Detroit Implodes

The Detroit auto industry appeared to be imploding Thursday.

Strong words starting out this USA Today article on the "downward spiral" of the US auto industry. There's a bit of a perfect storm going on for the industry, from a weak economy, bad credit markets and declining housing values wiping out a lot of wealth for working class Americans. But the overarching cause was to be found on the front page of the same day's paper:

Oil futures climbed briefly to a record above $142 a barrel on Friday...

Which would explain, back to the first article, why:

Consumer Reports magazine said Thursday that its latest survey showed that 80% of Americans aren't planning to buy a new vehicle in the next year. Of the few who say they are, 0% — none, zip, nada — say they'll consider buying something bigger than they're driving now.

The era of big cars and trucks is coming to an end. Those are the vehicles Detroit is geared to make and make money off of. The article ponders whether Detroit can weather two years in a row with the kind of sales declines they're facing. One industry expert made excuses:

"You could say they should have built these smaller cars and more fuel-efficient cars, but nobody saw these gas prices coming a year ago," Conway says. "You can't create a car to deal with $5 gas in one year. The guys who had those cars kind of lucked out."

Hm, in about two minutes of googling, I found a 1992 report on how the US auto industry needed to increase fuel efficiency to compete with Japanese car manufacturers. And a 2005 article on how US car manufacturers were fighting like hell to stop states from requiring greater fuel efficiency.

In 1993, when President Clinton gave the auto industry $1 billion to research building a fuel efficient car, rather than require them to actually build more fuel efficient cars. Fuel efficiency proceeded to decline to its lowest in 20 years.

GM decided to scrap the EV1, a commercially available all electric car in the 90s, probably because electric cars don't break down and so earn a lot less in the lucrative after market.

Yeah, just bad luck that Detroit got hooked on bloated short term profits selling gas guzzling small trucks. That they paid off Washington to remove said trucks from being held to any fuel efficiency standards. And the Japanese? Just lucky on the hybrids and greater fuel efficiency cars.

Detroit's luck is likely to get even worse if the projections of peak oil theorists is right and we are actually about to see, or are already seeing, a decline in the amount of oil capable of being produced. To call peak oil a theory isn't really accurate. No one would argue that oil is infinite, therefor it must run out some day. Much of the world, including the US in 1972, already passed peak oil capacity. The question then is when overall capacity, including OPEC countries, is going to peak (or when it did).

Shut out, for a moment, all the talking head blather trying to explain the current price of oil. If you think about supply, it all starts to make sense. Demand is rising, production is flat or falling most places, therefor prices will keep rising. Even Saudi Arabia, which keeps promising to pump more oil, hasn't actually come through.

This doesn't mean there won't be any short term declines in oil prices, but it does mean the trend will be ever higher. It means there's a good chance we're already at the end of the age of cheap oil, the age that brought us the industrial and green revolutions. That means everything is going to change.

Krugman at the New York Times, lays out the same case on oil though without looking at the possibility of peak oil. Rising demand from developing economies alone is enough to ensure a steady upward trend for oil prices.

A New Economics

New York to Boston Amtrak Dispatch 3

Still on the train. Moving slowly (track work) through Massachusets. Rolling meadows and tree covered hills extend into a misty horizon. A boat floats on a lake, bobbing with twilight fishers.

Let us never forget, not only the beauty of such a scene, but the literal treasure it represents. Not because it offers an ideal location for another sprawl of tract housing and big box stores. Nor because of the valuable timber it houses or gas reserves lurking beneath it. Land's true, everlasting value lies in it just as it is, intact and diverse.

It is time to transform our economics. The failure to exploit and remove the resources from land does not mean a lack of value created, as our current economics would have it. Intact ecosystems mean value perpetuated and preserved. We don't gauge the worth of our lungs by what they'd go for removed from us. This greenness of nature, this life unbound and glorious, it is our lungs, our circulatory system, our heart and our soul.

The longer we ignore this, the poorer we become.

Let's Play With Trains

New York to Boston Amtrak Dispatch 2

We grow up playing with toy trains. There is something so pleasing about watching a train curve and wind its way around the living room, past the impromptu towns made of blocks and boxes, through the mountains made of blankets and pillows.

I find that pleasure undiminished as an adult riding an actual train. The gentle rumble and roll, the country rolling by (even when it frustrates me with its monoculture), soothes and inspire me. How productive would I be if I could commute five hours each way to work on a train, with a lunch break in the club car as the train paused between trips.

Somehow, after WWII, we made a choice to bypass and cripple our national train system in order to lay 4 million of miles of highway. We let auto lobbyists trump the toy train hobbyists inside us, and convince us to disregard our childhood love of trains. We threw away our natural wisdom that trains were a better way to travel. Our country has since been scarred and devastated by that choice and the world soon followed. Housing tracts, given birth in Levittown, grew like cancer throughout the land with the parasitic infection of strip malls never far behind. We spread, sprawled, and drove big cars from end to end. In the meantime, we used up millions of years of oil in a century, paved over much of our wet and wildlands, and warmed the planet up, possibly past the point of return.

