The Ecuadorian Library

Bruce Sterling has popped up at Medium with a great essay (following up on an older one called "The Blast Shack") on Manning, Assange and Snowden - The Ecuadorian Library.

First let’s consider Bradley Manning, who is not at all close to the NSA. Bradley was a bored and upset minor military technician who burned a zillion US documents onto a DVD, and labeled that “Lady Gaga.”

The authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.

At least they didn’t manage to kill him. Bradley’s visibly still on his feet, and was not so maddened by the torment of his solitary confinement that he’s reduced to paste. So he’s going to jail as an anti-war martyr, but time will pass. Someday, some new entity, someone in power who’s not directly embarrassed by Cablegate, can pardon him.

Some future Administration can amnesty him, once they get around to admitting that Bradley’s War on Terror is history. The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed. There’s terror all over the sands now, terror from Mali to Xinjiang, and a billion tender-hearted Bradleys couldn’t stop that bleeding, no matter how much they leak.

Thanks to the modern miracle of fracking, though, the mayhem in the oil patch means a lot less to K Street. Someday, Bradley Manning will be as forgotten to them as Monica Lewinsky is. Then they’ll yield to the hornet-like, persistent buzz of the leftie peaceniks, and let Bradley go. He’s not dangerous. Bradley Manning will never do anything of similar consequence again. He’s not a power player. He’s a prisoner of conscience.

However, unlike poor Monica Lewinsky, Bradley Manning will never lack for passionate adherents who admire him and love him. Before Bradley went into his ugly maelstrom, he didn’t have that. Nowadays, he does. Maybe it’s worth it.

Then there’s Julian Assange. Yeah, him, the silver-haired devil, the Mycroft Holmes of the Ecuadorian Embassy. Bradley Manning’s not at all NSA material, he’s just a leaky clerk with a thumb-drive. But Julian’s quite a lot closer to the NSA — because he’s a career cypherpunk.

If you’re a typical NSA geek, and you stare in all due horror at Julian, it’s impossible not to recognize him as one of your own breed. He’s got the math fixation, the stilted speech, the thousand-yard-stare, and even the private idiolect that somehow allows NSA guys to make up their own vocabulary whenever addressing Congress (who don’t matter) and haranguing black-hat hacker security conventions (who obviously do).

Julian has turned out to be a Tim Leary at the NSA’s psychiatric convention. He’s a lasting embarrassment who also spiked their Kool-Aid. Crushing Julian, cutting his funding, that stuff didn’t help one bit. He’s still got a roof and a keyboard. That’s all he ever seems to need.

There’s nothing quite like a besieged embassy from which to mock the empty machinations of the vengeful yet hapless State Department. House arrest has also helped Julian with this obscure struggle he has, not to fling himself headlong onto Swedish feminists. The ruthless confinement has calmed him; it’s helped him to focus. He’s grown and matured through ardent political struggle.

Julian Assange is still a cranky extremist with a wacky digital ideology, but he doesn’t have to talk raw craziness any more, because the authorities are busy doing that for him. They can’t begin to discuss PRISM and XKeyScore without admitting that their alleged democratic process is a neon façade from LaLaLand. Instead, they’re forced to wander into a dizzying area of discourse where Julian staked out all the high points ten years ago.

More astonishing yet: this guy Assange, and his tiny corps of hacker myrmidons, actually managed to keep Edward Snowden out of US custody. Not only did Assange find an effective bolthole for himself, he also faked one up on the fly for this younger guy.

Assange liberated Snowden, who really is NSA, or rather a civilian outsourced contractor for the NSA, like there’s any practical difference.

It’s incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks. This valiant service came from Julian Assange, a dude who can’t even pack his own suitcase without having a fit. ...

While Julian Assange, to do him credit, has the street smarts to behave as if he’s in a situation of feral realpolitik. Because he is. And how.

