Today is Tomorrow

The video below is about Canada and focuses on its failure, unlike over 110 other countries, to declare the right to live in  a healthy environment as a legally binding human right. But the issues it covers - environmental degradation, resource depletion and both the threats and the possibilities for the future - sit everywhere on our planet.

Above all, it speaks to today's generation: both for our own futures and those who come after us. What we do now, shapes tomorrow. Global warming has a lag effect of between 30 and 40 years - so in other words, what we do now, good or bad, will make a difference to the world around 2045 to 2055. With the IPCC report this week showing that carbon emissions are rising faster than ever, breaking ever more records for pollution, climate change, a phenomenon that knows no borders, the need for us to act has never been greater. Not only Canada, but Britain as it plunges headlong down the route already taken by the USA to frack our countryside; or India as it commits to burning more coal that ever.

As the IPCC acknowledges, the alternatives are there and affordable - and, contrary to all the myths, China is leading the way as it now installs more renewable energy each year than any other country in the world and more than all of Europe put together. We must follow the lead from Beijing and, closer to home, Germany (which on a good day can now get as much as three quarters of its energy needs from renewables - compared to less than a tenth in the UK). As these economic powerhouses turn to clean energy for a sustainable future, the British, American and other large economies need to purge ourselves of the oil and gas lobbies and turn to the clean, renewable energies of the future - the only way, indeed, to ensure that there is one.

Frozen Britain's Future - Fracking or Feldheim?

Outside it is snowing steadily; the birds huddle miserably on the bare branches as the falling flakes cover too quickly the food put out a short time before. Yet again, the TV news revels in making much of cars stuck in drifts and kids sledging in what just a short while ago would have been completely unseasonal weather.

But, after over a decade and a half of virtually no snow at all, Britain has now had three years of bitingly cold temperatures and winters with a vengeance. After some years of children growing up having seen no snow at all, or a light dusting at best, now we are told to expect days and days of frozen weather in spite of yesterday being the first official day of Spring.

The cause of this is something foretold for many years by environmental campaigners and Greens - and rather cryptically acknowledged by the Coalition Government a couple of years ago without any official admission - see this post from December 2010.

Perhaps not as dramatically as in some scenarios, including the ludicrous one posited by Hollywood in The Day After Tomorrow, the Gulf and Jet Streams have shifted increasingly southwards for more and more prolonged periods, ending the centuries old near-guarantee of mild air from the Mexican Gulf warming Britain throughout the year providing us a 5 degree centigrade temperature increase that our latitude (on a par with much of Scandinavia and Russia) would not otherwise permit. The trigger for this is, ironically, global warming - as the overall temperature of the planet increases, the Arctic ice sheet has begun to recede further and further at speeds much faster than even the most pessimistic predictive scenarios suggested just a few years ago. This has meant that an increasing flow of colder water has poured into the Atlantic and, as cold trumps hot, the Gulf and Jet Streams have shifted increasingly southwards. The result will be, as we have seen these last few years, increasingly extreme weather - much warmer summers and much colder winters, heavier rainfall when it happens, prolonged drought when it doesn't and much more powerful gales as cold water falling below warm churns up the air currents above.

Gone south - the Jet Stream (red/orange) at 0600 this morning

And so what was predicted for decades and even centuries from now is happening around us. But the Government remains as complacent as ever, even declaring action on global warming to be something for later on given the depth of current economic woes. It ignores the very real threat to our survival now manifesting itself ever faster around us and as the window for action closes down it simply turns away and closes the door.

And yet all around us is the potential for recovery: like few other countries, Britain has a huge potential for developing and using renewable energy. Particularly wave, hydro and wind power - all of these could be deployed around our country and in the sea off our shores. And developments in photovoltaic technology, such as groundbreaking nanomesh cells, mean that even in our climate, solar panels could produce a substantial part of our energy needs. It is possible - other countries are acting faster; Germany for example is working hard to develop its renewable sector which has more than trebled in supply in the last decade to 20% of energy needs and in a pioneering effort, in May 2012, over 50% of the energy needs of the largest economy in Europe came from solar energy farms alone. 

