Holiday Greetings - back in 2008

My posting came to a halt faster than I expected.

I'll be off for a week or two. Here's a cartoon hurriedly done before my wife yells at me for not packing:

Been done before...

Believers enjoy flush of success | The Australian

This report notes that the current situation in Australian politics (all Labor, all over the place) is quite not as historic as it seems to be being portrayed:

The last time there was a similar alignment of the political stars was 1969, when John Grey Gorton was prime minister and the premiers included the indomitable and bull-headed Robert Askin, Henry Bolte and Joh Bjelke-Petersen, as well as Steele Hall, David Brand and Angus Bethune. Between the defeat of the Reece government in Tasmania in May 1969 and the election of the Dunstan government in South Australia in May 1970, there were Liberal or Country Party governments in all six states and the commonwealth.

Labor has several times held government federally and in five states, but never six.

Yeah, what was that about the arts suffering under Howard?

Local film industry gets $250m boost

The National Survey of Feature Film and TV Drama Production 2006/07 released by the Australian Film Commission yesterday shows that $625 million was spent on production activity in Australia during the 12 months to July this year, compared with $371 million during the preceding year.

Of course, it doesn't really matter how much money is spent, Australian films will continue to be unpopular while ever they have the crappy downer stories that 95% of them seem to want to tell.

Take that, soft parents

Parenting - theage.com.au

.... the study found parents who ban their children from using any alcohol at home significantly reduce the risk of creating teenage drinkers.

Deakin University Professor of Psychology John Toumbourou said the findings were a wake-up call for parents who believed they were doing the right thing by allowing their children to have a sip of alcohol.

Let the disillusionment begin!

Melbourne digs deep to let big ships pass

I assume that Tracee Hutchison will be very upset with Peter Garrett:

THE controversial dredging of Port Phillip Bay's shipping channels is set to begin in February, after federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett granted approval yesterday.

A different Joseph

Although it is always being staged by a high school somewhere, I had never got around to seeing a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

So, last weekend I hired the 1999 video version from the local video library.

If you too have never seen the show, go and get this DVD and have a look. It's great fun, and (I think) about the best video version of a stage show I have ever seen.

Sure, if you have an allergy to Donny Osmond without his shirt on for 90 minutes, you will have your reservations, but he does really well. The show is the complete opposite of the video version of Cats: lively, witty, lots of fast cuts, and very imaginative staging. (I don't like the modern style of overly fast editing of action movies, or even dance movies. But if you are more- or-less just filming a stage show, then lots of cuts between various degrees of distance from the action is one way to keep it more interesting.)

My boy liked it a lot too (although, like most fathers, I don't really want him to show too much of an interest musical theatre, if you know what I mean. He found the fake goat being pulled apart about the funniest bit of the show, though, so maybe it's OK.)

Appleyard -v- Pilger

Thought Experiments : The Blog: John Pilger

This is quite a witty take down of Pilger's latest Guardian offering by Bryan Appleyard. I like this line:

It has no substantial content other than the usual demand for action against everything.

Too true.

Intervention justification

Under-5s found with sex diseases | The Australian

From the report:

CHILDREN under the age of five in the Northern Territory have been found to have sexually transmitted diseases, according to new figures released by the Northern Territory Government.

Between January and June, there were 41 cases each of gonorrhoea and chlamydia in children under 15, including one case of each in children underfive.

The shocking figures reinforce the high level of abuse among children in remote indigenous... communities...

Oddly enough, this story was a "headline" one at the SMH website last night; this morning I can't see it there even under the "national news" section. But they run another story indicating how bad things are in Aurukun.

Anthony Lane's wit

He can make me laugh, that Anthony Lane. See this example from this week, reviewing a French animated feature in the New Yorker:

The film is largely in black-and-white, yet the result, far from seeming gloomy, has the pertness and the simplicity of a cutout. I found it, if anything, too simple. The faces are no more than tapered ovals, which makes some of the characters hard to distinguish, and I was left with the nagging, if ungallant, impression that I had been flipping through a wipe-clean board book entitled “Miffy and Friends Play with Islamic Fundamentalism.”

The puzzle of the laws

Universe - Laws of Nature - Physics - New York Times

Here's a very pleasing article about the recent controversy over what Paul Davies said about the laws of the universe and the nature of science.

The mysteries of existence don't seem at all close to being solved.

