Future Imperative

The Amazon Introduction to Future Imperative: Power to the People

2011-07-23T13:36:00.004-04:00

This book could begin in any number of ways, but let’s start with what the world needs – an inexhaustible, renewable source of clean fuel, food, fertilizer and electricity, that actually pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, can be “scaled up” to the industrial level, “scaled down” for remote villagers with very limited means, and is completely open source… belonging unconditionally to everyone. Do you want to improve on it and put those modifications into open source as well? Do you want to develop a proprietary technology that builds on this one? Go for it!

Later we can discuss why the above features are important, but for now let’s lay out the invention in question. Rest assured what follows uses several very simple long-established techniques, that just happen, in this case, to be working together to give us what we need.

The tools in question boil down to gravity, photosynthesis, air pressure, bacterial action, and sunlight. There’s a solar-concentration option for larger operations, and some charcoal burning if you want to lock up more carbon in the soil. But those first five resources are widely available.

Let us address some of the key objections experienced renewable-energy hands may instinctively have to the system we are about to discuss. They are important – in particular, because each one is a strength of this design, as opposed to a weakness.

First let’s list, and then we’ll go over each in turn as we describe the invention proper.

Is the real EROEI – the Energy Return On Energy Invested – positive? In other words, is the energy gained after the process of finding, extracting or manufacturing, refining and transporting it to market a net positive, especially if you count the energy required to make all the machinery and infrastructure in your system, and everything required to replace its parts and keep it in good repair?

Yes, and dramatically so. That’s one of the advantages of getting the natural elements of the system to do virtually all the work. And of having a system that can be built on the small to moderate scale with little more than scrap.

If there’s biomass involved, isn’t your system inherently limited by the amount you can find and transport to it?

Technically yes, but not if you’re creating even more biomass on site.

Aha! But how much can you realistically produce on site, or right around it?

Absolutely ludicrous amounts, especially at the industrial scale. Any biomass that doubles itself even once in a day, much less multiple times, is growing at a rate adequate for your needs. The theoretical, exponential daily increase in the feedstock in question is naturally limited by the inputs fundamental to its production – which is why our ability to supply those, essentially for free, at a phenomenal scale is so critical. That factor is why this particular innovation is a turning point with regards to the production of food, fuel and organic fertilizer, and a primary reason why it can absorb so much carbon out of our ecosystem.

Does this solution render everyone else’s work in, say, conservation or renewable energy pointless?

Not at all. In fact, quite a few techniques become even more powerful when joined to this open-source method. We’ll get to those as they come up, but having experience in anything from concentrated solar to waste treatment to algae harvesting to aquaponics would not only be useful in using this system but also in developing your own open-source or proprietary applications. If you are running a business, such advantages may give you a considerable edge in what has just become a vastly larger market for your skills.

Will this push conventional farmers out of business?

The kind of food produced directly, while eaten extensively in some parts of the world, will more likely be used as feed, feedstock or fertilizer and thus contribute to our food chain slightly less directly than if we ate all of it ourselves. Then again, given how much food, fuel and fertilizer are consumed by virtually all forms of agriculture, that isn't much of a drawback. Rather, it's something we need. And for farmers, this will reduce the cost of key resources needed for their work.

Will a few large corporations simply move in and dominate this field, pushing out smaller competitors?

While large organizations could easily set up major operations producing methane, fertilizer and other products, suppliers are apt to be much more of a patchwork presence, even in instances where intrepid companies carve multiple, highly profitable niches. Why? Two reasons. Natural gas has many benefits, but its greatest “drawback” is that it is both hard and dangerous to transport. As a gas, it can be moved around within a city or other locality, but liquefied natural gas is both tricky to process and very perilous if detonated, and pipelines have a distressing tendency to leak, if they even exist in a region in the first place. Further, large organizations with the greatest reason to generate huge quantities of extremely cheap methane are those who have a guaranteed market that directly benefits from very low costs, themselves. Power plants, some foundries, and other manufacturers are obvious candidates. These groups may produce some excess methane for the local market, and other associated products, particularly fertilizer. But for the most part, it will be other, higher-value products they ship to distant markets, if anything. Closer to home, electricity will be a more mobile resource, within the limits of the regional or national grid.

Process Overview

The technique for doing all this is simple, though it involves several elements, which we shall overview before going into greater detail on each one.

Biogas digesters are a method for reducing organic waste into methane, and can be used to turn animal manure into natural gas, or as a productive part of a city’s sewage-treatment system. Various types of digesters exist, but this book is primarily concerned with a version that combines organic waste, usually manure, with water in a slurry in which materials break down as they slowly flow through the system. In theory, up to 75% of organic waste being treated can be reduced to gas, roughly 40% of which is carbon dioxide while 60% becomes methane. Now, while this would yield up 45% of an organic mass as methane (and another 30% as CO2), getting close to the theoretical limits in a reasonable period of time is a bit more complicated, and most industrial efforts go through considerable effort to keep the slurry at the ideal temperature for the bacterial action involved, and to keep it periodically stirred up so that organisms can feed and break down organics more efficiently. Ironically, given the degree to which this system recycles all of its elements, maximizing gas production each time your organics pass through this digester will probably be one of your lowest priorities, for reasons discussed below.

As they stand, biogas digesters have many virtues, especially when you have large quantities of relatively safe organic waste that is easily reduced to gas and a remnant mass of fertilizer. But they are limited by the amount of usable biomass available.

Enter a potential solution many have explored in different ways – algae. Under ordinary circumstances, algae reproduces very quickly. For example, “Chlorella double in cell count every 8 hours or less if they have adequate nutrients and light, for pond temperatures in the range 20-35 °C.” As most forms are autotrophic, those varieties use photosynthesis to combine CO2 and water and fix nitrogen without demanding complex organic molecules as a food source. Most also do not require any kind of soil, fertile or otherwise. But their conventional pace of reproduction, while impressive, is less than what we would like, as is the density of the algae we would normally be harvesting.