This is not only possible - anyone with an even vaguely impartial viewpoint would see that it is essential. Our carbon fuel supplies, as well as damaging the biosphere that allows us to exist, are becoming scarce - there is less oil and gas available from easily exploited sources at a time when demand is growing from emerging economic giants like India, China and Brazil. North Sea oil and gas fields are becoming depleted and the only future sources of carbon fuel nearby are to be had only by either deepwater drilling in the north-west Atlantic using the same dangerous technology as BP's Deepwater Horizon deployed so devastatingly in the Gulf of Mexico, or alternatively using the noxious process of fracking under populated areas of northern England - the recent Blackpool earthquakes standing as chilling reminders of the potential impact of this method of dirty drilling.

Continued dependence on carbon fuel leaves us tied to foreign suppliers as well - and vulnerable. A fact that would leave many people with sleepless nights is that Britain rarely has more than three or four days supply of fuel of any sort available (and a similar supply of food much of the time, at least in retail outlets). This week, our gas supplies are down to just 1.4 days - barely 34 hours stand between us and millions going cold in this late winter weather. And set against this are potential problems with the Norwegian pipeline that supplies much of our domestic gas and price hikes of over 100% in the last 6 weeks by Russian and Arab gas suppliers, eager to profit from the need of ordinary people - even to the extent of keeping fully loaded super-tankers at sea, ready to sail to wherever in the world has the highest current price for gas; three Qatari tankers, each with 12 hours national liquefied gas supply on board, are currently heading for British shores. Rationing has become a real possibility, creating cost, discomfort and even danger for people across the country.

Just imagine for a moment a Britain supplied 100% by renewables - as Germany is on track to being by 2050 at least in terms of electricity generation. The energy would be virtually limitless in supply, locally sourced, cheaper than now, involve no destructive drilling or mining, generate no pollution and free us from any dependence on overseas energy. Additionally, it would hopefully disentangle us from the wars that our politicians so eagerly send our troops into in order to secure carbon fuel.

So why, when it seems so easy, is it not happening? Why are we allowing Germany to leave us in the shade when we have so much potential? Why do we look to carbon-addicted USA as our example when it is so clearly faltering and failing so badly and turning so readily to the gun to secure its energy needs when eminently clean and peaceful sources are available in abundance?

The German township of Feldheim has achieved 100% renewable energy;
and full community energy ownership, meaning consumers pay 30% less.

Well, there is another narrative - its not just about energy technology; even more it's about economics and ownership.

Germany is not only different in terms of its energy sources. It is also different in terms of who owns them. Over half of the rapidly emerging renewable sector there belongs to individual people rather than to big business (which holds less than a 10% share - with various community and public bodies holding the balance). By contrast in full-on capitalist Britain and the USA, with our so-called Anglo-Saxon neoliberal economic model prizing big business above all else, anything that undermines corporate control of something as valuable and potentially profitable as the energy supply is simply not to be contemplated - one reason the British Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition abolished the community renewable energy feedback tariff and other schemes that supported small scale ownership of renewable energy.

As we see with the current gas price hike, scarce energy is profitable energy - so don't expect the free market to deliver big scale investment in renewables any time this side of Doomsday. As Obama's America fracks itself and our world into oblivion, Britain joins in a show of bizarre macho-market pomposity that eschews anything European or mildly communitarian at an ultimately dreadful cost to all of us.

The biting winds of March may yet bring our carbon addiction into a painfully clearer perspective. When the thaw comes in due course, we can only hope that it melts frozen minds as well as freeing the green buds  to spring finally into the life that humanity is increasingly putting at risk.

DEMOCRATISING ENERGY - WHO OWNS WHAT IN THE GERMAN RENEWABLE ENERGY SECTOR
(chart from the Institute of Local Self-Reliance)

Blowing Away Nuclear?

Has a major technological breakthrough in Japan created a new generation of wind turbines that finally destroy the claims by the nuclear lobby that renewables can't match their dangerous and dirty radioactive power? Martin O'Beirne of THE ECOSOCIALIST ponders on what it could mean...

Major Wind Turbine Breakthrough! 3 times the output. The End of Nuclear and Fossil?

The designers of this new wind turbine, based in Japan's Kyushu University claim output, the amount of electricity produced is up to 3 times greater than a conventional turbine. 

