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“The minds on the margin are not marginal minds” is the guiding philosophy of the project Anil Gupta discusses in this talk, aimed at highlighting efforts to find indigenous Indian entrepreneurs who might have the best ideas for shaping a better future, though they lack the resources to get their ideas into the mainstream culture or the realm of cutting-edge science.
Knowledge is wealth in its purest form, fully possessed by and inseparable from the individual. As noted in previous sections of this essay, the application of deliberately obtained knowledge to complex situations establishes the sovereignty of the individual. Variety is wealth insofar as it offers an array of options which may be combined in countless ways to confront the problems of living in the world. Variety in knowledge offers adaptability, and adaptability is the key to survival and prosperity at all levels. Ultimately, resilience, rooted in such flexibility, is the real meaning or value of wealth, of any kind.
Without the interaction among particles, among diverse forms, forces, materials and beings, nothing of the universe we know could exist. It is the collision, the mechanics, the action and reaction, the combination and differentiation among existent bodies that makes life, gravity, beauty, freedom and invention possible. Within the intelligent recourse to variety, there exists for humanity a maximum possibility for resilience in changing and adverse conditions. Inherent in this variety of choice is not only existence, but the possibility of freedom. Choice is not freedom as such, but together with intellect, offers us the possibility of really approaching it. [Join the discussion...]
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.
Questioning the political culture in which pollution-intensive industrial infrastructure dictates what we take to be quality of life, cast as standard of living, the book provides insight, tracing statistical evidence, into how human life is undermined by the very system put in place to support and sustain it. The logic of infinite growth has meant that humanity broadly has reached far beyond its fair share of natures resources, now imposing on the life-sustaining ecosystems on which we depend for our habitable world and natural resource base a demand beyond replacement capacity.
Plan C takes on key myths in the “hype” surrounding the potential of hydrogen fuel cells. Although electric vehicles (EV) are cheaper to produce, do in fact work and can be operated in a zero-emissions manner (with clean electric energy), hydrogen requires an extraction process that may involve combustion and emissions, and the use of costly technologies that have never been perfected. The book’s focus is on finding ways to understand how close we are to reaching an across-the-board peak in nature’s capacity to supply for our expanding consumption, and implement innovative strategies for consumption “curtailment”, i.e. conservation, in order to make the world work more sustainably.
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.
The average US household is estimated to use about 11,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year. A single installed WindCube turbine is reported to be able to produce up to 160,000 kWh per year with an average wind-speed of 15 mph. In most areas, average wind-speed is not that high, but where it is, the WindCube could be an incredibly effective method of generating affordable clean energy.
One installation could power 10 homes or run a good-sized small business’ energy flow requirements. The device captures wind that would normally pass beyond the reach of the fan-blades, concentrating the air pressure onto the central fan-blades, allowing the turbine to turn under the pressure of an amplified wind-pressure, yielding more electricity than otherwise possible from such a small device.
Pres. Barack Obama today visited the Interior Dept., noting it was once called in jest “the Department of Everything Else”, a government agency with responsibility for nearly 1/5 of the entire land area of the United States. He professed his intention to task the Interior Dept. with taking major steps to help build green infrastructure for an energy economy based on solar-voltaic and wind-turbine-generated energy.
Obama said his budget plan would devote money to the Interior Dept. to provide clean drinking water for rural areas, and build improved schools with 21st century technology for Native American communities.
“Today I signed a memorandum that will help restore the scientific process to its proper place at the heart of the endangered species act”, Obama said, noting that the role of science in protecting endangered species and conserving natural resources had been diminished by those who sought to profit from exploiting natural resources.
Obama said that “smart, sustainable” policy was the best way to carry out the stewardship required of the Interior Dept., so that natural resources found on that land, including sometimes fragile ecosystems that provide real natural services, can be protected and preserved for optimal use, far into the future.
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), whose purpose would be to create competition in the credit markets by getting credit to consumers and setting rates that banks are reluctant, at present, to set, because the credit markets and the rate of return are less favorable than the credit market standards have been leading into this crisis.
