TheHotSpring.net » Building the Green Economy

Natalie Jeremijenko: The art of the eco-mindshift (TED talk)

Joseph Robertson — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:40:48 +0000

Natalie Jeremijenko’s unusual lab puts art to work, and addresses environmental woes by combining engineering know-how with public art and a team of volunteers. These real-life experiments include: Walking tadpoles, texting “fish,” planting fire-hydrant gardens and more.

See Natalie Jeremijenko speak at LucidNYC, on February 22, 2012 View her work at the [...]

Deep Green Economy: Real-time Sustainable Social Justice

Joseph Robertson — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:15:07 +0000

We are moving through a period of global economic transition. The new economy will favor complexity over hierarchy, and work with ecosystems and civil society, to achieve a more harmonious relationship between individuals and their environment. There are certain key points that will define this progress and build resiliency and generative capacity into the global economic system...

Toward a Deep Green Economy

Joseph Robertson — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:18:27 +0000

Obama Suspends Tar Sands Pipeline, Pending Review

Joseph Robertson — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:02:47 +0000

Amid intense and gathering pressure from the grassroots to the state government of Nebraska, to a national coalition of activist organizations, tens of thousands of demonstrators and an intensifying drumbeat from leading scientists, Nobel laureates and concerned public officials, Pres. Barack Obama this week ordered the suspension of the Keystone XL pipeline project. The pipeline would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico, for export to other nations, and would run through some of the most sensitive and important fresh water systems in the US.

We are Now 7 Billion

Joseph Robertson — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:25:56 +0000

Today, the UN officially recognizes the arrival of the 7 billionth person on the planet. Never before have so many human beings been alive simultaneously. Never before has the Earth's carrying capacity been so intensely taxed, as more people than ever before are moving into advanced stages of industrial urbanization. Even as we mark the arrival of the 7 billionth person, the average individual human being is demanding more resources than at any time before.

Nuclear Power & Offshore Drilling May Keep Oil Prices Artificially High

Joseph Robertson — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 18:50:23 +0000

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 [...]

Blueprint for a Renewable Energy Infrastructure Bank

Joseph Robertson — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 22:41:10 +0000

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 [...]

Occupy Wall Street, with a People-centered Investment Bank

Joseph Robertson — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:59:28 +0000

A people-centered investment bank could work like a clearing house for good ideas that deserve serious investment but would be ignored by conventional high-finance institutions. It could align with cutting-edge technology innovators of the kind that are too young, marginal or maverick, to have given up their intellectual property to major conglomerates and who might just be looking for an opportunity to become the next generation of entrepreneurs, with a mind to generalized improvement of socio-economic conditions.

ProjectQuipu.net: A User-made Global Economic Atlas

Joseph Robertson — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:12:45 +0000

Project Quipu is an endeavor to create a global economic forum, a user-made atlas of economic information, reporting, negotiation and planning, in order to craft a more relevant, human-scale model for economic information and application. The quipu [pronounced keep-ü] was a system of strings, knots, colors and patterns, created in each case by [...]

Saturation vs. Scalability: Old & Costly vs. Clean & Efficient

Joseph Robertson — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:02:43 +0000

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.

We Need a National Renewables Start-up Incubator

Joseph Robertson — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:08:12 +0000

There is a myth permeating our nation's energy policy and energy economy, which holds that renewable sources of energy cannot meet our outsized electricity demand, let alone power our entire economy. That myth is not only entirely untrue; it depends on the flawed assertion that the only way things can be is the way that they have been. The fact is: we can more easily achieve sustained energy independence with clean energy than by any other means.

21st Century Business Needs to Learn to Deal with Uncertainty

Joseph Robertson — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 18:35:21 +0000

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.

Solar Roadways to Power Smart Energy Economy (video)

Joseph Robertson — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:43:53 +0000

Solar Roadways is proposing a long-view paradigm-shift solution to major infrastructure, energy and climate challenges. The Solar Roadways system would might, at present, cost about three times what it costs to install an asphalt road, but would be more durable more easily replaced in modular fashion, and able to pay for itself by generating [...]

New Development of Carbon Fuels May Be Drag on Economy

Joseph Robertson — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:31:41 +0000

Opportunity cost is a serious, long-term stress on economies hampered by rampant governmental corruption, or by severe productive resource deficits—in consumer capital, infrastructure, or long-term reliable energy flows. With the ongoing boom in development of shale gas drilling and tar sands oil recovery, there is now massive investment, into the tens of billions of dollars of public and private money, in high-risk, low-yield ways of extracting carbon-based fuels, with the explicit purpose of extending old-fashioned combustible fuel technologies beyond what would otherwise be economically viable.

Pipeline Rupture Pours Oil into Yellowstone River

Joseph Robertson — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:43:57 +0000

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 [...]

Moving Minds with Citizen-Centered Non-partisan Discourse

Joseph Robertson — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 22:10:05 +0000

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.

Graphene: Flexible, Wearable, Ultrathin, Ultrapowerful Electronic Substrate

Joseph Robertson — Sat, 21 May 2011 21:21:18 +0000

Graphene is a single-layer of carbon atoms bound together in a chemical pattern. It can have 300 times the strength of steel, and significantly more conductive ability than today’s semiconductors. And, being made of carbon atoms, it can be produced from abundant resources at what may someday be very low prices.

The result: flexible, wearable, [...]

Yes! Your HR Department Can Go Green

Sally M — Sun, 15 May 2011 21:47:39 +0000

In today’s society, many workers spend more time in their offices than they do at home, especially people employed in human resource management. Everyone wants to have a comfortable workplace, and many human resources departments have noticed an increase in worker productivity if they provide their employees with a comfortable, eco-friendly office space. Keeping [...]

Carbon Fee and Dividend: to Spur Job Creation, Industrial Boom

Joseph Robertson — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 17:49:19 +0000

There is one way of steering outmoded, combustion-burdened economic systems toward a healthier state-of-the-art 21st-century energy economy, that will not entail rapidly escalating price burdens on a consumer market economy. With a carbon fee and dividend approach, we can make sure that only those interests that refuse to innovate and to improve their standards of operation for power generation pay for falling behind.

The Usership Society: Decentralized Energy Next Stage for Democracy

Joseph Robertson — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 15:53:47 +0000

Ownership is liberating only if it liberates; the new paradigm has to be a participatory society

In order to push his 2004 bid for re-election, and his radical and untenable economic ideology, George W. Bush touted the need for an “ownership society”. In theory, this meant ordinary people could have access like never before to [...]