The Australian - Oil price to push petrol up

NZ Herald - Petrol pain ahead after third hike in 3 days

The Age - Rift on Kyoto exposes leadership failure

MALCOLM Turnbull and all previous environment ministers in the Howard Government had one important thing in common. All understood the threat of climate change and the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Mr Turnbull has succeeded this year where his predecessors failed by reversing cabinet opposition to two key measures: carbon emissions trading and higher mandatory renewal energy targets. Six weeks ago he tried but failed to convince the cabinet to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. "We are going to meet our target anyway, so it wouldn't impose any burden on us that we haven't committed to anyway," he told The Australian Financial Review.

The wave of recent studies making the case for an urgent global response confirms it is only political pride and fear for its credibility that stops the Government ratifying the treaty. Mr Turnbull also indicated the Coalition was open to a target of a 60 per cent cut in emissions by 2050, which Labor has adopted on the basis of scientific advice on keeping climate change to manageable levels. Yesterday, however, Prime Minister John Howard again said Labor's modest policies would cause job losses and that committing to an agreement that excluded major emitters would be very damaging to Australia. This ignores the jobs and industries being created overseas as countries respond to climate change, giving them a competitive advantage in a carbon-limited world. The Stern report, released by the British Treasury, warned last year that inaction carried great economic costs. At the time, the Australian Treasury had still not done any modelling or analysis of climate change's long-term impacts, some of which may be upon us.

Mr Howard has studiously avoided linking the issues of drought, rainfall and bushfires to climate change while relying on two Kyoto defences: that it excludes developing nations and that ratification would be a purely symbolic act. Both are based on false premises.

NZ Herald - Team assesses viability of Antarctic windfarm. Windiest place I've ever been - Cape Palliser.

Wellington is a tougher proposition for a wind farm than Antarctica, says a team exploring the possibility of building turbines at Scott Base. Experts from Meridian Energy have flown to the world's windiest continent to conduct feasibility tests around Scott Base, which three years ago was hit by a storm with wind gusts that exceeded 200km/h, destroying the base's wind vane.

Iain Miller, Antarctica New Zealand's Antarctic services manager, said if the windfarm went ahead, it would help power Scott Base and also the neighbouring United States base, McMurdo Station. "Interestingly enough, because of turbulence created by the landscape, the wind at Scott Base and McMurdo isn't as brutal as parts of New Zealand where there are windfarms," he told The Press. "Meridian is planning one on the southwest coast of Wellington where the wind speed and turbulence are worse."

Peak Energy - The Fat Man, The Population Bomb And The Green Revolution. If you're interested in the population issue or in what the post peak agricultural landscape could look like, you might find this one worth checking out.

The "fat man" referred to in the title isn't Al Gore (whose weight seems to be an issue amongst some parts of the blogosphere though he doesn't look all that large to me), but instead one of the more unusual icons of the cold war era (and one of those wisdom deficient products of the RAND Corporation I referred to in "The Shockwave Rider") - strategist and futurist Herman Kahn.

In the post "Silent Spring" era, environmental issues made their way to the forefront of popular thinking for a while, prompting books like "The Limits To Growth", which I've gone on about at length previously, and more alarmist works like Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb". Herman Kahn was a conservative who set up, along with a group of other RANDians, an organisation called the Hudson Institute, which Wikipedia refers to as "the organization about which the phrase 'think tank' was originally coined". Kahn continued writing after he left RAND, and published a number of books during his time at the Hudson Institute, one of which I read a couple of months back called "The Next 200 Years", which he wrote in 1976.

"200 Years" was a reaction against what Kahn called the "doomsday literature" (which was rather ironic, given his background) of the neo-Malthusians, as expressed in The Limits To Growth, The Population Bomb and other similar books, and the "current malaise" the world was experiencing at the time. The RAND Corporation still includes the book in their list of "50 Books for Thinking About the Future Human Condition".

The book looks at the issue of growth and how it might be handled in 5 main areas - population, energy, raw materials (minerals in particular), food and the environment - in some ways it could be looked at as a deliberately optimistic thought experiment in dealing with the Limits To Growth, rather than denying they exist entirely. ...