Certainly the theme for Saturday in Copenhagen, if not Sunday as well, was mobilization. 100,000 marching from the city centre to the Bella Centre, location of the climate change conference, was impressive. More impressive was the diversity of the crowd. Both the international mix and range of organizations represented was phenomenal and in our experience unprecedented (we deal with this particular issue elsewhere).

While it led the mainstream news, to concentrate on the Copenhagen march is to miss the point of what is occuring around the world. According to the wonderful people at 350.org, over 3,000 actions took place globally. Take a couple of minutes to check out some of the media on their site. It’s easy for passionate NGO types to overplay these kinds of actions; 50,000 people marched in London last week for The Wave, In isolation that represents a medium sized UK demo. But add that to what’s going on in 100 or so countries within the past seven days though and a scale emerges. A scale that because of its distribution is easy to miss and easier still to ignore.

We saw Dieter Helm this November in London claim, perhaps correctly, that climate change had yet to produce a real political movement, that traditional politicians had yet to be given a mandate by their constituents. Reasons for this are legion, and it’s more than we have time for tonight to go into. However, around COP15 a light is being lit, and that light is illuminating individuals, communities and even whole nations (Tuvalu, the Maldives et al), who previous to now have not had a mainstream media cycle to jump onto. So a question for us in the NGO and media world is this: how do we turn this spotlight into that mandate Helm referred to? What do we do, and what to we tell Tuvalu to do between now the end of COP15 and Bonn, the next time we can reasonably expect international climate change negotiations to figure on front pages.

Another question then emerges. Yes we can keep shining the light, but sooner, not later, we have to throw the torch to our policy makers and let them run with the lamp. I’m recalling here a recent late night dicussion wiht @jamieandrews and @danielvockins. On whom, we asked ourselves, do we concentrate our efforts. Who are the tradionally invisible policy advisors to government and opposition we need to get to. And crucially, what do we give them for the win. For the language we need to communicate with is that of winning and losing in policy and media cycles. That’s what’s going to get the attention of the latter day Alastair Campbell’s, particularly in the UK and particularly five months from an election.

Back to COP15. 350.org and their like have done a huge job connecting the disparate dots all around the world. Using Copenhagen as the center of a web which brings in strands from all over. We all need to keep joining these. This isn’t about Copenhagen. It’s about giving all those who took part in actions over the past 48 hours the ability to mandate their leaders.

BTW, Keepfakingit will be moving on to the numbers beat Monday as the negotiations start to intensify.

[I'll link this up later, too much to do now]

Some consensus building and optimism from the editorial in today’s Financial Times [registration wall].
They go on to wade in on the carbon tax vs emissions trading debate. No surprise where our neo-liberal friends come out in that debate:

In theory, a global carbon tax could do this. In the actual world, a global scheme of tradeable emissions quotas is the best solution. To work, such a scheme, which must form the core of any Copenhagen deal, has to meet three conditions: it must lay down a time-path for emissions cuts over several decades (to let businesses and households predict the net costs of such long-term investments as houses and power plants); allow for adjustments if – but only if – the science changes; and impose binding limits on all countries.

There’s a bit about the fairness of developing countries catching a carbon break and then some big numbers:

Selling unused quotas would, moreover, be hugely lucrative for poorer countries. At today’s European carbon price, yearly carbon emissions have a market value of more than €500bn, a figure which could increase significantly as the global ceiling took effect. The potential transfers from rich countries resulting from quota trading could easily swamp the €100bn per year the European Commission has estimated poor countries will need to tackle climate change.

Most countries seem to grasp the gravity of the challenge. If they can also see what is in it for them, a deal may yet be within reach.

It’s a bit late this evening for me to jump into the Stern Report to see if these numbers stack up but it’s a lot of money either way. I also think that last paragraph is crucial. We have a lot of heavy hitting economists on these issues right now. I have my doubts as to whether runaway CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be halted, not to mind lowered within a traditional western capitalism framework but it sure looks like these guys are going to make an effort.

Frank McDonald writes in the Irish Times that as the EU has grown, its moral strength on environmental issues has weakened. Our friends in the east it seems want to retain their “hot air”. Seems like it’s not the Polish plumbers we should be worried about, but rather the Polish plumbing.

[Hot air] refers to the tradeable bank of credits built up by Poland and others as a result of the collapse of their Soviet-style economies in the early 1990s. Potentially, these assigned amount units (AAUs) – also held in abundance by Russia – are worth a fortune. But they could seriously undermine the international carbon market.

