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The Generator news service publishes articles on sustainable development, agriculture and energy as well as observations on current affairs. The news service is used on the weekly radio show, The Generator, as well as by a number of monthly and quarterly magazines. A podcast of the Generator news is also available.
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  • $2billion water fund does nothing for Murray River

    $2 billion Australian water fund untouched; not a single drop of environmental flow has gone back into Murray: Labor questions Govt commitment

    Although the 500 gigalitres of water the Federal Government had committed to putting back into the Murray was only a third of what was needed, even that had not been achieved over the last three years, said Labor’s shadow Treasurer Simon Crean in the Federal Parliament on 14 August 2007.

    Another election promise: "If you simply look at the water initiatives, you see that we have a government presiding over the worst drought in recorded history and it actually cut funding in terms of water," Crean said. "The only time it made a commitment to new funding, short of this latest initiative that we are debating, was just before the introduction of the water fund. This was part of the Prime Minister’s ‘drunken sailor spree’ — $60 billion spent in total by the government to get itself reelected. The problem with the $2 billion Australian water fund is that it has not been spent. So here we have a promise being made just before an election to get themselves into the frame of looking active, yet the funding has not been committed.

    Commitment to spend five-fold increase doubted: "Worse, not a single drop of environmental flow has gone back into the Murray, even though, at the same time as making that $2 billion commitment, they committed to putting 500 gigalitres back into the Murray. We say that the 500 gigalitres was deficient. We argued, and actually proposed, that it be 1,500 gigalitres. That was our policy. The government not only committed to merely going a third of the way; in the three years since, not one drop of water has gone into the Murray as a result of that commitment. Here we are, three years down the track, with another election pending, and we have another commitment. But it is not $2 billion this time; it is $10 billion. It is five times as much — but, as we know, with all the wriggle room in the world by which the government, if it is to be re-elected, can get out of making that spend."

    Reference: Simon Crean, Shadow Treasurer for the Australian Labor Party, Member for Hotham, House of Representatives, Commonwealth, 14 August 2007.

    Erisk Net, 19/8/2007

  • Queensland delivers major water recycling

    Combined project to deliver 232 megalitres: "This milestone is the first step in implementing the largest recycled water scheme in the Southern Hemisphere," Beattie said, "and demonstrates my government’s commitment to ensuring a reliable, climate resistant water supply that will satisfy our needs now and for future generations. When the Western Corridor Recycled Water Project is complete at the end of 2008, it will link all three of the world-class advanced water treatment plants at Luggage Point, Gibson Island and Bundamba with the Wivenhoe Dam. These plants combined will provide up to 232 megalitres of purified recycled water to the power stations and Wivenhoe Dam each day via 200 kilometres of pipeline. This is enough to satisfy more than a third of the region’s current daily water use. To date, more than 1.7 million working hours have been dedicated to ensuring that the Western Corridor Recycled Water Project is completed on time, and I am sure that members join with me … in commending their efforts."

    Reference: Peter Beattie, Premier and Minister for Trade, Member for Brisbane Central ALP, Legislative Assembly, Queensland, 4 September 2007.

    Erisk Net, 22/9/2007

  • Israel asks US to pay aid in Euros

    Secretary of State Rice has acknowledged a communique from Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Levni which requests that all foreign aid payments and loans from the United States be made in Euros rather than in Dollars. Foreign Minister Levni cited the rapidly declining dollar and it’s disfavor as a world currency as reasons for the request.

    "In the spirit of Yom Kippur, the United States will not hold Israel to any agreements obligating them to accept Dollars as payment for their foreigh aid. We will translate our obligations into Euros or whatever currency that best fits Israel’s needs" Secretary RIce said in the Friday, Sept 21 announcement.

    "We need to place our Israeli obligations at the top of our national prioriy list. Israel should not suffer any inconvenience due to currency fluctuations" said Rice before heading off to Camp David.

    A similar request from Egypt was declined last week.

  • Greens establish food and global warming inquiry


    "It is irresponsible and grossly inadequate to respond to dire crop
    forecasts and the pain caused to rural communities by promising bandaid
    cheques and platitudes about the drought eventually breaking," she said.

    "Our agricultural sector is fast approaching crisis. We need to address
    the issue of the future of agriculture urgently," said Senator Siewert.

