The Mound of Sound

The Massacheusetts Institute of Technology has announced a breakthrough in the effort to transform our windows into powerful solar energy collectors.

The MIT development uses a sequence of dyes that efficiently trap incoming light and transmit it to solar cells built into the window frame. From TechNewsWorld:

“The MIT procedure uses something called a “solar concentrator.” Unlike the 1970s-era devices, this creation is able to grab the light — and then hang onto it. The concentrator can send the light at a much longer distance than past models have achieved, shooting the energy straight into solar cells along the glass’s edge.

“A lot of technology goes into ensuring that the light is transmitted to the edge of the glass panel,” Rob Collins, professor of physics at the University of Toledo, told TechNewsWorld. “Oftentimes, when you illuminate a dye, it will radiate in all directions. What you want to do is capture it within a glass, [and] they have established a way of efficiently doing this.”

The solar concentrator results in 10 times more energy being created than what current systems can provide — and theoretically, it can do it at a fraction of the price.”

“You could do dual-use as a window or skylight, where you have some light passing through but also have power being produced by it. It could be interesting because it would have those aesthetic advantages,” [MIT researcher Jon] Mapel pointed out.

The MIT team estimates the products could become widely available within the next three years.”

More news about Afghanistan and, as expected, little good in it.

The Aussies have leaked a secret NATO study showing we’re not winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. To the contrary, a majority of those polled now see ISAF unfavourably. Maybe it has something to do with shelling and bombing the hell out of their villages, maybe not.

The Australian report was from last Saturday’s Syndney Morning Herald:

“AUSTRALIAN troops in southern Afghanistan face worsening security and their battlefield successes against the Taliban are not winning the support of local people, a confidential report and secret polling show.

The Sun-Herald has obtained a confidential security report that warns the capital, Kabul, will become virtually cut off from the rest of the country and is likely to be the target of a “spectacular” terrorist attack.

It says security in Oruzgan province, where about 1000 Australian troops are based and where Signaller Sean McCarthy was killed last week, will deteriorate, with the likelihood of more casualties among foreign troops.

The report, by international security consultants, says tactical successes against the Taliban are not being translated into long-term improvements in the lives of Afghan people.

The report’s warnings are underlined by a secret poll undertaken for NATO that reveals Oruzgan residents are increasingly negative towards foreign troops and regard their level of security as poor and getting worse.”

In Oruzgan province alone, where the Australians serve alongside the Dutch, 60% of the population has been found to be anti-NATO.

The Globe & Mail reported that the Canadian military has been reviewing the Soviet failure in Afghanistan in hopes of avoiding the same mistakes.

Researchers said the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is a major hindrance. The mujahedeen used the porous frontier to smuggle arms and resources into Afghanistan in the 1980s and are offering Taliban supporters the same supply route for insurgents and weapons today.

…In a separate memo that year, the same authors warn that NATO forces will never be able to stabilize Afghanistan until the country’s economy is sufficiently stable and growing to allow the fledging Afghan government to cover a substantial amount of its own security and welfare bills.

“The main reasons behind the fall of the pro-Moscow regime in Kabul were not defeat on the battlefield nor military superiority of the resistance but the regime’s failure to achieve economic sustainability and its overreliance on foreign aid,” says a document called Economic Development in Afghanistan during the Soviet Period 1979-1989: Lessons Learned from the Soviet Experience in Afghanistan.

…The authors say Afghanistan should redevelop its petroleum wealth as part of the solution. “Revenues from the sale of natural gas were a substantial part of Afghan state income until 1986. The development of oil and natural gas industries has great potential to benefit the Afghan economy.”

…Douglas Bland, chair of Defence Management Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, said a key lesson from the 1980s is not to leave in a hurried manner as the Soviets did.

“One of the big lessons for us is, don’t beat a hasty uncontrolled retreat because the place then really goes nuts,” Prof. Bland said. “The exit strategy has to be some very carefully considered process and based on a strong local security situation.”

“Canadians should be prepared for the fact that Canadian soldiers and policemen and others will be employed in security duties in Afghanistan for a very long time.”

Unfortunately Mr. (Dr.) Bland overlooks a fundamental point – time is not on our side. We’re infidels to the Afghan people. We’re ethnically, culturally, economically, politically, linguistically and religiously alien to them. We’re just the latest gang in centuries of Euros to set up shop in that country, stay a few years and then leave. General David Petraeus knows that counter-insurgency operations such as the Afghan effort have a markedly short shelf life before the foreign soldiers transition, in the eyes of the locals, from liberators to occupiers. The NATO report leaked by the Australians shows we’re already losing these people in droves.