News snippets

* Queer eye for the (presumably) straight Pope: While I still think that aging, gay Italian director Zeffireli was just seeking attention with his widely reported offer to do a makeover of sorts for the Pope, I was surprised to see in the BBC report that he has had a bit of a Papal connection in the past:

Zeffirelli, a Roman Catholic, was employed several times by the Vatican during John Paul II's reign as a designer for the staging of major papal ceremonies.

* The Bali Irony: The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

AMID talk of offsetting the hefty carbon footprint of the United Nations climate conference in Bali, organisers missed a large elephant in the room.

The air-conditioning system installed to keep more than 10,000 delegates cool used highly damaging refrigerant gases - as lethal to the atmosphere as 48,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, and nearly the equivalent of the emissions of all aircraft used to fly delegates to Indonesia.

Incidentally, was it really necessary to have 10,000 delegates there? There are less than 200 countries in the world, and surely some of the tiny ones would have had only a few attendees.

* Ruth Ritchie wrote amusingly of Nigella Lawson on the weekend:

Her show is for people who don't cook but just buy cookbooks as presents. When they watch and purchase Nigella, the way she sells it, they are investing in the services of a high-class culinary hooker, for their family and friends. The rest of us just see a woman melting chocolate with very long hair hanging into the bowl. Long hair is the secret ingredient in her luscious, sensuous, dark chocolate cherry sex trifle.

I don't think I have ever been tempted to try any recipe she has licked her fingers over, but I have the same reaction to most of the cream, butter, duck and goose fat obsessed English TV cooks.

* Big of him:

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has pardoned a teenage girl sentenced to six months in jail and 200 lashes after being gang raped

Getting rid of CO2

Well, here's another post where I just go about educating myself, and you can follow along if you wish.

It would seem that the problem with "clean coal technology" is not likely to be the CO2 capture part. The CSIRO seems particularly optimistic about this, talking about retrofitting capture devices to existing power stations. The National Energy Technology Laboratory in the US seems fairly upbeat about it as well:

Carbon capture and sequestration begins with the separation and capture of CO₂ from power plant flue gas and other stationary CO₂ sources. At present, this process is costly and energy intensive, accounting for the majority of the cost of sequestration. However, analysis shows the potential for cost reductions of 30–45 percent for CO₂ capture. Post-combustion, pre-combustion, and oxy-combustion capture systems being developed are expected to be capable of capturing more than 90 percent of flue gas CO₂.

For a general background on how coal burning power plants work, the Australian Coal Association gives a good short explanation. There are clearly some efficiencies (and CO2 to be saved) just by using better ways of burning coal, and I suppose getting China and India to use the most efficient methods would at least be a start. But for dramatic reduction of CO2 release, it doesn't look like you can pin too much hope on that.

But back to what to do with the CO2. Geosequestration seems to be the only idea being given serious consideration.

There's a post at Treehugger which gives reasons for being sceptical. Mostly it quotes from tim Flannery, who (despite exaggerating about aspects of global warming) may be onto something here.

It's important to get an idea of the scale of the problem. In the Treehugger post there is an attempt to picture the volume, but as is clear from the comments, it makes a mistake here.

It seems Karl Kruszelnicki made the same mistake in the lead up to the election, but he corrected himself at his blog. As he explains, the correct figure for the volume of CO2 made in Australia by power stations can be roughly calculated as follows:

The daily amount of carbon dioxide emitted from burning coal, when you liquify it, would fill a box 100 metres on a side - not 1,000 metres. And this is from burning coal to supply electricity for all of Australia, not just one of the states or one of the capital cities.

Well, that's an appalling enough figure anyway, isn't it? Every day, even if you captured only half of the CO2, you would still be left (Australia wide) with a volume of liquid CO2 that is 100m square by 50 m high. Seems a hell of lot to be looking to put down a hole somewhere every single day.

The thing is, it's not only the issue of where to put it, but how to get it there. It would seem that both the liquidification process (itself using significant amounts of energy) and its transport would be the really expensive aspects of this; not so much the pumping into the ground. If you were using pipes to move it around as a gas, you have the issues of the years it seems to take to build pipes of any length, and how long the place it eventually gets to can keep taking the gas. I suspect in the United States this may be somewhat less of a problem, as the geography seems more varied over shorter distances than Australia, and as such there might on average be shorter distances to get to useful places to pump the gas into the ground.

