The city of Oakland is experiencing a deep crisis of conscience, amid what appears to be the moral confusion of its administration. The mayor, who had marched with the Occupy Oakland demonstrators, has now ordered not one but two paramilitary strikes against nonviolent protesters, in which tear gas, “flash-bang” grenades, rubber bullets and powerful sonic pulses were fired directly at unarmed civilians.

An ex-Marine is now in the hospital, reported in critical condition, and authorities say the paramilitary tactics were justified. New video has emerged clearly showing a policeman firing directly at a group of unthreatening unarmed civilians simply attempting to assist a man injured by the attacks. To many, the crisis seems incomprehensible, even moreso because the mayor herself previously marched among them.

There are calls for attempted murder prosecutions against some of the officers. Thousands are now demonstrating against clear violations of constitutional civil liberties, caught on video. The reaction has spread across the country, and some have questioned whether the mayor should resign.

The most vital question, however, is how can the people of Oakland rally to the Occupy cause, without further inflaming tensions in a city where the elected government openly violates basic civil liberties? What strategy should the demonstrators adopt in order to maintain and defend their rights to peaceable assembly, free expression and to seek redress for grievances, that will allow them to show how steadfast nonviolence wins the struggle against brutal aggression?

Join the discussion here

The European Union has reached an agreement to relieve Greece of half of its sovereign debt, and to boost the Eurozone bailout fund to €1 trillion. The agreement may well be funded, in part, by non-European governments, even private investors, but it shows a new commitment to the Union as such, even amid a surge of anti-Union feeling in several key democracies. For years, the leading obstacle to true integration of the European economies has been seen to be cultural and political reluctance to fully embrace political union.

Will this new commitment to shared responsibility and the future of the Euro currency mean the European Union itself will begin to commit more fully to long-term political union? - Join the discussion here

We need a system of cooperative public-private infrastructure financing, a national infrastructure bank. But we also need to use that fabric of cooperative investment and output to foster specific areas of major improvement to our national economy. The model could be replicated across the world, but the US is uniquely positioned to deploy this solution and to vastly improve its chances of restoring vibrancy to the wider middle class by doing so.

Two parallel projects are necessary to make the infrastructure redevelopment and economic recovery strategy a success:

• a renewable energy infrastructure bank – to help target some of the wider funding options to the project of building a sustainable, smart energy economy, free of the massive externalized costs of carbon-based fuels
• an economic opportunity bank – to aggressively, specifically and persistently direct funds to businesses that are hiring, building capacity at the community level, and restoring real wage gains to the middle class

The first is our topic here: a national renewable energy infrastructure bank. To build such a bank, we would need to first establish how a cooperative public-private infrastructure financing scheme would work. Ideally, it needs to work much like an investment bank, where individual investors see visible gains, but money is kept in the pot for a long enough period of time to produce gain across the full spectrum of investor contributions.

In other words, there has to be commitment to the project, and that shared commitment of resources will yield shared substantial gains to all parties. In the area of clean energy investment, this is possibly much easier than with other types of infrastructure investment, because the industry is entering into a period of massive, and necessary, prolonged expansion. Big investors understand that big investment will help to secure that prolonged expansion.

If Congress acts to incentivize this investment, massive amounts of private-sector capital will flow to clean energy resources. There are three reasons why this will happen:

1. Fossil fuels carry with them massive production costs that have long been externalized; the economy can no longer afford to continue such a strategy.
2. Clean energy technologies offer a major opportunity for prolonged expansion of business value, as information technologies have shown over the last 30 years.
3. There are literally hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital sitting on the sidelines, waiting for directional certainty that fossil fuels cannot provide.

So, how to structure such an operation? The renewable energy infrastructure bank would need the following to reach its full potential:

1. A national price signal or clear set of incentives to direct investment to clean energy
2. An investment strategy that looks at best practices, value to community, prospects for building aggregate demand, and structural resiliency
3. A focus on job-creation, skilled retraining, and positive value feedback loops that favor consumers
4. A legislative charter that sets forth priorities favorable to public-sector, private-sector and start-up investors alike
5. A model for redirecting funding when key elements of a project require support or restructuring
6. A focus on rewarding institutions, individuals and investors who do cutting-edge R&D that is practicable, 100% carbon-emissions-free and scalable
7. Short-, medium- and long-term investment strategies for building, optimizing and utilizing the smart grid

Suggestions for deployment:

1. Implement a national carbon fee and dividend policy, to correct market failures in the pricing of carbon, return control of the energy economy to households and incentivize major private capital investment in the rapidly expanding clean tech sector
2. Identify, build or support and expand, focus facilities in cities and regions across the country, to operate as cooperative laboratories of R&D, start-up incubators, and investment engines (examples might be Brooklyn Navy Yard or Philadelphia Navy Yard, or the Fab Labs project)
3. Motivate scalability planning for distributed clean energy production projects, to ensure sustained investment opportunities, and optimized overlap between community-building, job-creation and investment strategies, for higher overall cost efficiency
4. Ensure legal support for avoiding corrosive business models, favoring generative ones, to ensure Investment flows to the new technologies and collaborative strategies that build future prosperity, not to extraction-oriented investments
5. Reward rapid ramping up of high-efficiency clean energy tech, because this will build structural resiliency, favor the highest-value market-healing technologies, and help to revive the middle class

We can begin doing this nationally tomorrow, if:

• We focus first on wind and solar, due to their naturally occurring US domestic supply far outstripping total demand and all possible demand growth
• We commit to decentralizing innovation, influence and income-growth in the energy sector, so community and regional economies are empowered by the transition
• We recognize the need to fully develop leading-edge infrastructure at all levels
• We identify and elevate the pioneers who already know how to motivate and execute this transition
• We charter public-private partnerships to manage investment flows to stakeholder-defined initiatives

The clean energy economy is coming, and to fully enable its expansion, the US needs to flex the muscle necessry to turn the ship of state, to wrest from entrenched industries and financial investment patterns rooted more in extraction than in generative payoff the ability to decide what comes next. There is nothing beyond clean and renewable in terms of energy production and distribution, except the work of achieving the most advanced efficiency gains and making robust power generation an ever more ephemeral affair, at an ever faster rate.

To lead in that new economy, we need to be the first to build its value.

 - – -

Originally published October 12, 2011, at ProjectQuipu.net

With gasoline prices at record highs in 2008, 2009 and 2010, 2011 has looked like a microcosm of the longer oil-market trend: consistent increases in pricing, fuel costs hurting small business and the middle class, slowing the pace of economic growth in the US, and—maybe most strangely of all—no national policy to motivate a rapid, comprehensive transition away from fossil fuels and the volatility and cost inefficiency of their products to the wider marketplace. Instead, we have seen a recommitment to ramping up production, expanding drilling and exploration, and prioritizing local importation (from Canada and Mexico), instead of real coordinated policy planning to end dependency on foreign-sourced fuels.

With the oil strain on an already precarious American economy at an historic extreme, Pres. Bush in 2008 pushed Congress to hold an “up-or-down vote” on renewed exploration of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) before its August recess. Opponents protested vocally that none of any oil found there would be available for production for 10 to 15 years, the total amount would do little to ease the overall dependency on foreign-sourced fuels, and that the OCS plan was little more than an aggressive attempt to deliver to hugely profitable oil firms an unjustifiable gift, taking advantage of the pressurized situation of exorbitant prices.

The Energy Information Agency (EIA), evaluating the OCS strategy, found that opening offshore sites in the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico would still not produce enough oil and natural gas to have a significant effect on domestic reserves, even as far out as the year 2030. In July 2008, as the debate raged over drilling, CNN reported that Democratic members of Congress were saying a preliminary investigation was attributing more than 50% of the soaring oil prices to speculation, while traders were saying OPEC had deliberately held production low in order to drive prices up. Dependency on speculation-susceptible foreign-sourced fuels was building unaffordability into the US economy.

So, after three years of prolonged economic malaise, with the energy and fuel sectors continuing to extract massive amounts of wealth from our local and regional economies, transferring economic leverage away from the middle class and spontaneous job creation, we must face the underlying truth: that fossil fuels work on the marketplace in ways that are corrosive to the long-term health and stability of democratic societies conducive to a vibrant middle class. And given the massive negative externalities, which all of us are funding all of the time, and the unaffordability of so much of the stagnant, status-quo industrial economy, we must also face the increasingly clear economic reality that carbon emissions are not just destructive to the health of our natural environment, but that they have real economic costs not directly related to ecosystem resilience, such as human health, and the cost of industrial activity related to clean-up and to the obsolescence of devices running on combustible fuels.

Devoting increasing amounts of our energy economy to combustible fuels at a time when prices are soaring—a periodic reverse trend of a few months of gradually easing prices is not a reversal of the long-term trend—has a multiple-negative economic effect. The key to understanding what is happening, and which looks likely to make recourse to nuclear and carbon-based fuels counterproductive, is to understand that we are no longer living in a traditional industrial energy economy. We are now dealing with the consequences of that economy’s exploration and combustion burden. The “carbon footprint” is not merely an environmental ethics concern, but a serious economic factor potentially mitigating future productivity, or added long-term costs on a scale never before seen.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the 2008 Republican nominee for president, proposed building 45 new nuclear plants across the country in order to bring down energy prices overall. The idea was borrowed, to a large extent, from then Vice President Dick Cheney, who had long been close to the nuclear lobby and who included nuclear energy as part of his initial proposals for a new national energy policy. Yet the economic reasoning behind such proposals is dubious: no plants have been built in the US in three decades, and environmental and cost concerns, including pending court rulings, make the strategy unlikely to be implemented.

The state of California—the world’s 5th largest economy—has only two nuclear plants, so the amount of energy sought in producing 45 plants is more than ambitious, especially when compared to the promise of new alternative fuel and energy-production options. That each plant could ulimately cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars in construction, maintenance, security, decomissioning, insurance, health and environmental costs, makes the proposition seem like an ill-informed proposed detour into fiscal collapse.

The entire nation has only 104 nuclear reactors, so the commitment to 45 new nuclear power plants—under McCain’s 2008 plan—would be serious, even as new options become available. What’s more, the history of accidents and near accidents is widely unknown among the public. We know the word “Chernobyl”, but most people don’t know that the V.I. Lenin Memorial Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station had four reactors, only one of which exploded in the cataclismic disaster of 1986. The other three reactors were finally shut down only years afterward, in 1991, 1996 and 2000, respectively. And, the Ukraine’s largest nuclear plant, also Europe’s largest, at Zaporizhzhia, has six pressurized light-water reactors.

We saw this spring what kind of unrelenting social, economic and biological catastrophe can result from the failure of multiple reactor cores, containment strategies and engineering and regulatory mechanisms, when Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi complex went into meltdown, after being struck by a tsunami. That crisis has yet to be fully contained, and no government agency in Japan or elsewhere, seems willing to publish definitive statistics detailing the full scale of the radiation released into the air and water. We know that contaminated rain has fallen on the other side of the Pacific Ocean—which covers half the globe—and so the US is living with fallout from the ongoing Fukushima Daiichi disaster.

We have heard of the serious nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in March 1979, in which partial core meltdown in one reactor led to the release of 43,000 curies of radioactive krypton (1.59 PBq), and 20 curies (740 GBq), considered a relatively small amount of the especially dangerous iodine-131 isotope, into the surrounding environment. But few people are aware of the major explosion, following core meltdown, in January 1961, at the National Reactor Testing Station in the Idaho desert. All three people working the plant during the explosion were killed and the radioactivity levels were so intense, they were required to be buried in lead coffins.

A massive 890 square-mile complex, now known as the Idaho National Laboratory, was the site of the first success in producing electricity from nuclear reactions, and is in part a national historic landmark. But among its 52 reactors, only three are currently operational, and there are reported to be plans to use at least one to produce plutonium-238 for classified national security purposes.

Now, given the intense security concerns related to nuclear power, rapid construction is literally impossible. Federal public health and environmental laws also require fastidious attention to detail, which has intensified since the last plant was constructed 3 decades ago. Failure to meet with absolute precision all the security requirements can result in catastrophic accidents and/or major cost-overruns in relation to federal regulatory fines and/or takeovers. This means that entirely new systems for construction need to be designed and tested before even the first construction of any new plant can begin.

There is, simply put, no way that new nuclear plants can affect current gas prices.The timeline here has also been pushed back as far as 2030 for any significant shift on percentage of national energy production derived from nuclear power, if the massive new construction project were undertaken.

With both offshore drilling and new nuclear construction likely to delay the infusion of new supply into the domestic energy economy, the real economic result of committing to these strategies for expanding domestic energy production may actually be the increase in prices for oil and automotive gasoline, as it becomes clear that overall supply depends heavily on these resources for the foreseeable future. Over the last few years, as carbon pricing legislation has stalled, discussion about future economic development has shifted to the need for funding the broad expansion of national infrastructure for renewable resources, like wind and solar power.

