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  • Peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks

     

    Experts say they have received a letter from David Mackay, chief scientific adviser to the DECC, asking for information and advice on peak oil amid a growing campaign from industrialists such as Sir Richard Branson for the government to put contingency plans in place to deal with any future crisis.

    A spokeswoman for the department insisted the request from Mackay was “routine” and said there was no change of policy other than to keep the issue under review. The peak oil argument was effectively dismissed as alarmist by former energy minister Malcolm Wicks in a report to government last summer, while oil companies such as BP, which have major influence in Whitehall, take a similar line.

    But documents obtained under the FoI Act seen by the Observer show that a “peak oil workshop” brought together staff from the DECC, the Bank of England and Ministry of Defence among others to discuss the issue.

    A ministry note of that summit warned that “[Government] public lines on peak oil are ‘not quite right’. They need to take account of climate change and put more emphasis on reducing demand and also the fact that peak oil may increase volatility in the market.”

    Those comments were written 12 months ago, but a letter in response to the FoI request written by DECC officials and dated 31 July 2010 says it can only release some information on what is currently under policy discussion because they are “ongoing” and “high profile” in nature.

    The letter adds: “We recognise the public interest arguments in favour of disclosing this information. In particular we recognise that greater transparency makes government more open and accountable and could help provide an insight into peak oil.

    “However any public interest in the disclosure of such information must be balanced with the need to ensure that ministers and advisers can discuss policy in a manner which allows for frank exchanges of views and opinions about important and sensitive issues.”

    Yet the note of the workshop distributed last year talks about secrecy around the topic being “probably not good”, although it also suggests officials stick to the line that the “International Energy Agency is an authoritative source in this field” and stresses how the IEA believes there is sufficient reserves to meet demand till 2030 as long as investment in new reserves is maintained.

    But the Paris-based organisation has come under increasing scrutiny from a growing group of critics who believe the IEA’s optimism is misplaced. Last year the Guardian revealed that the IEA was also riven with dissent over the issue with senior staff members privately telling newspaper they thought the official numbers on future global oil supply were over-optimistic.

    The IEA predicted in the 2009 World Energy Outlook published last November that oil demand would grow from 85m barrels a day today to 88m in 2015 and reach 105m in 2030. The organisation presumes the challenge of meeting that demand can equally be met by a mixture of higher Opec production and considerably more output from unconventional sources.

    But an internal IEA source said: “Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible, but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources.”

    The IEA has denied the claims of internal dissent and sticks by its figures. But Kjell Aleklett, a professor of physics at Uppsala University in Sweden and author of a report The Peak of the Oil Age, claims crude production is more likely to be 75m barrels a day by 2030 than the “unrealistic” 105m projected by the IEA.

  • Tibetan nomads struggle as grasslands disappear from the roof of the world

     

    Grassland degradation is evident along the twisting mountain road from Yushu to Xining, which passes through the Three Rivers national park, the source of the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang rivers. Along some stretches the landscape is so barren it looks more like the Gobi desert than an alpine meadow.

    Phuntsok Dorje (name has been changed) is among the last of the nomads scratching a living in one of the worst affected areas. “There used to be five families on this plain. Now we are the only one left and there is not enough grass even for us,” he says. “It’s getting drier and drier and there are more and more rats every year.”

    Until about 10 years ago the nearest town, Maduo, used to be the richest in Qinghai province thanks to herding, fishing and mining, but residents say their economy has dried up along with the nearby wetlands.

    “This all used to be a lake. There wasn’t a road here then. Even a Jeep couldn’t have made it through,” said a Tibetan guide, Dalang Jiri, as we drove through the area. By one estimate, 70% of the former rangeland is now desert.

    “Maduo is now very poor. There is no way to make a living,” said a Tibetan teacher who gave only one name, Angang. “The mines have closed and grasslands are destroyed. People just depend on the money they get from the government. They just sit on the kang [a raised, heated, floor] and wait for the next payment.”

    Many of the local people are former herders moved off the land under a controversial “ecological migration” scheme launched in 2003. The government in Beijing is in the advanced stages of relocating between 50% and 80% of the 2.25 million nomads on the Tibetan plateau. According to state media, this programme aims to restore the grasslands, prevent overgrazing and improve living standards.