Did someone mention “oil”? Why, of course, by all means build up Afghanistan’s oil and natural gas infrastructure. Pipelines. That’s the ticket, eh? One problem. We don’t control the countryside. We’re a tiny, garrison force. We don’t have but a fraction of the troops we need just to defend against the Taliban. Who in hell is going to defend vast stretches of pipelines that can be so easily destroyed with just a small amount of explosives? If the Taliban can virtually surround Kabul and cut it off from the rest of the country, pipelines will be destroyed as fast as they’re built – just another way of so many to undermine the Afghan people’s confidence in their government.

Then there’s the pipeline route. It’s planned to run through Farah, Kandahar and Helmand provinces, all Taliban hotbeds. From there it’s straight into Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, itself embroiled in an insurgency (with some American support). If the bad guys have a reserve of people willing to blow themselves up at the first sight of a NATO patrol, how hard will it be to persuade folks to place explosives on vulnerable pipelines?

The Globe’s Paul Koring went to Moscow to see what he could learn about the Russian experience in Afghanistan and got an earful from retired four star general Ruslan Aushev who spent five years with the Soviet army during the occupation:

“You are just repeating our mistakes,” Mr. Aushev said in an elegant, memento-filled office close to the Russian Duma.

“Most Afghans still live in a feudal society, in villages far from the cities,” he said. “For them, there is no difference between being bombed by the Soviets and now being bombed by the Americans … and it won’t succeed.”

“The Taliban may not be able to win militarily but they can’t be defeated and sooner or later the Western alliance will be forced with pullout,” he warned.

Support for the insurgents will grow the longer the foreign armies remain in Afghanistan, he said. Although the Soviets deployed more than 100,000 soldiers across Afghanistan – roughly double the number of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops currently deployed – and trained an Afghan army three times the size of Kabul’s current security forces, it was never enough, Mr. Aushev said.

“If we wanted stability we would have needed 800,000 soldiers,” he said, echoing the estimates of some unheeded American generals who called for much larger occupation forces in Iraq.”

The leaked NATO report is interesting. It clearly contains nothing that our adversaries – the insurgents, the drug barons and the corrupt politicians and government officials who collaborate with them – don’t already know. The risk to NATO is that the information might reach the voters in its member nations and further erode support for the hapless adventure in Afghanistan. After all the core element of guerrilla warfare is the struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the public and that’s a struggle NATO has to win both in Afghanistan and at home. If it loses either, it loses both.

We ought to be wary about the latest oil and gas proposals. Look at the facts. Our forces, alien as they are to the Afghan peoples, have been in-country since 2001, seven years already. We’re now propping up a decidedly unpopular central government and a power structure predatory to its citizens. We’re wearing out our welcome. Petraeus himself warned of the very limited shelf-life of counterinsurgency warfare in which the “liberator” comes to be seen as the “occupier.” We’re now in the “occupier” stage and we can only reinforce that perception, and play into the Taliban’s propaganda machine, if we get involved in developing, managing and militarily defending the country’s gas and oil resources.

With the Afghan mission already faltering, adding an oil dimension to it can only undermine its credibility with the Afghan peoples. We need an influx of American troops to help hold off the Taliban, not to defend long tracts of steel pipe. If the American army doesn’t secure the pipelines, the job will fall to someone else. Can you say Blackwater?

If Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach wants to protect his supposed, Tar Sands bonanza, he knows just how to do it. In fact, he keeps telling us he wants to do it. The problem is, we’ve been waiting for years for any sign that Special Ed or his predecessors will or even can do it.

The “It” is carbon sequestration. Alberta produces the dirtiest oil on the planet but whenever anyone points that out, Ed tells us what his employers, Big Oil, have been prattling on about for years – the answer is to take all that carbon output and sink it deep underground where it can do no harm to man or any other lifeform.

Ed’s even put up two billion petrobucks to fund a sequestration initiative, or so he says. He wants you to take his word for all of this. Just don’t ask Ed or Big Oil to lift the veil so that we can see the awesome results of their efforts. That would be rude, wouldn’t it?

The Alberta Tories are possibly even more indentured to Big Oil than the gang of squatters that currently occupy the White House. If it wasn’t for this windfall of unearned, subterranean treasure, the province might actually have to live off the labours of its own people. In today’s Alberta that must seem a thoroughly scary prospect indeed.

But TWO BILLION DOLLARS for carbon sequestration, that’s pretty impressive, rien? Hardly. The Americans recently scrapped their own sequestration trial after many years and countless bags of treasury doubloons because they couldn’t make it work. In fact, the technology has been or is being attempted elsewhere but… that’s where these alchemist’s tails always end, “but.”