It is fair to say that given the revolutionary advances in cost-effective construction and comparable end-user cost for renewable resources—we now know existing wind and solar technologies can power the entire US economy—, there has not been enough attention given to the potential for rapid infrastructure development that could bring new sources of energy production online within 2 to 3 years.

We face a stark choice, at this moment of economic division, confusion and peril: we can continue to heavily invest in the old, dirty, costly energy paradigm, or we can deploy smart policies to price carbon accurately, in a way that is designed to return economic influence to the middle class, to innovators and communities, and build a local, user-centered smart energy economy.

- – -

A version of this report was originally published July 31, 2008, at CafeSentido.com

Saturation means more of a given ingredient cannot be added to a given volume or fabric of activity, without spilling over, and being wasted. The fossil fuels market is saturated, in the sense that it cannot effectively capitalize on major new production investment without major new construction of productive facilities. The industry has effectively pushed prices higher and cannot reduce them without seeing a dropoff in profits. Most people can no longer afford the fuel they used to consume.

This raises the question of scalability. Scalability refers to the notion that as activity of a given kind expands, as the benefits and efficiencies of size, reinforced by growing market share, which means a greater ability to determine outcomes, an economy of scale arises: a thing begins to cost less per unit or per usage, because a scalable activity has made the unit or the usage cost less without reducing overall revenues.

Scalability depends on many other features of the marketplace, however. One of these is the value of investment. Another is the availability of that investment. When a market has already gone global, and is controlled by a handful of megaconglomerates and governments, and is saturated, and is pricing reliant consumers out, investment slows down. In a credit-scarce economy where no one is as rich as the oil interests, even moreso.

The ability to rapidly scale up production, and to create a potent and escalating visible return on investment for consumers, is hampered by justifiable skepticism about where this globalized, saturated and entrenched market sector can hope to go. Add to that this problem of a business model whereby one consumes a finite fossil resource that cannot be reproduced, burning one’s assets as one goes, and you have a model that does not shape up favorably for the 21st century.

The S&P 500 are now sitting on over $1 trillion in accumulated cash reserves. This money could, and normally would, be invested in future economic development. But sclerosis in the top-heavy oil sector, a serious lack of capital in the hands of consumers, and the real vulnerability of banks and even governments, are all conspiring to hold that money back. Wise investors understand that when the marketplace for risk and investment fails, a rainy-day fund is the best option.

In stark contrast to the fossil fuels sector, the clean renewables sector:

• is far from saturated,
• produces an ever-increasing rate of return for investors,
• is primed to produce economies of scale,
• can offer more jobs at better wages over a longer term,
• and lends itself to accelerating efficiency gains.

So, why are so many smart people still saying they favor the economics of oil? Two reasons:

1. They are invested in the fossil-burning-for-profits model and so don’t accurately perceive the saturation problem;
2. They don’t understand the paradigm shift and so view clean energy not as a rapidly expanding market but as a feeble one.

It’s not presumptuous to make these assertions about the anti-clean-energy crowd; it’s giving the benefit of the doubt to people who are not seeing the lay of the land as it is, but rather as they are accustomed to hoping it is. It is wishful thinking to hold that oil will always be king and no better option will replace it, wishful, that is, if you profit from oil’s dominance. The same with coal.

We are running out of ways to extract coal cheaply without literally blowing mountains apart, wiping them off them map, which carries very significant costs. Coal is an 18th-century technology not optimized for our 21st century needs. While employment from coal steadily declines, the risks and costs of its production mount, and coal-rich communities continue to experience chronic endemic poverty which the industry has been unable to solve.

We are running out of easy access to oil; the remaining reserves are trapped in undeveloped remote wilderness, behind high-risk, low-yield extraction processes that require major new dirty energy infrastructure to be built. Their development will impede investment in and development of better, cleaner, more efficient alternatives. We can do much better.

The fossil fuel saturation problem, known to states like Texas as an ongoing “energy emergency”, means we need to be actively searching not only for alternative fuels, but also for investment opportunities where we can build in drivers of more generalized prosperity, i.e. a restored and strengthened middle class, and accelerating returns in productive capacity.

The only way to achieve that is by building a smart-grid-based distributed clean renewable-energy market.

- – -

Cross-posted from TheHotSpring.net

Futurismo Verde :: En servicio al proyecto del Foro sobre Política y Crisis, la Red Hot Spring de innovación y debate plantea una conversación global sobre la seguridad alimenticia y la escasez crónica de agua y comida en África. Las lecciones de este experimento en investigación y brainstorming colaborativos se podrá aplicar a otras situaciones de crisis y escasez alrededor del planeta.

Los temas principales de debate serán:

1. Problemas relacionados con el abastecimiento alimenticio global, sobretodo en aplicación a las poblaciones más necesitadas;
2. La degradación medioambiental: o sea, servicios ecológicos y medidas de bienestar ambiental;
3. Deficiencies en las políticas de uso terrenal: cómo mejorarlas;
4. Caza furtiva de animales y cosecha furtiva de leño;
5. Tendencias corrosivas económicas;
6. La corrupción y la deficiencia urgente de presupuestos;
7. Medidas cooperativas para extender el suministro alimenticio a las zonas de conflicto;
8. Cómo superar los límites de la infraestructura de transporte;
9. Las enfermedades comunicables: tratamiento, educación, efectos socio-económicos;
10. Fallos comunicativos: cómo hacer llegar los datos tanto investigados como anecdóticos a los servicios relevantes.

La meta será idear y modelar soluciones calibradas a los desafíos al parecer imposibles de resolver, en relación a la seguridad alimenticia en diversas regiones del continente africano. Esperamos poder proporcionar ideas nuevas y factibles, prácticas y económicamente virtuosas, para que las poblaciones locales interesadas puedan comenzar a desplegarlas en su entorno.

Click aquí para agregar sus comentarios al foro…

TheHotSpring.net :: The debt crisis is attributable to “structural” causes, meaning the way the nation’s financing is structured over the next several decades, but also to political and economic causes, meaning both the way we make policy and the way we live and experience the marketplace for trade, credit and consumer purchases. So, we need to implement policies that make serious, sustainable corrections on all three fronts.

TheHotSpring.net :: With the objectivity and commitment to fact of S&P now seriously in question, and allegations now revived that it and other rating agencies were paid to give AAA ratings to junk securities derivatives, it is clear that we need a 100% not-for-profit (NFP) cooperative bond rating agency. The independent NFP agency could be one of several, staffed by top economists, stakeholders and public servants, and standing somewhere between the public and the private sectors.

The role of such a new cooperative agency would be to take the profit motive and the complication of day to day financial dealings out of the rating agency portfolio. While Standard and Poors is owned by the publishing conglomerate McGraw Hill, its analysts have been accused of incestuous relationships with the entities they are tasked with rating, sometimes taking huge profits in financial services fees while evaluating risky products put out by their patrons.

A not-for-profit rating agency would allow for greater transparency, a more aggressive process of analysis, and more unbiased foundation for that analysis. It would allow for a wider-ranging and more flexible input of data to ensure that evaluations correspond in some clear way to genuine long-term value. It would, in short, ensure that private interests don’t interfere with the straightforward process of factual analysis.

It would also, maybe more than any other single factor, help to contribute to a virtuous cycle of transitioning back toward separation of interests, diversification of markets, and decentralization of financial sector influence and wealth creation. How would this benefit society at large? It would allow for a more democratic, more evidentiary, more pragmatic reading of bonds and other financial services products.

The first step is to remove the profit motive from the evaluation process. The reason for this is that the assumption that narrow profit motives somehow spark virtuous behavior, “efficiency” and “performance” loses relevance when the incentive to produce a given rating—like AAA on high-risk subprime mortgage-backed derivatives—conflicts with the evidence-based analysis, which indicates that there is no way that product can be a safe bet for most investors.

- – - A brief aside: The same can be true in reverse: a bond rating agency that made such catastrophically bad misjudgments when there was a conflicting interest in play could seek to be more aggressive, in a highly visible way, to restore its reputation for seriousness of purpose, when—by coincidence—there is no direct accounts receivable windfall in play.

There is enough room for doubt that on the first day of trading since S&P’s downgrade of US Treasury bonds, those same bonds have hit an all-time record for demand, as investors seek shelter in the very product that was just downgraded. That suggests the S&P evaluation was flawed, or was issued for mathematically inconsistent reasons, or simply that—as one analyst suggested today—their poor performance during the mortgage bubble has left them less relevant and less well regarded generally. 

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, wrote today that “they may be a prestigious organization for some reason, but their track record is ludicrously bad.” In fact, he is not the only prominent economist expressing concern that the Wall Street firms and the financial services sector more broadly are becoming perilously divorced from the wider economy. – - -

The American economic system has artfully grappled for generations with the problematic tension between narrow, well-funded interests, and the wider landscape of stakeholder interests. A strong regulatory system and vibrant democratic marketplace have been able, periodically, to rein in abusive behavior and make it visibly profitable for powerful interests driving economic behavior to line up their interests with those of the wider economy.

Some now believe that time may have passed. A generation’s worth of deregulation and financial experimentation have led to the widest wealth gap since before the Great Depression, and credible economic analysis suggests the stagnant economic trendlines are the result of having a post-Depression system, with meaningful checks and balances, and a Depression-era economic dynamism. In other words, we should be experiencing a depression, but we have deployed failsafe measures to make it less likely.

The stakeholder problem is a very real bone of economic contention, and very much worthy of close scrutiny. Where financial instruments are based on bad investments, then pitched as good investments, and tens of trillions of dollars in private wealth evaporate, even the most minute activities within the financial services sector have high-stakes consequences for people and institutions throughout the economy.

A genuinely useful, wholly relevant and economically optimally constructive rating system requires real independence. It requires a commitment to fact, and a commitment to economic balance and generalized prosperity. It requires a substantive, transparent measure of the major economic drivers that induce periods of “irrational exuberance” for bad investments, which by extension bring widespread economic hardship in their wake, when banks shut down many of their financial support services to the middle class and small businesses.

The proposed NFP cooperative bond rating agency would be:

• fully independent of ties to Wall Street firms;
• required to publish source material and white-paper reports detailing internal discussions;
• required to publish information regarding all meetings with any interested parties;
• focused on stakeholder interests across the economy;
• responsible for public comment fora, at least one per month, to gather anecdotal guidance;
• staffed with independent economists, former financial services professionals, public service veterans—each without active ties to interested parties;
• required to pay only base stipends, with no bonuses except for consistent accuracy over the long term;
• a model for similar NFP financial analysis projects.

The four central ideas motivating this new model, and which should then be emulated by competing institutions are:

1. eliminating professional conflict of interest;
2. comprehensive transparency of process, sourcing and aims;
3. focus on overall stakeholder interest;
4. reliable precision, based on health modeling, not profit forecasting.

The simplest way to institute a project on this scale, with this level of responsibility and in a visible enough way to give it active influence and long-term viability is, of course, a public-private partnership. It should be funded in part by the federal government, and in part by the financial services sector, and top schools of economics should hold competitions to bring on board some of the world’s most visionary, flexible and precise economic minds.

The process should begin this fall and winter, with the goal of holding public hearings for the creation of the first independent NFP cooperative rating agency in the spring and fall of 2012. The fully functional institution could be active by the end of 2012, in time to play a constructive role in the landscape of analysis surrounding the 2013 negotiations on the 2014 federal budget, and the financial planning of major banks, insurers, governments and industry.

TheHotSpring.net :: Yemen may be where the Arab spring, this sweeping current of democratic upheaval in the Arabic-speaking world, takes a turn definitively toward violence or toward civic solutions. The regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh, a tribal dictatorship using feudal power tactics, based in the capital Sanaa, is now waging one war against extremist Islamists and another against non-violent pro-democracy protesters.

Yemen is an intensely poor country, likely to see its dwindling fresh water resources 100% depleted before any nation in the world, and could be the global home-base for jihadist extremists. Yemen could also, however, be a sparkling example of how peaceful democratic change can bring sustainable prosperity and security to an otherwise impoverished society ruled by feudal warlords and kleptocratic dictators.

The gap between the democracy movement and the regime is stark: while protesters are lawyers and doctors, university professors and economists, the dictator Saleh has only a high-school-level education. Saleh’s former allies have tired of his brutality, and are demanding that he immediately cease all violence against civilians, and honor his multiple pledges to leave power, allowing for a peaceful democratic transition.

