Smokin' Mirrors

Is LNG the next oil? By Willhemina Wahlin “There’s a joke from the early days of the oil business,” write Daniel Yergin and Michael Stoppard, in “The Next Prize,” an article in Foreign Affairs in 2003. “A geologist reporting back on drilling a wildcat exploratory well says, ‘the bad news is that we didn’t find oil. The good news is that we didn’t find gas’.” Little did the early oil tycoons know that natural gas would have the last laugh, thanks largely and ironically to the emergence of its liquefied form, Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)—and no country on earth is currently laughing louder than Japan, the largest importer of LNG in the world. The Japanese government views LNG as vital to its strategy to reduce the nation’s oil dependence, as well as a key ingredient in its post-Kyoto Protocol recipe for alternative fuels, and is actively promoting LNG through subsidies. Japanese corporations have been securing their lead position in every link of the global LNG supply chain, through the f

Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture Art, Truth & Politics In 1958 I wrote the following: 'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.' More

Big Country. Bigger Country Rock 'n' Roll. The Re-mains go to the Coalface. For most people, Australia conjures up images of a big red centre, populated by various versions of Mick Dundee or Steve Irwin. It's tougher than that. It takes four days to get from Sydney to Perth--east to west--and few musicians in Australia these days take on the gritty, tough audiences of rural and outback Australia, preferring instead the well worn Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane run of the east coast. But one band has found an untapped spring, a 'coalface' as it were, in this rugged terrain, and they have made it their mission to share their special pioneering brand of country rock 'n' roll around. Introducing the Re-mains, and their soundtrack to rough driving. More

Maid in Japan Sydney Morning Herald October 11, 2005 As its young women say no to motherhood for longer, the country's population has begun to shrink, write Deborah Cameron and Willhemina Wahlin in Tokyo. More... A new picture … Japanese women are increasingly torn between family and career. Photo: Reuters