Yet there are obvious ways to improve algae’s growth rates. Other land-based crops have been grown very successfully and at greatly enhanced rates in water, using aquaponics. Certain plants thrive under the aquaponic technique of suffusing the water around their roots with nutrients, while keeping them under light of greater-than-normal intensity for a period exceeding normal daylight hours, if not continuously. Ironically, while sustained lighting will prove helpful, determining ideal light intensity may actually be counter-intuitive. Research by Sorokin and Krauss on five varieties of algae found that lighting less than that of full, direct sunlight was most productive on their samples growing in a medium which was set in a water bath – with chlorella pyrenoidosa doubling just over 8 times in a day at 39 degrees Centigrade with illuminations ranging from roughly 1,000 to 4,000 foot-candles. Whether or not this full rate of growth can be achieved in normal water, or even water treated with our byproduct nitrates as described further on, the information that some varieties may in fact do much better in less than direct sunlight is very promising for operations taking place in less sunny parts of the world, and for any location dealing with inevitable cloud cover and so forth. Ultimately, you will want to test whatever varieties you have available to see which ones operate best under local conditions. Someone in a desert may want algae which makes fuller use of very intense sunlight, but an operation in temperate zones or under normally cloudy weather may be very happy with a species which favors dimmer conditions. Whatever your chosen crop, you will want an energy-efficient means to expose great masses of algae to roughly their ideal illumination.

The solutions here seem to present themselves. First, simply increase the time in which your algae is exposed to its ideal illumination, and the volume of algae thus exposed. Remember, normal algae in a pond or pool, for all its productivity, is limited not only to its daily allotment of sunlight, but by how much of the algae mass can be fully exposed to it. But what would happen if your algae were in a tank with at least two transparent walls on the sides facing the east-west daily path of the Sun? And what would happen if you used inexpensive mirrors, such as reflective mylar, to shine that light not only into the top of your tank but, by way of these walls, throughout it? Or if you “backscattered” direct or reflected sunlight using a bright white or moderately reflective surface, such the bottom of your tank or sheets of material (such as aluminum flashing) beside it? This backscatter can let you direct lesser or greater intensities of light onto that “lesser,” “imperfect” reflective surface, giving you a greater ability to control the exact luminosity. You can therefore shade a tank from harsh, direct sunlight while leaving your incoherent reflectors partially or fully unshaded, thus providing adjustable lighting. Reflectors around the tank could kick in, either manually or automatically, during substantially dimmer daylight conditions.

Energy-efficient LED bulbs, especially red and blue bulbs such as are produced cheaply for Christmas trees, would enable even a modest operation to sustain this light during the darkest days or nighttime hours, if it were so inclined. Some aquaponics practitioners have found that artificial red and blue light seems to be more effective than normal full-spectrum light. If this proves to be the case with algae, filtering sunlight into those wavelengths might an efficient way to blunt the full intensity of the Sun while allowing only the most useful light through. But there is no data on whether a normal filtering material could do this properly or how the algae would respond. Either way, the energy efficiency of simply using existing sunlight, especially in sunny regions, is hard to beat. Still, more than a few large operations are apt to have excess electricity, especially at night, a problem still endemic to most grid-supplying power plants. Hence, LEDs, at least, will be a viable option for many, if not all producers.

Some will argue about just how efficient algae are in terms of the percentage of sunlight they convert to useful energy in photosynthesis. This question is interesting, but for our purposes, somewhat beside the point. Our real concern is how much of the solar energy that falls in a particular area we can use in this process. When dealing not with a single cell or single layer of cells, but an entire, three-dimensional mass of algae more or less floating in a tank of water, you have to realize that a beam of light passing through one thin layer of organisms travels on only slightly occluded to the next. Which is why we are more concerned about not overloading exposed algae with too much light, and surrounding any mass we are nurturing with a more ambient light at an intensity it can make the most use of. In most brightly lit regions, the full light of day will actually be more energy than this process can really make use of, except in exceptionally optimized and high-density operations.

Now, you might reason that, even if you could fully illumine all the algae in your tank, for as long as possible, there is only so much CO2 available in the air to convert, much less in the water, and if you are not adding nitrates, the richest source of nitrogen will be the air as well. Even if you were effectively growing algae in three dimensions, would effective limits to these inputs limit growth in the depths of your tank as well?

They would, if we were only working with the CO2 present in the atmosphere, and only the gases available at the top of the tank. But we aren’t.

Remember that your biogas digester has two primary gaseous products – CO2, and methane, which we burn, and which converts to water vapor and CO2 in turn. I suspect that in many less advanced biogas systems, the methane and CO2 often mingle significantly despite their different density. For our purposes, it does not matter if there is some dilution of the methane we burn on site, as we will be “sequestering” all the carbon produced by turning it into our feedstock – whether for the digester, as actual food, or as fertilizer. Algae, you see, is eaten in many parts of the world, though more heavily in the Far East, and most commonly in forms such as kelp. Direct production of food is one option for this system, but many algae varieties best able to absorb CO2 may work best as the feedstock for our biogas digester and as organic fertilizer (either as a dead mass or as the solid remnant left after being processed the digester). In all likelihood, biogas methane and fertilizer will be the dominant, basic products of this system.

For sequestration, we can bubble carbon dioxide and some ordinary air into water as very small bubbles, as can be created through air pressure in submerged “leaky hoses” and other, more advanced methods. Ideally we will dissolve some of this CO2 into the water going into the algae tanks ahead of time, without reaching a concentration that becomes acidic. As with many aspects of this system, the larger your production becomes, the more effort you will have to make to keep everything in balance. A huge, rapidly growing algae biomass may require more and more carbon, but you can only pre-load so much, and you can only bubble in so much at a time to be sure that you do not overwhelm the algae’s capacity and risk acidifying the water.

But the best form algae can take for the sake of raw production is probably a loose mass, essentially a slimy cloud of floating, photosynthesizing life, preferably made of many very small, discrete units, if not individual cells. Micro-bubbles caught in this mass can slowly filter up through it, being used by each algae in turn, which being small and semi-independent will have that much greater surface area to be exposed to the carbon dioxide, nitrogen, water and sunlight. Similarly, you can make sure the tiny bubbles entering your water encounter a barrier that forces them to move a great deal as they rise, such as a slightly tilted sheet along which they slide to the highest edge, from which they spill over and rise to… the next sheet, tilted in the opposite direction. You could have several of these, folded together a bit like a deck of cards frozen in mid-shuffle. Alternatively, you could pass your bubbles through a mesh such as a screen or mass of fibers which helps to break them up further as well. Or you could possibly do both. And of course, considerable CO2 will already be dissolved into the water flowing into the algae tanks of operations burning significant methane on site, as we will discuss further below.