How do we rekindle that child like love of trains? Can we reconnect America with the joy of travel by rail enough to inspire the building of a proper, high speed national rail system (clean energy run, while we're at it)? Imagine what fun we'd have.

Pavement, Shopping Mall, Sub Division, Repeat

I'm riding on the train from New York to Boston today.

Looking out the window, it's hard to miss our absolute mania for pavement. Wherever the smallest cluster of buildings gather around  to form a town, city, or those endless lengths of strip malls, concrete and asphalt vie with each other to smother every piece of earth. Roads, alleys, parking lots, sidewalks, loading bays, gas stations, offices, stores, houses and broad stretches of pavement that serve no discernible purpose whatsoever, all spread like oil across water.

Where pavement does not lie, an obsessive, purposeless monoculture of ceaselessly manicured, herbicide and pesticide soaked, water hungry grass takes its place. Even when these bland expanses of grass obviously require substantial investment for upkeep while offering absolutey no use to anyone, the regime of monoculture is imposed. I'm looking right now at a broad lawn stretching out around an office park. No feet will tread barefoot on that grass, no games will roll across it and no picnic will spread out upon it.

In the smallest "neglected" corner, however, life insistently bursts forward. Life doesn't just tend towards diversity, it strains towards it, hurtles and hurls forward into a profusion of species and variety. That is the way of life. Out of the unmown strip of dirt behind a warehouse sprout dozens of kinds of wildflower and grass, vast colonies of ants, beetles, worms and caterpillars intent on their leaf by leaf journey towards butterfly. Vines grow to cover an abandoned concrete water tank. Pioneering trees risk notice by beginning to stretch up out of the spaces between unused track.

Life must dream of being neglected by us as our attention proves so deadly.

Between the clusters and towns, the occasional woods and wetlands flash their lushness, an acre bursting with more varieties of life than an entire town. Even these, though, are broken and discontinuous, inhospitable to any larger life that needs to range, forage or hunt to survive. The waters are often choked by the unintended monoculture of algae overgrowth, fueled by the runoff from all those lawns and all that pavement.

And always, more roads, parking lots, bridges, buildings, and pavement in all its myriad featureless forms.

How right was the person who said an alien come to earth would think the world was populated by a race of automobiles who had enslaved humans to serve them. In fact, we are a planet full of earthlings who seem intent on obscuring and forgetting the fact that we were born of the earth.

Words to Learn From

"Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."

Buckminster Fuller

via Where

An eloquent summation of a core philosophy behind the Cradle-To-Cradle design philosophy, that waste equals food.

Buildings that make energy

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, Feb. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Masdar announced today that it has chosen Chicago architecture firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG) to design its headquarters in Abu Dhabi's
Masdar City, the world's first zero-carbon, zero-waste city fully powered by renewable energy. The headquarters will be the world's first large-scale, mixed-use "positive energy" building, producing more energy than it consumes.

Abu Dhabi, one of the largest producers of oil in the world is building a car free, zero-carbon city with a net energy generating building as its centerpiece.

What do they know that we are not catching onto here? It would seem that the producers of oil know that the age of oil is ending. They don't intend to be left behind.

In any case, this is a resounding affirmation that we (meaning humans) can change the way we make things. Considering that in North America, our buildings contribute 1/3 of the greenhouse gases we produce, when do our office blocks start looking like this? Or looking like any kind of sustainable, inspired design?

Administration Unveils Bold New Global Warming Strategy

What does the political leadership of the world's most powerful (and polluting) nation do when they get an email from their own Environmental Protection Agency with news they don't like? Apparently, they refuse to open it.

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

I tried that once with my credit card bills. It didn't work out so well. I wonder how it will work as a strategy to fight global warming?

(Note: the desert that guy's head is stuck in probably used to be a prairie. Perhaps he's checking to see where all the oil went.)

Huge Win for Everglades

It's nice to be there bearer of glad tidings, sometimes. Florida is buying out U.S. Sugar Corp., the largest sugar producer in the state, in a $1.7 billion deal that will add 187,000 acres to the everglades and allow an uninterrupted water flow from Lake Okeechobee to the ocean. The state had previously developed an $8 billion plan to achieve the water flow through pumps and reservoirs. It can now be achieved naturally.

Yes, it represents a winning deal out for a company in not such great financial state and there are likely to be unforeseen clean up costs from their long term exploitation of the land. But this is unqualified good news on every front.

Recycling Compact Fluorescent Bulbs

Home Depot is now taking back compact fluorescent bulbs from any manufacturers, joining Ikea and True Value stores which already have similar programs.

