The individual does not actually suffer less, but somehow, human beings —across cultures, ages groups and regions— appear to have an almost inborn tendency to convince themselves that the one who suffers with others is somehow safer. This is, of course, rarely true. While yes, a young boy might survive because his older sister goes without food, two young children in a population beset with pervasive, persistent scarcity or political disorder, may be at significantly heightened risk of violence, or even enslavement.

Others suggest the phenomenon of psychic numbing is more to do with some sort of instinctual calculation of the worth of one’s efforts. If one seeks to help one lone child, one’s actions seem able; if one seeks to send a small amount to help millions, one’s actions may seem less able, less capable of ‘making a difference’.

There is a theory that this might be related to a long “prehistoric” period —far longer than the period which we refer to as “recorded history”— in which smaller tribal bands were the organizing principle of human society. We can understand safety in numbers, but we can’t conceive of how sending a few dollars, or writing a letter, will in any way contribute to easing the suffering of millions of people. Biologically, this just doesn’t compute in a cerebral infrastructure organized around tribal society.

Yet there are alternatives: there is the theory of an informational tipping point. The lone photo, with no information and no statistics, will spark great compassion. Adding statistics or removing the photo, or naming numbers that run into the millions, will lessen the likelihood of compassion across a large population. But when enough information is given so that the reader/viewer can comprehend in intellectually resilient terms the scale of a tragic crisis, the real energy of compassion is again motivated, perhaps more effectively than by any other means.

Social networking has allowed people to share information and to make donations with an ease of effort and on a scale of cooperative endeavor never before possible. This may be helping to ease the transition away from generalized psychic numbing and toward generalized charitable predisposition, as social networking sites help to shrink the size of the planet to the biologically comprehensible “village” scale, familiarizing people with their counterparts across the world.

How much of a role is there for social networking in solving this problem? How much of the problem is about resistance to new information about crises of massive scale? How much is a crisis of imagination? And are there examples of how we can do or are doing better in any given case?

• Join the discussion at The Hot Spring Network’s Crisis Policy Forum

The “Lobby Day” experience was part of the first annual CCL National Conference, in the nation’s capital. The landmark event brought together climate scientists, oceanographers, environmental engineers, economists, activists, community leaders, small business owners and concerned citizens, to deliver the message to members of both parties that citizens from the community, their own constituents, will support them if they take meaningful, comprehensive action to combat climate destabilization.

Citizens Climate Lobby is a national non-partisan, non-profit organization, working to organize citizen volunteers, by state, county or Congressional district, to lobby elected officials for a strong emissions reduction plan that will prevent catastrophic climate change and speed the transition to clean energy. The group aims to motivate political support, across the political spectrum, for a pragmatic approach to emissions reduction and to speeding the transition to clean energy.

The CCL strategy entails reaching out to all members of Congress, in both parties, regardless of their specific views or past staunch opposition to carbon-reduction legislation. The aim is to listen, to understand what specific elected officials and their constituencies most value and how they prioritize issues of energy and climate, and to work with them to help them achieve their goals in a way that is consistent with establishing a sustainable, responsible climate policy.

As part of the Citizens Climate Lobby myself, I can say it is integral to the organization’s mission to work to transition the United States from a legislative climate of full-time professional lobbyists to a new paradigm wherein ordinary citizens speaking for their communities and for the well-being and rights of future generations, are the preferred interlocutors for shaping the nation’s laws.

The conference was a three-day event, in conjunction with the RESULTS National Conference, from June 20 through 22, where citizen volunteer lobbyists gather to push Congress to act to combat poverty at home and around the world. Sunday and Monday were training and informational days, in which the CCL volunteers heard directly from established scientists presenting the latest science regarding climate destabilization and carbon emissions, and participated in workshops designed to prepare the teams for meetings with members of Congress and their staff.