Much of the country is illiterate, and tribal politics continue to be an easy way to sow division, to justify cold-blooded killing, and to undermine the progress promised by peaceful protesters. Even the government seems unable to comprehensively put down the Islamist militia vying for power in the deep south. And neither the protesters nor Saleh have been able to fashion a secure plan for bringing prosperity back to Yemeni ports on the Gulf of Aden.

The Yemeni democracy movement is well read, well educated and rooted in a commitment to nonviolence. Yet there are grave concerns that if the regime succeeds in applying the tactics of Col. Muammar Qadhafi—the once and possibly former Libyan dictator of four decades—Yemen could descend into a failed state status reminiscent of its neighbor across the water, Somalia.

Heavily armed Somali pirates—linked to a vast black-market criminal network which feeds the ongoing Somali civil war—have become a menace to global shipping through the Gulf of Aden, the main southern route of entry into the Suez Canal. That vast criminal network has expanded the power of Islamist militia in southern Somalia, and has contributed to the intensification of drought, famine and social collapse.

Yemen may be more at risk than Somalia in many ways, should collapse follow the atrocities committed by Saleh against the Yemeni people. The pro-democracy movement needs to maintain its non-violent approach, but plan for significant innovations and improvements in the process of governing and of economic development and planning.

Yemen is strategic enough to warrant major foreign investment, debt forgiveness and development aid, and its ports might be able to benefit from a secure, reliable, democratic challenge to the armed chaos in Somalia and throughout the Gulf of Aden. Mokha (on the Red Sea), Aden and Ta’izz could form a powerful new economic hub for regional trade, facilitating passage from the Gulf of Aden into the Red Sea.

Ta’izz, the intellectual capital of Yemen, could develop into the administrative center of power governing the new port industry. Such an outcome would be very much in the interests of the international community, as Ta’izz is the virtual home base of the surprising, liberal and modern pro-democracy movement.

Al Mukallah, in the remote east of the country, could be a first-stop along the coast of safe passage, if such a situation could be cultivated and secured. Mokha could be a Red Sea trading post, bridging the African and Asian continents in ways strategically designed to sow stability, mutual interest and prosperity.

The United Nations would likely need to be involved in helping to secure a fledgling Yemeni democracy against the chaos and sabotage sought by militant groups on the one hand and by regime loyalists on the other. But the development strategy makes sense for the region and for the wider world: instability anywhere inflates risk everywhere, and long-term planning for the Gulf of Aden trading zone is more than worth any time, effort and resources required to lay the groundwork.

An added benefit would come to Yemen, which as a safe harbor state with revitalized, modernized port cities, would be able to more easily gain access to an affordable imported flow of fresh water, and to afford state of the art desalinization facilities. We know that fresh water resource is urgently needed to prevent the total collapse of civil society in Yemen, and brining that resource value to Yemen could raise its profile among Arabian states, building into the fabric of economic cooperation which as of now, eludes it almost entirely.

The road from Mokha to Sanaa, like the road from Aden to Sanaa, should run through Ta’izz, allowing for what could become a virtuous feedback between the ideals of democratic government and the ideals of a vibrant trading culture in which not all wealth flows to or through the hands of the individuals who hold political power. It could create a more balanced and decentralized relationship between the people of Yemen and the power of those who govern them.

In short, the storied and problematic history of Yemen, along with the vast and surging need for new economic development, creates a real opportunity for massive coordinated international assistance to the nonviolent political activists who are seeking to build a modern, democratic civil society, and to build unprecedented cooperative links between Yemeni society and the outside world.

TheHotSpring.net :: It is a virtual mantra in the universe of political analysis that “business doesn’t like uncertainty”, and it is true that declining consumer spending, increasing fuel costs, squeeze profits and that in some cases, businesses worry about changes to the regulations they must follow. But uncertainty is the nature of an evolving global economy, and with the accelerating pace of innovation, doing any business well is going to require dealing intelligently with uncertainty.

“Uncertainty” is also, in many cases, a code-word for an aversion to paying taxes. And there are implications there, in that contest of ideas, that are more real and far-reaching than the metaphorical back-and-forth of the rhetoric involved. An out-of-balance system of taxation puts pressure on ordinary people, and breeds uncertainty. Yet some of the world’s largest enterprises continue to push for ever-expanding tax reductions, calling those guaranteed revenues “certainty”.

This is not a healthy marketplace. This is not a democratic marketplace. This is not conducive to fostering the kind of innovation and creative thinking that allows an enterprise to deal with uncertainty. Access to information is the most important tool for anyone who has a significant challenge involving questions of certainty or uncertainty. Yet markets are slowed and restrained by blockages in the flow of relevant information.

During the 1998-2008 period, in which subprime mortgages, and eventually the toxic and inviable derivative investment funds built on bundled subprime mortgages, clear information about what kind of real financial products (the particular mortgages) were being used to underpin and fill out the derivatives, which ultimately had much higher professed market value, was often not available to investors. Meaningful facts were obscured, which created irrational investments, and widespread toxicity in financial markets.

This had a direct impact on the way government money, including bonds and borrowing, was used in relation to private investment, and ultimately cost taxpayers trillions of dollars in emergency investment, much of it still being paid back. Efforts to make it easier to extract profits where they are not always justifiable, given real value to the market, can give certainty to some, but breed massive uncertainty elsewhere.

So, transparency must be a key value in a healthy 21st century economy. Constructive transparency, that allows entrepreneurs and investors to recognize, plan for and deal intelligently with uncertainty that might penetrate into their domain.

In order to build a healthy, cutting-edge, competitive, intelligent economy for the 21st century, we need to privilege the kind of thinking that will achieve those ends. Aversion to innovation, change, competition and evolutionary planning, will not achieve that. In order to achieve a balance of resources that lends itself to dealing ably with uncertainty, businesses need to have the flexibility and creativity to adjust, to renew their market position, to fund intangible values that shore up the human intelligence that drives their enterprise.

A few examples:

From Coal to Clean: Coal companies, for instance, may find “uncertainty” in the 21st century energy economy, as their main resource falls out of favor and the efficiency of clean resources catches up and rushes past their business model. They can start planning to use the efficiencies currently inherent in their business model to plan the transition they will need to fund in order to diversify their portfolio and be relevant in the post-coal era.

Print and Pixels: The press have done extremely well, for over two centuries, in North America, driving the democratization of society throughout, and informing people about their world. But print publications are struggling to harmonize their operations with online technology. That harmony may come from bold new experiments in crafting virtuous feedback loops between print and pixels, so that the use-value of each to readers expands the publication’s readership, building in a community to the publication’s business model.

Transparency ROI: The release of information that might normally be considered proprietary, or which commercial enterprises might prefer not to reveal, can pay significant dividends. Doing business with a forthright and trustworthy partner is worth a lot more to most people than an off-chance at getting a bargain. Building trust in the age of globalized online spin and the mischief some associate with impersonal, remotely managed services, can be the basis for a booming business, offering consumers shelter from uncertainty.

Adversity is Opportunity: There are times when sudden cost shifts threaten to impact the bottom line. If there has been insufficient planning, or revenues are too scarce, that can be an existential threat to a business. But an existential challenge can also be an opportunity to rapidly turn a slow, weighty ship of method, using the turbulence of the surrounding seas to nudge the bow in the right direction.

In the 1990s, Starbucks responded to a South American frost and tripling of wholesale coffee prices by agreeing to contract with producers for double the prior market price, knowing the market price would fall below their contract. They built into their contract requirements for quality and for quality checks that allowed them to get far more value out of their higher payments than the increase itself. They came out ahead and were better equipped to build a reputation for consistently high quality coffee.

Uncertainty is important, because it is not always what it seems. The instability it seems to suggest can also be an opportunity for growth, evolution, innovation. And a shifting landscape of influence and competition can allow for concurrent evolutions and innovations that support and sustain one’s own new models and methods.

Learning to thrive in this more interconnected, more challenging environment is integral to planning a viable business in the 21st century, whether large or small. Diversity of resources and of opportunity must be one of the assets built into any successful enterprise, along with the intellectual and strategic agility necessary for keeping afloat in periodically rough seas. Technology facilitates such adaptation, but the ability to invent new responses to problems one could not foresee must also be part of one’s tool kit.

TheHotSpring.net :: Borders Books and Music was a place of pilgrimage for book lovers, music lovers and people who loved to sit with coffee and read, chat or peruse magazines they might or might not buy. It has played a vital role in the distribution of books of both wide and narrow market interest, and has driven the cathedral-warehouse paradigm of big bookstore chains. Its failure, however, opens the field for more innovative, more reader-friendly experiments in book selling.

Some have argued that Barnes and Noble was changed by its competition with Borders. Barnes and Noble has long been a leader in the big bookstore sector. But Borders, in many places, went bigger. It stocked everything that might fit into the mainstream book, magazine and music market, and was aggressive in putting full-size cafes in its bookstores, where patrons could sit and read books, whether they bought them or not.

But Barnes and Noble made two crucial decisions whose value Borders seemed not to understand. First, it built its own site for online sales, and built the BN.com brand to sustain it. Second, it saw the power of the Kindle reader and made sure not to cede mass-market e-book distribution to its online rival. By making its Nook and Nook Color readers available in its stores, Barnes and Noble successfully merged electronic and print media in a way that appealed to bricks-and-mortar bookstore browsers.

Borders could have done the same, but instead of building its own website early on, it made a deal with Amazon, and avoided—or so it seems to outside observers—learning too much about how to sustain its overall business through online sales and marketing. When it made the switch, serious book readers had already figured out it was better to just use BN or Amazon.

They forfeited their leadership position and radically increased the costs of getting to parity, when they finally decided to make a run for it.

Borders also lagged in the e-book revolution. Though in 2001, small publishers—like the publisher of this publication, Casavaria—were experimenting with independent e-books and early global distribution formats, Borders treated e-books as a question of stocking electronics that might be of interest to readers. They did not—again, as it would seem to outside observers—understand that e-books were about the direct text-to-eyeball relationship publishers, and booksellers, could develop with readers.

They did not understand—though in fairness, few major industry players did—what Amazon figured out early on: an optimal e-book platform required a screen that would feel more like print on paper than a screen. Though Joseph Epstein, and many other publishing luminaries, had said the book was a technology that was almost impossible to improve upon, Amazon and e-Ink figured out that the convenience of digital technology with the feel of a book, would be the next step.

Borders did not see this crucial moment coming. Its Kobo e-book reader is not actually a Borders product. Kobo is its own enterprise, and Borders’ plan was to piggyback on Kobo’s innovation. Like its Amazon deal, Borders’ Kobo deal clearly showed that Borders did not understand that the Kindle and the Nook are not books; they are bookstores and libraries, personalized for the convenience of the reader.

Kobo is now having to defend its reputation and advertise its independence and its survival. This may be good for Kobo, because it will no longer be linked with the big bookstore chain, and that may give it some cachet among bibliophiles. But it will have to compete for quality, and Borders may not have done Kobo a great service by channeling its development through a failing chain bookstore.

Kobo, to its credit, figured out that e-Ink was the right way to make electronic text enjoyable.

While a very cogent, and legitimate, analysis suggests print publishers may now commit to lower print runs for many, if not most, of their titles, the collapse of Borders may be, for writers, readers and publishers, something more of an opportunity than a calamity. A massive economy of scale is not always best for quality innovation. In Borders’ case, it appears to have been an obstacle. The size of the giant enterprise blinded its directors to the most meaningful developments swirling around them.

Small bookstores survive not because of the scalability of a global business plan. They survive when their bottom line, and their ability to fund their operations, reflect three things: discipline, sensitivity and good fortune. This last comes from clients, location and other hard-to-manage variables that cannot easily be planned for.

What is most important about small bookstores is that they cannot survive by just hawking gold-print embossed bestsellers and books that have been made into movies. They cannot even survive just by stocking the headier titles on the New York Times bestseller list or which have been reviewed in the major publications. They have to know their readers, and treat their clients as readers, not as cash machines.

It is this knowledge element that may now gain more traction. Knowledge… sensitivity to the lay of the land, and to reader interest… and innovation.

What might some innovations be?

The true cafe/bookstore: A more balanced relationship between the bookstore and cafe sections of a retail space, with high quality coffee, with events and music, gatherings and opportunities to sit down with authors, and a bookstore that echoes this quality with content.

The information oasis: Bookstores can reposition themselves as trusted sources of information, a more robust 21st century newsstand, stocking quality publications, some new to newcomers, and unique titles with real depth and scope, understood by intelligent, engaged buyers and salespeople. Mainstream media may be an echo-chamber, but bookstores can be places where the individual is free to think for herself.

The genius bar: One of the reasons Apple’s stores are popular with Mac lovers is that they provide information and knowledge that is useful; customers can learn from staff. Bookstores could make sure to be a source of guidance to the reading public, taking back that role from distributors and advertisers and being more pro-active about deciding what they stock.

