SOLOPEC Nations Warn Sun's Output May Fall Short Of Demand

Seriously funny stuff!

Excerpt from The Onion, 22 June 2005

'RIYADH, MUHAMMAD ARABIA—The governing board of the Solar Output Power Exporting Countries announced Monday that, in spite of attempts to raise production levels, increased global-power consumption may begin to outstrip the sun's output by early next year.

"Our solar-accumulation arrays in Muhammad Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, and Mexico are operating at full capacity, and still, we're struggling to meet demands," said Muhammad Arabia's Prince Fayahd al-Saud, whose family has controlled the world's energy market for more than 100 years. "In a very short time, the sun will not be able to meet the world's energy needs."

SOLOPEC, formed in the '20s to regulate solar-energy prices, currently includes the sunlight-rich nations of Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Muhammad Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Venezuela, Iran, and Iraq...

With an output of 4x1026 watts per second, the sun was considered an inexhaustible energy supply when SOLOPEC was formed 30 years ago. However, if growth continues along the current trajectory, that amount will be inadequate to fuel the Cuba/Newer York/Boston megapolitan corridor as soon as 2070.

"Once again, human consumption has expanded to meet available supply," said SOLOPEC economic director Hermann Villalobos of Mexico City. "With today's fully automatic homes, artificially sentient robotic cities, 32-lane automatic roadways, floating antigrav-suspended skyscrapers, air-conditioned city-domes, and 96-inch personal fusion-screen monitors, the energy demand of human civilization has never been higher. Why, last year, the wattage requirements of leisurebots alone exceeded the entire world's energy-consumption rates of 1988. It's no surprise that SOLOPEC can barely keep up."

MIT scientist Glen Schraeder said he predicted the shortage a decade ago.

"The U.S. must reduce its dependence on foreign solar power," Schraeder said. "The sun was created billions of years ago, with the formation of our galaxy. When its unused energy output is gone, it's gone. We must look for alternative energy sources throughout the universe now."'

The New Geopolitics of Food

Reposted in full from Foreign Policy, May/June 2011

'In the United States, when world wheat prices rise by 75 percent, as they have over the last year, it means the difference between a $2 loaf of bread and a loaf costing maybe $2.10. If, however, you live in New Delhi, those skyrocketing costs really matter: A doubling in the world price of wheat actually means that the wheat you carry home from the market to hand-grind into flour for chapatis costs twice as much. And the same is true with rice. If the world price of rice doubles, so does the price of rice in your neighborhood market in Jakarta. And so does the cost of the bowl of boiled rice on an Indonesian family's dinner table.

Welcome to the new food economics of 2011: Prices are climbing, but the impact is not at all being felt equally. For Americans, who spend less than one-tenth of their income in the supermarket, the soaring food prices we've seen so far this year are an annoyance, not a calamity. But for the planet's poorest 2 billion people, who spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food, these soaring prices may mean going from two meals a day to one. Those who are barely hanging on to the lower rungs of the global economic ladder risk losing their grip entirely. This can contribute -- and it has -- to revolutions and upheaval.

Already in 2011, the U.N. Food Price Index has eclipsed its previous all-time global high; as of March it had climbed for eight consecutive months. With this year's harvest predicted to fall short, with governments in the Middle East and Africa teetering as a result of the price spikes, and with anxious markets sustaining one shock after another, food has quickly become the hidden driver of world politics. And crises like these are going to become increasingly common. The new geopolitics of food looks a whole lot more volatile -- and a whole lot more contentious -- than it used to. Scarcity is the new norm.

Until recently, sudden price surges just didn't matter as much, as they were quickly followed by a return to the relatively low food prices that helped shape the political stability of the late 20th century across much of the globe. But now both the causes and consequences are ominously different.

In many ways, this is a resumption of the 2007-2008 food crisis, which subsided not because the world somehow came together to solve its grain crunch once and for all, but because the Great Recession tempered growth in demand even as favorable weather helped farmers produce the largest grain harvest on record. Historically, price spikes tended to be almost exclusively driven by unusual weather -- a monsoon failure in India, a drought in the former Soviet Union, a heat wave in the U.S. Midwest. Such events were always disruptive, but thankfully infrequent. Unfortunately, today's price hikes are driven by trends that are both elevating demand and making it more difficult to increase production: among them, a rapidly expanding population, crop-withering temperature increases, and irrigation wells running dry. Each night, there are 219,000 additional people to feed at the global dinner table.

More alarming still, the world is losing its ability to soften the effect of shortages. In response to previous price surges, the United States, the world's largest grain producer, was effectively able to steer the world away from potential catastrophe. From the mid-20th century until 1995, the United States had either grain surpluses or idle cropland that could be planted to rescue countries in trouble. When the Indian monsoon failed in 1965, for example, President Lyndon Johnson's administration shipped one-fifth of the U.S. wheat crop to India, successfully staving off famine. We can't do that anymore; the safety cushion is gone.

That's why the food crisis of 2011 is for real, and why it may bring with it yet more bread riots cum political revolutions. What if the upheavals that greeted dictators Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya (a country that imports 90 percent of its grain) are not the end of the story, but the beginning of it? Get ready, farmers and foreign ministers alike, for a new era in which world food scarcity increasingly shapes global politics.

THE DOUBLING OF WORLD grain prices since early 2007 has been driven primarily by two factors: accelerating growth in demand and the increasing difficulty of rapidly expanding production. The result is a world that looks strikingly different from the bountiful global grain economy of the last century. What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity? Even at this early stage, we can see at least the broad outlines of the emerging food economy.

On the demand side, farmers now face clear sources of increasing pressure. The first is population growth. Each year the world's farmers must feed 80 million additional people, nearly all of them in developing countries. The world's population has nearly doubled since 1970 and is headed toward 9 billion by midcentury. Some 3 billion people, meanwhile, are also trying to move up the food chain, consuming more meat, milk, and eggs. As more families in China and elsewhere enter the middle class, they expect to eat better. But as global consumption of grain-intensive livestock products climbs, so does the demand for the extra corn and soybeans needed to feed all that livestock. (Grain consumption per person in the United States, for example, is four times that in India, where little grain is converted into animal protein. For now.)

At the same time, the United States, which once was able to act as a global buffer of sorts against poor harvests elsewhere, is now converting massive quantities of grain into fuel for cars, even as world grain consumption, which is already up to roughly 2.2 billion metric tons per year, is growing at an accelerating rate. A decade ago, the growth in consumption was 20 million tons per year. More recently it has risen by 40 million tons every year. But the rate at which the United States is converting grain into ethanol has grown even faster. In 2010, the United States harvested nearly 400 million tons of grain, of which 126 million tons went to ethanol fuel distilleries (up from 16 million tons in 2000). This massive capacity to convert grain into fuel means that the price of grain is now tied to the price of oil. So if oil goes to $150 per barrel or more, the price of grain will follow it upward as it becomes ever more profitable to convert grain into oil substitutes. And it's not just a U.S. phenomenon: Brazil, which distills ethanol from sugar cane, ranks second in production after the United States, while the European Union's goal of getting 10 percent of its transport energy from renewables, mostly biofuels, by 2020 is also diverting land from food crops.

This is not merely a story about the booming demand for food. Everything from falling water tables to eroding soils and the consequences of global warming means that the world's food supply is unlikely to keep up with our collectively growing appetites. Take climate change: The rule of thumb among crop ecologists is that for every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the growing season optimum, farmers can expect a 10 percent decline in grain yields. This relationship was borne out all too dramatically during the 2010 heat wave in Russia, which reduced the country's grain harvest by nearly 40 percent.

While temperatures are rising, water tables are falling as farmers overpump for irrigation. This artificially inflates food production in the short run, creating a food bubble that bursts when aquifers are depleted and pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate of recharge. In arid Saudi Arabia, irrigation had surprisingly enabled the country to be self-sufficient in wheat for more than 20 years; now, wheat production is collapsing because the non-replenishable aquifer the country uses for irrigation is largely depleted. The Saudis soon will be importing all their grain.

Saudi Arabia is only one of some 18 countries with water-based food bubbles. All together, more than half the world's people live in countries where water tables are falling. The politically troubled Arab Middle East is the first geographic region where grain production has peaked and begun to decline because of water shortages, even as populations continue to grow. Grain production is already going down in Syria and Iraq and may soon decline in Yemen. But the largest food bubbles are in India and China. In India, where farmers have drilled some 20 million irrigation wells, water tables are falling and the wells are starting to go dry. The World Bank reports that 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced by overpumping. In China, overpumping is concentrated in the North China Plain, which produces half of China's wheat and a third of its corn. An estimated 130 million Chinese are currently fed by overpumping. How will these countries make up for the inevitable shortfalls when the aquifers are depleted?

Even as we are running our wells dry, we are also mismanaging our soils, creating new deserts. Soil erosion as a result of overplowing and land mismanagement is undermining the productivity of one-third of the world's cropland. How severe is it? Look at satellite images showing two huge new dust bowls: one stretching across northern and western China and western Mongolia; the other across central Africa. Wang Tao, a leading Chinese desert scholar, reports that each year some 1,400 square miles of land in northern China turn to desert. In Mongolia and Lesotho, grain harvests have shrunk by half or more over the last few decades. North Korea and Haiti are also suffering from heavy soil losses; both countries face famine if they lose international food aid. Civilization can survive the loss of its oil reserves, but it cannot survive the loss of its soil reserves.

Beyond the changes in the environment that make it ever harder to meet human demand, there's an important intangible factor to consider: Over the last half-century or so, we have come to take agricultural progress for granted. Decade after decade, advancing technology underpinned steady gains in raising land productivity. Indeed, world grain yield per acre has tripled since 1950. But now that era is coming to an end in some of the more agriculturally advanced countries, where farmers are already using all available technologies to raise yields. In effect, the farmers have caught up with the scientists. After climbing for a century, rice yield per acre in Japan has not risen at all for 16 years. In China, yields may level off soon. Just those two countries alone account for one-third of the world's rice harvest. Meanwhile, wheat yields have plateaued in Britain, France, and Germany -- Western Europe's three largest wheat producers.