The specific focus of Citizens Climate Lobby’s efforts on Capitol Hill is to promote proposed language for a fee/dividend approach to limiting and reducing carbon emissions and promoting the transition to a world-leading clean energy economy. The proposed legislation would:

1. fee: place a direct and steadily increasing (year on year) cost on CO2 at the point of entry into the economy (well, mine or port);
2. dividend: return 100% of revenues collected to the American people directly, an equal amount per capita to every household;
3. clean energy: set a price that will make renewables cheaper than fossil fuels within 10 years;
4. level playing field: apply a border adjustment to balance carbon pricing for products from nations that do nothing to increase cost of carbon emissions;
5. pollution: stop construction of all new coal-fired power plants and phase out all existing plants, starting with the dirtiest…

The plan is supported by Dr. James Hansen (NASA’s leading climate scientist), by numerous retired military leaders and by leading members of the faith community. It is designed to relocate the hidden costs of carbon-based fuels (‘negative externalities’, in economics-speak) from the citizen, the community and the small business, back to the interests that seek to profit from the resources that generate those negative externalities for which the rest of us pay.

The CCL approach is intended not to be punitive, but to be clear and transparent. It does not discriminate, and it does not in any way limit the freedom of carbon-based enterprises to join the clean energy revolution. Over time, as the cost of producing energy from carbon-based fuels goes up, investment will move toward clean energy resources, technology and infrastructure, which will allow private enterprise to profit more readily and more consistently than the more costly carbon-based alternative, with its tendency to extreme volatility in pricing.

This method allows citizens, communities and small businesses to pay for any increase in costs that might come from utilities or other industrial enterprises passing along carbon fee costs to the consumer, and to drive demand for a clean energy alternative. The plan allows the American people to build the clean energy future they would prefer, and to drive a new wave of investment in innovation and ingenuity to secure the nation’s energy independence and protect the natural environment against progressive global climate destabilization.

Having met with and listened to so many members of Congress and/or their climate and energy policy advisers, CCL has begun the process of working to find areas of mutual interest and shared principle that can build a fabric of common understanding and common interest between rival political parties, rival community interests, rival ideological camps and even rival industries, to forge the political will to achieve the clean energy revolution this nation needs for its future economic, environmental and military security.

• Originally published at TheHotSpring.net

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 and the environment.

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 its 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?

• Join our discussions on Zero-combustion Energy Research
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• Energy Supply economics & innovation news (from partner site Café Sentido)
• Climate Bill Could Bring Total Energy Revolution (from partner site Café Sentido)
• Futurismo Verde: debate sobre un futuro energético limpio y renovable

Countering the rise of a global black market in stolen identities will require not just bold, innovative thinking, but a comprehensive awareness of the nature of media hyper-convergence, and the ways in which that process will affect our ability to interact with, judge, manipulate and keep safe from, the world around us. Standardization and atomization both present opportunities for would-be identity thieves, and so the major pro-consumer model must be centered on getting ahead and staying ahead, technologically, of those who seek to steal and misuse personal identity, whether digital, biometric or analog (like one’s signature).

Share the best practices and legal remedies for preventing identity theft, whether by digital means or wireless harvesting, or in the physical realm of paper, plastic and voice. What laws give consumers leverage in reversing fraudulent charges? What pending legislation will do the most to help protect the sanctity of individual identity? How can we leverage consumer technologies to protect against the most aggressive, innovative attackers? What can the credit scoring universe do to assist and protect consumers?

• Join or follow the discussion on the Hot Spring Network

Part of California’s renewables build-up process might well be, as Gov. Schwarzenegger suggests, a dynamic market in which renewable resourced energy is imported into the state. But part of California’s goal in doing this, admittedly, is to depend less on the volatility of imported energy. So there will have to be a major shift in the investment of public funds toward renewables infrastructure, within the state.

Keeping costs low is a priority, because to not bring down the costs of power generation for Californians means an already economically overstressed state will see itself pushed to the brink, as prolonged malaise —stemming from reduced consumer spending, sluggish credit markets and falling property values, and skyrocketing healthcare costs— nudges more families and small businesses toward bankruptcy.

To keep costs low, the state will have to both provide subsidies and channel federal green energy and infrastructure subsidies to new renewable energy-related projects. An end result of both building aggressively in-state and importing aggressively from out of state will be a significant reduction in the cost of renewable resourced energy, over time, and the eventual capacity to export a significant amount of energy from renewable resources.

