1959 onwards. ; it emits about 1.58kg CO_2e per kWh [source: Hazelwood West Field EES La Trobe Planning Scheme Amendment C32, Independent Planning Panel (2005)], compared to more typical numbers of 0.8-1.3 kg CO_2e/kWh for other coal-fired stations. In Melbourne in 2003 the average household consumed about 6,265 kWh of electricity, which would thus cause about 9.9t of emissions if all got from Hazelwood.

However, we're not obliged in our households to buy this power. We can put up solar panels, or we can buy renewably-generated electricity from our retailers.

The federal government has set up a Greenpower accreditation system. Basically, any renewable power created since 1997, and not involving the burning of native forest or reduction of environmental flows to rivers is counted. We have a privatised electricity system - one company will own a power station, another will buy wholesale electricity from it, and a third will retail sell that electricity to industry, commerce and households. Households can ask their electricity retailer for renewable electricity.

Now, if the household buys renewable energy, that does not mean the company sets up a special power line from the wind turbine to the home. It just means that if during the year the household buys (say) 6,000kWh of electricity from the retailer, the retailer must buy 6,000kWh of electricity from the owners of the wind turbine. The particular electrons you get may have come from Hazelwood, from the Snowy hydroelectric project, from your neighbour's rooftop solar, or some mixture of those; but your money goes to support the renewable energy generation.

Naturally, if more people ask for renewable than is being produced, the price of renewably-generated electricity will rise, and more companies will build renewable energy. That is, if say 20% of generation is renewable but 25% of consumption is from people buying GreenPower, they'd have to build another 5% of generation. Currently, this is not the case; demand for GreenPower is less than supply, as I wrote in green states and brown. The most recent Greenpower report [2Mb pdf of 2008-Q4] tells us that there were 476,762MWh of GreenPower sales in 2008-Q4; if this were annual, it would be 1,907,048MWh, or 1.9 billion kWh. The federal government's Mandatory Renewable Energy Target includes 9.5 billion kWh generated by 2010 and 45 billion kWh by 2020, compared to total 2007 consumption of about 240 billion kWh. So the household demand is considerably less than the current supply of renewable energy; this is probably because it costs more.

On the other hand, household electricity consumption as of 2006-7 is only about 231 PJ, or 64 billion kWh, and 2008-Q4's GreenPower consumption was a 37% rise on 2007-Q4.

The GreenPower-buying households are subsidising the non-green majority, but the GreenPower buyers are increasing rapidly. If renewables are installed quickly enough to meet the 2010 and 2020 targets (about 25% rise annually), and if demand continues rising as quickly as in the past few years (about 35% annually), demand for GreenPower will exceed supply in 2020. That is, government regulation and subsidy drive the growth in renewables to 2020, and the market drives it afterwards. I don't know if this is a fair assumption, but it seems to be the government assumption.

It's clear that either buying GreenPower or installing solar panels on your roof will have less environmental impact than simply buy standard coal-generated electricity. But it's not clear that having solar panels on your roof is any more or less environmentally-friendly than simply buying GreenPower from your retailer. In general, economies of scale will mean that a single large power station, whatever its power source, will have less emissions per kWh than many smaller power stations - for example on your roof. Would 1,000 1kW rooftop solar units have more or less impact than a single 1MW unit out in the countryside somewhere? Logically, they'd have more impact, needing more wires and inverters and maintenance and so on per kWh generated. However, I know of no formal study examining this in detail.

In sum, the environmental case for GreenPower or rooftop solar against conventional power is clear; which of the first two is better isn't clear.

FINANCIAL
We have established that a greenish person will want to get their electricity renewably, and will contribute to grid stability by having a rooftop solar photovoltaic installation, with the environmental case being strong for abandoning coal, but undecided for GreenPower, and that security of supply can't be had with a standard installation as it lacks batteries. But how much does all this stuff cost, and will it pay for itself?

Buying electricity retail
Conventional electricity retails at (including sales tax) A$0.18469/kWh, and wind-generated electricity adds a tariff to bring it to $A0.23969/kWh. There's also an A$174.90 service charge which we have to pay regardless of how much or little we use, so we can set it aside as a cost for the moment. The retail figures thus give us a baseline to judge the worth of the solar systems - how long before they generate enough electricity to pay for themselves?

If you have a rooftop solar system, each quarter they add up all the electricity you imported from the grid, and subtract all you exported into it. If you used more than you generated, you pay the same retail rate for the rest. In Victoria there exists a net feed-in tariff, so that if you generate more than you consume over a quarter, you are paid A$0.60/kWh for it.

A third consideration is that with fossil fuels peaking, countries considering various kinds of climate change avoiding/mitigating treaties, and a water shortage in Australia, we can expect that electricity will only get more expensive. Generating your own insures against retail consumption price rises, though does not insure against service charge rises.

The system and its retail cost
A typical household will be able to fit 1k-3kW of panels on the rooftop; a typical 175W panel is 1.3 x 1m and weighs about 16kg. Obviously a north-facing roof is needed to get a good output of power, and with the typical pitched roof this means only a quarter the area is available to use, so few people will be putting 5kW systems up there. I don't want to be seen as endorsing any particular company, but a websearch will show that the retail cost of solar panels in Australia is $10-$15 per Watt once you're in the kW range. So you're looking at $10,000 to $45,000 for the 1-3kW.

The inverter comes next; the larger the capacity of the panels, the tougher the inverter needs to be. This is not very big, around 60cm x 30cm x 20cm and a few kilograms, though bigger if it must be outside and waterproofed, or inside and silenced (they give out a "hum" like transformers in the street) and is usually another $2,000 or so.

Lastly there's the meter: conventional electricity meters are designed only to measure power going one way, so a "smart meter" must be installed. Typically the solar panel company has nothing to do with this, and the customer must get their electricity retailer to do it. Enquiries with my own retailer told me,

"The cost of a new electricity meter is approx $180 for single phase or $315 for poly phase meter. This is charged directly by your electricity distributor. There will also be a truck fee of $290. This will be passed through to you on your electricity bill from the electricity distributor. If your electricity box is not up to relevant electricity standards [ie is more than 25 years old], there will be a cost to upgrade. This cost could be up to $1500."

Thus, $500-$2,000 for the meter. It's notable that unless you spend $250 on a "site inspection fee", you cannot know exactly what it'll cost to change your meter over. It's a gamble.

If you want a stand-alone system, you'll want some batteries. A battery holding 5-10kWh worth of energy will retail for around $2,000.

Labour is typically folded into the retail costs. There are other expenses to push things up. For example, if you have a tiled roof, the panels require extra supports, which adds $150-$400 to the cost.

In all, taking we could be looking at $15,900 for a grid-connected 1kW solar system without rebates, or $17,900 for the same with battery backup for security.

The rebates and retail cost
The federal government offers $8/W as a rebate, with a minimum of 450W and maximum of 1,000W. In practice, nobody bothers installing anything less than 1kW. Essentially it's $8,000 off your 1kW system.

There also exist renewable energy certificates. For each 1,000kWh of electricity expected to be generated over 15 years, a certificate is issued. This REC may be bought and sold, and companies buy them to fulfill their renewable energy targets. For example, Hazelwood power station can be considered 20% renewable if it buys enough RECs. When installing rooftop solar PV, typically the householder surrenders their RECs to the installer who then sells them. This drops another couple of thousand off the price of a system.

Thus the panels and inverter cost of around $14,500 drops to about $4,000; the cost of meter and any extras remain unchanged. The capping of the rebate at 1kW means a big jump in price from a 1kW to a 1.5kW or larger system. Thus 1kW systems appear to make up the bulk of the market.

Last year the rebate system was too successful, with the federal government having to pay out more rebates than it had budgeted for. In response they put a means test on it; if the household earned more than $100,000, they couldn't get a rebate. In practice this removed a good chunk of the rooftop solar market, as even with all the rebates and RECs, it was still several thousand, and households with an income of less than $100,000 aren't likely to have several thousand to blow in one go. After June 30 2009 the rebate will be abolished entirely, and a higher price put on the RECs instead. It's expected that this will cause the cost of a typical 1kW system to rise about $2,000-$3,000 (see the website of any rooftop solar installer for quotes before and after 30/06/09.)

"Buy now!"
This imminent price rise has caused a surge in demand as people who were humming and hawing over getting the system in a rush to do it before it gets too expensive. Companies have responded to this by buying solar photovoltaic systems in bulk from China and Germany. The bulk buying has let them get the things cheap.

A typical offer from a long-established power company is $4,000 for panels and inverter for a 1kW system. New companies have offered systems of $2,500, and there is even one offering it for free. Generally, you pay the listed price, with the $8,000 rebate and the RECs being paid directly to the company. In the case of the "free" offer, you pay $8,000 and then the federal government pays you back later; so even though it's "free" you still have to have $8,000 spare for a few months.

While researching this I was of course initially quite attracted to the cheaper companies. However, I noted that no history could be found for these companies; they appear to be quite new. What happens to them once the big rebate ends and their market shrinks? A consideration in any large purchase is the warranty. Most companies offer a 25 year warranty for rooftop solar. If my $20 toaster conks out after month, I simply swear a lot and buy another one. If my $4,000 rooftop solar fries out after a couple of years, it could cost in the thousands to get fixed, so I want them around to honour their warranty.

Thus, for the price today, the smaller and new companies look good, but it could end up costing us more in the long run with repairs after a dishonoured warranty. It could be worth the extra $2,000 or so to know that they'll still be around ten years from now.

Payback time
A 1kW system in the Melbourne latitude and climate we can expect to generate around 1,825kWh a year, or 5kWh/day on average. around 3kWh/day in winter and 8kWh/day in summer. The average Melbourne household with its 6,265kWh of consumption, or 17kWh/day (generally about 14kWh/day for households with gas hot water and cooking, and 21kWh/day for all-electric households), will almost never generate more than it consumes; the net feed-in tariff of A$0.60/kWh can be forgotten.

However, it's possible for a household to reduce this consumption. We can use cool drinks and fans not airconditioning, jumpers and hot drinks not heating, hang washing out to dry, change to CFLs and pull plugs out on appliances not in use, and in this way get it down to about 5kWh/day (as my own household has done). But the net feed-in tariff is still a non-issue. With a standard 5kWh/day consumption, the 2kWh bought from the grid in winter (at conventional rates) would cost some $33, and the 3kWh/day exported in summer would earn $162, leaving $129 profit annually, which is not nothing, but not huge, and that level of export is easily wiped out by some airconditioning use. In usefulness, the net feed-in tariff is really for larger installations of 3kW and up.

In practice, we must simply calculate the dollar value of the electricity generated by a system.

1kW system, 1,825kWh/yr
Eq. conventional	$0.18469	$337
Eq. wind	$0.23969	$437

We can then divide its cost into the savings made to find the payback time. For the savings made I choose a middle figure of $400 annually; over the next decade we can expect the price of conventional electricity to rise by that sort of amount, and some people may prefer to compare rooftop renewables with retail renewables.

Below a table shows the initial cost of the 1kW system, and the resulting payback period. The minimum solar panel and inverter cost is zero, as I described above, but another $1,000 for reinforcing frames and meter changeover seems to be the minimum.

1kW system costs and payback
$1,000	2.5 years
$2,000	5 years
$3,000	7.5 years
$4,000	10 years
$5,000	12.5 years
$6,000	15 years
$7,000	17.5 years

I am told that in business a payback period of under 5 years is considered a certain thing, while more than 10 years it's dismissed without thought, since anything could happen in ten years, and that could change everything. Thus 5 to 10 years is where people become uncertain.

The $1,000 and $2,000 systems have payback periods of 5 years or under, but can only be got from companies we're not certain will be around in ten years. I don't know how much it costs to repair a typical solar panel fault, but when we had a blackout in February the bill was $275 just for the callout, so it seems safe to assume $1,000 or more is plausible.

About the cheapest you could hope for with a reputable and established company is $5,000 - $4,000 for the system, and another $1,000 for rooftop reinforcement, meter changeover and so on; as noted earlier, you usually won't know the meter changeover cost until the solar panels are already installed.

Thus, if you want a rooftop solar photovoltaic system, you can have a short payback period but with risk of further costs, or a decade-plus payback period but with certain costs.

CONCLUSION
Every householder must weight up the different considerations of vanity, society, systemic, security, environmental, and finance. Each plays into the other. For example, a standard grid-connected system offers no batteries, and thus no security of supply; adding batteries adds to the cost and the payback period.

For our household, our vanity was already satisfied by the other greenish things we did, and we felt they also made a social contribution. The systemic contribution would be small, and since we didn't plan on having batteries we'd have no security of supply. As for the environment, we already buy GreenPower, so it was not an issue for us; and this costs us an extra A$0.055/kWh, or $100 a year for our 5kWh/day - or $1,000 over 10 years, considerably cheaper than solar panels.

That left only the financial aspect - would we be financially better off?

The system may or may not repay itself in increased real estate value. Too few households in the country have solar panels for us to be able to tell; it seems reasonable to assume that every extra thousand on improving a house adds a thousand to its value; it could be more but we don't know. In any case we expect to be living in our house, not selling it, nor will we use our mortgage as a low-interest-credit-card, so whether it's worth more or less doesn't matter to us.

Taking the expected cost of $3,000-$5,000, a return of $400 annually on that is a decent rate of 8-13%. However, we are halfway through our mortgage, so we had to consider what $3,000-$5,000 now could do in avoided interest payments. The net gain is thus 2-5%, depending how interest rates go over the next decade. That's not much on inflation, and so we expected effectively zero financial gain from installing rooftop solar.

As the other considerations were for us not issues, and as we expected zero financial gain over the next decade from installing them, we decided not to. We'll continue buying GreenPower, and leave building renewable energy generation to big companies.