    "These poor seasons are no longer 'exceptional' circumstances. What we
    are seeing is not just one of the worst droughts in history but a shift
    in our climate. It is unfair to keep landholders hanging on without
    putting real resources into helping them adapt."

    Senator Siewert and Senator Milne have twice previously attempted to
    establish similar inquiries. 

    "This is not so much a win for the Greens as a win for common sense,"
    she said.
    The motion to refer this issue to the Rural and Regional Affairs and
    Transport Committee and the terms of reference for the inquiry are
    attached overleaf.

    The motion agreed to by the Senate reads, 
    That the Senate:
    1. Notes the dire state of the latest ABARE Crop Report (No. 143,
    released 18th September 2007).
    2. Recognises the severe impact of a series of ongoing poor seasons of
    the livelihoods of Australian farmers and the knock-on effect on the
    well-being of associated rural communities.
    3. Notes the need to ensure the security of Australian food production.
    4. That the following matters be referred to the Rural and Regional
    Affairs and Transport Committee for inquiry and report by 30 June 2008:
    a. The scientific evidence available on the likely future climate of our
    key agricultural production zones, and its implications for current farm
    enterprises and possible future industries
    b. The need for a national strategy to assist Australian agricultural
    industries to adapt to climate change
    c. The adequacy of existing drought assistance and exceptional
    circumstances programs to cope with long-term climactic changes.

  • Turkey implements wind power

    But in spite of the huge potential of the Turkish wind power sector—the country is surrounded by the Aegean, Mediterranean and Black Sea—so far Turkey has made a slow start in exploiting its wind energy potential.

    In 2006, only 19 MW of wind power capacity were installed, and this year, installed wind capacity increased to a little under 140 MW.

    There are ten wind farms—mainly on land—clustered together in the west of the country and in the Aegean region, including in Çanakkale, close to the site of ancient Troy, Çeþme, Akhisar and on the island of Bozcaada,

    Tanay Sýdký Uyar, Vice President of the World Wind Energy Association and Associate Professor of Renewable Energy at Marmara University, said that Turkey had a huge potential for renewable electricity from wind, solar and geothermal sources. He estimated that Turkey could install a wind capacity of 100,000 MW of electricity.

    Currently, Turkey has a total installed capacity of about 40,000 MW for electricity from all energy sources.

    "Wind power could supply Turkey’s electricity needs twice over within five to ten years if the government had the political will to develop this sector," he told RenewableEnergyAccess.com.

    However, Uyar said that the government was slow to give licences to build new wind parks.

    A backlog of applications to build wind farms with a total operating capacity of 8,000 MW is still waiting for approval from the government. So far the government has issued about 40 licences for wind parks, each with an installed capacity of between 20 and 60 MW.

    The country’s capacity for solar energy is also estimated to be huge, with an average of 7.2 hours of sunshine each day, according to the Research Institute for Electricity Affairs (EIEI) in Ankara.

    Also, Uyar said that geothermal energy has the potential to supply 5 million households with heating.

    In 2005, Turkey passed a new renewable energy law to bring it into line with European Union legislation to support renewable sources, including wind power, by giving a government guarantee to purchase electricity at a set price for a period of 7 years.

    But the tariff of about 5 euro cents per kWh of electricity is much lower than in most other European countries, and economic studies say it discourages investment in the renewable energy sector.

    "We have terrific geographic conditions for solar and wind power in Turkey. Exploiting it is already economically and technically possible, but the problem is that the government favors fossil fuels and nuclear energy," Uyar said.

    Turkey is locked into long-term agreements to purchase natural gas at fixed prices and also nuclear energy technology and these agreements are a financial disincentive to developing renewable energy, Uyar said.

    The government is planning to build 3 nuclear reactors with a total capacity of 4,500 MW by 2012.

    Uyar also said that more needed to be done in Turkey to make energy use more efficient.

    "There is a huge amount of energy waste. Turkey can cut its electricity needs by 50% if it uses more up-to-date energy efficient technology and so help keep down carbon emissions," he said.

    The share of energy that comes from renewable energy sources in Turkey is tiny. In 2006, the country had an installed biomass capacity of 35 MW and 15 MW of geothermal energy.

    In addition, Turkey had an installed capacity of 13,100 MW of hydro power, 38,867 MW of thermal power, 11,850 MW of natural gas, 7,491 MW of lignite, 1,845 MW of hard coal, 2,230 MW of oil.

