The quest for sane Republicans

By Richard K. Barry

It's easy to find wacky Republicans wherever you look. It's not much of a challenge. So when you find one who seems sane, you notice.

The New York Times ran a report on a California town, Lancaster, that has been successfully promoting solar energy. The mayor, a class-action lawyer by the name of R. Rex Parris, has been a strong advocate. 

When asked if global warming was indeed a threat, he responded, "Absolutely. I may be a Republican. I'm not an idiot." 

It's a good joke. Sadly, a lot of Republicans are idiots. 

Stimulus works

By Carl 

Finally, we may be seeing the renewable energy debate ending, and the renewable energy era beginning:

U.S. solar-panel installations more than doubled in the second quarter from a year earlier led by demand in California, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Installations totaled 742 megawatts in the quarter, up 45 percent since the first quarter, and may reach 3.2 gigawatts by year end, the Washington-based trade group said today in its quarterly market report. California led installations with 217 megawatts, followed by Arizona with 173 megawatts.

The U.S. now has 5.7 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, enough to power 1 million homes, according to GTM Research, a Boston-based consulting company that prepared the report with SEIA.

The boom was driven by large projects that sell power to utilities, with little growth in residential installations and declines in non-residential projects, Shayle Kann, vice president at GTM, said in an interview Sept. 7. "It's an indicator that the utility market will be the main story this year and probably for the next few years."

What does this all mean? It means that commercial developers are finally hooked on being both energy independent and turning what had been a cost into a profit center. It means that the cost per megawatt to install solar panels is going to start coming down. The 3.2 gigawatts installed this year is the tip of the iceberg, as the US has about 13 gigawatts in planned solar installations under contract, with 3.4 gigawatts slated to go online in 2013.

Developers are the mission-critical market in terms of getting acceptance of solar energy in the United States. By deploying solar energy in office buildings, retail spaces, and condo complexes, word of mouth at the consumer level will begin to build, and soon you and I will be at The Home Depot augmenting or even replacing our worn-out furnaces.

And we have President Obama to thank for all this. If he hadn't made a firm commitment to weaning the nation off foreign oil and backed that up with stimulus funding for the renewable energy industry (which has been growing in a nation where industries have taken a hard hit over the past thirty years), this would not be happening.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Craziest Republican of the Day: John Raese

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Surprise!

The Republican candidate for Senate from West Virginia is a global warming denier. As he put it in an interview with RealClearPolitics, quoted at Think Progress:

The oceans that surround the world produce 185 billion tons of CO2 per annum. Man per annum only produces six billion tons, so what could possibly be the concern? One volcano puts out more toxic gases-one volcano-than man makes in a whole year. And when you look at this "climate change," and when you look at the regular climate change that we all have in the world, we have warm and we have cooling spells.

I suspect that global warming denying is quite common in coal-rich West Virginia, but of course it's a pretty standard position throughout the Republican Party -- even if, in this case, Raese looks especially stupid. As Think Progress notes, showing him to be a fool and perhaps a liar:

Human activity puts about 29 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, well over 100 times as much as all the volcanoes in the world. The oceans actually vent about 332 billion tons of CO2 per year, but also absorb that much. Human emissions have disrupted the balance of the carbon cycle, leading to rising concentrations of greenhouse pollution in the atmosphere. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 40 percent, and global temperatures are on an inexorable rise, overwhelming any natural cycles.

Not that the facts are stopping him, as he is hitting his opponent, Gov. Joe Manchin, hard on energy and the environment:

Raese said that his campaign will launch a new television ad on Tuesday hitting his opponent-Democratic Governor Joe Manchin-for pushing through the state legislature last year the Alternative and Renewable Energy Portfolio Act, which compelled West Virginia's utilities to obtain 25 percent of their electricity from alternative energy sources by 2025.

"We call it cap and trade Manchin-style," Raese said. "Do the people of West Virginia trust a governor in the state of West Virginia who has already implemented cap and trade here in West Virginia? They're a little concerned about sending him to Washington right now."

Right, it's just a market-based system, spurring innovation in the private sector, designed to address the most pressing crisis of our time. Why would a Republican ever oppose that?