But remember, this system can be optimized in terms of photosynthesis by doing more than extending the length of its daily exposure to sunlight. Now, of course, there is no chart of how much light all your various, local varieties of algae can use at various temperatures, especially when given full access to all of the CO2, nitrogen and water they may need to use with it. Obviously, you will eventually want to test these properties, especially if you are moving beyond those varieties about which there is some established information (such as those tested by Sorokin and Krauss). The simple technique would be to begin by using the best known, optimal luminosity for extended periods if not all day long, and then to slowly vary each critical input – light, CO2 and any nitrates you choose to add (the system can produce and recycle these in excess) – and to note at what point you seem to have maximized your productivity. As you appear to reach practical limits, be sure to keep track of how much CO2 and even air (mostly nitrogen) that you are using, and then vary those amounts to see if your algae mass needs more (or less) of those resources rather than having reached the limit of how much light it can employ. Also be aware that other factors can affect a mass’ ability to process sunlight, such as becoming so heavy and thick that the central core is more heavily shaded, and so forth. Regular harvesting of excessive growth should limit such problems.

Some who have noticed algae blooms of chlorella in the presence of fertilizer may wonder if, say, nitrates should be added as an accelerant in the process and, if so, whether truly rapid increases in your supply of algae are sustainable without correspondingly significant supplies of fertilizers. We should remember, therefore, that the biogas digester digesting the algae produced will only convert a maximum of 75% of the organic mass fed in into gas. The “solid” remainder is, in fact, a fertilizer. Again, if you add any of this mass to your algae tanks, you will want to be very judicious in how much you add, and in confirming this digester fertilizer is sufficiently safe in whatever form you use it. Ideally, you will want professionals who can vouch for either the safety of any fertilizer going into your algae tanks – even if only into tanks used exclusively for digester feedstock – or who can vouch for the system you consistently use to treat that material. (A standard feature of these systems, as we shall see, is the ability to reduce this remnant to charcoal, even in most technologically-limited environments, so a reasonable degree of sterilization should be readily available.) You should also watch each variety of algae you are working with to see how it responds. As chlorella is apparently apt to create a bloom in the presence of only small amounts of fertilizer, excessive use may prove counterproductive, more so with some algae than others.

But we should also remember that the “normal” pace of algae growth can be extremely impressive. The earlier cited figure, that chlorella can double within eight hours or less given proper conditions, is no small detail. Three doublings in a 24-hour period is in fact a tremendous expansion. Remember that a mere two doublings per day will, in five days, give you ten doublings. How much is that? 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024. In other words, if you have “the room” in terms of space and resources, ten doublings means slightly more than a 1,000-fold increase in, say, five days. In ten, at that pace, you would have an over 1,000,000-fold increase. Obviously you will reach limits on all of this, but your key inputs are mainly water and sunlight, with CO2 and nitrogen being easily added and easily recycled from the most obvious uses of the algae you are producing. And the water will, to a degree, be recycling as well. You will reach limits on space, but depending on your situation – particularly in the case of certain large organizations and governments – there are some very impressive options available to you, even if you want to ramp up a massive operation quickly. As we shall see. But maintaining balance in all of this will, of course, be a key concern the faster you put these forces into motion.

Now you might ask, given water’s capacity to store heat and to convert light into heat, how hot your water will get if you are both concentrating sunlight and venting the exhaust of burning methane into your tanks. Clearly this would be an issue, but there are several factors that will help keep your tanks viable, even in warmer climates, though obviously environmental conditions may complicate the situation.

The first and most obvious step is to keep your water from getting too hot in the first place. One step with clear benefits is to sequester your CO2/water vapor exhaust from methane combustion in a separate tank where it can cool – preferably by bubbling the gas as often as practical through water waiting to enter your main algae tanks, where it can dissolve. As with your algae tanks, you can break these CO2 bubbles up as they enter the water so that they hopefully dissolve a bit more efficiently. Remember, within limits, carbon saturated water will actually transfer the CO2 more effectively to your algae. As with many inputs in this system, you simply have to avoid overdoing it – the water will eventually turn acidic if carbon is constantly added and rarely removed. Keep an eye on the situation. If you can not measure the presence of carbon (as most remote villagers can not) practice moderation, spread out your distributed carbon, and see how your algae does as you change each factor in turn. If you can measure this input, then – as with sunlight, nitrates and phosphates – we will shortly discuss methods for automating these sensors and your system’s reaction to them.

The second most obvious method is to circulate and refresh your water – removing excessively hot liquid and replacing it using a much cooler source. You could simply include an overflow pipe at the top of your tank at roughly the water level you want to maintain. Warm water will spill out on this side to be stored or used in other parts of your system as you choose. Meanwhile, on the other side of the tank, allow cool water to flow in, for example from just above the water level. Obviously, in very large tanks, you may have more than one inflow pipe and more than one overflow pipe. A “caveat” to the overflow pipe method is that some forms of free-floating algae will rise to the surface of your tank water and then want to flow out through your pipe. But as you will discover as we discuss conventional biogas digesters, the normal “slurry” is a 4-to-1 water-to-manure mix. If you are using an algae easily “skimmed” off the top, you may not want to filter it out, but rather position a long, flat opening to take in a high algae-to-water concentration, and use this liquid as your slurry water, thus minimizing labor, complexity and processing. (Setting this overflow pipe at 45 degrees and in a corner, or anywhere else that might serve as a crude funnel may prove useful with masses apt to get tangled upon the edges of a normal opening, especially if your algae is slowly drifting out of the tank. Apertures that are large as well as flat may prove advisable as well.) If you find you still have too much water, you can simply flow that water/algae mix into a flat, shallow evaporation “tank,” covered by glass, and use sunlight, concentrated or not, to vaporize as much water as necessary. A dark bottom to this segment will help, but if you have decent sunlight and a lot of reflective material around for concentrated solar, reducing the water content should be simple. If you have a lot of excess water and a great deal of algae production going on at night, you may want to evaporate an extra measure of liquid during the day to offset what you are not doing at night. Alternatively, you may have other sources of heat on site, such as any natural gas being burned, which may even be able to handle this process as a side-effect of the excess heat they are generating. Fortunately the digester will probably prove more adaptable to changes in temperature, both because most biogas systems will be dug into the ground (which naturally stabilizes the temperature at a lower level), and because there are other means of regulating their internal heat, to be discussed further on.

