A Second Hand Conjecture

I was sitting in an airport lounge yesterday and got to chatting with a member of the self-described “oilfield trash” who was bound for Lagos, and then for an FPSO in the Gulf of Guinea. These are rough and ready guys who lead the sort of perilous commercial-adventurer lifestyle that one has the mistaken tendency to think went extinct with the age of empires. Thus it’s always an interesting conversation when you run into them…and invariably, an intoxicated one. To form, I was soon quite drunk.

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Light and infrared targeting devices for games. (Photo by Rob Stradling | website)

Al Qaeda technicians have apparently pioneered the use of electronics in old SEGA game cartridges for bomb detonators. A smaller precedent than the use of the airliner as suicide missile, but no less remarkable as a demonstration of the the transnational terrorist group’s acumen and artistry at the reuse of civilian technology for military purposes.

The West, having derived its military advantages from the possession of advanced technology for centuries, has been preoccupied with the security risks of technology transfer perhaps since the classical Greeks. But the emergence of massive civilian technology transfers from modern to relatively underdeveloped cultures, and the accelerating pace of Western technological advance, presents a new challenge that promises only to expand in risk and complexity.

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IBD
Perhaps we are making progress.

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(photo: Rahim Alizadeh)

In Verdi’s opera Nabucco –the namesake of the western gas pipeline to Europe that holds the promise of partial independence from Russian energy reliance– the Jewish patriots take the daughter of the Babylonian king hostage, in order to compel his charity for Jerusalem. Today, after the Georgian invasion, Azerbaijan is a victim of a not dissimilar hostage-taking by example, and it’s just as perilous.

So much a captive to the gambit is Azerbaijan, that it had to be seen embarrassingly consulting with the Russian president, while the American vice president was left to rant to reporters in their captial. Cheney wanted a Nabucco pipeline endorsement from Azerbaijan, although he didn’t get the rejection portrayed in the press, he didn’t get approval either. He got the thing Dick hates most: strategic ambiguity.

Sympathy for the Azeri position here is mandatory. Their heart is with the United States, but their survival instinct forces them to withdraw into balance. An overt endorsement of a pipeline under American pressure would have potentially been against every instinct for a country that has been playing the game of pacifying powerful neighbors for far longer than the Americans have even been aware of the region. Any pipeline threaded through Turkey to Central Europe –which Iran has been refused access to, and is designed specifically in order to bypass Russia– has long promised the Azeris hostility from her two invidious and lethally powerful neighbors. (more…)

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John McCain, in an interview with Brian Williams on Sarah Palin:

“The facts are funny things. She’s been in elected office longer than Sen. Obama. She’s been the chief executive of the state that provides 20 percent of America’s energy; she has balanced budgets; she has had executive experience as governor, as mayor, as a city council member and PTA.

So she was in elected office when Sen. Obama was still a local community organizer. He’s never had one day of executive experience.

I think it’s almost ludicrous to compare her experience in elected office and as a leader of one of the most important states in America — certainly one of the largest — to compare her experience with his. It’s no contest.”
(CNS)

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I cited Victor Davis Hanson’s NRO post earlier in an easy defense of Palin, but there’s another point therein worth mention: Palin as agent of change for McCain, personally.

On energy, [Sarah Palin] will either blunt McCain’s unreasonable opposition to ANWR, or, in fact — as an Alaskan pro-driller — give him the opening necessary to “evolve” on the issue into a support for drilling there.
(NRO)

An entirely welcome possibility, as ANWR is increasingly looking peculiar within the context of McCain’s dramatically “evolved” (outright changed) positions on domestic drilling and energy independence as general policy principles.

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It’s rather amusing to see the ticket lacking in any executive experience, with a presidential nominee of extremely limited elected experience, attempting to attack McCain’s vice presidential nominee on grounds of inexperience. Reeling a bit perhaps. A more mature Democratic attack would go after the trooper scandal, the charge of reform hypocrisy and Sarah’s connection to energy company interests. Not that this would prove more successful mind you, but it’s a defter charge that takes account of the Obama campaign’s own manifest weakness in the more important area of the presidential nominee’s inexperience.

It’s also a more traditional process to select a presidential nominee with considerable experience, while taking on a younger apprentice for the vice presidential nominee. Obama, by selecting Biden, is only replicating the George W. Bush and John F. Kennedy departures from this predominant historical pattern. A departure that I think we’ve been arguably ill-served by in both cases.

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Powerline
“In yesterday’s radio address, John McCain talked about how the energy issue unites foreign and domestic policy”.

Exactly right. Energy is more than a Green issue or a Carbon Footprint issue. It is intrinsically linked to our survival.