However, Assange now knows that. He’s a hardened veteran of it. And he’s gonna stay imperiled for the immediate future, because the upshot of this is pretty easy to see.

The inconvenient truth about the NSA is lying there on a table in the Ecuadorian Embassy, as stark as a poisoned crow. But it’ll join our planet’s many other inconvenient truths.

Snowden told the truth to the public — but then again, so did Solzhenitsyn, and even Al Gore lets on sometimes. The truth doesn’t do the trick for anybody, the truth is just a complicating factor. The present geopolitical situation is absolutely cluttered with amazing lies that didn’t work out for their owners.

The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction never existed. Climate change does exist, and could drown Wall Street any day now. The abject state of global finance is obvious, yet it makes no difference to the ongoing depredations. Drones are stark assassination machines, and they don’t stay classified. Anyone could go on.

And, yeah, by the way, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Google et al, they are all the blood brothers of Huawei in China — because they are intelligence assets posing as commercial operations. They are surveillance marketers. They give you free stuff in order to spy on you and pass that info along the value chain. Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.

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A Texan tragedy: ample oil, no water

The Guardian has an article on the unfortunate intersection of the Texas drought and shale oil boom - A Texan tragedy: ample oil, no water.

Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.

"The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes," she said, blinking back tears. "I went: 'dear God help us. That was the first thought that came to mind."

Across the south-west, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted.

Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry's outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse.

In Texas alone, about 30 communities could run out of water by the end of the year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Nearly 15 million people are living under some form of water rationing, barred from freely sprinkling their lawns or refilling their swimming pools. In Barnhart's case, the well appears to have run dry because the water was being extracted for shale gas fracking.

The town — a gas station, a community hall and a taco truck – sits in the midst of the great Texan oil rush, on the eastern edge of the Permian basin.

A few years ago, it seemed like a place on the way out. Now McGuire said she can see nine oil wells from her back porch, and there are dozens of RVs parked outside town, full of oil workers.

But soon after the first frack trucks pulled up two years ago, the well on McGuire's property ran dry.

No-one in Barnhart paid much attention at the time, and McGuire hooked up to the town's central water supply. "Everyone just said: 'too bad'. Well now it's all going dry," McGuire said.

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The Third Carbon Age ?

Michael Klare has a depressing article at TomDispatch arguing that the investment in unconventional fossil fuel development still dwarfs that going to renewable energy - The Third Carbon Age.

When it comes to energy and economics in the climate-change era, nothing is what it seems. Most of us believe (or want to believe) that the second carbon era, the Age of Oil, will soon be superseded by the Age of Renewables, just as oil had long since superseded the Age of Coal. President Obama offered exactly this vision in a much-praised June address on climate change. True, fossil fuels will be needed a little bit longer, he indicated, but soon enough they will be overtaken by renewable forms of energy.

Many other experts share this view, assuring us that increased reliance on “clean” natural gas combined with expanded investments in wind and solar power will permit a smooth transition to a green energy future in which humanity will no longer be pouring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. All this sounds promising indeed. There is only one fly in the ointment: it is not, in fact, the path we are presently headed down. The energy industry is not investing in any significant way in renewables. Instead, it is pouring its historic profits into new fossil-fuel projects, mainly involving the exploitation of what are called “unconventional” oil and gas reserves.

The result is indisputable: humanity is not entering a period that will be dominated by renewables. Instead, it is pioneering the third great carbon era, the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas.

That we are embarking on a new carbon era is increasingly evident and should unnerve us all. Hydro-fracking -- the use of high-pressure water columns to shatter underground shale formations and liberate the oil and natural gas supplies trapped within them -- is being undertaken in ever more regions of the United States and in a growing number of foreign countries. In the meantime, the exploitation of carbon-dirty heavy oil and tar sands formations is accelerating in Canada, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

It’s true that ever more wind farms and solar arrays are being built, but here’s the kicker: investment in unconventional fossil-fuel extraction and distribution is now expected to outpace spending on renewables by a ratio of at least three-to-one in the decades ahead.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an inter-governmental research organization based in Paris, cumulative worldwide investment in new fossil-fuel extraction and processing will total an estimated $22.87 trillion between 2012 and 2035, while investment in renewables, hydropower, and nuclear energy will amount to only $7.32 trillion. In these years, investment in oil alone, at an estimated $10.32 trillion, is expected to exceed spending on wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, hydro, nuclear, and every other form of renewable energy combined.