IN THIS ERA OF TIGHTENING world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage, and countries are scrambling to secure their own parochial interests at the expense of the common good.

The first signs of trouble came in 2007, when farmers began having difficulty keeping up with the growth in global demand for grain. Grain and soybean prices started to climb, tripling by mid-2008. In response, many exporting countries tried to control the rise of domestic food prices by restricting exports. Among them were Russia and Argentina, two leading wheat exporters. Vietnam, the No. 2 rice exporter, banned exports entirely for several months in early 2008. So did several other smaller exporters of grain.

With exporting countries restricting exports in 2007 and 2008, importing countries panicked. No longer able to rely on the market to supply the grain they needed, several countries took the novel step of trying to negotiate long-term grain-supply agreements with exporting countries. The Philippines, for instance, negotiated a three-year agreement with Vietnam for 1.5 million tons of rice per year. A delegation of Yemenis traveled to Australia with a similar goal in mind, but had no luck. In a seller's market, exporters were reluctant to make long-term commitments.

Fearing they might not be able to buy needed grain from the market, some of the more affluent countries, led by Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and China, took the unusual step in 2008 of buying or leasing land in other countries on which to grow grain for themselves. Most of these land acquisitions are in Africa, where some governments lease cropland for less than $1 per acre per year. Among the principal destinations were Ethiopia and Sudan, countries where millions of people are being sustained with food from the U.N. World Food Program. That the governments of these two countries are willing to sell land to foreign interests when their own people are hungry is a sad commentary on their leadership.

By the end of 2009, hundreds of land acquisition deals had been negotiated, some of them exceeding a million acres. A 2010 World Bank analysis of these "land grabs" reported that a total of nearly 140 million acres were involved -- an area that exceeds the cropland devoted to corn and wheat combined in the United States. Such acquisitions also typically involve water rights, meaning that land grabs potentially affect all downstream countries as well. Any water extracted from the upper Nile River basin to irrigate crops in Ethiopia or Sudan, for instance, will now not reach Egypt, upending the delicate water politics of the Nile by adding new countries with which Egypt must negotiate.

The potential for conflict -- and not just over water -- is high. Many of the land deals have been made in secret, and in most cases, the land involved was already in use by villagers when it was sold or leased. Often those already farming the land were neither consulted about nor even informed of the new arrangements. And because there typically are no formal land titles in many developing-country villages, the farmers who lost their land have had little backing to bring their cases to court. Reporter John Vidal, writing in Britain's Observer, quotes Nyikaw Ochalla from Ethiopia's Gambella region: "The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the indigenous population. The deals are done secretly. The only thing the local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their lands."

Local hostility toward such land grabs is the rule, not the exception. In 2007, as food prices were starting to rise, China signed an agreement with the Philippines to lease 2.5 million acres of land slated for food crops that would be shipped home. Once word leaked, the public outcry -- much of it from Filipino farmers -- forced Manila to suspend the agreement. A similar uproar rocked Madagascar, where a South Korean firm, Daewoo Logistics, had pursued rights to more than 3 million acres of land. Word of the deal helped stoke a political furor that toppled the government and forced cancellation of the agreement. Indeed, few things are more likely to fuel insurgencies than taking land from people. Agricultural equipment is easily sabotaged. If ripe fields of grain are torched, they burn quickly.

Not only are these deals risky, but foreign investors producing food in a country full of hungry people face another political question of how to get the grain out. Will villagers permit trucks laden with grain headed for port cities to proceed when they themselves may be on the verge of starvation? The potential for political instability in countries where villagers have lost their land and their livelihoods is high. Conflicts could easily develop between investor and host countries.

These acquisitions represent a potential investment in agriculture in developing countries of an estimated $50 billion. But it could take many years to realize any substantial production gains. The public infrastructure for modern market-oriented agriculture does not yet exist in most of Africa. In some countries it will take years just to build the roads and ports needed to bring in agricultural inputs such as fertilizer and to export farm products. Beyond that, modern agriculture requires its own infrastructure: machine sheds, grain-drying equipment, silos, fertilizer storage sheds, fuel storage facilities, equipment repair and maintenance services, well-drilling equipment, irrigation pumps, and energy to power the pumps. Overall, development of the land acquired to date appears to be moving very slowly.

So how much will all this expand world food output? We don't know, but the World Bank analysis indicates that only 37 percent of the projects will be devoted to food crops. Most of the land bought up so far will be used to produce biofuels and other industrial crops.

Even if some of these projects do eventually boost land productivity, who will benefit? If virtually all the inputs -- the farm equipment, the fertilizer, the pesticides, the seeds -- are brought in from abroad and if all the output is shipped out of the country, it will contribute little to the host country's economy. At best, locals may find work as farm laborers, but in highly mechanized operations, the jobs will be few. At worst, impoverished countries like Mozambique and Sudan will be left with less land and water with which to feed their already hungry populations. Thus far the land grabs have contributed more to stirring unrest than to expanding food production.

And this rich country-poor country divide could grow even more pronounced -- and soon. This January, a new stage in the scramble among importing countries to secure food began to unfold when South Korea, which imports 70 percent of its grain, announced that it was creating a new public-private entity that will be responsible for acquiring part of this grain. With an initial office in Chicago, the plan is to bypass the large international trading firms by buying grain directly from U.S. farmers. As the Koreans acquire their own grain elevators, they may well sign multiyear delivery contracts with farmers, agreeing to buy specified quantities of wheat, corn, or soybeans at a fixed price.

Other importers will not stand idly by as South Korea tries to tie up a portion of the U.S. grain harvest even before it gets to market. The enterprising Koreans may soon be joined by China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and other leading importers. Although South Korea's initial focus is the United States, far and away the world's largest grain exporter, it may later consider brokering deals with Canada, Australia, Argentina, and other major exporters. This is happening just as China may be on the verge of entering the U.S. market as a potentially massive importer of grain. With China's 1.4 billion increasingly affluent consumers starting to compete with U.S. consumers for the U.S. grain harvest, cheap food, seen by many as an American birthright, may be coming to an end.

No one knows where this intensifying competition for food supplies will go, but the world seems to be moving away from the international cooperation that evolved over several decades following World War II to an every-country-for-itself philosophy. Food nationalism may help secure food supplies for individual affluent countries, but it does little to enhance world food security. Indeed, the low-income countries that host land grabs or import grain will likely see their food situation deteriorate.

AFTER THE CARNAGE of two world wars and the economic missteps that led to the Great Depression, countries joined together in 1945 to create the United Nations, finally realizing that in the modern world we cannot live in isolation, tempting though that might be. The International Monetary Fund was created to help manage the monetary system and promote economic stability and progress. Within the U.N. system, specialized agencies from the World Health Organization to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) play major roles in the world today. All this has fostered international cooperation.

But while the FAO collects and analyzes global agricultural data and provides technical assistance, there is no organized effort to ensure the adequacy of world food supplies. Indeed, most international negotiations on agricultural trade until recently focused on access to markets, with the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina persistently pressing Europe and Japan to open their highly protected agricultural markets. But in the first decade of this century, access to supplies has emerged as the overriding issue as the world transitions from an era of food surpluses to a new politics of food scarcity. At the same time, the U.S. food aid program that once worked to fend off famine wherever it threatened has largely been replaced by the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), where the United States is the leading donor. The WFP now has food-assistance operations in some 70 countries and an annual budget of $4 billion. There is little international coordination otherwise. French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- the reigning president of the G-20 -- is proposing to deal with rising food prices by curbing speculation in commodity markets. Useful though this may be, it treats the symptoms of growing food insecurity, not the causes, such as population growth and climate change. The world now needs to focus not only on agricultural policy, but on a structure that integrates it with energy, population, and water policies, each of which directly affects food security.

But that is not happening. Instead, as land and water become scarcer, as the Earth's temperature rises, and as world food security deteriorates, a dangerous geopolitics of food scarcity is emerging. Land grabbing, water grabbing, and buying grain directly from farmers in exporting countries are now integral parts of a global power struggle for food security.

With grain stocks low and climate volatility increasing, the risks are also increasing. We are now so close to the edge that a breakdown in the food system could come at any time. Consider, for example, what would have happened if the 2010 heat wave that was centered in Moscow had instead been centered in Chicago. In round numbers, the 40 percent drop in Russia's hoped-for harvest of roughly 100 million tons cost the world 40 million tons of grain, but a 40 percent drop in the far larger U.S. grain harvest of 400 million tons would have cost 160 million tons. The world's carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) would have dropped to just 52 days of consumption. This level would have been not only the lowest on record, but also well below the 62-day carryover that set the stage for the 2007-2008 tripling of world grain prices.

Then what? There would have been chaos in world grain markets. Grain prices would have climbed off the charts. Some grain-exporting countries, trying to hold down domestic food prices, would have restricted or even banned exports, as they did in 2007 and 2008. The TV news would have been dominated not by the hundreds of fires in the Russian countryside, but by footage of food riots in low-income grain-importing countries and reports of governments falling as hunger spread out of control. Oil-exporting countries that import grain would have been trying to barter oil for grain, and low-income grain importers would have lost out. With governments toppling and confidence in the world grain market shattered, the global economy could have started to unravel.

We may not always be so lucky. At issue now is whether the world can go beyond focusing on the symptoms of the deteriorating food situation and instead attack the underlying causes. If we cannot produce higher crop yields with less water and conserve fertile soils, many agricultural areas will cease to be viable. And this goes far beyond farmers. If we cannot move at wartime speed to stabilize the climate, we may not be able to avoid runaway food prices. If we cannot accelerate the shift to smaller families and stabilize the world population sooner rather than later, the ranks of the hungry will almost certainly continue to expand. The time to act is now - before the food crisis of 2011 becomes the new normal.'

