Peak Shale

About seven years ago, a film maker friend of mine started visiting with me after our workouts.  He had been working on a film, a puff piece actually for a guy named Aubrey McClendon.  Aubrey, as you may recall, was the guy who pretty much started the whole shale gas play excitement with his company Chesapeake.

My film maker friend, knowing that I am a big renewable energy guy, was telling me that there is this new process which will provide us with all the natural gas we will ever need for at least the next one hundred years.  I was skeptical but interested, so I asked him if he could send me the rough cut of his film.  The film, to his credit, was more than a puff piece for Mr. McClendon, it was a compelling story of how the first big shale play, was being mined right out from underneath Ft. Worth, Texas.

It was perhaps the first big urban oil field.

Now, some seven years later, who can't turn on the news without seeing that nice looking thin lady tell you about shale gas and how cheap and plentiful it is... and how everything is good again.  There is no end to our finite resources, and no problem with burning it, because climate change is not really happening and if it is, we really can't  fix it, and so forth and so on.

For various reasons, I track natural gas prices.  It's part of being an energy guy.  And for the last couple of years I've been telling folks that the so called shale gas miracle might actually be just a oil and gas flash in the pan, a slight of hand, a good story, one that we all want to believe.

Like this story from a Chevron page:

Natural gas is an efficient energy source and the cleanest-burning fossil fuel. Natural gas extracted from dense shale rock formations has become the fastest-growing source of gas in the United States and could become a significant new global energy source. Although the energy industry has long known about huge gas resources trapped in shale rock formations in the United States, it is over the past decade that energy companies have combined two established technologies—hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—to successfully unlock this resource.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates the United States possesses more than 2,500 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas resources, of which 33 percent is held in shale rock formations. Natural gas from shale has grown to 25 percent of U.S. gas production in just a decade and will be 50 percent by 2035, according to the EIA. 

I've had oil and gas cowboys from Midland as well as so called serious energy thinkers try to rib me about how all my work in renewables is going to collapse and fall into the sea of sorrow as the shale gas revolution changes everything we know about energy. They have lectured me about  their vision of the foreseeable future, a future bathed in an oily ointment of lies.

Sure, there are little problems with water use and aquifer destruction, but the future is clear, shale gas and oil is once again king.

So, as the above graph shows, there has been tremendous growth in shale gas production.  But in the last four months or so, it has slowed down, and as of last month,

It has peaked.

And you can see a new story beginning to emerge.  This from the Financial Times:

The price of US natural gas reached an 18-month high on Friday as stocks continued to fall, and hopes intensified that the effect of the shale revolution on the commodity may be waning.

“Imagine a scenario in two to three years’ time where the US gas price has ticked back up because the decline rate in US shale [production] is so high, which means you’ll need a higher price to spur investment for incremental production,” said Mark Lewis, European head of energy research at Deutsche Bank."

Or take this story from CS Monitor:

 As U.S. natural gas prices flirt with the $4 mark, some skeptics of the so-called shale gas revolution think prices are headed much higher. Such a move would, not surprisingly, seriously undermine the official story that the United States has a century of cheap natural gas waiting for the drillbit.

Several years ago when natural gas began flowing in great quantities from deep shale deposits beneath American soil, it seemed to be the beginning of the end of America’s troubled journey into dependence on energy imports—a journey marked by frequent worry, occasional war and enormous expense.

And that's the problem. The Shale Gas play is based on selling six or seven dollar gas for half that price.  And like the old joke about the farmer selling a truck of watermelons for half what it cost him to grow it, the answer is not more trucks.

And even the always willing to be an O and G hooker UT Bureau of Economic Geology sees the Barnett Shale, the shale that started it all,  declining from now on.

A new study, believed to be the most thorough assessment yet of the natural gas production potential of the Barnett Shale, foresees slowly declining production through the year 2030 and beyond and total recovery at greater than three times cumulative production to date. This forecast has broad implications for the future of U.S energy production and policy.

Yes, I would say it does.

Sure, higher prices will bring more production, but it also means that wind generated electricity at four cents/Kwh will be  competitive with six cent/Kwh gas electricity. (six dollar gas)

And large scale solar will be right there in that same range...without poisoning the water or changing the climate.