    The Tibetan government-in-exile says the scheme does little for the environment and is aimed at clearing the land for mineral extraction and moving potential supporters of the Dalai Lama into urban areas where they can be more easily controlled.

    Qinghai is dotted with resettlement centres, many on the way to becoming ghettos. Nomads are paid an annual allowance – of 3,000 yuan (about £300) to 8,000 yuan per household – to give up herding for 10 years and be provided with housing. As in some native American reservations in the US and Canada, they have trouble finding jobs. Many end up either unemployed or recycling rubbish or collecting dung.

    Some feel cheated. “If I could go back to herding, I would. But the land has been taken by the state and the livestock has been sold off so we are stuck here. It’s hopeless,” said Shang Lashi, a resident at a resettlement centre in Yushu. “We were promised jobs. But there is no work. We live on the 3,000 yuan a year allowance, but the officials deduct money from that for the housing, which was supposed to be free.”

    Their situation was made worse by the earthquake that struck Yushu earlier this year, killing hundreds. People were crushed when their new concrete homes collapsed, a risk they would not have faced in their itinerant life on the grasslands. Many are once again living under canvas – in disaster relief tents and without land or cattle.

    In a sign of the sensitivity of the subject, the authorities declined to officially answer the Guardian’s questions. Privately, officials said resettlement and other efforts to restore the grassland, including fencing off the worst areas, were worthwhile.

    “The situation has improved slightly in the past five years. We are working on seven areas, planting trees and trying to restore the ecosystem around closed gold mines,” said one environmental officer. The problem would not be solved in the short term. “This area is particularly fragile. Once the grasslands are destroyed, they rarely come back. It is very difficult to grow grass at high altitude.”

    The programme’s effectiveness is questioned by others, including Wang Yongchen, founder of the Green Earth Volunteers NGO and a regular visitor to the plateau for 10 years. “Overgrazing was considered a possible cause of the grassland degradation, but things haven’t improved since the herds were enclosed and the nomads moved. I think climate change and mining have had a bigger impact.”

    Assessing the programme is complicated by political tensions. In the past year, three prominent Tibetan environmental campaigners have been arrested after exposing corruption and flaws in wildlife conservation on the plateau.

    Infestation

    Another activist, who declined to give his name, said it was difficult to comment. “The situation is complicated. Some areas of grassland are getting better. Others are worse. There are so many factors involved.”

    A growing population of pika, gerbils, mice and other rodents is also blamed for degradation of the land because they burrow into the soil and eat grass roots.

    Zoologists say this highlights how ecosystems can quickly move out of balance. Rodent numbers have increased dramatically in 10 years because their natural predators – hawks, eagles and leopards – have been hunted close to extinction. Belatedly, the authorities are trying to protect wildlife and attract birds of prey by erecting steel vantage points to replace felled trees.

    There is widespread agreement that this climatically important region needs more study.

    “People have not paid enough attention to the Tibetan plateau. They call it the Third Pole but actually it is more important than the Arctic or Antarctic because it is closer to human communities. This area needs a great deal more research,” said Yang Yong, a Chinese explorer and environmental activist. “The changes to glaciers and grasslands are very fast. The desertification of the grassland is a very evident phenomenon on the plateau. It’s a reaction by a sensitive ecosystem that will precede similar reactions elsewhere.”

    Phuntsok Dorje is unlikely to take part in any study. But he’s seen enough to be pessimistic about the future. “The weather is changing. It used to rain a lot in the summer and snow in the winter. There was a strong contrast between the seasons, but not now. It’s getting drier year after year. If it carries on like this I have no idea what I will do.”

    Additional reporting by Cui Zheng

    • To order Jonathan Watts’ book, When a Billion Chinese Jump, for £9.99 (rrp £14.99) call 0845 606 4232 or visit guardianbooks.co.uk.