International Energy Agency - Crude Oil Peaked in 2006

From the horse's mouth of the International Energy Agency's Chief Economist, Dr Fatih Birol - crude oil peaked in 2006.

'


The time is running out, the oil is today our lifeline, it is everywhere in the economy, if the prices go up or if there's a supply disruption this will be definitely very bad news.
..
I think it would have been better if the governments have started to work on it at least ten years ago.'

Sourced from YouTube, 28 April 2011

'In this special Catalyst investigation, we travel from Paris, to London, to the outer space like world that is deep sea drilling to find out why so many industry insiders now say we'll soon look back on 2011 as the good old days when fuel was cheap.'

Can the Market Really Provide Food Security?

Reposted in full from Online Opinion, 20 May 2011

'Victoria now has a Minister for Food Security – part of the portfolio of Nationals MP Peter Walsh – and the Federal coalition too has rebranded its shadow minister Minister for Agriculture and Food Security. The conservative side of Australian politics thinks there's something compelling and politically useful in this notion of food security, and I'm sure they are right. It is a notion that over the last 3 years has burst into the Australian media landscape like the powdery mildew on Mildura's grape crops last summer. "Food security" was mentioned in a total of 177 articles in The Age, The Herald Sun and The Weekly Times in 2010 – a new record topping the 111 articles in 2009 and the 127 in 2008, and a nine-fold increase on the average of 19 articles per year for the 10 years up to 2007.

Whence this new interest in the security of our food supply? There is no doubt that Australians share with others around the world a heightened awareness of the constraints facing world food production: limited resources of land, water, energy and nutrients; growing demand due to growing population and dietary changes; competition over production resources between food crops and agri-fuel crops, and looming over it all the challenges of maintaining production levels under a changing climate. While writers such as Australia's Julian Cribb have been sowing the seeds many years, it was the world food crisis of 2008, during which the prices of major food commodities trebled and "food riots" occurred in some thirty countries which appears to have fertilised the public conversation.

But what does food security mean in Australia? Presumably its about the food on our plates and on our supermarket shelves - it's is about having enough food. The definition adopted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations is "food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life." So why is food security being added to the agriculture portfolio? Wouldn't it be better added to public health – which is concerned with our nutrition, or industry and trade, or perhaps consumer affairs? In India, China or sub-Saharan Africa where upwards of half the population eat mostly the food they grow themselves food security is clearly very closely linked to the productivity achieved on farms. But in Australia?

According to the DAFF's Australian Food Statistics, currently around 80% of the food that Australians eat comes from Australian farms, but that's an artefact of history not current policy, and has declined from closer to 90% ten years ago. There's currently no policy at State or Federal level that links our food supply to domestic food production, in fact quite the opposite. Our policy since the mid-1970's is that agriculture, like other industries, should operate in a competitive global market where producers sell to the highest bidder wherever they are, and buyers are free to buy the cheapest produce, wherever it comes from. Farmers are to make production decisions on the basis not of food needs in Australia or anywhere else, but on the basis of price signals.

Why are our supermarkets full of Chinese garlic (and why since 2007 have we been importing a greater value of fruit and vegetables then we have been exporting)?. Why does Australian farmland get converted into suburbs or mines, or sold to overseas investors? Why during the recent drought was irrigation water in northern Victoria sold by dairy farmers to wine and almond growers? Because the market has been working its magic, directing resources to the most economically efficient and profitable uses, delivering cheaper food for consumers along the way.

Our policy position is clear – we look to the market, and not to Australian farmers, for our food security. It's a policy that has much to commend it. If we get a greater economic return on labour from mining than from picking apples, and if China can grow apples at lower cost than what we can, then it's a good deal. We sell them our coal and buy their apples and everyone (except our orchardists) is better off. As long as we are cashed up (as a nation and as individuals), and as long as there is food to buy, our supermarket shelves and our plates will be full. It's bitter fruit for some farmers and their communities who find themselves competed out of a livelihood, but that's life in the global marketplace.

But what if there isn't food to buy? Remember the global food crisis of 2008, which was more or less repeated in 2010-11. The first response to rocketing food prices by some food exporting countries was to ban food exports – World Trade Organisation rules be damned. If we look at the world food situation there is real cause for concern. Food production is critically dependent on fossil fuel energy and non-renewable phosphate rock – supply of both of which is close to or at its peak. Water resources are in decline in many of the world's food bowls (including our own Murray-Darling Basin), and investment in, and productivity dividends from, agricultural technology R&D are also in decline. Markets are good at many things – but foreseeing major surprises down the track is not one of them.

Facing such an array of destabilising influences I wonder if it is wise to put all our trust in global markets. If I was Minister for Food Security I'd be thinking about a more diversified policy portfolio that hedges risks. Let's think about local food systems as well as global ones. Let's think about production systems that are less dependent on diminishing input supplies, and let's think about the value of maintaining a critical mass of skilled farmers who feel valued for producing high-quality food for Australians as well as for export income.'

Top 5 Myths About Subsidies to Oil Companies

Excerpt from Transition Voice, 2 May 2011

'...Myth #1: Drivers will lose cheap gas

Claim: “What will the oil companies – what does any company – do when its taxes go up?” asks conservative commentator Keith Koffler, echoing the industry’s Orwellian line that cutting subsidies is actually a form of raising taxes. “PASS THE COSTS ALONG TO THE CONSUMER. That is, higher gas prices.”

Reality: Of course, since peak oil came in 2006, from now on there’s not much anyone can do to stop gas prices from rising. A wicked brew of declining supply and increasing demand will make crude and gas prices volatile over the coming years, but the trend will only be up, up, up. Even in the short term, as they themselves have been telling us for years, ExxonMobil, Chevron and the other oil majors have little control over prices. US gas prices are driven mostly by global crude prices. And crude prices are set on the world oil market. A Joint Economic Committee report states, “the removal or modification of [one of these subsidies] is unlikely to have any effect on consumer prices for oil and gas.”

Myth #2: Workers will lose thousands of jobs

Claim: “The administration continues to ignore the fact this industry is among the nation’s largest job creators,” said API CEO Jack Gerard in February, claiming that cutting oil subsidies would eliminate “thousands of new potential jobs.” The industry claims to support 9.2 million American workers.

Reality: What’s the harm in a little exaggeration? Well, if you actually employ less than 10% of the workers you claim, then Houston, we have a problem. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, in 2009 the industry directly employed only 800,000 in the US, comparable to the number of clerks who work in sporting goods, hobby, book and music stores — and much less than 1% of total American jobs. Studies have consistently shown that emerging, labor-intensive energy sources like solar and wind create far more jobs per dollar than mature industries like drilling and mining, which increasingly rely on machinery to cut labor costs.

Myth #3: Government will lose tax revenue

Claim: Cutting subsidies “would actually lower revenue to the government by many billions of dollars as a result of foregone revenues from projects the tax hikes [aka, cutting subsidies] would prevent going forward,” says the API’s Gerard.

Reality: The true effective tax rate of the oil industry is a topic of dispute, with some analysts claiming that the petroleum and pipeline sector pays only about a third of the statutory corporate tax rate of 35%. If, in today’s overheated oil market, projects to find and produce oil aren’t worth doing without subsidies, then those projects were probably a waste of money to begin with. And after nearly a century of public support, isn’t this aged industry ready to take off the training wheels yet? Or have the world’s most profitable companies become addicted to corporate welfare?

Myth#4: America will lose energy security

Claim: “America needs policies that promote greater supplies of oil and natural gas, not policies that hinder the industry’s ability to provide consumers the energy they demand and need. The US could significantly improve its energy security by allowing access to domestic oil and gas resources,” says API-funded website Energy Tomorrow.

Reality: See Myth #3. Drill here, drill now, dream on. Or, in the words of radio host Cenk Uygur, “large multinational firms like ExxonMobil are not US property. They sell to the world and their allegiance is to corporate profits. So, when they drill, they drill for the whole world, not just us. Some might find that heart-warming, but it certainly has nothing to do with the US having more oil or lower prices.”

Myth#5: Clean energy will lose a big ally

Claim: The oil and gas industry is already supporting clean energy and creating green jobs more efficiently than the Obama Administration, according to the API, “and with less burden on American taxpayers through its own green investments.”

Reality: How stupid do oil lobbyists really think we are? Despite cheery ad campaigns with solar panels and sunflowers, the industry’s achievement in green energy clearly doesn’t extend far beyond the field of marketing. It’s true that the industry spent $98 billion on “renewable, alternative and advanced emerging energy technologies” from 2000 to 2005. But 0nly about 1% of that went into clean energy including solar, wind and geothermal, while a whopping $86 billion went into “refining heavier sources of petroleum, including tar and oil sands and oil shale, and on turning waste and residue hydrocarbons into usable products” — more or less the opposite of clean energy — according to a Senate report....'

Collapse P*rn?

The content of the message, all true (and the same a large number of people have been saying for many years), but the way the message is delivered?

Excerpt from Climate Denial, 29 September 2010

'A movie that is now being launched in the UK called Collapse shows Michael Ruppert chainsmoking his way through visions of social and economic disaster. It is symptomic of the utterly self defeating way that peak oil and climate change are typically communicated...

What is interesting is the way that footage of Ruppert is interwoven with a rolling news format of economic and social collapse. Recent documentaries and disaster movies now frequently use a collage of rapidly edited random footage taken out of context. This slick style aestheticises images of destruction and objectifies the suffering of the people who appear, all too briefly, as bodies being blown up or swept away.

