CUTTING THROUGH THE HYPE

Do we really have an illegitimate government?

Let’s not confuse illegitimate with Incompetent

Tony Abbott and his associates keep banging the drum that somehow, we've acquired an illegitimate government. Alan Jones and other extreme people over on the right of the great divide are clamouring for a public revolt to bring down this government. Bronwyn Bishop took time out from the hairdresser’s to support him to declare our government illegitimate.

   

Let me make it clear right up front: I agree that this government has shown far more incompetence than leadership. Competent leaders don’t jump the gun and announce deals that aren’t done – like East Timor accepting our asylum seekers. Competent leaders don’t paint themselves into corners as this lot did with the Malaysian solution, which had everyone up in arms. Competent leaders don’t dig their heals in on the wrong issues. Competent leaders know when to say: I was wrong. They know others will respect them for it. Gillard knows none of these things.

Back to legitimacy

Julia Gillard sounds like a fishwife, dresses like a colour-blind hairdresser and waddles like a duck. Yes, I loathe the woman and that is my personal view, but she is unarguably our democratically elected prime minister. On what basis are people calling for another election, the shock-jocks demanding we 'ditch the bitch? No, the words I wrote above about Julia Gillard aren’t kind, but I’m not out there agitating to get rid of her because I can’t stand the sight and the sound of her. I’d rather judge her by her deeds than her looks.

Now let me ask a simple question, one that none of our journos has thought of asking:

• Tony, how much more legitimate would a minority government led by you and a few independents be?

• Tony, how would that scenario differ from the one you’re calling illegitimate?

There would be no difference, since your party didn't win any more votes than labour. You had to negotiate with the independents for their support too, but you lost. What's that? She doesn't have a mandate becasue she changed her mind about the carbon tax? Didn't John Howard change his mind about the GST? Did you tell him he no mandate after that, no legitimacy?

Only last week, after the first year of this government, Tony Windsor, Rob Oakshot and Andrew Wilkie confirmed their support for Gillard and her lumbering lot. Sorry Tony, but isn’t it time you stopped carping and bitching and accepted the umpire’s verdict?

  Illegitimate shockjocks

There he was: Alan Jones aka ‘The Parrot’, enjoying the role of agitator on the lawn in front of parliament house, up on a podium with a mike in his claw, seething at the measly few hundred people who'd turned up, shouting that this was ‘the most disgraceful thing that has ever been done to democracy,’ ... ‘a total corruption of the democratic process,’ and claiming that large numbers of truckies that were part of the ‘Convoy of no confidence’ had been stopped by police at the ACT border.

Photo: Andrew Meares, Sydney Morning Herald

All of his claims, repeated for days back in Sydney on his radio show, according to Media Watch (ABC Aug 29, 2011), were rubbish. Why people still listen to Alan Jones after the Cash-for-comment affair is a great mystery. Just how legitimate is Jones as a source of anything, when his comments were for sale to the highest bidder for years?

He wasn’t charged for those misdemeanours, nor for his part as an agitator in the Cronulla riots – for heaven’s sake: how is a radio talkback host getting away with stuff like this? Is there no one in NSW or federal politics with the balls to call this odious little man’s bluff? Gillard didn’t – she grovelled with the best of them, took the abuse from Jones about being 10 minutes late to come on his program instead of saying: Alan, I’m the Prime Minister of your country and I won’t be spoken to like that. Find another target for your vitriol – good bye.

Respect doesn’t fall on you like rain – you have to earn it

That would’ve made people sit up and take notice, but Julia doesn’t know about taking the high ground. She doesn’t have the power of the deft put-down that Keating had – the best she can do is to get down with her opponents in the gutter and lose the mud-wrestle. Competent politicians raise the game to a level that street fighters like Abbott and the shock-jocks with smear campaigns can't reach.

Why would she bother with Alan Jones anyway? How many of his listeners are going to vote for big Julia next election? They used to vote for Pauline Hanson, and now have to settle for Tony Abbott who’s doing his best to sound like Pauline Hanson. Needless to say, Tony Abbott the great opportunist was up there with Alan Jones in Canberra, ready to ingratiate himself with the denizens of Jonestown.

That’s enough for now

Kim 

Grange gets all the PR, but St. Henri is a corker

It was an anniversary, and I thought the 1986 St. Henri should be about ready to drink. The last bottle we drank about 7-8 years ago showed sublime fruit and balance but surprised us with its youth and vigour. This time, the wine had mellowed to an almost perfect degree showing sweet fruit, wonderful balance, great length and a soft elegant finish. Perfect with my partner’s duck and my lamb shanks.

 

Grange and St. Henri were created by two young Turk Penfold winemakers in the early fifties: Grange by Max Schubert and St. Henri by John Davoren. We know all about Grange and how Penfolds sent Max to Bordeaux after WWII, and how Max came back saying: their secret is maturing the red wine made mostly from Cabernet grapes in new small French oak barrels.

In those days, there wasn’t much Cabernet grown in Australia, so Max used shiraz from selected sources that included the Grange vineyard in Adelaide. French oak barrels were - and still are - hideously expensive, so Max bought the cheaper American oak. The rest, as they say, is history.

Nothing had prepared our leading wine men for the early Granges because new oak flavours were foreign to them. And it took Max a few years to work out that ripe South Australian Shiraz was much more muscular than Bordeaux Cabernet, and that American oak contributed a lot more oak flavour than the French timber because it is much more porous.

His masters told Max to stop making this wine that caused Penfolds so much bad PR in the fifties but Max persevered in secret. A few years later, our judges started to see how these wines developed and became fans. Today, Grange sells for hundreds of dollars a bottle when released.

St. Henri has a much less exciting history. John Davoren made the wine from shiraz and matured it in big old barrels as was the Aussie tradition then. He found a box of the quaint St. Henri Claret labels in an attic and decided to use it. Both wines were blends from sources that varied year on year and both wines sold for the same price until the early sixties (a bit over $2), then St. Henri dropped behind.

