January 7, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The Sandia National Laboratories have achieved a landmark breakthrough in solar-voltaic power-generation technology. The snowflake-like “solar glitter” uses 100 times less material to produce the same amount of electricity as today’s standard 6-inch square solar cells. This achievement of ultra-miniaturization now has the potential to move solar-voltaic power generation to the forefront of the clean energy revolution, and help speed the transition away from carbon-based combustible fuels.
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January 7, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
That too many people, including policy-makers and media figures “are out of their intellectual depth and easily manipulated” by the bewildering complexity of the financial-political feedback-loop is almost irrefutable, and I agree with comments in this debate it’s “a symptom of the limitations of our neural architecture”. But I don’t know if we should take the question of neural architecture in the biological sense. There’s a cultural and practical response that needs to be considered at least as strongly.
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October 8, 2009 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
DVR is an increasingly popular consumer-oriented technology which simultaneously liberates viewers from strict TV viewing schedules and also imposes new constraints on recording freedoms (including sharing). DVR is a concession by content providers, advertisers and infrastructure (connectivity) providers, to the advantages of digital technology, and to the common individual demand for more freedom to control [...]
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October 8, 2009 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Clean, safe drinking water is scarce for over 3 billion people across the world. At least 1 billion literally never have access to clean, safe drinking water, putting them at constant risk of severe thirst-related ill health effects, infectious diseases or toxic contamination. Over 100 countries face either sporadic or chronic crisis-level problems related to [...]
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October 8, 2009 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Water resource depletion leads not only to chronic scarcity of clean, safe drinking water for increasing numbers of people, but means arable land is harder to cultivate and to maintain. Persistent drought and accelerated desertification (the expansion of deserts into the farmed and/or built environment) are results of water resource depletion.
But the most insidious and [...]
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August 15, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
A World Bank study has projected that the global financial crisis and resulting recession will plunge some 53 million people across “emerging markets” —like China and India— into absolute poverty, in 2009 alone. In China, tens of millions of people have lost jobs related to the export-dependent manufacturing sector.
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August 15, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The quest for the most fuel-efficient vehicles has entered a new phase, with major government private-sector investment in research and development for industrial-scale commercial production of a new class of gas-electric hybrid vehicles and EVs (all-electric cars). Swiss-based Solar Impulse is building the world’s first 100% solar-powered airplane, an achievement that will revolutionize the travel, industrial production, transport and fuel sectors.
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July 29, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
One day, recently, I saw a fire-engine, crawling its way through a stop light, sirens blaring, hulking its way to provide the noble service of putting out someone’s fire or performing some other rescue operation. It was pouring a dark grey exhaust from one side, looking shiny new and well cared for, but obviously lacking advanced exhaust filtering or clean-energy drive technologies.
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July 21, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Pres. Barack Obama has proposed a national high-speed rail program that would develop eight to ten regions for high-speed rail (currently, only the so-called northeast corridor, running from Washington, DC, to Boston, through Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, has a regular high-speed service), as part of a phased-in long-term economic recovery plan. The rail project comes into play also as part of Obama’s plans for a comprehensive energy-sector overhaul, aimed at reducing carbon emissions.
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July 16, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The Labour party government of the United Kingdom has announced plans to establish an aggressive overhaul of national energy markets, shifting to 40% low-carbon energy sourcing, across all industries, by 2020. The energy secretary, Ed Milliband, will be given control of allocation of electricity across the energy grid, in an effort to speed the green-energy revolution to allow the UK to meet its legally-binding agreed emissions cuts of 34% by 2020.
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July 8, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
A crop-borne fungus that targets wheat, named Ug99 because it was first identified in Uganda in 1999, has become one of the primary threats to global food security. Newfound virulence in the evolving stem-rust strain suggests the fungus could destroy as much as 80% of the world’s most widely grown crop: wheat.
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June 16, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Earlier this year, Chinese finance officials chastised the US for perceived risks to long-term fiscal solvency. Many economists of widely diverging views on best economic practice or theory have observed that a “symbiotic” relationship has emerged, in which cheap goods from China are sold in the US, where consumer spending is enabled by easy credit, funded by low interest rates, in part supported by the expanding market for US government bonds, funded by Chinese buyers, who are essentially closing the circuit, turning US consumer dollars into Chinese bond buys, which in turn facilitate consumer spending.
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June 16, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
A coalition of German firms has answered a call to study making an investment of 400 billion € in solar energy across North Africa. The plan, initiated by the Club of Rome, which has been promoting sustainable development and sustainable economic growth practices, since 1972.
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June 10, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
How can we reach the state of affairs in which online activity is entirely secure against identity theft? Hyper-convergence means media and services of all kinds will be increasingly integrated across a broad-spectrum multi-media fabric, where one’s actions and interests, private information and financial data, will be increasingly widespread.