Australian federal budget, part I

2009-05-12T19:41:00.000-07:00

Recently the Commonwealth's Federal Treasurer has presented his budget for 2009-10 (a more readable overview of it is at the ABC). For anyone who is careful with their spending and is concerned about peak fossil fuels and climate change, it makes depressing reading. The following, which will be a bit long so I'll split it into a few parts, will probably not be of much interest to non-Australians, though it does give an insight into many of the issues faced by First World countries these days: consumerism, debt, an ageing population who want to retire in idle comfort, and a wilful ignorance of resource limits and the environment.

Background

All economies have different sectors:

agricultural, producing food, timber and fibres like cotton
mining, producing fossil fuels and minerals/metals like iron, salt and aluminium
manufacturing, taking fossil fuels and agricultural or mining raw materials and making them into products, eg timber into furniture, aluminium into cans, cotton into clothing, etc.
services, where people offer their knowledge or skills and usually produce nothing physical, eg lawyers, accountants, doctors, chefs, etc.

Historically, countries begin with large agricultural sectors and a small service class (peasants and knights). They develop their mining and manufacturing, and the service class grows (industrialisation); they import raw materials and export manufactured goods, and become rich.

After a time they send their manufacturing jobs overseas to poorer countries, and the service sector comes to be the largest part of the economy. They import both raw materials and manufactured goods from poor countries, but live off debt and exploit the poorer countries by means of the International Monetary Fund, unfair trade agreements, and overt threats of force, all to ensure they get cheap stuff. Like the company store in a mining town, they don't produce anything but they own everything. Thus, the service economy.

What would happen if the whole world industrialised and wanted to have mostly service economies is not clear. As Gandhi said, since the First World gets rich by exploiting the Third World, who would the Third World exploit? In the beginning they exploit themselves: with some 2 billion people in China and India alone still living on the land (agricultural) who'd be quite happy to see their country industrialise, running out of people to exploit isn't a problem we'll face in the near future. But in fact because of resource limits, they'll probably never be able to fully industrialise.

Australia's economy, like that of many Third World countries, is based on "dig it up and sell it overseas." Only 10% of the economy's total money comes from agriculture and mining, and 68% from services. However, 57% of our export money comes from mining and agriculture. We export coal, gold, meat, wool, alumina, iron ore, wheat, machinery and transport equipment. The latter two are mostly foreign car makers with factories here, so while foreign money comes to Australia, it flows out again through those foreign countries. The mining and agricultural companies are mostly Australian, though we've started selling some of the mining companies off to the Chinese.

The services exist on the back of the agricultural and mining sectors. To run a modern economy you do need a certain number of lawyers and accountants, and they'll want a certain number of hairdressers and coffee-makers. But in the end you have to actually produce something tangible to get the economy moving. In earlier times we manufactured things, but because we believe in free trade and at the same time want to pay less for stuff, the factories have moved to lower labour cost countries like China.

So we export raw materials, and import manufactured goods. Obviously manufactured goods are worth more than raw materials (a table costs more than the wood in it), so that has a large current account deficit - that is, we spend more than we earn. This leads to a large foreign debt.

Debt
There are four basic types of debt a country has:

Household debt, that of individuals and families
Government debt, when the government spends more than it brings in with taxes, it gets indebted
Commercial debt, the debts companies build up in operating or expanding themselves
Foreign debt, the money owed to people overseas

Obviously these are all mixed together. A company may borrow money from a foreign bank, so then it looks like we have $1 million of commercial debt and $1 million of foreign debt, $2 million debt, right? Nope, we counted it twice. It's just $1 million. So for simplicity, we'll ignore commercial debt, to give us a better picture of the overall situation.

Historically, Liberal/National federal governments in Australia make trade more liberal, increasing our foreign debt, and cut social spending (welfare, health and education), giving a federal budget surplus. Labor federal governments control or subsidise trade, and raise social spending, giving a federal budget deficit. However, this depends a lot on how much tax they can gather. When so much of the economy depends on commodities, if those commodities leap around in price, so does the tax we get from them. For example if we sell 100 million tonnes of coal at $200 per tonne, then later the price drops to $100/t, that's a difference of $10 billion in the economy, and something like $2.5 billion in federal government money. So that some Lib/Nat governments have had big deficits, and a few Labor governments big surpluses. The current Labor government had originally expected a large surplus, but is now looking at a large deficit.

Under the Howard federal government of 1996-2007, social spending was cut and trade liberalised. So government debt dropped to zero, while household and foreign debt went high. That is, as government offered less services, people had to increase their household spending to make up for it; if the government won't pay for your university education, you have to pay for it. And as less things were produced in the country, we bought them overseas. While the government praised itself for getting rid of government debt, it chose not to mention the blowout in household and foreign debt.

Debt as fraction of GDP
Year	Federal	Household	Net foreign	Total
1995	15%	40%	50%	95%
2007	0%	100%	65%	165%

The lesson is that whatever we do, we end up with some debt. If our economy were based on actually making things, rather than just digging it up and selling it overseas, our total debts wouldn't have increased. Still, some debt is inevitable, the only question is whether it's owed by the government, the people, and whether it's to foreign countries. Some argue that it's better to have privately-funded education or healthcare and the like, others that public is better. It comes to the same thing in the end, though. For example, from 1975 to 1987 or so, tertiary education was basically free in Australia. Then the government said "user pays!" and gradually introduced fees. However, the fees of doctors, laywers, dentists and so on then went up, because they had to pay for the education they'd got; and once they'd paid off their student loans they didn't then lower their fees, of course. So either way we pay for the doctor's education; we can pay today in taxes, or pay tomorrow in doctor's fees.

Spending
For these reasons, I don't have any aversion to government debt as such. Debt in general is bad, but government debt is not worse than household or foreign debt. With all debt, the important thing is how is the money spent? I can borrow $200,000 to buy a house, pay it off over 25 years, and in the meantime have a home. Or I can borrow $200,000 and blow it all on the pokies. I say that money is well-spent when you have something useful or nice to show for it afterwards, when you're building something your children and grandchildren can use. What will our government's A$57.6 billion debt get us this year?

Not much of use. Most of the debt is just borrowing to make up for lack of income. A friend of mine lost her job recently, and is now living on her credit card; her income dropped below her spending, but she's kept her spending the same. Similarly, because of the world economic downturn, the world's buying less of our coal, iron, grain and so on - so we have less money coming in, but want to keep spending the same. If government income drops, they can raise taxes, drop spending, or just go into debt. But if they raise taxes or drop spending when the economy is already in trouble, they push it over the edge into the shit pit. So they have debt instead, in the hopes that with all the government money flying around, some will stick and help things along.

I'll talk more about spending in part II.

Fossil fuels are dead

2009-04-29T20:36:00.000-07:00

Whenever the subject of climate change comes up, someone always says with little tears forming in the corner of their eyes, "but what about the economy?" The problem is that most of us don't really believe in a free market. We want to prop up dying companies run by people too stupid to know times are changing. Larry the Liquidator expressed it the best:

"This company is dead. I didn't kill it. Don't blame me. It was dead when I got here. It's too late for prayers. For even if the prayers were answered, and a miracle occurred, and the yen did this, and the dollar did that, and the infrastructure did the other thing, we would still be dead. You know why? [...] New technologies. Obsolescence. We're dead alright. We're just not broke. And you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes. Slow but sure.

"You know, at one time there must've been dozens of companies makin' buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let's have the intelligence, let's have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future.

"Take the money. Invest it somewhere else. Maybe, maybe you'll get lucky and it'll be used productively. And if it is, you'll create new jobs and provide a service for the economy and, God forbid, even make a few bucks for yourselves. "

Larry's absolutely right. General Motors is dead. Ford is dead. Western Coal is dead. BP is dead. The Saudi royal family is dead. All the companies relying on burning fossil fuels are dead. They face two problems: the stuff is finite, and once burned is gone forever, and burning it is killing us. Whether it'll run short before we toast ourselves, or whether we'll toast ourselves first, who knows? Either way, new technologies are replacing fossil fuels, making them obsolete. So companies relying on burning stuff to make money will get an increasing share of a shrinking market.

This upsets a lot of people. Some of them have invested heavily in oil, and are so keen to keep demand high they even deny global warming, and talk fearfully of the "costs" of change. Which is like talking about the costs of earthquake-proofing homes in Japan, putting up levees in New Orleans, or drought-proofing homes in the desert. You can spend money, or you can just die. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but trouble is coming. We can prepare for it, or we can die.

Change is coming whether we like it or not. Fossil fuels will run short, and since their burning is killing us, at some point someone will get annoyed about it and stop it. One day, we're going to have to live without fossil fuels. No choice. Driving is not a rational choice, but someday there won't be a choice at all - there'll be no fuel for that car. Maybe you're happy with factory farming of animals, maybe you're horrified but try not to think of it as you tuck into your burger - doesn't matter a bit, someday the artificial fertiliser and all the trucks will stop, and that's that, no more burgers, sorry. Maybe you think the environment is a human rights issue, maybe you care that Congolese die so we can have our mobile phones, or that ten million Bangladeshis will drown under rising sea so we can drive half a mile to the shops, or that fossil fuels won't be around for our children and grand-children to burn - it doesn't matter, things will change anyway.

The world is changing. Fossil fuels are dead. I'll bet the last car company around makes the best damn cars you ever saw, and the last coal company makes the best damn coal-fired power stations you ever saw. You want to be a stockholder in those companies?

We invested in the business of burning fossil fuels in every way imaginable, and that business is dead. It's just not broke yet, thanks to the billions we keep pumping into it to save it. With modern medical technology, a guycould lose his head, and we could keep his body alive without it, keep the heart pumping and the legs twitching. He's still dead, though. No matter how much we wish upon a star and click our heels and say "there's no place like burning, there's no place like burning," it's dead and gone.

Let's have the intelligence, let's have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future.

Listen to Larry, unlike the car and coal and oil company CEOs or our governments, he's not a cowardly communist. He believes in a free market, just like a good greenie should. Let's invest in products with a future, create some jobs and a service for the economy, and God forbid, even make some money for ourselves.

Solar power... in SPAAAACE!

2009-04-19T22:59:00.000-07:00

Recently there's been some discussion of space-based solar power. Basically you whack a bunch of solar panels up there with a big mylar sheet to concentrate the light, then you beam the power back to Earth. Sounds cool, yeah? Well...

Apart from the obvious cost difficulties (it's about $10,000/kg to get something into space), this faces many practical difficulties, too. To be able to beam back to a single station, the satellite would have to be in geosynchronous orbit - about 36,000km up. Getting it up there takes a lot more energy than to low earth orbit where we put the space station and the like. At first that looks like just a cost issue, but it underpins many of the technical issues I outline below.

The first issue is that if you have a 1km² mylar sheet, the solar wind (the stream of particles it blasts into space along with its heat) and the very light it's designed to capture will blow the satellite out of position over time. The solar wind is such that people have actually planned spacecraft which use it to travel around the solar system. You can have manouvering rockets on board to counter this, but that uses up fuel - and you have to get the fuel up there, too, a few times over the several decades lifetime of the satellite.

Secondly, the Earth has a magnetosphere, that is its magnetic field shields it somewhat from high-energy particles from the Sun. Craft high up don't have that protection (which is one of the problems with long-range spaceflight, both manned and unmanned) and so would need to be heavily shielded (increasing the non-productive weight to put up there), or else would occasionally get blasted and destroyed. Repairs would be difficult to say the least.

Thirdly, beaming the energy back to Earth is difficult. As anyone who's ever had an electric torch knows, light spreads out. You can tighten the beam somewhat, but still over thousands of kilometres it'll spread out. So either your receiving station is really huge or else you lose a good chunk of the energy; if you're losing the energy anyway, why bother putting the station in space, the whole purpose of which was to get more energy than you could on the ground?

Fourthly, the building of the thing would require several launches, and assembly in space. The International Space Station was planned for 12 years before the first modules were launched into orbit, and has been in construction for 10 years, still not finished - and it's only in Low Earth Orbit, not the geosynchronous orbit this thing would require.

Fifthly, geosynchronous orbit is already pretty crowded. Basically it's the plum spot for communications and spy satellites. It's one thing to whack another table-sized sat up there, it's another to put a 1km² satellite up there. Or hundreds of them, as we'd need.

The first and fifth points combine to make a maintenance nightmare. At orbital velocities of kilometres per second, the tiniest speck of dust becomes deadlier than a bullet. It whacks into the mylar sheet and makes a hole. Then the solar wind pulls on the sheet and tears that little hole into a big long rip. Much less or no power is produced by the thing. Then your power satellite is pushed more on one side than the other, and starts spinning.

You better have a lot of spare fuel on board, and a crew ready to head up there and repair it. You can't just chuck the old mylar sheet away, that's 1km² of rubbish floating around in orbit at several kilometres per second, other satellite owners - especially those owning other power satellites - won't appreciate that kind of litter. So you have to roll it up. Fancy rolling up a 1km² sheet? Do you know how to? Nope, neither does NASA or anyone else, no-one's had to do it before.

So even if the launches were completely free, there are a lot of technical obstacles in the way of this kind of satellite.

Seems a lot easier to build the thing on the ground. I mean, does the Earth really lack big empty spaces for us to build power stations in? Not Australia, that's for bloody sure.

And so in conclusion, here we see another example of the modern religion of Science! That's different to plain old science, which is just the study of things to figure out how they work; the believer in Science! has blind faith that it'll save us like a Messiah. "They'll figure something out," the believer says, meaning "the Lord will provide." By which reasoning I should go ahead and leap off a cliff because I'll figure out how to fly before I hit the bottom. Maybe - but probably not.

It's really a lot easier to go with what we definitely know works, and works well: reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order, combined with a mix of geothermal, hydroelectric, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, tidal and wind, railways, walkable towns and cities, eat less meat and more plants, and don't buy so much junk.

Science is needed for all that, Science! isn't.

Forget about gun control...

2009-04-14T16:49:00.000-07:00

...unless you want to do some media control, too. Which I'd be happy to see, but most wouldn't, I think. Most would prefer our hysterical childish media - freedom of speech and all that.

Charlie Brooker sums it up:

The rest of his series is here.