Obviously, Raese is playing on fear, anger, and ignorance in a state that is worried about the loss of the coal industry. Given the poor state of the electorate, it may just work.

Especially if enough voters buy his utter craziness about volcanos.

While we were sleeping

Guest post by Nancy Brune

Dr. Nancy E. Brune is currently the director of Research and Policy at UNLV's Institute for Security Studies, where she works on energy security and national security issues. She is a Truman National Security fellow, as well as a member of Women in International Security and the Pacific Council on International Policy. This is her first guest post at The Reaction.

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There's a reason why the Senate's new clean energy bill is called the American Power Act. If America fails to adopt a comprehensive energy strategy to keep us strong in the 21st century, we won't have much national or military power to speak of as we confront an increasing number of national security challenges.

The new Senate clean energy and security bill was a long time coming. The decision made by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham several weeks ago to suspend his involvement in negotiations did not bode well for America's energy security. Long gone are the days of Summer 2008, when candidates from both parties called on America to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, offering solutions to make us greener and safer. Sadly, while our political leaders have yet to achieve any real progress in making us safer and less reliant on foreign oil, other countries are aggressively taking steps to ensure their own long-term energy security and sovereign power.

Over the last few years, geopolitical powerhouses – including China and Russia – have taken bold measures to ensure their long-term energy security. Driven by the need to fuel its rapidly growing economy, China has invested in distant, oil-rich African nations including Algeria, Angola, Nigeria, and the Sudan. But it has also ponied up money closer to home. On April 20, China's National Petroleum Company announced a $900 million heavy crude production project with Venezuela. Just a week earlier in neighboring Brazil, a country that sits on vast pre-salt oil reserves, China's Sinopec and the China Development Bank signed a strategic development pact with Petrobras, Brazil's state-owned oil company.

In addition, China – along with several sovereign wealth funds owned by countries in the Middle East – have made significant investments in energy companies in Canada, one of America's closest allies and biggest source of oil imports (almost 25 percent). This wave of investment in our northern neighbor stands in stark contrast to the recent decisions last fall by the U.S. Department of Defense and private firms to reverse course and cancel plans to develop and use Canadian tar sands oil.

Russia has also been quite active in building strategic relationships with several resource-wealthy countries to enhance its long-term energy security. In September 2009, Russia and Venezuela announced several cooperative agreements on defense, trade, and energy. A consortium of energy giants in Russia signed two agreements with Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the country's national oil company. Last week, former Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed the merger of Gazprom, Russia's state gas company, with Naftogaz, Ukraine's state energy company, in a deal that would give Russia control over the Ukraine's vast European pipeline network.

Even our European allies, despite facing significant economic strain, announced recently that they are investing precious financial resources in almost fifty new energy projects "to strengthen the region's energy security."

Around the world, America's allies and competitors are moving aggressively to secure access to energy resources as part of a comprehensive national energy strategy. For instance, in addition to investing in oilfields, China is also making significant investments in renewable energy. In 2009, China's investment in renewable energy totaled $34.6 billion, surpassing U.S. investment of $18.6 billion.

America cannot afford to delay any longer. Energy security and resiliency are inextricably tied to America's long-term national security interests, geopolitical bargaining power, and economic might. Every day that we put off forging a comprehensive national energy strategy undermines the power of our military, the single largest consumer of energy in the world. We need a climate and energy bill that will provide measures to help us diversify our sources of energy, protect our military, and reduce our vulnerability to turbulence in global energy markets.

As was clear in 2008, energy security is an issue of national importance. We can't afford to let politics or a single interest group hijack our long-term energy security. There are signs that national leadership is committed to moving forward. Last month, the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar took the bold and courageous step of allowing the Nantucket Sound wind project to move forward. The recent oil spill has made the urgency of supporting measures to develop other sources of energy more critical. On Wednesday, Senators Kerry and Lieberman presented their new energy and climate bill, the American Power Act.

We now have before us an opportunity to make America less vulnerable to political instability and volatility in global energy markets. Other nations recognize the critical link between energy surety and national security. Will America?

Quote of the Day: Dick Durbin on offshore drilling

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Sen. Durbin, today:

There's a lot to be learned by members and perhaps new standards when it comes to off-shore drilling. I don't think we're going to eliminate offshore drilling in the future, but any future offshore drilling is going to be held to much higher safety standards.

