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The largest battery in the world has sat quietly in George Washington National Forest along the Virginia-West Virginia border for nearly 30 years. A five-hour drive from the nation’s capital, it sits in the middle of the Appalachians, tucked behind the Blue Ridge Mountains. ... The Bath County Hydro Pumped Storage Facility is not really a battery in the common sense of the term, but it is the largest pumped storage facility in the world. It stores a lot of energy, which helps 60 million people in 13 states (and DC) served by the regional transmission organization, PJM Interconnection. ...

Europe continues to invest heavily in pumped storage, with skyrocketing renewable output and decent capacity. There are 40 pumped storage facilities in the U.S., and Bath County is one of the youngest, even though it remains the largest in the world. Rocky Mountain Hydroelectric Plant in Georgia is the newest, commissioned in 1995. Development in the U.S. has been slow because the facilities are expensive, hard to site, and hard to build.

Plants and certain animals like the fog beetle can survive in very arid regions because they’ve developed ways of absorbing minute amounts of water from the atmosphere. Learning from their example allowed us to develop fog harvesting technologies – basically giant nets that trap moisture in the foggy mist, and funnel all of the tiny droplets into a container where they add up to water we can drink. Now, scientists at MIT have created an advanced fog-harvesting material that enables these giant mist catchers to generate five times more water ...

Preliminary tests suggest that the new, smaller-pored material can improve efficiency five times in mild fog conditions, making the system far more feasible and practical than existing versions. The team is currently carrying out a year-long test in Chile to study the durability and water yield of different configurations. “Chilean investigators have estimated that if just 4 percent of the water contained in the fog could be captured, that would be sufficient to meet all of the water needs of that nation’s four northernmost regions, encompassing the entire Atacama Desert area,” states the same release.

The financial collapse of electric-car venture Better Place Ltd., which filed for liquidation over the weekend, is a blow for French automotive group Renault SA, RNO.FR +2.37% which helped the Israeli company develop its novel battery-switching system for electric cars.

Founded by Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi in 2007, Better Place developed a system where electric-car owners could drive their vehicles into a network of stations around Israel ILCO.TV +0.05% and replace the cars battery with a new one in about the same amount of time it takes to fill a gasoline tank on a regular car.

The "quick drop" system was supposed to remove one of the main obstacles to the adoption of electric vehicles, namely the several hours it takes to recharge a flat battery.

Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn had championed Better Places technology as one of the pillars of the French auto makers ambitious €4 billion ($5.17 billion) electric-vehicle strategy. The first cars equipped with Better Place technology were Renault Fluence Z.E. sedans.

South Korea plans to build a tidal- energy plant on the southern tip of the peninsula by 2016, saving an estimated 330,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year.

South Jeolla province signed an initial agreement with Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEP), Korea Midland Power Co. and five other companies to build the 200-megawatt plant in Jindo, the provincial government said in an e-mailed statement without giving cost estimates.

Engineers have created a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil minutes after they pour in harvested algae — a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup.

The research by engineers at the Department of Energys Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was reported recently in the journal Algal Research. A biofuels company, Utah-based Genifuel Corp., has licensed the technology and is working with an industrial partner to build a pilot plant using the technology.

In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.

With additional conventional refining, the crude algae oil is converted into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel. And the waste water is processed further, yielding burnable gas and substances like potassium and nitrogen, which, along with the cleansed water, can also be recycled to grow more algae. ...

PNNL scientists and engineers simplified the production of crude oil from algae by combining several chemical steps into one continuous process. The most important cost-saving step is that the process works with wet algae. Most current processes require the algae to be dried — a process that takes a lot of energy and is expensive. The new process works with an algae slurry that contains as much as 80 to 90 percent water.

The next time you hear about another round of layoffs at a TV news division, the closing of a bureau, the decision not to cover a foreign story with full force, remember this week of silliness in April.

Remember the millions of dollars, hundreds of staff and hours of coverage spent on a wedding in London when crises around the globe and here at home festered. Remember the unseemly pas de deux between the press and a reality TV show huckster peddling racially-fraught falsehoods, as both interviewers and the interviewee seek a bump in ratings.