For many years it was the bargain in the Penfolds range as punters chased the other reds that were matured in oak – Bin 389, 28 and 128. I remember picking up a dozen 1967 St. Henri from Farmer Bros for about $11 a bottle in the early eighties, when the Grange of that vintage would’ve cost 10 times that or more. The 67 St. Henri was another elegant, well balanced wine that mellowed gracefully.

Today, St. Henri costs more than $100 a bottle on release, so it’s no longer a bargain by ant standards. So this 1986 may be the last bottle of St. Henri we’ve enjoyed, and it may be a good thing that it made such a wonderful impact. It was one of the best reds I’ve ever drunk, it was that good.

SCULPTURE BY THE SEA

Art adds a new dimension to one of the most walked tracks in Sydney

It was lucky we woke up early last weekend, my partner did anyway. Usually she has the good grace to slip out of bed like a ballet dancer might glide off-stage behind the curtain. This morning, she decided to share the early hour with me which made me a bit grumpy at first because I longed for more slumber.

When I gave up and got up to make coffee and breakfast, she kept shushing me, reminding me of the neighbours and the early hour. I reminded her that it was she who’d caused me to rise at this early hour but it did no good. Now on Sunday mornings we are in the habit of going somewhere nice in Sydney, near the water ideally, to spend the day walking, picnicking and doing whatever else comes along.

She’d mentioned that the sculpture walk was on a few days earlier so I asked her if that idea appealed to her, and it did. We were leaving the driveway not long after 6 and wondered how long the fog would last. It was pretty thick, most likely the result of the intense rain that had washed over Sydney the day before. As we headed for the coathanger, we realised that there was no fog on the other side – only bright sunshine.

We were down by the beach in Bronte before any of the coffee shops were open. We set off on our walk at about 7 and now I was glad we’d come early because this coastal walk gets to look like Pitt Street in peak hour on fine Sunday mornings. There were as yet few people and lots of interesting sculptures, and we could move freely.

 

I put up a little gallery of a dozen shots which you’ll see in the right margin under photo albums. It was a wonderful exhibition, with a lot of sculptures up on the headland between Bronte and Bondi, and we had a great time. Sculpture by the Sea will finish soon so get there this weekend if you can, and get your partner to wake you up early.

 

More info here:

http://concreteplayground.com.au/event/8279/sculpture-by-the-sea-2010.htm



CO2 is a Smoke Screen

Why don’t we confront the real issues?

The debates go back and forth over how high temperatures and sea levels might rise by 2050, and what the consequences might be. While scientists, politicians and skeptics argue about hypothetical events way in the future, the problems confronting us right now get no attention: the main one is that the earth is straining under the weight of human feet.

It’s the same with clean energy: all the talk of clean coal and new generation nuclear power is about results that are a long way off in the future. Here’s the problem: in the 20 years it will take for alternative energy sources to provide more than a token contribution, the world population will have grown by another 1.6 billion.

Unless we prevent that population growth before it happens, and curb our consumption of goods, gadgets and energy, we’re left in a vicious spiral that’s pushing us ever closer to edge. We must focus on what we must do now if we want our grand children to have a future.

The twin elephants in the room

The world’s population is projected to grow from 6.7 billion today to about 9.5 by 2040. That’s more than 40%, and no leaders or scientists say: wait a minute – that spells disaster. Let me ask a very simple question: What are the chances of us reducing CO2 emissions by 40% in the same period? The way we’re going right now, zero.

I’m not sure if reducing CO2 emissions will address global warming, but I’m utterly sure that reducing CO2 emissions will do absolutely nothing to stop deforestation, depletion of fisheries, soil degradation, desertification and declining food production. Isn’t it obvious that global warming is the symptom here, not the disease? Targeting global warming is like giving a child an aspirin to bring the fever down, which doesn’t address the cause: the infection.

Why are our leaders so silent on these issues?

We’re depleting essential resources right now, at current population and consumption levels. No one is arguing that forests aren’t shrinking along with wildlife and fish stocks, not even Viscount Monckton. You can plot a straight line to the point where we’ll run into serious food and water shortages, the tipping point.

Overconsumption and overpopulation are driving us toward it, but they get little publicity. Why? They’re two major causes we can take action on right now, so why aren’t we? Why aren’t they high on the agenda of political debate? Is it because they take guts and vision to tackle, qualities our leaders are lacking?

You can’t do that!

Almost all that population growth is occurring in the developing world. And almost all of the developing world receives ‘development assistance’ or foreign aid from the north. Surely we have the right to attach conditions to the aid we provide, along these lines: Put in place population control measures, or we won’t come to the party. Stop chopping down your rainforests, or you’ll get no assistance. Invest in alternative energy or we’ll cut your foreign aid.

Yes, I know it’s heresy. We can’t tell people how many children they’re allowed to have, can we? No, we stand for democracy - only communist regimes do that kind of thing. Yes but, during the time China did that, India’s population doubled and Africa’s population increased by 50%. Every day, the earth’s population grows by 200,000. Or by 80 million a year if that helps define the size of the threat. Population growth is out of control but we can’t do anything about that? Even if it destroys the world we leave for our grandchildren? Is that what we’re saying?

We could start by educating people

About contraception, for one. 2 out of 5 pregnancies in developed countries are unwanted – if we could avoid those pregnancies, or a majority of them, we would stop the population spiral. Simple as that. Once again, our leaders would need to grow some balls because they’d need to take on institutions like the Catholic Church who rail against condoms, other forms of contraception and abortion.

That the Catholic church’s position never changed during the African AIDS epidemic defies reason. The AIDS epidemic was mostly media hype but Africa’s growth from 600 to 900 million people in the last 25 years is as real as it gets.