Higher safety standards are the least that can be expected from this (man-made) disaster.

I appreciate Durbin's concern, and I wish him well, but the real lesson here is not that there need to be higher standards, which is pretty obvious, but that, if at all possible, there shouldn't be any offshore drilling at all, and that the only way to avoid not just this sort of disaster in future but environmental destruction generally, not to mention to slow down climate change, of which our reckless oil consumption is a leading cause, and stabilize global temperatures, is to shift to alternative and renewable energy sources.

Last time I checked, solar panels and wind turbines don't have quite the catastrophic consequences as, say, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico does.

Better, stronger, faster

By Carl

The television show The Six Million Dollar Man used this as an opening monologue:

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.

That program was about a test pilot crippled in a horrendous crash, rebuilt using the (then) latest technology.

So it goes with our electrical grid, if only in fits and starts and drips and drabs:

Winners in the Obama administration's $3.4 billion smart grid sweepstakes were exultant. Some losers sounded bitter. But there seemed to be no quarrel that yesterday's Energy Department grants will accelerate revolutionary changes in the ways electricity is generated and managed by utilities and their consumers.

"The grid has to evolve to support where policy is driving us," said Chris Baker, senior vice president and chief information officer of San Diego Gas & Electric Co., which won a $28.1 million federal smart grid grant yesterday. It will help to fund a $60 million futuristic information management system that ties key elements of its smart grid together.

As events of August 2003, as well as events early in the Bush administration demonstrated, we are running a 21st Century economy on bearskins and bone knives, in terms of electrical power.

The grid as it stands is basically a series of local nodes inadequately joined to create large regional swaths of interconnected power feeds. If one plant goes off line, another can shunt electricity to that region and draw on others down the line. This all happens incredibly fast with incredible amounts of power being rerouted chaotically, without function or form.

Not good, particularly as the ultimate oversight is a guy with a button or switch, in case things get hairy. As 2003 demonstrated, many times that guy ain't fast enough.

Current monitoring of power flow takes places in whole seconds, when milliseconds have proven to be critical in determining how to route power. That's going to change. This means that routing will not take place in chunks of power but in fine-tuned streaming.

That's going to save a lot in terms of efficiency, repairs, and load on the grid.

Ultimately, I would hope the goal for energy in America is tons of small, renewable energy plants sprinkled across the landscape, and a power grid that can fine tune the low-power generation that renewable sources will create into plentiful electricity for the nation.

It's just smarter that way.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

The importance of geothermal power

Guest post by John Malone

John Malone, a VP/Senior Analyst with John S. Herold, an energy investment research firm in Connecticut, is a Truman National Security Project fellow.

Ed. note: This is the second piece we've cross-posted from Operation FREE. The first, on veterans and Big Oil, is here. -- MJWS

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In the world of renewables, most of the attention is on the wind and the sun. Geothermal power just hasn't gotten the same respect. That could be changing, as both the Obama Administration and Silicon Valley are considering the heat under the ground as a potentially huge source of clean, domestic U.S. energy, but recent setbacks are calling into question how much geothermal can contribute. Given the potential benefits, we should be doubling our efforts to make geothermal a viable power source for the U.S.

Some background: All thermal power plants use the same basic process. A heat source (burning coal or gas, uranium, concentrated solar energy) is used to turn water into steam, and the energy released turns a turbine that produces electricity. What sets geothermal apart is that the steam comes directly from the ground. Water percolates down through cracks in the ground and is heated to the boiling point by hot rocks underground (in some cases coming back up as a geyser -- think Old Faithful), and the resulting steam is drawn up via a well to a turbine.

This makes for, in principle, the ideal alternative energy source. Geothermal power releases virtually no CO2 or pollutants. Crucially, geothermal provides baseload power -- wind and solar power are better suited as peaking technologies, as they are dependent on energy sources that wax and wane over the course of a day. Geothermal power is on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (geothermal power plants can have utilization rates up to 98%). And from a national security angle, the promise of geothermal is obvious: There is no more domestic source of energy than the actual ground underneath us.