The compromise agreed by EU environment ministers at their meeting in Luxembourg on Wednesday said the unrestricted “banking” and use of AAUs at their full value to comply with commitments on emission reductions beyond 2012 would have to be “addressed appropriately” to ensure the environmental integrity of a Copenhagen deal.

Frankie Frankie also mentions poorer EU states’ unwillingness to pay for original members’ polluting past (that’s since ~1750 for those of you in the UK):

Poland, together with other former Soviet satellites, sees no reason why it should have to dig deeply into its own coffers to help other countries combat climate change. (It also wants to hang onto its carbon-intensive coal-fired power stations as long as possible).

Heads of state meet in Brussels to get this sorted. They then have some last minute talks in Barcelona in November. If they can’t find a solution by then it’s tough to see one coming in the pressure cooker that will be COP-15. And ff the EU can’t get their own yard into shape it’s hard to see what leverage they can assert over the US or China.

From the Guardian

I’m using the Trafigura / Ivory Coast / press gagging travesty of human decency as a case story tomorrow. It’s shocking how little attention this is getting in the main stream media. Here are my notes, I’ll add some opinion tomorrow.

The Guardian broke this in the UK so lots of links are from there.

Video
First off check out this video featuring Real Victims ® http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/sep/18/trafigura-ivory-coast-probo-koala

Ok, now for some background.

The Guardian publish this background on September 16th. Some highlights:

Trafigura trader James McNicol wrote from the firm’s Oxford Street office block: “This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars … Each cargo should make 7m!!”

The plan was to buy a tanker load of dirty fuel, clean it on board, sell the good stuff and then Get rid of the slops.

Trafigura’s London head of gasoline trading, Leon Christophilopoulos, suggested a desperate remedy: a floating refinery: “I don’t know how we dispose of the slops and I don’t imply we would dump them, but for sure, there must be some way to pay someone to take them.”

The Probo Koala, was anchored off Gibraltar. Between April and June, it took three cargoes, each of 28,000 tonnes of contaminated gasoline [and cleaned them]. The Probo Koala’s spare tanks soon filled up with waste containing freshly created sulphur compounds.

The waste was shipped to Amsterdam where nobody would take it. So it set sail for the Ivory Coast. (Note: the Basel Ban, as well as the Bamako Convention, contains strict rules against the export of waste from developed to developing countries and according to Greenpeace clearly applies to this case.)

What followed was an environmental and human catastrophe.

The waste ended up being tipped all around Abidjan. It would have contained such unstable substances as mercaptans, mercaptides, sodium sulphide and dialkyl disulphides. Those living and working nearby risked burns, nausea, diarrhoea, loss of consciousness and death from contact with such compounds.

Thousands fell ill, the story broke locally and ultimately a case was taken against Trafigura:

As 31,000 Africans, many desperately poor, joined in an unprecedented group action for compensation organised by London lawyer Martyn Day, Trafigura tried repeatedly to give the impression that its ship had only pumped out ordinary slops from tank-cleaning: a completely different type of activity.

Trafigura settled with a £30m deal. That’s just under £1,000 per person involved.

The Guardian carry some details of the settlement here:

The settlement will cost Trafigura slightly more than 10% of its reported $440m (£270m) profits last year, and comes on top of the £100m the company had already previously paid the Ivorian government for a clean-up, also without conceding legal liability.

Hey, it’s like, 2009!

One of the big questions here is why is this only getting decent media coverage in the last month. The answer of course is lawyers.

This from the Financial Times:

The case cast an unaccustomed and uncomfortable light on a company that had until then enjoyed a low-profile existence as one of the world’s leading traders in commodities, including oil.

Trafigura has made heavy use of libel lawyers – including two defamation lawsuits and at least one court injunction – to combat coverage of the case, in which it continues to deny liability.

The company and Leigh Day & Co, lawyers for the Ivorians, reached their financial deal to settle allegations that the waste dumping had caused flu-like symptoms in people who were close to the site.

CSR: Letter to the Editor

Is this kind of City-media-lawyer-we’ve-got-bigger-dicks-than-you shit even legal? We’re going to find out, Conservative Peter Bottomley thinks not.

According to (who else but) the Guardian, he told MPs he was reporting Carter-Ruck, to the Law Society, saying that no lawyers should be able to inhibit the reporting of parliament.

“I will be seeking their advice on whether it is proper for any lawyer to purport or intend to inhibit the reporting of parliament,” Bottomley told the Guardian.

“It is the job of the press to make aware to all what is known by a few. Any court action which inhibits that should be approved at a very high level, with full justifications, and in normal circumstances, should not be made in secret.”