As you may know, compact fluorescent bulbs use about 1/4 the energy of a typical bulb, lowering energy use and costs significantly. However, the bulbs do contain small amounts of mercury. When they are improperly disposed of that mercury leaks into the environment where it is highly damaging. Compact fluorescents still produce less mercury over their lifetimes than a typical incandescent bulb due to the mercury released from coal powered plants that generate much of the power used by the bulbs. But no mercury is far, far better than less mercury. That mercury has a way of making it into and up the food chain, and eventually back into us and other creatures at the top of the food chain where it does much damage.

Since there is of yet no national recycling program for these bulbs, these stores are probably the easiest ways to properly recycle them properly. You can also check on earth911.org for other recycling centers.

Now for your related viewing pleasure, I'm reposting an animated PSA we completed recently encouraging the switch to compact fluorescent bulbs.

Every Citizen Must Read This

20 Years ago yesterday, climatologist James Hansen testified to congress that there was a 99% certainty that human activity was causing global warming to eventual catastrophic results. Every year since then has been warmer, and the scientific and world community have caught up with him. But we have not moved to make the changes we needed to stop climate change. Now, according to his new testimony given to congress yesterday:

...we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next President and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.

Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control.

Changes needed to preserve creation, the planet on which civilization developed, are clear. But the changes have been blocked by special interests, focused on short-term profits, who hold sway in Washington and other capitals.

I argue that a path yielding energy independence and a healthier environment is, barely, still possible. It requires a transformative change of direction in Washington next year.

Read his entire testimony. Make sure everyone you know reads it. Hansen gave us clear warning 20 years ago, and we did not heed it. We have no excuse today. We also have no time. One year to get moving. Carbon dioxide, already at 385 ppm (parts per million) in the atmosphere and rising, must be lowered below 350 ppm to avoid disaster (350.org will fill you more in on the science and what to do).

Why we are not moving decisively now will seem an impossible mystery to future generations. But congress and the president have failed to act even on a vastly inadequate bill like the Lieberman-Warner Bill that just died in the senate. We cannot let them do so again. Whoever is in office next year must feel an irresistible pressure from the citizenry (by which I mean all who live on this land, not only those who are granted legal recognition as citizens). The action we take must not be timid or in the sway of special interests.

The things we need to do are clear and have been for 20 years. Amongst other things, Hansen argues for an immediate moratorium on all new coal plants and the introduction of a carbon tax. The carbon tax would be non-regressive, in that the full amount should be refunded to the population. People with less money would benefit by increasing their efficiency and getting the credit. The economy would benefit from the drive to innovation. Our children would benefit by not inheriting a climate gone wild with half the species on the planet dead, mass famine, desolated oceans, extreme weather, and more.

Truly, read the whole thing and pass it along to everyone you know. We have no excuses this time.

The Dell of Solar?

A company called Sungevity is offering a fully installed solar rooftop panel system available for $2,000. It's only in San Francisco, and the cost is due to incentives. Sungevity isn't focused on the hardware end of solar, but on the sales and distribution end, trying to commoditize the market and scale it up to mass installations, hence they're being touted by some as the Dell of solar. They even use satellite imagery to allow them to deliver a quote entirely online.

via grist

Islands of Plastic, Wilderness Full of Trash

All those millions of plastic bottles we use for a few minutes every day but that last for hundreds of years, where do they all go? And all the other nearly indestructible, though briefly used, hunks of plastic we shed like skin cells? Most end up in landfills where our great great grandchildren, many times over, will still be dealing with them. But many end up in the ocean, including in a Texas sized island of trash in the Pacific. From there, many wash up on the shores, including the wilderness of Alaska (if you can really call a beach strewn with garbage "wilderness" any more). All this plastic creates yet more pressure on our already endangered sea life.

This New York Times Magazine article looks at the issue through a probably quixotic clean up of one such Alaska beach.

One key paragraph from the article:

Eventually we will have to abandon planned obsolescence, and instead manufacture products that are durable, easily recyclable or both, Moore said. And we will have to overcome our addiction to conspicuous consumption.

Seems a bit obvious by now, though you wouldn't think so by our lack of action. As always, I refer you to McDonough and Braungart's Cradle to Cradle for the bible on how we can design the things we use without creating islands of plastic and beaches strewn with garbage.

These guys are in the middle of sailing a boat made of garbage from California to Hawaii to bring attention to the same issue. Happy sailing, fellows, and may the wind soon be at your back!

Greening the Ghetto

Majora Carter rocks!

Watch. Be moved. Then, hopefully, be moved to action.

Grease to Fuel in SF

On the more down to earth alternate energy side of things, San Francisco will be building its first grease to biodiesel plant from brown grease, or pan scrapings and oil residue caught under the sink. It will also keep the stuff out of the sewage plants where it used to end up.

Speaks for Itself

by Mike Peters

Truly Green Fuel

More in the technologically optimistic renewable energy vein.

