The Plot To Stop Airport Expansion

Reposted in full from Greenpeace UK



'We've bought a piece of land slap bang in the middle of the proposed third runway site at Heathrow. We're not going to let the runway get built and we need your help.

The government plans to go ahead with airport expansion across the country even though this means we'll have no hope of meeting our climate emission targets. At full capacity, Heathrow would become the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the whole country. We can't let this happen if we are serious about tackling climate change.

We've bought the plot at Heathrow to make sure that climate change cannot be ignored. We will challenge the proposals every step of the way. We will give evidence at the planning inquiry, resist the compulsory purchase of the land, we will campaign during the national election and final, if necessary, we will stand with the community of Sipson and stop the bulldozers.

The village of Sipson, including 700 homes, businesses, the local school and several local pubs, will be flattened to make way for the third runway.

We have four legal owners on the deeds: Oscar winning actress Emma Thompson, comedian Alistair McGowan and prospective Tory parliamentary candidate Zac Goldsmith and Greenpeace UK. That's the maximum number of owners we can put on the deeds, but we're inviting everyone to join the plot as a beneficial owner and stand beside us to resist all attempts to build the runway.

You'll be joining others who've already signed-up to be beneficial owners, including local Labour MP John McDonnell, Tory frontbench spokeswoman Justine Greening, Lib Dem MP Susan Kramer, environmentalist George Monbiot and acclaimed climate scientist and Royal Society Research Fellow Dr Simon Lewis.

We'll be depending on thousands of people to join the Airplot community in the coming months and years to put pressure on your MPs, write letters to local media, join us at events, tell friends, and come up with your own ideas to make sure that everyone in the country know that we must stop airport expansion if we are going to stop runaway climate change.

The government says that we need the third runway to create jobs in these tough economic times. But building a runway in 10 years time will do nothing to stop a recession now. And the benefits to the economy have been completely overblown by the government. In fact an independent study commissioned by WWF suggests that the true cost of a third runway would lead to a £5 billion loss.

In truth the government has few allies outside the aviation industry on this issue. Scientists including the government's former Chief Scientific Adviser Sir David King, the head of the environment agency, Chris Smith, cabinet ministers Ed Miliband and Hillary Benn, all major opposition parties, and an increasing number of Labour MPs have all spoken out against the plans to build a third runway at Heathrow.'

Poor Neighbourhoods Can Kill

How poverty and social disadvantage and associated stress affects health and well-being...

Excerpt from the New Scientist, 13 January 2010

'...Across the US, death rates among black women diagnosed with breast cancer are 37 per cent higher than for whites, but in Chicago the difference is an astonishing 68 per cent (Cancer Causes & Control, vol 18, p 323). Something about this heaving metropolis is sending black women to an early grave.

Poor access to screening and therapy is clearly an important factor. But according to a novel collaboration between sociologists and biologists, the strain of living in some of the toughest neighbourhoods in the US may cause biological changes that lead directly to earlier deaths.

Results from the collaboration indicate that social isolation and a fear of crime cause an overload of stress hormones that can change cell biology, sending tumours into overdrive. "We're showing that your social environment can affect your health directly," says Suzanne Conzen of the University of Chicago. "It goes into gene expression. That concept is really new."

Crucially, this insidious influence is felt most by Chicago's African American women, who are far more likely to live in the city's deprived areas than their white counterparts.

The provocative hypothesis highlights the need for new ways of fighting breast cancer in black women in Chicago specifically, including via social interventions. More broadly, other health researchers are hailing the union of biology and sociology as a model for future studies into a whole range of health disparities. "It's a great example of the kind of direction in which I can see us heading," says Tim Rebbeck, an epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There are already hints that stress and social deprivation could have similar effects on diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

To get a handle on how tough life in Chicago can get, a good place to start is the neighbourhood of Englewood in the city's South Side. Poverty in Englewood is grinding, crime is endemic and amenities that the mostly white residents of comfortable suburbs like Clearing take for granted are long gone. "Even churches have moved out," says Sarah Gehlert of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, lead sociologist on the project.

New Scientist got a taste of conditions on a tour of the South Side with members of Gehlert's research team. At vacant lots strewn with beer bottles and other debris, I'm told to watch my step. A previous visitor stumbled on a bag of urine and other medical waste. Along one Englewood street, we pass three burnt-out houses. On this winter morning, the gang activity that blights the area has yet to ramp up for the day. But the grilles on the windows of the Simon Guggenheim Elementary School are a testament to the crime that stalks these streets. You wouldn't want to be here after dark, says Charles Mininger, a graduate student on the project...'

Lab Experiment - Atomic Dogs

Change agents need to be students of what causes people to forward articles, videos and ideas that 'go viral' - but what makes this? The New Scientist created its own experiment...the video itself is not the most riveting, and how one could measure an increase in scientific understanding after watching it I don't know...but who could resist golden retrievers?!

Excerpt from The New Scientist, 28 December 2009

'It is a cold November evening and I am perched atop a tall stepladder in a village hall outside London. On the floor, 16 golden retrievers stare up at me bemused. They are arranged in a square, four by four. I watch through the viewfinder of my video camera. This, I think to myself, could make me famous.

It all came about at the behest of my editor. We want you to write about viral videos, he had told me a couple of weeks earlier. Go and find out why some videos go viral. What makes people share them? It sounded straightforward enough. He sent me a link to Charlie Bit My Finger, a video of a baby biting a toddler. It is currently YouTube's most watched video of all time.

"I want you to make your own viral and become internet famous," he said.

"If this can get 135 million hits, you can do it too." Without wanting to spoil the ending, I can reveal that Charlie's record remains intact. Still, despite my worst fears, my video turned out to be a surprising success.

Watch the average homemade viral video of, say, a skateboarding dog, and you could be forgiven for thinking that going viral is easy. In fact, the odds are stacked against you. Approximately 1 million new videos are uploaded to the web daily, according to some estimates. Up to half of those are on YouTube, which claims 20 hours of footage are posted every minute.

The vast majority bomb. Less than 10 per cent of YouTube videos show any sign of viral behaviour, according to Riley Crane of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studied around 5 million of them. In most cases, the only hits they receive are those you would expect from family and friends plus a handful of people stumbling across them at random, he says.

To better understand what makes people share videos, I turned to Judith Donath of MIT, who studies online social networks. She argues that the factors driving people to share stuff over the web are not that different from the reasons apes pick bugs out of each other's fur: it's a way of establishing social bonds. Other researchers have argued that in human societies, language - especially gossip - has taken on the social function of such grooming. Sharing videos via email or within social networks is just the next step, Donath argues. "Sharing online is equivalent to small talk," she says. "It's a little gift of information. It shows 'I'm thinking of you'."

Video sharing is also a way of making a statement. "People use videos as a way of showing their position in the 'information ecology'," she says. "A video reflects on the person who sends it." In other words, people will pass on a video if they think it's cool - because it makes them look cool too...

Eventually, we hit upon a winning idea. I called it Pets Teach Science. The aim, as stated on our web page (youtube.com/user/PetsTeachScience), is "to demonstrate tricky scientific concepts ranging from quantum physics to chemical structure with the help of man's best friend and other furry companions". It was fun and had the potential to be copied by others to become an "internet meme".

The next question was what to film for the first episode. According to Bernardo Hubermann of HP Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, aspiring viral makers should throw everything they have into their initial effort. When he and his colleague Fang Wu analysed the performance of 10 million videos, they found that the probability of a video succeeding plummets if it is a user's second or third effort - even though the quality of the later videos is generally higher. "If you don't make it in your first submission, you probably won't make it," says Hubermann.