And just to reassure us all, GB has called the case “unfortunate”. Yeah thanks Gordon. Just like how it’s going to be “unfortunate” you’ll be an ex-prime minister next June.

In terms of media discourse, the breaking of the court ordered gag is interesting. I’m not sure it’s altogether Earth shattering though. Here’s what Guardian supremo Alan Rusbridger has to say. Go read it yourself. I’ve got other things to worry about.

So the media were bound by the laws of the land and those that would abuse them. What about NGOs. As far back as September 2006 Greenpeace were all over this.. Here’s an interesting para from that press release:

One question is whether the wastes were entirely generated via on board operations. In a statement to the press the charterer Trafigura states that the caustic nature of the waste was from use of caustic soda as a detergent for tank washings. However given the rarity of using caustic soda to wash tanks that carry refined petroleum products, it is not unreasonable to consider that the waste could come from land based sources.

After the Ivory Coast government and Trafigura reached a deal on cleanup costs, but importantly not on compensation for victims or even an admittance of culpability, Greenpeace came back with more.

“One cannot do justice without knowing the facts in their entirety. At this stage, it would have been more appropriate to secure a provisional settlement with an advance payment, rather than one that closes the books definitively, especially when the full extent of liabilities have not yet been determined,” said Jasper Teulings, Senior Legal Counsel, Greenpeace International.

Although this settlement has no bearing on the legal rights of the victims of this disaster, it is feared that the victims will now receive little, if any, support from their government in pursuing justice.

“This Faustian deal may provide the Cote D’Ivoire the much-needed funds to deal with the clean-up, but it is by no means fair. Trade in hazardous waste is a serious crime under international law (2), and by agreeing to this deal, the President has signed away his country’s right to bring a criminal corporation to justice,” said Helen Perivier, Toxics Campaigner, Greenpeace International, “The ease with which international environmental laws are broken and questionable deals exchanged for real justice, painfully highlights yet again, that the international community creates laws but simply lacks the political will to implement and enforce them.”

And Greenpeace is continuing the fight to convict Trafigura of a crime. Something that has not happened anywhere yet. This from Reuters.

Trafigura for their part have a series of related press releases on their site. Headlines such as
“High Court confirms that Probo Koala ‘slops’ cannot have caused deaths, miscarriages, or other serious or long-term injuries”
and
“SETTLEMENT VINDICATES TRAFIGURA”
aim to tell their side of the story. No doubt Carter-Ruck will have signed those release off after careful inspection.

The ship

In a move straight from Radar, here’s four links from the past week or so. Keepfakingit says yes to the best.

A Liberal Defence of Money by William Davies in The Liberal. Davies throws some high-value grenades back in the direction of Chris Anderson and the Free brigade.

The COP15 Train is being organized by the Campaign against Climate Change to get you to Denmark for some mid-talks debate. All aboard from St. Pancras International Friday 11th December.

Penn Station, New York. The way it used to be. It cost too much to clean the windows…

NEF, The New Economics Foundation. The independent think-and-do tank that inspires and demonstrates real economic well-being. The aim, to improve quality of life by promoting innovative solutions that challenge mainstream thinking on economic, environment and social issues.

Not sure what A-List artists and pro-wrestling has to do with bears. Here’s what the WWF website says:

For over three decades, our army of sturdy panda collecting boxes stood outside shops and offices around the UK, but were all recalled in 2007.

Rather than recycling the lot, we got together with specialist curators Artwise and challenged top British artists to reincarnate them as innovative and memorable artworks, to communicate the importance of our work in a truly inspirational way.

“Back to nature” is not a trip to the country-side. It’s a total realignment of humanity’s place in the encyclopedia. That realignment, or rather that correction of a categorization that should never have happened in the first place is one of the core treatises of the Dark Mountain Manifesto. And within the manifesto is as strong a call to action for writers, musicians and artists of all hues, to embrace a new thinking of our place in the world as Keepfakingit has seen for an awful long time.

The Manifesto is the work of Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth. My involvement in the project is slight. I answered a crowd-sourcing call for funding over Twitter and donated a small amount towards the publication of the first edition. The attraction at the off was simple. Here’s a project that seeks to address climate change through a wholly fresh literary/artistic prism. At least that’s what the pitch said, and that was good enough for me and my PayPal account.

The meat and potatoes of the slim hand-stitched 18 page tome as I see them:

Thesis 1.
Civilization is built on little more than beliefs. As beliefs fail, so too does civilization.