The science and technology is much too complex for the likes of you and me to really comprehend which explains why the Eds of this world use such childlike language when they speak to us of these things. But you don’t really need to understand coal seam geology to sort your way through this anymore than you need to know what makes the canary fall of its perch and die in the mine.

Here’s the dead parrot for carbon sequestration claims. In fact you’ve got a flock of dead parrots, all of them lying at your feet.

The ever popular Norwegian Blue. If Special Ed really believed that the miracle of carbon sequestration was in his hands, why would he bridle at the first suggestion of capping carbon emissions?

The Reunion Ring-Neck. Taking Ed at his word, why are his projections for Alberta’s carbon emissions so high as to render futile Our Furious Leader Harpo’s “50 by 2050” commitment completely unobtainable?

The African Grey. If this vaunted carbon sequestration technology that Big Oil has been hailing for so many years existed, where the hell is it? They’ve been promising this FOR YEARS but never allowing us so much as a peek at anything resembling a practical, carbon sequestration system.

My favourite, the Bismark’s Hanging Parrot. Ignoring the Blue and the Grey (and that pesky Ring-Neck) altogether, why are the Petro-Morlocks so stubborn about timelines for their eco-salvation technology? Could it be they don’t want us to know that, even if they could turn lead into gold, it would take two decades, possibly more to refine and deploy the technology?

The Scaly-headed Pionus. If Big Oil and its legislative henchmen can perfect carbon sequestration, why are they doing so precious little about the other environmental ills associated with the Tar Sands? Why are those oily tailing ponds now visible from space? How about Fort Chipewyan downriver and its strange cancer rates? How about the other aspects of land, air and water pollution? What about the inordinate strain on the region’s fresh water and natural gas resources?

You see, everywhere you look it’s the same thing – dead parrots. That’s got to tell you something.

It’s the mantra of the rightwing – deregulate now, deregulate everything. The idea is that it’s always better to rely on free enterprise, on the markets to self-regulate. After all, they know what’s best, not some bureaucrat regulator.

Brian Mulroney deregulated Canada’s airline industry. At the time we had a reasonably stable system of carriers headed by Air Canada and Canadian Pacific Airlines, two flag carriers. Below them were a stable of charter and regional carriers.

One of the advantages of airline regulation was the advancement of public policy. The big carriers were given preferred access to the major, big-city and international routes but they were also expected to bring air service to smaller centres that might otherwise not have been served. Like the early investment in microwave towers, regulated air travel helped open up Canada’s remote regions.

Everything seemed to be ticking alone reasonably well when the whole business got overrun by free enterprise in the wake of Mulroney’s deregulation of the industry. Air Canada was privatized and began the steady descent that continues to this day. Canadian Pacific got into an aggressive takeover and expansion mood, in the process swallowing Pacific Western Airlines and even Max Ward’s Wardair, emerging as the bloated, Canadian Airlines International.

Both airlines engaged in a mutually-destructive air war, each scheduling unnecessary flights trying to muscle the other out on major routes such as Vancouver-Toronto. The revenue lifeblood drained out of both, forcing the final showdown.

The inevitable dog fight ensued (not the aerial kind, the sort that involves dogs tossed into a ring). Canadian tried to salvage itself by overrunning Air Canada. The former People’s Airline fought back. Canadian Airlines finally collapsed under its own weight and Air Canada got busy picking at the corpse before wrestling with its own insolvency.

Where are we today? That all depends on your perspective. If you don’t recall Canadian air travel at its zenith in the late 70’s/early 80’s, today’s airline service might not look godawful. If you do, it does.

But the airline industry doesn’t stand alone as an indictment of deregulation. A more recent example is the sub-prime mortgage debacle in the United States. Rather than intervening to regulate excesses, the Fed sat back and let havoc ensue. In the months leading up to the bubble bursting, two out of three new mortgages in California were “interest only.”

America was awash in cheap, unregulated money for which there were far too few legitimately qualified borrowers. That didn’t bother many mortgage lenders who weren’t planning on holding on to the securities anyway but, instead, bundling them and flogging them out to eager buyers. Lending mortgage money became a means to create product for the “asset-backed commercial paper” market. Insane? Of course. Inherently self-destructive? Absolutely. Yet these realities don’t bother the deregulated hucksters who see easy, short-term money and have no plans on being around for the collapse anyway.

These are just a couple of examples of the downside of deregulation. There is an unspoken assumption in deregulation – that the newly deregulated will act rationally and in the best interests of their industry and society.