For what I had in mind, a degree of canine discipline was required, so I contacted a group of dog trainers called the Southern Golden Retriever Society Display Team based in Kent, UK. They agreed to help, and last month we made a film using 16 of their dogs to illustrate the structure of the atom. Some of the animals acted as the protons and neutrons in the nucleus, while the rest circulated to mimic the electron cloud...

A few days of shamelessly begging all my friends and family to disseminate the video garnered fewer than 1000 hits...

The big breakthrough came after a tip from Michael Wesch, an anthropologist at Kansas State University in Manhattan who studies the behaviour of visitors to YouTube. He does so using the methods his peers apply to studying remote tribes - by participating. His own videos have attracted more than 10 million views.

One of the key bits of advice he gave me was to send the video to a so-called "sneezer" - a media outlet or blogger that can quickly disseminate your video to a large number of people. "Almost every viral has a catalyst moment at which it has a big leap of, say, 100,000 viewers at once," he says. For the massive videos, that sneeze can be anything from a TV appearance to a tweet by a popular Twitterer, such as movie actor Ashton Kutcher to his several million followers. This catapults the video onto YouTube's daily "most popular" lists, and the chain reaction begins. Even if only 1 in 10 people continue to share the video, you have succeeded.

The sneezer hypothesis is backed up by Crane's statistical analysis. Though around a third of viral videos appear to spread gradually by word of mouth alone, the rest receive some kind of external plug that boosts their popularity.

My own sneeze came after I sent a link to the free London newspaper Metro. The paper gave Pets Teach Science an enthusiastic write-up, and the video's views surged by about 8000 within a few hours. It soon appeared on YouTube's "pets and animals" page. In the following days, The Huffington Post picked it up, providing another surge, and a link from the über-blog Boing Boing almost doubled my hits overnight to more than 50,000.

As this article went to press, the video had been viewed more than 110,000 times, proving that with a little cunning, and some cute pets, anyone can make a video go viral...'

How to Start a Revolution

Excerpt from The Tipping Point - The Net Version, a paraphrasing of the main ideas in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point by Robert Paterson

'The Tipping Point is: That one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once. The moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point, a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is a certainty.

Epidemics tip because of the extraordinary efforts of a few select carriers. But they also sometimes tip when something happens to transform the epidemic agent itself.

Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

Are another example of geometric progression: when a virus spreads through a population, it doubles and doubles again into infinity.

Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating:

• they (Epidemics) have clear examples of contagious behavior
• they both have little changes that make big effect
• it takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic's equilibrium
• they happen in a hurry
  

This is the most important trait, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does.

...In order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first. Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message.


The Law of the Few

There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them. With an epidemic, a tiny majority of the people do the work. Once critical factor in epidemics is the nature of the messenger. Messengers make something spread.

Word of mouth is still the most important form of human communication. Rumors are the most contagious of all social messages.


Connectors

• people with a special gift for bringing the world together, people specialists
• know lots of people
• have an extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances, making social connections
• have mastered the "weak tie"; a friendly, yet casual social connection
• manage to occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches
• by having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together
• acquaintances represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are
• social glue: they spread the message

Mavens

• information specialists
• once they figure out how to get that great deal, they want to tell you about it too.
• solves his/her own problems, his/her own emotional needs, by solving other people's problems; have knowledge and the social skills to start word-of-mouth epidemics.
• a teacher and a student
  
• in a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks; they provide the message.

Salespeople

• have the skills to persuade when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing
• little things can make as much of a difference as big things
• gives nonverbal clues that are more important than verbal clues...
  

The Stickiness Factor

There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible/sticky and compels a person into action. All you have to do is find it. In order to be capable of sparking epidemics, ideas have to be memorable and move us into action. Content of the message matters too.

• what is needed is a subtle but significant change in presentation to make most messages stick
• the elements that make an idea sticky turn out to be small and trivial
• 'clutter' has made it harder and harder to get any one message to stick
• the information age has created a stickiness problem
• pay careful attention to the structure and format of your material, and you can dramatically enhance stickiness
• can tip a message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas

The Power of Context

We don't necessarily appreciate that our inner states are the result of our outer circumstances. We are more than just sensitive to changes in context. We're exquisitely sensitive to them. And the kinds of contextual changes that are capable of tipping an epidemic are very different than we might ordinarily suspect. The impetus to engage in a certain kind of behavior is not coming from a certain kind of person but from a feature of the environment.

• small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics...
• what really matters is little things - 'Broken Windows Theory': in a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes (Rudy Gulliani's belief)
• an epidemic can be reversed/tipped by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment
• there are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions
• human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context. We are a lot more attuned to personal cues than contextual cues
• character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstances and context
• the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions then the immediate context of your behavior...
  

Conclusion

First Lesson of the Tipping Point

Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas. Your resources ought to be solely concentrated on the Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

Second Lesson of the Tipping Point

The world does not accord with our intuition. Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.


Important Conclusion

What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push; just in the right place; it can be tipped.


Notes

Diffusion model: a detailed, academic way of looking at how a contagious idea or "product" or innovation moves through a population.

• Innovators: the adventurous ones, visionaries
• Connectors, mavens, and salesmen make it possible for innovations to connect with the early adopters. They are translators: they make ideas and information from a highly specialized world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand. They drop extraneous details and exaggerate other details so that the message itself acquires a deeper meaning'
• Early adopters: the slightly larger group that is infected by the innovators. Visionaries.
• Early Majority: the deliberate and the skeptical mass, who would never try anything until the most respected of this group try it first'
• Late Majority Laggards: the most traditional group that see no urgent reason to change'

This Is Indexed

Jessica Hagy has been blogging these sorts of diagrams for a while, now has turned them into a book! Here are a few that relate to sustainability:

http://thisisindexed.com

Australian Centre for Social Innovation - Adelaide

Reposted in full from the Adelaide Review, 28 January 2010

'The Australian Centre for Social Innovation is the latest in a series of institutions that aim to provide both the city of Adelaide and the state of South Australia with guidance in creatively addressing a raft of current and potential social problems. The Adelaide Review spoke with newly appointed CEO Brenton Caffin.

With strong support from the Premier and South Australian government, the idea for the development of an Australian Centre for Social Innovation, headquartered in Adelaide, came from a key recommendation from former Thinker in Residence, Geoff Mulgan. Mulgan argued for the role of such institutions in developing methods for social innovation and better matching the supply of good ideas to the demand of current and future social problems, of which there are no shortage.

Following Mulgan’s recommendation, the State Government agreed to provide seed funding to establish the Centre and recruited a national Board, chaired by Phillip Adams, to oversee the Centre’s development. New CEO Brenton Caffin joined the Centre in October last year and has since been working with the Board on both the business plan and program of work for 2010.

Social innovation, lest it be thought a rather woolly term, could be best described as “a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals”. Geoff Mulgan has succinctly described social innovation as “new ways to address unmet social needs”.

South Australia has a strong tradition of social innovation, from the early development of the Torrens title, legislation to enable women to run for parliament, the establishment of the South Australian Housing Trust back in the 1930s, environmental legislation such as the container deposit and more recently the plastic bag ban and alternative accommodation initiatives such as Common Ground. Meanwhile, global examples range from the Grameen Bank’s development of micro-finance in Bangladesh through to new ways of online collaboration such as WikiPedia.

A social innovation can be a product, production process, or technology (much like innovation in general), but it can also be a principle, an idea, a piece of legislation, a social movement, an intervention, or some combination of them.

“Social innovation can take place within government, within traditional companies, or within the non-profit or third sector, but is increasingly seen to happen most effectively in the space between the three sectors,” comments Caffin.