And then please take a moment to remember the eight American soldiers and one contractor killed by an Afghan soldier at the Kabul airport in a war too easily forgotten. Remember the hundreds likely being killed in Syria and Libya, not to mention the death and unrest plaguing countries like the Ivory Coast, which almost never earn more than a mention on our most-watched newscasts.

Remember those who have the least amongst us, struggling after more than a year of unemployment, a long commute they can no longer afford, or the diagnosis of a medical condition that could kill them and bankrupt their family.

The networks couldnt ignore the devastating storms that killed hundreds in the South, but you had the odd juxtaposition of that news being delivered by anchors sitting in front of Buckingham Palace.

Theres always the question, is the audience chasing the news or the news chasing an audience? I have nothing against the royals or their wedding. It is a legitimate news story, a big event for one of Americas most stalwart allies. We have had a lot of bad news lately, and if you are someone who finds this diversion interesting and exciting, then I think thats great.

What bothers me is the hypocrisy. The idea that we cant afford to throw resources at an important foreign story, but can afford to spend this kind of money on a story like the royal wedding is just plain wrong. The idea that we cant break into regularly-scheduled programming for an address by the president is wrong as well. When the topic was the "Birther Story" (better referred from here on out by the first letters of those two words), the networks jumped right in.

As a journalist, you like to be the one asking the questions. But its time that some of our news executives gave some answers of their own.

Down on the Mall – the tree-lined avenue that joins Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Square – they’ve put out more flags: huge Union Jack banners on each pole, flapping in the coolish wind. Hundreds of metal safety barriers are up — a double layer of them, unlike 1981, when they did not believe that at least two metres of space were required between royals and commoners — and they’re lined with tents, small brightly coloured one- and two-person numbers.

There’s a touch of Scott’s last expedition about these strings of pods, with people huddled in, surviving on iron rations (shortbread and Earl Grey) and updating their blogs. There’s a lot of teenage girls here, hanging out in an ironic/unironic way, ribbons in their hair, and Wills ‘n’ Kate T-shirts ironically punked up. The occasional teenage boy hanger-on with them, hoping that some of the overflow of pagan fertility rite will slop his way.

But above all, it’s women of a certain age, tending the flame and putting on the kettle — cheerfully mad, decked out in red, white and blue plastic boaters, and wearing Wills ‘n’ Kate tea-towels like capes, conferring superpowers. In any tribe though, the father may well give away the bride, the means by which it is done is secret women’s business.

In the most patriarchal of countries, the personification of power and national being is a grey-haired 80-something matron, who may well have another 15 years on the clock, and these women, with their T-shirts and bye-byes, are her honour guard.

We walk slowly down the Mall, and at the entrance to Clarence House, we’re stopped to let someone swing into the drive:

“Someone’s coming in,” a woman says excitedly, her Wills ‘n’ Kate springy-head-antenna bobbling excitedly.

Yes they are. A truck of Portaloos parts the crowd. There’s hundreds of the things. They’ve really gone over the top with the poop coops — they run the whole length of the Mall, like a phalanx of horse guards standing at attention.

They really are scared of public pooping — not unreasonable given the British tendency to let it go anywhere (recently it was found that parts of the National Gallery stone were being worn away by people letting their small children take a leak against the side of it).

Me, I think a river of effluent down the Mall gutters would give the whole thing a delightfully medieval turn. Something has to. Our Kate is no Diana, although the eating disorder appears to be coming along nicely. The carriage (she was originally to arrive by car) will be less magical, the veil less diaphanous, and the marriage boringly genuine. How bourgeois can you get?

Indeed, that’s the whole problem. At the heart of this ceremony, which is meant to bind us together as one nation somehow represented, bodied forth, by the bodies of a young couple, it cannot help but be observed that the marriage is, well, more than a little yecch. The Middleton — Middleton! — family is from Bucklebury, a home counties town, 80 kilometres out of London, the haute-bourgeblah, living-death belt, neither city nor country, to which they retired after making a fortune from a business selling party supplies by mail order. Good God. How is it possible that Prince Philip is still alive after that news? Prince William could have married a shop assistant, a Hapsburg princess, a Glasgow crack whore, or a woman named Lurlene doing 30-to-life in Arkansas, and they all would have been more romantic matches than the girl from the big neo-Georgian house, who, even in real life, looks like she was drawn by an illustrator of chicklit novel covers.