Four years ago an excellent report by the Institute of Public Policy Research identified alarmism in words and images as one of the dominant narratives about climate change. Gill Ereaut wrote:

The sensationalism of alarmism and its connection with the ultimate unreality of the movies also serve to create a sense of distance from the issue. What is more, in this ‘unreal’ and awesome form, alarmism might even become secretly thrilling – effectively a form of ‘climate porn’ rather than a constructive message. Alarmism potentially positions climate change as yet another apocalyptic construction that is perhaps a figment of our cultural imaginations. All of this serves to undermine the ability of this discourse

By this analysis ‘Collapse’ is an 82 minute long apocalypse pornfest that further reinforces the association between the visual aesthetics of disaster and concerns about resource shortages, peak oil, and, by association, climate change.

In terms of public motivation this is very bad news. Repeated research has shown that apocalyptic language and images create a sense of powerlessness and actively undermine peoples’ capacity to act. They can also directly feed a range of associated denial strategies including a short term hedonism and nihilistic cynicism that can be very appealing to young people.

Increasingly - as we are seeing with the political polarisation in the US and Australia- people are not weighing up climate change or other resource issues on the strength of the solid evidence but are choosing between competing worldviews that deliver a package of lifestyle, political and ethical decisions.

On the one side people are presented with a cornucopialist future of endless expansion, built on technical ingenuity and personal freedom. This has now become absorbed into a wider right wing narrative of globalisation, corporatism, minimal government and free markets.

On the other side the apocalyptists promote a future of decline, conflict, corruption, personal guilt, and collapse. This worldview has become deeply associated in the public mind with climate change and peak oil and this movie reinforces it in every way.

So if Ruppert is right he is following the worst possible strategy for raising concern about Peak Oil. By emphasising and reinforcing the existing worldview divides he is following a script that could have been written for him by those opposing action.

That is if he is right. But I think he is wrong. I think that capitalism is, for all the reasons that its defenders use, far more resilient than most apocalyptists believe and has repeatedly shown its capacity to postpone the impacts of resource shortages. What is more, there is overwhelming evidence that even when people do face problems they are far more likely to work together and seek collective solutions than to panic and riot. The images in this film of looting and rioting are rooted in a very American fear of the underclass.

This does not mean that I do not think that we are running into severe problems. There is no doubt that our resource use is insanely short sighted and we are already seeing the first shortages...

Of all resources, the most precious is the willingness of people to listen and change. This too is finite and only changes between generations. We only get one shot at this and we’re really blowing it...'

A Strategy for National Security - Sustainability

Excerpt from New York Times, 3 May 2011

'Here’s a proposition: The death of Osama bin Laden brings a moment to talk about something other than threats — not because they don’t exist, but because for the country to see and speak of nothing else is mortally dangerous.

Col. Mark Mykleby, a senior advisor on strategy to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Capt. Wayne Porter of the Navy wrote a paper calling on the United States to focus on social policies, education and sustainability...“A National Strategic Narrative,” a paper written by Captain Porter and Col. Mark Mykleby of the Marines, which calls on the United States to see that it cannot continue to engage the world primarily with military force, but must do so as a nation powered by the strength of its educational system, social policies, international development and diplomacy, and its commitment to sustainable practices in energy and agriculture.

“We must recognize that security means more than defense,” they write. After ending the 20th century as the world’s most powerful country, “we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable form of energy.”

The two officers each have more than 20 years of service, and now work as special strategic assistants to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Their paper, which is not an official policy document, was published last month by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, and is available on the center’s Web site, wilsoncenter.org...

In their paper, the officers argue that the United States has to move from “containment” — the foreign policy established after World War II to limit the expansion and influence of the Soviet Union — to what they call “sustainment” or sustainability.

The first priority, they write, should be “intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.” They go on to say that the country’s security may require “a hard look at the distribution of our treasure,” arguing that the historic focus on defense and protectionism has meant the neglect of international development and diplomacy. And with technology piercing the isolation of nations, they write that the United States has a stake in helping countries held down by illiteracy and poverty.

Finally, they write, the world population is projected to reach nine billion by midcentury and the country must face the demands for water, food, land and energy...'

If Cars and Cities Were to Evolve Together

Ecocity Builders's Richard Register plants an interesting idea in the consciousness of car companies - just as fossil fuel companies need to evolve into energy utilities, can car companies evolve into '

whole systems transportation/infrastructure companies'?

Reposted in full from Ecocity Builders, 29 October 2010

The following article by Ecocity Builders President Richard Register will be appearing in the upcoming edition of Nissan Technology Magazine

'I'm the author of books on "ecocities," head of some local ecological restoration projects and a speaker on the international circuit. By ecocities I mean simply cities that are ecologically healthy, that leave the biological world happily buzzing along while we humans do whatever we do best in our built environments of cities, towns and villages and in moving about and utilizing the countryside while protecting nature - mostly from us.

I don't have to tell many audiences these days that climate is changing rapidly now and in dangerous directions, that biodiversity is sliding from high to lower every day, that humanity is drawing down resources rapidly in many areas from finite energy stores to digging up, using and losing considerable amounts of finite minerals for our metals, and failing to recycle efficiently.

In thinking of the next twenty-five years for Nissan and its publications' readers, I have to admit, I am not optimistic. The basic ideas I've been advancing for forty years have not yet caught on, have barely started the journey. So instead of trying to predict I'll simply say what I think is the problem and what I would like to see as the solution - and car companies' role in the solution.

It starts with whole systems thinking. Car companies should become whole systems transportation/-infrastructure companies, bifurcating their moveable products into cars so much smaller they become carts - that's right - essentially carts like improved golf carts, on one hand, and train systems large and small plus elevators and conveyor belts sometimes called "people movers" like we see in airports. Transport and city development needs close coordination with architecture, plazas and parks and streets and rails. A small number of what we think of as cars today would still be needed for rural work and living and available as rentals for city and town people wanting to get to places in the country far from small towns with train stations.

The conventional car is about 30 times as heavy as a person, 10 times as fast in optimal operation and takes up about 50 times the volume. To say the least, it doesn't mix well with pedestrians and bicycles. It demands hundreds of acres per city for parking lots and whole extra buildings called parking structures stuffed into city infrastructures scattering everything farther apart making everything work worse for foot, bike and transit.

Another important point: the presently understood better car actually makes the city worse - and takes the world down with it. The car does not stand alone; it is integral to the buildings and their arrangement and to the street and energy systems. To improve the car simply continues the pattern of sprawling development and all the harms that go with it. If it's energy efficient, it is most efficient in convincing its owner he or she is "green" while perpetuating a disastrous urban form. It would be a sad day for most car companies to wake up to this notion, which I take to be a reality, without realizing that they could become companies to coordinate far better urban development with transport. They could turn out to be thriving and profitable endeavors after all serving society and nature alike, but only if remissioned, retooled and retrained to participate in building ecocities, perhaps even taking the lead. There is no one like the reformed to lead with enthusiasm and effectiveness. The story of their conversion is powerful.

The ecological city, the "ecocity," would be much more compact - think Manhattan, downtown Tokyo, or at the other end of the size scale, compact pedestrian European villages where buildings are no more than five or six stories high. Ecocities are three-dimensional, not essentially flat like most American cities excepting their central business districts. Ecocities are cities primarily for pedestrians, supported by bicycles and transit the best of which would be rail from streetcars to metro systems.

But they would go beyond models we see in the general layout of compact cities of separate buildings, the European old city model, for example, by beginning to stitch the buildings together in whole systems design featuring extreme pedestrian permeability - access three-dimensionally through the city. This means there would be bridges between buildings with rooftop "uses" like shops and restaurants, mini-parks and plazas on rooftops and rooftop gardens for native species of birds, some food gardens, though not high volume production relative to the number of people obviously, but educational for the children - and all this with fantastic views over the city and surrounding landscapes. Systems of bridges for bicycles and monorail-like connections fit too in the larger city context, connecting those rich, verdant pedestrian environments hanging in the sky.

This configuration of the physical structure - clusters of buildings linked on ground level and one or more levels above ground level arranged around streets, parks and plazas uses radically less land, as well as energy, than the car/sprawl/paving infrastructure we see so dominant today and growing rapidly in many countries. Ecocity design means natural landscape and agriculture can come back into close relationship to the city. Just take an elevator - I encourage adventurous glass elevators on the outside of some buildings for pleasure rides - walk a few short blocks and be in the country. Ecocity wholes systems design also applies at all scales.

I've been in some villages in Nepal, Turkey and Northern Italy that are only four or five blocks long and wide and yet have buildings six or seven stories high, infrastructure providing for enough people to have a very lively cultural life, plus hosting a small hotel or two for very personal connection to the outside world. Think in addition to such structures attached solar greenhouses and those bridge linkages and roof and terrace experiences.

So as part of a coordinated enterprise understood by people everywhere, we can well imagine car companies joining, even leading, a larger program of coordinated parts in which the city is stitched together in the ecocity way and a healthy future is launched.'

The Great Disruption - Paul Gilding

Paul Gilding's talk on his new book, 'The Great Disruption', to the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London (audio only)

Sourced from the RSA, 13 April 2011

www.thersa.org/__data/assets/file/0004/396994/20110413PaulGilding.mp3 (1 hour)

'Paul Gilding is an independent writer, advisor and advocate for action on climate change and sustainability.

An activist and social entrepreneur for 35 years, his personal mission and purpose is to lead, inspire and motivate action globally on the transition of society and the economy to sustainability. He pursues this purpose across all sectors, working around the world with individuals, businesses, NGOs, entrepreneurs, academia and government.

He has served as CEO of a range of innovative NGO’s and companies including Greenpeace International, Ecos Corporation and Easy Being Green. He has also helped to establish and served on the board of a number of new NGOs including Inspire Foundation, the Australian Business Community Network and Climate Coolers. His speaking and work has taken him to over 30 countries including the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, South America, Europe, South Africa, the USA and Mexico.