In addition, as the IEA explains, an ever-increasing share of that staggering investment in fossil fuels will be devoted to unconventional forms of oil and gas: Canadian tar sands, Venezuelan extra-heavy crude, shale oil and gas, Arctic and deep-offshore energy deposits, and other hydrocarbons derived from previously inaccessible reserves of energy. The explanation for this is simple enough. The world’s supply of conventional oil and gas -- fuels derived from easily accessible reservoirs and requiring a minimum of processing -- is rapidly disappearing. With global demand for fossil fuels expected to rise by 26% between now and 2035, more and more of the world’s energy supply will have to be provided by unconventional fuels.

In such a world, one thing is guaranteed: global carbon emissions will soar far beyond our current worst-case assumptions, meaning intense heat waves will become commonplace and our few remaining wilderness areas will be eviscerated. Planet Earth will be a far -- possibly unimaginably -- harsher and more blistering place. In that light, it’s worth exploring in greater depth just how we ended up in such a predicament, one carbon age at a time.

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Elon Musk unveils his plans for the Hyperloop

TE has a post on Elon Musk's unveiling of the "hyperloop" concept - Elon Musk unveils his plans for the Hyperloop.

Just now ... Elon Musk unveiled more details of his much-discussed blue-sky idea: the Hyperloop, a system to carry passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco, 382 miles or 615 km, in about 35 minutes — less than half the time it takes to fly between the two cities. While early rumors suggested the Hyperloop might connect Los Angeles and New York, and even New York and China, the alpha plans of the highly speculative system are focused in California, as a provocative response to a $68.4 billion high-speed rail plan to connect the state’s two largest coastal cities. As specced, that high-speed rail system would be only slightly cheaper than flying — and would take about twice as long, at 2 hours, 40 minutes. (Of course, right now, the train between Oakland and Los Angeles takes a cool 12 hours, 10 minutes.)

Musk’s Hyperloop is an aboveground system — long tubes set atop pylons — that could run alongside highways. The system would run capsules that hold 28 passengers each through the tubes, departing every two minutes. These capsules contain compressor fans in their nose that form a cushion of air underneath them.

“Wheels don’t work very well at [700 mph], but a cushion of air does,” the plans read. “Air bearings, which use the same basic principle as an air hockey table, have been demonstrated to work at speeds of Mach 1.1 with very low friction.”

Building the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion — a fraction of the proposed high-speed rail system. A ticket on the Hyperloop would cost $20, far trumping both airfare and the price of gas for the same car trip.

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A Material That Could Make Solar Power “Dirt Cheap”

Technology Review has an article on solar power research at UNSW - A Material That Could Make Solar Power “Dirt Cheap”.

A new type of solar cell, made from a material that is dramatically cheaper to obtain and use than silicon, could generate as much power as today’s commodity solar cells.

Researchers developing the technology say that it could lead to solar panels that cost just 10 to 20 cents per watt. Solar panels now typically cost about 75 cents a watt, and the U.S. Department of Energy says 50 cents per watt will allow solar power to compete with fossil fuel.

In the past, solar researchers have been divided into two camps in their pursuit of cheaper solar power. Some have sought solar cells that can be made very cheaply but that have the downside of being relatively inefficient. Lately, more researchers have focused on developing very high efficiency cells, even if they require more expensive manufacturing techniques.

The new material may make it possible to get the best of both worlds—solar cells that are highly efficient but also cheap to make.