“We will definitely be drawing lessons from a range of models, while putting our own flavour on what we do here. The Young Foundation (where Mulgan is Director), which builds on the 50 year legacy of social entrepreneur Michael Young, has been extremely supportive to date in sharing their thoughts and experiences. There are some other excellent examples, such as MindLab in Copenhagen and KennisLand (or KnowledgeLand) in Amsterdam, that I recently had the privilege to visit.

“From the White House (Obama has established an Office for Social Innovation) through to Singapore and New Zealand, there is a growing movement for institutions like ours to contribute to achieving positive social change through innovation. Collaboration with these institutions will be key to developing our methods and ideas further.”

A primary task will be simply raising awareness of social innovation in Australia – identifying, supporting and promoting the best social innovations across the country and getting involved on projects that will see a social impact here. And while ultimately the goal is to be a national centre of excellence in the field of social innovation and some initiatives will be pitched at a national audience, much of the Centre’s initial work will start in South Australia.

March 2010 will see the launch of Bold Ideas, Better Lives, Australia’s Social Innovation Challenge, where individuals, communities and organisations across Australia can submit their ideas to the Centre. Working closely with a shortlist of entrants, ideas will be developed into feasible projects and in the final stage up to 10 projects will be supported both financially – there is $1m on the table – as well as with capacity-building to implement their ideas.

The Centre is also looking to explore the potential of using design-thinking approaches to radically redesign social services.

“The design community, as exemplified in the work and writings of Tim Brown and the team at IDEO, is rediscovering its role in not just designing better products, but in making better lives. At the same time, constraints on public spending are forcing the public sector to think creatively about how to achieve policy outcomes in more cost-effective ways. We are keen to bring these two worlds together to experiment with and develop new ways of working and new models of service delivery,” adds Caffin.

There will be an emphasis on collaboration.

“One of the first questions we ask when conceiving a new project is “who can we work with on this?” We recognise that there is a huge range of expertise, interest and passion out there and we want to harness that power and enthusiasm and avoid reinventing the wheel. So we’ll be partnering with institutions, communities and individuals to make sure we’re finding the best way forward to achieve positive change in our society.

“Ultimately, the Centre has been set up to contribute to a more inclusive and just society for all Australians by being an incubator for socially innovative ideas and a safe space for experimentation. The pace, scale and complexity of challenges that are emerging, from climate change adaptation to the consequences of an ageing society, means that we have our work cut out. Staying relevant means addressing existing social problems while recognising and responding to new and emerging challenges. Ultimately, we will be judged on the value of the contribution we make.”

In this respect, Caffin urges the public to become directly involved: “Talk to us. Write to us. Come to our events. Dream up an idea and let us know. Is something affecting your community? Tell us your story and what you want to see changed (even better, tell us how you think you can change it). People lie at the heart of social innovation so we will be actively looking for ways to get people involved.”

For more information, visit www.tacsi.org.au or write to: info@tacsi.org.au

Vote for the Ignoble Prize for Economics

Reposted in full from real world economics, 1 February 2010

The Ignoble Prize for Economics, to be awarded to the three economists who contributed most to enabling the Global Financial Collapse (GFC).

Vote for three. The ballot itself can be accessed at

http://rwer.wordpress.com/poll-procedures-for-the-ignoble-prize-for-economics/vote-for-the-ignoble-prize-for-economics/

'Short List of Nominees for the Ignoble Prize for Economics

Fischer Black and Myron Scholes

They jointly developed the Black-Scholes model which led to the explosive growth of financial derivatives. The importance given to their hypothetical calculation of derivative prices was baneful not just because it was bogus, but also because it meant that relevant and often urgent real-world economic research was widely neglected by the profession.

Eugene Fama

His “efficient market theory” provided the moral umbrella for all sorts of greed, predatory behaviour and incompetent corporate management. It also provided the rationale for deregulation. And his theory’s widespread acceptance meant that “discussion of investor irrationality, of bubbles, of destructive speculation had virtually disappeared from academic discourse.” In these three ways Fama’s work created the environment which made possible the GFC.

Milton Friedman

He propagated the delusion, through his misunderstanding of the scientific method, that an economy can be accurately modeled using counterfactual propositions about its nature. This, together with his simplistic model of money, encouraged the development of the financial theories with unrealistic assumptions that facilitated the GFC. In short, he opened the door for everyone subsequently to theorize without fear of having to be attached to reality.

Alan Greenspan

As Chairman of the Federal Reserve System from 1987 to 2006, he both led the over expansion of money and credit that created the bubble that burst and aggressively promoted the view that financial markets are naturally efficient and in no need of regulation. Before a Congressional committee on 28 October 2008 Greenspan confessed that his theoretical beliefs of 40 years were now proven to be without foundation, hence his total confusion and failure at his job.

Assar Lindbeck

By working to make the Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (“Nobel Prize in Economics”) almost exclusively a prize for neoclassical economists, this Swedish economist has contributed significantly to the conversion of the economics profession and of world public opinion to market fundamentalism.

Robert Lucas

His development of the rational expectations hypothesis, which defined rationality as the capacity to accurately predict the future, both served to maintain Friedman’s proposition that monetary factors do not affect the real economy and, in the name of “rigor”, distanced economics even further from reality than Friedman had thought possible.

Richard Portes

As Secretary-General of the Royal Economic Society from 1992-2008, he helped suppress worries expressed by non-mainstream economists about developments in the financial sector. In 2007 he wrote a Report for the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce giving a clean bill of health to Icelandic banks only a few months before they collapsed. When investigators called attention to the real state of Icelandic banking, he wrote a series of letters to the Financial Times defending the soundness of Icelandic banks and imputing professional incompetence to those who doubted it.

Edward Prescott and Finn Kydland

For jointly developing and popularizing “Real Business Cycle” theory, which by omitting the role of credit greatly diminished the economics profession’s understanding of dynamic macroeconomic processes.

Paul Samuelson

Through his textbook Economics: An Introductory Analysis (19 English language editions and translated into 40 languages), he popularized neoclassical economics, contributing more than any other economist to its diffusion and thereby to the deregulation of financial markets which made possible the GFC.

Larry Summers

As US Secretary of the Treasury (formerly an economist at Harvard and the World Bank), he worked successfully for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which since the Great Crash of 1929 had kept deposit banking separate from casino banking. He also worked with Greenspan and Wall Street interests to torpedo efforts to regulate derivatives.

Procedures

The voting is being conducted using PollDaddy. Its system uses cookies to prevent repeat voting. A voting box showing the short-listed candidates and a link to their dossiers will remain till voting closes near the top of the right-hand column on the home page of the Real-World Economics Review Blog. Voting is open to all interested parties. Each voter can vote for up to three of the listed candidates. The ballots are secret. Voting will remain open for several weeks. No results will be announced before closing the poll.'

The Best Things In Life Are Free

Excerpt from Sharing the World's Resources, 15 January 2010

'Rebuilding a socially useful financial system requires a fundamental rethink of our relationship with money. To commence this change, we should recognise the already vast non-monetary economy - often based on sharing and bartering...

This is what happened in 2009: a small group in society takes a huge gamble with the entire economy to earn large bonuses for itself, inflicts lasting damage on everyone else, expects the public to pick up the bill and then carries on as if nothing much happened, while displaying an extraordinary sense of entitlement and arrogant disregard for the rest of society...

If 2009 was spent rescuing the financial system, the year ahead should be spent remaking it, and to do that we need to fashion a fundamentally different relationship with money.

The main lesson of the crisis this past year is that money has become a capricious and overbearing ruler of our lives - by turns threatening to discipline us, only to offer us liberation, on its own terms. Instead of hoping for a return to easy credit and rising property prices, we should put money in its proper place by reducing its footprint in society, limiting its reach, promoting alternative ways to account for what we value and finding less socially destructive ways to save and invest, lend and borrow. We need to see money less as a mystical religion or a drug and more as a tool.