What we've learned from the G20

2009-04-12T17:53:00.000-07:00

The G20, a group of the 20 wealthiest industrial countries, has met in London to discuss the financial crisis. They've approved pumping another trillion dollars of public money into the circulation of the haemmorhaging financial sector, and are making token gestures at regulation to at least put a little token bandage on the arterial spurt of money flowing out. As an afterthought they tacked on some warm fuzzies about the environment. This is of course completely arse-backwards.

They move remarkably quickly when it comes to using public money to bail out private interests.

When it comes to things which are for the public good, they're a bit slower.

As I always say, they're not leaders, but followers. This desperate attempt to pump more hot air into the ruptured and sinking balloon of world finance, doomed as it is to failure, is simply their inertia.

Often in English "inertia" is thought of as being still, doing nothing. But inertia actually means to keep moving in the same direction at the same speed unless acted on by an outside force. That includes sitting still, but it also includes doing the same things you've always done, at the same pace.

Governments and corporations have inertia, they will keep moving in the same direction at the same speed unless acted on by the outside force of the public. Unfortunately they do their best to insulate themselves from this force. You cannot expect someone who travels with an entourage of 500 people to have a firm grasp of the wants and needs of day-to-day life for the typical Westerner, let alone the typical Third Worlder - however many "town hall meetings" he has.

There's a documentary called The Corporation [available in full on YouTube] and there's a scene in it from the Seattle WTO protests of 1999. We beginoutside with the chanting protesters, tens of thousands of angry people, the crowd pressing against lines of riot police, and then go inside the building, with corporate and government people in suits with glasses of wine, the chants rendered a dull and distant murmur by the glass windows and carpeted floor. They shake their heads sadly, "They don't understand - we're doing all this for them."

Almost ten years later, this has not improved. As one article puts it, "[US VP] Biden asked the demonstrators to give the leaders a chance to deliver, and not to disrupt the talks." By which he meant, "please don't distract democratically-elected leaders by telling us what you want."

That's what inertia looks like, that obliviousness.

So it takes a lot of effort for us to get through to them. We have to really batter away. It's hard work making our choices as citizens known. Just imagine that you're dealing with an annoying child who sticks his fingers in his ears and says, "la la la I can't hear you!"

They'll get it eventually. But it's a slow process. Once in each season of the year, write to your local, state and federal elected representatives (and in election seasons, to other candidates for office, too) and tell them what you think. Stick to just one topic, though - if you write ten things their secretary will reply to only one of them and ignore the other uncomfortable nine, and if you write more than 200 words nobody will read it. Keep the pressure up.

You have to tear the kid's fingers from his ears, hold him firmly by the shoulders, look him in the eyes and tell him what you need to say, and what he needs to hear, whether he likes it or not.

Maybe a light thwap across the back of the head is needed, too. Some kids are slow. That's what we've learned from the G20.

Film: We Feed the World

2009-04-08T16:47:00.000-07:00

On YouTube in several parts is the film We Feed the World.

It's in German but with subtitles so some of us will need our glasses! You can get the gist of the story from the blurb,

"Every day in Vienna the amount of unsold bread sent back to be disposed of isenough to supply Austria's second-largest city, Graz. Around 350,000 hectares ofagricultural land, above all in Latin America, are dedicated to the cultivationof soybeans to feed Austria's livestock while one quarter of the localpopulation starves. Every European eats ten kilograms a year of artificially irrigated greenhouse vegetables from southern Spain, with water shortages theresult."

It covers many issues I've discussed before, for example that in feeding the world we have about twice as much food as we need to feed all 6.7 billion of us, but we in the West throw away about a quarter of it and the rest isn't evenly distributed, with lots going to livestock and our fuel tanks; that factory farming is inhumane but avoidable; that the environment is a human rights issue, and so on.

I'll be discussing more of these food issues in future, along with more articles on the importance and methods of doing your own research.

I've been trying to have more of a regular schedule for my articles. Typically I have a burst of enthusiasm and write ten in two weeks, then am burned out and write nothing for a month. So I've queued them up, writing them when I want to, and scheduling them to be published automatically every Wednesday and Sunday. About twice a week is as much as you can bear reading any one blog, and less than that you'll forget to check for updates!

Looking back on 2008

2009-04-04T19:45:00.000-07:00

With a crystal ball we look forwards, as I did in January 2008. With the benefit of hindsight we look back. By seeing where we were right and where wrong, we can understand better what happens in the world. But you need a bit of distance on the events you're looking at - that's why I'm doing this review now at the end of March, instead of at the beginning of January. So let's look at the predictions I made, and how they turned out.

In short, we can say that I was right about the general trends, but I underestimated the importance of the financial collapse, and overestimated the pace of change, and I fell down badly when I tried to get specific. In detail,

"In oil, total liquids production [ie everything burnable, ethanol, tar sands, etc] will not exceed 86Mbbl/day, and coventional crude [ie regular crude pumped out of the ground plus the liquid stuff that drips out when you pump out natural gas] will not exceed for more than a month the 74.3Mbbl/day achieved in May 2005 - that was the peak. But it won't drop more than below 72Mbbl/day."

Score: 1/2 pt. The latest EIA figures (5Mb download) show that the world's greatest ever production of total liquids came in July 2008, at 86.848Mbbl/day (million barrels a day). However, this was a standout month, the next highest was May at 85.9, the lowest September 84.4, and the year's average 85.467Mbbl/day. As for crude and condensate, the highest figure was also in July 2008 with 74.831Mbbl/day, the next highest being May and June at around74.1; the year average was 73.8Mbbl/day.

It's worth remembering that at any time there are hundreds of millions of barrels of oil in tankers at sea around the world. The UN tells us that over one-third of all seaborne trade is in oil. For example, Japan alone in November 2008 consumed 4.565Mbbl/day. That's about a tanker every two hours. In the first part of 2008, China bought large amounts of oil to stock up for the Olympics, and build their strategic reserve (what they'll rely on if they run short). This of course drove up the price. But China was also buying the lighter oil - the kind we make fuel for cars and planes from - leaving the heavier oil on the market - that is, sitting in tankers moored off the coasts of the exporting countries.

Now, an often forgotten fact is that when we count oil "production", the EIA, IEA or whoever doesn't have little meters sitting on oil wells ticking over. They just count whatever shows up on the market to be bought and sold. So if I buy 30 million barrels of oil in January, leave my tankers sitting offshore through February, then sell it all off in March - "production" went up by 30 million barrels in March, or 1Mbbl/day. So the +/-1Mbbl/day we see in the oil production, that variation can be due to just a few more or less of the 1,122 long-haul tankers in the world sitting still or unloading.

So I credit myself with a partial success on that prediction, 1/2pt.

"The huge demand will mean that the price of sweet crude hits $180 during the fourth quarter of 2008 - November 2008, says my gut. This may push total liquids production up for a couple of weeks to a level where the mass media tell us hopefully that there'll be no peak; but the month won't hold it up. Coal will hit US$200/tonne, and natural gas US$12/MMBTU"

Score: 1/2pt. The actual highest oil price was in the third quarter, and was $148/bbl; in the fourth quarter it dropped rapidly down to $30/bbl or so. I wasn't alone in being wrong on this, the OPEC President predicted $150-$170.

As for coal, it did indeed hit $200/t in July08, but like oil dropped considerably by December; this looks like a successful prediction, but to be fair I must note that coal price varies a lot, since some coal is basically pure carbon, while other coal has lots of water and sulfur; the different coals sell for very different prices.

Natural gas hit $13.31 on July 2nd, 2008, but is now floating around $4.

What went wrong? Quite simply, I failed to make the obvious connections. I said that hueg demand would push prices up, but I also said the world economy would decline; if the world gets poorer, they consume less of everything, including fossil fuels. This was a "beware graphs" kind of mistake, looking at half the problem and ignoring the other half.

"In the US economy [...] we'll see their credit crisis evolve into both a solvency and a liquidity crisis. The US Federal Reserve will by third quarter 2008 have cut interest rates to 1.00% in a desperate effort to pump more heat into the sinking and ruptured balloon of their economy. But the oil price rise in the next quarter will turn the entire US economy arse-up anyway."

Score: 1/2pt. The US Fed knocked rates to 1% in October. So I was a month late, but by December they'd knocked it to 0.25%. So I was right about the general trends. However, I was wrong that oil prices would rise in the fourth quarter and give the final push; oil prices fell, and the US economy tanked anyway. Again, I underestimated the financial crisis, and overestimated the energy crisis.

"China, Japan and the EU won't do a massive sell-off of their US debts, but will diversify their interests, putting their money somewhere else, leaving little or none for the US."

Score: 1pt. This has come true. US dollars are being left on the market, and mostly Euros purchased instead. Now China speaks of replacements for the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. I've previously discussed the effects of countries moving away from the US currency, and what happens to countries who suggest replacing the dollar with their own currency for buying oil. How the US intends to fund its bailout debts and tax cuts in coming years is unclear; at some point, the people lending the US money will ask for it back.

"The mortgage crisis and third-fourth quarter recession will combine to empty millions of homes in the US, leaving millions homeless. [...] Somehow they'll get by, probably by squatting rent-free in abandoned homes - at least they can protect the owners from theft of copper, glass and timber from the homes. "

Score: 1pt. Statistics on US homelessness are difficult to get because no federal agency keeps proper figures; like unemployment, the definition is designed to keep the number low. However, one source tells us that homelessness in US cities rose 12% through 2008, and hunger 18%. The US Census claims 759,101 homeless, with 13.8 million homes vacant, 4 million of these rental properties. Around a third the homes are "weekenders" in some holiday area, so you might argue they're not really "empty", but that still means around 9 million empty homes, compared to 129.4 million homes in all.

Shanty-towns are appearing in the US. For those who prefer a proper roof over their heads, there's a growing squatting movement. One guy has even given himself a job arranging squatters for empty housing. But the entirely empty ones are indeed being looted. Full points to me, minus several million points to the US.

"States like California and Arizona will start talking about having their own laws to allow illegal immigrants to settle; the federal government will of course fight those as unconstitutional, but be increasingly seen as irrelevant to day-to-day affairs."

Score: 1/2pt. California offers tuition fees to illegal immigrants, and other benefits, and it's being fought as unconstitutional. Some US states governors are rejecting billions in federal money and not being immediately impeached. In general, 2008 has seen a weakening of the perceived legitimacy of the US federal government. I give myself half marks: the essentials were right, the details weren't, and as usually happens when you try to predict the future, I figured things would happen quicker than they are happening.

"Whoever becomes US President will say that everything is fine and will pick up soon. They will offer tax cuts, and start subsidising petrol prices"

Score: 1pt. Obama's inauguration speech was more measured, saying, "we're in trouble, but if we work hard it'll be okay." That hasn't stopped him offering $300 billion in tax cuts, though. Petrol subsidies haven't been needed because as previously discussed, the oil price dropped.

"Several US bases will be mothballed"

Score: 0pt. I forgot: there's always spare cash for the military.

"China's export-driven economy will have some trouble because of lowering US imports in third and fourth quarters 2008, which will drop their 9-10% GDP growth to a mere 5-6%; by that time, their foreign currency reserves will have risen to close on $2 trillion, and they'll draw on some of those to continue development. "

Score: 1pt. Bingo on growth (6.8% in fourth quarter 2008, expected 5% in 2009), right on with the foreign currency reserves ($1.946 trillion), and this growth seems to have stopped.

"China will not go to war with anybody, still less have any significant domestic political and ethnic troubles, though rhetoric from Beijing will start offering Taiwan a Hong Kong-style "One China, Two Systems" solution"

Score: 1/2pt. China was indeed peaceful (though they have a heap of protests), and have been treading carefully with Taiwan.

"India's economy will continue to grow [...] India will face more cross-border trouble from Pakistan, which with the occasional US airstrike or commando raid to show the weakness of the Islamabad government, will continue to slide further into civil war (they already have one in Waziristan). Sri Lanka, after inflicting significant defeats on the Tamil rebels, will arrive at a more-or-less peaceful settlement of that conflict."

Score: 1pt. India's economy has grown, and India suffered attacks by Pakistan-trained terrorists. The US carried out at least 18 strikes against targets in Pakistan in 2008, and the Pakistan government was forced to allow self-government to Taliban groups in Waziristan; it's now what John Robb calls a "hollow state", one which still appears as a state on the world stage (as opposed to a "failed state" like Somalia or Afghanistan), maintains a few "national" institutions, but its government is given over entirely to corporate or factional interests, and has surrendered large swathes of its territory to tribes or bandits.

At time of this writing, the Sri Lankan government has effectively defeated the Tamil Tigers as a conventional military force, with them begging for a ceasefire. However, still no peace, and of course as the inventors of the suicide bomber the Tigers can keep "fighting": as I said above, I overestimated the pace of events.

"Japan will [have] a slight dip of a percent or two in their GDP growth because of the US recession, but as they have diverse markets they'll not suffer a recession."

Score: 0pt. Wrong! They tanked at the end of the year. Again I failed to connect the dots - if the US economy tanks, then their demand for Japanese stuff drops, too. And that has flow-on effects to China, and thus to Japanese companies operating there.

"The EU [...] economy will be somewhat flat. This is because of the US recession, and the costs of absorbing lots of immigrants from the former Eastern bloc countries, both legal and illegal. The issue of their cheap labour and racist accusations of their leeching off the wealthier Europeans will come to a head, with France continuing to have riots, and some riots happening in the UK and Germany."

Score: 1pt. EU economic growth was 1% in 2008, and is forecast to be -2% in 2009. The European Parliament in June 2008 passed laws allowing detention without trial for 18 months before deportation of illegal immigrants. These laws did not necessarily have wide public support, judging from the riots in France. In the UK there was an "Anti-Islamisation Conference" (many illegal immigrants to the EU are North African, Middle Eastern, or Central Asian and at least nominally Moslem).

"South America will continue developing [...] common markets. [Chavez] will suggest a common currency for a new Latin Monetary Union - but nothing will happen for a few years. A drop in US imports of Venezuelan oil will hurt the Venezuelans for a financial quarter, but demand from the rest of the Americas will make up for it."