One of the world’s top solar researchers, Martin Green of the University of New South Wales, Australia, says the rapid progress has been surprising. Solar cells that use the material “can be made with very simple and potentially very cheap technology, and the efficiency is rising very dramatically,” he says.

Perovskites have been known for over a century, but no one thought to try them in solar cells until relatively recently. The particular material the researchers are using is very good at absorbing light. While conventional silicon solar panels use materials that are about 180 micrometers thick, the new solar cells use less than one micrometer of material to capture the same amount of sunlight. The pigment is a semiconductor that is also good at transporting the electric charge created when light hits it.

“The material is dirt cheap,” says Michael Grätzel, who is famous within the solar industry for inventing a type of solar cell that bears his name. His group has produced the most efficient perovskite solar cells so far—they convert 15 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity, far more than other cheap-to-make solar cells. Based on its performance so far, and on its known light-conversion properties, researchers say its efficiency could easily rise as high as 20 to 25 percent, which is as good as the record efficiencies (typically achieved in labs) of the most common types of solar cells today. The efficiencies of mass-produced solar cells may be lower. But it makes sense to compare the lab efficiencies of the perovskite cells with the lab records for other materials. Grätzel says that perovskite in solar cells will likely prove to be a “forgiving” material that retains high efficiencies in mass production, since the manufacturing processes are simple.

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A Farewell To The Oil Drum

I started blogging (at Peak Energy) about peak oil in late 2004, having become interested in the topic over a period of years. I'd first started thinking about oil depletion when working on systems for collecting and managing large volumes of oil exploration data in the mid 1990's. Not long afterward I worked for Woodside Energy at a time when their main development project was the Laminaria / Corallina floating oil production facility in the Timor sea. A few years later production from this project had dropped below 50,000 barrels per day from an early peak of 180,000 bpd. Around the same time I came across the writing of Colin Campbell and Ken Deffeyes and began to consider what the global oil depletion picture looked like (the war in Iraq and the steadily rising oil price also added to the interest factor).

2004 was the year where blogging exploded in popularity and a vast range of writers emerged from obscurity. A number of these began mentioning peak oil and a loosely knit community of bloggers quickly formed around the topic. At the time the traditional observers of the topic were mostly retired geologists from the oil industry and academia following in the footsteps of M King Hubbert (such as Jean Laherrerre, Walter Youngquist and Ali Samsam Bakhtiari as well as Campbell and Deffeyes), along with some writers such as Richard Heinberg and a vibrant (albeit wildly pessimistic) online community of neo-malthusians hanging out at forums such as the "Running On Empty" groups, "Energy Resources" and "Alas Babylon" - usually heavily influenced by Jay Hanson's infamous "dieoff.org" site - and various fringe websites like Mike Ruppert's "From The Wilderness" and Mark Robinowicz's "Oil Empire". There were also 2 news aggregation sites focusing on the topic that had started up - Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org) and PeakOil.com - both of which assembled a steady stream of news on peak oil and related topics.

In 2005 The Oil Drum appeared, with Prof Goose (Kyle) and Heading Out (Dave) quickly building a large following that eclipsed that of the other sites commenting on the subject. I was pleased to be invited to join as a contributor in 2007 and spent a very enjoyable 3+ years writing for the site on a regular basis and co-editing the TOD ANZ site with Phil Hart.

After a time I found a combination of factors led me to become less active and eventually stop writing original work for TOD - in no particular order a couple of changes of job, moving house twice, getting divorced, having a couple of kids who required more of my time and a general depletion of interest caused by writing on the same broad topic for more than 5 years.

It has been disappointing to see some of the commentary about TOD's closure claiming that it indicates "fracking has killed peak oil". Personally I've been amazed TOD has lasted as long as it has, which has been a credit to the editors and staff, especially with so many contributors drifting away over the years.