The current food crisis has highlighted the disastrous consequences of shifting corn production towards biofuels. It isn't helping us become energy independent. It isn't decreasing our carbon footprint. It is contributing to incredible hardships around the world as well as increased food bills at home. It carries high environmental costs, including increasing the Gulf of Mexico dead zone with its runoff. Simply put, crop based bioefuels are bad for people and bad for the planet (albeit, good for the agri-business that benefits from the subsidies and the politicians they buy off).

What is it good for? More subsidies for agri-business.

It does not follow, however, that we should abandon biofuels in general. There are some amazing new technologies that promise sustainable biofuels production with actual economic benefits beyond graft and profiteering. A company called Algenol is planning to produce 100 million gallons of ethanol by the end of 2009 in the Mexican desert. They are projecting to increase that to 1 billion gallons annually by the end of 2012 from this single facility. The algae can be grown on non-arable land, and therefor does not compete with food crops. The algae not only produces ethanol, it sequesters carbon from existing power plants as an input to the process. It will produce ethanol at a rate of 6,000 gallons per acre, compared to 370 gallons per acre for corn and 890 gallons per acre for sugarcane, requiring a fraction of the land use, and again, non-arable land use.

Let us again take a leap. In 2007, the US used 142 billion gallons of gasoline per year. According to Algenol's calculation, 50 million acres of non-arable desert, one quarter of the acreage of corn fields used to produce 7 billion gallons of ethanol in 2008, could produce 50 billion gallons of ethanol a year. That's one-third of  our annual gas consumption.

Technology cannot on its own fix the problems we have created. We need to transform the way we live and relate to the planet that gave us birth. But this kind of cleverness will help us make that transformation much more gracefully and is to be welcomed.

via Sustainable Design Update.

Gigawatt of Goodness

A company called Nanosolar has developed the first device capable of generating a 1 gigawatt (GW) of solar capacity per year, compared to most current devices that produce 10-30 megawatts annually. They are also claiming that it produces the cheapest solar panels available, which they have begun shipping for utility deployment.

This kind of advancement gives a sense of how we could shift our energy production to renewable resources. According to this Wikipedia article, we currently use about 3.5 terawatts (TW) of energy per year, or 3,500 GWs. So, if you will join me in a rather sloppy abstract exercise, 3,500 of these devices should be able to create enough solar power to replace our entire energy infrastructure in one year. Of course there's no way for them to scale their technology like that any time soon, and since solar capacity isn't constant it doesn't scale like that. 

But using our imaginations for a moment, it helps make concrete the possibilities for renewable energy. This is just one device, from one company, working with just one form of renewable energy. Extend this kind of potential across all forms of renewable energy (including wind, tidal, solar, geothermal, biomass) with the many technologies currently being developed. These are the technologies that will put any economy championing them into a leading position in the world, and help bring sustainable development to all parts of the world.

It is precisely a failure of imagination that prevents us from pursuing renewable energy with all our social and economic might, and leaves us talking about wrecking our precious coastlines in a futile race to suck off the last of our petroleum because we're frustrated at our gas prices.

I'm preparing a longer post on rethinking our conception of innovation, but am always happy to note positive technological developments like this. They will play a significant role in our getting ourselves out of the mess we've gotten ourselves into.

Truth Over Politics

It's good to see some resistance to partisanship on oil drilling. Schwarzenegger says the offshore drilling is not responsible for high oil prices and that the California coastline is a treasure he is committed to protecting. This despite his endorsement of McCain, who in a clear sign of election year pandering over truth, has come out with Bush to resume offshore drilling despite the fact that it won't produce oil for more more than a decade and even then won't significantly affect the price of oil or gas.

Rising Seas

It seems the oceans are getting warmer and rising faster than was realized. It refutes those who tried to use some short term findings to argue the oceans were cooling. The good news is it confirms the climate models scientists have been building to predict changes. The bad news is that the models show, well, bad news. Making the continued short term fossil fuel boosting politics as usual that's been on display particularly disheartening.

Wind Pays for Own Subsidies

In the "Yet more evidence for the government to be investing in renewable energy resources, as if we needed more evidence" category, a new report shows wind farm tax revenues more than pay for the tax incentives used to build them with the tax revenues they generate. Wind projects also create lots of jobs during construction and afterwards.

Oh, they're also part of the process of saving the planet rather than a contributor to its destruction, if that means anything.

Now if we could just wean the fossil fuel and nuclear industries off their subsidies.

Drilling for Dollars

More on the oil front today with Bush, McCain, Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, and other friends of oil calling for reversing the first Bush's 1981 ruling ending offshore oil drilling. With oil and gas prices at record highs, these friends of the oil industry are hoping to harness consumer frustration to push through an ineffective and potentially catastrophic policy.