We expect spiritual leaders to lead us to enlightenment, not keep us in total darkness.  We expect our leaders to lead us to a sustainable future, and a future with 10 billion humans on this earth is not sustainable. The same applies to a future of unchecked growth in consumption.

 

Next, we have to re-educate ourselves

Sadly, overconsumption is welded into the tenets of western economic thinking. It’s the Siamese twin of growth, the core premise our entire western economies are built on. No growth = no profits, no wealth, no progress, stagnation.

Simple minds think along these lines. Surely, if we can send a man to the moon and unravel the entire human DNA, we can come up with an economic model that doesn’t deprive our children of a habitat. Nothing is inevitable, but we can’t keep acting as if those two elephants didn’t exist or as if there were nothing we can do about them. The first thing we must do is open our eyes to the reality that is around us right now.

 

Kim

Alternative Energy, A Reality Check

Nuclear resurgence

President Obama’s recent loan guarantees for the construction of two nuclear reactors brought ‘new nuclear’ into sharper focus. For one, it showed that nuclear power is still a losing proposition that no bank will underwrite. The nuclear lobby is a bit coy about the reason so few new plants have gone into production in the USA: The ‘insane economics’ involved - http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1964846,00.html

That’s why the nuclear marketers prefer to focus on the future, where the economics problems will be solved by smarter Gen III+ and Gen IV reactors. Not in the near future, though, by the look of it: one of the first projects to build a Gen III+ nuclear reactor in Finland (a so-called evolutionary pressurized water reactor, or EPR) is already three years behind schedule and around $2 billion over budget.

Nuclear energy is an expensive, taxpayer-funded, long haul solution. Building enough power plants to replace old ones and add significant extra capacity is simply not possible according to Scientific American. Just to maintain current capacity will be a challenge http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=reactivating-nuclear-reactors-to-fight-climate-change&print=true .

 
Other forms of alternative energy

A piece in the Wall Street Journal titled The Long Road to an Alternative-Energy Future provides a short summary of the main alternatives here

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704182004575055910461373220.html

Every section ends with the line: WHY IT'S GOING TO TAKE SO LONG, and a friend made the point that the fastest way to increase available energy is for us to cut down our consumption. Jerry Unruh is much savvier on this subject than I am so I asked him to give us his take in the guest post below.

Jerry is a retired research chemist with most of his professional work in organo-metallic chemistry and homogeneous catalysis. He obtained his B.S. in Chemistry at Colorado State University in 1966 and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Oregon State University in 1970. Jerry worked in an R&D function for Celanese Ltd in Corpus Christi, TX from 1970-2000. He reached the rank of Senior Research Associate and has around 10 papers and 25 patents to his credit. 

After taking early retirement in 2000, Jerry and his wife Diana moved back to Colorado and built a passively solar-heated rammed-earth tire house. They obtain about 90% of their heat from the sun and 98+% of their electricity via PV.

Jerry is on a technical advisory group (renewables and demand side management) for Colorado Springs Utilities, and the climate action committee for Manitou Springs, CO. He is also the past president of the Southeastern Colorado Renewable Energy Society (a subgroup of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society).

Alternative energy options, reality check (by Jerry Unruh)
Conservation/Efficiency:  This was not mentioned in the article, but it is so important, I'll lead with it.  The cheapest energy out there is that not used.  This can be as simple as reducing energy use by turning things off, driving less, etc which is free.  However, increasing efficiency generally has at least up front costs.  The Southwestern Energy Efficiency Project (SWEEP) consistently shows electrical efficiency improvements cost about 2-3 cents/kWh saved - much cheaper than anything else.  The "World Energy Outlook 2009" (from the International Energy Agency) calls for 50-70% reduction in consumption via conservation/efficiency to solve the climate crisis.  Likewise the plan by the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) requires roughly the same energy consumption reduction.  The McKinsey & Co report for energy conservation in the U.S. focuses entirely on the subject.   I am surprised that the WSJ article did not, at least mention it.  Conservation/efficiency can rapidly be deployed with paybacks from as little as zero, 6 months to 10 years.

References.

1. SWEEP: http://www.swenergy.org/
2. ASES: http://www.ases.org/ particularly ASES_TCC_Jobs.pdf
3. IEA: http://www.iea.org/ particularly WEO2009_es_english.pdf and IEA world abatement, 450 ppm jpig9-2.jpg

Nuclear:  Over the years, I have bounced back and forth between being a reluctant proponent and reluctant opponent of nuclear energy.  At this time I am a reluctant opponent, but I'm trying to keep and open mind (it is rather hard).  Whatever the case, if nuclear is going to work, in any real fashion, we will need to use breeder reactors because there just isn't enough fuel otherwise.  The trouble with breeders is they are expensive and dangerous (?).  Many years ago (50s or 60s?) there was a breeder reactor in Detroit called the Fermi reactor.  It nearly had a meltdown which would have been disastrous.  There was active breeder research around the world but most were shut down years ago.  That seems to be changing.  For example, I just heard about the "Traveling-Wave Reactor" being developed by Intellectual Ventures that sounds promising. Still, if you read between the lines, it sounds speculative and quite expensive.  An issue not discussed much is decommissioning plants after their useful life.  As I understand it, the entire reactor system is radioactive and I'm not sure whether we know what to do with them.

Despite what some may say, there are substantial subsidies, both direct and indirect.  For example the Price-Anderson Act effectively absolves U.S. energy produces from liability and shifts it to the government (tax payers).  Of course there is also the cost of repositories from spent fuel such as Yucca Mountain that now has been shutdown.  To be fair, breeder reactors should require considerably less storage.  As far as I know, there have been no nuclear reactors build anywhere in the world without government subsidies (does anyone have an example to the contrary?).