Earlier this year, a former head of BHP was quoted as expressing scepticism about its viability from the point of view of public concern about its safety:

Paul Anderson, who ran BHP-Billiton in 2002 and still sits on its board, told the Herald: "People can't believe you're safe putting nuclear waste five miles under the ground when it's petrified in glass. How are they going to feel safe putting pressurised gas under the ground?

"I think it's as big as the issue of nuclear waste. What are you going to do with millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide that is not nearly as compact as nuclear waste?"

So...are there any alternatives to pumping liquid CO2 into the ground?

The comments in that Treehugger post listed above include one promoting Enpro, a Norwegian company which is promoting a process using salty water to convert CO2 into solid sodium carbonate (with clean water as a by-product.) The website is short on detail, and there is no mention of what can be done with the mountains of sodium carbonate this would produce. (There is also the added problem of the source of salty water if your power station is not near the ocean or adequate bore water.) The website claims these appealing features:

Unlike any other solution proposed thus far, EnPro technology:

• Provides a 95% reduction in CO₂ emissions from flue gases.
• Provides a 95% reduction of CO₂ in natural gas.
• Is effective in oil, gas or coal-powered plants.
• Can be retrofitted to existing plants at a reasonable cost.
• Produces commercially valuable by-products.
  (water suitable for industrial use and sodium carbonate etc.)

Given the very significant problems associated with geosequestration, surely anything leaving open the possibility of a solid that can be safely buried is worth looking into in detail.

(By the way, the Enpro site links to the Wikipedia entry on the similar Solvay process, which links to the abstract to a paper which sounds very significant on the issue. Unfortunately, you have to pay for it. But the abstract notes:

Long-term storage of a gaseous substance is fraught with uncertainty and hazards, but carbonate chemistry offers permanent solutions to the disposal problem. Carbonates can be formed from carbon dioxide and metal oxides in reactions that are thermodynamically favored and exothermic, which result in materials that can be safely and permanently kept out of the active carbon stocks in the environment. Carbonate sequestration methods require the development of an extractive minerals industry that provides the base ions for neutralizing carbonic acid.

The Wikipedia entry on carbon sequestration is not as detailed as one might expect.

I doubt that ocean dumping of liquid CO2 is a good idea, and would be seen as a big environmental unknown. (Iron fertilization would seem to me a much safer thing to try.) Pumping CO2 into areas where it is expected to be mineralised in the ground quickly gets mentioned in quite a few places on the Web, but again, you have transport and safety issues to consider.

A Google search shows up a fair few ideas for using carbonate reactions for CO2 sequestration.

Seems to me that, as with pebble reactors, it is an idea that is being pursued rather slowly, but in theory sounds very promising. At some stage, governments may have to start trying to pick winners if this is to be investigated as thoroughly and as quickly as possible.

Blogging slowdown

Still can't find enough time to scan the internet or blog properly. What little news I have seen or heard seems remarkably uninteresting. (ABC Radio National had on the news this morning a report that a Queensland man is to face charges for having unrestrained kids in his car! Hardly earth-shatteringly newsworthy. I think someone in the ABC newsroom must have taken to closing his or her eyes, spinning around three times and using a pin to pick out a story from the Courier Mail.)

Maybe tonight I can troll the internet for something interesting.

Meanwhile, vast international audience, any leads on sites that contain good information on the main "clean coal" technologies under development or research around the world? Pumping it into the ground or ocean seems intuitively to me to be fraught with complications, such as whether it will work particularly well, and finding the locations in which to do it. I would have thought that any process that involved chemical conversion of CO2 might be more reliable and better in the long run, if more expensive.

The talking PM

Fresh from not solving one problem, our PM rushes to not solve another:

Rudd to face indigenous leaders | NEWS.com.au

This is good. Seems to me that PM Rudd is shaping up early as someone who likes to build up hope, and to be seen absolutely everywhere talking to everyone, and then can't deliver.

Greenhouse gas - reduce how exactly?

Over at Slate, there's an interesting article talking about just how "green" are fully electric cars in reality. (Answer: pretty damn green, especially if you live where nuclear power makes your electricity.)

The article made the point that in the US, 49.7% of all electricity is coal generated.

This got me thinking about the Australian situation, and what it means for the range of CO2 reduction which the post-Kyoto Bali conference is talking about.