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Ceasefire be damned,* the Russian army reportedly destroyed the Metekhi-Grakali railway bridge. The bridge was used by Georgian refugees fleeing the mayhem in the Russian occupied zones given that the highway is controlled by the Russian army, which has naturally acquired a rapacious reputation among Georgians. Thus it could expand the humanitarian crisis in Western and Central Georgia.

Oddly, the Russian military has denied it destroyed the bridge, which is perhaps further evidence of factional schizophrenia in Russian policy, given that the bridge is in fact destroyed (photo).

In reaction to this and continued Russian occupation of Georgia, Secretary Rice said that the Russians are “perhaps” just liars. That’s news to no one at this point, but there’s reason to assume command-and-control is fantastically weak within the occupation army (much less within the state).

There’s also an energy oligarch-faction corruption rationale for a Russian action on the bridge, as it was the conduit for Azeri oil export which has now had to cease.

* Edit: Attack was coordinated to occur a couple of hours before Medvedev signed the agreement.

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Notice what drilling is doing to the wildlife.

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How much of the Georgia/South Ossetia/Russian conflict can be laid at the hands of a corrupt cabal of former soviet ministers bent on lining their own pockets? Perhaps a great deal.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has handed his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, a victory over the “siloviki” in Russia. And if Medvedev is able to take advantage of the fruits of this victory, the consequences will be significant not so much for Tbilisi as for Moscow.

So, why is this a victory over the siloviki — those in the Russian ruling elite with close ties to the state security organs? Because there is no way the regime in South Ossetia can be in any sense called “separatist.” Who there is a separatist? The head of the local KGB, Anatoly Baranov, used to head the Federal Security Service (FSB) in the Russian Republic of Mordovia. The head of the South Ossetian Interior Ministry, Mikhail Mindzayev, served in the Interior Ministry of Russia’s North Ossetia. The South Ossetian “defense minister,” Vasily Lunev, used to be military commissar in Perm Oblast, and the secretary of South Ossetia’s Security Council, Anatoly Barankevich, is a former deputy military commissar of Stavropol Krai. So who exactly is a separatist in this government? South Ossetian “prime minister” Yury Morozov?

However, alas, I also cannot say this regime is “pro-Russian.” On the contrary, all the recent actions of Eduard Kokoity, the leader of the breakaway South Ossetian government, have run counter to the interests of Russia in the Caucasus — beginning with his embarrassing Russia in the eyes of the international community and ending with his ratcheting up the tensions in the very region where Russia might begin to come undone. South Ossetia is not a territory, not a country, not a regime. It is a joint venture of siloviki generals and Ossetian bandits for making money in a conflict with Georgia. For me, the most surprising thing in this entire story is the complete lack of any strategic goals on the part of the South Ossetians.

[...]

Again — nothing that is going on in South Ossetia makes any sense from the point of view of strategy. It only makes sense as a means of making money. And we aren’t talking about small sums. Running a gas pipeline through the mountains from Russia — a precaution in case Georgia decides to cut off the 70,000 residents — cost $570 million. And then there is the secret budget Russia has allotted for the struggle — estimated at somewhere around $800 million. And don’t forget the pensions and wages for state-sector workers, who officially number some 80,000 but whose actual numbers are not more than 30,000.

Yulia Latynina lays out a convincing case that this war is not about ethnic tensions, nor about Russian power plays, but instead about the soliviki creating the tensions necessary to loosen the Kremlin’s purse strings. Towards that end, Kokoity is using the PLO playbook:

Whenever someone starts telling us about shelling in Tskhinvali, it is important to keep in mind exactly what Tskhinvali is. It is not a city somewhere in the middle of a republic that is being fired upon by saboteurs. On three sides, Tskhinvali is surrounded by Georgian villages. The edge of Tskhinvali is a military outpost. South Ossetian forces fire from there into the Georgian villages, and the Georgians respond with fire of their own. To help keep Georgian fire from hitting civilians in the city, all the South Ossetians would have to do is move their military base forward a couple hundred meters.

But, of course, it is a fundamental principle of terrorists the world over — set up firing points in civilian areas and then when your enemy fires on you, you gleefully parade the bodies of your own children in front of the television cameras. Kokoity’s terrorists are following this same principle. If South Ossetia can in any way be considered a state, it must be considered a terrorist state.

When we are told about “peaceful civilians” in South Ossetia, we must keep in mind that the situation there is similar to that in Palestinian refugee camps. South Ossetia, like the Palestinian Liberation Organization before it, is not a state or an ethos or a territory. It is a peculiar form of mutated government in which residents have been turned into militarized refugees. It is a quasi-armed force that is not allowed by the authorities to occupy itself with anything other than war — a situation that gives the authorities absolute power and absolute control over the money at its disposal. It is a place where the hysteria of this disfigured population is the primary means of filling the authorities’ personal coffers.