Paul believes we are now in a global ecological and economic crisis that will lead to a period of major global economic transformation. As he advocated in his 2005 letter Scream Crash Boom and his 2008 update The Great Disruption, he sees this crisis driven change as an enormous opportunity to build a new approach to economic and social development for humanity.'

Climate Change 101 - A Venn Diagram

Created by yours truly...

The Carbon Atlas

click on link to original source for interactive map

Sourced from The Guardian, 9 December 2008

'New figures confirm that China has overtaken the US as the largest emitter of CO2. This interactive emissions map shows how the rest of the world compares. Global C02 emissions totalled 29,195m tonnes in 2006 – up 2.4% on 2005'

The Old American Dream is a Nightmare

Excerpt from Grist, 9 March 2011

'...[James Howard] Kunstler has long warned of the horrendous hangover we're going to wake up with after our "cheap oil fiesta," but he's not gloating as global instability and climate destabilization become the new not-so-normal. Unlike some dystopians, he's motivated less by the desire to say "I told you so" than by the hope that we might still manage to reinvent the American dream on a scale that better suits our current circumstances.

Q. In your 2005 book The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, you gave high-rises low marks, and declared that you're "not optimistic about our big cities." You maintain that towns and small cities are far better equipped to adapt to the post-cheap-oil future.

Now, we've got economist Edward Glaeser talking up skyscrapers in The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. David Owen made a similar case with Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability.

Do you find yourself swayed, even a little, by these defenders of urban density?

A. I am completely on board with compact, dense urbanism. It's a mistake, though, to think that's the same as an urbanism of mega-structures - either skyscrapers or landscrapers.

A lot of this misunderstanding derived from David Owen's 2004 New Yorker article, "Green Manhattan," which declared that stacking people up in towers was the ultimate triumph of urban ecology. Owen is a very nice fellow, but this thesis was a crock.

And I'm confident that Ed Glaeser and his acolytes will be disappointed with how it all works out, too. We are entering a capital-scarce, energy-scarce future. The skyscraper is already obsolete and the architects and academic economists remain tragically clueless about it.

Oddly, the main reason we're done with skyscrapers is not because of the electric issues or heating-cooling issues per se, but because they will never be renovated! They are one-generation buildings. We will not have the capital to renovate them - and all buildings eventually require renovation! We likely won't have the fabricated modular materials they require, either - everything from the manufactured sheet-rock to the silicon gaskets and sealers needed to keep the glass curtain walls attached.

You cannot have a city of buildings unavailable for and unsuited for adaptive re-use. This final exuberant generation of skyscrapers built the past few decades - including the mis-named "green" skyscrapers - may be considered the architectural expression of the final cheap oil blow-off.

From now on, we need desperately to tone down our grandiosity. We will discover to our dismay that all these skyscrapers - amazing feats that they might be - are liabilities, not assets. Our cities are going to contract a lot and the process will be painful in terms of lost notional wealth (and probably other ways, too). They have attained a scale that is inconsistent with the economic and energy realities of the future. The optimum building height, we will re-discover, is the number of stories most healthy people can comfortably walk up.

Q. Is "smart growth" the antidote to sprawl, or just a developer's disingenuous oxymoron?

A. "Smart growth" started as a polemical retort to the "dumb" growth of suburban sprawl. It happened that dumb growth was utterly entrenched in all our local land-use laws, and in the sectors that served them - especially the construction trades and our lending practices. The zoning laws mandated a car-dependent outcome, and the builders furnished it, exactly as specified.

By the way, it's important to understand that suburbia was not dreamed up by the devil or any of his agents among us. It just seemed like a good idea in the America of the 20th century. We had the material and capital resources to build this empire of comfort and convenience, so we did. And all this implies a powerful cultural consensus - a broad agreement that this way of living is okay.

Eventually, of course, it became embedded in our national identity as a late incarnation of the American Dream. All well and good - and over! Because our circumstances have changed drastically now. We face the awful predicament of peak oil, and the global contest over the world's remaining resources, and reality is telling us very loudly that we have to live differently - we have to get a new American Dream.

The resistance to this is ferocious, not because Americans are particularly dumb or wicked, but because of the massive investments we have already made in these suburban infrastructures for daily living. We can't accept the scary mandates of reality, or begin the process of letting go.

Smart growth was a strategy undertaken by the New Urbanist reformers to offer an alternative template for land development in America - one based on the traditional walkable neighborhood. The New Urbanists were superbly skilled at drawing up clear graphical codes that might be used to replace the suburban codes around the country. The term "smart" growth was intended to be a selling point - though, unfortunately it often offended the very people it was aimed at by making their own codes look dumb...

The housing bubble bust...represents not just a transient economic fiasco; it is the end of the suburban project per se. We are finished with suburbia. We're stuck with the residue of it. And now we'll see how this all sorts itself out in the face of $100+ per barrel oil.

We will probably come to see a long era of little-to-no-growth. Whatever happens in terms of the human habitat from now on will involve the re-use of stuff that is already there, one way or another.

Personally, I believe the action is going to shift to small towns, small cities, and places that exist in a relationship with a productive agricultural landscape. The fate of suburbia is to become slums, salvage sites, and ruins. Human beings are very good at sorting out materials, and we'll have to do a lot of that. I believe a great deal of all trade in the years ahead will be in material goods already made, re-purposed, as they say, and re-circulated.

...I maintain that any activity organized at the colossal scale will tend to fail in the face of the compound crises of energy, capital, and ecology (climate change). Giant governments, giant universities, giant retail operations - all these things will wobble and fail in the years ahead as reality compels us to downscale and re-localize...

...we are mounting a foolish campaign to sustain the unsustainable, to defend our previous investments in things like suburban living, instead of making new arrangements. That's what we do when we invest half a trillion dollars of "stimulus" capital in building new circumferential highways around our hypertrophied metroplex cities instead of repairing the railroad system.

There is, sadly, much truth in the old saying that people get what they deserve, not what they expect. We are an extremely demoralized nation, unable to construct a coherent consensus about what is happening and what we might do about it, and floundering as a result. Even at the elite environmentalist level, the conversation is ridiculous. For two years in a row, I attended the Aspen Environmental forum, which attracts the cream of the green-and-enviro community. Whenever the subjects of peak oil and our extreme car dependency came up, all they wanted to talk about was running cars by other clever means: electricity, biodiesel, etc. They showed a total lack interest in walkable communities or public transit. They were blind to the fact that their own techno-grandiosity left them in a position that only promoted further car dependency - which is suicidal, of course...

...I suspect that we have left behind the supposed normality of the past decade and have now entered uncharted territory of the long emergency. We have also seen the first stirrings of American unrest in the battles over public employee bargaining rights. I'd maintain that this is only the start of a very rough political era in the USA. The buildup of tensions is fantastic. You have a dissolving middle class watching their futures whirl around the drain, and an obscenely rich Wall Street banking class (abetted by a disgustingly bought-off political class) that has been allowed to evade the rule of law in running a set of ruinous financial rackets, swindles, and frauds, and this alone is, to me, a recipe for civil disorder. I'm amazed that the Hamptons have not yet been torched.'

Peak Oil Angst and the Lure of Techno-Utopia

'Latest 'Zeitgeist' Documentary Mixes Sound Critique and Goofy Futurism' — Transition Voice

I must concur – the film’s diagnosis is pretty much on the money, but the prescription? I am highly suspicious of technological master plans that deny the diversity of humanity, and don’t really address the internal dysfunction that brought us to this point.

Excerpt from Transition Voice, 30 March 2011

'...to many who are disgusted by party politics and corporate greed, the dispassionate world of science, with integrity built right into the experimental method, looks appealing by comparison...

2011′s Moving Forward is actually the third film in the series, which began with Zeitgeist in 2007, a film roundly attacked for promoting conspiracy theories on 9/11, Christianity and the international banking system. A second film, Zeitgeist: Addendum came out in 2008, focusing again on the financial system.

Clearly, these documentaries and the political movement behind them (the Zeitgeist Movement has a separate Facebook page with 95,089 friends) have tapped into a trend.

With a hard-hitting critique of market economics and corruption in politics by such visionary thinkers as Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky and Vancouver physician Gabor Maté, the film’s got a lot that a thinking person can agree with. I was glad to see that director Peter Joseph gave plenty of time to peak oil, featuring both Michael Ruppert and Colin Campbell.

But this impressively produced film is wracked by a split personality. On the one hand, it’s as cynical as can be about the difference between Democrats and Republicans (none that matters), the health of the financial system (poor to critical) and the consequences for the future of the market economy (bleak, bleak, bleak).

On the other hand, Zeitgeist’s solutions are not merely uncompelling and unconvincing. They seem to rely on the very thinking that got us into today’s problems in the first place.

Here’s what the Very Smart People behind Zeitgeist think will save civilization: The peoples of the world should rise up simultaneously in revolt and demand an end to the current world order. The film imagines a scenario where demonstrators mass peacefully in the major cities of the world and dump the life-savings they’ve just withdrawn from the nearest ATM into huge piles of cash on the street in front of the offices of their nation’s central bank.

What’s next? Somehow, an enlightened regime of brainiacs, chosen in some unspecified manner entirely free of either party politics or moneyed interests (oh, right, there’s no more money), will revamp world civilization according to a blueprint from the world of — get ready for it — systems engineering.

Resources will be sourced from where they’re produced anywhere on Earth to wherever they’re needed anywhere else on Earth. Shopping will be a thing of the past as people simply “check out” any goods that they need for temporary use from the local lending library.

And the world’s cities? Somehow they’ll all become completely rational, with concentric circles of high-tech building complexes designed to maximize land use and energy efficiency, all fed by hydroponic agriculture and with transportation provided by monorails apparently borrowed from Disney World.

Apparently gone will be narrow Renaissance alleys and Victorian brownstones, Manhattan high-rises and Stalinist low-rises, Qing Dynasty hutongs and Meiji Era courtyards. How will we get there? Again, details TBA.