And unlike all of these flash in the pan finite resources,

Our abundant renewable resources only peak

with our imaginations.


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Big Data

Earlier this month, we bought our film passes to the SxSW film event.  We always like to see how many movies  we can watch until our butts wear out and our brains turn into mush.  Usually,  you buy a ticket, keep it in your wallet or purse, and show it with your ID to get in the door.  This year, in an effort to get more and more high techy and swanky, the producers of the event  decided we all needed wrist bands. And these bands were put on by the staff pretty dang tight.  I can understand a wrist band for a night or even a weekend, but 9 days?

It seems a little much to ask anyone to wear anything that long.

Well the next morning, I got to reading and looking at the bracelet and I realized it had a chip in it.  You know, one of those RFID chips.

If you don't know what I'm talking about go to Wikipedia:

A radio-frequency identification system uses tags, or labels attached to the objects to be identified. Two-way radio transmitter-receivers called interrogators or readers send a signal to the tag and read its response. The readers generally transmit their observations to a computer system running RFID software or RFID middleware.

 RFID systems typically come in three configurations: One is a Passive Reader Active Tag (PRAT) system that has a passive reader which only receives radio signals from active tags (battery operated, transmit only). The reception range of a PRAT system reader can be adjusted from 1-2,000 feet.

Another configuration is an Active Reader Passive Tag (ARPT) system that has an active reader, which transmits interrogator signals and also receives authentication replies from passive tags. Finally, there is the Active Reader Active Tag (ARAT) system in which active tags are awoken with an interrogator signal from the active reader. 

The RFID tag can be affixed to an object and used to track and manage inventory, assets, people, etc. For example, it can be affixed to cars, computer equipment, books, mobile phones, etc.

So, after seeing that I had a tracker on my wrist, and after looking up the manufacturer, which called Austin its home by the way, I became the proverbial wolf with his paw in a trap.  Soon the equivalent of gnawing  my paw off began.  That's another story.

What I wanted to know is why use a chip? There are hundreds of volunteers at "south by" who are more than glad to put their eyes on you as you enter almost any venue.

The answer it appears is "Big Data."

Big Data, as the name implies is lots and lots of data....unimaginable and unmanagable amounts of data that couldn't possibly be useful to anyone.

Until now.

Big data^[1][2] is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis, and visualization. The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to "spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions."

And just as there is Moore's Law  which states that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years, there is a similar law  called Kryder's Law  for storage cost per unit of information, which is roughly equal to the rate of increase in transistor count, if not a little faster.

This means that we can now not only afford to record enormous amounts of video, phone calls, emails, your position on a map, the restaurant you went to, the path you took home, and the pack of cigarettes you bought, we now have the computing power to make sense out of all that data.

RFID tags are tracking vehicles, airline passengers, Alzheimer's patients, your pets and cattle. Soon, they may even track your preference for chunky or creamy peanut butter.

So why would producers of a film festival want to put a RFID on your wrist?

In the most benign of views, to better understand their customers.  They will also someday be able to sell that data.

There is a new book on Big Data and here's their blurb:

A revelatory exploration of the hottest trend in technology and the dramatic impact it will have on the economy, science, and society at large.

Which paint color is most likely to tell you that a used car is in good shape? How can officials identify the most dangerous New York City manholes before they explode? And how did Google searches predict the spread of the H1N1 flu outbreak?

The key to answering these questions, and many more, is big data. “Big data” refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena—from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books—into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior. 

In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards. Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.

Actually, I think the first book about this was written a long time ago.

In it,  

War is Peace, 

Freedom is Slavery, and 

Ignorance is Strength.

And the Ministry of Love

just nabbed those terrorist.

With their Big Data.

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Howard's History

After quite a few months, I finally finished Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, all 670 something pages of it. This most recent volume goes through the election of 2000 and the beginning of the war on terror.