There's one problem, though. There are only a few places in the U.S. where you can find shallow groundwater hot enough to get steam directly from the ground. Engineers and geologists are therefore looking at a new way to tap underground heat. Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) make use of the fact that, if you drill deep enough, any bedrock in the world gets hot enough to boil water. Basically, EGS involves drilling a well into deep, hot, dry rock; drilling a second well nearby to the same depth; fracturing the rock between those two wells enough to allow water to pass between them; and then pumping water down the first well and allowing it to percolate through the hot fractured area to the second well, where it will come back to the surface as superheated steam. The potential for EGS in the U.S. is enormous. A 2006 MIT report concluded it could provide 100,000 MW of power by 2050.

EGS is not without its drawbacks. Cost is the main hurdle. Oil and gas companies now measure well depths in miles, but these are wells drilled through relatively soft rock, not the hard granites that are best suited for EGS. If not managed properly, rocks could lose their heat -- eventually, pumping water through a hot rock system could bring the heat gradient down to the point that new wells need to be drilled. There has also been some concern about earthquakes. In 2006, an EGS pilot project in Switzerland set off a 3.4 magnitude quake.

That said, these hurdles are all surmountable, and given the huge benefits it could bring, there is already a surge in investment -- both public and private -- in EGS. Google laid down an $11 million investment for early-stage research. Perhaps most encouraging is the interest shown in EGS by our Nobel Laureate Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu. Obama's stimulus plan set aside $400 million for pure geothermal R&D. And it's looking like EGS wouldn't need too much more of an investment. A recent NYU study found that as little as $3 billion in R&D development could make EGS cost-competitive with fossil fuel plants.

The widespread application of EGS is still a ways off. But geothermal, whether traditional or EGS, should be used alongside technologies like wind and solar to diversify our renewable base. There is no silver bullet in renewable energy. It's better to think in terms of silver buckshot, where a collection of solutions add up to a big impact. We should do our best to make sure that one of those solutions is the one right under our feet.

Green or not

Guest post by Boatboy

Boatboy is the author of the blog The View from the Docks.

Two recent stories highlight how difficult it is to promote responsible energy policy in the US.

The first is from the Los Angeles Times, describing how the hybrid car market more or less collapsed in the first quarter of 2009.

I'm curious why there is no mention of how the entire automobile market crashed at about the same time, that the hybrid market was hindered by dealer markup of perhaps $10,000 on the vehicles (the Prius I looked last year at had an MSRP of $24,000 and a sticker of $33,000), that the "hybrid" market includes such laughable examples as the Lexus RX400H and Cadillac Escalade Hybrid which aren't all that attractive economically in the first place, or that nobody's buying anything right now due at least in part to the fact that credit for autos is almost harder to find than a decent mortgage. According to the LAT, it's all about the price of gas, which admittedly has dropped from the $4/gal mark it hit in 08 and has only recently started climbing again.

On the other hand, this item from Washington Monthly gives one hope. It seems there's a growing market for solar power, centred in Gainesville, Florida, and poised to be one of the next great growth industries. ECS Solar, one of the vendors listed in the article, has a fairly extensive Website, and lists that the local power utility has agreed to a Feed In Tariff of $0.32/kwh. A Feed In Tariff, as the Washington Monthly article states, is a premium paid to alternate energy producers that feed the utility's power grid, and is scaled to create an incentive for wind and solar projects.

I'm struck by the two entirely different flavors of the articles. On the one hand, what's essentially a household consumer durable good - the automobile -- while experiencing the same catastrophic drop in demand as has all its peers (refrigerators, plasma TVs, etc), is treated as a special case just because "consumers refuse to pay a premium for a fuel-efficient vehicle now that the average price of a gallon of gasoline nationally has slipped below $2." On the other, we have major property owners -- condo associations, businesses and apartment complexes -- either ponying up wads of cash themselves or making sweetheart arrangements with solar proprietors to get panels on their roofs, because unlike the here-and-gone-again income tax credit for the hybrid car the FITs being touted are perhaps double the actual cost of the energy if those installing solar were to purchase it instead of producing it.