Score: 1pt. They're well on their way to a common market and currency, but as I said it's slow. As for their oil income, that's dropped but they've got some spare cash from when it was high.

"Africa will suffer some neglect, with less funds available for loans and general relief. Surprisingly, this will actually be good for them. Civil wars will remain stalemated, but with a dip in foreign money and arms coming to them, they'll be in an armed standoff, Korea-style, which allows each area to pick itself up."

Score: 1/2pt. The IMF tells us that, "Sub-Saharan Africa's [economic] prospects have deteriorated somewhat and the risks have increased." There were coups d'etat in Guinea and Mauritania (and earlier this year, in Guinea-Bissau and Madagascar), but these killed only a few people. In terms of violent conflicts, Kenya suffered post-election violence killing over a thousand, and Sudan, Zimbabwe and Somalia continue to be a mess. The LRA kept fighting in Uganda. Nigeria continued suffering from MEND trying to shut down oil production, or put another way, suffering from Shell. Western Sahara continues with its long ceasefire not leading to an actual peace. DR Congo found some peace, as did Angola.

So overall, things are looking up for Africa in some ways; however again I failed to connect economics with other issues: if an already poor people get poorer, they get angry. People will put up with the most incredibly shitty lives if they've some hope - however small - that things will improve.

"Iraq will continue to be a mess [and] will continue to look something like Lebanon in the 1980s."

Score: 1pt. But that was an easy one. The US had tried to quite things down by the simple expedient of hiring most of the insurgency (the "Sunni Awakening"), but that's unravelling.

"Iran will continue to not even try to build nuclear weapons."

Score: 1pt. Again, an easy one. Even the US intelligence community says they're not trying to build a bomb.

"Several bulk cargo and container ships will make a "northwest passage" across the Arctic in June or July"

Score: 1/2 pt. The passage across both Canada and Russia was open in July-August 2008, but no commercial ships went through until November.

"A cold snap across the US and EU during the summer [...] When this is followed by a record heatwave [...] A tropical cyclone will hit outside "the tropics", probably in East Africa or eastern Australia."

Score: 0pt. A cold snap hit Germany in spring. However, the EU summer was overall hot and dry. But then, Alaska had its coldest summer ever, and France in August had a tornado kill some people. The world got warmer. A cyclone struck Yemen and Burma, but this is not unusual. I might be generous and award half a point, but really I should get zero points for even trying. It's impossible to be that precise.

"The media will continue to present us with stories of how Science! will save us with this or that wonder technology which is "two to three years away from commercial production", and which we'll never hear about again."

Score: 1pt. Again, an easy one.

"High level delegations will continue talking about what they should do, while a growing grassroots movement in Australia and the EU will begin seeking ways to solve the troubles."

Score: 1pt. I don't think I need link to all the many and various conferences there have been about climate and the economy. As for the grassroots, well here are some. Search around and you'll find lots. And above I noted the guy moving squatters into empty homes - a good example of do-it-yourself.

"And we in the West [...] will continue to refuse to admit what our wealthy and wasteful lives really mean [...] we'll continue to focus on the rather trivial and unimportant issue of how to keep our SUVs burning along in traffic jams, while ignoring the more important issues of taking our foot off the necks of the world's poor, food security, climate change and electricity."

Score: 1pt. Public debate so far has been on how to get Westerners consuming lots again. Thus for example here in Australia the government is going to simply give $900 to every taxpayer earning under $100,000, including people who've died sometime in the last financial year and people in prison with savings earning interest; though it'll give nothing to the unemployed, etc. This is around $10 billion in all just this year, compared with over the next four years $1.8 billion on climate change initiatives, only $230 million of which will go to renewable energy. So the incentive to "consume more, you bastards" is around twenty-five times greater than the incentives to avoid climate change (if we count the $400 million which is going to "clean coal").

SUMMARY

Thus my conclusion that I was right about the general trends, but I underestimated the importance of the financial collapse, and overestimated the pace of change, and I fell down badly when I tried to get specific.

Why I talk and act

2009-04-01T16:58:00.000-07:00

Over at TheOilDrum, Nate Hagens asks why we blog, and whether we're not better off doing something. The first thing to say is talk or action is a false split. We can do both. Only talking is just slacktivism. Only acting is useful, but won't create widespread change. But talking and acting, together they add up to much more than they are separately.

The reason speech must be free is to make sure decent ideas get out, and crappy ideas are cast aside. Blogs are nothing special in this regard. In terms of public affairs, they act like something between a letter to the newspaper, and an opinion column in it.

Blogs are just another form of speech. It's sometimes said there are over 100 million of them, so it's easy for your voice to be lost in there. But remember that like dating and facebook profiles, most are inactive - someone made one and then lost interest, forgot about it. Many are duplicates. That takes out the majority of blogs.

Of the active blogs, most are not concerned with public affairs except in a day-to-day conversation way. People talk about their hobbies, their day-to-day lives. So your activist blog can stand out if you have decent writing, update often enough, and engage with your readers by writing things which interest them and responding to their comments in one way or another.

Most people aren't political. That doesn't mean they're stupid or have no opinions, it just means that public affairs are not a major concern of theirs. Their opinions are nonetheless influenced by things they read and hear and see.

Because my own blog talks a bit about reducing your personal or household impact on the environment, people sometimes ask, "what's the point if no-one else does it?" I answer that in the first place, the right thing to do is the right thing to do, whatever the effect on the world as whole; but the second and main thing is that it's the power of example to make the radical seem ordinary. Because the more someone not obviously insane talks about their lifestyle, the more you see them live it, the more ordinary it seems.

And when things seem ordinary, people just accept them and themselves change. It's a slow but at the same time sudden process, as Rebecca Solnit writes.

"Sex before marriage. Bob and his boyfriend. Madame Speaker. Do those words make your hair stand on end or your eyes widen? Their flatness is the register of successful revolution. Many of the changes are so incremental that you adjust without realizing something has changed until suddenly one day you realize everything is different."

We can see this with the peak oil question. Twenty years ago the issue was simply unknown. Ten years ago it popped up from time to time, but the peak oilers were dismissed as crazy or stupid. Around five years ago this started to change. Nowadays it gets mentioned in the newspapers in passing as something given, something obvious to everyone.

That's how ideas spread. There's no proud ego-patting moment when someone turns to you and says, "you know, you were right! I'm sorry I doubted you." You spend years being mocked or ignored, then suddenly one day everyone knows what you know, and claims they always knew it. Just look at all the drongos popping up now on telly to say they knew the economic crash was coming - searches of their past writings and speeches often turn up no trace.

Or consider how hard it is to find anyone who'll claim membership of the KKK in the 1960s, and how easy it is to find someone who claims to have been at Woodstock. The Red Army noted that when they went into Germany, about two-thirds the population claimed to have been members of the Social Democrats party. After the revolution, everyone's a revolutionary.

Hagen's article asks, if we knew a particular date was when everything would turn nasty, would we keep blogging, or get out and do something else? Obviously if I knew an exact Doomsday then I'd be more active. But there's no indication that there'll be some sudden moment when everything turns to shit. Unlike Sarah Connor, we haven't been visited by someone from the future to tell us about Judgment Day. Much more likely - if things go bad - is the slow crash, the long emergency. Things slowly become harder, blackouts go from being just on hot days a few times a year to being one or two days a month, then a week, then finally we find that electricity's only on for a few hours a day, but usually 9am-1pm. And people adjust.

That was the experience in the former Communist bloc. Nothing happened overnight, things just kind of sputtered along for a bit gradually becoming worse. Of course the Transition (as they called it) will be harder for us than it was for them. They were able to draw on the resources, money and people of the West to help them; but in a global crisis we have to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, or continue sinking. Also their Communist system was so hideously useless that people were accustomed to getting by on their own and their community's resources, and good at making deals (including with law enforcement); our "just in time" system has been so efficient that we've not had to rely on ourselves for quite some time, it'll be a big shock to us if we have to.

Or if rather than a "slow crash", you want to think of the Ecotechnic world coming to be, consider the Industrial Revolution: it didn't happen in a matter of a decade worldwide. It took generations, and still hasn't reached most of the world's population. It's not like one day everyone was out hoeing the fields, then the next day a factory popped up and everyone had a telephone. Genuine change is gradual, and only looks revolutionary in retrospect. The Industrial Revolution also gave us communism, fascism, modern democracy, corporations, two World Wars, and the fall of several empires. I'd expect an Ecotechnic Revolution to be no less profound.

So for my activism, I don't really expect my own words to create some kind of instant revolution. Our words, ideas and actions are drops of water falling into a glass in the dark. At some point the glass will overflow - but we can't know when.

Why I left my lights on for Earth Hour

2009-03-28T22:41:00.000-07:00

Earth Hour is "a global call to action for every individual, every business, and every community. A call to stand up and take control over the future of our planet."

As the usually-wise Edouard put it, "we need to show our commitment to avoiding climate change. So let’s switch off our lights!"

This is a beautiful gesture. Just one hour! Come on, everyone! We could have an Honesty Hour, and a Fidelity Hour, and a Tolerance Hour - for just one hour a year, we could tell the truth, not be unfaithful to our spouse, and not be racist, sexist and so on.

Just for one hour. This would make world leaders know just how important honesty, fidelity and tolerance are to us! They would know this from the way we went straight back to lying, screwing and hating the instant the hour was over.

Earth Hour is a token effort we know is useless, but do anyway because real action takes sustained effort over time, and we're too lazy for that. Their "take action" page lists signing up, telling your story, running an Earth Hour, and writing a blog post. That is, all the "actions" are mouse-clicks and words; not actually actions. It's slackitivism. "The act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem."

I didn't turn my lights off for Earth Hour. I show what I want by a sustained effort over the whole year, and by talking about it a lot in an annoying way so people remember. That won't make the news, but it's much more effective in creating positive change. You want change? Try this list here, and this time instead of saying, "but I can't because -" say, "that seems hard, but I'll figure out a way to do it."

Then you can leave your lights on for Earth Hour.

Some answer that "it spreads awareness." At this stage, everyone on the planet who wants to be aware is aware of the climate change problem. It's like how we have nutritional information on food packets, but we still have a lot of obese unhealthy people. Lack of knowledge isn't the issue, it's lack of caring.

The other day we visited a workmate of my woman's, they had four televisions (including one large LCD and one projection screen), four computers, two stereos, two game consoles, two cars, a boat, and lots of halogen downlights.
"Wow, you have lots of stuff!" I said.
"Yes," his wife said, "my husband loves all this stuff, I tell him his energy footprint is huge!"
The husband smiled, laughed and shrugged.

Knowing is easy. Caring is hard. An Earth Hour actually works against caring, because when people make a warm gesture, they think that's enough. Psychologists tell us that if a man usually doesn't bother giving flowers, but starts doing it a lot with his wife, it may be a sign of infidelity; he assauges his guilt at the big wrong by doing a small good. And of course it doesn't balance out.

We're past peak oil

2009-03-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

A recent TheOilDrum article is titled "world oil production peaked in 2008". A closer look shows something different.

First up, I would say that if the peak was only last year, then it’d be very hard to know for sure it was then. We need a few years to be sure.

Secondly, I note that the article actually tells us what I said a couple of weeks back, that conventional oil supplies peaked in 2005 - the small increase in total burnable stuff since then has come from,

tar sands, which use lots of natural gas to extract
natural gas liquids; as natural gas production has risen, so too has the production of NGL
biofuels, the growing of which causes deforestation and requires large inputs of artificial fertiliser - made with natural gas

Thus, actual peak oil already happened in 2005, we’ve only been able to squeeze out a bit more stuff to burn by turning to a second fossil fuel and drawing on renewable resources (plants) in a non-renewable way (cut down forests, grow things with gas).

In this way, to offset peak oil we bring peak natural gas closer. In future years we can expect to see more coal-to-liquids plants, too - making oil from coal. This will bring peak coal closer. As for peak forests, well that's something people don't seem to have looked into.

By drawing on fossil fuels to each substitute for the other, and on plants and soil to substitute for all three, we mitigate our problems today at the expense of worse problems in the future. My general view of peak oil is in Peak Oil, Mad Max and Me, but a sketch of future scenarios for the world as a whole is in What about the Third World?, and for the West in particular in The Oily Smudge on the Future of the City-State.

What it boils down to is that I expect us to see a period of energy and climate crisis in 2015-25 - this could be put off by a global recession since that’ll reduce our consumption - and then we’ll settle down into vile poverty haunted by insane weather and desertification for the Third World, and gated ecoptian cities in the western EU and Japan, and perhaps the US and East Asia, surrounded by slums of people with no services. What I’d like to see is of course something much nicer… It need not be so grim - but we get the world we choose to have. We should make our choices known.

Edit on 2009.03.29: and in a recent submission to a Senate committee, Buckee of ASPO says [pdf, p56], "there—the black oil has peaked. This is disguised by the NGL production from the big gas fields in Qatar. They are quite rich in liquids and, as the LNG has been boosted from there, so has the associated NGL. So that has enabled the world’s liquids to keep growing, albeit slowly, while the black oil itself has declined, and this is disguised."

If you want it done properly, do it yourself, Part I

2009-03-19T15:56:00.000-07:00

Research, learning the truth - if you want it done properly, do it yourself. That's because the media are generally lazy and stupid. Even comedians have more incisive questions and commentary these days. Below, Jon Stewart presents the financial crisis.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

comedycentral.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor

Over at TheOilDrum, Glenn McCann presents this as Stewart attacking dodgy investors. It's like we watched different editions of The Daily Show. Though Stewart attacked the dodgy financial guys, his focus was on the journalists. "You didn't seek the truth," he was saying, "which is your duty as journalists."

It's a tremendous failure of the "fourth estate". For example, Shaun Carney asks, "How did we get here?" He expresses surprise at the sudden arrival of the economic downturn. Now, perhaps the editors of that major national newspaper were surprised, but many others did see it coming. They asked the hard questions and didn't like the answers.