This will give California a competitive edge in the coming age of battery-powered rechargeable vehicles (EV) and mandates for emissions reductions. Building and investing now for that later competitive edge will help the state and its residents (and businesses) save money later, when there is no longer any leeway in choosing between renewables and carbon-based fuels.

What’s more, California-based Tesla Motors will be releasing the most high-performance EV fleet ever built, for the mass commercial market, in a one to two-year time-frame. Having achieved not only that goal, but also having successfully integrated a robust renewable resource-based power grid with a network of EV “filling stations”, would put California at the global forefront for clean energy economic development.

This is more than just a fashionable claim the state could make in search of green subsidies and good PR: building a robust renewable resource economy could allow California to become one of the first major exporters of a top-priority commodity in the economic matrix of coming decades: electricity with little to zero environmental impact, a resource that will have not just moral and legal value, but economic incentives tied to it.

• Join or view a discussion on this topic at The Hot Spring Network

The Hot Spring Network (TheHotSpring.net) is a project of Casavaria Publishing, aiming to connect ‘idea people’ across the world. You can use The Hot Spring Network to connect with friends or to seek out people in your field or in a field of interest, to post links or share ideas, publish your own blog posts or share research, media or information generally.

The Hot Spring Network is linked to the publication The Hot Spring (TheHotSpring.com), which aims to produce meaningful analysis of bold new ideas in paradigm-shift fields of research, including media hyper-convergence, advanced ecology, economics, food supply, human health, crisis policy, cutting-edge publishing technologies.

We aim to not only function as a social network across disciplines, borders and interests, but also to formulate a revolutionary new kind of intellectual property preserve. Working from the philosophy of the Creative Commons —which allows creative people to share their work through flexible licensing choices—, we hope to establish a new standard whereby great ideas can be pooled into one productive research base in which all material contributors will share a part.

Check our ‘Rights‘ page periodically for updates on the progress of this project and information about how you can use The Hot Spring Network to distribute your ideas, pool your work with that of others and work toward forging the solutions we all need in order to shape a better future.

For now, feel free to message, blog and share links, expand your connections on the Network, invite friends, join groups and discussions, and help us turn The Hot Spring Network into a vibrant community of information and debate. If you have any questions or would like provide input about how you think the site and its service could be improved, please contact us at thehotspring@casavaria.com or message the Network Director here.

According to a NASA report, hypoxia is so extreme in some areas, that total anoxia (zero oxygen availability) can be found, allowing for no animal life to exist. In the Mississippi River delta, feeding into the Gulf of Mexico, it is thought that agricultural waste is creating a glut of nutrients for phytoplankton, which leaves excess organic matter for bottom-dwelling bacteria to feed on.

“When the fertilizer reaches the ocean, it just becomes more nutrients for the phytoplankton, so they do what they do best: they grow and multiply. Which leads to more organic matter reaching the bottom, more bacterial respiration, and more anoxic bottom water.”

The water becomes anoxic because bacteria use oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, depleting the oxygen other life forms require to sustain life.

We need responsible, enforceable agricultural waste policies, clean water regulations, oceanic industry controls, and international consensus to put an end to these harmful outcomes of unchecked industrial farming, fish production and fossil-fuel use, all of which contribute to or feed back into the vicious cycle of oxygen depletion in the world’s oceans.

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Publishing models determine which texts are made available to a wide audience, and by what means. New media, like this social network, are providing new opportunities, but the crossover between print and digital media will provide bold new opportunities for making the best new ideas available to the people who can do the most with them.

Share your ideas on what you would like to see to make news media, research materials, conceptual innovations and basic statistical evidence, and/or writing that expresses new ways of thinking, available for your consumption.

• The Hot Spring Network’s Discussion on ‘New Publishing Models to Speed Ideas to Application’

“Cognitive science has revealed a human brain notable for its plasticity. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Internet not only shapes itself to the mind but shapes the mind to itself”, writes Ana Menéndez in this month’s Poets & Writers magazine.

What can we do to impede the erosion of some of our most prized social-intellectual habits of mind, rooted in organic brain structure and in social networking (from campfire to empire, parliament to newsprint, to Twitter and The Hot Spring Network), while taking advantage of the power of the web?

• Join the discussion at The Hot Spring Network