This from Wikipedia:

A People's History of the United States is a 1980  book by American historian and political scientist Howard Zinn. In the book, Zinn seeks to present American history through the eyes of the common people rather than political and economic elites. A People's History has been assigned as reading in many high schools and colleges across the United States. It has also resulted in a change in the focus of historical work, which now includes stories that previously were ignored. The book was a runner-up in 1980 for the National Book Award. It has been frequently revised, with the most recent edition covering events through 2005. In 2003, Zinn was awarded the Prix des Amis du Monde Diplomatique for the French version of this book, Une histoire populaire des États-Unis.

More than two million copies have been sold.

I loved reading this book.  I didn't know that John Adams was the lawyer who successfully defended the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre. I didn't know that Lincoln questioned Polk's war on Mexico and the reasoning for sending US troops.  From Columbus to Bush vs Gore, Zinn's version of history seems more plausible than the pablum most of us are fed.

In a letter responding to a 2007 critical review of his A Young People’s History Of The United States (a release of the title for younger readers) in The New York Times Book Review, Zinn wrote:

My history... describes the inspiring struggle of those who have fought slavery and racism (Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses), of the labor organizers who have led strikes for the rights of working people (Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, César Chávez), of the socialists and others who have protested war and militarism (Eugene V. Debs, Helen Keller, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, Cindy Sheehan). My hero is not Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and congratulated a general after a massacre of Filipino villagers at the turn of the century, but Mark Twain, who denounced the massacre and satirized imperialism. I want young people to understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties. Our people are basically decent and caring, and our highest ideals are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which says that all of us have an equal right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The history of our country, I point out in my book, is a striving, against corporate robber barons and war makers, to make those ideals a reality — and all of us, of whatever age, can find immense satisfaction in becoming part of that.

Not to long before Zinn passed, we saw him address a rather significant crowd, one that any historian would be jealous of.  He was well into his 80s but his presentation was full of energy and the crowd loved it.  No wonder so many historians like to take him apart a little.  Very few historians become rock stars.

Writing in The New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert wrote:

Mr. Zinn was often taken to task for peeling back the rosy veneer of much of American history to reveal sordid realities that had remained hidden for too long.  What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to warfare should be found, that blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities should have the same rights as whites, that the interests of powerful political leaders and corporate elites are not the same as those of ordinary people who are struggling from week to week to make ends meet?

 In 2009, Zinn said:

Let's talk about socialism. I think it's very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country. Socialism basically said, hey, let's have a kinder, gentler society. Let's share things. Let's have an economic system that produces things not because they're profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism.

In the 1960s, as a result of Zinn’s campaigning against the Vietnam War and his influence on Martin Luther King, the FBI designated Zinn a high security risk to the country, a category that allowed them to summarily arrest him if a state of emergency were to be declared. The FBI memos also show that they were concerned with Zinn’s repeated criticism of the FBI for failing to protect blacks against white mob violence. Zinn's daughter said she was not surprised by the files; "He always knew they had a file on him"

Zinn was swimming in a hotel pool when he died of an apparent heart attack in Santa Monica, on January 27, 2010. He had been scheduled to speak at the Santa Monica Museum of Art for an event titled "A Collection of Ideas... the People Speak."

In one of his last interviews he said he'd like to be remembered "for introducing a different way of thinking about the world, about war, about human rights, about equality," and "for getting more people to realize that the power which rests so far in the hands of people with wealth and guns, that the power ultimately rests in people themselves and that they can use it.

This morning, I was in a Taco line and a young woman had a T shirt that had a flag of the United States on the back of the shirt.  The inscription read,  Back to Back World War Champions.

Howard would have been horrified.

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The History of the Future

Back in 2009 as the media was gushing over the excitement and spontaneity of right wing groups around the country who were calling themselves the new Tea Party of true patriots, I wondered who was organizing, who was paying, and how did this happen so quickly?

This piece by Al Gore confirms what many of us  thought about this so called uprising of the Tea Party:

False Spontaneity of the Tea Party
By Al Gore

A new study funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health reveals that the Tea Party Movement was planned over a decade ago by groups with ties to the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. The movement was not a spontaneous populist uprising, but rather a long-term strategy to promote the anti-science, anti-government agenda of powerful corporate interests.