Now, to keep water cool as efficiently as possible, the best method for both industrial scale operations and smaller, village-level projects is to simply have an underground water tank, using the ambient temperature of the Earth to cool your water (a bit over 50 degrees Fahrenheit in most of America, as an example). If you can arrange it, putting a shaded, underground tank in a nearby hill and then flowing water down using gravity is particularly efficient for this aspect of the operation. Further, methane is notably lighter than air, so you could conceivably allow your biogas to flow up to an uphill tank, an advantage if you are planning to burn the gas beside that water and then filter your CO2 and water-vapor exhaust through it. On the other hand, in terms of collecting water for your overall system, other locations may prove more practical, even if you have a hillside handy.

Fortunately, there are other options. For the village-level operation, we will discuss various alternative water pumping options shortly. But in terms of water cooling, remember that not only can you shade your tank and bury your tank, but you can reduce ambient temperature around your site by a number of means, the most obvious of which is to alter the amount of sunlight absorbed everywhere other than your algae tanks and any other key, solar-driven processes. Aside from any convenient shade you may have which does not interfere with your algae’s lighting or the operation of your mirrors, you also have the very simple option of painting rooftops, asphalt roads and other dark inanimate infrastructure white, thereby reflecting considerable sunlight and helping to break down your local “heat-island effect.” This may seem trivial, but remember that simply using passive means to reduce your site’s temperature by several degrees during hot months of the year will help considerably in keeping everything cool, while using much less energy.

And, of course, there are various refrigeration, air-conditioning and water-cooling systems powered by natural gas available – a power source you will obviously have in considerable supply, though one which you should make a point of conserving for practical reasons, as well as on principle.

For the water used in your system, collected rainwater and, for the biogas digester in particular, greywater should prove adequate. Care in recycling usable water will always be useful, for numerous reasons. Ironically, collecting water in urban areas, given the number of rooftops available and the greywater accessible, may prove easier than anywhere other than major freshwater sources such as lakes and large rivers. Rainwater collected from rooftops and stored in rain barrels can also be stored up at higher stories and use gravity to help pump that water supply. But large reservoirs and natural bodies of water may be the most realistic alternative for remote, low-tech rural systems, though we will eventually discuss some passive desalination techniques for seaside operations and ways of moving large quantities of water without pumps in case your operation is far away from your nearest large freshwater source. And, obviously, we will be recycling water as well as creating it in the exhaust of any methane burned on site.

Now finally, your biogas digester will be producing two main components – gas, and the solid remnant of the organics broken down within it. The gas mainly consists of CO2 and methane. Nitrous oxide, another common greenhouse gas produce by organic decay, is volatile and unless separated out deliberately for sale, will likely burn up with the methane or break down when dissolved when cycled back into the algae tanks with the CO2.

The solid remnant, however, is normally used as a kind of fertilizer. Of course, you may recycle some of this material back into your system to spur algae growth, but in all likelihood you will at some point have an excess supply you want to deal with. Could you use the raw remnant directly as fertilizer? Well, so long as you abide by any regulations and there is nothing of health concern in the material, yes. But as there is presently a serious concern regarding the impact of human-released carbon on the climate, let us consider a form less apt to break down into greenhouse gases once put in the ground or spread over it.

Dr. James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, has suggested reducing agricultural waste to charcoal before using it as fertilizer. The operation described above, given its capacity to produce huge amounts of fertilizer as a by-product of its main work, is an obvious candidate for such a procedure. Charcoal making has been around for a very long time, and amounts to a low-oxygen burn which slowly reduces the material in question. The temperatures do not have to be terribly hot, and if you have a lot of unused solar-concentration material on site during bright, sunny days, you can concentrate light on the steel barrel or tank you are using for charcoal making. Anyone using concentrated solar to squeeze out more free energy from the Sun in very dim conditions will probably have at least some unused reflectors during full sunlight, given that you will not be using all the light available for your algae production anyway.

Operations that are burning methane on site may also be able to tap that excess heat as well, but if you can not do so in an absolutely safe fashion, do not bother. You will have plenty of energy available in most climates if you plan your charcoal burning carefully and make full use of the free energy on hand and, failing that, you can use your spare methane directly as a fuel. Still, technically adept and creative operations will want to make use of all of their resources rather than wasting them, especially since raw heat is one factor you will want to contain in any industrial-scale project.

We will discuss a number of unusual ways the above system could be brought online, especially in areas with very limited resources. But governments and companies dealing economic crises and other challenges might wonder how they could ramp up this kind of production on short notice, given the time it would take to build even this relatively simple system on a very large scale. They should remember that many elements of this design may already be in place and near at hand.

A Brief Disclaimer

The material in this book is for informational purposes only. Please seek appropriate technical, legal, financial and/or medical advice as appropriate before attempting to use any of the concepts discussed herein. Future Imperative is about sharing ideas and possibilities rather than prescribing any specific plan of action. The author expressly disclaims responsibility for any adverse effects that may result from the use or application of the information contained in this book.

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The above piece is the partial introduction to Future Imperative: Power to the People that you can also read for free on Amazon, as well as the disclaimer. This part of the book is here only because many readers may not have the free program to read Kindle ebooks on their Mac or PC, and because you can get a good sense of the invention from this section, even if you don't get or can't afford the book.

NASA Video -- World

2011-07-09T16:26:00.001-04:00

"Be careful what you wish for... History starts now."

Bitcoins: The World's First Decentralized, Digital Currency

2011-06-07T02:19:00.000-04:00

Bitcoins are a fascinating foray into an alternative, decentralized, online economy. I don't know that they will become a major force in the world economy, but for what they are, they certainly seem viable. I suppose the next step would be making Bitcoins available on your smartphone, so that you could spend them at a brick & mortar (real-world) store instead of just at online storefronts. But I suspect such an app will not be long in coming...