The melancholy fact is that working with this sort of material, the wedding cannot be other than underwhelming. The overall effect is not to raise Kate up, but to draw William and the royals down. Wills himself hasn’t helped, losing his looks in his mid-20s.

He started that decade of his life as a Greek God; now, balding and with the in-breeding showing, he could be mistaken for the junior partner in a Jaguar dealership, having been invalided out of the Green Howards after getting fragged in Basra.

So there is the distinct feeling among many that we are not so much attending a fairytale wedding, as being dragged to the hitching of some cousins we never really knew, and who look like they’ll start talking about how great Andrew Bolt is, at the reception, shortly before the free piss runs out.

That feeling is spread pretty evenly across the country. Even on the afternoon before the event there were good possies to be got right up against the barrier on the Mall, a sign that there’s been a less-than-frantic rush to be part of it. The same is true of street parties, those gingham and teapot ceremonies in which tables are run down the middle of street, to be bombed by the Luftwaffe; this time around, there are only a fraction of these being planned, compared to 1981.

Tempting as it would be to blame this on the echtness of the wedding itself, it can’t be sustained. Nor is it the result of buyer’s remorse on the last wedding. Diana’s fairytale turned into a local production of Liaisons Dangereuses, in which the only one who wasn’t aware she was a patsy, was the patsy herself, subject to the tender mercies of the sort of dysfunctional German family clusterf-ck usually only found in late Fassbinder. The whole thing left a sour taste, and laid bare the process of monarchy, i.e. mostly as a racket. If the 1981 wedding gave monarchy a brief boost, the marriage was worth 100 republican conventions as a teachable experience.

So folks won’t get fooled again. But above and beyond all that, they can’t feel connected to it as they did 30 years ago, because they don’t feel as connected to each other. We have now had three decades of a single social-economic system, administered by Thatcher, Major and Blair, and only mildly mitigated by Gordon Brown, and that is one that put individualism at the heart of British life, a society in which collective being had hitherto been dominant.

Until 1980 the primary political struggle had been over the form collective life would take — socialist, elevating equality, or conservative, elevating tradition. Thatcher changed that, releasing energies good and bad, but above all dissolving the very society she thought she was defending — that of “Victorian values”. The great paradox of the last century was that UK Labour was the guardian of more of that than Thatcher was — just as the European “bicycle” monarchies have only been able to survive in social democracies.

Social democracy mirrors monarchy in affirming that there are social values and institutions that should remain outside the market maw — that having such “sacred” values is essential to having a society in which shared meaning is possible. Both stand against the neoliberalism of the last decades, which is a form of nihilism, dissolving not only meanings (because the market expresses everything in terms of everything else, quantitatively), but the capacity for connection in which self is dissolved.

The more you entrench a society like that, the more you entrench a permanent “solitude together”, in place of collective life, and a mild and persistent melancholy that goes with it — to be obliterated, when too much, by booze or Jesus.

By nationhood too, but where the atomisation process has gone too far, that sense of shared life cannot be retrieved, and many ceremonies become expressions of a rather forlorn yearning for what can no longer be felt (Anzac Day is a supreme example of this). The Brits are not yet at that point, but give them another 20 years, and such ceremonies may feel absurd rather than mysterious. Those flags on the Mall flap in the wind almost petulantly; those pod-tents are cocoons, woven to the barriers, shielding their charges from the harsh world until morning. When, with the clatter of hooves, and rain on the streets, the colony wakes once more.

Well, its an exciting time to be blogging about "Risks to Global Civilization", what with Arab populations revolting against their dictators, nuclear power plants blowing up and spewing radioactivity, and now western militaries about to start bombing Libya any moment. I hardly know which way to turn.