The two organizations mentioned in the report, Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks, used to be a single organization that was founded by the Koch brothers and heavily financed by the tobacco industry. These organizations began planning the Tea Party Movement over ten years ago to promote a common agenda that advocated market fundamentalism over science and opposed any regulation or taxation of fossil fuels and tobacco products.

The disturbing history of links between market fundamentalists, the tobacco industry and the Tea Party movement is part of an even larger trend that I describe in my new book, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. Following the era of Progressive and New Deal reforms that restrained corporate influence in American politics following the infamous Robber Baron Era, market fundamentalists were once again motivated and radicalized by the social turbulence of the 1960s. In 1971, a prominent lawyer for the tobacco industry, Lewis Powell, wrote a memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that presented a comprehensive plan aimed at shifting the balance of political power in favor of corporations. President Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court just two months later.

Guided by the Powell Memo, market fundamentalists have pursued a comprehensive strategy to dramatically increase corporate influence in American politics. Powell himself worked with other pro-corporate justices to interpret laws in ways that were favorable to corporate interests, most importantly expanding the precedent of corporate personhood. As a direct result, corporate lobbying exploded, increasing from $100 million in 1975 to $3.5 billion in 2010. Corporations also used increasingly voluminous campaign contributions to promote the election of pro-corporate politicians at all levels of government. Wealthy donors founded conservative think tanks to influence public opinion in favor of market fundamentalism. The Tea Party is a clear extension of Powell's strategy to promote corporate profit at the expense of the public good.

Our democracy has been hacked by this expansion of corporate power, preventing meaningful action on several crucial issues. The climate crisis is an instructive example. The strategic goal of the market fundamentalists to "reposition global warming as theory not fact" has created enough false doubt around the issue to hinder progress. The potential consequences of climate change have never been clearer than they are today. Consider what we saw in America just last year. 2012 was the hottest year in American history and 60% of America experienced drought. Extreme weather events, like Superstorm Sandy, caused over $110 billion of damages. Yet Congress remains paralyzed, with many lawmakers even refusing to acknowledge the validity of climate science. The future of our planet demands that we put the sustainability of our planet before corporate profit.

We must reclaim control of our destiny. Reducing corporate influence in American politics and reinvigorating reason-based decision-making is vital to the sustainability of our democratic system.

As Mr.  Gore says, he has a new book out called the Future.

Here is the official blurb:

Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world:

• Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past. 

• The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases. 

• The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets 

• A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species. 

• Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands. 

• There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide.

 I just bought the book, so I haven't read it yet.   But I did turn to the last words:

"Human civilization has reached a fork in the road we have long traveled.  One of two paths must be chosen.  Both lead us into the unknown.  But one leads toward the destruction of the climate balance on which we depend, the depletion of irreplaceable resouces that sustain us, the degradation of uniquely human values, and the possibility that civilization as we know it would come to an end.

The other leads to the future."

There is a long history of the future.

And as the saying goes,

It's very difficult to predict,

Especially if you are talking about the future.

True, the future is what we do in the present.

How will 3 D printers disrupt our material world?

How will paintable, printable PV change our energy world?

Imagine how our minds will change

when virtually everything that we think we know,

becomes history,

and we simply reside in the only thing that is real,

the present.

And the People of  Earth

become a Family.

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From Everything to Everything

Early in December, we went to Real de Catorce to celebrate the birthday of the Nobleman in the movie the Mexican.  He, indeed is the Nobleman. For four days we danced and celebrated the 70th birthday of this very great man who many know and many love.

One morning as the festivities were beginning, we arose early and walked to the sacred mountain four miles away.  We were to get there before the sun arose and we did.

There we participated with  two shaman and their families and about forty of his friends and family. There on Quemado, we were blessed with the waters, the mescal, the winds, and all the sacraments of the Huichole tradition. 

As we left the 11,000 foot peak, we followed the 87 year old shaman who glided effortlessly back to the 300 year old village.  For the Huicholes, the area is called Wirikuta.  For most of us, it is the state of San Luis Potosi.