As Vikram Pandit, the head of CitiGroup, told Congress this week, the banks have been slow in adjusting to the new reality, which will likely mean tighter margins and harder work keeping everything viable. This may or may not be about human frailty, about wishful thinking, about a psychology of denial; what matters at the heart of it is that allowing those weaknesses to slow progress on corrective action is not a sound option. A federal competitive-lending bank would drive banks to rethink the present climate now, rather than later.
One of the chief areas of appeal for the FCLB concept is that the banks’ extreme caution with regard to lending is causing a downward spiral effect that makes the banks’ own troubles more like a self-fulfilling prophecy than an inevitable calamity. The banks could do a lot more business than they are doing, but they are nervous and no one wants to be the first to leap into the abyss.
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.
Details of a new global climate protocol, to replace the troubled Kyoto protocol, which does not regulate China, India or the United States, are to be discussed at Poznan and established at the Copenhagen conference, in 2009. As reports from Poznan suggest progress is moving slowly, with some nations demanding the right to delay implementation of emissions caps, there is concern the Copenhagen protocol will be weaker than needed, or will fail to be adopted.
Steve Howard, chief executive of the Climate Group, says “Expectations from Poznan are not exceptionally high, but there are some clear signals from the major players that we are moving towards a robust global framework. Poznan needs to set the stage for Copenhagen to have a realistic chance of success.” The Climate Group works to bring governments and business leaders together to hash out a viable global framework for climate policy.
The UN’s top diplomat, however, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called for a global “Green New Deal” and says that precisely because the global economic crisis threatens to distract policy-makers from much-needed action, now is the time “We must re-commit ourselves to the urgency of our cause”. One of Ban’s first trips after accepting the post of UN secretary general was to Antarctica, where scientists showed him the dire effects of global climate change and brought his attention to the threat of rising sea levels.
One major area where progress may be set back is emissions regulation. The European Union is now grappling with serious questions over how aggressively to pursue its emissions-reduction regime, which many countries are now failing to meet. Economic conditions have made it more difficult for private business to make the necessary technological improvements or fund green-friendly energy processes, which would help reduce emissions across nations and the Union more broadly.
EU ministers are now studying the problem at Brussels, with policy-makers in the US watching closely. According to The Washington Post:
At the Brussels meeting, E.U. leaders must decide whether to finalize plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2020, while also reducing energy use by 20 percent and obtaining 20 percent of their energy supply from renewable sources. Coal-dependent nations such as Poland want to delay further lowering of emissions limits under the European Union’s nearly four-year old cap-and-trade system.
There is disagreement across the EU, however, on what the economic implications of speeding a shift to clean resources will be. The disparity in policy positions or confidence about the viability of green energy initiatives is tied in part to the degree to which various nations rely on emissions-intensive industries for their economic output. The AP is reporting:
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the EU’s biggest economic power wanted an unequivocal commitment to the plan despite the economic downturn. But Italy’s premier threatened to veto the deal, and the 27 EU leaders will have a tough time finding a compromise that satisfies the often-conflicting demands from national industries.
With Poland, the nation hosting the Poznan conference, aiming to delay aggressive reductions, new global action on emissions reduction may be set back significantly, especially if the view takes root that emissions reduction is not economically viable. Green energy proponents, ecologists and some leading economists argue that such strategies are inseparable from achieving sustainable future prosperity, but skeptics and industry leaders continue to argue that such changes mean unnecessary economic strain.
The transition team for incoming US president Barack Obama has signalled that his policy on greening the economy will operate from the logic that an overhaul of the economic infrastructure will spur growth and build important resilience measures into the economy, over the long term. Ban Ki-moon’s call for a Green New Deal urges world leaders to include green economic inputs as a major segment of the massive economic stimulus plans currently being contemplated or implemented to spur economic recovery.