In the 1950s, dull, respectable Britain was not obsessed with money. There were limited opportunities to make money and fewer to spend it in a time before shopping malls. Modesty and thrift, repair and reuse, were the watchwords of the day. It was in the late 1970s that politics started to revolve around how money could bring dynamism and disorder to society.

Thatcherism started life as monetarism, a critique of how Keynesianism had allowed government to become financially incontinent. Thatcher's original crusade was to restore respect for the value of money through strict control of the money supply. This discipline did not last for long, however. From the mid-1980s, with monetarism cast aside, Thatcherism's mission was to let money loose. Money was no longer a source of discipline, but an elixir, a source of liberation, freeing people to make their choices in the commercial democracy of the open market. Easier credit allowed a culture of debt and desire to overtake deferred gratification and modest self-sufficiency.

The City embodied Thatcherism's monetary schizophrenia. One the one hand global financial markets were meant to be unforgiving: companies had to deliver returns to shareholders who could shift their funds wherever they liked at the flick of a switch.

Yet, just as the capital markets were making our livelihoods more insecure, they offered their own escape plan. The City began to multiply and regenerate money in startling ways. On taking out a mortgage, people were ushered in to a casino in which ever more complex gambling games were being created the whole time. With one hand, money disciplined us, keeping wages in check. With the other, it set us free, with seemingly limitless credit bridging the gap between what we wanted and what we could afford. If we really want a more stable future we need to put this abusive and dependent relationship with money behind us. That demands going back to understand what we really value and what money is for.

What we most value - love, dignity, good conduct, pride, trust, friendship, care - does not come from money. If we were to try to use money to buy any of these things most people would think we were mad. Imagine for example asking, "How much do I owe you for that?" after your first kiss with a lover. Those aspects of our lives that we really value are things that cannot be priced and could not be sold: what makes them so valuable is precisely that they are beyond price. You cannot change a nappy with a credit default obligation derivative. Poets do not write for stock options. Good relationships do not need insurance policies. Few people would care more for another person if there were a bonus attached.

Not surprisingly, most utopias - starting with Thomas More's - planned to do without money. Yet societies that do without money entirely invariably end up failing. Cities have done without money, but usually only under siege, when gold, ammunition and, most of all, food becomes the currency. Pol Pot's Cambodia did without money. Closer to home, experiments such as time banks, which seek to use time as a currency, and local economic trading schemes are more talked about than used.

The trouble is that what we value in itself and what we put a price on are often inextricably linked. My wife and I fell in love over a series of lunches in London restaurants - yet you will not find "Falling in love" listed on the bill, just after the fizzy water. The paid-for meals were a vehicle for the expression of love which is beyond price. The value something has in itself is often "hidden" behind the entrance ticket we buy to make it possible. The cover price of a great book never captures its value.

When the money side of this relationship becomes too strong - as it has done in the past two decades in Britain - life becomes unbalanced. We focus too much on the surface value, price, and not enough on the hidden value, which lies behind it. To live flourishing lives we need something to lie behind the surface world of buy and sell. As the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor puts it in A Secular Age, his history of how religious belief adapts to the society around it:

"The individual pursuit of happiness as defined by consumer culture still absorbs much of our time and energy, or else the threat of being shut out of this pursuit through poverty, unemployment, incapacity galvanises our efforts . . . and yet the sense that there is something more presses in. Great numbers of people feel it: in moments of reflection about their life; in moments of relaxation in nature; in moments of bereavement and loss; and quite wildly and unpredictably."

The something "more" that Taylor is talking about tends to be those experiences that give us a different perspective on life. They have a lasting impact if only because they are memorable experiences, which move, touch and so stay with us. They make us feel authentic, as if we have found ourselves - for example, through travel - rather than having ourselves defined by humdrum work. They invariably involve relationships, bringing people together: friends, families, lovers, fans and believers.

The objects in our lives that we really value - the stuff we cannot bear to throw away - mark out relationships that we value - a memento from holiday, a photograph from a wedding, a collection built up with a partner, toys kept from childhood. That is one reason we are so fascinated and consumed by homes, because they sustain relationships. It is also why we pay to be part of huge social gatherings - festivals, carnivals, raves, sporting events: mass shows of emotion that give us a sense of being caught up in something more than ourselves.

When money serves a "something more", then consumption has a point. When the link is broken, modern, money-driven society loses its anchor. The challenge for politics ought to be to turn that insight into policy and politics by putting money in a more subordinate position in society.

A cornerstone of this would be to recognise the already vast non-monetary economy on which most of life depends. Most of the work of caring for children and elderly parents is done for free, mainly by women. A society that wants to age well should promote the non-monetary values of volunteering and relationships. Consumerism is not a good training for later life. Helping people to participate and contribute, to remain active and independent for as long as possible, is.

The young are also fostering non-monetary economies through the web's growing culture of mass barter and sharing. The CouchSurfing community, in which browsers, most of them young, arrange to sleep for free on one another's sofas when visiting a city, has more than a million members. Car pools and lift-sharing schemes organised on the web, such as Zipcar and GoLoco, are thriving across the world. Freecycling, in which people give away things they don't want to others who need them, has hundreds of thousands of participants globally...

We should also encourage financial innovation that works in society's interests rather than serving the self-interest of bankers. The 1990s were not just the era of ultra-complex debt products. At the other end of the social spectrum, the Grameen Bank found ways to get millions of small loans to poor farmers and villagers to allow them to do the most basic things - such as put tin roofs over their huts. Kiva, an exchange that allows people in the developed world to invest directly in enterprises in the developing world, handled loans of $3.8m in just one month four years after being established.

Zopa, the online peer-to-peer banking exchange that directly matches lenders with borrowers, is lending more than £2.5m ($4) a month. In Africa new microbanking systems are emerging, such as M-Pesa in Kenya, which uses mobile phones as its infrastructure and phone credits as its currency. M-Pesa launched in March 2007 and now has more than six million members in Kenya. We need more financial innovations such as Zopa, M-Pesa and Grameen, which are simple and clearly socially useful.

That should be combined with more open, social regulation of the money machine. Science is increasingly opening itself up to public scrutiny as it develops complex new fields such as nanotechnology. It is time we had a similarly open approach in finance, so that innovations could be scrutinised by ordinary lenders and borrowers before they are approved.

Reforms of this kind, combined with tighter regulation, more socially responsible bonus systems and taxation regimes designed to promote greater stability, such as the Tobin tax, might give us a money machine that serves society, rather than what we have: a dysfunctional system, hosted by a society that seems to have little control over its behaviour.

Money does not make the world go round - not all the time, and never on its own. Money really brings meaning to our lives only when it helps us in our search for something more. If, as a society, we do not start that search for something more, money will rise to rule us again, to our ruin.'

How to Share The World's Resources: A Proposal

Excerpt from Sharing The World's Resources, 24 September 2007

'A comprehensive proposal for how a system of economic sharing could function within a reformed world economy and the effect it would have on corporate trade, international finance and aid mechanisms:

A growing body of progressives within the global justice movement, including environmentalists, economists and policy makers, broadly agree that a significant overhaul of the world’s economic and political systems is long overdue, and that without significant restructuring our most pressing problems will never be tackled.

Whilst financial wealth soars to new heights for the few, the majority world are growing relatively poorer in the face of unfair trade, debt-based finance and grossly insufficient international aid. At the same time, developing countries have to endure the harsh environmental consequences of the industrial growth that fuels the skewed generation of wealth. Instead of being given the tools to end poverty they find themselves forced to systematically abdicate democratic control over their economies and resources to economically dominant countries and corporations.