Fukushima Daiichi -- "We Nearly Lost Northern Japan"

2011-06-07T01:10:00.000-04:00

Michio Kaku (physicist and co-creator of modern superstring theory) says that according to recent government revelations, we now know Fukushima Daiichi experienced a 100% simultaneous meltdown of three of the site's six reactors. The only thing that saved Japan from complete disaster was the government overriding TEPCO and ordering the utility to run seawater into the plant, a last-ditch effort which absorbed the excess heat and prevented the cores from exploding outright.

If the seawater had not worked, Dr. Kaku remarks, we would have had 3 simultaneous Chernobyls, and northern Japan would no longer be habitable.

Indian Whistleblower Website Exposes and Stamps Out Corruption

2011-06-06T02:47:00.000-04:00

The BBC is reporting on IPaidABribe.Com, an Indian website which allows visitors to report on bribes they have been forced to pay by local officials. The pressure this site has brought to bear has already been notably effective in the State Transport Department of Karnataka, where the commissioner in charge was able to use the reports to gather support in his office for an anti-corruption drive.

Text reports and uploaded videos enable individual Indians who want their voices heard on what is reportedly one of the most vexing aspects of life in their country.

Readers of this blog may remember a February article on Future Imperative entitled "How Facebook and Cell Phones Can Stop Street Crime and Corruption in Egypt, and Everywhere Else...," which discussed how some simple cell-phone photos and an out-of-country website could enable citizens to report crimes even in countries which lack India's civil rights and longstanding democracy.

"Hackers" Gather Worldwide to Fight Climate Change

2011-06-06T02:10:00.002-04:00

Random Hacks of Kindness, a grassroots effort of problem solvers looking to find powerful-yet-inexpensive solutions to major problems, is now underway worldwide. Originally brought together in 2009 by the combined resources of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank, RHoK draws from a very deep pool of talent beyond those founding organizations.

"RHoK works by bringing together experts in development and volunteers with a broad set of skills in software development and design. The goal is to produce practical open source solutions to development problems." CNN covers the latest gatherings here.

The open-source movement is best known for its work in assembling major software projects (such as Linux). But open-source advocates have become increasingly involved in trying to solve practical, real-world problems beyond the field of software alone -- for example, the OpenFarmTech project, which strives to put open-source designs for all major farm and manufacturing devices into the public's hands, so that "the means of production" can be owned by all.

Global Village Construction Set in 2 Minutes from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

Such efforts can seem ambitious, but such is the power of innovative thinking and the leveraging of minds from around the world that many global problems can be addressed by these conferences. Local problems, on the other hand, are proving to be very well understood by people committed to dealing with them in those locations, and hence workable solutions emerge to deal with each region's specific, relevant problems. And given the skills mobilized at each assemblage to target these issues, solutions can not only be found, but put into practice.

Here are a couple of brief videos showing some of the problems targeted by local Random Hacks of Kindness projects in Philadelphia and Toronto.

RHoK Philadelphia...

RHoK Toronto...

More videos can be found at RHoK's site.

Global Warming Threatens Many Region's Agricultural Viability

2011-06-05T02:06:00.000-04:00

Rising global temperatures imperils long-term food production not only in southern Asia and Africa, but within two generations, China and Latin America as well. Meanwhile, substantial ocean acidification could threaten oceanic aquaculture, especially in sensitive species.

Of course, the series of agricultural disasters which have hit the world in the last 15 months have already been epic in their regional impacts. As I have said in the recent past...

"The droughts in Russia, the flooding in Pakistan, the drought in western Australia and the floods in eastern Australia, the desertification of cropland in China, the collapse of the "fossil" water tables in India... combined with more minor events, such as the Midwestern ice storm affecting winter wheat in the U.S., and major damage to vegetables in Mexico and southern China, these suggest a planet whose agriculture is already in crisis. In many less wealthy nations, people normally spend up to half of their income on food, and food prices have risen dramatically in the last year."
A number of the "potential, long-term impacts" of climate change already seem to be upon us, whether agricultural disruptions or wildly unpredictable and often dangerous weather. As individual harvests are destroyed on a national basis, and events such as half-mile-wide tornadoes hammer American towns, perhaps we should remember that according to the scientific community, climate change has still barely made an impact compared to the effects that a global heat-up of another degree or two would create.

Given how harsh these -- relatively mild -- events have been so far, perhaps we should change our path before we can find out fierce nature can be when she means business?

The World Bank and the World's 40 Largest Cities Reach Climate Deal

2011-06-05T01:41:00.000-04:00

The World Bank has reached an agreement with the C40 Group (the mayors of the world's 40 largest cities) to help finance their efforts to adapt to climate change. These cities, which represent 12% of global human greenhouse emissions, would be able to more easily access the up to $6.4 billion in funds the Bank is making available for climate relief.

Bank President Robert Zoellick suggests that private initiatives could increase that number up to $50 billion.

This agreement is an important one. $100 million, much less $1 billion, well spent can make a tremendous difference in places like Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro or Mexico City. But in terms of getting the ball rolling on critical projects -- such as breaking the "heat island" effect raising temperatures in all major urban areas, using methods as simple as planting trees or painting rooftops or road asphalt white -- simply getting the money flowing to meaningful operations can make all the difference, especially in the present economic climate.

Further, these cities are seen as leaders in their countries, and when major changes take place in their environs, particularly changes for the better, people take notice. Their ability to lead by example can not be underestimated.

Obama, Osama, and the Deeper Strategy -- Part II

2011-05-24T02:14:00.000-04:00

In my last article on the intelligence coup scored against the al Qaeda network, I pointed out that many of its members could be turned into de facto agents and informants for the United States... without their cooperation or even their knowledge. The U.S. Government's ability simply to track the movements and actions of individuals is incredibly formidable -- assuming its intelligence and law-enforcement organizations know who to track and where to find them.

Obviously, the intel in that 2.7 terabytes of data is probably vast and incredibly significant, giving American forces an overabundance of potential surveillance targets. But the technology already available for tracking "persons of interest" has improved dramatically, as can be seen in this Wired article.

I should point out that the linked article only covers a handful of potential ways to track an individual. A host of other methods exist, ranging from traditional techniques to other cutting-edge options not normally associated with police or spy work.

Rest assured, the people tracking al Qaeda are familiar with most if not all of these tools, and if they are not using all of them... it is only because too much of the network is folding up (or becoming utterly compromised) too fast.