Climate scientists continue to sound the alarm, warning that failure to act on global climate change could lead to a severe worsening of chronic famine in poor parts of Africa. Climate-induced migration and the degradation of arable land could lead to a degeneration of food security, in Africa and across the world economy.
US president-elect Barack Obama has signalled his understanding of the intertwining of these issues. The Christian Science Monitor reports that, after meeting privately with his vice-president-elect Joe Biden and former VP and Al Gore —who won a Nobel Prize and Academy Award for his work to raise concern about the climate crisis—, Obama told reporters:
We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now, that this is a matter of urgency and national security, and it has to be dealt with in a serious way. That is what I intend my administration to do.
He also expressed his belief that “We have the opportunity now to create jobs all across this country, to re-power America, to redesign how we use energy, to think about how we are increasing efficiency, to make our economy stronger”. He has also linked the challenge of creating a clean-energy economy to national security, in part due to the need to extricate US economic prosperity from the availability of oil from authoritarian or hostile regimes.
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.
With capital vanishing, nearly $7 trillion in stock losses in just a few months, and banks refusing to lend even the tens of billions they were given precisely to lubricate the lending process, we are facing a crisis of confidence and an inability to conceptualize shared interest. The idea that self-interest motivates markets somehow developed, irresponsibly, into the idea that self-interest is more important than the functionality of market dynamics.
With ever-larger banking interests concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands, they also began to rely on mystical assumptions about the wealth-generating power of certain financial risks. The obscurity of those financial gambles, the need to believe in their power of wealth-expansion, allowed financial institutions to use questionable deals, with even more questionable projected rates of return, to paper-over already measurable under-performance, both in their own businesses and in the markets generally.
The underlying problem in the 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.
One of the major innovations that could take place —either by collaborative effort now in a time of crisis, or over time, as everyday operators within markets work to adopt the most intelligent organizational tools— would be a vast network of open information, regarding the management of investment funds, securitized loan holdings, and lending practices at a given institution.
This system need not reveal any personal private information about individual investors or bank customers, but would be made available to the public so that the maximum possible amount of information be searchable for anyone wishing to vet the claims of in-house analysts. Part of the goal would be to facilitate the proliferation of new smart-reporting economic databases, and to allow competing points of view on the most complex investment-backup schemes to have an open hearing, as based on credible information.
One of the side-effects of this sort of banking transparency network would be to reduce the motivation for wrongdoing, be it small manipulations or distortions on a grand scale, because by its nature, the system would privilege the more reliable sources of information. Banks with better reporting would be considered superior institutions, in terms of viability and therefore smart investment choices. Grandiose claims would be far less relevant, because they would be measured by their truthfulness, not their dimension.
For many reasons, this may seem like pie in the sky; for one: we don’t know what sort of computing technology could do the work necessary to parse such large volumes of information in a timely fashion. But computer speeds are accelerating rapidly, with the Roadrunner super-computer at Los Alamos achieving petaflop speeds —one thousand trillion calculations per second— and nano-chemical computing on the horizon, potentially magnifying the processing power of traditional microprocessors by thousands or even millions of times.
And, that’s still without touching on the controversial topic of quantum computing, in which everyday substances —like 12 ounces of coffee— can be turned into massive computational neural nets capable of working out problems that require trillions of calculations instantly. The complications there are too many to go into at present, and there is no reliable quantum computer that can be applied to something with so many legal implications as a banking system, at the moment, but the work is ongoing.
Cloud computing may be the first major speed-related improvement that can allow the beginnings of a true banking transparency network. This is a major undertaking, and will require a daunting philosophical shift for many in the financial industry, but armed with computers working at thousands of times today’s computers’ top speeds, spread out over a dispersed cloud-computing network, it would be possible to optimize processing speed, memory allocation, memory recall, informational back-up, time-keeping and matrix cross-referencing.
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.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s resulted from a misguided atomized over-exploitation of arable land. Ancient Sumerian civilization collapsed entirely because excesses of irrigation coupled with poor planning raised soil salinity to levels toxic to agriculture. At the end of the 20th century, global industrial activity had come to far outstrip the available resources feeding into it, and our global economy had come to depend on increasing demand and increasing output to feed unsustainable rates of increasing growth, across the planet.