For example, in February 2008 some commentators wrote,

"the end of the third quarter of 2008 will be marked by a new tipping point in the unfolding of the global systemic crisis."

The same people were saying similar things in 2006.

David Andrews also saw trouble coming in early 2006, as did David Pollard. Even dumb old me in January 2008 predicted the US economy would tank in the second half of the year.

I could go on, but while the various predictions of these people did not all come true, or not as they expected, with mistakes which are obvious in hindsight (for example, I forgot that if there's a recession then fuel demand drops, and thus the price of oil drops, too) that a financial crisis was coming was obvious to all people who did not have a direct financial interest in saying "la la la I can't hear you we'll get richer and richer FOREVER AND EVER."

We were badly failed by a lazy and stupid media. And really that's what Stewart's piece was about. The investment bankers and the like at least had plain old "but then I'll get more cash" to excuse their lies and self-deception; the media is simply lazy and stupid.

That's why, as I've said, if you want to know about something, use the media as a starting point for your researches, don't just take everything you read or watch or hear at face value. Graphs don't tell the whole story, just part of it, and maybe distorted. Stories as diverse as Cuba's problems with peak oil, and a guy shooting a couple of burglars, they're very different stories when you dig a little. Any interested citizen can do this kind of research; journalists typically are not interested.

Not to pick on the US media in particular, other countries' are as bad (Australia's is particularly shite), but:-

Research: if you want it done properly, do it yourself. Doubt leads to liberty.

Guns, guns, guns! Part II

2009-03-06T15:52:00.000-08:00

I tell this story as another caution not to take everything you read at face value. People often present stories very carefully, excluding the parts that make things complicated and don't support what they want to say, exaggerating the parts that support their ideas. Thus for example we should beware graphs.

Someone recently sent me an article about Tony Martin. I don't publish private emails without permission, but it was presented in basically the same way as over at the NRA site's version here: burglars broke into a man's home ("a man's house is his castle!"), and he defended it by shooting them, now he's in prison, see that's what happens when you control firearms, you get horrific injustice.

Not exactly.

Like most stories told by people strongly in favour or strongly against firearms ownership, this one is incomplete. When you tell the whole story, it's more nuanced and less in support of one particular side of the argument.

In 1976 Martin threatened a friend with a revolver and fired it in the man's house. In 1987 he argued with his brother over property and smashed some windows with his shotgun.

At his trial, Martin claimed he'd been burgled many times previously. In 1994 he'd caught someone with his children apparently stealing apples from his orchard, and as the thief drove away in a vehicle, Martin fired his shotgun at it. As you're not allowed to use lethal force to prevent someone stealing your apples from your orchard, or fire at a vehicle with both a thief and some children in it, his shotgun licence was revoked, his firearms confiscated. Despite this, he found another shotgun. He made many other complaints to the police about burglaries; the police claim they're not convinced all the incidents actually took place.

So Martin had a history of aggressive behaviour involving firearms, and the police felt that he made up stories to give him excuses to be angry and violent.

Martin slept fully-clothed with an oiled firearm by his side, had set up booby traps around his home, and had told people previously that he wanted to kill a burglar, that "Hitler was right" and he would like to put Gypsies in a field and machinegun them. His uncle was a founder of the National Front, and Martin was a regular visitor at his uncle's home, where "Aryan" meetings were held.

One of the burglars was a Gypsy.

Martin had told police in May 1999, "if burglars come back, I'll blow their heads off." In August 1999 he did indeed shoot two burglars.

The burglars were unarmed (though one may have had a crowbar, the media mentions it but the court summaries don't), they fled when Martin confronted them and he shot them both from behind as they were fleeing. The first and lethal shot was fired from 3 to 4.1 metres (9'9"-13'6"). Martin claimed that their torches were blinding him so that he was unable to see that they were unarmed - but if he were blinded, that three out of three shots hit was lucky indeed.

It appears that he fired a shot into the back of one of the burglars while he was bending down to put some silver in his bag, and that the two burglars then fled, with Martin following them to shoot them again. Generally if you're chasing them and they're fleeing, it's hard to argue "self-defence".

On appeal, Martin's own defence team submitted that he suffered from a paranoid personality disorder. That is, he thought people were out to get him and wanted to get them first. Paranoia would certainly explain making complaints about burglaries that never happened, and sleeping fully-clothed with a shotgun by you. He also suffered from depression, they said. So his own defence team argued that he used excessive force, but that it wasn't really his fault because he was a bit nutty.

The appeals judge concluded,

"There is also no doubt that the two men who broke into Mr Martin's house were intent on committing burglary. Mr Martin was entitled to use reasonable force to protect himself and his home, but the jury were surely correct in coming to their judgment that Mr Martin was not acting reasonably in shooting one of the intruders, who happened to be 16, dead and seriously injuring the other."

The conviction for murder was downgraded to manslaughter.

I believe that justice has been served in this particular case. A man with a history of aggression with firearms had his licence to possess them revoked; despite the prohibition, he got firearms. Two burglars came into his home unarmed. He was entitled to use force, but not lethal force, to remove them from his home. He shot an unarmed man in the back, and when they fled - when they were definitely no longer a threat to him - he pursued them to finish them off, like a hunter pursuing a wounded stag.

This is not murder - they were robbing him, after all - but it is not fully self-defence, either. He was defending his home, but using excessive force in doing so. The right charge was manslaughter, which is what he got in the end. Incidentally, this shows the excellence of our common law system, when you read the case, sound common sense is used by the judge in each instance.

As is usual with both the NRA and anti-gun types, the story has been distorted from the truth to suit their own vile and cowardly ends. This is common on all issues, whether gun control, climate change, caffeine being good or bad for you, and so on. Never take what you read at face value, if it's an issue important to you always look more deeply.

References:-
Guardian article on the case
Appeal Court decision on case
Appeal Court decision on parole

a bunch of commie hippies...

2009-02-20T12:00:00.000-08:00

... are the biggest patriots in the Australian Parliament right now.

There was an interesting panel discussion on the ABC's Q&A last night, they had Greens Senator Milne, the Treasurer Wayne Swan, Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey, a union guy Paul Howe and some corporate lobbyist and former party-comrade of Hockey, Kate Carnell. They were there to talk about the stimulus package (where the government tries to convince the public to Don't Worry, Just Go Shopping), but halfway through it got turned into a discussion about climate change, the Emissions Trading Scheme, and so on. You can see the episode here, and there's a transcript there, too.

What I found interesting was that the Greens were the only ones who had any view of Australia as actually making stuff, rather than just digging it up and selling it overseas. Basically it went,

Milne: "We have to reduce our emissions."
Hockey: "The Labor Party sucks."
Union idiot: "Yes but what about the coal miners? And the iron miners?"
Milne: "We should be manufacturing things - like wind turbines - and so overall there'll be more jobs than there are now."
Union idiot: "Oh my God you don't care about the coal miners!"
Swan: "The Liberals suck."

Consider:

woodchips for pulp = $30/tonne; paper = $1,500/tonne
aluminium = $2,000/tonne; aluminium pots and pans = $20,000/tonne
iron = $80/tonne; iron rails for railways = $300/tonne

and so on. The prices are just off the top of my head, those commodities leap about all over the place.

The arguments for producing manufactures rather than raw materials are,

a tonne of manufactured goods is worth more money than a tonne of raw materials; since Australia has a large trade deficit (we import more than we export in dollar terms), this has got to be good.
If we used our own raw materials for the manufactured goods, we could use less resources and create less pollution for the same money (eg instead of 50 tonnes of timber logged for $1,500, we could have 1 tonne of timber logged to make 1 tonne of paper... for $1,500).
commodities prices are extremely volatile, manufactured goods less so (Camrys don't go from $6,500 to $15,000 to $3,500 in the space of 18 months, unlike oil, etc), so income will be more reliable
making a tonne of manufactured goods employs more people than making a tonne of raw materials; since Australia is entering a recession and people are losing jobs...

The arguments against manufacturing are... um...

Only advanced nations can do manufacturing. For example, when Australian cities expand public transport, they buy buses, trains and trams from Sweden and Germany. But really high-tech countries manage to build their own buses, like the famous technotopia Ivory Coast.

What we see then is that we could be logging and mining something like one-tenth as much stuff yet employing more people and making more money from the stuff than we do today. So overall about a fifth of the emissions - 80% reduction in carbon emissions, and make more money. Less emissions, more jobs and money. We wouldn't want that, would we? It's unAustralian or something. Only dark-skinned impoverished foreigners are meant to make things!

A bunch of commie hippies are the biggest patriots in our Parliament, how crazy is that?

Senator Milne:

"we do not want to remain Asia's quarry. We need to diversify the economy and build resilience."

Swan rolled his eyes, Hockey looked lost, and the union bloke got angry.

Fires and silence

2009-02-13T21:33:00.000-08:00

Just a short post to describe what's happening here Down Under, and why no articles from me lately.

First we had an interstate holiday before the New Year. Then we bought a new home, and were moving. After that it was a couple of weeks to get the internet on, but we only had it a week before a power surge wiped out our laptops. So now we wait on insurance for new stuff. As I write, orange light comes from the Sun directly overhead, light shining through ashes of forest, livestock, homes and people. Bushfire has come to Victoria once more.

We've had ten years of drought and gradually rising temperatures courtesy of climate change, and had a relatively cool and wet November and December, and then in late January about four days of over 40C (causing blackouts and the collapse of the train system), then a few days' relief, then the hottest day in Victorian history last Saturday - 47C. So the wet helped grow lots of fuel, then the heat dried the fuel out. Some bushfires started on that hottest day, and it seems a few were started by arsonists, too.

The Aussie bush of the south actually needs fires every now and then to clear it out, some plants reproduce that way. So we either have lots of little fires or the rare huge fire. Poor forestry management has meant that we've had much fewer small controlled fires. Thus the big one now.

This fire is also worse than others in the past simply because we have more people living in the bush, or in towns which are effectively outer suburbs of the city, heavily forested.

In the past the policy has been that each householder uses their own judgment - prepare well to fight the fire and stay, or else get out ASAP. Unfortunately, the scale and speed of the fires meant that some people couldn't get out even when they chose to, they got caught on the road in their cars, or the fire swept over their home before they realised what was happening.

At least 181 people are dead, but it'll probably climb to 300 or so. Another several hundred have been treated, and 100 or so are in hospital with severe burns and the like. A few small towns have essentially been wiped out, 75-100% of all houses destroyed. About 7,000 people are now homeless and refugees (though we don't like to call them that here).

Everyone is pitching in. Other states have sent fire services, the Army is out supplying tents and food and helping search for remains and clear firebreaks, clothing and food have been donated in huge amounts, a public appeal has raised over $100 million, the Red Cross is overwhelmed with offers to donate blood and is putting people on a waiting list to do so, and so on.

The press is having an orgasm of overfocus on it allit reminds me a bit of the 1991 Gulf War. Extended news bulletins every day, press getting in the way of relief workers, etc.

We'll get the fires under control over the next week. We just have piled a heap of resources into doing so. Fire threatens Yea where the refugees are, Thomson Dam which is Melbourne's main water supply, and Longford gas plant which supplies most of the state's natural gas. But we've got so many people fighting the fires now I don't see them as likely to go. Depending on the weather, we shouldn't have any more big fires this summer - and if we do, far fewer casualties since people will be much more inclined to just run at the first sign of trouble.

Meanwhile down in Melbourne the heatwave caused transformer blowouts and blackouts to half a million households, and lots of knock-on effects in the weeks following. Last Friday we had a high tension line fall on a low tension line and gave us a power surge and blackout. We lost several appliances - so my responses come from the public library and may not be prompt...

Which is better, plastic or paper rubbish bags?

2009-01-05T00:34:00.000-08:00

Someone wrote and asked me this. Luckily, I had a prepared rant ready to roll out.

Here's the thing: way I see it, our Earth is a patient who's just come into the trauma ward, he fell off his motorbike and through someone's windscreen. He's had his right arm broken and torn and has an arterial bleed spurting blood everywhere, a smashed skull with possible intracranial haemorrhaging... and he also has a lot of cuts and bruises.

We're talking about the bruise on his knee when we haven't yet dealt with his spurting artery and poor brain being squashed from swelling.

In terms of impact on the Earth, the big things are how you heat, cool, cook and transport things, and how you get your food. If you deal with those things, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions at least, that's something like 80% of your impact.

That's why the one tonne CO2 lifestyle makes no mention of plastic bags, or organic cotton underwear, and so on. That's the small stuff. Sort out the big stuff first, worry about the small stuff later. If you get your heating, cooling and cooking from fossil fuels, if your transport is a car, if you fly in an aircraft, if you eat more than two dozen pounds of meat a year, if you buy new consumer goods, then all these things make everything else utterly irrelevant by comparison. Deal with those things first, give yourself a few years to change them, and then we can worry about the other stuff.

I use cloth bags to get my shopping, but still use plastic garbage bags. However, because our local council recycles everything except plastic wrapping, and because I compost, the only rubbish we have going to landfill is... plastic wrapping. Like if you buy a packet of crackers, the packet is cardboard but has a plastic wrapping around it, that sort of thing. And that stuff doesn't degrade.

It seems a bit pointless to have a biodegradable bag to put nonbiodegradable stuff in.

With plastic bags, the real damage they do isn't in greenhouse gas emissions - less than 4% of all oil goes to making plastics of all kinds - but when they get in waterways or the ocean. They choke up marine animals, basically. So the thing to do is make sure your stuff actually goes to landfill, and not down some drain or left on a beach.

Ideally we wouldn't have any rubbish going to landfill at all. But if we do, it's senseless to worry about the bag breaking down if the contents won't.

You're better off just reducing how much rubbish you send to landfill.

Deal with the big stuff first. Don't worry about the petty stuff people try to sell you so you can feel warm and fuzzy.