Thesis 2.
We are not apart from nature, from the world around us.

Climate change is the ultimate clash of civilization versus nature. Things won’t be fine. We’re not even sure if we want it to be fine.

Thesis 3.
What if we looked down? We believe it’s time to look down.

Thesis 4.
Artists are the only ones who can uncouple mankind’s ego from the blinkered view that separates us from nature.

Thesis 5.
Ecocide demands a response.

So Hine and Kingsnorth clearly aren’t overly concerned with telling us to change the lightbulbs or put a brick in the loo. In fact they don’t give a shit about that sort of middle-class-doing-my-bit-to-waylay-my-guilt approach and I’ll warrant the organic field-reared Spring lamb on offer down at Waitrose isn’t top of their shopping list either.

And why should they be. The time for small actions is over. This Manifesto is about the big stuff. The fragility of our social fabric and how that fabric, due to the wear and tear being inflicted upon in by climate change is about to rip right in half.

Bertrand Russell and Joseph Conrad are both quoted on the way to the assertion that

Our civilisation is built on little more than the belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.

And it is in the belief that mankind is apart from nature that the problem starts.

The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won.

So it is nature that will suffer the ravages of climate change. But as luck would have it we (humanity) are outside of that nature. Yes Katrina and her bad tempered companions will occasionally give us a good going over but we’ll come up with solutions, “solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius.”

In the Guardian last week George Monbiot debated Kingsnorth on the merits of this viewpoint. It’s a debate that every climate change activist should read, one which should, if only for a moment, make all of us who consider ourselves part of this movement question what it is we’re trying to prevent. Is it nature’s destruction, the destruction of our own civilisation or something else entirely? And isn’t even the term “nature’s destruction” rather missing the point if we are after all joined at the hip.

During the debate Monbiot accuses Kingsnorth of actively longing for the other Eden, the post-fabric-ripped Mad Max visage. After having re-read the Manifesto it is more apparent that Kingsnorth does indeed seem to come out in favour of the nuclear option. But what of it? As a society, a civilization, surely we must once in a while look in the mirror in an effort to see of what sort of stuff we’re made. And if we don’t like what we see what is wrong with having the balls to put another vision on the table.

And this is a crucial point. Those ascending the Dark Mountain would have us believe we’re scared even to do that, to imagine. In their words scared to “look down”. And scared the economists, the priests of mono-theism and the politicians should be because this reflection offers them only an end to their way of thinking, doing and controlling.

So to the Manifesto’s ultimate cry. Our “leaders” won’t allow us to look at ourselves with a clear gaze. They won’t allow us examine ourselves and build that metaphysical bridge back to nature, the logical response to a diagnosis that is writ large by the Manifesto.
But ecocide demands a response they proclaim.

That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilization itself? What gallery mounts an exhibitions equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord?

We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.

[Checklisted as Uncivilised artists before their time are Robinson Jeffers, John Berger, Alan Garner, Wendell Berry, WS Merwin, Mary Oliver and of course, Cormac McCarthy]

This is the call for Uncivilised Art. Art that offers a non-human perspective. Being literary types Hine and Kingsnorth’s concern is writing in particular. They insist that this Uncivilised writing

comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation, but from somewhere on its wilder fringes… from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing.

Ah, so these guys are hippies in disguise, looking for this century’s Watership Down, or Call of the Wild. That’s the cynical conclusion, one which is fended off immediately:

It is not environmental writing, for there is too much of that already… it is not nature writing, for there is no such thing as nature as distinct from people…and it is not political writing, with which the world is already flooded, for politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and decaying from within.
The shifting of emphasis from man to notman: this is the aim of Uncivilised writing.

You can bring an artist to the Dark Mountain…

One doesn’t have to travel all the way down Kingsnorth’s Damascene highway of civilisation to appreciate the value of at least daring to look at the map. If we are to fight the almost unwinnable fight against the ravages of climate change we had better know what we want the win to look like. And it is the job of our artist to start painting what that looks like.

The Dark Mountain Manifesto may be be considered a preparatory sketch in this regard. If so, only one question remains, do our artists have the imagination to use it?

I’m involved in organizing a screening of Age of Stupid next Saturday 22nd August. 8pm.

Here’s the official blurb:

The Age of Stupid is the new four-year epic from McLibel director Franny Armstrong. Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? MORE

If you can come please do, it’s free in, we’ll have a cheap bar and the movie itself shouldn’t be missed.