Four days later, we left San Luis and flew back to Austin early in the morning.

We arrived around 12:30, but instead of turning left coming out of the airport, I turned right and headed east towards Bastrop.  For the next four days would not be full of mountains, and deserts,  Huichole Indians, dancing and celebration with good friends and family, but rather the next four days would be full of resort food, majestic pine trees, video production crews, well known speakers, colleagues, and thought leaders.

It was the Texas Renewables 2012 conference and this year it was a doozy.

Roger Duncan, sited by Business Week as one of the top 20 humans fighting climate change on the planet, somewhere right in front of Tony Blair, opened the conference with Everything is Energy.

Roger was followed by Peter Fox-Penner who talked about the Smart, Low Carbon Energy Grid.


After that, Brewster McCracken took the stage to talk about the Pecan Street Project in Austin which is an embodiment of the Unified Energy System where 200 of the development's 600 well designed smart homes have roof top PV and 60 homes have plug in hybrids.

Tom Smith of Public Citizen couldn't make the electric car panel, so he and his staff created the Renewable Dream video which played on the two giant screens instead.  It was beautiful.

After lunch we brought on Mell Lawrence to talk about the Built Environment.

I followed with the "The Solar Age Comes"

Then we asked Kate Galbraith to talk aboout "Telling the Texas Energy Story", and we threw in some Ted talks. We also brought in Peter Sinclair from Climate Crock of the week fame to give us the latest on climate change and the thinning of the ice in the Arctic. He showed us how climate change is now

We closed the day with  David Freeman, one of the most famous Public Power managers ever. He made it clear that the "Revolution is Now".

The next day, we opened the talks with Heidi VanGenderen and her talk, The One Certainty.

After a great luncheon, and some impressive breakout session, we finished with state representative Mark Strama.


You can see all the videos and more as we get them uploaded at our Tex Renew you tube site.

In eight days we had watched the third quarter moon move from over our heads as we force marched in the dark to the sacred mountain of Quemado to moving into conjunction with Venus on that first morning we started taping.

As the New Moon moved into the Sun on that last day, we knew...

We had gone from Everything to Everything.

And it was all energy.

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Digital Tunnel Democracy

 

I didn't really realize how important it was for President Obama to be re-elected until it happened.  It was one thing to elect the first kind of black president in our history, but Oh my, so much more important to re-elect him.  Once again, we were superstitiously at the same election night party we had been at in 2008.  And once again we celebrated and sang and danced with expensive champagne as the election was called.

Democracy had once again won.

Or did it?

Several days later, I saw a story that true or not was at least very fun to read.

Here is the gist thanks to the Free Press

Why Rove failed to deliver Ohio on Election Day: What happened in Ohio – this time around
November 12, 2012

Was the "fix" in on Election Day in Ohio? The questions surrounding Election Day activities in Ohio and Karl Rove’s now-infamous meltdown on Fox TV election night are causing a buzz in the election integrity movement.

Of course we do not know for sure what happened in Ohio – but we do know the circumstances were eerily similar to election tampering techniques the Free Press discovered after the 2004 election.

One major similarity was Rove's insistence to his colleagues on Fox News that the media consortium’s exit polls were wrong in Ohio. This is the same claim he made in 2004 concerning Ohio and 2000 in Florida.

Curiously, the Ohio Secretary of State’s vote tabulation website went down at 11:13pm, as reported by Free Press election protection website monitors, and mentioned by Rove on the news. This was one minute earlier than the time on election night 2004 -- when Ohio votes were outsourced to Chattanooga, Tennessee -- and then the vote flipped for Bush. This isn’t just a Free Press claim, but is well-documented by Vanity Fair Contributing Editor Craig Unger in his book Boss Rove.

This time, the Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) vote tabulation site went down as on election night as well.

In his rant on Fox, Rove argued that Fox News should not confirm Ohio for Obama until votes came in from the southwest Ohio GOP strongholds of Delaware, Butler and Warren counties and suburban Cincinnati. It was after the crash of the secretary of state’s site in 2004 that improbable vote totals came in from Republican counties in southwest Ohio – particularly Butler, Clermont, and Warren counties. These three counties provided more than Bush’s entire Ohio victory margin of 119,000.