There's a great deal to be said for cost-effectiveness. It's true that for a hybrid vehicle to match the cost per mile values for its conventional counterpart it has to be kept and used for a substantial amount of time (something like five years or 75,000 or so miles). The up-front expenditure is substantial, and in the current market climate a working vehicle that is either owned outright or on manageable terms is considerably more attractive than the headaches and additional burdens of purchasing something newer and more fuel-efficient - assuming you're approved for the purchase at all. But if upfront costs were such a hurdle, then the solar industry would be in deep trouble.

I investigated a solar array for my building a year ago. We learned that our building could support a 1Mw array, but it would cost about $2.2 million to purchase and install. TECO, our electric provider, as of today does not offer a FIT, though it does buy back at retail rates and accepts inputs up to 2Mw (the previous limit was 25kw). One vendor offered to lease the equipment to us, taking our lease payments in terms of our electric consumption. Essentially, the building could lock in its electrical rate for the duration of the lease. So far, though, I cannot persuade the board to go further with this than additional study. However, each member I have spoken to has been intensely interested in the project: the hesitation comes from each's assumption that it will be difficult to persuade the others.

It boils down to costs, and to the understanding of costs incurred. The solar initiatives are gaining traction because they have a clear and measurable payback schedule; the hybrid car does not, and MPGs can be misleading. There is a growing respect for the Gallons Per Mile computation as a more accurate indicator of efficiency: you can read a fairly clear analysis here.

It also boils down to costs incurred by whom. Mid-sized industries (those large enough to own their own premises), housing complexes and the like are better placed to make large-scale leases or purchases of this sort than the average household. Indeed, the average household isn't in much of a position these days to lease or purchase anything not absolutely necessary.

The bottom line is that there remains a solid and growing market for energy-efficient and energy-alternate products. The trick is making them attractive - in any economic environment - for their respective consumers. It also helps if we can avoid bewailing how the US isn't interested in being efficient in a cheap-energy environment without considering other factors at all seriously.

Recovery

By Carl

Paul Krugman won his Nobel honestly, to say the least. Today, he puts forth the following proposition:

A few months ago a headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion, on point as always, offered one possible answer: “Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In.” Something new could come along to fuel private demand, perhaps by generating a boom in business investment.

But this boom would have to be enormous, raising business investment to a historically unprecedented percentage of G.D.P., to fill the hole left by the consumer and housing pullback. While that could happen, it doesn’t seem like something to count on.

A more plausible route to sustained recovery would be a drastic reduction in the U.S. trade deficit, which soared at the same time the housing bubble was inflating. By selling more to other countries and spending more of our own income on U.S.-produced goods, we could get to full employment without a boom in either consumption or investment spending.

I agree. I think the largest concern for the American economy over the past decade or so has been the transnationalization of our debt.

Think about it: the Chinese, British, and Saudis (as well as other nations swimming in new-found cash) basically have funded not only our national debt, but in turn, our personal indebtedness, including our mortgages.

Our foreign policy has followed suit, you might have noticed. The Iraq invasion was as much a pretext for getting money from the House of Saud as it was for "protecting America from terrorism".

Too, once these foreign governments found themselves swimming in American paper, the more risk-tolerant governments began buying up American private instruments: corporate bonds, securitized mortgages, credit and auto loans, things like that. Better return
for only slightly higher risk.

I'd got so far as to make the observation that the change in bankruptucy laws that made it nearly impossible for Americans to walk away from debt was less about the banking lobby and more about not knifing our allies in the back.

Once this house of cards began to topple (and this really is only the beginning), much effort was put not into prevention, as in financing Americans directly, but in staving off the collapse of the mediators: the banks and brokerages.

You see, we're stuck paying these bastards off for stuffing our mailboxes full of solicitations, egged on by a president who's idea of sacrifice is to take our credit cards out and spend, spend, spend! Financing us just brings the problems the institutions have to a head.

What we as a nation need to do, therefore, is to repatriate our owings, if we are to reclaim a recovery of any length and note. You'll notice the last time we had a truly healthy recovery, we were paying down our budget deficits and even making inroads into what was now-laughably called a crisis national debt of $3.8 trillion (it is now over $10 trillion and climbing fast).

The trouble, of course, is that other nations may not take kindly to this domestication of resources and money. China, for example, lives by our imports of their goods. It would be a bit irritating if we suddenly opened factories all across America, and paid people a living wage to make goods that China can produce far cheaper than we can.