After the game is won, all bets must be paid

2008-12-26T02:31:00.000-08:00

We see recently linked on TheOilDrum an article saying that Russia has "blundered" because... it relies on fossil fuel exports for money. The writer Steve LeVine is speaking too soon in saying that Russia is "in trouble". For one thing, he lacks perspective,

"Simply put, Russia is in trouble. Its much-ballyhooed $600 billion cash reserve base dropped by a quarter by Dec. 1, to about $450 billion, and even further since."

At least they have cash reserves, rather than having to borrow funds to do their spending. He goes on,

"The Putin era’s new generation of oligarchs, like Deripaska — men who obtained ownership of large parts of Russia’s industrial sector in the last few years — is lining up for a bailout from some $110 billion in foreign debt coming due next year. According to Bloomberg’s Yuriy Humber and Torrey Clark, that’s twice the debt owed in Brazil, China and India. The oligarchs are seeking some $78 billion in loans."

It is unclear why US$280 billion for the EU, or US$700 billion for the US, or US$255 billion for Japan, why these occasion no comment in an article where the much smaller amount of US$110 billion is presented as a dangerous thing.

Of course the Third World has a total debt of some $523 billion; readers may recall that a few years ago when the Third World asked for this debt to be delayed or written off, it was explained that doing this would cause financial chaos in the West; we can afford $1,235 billion for ourselves, but cannot afford $523 billion for them. We wagged our fingers and gave them a lecture about fiscal responsibility. Stop laughing, please, it's rude.

Apparently, tremendous debts are bad for Russia and the Third World and absolutely must be paid back as soon as possible, but tremendous debts are an unfortunate necessity for us in the West and we should pay them back... well, sometime later, no hurry.

LeVine, an American writing in an American magazine, also quotes Zachary Shore, an American, as speaking of Russia's "weak banking sector", and apparently is not trying to be ironic.

This sort of article shows how the West tries very hard to present itself as a brilliant success and the rest as a dismal failure. But Russia of course also has natural gas, and while oil's price has plummeted from near $150 in July to under $40/bbl this December, natural gas has halved rather than dropped by three-quarters; though as Lavine correctly notes, much gas is sold on long-term contracts, so spot prices don't reflect immediate conditions as much as with oil. Can Russia increase its gas prices to make up for loss of oil revenue? It seems that they think so.

Putin says "cheap gas" era ending
Mr Putin said the cost of extracting gas was rising sharply, therefore "the era of cheap energy resources, of cheap gas, is of course coming to an end".

The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) [a precursor to a natural gas version of OPEC] meeting in Moscow has agreed a charter and plans for a permanent base. [...]

The countries attending are Algeria, Bolivia, Brunei, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela. Equatorial Guinea and Norway are attending as observers. [...]

Officials at the meeting stressed they were not trying to set up a price-fixing cartel. [...]

Ukraine row
At the moment Russia remains locked in a dispute with Ukraine over non-payment of debts.

Russia's Gazprom says Ukraine owes it $2bn (£1.4bn) and has warned it may cut off gas supplies next month if the dispute remains unresolved.

On Monday, Gazprom said it had warned European customers about possible disruption linked to the Ukraine dispute.

"It is not ruled out that the current position of the Ukrainian side and some of its actions could lead to disruptions in the stability of gas supplies to Europe," Gazprom Chairman and First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov said in a statement.

A similar dispute three years ago saw Russia briefly cutting gas deliveries to its neighbour, action that also affected supplies to several western European countries.

So what do we have?

Russia's income from oil drops
Russia speaks of the possibility that gas will become more expensive
Ukraine is behind on its gas bills, and so Russia may cut their gas off, which - oh no! would cut off a good chunk of Europe, too - most unfortunate and I'm sure Russia would express many regrets.

They don't need an official price-fixing cartel with that happening. The EU will pay Ukraine's gas bill, and in the next round of gas contracts higher prices will be negotiated. Putin and Medvedev, following their checkmate of the West in the Caucasus where the EU was trying to diversify its oil and gas supplies, now want the EU to pay up.

This is the price the West pays for continuing to burn large amounts of fossil fuels. Russia is not blundering, we are.

Edit on 08Jan2009:- And now we see that the Russians have turned off the tap entirely, are asking for a higher price for their gas, and at the same time, by an amazing coincidence, Ukraine is asking the IMF for billions. And when the IMF gets money, it comes from the World Bank, if the World Bank's shareholders vote to agree to it. Who has the largest share of votes at the World Bank? Why... those very same EU countries which are now feeling the chill.

Fossil reserves and culture

2008-12-22T17:27:00.000-08:00

Over at his blog, Edouard tells us that coal reserves might be overestimated. He thinks this is a good thing, probably because it'll lessen the chances of catastrophic climate change and encourage us to change to renewable energy. I don’t think that’s necessarily so, and that’s because of culture. My reply was longer than his article, so I post it here.

Reserves are not fixed, they depend on price
Fossil fuel reserves in general are hard to estimate, even if you’re being purely scientific and there’s no financial incentive to fudge the figures up or down. Basically the higher the price of fossil fuels, the bigger the reserves.

People often think of fossil fuels as sitting in big lumps. Coal is a huge chunk of coal, oil is sitting in vast underground caverns and so is gas. But it’s more complicated than that.

Oil and gas sit in rocks with holes in them, like a great sponge. That’s why we pump in water or carbon dioxide to get them out, and why a reservoir is never “dry” but always has some stuff sitting in a corner somewhere. Maybe you could get it out, but it’d be a lot of trouble - like the recent oil find off the coast of Brazil, under 3km of sea then 1km of rock and 2km of salt and 1km of rock.

Coal appears in layers between rock, and obviously there’s a difference between 0.02m of coal between 10m of rock and alternating 5m of coal and 2m of rock. That two-centimetre layer, there might be millions of tonnes there across a whole mountain, but is it worth the trouble to get it out? Do you count it or not? If you don’t count the 2cm layer, will you count the 3cm layer, or the 30cm layer? What if it’s 2cm of coal with 1m of sand, compared to 2cm of coal with 1m of hard granite, obviously the first is much easier to get out than the second. Where do you draw the line and count one but not the other?

We draw the line with “how much will it cost to get out, and how much can we sell it for?” The geologists look at each area with these fossil fuels, and say that in principle they could get it all out. That’s the high number for fossil fuel reserves. Then they say, well realistically we can get it out but it’ll cost a fortune - we could get a barrel of oil from Titan, the moon of Saturn, but it’d cost a billion dollars. That’s the lower number.

So reserves are assessed based on price. If you think that oil will be (say) $100 a barrel next year, then you’ll think that you can get into harder-to-reach places than you could if oil were $50 a barrel. So at $100/bbl we have reserves of (say) 1,000 billion barrels, and at $50/bbl we have reserves of (say) 800 billion barrels. What are the “true” reserves? Neither. It depends on the price. (The same goes for uranium and other minerals, by the way.)

Thus everyone is lying, and at the same time telling the truth. Just looking at what is physically in the ground the reserves are absolutely enormous. But looking at what is going to be profitable to extract at different prices, that changes the reserves considerably.

Culture
I don’t really look forward to low reserves. That’s because lower production leads to higher prices. Now, in a perfect free market higher prices for fossil fuels would lead to people pursuing other forms of energy. But we don’t have a perfect free market. As Edouard says, we have absurd subsidies for fossil fuels.

But as well as subsidies, there’s people’s culture. Government subsidies for fossil fuels are nothing compared to what we the public spend on them. But why do we spend as we do? As I’ve said before, driving is not a rational choice - people don’t carefully consider each journey they have to make and decide whether to use car, bus, train, bike or walk it, which will be the most convenient and efficient for this particular trip. They just automatically go to whatever they’re used to using.

Thus I will walk past my woman’s car to go 3km to the shops, while my friend drives 400m down the corner to work in the morning. The same applies to the way we heat and cool ourselves, what we eat and buy, and so on.

We’re not the perfectly-informed rational actors supposed by the free market advocates, we have a culture, sometimes we do things just because we like to do things that way, not because they’re the optimal choice.

Jared Diamond talks about this a bit in Collapse, how as their land cooled the Norse in Greenland continued trying to farm cattle and wear wool from sheep and refused to eat fish and wear animal skins, though they had the examples of the Inuit to show them how it was done. They’d rather die than change. Not really a conscious decision, more a lack of imagination, not being able to imagine any different way of life. That’s culture.

If culture remains unchanged, then as the price of fossil fuels increases we don’t seek alternatives, we just shout at the government to reduce fuel taxes or even bring in subsidies, we encourage them to invade countries with large oil reserves and so on. And the rising price and wars and so on bring a lot of misery and chaos.

The other issue about price is that it’s so volatile, people see it as temporary. This year of 2008 with oil rushing to $150/bbl and down to under $40/bbl will be remembered for a long time, I think. Whenever price goes up this will increase the stated oil reserves, so people will think, “well it’s expensive but we have lots of it,” and not change. When the price goes down they’ll say, “well why should we change when it’s cheap?” As a market signal price is a very fuzzy picture.

I don’t care about the Earth
All that’s why I think that if reserves are low it’s not necessarily a good thing. I’ve said before that I don’t care about the Earth, I care about people. If we have low reserves and do nothing to seek alternatives, then yes the Earth is saved from catastrophic climate change, but there’ll be a lot of misery and chaos. If we have high reserves and burn them up then climate change will also give us misery and chaos.

Since I don’t care about the Earth, exactly where the misery and chaos of humans comes from doesn’t matter to me. I just want to avoid misery and chaos. So I don’t hope for high or low fossil fuel reserves, I hope we just stop burning all that shit and move towards a better life for all humanity, not just a few rich buggers in the West. I hope our culture changes.

Cultural change requires that the current one be undermined by lots of criticism, and that a loud and annoying minority demand it change. It doesn't require a majority, but I'll write about that in another article.

Not leaders, but followers

2008-12-21T04:02:00.000-08:00

... and sometimes not even followers.

I've said many times before that our elected representatives are not "leaders" as we commonly call them, but followers. Some of them come up with an original idea or radical policy some time at the beginning of their career. In this they are like a vaguely leftie arts graduate joining the banking sector for a long career in a cubicle. Both quickly realise that they are at the bottom of the bureaucratic ladder, and as such powerless, but to ascend this ladder they must keep their knees and elbows in tight, and not dance around or wave their arms about angrily, or else they'll just fall off.

Democracy stifles original ideas
So they take all their original or radical ideas and bottle them for later consumption. After twenty years of kissing arse, backstabbing rivals, greasing palms and nodding in meetings, they reach the top, and open the bottle of ideas to hear a slight pop! as the contents turn out to have dried up, leaving only the crusty sediment of humbug. It turns out that ideas are not like pickles you can leave in the back of the cupboard for years and then consume later. Ideas are living things, they require the open air, and the food of other ideas. Bottled up they perish.

In many ways this stifling of ideas is inevitable. It's a mark of our free and democratic society. If you have a parliament or company of a few hundred people, it's impossible to get everyone to agree on anything except when it's time to go for a long and booze-filled lunch. Add in the elected representatives at other levels, other companies, various public officials and lobby groups, and it's amazing we last five minutes without civil war. So everyone has to compromise. And if you compromise on things every day for twenty years, well pretty soon you have no original ideas left at all.

In some way this is a good thing. After all, many original ideas are stupid and wrong. Usually the reason nobody mentioned the radical idea before is not that only this one guy was enough of a genius to come up with it, but that lots of people thought of it and then said, "no, I guess not, since that would be fucking stupid." When some political or corporate fruitcake pops up to eject from its sticky liquor-laden surface a fermented glazed cherry of embarassing stupidity into the back of your throat to gag on, some nonsense like having a single grand industrial pig farming facility in Poland to supply all the pork in Europe, or setting up a global electrical "supergrid", or having a global build-out of nuclear reactors when the prospect of one country having them is considered a pretext for war, or throwing out the most hard-working people in your country simply because they had the impertinence to be born elsewhere, when such absurdity is put out there in all seriousness, you start to see why people talk about "checks and balances", and "separation of powers". And you don't mind so much that most original ideas get stopped before they start.

Of course not all stupid ideas get stopped. Sometimes we decide that the best way to fight radical Islamists is to invade a secular country whose regime those same radical Islamists have sworn to destroy, rather as if we had decided to fight the Nazis by invading the Soviet Union. Or perhaps when the financial sector is in crisis, we decide that the best way to deal with people who irresponsibly wasted money is to give them more money. All sorts of stupid ideas get through. But most of them are stopped.

The buddy system of the elites
It's thus inevitable that original ideas are stopped, radical programmes don't take place, and it's generally good. How then does anything actually happen? Well, our elected representatives and corporate leaders (these not elected, but kept in place by what we buy from their companies, which comes to the same thing) do actually listen to the people talking to them, more or less. They may not have any ideas of their own anymore, but if a thousand people write to them with the same sorts of ideas, then they sit up and pay attention.

This is the power of the corporate donor to a political party, or the power of a Minister of the Cabinet. Talk time. If I ask to chat to the CEO of Acme Monopoly, Ltd, or the Minister for Important Stuff, they'll say, "who the fuck are you?" and that will be that. But if I donate $10,000 to the party then the Minister will naturally be interested in a chat over canapes; if I am actually a Minister of something, then Acme's CEO will take my calls.

Strange as it may seem, these people are actually human, and like the rest of us listen to their friends, or at least to the people they know. If some random stranger on the street stops me to tell me about a great new restaurant that's opened across town, I'll ignore them; if my mate Jo tells me about it, I'll listen. Of course actual corruption is a possible consequence of this: donate to the party, get a new government subsidy for some technology that'll never work but will boost the share price, that sort of thing. But more often it's just a bunch of people who know each-other well and trust each-other's opinions, and look out for their mates.

Speech is powerful...
Still, even with the buddy system of the elites going on ("what happens on fact-finding missions, stays on fact-finding missions"), they are usually aware of public opinion. Elected representatives want to get re-elected, CEOs want people to buy their company's stuff. So they do listen - but only if you speak to them. And across the West there's a real disenfranchisement. The "franchise" is your right to vote, but actually being prohibited from voting is unusual, apathy and indifference do the trick just as well.