The first question is...What major design breakthrough could possibly be responsible? Some super light material allowing the turbine to spin faster? Some inexplicable method of increasing wind itself...eh? No that would be silly, why did you say it, but not far off, see the video.

They have had the amazing idea of ...Wait for it......Putting a ring around the outside...Oh....So we have to be a little guarded before we get too excited. If it was that easy, surely it would have been done before now, right? Let's wait for some independent research and so on, and I mean independent because the fossil fuel and nuclear industries will be falling over themselves to rubbish it. 

The other caveat (ironically) is that the anti-nuclear movement in the wake of Fukushima are making progress.  The energy agency plans to earmark up to 20 billion yen ($261 million) for offshore wind farms. This has displeased the local fisheries. At the end of this video the commentator suggests the wind farms could be used for fishing, which is a little hard to buy. But hey I don't want to play sceptic here! 

IF the designers are right, the implications are immense. If we were to be conservative and say that all it does is double the output this really could be the end of any of those arguments about the cost of nuclear actually being cheaper than renewables (Ask the workers and local people at Fukushima how they define cost) Wind generation would be closer to those claims we heard all those years ago about nuclear (that it would be too cheap to meter). In the video below a single offshore wind farm using the turbines would be equivalent to an entire nuclear plant. Think of the 8 new nuclear power plants planned for the UK replaced by 8 offshore windfarms with the benefit of no nuclear waste to bury or plants to decommission.
 
In addition there is no great paradigm shift involved if we were to propose that the very expensive tar sands extraction and fracking would not get a look in. Just a quiet woosh of spinning turbines. 

But the real deal is how the argument stands up for capitalism. This could be divisive, major fossil and nuclear companies with their dirty fingers in all the pies, could not compete with companies pushing the new wind farms, they would either have to embrace it themselves or suffer the consequences, but either way the Military-Industrial (Fossil Fuel, Nuclear, War) Complex (as David Schwartzman calls it) that sustains capitalism would wither. Perhaps an example of how the market  (for a change) could work in our favour. 

Wouldn't it be something if nature herself destroyed capitalism before it destroyed her. 


original article, plus video HERE

Libya: Solar's Missing Link

An interesting article today in the New York Times on the Desertec North African solar project, which promises to harness the solar potential of the Sahara to provide Europe with guaranteed, clean, renewable energy. Under the DESERTEC proposal, concentrating solar power systems, photovoltaic systems and wind parks would be spread over the desert regions in Northern Africa like the Sahara and the Maghreb regions. Produced electricity would be transmitted to European and African countries by a super grid of high-voltage direct current cables. As much as 100 gigawatts could be produced and carried to the European mainland, around 15% of total energy requirements.

He's not the sun-king - Gadaffi blocks the new network

Desertec, it is argued, would be enough to help Europe meet its target of 20% of its energy being from renewable sources by 2020, especially when combined with other renewable sources easily tapped by the Continent, including on and offshore windfarms, barrages and ground sourced heat. The North African component is a key part of this project. And for Greens it is a controversial one too.

For while it offers to provide our Continent with clean energy, the political machinations surrounding it are substantial, and inevitably the Arab Spring poses many questions about how  and whether this project should proceed. At its core is an assumption, a need even, for the north African regimes to be friendly to Europe. From Egypt to Morocco, with the notable exception of Libya, the ancien regimes of Arab nationalism have been co-opted to provide solar sites and transmission for Europe. Hence, in part at least, the reluctance to call on Mubarak to go when the Tahrir Square demonstrations began, and the continuing support for some pretty reactionary and brutal governments, especially in Algeria.

Gadaffi's Libya opposes the planned Desertec network

It may also partly explain why the West is keen to see a new regime in Libya. Gadaffi, like his nemesis King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, has been no proponent of renewable energy. Libya has enjoyed a massive income from oil and while the solar project would doubtless convert sunlight into euros (or maybe preferably dollars), oil for now remains more profitable - indeed, tightening supplies in the years ahead promise ever higher dividends for the oil men. Consequently, Libya has declared itself officially not interested in Desertec and it has not been part of the project in spite of both its potential as a site for solar farms and its geographical centrality to the proposed solar network. Will a new Libyan regime, already in debt to Europe for its war funding, take a more emollient view of the renewable project?