Let us be clear. This has nothing to do with bringing relief for American gasoline consumers. Absolutely nothing. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

This bit from today's NYT article on the subject should settle that question:

A 2007 Department of Energy study found that access to coastal energy deposits would not add to domestic crude oil and natural gas production before 2030 and that the impact on prices would be “insignificant.”

According to the administration's own Energy Department study, offshore drilling would  add no new oil for more than a decade. Even then it would have a minimal impact on the price of oil and gas. At a time when our fisheries and all ocean life are in precipitous decline, it will add greatly to the stresses on our oceans with increased oil spills. From a BBC article today:

...the US government recently calculated there was a 33-51% chance of a major spill in the lifetime of an offshore oil and gas lease in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska.

Offshore drilling is about more dollars in for oil companies already awash in record profits. It is a giveaway to big oil at the expense of all the rest of the planet with no upside for us. There are no two sides to this story.

We already know what we need to do. The cheapest way to increase the supply of oil is conservation, of which we have done a very poor job. Beyond that, we need to invest heavily in alternative sources of energy. Using a suite of existing solar, geo-thermal, wind, and tidal technologies, combined with a Manhattan project to push the development of new technologies, we can genuinely become energy independent. Not just from foreign powers, but just as importantly, from the oil industry. Our energy future can't lie in the hands off anyone with separate, vested interests.

An inquiry into those record oil industry profits at a time when the world is paying such a high price for oil, and, coincidentally, the US is being led by an administration made up of oil industry insiders, would also be welcome.

Don't let anyone sell you on their offshore snake oil drilling plans to ease the pain of high gas prices.

You can read more about the Bush's statement on energy independence here.

Unexpected news from Iraq

Well, isn't this a shocker? (from the NYT)

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

An administration run by oil executives invades Iraq under a series of pretenses later shown to be complete falsehoods and five years later, the four western oil companies kicked out of the country 36 years ago are back in with no bid contracts. 

Never saw that one coming.

Oh, remember how so many were ridiculed for claiming this war was always about oil? Who can seriously  we'd have spent:

...to date on our occupation of Iraq if their primary export was, say, fava beans? 

350.org: Because the world needs to know

350 parts per million (ppm). That's where CO2 levels need to be reduced to if we want to maintain the climate that allowed life to develop on earth (all in all a good idea). We're currently at 385 ppm and rising. Hence the inspiration for 350.org, a group seeking to build the understanding around this crucial number and a movement to mobilize us to reach it.

Since climate change is the very definition of a a global issue, they've produced a wonderful wordless animation to communicate the concept and the need for action. Passing it on is an easy enough place to start.

Air Car

Detroit long ago dropped the ball.

The government ain't funding it.

Thank goodness some folks see that coming up with low pollution, high milage cars is an incredibly good idea.

The air car. It uses compressed air to drive the car. At speeds below 35 mph, it will actually exhaust cleaner air than it takes in. Above 35 mph, it will exhaust 1/4 as much carbon as a typical car. It is estimated to get well over 100 miles per gallon.

And it's due to be on the market in early 2010. Pretty cool. Zero Pollution Motors (ZPM), the manufacturers, say they're taking reservations soon.

They're also competing in the Progressive Automotive X Prize, a ten million dollar contest to design "viable, clean and super-efficient cars that people want to buy."

Electric vs. Gasoline Car Smackdown

Think electric cars are cool cause of all that save the planet stuff but just can't offer the performance as gasoline powered cars? Well think again.

Electric cars kick gasoline car ass!

Don't take my word for it. Take it from the MythBuster guys.

Stroke of Insight

One morning, brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor (pictured hanging out with a brain, researchin') had a massive stroke. It came with a couple of unique features. First, a major spiritual epiphany. Second, because she was a neuroscientist, she was in a unique position to study and explain, from a scientific point of view, what was going on. I highly recommend taking the time to listen to listen to this talk from TED (a site full of a lot of great thinkers and their ideas).

Taylor's entire left hemisphere, controlling her sense of self and logic, was suppressed by the stroke. What was left was an unbridled sense of limitlessness, of one-ness with the universe, of peace. In other words, she was thrust into a state of nirvana. One might say this was an illusion born of the brain trauma, but, as she describes it, this sense of true awareness was simply unbound from the ordinary limits of the practical, day to day work carried out by the left hemisphere (where are my keys, what's wrong at work, is that a pink elephant dancing in the hallway?, etc.). She found in her experience the potential for all of us to be able to reach that state, and to discover on the deepest level what connects us, to each other and the rest of existence.

Oh, what a different world it would be.

There is much that is inspiring and moving in her story and thoughts. One of the things that got me thinking was the relationship between science and spirituality, between the "how" things work and the "why" of our existence. They are too often posed in contradiction to one another. It is all one universe, and both are a means of reaching the same truths. When they are truly open and expansive enough, each has room for the other. Who cares if nirvana is a state of divine energy or a function of the unique physical structure of the human brain, if it is in fact the same state. I would tend to say that each is in fact an expression of the other, in truth the same thing. 