The cyber-paper crossover: Barnes and Noble, BN.com and the Nook, have made for an impressive collaboration. Small bookstores can take Borders’ market share, collectively, if they learn the lesson Borders missed: assist your readers in all media, and they will stand by you. Wifi is useful, but dedicated new-fangle web access, whatever that looks like, could help bricks-and-mortar independents sell print books.

These are just a few ideas, but there is no mistaking the fact that as we enter the age of hyper-convergence, oversized enterprises won’t make it if they don’t innovate, and independent bookstores can do what microbreweries and coffee houses have done: become creative micro-distributors invested in the knowledge and emotion that naturally flow from, and to, the products they love.

TheHotSpring.net :: As the Pentagon issues its official cyber-security posture, it is imperative that we move into the era of strategic cyber-security with one paramount aim: that cyberspace not be militarized in any substantive way by any nation. Cyberspace should operate much the way our space exploration has worked: aiming for technological superiority and peaceful, international cooperation.

The Pentagon’s publicly released policy report suggests that were a military-type cyber attack to lead to damage and casualties comparable to a conventional military attack, it might be treated as an act of war and warrant a military or cyber-military response. But wisely, at least as is publicly known, there is no existing plan to organize a “cyber force” to militarize cyberspace as already exist with land, sea and air.

The Internet was developed in large part by Pentagon advanced research as a communications tool, to help improve the chances of ably protecting against an intercontinental or sea-borne attack during the Cold War. But as a tool of civilian communication it has far outstripped the projected value and productivity of its original design.

So much so, there is a growing legal movement, across the world, to treat Internet access as a basic human right, on a par with access to clean air and clean water. Knowledge, of course, has nearly the same value, in terms of determining whether an individual or a population will have the ability to compete and to stave off oppression, in a technologically organized global civilization.

Cyber-security is an issue of human rights and democracy. If governments, foreign or domestic, are able to use the Internet to impose their will on otherwise free people, real freedoms can be infringed and democratic societies can become vulnerable to the whims of tyrants. But cyber-security is in many ways like environmental security: just as we have a right to clean drinking water, we have a right to unobstructed access to information.

This should be the aim of any regime of national cyber-security, not the application, or projection, of centuries old military force doctrine to the world of digital information and communication. In the atmosphere of true hyper-convergence, the web beyond Facebook and gMail, the integrated freedom of the individual depends on the integrated civil liberty of the world wide web.

Just as we expect to go about our days without tanks rolling down our streets, we must demand we have the liberty to use the Internet as we choose, and safely, without military intervention or monitoring.

The investigative news magazine Vanguard reports from Indonesia on the tobacco industry’s massive, coordinated effort to get as many young people across the developing world, hooked on deadly cigarettes, in order to profit from their addiction. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg says 1 billion people will be killed by smoking this century, unless something is done to curb big tobacco’s efforts to profit from destroying the health of its customers.

This is more than a major public health crisis; this is a humanitarian disaster being planned, being deliberately built into developing economies around the world, and which hinges on luring young children into a life of addiction, disease and early death. It is the single largest campaign of planned toxic contamination of the human population, and, given what the tobacco industry knows about its product, could be considered to be the most widespread coordinated effort to wipe out millions of human lives.

In the United States more than anywhere else, and now in Europe, significant government attention has been given to the urgent need to counteract the long history of false advertising and impunity. Tobacco companies are being forced to advertise not in favor of their products, but to alert the public to the extreme health risk posed by their products. It is increasingly routine to see bold written warnings and even gruesome photographs on cigarette packs themselves.

In New York City, public health is winning out over profits, as the city has successfully barred smoking in all places of business, in any indoor setting where non-smokers or children might be affected, and in 1,700 public parks. While on the streets of Spain, it may still be almost impossible to walk for 30 seconds without getting a whiff of tobacco smoke, in New York City, one can go for days without seeing one lit cigarette.

We know that public health campaigns, bans on smoking, and high sin taxes, work. And we know that places like New York City, or Dublin, Ireland, where smoking bans have taken effect, are not harmed by the legislation, but in fact have seen a boom in the public’s use of restaurants and bars. The center of New York City is now being remade as a pedestrian-friendly open-air city center, organized around people, and tourism is booming.

But a global public health campaign is needed to bar big tobacco’s entry into these new markets. Policies that make it extremely expensive, or extremely difficult, for tobacco producers to advertise their product, to sell their product, and which penalize any and all entities connected in any way with the sale of tobacco to minors, must be developed and adopted, across borders.

The desperate situation in Indonesia, where it is expected well more than half the juvenile population will begin smoking by adolescence, along with the tobacco industry’s plans to move aggressively into India, China and to target poor areas of Asia as a boom market, may necessitate a global anti-tobacco treaty, with real legal penalties and sanctions for public officials, businesses and nations, which seek to use the young and vulnerable for profit which will take their lives.

Please join our discussion on how to stop the spread of deadly tobacco products to the developing world.

TheHotSpring.net :: The United States of America has been, since its birth 235 years ago, a world leader in promoting universal public education. It has also been a world leader in promoting universal access to higher education and to advanced degrees. That history has made the US a leader in technological innovation and advanced problem solving for two centuries. That legacy is under threat, and national educational aims demand immediate attention.

In the current budgetary and economic climate, cuts to public education, the rolling back of teachers’ salary opportunities, job security and benefits, and the underfunding of financial aid for higher education, are threatening to stunt the quality of education available to millions of Americans. But education is the key to strong, resilient democracy.

The new report describing a National Strategic Narrative for the United States, for the 21st century, from two top Pentagon analysts, finds that the United States must put top-quality education above all other priorities, privilege the virtues of sustainability in economic and security policy, and leverage mutually beneficial relationships with foreign powers.

The value of top quality education for the future of any society is almost incalculable: it affects the relative value of all other elements of the economy, and the efficacy of all areas of public policy, governance and democratic process, including security policy and conflict resolution. There is substantial evidence that lack of universalized top-quality education imposes major costs on entire societies.

Those added cost burdens, from economic and policy inefficiency, to counterproductive security actions, degraded infrastructure and sluggish entrepreneurial activity, can degrade the quality of life for most people in a society, degrade the quality of public discourse and public policy action, and undermine national security and economic prosperity, generally.

Lower quality educational resources build into a society patterns of unnecessary waste and degradation. Top quality educational resources build into a society the capacity for vibrant, rapid, innovative adaptation to changes in an evolving landscape. With the 21st century more likely to be defined by an evolving global political and economic landscape, nothing is of more paramount concern than the quality of education available to every last person living within a given geographical area.

Nothing will define a nation’s ability to compete in international markets more directly or comprehensively than the level of educational opportunity enjoyed by its people.

We are entering an age that is no longer about building industrial capacity or penetrating beyond new frontiers in terms of geographical or spatial exploration. Technology is advanced enough that many new technologies can be mapped out intelligently long before they are within the realm of the practical.

We are entering an age in which the ability of an individual, a company, a region or a nation, to solve problems rapidly, efficiently and with little resulting negative feedback, will be the decisive quality in determining success or failure, prosperity or ruin. Borrowing problem-solving capacity from another society is not like borrowing industrial capacity; there is no way to export the cost while importing the benefit.

If the United States is to prosper in the 21st century as it did during the 2oth, if it is to lead on the global stage in a credible way, it has to maintain its ability to be the most credible, open and constructive resource for problem-solving, and that means it must have the best quality human capital, the most talent, the most informed, creative and forward-thinking population.

While Europe and China are weathering the global economic slowdown with a renewed focus on higher education, the United States Congress has been seeking to roll back funding for public education generally and for access to higher education, already prohibitively expensive for most Americans.

Pres. Obama instituted one of his boldest and least well-known reforms in 2009, when he replaced the expensive, slow and bank-run system of student financial aid with a more direct system of loans from the government to students, with incentives for repayment, lower interest rates, better access to top-flight institutions, and long-term incentives to make use of one’s talents in ways that benefit the wider economy and the nation.

That student financial aid reform must be a building block, with new initiatives at the state and national levels both to foster not test-score improvements, but genuine improvements in educational quality, critical thinking, creative reasoning and intellectual skills that infuse the landscape of scientific and commercial innovation with real potential for designing and riding the wave of the new economy of this century.

TheHotSpring.net :: Generative economics is rooted in a simple insight: that economic activities can have corrosive or generative impacts on future available resources. The dynamics of an economic environment can add another layer of corrosive or generative potential to the activities in question. Analysis can be subtle, however, because generative qualities are often not the focus of conventional thinking or play out over the long term.

New trends in corporate benefits offerings show evidence of the substantial generative potential of health and fitness benefits for employees. Even as major corporations have cut jobs and reduced pension offerings, major employers have increased funding for employee access to fitness facilities. And there appears to be substantial value added, over time, from doing so.

The clear motivation is the increased productivity of healthier employees and the resulting reduction in long-term health spending. The human resources of these corporations are enhanced and magnified by fitness. The benefits of individual health and fitness translate into company-wide benefits.

Even as the recession and its prolonged legacy of sparse and hard-to-access credit, elevated joblessness and slumping investment in housing, continue to slow many businesses, health benefits that include fitness facilities, have remained in place or been expanded.

According to the Washington Post:

The number of companies with 20,000 or more employees that provided fitness centers, subsidies or discounts grew by 11 percent from a year earlier, according to a 2010 national survey by Mercer, a benefits consulting firm. Another survey, by the Society for Human Resource Management, shows that the proportion of companies offering gym benefits has held steady since 2007. During the same period, many employers were paring retirement and other financial benefits because of the recession.

The reason, according to many studies, is that wellness benefits provided in the workplace yield more productive employees who require less health care. That translates into savings on health insurance for companies and workers.

According to a 2010 article in the Harvard Business Review:

Doctors Richard Milani and Carl Lavie demonstrated that point by studying, at a single employer, a random sample of 185 workers and their spouses. The participants were not heart patients, but they received cardiac rehabilitation and exercise training from an expert team. Of those classified as high risk when the study started (according to body fat, blood pressure, anxiety, and other measures), 57% were converted to low-risk status by the end of the six-month program. Furthermore, medical claim costs had declined by $1,421 per participant, compared with those from the previous year. A control group showed no such improvements. The bottom line: Every dollar invested in the intervention yielded $6 in health care savings. [Emphasis added.]

There is controversy over how this value translates on a smaller scale. There is not a lot of evidence about how such programs affect smaller enterprises, in part because smaller enterprises often cannot afford benefits programs that include fitness, and tend not to have on-site fitness facilities.

The Congressional Budget Office has also expressed a need to find more data relating to this kind of health benefit spending. But for CBO, the calculation may be different, in the short term, as much government health spending deals with more vulnerable individuals and more long-term care, undermining somewhat the ease with which the 1:6 cost-to-benefit ratio can be reached.

TheHotSpring.net :: The rupture of a pipeline in Montana has caused at least several tens of thousands of barrels of oil to spill into the pristine Yellowstone River, raising concerns about the tar sands pipeline planned to pass through the most important fossil aquifer in North America. The spill is precisely the kind of irreversible and unnecessary environmental disaster conservationists, farmers, energy reformers and local activists across the Great Plains seek to prevent.

The initial reports cited Exxon-Mobil spokespeople explaining that only a few hundred barrels of oil had been released into the river, and that the multinational was bringing in top cleanup experts from across the nation to do the most advanced cleanup work possible. But yesterday the news came that the spill had in fact released at least several tens of thousands of barrels of oil into the Yellowstone River, threatening pristine wilderness, delicate ecosystems, and human health, across several states.

Exxon-Mobil now says its expert cleanup effort is being hampered by Mother Nature. The takeaway seems to be that, more than twenty years after the catastrophic Exxon-Valdez spill, the oil giant has used its routine megaprofits to produce no viable cleanup strategy. It also appears there was insufficient maintenance to an insufficiently constructed pipeline, and a near total disregard for the potential impact on the natural and human environment.

The scale of the disaster was revealed when the multinational’s false reports were shown to be false by huge amounts of oil washing up on farmed land and spilling over the banks of the rising river. Critics say Exxon-Mobil’s complaints that rising waters are responsible for hampering the cleanup effort reflect the company’s frustration with how that same phenomenon revealed it had lied to the press and, presumably, to authorities, about the scale of the spill.

The material composition of the nation’s energy markets has a lot to do with this kind of crisis. Unreasoned overreliance on carbon-based combustible fuels continues even now, in the second decade of the 21st century, to incentivize irresponsible practices that threaten other natural resources, as well as animal life, arable land, aquifers and human health.