It’s taking place on the roof of The Printworks, Ashwin St, Dalston (E8 3DL) and it will look something like this:

Nicholas Stern in his introduction to ‘A Blueprint for a Safer Planet‘ outlines as succinctly as I’ve seen it just why Copenhagen this December is the most important international conference so far this century.

The Copenhagen deal must be more ambitious [than Kyoto], more international and much stronger. We must agree not only on our ambitions but on the details of action; the timetable is very tight. It will not be easy, but success is vital to the future of the planet.

If we do succeed, we will have created the potential not only to provide a serious response to the problem of climate change, but also to unleash an era of internationalism which could make the world much better at dealing with some of the other important international issues of our time, above all the fight against poverty. If we fail, the confidence and trust necessary to create and sustain an international agreement may be destroyed and the confidence of investors and markets, crucial for the real decisions that will make the necessary changes, will be undermined. Furthermore, addressing many of the obstacles to development, such as water availability, agricultural production, malaria and Aids, will become much harder and more costly. We have to see the issues of economic development and of climate change as parts of a whole.

Over the past months Smart Meters and what I like to think of as the Semantic Smart Grid has been getting more and more press. A Twitter conversation this week has put me over the edge, it’s time to bring some thoughts together.

Electricity is, as most of us think of it, an abstraction. We’re thought to think of it as we would a flow of water. It’s got current, waves, flow, power. Really though, unless you’re unlucky enough to be electrocuted it’s pretty intangible.

The modern electricity grid is much like the contemporary newspaper industry. Fucked. It’s in big trouble unless it acts fast. It’s running on a century old business model of central manufacture of resource (electricity/news in power stations/newsrooms). It’s transmitting/broadcasting the product down one way pipes and crucially is neither listening to its consumers/audience nor is it aware of the conversation/usage its audience is engaged in.

*****
Interestingly it was not always so for Big Power. As Thomas Edison and the early electricity entrepreneurs electrified the big cities of East Coast USA there were power stations all over town. Maybe it’s time we looked again at this model, I’ve thought for some time that the best future use for the disused Battersea power station in London would be as a local, sustainable power station. But that’s a thought for another post.
*****

Smart Metering

Metering and visualization of energy consumption is vital.
We can’t manage change what we can’t measure. In this case what we want to change downwards is power consumption

Home energy visualization kits have been knocking around for the past few years and up until know have been largely the preserve of hackers . To introduce another analogy here let’s compare this activity to the use of Usenet in the early 90’s. Lots of smart people collaborating on important issues, but not getting widespread traction.

Balaji Natarajan on Earth2Tech conveniently continues the analogy in regard to management and communications tools for energy:

Simple HTML pages publicized the concept of the Internet to the common user back in the mid-1990s. A tool like this that offers a rich user experience can help in connecting the customer to the concept of the smart grid

Smart Meters will connect end-users to the Smart Grid in the way Mosaic and Netscape connected us to the internet. Again from Natarajan:

Extend the functionality of the smart grid into a variety of always-on lifestyle interfaces, including meters, panels, garages, vehicles, recharging stations and mobile devices. The Internet really took off within universities (and then everywhere else) because of the concept of the “browser.” From that point on, Internet access wasn’t tied to an IBM supercomputer or a Windows proprietary desktop. With that shift, the tantalizing possibilities of open access invited strong investment, and we continue to reap more benefits of such a model more than two decades later.

Bingo!

The Smart Grid

Which is one of the reasons these guys are jumping into the space

In their own words, Google’s launch partners

span the globe and are large and small utilities, rural and urban, privately held and municipally run and include one of the largest meter manufacturers. They all have one thing in common – a desire to serve their customers by providing access to detailed information that helps customers save energy and money.

The reality is that most global customers don’t have a lot of choice as to where they get their electricity, so the real benefactors here are the utility companies and of course Google, who just love collecting and organizing our data. And there are lots of reasons why Google would want this data.

Smart Grid + Demand Response

From WorldChanging.com:

Today our grids aren’t nimble enough to take advantage of renewables at large scale because of the intermittency problem, which requires huge amounts of electricity storage that is just not economically feasible today. Smart grids, however, help solve this problem in two ways.

First, by turning the grid into an internet, where it is read-write rather than a broadcast medium, we can take an excess of power being generated in one place (due to high winds or a sunny day) and route it a few hundred miles away where there’s more demand (due to night coming on, or cooler weather), then send power in the other direction an hour later when conditions have changed.

Secondly, as Amory Lovins has also mentioned, combining smart grids with large-scale adoption of electric vehicles would allow the EV’s [electric vehicles] to act as the massive storage capacity for the grid.