     

  • Low cost e-waste recycling in China releasing catalogue of pollutants

    Low-cost e-waste recycling in China releasing catalogue of pollutants

    Ecologist

    3rd September, 2010

    The world’s growing waste mountain of mobile phones, computers and other electronic goods is being illegally recycled in unregulated and primitive conditions in China and causing significant toxic pollution

     

    China’s family-run cottage industry for recycling e-waste is releasing dangerous amounts of toxic pollutants and posing a threat to local health, according to a team of scientists from the US and China.

    Sales of consumer electronics, particularly mobile phones and computers, have soared in the past two decades – with one billion of the former sold in 2007.

    Although Europe and the US have set up e-waste recycling systems much of the e-waste ends up being illegally exported to less industrialised countries where the laws to protect workers and the environment are inadaquate or not enforced.

    China in particular is expected to see seven-fold increase in mobile phone waste and four-fold increase in old computer waste by 2020.

    Researchers from the US and China studied the e-waste cottage industry that has sprung up in Shantou City, a town of 150,000 people in China’s Guangdong Province – the main destination for electronic waste.

    Previous studies have focused on toxic metals being released, however this study highlights the air pollutants being emitted into the surrounding air. It says the family-run workshops have no capability to control or reduce pollutant emissions.

    The majority of the electronic components are removed by heating the boards over a grill on a strove burner, a process known as ‘roasting’, before removing the reusable parts. This heating process releases numerous chemicals, heavy metals and other pollutants into the air.

    Study co-author Bernd Simoneit from Oregon State university said the pollutants were damaging not only to the environment but also the health of workers and people living in the area.

    ‘Some of these chemical compounds may be carcinogens; others may be just as harmful because they can act as “environmental disruptors” and may affect body processes from reproduction to endocrine function,’ he said.

    Greenpeace say the groundwater around the nearby town of Guyiu, in the same province as the study town, is undrinkable because of toxic e-waste being dumped in streams and fields.

    Useful links
    Study: Heavy Metals Concentrations of Surface Dust from e-Waste Recycling and Its Human Health Implications in Southeast China

  • Labor ahead in strategic power game

     

    Whether the rural independents back the Labor Party, as the tea leaves and the betting agencies suggest they may, or whether Bob Katter, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott ultimately decide to throw their support behind a conservative government, Labor has played the more strategic game in lobbying for their support. Leaving personal dignity at the door, Gillard has done everything that she can to negotiate a deal. If she wins that won’t matter; if she loses it will be the final embarrassment in a short prime ministership.

    Related Coverage

    The independents highlight stability and longevity of government as two key ingredients to securing their support.

    Labor was clearer from the outset than the Coalition was about its preparedness to run full term if it formed minority government. That ticks the longevity box. In fact Gillard was even willing, quite carelessly in my view, to rule out the prospect of a double-dissolution election if the independents backed her in.

    In other words, 100 years of convention, that a federal government needs to have a trigger to go to the polls if its legislative agenda is stymied, is less important to Labor than Gillard saving face.

    This week she denied that how history might view her had played any role whatsoever in her attempts to form government. If you believe that you will believe emissions can be curbed without putting a price on carbon.

    In contrast, while the Coalition is assuring all and sundry that it plans to run full term if it is supported into government, early on senior Coalition sources were telling journalists that a return to the polls was the best option, that when the Greens gained the Senate balance of power in July next year it would provide the perfect trigger for an early election, and that because defeat would lead to internal blood-letting for Labor it wouldn’t be long before the polls made an early election too tempting to avoid for the Coalition — so that it could win a mandate in its own right.

    The Coalition also has tried to suggest a Labor government won’t be stable because of the recriminations likely after the poor election result, even if it does win. But that ignores what we all know, which is that as a tribal party that imposes strict discipline on its parliamentary team, Labor is better placed than the Coalition to hold together in minority government.

    That is especially the case considering the Coalition partners are already attacking each another over the money spent fighting one another in safe conservative electorates: coin that could have made the difference in tight marginal contests across the country.

    And while at first glance the idea of a Labor-Greens alliance may appear unstable to conservative rural independents worried about radicalism, the electoral reality is that without the backing of at least two of the three rural independents a left-wing agenda can’t pass through the House of Representatives to even be debated in the Senate.

    The rural independents will decide what passes into law and the circumstances when it does.