References

1. Michio Kaku and Jennifer Trainer, Nuclear Power: Both Sides, Norton & Co., NY, 1982.  An old book, but lays out the fuel problems quite well.
2. Traveling-Wave Reactors: http://www.intellectualventures.com/TerraPower.aspx

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS):  This emerging technology is the hope of the coal industry to keep coal-fired electrical generation alive.  It is really two technologies - carbon capture at the the generation site and long term storage after it has been captured. Ultimately CO2 capture from natural gas and oil may be required. 

First the storage issue.  Coal produces about twice as much CO2/Btu as natural gas (oil is in between) so it is the worst of the fossil fuels from a CO2 production standpoint as well as other pollution problems.  Depending on rank, coal produces more than 2 to more than 3 kg of CO2/kg of coal burned (pure carbon produces 3.67 kg CO2/kg carbon burned).  So finding safe sequestration sites is a real problem.  There are possibilities.  CO2 has been used for enhanced oil and gas recovery for years and could be stored in depleted fields.  Norway is experimenting with injection into sea floor bed sedimentary rock.  Salt domes have been suggested and are likely fine.  Others have suggested deep sea injection but that really scares me.  So there seems to be possibilities, but the enormous amount of storage required to make a dent in CO2 emissions is daunting.  Remember CO2 must be pressurized to keep it in gaseous or liquid form so transport to storage sites would have to be via pipeline or pressurized vessels. 

Capture is also not easy.  I'll stick to coal-fired power plants since that is the biggest problem.  Conventional electric generation only converts about 1/3 of the energy into electricity whether coal-fired, gas-fired or oil-fired.  The rest is lost as waste heat.  That heat can partially be recovered in combined heat and power plants (CHP) such as district heating, industrial heat, etc.  Unfortunately, in the U.S. there is relatively little CHP - Europe is much better at this.  In the case of natural gas, combined cycle electrical generation can be used to so that efficiency to electricity can be has high as 50-60%, but this is not an option for coal (more later).  In the case of coal-fired power plants, Herzog of MIT seems to show the best results I have seen.  He assumes that if the waste heat from the power plant is used, it would take about 25-30% more energy to capture the CO2 using monoethanol amine (MEA) as the capturing agent (CO2 can be relatively easily recovered from MEA).  That still means that coal-fired electrical generation will decrease to about 25%.  There are also starting to be controversial articles that "peak coal" may be closer than generally thought.

There are possible solutions to coal-fired generation that will make carbon capture easier, but at a cost.  One is to feed pure oxygen to a coal plant to make the concentration of CO2 higher in the flue gas.  This requires a gas separation unit on the front end which is a capital cost and consumes energy.  Another possibility is "integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC)".  The idea here is to gasify the coal, shift the CO and CO2 formed to hydrogen, burn the hydrogen in a combined cycle system like natural gas and capture the highly concentrated CO2.  There have been experimental plants built, but are generally viewed as too expensive and have not yet demonstrated the presumed overall efficiency gains.

The bottom line may be as stated in Worldwatch's State of the World 2009, pp. 99-102 CCS is unproven and expensive.  If renewable and conservation are aggressively developed, CCS as a bridging technology will not be needed.

Incidentally, you may run into various solutions such as lime or sodium hydroxide capture of CO2.  Neither of these are viable due to energy required to generate them being more than the energy content of the coal.

References

1. Norway CCS: http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/oed/Subject/carbon-capture-and-storage/Carbon-Dioxide-Capture-and-Storage-in-No.html?id=451454
2. Don’t have general reference to enhanced oil recovery, but there are many.
3. CCS:  I have copies of the Herzog articles but not the web address.  I imagine you can find them on the MIT Website.  They are: Future of CCS Herzog.pdf and Future of coal CCS Herzog.pdf

Algal Biofuels:  As far as I can tell there is little hope for this technology and it has been greatly oversold.  My friend Robert Rapier writes and energy blog and has discussed this extensively and fairly recently.  Go to R-Squared Energy Blog for information http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/  

Wind and Solar:  Overall the WSJ got these pretty right.  A few comments.  PV prices appear to be dropping very rapidly, and may be cost competitive with conventional electricity sooner than generally thought.  However, as stated in the WSJ, supply/demand issues may keep prices high.  I am also disappointed that there was so much on large solar farms and less on distributed energy on houses, businesses, etc. since the infrastructure is already there.  This is not the whole answer, but, along with conservation/efficiency, it is a large part of the answer.

In both wind and solar cases, I'm surprised the article didn't mention storage issues which are a big part of full-scale use of wind and solar.  Combined wind and solar as well as widely distributed wind farms reduces storage issues but doesn't eliminate them.

References

1. PV Prices in Solar Today, an ASES publication. http://www.solartoday-digital.org/solartoday/20100102#pg15
2. Don’t have a direct reference to storage issues, but there are many.

Electric Vehicles:  I think the article is pretty good here as well.  Several things not mentioned is that battery research is an active area and there may be better batteries in the future. However, battery improvements are hard.  Also, in the case of lithium batteries, the major sources of lithium are in China and Chile and lithium availability may become a limiting factor.

References

1. Lithium supply: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/ particularly: mcs-2010-lithi.pdf

Possibilities Not Mentioned:  I'm surprised that geothermal energy, wave energy, tidal energy, ocean thermal energy conversion, etc. were not mentioned.  These all hold promise, but I guess there are only so much space available. Note that Robert Rapier’s blog above has very recent info on ocean thermal energy conversion (http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/ ).

GLOBAL WARMING IS ONLY THE SYMPTOM

Shrinking Resources and Growing Population are the Illness

 

Why are they arguing about degrees of temperature or sea level rises in 2050, when the evidence is piling up around us that we’re destroying the Garden of Eden the Lord gave us. Deforestation, ocean acidification, overfishing, desertification and species extinction  are facts, not estimates.

With our voracious appetites and our numbers growing at 200,000 a day, we are plundering the planet’s riches with little regard for the consequences. No wonder food production areas are exhausted or shrinking in many countries, and water security is growing uncertain. We’re running out of sources for cheap energy, and we've produced very little be way of clean alternatives.