I don’t fault a documentary that’s already pushing three hours for skipping over all the steps of how such a wondrous transformation could occur. I’ll trust that the super-smarties at the Venus Project, a clearly well-funded group behind Zeitgeist, have some ideas on how to pull the old stuff down, reuse the materials and rebuild everything to look like a set from Logan’s Run.

The real question is, after dozens of compelling visions of techno-dystopia, why anyone today would still find appealing a future in glass domes and Modernist towers that look like the theme restaurant at LAX.

If the only way to free ourselves from the Koch brothers, Goldman Sachs and Michelle Bachmann is to wipe away the glorious mess that is 5,000 years of civilization and replace it with a Version 2.0 that’s all metal and perfectly aerodynamic, then there doesn’t seem to be all that much point to human survival.

What the hell would we do in those damn domes all day anyway?

Fortunately, if for energy and resource depletion alone, not to mention human psychology, a future in geo-domes eating hydroponic asparagus picked from the glass balcony is about as likely as seeing George Jetson as president or Buck Rogers as Secretary of Defense.

The appeal of a cerebral version of urban renewal — tear down the slums of history and replace them with shiny new stuff that’s approved by science — is worrisome.

Clearly, too many people still think we have to destroy civilization to save it.

And if you want to point your finger at dirty politics and the greedy market as the root of all evil, can you really claim that science still has clean hands?

From eugenics to Auschwitz, from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima, from physicists flocking to Wall Street to design complex financial derivatives to Monsanto’s latest genetic engineering horror, science has shown little scruple about ethics when money and power came a-calling.

Why should next time be any different?'

Ecocity Economics - An Economics Built on What We Build

Reposted from Ecocities Emerging, March 2011

'...The ongoing economic crisis that began with the unraveling of wildly inflated real estate prices and the Wall Street derivatives bubble in 2007 and the crash into near depression in October of 2008 resulted in trillions of dollars of public bail out money for banks and other institutions around the world. Other banks and businesses collapsed or went bankrupt and many individuals lost their homes and/or their jobs. Talk of recovery and getting back to where we were with continued world economic GDP growth, back to "normal," based on improving stock prices and with a stabilizing of real estate prices in the United States averaging almost 40% less than what they were in 2007 is highly unlikely to be correct. That is because of the high unemployment rates, lost value in retirements, far more expensive costs for education and health insurance than before, cuts in public services from closed swimming pools, parks and libraries, streets wearing out without maintenance, immense debts and deficits in all but two state governments in the United States and hundreds of cities and so on and on. Our police force here in Oakland, California where I live, for example, a city with an extraordinarily high murder rate, has had to fire 80 police officers five months ago due to enormous city government deficits. The same is the situation for the State of California where Jerry Brown the new Governor (who was also governor 30 years ago) is cutting deeply into almost all services the state provides and has proposed the elimination of all California Redevelopment Agencies in an effort to balance the budget. But there is a much more profound reason not to expect "full recovery" of the economy if, as almost always implied, that means a return to all those comfortable economic indicators of on-going growth. In this regard there are two big problems: 1.) infinite growth in a finite environment is impossible and 2.) you have to know what to build to thrive and all evidence is that humanity has a very ill-considered and dangerous notion of what to build at this time in history.

Infinite growth is impossible

Our newsletter readers all know that infinite growth in a limited environment is impossible so I’ll mention here, without trying to prove the case, an interesting fact: life depends on energy, 99.97% of which arrives in the thin zone of life on Earth from the sun. Only .025% oozes up from the crust as geothermal energy and the thin slice of .005% comes from tidal energy, cosmic rays, meteor friction with the air and most interestingly I think, residual heat from the originally birth of the planet in accumulating bombardments from asteroids, comets and space dust.

Life, of course, also depends on climate, local or regional soils and/or waters and the interaction between living organisms. Carrying capacity in the case of human presence on Earth has components that multiply one another in a manner similar to that identified by Paul Ehrlich in his famous formula: I = PAT, meaning Impact (on the environment and everything in it) is equal to Population multiplied times Affluence (or consumption) times particular Technology. One technology may be almost totally benign, solar energy for example, and another definitely risky, such as nuclear with its unsolved waste problems and necessity for massive insurance and investment subsidies.

In my opinion Ehrlich is missing the pervasive and powerful role of the built environment or the “land use and infrastructure” pattern our cities, towns and villages embody physically, the anatomy of our cities, towns and villages. Our collective constructed habitat is a gigantic creation at the foundation of human economy and, you might say, a meta-product made up of many other products. The city orders and supports – or confounds – practically all other of our technologies and ways of living in their efficiencies – or inefficiencies. For example, once you build the city designed for the convenience of cars you are stuck for decades with dependence on cars and all their supporting technologies, space and energy demands, climate change and violent accidents. Build a city for people mainly on foot and the technologies that work with that built community include solar electric power plants, bicycles and streetcars and their supporting technologies. I sometimes contract “land use” and “infrastructure” into the one physical thing itself, as “landustructure,” the physical built community itself. Thus I have propose I = PLAT. Coincidentally, “plat” in its common usage means the layout of a set of uses on the land. Impact = Population times the kind of Landustructure they occupy times level of Affluence times particular Technologies.

Presently the “ecological footprint,” a concept that was detailed first in the doctoral dissertation of Mathis Wackernagel working with Bill Rees at the University of British Columbia in 1994, is probably the best measure of human overshoot. Wackernagel as President of Oakland’s Global Footprint Network, with offices also in Zurich and Brussels, keeps track of the worsening degree of overshoot for our whole planet, which at this point is consuming more than 30% more resources than can be utilized and stored by the Earth’s biological systems powered by sun, chlorophyll and soil. In economics terms this might be called using up the planet’s capital while maxing out humanity’s income allotment all at the same time, digging rapidly into the geological energy savings account, the only one that exists. The fossil fuel savings account was accumulated over close to 100 million years during the Carboniferous geological period ending a little less than 300 million years ago. The accumulation was slow – especially relative to the rate at which we are using it up now: at around 500,000 years worth of deposition literally burned up every year. Basically, the biofuels that compete for soil and sun with food and wood, which provides also building materials and paper plus maintains most terrestrial biodiversity, is the only source of energy we can depend on other than direct renewable solar energy and its derivatives, wind and hydropower, and a tiny fraction from geothermal.

To get a sense of the implications of the problem of overshoot in terms of metals and non-metallic minerals, it is instructive to step back and contemplate a powerful image of our situation from the point of view of minerals already mined out of the surface of the earth. The McGraw Hill text book by Fellmann, Getis and Getis, Human Geography – Landscape of Human Activities, Tenth Edition, provides a perspective on that situation that should concern us all.

The extractive industries depend on the exploitation of minerals unevenly distributed in amounts and concentrations determined by past geologic events, not by contemporary market demand. In physically workable and economically usable deposits, minerals constitute only a tiny fraction of the earth’s crust – far less than 1%. That industrialization has proceeded so rapidly and so cheaply is the direct result of an earlier ready availability of rich and accessible deposits of the requisite materials. Economies grew fat by skimming the cream. It has been suggested that should some catastrophe occur to return human cultural levels to a pre-agricultural state, it would be extremely unlikely that humankind ever again could move along the road of industrialization with the resources available for its use. (2008, p. 282)

The fact is that massive quantities of metals and other minerals are in the form people can use, are in circulation right now, in many cases in near 100% pure form. And many of these can be recycled essentially forever. But, the amount per person on average has to be divided by the population of humanity and some is inevitably lost through rust or dispersion to concentrations unrecoverable by any economically available means. As energy resources become more expensive economic availability becomes much more problematic. I call this “the Rust Factor” and it needs to be seen as compounding the problems of “Peak Oil.”

In other words, far from an imminent return to normal growth that politicians and economists are claiming will materialize in a few years if not sooner, what we are more likely to see is better revealed by thinkers who for a long time now have been trying to asses society’s longer term trajectory on the planet. Jonas Salk discussed in his book “Survival of the Wisest” in 1972 the graphing of growth curves representing living organisms in finite environments, including us on Earth.

“S” curve, bell curve, collapse or just permanent downturn?

In broadest terms, Salk compares human impacts on the planet to any living organism living and reproducing in a limited environment with a steady supply of incoming nutrient. A petri dish with a colony of bacteria, for example, starts out with plenty of food per individual bacterium and increases population geometrically as represented by a line on a graph as it reproduces, producing an upwardly accelerating “C” shaped curve. At a certain point resources become more scarce per organism and the environment becomes crowded. It starts filling up with the contamination of the bacteria’s waste. At a certain point the upward “C” shape begins to decelerate in its growth rate and begins to describe an “S” shape. Where the line changes its direction representing accelerating growth to decelerating growth we have the “point of inflection.” The line at that point instead of curving ever more toward the vertical begins to curve to the right and toward the horizontal. Salk suggests that the wise person realizes from an assessment of the major needs and resources of living organisms and the realities of their environment that we need to slow growth before arriving at the point of inflection else we suffer, shall we say, swimming in a crowded pool of scarce food and our own organic and industrial excrement. In theory we could arrive at a high top population in miserable circumstances as the line on the graph takes a horizontal path to the right indefinitely.

In 1972 when his book was published and I had the pleasure of talking with him about it we may well have been at approximately his point of inflection. Obviously we didn’t act as wisely as he might have wanted. It’s one thing for literally billions of people to have been saved from polio with a shot of Salk’s vaccine. It’s quite another for those same to achieve wisdom.