    (That said, watch this space if Labor does form a minority government and a carbon tax gets put on the agenda. It is hardly radical left wingism, but the Greens would support it in the Senate, and even if only Oakeshott out of the three rural independents backed it in the House of Representatives, what would Malcolm Turnbull do? He has crossed the floor before over an emissions trading system and may do so again given his commitment to the need to put a price on carbon. It is the one policy area that may frighten Windsor and Katter, in particular, from backing Labor.)

    If stability is important to the independents, Labor has used momentum this week to give such an appearance. First it locked in the Greens MP-elect Adam Bandt. Then it struck a deal with Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie. Neither move was unexpected, but it gave Gillard a winning appearance this week.

    Combined with the costings problems on the Coalition’s side and the revelation that Abbott offered Wilkie a profligate $1 billion for his local hospital to try to win him over, Labor is meeting the rural independents’ two-pronged demands more obviously than the Coalition.

    While Abbott has been clever to keep referring to Gillard as the acting Prime Minister — as a reminder that she doesn’t have the legitimacy of incumbency any more — the rest of his team has been positively ill-disciplined.

    Bill Heffernan, Alby Schultz and Barnaby Joyce haven’t managed to hide their frustrations about the rural independents taking their time to come to a decision, and they aren’t alone.

    If Abbott can’t control his troops during a delicate time such as the present, what chance does he have down the track?

    The question is, does any of this really matter? Are the independents wooed by the momentum and the offerings Labor is putting on the table or are they giving out signals that they may be leaning Labor’s way only so they can claim they treated the process evenly and with considered thought before siding with the Coalition?

    That is what happened to West Australian premier Alan Carpenter in 2008 when neither main party won an outright majority at the state election. It was left to the unaligned Nationals and independents to determined which side formed government.

    Nationals leader Brendon Grylls gave the impression that he was more attracted to the Labor offerings but ultimately sided with his former Coalition partner, the Liberals. Although there was no love lost between the Nationals and the Liberals in WA leading up to polling day, they did have a history of working together in the parliament.

    What worries Coalition strategists federally is that the history between the rural independents and the Liberals and Nationals is bitter and dominated by mutual loathing. The concern is that such animosities may prevent a deal being done, especially on the back of a poor post-election campaign to win them over.

    If anyone doubts just how high the stakes are as to which side forms government, again Western Australia provides some insights.

    The Barnett government, despite predictions that it would be marred by instability and chaos because of its minority status, is popular and politically dominant. The opposition has descended into a rabble and its leader is under siege.

    Let’s not forget, being opposition leader is regarded as the hardest job going around.

    Watch Peter van Onselen and his panel of senior News Limited journalists interview Communications Minister Stephen Conroy on Australian Agenda on Sky News on Sunday morning live at 8.30am, replayed at 12.30pm and 8.30pm

  • Thirsty foreigners soak up scarce water rights

     

    More than $2 billion of that trade took place in NSW, making this state’s water market equal to the entire value of the country’s wool exports.

    The federal Labor government helped inflate the price by buying more than $1 billion worth of water as drought bit last year, accelerating its $3.1 billion buyback of water in the Murray-Darling Basin.

    After good rains and a change to the government’s tender system, prices have dropped by as much as 40 per cent this year, hurting irrigators who need to sell their water rights, but making buying into the market more attractive to investors.

    ”We know that water is a scarce resource in a resource-starved world,” said Guy Kingwill, the chief executive of the agricultural company Tandou, which has substantial US and British investors.

    ”We are long-term investors in secure water entitlements and Australia is one of the few countries in the world where you can own those,” he said.

    Yet there is virtually no oversight from the Foreign Investment Review Board.

    The federal Treasury says it never looks specifically at foreign acquisition of water licences, and takes an interest only if a foreign player is buying an agribusiness worth more than $231 million.

    Mr Lourey rejects fears about ”water barons”, claiming his investment fund will allow ”water to be used in the most productive way possible. We would argue that’s in Australia’s strategic best interests”.

    But farmers’ groups are worried that big players could corner areas of the market by buying up permanent rights in whole valleys, or being able to dictate what food is grown where by controlling water.