My best friend is a man with a fierce love of life. He loves his wife, he loves his children and grand children, he loves the world and everything in it. I don’t know why but he has fallen in with the ‘global warming is crap’ crowd.

When we talk about the climate and the planet, my friend rants and raves about the planet cooling and Antarctic ice shelves growing and polar bears overrunning Canada. Global warming is a myth to him, manmade global warming anathema, and the whole thing is a disguised plot by lefties to destroy capitalism.

 

Schizophrenia

When I raise the on-going decimation of rainforests, or forests in general, he agrees that it’s a disgrace. When I remind him that our oceans are being fished out, we find ourselves in violent agreement. When I talk about my concerns for the depleted world we’re leaving our grandchildren, tears come into his eyes.

It’s a good example of the schizoid thinking that we see all around us: we deplore the vanishing species and the pulping of old-growth forests, and we worry about the dust storms and the extremes of weather, but politicians and climate scientists argue about CO2. Why? Surely rising CO2 levels are just a symptom of the earth’s poor health, like a fever is a symptom of infection in children.

I know scientists are meant to observe, draw conclusions and make predictions. If moons circle the orbit of Saturn, the earth cannot be the centre of the universe, stuff like that. If carbon is a heat-trapping gas, more carbon in our atmosphere will lead to global warming. They'd be much better off concentrating on the poor state of the earth today.

 

Sloppy science doesn’t help

The other side, well funded by polluting industries and conservatives whose only interest is maintaining the status quo, seized the day. Does CO2 really cause global warming? Prove it. Is global warming manmade? Prove it. Is it really warmer than it was 1,000 years ago when Greenland was ice-free? Good street tactics.

 

 
Why don’t our climate scientists focus on what’s already happened? In the Amazon alone, 22,000 km² of rainforest are cleared every year, for cattle or soy beans. From 1991 to 2000, the total area of forest cleared in the Amazon rose from 415,000 to 587,000 km². That’s the same size as the US state of Georgia, and the pace of clearing will accelerate given the highways being built to open up the Amazon. 

While the arguments over global warming continue, commercial fishing fleets with their electronic locators and driftnets have strip-cleared whole sections of the oceans of vegetation. 80% of all marine fish stocks are currently fully exploited, overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion.

While the arguments over global warming continue, the world’s population grows by 1 million every 5 days, or by 80 million a year, or another 800 million every decade, or 12% relentless growth. Current forecasts are for our population to grow from 6.6 billion to over 9 billion by 2050, an increase equal to the world’s population in 1965. These numbers are presented to us like commandments handed down from heaven, yet as many as two in five pregnancies worldwide aren't intended or welcome.

 

More of the same won’t do it

Even if our politicians agreed at some future conference on reducing carbon emissions, would the reductions not be offset by the growth in population? Or more likely, outstripped? Even more likely, any action taken will fail just like the Kyoto Protocol failed to do anything. Global carbon emissions rose by the same amount they were supposed to fall, and even Europe’s emissions rose despite the adoption of a cap-and-trade system for carbon.

On the other side of the ledger, very little alternative energy has come on stream. Coal and oil are still cheap and plentiful, for the moment. China opens a new coal-fuelled power station each week, and Europe plans to build 50 new coal-fuelled plants. North America plans to add 200. One plant under construction in West Virginia alone is expected to generate the same amount of carbon as a million cars. Are any of these plants going to run on clean coal? No. In the foreseeable future, there’s no such thing.

 

Poor countries bear the brunt

We only got a glimpse of how the South feels about the North shirking its responsibility for fixing the damage it’s done to our environment. A recent assessment of the environmental costs of economic globalization since 1961 - in deforestation, climate change, overfishing, agricultural expansion and so on - found that the richest countries had generated 42 per cent of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3 per cent of the resulting costs.[1]

Another study estimated that twenty-nine developing countries stood to lose 20 per cent or more of their current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already rich North will receive an 8% boost from warmer temperatures.[2]

This is why 100 poor nations called for the maximum global temperature rise to be limited to 1.5 degrees in Copenhagen. And the chief negotiator for the G77 bloc complained that Africa was being asked ‘to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact,’ in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries.

 

Living on the Edge

Almost a billion people in poor countries rely on fishing for much of their food security or livelihood. Many rely on river deltas and coastal swamplands for rice production. Others live on island chains like Tuvalu and the Maldives, relying on tourism for their living and worrying that tourism will dry up when water levels rise.

 

 

 

Others again live on the edge of deserts, like the people in Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan do. It’s not that the Sahara has been expanding southward, it’s that human activity has yielded more cleared land to the Sahara. Either way, desertification is reality for the people there.

Nigeria is a mirror for dozens of countries with the same dilemma: it’s population tripled in the last 50 years, while its livestock populations grew 12-fold.[3] These unrelenting pressures on Nigeria’s ecology have seen it lose 867,000 acres of cropland and rangeland to the desert each year. We don’t need 5,000 climate scientists to tell us what the outcome of this simple equation will be.

Nor do we need them to explain to us why Australia’s agriculture is in so much trouble. Much of it was based on irrigation water provided by dams built in the Murray, Darling and Murrumbidgee rivers. We could grow anything, from wine grapes to oranges, even cotton and rice. Over the years, the irrigators literally sucked the rivers dry.

Even when rivers flooded (which happens on occasion), they sucked the water into their huge pipes with huge pumps powered by huge diesels. This process is so effective that no water was going to reach the Murray even after recent torrential rains flooded much of Western NSW just to the north. The Premier of South Australia had to beg for some of the flood water to be let go down the Murray. South Australia has been on its last legs for years, agriculturally speaking.

 

The Lucky North

In countries on the edge, from Brazil to Indonesia, even small shifts in water levels or temperatures have devastating consequences for the people who live there. This is what their leaders were trying to get through to leaders of northern countries in Copenhagen, and it is the same story climate scientists have been trying to tell us with their convoluted models. 