If science can help us have a greater understanding of how to achieve greater peace and understanding within and between us, and our spiritual quest leads us to appreciate and search for greater physical understanding of the universe, I think we are on the right track.

The High Costs of Doing Nothing

Get used to people saying we can't afford to act on global warming and other urgent ecological issues. Then get used to gently pointing out the absurdity of the argument.

Let's leave aside the fact that our future economic vibrancy is likely to depend on taking a leadership role in green technology. One look at how the US auto industries fierce resistance of moving to more fuel efficient cars has left them in such terrible shape should prove ample warning that getting behind the greener technology curve is simply bad economics and bad business.

The fact is, the costs of not dealing with climate change, and in fact a host of other core environmental issues including biodiversity, healthy ecosystems, and toxins in the environment, are incalculably higher than the cost associated with doing something. While we can't link any particular weather event, such as the current flooding in the midwest, to global warming, we can recognize our future in them. Climate change is already shifting our weather patterns. We are likely to see greater deluges, such as these storms, combined with more droughts. Rising ocean surface temperatures will bring stronger storm and more severe weather. Flooding like this and that experienced by New Orleans during Katrina will be the result. The human and economic costs of events like these are enormous. We need to shift how we look at the costs of things. First by improving our infrastructure, the decline of which played key roles in the devastating impact of these events. Then by recognizing we can't afford to not act on climate change.

UPDATED: More on the harm from coming climate change here.

Funny Stuff

Thank you Greenpeace for making me laugh.

And hopefully got a few folks to swap out their light bulbs.

Does this also point to a possible new area to be mined for alternative energy sources?

In Memoriam

When an actor, musician, royalty, or other entertainer dies, we are certain to learn of it on the front page of our newspaper, on the evening news, and around the clock on cable news. If their life, or death, catches our imagination enough, we're likely to see more coverage every year, biopic films, books, and so on.

I don't intend to belittle the importance of any person's death. In fact, we need to learn what is lost when people we don't know die (for instance, the 5,000 children who die every day from unclean water). But I do ask you to compare our reaction to one remote individual's death (one famous or even semi-famous death, that is) to the extinction of an entire species.

Heard of the Caribbean monk seal? After five years of searching for a surviving member of the species, the US government just declared them extinct. It is the first species of seal made extinct by human activity (with the damage starting way back with Columbus' second voyage). It is unlikely to be the last. Two other species of monk seals, the Hawaiian and the Mediterranean, are already in decline and endangered.

The monk seals are not alone. We are in the middle of an accelerating mass extinction of creatures great and small. It takes millions of years for species to develop. The ecosystem that is our world depends on a vastly complex and interconnected web of life that has taken 3.6 billion years to develop. We are decimating that web at an alarming and increasing rate without even understanding what we are losing. Food chains, oxygen production, pollination, all aspects that keep all creatures (including humans) alive are being impacted in unpredictable ways. We are losing our fish. We are losing our frogs. We are losing our bees.

It does not take long to drive a species to extinction, but it does take millions of years to restore them. That's how long the world took to restore biodiversity after previous mass extinctions. With the damage we are doing to the entire ecosystem, however, even that time frame may be optimistic. In any case, we won't be around to see the emergence of new species of the same complexity as a seal.

It certainly would be easier to protect them while we can. I guarantee you, our grandchildren will be grateful if we do. I can only imagine the words they will have for our failure to do so. We already have the tools to get started on this, but perhaps the first step for many of us is to start paying attention. To shift our priorities, and feel the grief when a species that took millions of years to arrive in all their gorgeous uniqueness and complexity leave us forever. To pay as much attention to this loss as we do to someone we saw on TV or read about in the tabloids. 

So, a moment of silence in memoriam for the the Caribbean monk seal. And all those other species joining the mass extinction we may never know of. It's the least we can do.

A Self-Portrait of Waste

Chris Jordan is an artist with a genuinely astounding project called Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait. The true scale of our wastefulness is nearly impossible to absorb in the abstractness of printed words and numbers. Jordan has found a visual language to describe and demonstrate this waste that is both beautiful and shockingly tangible.

In the spirit of his work, a picture being much more effective than a thousand words, I will stop writing and let you go see. Allow yourself some time to truly absorb the information and truth inherent in these images.

The Food Crisis

With food prices at a three decade high and stockpiles dangerously low, the UN is holding a meeting of world leaders in Rome to discuss the growing food crisis. This crisis poses a disaster on many levels. There's the immediate massive human suffering caused by hunger (in Haiti, people are literally eating dirt to ease their hunger pains). Compounding this is the incredible damage this does to stability and economic development in the poorest areas of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia and South America. Hunger and poverty replicates itself leaving these areas to continue their decline.