Something had to give. The mathematics of the whole big picture had come to rest on the assumption that already over-stressed basic resources could expand along with economic expansion. They could not. We may now be seeing just the beginning of this realignment of economic expectations, forced by circumstance.
As major resource scarcity spreads, with China losing ever more arable land to encroaching northwestern deserts and road building in the industrial east, as China’s exploding demand for petroleum, steel, copper, water, meat and grains, put pressure on world markets and pushes the cost of basic goods like food staples ever higher across the world, as the unsustainable demand for fuel moves the US corn belt to shift to cropping for ethanol —as much as 40% of world corn exports are from Iowa, which now devotes 18% of harvest to bio-ethanol—, we are experiencing the natural results of an economy that hinges on hyper-exploitation of resources. The correction, when fully upon us, may yet be far more severe than the 2008 credit-freeze crisis.
Hyper-exploitation is a doctrine: it underpins public policy, government spending, security policy and the philosophical arguments for and against deregulation and the trickle-down theory of economic growth as related to tax policy. It requires that we believe in unstated, unproven modes of natural replenishment; it is a proposition that all things can be tapped, moved, transformed and spent, infinitely, because somehow, the market will set all the right limits and excesses will never be so severe as to ignore the laws of nature.
It is, for this reason, dangerous, because it not only is a doctrine that requires us to use more of the vital resources we require than can be replaced at sustainable levels, it moves us deeper into the vice of living on borrowed time. The result is that we must periodically learn the lesson that borrowed time cannot be financed, that we must pay the full price when it comes due, and our unprecedented resource depletion will leave us, quite simply, without the level of supply required to sustain our standard of living.
Already, wealthy governments are moving to take over cropland in poor countries in order to shore up their own food supplies, as the food security crisis spreads throughout the world, affecting even the wealthiest economies. The fear is that this over-consumption now extending to land use in poor foreign states may lead to a wave of mass starvation throughout the developing world, sparking conflicts and threatening the integrity of the international system as such.
According to the Guardian’s Julian Borger:
“In the context of arable land sales, this is unprecedented,” Atkin said. “We’re used to seeing 100,000-hectare sales. This is more than 10 times as much.”
At a food security summit in Rome, in June, there was agreement to channel more investment and development aid to African farmers to help them respond to higher prices by producing more. But governments and corporations in some cash-rich but land-poor states, mostly in the Middle East, have opted not to wait for world markets to respond and are trying to guarantee their own long-term access to food by buying up land in poorer countries.
India and Bangladesh are constantly disputing river water resources that both countries depend on for basic sustenance for tens of millions of people. Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt are gripped by a struggle over control of the Nile’s water, with the river running dry at the Nile delta on the Mediterranean during some seasons. The Colorado River in the US has failed to reach the sea and is seeing its flow through the Grand Canyon significantly reduced, as states in the Colorado River Basin dispute claims on the river’s water.
Hyper-exploitation even extends to the use of natural resources like water as dumping grounds. The level of toxic chemicals and plastic polymer byproducts now found in ocean water the world over has reached alarming levels, threatening vast ecosystems and undermining the health of human beings and wildlife in most of the world. Drinking water across the US was found to be contaminated by high levels of pharmaceuticals earlier this year, raising the specter of as yet unknown potential harm to public health, over the long term.
High levels of contaminant emissions or toxic dumping are an abusive use of natural resources we often overlook —like air, land, water and forest cover— in our quest for combustible fuels, industrial-scale production and economies of scale we hope will reduce costs, even if they also increase the risk to our long-term economic and physical health and wellbeing. We are now facing a structural economic crisis, which requires us to reformulate and rebuild our economic model, at the most basic levels, a process which will be more or less painful, depending on how seriously we commit to getting it done and done right.
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Cafe Sentido The Hot Spring