  • How Israel has turned war into economic oil

    Political chaos means Israel is booming like it’s 1999 – and the boom is in defence exports field-tested on Palestinians

    By Naomi Klein

    09/16/07 "The Guardian" — — Gaza in the hands of Hamas, with masked militants sitting in the president’s chair; the West Bank on the edge; Israeli army camps hastily assembled in the Golan Heights; a spy satellite over Iran and Syria; war with Hizbullah a hair trigger away; a scandal-plagued political class facing a total loss of public faith. At a glance, things aren’t going well for Israel. But here’s a puzzle: why, in the midst of such chaos and carnage, is the Israeli economy booming like it’s 1999, with a roaring stock market and growth rates nearing China’s?

    Thomas Friedman recently offered his theory in the New York Times. Israel "nurtures and rewards individual imagination", and so its people are constantly spawning ingenious hi-tech start-ups, no matter what messes their politicians are making. After perusing class projects by students in engineering and computer science at Ben-Gurion University, Friedman made one of his famous fake-sense pronouncements. Israel "had discovered oil". This oil, apparently, is located in the minds of Israel’s "young innovators and venture capitalists", who are too busy making megadeals with Google to be held back by politics.

    Here’s another theory. Israel’s economy isn’t booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-90s, when the country was in the vanguard of the information revolution – the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack, and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners.

    Within three years, large parts of Israel’s tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms, Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the "flat world" to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of 24-hour-a-day showroom, a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.

    Discussions of Israel’s military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country – US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank, and British companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel’s huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2bn in "defence" products to the United States – up dramatically from $270m in 1999. In 2006, Israel exported $3.4bn in defence products – well over a billion more than it received in American military aid. That makes Israel the fourth largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.

    Much of this growth has been in the so-called homeland security sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2bn, an increase of 20%. The key products and services are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems – precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.

    And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror".

    It’s no coincidence that the class projects at Ben-Gurion that so impressed Friedman have names like Innovative Covariance Matrix for Point Target Detection in Hyperspectral Images, and Algorithms for Obstacle Detection and Avoidance. Thirty homeland security companies have been launched in Israel during the past six months alone, thanks in large part to lavish government subsidies that have transformed the Israeli army and the country’s universities into incubators for security and weapons start-ups – something to keep in mind in the debates about the academic boycott.

    Next week, the most established of these companies will travel to Europe for the Paris Air Show, the arms industry’s equivalent of Fashion Week. One of the Israeli companies exhibiting is Suspect Detection Systems (SDS), which will be showcasing its Cogito1002, a white, sci-fi-looking security kiosk that asks air travellers to answer a series of computer-generated questions, tailored to their country of origin, while they hold their hand on a "biofeedback" sensor. The device reads the body’s reactions to the questions, and certain responses flag the passenger as "suspect".

    Like hundreds of other Israeli security start-ups, SDS boasts that it was founded by veterans of Israel’s secret police and that its products were road-tested on Palestinians. Not only has the company tried out the biofeedback terminals at a West Bank checkpoint, it claims the "concept is supported and enhanced by knowledge acquired and assimilated from the analysis of thousands of case studies related to suicide bombers in Israel".

    Another star of the Paris Air Show will be Israeli defence giant Elbit, which plans to showcase its Hermes 450 and 900 unmanned air vehicles. As recently as last month, according to press reports, Israel used the drones on bombing missions in Gaza. Once tested in the territories, they are exported abroad: the Hermes has already been used at the Arizona-Mexico border; Cogito1002 terminals are being auditioned at an unnamed American airport; and Elbit – also one of the companies behind Israel’s "security barrier" – has set up a deal with Boeing to construct the Department of Homeland Security’s $2.5bn "virtual" border fence around the US.

    Since Israel began its policy of sealing off the occupied territories with checkpoints and walls, human rights activists have often compared Gaza and the West Bank to open-air prisons. But in researching the explosion of Israel’s homeland security sector, a topic explored in greater detail in my forthcoming book, it strikes me that they are something else too: laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested. Palestinians – whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling Hamastan – are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.

    So in a way Friedman is right, Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn’t the imagination of its techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target "suspects". And fear, it turns out, is the ultimate renewable resource.

    Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, will be published later this year by Picador; a version of this article appears in the Nation, www.thenation.com and www.nologo.org

    More about academic boycott of Israel:

    http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7640

    http://www.pacbi.org/

    http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=588_0_1_0_C