Whilst economists and policy makers of the G8 nations remain comfortable in their runaway train of neo-liberal policies, we cannot rely on governments to instigate change until after the train collides. Their systematic prioritization of competition, self-interest, market forces, economic growth and the blatant subsidizing of corporate activity has created an unsustainable, commercialized society and has distorted the very meaning and function of economics. In a world where 2.7 billion people live on less than two-dollars-a-day and 50,000 people die as a result of poverty each day, economic practice can no longer claim to ensure the efficient distribution of resources for all, but rather the maximization of wealth generation without regard for consequence.

It is clear to many that the rogue train is on a collision course with environmental devastation and global economic and financial instability . If that isn’t enough, old Cold War divisions from renewed competition over resources and resentment from marginalized communities throughout the world present themselves as security threats, which are potentially catastrophic in a nuclear age.

It is time for a significant re-evaluation of global economic and political values and the creation of an economy that serves the needs of the global community as a whole, within our environmental limitations. It may seem a vein hope that policy makers will wake-up before the collision, but we can at least be sure that they will take heed once they emerge from the wreck.

The question arises - along what lines should a sustainable economy be based? To answer this, it is useful to outline the key problems:

• A rapidly globalizing market-based economy with self-interest and competition at its heart, prioritizing profit over people.
• The privatization of resources for the sake of security and profit, and the propagation of economic growth as the panacea for development.
• A corrupt and unstable global financial architecture based largely on speculation and bearing no relevance to the lives of most people.
• The monopolizing power and influence of multinational corporations and the welfare they receive to propagate economic growth and shape the ideals of society.
• Inefficient and damaging export-oriented trade and agricultural practices that prioritize profit over food security.
• Grave environmental neglect and climate change as a result of overconsumption and excessive commercialization.
• The neglect of mass poverty and growing inequality by policy makers who mistakenly leave the provision of basic human rights to commerce, market forces and the so called ‘trickle down’ effect.
• The minimization of true democratic institutions and influence.
• Political and economic competition between nations and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
• The commercialization and homogenization of our values and cultures.

The list could be extended but is sufficiently comprehensive for the purposes of this analysis. On the other hand, a just and sustainable economy must:

• Secure basic human rights and needs for all people everywhere as a priority.
• Create effective and interdependent local economies that co-exist harmoniously within a stable world financial system.
• Create democratic and representative global and local institutions to regulate economic activity and to guarantee social and economic rights.
• Ensure that corporate enterprise serves the public good and is rooted locally where possible.
• Ensure that all economic activity occurs with ecological limits and within a strict framework for emission reductions.

An effective and uniting global framework for economic and political activity must supersede the restrictive and often divisive prescriptions of socialism, communism and capitalism. Once we overcome such ideologies, many comprehensive and inclusive solutions to these problems present themselves through the work of individuals and institutions around the world. Proposals by ‘green economists’, the International Forum on Globalization, proponents of ‘localization’ and others propose generally to root economic activity in local communities as a way of reducing CO2 emissions, reducing corporate power and reinforcing participatory democracy.

What is missing from these and other proposals, which have at times been interpreted as protectionist and regressive, is an overarching concept for how the global community can continue to operate in an interdependent and globalised capacity, in line with the observable cultural shift towards international unity. The more basic question is how can the outdated values of privatization, self-interest and competition - which drive economic globalization - be fundamentally transformed to reflect principles that more accurately embody our humane nature?'

The Awesome Duty of Librarians

Reposted in full from Richard Heinberg's Museletter, October 2009

'Peak Everything' author Richard Heinberg asks a critically important question, and not one that immediately springs to mind when considering future energy challenges...

'Preservation of digitized knowledge can become a problem simply because of obsolescence. Think of the billions of floppy disks manufactured and encoded during the years between 1980 and 2000: few of us still have working computers capable of retrieving the data on those disks. But this is hardly the worldwide information system’s point of greatest vulnerability.

Ultimately the entire project of digitized cultural preservation depends on one thing: electricity. As soon as the power goes off, access to the Internet goes down. CDs and DVDs become meaningless plastic disks; e-books become inscrutable and useless; digital archives become as illegible as cuneiform tablets—or more so. Altogether, digitization represents a huge bet on society’s ability to keep the lights on forever...There is a task that needs doing: the conservation of essential cultural knowledge in non-digital form. This task will require the sorting and evaluation of information for its usefulness to cultural survival—triage, if you will—as well as its preservation...

It’s ironic to think that the cave paintings of Lascaux may be far more durable than the photos from the Hubble space telescope...'

Full Article:

'How secure is our civilization’s accumulated knowledge?

It is a question that, in a fundamental sense, transcends many life-and-death concerns (threats of sickness, natural disaster, or military invasion) that prompt us collectively to spend fortunes on insurance, health care, and weaponry. We know that we each individually will die, though we are willing to go to great lengths to delay the event as long as possible. But we have an overarching shared interest that the world of ideas will go on without us: that our descendants will continue to compose music, invent tools, refine scientific knowledge, and write histories, extending into the indefinite future the cumulative, constantly evolving universe of signs, symbols, and skills that have enriched our lives. Cultural death—the passing of the wisdom, artistic creations, and practical knowledge of an entire people, painstakingly built up over many generations—is a loss almost too wrenching to contemplate.

Yet cultural death happens. The examples from history are legion. Anthropologists and archaeologists have identified well over 10,000 distinct human cultures, of which most have perished, many by absorption into one multi-ethnic civilization or another. Linguists have catalogued over 6,000 human languages; again, most are extinct or endangered, often for a similar reason—absorption of indigenous populations into multi-ethnic urban civilizations. But civilizations are also mortal: about 24 are known to have existed over the past 5,000 years, and again most are now dust.

Here is perhaps the most salient fact: when past civilizations were in the process of decline and collapse, they seem to have given insufficient thought to preserving the best of their achievements; indeed, the reverse often happened—libraries were burned, statues defaced, tombs looted. Archaeologists make heroic efforts to piece together the histories of these vanished empires, but they face enormous hurdles. Even the monumental and long-lasting civilization of ancient Egypt left behind more questions about itself than answers: we’re not even sure how much arithmetic and geography the average educated Egyptian knew.

It might seem that our own civilization’s achievements are less vulnerable. After all, the sheer weight, volume, and variety of contemporary cultural materials is unprecedented, including hundreds of millions of books, and more hundreds of millions of newspapers, magazines, paintings, sculptures, photographs, motion picture films, phonograph records, CDs, DVDs, websites, and on and on.

But all this volume and diversity may be deceiving. In some respects our culture is arguably more ephemeral than most others, and a surprisingly large proportion of our cultural materials is in danger of being swept away with astonishing speed, leaving virtually no trace—like a candle flame vanishing in a puff of wind.

If we want future generations to have the benefit of our achievements, we should start thinking more seriously about what to preserve, and how to preserve it.

The Ascendancy of Electronic Media

The survival struggle of America’s remaining newspapers is symptomatic of a trend that began in the 1970s, when computers began finding their way into businesses, schools, and homes. Today many of us get our news from the screen, not from the local print daily—and the proportion is growing. Major newspapers like the New York Times now have robust websites to accompany their print editions; but many industry forecasters say the print editions may not survive. Even before the beginning of the current recession, newspaper advertising revenues were declining steeply, and this year daily average circulation for 395 newspapers has fallen 7.1 percent to 34.4 million (from 37.1 million last year). In recent months the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have ceased print news operations, and both the Chicago Sun Times and the Tribune have filed for bankruptcy.

The magazine and book trades are likewise evolving quickly under pressure from the Internet. Something like 50,000 new book titles still appear each year, and the book industry remains profitable in most years; however, according to Book Industry TRENDS 2009, many insiders think advances in digital publishing will force an unprecedented transformation of the industry, as ever fewer books are released in print versions and more in online or e-book formats—a trend already sweeping the textbook sector.