What a great idea. Using our cars as mobile batteries to help carry energy though the day. Then bring in Demand Response. From the same WorldChanging article:

[Tom Raftery] also mentioned demand response systems, which will be a huge new business market in the coming decades, with or without smart grids. Apparently the higher-resolution power meters these days are so good that you can tell the make and model of the appliances in a home just from their cyclic power signatures. You can even see when your fridge needs repair, by how it uses electricity differently. This raises privacy concerns, but also allows for intelligent upgrades of equipment for consumers. Connecting smart meters in your home (or factory or office) with smart grids, what if your power meter could poll all power generators to find out prices and carbon footprints for all generators online at the moment, and decide in real time what the cheapest and greenest power is to buy? (And remember that the greenest and cheapest will usually be the same.) Software-wise it’s not a hard problem; it’s like eBay with some scripting. But it requires a complete overhaul of the grid infrastructure to enable it. Raftery estimates that smart grids could save 2 gigatons of CO2 per year, so clearly this infrastructure is worth the investment.

Let’s go back to Google.

In theory, by connecting or even controlling the world’s smart grids Google could find itself in receipt of information on every. single. electrical. appliance. on . Earth. That’s some serious data. Will our fridges start displaying Google provided adwords for milk as our stocks run low? That would be some truly smart metering.

But right now, here’s an example of how we can bring all of this together.

Putting Smart Metering, Smart Grids and Demand Response all together you get something like this:
A trial in North Carolina integrating meters, smart grids and alternative energy sources.

The utility wants to use communication networks and software to power down certain energy-hogging actions during peak times (air conditioners) but at the same time keep customers happy and comfortable.

[The Trial] will include a utility-grade solar photovoltaic system attached to a substation, and a battery for energy storage (zinc bromide). The companies’ software will not only have to manage the energy data from the home devices but will examine how to use energy storage and solar to add more clean power but keep the grid load stable. While utilities and lawmakers are paying an increasing amount of attention to adding energy storage to the power grid as a way to address the variable availability of renewables (the sun shines and the wind blows only at certain times of the day), the Charlotte trial is groundbreaking in that it is examining how that can be managed alongside demand response.

Here’s an example of smart metering interfacing directly with appliances. See if you can spot the minor greenwash for GE. I mean, dude, you want to cut that electrics bill, get a smaller fridge.

We’re at an interesting juncture where I suspect many big utilities are waiting to see how Google’s initial work in this area progresses. We’re seeing increased consumer interest in opening up the electricity supply chain and as importantly wanting to supply energy, via small turbines and solar panels, back to the grid itself.

Whether consumers, Big Power, or the likes of Google or SAP fit neatly into roles (I’m thinking carrots, sticks and donkeys) remains to be seen. What is clear is that energy usage must come down and the proportion of renewables we use has to go up. Here’s the techonologies by which we can manage those transitions at a consumer and supplier level.

One area I haven’t had time to get into in detail here is the concept of a social semantic smart grid. Layering machine readable human information on top of the grid and using that to drive smart decisions. The grid as semantic web…

I may have said this before but that’s never stopped me. It’s time to stop abstracting our resource usage. Check this out.

From NicolasNova.

Copey and company bow down to the Greatest Briton (image cc Lloyd Davis)

I’ve just come across this personal account of the April 1st G20 protests from none other than Julian Cope, Liverpool post punk leftover, Krautrock boffin and the original Megalithic European.