Without endorsing Ms. Latynina’s views, I have to admit that they are quite compelling, and that a lot of it makes logical sense.

[HT: Joshua Foust]

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I know that many of you think that global warming, at least anthropogenic global warming, is a fraud. I am not so sure. Either way though, I think Peter Huber has the broad contours of any attempt to address it correct.

So does the climate computer have a real audience, or is it really just another bag lady muttering away to herself in a lonely corner of the intellectual park? That the computer is heard in Hollywood, Stockholm, Brussels and even some parts of Washington is quite beside the point–they have far less global power and influence than they vainly imagine. Vinod Dar is right: “Contingency planning should entail strategic responses to a warming globe, a cooling globe and a globe whose climate reverberates with laughter at human hubris.”

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Just not the way we are doing it now.

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Over at Green Tech we get some figures that should be rather sobering for those who wish for alternative energy to be a significant source of energy in the near future:

Put another way, we’d need to equip 250,000 roofs a day with solar panels for the next 50 years to have enough photovoltaic infrastructure to provide the world with a CMO’s worth of solar-generated electricity for a year. We’re nowhere close to that pace.

But don’t blame the solar industry. You’d also have to erect a 900-megawatt nuclear power plant every week for 50 years to get enough plants (2,500) to produce the same energy in a year to equal a CMO. Wind power? You need 3 million for a CMO, or 1,200 a week planted in the ground over the next 50 years. Demand for power also continues to escalate with economic development in the emerging world.

“In 30 years we will need six CMOs, so where are we going to get that?” Malhotra said. “I’m trying to communicate the scale of the problem.”

What is a CMO? A cubic mile of oil: (more…)

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And by eventually, they mean decades down the road.

This is a perfect example of government getting in the way of the innovation we need to dig ourselves out of our fossil fuel dependency.

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1362/1/

If you want to build a wind farm in Minnesota right now, you’re in for a nasty surprise. A 612-year nasty surprise in fact.

The Midwest Independent Transmission System (MISO), the organization in charge of the power lines, has to approve every new project that will connect to existing power lines. And MISO is only used to dealing with coal-plant-sized projects. Thus, the current regulations say that they must dedicate 2 years of their time to every project that will connect to the grid.

Not only that, but they’re only allowed to process one application at a time.

This worked fine back when they were approving coal plants. Two years was plenty of time, and there weren’t enough giant fossil fuel plants to fill their docket.

But a system that worked fine for fossil fuel has completely broken down in the face of distributed wind energy. People filing an application with MISO to build a medium- to large-scale wind project (of which there are currently over three hundred) have a heck of a wait in front of them.

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Gas flaring in the Niger Delta (photo: Ellie)

John Ghazvinian is a journalist and historian of considerable insight into African affairs. He also happens to have written one of the best recent books on the emergent international struggle for African petroleum: Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil (the paperback edition is due out in April). Whilst being an enormously valuable investigation of a very serious issue, it is also a page-turning and literate adventure into exotic and dangerous places. Indeed, one that’s practically impossible to put down once you’ve picked it up.

As John writes therein, since 1990 the oil industry has invested $20 billion in oil exploration and production in Africa, with $50 billion more planned before 2010. Over the next five years Chevron alone is devoting $20 billion in investment for Africa. Taken collectively, this exercise represents the largest commercial investment in African history. But such a spectacular windfall for some of the world’s most impoverished countries can be a poisoned chalice, where the brutal economic forces of the so-called “resource curse” hollow out states, eviscerate agricultural economies and break traditional cultures.

Populous and promising Nigeria for example, is one of the oldest and most well established oil producing countries in Africa. But with the expansion of Nigeria’s oil extraction industry, she has seen only the systematic erosion of her economic and civil society. As well as witnessing the transformation of her oil bearing region in the Niger Delta (one of the richest in the world), into a vast social wasteland of extreme poverty, rapacious crime and guerrilla warfare. As John notes, “Nigeria” is now a shorthand expression in Africa for what everyone with oil desperately wants to avoid.

John took some time out of his morning yesterday to sit down with me for a telephone interview. We were able to discuss a variety of subjects related to issues raised in his book. Including among other things, US oil supply diversification, the political consequences of offshore exploration in the Gulf of Guinea, the resource curse and rentier states, instability and post-nationalist militancy in the Niger Delta, oil field subculture, the labor problem, Chinese energy strategy in Africa and the difficulty of talking about Africa “without lapsing into sanctimoniousness” (as John puts it in the preface of his book). As I did, I believe you’ll find this to be a rather rewarding and unconventional discussion.

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