    ”We don’t have a problem with investment, or indeed, speculation in the water market,” said Mr Gregson of the Irrigators Council. ”We are concerned about market dominance. It’s a recently developed, relatively fragile market.”

    FOREIGN OWNERSHIP

    ONLY a tiny handful of water bureaucrats in each state has full knowledge of who owns the country’s permanent water rights, as water registries cannot be openly searched. Some foreign acquisitions of water that have emerged include:

    Summit Global Management, founded by John Dickerson, of San Diego, owns $20 million worth of water through its Australian subsidiary Summit Water Holdings. The company wants to buy more.

    The Singapore company Olam International acquired nearly 90,000 megalitres of permanent water along the Murray when it picked up the almond operations of the failed managed investment scheme Timbercorp last year. The land and water were valued at $288 million.

    The British investment fund Ecofin owns 20 per cent of Eastern Australia Irrigation, a company with extensive land and water holdings in south-eastern Queensland.

    Tandou Limited owns Tandou Farm, near Menindee Lakes, in far western NSW. A fierce takeover battle this year has left the company dominated by the New Zealand corporate raider Sir Ron Brierley’s Guinness Peat Group (28 per cent), battling it out with Ecofin (19.9 per cent) and the US company Water Asset Management ( 13 per cent). Tandou’s most valuable asset is $30 million worth of water rights.

    A Japanese consortium led by Mitsubishi Corporation acquired the Australian water businesses of the British company United Utilities in May.

    Causeway Asset Management, of Melbourne, wants to attract $100 million from foreign investors to a ”diversified portfolio of permanent water entitlements” in Australia.

  • German Military Report: Peak Oil Could Lead to Collapse of Democracy

     

    That collapse could, in turn, cause many countries to abandon free markets principles, the report states. Deals would be struck between oil-exporting and oil-importing countries that would fix prices and remove large amounts of oil from the global market place.

    “The proportion of oil traded on the global, freely accessible oil market will diminish as more oil is traded through bi-national contracts,” the report states.

    That would prompt some governments to abandon free market economics altogether, the report suggests. With peak oil causing “partial or complete failure of markets … [a] conceivable alternative would be government rationing and the allocation of important goods or the setting of production schedules and other short-term coercive measures to replace market-based mechanisms in times of crisis.”

    But the report also warns that the economic crisis caused by shrinking oil supplies and skyrocketing prices could be seen by the general public as a failure of market economics as a whole — and with it, the political institutions that created those economic systems.

    Public anger at the existing system would create “room for ideological and extremist alternatives to existing forms of government.” Populations would fragment along political lines and “in extreme cases” this could “lead to open conflict.”

    Peak oil — which refers to the moment when the world’s production of oil begins to shrink — is a controversial concept, but few doubt the basic logic underlying it: That eventually the world’s finite supply of oil will run out, and nations will have to turn to other sources of energy, or face economic disaster.

    With the report, Germany joins the growing ranks of Western governments apparently alarmed by the prospect of peak oil.

    Last Sunday, the UK Observer reported that Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change is refusing to release documents related to peak oil, even though, as the Observer noted, previously released documents argue the veil of secrecy around the issue is probably “not good.”

    The UK government is reportedly canvassing leading scientists and industrialists for their advice on how to build a contingency plan for peak oil.

    And earlier this year, a report from the US Joint Forces Command stated that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.”

    The report continued, “While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India.”

    Not everyone agrees that peak oil is a reality — at least not yet. Detractors point out that predictions of peak oil have been made since the 1950s, and the date for it was originally pegged at around 1995. But the discovery of new oil fields and the development of new technologies for oil extraction mean that oil production has continued unabated in new oil fields even as traditional oil supplies run dry.

    Peak oil skeptics argue that rising oil prices are responsible for the continuing supply of oil — as oil gets more expensive, extracting it from difficult places becomes more profitable. Some argue this process could continue for decades.

    But environmentalists point out that these new alternative methods of extracting oil are more environmentally harmful than traditional methods. Producers in the Alberta oil sands, for example, use large amounts of water to push oil out of sand, and the thick oil produced by this process is significantly higher in carbon content than the light, sweet crude imported from the Middle East.

    © 2010 Raw Story