As with newspapers, most magazines now publish their content online, and some (like The Ecologist) have already gone all-electronic, jettisoning their print versions. Perhaps the most economically secure of print publications are also the most ephemeral in their content—People magazine and other fixtures of the supermarket checkout line.

The production processes for books, magazines, and newspapers—from writing to typesetting, printing, and distribution—are already thoroughly computerized.

Digitization has nearly completed its takeover of the motion picture, photography, and music industries. Just try to buy a package of Kodachrome film for your 35mm camera, or an analog recording of your favorite band’s latest songs. And with the explosive growth of I-tunes, YouTube (and other sources of streaming video), and online photo galleries, the Internet is gradually becoming the primary delivery medium for all these media.

Libraries are being forced to adapt, as they face enormous pressure to expand digital media at the expense of traditional media. For archivists, the emerging trend can be summarized in one word: digitization. Whether the original exists on paper, vinyl, or celluloid, its future lies in endless strings of ones and zeroes encoded on magnetic or laser-etched media, which will presumably preserve the original content while making it accessible to millions or billions of people today and in future generations.

At the same time, the very function of libraries is up for grabs: a presentation at the 2008 American Library Association conference reported in Library Journal suggested that libraries should be “more and more a place to do stuff, not just to find stuff. We need to stop being a grocery store and start being a kitchen.” As libraries become multi-purpose cultural centers (in many occasions serving as informal daytime homeless shelters), one of their primary practical functions is the provision of free public Internet access, with computer included. Yet these new demands and functions arrive at a time when funding for libraries is shrinking, as city and state budgets are downsized to fit evaporating tax revenues.

Preservation of digitized knowledge can become a problem simply because of obsolescence. Think of the billions of floppy disks manufactured and encoded during the years between 1980 and 2000: few of us still have working computers capable of retrieving the data on those disks. But this is hardly the worldwide information system’s point of greatest vulnerability.

Ultimately the entire project of digitized cultural preservation depends on one thing: electricity. As soon as the power goes off, access to the Internet goes down. CDs and DVDs become meaningless plastic disks; e-books become inscrutable and useless; digital archives become as illegible as cuneiform tablets—or more so. Altogether, digitization represents a huge bet on society’s ability to keep the lights on forever.

Without precious kilowatts, what would survive? Sculpture and architecture would persist. Previous generations of sound and visual media might be decipherable: old phonograph records could still be made to emit music, given a hand crank, needle, and megaphone, and silent films would be relatively easy to show. Books and collections of physical newspapers and magazines would fare reasonably well for a few decades, but deteriorating acid-laden paper threatens the survival of about 85 percent of books and nearly 100 percent of newspapers and magazines (ancient books written on parchment and acid-free paper could last many more centuries).

It’s ironic to think that the cave paintings of Lascaux may be far more durable than the photos from the Hubble space telescope.

Altogether, if the lights were to go out now, in just a century or two the vast majority of our recently recorded knowledge would be gone or inaccessible.

How Likely Is Blackout?

If we could be fully confident that a more-or-less permanent blackout is unthinkable, then this discussion would be a purely academic exercise. Where might such confidence come from?

Two questions could help us assess the magnitude of risk: What has to go wrong for the lights to go out?, and, What has to go right for them to stay on?

Here’s a short list of what would have to go wrong:

• Failure to replace aging infrastructure. All knowledgeable observers agree that North America’s electricity grid system is overdue for a massive upgrade. According to electrical industry consultant Jason Makansi in his 2007 book Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, What it Means to You, “You almost can’t read a report on the U.S. electricity industry that doesn’t decry the state of the nation’s transmission grid.” The consequences of failure to invest tens of billions in new infrastructure will be more frequent and ever-longer blackouts and brownouts, leading perhaps to electricity rationing and a host of fairly dire economic impacts.
• Unavailability of sufficient investment capital. Replacing infrastructure will require capital and political will. The current grid was built when energy was cheap, demand for electricity was lower, and the economy was growing at a rapid pace. Today investment capital is scarce, so the Federal government will have to pay for most of the grid upgrade. But the U.S. budget is already overextended in paying for bailout and stimulus packages, not to mention a couple of lingering wars. Until an unavoidable crisis arises, grid investment is likely to continue being moved back in the line of projects needing money.
• Inability of the industry to maintain sufficient supplies of fossil fuels for electricity generation. In my new book Blackout, I discuss credible reports suggesting that U.S. coal production could peak in the years between 2020 and 2030 and decline afterward, with prices for the resource inevitably escalating. Natural gas seems plentiful for the time being, but continued exploration and production from new shale gas plays require high gas prices; further, problems with well productivity and low energy return on energy invested may render the new gas plays a mere flash in the pan.
• Inability of alternatives to make up for fossil fuels. If higher-priced and soon-to-be scarce coal and gas could be easily, quickly, and cheaply replaced with other energy sources, fossil fuel supply limits would pose no problem. However, all of the available alternatives are problematic in one way or another. Yes, we could have more wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal power—but it will take time and enormous amounts of investment capital (see above), and most of these alternatives are intermittent energy sources. (Post Carbon Institute and International Forum on Globalization have prepared a lengthy, soon-to-be published report, Searching for a Miracle: “Net Energy” and the Fate of Industrial Societies, that examines 18 energy sources across 10 criteria, concluding that no combination of alternatives is likely to be able to replace fossil fuels within a reasonable time frame, and that therefore the world must rely on energy conservation as its primary strategy to deal with climate change as well as oil, coal, and gas depletion.)
• Nuclear war. The electromagnetic pulse generated by the explosion of hydrogen bombs has the capacity to fry the grid, and hundreds of millions of electrical devices plugged into it, nearly instantaneously. For war planners, this possibility is not only real and credible, it is one of the greatest causes of worry with regard to national survival following any nuclear exchange.
• Systemic vulnerabilities. We live in a world that is increasingly interconnected, and in which the pursuit of economic efficiency has reduced overall resilience. In such a system, problems in one area have a way of spilling over to create more problems elsewhere. For example, difficulties with oil supply will also eventually impact the electricity system, since spare parts and fuel (coal) for that system are made and/or transported with oil; similarly, problems with the electric grid will impact oil supply, since pumps and refineries require alternating current. Similarly, natural disasters, sabotage, social breakdown, and economic collapse could have knock-on effects (some too circuitous to predict) that would imperil continued, reliable delivery of electrical power.

What has to go right in order to avert grid breakdown? In many respects, this list could be a mirror image of the previous one:

• Successful massive investments in grid upgrades. As discussed above, these are far from being assured.
• A rapid, successful conversion to alternative energy sources. Again, as mentioned above, this is a long shot at best.
• Averting of international conflicts that might go nuclear. So far, so good….
• Averting of grid breakdowns due to natural disasters, etc., or rapid recovery from such problems. Society has been able to do this for decades: even in the cases of hurricanes, earthquakes, and wars, recovery was usually rapid. But increasingly crises are becoming synergetic.

The breakdown of electricity supply systems is not just a matter of theory. In about 100 nations around the globe, supplies of power are already problematic. Consider just one example: the nuclear-armed nation of Pakistan. Here is a quote from an article posted earlier this year on the website All Things Pakistan:

While rolling blackouts or load shedding as its locally known has always been a staple of daily life in Pakistan, the problem has become acute in the last couple of years. In the second half of December, the situation got so bad that WAPDA & KESC (power generation entities in Pakistan) resorted to draconian levels of load shedding. The power cuts during this time amounted to 20-22 hours a day in most small cities and even cities like Karachi were seeing 18+ hours of load shedding.