Hydrocarbon fuels currently comprise such a significant segment of the overall energy landscape, they are clearly built into our energy future, to some extent, but their current dominance does not reflect their viability as resources that produce optimum benefit to our society or our economy. The Yellowstone spill is just the latest in a seemingly unending chain of events that demonstrate the very serious dangers inherent in depending on fossil fuels as the baseload (or “go to”) energy resource.

The combustion-based energy extraction model goes back to the days when fire was first discovered and harnessed. It has served to help human civilization achieve great advances and humanize the planet, both in terms of resource-use and the expression of ideas. But that does not mean it does not bring with it the drawbacks of a primitive technological paradigm.

The amount of waste built into the combustible fuels model of energy extraction is startling. Only 2% of the energy from burning coal reaches the lightbulb in your home. The other 98% is lost, mostly in the form of uncontained heat. But the risk of uncontrolled spills, into pristine wilderness, delicate ecosystems, groundwater and the food production process, is worst with oil.

The BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, over several months in 2010, showed that across the entire oil industry, there is still a glaring lack of advanced strategy for doing immediate, effective and total cleanup. The Yellowstone spill appears to show that even on a much smaller scale, that lack of understanding and know-how plagues the industry and threatens the natural and human environment.

We don’t, in fact, have to rely on combustible fuels anymore, as the state of the art in clean renewable resources, like wind and solar, is now sufficient to extract enough energy to power the US economy. All that we are lacking is the state of the art energy infrastructure required to harness clean renewable energy on that scale.

That the nation is undergoing a prolonged job-creation slowdown is just one hint that the time is right for a major investment in new state of the art energy infrastructure. The emerging race with China for the global clean energy future (China is now investing an estimated $600 billion in developing, producing and acquiring advanced clean energy technology) is another.

But it is the massive externalized costs (costs passed on by industry to taxpayers and consumers) that pose an immediate and continuing threat to the economic wellbeing of the nation. The externalized costs of oil include not only the massive costs of even small spills, which are far more frequent and numerous than is widely reported, but also the impact of pollution on human health, the impact of heat-trapping emissions on the stability of climate bands on which all human civilization depends.

Wind and solar energy have no cleanup costs, no hidden human health costs, no climate-band dislocation costs, no long-term costs associated with burning and wasting the resource itself, no world-record military spending costs, and need pose no risk whatsoever to groundwater or the human food supply.

The Yellowstone spill has to be a signal to the American people, the United States Congress and to markets, that the time has come to phase out our reliance on fossil fuels. The way to phase out that reliance is to incentivize a shift to the construction of state of the art smart grid infrastructure and the proliferation of technologies to harness clean, renewable energy from the environment.

As of this writing, Exxon-Mobil now says the scale of the spill could be worse than has so far been reported, but has not yet released new numbers, beyond the latest estimate of 42,000. It appears the pattern of reporting is following the customary pattern for such spills, where the company involved starts with severe underreporting and little by little increases the estimates until an eventual admission of massive, catastrophic levels of contamination of the environment.

TheHotSpring.net :: Citizens Climate Lobby is an international non-partisan, non-profit volunteer organization, working to build political will for a livable world. To do that, they aim to find an ideologically neutral, democratically viable, market-focused way to reduce the amount of carbon trapped in Earth’s atmosphere and speed the transition to clean, renewable fuels. I am proud to be a member of the organization, and one who is inspired by the passion of its volunteers and fortunate to count so many good friends among its partners.

This past week, the organization took its campaign to Capitol Hill, bringing 85 volunteers to 140 office visits in the United States Congress —both houses, both parties— along with the State Department, the Department of Energy and the World Bank. The project is more than a response to fallout from excess atmospheric carbon dioxide; the CCL project involves connecting citizens with decision-makers on Capitol Hill, to take ideology out of the energy debate, and fashion policy more democratically.

CCL proposes addressing the carbon crisis in a new and different way, which in fact avoids the pitfalls of more complex and unwieldy past attempts at reducing overall emissions: the proposed Carbon Fee and Dividend Act of 2011 would put a fee on carbon-emitting fuels at the source, then deliver 100% of that money directly to American families and households.

The plan avoids the need to create burdensome new regulatory infrastructure, does not deliver any new revenue to the federal government, and turns the power to forge a brighter, more economically efficient energy future back over to the American people, the marketplace. By unmasking the massive externalized costs (not paid by industry) of fossil fuel dependency, but covering consumers so the transition is not traumatic, the fee and dividend proposal allows the virtues of a genuine market to operate.

The CCL mission is guided by the principle that when people remain open to one another, to differences of opinion and to opposing views, they can fashion a dialogue based on common vocabulary and put aside ideological biases. This, then, should allow for intelligent people, working to serve their nation in the most forthright and meaningful way possible, to work together to craft practical solutions to practical problems.

Climate destabilization has been turned into an intensely partisan issue, in which ideological assumptions and partisan strategy trump cooperative civics and negotiated problem solving. This is bad for democracy and bad for the human environment, in which impacts from inaction are mounting, and the economic fallout looks to be accelerating, certainly beyond the current window of opportunity to act.

The challenge of the political moment is to find a way around the intense partisan divide, and that is no small task.

On Capitol Hill, there is frustration on both sides of the aisle with the inability of Congress to work together in a responsible way on practical issues, and much of the gridlock is due to ideological bias interfering with sound policy judgment. But the United States now faces another moment of urgency regarding climate and energy: China is racing ahead with massive investment in clean energy resources, even as it expands at record pace its use of the dirtiest form of fuel, coal.

The Chinese agenda, to take control of the global marketplace for new technologies, not by manufacturing alone, but by developing the newest, most cutting-edge technologies that will build the future economy of the world, means the United States now sees its dominance in technological innovation and research and development threatened. If we, as a nation, do not succeed in building the foundations for the global clean energy economy of the 1st century, our ability to compete internationally, and to thrive domestically, will face constant pressure.

The most advanced intelligence work of Pentagon analysts has found that sustainability and security are now intertwined and cannot be disentangled: economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, the sustainability of alliances, of political borders, of nation states, of an economic model that allows us to thrive in relative peace and security, are all linked, and the emerging national strategic narrative [pdf], capable of addressing the complexity of the global environment, needs to rethink the paradigm of threat and risk, and view such challenges as opportunities to shape and influence the landscape of human civilization, for the better.

The great success of this week of CCL lobbying on Capitol Hill was that individual volunteers, the citizen-based movement as a whole, and some of those who sat in meetings with the organization, experienced breakthroughs in terms of openness and interest in dealing with this issue as one of practical problems demanding practical solutions.

It is CCL’s mission to work with members of Congress of all variety of ideological inclinations, many of whom have never been able to share a constructive conversation about climate or energy, with one another, to build a coalition based on citizen interest and a shared vocabulary for building a vibrant and resilient, cutting-edge clean energy economy, through which sustainable American prosperity and quality of life can be secured in this century.

It will be citizens who build, manifest and deliver the political will to achieve these vital goals, and success will mean the strengthening of our democracy and our economic future.

TheHotSpring.net :: Climate change means “global warming”, so how can severe winter storms and excessively cold breezes be evidence of a warming climate? The key is in the word “global”: the warming of the overall global average temperature need not manifest in all places at all times as warmer weather. Throughout the history of human civilization, the Earth’s climate has remained relatively stable, due to optimal global average temperatures; as global average temperatures slip outside that optimal range, the warmer air makes the interaction between climate systems more inconsistent and more severe.

So, while monsoons are failing across Africa and southern Asia, and major rivers are starting to run dry for part of the year, failing to reach the sea, in northern climate bands, storms are getting to be more severe and winter weather is hitting harder. This is because climate bands themselves are blurring, becoming less rigid, less reliable, and so in traditionally temperate climate zones, arctic and tropical air are coming together more often than before, both demonstrating and exacerbating the ongoing destabilization of major climate patterns.

On Sunday in New York City, freezing temperatures, dense snowfall and high winds all coincided with thunder, to the surprise of many, who had never observed this phenomenon before. As explained on the local news, such events can happen when the right combination of factors create a storm with some of the characteristics of summer storms. That means thunder can accompany snowfall if the cloud patterns are being fed by the right mix of freezing air and warmer southerly sea air.

The concern climate scientists have about global warming is not warm days as such, or mild winters, but rather the cumulative effect of warmer global average temperatures. That effect is widespread destabilization of vital climate patterns, and the resulting feedback loop, which would turn warmer high-altitude temperatures into melting glaciers, reduced precipitation and rising sea levels.

If the weather you’re seeing in your hometown is colder than usual, it is not evidence that the global average temperature is not warming. It is, however, consistent with a warming global climate to see weather that is more extreme in temperature or precipitation than has historically been the case in a given region.

One blizzard is not itself proof of global climate destabilization, but a mounting pattern over several years, where tornadoes converge on New York City (September 2010), more than 20% of Pakistan’s entire territory is inundated (summer 2010), hurricanes are more frequent, more numerous and more intense on average (2004-2010), and crops are under increased threat from frost in places like Brazil, Florida and India (1998-2010), are evidence of the destabilization of major climate patterns.

The persistent and mounting melt of Antarctic ice shelves, and their calving into the planet’s oceans, is further evidence of a persistent and mounting global increase in annual average temperatures. No system on Earth is entirely closed. Systems interact, which means chemical compositions of regional air and water flows, temperature adjustments, and frequency and precision of ecosystem services all interact and affect one another.

Such processes honor no political borders, recognize no economic zones and respect no observable boundaries. The warming of waters in the Gulf of Mexico means the Gulf Stream carries that warmer water to northwestern Europe, gradually warming the chill arctic waters, which then become less effective at rapidly cooling the Gulf Stream waters. This is important, because that rapid cooling generates the world’s most massive and powerful waterfall, as the cooled water plunges to the bottom, and flows around Europe and Africa into the Indian Ocean.

That Deep Ocean Current relies on the proper balance of warm and cool water at the precise point where falling water can push the right volume of water around the globe, at the right temperature to maintain key surface temperatures and major climate bands. To understand climate destabilization, it’s more instructive to think about the snowflake than the thermometer: cool temperatures don’t always bring snow, because weather is highly variable from moment to moment; but the fragile, tiny snowflake, of itself harmless, can become a paralyzing force across an entire region. Little incremental ticks of climate relevant data can mount to generate catastrophic change.

Today, we are digging out from under 25 inches of snow that fell in less than 24 hours. Digging out from under comprehensively destabilized global climate systems will not be so easy. The smart money tends to flow toward the more rational approach to problem solving. Having no plan but wait-and-see leads to transit collapse, states of emergency and regional collapse. The smart money for future investment wants to support more rational behavior, the kind that honors human need, human rights and the logic whereby democracy is highly capable of coordinated human brilliance.

The United States of America is the “wealthiest country in the history of the world”. We hear this repeated so often, it’s almost as if it has become the national slogan. Economists tend to agree that it’s the truth, but that wealth is relative: tens of millions of Americans live in abject poverty, unable to obtain basic sustenance, medical care, adequate education or even basic public safety. One in five children in the United States now live in poverty. Among African American and Hispanic children, the rate is 30 percent.

In some formerly leading industrial states, one in four households is now on food stamps, and unemployment insurance and welfare are now capped and conditioned on expectations that cannot be met given the real-world economics of the places where affected people live. The social assistance system was reformed virtually out of existence in the 1990s, and over the last 12 years, has evolved to offer solutions that only highly educated people with no history of credit problems or public assistance could really qualify for.

Essentially, people who have comfortable lives have engineered, through their political choices, a system in which people who have never had comfort, or opportunity or anything resembling a fair and level playing field, are treated as if their poverty is the result of laziness. This is a misplaced focus on the virtues of independence and free will. We cannot use the virtue of individual liberty to throw our fellow citizens to the proverbial economic wolves.

Yes, anyone does have the freedom to and should have the wherewithal to apply informed free will to make sound choices and lead a productive, self-sustaining life, but the conditions in which such a thing is possible are not always within reach. When a system of economic activity becomes as complex and sophisticated as that of the United States, it is all too easy for hard-working, intelligent, good people to be systemically boxed out of any and all real opportunity. We should guard against that kind of institutionalized hardship cycle.

When a cycle of economic, political and educational degradation, persists long enough, entire communities can find they have no one working to improve them that is simultaneously rooted in the community and empowered by a series of successes and by a network of people who stand on solid economic footing. In such a situation, communities degrade radically, until there are no supermarkets, no banks, no clothing shops, no reliable businesses and normal everyday life cannot function in line with commercial expectations for a prosperous economy.

In that kind of situation, what sort of jobs is one supposed to seek? Whole communities find their local economic stock depleted to the point where they can only look for work in neighboring communities, often having to compete with people not facing the same obstacles they face. Protections that would help them obtain work in such communities have been stripped away and the financial cushion meant to help them retrain and take advantage of opportunities has been cut off.