According to a paper by the WWF (downloadable here,) coal accounts for about 85% of Australian electricity, hydro power is about 8 % (more than I thought) and natural gas is 7%. This Parliamentary Paper from 2000 indicates that the figures are about right: there might be one or two percent of wind, solar and other renewables as this pie chart from the paper (showing the renewable energy components in Australia) indicates:

but really, hydro power is the only truly significant "green" electricity we have at the moment.

As everyone has probably heard, the Bali conference is talking about total emissions reductions of 25 to 40 per cent by 2020. Kevin Rudd is (so far) insisting that he won't be nominating Australia's target just yet. But, even assuming a 30% target is what Rudd settles on, what does this mean for our electricity industry?

According to this recent government paper, close enough to 50% of Australian greenhouse gases come from electricity generation. Transport accounts for 12.5%, about 23 % comes from agriculture and land use, and industrial and waste seems to account for much of the rest.

The paper confirms too that Australia has kept pretty close to the Kyoto target (which still allowed an increase on 1990 emissions) by reducing land clearing. I would guess that further progress that could be made in reducing land clearing is probably getting limited.

As for transport; it's hard to see how a 30% reduction in that sector is likely to be achieved without massive changes over the next 13 years. Maybe a 10 to15% reduction, but remember that whole sector only accounts for 12.5% of total gases now anyway.

So, it would seem, if Australia is to have any hope at all of meeting a 30% reduction within 13 years, the electricity sector is going to have to bear the greatest burden of this change.

Even if renewables made a massive increase from its current 8-9% (nearly all hydro, remember) to 20% (the target Rudd has already set for 2020), and you give natural gas another percent or two, it would still leave about 70% or so of electricity from coal.

Roughly speaking, (and I won't put my back of the envelope figures up in case I have stuffed this up completely), it seems to me that even if you allow for renewables at 20% of all electricity, you would still have to have about half of your coal as "clean" coal for the energy sector to be able to come close to accounting for the bulk of the total target of a 30% reduction in CO2.

My suspicion, based on European experience (see some of my earlier posts) is that even with massive investment, renewables at 20% is very, very improbable by 2030. I also suspect that having about one half of all coal power stations operating at zero emissions by 2030 is very, very improbable. Quite frankly, no one knows how well CO2 sequestration will work. People do know that nuclear does not make CO2.

My points:

1. Australia's extremely high reliance on coal makes it exceptionally difficult for it to meet a target even towards the lower end of the range that the UN says Australia should have in 13 years from now.

2. Those countries that have or will develop large proportions of nuclear power in their electricity generating mix have a task that is very significantly easier.

3. People in Australia don't understand this yet.

The patron saint for me

Expeditus

Back soon.

Two days

OK, you all want me to have money to spend over Christmas don't you?

Then I have to spend a couple of days doing bills. A self imposed internet browsing ban is needed, or a donation of $10,000 or so. No? Thought so.

Back in a couple of days....

Here's a treat for you

This is the Pixar UFO short "Lifted" which was shown this year with Ratatouille. Enjoy!

England's rubbery figures

UK's official CO2 figures an illusion

Britain is responsible for hundreds of millions more tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions than official figures admit, according to a new report that undermines UK claims to lead the world on action against global warming.

The analysis says pollution from aviation, shipping, overseas trade and tourism, which are not measured in the official figures, means that UK carbon consumption has risen significantly over the past decade, and that the government's claims to have tackled global warming are an "illusion".

Under Kyoto, Britain must reduce its greenhouse gas output to 12.5% below 1990 levels by 2012. According to official figures filed with the UN, Britain's emissions are currently down 15% compared with 1990.

But the new report says UK carbon output has actually risen by 19% over that period, once the missing emissions are included in the figures.

A peculiar case from Aurukun

Girl, 10, 'probably agreed' to sex | NEWS.com.au

I suspect this story will have some legs.

A female judge in Cairns gives what appears to be very, very lenient treatment to a bunch of aboriginal men who had sex with a 10 year old girl. The fact that it was apparently consensual is cited by the judge, as is the fact that the prosecutor apparently did not ask for any more severe penalty than suspended jail.

As the report notes:

News of the non-custodial sentences has added to the violent hatreds that exist in Aurukun between families and tribes and which have played a part in recent brawls involving dozens of assailants, many armed with sticks and spears.

Further evidence that lack of facilities at Aurukun is very far from the whole story as to why the place is in social disarray.