Obama, Osama, and the Deeper Strategy

2011-05-09T02:16:00.000-04:00

As the death of Osama bin Laden sinks in around the world, attention has focused on the 2.7 terabytes of data recovered in the assault. One terabyte being roughly 2,000 hours worth of video or 220 million pages of text, these de facto archives seem significant.

Although analysts have remarked on the value this intelligence could represent, even given some duplication of files and redundant material, outside observers may have made some inaccurate assumptions about how valuable these records really are.

While normally information about cells, agents, leadership and couriers would normally be incredibly important, especially on this scale, there is another factor in play beside which these details, while still critical, seem to pale.

This would be... the donor list.

While al Qaeda may not have maintained a single record of its major contributors, fundraisers and those entrusted to keep and transfer its funds, they are very likely referenced in an archive of this scale. On the face of it, this information would seem to be just one more useful set of clues. On further examination, however, it may well become the crux of President Obama's strategy to shift from a primarily military hunt of al Qaeda to an intelligence and law-enforcement-driven campaign.

When you begin to analyze the movement of al Qaeda funds, especially the money that moves by conventional channels (and quite a bit undoubtedly does, if not directly to its recipients, then to people they pay off, to couriers, to other people in the financial network), you will begin to see some fascinating and telling patterns. If three supporters all send money to a particular recipient over time, and you notice four other individuals making sizable transfers to the same person or organization over time, you realize you may be looking at a person of interest. But when you have enough information to collect bank records for hundreds if not thousands of people, you can run algorithms and pick up a great many patterns very, very fast.

What does this do, in the end?

Ah, that's the fascinating part. Remember that all of this activity is happening in the context of popular democratic revolutions in the Middle East, and that many of the people who have supported al Qaeda over the last 25 years may not be fanatics at all. Remember, their tactics and ostensible goals have changed considerably over the last quarter century.

So, you have a lot of people with lives and jobs and a great deal to lose, now being revealed at incredible speed to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement. You will find some ardent supporters in this group, and the less passionate who keep silent for any number of reasons -- lingering loyalty, fear of reprisal, social pressure, or simply a desire to put all this behind them. But if their leader is gone, if the ideological reasons for al Qaeda's shadow war are patently dissolving, and if these people see the net closing around them... what then?

That question is complicated by the fact that more people besides al Qaeda's casual donors and trusted money men will be asking it. Bin Laden's records are likely extensive enough to reference critical government contacts in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere... people who will realize they are at risk, and who can point to others in return. Indeed, just about every Qaeda ally, leader, lender or operative "knows people," and has intelligence to impart, if only to confirm other data.

Yet the sheer scale involved -- the number of Qaeda supporters, contacts and allies exposed -- is so vast that the U.S. and its friends will inevitably prioritize. And who, then, would law enforcement and intelligence be apt to seize last? Regional or cell leaders trying to slip away in the night? Fanatical killers with a death wish and nothing to lose? Or...

Financiers unlikely to strike personally, and whose primary service to the network, transferring money, might actually be more revealing and valuable to American observers than their immediate arrest, especially if the money -- physical or virtual -- could be tracked by any number of means? Especially if the money could be tracked for great distances, or through multiple transfers?

Ah, you might say, but won't the network eventually realize this fact?

Yes, but the problem is that everyone is now suspect. Their most loyal, diligent, careful people may now effectively be stalking horses for the Americans, all unknowing. And the network may not find out how many have been turned, knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly, for years, if ever. U.S. surveillance methods can be incredibly powerful, if they know who to watch and particularly if they can employ the right tools for the right circumstance. They have not had this latitude in the recent past, but matters have already changed dramatically.

But to focus again on the network, we now come to the last, devastating effect of this mission.

As a result of the factors above, Al Qaeda has rebranded itself. The name Qaeda is not so much the mark of failure.

Al Qaeda is now the mark of death.

Consultants who describe al Qaeda as a kind of "shadowy franchise of evil" fail to mention a key fact -- everyone who knows how deeply compromised they are, and who realizes the Americans effectively have to take their time collecting some members, and that the U.S. actually gains by leaving some of them at large... these people all realize that to involve yourself with al Qaeda now is to put yourself in unnecessary peril. Less devoted agents and supporters may melt away, but allies will certainly rethink their association, and most contacts -- suppliers of arms, opium merchants, militia leaders -- will want to distance themselves. Some, indeed, may choose to eliminate the people who link them to the organization, thus removing witnesses or creating "plausible deniability." Governments and intelligence agencies may be especially prone to killing or arresting people themselves in order to silence them or as a "gesture of good faith." And in a rare twist, given the extent to which the tide has turned, U.S. operatives may find it more valuable to leave certain raids and arrests to carefully observed local and national organizations, as a method of testing the competence and trustworthiness of specific people in circumstances where the individual targeted may not be that important... or where their "plausible escape story" might actually add to their value to the intel and law-enforcement agencies directing them or tracking them.

Worse, remember the democratic revolutions mentioned above, and then the whole "shadowy franchise of evil." There are supposedly groups calling themselves al Qaeda with little or nothing to do with the main group. Whether or not that is true, what impact do you think it will have on recruiting, on finding funders, suppliers and allies, if everyone automatically thinks of any Qaeda group as massively compromised, and full of knowing and unknowing agents of the United States?

Further, while such groups can renounce the name, given how widespread Qaeda and its namesakes are, what impact will all of this have on other Sunni-extremist terrorist groups in the Middle East, if everyone begins to assume such groups can be traced and utterly exposed by this overlap in financial supporters -- with people who are inclined to support al Qaeda being inclined to support similar versions of fanatical Sunni terrorism? What impact will it have if people do not believe you if you claim to share their passions but have never had anything to do with the overthrown network... when many people would know to lie, especially any knowing agent of the Americans?

Such networks can not prevail if this kind of environment becomes prevalent, given that the tide of history, represented by democratic movements and other forces, already seems to be leaving al Qaeda in its wake.

In effect, the combination of this mission and the data retrieved from it, alongside the Middle Eastern democracy movement, may have created a powerful immune response in the region, transforming a deadly virus into a potent vaccine.