Which brings me to some linkage, something that Barack Obama had already proposed on the campaign trail for other purposes, but which can make us a manufacturing powerhouse again without really upsetting our trade with China among others.

To put it in a phrase: green energy.

Right now, we have a nascent renewable resources manufacturing industry. We have the innovative American mind, the entreprenurial spirit with which to create, and the structure to manage and distribute this kind of knowledge around the nation.

More important, we have the idle capacities in terms of both plants and labor. There's not much reason not to insitute this program of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, weaning ourselves off the notion of "brand, spanking, new", and weaning ourselves of the notion that this kind of work, manufacturing and fabrication, is somehow a dead art in America, that Americans find this work beneath them somehow.

Ultimately, this technology would become an export, and a lion-sized one to boot. We'd be able to balance our trade and budget deficits, and make some paydowns of our national debt, probably just in time for the next recession.

(Cross-posted at Simply Left Behind.)

At the intersection of Hopes and Success

By Carl

The single greatest challenge in solving world poverty is getting cheap electricity to communities that are far off the grid, who are not fortunate enough to live in a society where the government will subsidize the extension of the grid to these communities, often hundreds of miles from civilization.

See, conservatives? Big government gets the job done!

Here, however, is an amazingly simple yet practical solution for at least some of the world's poor:

Unleash the Power For the People Foundation is a charitable organization that raises money for the purpose of enabling people to help those that are truly impoverished in the world. Channeling the power of people to provide power for people.

Corp-speak for "We'll help poor people generate their own electricity, which will drive machines which will provide a living, which will help lift them out of poverty."

Portable solar panels with DC/AC transformers built-on, windmills, and other renewable energy sources will be provided to communities (the rough nut to provide is about $20,000 per every 50 people in a community, so we're talking lunch money for the Iraq invasion forces for one day to provide millions of people with free energy). The primary goal will be to bring fresh drinking water to these communities: these power sources will drive pumps and desalinization plants.

America is fairly unique in that the richest among us live nearest the shore. This is not the case in less developed nations.

With water comes sanitation, cleaner food, fresher food, better health. As the community strengthens, excess capacity (and there will be plenty) can be diverted to wiring for lighting, computers, and other machinery that will allow the citizens access to information and markets.

With renewable energy comes a cleaner environment, less carbon release, healthier people who live longer and are more productive and able to provide for themselves and their families.

But there's a deeper issue here, one that can be extended to even a nation as powerful and wealthy as America: distributive power generation.

The fatal flaw in the US grid is, unlike the Internet, electricity is interdependent on every other node in the grid: if one goes, likely many will go before the drainage can stop, and it requires hands-on rejiggering to reroute around a trouble spot.

Think of a big city traffic jam: that's the model the electrical grid works on.

By pushing power generation down to the community level, you're giving local populations an option: generate as much power as you can, and take from the grid what you need beyond that. Should your generator go down, the grid is your backup.

Should the grid go down, all you need to do is to power down nonessential uses until it comes back up.

Too, you'd be cutting the costs of electrical generation substantially, as well as providing jobs as diverse as wiring to the new generator (and maintaining that wiring locally) to economic development of this new resource.

Who said going green would kill the American economy? If anything, it brings money back to the people.

Which brings us back to unleashpowerforthepeople.org.

One thing poor people around the world have in common is a lack of access to power, and by that I mean, political. It's easy to overlook people who have no voice, who cannot contact the people who nominally represent them. By providing them with electrical power, you provide them with a voice, an economy, and a say in what directly affects them.

Look at Myanmar, for example. Even before the cyclone, we heard stories about the terrible regime there, Aung San Suu Kyi's imprisonment, the Buddhist uprising.

Why? Because there was access to the rest of the world, through the media and the Internet.

Imagine how much faster the world could have responded to Darfur if this program had been in place when the crisis was just beginning? Imagine if images of the Janjaweed's rapes and murders had been posted by someone with a videocamera (provided by Peter Gabriel's charity, Witness) had documented and uploaded video in real time?

Imagine. Just imagine. And all that, just from a few solar panels or wind turbines...

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)