Some have questioned the viability of the scheme, and many Greens have argued that it is simply not needed - smaller, more local or regional projects harnessing community and individual resources would, if fostered properly, produce enough for our needs. But the corporations that own and control our energy supplies think very differently - they want massive projects like Desertec so that their monopoly/oligopoly of energy supply will continue even beyond the age of oil. The Desertec organisation, a combination of no less than a dozen privately owned European energy companies, is no exception in spite of its green tinge - although set up as a not-for-profit foundation, its funders and partners, are private companies, making it in essence a "front company" for what is a large, profit seeking conglomerate.

By contrast, microgeneration projects, where communities and even individuals can use assets such as their homes to become producers as well as consumers of energy, threaten and actively undermine the grip of large corporate suppliers. This could well be one reason why the UK Government has effectively destroyed any prospect of significant community microgeneration by announcing the end of funding for most small scale projects.

So it is not just oil that drives energy wars and not just oil that multinational corporations seek to turn into saleable assets. Energy is key to a vast range of human activities, especially those regarded (albeit often rather questionably) as "civilised". As we stand on the threshold of a new age of clean, renewable energy, while we should not automatically turn our backs on large projects like the solar network, let's hope we can at least find politicians with the will to challenge energy companies that seek to prolong their stranglehold on the supply of such a vital resource, whether from fossil or renewable sources.

If we end up turning sunlight into a corporate commodity, what is next? Is only air sacred, or is that a dangerous question not to be asked?

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Saudi Prince frets about the need to keep oil prices low to choke off renewable investment

The No sense of Nuclear Nonsense

Russia Today interview on the many high costs of nuclear energy and the myth of abundant atomic power.



Lest We Forget Lithium - or why we will never leave Afghanistan

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

~George McGovern, US Democrat Presidential candidate, 1972

Today, Remembrance Day, we commemorate the dead of the wars since 1914 - the hundred and twenty million souls, military and civilian, lost in conflict on the most massive scale in human history. And this year as for the last nine, we have to remember the dead of wars Britain is currently engaged in support of its American ally. Iraq may be over, but in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the Afghan war continues unabated as it has ever since the US-led invasion of October 2001.

"Old men make wars, and
young men fight them."

Barely four weeks after the attack on the Twin Towers, with the participation of Britain and Australia, American forces invaded Afghanistan and joined with the Northern Alliance rebels. In a lightning campaign, they overthrew the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban government which had hosted the al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and his closest acolytes. Elections were held and the pro-western Hamid Karzai was duly installed as President. It was proclaimed that this war-torn country, at odds with first the Soviets and then with itself for over twenty years, would finally have some peace and time to repair its shattered lands.

The war was originally justified as necessary retribution for 9/11 and the incredible speed of the invasion reflected American anxieties that their high level of international support in the wake of the Twin Towers atrocity might evaporate in the event of any delay. Unlike the Iraq war, where oil was to be seen as a determining factor in the desire to invade, Afghanistan had no apparent cornucopia of raw material wealth to make an invasion a profitable option. Rather, this was a war to protect the world from terrorism, to extend democracy and, in a unique burst of right-wing altruism, to improve the position of women in a society where it had been a serious crime for a woman to emerge from the home in anything other than an all-encompassing burka.

Now, nearly a decade on, what is Afghanistan's position?

Taking to the hills in late 2001, the Taliban licked its wounds and then resumed the conflict. As the Karzai regime became more and more corrupt, blatantly stealing the Presidential election of 2009 with the approval of the Americans and British, the fundamentalists support grew again. In the conflict, over 1,200 American, 342 British and nearly 500 Canadians, French, Germans and other allied soldiers have died as well as thousands of Afghan soldiers. Largely uncounted, so too have thousands of ordinary Afghan and Pakistani civilians  perished, often caught in the crossfire or the victims of indiscriminate bombing attacks by US "drones" - robot planes piloted from the safety of a computer screen back in the United States, firing at targets on relayed satellite picture screens. The toll of dead civilians, and children especially, has been dreadful, turning more and more Afghans against the occupying forces and the government in Kabul.