For us in the 'north', it’s merely a war of words and we have to wonder how come the climate change deniers are winning it. Throwing labels like ‘Climategate' and ‘Glaciergate’ around is highly effective, at least in the media, as is the other side likening these people to holocaust deniers.

In the midst of these slanging matches, someone needs to put their hand up and say: the glaciers of the world have been shrinking for the last two decades. Stop arguing about whether the ocean levels will rise by two or twenty inches and look around you. Stop arguing and take action. That’s all I’m trying to do here: cut through the bullshit barrier to the real issues. A few errors in a 3,000 page report on climate change doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem.

 

    *     *     *

---

[1] U. Srinivasan et al, 'The Debt of Nations and the Distribution of Ecological Impacts from Human Activities', Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 105, 5 February 2008, pp. 1,768-73

[2] William Cline, Global Warming and Agriculture: Impact Estimates by Country, Washington, dc 2007, pp. 67-71, 77-8

[3] Data Highlights on the Global Food Supply http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/press_room/C68/2010_datarelease7

GFC - Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won

I came across this piece in the New York Times, and it reminded me that no one has yet gone to jail for the biggest fraud of a century and more, for stealing money from innocent pensioners and retirees as far away as Australia.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/business/24trading.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

I mean these guys packaged up their bundles of junk mortgage securities, threw in some others to muddy the waters, got their buddies at S&P and Moody’s to put AAA stickers on the boxes and sold them to their clients. Just how agencies who’re paid by the very people they’re supposed to grade can still rule the roost is beyond me. Just how they still do the ratings after this sleazy episode beats me.

 

That's bad enough but it wasn’t all. The investment banks hedged their bets and bought credit default swaps so they’d make money when those parcels of junk CDOs did a jack-in-the-box trick and went futt. This kind of insider trading was standard practice for investment banks like Goldman Sachs who hedged bad bets even while selling the suspect product to their clients.

It turns out that the GFC (great euphemism for a great scam) didn’t happen because the housing market went down. Na. According to Nobel-prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, it happened because: ‘The banks have made mega-bets with one another through complicated instruments such as derivatives, credit-default swaps, and so forth. With these, one party pays another if certain events happen—for instance, if Bear Stearns goes bankrupt, or if the dollar soars. These instruments were originally created to help manage risk—but they can also be used to gamble. Thus, if you felt confident that the dollar was going to fall, you could make a big bet accordingly, and if the dollar indeed fell, your profits would soar. The problem is that, with this complicated intertwining of bets of great magnitude, no one could be sure of the financial position of anyone else—or even of one’s own position. Not surprisingly, the credit markets froze.’

http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/01/stiglitz200901?printable=true

 

So did anyone go to jail?

Yes, Bernard Madoff did, but he was running a simple Ponzi scheme. Enron was built around a bold scam and, in that case, CEO Jeff Skilling went to jail. But no one has gone to jail over the trillion dollar GFC. Sure, a few people had to resign, tutt, tutt, with golden handshakes mind you.

Not only did no one go to jail but you and I bailed them out. Yes, governments used our taxes, our money, to bail out the perpetraitors who claimed the world would come to an end if they didn’t get a trillion or so to put things right. It’s like a burglar breaks into your house, rapes your wife and daughter and steals your possessions and you run after him and promise not to call the cops but to pay his salary and his mortgage forever instead.

 

Flicker, IMG_0326 

This letter in the NYT in response to the article says it all very well (DEC 24, 2009)

‘Speaking as someone who worked in the IT and risk area for credit derivatives at one of the largest financial institutions -- it was fraud on a massive scale. Nobody really believed the risk management numbers for CDOs were anything more than so many angels dancing on the head of a pin. I'm talking about the quants/mathematicians, the traders and most of all the high level executives at the top of the fixed income food chain.
What they did believe was that bonuses were paid out on an annual basis for performance that was measured largely by sales. Not the eventual value of the trades, which ended up being worthless.
These bankers should be dressed in orange pajamas and sent down to Guantanamo. They are the real terrorists. Not the fake movie style terrorists and bank robbers that the government wants us to believe in -- who wear masks and carry guns. No, these are the real bank robbers who work inside the institution and would need tractor trailers to carry out all the money. Real bank robbers wear suits and have the money transferred directly to their own bank accounts.
What a joke that Goldman pretends to be innocent, and claims to have "paid off their TARP money," while their biggest creditors -- including AIG -- were given huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to pay off trades they had with Goldman. The Goldman bonuses are our tax dollars at work. Plain and simple. I was a witness to history. I saw it happen. The mathematical models were so complex even the mathematicians made jokes about them. Well, the joke is on all Americans.’

 

All I can add is that the joke was on Brits and Germans and Australians too. 

 

 

Bidrivals.com – Is It a Scam?

YOU BET!

'Scam - Trick or Swindle.' Oxford Dictionary

 

BidRivalsmust be raking in the money. The driver for people falling for this deception is the same as the one that makes people fall for the Nigerian money scam: Greed. And the lure of astonishing bargains, like a brand new $1,000 Nikon camera for $70.

 

  
  
Sites like these are a new wave called Penny Auctions. Here’s how they work:

Once you become a member,  

1. You place bids by pressing the BID button
2. The latest three bidders are shown, the last bidder is on top
3. The current auction price is shown as well
4. The user with the highest bid when the time reaches zero wins the auction and buys the product for this price
5. Time is counted down towards auction closing. The time is reset with the bid time indicated in the grey field if a new bid is placed

If you lose, the money you’ve spent bidding is left on the table as in a poker game. The difference here is that the winner gets the goods and the house keeps the money all the players have left on the table. You bet! They win. Simple, isn’t it?

How does Bidrivals make money?