In reality, the “S” curve doesn’t end there in a horizontal trajectory since the steady availability of incoming nutrient – and on the whole Earth 99.97% of that income would be the steady flow of solar energy – may be there, but when maximum population arrives it is not just that the environment is polluted and crowded but that pathologies that began multiplying as the curve approached the top produce conditions in the organisms themselves and in the contaminated soup of their environment such as diseases. And those conditions of “diseases” have their own growth curves and negative cumulative effects that may not kick in until well over the maximum number of our subject organisms are alive and the “S” curve line is topped out and tending toward the horizontal. In the case of us humans, dangerous psychological and social/political reactions are guaranteed as well as actual diseases. This has been historically demonstrated in cases of civilizations that have collapsed throughout history and even prehistory.

But as far as human society is concerned, by far the greatest source of energy in use and which we depend on almost absolutely is not of the steadily arriving solar variety, but fossil fuel reserves topping out sometime right about now. Add that to the delayed action of those independent “diseases” just mentioned that exert their degenerating effect after the ”S” curve tries to top out and move horizontally. Students and Paul Reveres of Peak Oil have been warning us for more than a decade now that peak oil production portends a great deal of dislocation not only by prices rising as oil becomes scarce, as it must sometime as a finite resource, but also because of the degree to which it has permeated our economy in the form of plastics and hundreds of chemicals that turn up in a vast number of products. They suggest a bell curve, rather than an “S” curve, one that rounds over the top and heads down with a rapid drop. Richard Duncan a systems engineer studying Peak Oil has pointed out, however, that peak oil per person was actually passed in 1979 with no dire crisis after that point. Some of the early 2000s peak oil authors expected the beginning of the collapse of absolute quantity of consumption of oil in the 2007-2010 period and perhaps they were right or perhaps society is at a kind of ragged top “plateau” that will slide more slowly away with oil use tapering off more gradually as other energy systems come on line. The only trouble is, other source of energy from the Earth’s surface are either almost as scarce as oil, natural gas in particular, or even worse in terms of climate changing CO2 and pollution levels, coal in particular, or more expensive in terms of energy, technology and clean up needed in procurement, such as shale oil, tar sands and nuclear. The Great Downturn, the Great Recession, the Crash of 2008 or whatever it becomes known as eventually, illustrates that policies (government deregulation on one hand and the personal policies of greed in high investment and speculative circles) and societal factors that are not tracking resources that closely can have immense impacts as well. But perhaps what is important to say at this juncture is simply that even if slow in terms of years the patterns are getting clear in terms of decades and in those time periods our children’s lives are deeply implicated by the slowdown in energy available in a world getting crowded and heating up.

Leaders and the public show few signs we know what to build

It’s not quite that we never ask what to build, it is that we are afraid to look at the question in its fullest implications. Around the world we have no problem in 2011 with looking into building the green building. We can all imagine that – at least for those who are interested. But to inquire into building the right kind of city or town, that affects us all in our neighborhoods, in our everyday transportation situation and in many other aspects of our life styles – that is another thing entirely. I’ll explain this in a little more detail but first I want the reader to look at my chart entitled “The Illustrated Realconomics Chart.”

Studying it you will see solar energy providing almost all the energy available on the planet, both as a flow of arriving energy and as a store in the form of the fossil fuels. The chart shows our dependence on the layer of chlorophyll and soil for making almost all of our useful products, prominently featuring our built environment, as, after all, the built environment is the largest of our creations. You will also see I have placed human economics completely within nature’s economy and have shown the speculators’ economy as a black hole of profit that, whenever economic “bubbles” develop, accrues as gambling winnings for the very few but has zero product or service to the larger economy – and often impoverishes millions of people when the bubble bursts, taking down many unlucky speculators as well.

I have noticed that even high finance economists who deal in derivatives and buy and sell disastrously overpriced subprime mortgages occasionally use the term “the real economy.” Alerted to what it might be and investigating some I concluded they were talking about the economy not of speculative finance that has no physical product or service but the economy that does, the economy of material, energy, strategic thinking and good hard work. Still, that economy may operate as both capitalist and socialist economists have advocated for exploitive drawdown of nature’s resources and thus it is not the real real economics because it is lost in its delusional fantasy of infinite growth and independence from nature. Therefore I’m suggesting constructing an economics that understands that edge between nature’s economics and ours, that thin green and brown line of chlorophyll above and soil below. I’m suggesting we give it a new name to distinguish it even from the human economics seen as the economists’ “real economics” plus “nature’s economics” in their dynamic interrelation – another kind of economics. I’m suggesting “realconomics.”

The Illustrated Realconomics Chart

Economist speak of “real” economics as the economics of productivity, consumption and recycling utilizing Earth’s resources and whatever energy is available to power the system. They do this because often the manipulations of finance and speculation dominates much of economic theory, circulating largely around stock markets and their regulation – or deregulation.

The Realconomics Chart puts forward the idea that there is a natural economics based on the Earth’s minerals and solar energy income translated into useable food and fuel by photosynthesis in plants. Products of photosynthesis are stored in soil fertility, wood, fruits and vegetables and animal protoplasm and some is stored in the Earth’s sediments as fossil fuels.

The human economy taps into the larger natural economy and has its own particular dynamics having to do with resources, invention, capital, labor, planning, interest manipulation, supply of currency, rules of contract and so on.

A subsection of the chart is speculative economics, the economics of physically non-productive investment and return – or betting for win or loss – that may or may not facilitate the larger human economy. The human economy is dependent on the materials and energy flows of the natural economy. And if we can devise an economics that effectively integrates nature’s economics and human economics in one total economics system, I’m proposing calling it “realconomics.” Only if the system includes all crucial parts could it be considered “real,” thus the proposed name.

Chlorophyll in plants creates a thin membrane on the Earth’s surface that transforms solar to chemical energy for practically all organic functions of living things. The chemical residues of the work of this membrane are geologically stored as a one-time supply of energy in the fossil fuels.

To continue with looking at the built environment, when one goes from making buildings more land-conserving and energy-conserving and designed for more positive environmental impact in general, then on to making the city greener, we suddenly get into the issues of changing neighborhoods, confronting automobile dependence, the need to remove buildings if they promote automobile dependence or if they are in the way of restoring ecologically healthy functions such as through opening up small waterways, shorelines, ridgelines and so on. Ultimately the very uncomfortable issue comes up for many people that living in a multi-unit apartment or condominium without a car in a mixed-use center is far healthier in ecological, climate and resource terms than living in a house with a car in a low density residential area. Oddly, living in a house in a high density mixed use neighborhood might be the worst of all since it keeps out many people who could be leading “greener” lives there.

Our leaders and the vast majority, even of climate scientists and environmentalists are averse to looking this problem in the eye. It seems far too daunting but look we must or we simply will not solve the major crises of our times. The Obama Administration in my country doesn’t know what to build. To use an Oakland example again, the Federal Government has funded a “shovel ready” project as part of its economic recovery program to drill a fourth bore through the hills to the east of Oakland and Berkeley – at a cost of $420 million (before cost overrides – who knows what the final figure will be!). This will make four tunnels where there are now three linking the San Francisco Bay Area with the suburbs on the far side of the hills – for cars. This is precisely the wrong time in history to be promoting and serving yet more cars and sprawl development. A half billion dollars could do good instead of damage if it were for ecocity development near an existing rail station or serving development in vitality centers that could be moving toward ecocity design and development.

In simplest terms, we have built a city for cars instead of people. We have done this almost as if we are in automatic, that is, just reacting our way into the future picking up on whatever short-term technological future plops in our laps. Cars have been fun but… Interestingly the world automobile means something that moves (is mobile) on its own (auto). It is automatic in a sense too, just like our reflexive adopting of the automobile with little thought to its implications. The city built for the automobile, we could call the autocity (as compared with the ecocity), meaning not only built for the car but built almost automatically without serious forethought. If you want to know how we got here to climate change, rapid resource depletion, paving farmland and species extinctions, that’s the lion’s share of the explanation.

Even most conscientious promoters of renewable energy, energy conservation, recycling and non-toxics have failed to notice that slice of history, don’t get it. They almost uniformly promote subsidizing electric cars and putting solar electric panels on suburban houses which works to maintain the suburbs we should be moving away from, continues covering farms and killing people and animals in tens of millions of accidents around the world every year. Jobs supporting expansion or perpetuation of the car/sprawl/paving/massively energy consuming autocity shouldn’t be seen as green jobs at all. Their “greenness” is more than nullified by supporting exactly the wrong infrastructure. However if we do know what to build – the ecocity of compact, highly diverse centers from neighborhood centers and district centers to revitalized downtowns as complete small cities in their own right – then we will see people have learned “what to build.” Then we discover we have a much broader definition of “green jobs” which includes the iron worker constructing apartment housing in an area where the preexisting imbalance is toward the commercial, the waitress providing café services, for example, to people who arrive there on foot and so on. Almost any job, in the right location is a green job, whereas jobs in a location supporting the disastrous urban infrastructure that dominates the world and causes many of its worst problems today, is anything but a green job.

So what should we be building? Not only the more compact neighborhood, district and city centers of real diversity but seen in the thoroughly “ecocity” way with high levels of integration, with features and detailing appropriate to the location. The basic principle here is so important it should be seen as one of the foundation stones of realconomics. That is that complex living systems, such as our own human bodies, function best as lean, three-dimensionally arranged entities. Similarly, the healthy city functions best as a lean, energy and land conserving entity that is also essentially three dimensional, not flat and spread out like modern, high energy and high land consuming suburbia. This is because lines of supply and communications are much shorter and quicker when they cross over and below one another instead of scattering out away from one another over large areas. Architect/philosopher Paolo Soleri put forward this paragraph’s observations in the early 1960s – they’ll be relevant and instructional forever.

This notion of “leanness” through compact complexity, that is, great variety well organized close together, is not only what is conventionally considered more “efficient” it also means there is more energy and material, land and time left over after essential maintenance activity to relish for relaxing, more time and energy for creative personal or collective activity. The city of health and options is the one that doesn’t trap the person on his or her way to work in a traffic jam or force the consumption of 500 gallons of gasoline a year, typical in the United States, but let’s the “commuter” get to work by just bicycling or walking a short distance. The three-dimensional lay out of the city is that basic – and such physical organization is common to all complex living things including the living (as compared to dying or killing) city.

