Alan Kohler has an interview at the ABC with Better Place CEO Evan Thornley following the Victorian motoring association, RACV, committing $2 million to an investment in the company - Electric cars an 'attractive proposition' for Australia. The impact of electric cars on the local motor vehicle manufacturing industry is also discussed.

Those of you who are free in Sydney on Wednesday night might like to head along to this forum being held at NSW Parliament House - Peak Oil - Is this the end of civilisation as we know it ?.

The 14th. forum of the Fellowship of the Round Table will be held in the Jubilee Room, Parliament House, MacQuarie Street, Sydney on St. Patrick's day 17th. March 2010 6pm to 8:30pm.

Solar thermal is a way of harnessing the largest source of energy available to us, so in this post I'll have a look at the upswing in interest in the use of this technology for power generation in recent years and look at some of the approaches being pursued to make it economically competitive with coal fired power generation.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/

Time Magazine recently had an article (Why the Tea Party Movement Matters) that looked at the latest manifestation of populism in the United States, with widespread discontent at the state of the US economy and the US political system, particularly the lack of transparency evident in many government initiatives ranging from the bail-out of the financial system to proposed changes to healthcare, along with discontent about costly wars in the middle east that seem to be never-ending.

The "tea partiers" remain a somewhat disorganised grass-roots movement (albeit one with concerted efforts by the conservative establishment to pull their strings) and they are showing some signs of adopting the tactics of the hippie counterculture of past decades and simply dropping out of mainstream society (see this piece on the "Rippies" for some background), but they do have the potential to grow as a result of a number of problematic trends affecting the western world in general and the United States in particular.

The graph below shows a possible scenario for average per capita oil consumption in the United States over the next 40 years, which could possibly drop by 90%. In this post I'll have a look at the boost this is likely to give to populist politics and some of the possibilities for addressing this.