Is:

"Seas rise faster than forecast"

code for "we've just passed the tipping point"?

RE: Greens and industry square off over climate plan

Ralph Hillman is executive director of the Australian Coal Association.

HILLMAN: What you would see is a loss of competitiveness. Our share of export markets would decline,

Like hell it will! I'd ask, rhetorically, if he takes us all for fools, but the unfortunate answer is 'yes, he does'. Where does he expect all the massive coal-consuming countries to source their coal from? China is topped out, North America is at historical highs (at least until the GFC hit), we are doing everything we can to get the garbage out of the ground (including placing leases on prime agricultural land). We're already the worlds largest exporter!

What fools like this industry toolbot don't understand is that the Economy is a wholey-owned subsidiary of the Ecosphere, not the other way around!

"Think of the miners! Won't _somebody_ think of the miners?!"

I hope The Greens stick to their guns, and hold the Government accountable, even if it forces a Double Dissolution.

While I'm not a population doomer and disagree with most of what is said in this, here's one from Michael Lardelli - Common myths of the population debate.

A couple more from lobes in PNG :

No Fuel in Hagen
http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20090313/news01.htm

Major fuel supplier, InterOil Products Limited yesterday announced that Mount Hagen has run out of all automotive, industrial and aviation fuel.
Supplies in stores in the region are running low and export commodities like coffee and tea are stranded in the region. “The situation has gone beyond critical as there is not enough fuel available to ration. The nation’s third largest city is now effectively without fuel and we do not know when fresh stocks will be brought in. It is only a matter of time before industry, public transport and some important public services begin to wind down,”

Hospitals and police hit
http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20090313/news02.htm

HOSPITALS and police operations in the Western Highlands, Southern Highlands and Enga provinces face a critical situation as the fuel shortage in the region gets worse. Operations in the hospitals in Mendi, Wabag and church-run Mambisanda and Kudjip facilities are now scaled down with fuel reserved for emergency cases only.

The Age has a report on the prospect of CSG to LNG in NSW as well - Eastern Star hoping to turn coal gas into LNG

EASTERN STAR has raised the long-term prospect of its Narrabri coal seam gas joint venture in NSW eventually underpinning a multibillion-dollar liquefied natural gas export project based in Newcastle.

The LNG potential of the project emerged as a key promotional point in the group's successful and heavily over-subscribed $50 million share placement at 55 cents a share.

It comes as the market has been turned on to CSG-to-LNG opportunities after $16 billion was pumped into Queensland projects last year by global industry heavyweights ahead of another $20 billion in planned investments there.

Eastern Star managing director David Casey was not about to overstate the prospect of the Queensland boom in CSG-to-LNG coming to NSW. "We are not saying we are an LNG company. But we hope to be one, and there is no reason why we couldn't be," he said.

Recent drilling results and the joint venture's contingent resource estimate upgrade to 6000 petajoules had given encouragement to begin thinking what Narrabri's coal seams could deliver over and above the 72 petajoules a year spoken for in supply memorandums-of-understanding.

Sorry - no time for a Bullroarer from me this weekend - but here's one from Larvatus Prodeo - Who killed clean coal?.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a fascinating story about a US Congressional inquiry into the cancellation of the FutureGen project, a massive demonstration of an integrated, commercial-scale clean coal plant (discussed earlier on LP).

Staffers of the majority (Democratic) members of Congress on the House Science and Technology committee put together a rather extensive report into the issue; the press release announcing the report gets to the crux of the matter:

The report was the result of staff review of thousands of DOE internal documents. That review found that former Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman strongly disliked the project, but to keep the President’s initiative alive, he reconfigured it into a competition under which private companies would be paid to add a CCS component to their IGCC plants. Bodman publicly claimed that the restructured FutureGen would cost less but would result in multiple clean coal demonstrations and expedite the development of clean coal technology. But he was warned numerous times by staff that industry would not respond favorably because participation was not financially advantageous – warnings that were borne out when the Department received only four applications for the new competition. None of them were for IGCC plants, and two of them were not even responsive to DOE’s solicitation.

While it’s important to keep in mind this was put together by Democrats looking for a political angle, their report paints a pretty convincing picture that the Energy Secretary (a member of the Bush Cabinet) was looking for an excuse - any excuse - to kill the project, despite being repeatedly told that FutureGen was essential if carbon capture technology was going to be commercially viable by 2020 or so. He then proposed a “plan B” that had no hope of getting up; the kind of bureaucratic maneuver typically used to disguise killing a policy. In the process, the FutureGen project’s international partners - including Australia - were left completely in the lurch (yet another example of the Howard government getting shafted by the Bush White House, incidentally).

But there’s a broader question here. While it’s beyond the scope of the report, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that industry was lobbying to save the project. That’s just bizarre. Whatever senior executives in the coal industry personally think about climate change, they’d have to be completely moronic to think that carbon regulation isn’t coming. Here was a chance to get the US government to fund a large chunk of the technology that holds out the only hope for the long-term future of their industry. But they were happy to let their lackeys in the Bush White House kill it.