Members pay 80c for each bid they place. Each bid raises the auction price by 2c and extends the auction by 15 seconds. If you end up the top bidder when the clock strikes zero, you win the item for the price it has reached and the Nikon is yours for $70.11.

Well not quite, because you’ve most likely placed a number of bids at 80c before you won. Let’s say you placed 50 – that’s $40 you’ve spent, plus the $70 final price. At $110, you're way ahead, right?

Yes you are, but Bidrivals is the winner here. You see, to drive the price up to $70 would’ve taken 3,500 bids at 80c each (2c at a time). Bidrivals would've collected a cool $2,800 from all the bidders. You see what a great system this is?

It is for Bidrivals. They’re quite open about it. You can check auctions that have closed on their website and get all the stats. Here’s an example (date stamp is in US format):

 

There is an OUT from the GOTCHA: you see the ‘Buy Now’ option in the left bottom corner? It lets you buy the item you lost out on by ‘paying the difference between your spent bids and the purchase price. You can do this ... up to 24 hours after the auction closed.’ (http://www.bidrivals.com/au/how_it_works.html )

The old Bait & Switch! Suddenly the online auction site that lured you with a $70 Nikon DSLR or a $122 MacBook Pro turns into a regular online store, where you can buy regular goods at regular prices. If you’ve put $500 on the table and missed out on the MacBook Pro, doesn’t it make sense to spend another $1,400 and buy a MacBook Pro rather than kissing your $500 goodbye?

Is it Legal?

It shouldn’t be but it seems that way. Legally it’s an online auction site, not an online gambling site. Actually it’s an online store masquerading as a bargain auction site. I called the ACCC to check but it can’t name a company a scam merchant until its proven in court. Here’s a link for generic advice and reporting suspected scams:

http://www.scamwatch.gov.au/content/index.phtml/tag/OnlineAuctionShoppingScams

My old friend Nick Ross wrote a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald that raises various concerns about these ‘Penny Auctions’ operating in a greay zone below ‘the radar’ of Consumer Watch Groups http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/when-the-bid-becomes-a-bet-20091202-k55a.html .

I also spoke with the good people at Choice, and they couldn’t add much at this point. I checked what people were saying on the internet, and some said funny stuff happened at the last moments in an auction, preventing them from making a final bid.

The reality is that Bidrivals and similar Penny Auction companies operate freely in lots of countries. The first and clearest warning I received was from a very different source, and I received it when I went to the bidrivals.com.au website

   

You see, unlike website link scanners that check for malicious intent, Web Of Trust works by collecting feedback from millions of users. And it seems users have voted, because you’ll get this warning when directing your browser to most of these penny auction places. Check out this brief piece on Safe Online Travel where I’ve reviewed several early warning systems (all free) http://bit.ly/Pljwy

Animal Farm 2 - Another Week with the Liberals

Hockey the bear wished it were winter, so he could just curl up in his cave and go to sleep for a long time. He still couldn’t get his big head around Abbott the wolf getting control of the farm. How on earth did that happen? The lean and hungry Abbott with his big ears and his big mouth that he liked to stick his big foot into.

Now the farm had a pair of lean and hungry-faced leaders, Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop, the tough little terrier with the glassy stare. Make that an Abbott and two Bishops, Hockey the bear corrected himself: Bronwyn the Boiler was back in the front ranks, Bronwyn Bishop who’d once boiled some old chooks in kerosene until they blistered.

Hockey sat down under a tree and closed his eyes. He should’ve been tougher. They didn’t want a soft and cuddly bear, they wanted hard creatures who could tear into King Kevin’s flank. He was hell-bent on giving the farm away, when all he had to do was to build an extra desalination plant or two.

Hockey couldn’t believe that Abbott had put cane toad Joyce in the front row. Toady Joyce told everyone who would listen that global warming was a plot hatched by the stupid geese over in the left paddock. Everyone knew that Toady Barnaby had so much bad blood in him that it affected his ability to think. No one had any idea what he’d say next, least of all Toady Barnaby.

And Andrews the emu was back as well, his ratty head towering over Abbott the wolf’s big ears. Andrews took great delight in picking on innocent creatures with his sharp beak, and pulling the wings off grasshoppers. Abetz the crow was no better, and he was back too with that awful voice of his ripping up the peace of the paddock like a lumberjack’s chainsaw.

Hockey the bear opened his eyes. Closing them didn’t stop the pictures going through his mind, pictures of Ruddock the buffalo shooter back with his ute full of barbed wire, chains and padlocks, and guns standing up behind the driver’s cabin. Ruddock claimed that all the buffalos had come to the farm illegally from Indonesia, and had made it his mission to send every last one of them back.

 

  
 pictures courtesy of themichaelduffyfiles.com and AAP/Alan Porritt

They said Ruddock carried death adders in his briefcase, which he would open for anyone who gave him trouble. Why, oh why had Abbott the wolf brought Ruddock the buffalo shooter back? The animals had always been scared of him - the Tasmanian devils said he looked like Dr Death. They should talk, with their mouth cancers.

Cancer was everywhere, Hockey the bear thought with a heavy heart, most of all in the soul of party. It was all Minchin the lizard’s work. Now that Howard the rat was gone, Minchin had for the first time been free to show the full extent of his enormous frilly neck. It had scared the other animals half to death.

Hockey the bear saw Pine the limpet slinking across the paddock toward Abbott the wolf, ready to take his orders, followed by Mirabella the wombat. The only renegade Abbott hadn’t put in his front row was Tuckey the mad old vulture. Hockey the bear wondered why not. He would’ve fitted right in with the rest, especially Toady Barnaby.

Hockey the bear saw Malcolm the lion under a tree not far away, still licking his wounds. He got up and lumbered over to him. The rest of the animals were too scared to talk to Malcolm, in case Minchin the lizard was watching. And now, with Bronwyn the Boiler and Ruddock the buffalo shooter invited back, they were all on their best behaviour.

Best behaviour? Hockey almost let out a chuckle.