Earlier in the day, I filed suit in both federal and state courts seeking to remove uncertified and untested “experimental” software patches from county vote tabulators in at least 25 Ohio counties. Election Systems & Software (ES&S) installed the last minute software on county tabulators linked to the secretary of state's office. Coincidentally, Warren and Cuyahoga counties were two of the counties targeted with the software patch.

When the Free Press investigated Bush’s implausible 2004 victory in Ohio, we discovered ES&S and Triad technicians had placed similar last-minute unauthorized patches on tabulators in an estimated 44 Ohio counties.

All the counties that Rove mentioned on Fox News had irregularities and funny numbers in 2004.

This time, the Fox exit poll number crunchers simply refused to listen to Rove, and well they should not have. While Rove was claiming that the outstanding vote in Hamilton County (Cincinnati), which went to Obama in 2008, should break 60%-40% for Romney –- the exit polls showed 55% for Obama. Obama actually gained 5% of the vote in Hamilton County after Rove made his absurd prediction. The outstanding vote was not in the white suburban areas which had voted early and without long lines, but rather in the African American urban districts where lines were long."

Was Rove hoping to flip votes like he did in 2004?

According to the hacktivist group "anonymous" the answer is yes. This story is from Brian Lynch.

Just a few weeks before Election Day, the hacktivist group Anonymous issued a video statement against Karl Rove.

In the video released prior to Election Day, Anonymous warns Karl Rove that he’s being watched. “We know that you will attempt to attempt to rig the election of Mitt Romney to your favor,” a black-robed figure in a Guy Fawkes mask says in the video. “We will watch as your merry band of conspirators try to achieve this overthrow of the United States government.”

The figure then warns Rove that Anonymous is “watching and monitoring all your servers,” and goes on to say, “We want you to know that we are watching you, waiting for you to make this mistake of thinking you can rig this election to your favor…If we catch you we will turn over all of this data to the appropriate officials in the hopes that you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Then, just two days after Election Day, as the Republican Party was in full-blown despair and Karl Rove was trying to figure out what went wrong, Anonymous released a press statement claiming it did indeed prevent an attempt by Rove to steal the election for Mitt Romney.

The statement reads, “We began following the digital traffic of one Karl Rove…After a rather short time, we identified the digital structure of Karl’s operation and even that of his ORCA. This was an easy task in that barn doors were left open and the wind swept us inside.”The “ORCA” that Anonymous is referring to in the press release is a massive, high-tech get-out-the-vote system created by the Romney campaign this year that will keep tabs on potential voters and coordinate with operatives to target who has and hasn’t voted yet on Election Day.

Romney’s Communications Director Gail Gitcho bragged about how sophisticated ORCA is saying, “At 5 o’clock when the exit polls come out, we won’t pay attention to that. We will have had much more scientific information based on the political operation we have set up.” In other words, ORCA will know who won Ohio better than any exit polls.

But, according to Anonymous, ORCA had nothing to do with getting out the vote and everything to do with rigging the vote.

“We coded and created, what we call The Great Oz. A targeted password protected firewall that we tested and refined over the past weeks. We placed this code on more than one of the digital tunnels and their destination that Karl's not so smart worker bees planned to use on election night.”

Anonymous alleges these “digital tunnels” were leading to servers in three different states. The release goes on to detail what happened on election night as Rove’s operatives attempted to access these tunnels. “We watched as Karl's weak corrupters repeatedly tried to penetrate The Great Oz. These children of his were at a loss-how many times and how many passwords did they try-exactly 105.”

“Karl’s speared ORCA whale was breached, rotting with a strong stench across his playground, unable to be resuscitated,” claims Anonymous.

So might this have really been the reason for Karl Rove’s shock on election night? Under the guise of sophisticated get out the vote operation, had Rove and the Republican Party actually built up a massive system to steal the Ohio election, just like in 2004, only to have it thwarted at the last minute by a group of computer hackers?

If this is true, then the implications are enormous and could take down the entire Republican Party and finally wake Americans up to the fact that our privatized vote system is shockingly flawed and insecure. 