However, its important not to lose track of the slower burning but equally important stories that affect the evolution of our global civilization. One of these is Iraqi oil production. Iraq is a country with enormous oil reserves that were rather under-exploited by regional standards due to the constant stream of wars and revolutions that have plagued the country for decades. The graph above shows the last decade and a bit of oil production - you can see the declining production in the early aughties (due to UN sanctions on Saddam Husseins regime), followed by the precipitous decline when the US invaded the country in 2003. After that, production rebounded to a low level, improved a bit with the increasing stability in the country associated with the Petraeus surge, but then plateaued at or below 2.5mbd.

Then in 2009, then oil minister Hussein al-Shahristani presided over an extremely ambitious plan to auction off contracts to manage Iraqs oil fields to the big international oil companies. All those contracts together sum to a total Iraqi production of around 12mbd, and they call for the operators to reach those plateaus in only seven years. This is enough oil, and soon enough, that it would have a fair chance of materially postponing the global peak of oil production, and thus reducing the pressure on the world to transform into new, yet unclear, political and economic configurations.

Almost no-one believed that large an increase in oil production would happen that fast, but skepticism ranged from those who thought the country would collapse back into civil war and produce less oil, rather than more, to those who thought that Iraq would eventually produce a great deal more oil, but that perhaps logistical bottlenecks would prevent it happening as fast as Dr al-Shahristani had contracted for, and perhaps the eventual plateau would be lower.

In any case, through most of 2010, Iraqi production languished at levels slightly below those achieved in 2009. Various stories came out as to this or that subcontract or drilling campaign, but it was too soon for it to translate into actual production. However, in December of 2010 (or January of 2011, depending on which data source you want to believe), we finally have an uptick of production that has taken it clearly above the post-surge plateau.

Whether this is the beginning of a long slow uneven ramp-up as the al-Shahristani plan begins to take effect, or whether continued instability will engulf the country, I leave the reader to decide. My guess is the former, but I acknowledge that huge uncertainty remains, so that reasonable people could differ.

10.18.11 Perth, Australia City of Canning Community Lecture

10.19.11 Adelaide, AU Ridley Center 6th Annual Australian Wine Industry Environment Conference, Speech

10.20.11 Adelaide, AU Palace Cinema Thinkers in Residence, Zero Waste Public Lecture

10.21.11 Melbourne, Australia Melbourne Town Hall City of Melbourne Public Lecture

10.21.11 Mornington, Australia Mornington Peninsula Theater Public Lecture

10.22.11 Melbourne, Australia Wheeler Centre Australian Conservation Foundation Public Lecture

10.23.11 Melbourne, Australia University of Melbourne, Buzzard Theater ACFs The Climate Project Weekend Forum, Keynote

10.24.11 Melbourne, Australia Marriott Hotel Australian Conservation Foundation Business Lunch

10.25.11 Victoria, Australia St. Kilda Town Hall Thriving Neighborhoods Conference, Keynote

10.26.11 Mackay, Australia Mackay Entertainment & Convention Centre Minerals Council of Australia SD 2011 Sustainable Development Conference, Keynote

10.27.11 Melbourne, Australia GHD Masterclass

10.28.11 Bendigo, Australia Bendigo Town Hall Bendigo Sustainability Group Business Lunch

10.28.11 Bendigo, Australia Bendigo Town Hall Bendigo Sustainability Group Awards Dinner

10.31.11 Sydney, Australia KPMG Masterclass

10.31.11 Sydney, Australia KPMG Public Lecture

11.1.11 Brisbane, Australia Queensland University of Technology Public Lecture

11.2.11 Brisbane, Australia Bond University Public Lecture

Last week, the Tehran Times noted that the Iranian oil bourse will start trading oil in currencies other than the dollar from March 20. This long-planned move is part of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vision of economic war with the west.

“The dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme is nothing more than a convenient excuse for the US to use threats to protect the reserve currency’ status of the dollar,” the newspaper, which calls itself the voice of the Islamic Revolution, said.