Further Impacts of Climate Change on Grain Productiion

2011-05-08T00:49:00.000-04:00

Given the recent string of agricultural disasters the world has experienced over the last year, climate change's impact on global food production may be much more pressing than many realize. Here, however, is an article taking into account the overall global trend over the last several years. This piece is useful, but may regard the changes underway as more predictable than they really are.

The U.S. Administration's Energy Agenda and the Economy

2011-05-08T00:29:00.000-04:00

A Flash of Inspiration

2011-04-28T16:00:00.001-04:00

DARPA is researching how electrical brain stimulation by non-invasive means can assist in learning. Those receiving the full stimulation improved twice as fast in a skills-learning test than those who did not, which suggests that the impact of this technology could prove considerable. Research continues at the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation.

An important follow up to this study might be to find out what techniques and technologies work synergistically with it, and if a regimen combining the most ideal set could be developed for public use.

Al Gore's Book-Turned-App Our Choice

2011-04-28T15:09:00.002-04:00

Al Gore's Our Choice Guided Tour from Push Pop Press on Vimeo.

FHA-Backed Loans of Up to $25,000 for Homeowners Making Energy Improvements...

2011-04-28T14:02:00.000-04:00

The news release from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development...

HUD SELECTS LENDERS TO PARTICIPATE IN NEW PILOT PROGRAM TO HELP HOMEOWNERS PAY FOR ENERGY IMPROVEMENTS TO THEIR HOMES
FHA PowerSaver Program to offer low-cost financing to credit-worthy borrowers

WASHINGTON – Eighteen national, regional and local lenders will participate in a new two-year pilot program that will offer qualified borrowers living in certain parts of the country low-cost loans to make energy-saving improvements to their homes. Backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), these new PowerSaver loans will offer homeowners up to $25,000 to make energy-efficient improvements of their choice, including the installation of insulation, duct sealing, replacement doors and windows, HVAC systems, water heaters, solar panels, and geothermal systems.
U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan and U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the participating lenders (see attached list) during a tour of a family-run company that offers home energy audits and upgrades in Long Island, New York.
“We believe the market is right for a low-cost financing option for families who want energy-saving technologies in their home,” said Secretary Donovan. “PowerSaver hits on all cylinders by helping credit-worthy homeowners finance these upgrades, cut their energy bills and boost the local job market in the process. While FHA and these lenders are jumpstarting this pilot, we hope its success will lead to a growing private sector interest in making these types of loans.”
Secretary Chu said, “Today, we are breaking down barriers and making energy efficiency more accessible and more affordable. It’s the right thing to do for our environment, for our economy and for the pocketbooks of American families.”
The remodeling industry cites surveys that point to a growing demand among homeowners interested in making their homes energy efficient. Yet options are still limited for financing home energy improvements, especially for the many homeowners who are unable to take out a home equity loan or access an affordable consumer loan. Initially, the PowerSaver pilot program is estimated to assist approximately 30,000 homeowners to finance energy-efficient upgrades though higher market demand may increase this impact. According to HUD projections, more than 3,000 jobs will be created through this pilot program and the impact may be larger if market demand for the loan program increases over time.
Participating lenders are largely selected based on their commitment to work in partnership with established home energy retrofit programs provided by states, cities, utilities and home performance contractors. These markets include, but are not limited to areas of the country participating in the Energy Department’s Better Building Program.
PowerSaver loans will be backed by the FHA but require these lenders to have significant “skin in the game.” FHA mortgage insurance will cover up to 90 percent of the loan amount in the event of default. Lenders will retain the remaining risk on each loan, incentivizing responsible underwriting and lending standards.
PowerSaverhas been carefully designed to meet a need in the marketplace for borrowers who have the ability and motivation to take on modest additional debt to realize the savings over time from home energy improvements. PowerSaver loans are only available to borrowers with good credit, manageable debt and at least some equity in their home (maximum 100% combined loan-to-value).
HUD developed PowerSaver as part of the Recovery Through Retrofit initiative launched in May 2009 by Vice President Biden’s Middle Class Task Force to develop federal actions that would expand green job opportunities in the United States and boost energy savings by improving home energy efficiency. The announcement is part of an interagency effort including 11 departments and agencies and six White House offices.
Read the FHA PowerSaver fact sheet.

FHA PowerSaver Approved Lenders

Admirals Bank
AFC First Financial Corporation
Bank of Colorado
City of Boise, Idaho
Energy Finance Solutions
Enterprise Cascadia
HomeStreet Bank
Neighbor's Financial Corporation
Paramount Equity Mortgage, Inc.
Quicken Loans
SOFCU Community Credit Union
Stonegate Mortgage Corporation
Sun West Mortgage Company, Inc.
The Bank at Broadmoor
University of Virginia Community Credit Union, Inc.
Viewtech Financial Services, Inc.
WinTrust Mortgage
W. J. Bradley Mortgage Capital Corporation

Former Saudi Oil Minister - Kingdom's Oil Could Hit $200 to $300 a Barrel

2011-04-11T00:48:00.000-04:00

A former Saudi Arabian oil minister, Sheikh Zaki Yamani, has said that serious political unrest in the Kingdom could drive its oil exports to $200 to $300 a barrel.

Needless to say, the repercussions of such a rapid and dramatic increase on the global economy would likely be swift and profound.

Regular IAEA Reports Logged for Fukushima Daiichi Disaster

2011-04-07T00:33:00.000-04:00

For those interested in some outside, relatively authoritative reports on the Fukushima Daiichi crisis, the International Atomic Energy Agency is compiling its ongoing updates here.

LAVA Wins Contest for Designing the City Center of the World's First Sustainable City in the UAE

2011-04-04T22:10:00.000-04:00

The Laboratory for Visionary Architecture has won first prize for its city-center design for Masdar, the world's first sustainable city being built in seven stages by the government of the United Arab Emirates. The link includes some impressive images for the planned city center.

Some would complain that the design is not practical for areas with substantially less resources -- poor Third World villages, for example. But to be blunt, I think any meaningful plans for the future, especially coupled with action, are a huge improvement over widespread inaction, and I am glad to see the UAE taking this step.

Stuxnet as a "Cybernetic Weapon of Mass Destruction"

2011-04-04T17:14:00.000-04:00

Ralph Langner's analysis of the Stuxnet malware.

