And I’m wondering what price will initiate real change. The recent protests in Burma against the military oppressive government weren’t triggered by human rights abuses, they were the result of the government removing their artificially low gas prices (under 10 cents a gallon). Overnight it became virtually impossible to afford to drive. This triggered an entire country to rise and confront their government on a wide range of issues.

Recent earnings reports from the big oil companies had their results down sharply from the year before (when they recorded the highest profits in history for any kind of company). Ask yourself why? My answer?

They have been intentionally keeping gas prices at the pump from rising as oil prices have risen because they know the social implications of a sharp rise. One economist estimates that a $10 rise in oil should increase retail gas prices by 2.2 cents a gallon. Oil has risen almost $50/gallon without a related rise in gas prices over the past year. However, on the heels of these earnings reports and the extremely unstable political situation in the Middle East (Kurds and Turks fighting, Musharraf showing his true thug nature, Israel and Hamas fighting, sword-rattling between us and Iran…) we’re finally seeing prices rise. High test today was $3.47! Now these are New York state prices that include high taxes but…

So oil is nearing $100/barrel which puts the true cost, adjusted for inflation, higher than at our worst point during the Arab oil crisis of the seventies. I’m old enough to remember gas lines, rationing and an uptake in public transportation. I imagine that these things won’t happen until we hit $5 because we’re slightly more efficient mileage-wise than we were then. But only slightly, thanks to the insane lobbying to keep gas-guzzling behemoths legal by the US auto industry.

We could easily be driving 100 MPG vehicles today. If we were, we wouldn’t be at war in the Middle East, we’d be in a position to tell the Saudis to stop this fundamentalist craziness, we’d be an example in fighting climate change for the rest of the world and we’d be creating a better world for our grandchildren.

So bring on the $5/gallon gas if that’s what it takes to wake us up.

BTW, GM posted a $39 billion dollar loss today. This would never have happened if they had any real strategic long-term planning instead of the afore-mentioned lobbying and reliance on old technology instead of innovation.

Residents of Atlanta, Georgia may open their taps in the next month and have nothing come out. 14,500 lawn and landscape workers have been laid off because there is no water. The state has done nothing to deal with the crisis except for asking residents to ‘take shorter showers’. (!) Real estate developers have built like crazy and were never required to prove there was enough water to support the development.

North Carolina today asked its residents to halve their water use through Halloween so the state can evaluate its ability to handle a water crisis.

300,000 Southern Californians (update- make that 500,000) flee fires that cannot be fought because of Santa Ana winds, extreme drought conditions and large amounts of dead, dry brush. Thousands of homes will be lost.

The Great Lakes are down seven inches from their normal levels due to very dry winters. Each inch of loss means that 8000 tons of raw materials that drive manufacturing in the region cannot be shipped this year because of the danger of shipping running aground.

In Canada’s West glaciers are rapidly disappearing. These glaciers supply the lakes and rivers that are the primary water sources for huge farms. The permafrost on the mountains is melting so that snow runoff, instead of running into the streams, is being absorbed by the ground, accelerating the losses to the water sources.

The Colorado river is drying up. It is the only supply of water for the entire South West including much of Mexico as underground aquifers are no longer viable. Yet there have been 300 hundred golf courses built in the region in the last five years.

These stories are all current today. In each case there is no man-made solution, no emergency action we can take to fix the problem. Nor are we doing anything about this- not a thing. We are building housing like crazy in areas that have no regional water sources. A study released today shows that carbon emissions worldwide have risen drastically since 2000, much faster than expected. Again, we are doing nothing.

No matter how rich we are here in North America, we cannot sustain life without water. We have no infrastructure to produce water where there is no natural source and building such an infrastructure would mean mustering hundreds of billions of dollars and a solid political consensus that understands the emergency nature of the problem. Not much chance of that taking place.

I have friends who tell me they can’t read this blog too often because it is depressing. I have held off on blogging because there is too much climate change news every day. It is obvious that this thing is upon us full force yet there is still denial at the very center of power. We have to reach these people somehow and get their attention. Perhaps having dry faucets in the thousands of McMansions around Atlanta will wake a few people up.

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”

This freaks me out: Read Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker piece on the extensive ramp-up of Iran war planning in the White House and then send the article to everyone you know. These people are completely insane.

Money Quote from an unnamed intelligence official:

“Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President”

“Our Claim:
Orbo produces free, clean and constant energy - that is our claim. By free we mean that the energy produced is done so without recourse to external source. By clean we mean that during operation the technology produces no emissions. By constant we mean that with the exception of mechanical failure the technology will continue to operate indefinitely.
The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy, perhaps the most fundamental of scientific principles. The principle of the conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created or destroyed, it can only change form.
Because of the revolutionary nature of our claim, not only to the world of science but to the world in general, Steorn issued a challenge to the scientific community in August 2006 to test our technology and report their findings. The process of validation that has resulted from this challenge is currently underway, with results expected by the end of 2007.”

Steorn today announced a ten day public demonstration of its free energy generation technology (branded as Orbo) that does not require any energy source or fuel. Because these claims smack of a perpetual motion machine the energy and science communities scoffed at the concept last year when it was announced as an accidental discovery. As I covered back then, Steorn issued an open challenge to the scientific and engineering community to debunk their claims, a challenge which was apparently taken up by several hundred people.
Now they claim that they will openly demonstrate the technology in London in a completely transparent test and will release licenses to it under a modified general public license. The test will be available live on the web tonight with four cameras streaming the device in action. The license will be widely available at a nominal fee to encourage widespread adoption.

It is hard to dismiss the scam factor in claims such as this, however if there was the slightest chance that this was legit it would be an earthshaking breakthrough offering free energy worldwide without emissions. Crazy but interesting to watch the story unfold.
Stay tuned.
Update: Due to ‘technical difficulties’ they are not launching the demo until tomorrow. The blogosphere is on the case: Free energy tracker.

This should be the best post-iPhone story this week unless it’s all bullsh*t…

Update #2: Not happening today (7/5/07) possibly because of the ‘heat from the video lighting’…ha!

Final Update: Demo cancelled indefinitely. If these guys used a PR firm they should be fired immediately. If not they should get one ASAP because this comes under the category of PR disaster- as in international laughingstock…