Pakistan is a poor, politically unstable country; surely nothing like this could ever happen in a wealthy industrial nation! Yet consider the situation in Britain: a recent article in the Telegraph was headlined, “Britain Heading Back to the Dark Ages: The UK is facing a tipping point over the next few years in its ability to generate enough power to satisfy an ever-increasing demand.” The article notes: “Over the next 10 years, one third of Britain’s power-generating capacity needs to be replaced with cleaner fuels, as a result of European laws on pollution. By 2025 the situation is expected to worsen….” Another article, this one from the BBC, is titled, “Britain Could Face Blackouts by 2016”; it quotes David MacKay, a researcher at Cambridge University and soon-to-be government energy advisor, as saying, “The scale of building required [to avert blackouts] is absolutely enormous.”

Generating electricity is not all that difficult in principle; people have been doing it since the 19th century. But generating power in large amounts, reliably, without both cheap energy inputs and secure availability of spare parts and investment capital for maintenance, poses an increasing challenge.

To be sure, here in the U.S. the lights are unlikely to go out all at once, and permanently, any time soon. The most likely scenario would see a gradual increase in rolling blackouts and other forms of power rationing, beginning in a few years, with some regions better off than others. After a while, unless governments and utilities could muster the needed effort, electricity might increasingly be seen as a luxury, even a curiosity. Reliable, ubiquitous, 24/7 power would become just a dim memory. If the challenges noted above are not addressed, many nations, including the U.S., could be in such straits by the third decade of the century. In the best instance, nations would transition as much as possible to renewable power, maintaining a functioning national grid or network of local distribution systems, but supplying rationed power in smaller amounts than is the currently the case. Digitized data would still be retrievable part of the time, by some people.

In the worst instance, economic and social crises, wars, fuel shortages, and engineering problems would rebound upon one another, creating a snowballing pattern of systemic failures leading to permanent, total blackout.

It may seem inconceivable that it would ever come to that. After all, electrical power means so much to us that we assume that officials in charge will do whatever is necessary to keep the electrons flowing. But, as Jared Diamond documents in his book Collapse, elites don’t always do the sensible thing even when the alternative to rational action is universal calamity.

Altogether, the assumption that long-term loss of power is unthinkable just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. A permanent blackout scenario should exist as a contingency in our collective planning process.

Remember Websites?

Over the short term, if the power were to go out, loss of cultural knowledge would not be at the top of most people’s lists of concerns. They would worry about more mundane necessities like refrigeration, light, heat, and banking. It takes only a few moments of reflection (or an experience of living through a natural disaster) to appreciate how many of life’s daily necessities and niceties would be suddenly absent.

Of course, everyone did live without power until only a few generations ago, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide still manage in its absence. So it is certainly possible to carry on the essential aspects of human life sans functioning wall outlets. One could argue that, post-blackout, there would be a period of adaptation, during which people would reformulate society and simply get on with their business—living perhaps in a manner similar to their 19th century ancestors or the contemporary Amish.

The problem with that reassuring picture is that we have come to rely on electricity for so many things—and have so completely let go of knowledge, skills, and machinery that could enable us to live without electrical power—that the adaptive process might not go well. For the survivors, a 19th century way of life might not be attainable without decades or centuries spent re-acquiring knowledge and skills, and re-inventing machinery.

Imagine the scene, perhaps two decades from now. After years of gradually lengthening brownouts and blackouts, your town’s power has been down for days, and no one knows if or when it can be restored. No one is even sure if the blackout is statewide or nation-wide, because radio broadcasts have become more sporadic. The able members of your community band together to solve the mounting practical problems threatening your collective existence. You hold a meeting.

Someone brings up the problems of water delivery and wastewater treatment: the municipal facilities require power to supply these essential services. A woman in the back of the room speaks: “I once read about how you can purify water with a ceramic pot, some sand, and charcoal. It’s on a website….” Her voice trails off. There are no more websites.

The conversation turns to food. Now that the supermarkets are closed (no functioning lights or cash registers) and emptied by looters, it’s obviously a good idea to encourage backyard and community gardening. But where should townspeople get their seeds? A middle-aged gentleman pipes up: “There’s this great mail-order seed company—just go online….” He suddenly looks confused and sits down. “Online” is a world that no longer exists.

Is There Something We Should Be Doing?

There is a message here for leaders at all levels of government and business—obviously so for emergency response organizations. But I’ve singled out librarians in this essay because they may bear the gravest responsibility of all in preparing for the possible end of electric civilization.

Without widely available practical information, recovery from a final blackout would be difficult in the extreme. Therefore it is important that the kinds of information that people would need are identified, and that the information is preserved in such a way that it will be accessible under extreme circumstances, and to folks in widely scattered places.

Of course, librarians can never bear sole responsibility for cultural preservation; it takes a village, as Hillary Clinton once proclaimed in another context. Books are clearly essential to cultural survival, but they are just inert objects in the absence of people who can read them; we also need skills-based education to keep alive both the practical and the performing arts. What good is a set of parts to the late Beethoven string quartets—arguably the greatest music our species has ever produced—if there’s no one around who can play the violin, viola, or cello well enough to make sense of them? And what good would a written description of horse-plowing do to a post-industrial farmer without the opportunity to learn hands-on from someone with experience?

Nevertheless, for librarians the message could not be clearer: Don’t let books die. It’s understandable that librarians spend much effort trying to keep up with the digital revolution in information storage and retrieval: their main duty is to serve their community as it is, not a community that existed decades ago or one that may exist decades hence. Yet the thought that they may be making the materials they are trying to preserve ever more vulnerable to loss should be cause for pause.

There is a task that needs doing: the conservation of essential cultural knowledge in non-digital form. This task will require the sorting and evaluation of information for its usefulness to cultural survival—triage, if you will—as well as its preservation. It may be unrealistic to expect librarians to take on this responsibility, given their existing mandate and lack of resources—but who else will do it? Librarians catalog, preserve, and make available accumulated cultural materials, especially those in written form. That’s their job. What profession is better suited to accept this charge?

The contemplation of electric civilization’s collapse can’t help but provoke philosophical musings. Perhaps cultural death is a necessary component of evolution—as is the death of individual organisms. In any case, no one can prevent culture from changing, and many aspects of our present culture arguably deserve to disappear (we each probably carry our own list around in our head of what kinds of music, advertising messages, and television shows we think the world could do without). Assuming that humans survive the current century—by no means a sure thing—another culture will arise sooner or later to replace our current electric civilization. Its co-creators will inevitably use whatever skills and notions are at hand to cobble it together (just as the inhabitants of Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance drew upon cultural flotsam from the Roman Empire as well as influences from the Arab world), and it will gradually assume a life of its own. Still, we must ask: What cultural ingredients might we want to pass along to our descendants? What cultural achievements would we want to be remembered by?

Civilization has come at a price. Since the age of Sumer cities have been terrible for the environment, leading to deforestation, loss of topsoil, and reduced biodiversity. There have been human costs as well, in the forms of economic inequality (which hardly existed in pre-state societies) and loss of personal autonomy. These costs have grown to unprecedented levels with the advent of industrialism—civilization on crack—and have been borne not by civilization’s beneficiaries, but primarily by other species and people in poor nations and cultures. But nearly all of us who are aware of these costs like to think of this bargain-with-the-devil as having some purpose greater than a temporary increase in creature comforts, safety, and security for a minority within society. The full-time division of labor that is the hallmark of civilization has made possible science—with its enlightening revelations about everything from human origins to the composition of the cosmos. The arts and philosophy have developed to degrees of sophistication and sublimity that escape the descriptive capacity of words.

