Naomi Klein, author of “The Shock Doctrine”, asks in her TED presentation “What makes our culture so prone to the reckless high-stakes gamble, and why are women so frequently called upon to clean up the mess?”

One thing that comes to mind when I watched this was how President Bush signed an executive order on July 14, 2008, just before the end of his term, to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The moratorium was put in place in 1990 by his father. A year earlier President Bush lifted the moratorium from drilling in Alaska, also put in place by his father.

I thought the risk policy differences, between these two men, would have been at least mentioned.

The XJ Supersport is a diesel? It’s fast. Very fast.

The 4.4 liter diesel engine will deliver a total of 375bhp and a peak torque of more than 600lb.-ft. The sprint from 0 to 60 mph will be made quicker than the supercharged XJ and will return 40mpg. Same engine is also rumored to be offered in the Jaguar XF.

It hits 60 in 4.7 seconds, only 0.01 of a second behind the Jaguar XKR sports car. Oh, that 40 mpg figure actually drops to 24 mpg in the Supersport, but it’s still impressive for a sports car today.

It also has a high-tech interior. The dashboard is a dynamically changing TFT flat-screen panel, as described in a CNET review.

All the graphics shown there are dynamic and context-sensitive, so the visuals change, depending on what the driver requires. Receive new directions from the sat-nav, for example, and the fuel gauge is temporarily replaced by a full-colour map showing new directions. Access the engine computer and the rev counter is swapped for a colour menu that gives you access to vehicle setup functions.

It’s so fast, despite being fuel efficient, the police even have a model. Actually, the police model gets the smaller 40mpg engine but it still runs under 6 seconds to 60:

The Jaguar XF Diesel S is powered by a 3.0-liter AJ-V6D Gen III diesel engine that delivers 275 hp. The Diesel S accelerates from 0-60mph in just 5.9 seconds, while top speed is limited to 155 mph.

Send Ford an email and tell them to take the lessons learned from Jaguar and offer diesel options in America. What are they waiting for?

It sounds like a race against time, to capture the methane gas bubbling up from beneath the water in Rwanda.

In 1986, a similar phenomenon killed an estimated 1,700 people when gas erupted from Lake Nyos in Cameroon, suffocating almost everyone within 25 kilometers of the lake.

Scientists believe a similar process occurs at Lake Kivu roughly every 1000 years, devastating life in the area. If it were to occur today, some two million people living around the lake could be killed.

In order to prevent this, the Rwandan government is trying to pump the methane out of Lake Kivu, and put it to good use.

The infrastructure, however, is not ready to support the new source of available energy.

“The gas in the lake has the potential to produce a total of 700 megawatts of electricity,” [engineer Alex Kabuto] said, adding that it is much more than Rwanda needs. “It is our aim to generate enough energy to be able to export electricity.”

But that is currently far from reality.

As things stand only ten percent of homes are connected to the grid. About 11 megawatts are generated by hydroelectric power, but most of Rwanda’s energy comes from diesel generators.

I wonder if anyone is considering this as a good use case for methane-diesel options, like experimental Volvo engines.

The CEO of Squaw Valley has sent a letter explaining an interruption of services and loss of power at one of their busiest times of year.

On December 30 at about 12:00pm, the power lost one “leg” from the bottom of Headwall to the upper mountain. We immediately pursued contingency plans to activate backup power, and contacted the power company, NV Energy. A fuse located on a power pole operated by NV Energy near Granite Chief Road had failed. It took us 30 minutes to locate the fuse following the failure, at which point the power company was already en route. Upon arrival, the power company repair crew replaced the fuse, which they found had melted. We were advised, based on the state of the melted fuse, that failure was attributable to a defective fuse and was not related to the mountain’s infrastructure or operations.

Good example of a disaster recovery plan failure; the energy company was wrong in their assessment and the mountain infrastructure was the problem. Power failed at about the same time the next day, indicating it was caused by load.

The same fuse failed again on December 31 at 11:00am. Again, our team immediately mobilized backup power supplies and generators. NV Energy was on site within 30 minutes. A decision was made to replace the fuse with a larger set, which had to be sourced and delivered. The process took about 30 additional minutes.

The three legs of power thus had to be upgraded to the larger fuse. The CEO did not explain the cause of load or why the larger fuses were necessary. Squaw Valley has initiated an audit of their infrastructure and operations. It could also be related to how the power company was handling a wider set of power outages in the region.

A similar incident happened last year, when the Kirkwood infrastructure was overloaded and overheated. Kirkwood runs on power from six diesel generators, however, and so it caused an explosion and giant fuel fireball, covering the mountain and visitors with pollution for several days. The Kirkwood Senior Vice President said their plan has been to migrate the resort to power lines.

Ultimately, Cohee said, the resort would like to maintain the diesel generators for back-up purposes only. For the last few years, Kirkwood has sought to connect to Pacific Gas & Electric’s power grid in the region. The move, which would mean burying power lines in federally owned forest land, is under environmental review.

It is a wonder the resorts do not work on developing locally-sourced energy. They often have to close due to high-winds, which seems like an ideal time to run windmills and generate power. The days without high-winds produce abundant sunshine, which seems like an ideal time to collect solar energy. Innovation could also improve the efficiency of lifts and the resort, with sources more independent and redundant, so less load would have to be pulled from a grid. Guests would be less at risk of emergency conditions even with a main-power outage.