As for the Americans, British and their allies, billions of dollars and pounds have been poured into a conflict in a land that has swallowed whole armies since the days of Alexander the Great. Remote and mountainous, with bitter winters and scorching summers, squaddies from Huddersfield and Glasgow and marines from Iowa have trudged across a landscape often almost as alien and inhospitable as the surface of Mars on ceaseless patrols. There, they have died under assault from snipers, guerrillas and the dreadful IED - "improvised explosive devices" - set at roadsides to destroy even well-armoured vehicles. Yet just this week, a senior British commander has warned the recent noises of optimism are misplaced and the war is as intractable as ever.

342 British soldiers have died.

So why do we continue? There is much talk of an eventual exit strategy, of handing over to the Afghan army, but  beyond vague hopes for certain conditions being met by 2014, there is no timetable. Nor will there be.

American and Britain will never leave Afghanistan unless they do so in defeat. As victory is even more unlikely, what it means is that the war will go on, but it will not continue in order to secure human rights and democracy. Rather it will continue in order to secure lithium.

Lithium is a rare white metal, the seventh (out of 32) most scarce of the chemical elements. Suitably processed, it has a wide range of applications in western society, including in medicine, but its most valuable potential is its use in electrical batteries. It is over 30% more efficient than lead acid and double as effective as zinc carbon. Currently used in the likes of laptop batteries, it will be a key resource in the years ahead as, with the world now passing peak oil production, electrical power in transport especially becomes more and more important. Electrically powered vehicles will become exponentially more practical over the next few years and the world's billion vehicles will begin a rapid transition towards battery power. Lithium will become increasingly valuable .

By an allegedly amazing coincidence, Afghanistan has suddenly been declared to be awash with valuable minerals, including huge lithium deposits - $1 trillion worth at current prices. In June the Pentagon identified Afghanistan as the "Saudi Arabia" of lithium, rivalling Bolivia as the world's largest reserve. The only problem is that much of it lies in Ghazni province, which remains largely in Taliban hands. It is perhaps more than coincidence then that, concurrent with the report, the Karzai government stepped up its contacts with the rebel movement to seek an armistice and peace talks - so far with little success.

So Afghanistan is as much an Energy War as Iraq ever was - simply about a different form of fuel. The long term strategic interests of the West come into sharp focus when George Bush's warning that the War against Terror will last for 40 or 50years. In this context, the long, slow retreat by the USA from Saudi and redeployment to Kabul takes on a very different and sinister hue to the noble war for freedom portrayed so resolutely and repeatedly by the Presidents and Premiers.

Britain invaded Afghanistan twice
in the 19th century

As we remember those who have fallen, we may also contemplate those who are yet to be cut down in their prime - the 18 and 19 year olds, fresh from school, put up against a land that held back Britain's forces a century ago and  broke the Soviet army (and arguably the entire Soviet Bloc) during the 1980s. Now, without an unforeseeable major change of policy, our forces are set to stay in one guise or role or another, dying indefinitely on the distant Bactrian battlegrounds while politicians and corporations sate their thirst for new sources of energy and money.

Caught in the midst as ever too are the Afghan people, some fighters, but most innocent, desperate victims who eke out a pitiful living at the best of times. In a just world, lithium could offer them the lifeline to a more prosperous and peaceful existence than they dare dream of for now. But just as British soldiers are set to continue to be betrayed, their bravery and bodies tossed nonchalantly by hand wringing double dealers into the cauldron of conflict, so the prospect of the Afghans' natural resources being used to the benefit of their own land seems somehow very distant still.

As the drones circle, ready to spit their latest molten arrows of death into the helpless, nameless people scattering on the ground below, we do well to recall the words of the British Opposition Leader, William Ewart Gladstone, when he railed against the second British invasion of Afghanistan in 1878:

“Remember the rights of the (Afghan)…Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.”



JUST A DAY AT THE OFFICE : SEE HOW AMERICA CONDUCTS WAR FROM THE SAFETY AND COMFORT OF A BASE 9,000 MILES FROM THE CONFLICT ZONE

CAUTION - CONTAINS DISTURBING IMAGES