Yet so much of what we have accomplished, especially in the last few decades, currently requires for its survival the perpetuation and growth of energy production and consumption infrastructure—which exact a continued, escalating environmental and human toll. At some point, this all has to stop, or at least wind down to some more sustainable scale of pillage.

But if it does, and in the process we lose the best of what we have achieved, will it all have been for nothing?'

Growth is Good…Isn't It?

Expansion has progressed so far that key resource boundaries have been broken: we're teetering on the edge of an ecological cliff

Reposted in full from The Ecologist, 25 January 2010

'Like a patient waiting for hospital scan results, this week the government nervously anticipates new growth figures for the economy. Any sign of an increase and relief could quickly lead to self-satisfaction about its handling of the recession. Approving nods may be seen later this week in Davos at the World Economic Forum. Why? Because among political and business classes, growth, measured by rising GDP, is considered always a "good thing". But is it?

The banking crisis taught us that when things look good on paper, if the underlying accounting system is faulty, it can conceal high risk and imminent disaster – as Jared Diamond put it in Collapse, his book about societies throughout history that fell by wrongly estimating the resilience of their environmental life-support systems. What looks like wealth might just be a one-off fire sale of irreplaceable natural capital. Ecologically speaking, he writes, "an impressive-looking bank account may conceal a negative cashflow".

To avoid collapse the economy has to operate within thresholds that do not critically undermine the things that we depend on on a daily basis. They're often interconnected, like a sufficiently stable climate, productive farmland, fresh water and a healthy diversity of plants and animals.

On climate change, a new piece of research by the New Economics Foundation thinktank looks at which rates of global economic growth are compatible with prevention of a dangerous level of warming.

It shows that, even with the most optimistic likely uptake of low-carbon energy, it is seemingly impossible to reconcile a growing global economy with a good likelihood of limiting global temperature rise to 2C, the agreed political objective of the European Union, and widely considered the maximum rise to which humanity can adapt without serious difficulty.

In this context, Adair Turner, chair of the Financial Services Authority and the Committee on Climate Change, refers to the pursuit of growth for its own sake as a "false god". Other work by Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University concludes that: "Economic growth in the OECD cannot be reconciled with a 2C, 3C or even 4C characterisation of dangerous climate change."

The problem is that growth drowns out the gains from increased efficiency and technological innovation. The New Economics Foundation study looks at by how much growth would need to be delinked from fossil fuels – theso-called carbon intensity of the economy – to reach the mark of climate safety suggested by NASA climate scientist James Hansen.

Having improved steadily in the late last century, "carbon intensity" changes flatlined over the last decade and even worsened in some years. Against this trend, to avoid dangerous climate change the fall in carbon intensity would need to improve by more than two hundredfold. The economic doctrine of growth collides headlong with the laws of physics and thermodynamics.

Only so much energy efficiency can be squeezed from a system. The other problem is the counter-intuitive rebound effect spotted by William Stanley Jevons in 1865 when he wrote, "It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth." Increased efficiency tends to lower costs and perversely drives up overall resource use.

Writing in the science journal Nature last year, a multidisciplinary group of scientists identified nine key safe-use planetary resource boundaries, three of which had already been transgressed (climate change, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle to do with farming). We are on the cusp of several others.

So, this week, if you find yourself cheering a return to growth, you may be inadvertently celebrating our acceleration toward an ecological cliff edge and an opportunity missed to find a new, better direction. For example, the economist Herman Daly points out that full employment could be easier to achieve in an economy not addicted to growth because it would reverse "the historical trend of replacing labour with machines and inanimate energy".

Both the desirability and possibility of never ending growth goes unquestioned in mainstream economics. It's odd, because the world would be a very strange place if the same was applied in nature. For example, from birth until around six weeks old, a hamster doubles its weight each week. If, it didn't stop and continued doubling each week, on its first birthday, you would be looking after a very hungry nine billion-tonne pet hamster.

There is of course one thing in nature that grows uncontrollably. It's called cancer and tends to kill its host. So when those growth figures come out, let's hope the government scans the results for what they really mean.'

Ghana's Slums Recycle Western Waste

Reposted in full from The Ecologist, 28 January 2010

'The slums of Accra in Ghana are being used as a dumping ground for Western consumer waste, including toxic electrical components.

The sound of pounding metal peals like funereal bells across the landscape. An acrid black smoke drifts above the earth, dyed bright yellow and cyan by ink spewed from fractured printer cartridges.

We step across a wasteland of rusting car parts, jaundiced computer shells and the entrails of refrigerators bought decades ago in a country other than Ghana.

This is Sodom and Gomorrah, the local name for the Agbogbloshie district of Accra in Ghana.

Named after the fated cities of the Bible, synonymous with impenitent sin, and destroyed by God with brimstone and fire.

It is a huge area of slums, workshops and market stalls, created to provide accommodation for refugees that fled violence in northern Ghana during the 1980s. It has sprawled with urban migration and today is a stronghold of anti-government sentiment. Law and order is enforced by the military, and Accra’s mayor has vowed to ‘decongest’ it, a political euphemism for eviction and demolition.

This is the final resting place for many of the white goods and electrical appliances that we buy in the developed world. It is a shrine to built-in obsolescence and a time capsule to twentieth century consumerism. We walk down paths lined with forgotten models of familiar brands, Candy fridges, Panasonic televisions and Sony stereos.West dumping ground

Old products, superseded or considered dead in the developed world, are bought by Accra’s merchants for re-use. Most can be brought back to life and those that are beyond repair are broken down for parts by workers using hammers and chisels.

Aluminium girders are smelted over three-stone fires, re-moulded into cooking pots and gates, sheets of steel are cut and welded into tiny stoves and copper wiring is pulled by hand from refrigerator compressors, the leftover shells used for storage.

Ghana does not have the technology to recycle these products safely. Car radiators ooze toxic gunge and CFC gases leak unnoticed into the air. The health of the community suffers and the workers’ hands we shake bear witness to a history of lacerations and burns.

The local environment is also affected. The nearby Korle Lagoon is the dustbin for these workshops and the government has given up dredging it while the community remains in place. Nothing lives in its fetid waters.

Sodom and Gomorrah is the site of a double hypocrisy, of the Ghanaian government turning its back on the slums of their own creation, and of harmful refuse expediently discarded and forgotten by the developed world, trickling its way down to the world’s forsaken.'

Oil Demand Has Peaked In Developed World: IEA

Well that's that solved then, phew! Oh, there's a whole bunch of countries who aren't yet 'developed' and want to be?

Back to the drawing board, fellas.

Excerpt from Planet Ark, 29 January 2010

'Oil use in rich industrialized countries will never return to 2006 and 2007 levels because of more fuel efficiency and the use of alternatives, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency said on Thursday.

The bold prediction, while made previously by some analysts, is significant because the IEA advises 28 countries on energy policy and its oil demand forecasts are closely watched by traders and policymakers.

"When we look at the OECD countries - the U.S., Europe and Japan - I think the level of demand that we have seen in 2006 and 2007, we will never see again," Fatih Birol told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"There may be some zig zags up and down but as a trend I think it will be a downward trend in terms of oil consumption."..

In its January 15 monthly Oil Market Report, the IEA forecast OECD demand would average 45.48 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2010, unchanged from 2009. World demand is forecast at 86.33 million bpd, up from 84.89 million in 2009.

Birol said the economic crisis had played a role in curbing OECD demand but the main reasons were more efficient cars and the increasing use of electricity and gas instead of oil in areas outside transport...

While non-OECD demand is expected to keep world oil use on a growing trend, some believe global consumption could reach a high point in the next decades as a result of policies to tackle climate change...'

Too Big To Fail

Love this image! Originally spotted at www.zazzle.com, this higher res version from Economic Collapse 2010