Government doesn’t deregulate an industry hoping it will fail and collapse. Deregulation is always presented as a means to free up and thereby strengthen the affected sector. The logic is always the same – the industry knows better than the government regulating it. In reality that’s usually true. The industry usually does know better. However there’s a giant leap between knowing what’s best for one’s own industry and actually doing what’s best instead of what offers the greatest, short-term reward or immediate competitive advantage.

I’m not sure whether the problem is inherent in deregulation of itself or in our poor grasp of the deregulation process. Maybe we just don’t understand how to deregulate effectively. Maybe we’re too quick to throw the doors wide open before laying the groundwork for self-regulation.

Was the implosion of the Canadian airline industry not foreseeable? I think it was. Was the subprime collapse not foreseeable? Sure it was. What about the preceding bubble, the dot.com collapse? Not foreseeable? Of course it was. Enron, WorldCom? You decide.

The subprime fiasco may be the straw that broke the camel’s back. E.J. Dionne, writing in the Washington Post, claims that a new reality is settling over American capitalism:

“Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn’t matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to “grow the pie” is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is “protectionism.”

“… [In a recent speech, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke sounded like a born-again New Dealer in calling for “a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers.”

Bernanke said the Fed needed more authority to get inside “the structure and workings of financial markets” because “recent experience has clearly illustrated the importance, for the purpose of promoting financial stability, of having detailed information about money markets and the activities of borrowers and lenders in those markets.” Sure sounds like Big Government to me.

This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early ’80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What’s becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.

[Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Barney] Frank also calls for new thinking on the impact of free trade. He argues it can no longer be denied that globalization “is a contributor to the stagnation of wages and it has produced large pools of highly mobile capital.” Mobile capital and the threat of moving a plant abroad give employers a huge advantage in negotiations with employees. “If you’re dealing with someone and you can pick up and leave and he can’t, you have the advantage.”

“Free trade has increased wealth, but it’s been monopolized by a very small number of people,” Frank said. The coming debate will focus not on shutting globalization down but rather on managing its effects with an eye toward the interests of “the most vulnerable people in the country.”

We’re only just beginning to recognize that our notions of capitalism are based on a deeply flawed understanding of economics. It’s not all “supply and demand” curves any more. Our traditional economic models based on the mythical producer and mythical customer are increasingly failing us. Some of the best minds in the business are now introducing us to the powerful realities of things like social economics and environmental economics. We’re beginning to see the notion of “costs” as never before.

We’re entering an era in which “growth” may no longer be the saviour of our economies and our societies. We’re witnessing the inescapable consequences of massive growth in emerging economies such as China’s and India’s. We’re confronting the realities of resource depletion and renewable resource exhaustion and the resultant excessive demand. This rising tide doesn’t float all boats, it causes some to settle lower in the water.

As we adapt to these new economic realities we’ll probably require more regulation, not less, to help us adjust. Call it protectionism if you like but unless you’ve got a better idea…

Now, as I noted a tad prematurely in my previous post, I’ve gone fishin’. See ya later.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/10/AR2008071002264.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Ciao.,

MoS

Looking at carbon emissions on a national basis, China versus the United States for example, is simplistic and misleading. China has four times the population of America. So, even if China has just edged out the U.S. in total emissions, it’s per capita emissions are still a small fraction of the carbon footprint of the average American.

What’s fair in that? Nothing. If you want to use that approach, why not judge the United States against a smaller country, say Lichtenstein? That would be silly, wouldn’t it. Of course. America would say, “but you’re just a fraction of our size, so it’s not fair.” Hmmm, isn’t that what China and India are saying? Maybe we should assess America against the carbon emissions of Malawi. No, that would be even sillier, wouldn’t it? Sure. Malawi’s national GHG emissions and it’s per capita emissions are miniscule compared to America’s.

Trying to come up with a meaningful assessment on a nation by nation basis is virtually impossible. It leads each nation to seize the particular measure that best suits them as the one to use. The most populous countries want to go per capita. The most energy-consumptive nations want to the test to be total national emissions (provided the small countries are left out of it). The Third World? Who cares what they think? Apparently nobody.

There’s also the debate about contemporary emissions versus historical emissions. The developing world says to the West, “you got rich by contaminating everyone’s atmosphere, so you ought to make the deepest cuts.” The West would like to ignore that point altogether.