Sorry I’m a day late with this Drudion, but I was in London yesterday at the G20 anti-Kapitalist protests that focused on the Bank of England. Unfortunately, I totally fucked up my plans through sheer yokel paranoia and came away empty handed. Intending to meet up with my dear friends, the writer Gyrus and U-Know editor Merrick, at Liverpool Street Station, at 10.30am, I left our W. Country home at 6am and was in central London just before nine. Nervous that there would be thousands of people milling about, I arrived on foot at Liverpool Street a full hour early, to be confronted by hundreds of police already in place. Of course, I was dressed extremely dodgily, with my hair up in a black wig and dressed in the kind of all-purpose rural chic that couldn’t have been further from my regular Rock God image (!). The police, however, were so fucking paranoid that they conducted a Stop & Search on me at the top of the escalators at 10.20; a full 40 minutes before the march had even started. Of course, I declined to give my name and address and, having no ID or cards on me, they detained me and wrote down a description. Unfortunately, when the main cop read on the report that I was wearing a stab vest, he came over personally and demanded to look at it. I just about managed to take the thing off without disturbing my wig, but the cop told me he believed the vest was part of a stolen consignment of police uniforms and gear, and that I’d taken off the labels to hide this fact. Kiddies, I’ve had this stab vest at least two years and wear it any time I’m in the city, but the cops just used this as an excuse to do a full body search and they soon confiscated my burka, a pair of women’s tights and all of my (expensive) police body armour. All of this occurred in full view of the general public and was clearly done just to make a show of me. When I still didn’t give my name, they sat me in a van to think about it for hours and the fucking protest went off with me detained. In the meantime, dammit, an exultant Merrick was texting me from Bishopsgate telling me the Climate Camp have taken over, while Gyrus had been penned in at the Bank of England. With hindsight, I’ll admit I looked extremely dodgy. But what got me most was how the police discovered all of my gear but still didn’t realize I was wearing a 99p black eBay wig! On the Stop & Search report I’m even described as having ‘Hair: black, short.’ I can’t show you my face on the self-portrait I took as I plan to use this disguise again in the future, but Holy McGrail referred to it as Scargill Chic and pointed out that there are clearly blonde tufts visible from underneath the rug. If McGrail could suss it from the crappy mobile phone photo (shown above), then so much for the West’s so-called War on Terror. What the fuck!

That one of England’s true rock (and I mean ‘rock’ in all senses of the word) heroes was detained at the Met’s pleasure for hours on end is galling enough but that he was recognized by none of his captors is truly an indictment on the state of policing in Britain today.

Missed this on Friday. Tom Raftery at Greenmonk posted this overview talk by Doug Neal (Research Fellow at the Leading Edge Forum – Executive Programme and is responsible for research into Innovating through Technology). Doug was talking at the 2008 it@cork Green IT conference.

Tom covers the big points on Greenmonk so I’m going to mention just one area that’s super-interesting for me. At 18 minutes Doug talks about leveraging social pressure, some would call would call it CO2-guilt, through social networks. It’s not a hugely original idea, but, in this case one we can pump an awful lot of creativity into. I’m not talking about the Dopplrs of the world, great though they in particular are. But rather burrowing into people’s social graphs on their already existing networks and laying the problem/solution right there right then.

I know The Carbon Account tried this with their Facebook App. Who else is in this space? What can we do to push it on? Too late in the night for answers right now I’m afraid.

-edit-

Really what we’re talking about here is connecting the social graph to the grid. With smarts. Who’s doing it? Who’s up for it?

As you’ll see if you take a look over on TrashBlanc.com right now I was up early this morning visiting what I believe is London’s only annual Potato Fair. I was with four longtime patrons of the event who provided plenty of advice, but the most important piece was “get there early”. They weren’t wrong, by 10.30am I was in a bustling school féte scene straight out of the Archers.

I could write for hours about the great varieties on display, from the bog standard Golden Wonder to the brilliantly named Skerry Blue and my own personal favourite the Sharpe’s Express, but it was the sheer fact that this was taking place in the middle of London that impressed me most. George Monbiot wrote a lighthearted piece recently about his love forapple varieties. Well and good I thought at the time. But attending something like the Potato Fair and seeing the variety of potatoes alone we have in our soil is simply amazing. And it’s also terribly depressing. 95% of these varieties will never hit the shops. Tesco, Lidl and Aldi have no interest in small lots with smaller margins and the vast majority of the population don’t know what they’re missing. Shame.

Here are some photos from my Flickr account.

As you can see the TrashBlanc team are back in action. Likewise big international food crises have kicked navel gazing Irish finance reporters off the front pages of Ireland’s finest journals. It may be fun and games in the TB kitchen but right now a half billion Euro pork industry is going down the shithole in Ireland. And the industry in question has only itself to blame.

The irishtimes.com has a good chronology of events here.

The basic problem: bad chemicals that have found their way into some feed that has come through an agri/bio recycler. The feed of course is centralized and has distributed the contaminated contents to farms throughout Ireland. Any good journalist would ask what else is in the feed? What is being recycled? But maybe the public isn’t quite ready to hear how their sausages are bred and fed right now. Though one can only ask if not now, then when?

It’s time the entire European Union started questioning a system that can turn one incident at one feed/recycling/rendering plant into a continent wide hunt for contaminated Irish Pork.

When one link in the production chain can effect every other downstream link in an entire industry, there’s deep deep problems.