“Recall that Saddam [Hussein] announced Iraq would no longer accept dollars for oil purchases in November 2000 and the US-Anglo invasion occurred in March 2003,” the Times continued. “Similarly, Iran opened its oil bourse in 2008, so it is a credit to Iranian negotiating ability that the crisis’ has not come to a head long before now.”

Iran has the third-largest oil reserves in the world and pricing oil in currencies other than dollars is a provocative move aimed at Washington. If Iran switches to the non-dollar terms for its oil payments, there could be a new oil price that would be denominated in euro, yen or even the yuan or rupee.

India is already in talks with Iran over how it can pay for its oil in rupees.

Even more surprisingly, reports have suggested that India is even considering paying for its oil in gold bullion.

Energy analysts at Bernstein say the marginal cost of oil production, already $92 per barrel, is nearing $100 per barrel.

The marginal cost of the 50 largest oil and gas producers globally increased to US$92/bbl in 2011, an increase of 11% y-o-y and in-line with historical average CAGR growth. Assuming another double digit increase this year, marginal costs for the 50 largest oil and gas producers could reach close to US$100/bbl.

Their analysis does not include OPEC or former Soviet Union producers. But this does not matter. Since the former SU and OPEC arent going to grow their production fast enough to meet rising world demand the marginal cost of the other producers will determine at what price rising demand and market price will meet.

This rapidly rising marginal cost of production is what Peak Oil looks like. Peak Oil is going to happen because marginal cost will go too high for the world economy to afford to pay what it takes to boost production. At that point oil production will start falling. I originally expected peak production to happen at a much higher price for oil. But the European debt crisis, the deceleration of Chinese economic growth, and the continued weak US economic recovery make me think peak global oil production will happen at a price not much higher than current oil prices.

The costs of tight shale oil is very high and high oil prices are needed to keep it flowing.

"The United States is producing an awful amount of oil from tight shale and tight sands reservoirs... If oil prices send a signal and drop below the $90-$80 level it is going to be uneconomic to drill those well. So drilling will stop immediately," said Michel Hulme, fund manager at Lombard Odier.

How high an oil price is needed to start world oil demand headed on a downward slope? Higher or lower than the current price range near $90-100?

It was President Obama who famously said, after the 2008 vote that “Elections have Consequences.” Well two years later that dictum still applies (as it will two years from now). I bring it up since (h/t to Luis) the European Commission has just released a report on High Speed Rail which gives some of the progress that has been achieved on that continent since the first high speed line was inaugurated between Florence and Rome in 1977, though it was not until the service between Paris and Lyon in 1981 that the boom began. And now Europe has 3,861 miles of high-speed lines where trains can travel at faster than 150 mph (the fastest is over 220 mph in commercial service, 350 mph in trials). The inter-continental service is continuing to grow, though to facilitate progress the EU is seeking to develop common technical standards across the network. Unfortunately, after Tuesday, the prognosis is not that favorable to the change in the United States.



It will be a considerable boon in Europe, as expansion continues. Spain, for example, is planning on expanding the network so that 90% of the inhabitants are within 30 miles of a station. The results can be seen with the reduction in travel times between major cities. (And remember that the stations generally lie in the heart of the city, not an hour or so away as many airports now are).

It becomes faster, and more efficient, as well as (speaking personally) less physically tiring, to travel increasingly great distances in Europe by train, in contrast both with air and car. As a result, the report notes:

The advantages of HSLs, in terms of frequent connections (which can easily be modified depending on demand) and flexibility for passengers, have allowed the railways to compete more effectively against other modes of transport. Since 1997, over 6 million passengers a year have been using the Brussels–Paris HSL. As a result, flights have been cut back on this route.

Overall the growth in traffic has been a six-fold increase in usage.

Since high-speed lines were introduced, the number of passengers opting for this mode of transport has constantly increased. The number of passengers on all German, Belgian, Spanish, French, Italian and British lines increased from 15.2 billion passenger-kilometres (bpkm) in 1990 to 92.33 billion in 2008.

In looking at door-to-door travel times, the report chart shows that air becomes faster than conventional rail at a travel distance (in Europe) of around 240 miles, while air does not become faster than high speed lines until a distance of about 500 miles. I start to think about flying instead of driving at a distance of around 300 miles.