Now there’s another issue being raised, one that’s of direct importance to Canada. A new report shows that nearly a quarter of China’s total carbon emissions arise from the manufacture of goods for export. Who should be responsible for the problem – China or the countries that get the goods? From the Environmental News Network:

“[British] researchers, who embarked on their project in 2006 and have an end date in 2009, wrote a commentary note called the Tyndall Centre Briefing Note on the G8 meeting and suggested that a nation’s entire carbon footprint should also include imported goods and services manufactured elsewhere.

It’s an argument that is heard frequently. The supply chain logic follow through is gaining momentum in the corporate world these days in particular. As carbon calculations are increasingly getting more sophisticated, more and more companies are getting to the nitty gritty parts of their carbon emissions by including data on their suppliers.

The Tyndal researchers, Tao Wang and Jim Watson, make a number of strong points. First of all they suggest that China’s carbon emissions from goods exported to the first world are the equivalent of more than double the UK’s emissions or the whole of Japan’s. That is quite hefty. Then they claim that industrialised countries are both historically responsible for the majority of carbon emissions to date and that they’re likely to have accelerated the rapid growth in emissions in these countries.

The arguments build up to the logical deduction that it makes sense for the developed world to get on with cleaning up the environment by imposing strict rules and by helping the poor countries along the road.

Wang and Watson’s calculation of just how China’s greenhouse gas breaks down firmly supports this argument. The numbers are taken from China’s official 2004 data (the most recent year for which full data was available) and they indicate that China is now the world’s top polluting country (having overtaken the US). And these results may be on the low side because between 2004 and 2006, China’s export increased from $32bn to $177bn.“

The same issue arises out of the Athabasca Tar Sands project. The Tar Sands (and no, they’re not “oil” sands) have become the strategic energy darling of the United States. Most of the production of synthetic oil is destined for the American market. Washington is urging us to quadruple production of their SUV juice. Why should the U.S. get the oil while leaving Canada saddled with responsibility for the emissions created to get them their fuel? It’s not even as though Big Oil was paying the Alberta government anything remotely approaching realistic royalties.

Slashing global carbon emissions isn’t going to be easy but there’s almost no chance of it happening if we insist on simplistic approaches to emissions allocations. If emissions are measured in a way that’s unrealistic or that fails to recognize valid factors such as population disparities, export production and so on, those calculations will be rejected as unfair by one or more of the key players. Unfairness dooms any hope of coming up with a global solution and, as far as the global warming problem is concerned, nothing short of a global solution will work.

The Canadian public isn’t put off by skyrocketing gas prices, they still want urgent action to combat climate change from their government.

A Canadian Press/Harris Decima poll found Canadians, by a 2-1 margin, want strong action on the environment as a way to find greener, alternative sources of energy.

Gee, given the level of popular support, what could be holding our Furious Leader back? Oh, silly me, I forgot – it’s his boss in Washington and their mutual pals better known as Big Oil.

But wait, didn’t these guys just agree to a 50% cut in emissions by 2050 at the G8 summit? Of course they did but, then again, they would have as easily promised everyone a tasty hunk of green cheese from the moon by 2050 if only they’d been asked.

Barack says “soon,” McSame says “sometime, maybe” but that’s not good enough for the Iraqi government.

Iraqi prime minister Nouri al Maliki wants a fixed date for the withdrawal of American forces and he wants it enshrined in the “status of forces” agreement now being negotiated between Baghdad and Washington. From the Associated Press:

“Maliki said in a meeting with Arab diplomats in Abu Dhabi that his country also has proposed a short-term interim memorandum of agreement rather than the more formal status of forces agreement the two sides have been negotiating.
The memorandum “now on the table” includes a formula for the withdrawal of US troops, he said.

“The goal is to end the presence [of foreign troops],” Maliki said.”

But, but, but… what about those 58-military bases the Pentagon is planning to operate in Iraq (30-already exist, 28-new installations to be built), and that Vatican-sized US embassy? And what about all that oil? Yeah, that’s right, the oil.

McCain still can’t bring himself to say the “w” word – withdrawal. All his spokesman offered up was that the senator “has always said that conditions on the ground – including the security threats posed by extremists and terrorists, and the ability of Iraqi forces to meet those threats – would be key determinants in US force levels.” Read between the lines and you get “we’re not going anywhere.”

Meanwhile Afghanisnam is quickly turning into a regional conflict. Kabul is blaming yesterday’s suicide bombing of the Indian embassy as the work of Pakistan’s wily intelligence agency, the ISI. India has long worked in Afghanistan, not so much out of concern for the Afghans, but to get at Pakistan. There’s nothing India would like better than a Kabul government truly at odds with Islamabad. There’s been no proof yet that the Pakistanis were actually behind the embassy attack but it wouldn’t be surprising either.