The United States now faces the disturbing contradiction of being the world’s richest country, blessed with an extreme surplus of food, clothing and property, yet being unable to provide affordable housing and food to a very large segment of the population. In 2009, one in seven Americans, 14.3% of the population, was living in poverty, according to official government numbers.

That’s 44 million Americans living in poverty.That’s the entire population of Spain. Of 224 nations on Earth, 194 of them have populations smaller than the number of Americans living in poverty. There are more people living in poverty in the United States than in the Sudan. And poverty is not just a temporary gig: it’s a spiral of factors that close in and make escape all the more difficult, despite the lavish opportunity available to others within the same society.

When a family is in those circumstances, the most likely scenario is that there is not enough money to pay for enough food for everyone to thrive. When public assistance is cut off, there is no solid economic footing on which any member of that family can stand to make a move upward. Upward mobility is supposed to be the “American dream” —anyone can build a castle for his or her family, if only they work hard enough—, but the United States has fallen behind Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany and Spain, in social mobility.

The new report [pdf] from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) finds the United States falling behind other leading industrial democracies, as access to quality basic public schooling and higher levels of education is put out of reach of more and more people. Deep cuts in social spending, spurred by massive, unfunded tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, have put unprecedented stress on public school budgets, causing property taxes to rise and playing havoc with crucial programs that cultivate a more dynamic, upwardly mobile workforce.

France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States were singled out as four developed nations where the socio-economic status of fathers closely determines the opportunities available to children. The report also finds that “Inequalities in secondary education are likely to translate into inequalities in tertiary education and subsequent wage inequality.” (OECD, p. 5) In other words, if the quality of high school education is vastly disparate, access to the empowering environment of a top-level university education will be greatly diminished for those with a less advanced high school experience.

Since 2008, states and municipalities have been aggressively cutting the funds available for public education. California’s budget crisis bodes very ill for its once vibrant network of cutting edge public schools, and has caused its lauded research universities to turn to private funding to expand their endowments. In New Jersey, cuts have been so deep, even individual schools in rural Cape May saw 7-figure cuts to their annual budget, causing layoffs and reducing the resources available to students.

If not for a $100 million challenge grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, many outside observers believed Newark’s failing school system was headed for financial ruin and possible institutional collapse. Chronic underfunding and a property-tax-based system of public school funding put Newark in a kind of razor’s edge circular logic of failure and penalty, undermining students’ chances and degrading the local community.

The failing school system was in such dire straits, it was under state control (a condition in municipal-control New Jersey that means “bring of disaster”) for 15 years. Now, Zuckerberg’s grant will allow Republican governor Chris Christie (responsible for crippling cuts elsewhere) and Democratic mayor Corey Booker to give control back to the city, with Booker’s office taking on the responsibility for finding $100 million in matching donations and administering a wholesale revival of the district’s schools.

Funding matters. And education matters. The philosopher Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, speaking of his passion for Greek classics, is credited with saying “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.” But in the United States, fiscal pressures lead politicians to toss funding for books, schools and teachers, to the wind, even as they decry the cost of social assistance such as food stamps and welfare (clothes and shelter).

But it might be that investing in books is precisely what troubled school districts from Newark to Camden to Cape May (all in New Jersey) to Philadelphia to Sacramento need to do. Cutting funding allows politicians to posture about their own short-term “fiscal responsibility”, but that political capital is purchased with the degrading of young people’s and entire communities’ future opportunity and prosperity.

Punitive standardized testing, viewed with concern by many education experts as something of a racket that pads the profits of educational publishers (who create and distribute the tests and sell books designed to help prepare course material related to them), has nudged public education away from the paradigm wherein every innocent child has the right to a complete and thorough top-quality education, which also serves our interest as a society by yielding more well-rounded, dynamic thinking citizens, to a cut costs, punish-to-improve mentality.

But a student that tests well in science in 3rd grade might see his or her future career limited to low-paying vocational work that requires mechanical understanding, if he is never exposed to any creative fields that work on the intellectual centers of the brain, and a 3rd grader who tests not very far above average in basic science, but excels at playing the cello, painting and gymnastics, might have a better chance of being able to recognize the potential of a career in astrophysics, and be better prepared for it.

If we are not upwardly mobile, we are not as free as we pretend to be. If we leave 44 million of our fellow citizens behind, without so much as a flutter of the eye or a downward curl of the lip, our republic is not as committed to democratic principles as we say it is. We are the republic, every one of us, and if the inner-city child in a single-family home that owns no property can’t get her hands on a book to develop her own abilities, we are less free, and if the Appalachian child, living with three generations of his family cannot develop writing and IT skills, we are less free, every one of us.

Right now, one in seven American citizens is living in poverty. If you’re not the one, then one in six of those around you is. And if you can safely say “not so in my backyard”, then you are living a segregated life where everybody’s liberty and life experience, including your own, is degraded. One in seven of us is living in poverty. One in American children are living in poverty. One in three Hispanic or African American children are living in poverty.

In the eight years from 2001 through 2008, household median income fell by $2,000. Our economy collapsed in 2008, because our banking system was operating on the assumption we were all getting richer, when in fact, most of us were getting poorer, even as basic expenses, and interest rates, healthcare and transport costs, steadily rose, eroding our individual liberty to live as we would choose.

The road to real reform is long and complicated. It will require tough choices. But those choices might have to be something a little more selfless than “cut the budget for my neighbors’ kids’ school”. It may have to be: “if I vote you in, I want you to do whatever it takes to make sure our schools work, and our kids have a future, and our neighbors’ kids and their neighbors’ kids”.

It might have to be we take seriously the lessons of thinkers as diverse as Thomas Hobbes and Martin Luther King, Jr., Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, John Dewey and Thomas Jefferson: if even one among us is boxed out of a full, self-empowered and prosperous life, excluded from the generosity of human intellectual history and real-time human ingenuity, then we are all diminished, and our freedoms are hollowed out, and our republic is in jeopardy.

While the Great Recession, or its lagging statistical wake, rattles on, we need to make sure that no one who lives in this society is treated as less than fully human, that no one is denied food or shelter or the right to self-improvement or genuine opportunity. We need to make sure there are no hungry children and no school closings based on ideological bias or unstudied experimentation. We need to take seriously that every single thing we do is building our future republic: do we want to slide toward an anti-democracy, or empower every citizen to help shape a better, freer future?

Will viewers more actively select for the content of their media environment, as hyper-convergence moves forward and the news of the world at large is enmeshed in a spreading web of personal information? Will impartial news programming or even generalized mainstream media content disappear from the viewer’s localized media environment?

Do new technologies that allow for choosing what to watch and when, or to customize online content, create playlists and clip and archive articles or combine competing media, have the potential to empower viewers, reduce viewers’ influence over content, or liberate information from the strict control of programming executives and editorial offices?

• Join the discussion now on the Hot Spring Network

The European Commission is considering new rules that would give it far more control over the domestic fiscal policy of member states, including the possibility of fines to countries in distress that do not adopt austerity measures to reduce spending. Today, across Europe, there are protests organized by labor unions and citizens groups who allege austerity is just a veiled way of making the majority of working people, innocent of the financial system’s collapse, pay for the abuse or misjudgment of top executives and reckless investors.

Spain is under a general strike, and unions representing workers in over 30 countries have descended on Brussels to argue that austerity measures are hurting Europe’s economic base and slowing recovery. Will individual European nations rebel against the EC’s claim of control over domestic spending policies? Will a more federal style of union gain traction if budget-related tensions are not diffused?

• Join the discussion now, on the Hot Spring Network

The Economics of Carbon Pricing & the Transition to Clean, Renewable Fuels

Whenever legislation to price carbon starts to gain traction, the fossil fuel industry trots out this talking point: “It will kill jobs and ruin the economy.” In this paper, however, HotSpring Network founder and Citizens Climate Lobby volunteer Joseph Robertson ties together numerous reports and case studies to present a different picture, one in which the transition to clean energy will produce new jobs and provide a stimulus to the economy.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Putting a price on carbon creates a contextual incentive for diversification and innovation in the energy economy. When Germany shifted its tax-base from income to energy, it spurred a decade of aggressive public and private investment in renewable resources. In just four years, it became the world leader in clean energy export, taking 70% of the world market just eight years after the initial policy shift.

German firms are driving investments of €400 billion in the Desertec solar project in North Africa, part of a plan to connect two continents via multi-gigawatt undersea transmission cables and advanced smart-grid technology. The project will revolutionize the energy sector in Europe and Africa, creating wealth for businesses and communities large and small. Morocco, for instance, plans to use its desert and mountain terrain, as well as its wind-intensive coastal areas, to generate enough renewable energy to become an export leader for the European market. This model can be duplicated in mountainous, desert-rich and coastal states across the U.S.

Concerns that coal country will be adversely affected by a price on carbon are understandable but somewhat unfounded. Communities dependent on coal for employment are not generally more prosperous than the national average, so a transition to clean renewable resources can help to overcome problems of endemic persistent poverty. Studies comparing cost-benefit analysis for mountaintop removal mining and wind energy show wind is more effective at generating prosperity over the long term, for all but a narrow group of interests.

The regional disparity in impact from a carbon tax is projected to be negligible, starting at just two-thirds of one percent and moving to just one-third of one percent over time. If revenue from a carbon fee is returned to all households, any wider regional disparity might be reduced by targeted dividend adjustments. Communities in remote areas, or which rely on coal for cheap energy or for employment, can benefit economically from diversifying into and taking ownership of clean renewable-energy technologies.

Job creation will be the hallmark of the clean energy revolution. Studies show the potential for millions of new jobs in industries ranging from manufacturing to installation and maintenance, as well as administration, marketing, energy efficiency and other related fields. The potential for efficiency gains from clean energy and smart-grid technologies will free up massive amounts of consumer spending over time and relieve dependence on fossil fuels from hostile states.

• Summary + Conclusions
• Download the full report here in PDF form

TheHotSpring.net :: Buckminster Fuller was one of the 20th century’s most visionary architects, whose philosophy of socially responsible planning and design has influenced cutting-edge technology research and public policy the world over, through the UN’s development programs and pioneering entrepreneurship aimed at lifting billions out of poverty. His vision was, in his own words, “To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

So Buckminster Fuller made it his mission as thinker and designer to aim for a new paradigm in the use of technology, wherein the ancient and medieval assumption that the world could only provide for 1 in every 100 people to live comfortably could be discarded by the self-evident power of more advanced technology and economic balance, in which 100% of people could live in comfort, freedom and dignity. Metropolis magazine has called the prize “socially responsible design’s highest award”.

According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute website:

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is an annual international design Challenge awarding $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. It attracts bold, visionary, tangible initiatives focused on a well-defined need of critical importance. Winning solutions are regionally specific yet globally applicable and present a truly comprehensive, anticipatory, integrated approach to solving the world’s complex problems.

The complexity of Fuller’s vision is daunting, because it entails as a foundational principle finding a way to transcend the more primitive tendencies of human socio-political organization which lead us to believe that we can only gain by displacing our costs to terrain inhabited by others. But the embrace of constructive complexity is part of what makes Fuller’s vision so relevant and so important today. The U.S., for instance, must find a way to not only reduce its dependency on “foreign oil”, but in doing so must realize that there is no genuine economic resilience gained by simply causing poorer societies to carry the environmental costs of our carbon-based economy.

So there is a deep optimism, firmly rooted in reason and in scientific imagination, that guides the work of those who seek to carry out Fuller’s vision, by which humanity can only achieve long-term sustainability by also doing something like achieving the ideal. The “challenge” is very much the same challenge Fuller put to himself, and which he demanded all people everywhere rise to comprehend and to pursue. The prize given in his name is a way of driving that optimistic approach to problem-solving forward.

This year’s winner, Operation Hope, describes its function as demonstrating “how to reverse desertification of the world’s savannas and grasslands, thereby contributing enormously to mitigating climate change, biomass burning, drought, flood, drying of rivers and underground waters, disappearing wildlife, massive poverty, social breakdown, violence and genocide”. Solving multiple problems related to a complex and evolving crisis situation is key to why Operation Hope was able to win this year’s Fuller Challenge prize.

To submit ideas for 2011, applicants are asked to

Please choose two of the following issues your entry primarily addresses:

communication and media
community and social systems
economy and livelihood
education
energy
environmental health
food systems
human health
human rights
materials and resources
shelter and built environment
transportation
water

And to answer nine questions such as: “How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key social, cultural, economic, ecological, and technological issues which shape the condition you are seeking to transform? Why is your strategy a breakthrough and what makes it a preferred state model? (300 words)*”

For more, or to apply or recommend an applicant, click here

TheHotSpring.net :: Scientists in Mississippi say they have discovered microscopic globules of hydrocarbons, i.e. petroleum, inside the outer shells of blue crab living along the Gulf coast. This discovery appears to show that oil has now entered the food chain. This process cannot be reversed, though measures may be taken to limit the spread of the oil deeper into the local and regional ecosystem.