At the present time those dealing with the anticipated growth of the network over the next ten years have not, I suspect, taken into consideration the changing fuel availabilities of the next decade. If, as is a reasonable possibility, crude oil pops over $100 in the next year, thereby drawing increasing attention to the coming of Peak Oil, then it is likely that demand for improved rail traffic will likely rise significantly beyond the 25% increase in growth that has been projected. As I have noted before, trains in Europe are becoming increasingly full, at current rates of demand, even in off-peak hours. In the shorter term, as the report notes, train transport may also be helped by the increasing saturation of existing airports with flights. But it also leads to the problems of using rail to transport goods as well as people. These services have different imperatives, and so the report concludes that two separate systems will evolve. ...

Although the environmental impact of HSLs can also be reduced by improving the energy efficiency of trains and working on other elements of the vehicle, the carbon foot- print of rail travel is still much smaller than that of air or road travel. In the case of a journey from Paris to Marseilles, CO2 emissions in grams per passenger-kilometre (g/pkm) are just 2.7 g/pkm by HS train, compared with 153.0 g/pkm by air and 115.7 g/pkm by car. From the point of view of energy efficiency, HSTs also perform better, using 12.1 grams of petrol per passenger-kilometre, compared with 17.6 for conventional trains, 18.3 for a coach, 29.9 for a car and 51.5 for an aircraft.

So how does this tie into the first paragraph? Well in the United States, and a part of the Stimulus from the Federal Government, high speed lines had been proposed, with funding from Washington. However, with the election of Republican governors in several states due to receive that money, the plans may have to change. The new governor of Wisconsin, for example, has vowed to kill the high-speed line between Madison and Milwaukee. This was meant to be part of a network that would run from Chicago to Minneapolis, and stopping the project will likely cost the state money and jobs – but as a top campaign issue it is likely something the Governor-elect may have to follow up on.

Similarly in Ohio, the incoming Governor, John Kasich has said that “Passenger rail is dead in Ohio.” In this case he was discussing the $400 million plan to restart passenger service between Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland.

Work on the high-speed Florida link has already started, this is expected to carry up to two million folk a year from Tampa to Orlando or back, by 2015. It was not favored by Rick Scott who was just elected Governor of the State, though some of his opposition may come from the investment needed to extend the link from Orlando down to Miami. However the incoming Chair of the House Transportation Committee has already spoken out against it.

On the other hand the fate of the investment in a high-speed link in California has not been changed by the election. The backbone of that system, the 500 miles from LA to San Francisco is planned for completion by 2020.

As recently as this summer, while the economy unraveled (BusinessWeek, 7/14/08), I made two trips to Silicon Valley in the hopes of finding leaders who grasped the crisis—and the opportunity—inherent in the destruction of trust. I listened to Facebook executives but found them obsessed with how to monetize the site with advertising. Their users were not individuals, but "eyeballs." I asked Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt how he would develop and sustain the trust of his users. His response was to cite the provision of two classes of stock intended to insulate top management from investor pressures. I gave a talk on the crisis of trust. The response from self-described Internet court jester Esther Dyson was typical of what I had been hearing: "Personally, Im not that concerned if people dont trust large institutions."

A few weeks later economic panic gripped the stock market. I flipped on ABCs Sunday morning news show with George Stephanopoulos only to hear economist Larry Summers explaining that the surprising depth of the economic meltdown was due to the loss of trust in institutions. What he didnt say was that this loss of trust is a vast sea whose level has been rising for decades. The subprime debacle and the ensuing credit freeze simply marked the moment when the sea wall was finally breached. ...

So can we invent a business model in which advocacy, support, authenticity, trust, relationship, and profit are linked? Can I write that sentence without invoking fear, disbelief, cynicism, or peals of laughter? The ugly practices that killed trust seem intractable to most people, whether they are the ones trapped inside the money machine or on the receiving end of its operations. But after this election, the answer to these questions has irreversibly changed. The answer today would have to be not only "yes we can" but also "yes we must."