The vote's not much of a statement, though. A cross or number in a box every couple of years. It's like when you were at school and some lazy teacher gave you a grade on a paper but no comment. You knew how well they thought of your work, but not why - so how could you improve? How do they know what you want if all you do is vote for or against them? That's why I say that you ought to in the first week of each season write a brief letter to each of your local, state and federal representatives telling them exactly what you think. I'll always remember an interview with a state MP who said that if he got more than thirty letters on any one topic, he'd bring it up in parliament - because he knew that for every one letter there were a hundred who thought the same, would remember at the election, but not bother with a letter.

We saw this in my area recently. The Post Office removed a mailbox from the street because it only got twenty letters a week, it wasn't worth the trouble picking them up. A little old lady with a walking frame who wrote six of those letters was unhappy, and somehow this made the local paper. Lots of people felt sorry for her and wrote to the paper and their local and state representative. The state one contacted Australia Post who (as a federal agency) told her to bugger off. She brought the issue up in Parliament, and a week later the mailbox was back.

Our elected representatives will respond to us on matters of the most astonishing triviality, if we take the trouble to annoy them about it. This is because they are not leaders but followers.

...but actions speak louder than words
If we don't speak to them, they'll look for other ways to listen to us. For example, the US is the world's largest user of oil, and the world's biggest importer of it. And of course oil is a finite resource, and probably we're at about the point where we have the most available to us, there'll only be less from now on. Imagine that you become President of the US around 2000. Not the current retarded alcoholic, just yourself suddenly made President by some magic. You've heard this news about peak oil. What do you do?

If there's a shortage of something, you have two possible solutions: use less, or get more. Well, "use less oil"... one guy put solar panels on the White House roof and lost the election to a senile actor who consulted his wife's astrologer and tore them down - and that guy got re-elected. No use bringing in conservationist policies just to have the next guy tear them down, is it? Let's say you slip away from the Secret Service, dress up as a street bum and go out into the open air to hear what the common people think. Looking at all the people stuck in traffic jams scarfing down fast food, would you expect them to be happy about conservation?

That leaves "get more oil." Where can you get more oil? Your country's tapped out, Texas has got more oil wells than a teenage boy's got pimples, sure Alaska's got some too but it's under ice and anyway nowhere near enough to keep everyone truckin'. Well... there's this country with a mad dictator nobody likes, you smacked his army over once before twelve years ago so you're pretty sure you could do it again today, and that country has heaps of oil - not only that, but all that country's neighbours have heaps of oil, too. A couple hundred thousand troops and half a dozen aircraft carriers sitting an hour from their capital might give them a subtle hint about ensuring a steady oil supply. Off you go to war. Well, not you, that's what the poor are for.

As President, you'd listen to the people. Sure, maybe half a million people marched against the war, but the day before the march the country used 21 million barrels of oil and the day after the march it used another 21 million, so what does that tell you?

It's what the people want, right? Well okay, apart from a few morons rattling their virtual sabres from the safety of their blogs or newspaper opinion columns or some tubby bearded guy in a bar, the people don't actually want war, they don't want 4,000 dead soldiers and 100,000 dead foreign civilians and death squads and women slain by "honour" killings and naked prisoners of war with dogs biting their balls off and a country in miserable chaos. But they want oil, and to get oil we have to have that other nasty stuff. I mean, I want sausages but don't really want to visit the abbattoir to watch them being made. We like the end result and try not to think about the process.

It's not always this cynical and nasty, but this is the sort of reasoning elected representatives and corporates have to go through to figure out what we the public want - not just what we say in words, since too often are words to them are few, but in our actions.

I've always been a bit wary of loud patriots. Here Down Under our media have a funny way of deciding who is or isn't "Australian." If you do something good you're Aussie even if you were born somewhere else and just lived here for a bit. If you do something bad you're not Aussie no matter what. For example, the actor Russell Crowe (born in NZ, doesn't have citizenship here) is often called "our Russ." But when George Speight (born in Fiji, has Australian citizenship and a degree from Brisbane) held the Fijian Parliament hostage, funnily enough he wasn't "our George."

It's the same with the people and the government. When the Boxing Day tsunami hit and the federal government promised a billion dollars to Indonesia, everyone was very proud and boasted to the world how generous we were. But when we locked up refugees and invaded Iraq, it was "look at what those bastards have done."

The way I see it, if we want to take the credit for the good stuff our country or government do, we have to take the blame for the bad stuff, too. No taxation without representation, they say. No credit without blame, I say.

It's a government of the people in a democracy. They're our elected representatives, elected by us and acting according to what they believe are our wishes. If they do something good it's to our credit, if they do something wrong it's our fault.

So when the federal government of Australia announces the rather unambitious goal of a 5% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020, that's my fault. And every other Australian's fault. I'm sorry. I've failed as a responsible citizen of my country and the world. I didn't make my wishes loud and annoying enough. Nor did the rest of Australia.

It was once said to me on a course, "it's time for you to get your shit together in a sock and wire it tight." I'm still not quite sure exactly what that means, but it certainly sounds like strong encouragement to act.

Write to your local, state and federal representatives right now. Tell them what you think, what you want to see happen. It's time for us to get our shit together in a sock and wire it tight, because our elected representatives and corporates are not leaders, but followers. Think of your Congressman or MP or Councillor as like the fat kid at the back of the group of kids on the school excursion, stumbling along with his face smudged with pie, sweating and calling, "wait for me!" Don't wait. Move on and let him catch up later.

The Problem Exclusion Principle

2008-12-03T20:25:00.000-08:00

No more than one global problem may be acknowledged by a person at one time.
After the first problem is acknowledged, any others must be downplayed or denied.

This is the Problem Exclusion Principle, after the Pauli Exclusion Principle. I came up with it because I noticed that many people concerned about climate change will downplay or deny depletion of fossil fuels as a problem, as for example in this discussion I had where one rather hostile bloke said, "Fossil fuels supply is effectively infinite up to the end of this century: the coal can supply the energy we needed for a few more centuries."

I tried to explain the distinction between reserves and supply - a distinction any broke teenager with wealthy but stingy parents understands, just because you have a lot of something sitting around doesn't mean it's possible for you to get it - but he got angry, the thread was locked and abusive comments of his were deleted. I had told him there was more than one problem in the world, this upset him a lot.

Many people concerned about peak oil are the same about climate, for example here. Strangely, even amongst those concerned about peak oil, concern seems to be much less about peak gas or coal, though their peaking is more deadly to us and our comfortable lifestyles, since we use coal to power us, natural gas to grow and cook our food, but oil just to transport stuff and make plastic junk.

And if you ever have the misfortune to talk to a convinced young Communist in the West, they will tell you that it's all about class warfare. If they admit that climate change or resource depletion happen at all, they will claim it's just an expression of the class war. For example, one socialist tells us that, "Governments and capitalists worldwide have seized on the opportunity to legitimise another way of taxing the poor to enrich the already wealthy - user pays and "green" taxes."

It goes on like this, whether the issue is peak oil, climate change, social inequity, poverty or whatever. Each sees only the global problem they're most interested in, and says that the other problems are just an aspect of their one, or are unimportant compared to it, or even don't exist as problems at all. It's as though we are little monkeys who when offered the choice between a banana and a peanut get upset and confused.

Thus the Problem Exclusion Principle, "No more than one global problem may be acknowledged by a person at one time. After the first problem is acknowledged, any others must be downplayed or denied."

This is a great pity, because many different problems have the same solutions. For example, I've previously said that in terms of environmental impact, the problem is not really population but consumption and waste. To prevent catastrophic climate change we need by 2050 to reduce our emissions to 15-50% of those of 2005, as I've noted before. Australia and the US with 5% of the world's population caused 25% its emissions, while India with 17% causes 5% of them. So the climate can take 3 or more Indias, but cannot take even one Australia and the US.

Nonetheless, India is straining with 1,200 or so million people, so would do well to control its population. But what is the most proven method of stabilising and reducing population? Well, the World Health Organization tells us that when you improve the prosperity, education and political power of women, they have less children. Poor, illiterate and oppressed women have lots of kids; wealthy PhDs who just got elected to parliament, not so many. So by improving the prosperity, education and political power of women in the Third World we could reduce the Third World birth rate. We would with one policy deal with problems of population, environmental damage, poverty, and human rights. Strangely, those who speak of population being a bigger problem than consumption and waste are not so keen on this.

Likewise with climate change, peak fossil fuels, the economy, and war and terrorism.

Problem! fossil fuels are finite. Solution? burn less fossil fuels, and eventually burn none.
Problem! burning fossil fuels puts stuff in the air which warms up the world, kills millions and generally makes life difficult. Solution? burn less fossil fuels, and eventually burn none.
Problem! fossil fuels exist in large supply in other countries, so we have to give them money to get them. Thus, money flows out of the country. Solution? see above.
Problem! many of those other countries have people who are unfriendly to us (Saudi Arabia's Wahhabis who fund the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or Russia or China who build nuclear weapons) and thus our money is used to buy bullets and bombs to kill us. Solution? I think you get the idea.

And so on. If we focus on just one problem and downplay or deny others, we come up with stupid solutions which may fix one problem but make others worse. For example, if we just look at climate change due to burning fossil fuels, biofuels seem pretty good. But if we look at other issues, then they look bad, because people will cut down more forests, and deforestation is responsible for 17% of greenhouse gas emissions, and for a lot of hunger and misery; see for example Haiti.

Or if we just look at racism ignoring all other issues, we can conclude that the election of a half-black man to the US Presidency is a great revolution, thinking that it will lead to overnight racial equality, and forgetting that just because blacks are 13.5% of the US population, having 13.5% of rich people and 13.5% of impoverished people in that country being black would not make being rich any the less wasteful of resources, and being impoverished any the less miserable.

We have to acknowledge the importance of all problems, and look for common solutions. If our unemployed drug addict brother has influenza and hasn't eaten for four days and asks us for ten bucks for dinner, we can give him a job, take his drugs off him and flush them down the toilet, send him to the doctor to treat his flu, or give him dinner or cash for dinner. If we insist that only one of his problems matters, and do only one of those things it is as if we have done nothing, our loser brother will be back to annoy us next week. He has four problems, but all are just as important as each-other and perhaps two or more of them will have a common solution.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle is a principle of nature, and thus cannot be overcome. The Problem Exclusion Principle is perhaps some kind of expression of human nature; but as humans we can face our animal instincts and ignore and overcome them. Only by overcoming the Problem Exclusion Principle can we create lasting and effective solutions to our global problems.

The freedom to be left the fuck alone

2008-10-26T16:19:00.000-07:00

I have previously written on the case of Mohammed Haneef, a man who was detained without charge or trial, who when eventually charged was granted bail and then was imprisoned by ministerial fiat, eventually all charges dropped due to lack of evidence and the courts reinstating his work visa. Despite the best efforts of the Commonwealth Government, justice was done in the end.

Now with the change of government in the November 2007 federal election, there's an inquiry into the affair, though as usual in such cases, of limited enough scope to ensure not too many people will be embarrassed by it. It continues to be news. The Australian Federal Police complain about the criticism.

"The actual arresting officers have come to feel to an extent as if they're the face of all that's wrong about Australia's draconian terrorist laws and that they've gleefully and recklessly gone out and used powers that they shouldn't have."

The police are necessarily the face of any laws, good or bad, and given that in the end Haneef was entirely cleared, it's fair to say that the AFP's use of its powers was at the very least not the wisest. When we read transcripts of Haneef's interviews with the AFP, we're certainly given cause to wonder about things a bit.

Q1395. [...] Police who have been looking through your diary, have found some handwritten notes in the back of your diary. Okay.
A. Mm hm.

Q1396. And one of these handwritten notes is details for Kafeel Ahmed.
A. Mm hm.

Q1396 [sic] Telephone numbers and looks like an address. A couple of addresses. Now, that writing there is that your writing.
A. This is not my writing actually. [...]

Q1397. The only issue is it's in your diary. Can you give me a reasonable explanation as to why.
A. Oh well ah [...]

Q1399. Could you just excuse me for a second.
A. Sure.

(SIMMS LEAVES THE ROOM - NO CONVERSATION{

Q1400. Okay. Thought that might have been the case. The person, the Police Officer that's given me this, incorrectly told me that that was a copy of the diary. In fact it's not, this is what's been written by Police. So it's not your handwriting at all.
A. Yeah.

Perhaps not the sharpest tools in the shed. But what's most of concern is the political interference in the case. Apparently, the Prime Minister himself was involved in pressuring the AFP to get charges and convictions. From the first linked ABC article,

John Howard's former chief of staff Arthur Sinodinos says it is the AFP's job to do the Federal Government's bidding.
[...]
Mr Sinodinos says that Commissioner Keelty was conscious that he needed to look after the various stakeholders relevant to the AFP, including the prime minister.

When asked whether it was their job to do the bidding of Government as long as it was legal he replied : "In my view it is."

"Their job is to work within the framework of policy, subject of course to not breaking the law," he said.

When the police do the bidding of the government of the day, we are on our way to a police state. It is not the job of police to arrest who the government wants them to arrest, or charge or detain them on ministerial order. We're accustomed to thinking of people using their connections to get someone let off as a bad thing. "We can't arrest him, he has too many friends, he's connected." We think that's bad, it's corruption. But arresting the innocent for political reasons is worse than releasing the guilty for political reasons.

That's because "freedom" is essentially just having people leave you the fuck alone. That's what free speech and freedom of religion and association, and privacy and no seizure of property without fair compensation and protection from arbitrary detention without trial and so on, it's what all human rights boil down to: leave me the fuck alone.

When freedoms are restricted, these restrictions must be done under the rule of law and subject to review by a public court where common sense may be applied. When decisions about detention, arrest and trial are made by politicians, they'll be done for political reasons. When police do the bidding of politicians, we're on our way to a police state.