If we can understand the city as a three-dimensional living organism and see that as a major insight for a realconomics of true sustainability we can suddenly see that many architectural features of clusters of buildings appear as if by magic from that realization. Suddenly bridges between buildings roof-to-roof or terrace-to-terrace and mid block ground level passageways such as cozy alleys, sky lit hallways and grand gallerias, make perfect sense for high pedestrian permeability. Rooftop gardens, shops and restaurants linked by those bridges and rooftop parks and promenades, multi-story solar greenhouses and exterior glass elevators all become part of the rich architectural palate people have to date barely noticed. You, dear readers are the exception of course, hearing this list of ecocity features from my many times over the years. When we actually try them out and put them all together I believe we’ll only then realize what a powerful and healthy finally complete design for living actually is.

Getting building

Now that we have a better idea of what to build, how to get started? Ecovillages in the country have the opportunity to express these ecocity features and take the lead if they feature the kind of elements mentioned in the paragraph immediately above. They would have to involve bridge-linked buildings of probably seven or more stories to fully illustrate full-bodied ecocity design and would have to relate to adjacent agriculture and natural habitat restoration. Attached food producing solar greenhouses ascending part of the sunny side: absolutely necessary.

Such projects could grow up from a neighborhood centers too. This in the ecocity movement we call an “integral project” or an “ecocity fractal,” which is a fraction of what could be a whole ecocity with all essential parts and functions – housing, work, commerce, learning, farming, restoration of nature and connection to other centers with bicycle or rail routes – present and well arranged. Understanding the “full spectrum” or “complete” center in this way informs us about the components of the ecocity and fills out the notion of what we need to build for a truly sustainable natural and human economics, my proposed realconomics.

“Knowing what to build” means we also know that there can be plenty of work for everyone. The ecocity foundation of realconomics provides a very full and vibrant economy even if it is an economy of a city shrinking in footprint and total size, that is, actual size in terms of volume of physical built infrastructure for any particular population, and shrinking in terms of quantity of land, materials and energy needed for its construction and maintenance. This is a paper about economics of an ecological nature so it is highly relevant to point out that the Great Depression was put to an end by Keynesian economics in the hands of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration between 1932 and 1945. Struggling to figure out what to do about more than two years of a depression getting deeper and deeper when the new president took over, Roosevelt began experimenting with dozens of initiatives to enliven the economy. Things actually got worse for a while. His administration followed the deficit spending formula of John Maynard Keynes putting everyone to work on clearly defined projects in not only new infrastructure construction – airports, hospitals, bridges, highways, dams, post offices, libraries and so on – but ecological projects such as reforestation and soil reclamation. Conservative capitalists, whose hands-off government philosophy let economic conditions sink rapidly from the Crash of 1929 until the Roosevelt years, considered the new president leading the country to socialism and many did not believe in his attempted solutions. While good projects were happening, they weren’t being embraced completely whole-heartedly. But when the Second World War started, there was no doubt at all what needed to be built, for better or worse, and the whole country went into gear behind the war effort. Deficit spending, targeted for a particular outcome – victory over fascism and slavery – was seen as a strategic investment in future prosperity and tapping into that prosperity at a later time to pay down the expenses of winning the war.

It was perhaps the largest experiment in application of an economic theory with the most clear lesson – if anyone bothers to pay attention – that we’ve had in a century or more or maybe ever. What it means for us now is that if we could decide we need to build the ecocity civilization and invest in it vigorously we could win this war against our planet by turning it around and making it instead a war to save our planet. What we most need then is realconomics and its physical manifestation: ecocities.

The Big Five

Alas, that is not enough! Our cities, towns and villages are collectively the largest thing our species creates but then we are too large ourselves. That is, human population is enormous and without massive use of energy and material, probably even in the context of an ecocity future, it would in all likelihood be far more than a healthy ecology of real diversity on the planet could tolerate. I see, in fact, five big items we have to deal with, all of which most people are very resistant to facing. Much less do many seem to be able to summons the courage, commitment and personal energy to engage realistically with good hard work. To me they seem to be lacking a clear idea of what is needed and an outline of how to proceed. Maybe that would summons the courage and hard work. This leads to the following thinking:

Axiom 1.

The City is the engine of prosperity.

This is the gigantic economics lesson I’ve been writing about to this point in this paper. And the ecocity is the type of city that contributes to soil and biodiversity buildup as well as prosperity while demonstrating how the city can grow smaller in land and energy consumption. By the way, in a world stuffed with computers that get more valuable as they get smaller per function, this should sound about as normal as things can get, and a very good idea.

Axiom 2.

The Big Five

If we wish to build a healthy economics, there are “Five Big Areas of Action” we need to engage which society has been avoiding, of which the built environment is one. They are:

Physical actions

1. Deal with overpopulation

2. Reshape the agriculture/diet nexus to be far less land and energy consuming

3. Build ecocities

Detailing the above two not already covered in this paper is material for another paper.

But we can see at a glance that in dealing with religious dogma, family habits, old age security, education and reproductive rights for women and business prejudices for maximum growth we are up against a very large problem in trying to solve the population problem. Yet we need to do this and can, reducing human numbers gradually, steadily and peacefully to a level where each of us in some future time can thrive in a world where nature thrives too. In addition it should be stressed that the idea of infinite growth translates into an economics absurdity that the larger the population on a limited planet the more for each of us, “the more of us the larger our slice of the pie.” (Could economists really mean this?!) The reverse is closer to the truth, “the fewer of us the more for each,” down to at least, enough of us to provide for the variety of experience for genuinely full, creative, compassionate lives. We need in other words workers, organizers of work, teachers, artists and scientists for insight and knowledge, children for inspiration and continuity of our species into the future and so on, population enough for a truly prosperous human presence. We don’t know the best approximate number because we have yet to honestly address the situation, but seven going on nine or ten billion?!…

Regarding the agricultural/diet nexus we have another enormous problem that starts with modern agriculture taking up so much land. This is the only enterprise humanity engages in that is on a scale comparable to building cities, towns and villages. Agriculture is different in that it takes place in a thin layer in two dimensions rather than in three-dimensional volume. Even before its ecologically damaging chemicals and massive demand for energy is factored in, it eliminates vast areas of natural habitat that is needed if we want long-term healthy biodiversity on this planet. The answer is largely to move toward organic agriculture and move away from diets heavy in meats.

Reshaping the autocity impacts agriculture in two very significant ways right of the top. First, reversing sprawl would liberate millions of acres presently covered in concrete and asphalt for the cars, and second, more and more farmland is being appropriated for fueling cars instead of feeding people. Says Lester Brown, if all the farmland in the United States were dedicated to biofuel production for the country’s cars, there would be none left for food production for people. In fact there would not be even enough for all the cars. That’s how much energy a 3,000 pound object accelerating to and decelerating from ten times the speed of a person consumes. Another way of looking at it, filling the typical car’s gas tank once takes about as much agricultural land for biofuel production as feeding a person for an entire year.

Mental actions among the Big Five

4. Act on generosity, invest in ecological health and peace via the above three

This means paying taxes, seriously graduated income taxes, and being, as all democracies are rightly said to be required to be, ever vigilant to prevent corruption in both government and business. The percept also has another dimension: that we try much harder to put an end to violent conflict as in the stealing and killing in war and wasting of vast treasure in preparing for war. That is the absolute antithesis of generosity.

5. Education strongly emphasizing the above four

Axiom 3.

If we want to actually engage building the physical solutions to our growing economic debacle it is instructive to notice what I call the “Three Sacred Cows” of US Capitalism. If you want to build anything you have to go to where the money actually is. And where it actually is happens to be is 1.) hoarded by the super rich, 2.) locked into military spending and 3.) invested in the (presently very badly) built environment. Those are the three big areas of the resource called money and areas constantly generating more and more waste that instead could be turned to our salvation in crucial times.

About the first, which has everything to do with generosity, #4. among the Five Big Ones, it’s hard to tax the rich with all their power to buy politicians. But by law or persuasion and conscience of the sort that occasionally produces real philanthropy, it must be done if we have any hope of building our way out of economic, I’d say, realconomic collapse. Serious graduated income tax with no loopholes would solve many problems. Unfortunately people are too categorically fixated – dare we not call them stupid – to lump the super rich in with the middle class and the financially more challenged under the slogan “no more taxes!” This is a cry that makes no sense at all when a few million people have thousands of times what those billions on the lower rungs of society have. The question is tax whom? If the vast majority can’t figure out that tax breaks for the rich are not in their interest, one is tempted to say they are fools enough to deserve financial ruin. Except that at this point in history when we need to spend money on building right to solve deadly problems, the children of those who can’t figure out this simple math, all the other species, and no doubt even the children of the rich, are the ones who will suffer catastrophically.

The military budget – colossal! We all know we need to work on conflict resolution, honest diplomacy and cooperation instead of lying for advantage and using secrecy and competition to the point of killing one another and overrunning each other’s countries. We all know it would help getting to know and appreciate one another better. I won’t undertake here how to do that, but I will suggest that lower budgets for “defense” would release salvation-scale investments if we knew what to build, and I’m claiming this paper knows what to build.

As to the automobile city infrastructure getting in the way, remember the misallocation of money for the Caldecott Tunnel Fourth Bore and go from there: not just billions but trillions of dollars for building nothing less that a thriving future as an alternative to collapse.

Axiom 4. Work Hard – China is proving it works.

That is the last very basic word of guidance and requirement in my realconomics list, as if it really needed to be said, though people don’t like thinking about this one, another very big issue, either. But hard work really works.'