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June 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Overfishing has depleted fish-stocks the world over. Subsidies and lack of enforcement of sustainability measures drive the fishing industry to deplete the very stocks on which its existence depends, while climate interference and global contamination are leaving oceans so hypoxic (oxygen deprived) they cannot support marine life. At least 405 such ‘dead zones’ have been identified across the globe.
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June 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The underlying problem in the financial system —which allowed banking institutions to hide bad debt in bundled assets, and resell it to trading partners who may not have been given full disclosure on the unsustainable nature of much of the underlying debt— is transparency. A fierce individualist ideology led to a convenient clouding over of the reporting mechanisms intended to make financial institutions more ethical, more stable, and more useful to those outside their walls.
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June 6, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The European Parliamentary elections are the world’s largest transnational democratic vote, with 375 million people across 27 nations, choosing among 650 parties for 785 seats in the Parliament. It is worth asking what effect these elections, held once every 5 years for all the seats in the European Parliament, will have on EU environmental policy. Will these elections speed the spread of clean energy resources, like wind, solar and wave power, across the EU member states and neighboring states?
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June 5, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The Urban Institute found that 22,000 people died in 2006, in the United States, specifically from lack of health insurance. Other projections, which count the accumulation of long-term pathologies, compounded ill health or medical “error” involving staff calculations about the wisdom of providing the most costly care to those who can’t pay, run into the hundreds of thousands.
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May 23, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
It’s worth asking: how can we achieve products that are produced, packaged, distributed and brought to market, in such a way that they could achieve near 100% organic status? Are we counting the non-organic-quality industrial processes involved in burning fuel and creating plastics? Can we do without such processes? Would corn-based biodegradable plastics be a significant first step?
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May 22, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
NOW, with David Brancaccio, travels to the Indian Himalaya, to examine the problem of persistent accelerating ice melt which is speeding the erosion of glaciers that feed the Ganges River, which in turn provides water for hundreds of millions of people and sustains a precarious but massive food economy.
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May 21, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The new stadium built for the World Games 2009, located in Taiwan’s Kaohsiung City, is being hailed as a landmark example of environmentally friendly building design. The stadium is rimmed with a partial canope roof that trails off into the surrounding promenade and is clad in 8,844 solar-voltaic panels, to generate electricity. The solar complex [...]
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May 19, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 5 Comments
The book Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change addresses the problem of resource depletion and the degradation of our environmental base by illustrating how community erosion due to a culture of excess leaves human society without adequate means of planning for a world in which exponential growth is not the norm. Resource depletion already means the endless expansion of resource consumption is not possible, so author Pat Murphy proposes a localized community-oriented approach to overhauling the prevailing economic paradigm.
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May 18, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Organic solar concentrator systems make it possible for windows stained with transparent dyes to become the most efficient form of clean energy yet developed. They can be used for retrofitting or in new builds. Applications for the technology are easy to imagine, but the engineering to fit readily usable windows of all shapes and sizes with the special edge-mounted solar cells will be key to implementing the OSC paradigm globally.
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May 12, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The US economy has faced serious challenges on a number of fronts, over the last few years, contributing to a complex downturn with little easy salvation in sight. In order to transition to this new era of recovery and slower growth, the US consumer will have to cut back drastically on luxury spending, and the market will have to rely less on the easy flow of consumer credit.
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May 11, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
The wind-power generation paradigm is wind turbines turning due to the pressure of oncoming winds. The standard is a single fan with three blades that turns at a relatively slow and constant rate to maximize energy extraction from wind currents passing over the blades and turning the turbine. The ‘WindCube’, however, fits a wind-amplification paradigm, a possible first-step to a new era in wind-turbine technology.
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April 28, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
We are witnessing the systematic implosion of the American auto industry. The situation is so grave that instead of seeking to reinvent, or spin off or sell off its Pontiac division, GM is simply closing it down and laying people off. No attempt to fix problems or to take advantage of the opportunity to comprehensively reinvent a company already fitted with major industrial manufacturing capacity, just the unilateral shuttering of major plants and an entire company.
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March 20, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The converging crises of carbon-induced climate destabilization and unsustainable transport-related costs and land-use are pushing global society toward a moment of major change, in which “fuel” as we know it will be less a matter of resourced-fuel combustion and more a matter of renewable clean electric power storage and delivery. The petroleum industry needs to adjust its business model to operate in a world where burning its prime resource is not the goal.
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March 2, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: No Comment Yet
The Obama administration is looking at the severity of the banking crisis with a mind to settling the issue of survivability and recoverability of banks, case by case, based on facts in evidence. The first step will be to gather evidence, through a series of ’stress tests’ designed to examine what resources troubled banks have to weather oncoming storms, then plan according to the results of those tests.