Since 1215 our common law has said,

"no free man shall be seized or imprisoned [...] except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice."

It is necessary sometimes for countries to renew themselves, to return to the principles upon which they were built. It is not the job of the police to do the bidding of the Federal Government. As I've said before, human rights and the environment are one and the same, respect or contempt for them spring from the same source.

The USA's decline as a Great Power

2008-09-29T22:51:00.000-07:00

As I write this, the US Congress has rejected the Administration's plan to have $700 billion to buy the bad debts of US banks. [Edit on 04Oct2008- and now they've accepted it. Apparently they couldn't afford $700 billion, but they could afford $700 billion + $100 billion tax cuts - so they increase the national debt while decreasing the revenue they'll use to pay it back. Hmmmm.... brilliant forward planning!] This rejection is a bit surprising, though perhaps it shouldn't be. No doubt the Congresspeople are being bombarded by their constituents telling them to vote against it. The people imagine that the bailout is to protect the rich, but in fact it's to protect everyone. Of course it won't work, but that's the intention.

As I see it, the US banking mess is like the war in Iraq, in that they shouldn't be in this mess in the first place, but now that they're in it there are no easy solutions.

Debts bad and good
It all began with CDOs, Collateralised Debt Obligations, where they mixed bad debts with good and called the package good, high credit rating. It's a bit like getting pet mince and premium mince, mixing them together and calling them premium. The crisis has come from everyone finally admitting it was partly pet mince - and they're not sure how much of the stuff is spread around other meats. How do you separate the edible mince from non-edible afterwards? Well, this bailout plan was a plan to do that - the US government would buy the bad debts and take them all on.

The banks are made up of good debts, bad debts, and deposits. Once the bad debts get too big, the deposits dissolve, too, as people lose faith in the bank and withdraw their money, then the interest the bank can pay to those with deposits drops, which causes more people to withdraw money, which means the bank has to call in some of the good debts to cover it all, or perhaps the bank has to put a freeze on deposits... bye-bye bank. Some people are cheering the failure of the bailout package. They perhaps won't be cheering when they find their deposits are no longer available to them, or only ten cents on the dollar is still around. It's happened in many other countries in the past.

The reason for the government to take on the bad debts is that governments are different to individuals and corporations in that they can default on or even entirely repudiate and write off debts without ceasing to exist financially. Usually people use the law to get you if you toss aside a debt, but a government is the law, so... Now, the government may not actually write them all off - and they certainly won't say they'll do that - but the mere possibility stabilises the system, since the government can renegotiate things. For example, up in Canada they exchanged the dodgy stuff for bonds which would mature in seven or nine years - the interest paid to investors would be much less, but it'd be stable and predictable.

The problem is that while buying up the bad debts to write them off is a good idea, since the banking regulations haven't been changed we'd just see the same or similar problems again in a few years. It's like removing a cancerous lung from a patient who then goes on to keep smoking. What was really needed was a package where the banks which accept the bailout must also accept new regulations, lessening the chances of their needing a bailout in future.

Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen in the US, because in the past two decades their primary export has been debt. Now, money, whether currency or debt, it has to be backed by something. Doesn't have to be gold or silver, but there has to be the promise of some tangible goods or services at the end of it all. That is why you'll accept an IOU from Jennifer Smith, QC, of the old law firm Smith, Jones & Daughter, but won't accept an IOU from Mildred Smith, smelly alcoholic living on the street. That's what it means to be bankrupt, that your debts exceed your perceived ability to ever pay them all back.

The US government, corporations and people haven't really considered this. In the end, you have to have something tangible behind it all.

The US$ is an oil-backed currency
Until the early 1970s the US backed its currency, gave it something tangible, with gold. After that, it appeared to be backed by nothing but good faith (like Ms. Smith, QC - backed only by her reputation and your trust in her), but in fact they'd got OPEC to price oil in US dollars. Thus world demand for oil also created a demand for US dollars; this meant that the US currency went from being backed by gold to being (effectively) backed by oil. For as long as the world wants oil and it's priced in dollars, that provides a base for the US dollar. Whatever else happens to the US economy, at least you can buy oil - which everyone wants - with their dollar.

It's not a coincidence that Iraq was invaded a year after Saddam Hussein suggested to OPEC that they change to using the Euro, and that the other country they're talking about invading - Iran - has made similar suggestions. Nor is it a coincidence that they've been climate change deniers, and peak oil deniers, for so long - because if we burn less stuff, the demand for oil drops, and then what is the US currency backed with? Nothing.

Trade deficits
A "trade deficit" is a fancy way of saying "we're spending more than we're earning." If my woman and I become unemployed but go and buy a plasma screen tv, then our household has a trade deficit - we are taking in more stuff in dollar terms than we send out. Well, the US has had a massive trade deficit for some years now. Trade deficits typically lead to economic depressions or wars. We can look back in history for examples.

The British bought tea from China in the 19th century, and China insisted on being paid in silver. Britain's currency was backed by silver - you could, by law, take a pound note into the bank and receive a pound of silver. But all the silver was going into China, so the British appetite for tea threatened their own currency's strength - the day someone took a note into the bank and couldn't get silver for it, the currency would lose all its value and the economy collapse. So the British had to get the silver back - or they had to drink less tea. Well, no-one was going to get elected to the House of Commons telling the British to drink less tea, so they had to sell something to the Chinese to get their silver back.

The problem was, they didn't sell anything the Chinese wanted - except opium. And the Chinese government wasn't very happy about its people being stoned all the time, and they also didn't like silver flowing out of their country, so they tried to stop the trade. Thus the British went to war with China over "free trade"... in drugs. A depression at home, or kill a few thousand dirty foreigners, the choice was clear!

The Americans have got a similar problem. They want lots of stuff from the world, but the world doesn't want as much stuff from them. What have the Americans got to offer? All the raw materials they produce they consume themselves, and they've sent all their manufacturing overseas, too. The only exports they have are grain and guns. Well, the grain is being sucked up by biofuels, and their guns are overpriced and don't work very well. "Um... we'll pay you later." In order to keep living their rather well-off lifestyles they had to create yet more debts so they could afford to keep buying stuff.

But that debt-creation reaches a limit, because in the end the debt has to be backed by something tangible. Our wealthy solicitor Ms Smith, QC, her IOU doesn't look so good once you realise she has earnings of $130,000, spends $150,000 each year and has debts of $500,000. The perceived value of her IOUs goes down.

The first crisis of many
So whatever the Americans do about their domestic banking problems, in a few years they'll be facing foreign banking problems. At the moment the US is a $13.3 trillion economy, but foreign countries have $4 trillion of US currency and debts. China alone has $1 trillion. What do they do if those guys sell off US Treasury bonds cheap? At the moment they won't do that, because they'd knock back US ability to buy their stuff, so they'd be hurting themselves. But they're diversifying their trading partners.

There comes a point where the US has to either buy back all its debts from these countries, or they have to... well, become their bitch. And what could they buy the debts back with? More debts?

Rise and fall of Great Powers
It's essentially the decline of the US as a Great Power. This began when they invaded Iraq, and will take a few decades to play out. I think I've said before, reading Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of Great Powers, basically a Great Power is a country which has (say) 5% of the world's population but uses 25% of the world's resources. That leaves other countries short. Traditionally some middle-ranking power with (say) 5% of the world's population and 10% of the world's resources decides to compete economically or militarily with the Great Power.

The Great Power often finds itself unable to compete economically, so resorts to military means. So the share of military spending rises to match their share of the world's resources. But this just pisses off the middle-ranking countries more, and there are conflicts, lots of little wars on the periphery of the empire. The Great Power senses a decline.

At this point they have a choice: accept decline more or less gracefully (as did Britain after WWII) or go down fighting (as did Germany in the 1914-45 period). If they choose to fight, they increase their military spending, until they've got Population 5% - Resources 25% - Military 50%. An increasing amount of the resources the country uses go to its military. This undermines and weakens the rest of their economy. While their share of world resources may even increase to 30 or 40%, much of that's going to the military, so the people are actually worse off than before.

Eventually it all collapses. Economic troubles and military defeats pile up until the Pop 5% - Res 30% -Mil 50%, the latter two decline. Usually the country doesn't go down to Pop 5% - Res 5% - Mil 5%, because the things which made it a Great Power in the first place are still there (high domestic resources, lots of educated people, an industrious mindset, etc), but to something like Pop 5% - Res 10% - Mil 10%.

So right now the US is at population 4.5%, resources 33%, and military 50+%. They'll be going down from here. They're obviously not going to accept their decline gracefully. Most Great Powers don't, and it's certainly not in the American character. They're a nation of "winners", didn't you know? The only question is how much damage they do on their way down.

Conclusion
I mean, obviously that's a simplified picture of things. Lots of other things complicate it. Like in previous years to military spending could be quickly changed to domestic spending, and vice versa. The factory which made kitchen pots could be changed to make artillery shells. The factory making tanks could make cars. But things are more specialised now, we have factories just for the interior trim on cars. And the fact that because of peak fossil fuels, not only your share of resources, but the total amount of resources available, that'll drop. And because of climate change we'll ideally change things voluntarily anyway.

Nonetheless, there are some broad patterns in history, because for all the fuss we make about the wonders of DVD players or whatever, in the end it all comes down to wanting your own people to live in the best comfort possible, and have your country be the butch while others are the bitch. So I think the Americans are on the way down.

Again, this doesn't mean the US is going to decline so far it breaks up into warring states, or become a Third World country. That is possible, but is extremely unlikely, macho Mad Maxian or Wild West fantasies of guys like Kunstler notwithstanding.

The USA, as much as its leadership and people try to undermine it by general apathy, laziness and idle whinging, has many fundamental strengths - it's large geographically, has land borders with only two countries both of which are much weaker than it in population, economy and military, has large natural resources, an excess of agricultural production, a large educated populace and even larger pool of people willing to work productively for low wages, has good internal communications for transport and information, and so on. Its fundamental strengths mean it won't decline to its fair share of the world's resources and military.

But the USA will decline from being a Great Power. They can go gracefully, or go down fighting. Normally I'd be betting on China and India to take their place, but they have the misfortune to be rising powers in a time of decreasing resources, so who knows.

Tree planting II

2008-09-21T04:39:00.000-07:00

La Marguerite was asking why we don't talk more often about trees, their planting and cutting down - since as I've written before, they're a pretty important topic in climate change and in our future. Trees, Compost & Carbon talks about the general processes of nature, and Can We Be Zero Carbon? talks about how because of the way we use land - trees - we can't be zero carbon just by putting up windmills, and how because of fossil fuel depletion we're likely to see more deforestation in the future. But here I write about why they're not a popular topic.

There are three reasons trees aren’t much talked about in environmental discussions.

The first is that here in the West it’s partly an image thing. When we hear someone talking about trees, we often imagine it to be someone like these people:

But people genuinely concerned and acting on deforestation are much more often like these two:-

Confronted with that, it's pretty tempting to say, "well, I'm concerned about the environment and stuff, but I'm not a tree-hugger or anything." Long before anyone thought about climate change, there were “tree huggers” - and just as women will say, “I’m not a feminist, but -” (but - "I want the vote, and human rights, and all that stuff") so too will environmentalists say, “I’m not a tree-hugger, but -”. Both are groups which feel themselves in the minority, and are (nowadays) scared to stand out. Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to get the Nobel Peace Prize, and she got it for organising tree-planting, but I don't think an American or European is going to get one soon for the same thing - and certainly not an Australian. Image. It's important to us.

The second is that deforestation largely happens in the Third World, and we in the West don't like to talk about the Third World if we can avoid it, there are too many dark-skinned poor people, it distresses us a bit too much. Forests are generally stable or growing in most of the West. This Third World deforestation is largely caused by two factors - our Western desire for burgers and timber products, and by the world’s poor.

Eating large amounts of meat is only possible with large amounts of land, either pasture or grain land for the animals. Having half a dozen newspapers or magazines, ten shop catalogues and a hundred pages of printed drafts of reports a week is only possible with lots of forest-clearing. We in the West don’t want to eat less meat or have less paper stuff.

The world’s poor generally have no means of support, there's no unemployment benefit in the Congo, so the only way to eat is grow their own food. But they have no land, so they make some land - by clearing some forest. Or in other places they lived on the forested land for generations, and whatever the government says, they feel it’s theirs, so they log it. Often this ties in with the West’s demand for timber products, as locals make deals with illegal logging companies to clear their own forests. Deforestation may kill you in twenty years (see Haiti), but hunger will kill you this week. Obviously the world’s poor are not going to volunteer to starve to death so that we can continue driving our SUVs and have our airconditioners blazing away night and day without guilt, and we’re not going to press the issue.

The third reason is that solutions favoured by governments and corporations are those which require governments and corporations - One Big Facility, or a Five Year Plan. Carbon capture and storage, miles of solar panels or railways, emissions trading schemes and the like, these all take lots of bureaucrats and lots of planning and spending of public money and those putting them forward go to lots of meetings and conferences and cocktail parties.

Whereas people just planting and caring for trees, not so much. It’s the same reason they’ll spend $2 billion on a reservoir but not $1 billion on giving homes water tanks with a greater total water capacity. One Big Facility - it’s the government and corporate way. That's not an evil plan or anything, it's just human. "What can we do? We can make a plan! And make a budget to spend big." It's just the way they're accustomed to seeing things. There are millions of Mangari Waathais in the world (not just in tree-planting, but in all sorts of simple projects for the long-term good of communities and countries), but they won't usually get help or recognition from government or corporations, and certainly not the media.

Planting some trees is a very humble and simple thing. You'll probably sweat a bit. You are very unlikely to win a Nobel Prize. But that's okay. So go plant some. Yeah, I know right now you've got a nice vision in your mind of a tree-covered landscape, of everyone out in the community laughing as they dig holes together. Now take your warm fuzzies and put them in a box for later, and just get off your bum and do it. I don't write to make you feel good, I write to make you get off your seat and act. Go plant some trees. "But I got no space..." Make a space.