If the prospect of millions starving is not enough to push the US and other wealthy nations past their own narrow interests and into action, the awareness that we are not somehow separated from this suffering, not immune from its impact, should. When there is not enough food in an area, conflict develops. Governments become destabilized. Civil wars break out. Epidemic diseases, which respect no borders, break out. And the grounds are laid for violence, which also does not know borders. Sudan, Somalia, and Afghanistan are a few examples where not enough water and food has played a leading role in fomenting instability which in turn threatens global security. While there are obviously many other factors, including foreign military, political, and economic interference, lack of an adequate food and water supply is probably the greatest long term determinate of instability, leaving a society open to just those sorts of interference. 

Simply put, our own security is best served by promoting sustainable development in the poorest areas. Even population stabilization requires food and health security.

The particular causes of the current crisis are manifold. There is the diversion of grain crops like corn to bio-fuels, a disastrous and completely ineffective way to address carbon emissions. Market manipulations and profiteering. World Bank policies that have shifted developing countries away from producing their own foods and towards producing cash crops for export. The insistence of wealthy donor nations, particularly the US, to offer food aid as exports from their own agriculture industry, thus shipping food across the world rather than developing local agriculture. Perhaps the most alarming cause is the long term shortage of water for agriculture growing from a combination of global climate change and serious mismanagement of water supplies.

So, how much, in the short term, will it cost to address this crisis?

Jacques Diouf, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the host of the meeting, estimated it could run to $30 billion a year.

$30 Billion a year to resolve the current food crisis, including focusing resources on helping increase agricultural output in these regions with seed stock and improved techniques and technology. $30 Billion from all the wealthiest countries in the world to end the looming threat of mass famine and increase international peace and security. Let's put that in some perspective. The US is currently spending $100 billion a year on the war in Iraq. When Americans were convinced, falsely as it were, that our security depended on the war, an overwhelming majority supported it. Cost was not an issue.

So we need to develop a new sense of what security means. Putting the needed resources towards sustainable development would ease suffering, safeguard our global environment, and dry up the human ecosystems that breed terrorism and civil war. Let us imagine how our role in the world would change if we begin to link our security and prestige to how much hunger and suffering we ameliorate rather than to our ability to militarily and economically dominate. In any case, the latter strategy has certainly been a bit of a bust, except for those who made tremendous profits from the enterprise of war.

Truly breaking those regions out of poverty and laying the basis for a sustainable, prosperous future, to the whole planet's benefit, will take more money than that. Again, some comparison. The counter below shows the running total for the war in Iraq so far. This is only one component of waste, but an obviously glaring and unnecessary one. 

Jeffrey Gold, in his new book Common Wealth, estimates the amount needed address issues from poverty, population stabilization, global warming, protecting bio-diversity, and sustainable development at about 2.4% of wealthy nations GNP. These are the investments we, as a country and a community of nations, cannot afford to put off. The costs of doing failing to act will be unimaginable.

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In a related note, another New York Times article today looks at how some private investors are  responding to the rise in food prices by purchasing farmland, grain elevators, fertilizer, and shipping equipment. Some are focusing in particular on sub-saharan Africa where land is cheap. They are consolidating small farm holdings into larger, more efficient farms.

On the one hand, these areas desperately need investment in their agriculture. But let's think about what is happening here. Their land will now be owned by international investment firms. The local populations will in effect become serfs on their own land. The food will not be theirs, except to buy from these same international investors. These areas need investment, but for speculators to be leading the way is yet another avoidable tragedy in the making.

Yale's new online enviro magazine

The Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies has launched a new environment focused online magazine, environment 360. Lots of good stuff in here, including an overview of the global water crisis. If we think the end of oil will bring great disruptions (which, of course, it already is), what happens when we run out of fresh water?

Bill McKibben, author of the first general audience book on global warming (The End of Nature in 1989), writes on our having crossed the tipping point on carbon dioxide. Another article looks at the deep impacts rising carbon levels are having on our oceans. And there's a nice piece on the emerging, and quickly growing, environmental movement in China. Given the outsized role of China and its growth on the global environment, this last is a development of great significance.

End of the Hummer?

In response to American's increasing flight from trucks and SUVs towards smaller cars, not to mention the small detail that wallowing in the fast and easy profits of churning out gas guzzlers has left the US auto industry on the verge of bankruptcy, GM announced it was closing four of its truck plants. They're also looking for someone to buy their Hummer brand altogether. 

Yeah, I see buyers lining up around the block for that brand.

In further response to the age of higher gas prices, GM aims to have the Volt, their serial hybrid vehicle (meaning it has a small gas engine to generate electricity for trips of more than 40 miles),  in showrooms by 2010. Too bad they had an electric car already in production in the 90s, the EV1, but not only discontinued it but took them all back and crushed them. Their strategy instead? The cash cow that was the Hummer. That's right, GM took a commercially viable, zero emission auto, and literally crushed them all to make way for the Hummer. Now they are planning to have an electric car that still has a gasoline engine ten years after they crushed the purely electric car.