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March 2, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The hardest thing to understand about the current, and deepening, economic crisis, is that it came about largely because some of the most experienced, well-staffed and prestigious financial institutions in the world gambled on untenable projects of unlimited expansion, without ever producing sound mathematics to back up the projections. Philosophical exuberance replaced philosophical underpinnings, and the dynamo of financial speculation greased the wheels of commerce in a way that masked underlying shortfalls.
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February 13, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
There is talk of a major overhaul of the US banking system, with some analysts and economists saying the situation is so dire that widespread “nationalization” —or government takeover— will be necessary, and others saying there needs to be a bad-debt takeover bank, that takes on the huge financial risk of major banks’ “toxic assets”, so that the banks can “clear their books” and begin to lend. But another possibility looms as the likely more appealing option: the creation of a Federal Competitive-Lending Bank (FCLB)…
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February 8, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Pres. Barack Obama announced, just one week after taking office, the creation of a new website, Recovery.gov, which will detail the manner in which all the money from his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, once passed by Congress and signed into law, is being spent. The website is another in a series of steps to create a far-reaching reform of the federal government’s reporting to the public about its activities, with the aim of achieving Obama’s promise of the “most transparent” government in US history.
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January 6, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Each information transaction, sometimes as exemplary, sometimes as single element added to a sweeping aggregate of historical sway, is a precedent, which can motivate, influence or redirect the push of future happenstance. And, we must take note, every transaction involving matter or energy contains information, traces of a history of its coming into being, and generates a “footprint”, a trace of its appearance and its transition into something beyond the transactional moment.
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December 21, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
There are over 230 million people suffering from hunger or undernourishment in India. No other nation has so many people suffering chronic malnutrition, and the undernourished in India represent 27% of the worldwide hunger-stricken population. While India’s economy develops and the potential for an expanded middle class takes root, the total number of Indians going hungry has risen, despite the overall percentage of undernourished, as part of the whole population, having been reduced in recent years.
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December 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
A long-running bellwether legal case in Canada’s farming industry, which has left at least one farmer unable to farm any crop variety of rapeseed (canola) —for fear of having to pay accidental royalties to bio-chemical giant Monsanto—, highlights the need for comprehensive reform of international seed regulation standards. The Canadian courts ruled that the individual farmer had to shoulder the burden of ferreting out any instance of “contamination” of his crop by pollen from nearby genetically-modified (GM) planting, as Monsanto held a patent on the seeds. The farmer, and those who support his claims, argue that there is no means by which anyone can prevent cross-pollination from GM plants.
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December 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
President-elect Barack Obama held a press conference today in Chicago to announce his choice for Health and Human Services secretary, former Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. Daschle is a top adviser to Obama and the two have made clear their commitment to ending the problem of underinsurance and the uninsured and making sure that no Americans go without treatment.
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December 12, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
At a time when major U.S. companies are announcing job layoffs almost daily, the renewable energy industry is hiring new workers every day to build wind farms, install rooftop solar arrays, and build solar thermal and geothermal power plants. The output of industrial firms that manufacture the equipment for these energy facilities is expanding by well over 30 percent a year. These investments both create jobs and help prevent climate change from spiraling out of control.
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December 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The climate change conference currently underway in Poznan, Poland, seeks to build on the Bali agreement, adopted by 180 countries in 2007, in hopes of achieving a global emissions regime. A sweeping economic downturn overtaking North America and Europe, and now hitting China’s manufacturing and export base, it is feared, will hamper efforts to implement comprehensive green industrial and economic reforms.
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December 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
It may be that “a few bad apples” got the ball rolling on what has turned into a massive international financial disaster. Or, it may be that a few bad apples got their names in lights, while the entire system conspired unwittingly in a spectacular collapse. Either way, the best expression of the problem might be to say that markets have stopped working, in part, because they have been comprehensively modified to stop working like markets. An open banking transparency network would reduce the motivation for wrongdoing and privilege more reliable sources of information, creating confidence and motivating sound market dynamics.
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December 8, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
US president-elect Barack Obama pledged on Saturday, in his weekly radio and web address, to initiate a massive public works program to help create jobs, build a greener economy, restore US industrial relevance and spur economic growth. The plan announced by Obama would also require that states who participate in the massive investment in new and upgraded infrastructure use the money quickly or lose the funding.
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November 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
As the “perfect storm” gathers from inchoate, deceptively non-threatening winds, we can look ahead, backward and into the mirror and ask how crisis comes, or why, if it is inevitable, if we might just fall right out of it, as we fell into it. But the answer is simple: human crisis comes from excess, from inordinate ambition, from misplaced aggression, from over-exploitation of resources, each of which generates real and problematic tension across the landscape of human experience.
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