According to Harlan Kirgan, of the Mississippi Press:

Oil droplets have been found beneath the shells of tiny post-larval blue crabs drifting into Mississippi coastal marshes from offshore waters.

The finding represents one of the first examples of how oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill is moving into the Gulf of Mexico’s food chain. The larval crabs are eaten by all kinds of fish, from speckled trout to whale sharks, as well as by shore birds.

The finding is of crucial importance, because it means the oil dispersed from the massive, and growing, spill, has penetrated into the biological fabric of the Gulf coast ecosystem, and will now likely migrate further inland and into the wider food web, across the region. There had already been concern that seabirds could carry the pollutants inland after feeding on fish from the spill zone, though this has not yet been detected.

Science magazine is reporting that the contamination of the food chain by way of post-larval crabs could be “widespread”. That contaminated crab larvae were found in Texas only shortly after the first landfall of visible oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill on the Texas coast is a clear sign that the crab larvae were likely landing there before the visible oil, and so such organic contamination can spread beyond the reach of the main spill zone.

Reporting for Science, Erik Stokstad writes:

Two groups of scientists, funded by NSF rapid response grants, have been looking for changes in abundance of tiny crab larvae as they swim to estuaries along the U.S. Gulf Coast. One team, led by population ecologist Caroline Taylor of Tulane University in New Orleans, first found mysterious yellow-orange droplets in May while collecting blue crab larvae off Grand Isle, Louisiana. “We didn’t expect to find anything [like this] inside them,” Taylor says.

Subsequent surveys by Taylor’s team have turned up droplets in larvae in several genera of crabs in sites including Pensacola, Florida, and Galveston, Texas. In some places, up to 100% of larvae contain these droplets. The composition of the droplets is currently being analyzed, and Taylor expects results next week.

Having reached both the Florida panhandle and coastal Texas, the contamination of post-larval crabs signals a regional ecological disaster only beginning to unfold. It is unclear how toxic the droplets found inside the crabs are, but with 100% contamination in some areas, concern about penetration of more complex coastal fauna is warranted.

Harriet Perry, director of the Center for Fisheries Research and Development at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, told the press:

Fish are going to feed on (crab larvae). We have also just started seeing it on the fins of small, larval fish — their fins were encased in oil. That limits their mobility, so that makes them easy prey for other species. The oil’s going to get into the food chain in a lot of ways.

It is expected such a process of contamination will take years to reverse, not months. There are many questions about how best to counter the spread of molecular residue of dispersed oil from the spill. Oil contamination of this kind has never been faced in so pervasive a way, and the National Science Foundation’s emergency response projects, funded by “rapid response grants”, will be studying new methods and best practices, in hopes of preventing the oil’s spread deeper inland.

TheHotSpring.net :: There is nothing ideological about the issue of renewable energy resources. Proponents tend to care about the health of the natural environment, which motivates their wish to see renewables replace high-polluting resources like oil and coal, but the technologies, the fact of their economic viability and their usefulness for society at large, are not in any way a matter of ideology.

Neither is there anything ideological about the allegiance of some to carbon-based fuels. The considerations are entirely practical on all sides, and we need to remember this as we try to find consensus on how to move forward, responsibly, as a civilization, in terms of our relationship to energy.

For some people in the political arena, it would appear to make more sense to continue to support carbon-based fuels as the primary resource for energy production, for a number of practical reasons, each of which can be refuted on practical grounds: 1) because those entities that profit from carbon-based fuels donate to one’s campaign; 2) because those entities that profit from carbon-based fuels “create jobs”; 3) because burning things to release energy is easier to understand than more advanced technologies.

There are real ideologically-rooted reasons why the passions can run so deep on either side: for environmentalists, it is morally unconscionable that we continue burning dirty fuels and eroding the natural systems on which all life depends, no matter the reasons; for the pro-petroleum segment of the political spectrum, there are patriotic roots, hearkening back to two world wars and the Cold War, with oil seen as a guarantor of security.

Oil is no longer that, and passions aside, thinking people have to acknowledge that the root of those passions is really practical and not ideological anyway. It makes practical sense to be good stewards of the environment on which we depend for everything that we have, and it was a practical consideration that linked industrial production and national security to the availability of carbon-based fuels.

But now, national security has become so closely linked to energy supply issues that we can no longer rely —again, in strictly practical terms— on a commodity as volatile, finite and problematic as petroleum. The costs to society are too great, whether we are talking about war-fighting —and war-funding, for that matter—, the loss of freedom in terms of shaping our foreign policy, costs in terms of human health or the destabilization of major climate systems.

And coal, while abundant in North America, is so dirty a resource that the environmental fallout alone makes it less than reasonable as a foundational resource for long-term future planning. There may come a time when carbon itself is a resource, required for its chemical properties, but not necessarily as useful as we now pretend, as a combustible fuel. Places where the coal industry has its roots may have to change focus or find technologically cutting-edge ways to justify the exploration for coal.

The reasons for this are hard to understand, if one starts from the assumption that there is something traditional or sacredly local or productive about coal. But if we step back and consider the real adaptability of human populations, we find that no community really needs the coal industry, having no chance of survival or prosperity in absence, in the way the coal industry lobby pretends.

Communities are made up of human beings and are as adaptable as those human beings’ minds, hearts and relationships. The relationship to powerful coal interests is not always a happy one, and this alone can open doors for the development of resources that are more sustainable, more local-friendly, and respectful of future human need in ways that older technologies simply cannot be.

Even the coal industry itself could innovate, diversify, and find ways to turn its operations into major sources of clean renewable energy. At least three renewable resources come to mind: geothermal energy production, wind and solar. Mining companies in many cases own or lease land for which they have not yet devised a marketable use or long ago abandoned, and these can be converted to solar farms, wind farms or geothermal fields.

While international mining companies are outsourcing administrative jobs and moving to more “cost effective” mining sites overseas, some are beginning to use disused mining sites in the US to build part of the new clean-energy infrastructure. Across the southwest, such projects are already in development or being implemented. According to the Arizona Republic:

Both the Bureau of Land Management and Environmental Protection Agency are studying the potential to put renewable-energy projects on mines, landfills and other disturbed lands.

Mines can help avoid many of the expenses solar plants face on pristine desert, experts said, such as environmental rules that require relocating saguaros and other protected plants.

There is no reason why environmentalists seeking to promote clean energy and communities steeped in a long tradition of coal mining or oil drilling cannot come together, free of ideological constraints, to craft the solutions that will make the US a global leader in efficient, profitable, mass-produced clean energy. The ideology that claims this issue is one of ideology is simply a rhetorical framework that serves the interests of the most stagnant and unimaginative coal and oil interests.

Major oil producers could easily invest billions in renewable R&D and become global pioneers in the rush to achieve a fully self-sustaining clean-energy economy. Their resistance is perhaps more linked to a short-sighted ideological prejudice than to a lack of will to be part of the future, but they do not have any real ideological framework to back up their position, and the logic that favors a transition to renewables does not require one.

From a strictly economic standpoint, it does not make sense to continue being near totally reliant upon a way of doing business that carries the wildly exorbitant potential costs of an Ixtoc, an Exxon Valdez, Texaco in Ecuador, or a Deepwater Horizon disaster. If we want to be intelligent about how we achieve “energy independence”, we have to first assess and confront the real costs of doing business the way big oil does business.

It’s not a matter of “a tax on energy” or “a tax on carbon”, it’s a matter of making sure the responsible parties pay their share. Subsidies on an unprecedented scale, have made the oil business look and feel profitable in ways that it actually is not, when the health of the wider economy is considered. Were those wider costs built into the business itself, big oil would not be nearly as attractive an investment as it seemed to be until the Deepwater Horizon well blew out in April.

While an “ideology” that values the natural environment over the right of the oil industry to make profits may rejoice at the opportunity to use such a failure as BP has experienced in the Gulf of Mexico to make the case against oil, that does not make it any less true that BP had no responsible or credible action plan for dealing with an environmental catastrophe of this magnitude, despite deliberately doing everything necessary to bring about the catastrophe.

That such risks can be avoided with a transition to clean, renewable energy resources that do not require combustion and do not require oil or coal to achieve the efficiency gains they aim to achieve, is just as honestly not a matter of ideology. It’s the way it is. And science is now demonstrating that we can produce more than enough electricity, nationally, to power our entire domestic energy consumption through wind and solar alone, if we build the infrastructure.

At the point where the renewable energy infrastructure is pervasive and functional enough to outpace carbon-based fuels in total power generation capacity, there will be no question, practically speaking, whether or not renewables are a more effective method of promoting long-term economic health and prosperity. Where is the ideology inherent in planning for such a virtuous moment of future achievement?

• Climate Bill Could Bring Total Energy Revolution
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TheHotSpring.net :: There is mounting concern the ongoing flow of oil from the damaged BP Deepwater Horizon well in the Macondo field may be the result of one or more serious structural breaches in the cement well casing below the sea bed. Statements made on 7 June by Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, suggest the well casing has ruptured, there are multiple points of seepage across the surrounding sea bed, and the well can likely only be closed from below, if or when the two relief wells connect with the damaged well.

The news is gravely important, because it would mean that 1) efforts to seal or cap the well from above will not work and 2) the cement lining of the well itself may have been structurally flawed from the outset. Firedoglake has been reporting on this issue, in an effort to bring to light information that has apparently been included in private briefings to members of Congress but never disclosed to the public. A breach in the well casing means the leak will be far more technologically challenging to close than what was thought until now.

While it is premature to talk of the “death of the Gulf of Mexico”, it does now look likely this will be the most cataclysmic environmental disaster experienced in or around North America in recorded history, with no clear solution in sight. A breach of the well casing would also mean any future attempts to close the well from above could be even more disastrous and could ultimately prevent the safe, secure closing of the well.

It is also of serious concern that BP’s stock value dropped again by 9% in one day, even as the directors contemplate freezing dividend payments in order to meet their obligations in paying for containment and clean-up across the Gulf region. The rapid deterioration of BP’s stick value has raised concerns the company will be taken over by a rival or forced into bankruptcy, so the US government is reported to be exploring ways to legally bar either of those from happening.

According to Firedoglake’s reporting, Sen. Nelson sent the following letter to BP earlier this month:

June 2, 2010

Mr. Lamar McKay
Chairman and president, BP America, Inc.
501 Westlake Park Boulevard
Houston, Texas 77079

Dear Mr. McKay:

I understand the priority of your company right now is capping the Deepwater Horizon well. But new information about the accident has come to light in two recently published accounts that raise serious questions I hope you can promptly address.

Specifically, a recent Wall Street Journal account indicates that BP altered the design of the Deepwater Horizon well even up to five or six days before the rig exploded. And one of these design decisions, according to drilling experts cited in the Journal, could have left the well more vulnerable to the blowout that occurred April 20.

Also, a Washington Post report cites sources including a BP official saying that sometime during or after the recent abortive top kill operation, new damage was discovered inside the underground well. Some of the drilling mud that was forced into the well was moving sidewise into rock formations, sources told the newspaper.

If the sourced information is accurate and mud leaked out the side of the well casing, oil and gas likely are leaking beneath the seafloor as well, according to Professor Ian R. MacDonald, an oceanography expert at Florida State University who advised my staff.

Both of the published accounts, then, raise serious questions. Please address these accounts and provide my staff with any and all information and documents regarding the following:

· The discovery of breaks or leaks in the well casing beneath the seafloor;
· Records of any monitoring BP is undertaking of the Deepwater Horizon wellbore for structural integrity;
· Records of any monitoring of the seafloor surrounding the Deepwater Horizon well, including any geological or geophysical information showing changes in the formations within the proximity of the Deepwater Horizon well;
· Records reflecting whether any oil, natural gas, or residual drilling mud might be migrating to the seafloor beyond the boundaries of the casing, including any analysis of how this might impact the drilling of two relief wells or other methods to mitigate the flow of oil;
· All documents related to BP’s casing strategies for wells in the Macondo prospect.

Thank you in advance for your prompt response.

Sincerely,
Bill Nelson

There are now serious doubts about the real scale of the disaster, with news from BP suggesting the most severe official estimates to date of how much oil is gushing from the blown-out Macondo well may be a gross underestimate. BP has announced it intends to be able to collect as much as 80,000 barrels per day from the gushing well within a few weeks, despite the most severe official estimate, only just released, setting the worst case at 40,000 barrels per day.