One more example of why good environmental sense is good business sense. Unsustainable practices are not...sustainable. 

Design, technology, the environment, and joy

This is a wonderful talk by the visionary architect and urban designer Sir Norman Foster exploring the intersections of technology, design, and the environment. One of the themes running through it is how green design is so celebratory in nature. This is a critical concept, that designing for a sustainable future is not about sacrifice and misery. When we realize our interdependence with the rest of the planet and design our societies, buildings, and infrastructure accordingly, we literally increase our joy. This is not a zero sum game where every step towards efficiency requires some loss of happiness. Quite the opposite is true. As just one example, green buildings are flooded with sunlight, exposed to the natural world, and consistently provide more enjoyable and productive experiences for their users.

Steal This Trash

This New York Times article caught my eye, exploring the rising problem of restaurant grease theft. Yup, with gas prices steadily increasing (though they in no way reflect the true cost of gasoline which this report pegs at as high as $15 per gallon), that vat of left over KFC grease has turned into liquid gold. Folks are rustling waste grease for use in bio-fuels.

Truly, this is a sign of sanity and progress. The whole concept of garbage is one we need to throw in the trash. Or perhaps reuse for some other higher function. But trash's days should be numbered, and those folks who recognize the value of what we throw away are ahead of the curve, even if they're behind the law.

GIve a moment's thought to the great lengths we go to and the incredible expenditures of energy and labor we expend to mine, harvest, and make stuff. A lot of the materials we use, like metals and fossil fuels, are of finite supply. They will eventually run out. In the end, what do we do with most of this stuff we worked so hard to make? We dump it in a landfill where it will leach dangerous toxins into the environment (i.e. the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil that grows our food) for centuries or longer. The materials themselves become unusable.

Or we burn them.

Very clever.

In a world that loves its stuff so much, what do we do?

McDonough and Braungart's brilliant book Cradle to Cradle offers an elegant path to, as the authors put it, remake the way we make things. The core principle of their philosophy, eco-effectiveness, is "Waste equals food." It's a design philosophy that eliminates the whole concept of waste.

In nature, nothing is garbage. The waste from one process (say a bear pooping in the woods, or more lyrically, cherry blossoms gently drifting to the forest floor), becomes food for another (flies, worms, trees, the birds that live in the trees and eat the flies and the worms, and on and on).

We are part of nature. No one gets to opt out, no matter how much formaldehyde they pump in your body when you go. If we are to become a sustaining part of nature rather than consuming it and throwing it to the mythical land of "Away," we need to produce things with the same cyclical method in mind. To McDonough and Braungart, what's left from making and using stuff must either be a biological nutrient, i.e. it turns back into dirt, or a technical nutrient, i.e. something which can be used again and again. So once we've gone to all that trouble to get that iron ore out of the ground, or turn that crude oil into plastic, we keep on using it indefinitely. I'm quite certain our grand children will be truly grateful.

That's a tiny nutshell of their ideas. The book has at least a tree worth of nuts. Go. Reimagine. Remake. Prosper.

And in the meantime, make sure to lock up your grease.

How Lunch in Mumbai Affects Bird Dung in Peru

It's no metaphorical flight of fancy to say the entire universe is interconnected. The whole place started out in one hot mother of a singularity we call the big bang and spread out from there. We're all still reverberating from that explosion.

It should be no surprise, then, that the thin and delicate layer of life clinging to the surface of our speck of a planet is highly interconnected. Moreover, as humans grow ever greater in number and more capacious in our appetites, the impacts of what we do becomes more immediate, planetary in scale, to often devastating consequence.

Case in point, Peruvian bird poop. As this article describes, the guano, or bird dung, left on these islands off Peru is a highly prized source of organic fertilizer. Demand is rising due to rising fossil fuel prices (most inorganic fertilizers are made with natural gas) and rising consumption of organically raised foods (though there are much more sustainable means of fertilizing crops than shipping poop from Peru around the world).

But the anchoveta, the fish that the birds that make the guano eat, are being over harvested to provide feed for poultry and other livestock to feed Asia's growing appetite for meat (no finger pointing at Asia, we still eat far more meat in the US per person). As it is going, the fish and the birds could die off by 2030. As the birds go, so goes their guano. And the food it would help produce.

Everything we do affects life all over the planet. What we eat. What we drive. How we mine, harvest, manufacture, package, transport, and dispose of everything we consume. For our own sakes, it is time to change the way we do all these things so they nurture this thin layer of life we grow in, rather than deplete and poison it.

Fortunately, we have much of the know how in place to do just that, and the imagination to come up with new ones. What we require is the will and the attention span.