In their press release, Anonymous concludes, “We have a warning for Karl – sail again at your own peril. We may just put all the evidence into a tidy little package and give it to a painfully bored nemesis hanging out in a certain embassy in London.”

As scary as this story is...and as unlikely true as it may be, its just fun to see the bad guys fry on national TV.

Almost as fun as this story. 

Which is most definitely true.

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The Unified Energy System

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A bunch of us have been working on a project for the last several months and its finally coming around.  Somehow, I didn't really figure it out that it was on 12.12.12 until a few weeks ago. Here's a letter that is going out to several pretty big mailing list later this week.

Dear friend of Clean Energy,

Roger Duncan and I want to alert you to a unique opportunity this December.  It’s a special conference and video-taping called Renewable Energy and The Unified Energy System. And it’s going to be at the Lost Pines Resort just outside of Austin on the way to Bastrop.

Renewable Energy has truly come of age.

Solar modules are below a dollar/watt and distributed solar is about to blast through the proverbial roof.  Texas Coastal wind now competes with base load fossil plants in price, yet performs like a more expensive gas peaking plant.  Just as important, large scale solar plants can now compete with natural gas peaking units in price.  Plug-ins and all-electric cars are becoming commonplace on our streets.  Rules for storage facilities are finally written.  Advanced thermostats and controls and other smart grid developments  are providing new avenues in demand side energy management for both homeowners and utilities.

Our cars, buildings and the electric grid are becoming unified and Renewable Energy will be the big winner in an energy horizon where energy sellers become buyers, buyers become sellers, and renewable energy competes with oil in the transportation sector.

Texas Renewables 2012 is designed to address this transition and highlight the accomplishments of the Pecan Street Project where 200 of the 600 energy efficient smart homes are fitted with solar PV and 100 of the homes will support a plug in vehicle. The conference will provide a solid understanding of the forces at play to further the vision of a “Unified Energy System” and discuss strategies to sustain continued growth for the renewable energy sector.

You may even want your company or agency to be an exhibitor.

Click here to register.

We only have room for about 500 folks, so be sure and act now to reserve your place. We can't think of a better place to be on 12/12/12.

Hope to see you soon.

Roger Duncan and Michael Osborne
Cochairmen/ Texas Renewables 2012

The press release goes on to say:

Co-chairs Roger Duncan, former manager, Austin Energy and current president of Pecan Street Inc, and Michael Osborne, renewable energy visionary and author, designed this conference to provide:

   -        A new level of inspiration and insight through entertaining videos, debates, panels and Ted Talk style presentations

   -        A clear vision of shifts in solar pricing and how solar is about to become a dominant player in energy markets in the next decade, and what that means in associated opportunities and challenges

   -        A discussion of the realities of our ever-changing political environment and the tools to reduce partisanship within the energy industry.

   -        An Exploration of the new unified energy system horizon where energy sellers become buyers, buyers become sellers, and renewable energy competes with oil in the transportation sector.

Expect a faster paced conference embracing video and new technology formats designed to actively engage inspire and inform. "Now, perhaps more than ever, the quest for the "Unified Energy System" requires a unified renewable energy community," said Russel Smith, Executive Director, Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association (TREIA).

"In the end it is our hope that participants will embrace the changes ahead and depart prepared to work together to seek opportunities across resource lines, and acknowledge
and support the varied roles each sector must play in achieving the Unified Energy System,"

We've got a lot of great speakers,  authors, writers, thought leaders, and business types who will be attending. And quite frankly, I can't think of a better place to be on 12.12.12 than to be with several hundred folks who actually give a damn.

The entire three day event, like most events of this sort, will cost you about as much as  taking two couples to dinner with some pretty decent wine.  And to be truthful, our wine won't be that good, and the food will just be OK.  But the conversations and the thought forms should be first rate.

This might well be the energy/media event you've been looking for.

So sign up here.  And if you really can't afford it, email me.

Oh and by the way, there is an election coming up.

And the good guys win.

More on that in a few days.

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 *art courtesy of Charlie Tomorrow