Malcolm growled and bared his teeth when Hockey the bear sat down next to him.

‘Hey Malcolm, what've I done to you?’

‘You said you wouldn’t stand against me.’

‘I didn’t but, once they’d decided to push you out, I had to stop Minchin and Abbott getting the upper hand.’ Hockey the bear let out a big sigh.

Another growl from Malcolm the lion. ‘You failed miserably. They’ll take the party back to a time before Menzies, you’ll see. They’ll take it back to a time when women weren’t allowed to vote.’ He pulled himself up on unsteady legs, growling ‘I’ll be back to fight another day,’ and shuffled off toward another gum tree.

Hockey the bear wished it were winter so he could just curl up in his cave and sleep for a long time. But it was summer, forty degrees in the shade, and there was smoke in the air from all the bushfires.

FIREPOWER

Scams don’t get much better than this

After his exposure as a fraud a couple of years ago, our authorities let Firepower CEO Tim Johnston slip out of Australia quietly, his passport in his hand, just as they’d done with Christopher Skase. For reasons that aren’t clear, Johnston returned just before the Melbourne Cup in November 2009. This time, Firepower’s liquidators wanted to talk with him since Firepower owed shareholders some $100 million.

Alas, they were in Perth, once the home of Firepower, and Johnston was in Brisbane asking for an adjournment of the court hearing because he had a ‘medical condition’ and claimed doctors were investigating a ‘cardiac irregularity’ and had told him he should ‘avoid all stressful circumstances’ http://tinyurl.com/ykt7mdw.
It’s a familiar tale, the hardened business man or aging dictator falling ill or losing his memory just as he’s about to meet his just desserts. And Johnston had a second trick up his sleeve in case the first one didn’t work: ‘undesirable elements were pursing him in some way.’ Asked whether they could be investors, Johnston’s lawyer acknowledged that a lot of people had lost money in Firepower.

We’ll get to how that happened. Meanwhile, here’s a picture of a perfectly healthy looking Tim Johnston taken a few days ago.

 

 

Courtesy of WA Today, photo by Paul Harris

 

History

I happened to hear an interview with reported Gerard Ryle who (un)covered this story and won a Wakeley award for it. A lot of scams have been exposed in the last couple of years, from Wall Street selling boxes of manure at vast profits, to Ponzi schemes, to governments bailing out the culprits on Wall Street.

Firepower had nothing to sell, not even manure. It had no fuel technology product either, nor a factory that made the little brown fuel additive pills Johnston waved about, no tests to show that the additive did what he claimed, no money, no nothing. As crikey.com so aptly concluded, ‘Firepower was very, very publicly proclaiming that it could turn lead into gold, water into wine, grow hair on a billiard ball and cure the common cold. And tomorrow it was going to deliver peace in the Middle East and raise Diana Windsor from the grave.’

 

Everybody who was anybody

The link below points to an article by Gerard Ryle covers the most salient details. The short story is that Firepower’s founder conned everyone from John Howard, ex-Governor Jeffery, ex-Queensland Premier Peter Beattie, the folks at Austrade, Russel Crowe, Peter Holmes-a-Court, the Sydney Kings and most of Australia’s media.

Johnston became our biggest ever sports sponsor, throwing sponsorship money at rugby, basketball and motor racing as if it were confetti at a wedding. The confetti must’ve been so dense that it blinded people.

 

 

 

Johnston convinced many of those he met along the way, including Austrade, to invest money in Firepower, a company that wasn’t even registered in Australia but the Virgin Islands. He convinced most of his willing victims that Firepower would soon be listed on London's Alternative Investment Market (AIM) and would pay back big time.

 

Sweet Dreams

Since his escape from Australia two years ago, Johnston has lived in a luxury apartment in London, free as a bird and charged with no crime despite stealing $100 million. The only person who’s been convicted of anything is the ex chief-exec who left Austrade to work with Firepower. Australia’s regulatory watchdog ASIC was asleep at the wheel, as always, even though they were tipped off about Firepower in 2006. The ACCC also did nothing, even though Graeme Samuel routinely prosecutes companies for making false and misleading claims about their products.

No one tested the product Firepower claimed it had sold in many countries around the world, until the West Australian Department of Consumer and Employment Protection announced it would have the fuel additive pill tested by an appropriate authority. That was in February 07, after Johnston had bolted and the gates closed behind him.

One suspects the reason Johnston hadn’t been charged and extradited is that so many big names don’t wish to be reminded of their gullibility and end up with a bucket-full of egg on their faces. The watchdogs who were sound asleep don’t want to, the government agencies who promoted Firepower and gave it money don’t want to, and the sporting clubs and sporting heroes who were conned don’t want to talk about the scam either - no one does.

More history

And no one ever asked even the most rudimentary of questions. No one checked into Johnston’s history where they would’ve found that he ran a scam called Power Plan International in NZ nearly 15 years ago, promoting a magic blue fuel additive pill, which the New Zealand Automobile Association found didn’t work. Yet Johnston claimed that his product had been tested by the Victorian police commissioner, had been endorsed by the New Zealand Commerce Commission and was about to be recommended in Australia by the NRMA and the RACV.

None of that was true. Nor were the Firepower stories about labs and plants in Germany, Romania or Russia, or those about various countries’ defence forces buying the brown pill by the truckload. There were no labs or plants. There was nothing but scam and greed. As crikey.com summed up: ‘... various Australian “watchdogs”, Austrade, the NBL, NRL, ARU and Western Force seemed either too stupid or wilfully ignorant to notice. And the same can be said for the majority of Australia’s media that had a hot story bubbling under their collective noses and didn’t touch it.’

 

The moral of this story is: if you’re going to pull of a con, make it bold and big and involve lots of important people who will just want the whole thing to go away when the shit hits the fan.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/rise-of-a-man-with-a-magic-mystery-pill/2007/01/07/1168104867997.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2