At 80,000 barrels per day, which is 3.2 million gallons, of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, just four days would equal the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Exxon Valdez was 11 million gallons spilled into the pristine waters of the Sound, devastating the marine and coastal environments, killing wildlife and imposing chronic harm on local communities. Today is day 57 of the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

TheHotSpring.net :: Pres. Obama addressed the nation last night from the Oval Office, on the tragedy unfolding across the Gulf of Mexico, and issued an impassioned call for the entire nation to rally to the cause of breaking its “addiction to fossil fuels”. The president’s vision goes beyond the question of “energy independence”, which tends to favor expanded offshore drilling, to a push for a comprehensive transition to clean, renewable sources of energy and the phasing out of carbon-based fuels.

For more than a decade, ecological economists have been arguing that the United States needs to make a nationwide effort, “at wartime speed” to innovate and commit to clean, renewable power-generation methods. Last night, Pres. Obama became the first US president to echo this vision, reminding skeptics that no one believed the US could build its military capacity as rapidly or completely as it did to fight World War II on two opposite sides of the globe.

Obama said “The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most clean and painful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now”. He also noted that a nationwide transition to clean energy is an integral part of the nation’s long-term economic recovery, saying “The transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of new jobs, but only if we accelerate that transition.”

There are some in Congress who oppose this message, but this appears to be mostly from allegiance to the carbon fuels industry and the outdated view that clean energy solutions are not cost-effective. For many politicians from the Gulf coast region, the prospect of a comprehensive shift away from fossil fuels is not only terrifying, but taboo. There is such a deep fear that jobs tied to the oil industry cannot be replaced by any other means and that no other industry can be so effective at “creating wealth” that it is virtually forbidden for anyone in politics to speak of moving away from oil production.

The generating capacity, however, of wind, solar and wave power, has advanced to a level of efficiency where it is feasible to replace the energy production capacity of the Gulf of Mexico’s oil industry with renewables. What is needed is infrastructure, and building it will create jobs as soon as the first project is launched.

Obstruction from pro-petroleum politicians in Washington and across the Gulf region is linked to the 18th-19th century idea that burning carbon-based fuel is the most efficient way to produce energy. But refusal to pour major investment into the transition to clean, renewable resources and the infrastructure needed to make that system a reality is a direct impediment to immediate, widespread job growth in the very areas under siege from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The BP spill is in fact, no matter one’s perspective on clean energy, a watershed moment in thinking about energy and environmental policy: it is now clear the incalculable potential costs to every sector of society from the failed strategy of a devotion to carbon-based fuels far outstrip our ability to easily respond to a disaster of this kind, and the logic of using clean energy has suddenly come into stark relief as an obvious and necessary next step.

The call to arms, part of what the president called his “battle plan” for addressing the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, comes none too soon, as China and India have joined Europe in pushing the envelope of clean energy innovation. China has made the world’s largest investments in clean energy startup incentives and the EU has poured tens of billions of dollars in solar investment into projects in Africa and elsewhere.

But India has also joined the trend, as reported by Shravya Reddy, for the Natural Resources Defense Council:

On May 24, India unveiled the draft of its National Green Mission, one of the eight missions under its National Action Plan on Climate Change.   This is exciting news, especially for NRDC’s India team which is currently in New Delhi discussing climate change with Indian officials and civil society.   NRDC welcomes the draft and is encouraged to see India’s commitment to addressing the challenge of climate change and managing its greenhouse gas emissions.

India’s national green mission is just the latest major national policy proposal designed to not only build toward a new era of responsible environmental stewardship and reduced carbon emissions, but to transition a major national economy toward the use of clean, renewable resources for power-generation, industry and transport.

A dramatically expanded commitment to clean energy resources is no longer just a matter of environmental responsibility, it is now a very urgent matter of direct international economic competition. Denmark and Japan have become the world leaders in the production of advanced wind turbine technologies, while China is now pushing investment in both innovation and production of cutting edge solar and wind power technologies, for export.

The blow-out (explosion and collapse) of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and the well 5,000 feet below has brought into high contrast a serious problem inherent in the way we produce energy: we have long refused to calculate the real costs of extracting fossil fuels. Ecological economics is founded on this point: we should calculate the value of the natural ecosystem services disrupted by the after-effects of carbon emissions.

But we now have a clear view of another deficiency in the market economics of oil production: BP did not adequately plan for the eventuality of a catastrophic blow-out and region-wide spill. By not adequately calculating that risk, BP was not able to take as seriously the absolute obligation to ensure the safety and security of its drilling rig at the Deepwater Horizon site. Even now, there is speculation BP still views the potential oil wealth of the failed well to be more valuable to the firm than curbing the catastrophic economic and environmental fallout from the spill.

As David Leonhardt wrote in last week’s New York Times magazine, “The people running BP did a dreadful job of estimating the true chances of events that seemed unlikely — and may even have been unlikely — but that would bring enormous costs.” Leonhardt also points out that this is a generally human quality, the inability to adequately measure the costs of low-probability high-cost events before they occur.

This is why they seem like the rare “black swan”, which changes our thinking about probability and expectation in fundamental ways. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is one of these low-probability high-cost events that was not unforeseeable but whose remoteness made it easy to avoid thinking about, until it happened. Now that we have met the black swan, we can evaluate its true cost and we can plan better.

We need to assess what the real long-term planning costs are, given the obviously inadequate state of the technology needed to address a catastrophic well failure like the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, and how can any enterprise plan to finance such risk? (BP, it must be remembered, lost $17 billion in stock value yesterday alone, and is now reported to be contemplating bankruptcy.)

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The Gulf of Mexico coastline of the southeastern United States has been hard hit by the ongoing BP oil disaster, with catastrophic environmental damage, the collapse of the local fishing and shrimping industry, and tourism bottoming out in some places near zero, just as summer gets going. There is a moratorium on deepwater exploration and drilling, which is putting a strain on the job market across several states. A serious investment in renewable energy resources would build a more vibrant, more reliable jobs market into the regional economy and help prevent the environmental fallout of offshore drilling.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of early 2009, what many refer to as “the stimulus”, which it was not designed to be, is actually a long-term economic reform and investment program, designed to help steer major sectors of the US economy away from abusive practices which impose long-term costs (‘negative externalities’, in economic jargon) on society. So subsidies for destructive practices are rolled back while subsidies for sustainable practices and innovation-oriented enterprise are expanded. It includes the single largest investment in clean energy in US history, as well as a major investment in infrastructure.

What’s more, the ARRA is phased in over several years, meaning there is still money to be invested. The coastal region of the Gulf of Mexico could develop a highly lucrative, highly productive, clean energy infrastructure, designed to harvest wind, solar and wave power, without any need for incurring the environmental risks of deepwater drilling. With the rapid acceleration of the efficiency of clean energy technologies, the Gulf region could, like California or certain states of the Great Plains, become a net exporter of clean energy.

Why is this not being proposed as an immediate, aggressive, well-thought government response to the crisis involving BP’s blown-out oil well? For one, Republican governors have staked their political fortunes on refusing to cooperate with Pres. Obama’s economic recovery and reinvestment plans, so they have either rejected or sought to impede the spending of the federal money they could otherwise get through the Recovery Act. But there is also the pervasive influence of the drilling industry, from rig operators to oil services companies to the big oil firms like BP, who invest heavily in political campaigns.

Gov. Haley Barbour, of Mississippi, a Republican who has bet his political future on the notion that offshore drilling is the best, or perhaps only, way to go economically, has just about called on the media to stop reporting on the spill, alleging that reporting on the impact of the BP disaster has hurt his state economically. Barbour does not have a clean energy plan; he has opposed the spending of Recovery Act money in his state, yet he has requested federal help in dealing with the oil spill, even as he alleges there is no problem in Mississippi and seeks to blame the media and not the oil industry.

Barbour wants offshore drilling expanded and has put himself forward as something of a mouthpiece for big oil’s interests in the Gulf of Mexico, citing his state’s economic interest in attracting “investment” from the big oil firms. What Barbour has not been able to articulate is: why is he not in favor, then, of an economic recovery strategy, already available to his state prior to the spill, which would help Mississippi diversify its energy economy, produce clean energy, reduce the environmental threat from energy production, and create lasting new jobs?

In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal, also a Republican who has opposed his state spending any money from Pres. Obama’s Recovery Act, a flagrant act of political grandstanding that was specifically calculated to deprive the people of his state of the investment they needed in hard times, in order to make it appear that Pres. Obama was not addressing the economic crisis, has been playing the populist. But even as he attacks the federal government and demands more assistance, he blames the government for the actions of interests he has supported and whose support he has enjoyed.

The truth, it turns out, is not Gov. Jindal’s friend: he has been a staunch ally of big oil and even now is calling for more drilling off the Louisiana coast. He has no serious plan for energy innovation and no willingness to cooperate with the federal government’s most significant investment in clean energy in history, despite the many ways it could benefit the people of his state. In fact, Jindal has been one of the most persistent champions of BP and other drilling interests, both in Washington and in Louisiana.

As reported by Mother Jones:

[The] media’s panegyrics have ignored Jindal’s own weak response to the oil spill and his outsized role in promoting the kind of regulatory cutbacks and dangerous offshore drilling policies that are now wrecking Louisiana’s economy.

In February, 2006, while serving as a member of the GOP-controlled US House of Representatives, Jindal introduced the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act. Passed by the House a few months later, the bill would have opened up the entire US coast to offshore oil drilling. States could override the law and ban rigs in their territorial waters, yet the law would let them share lease royalties with the federal government–a strong incentive to drill. Adjacent states would have little say in the matter (clearly a problem, given that BP’s spill has marred several states’ coastlines).

In fact, it is astonishing how closely Jindal’s efforts mirror the history of lax oversight and cozy relations with the oil industry that led to the specific situation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Using language that is first of all not very legislative in nature and secondly either extremely naive or cynically aligned with big oil, the bill actually asserted that: “(4) it is not reasonably foreseeable that . . . development and production of an oil discovery located more than 50 miles seaward of the coastline will adversely affect resources near the coastline.”

The Deepwater Horizon well is located roughly 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, and Mr. Jindal is now reframing his entire political persona around the notion that this well poses and apocalyptic threat to coastal communities, to local ecosystems, the fishing and tourism industries, the habitability of certain areas and the economic wellbeing of the entire region. What’s more, some observers believe a spill further out would only have resulted in a wider swath of coastline being directly impacted.

Mother Jones goes on to observe that:

As Jindal was pushing to radically increase offshore oil drilling (while accepting more than $100,000 from oil and gas companies), there’s no indication that he saw the slightest need to increase government oversight. His stated governing philosophy is deeply anti-regulatory. In March, 2009, he said: “There has never been a challenge that the American people, with as little interference as possible by the federal government, cannot handle.”

The Jindal saga is common in Gulf coast politics: even now, Gov. Jindal continues to push for expanded offshore drilling, even as he pretends to be a fierce defender of the environmental and quality-of-life interests of the people living along the coast. He wants to have it both ways, to promote the unsupervised abuses of an industry that does not know how to protect the marine or coastal environment, while taking no responsibility for his role in bringing about this catastrophe.

It is this kind of political representation, one could argue, that has left the people of the Gulf coast region without an alternate economic plan to offshore drilling. Jindal, Barbour and many others have long seen oil money as easy money, ignoring the risks and downplaying the very real costs to society at large. But now, the people of the Gulf coast region are faced with a serious challenge to that way of thinking: there is nothing easy or reliable about the offshore drilling economic growth strategy.

What is needed is something new: state of the art offshore windfarms could be built in place of deepwater rigs. New advances in solar-voltaic power-generation technology make it as much as 100 times as efficient as the advanced state of the art over the last decade. The Gulf of Mexico’s strong undersea currents also make it a strong candidate for high-capacity wave-power generation. A combination of the three could make the region into a clean energy powerhouse, if only the political leadership could grasp the nature of the problem and the wisdom of such a solution.

It’s not just the intense vibration, noise pollution and toxic contaminants associated with trucking that we need to address, but the broader environmental fallout from depending so heavily on a petroleum-based combustion-centric mode of transport. Heavy overland transport vehicles demand a massive amount of power to move them from place to place; advanced battery technologies may soon allow us to power them using electricity, but we need to build the infrastructure to produce, store and transport all that green energy.

The vehicles could “switch-out” their batteries at “filling stations” of the kind conceived by Shai Agassi’s electric vehicle infrastructure company Better Place, but a business model needs to be applied nationally, and almost universally, in order to enable this new paradigm to fit the trucking industry. We need to look at and hash out the technical and organizational challenges, and try to push for this better, cleaner trucking paradigm, for the health and wellbeing of the truckers themselves, as well as our communities, our environment and our future.

How close are we to something better, quieter, cleaner, which will allow us to improve our quality of life without degrading the environment or our children’s future?

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