Even if we ignore the gross environmental and sustainability issues at play here, there’s a simple economic argument. Farmers and agri-business throughout the EU and the US are massively subsidized through grants, tax breaks and artificially inflated food prices. This subsidization is directly responsible for the upkeep of agricultural poverty cycles in developing countries. And even with all that in play our farmers have still managed to waste those grants on a system that has utterly failed.

The economies of scale that big-farming claim necessitate centralized feeding and distribution have been been proved utterly false once again. The big supermarkets, Tesco, Carrefour and Asda/Walmart are equally guilty. But it’s our finance and agriculture ministers who we elect us to save us from ourselves and ourthirst for low prices. It’s time they started doing just that.

Tom Raftery at GreenMonk talks about the new (US) EPA programme, SmartWay, which is aimed at bigging up companies who cut down on product transport emissions. I particularly like one phrase:

You are only as Green as your supply chain after all!

Exactly. And for those who have been through and now do organic and clean energy as standard, supply chain cleanliness is a logical next step. Telling the world about it is even more logical.

This has pretty wide applications. Food, from fresh produce to produced supermarket meals. Clothes, including production conditions and textile sources . All aspects of technology production, energy consumption and distribution.

I’m picturing a scenario where I open my nicely new matt-finished iPhone box. Inside it has some fancy Apple packaging that includes the line “Designed by Apple in California.” And then “Produced and distributed on behalf of Apple at http://tinyAppleURL/34512″

Click the URL and get a full breakdown of labour, materials and distribution for YOUR individual iPhone.

Is this possible? Of course it is.

I carry in my pocket two mobile devices every day. Both have GPS and cellular triangulation just in case I go kill someone and the feds need to hunt me down. I’ve got an Oyster card that uses some sort of RFID magic to open the doors of Transport for London for me on the days I’m not on a bike. So the tracking technology is already in my pocket and probably yours. Crucially it’s also already on the scanning codes that big logistic enterprises use. Tie this in with a network of energy, textile, labour and component databases and we start to paint a pretty vivid picture of the history of pretty much any goods sold in the West. So the logistic technology is there to start tracking. Tie all the above into a carbon reporting database and we start getting a true picture of the actual cost of your new iPhone.

That’s the theory anyway. Is there anybody working on this right now? And what are the implications for companies that do this? Are there really that many profit making or even seeking corporations who will be willing to put their necks on such a transparent line?

Last word to Tom Raftery:

Chain image (c) from Heaven’s Gate (John)

The Wall Street Journal asks who’s responsible for the fall in price of crude oil over the past few days: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/08/12/falling-oil-whodunnit/

Thomas Friedman in the NYT (clearly just back from strawberry picking in the Nordics) asks is it better for oil to remain high: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/opinion/10friedman1.html?em

Tom Raftery has been saying for months that oil is better off over $200 per barrel: http://greenmonk.net/the-sooner-oil-hits-200-per-barrel-the-better/

And back to the WSJ which claims at off-shore drilling is really a complete non-issue despite the above: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/08/12/rigged-why-does-offshore-drilling-dominate-the-debate/

Image courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/welshy/

Shell made £2,000,000 profit per hour last quarter.

Some points from GreenBang:

• First, Shell maintains it is committed to investing in renewable energy and clean technology and the company does spend $500m a year on alternative energy resources. But let’s put that into a bit of perspective – that’s about five days’ profit based on today’s results.
• Next is the fact these latest profits were boosted by Shell’s Canadian oil sands business. The high price of oil now makes this controversial form of oil extraction financially viable for the big oil companies (not just Shell), but it is more energy and carbon intensive than traditional extraction.
• Finally let’s not forget Shell recently sold its stake in the Array London wind power project – the world’s largest offshore wind farm project, although Shell maintains that decision was not a reflection on its commitment to alternative energy and points to its involvement in many similar projects around the world.

More on the Guardian

That’s 30,000,000 people. Nearly half the population of the UK. Not exactly a few poor farmers kicked off their land by unthinking palm growers.

Earth2Tech reported this yesterday. The number is staggering. And further on in piece they highlight another heinous issue related to biofuels that is going largely unreported. The CO2 impact of the palm oil plantations.

The report goes beyond the humanitarian consequences and puts numbers to the environmental boondoggle that is the current biofuel economy. Oxfam estimates that land-use changes largely from the palm oil plantations that have popped up around the world’s equator, are emitting a huge amount of CO2, and it will take 46 years of projected 2020-level biofuel use to make up a “carbon debt.”

So it’s time to tell UK transport minister, Opus Dei practitioner and ardent biofules supporter, Ruth Kelly, exactly what you think of the UK’s continued support of this energy source. Information on how to do this is here.