If I look back to when I first started, none of the peak oil blogs around at the time are still publishing - the ones that come immediately to mind include Past Peak, Mobjectivist, Peak Energy (US), The Energy Blog, Jeff Vail's A Theory Of Power, Peak Oil Optimist, Life After The Oil Crash, Karavans and a myriad of temporary blogs created by a guy calling himself the "Flying Talking Donkey" - all of which ceased for the reasons cited by the TOD board (or due to ill health on the part of the author). This isn't a phenomenon unique to peak oil blogs - none of my favourite blogs from 2004 still exist today - the best sustainability blog of the time, WorldChanging, closed down several years ago, Bruce Sterling's "Viridian Design" did the same as did Billmon's "Whiskey Bar" and Jeff Well's "Rigorous Intuition".

So from that point of view TOD has done remarkably well to have lasted for more than 8 years.

The decision to narrow the focus of the site some years back didn't help in my view but I suspect the end result would have been the same regardless - though I tend to think allowing all of the "Limits To Growth" to be analysed may have kept the energy levels of the contributors up for longer and perhaps encouraged a wider range of contributors to participate.

It is true, however, that global oil production has not declined in the way that many (if not all) of the peak oil writers of 10 years ago predicted. While the predictions can be qualified ("conventional oil production has peaked" or "oil production per capita has peaked") the "total liquids" number clearly hasn't yet and this is the important one along with the oil price.

There are 4 obvious avenues open for dealing with peaking conventional oil production:

• 1. Find more conventional oil
• 2. Exploit unconventional oil sources
• 3. Become more efficient in our use of oil
• 4. Switch to alternatives

Over the years a lot of peak oil analysis has tended to focus on how far the first item can be pushed and what could happen once the limit is reached, with short shrift being given to the other 3 avenues (unless "powerdown" counts as "more efficient use of oil") - and even the amount of conventional oil available being somewhat underestimated (Iraq being the example I always used).

The ability of the oil industry to expand unconventional oil production (the shale oil boom being the obvious example though production of tar sands and heavy oil deposits are also increasing) has been the key factor in pushing the date of the peak out further into the future (I liked Stuart Staniford's quip that this could possibly be characterised as the "frantic scraping of the bottom of the barrel").

The dawning of the "gas age" has also kept fossil fuels in the picture for time being, with substantial unexploited conventional natural gas reserves being developed and unconventional gas production growing strongly.

While these developments have thus far dashed the hopes of the doomer community the fact remains that even if the whole world was made of oil, there would still be a finite supply of it - and thus at some point we will need to transition to alternative sources of energy, assuming the temperature of the planet hasn't risen to a point that makes it uninhabitable in the meantime.

It's this transition to alternative energy which captured most of my attention when writing - and which I'll make the topic of my second parting post for TOD - "Our Clean Energy Future" - which I hope to have ready soon.

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How a White or Green Roof Can Keep Your Building Up to 84% Cooler This Summer

Inhabitat has a look at the effect habving a white or green roof can have on urban temperatures - How a White or Green Roof Can Keep Your Building Up to 84% Cooler This Summer

The benefits of white and green roofs are nothing new to us, but a recent study by two top NYC universities has shed light on just how effective these non-traditional roofs can be at lowering building temperatures. Non-reflective dark roofs are known to exacerbate the urban heat island effect and do absolutely nothing to reduce storm water runoff, which is why New York City sewers overflow almost every time it rains. But a recent study released by Columbia University and City University of New York has found that greening NYC rooftops or adding a few coats of white paint can reduce temperatures by as much as 84%! ...

In order to ascertain the real benefits of greening or whitewashing city rooftops, researchers studied three different roof surface treatments at the Con Edison Learning Center in Queens: a green roof, a dark roof and a white roof. Measurements on each one showed that on average the white roof was about 30 degrees fahrenheit cooler than the dark roof, while the planted sedum roof was a whopping 60 degrees cooler! NYC is working towards applying white paint to one million square feet of rooftop a year in order to reduce those draining summertime highs, but city dwellers can do their part by taking the initiative as well.

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