Two key points:
One, this work is brilliant, but generic, and could be redirected to sabotage many infrastructure targets, particularly in the developed world.

Two, we had better get ready for that.

In the wake of the havoc caused by natural disasters and human error at Fukushima Daiichi, his points are well taken.

Plot and Create Your Own Animated Movies of Fukushima Isotopes

2011-04-02T01:22:00.000-04:00

For those interested in taking available data on isotopes released at the Fukushima Daiichi site and plotting their course, and even creating animated movies of their potential spread, look no further.

"Using the interactive plotting tool you can create custom plots of the forecast data. The tool provides the ability to create custom horizontal and vertical cross section plots, as well as animated movies of the transport."

Natural Nuclear Reactors

2011-04-02T01:17:00.002-04:00

James Lovelock, from The Ages of Gaia, on a natural nuclear reactor supposedly put into effect by bacteria.

Chris Martenson Providing New Photos of Fukushima Complex

2011-04-02T00:44:00.000-04:00

Chris Martenson (better known for his interest in energy depletion) provides new photos of the Fukushima Daiichi complex, with commentary gleaned from a nuclear engineer and an imaging expert clarifying what we are seeing in them.

Localized Criticality Possibly Reached by One Fukushima Reactor

2011-04-01T21:48:00.000-04:00

A "localized criticality" -- basically, a small amount of fissioning in the fuel or spent fuel present -- may have been achieved at one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi site. An ethereal blue light has been seen at the site, presumably as a result of this event. The IAEA does not think this situation will cause a full meltdown across the plant.

Exposure of Spent Fuel -- Commentary from Fairewinds Associates

2011-04-01T19:51:00.000-04:00

Untitled from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Study Claims Apple Pectin Reduces Cesium-137 Levels by 62.6% in "Chenobyl" Children

2011-03-29T02:39:00.000-04:00

A study of children exposed to Chernobyl's fallout found providing them with apple-pectin powder reduced the levels of Cesium-137 in their systems by over 60%.

Chemists Warn of a Food and Natural-Resources Crisis

2011-03-29T02:34:00.000-04:00

Five major scientific societies have joined together to warn of a looming food crisis in the face of shortages of phosphorus -- a critical element in fertilizer. They also warn of increasing shortages in other critical resources, such as rare-earth elements, and declare their intent to find breakthroughs to help solve these problems.

Their report can be found here.

UN -- General Report from 2000 on Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation

2011-03-29T02:21:00.000-04:00

Some information from the United Nations (from the year 2000) on ionizing radiation:

UNSCEAR 2000 REPORT Vol. I

SOURCES AND EFFECTS OF IONIZING RADIATION

United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation
UNSCEAR 2000 Report to the General Assembly,with scientific annexes

Volume I: SOURCES

Report to the General Assembly
(without scientific annexes; 17 pages)
Includes short overviews of the materials and conclusions contained in the scientific annexes
Scientific Annexes:

Annex A: Dose assessment methodologies (63 pages)
Annex B: Exposures from natural radiation sources (74 pages)
Annex C: Exposures from man-made sources of radiation (134 pages)
Annex D: Medical radiation exposures (203 pages)
Annex E: Occupational radiation exposures (158 pages)

UNSCEAR 2000 REPORT Vol. II

SOURCES AND EFFECTS OF IONIZING RADIATION

United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation UNSCEAR 2000 Report to the General Assembly,
with scientific annexes

Volume II: EFFECTS

Report to the General Assembly
(without scientific annexes;17 pages)
Includes short overviews of the materials and conclusions contained in the scientific annexes

Scientific Annexes:

Annex F: DNA repair and mutagenesis (72 pages)
Annex G: Biological effects at low radiation doses (103 pages)
Annex H: Combined effects of radiation and other agents (120 pages)
Annex I: Epidemiological evaluation of radiation-induced cancer (153 pages)
Annex J: Exposures and effects of the Chernobyl accident (115 pages)

Toyota Has Warned Her U.S. Plants -- Prepare to Shut Down

2011-03-24T16:23:00.000-04:00

A feature of the just-in-time system of manufacturing is that not only are few if any products stockpiled anywhere but on store shelves, but that spare and component parts are also rarely kept on hand in any significant number. Hence, it comes as no surprise that Japanese carmaker Toyota has told all of its U.S. plants to be prepared to shut down. After all, once they are out of the parts they need -- built only in Japan, and now built nowhere at all -- they have no choice but to cease production.

Though the company insists a shutdown is not inevitable, Toyota's manufacturing has halted in Japan.

This situation impacts the entire auto industry, as Toyota makes parts used by other manufacturers. A sustained shutdown of her Japanese plants will apparently hamper if not disable the plants of at least some of her competitors.

Radioactive Iodine Exceeding Limits for Infants Found in Tokyo Tapwater

2011-03-23T17:35:00.000-04:00

According to the city government of Tokyo, radioactive iodine exceeding the safe limits for infants has been found in the city's tapwater.

Lights Out in Northeastern Honshu -- View from Space

2011-03-22T14:27:00.000-04:00

New Scientist offers this composite view of Japan from space. The yellow light shows where lights were shining both well before and after the earthquake, and the red indicates where lights shone before but not after. Sizable regions of Japan are still suffering from rolling blackouts in the wake of the quake.

The JODI Data -- Now a Confused Muddle

2011-03-22T01:23:00.001-04:00

Given our last adventure in which the Joint Organizations Data Initiative proclaimed two of its January data sets complete while forgetting to include 3 countries in them, I am becoming a bit more cautious in double checking the information they supply. Hence, the addition of January data for Eurostat, UNSD and IEA/OECD countries prompted me to look at the aggregate data for December of 2010.

Curiously, the results led me to wonder if some countries are being double counted in the data, or... Well, I'm not really sure what they're doing, really.

Here's the data for December by group.

22,605,000 APEC

102,000 Eurostat

14,332,000 IEA/OECD

6,366,000 OLADE

30,342,000 OPEC

2,690,000 UNSD

76,437,000 Total of above figures

Meanwhile, the official total is...

63,156,000 JODI Total All Submissions

Are they double-counting some countries?

Yes, I know national oil reserves and production tend to be the ultimate "fudged" numbers, but whether or not a set of statistics are accurate or merely reassuring falsehoods, I would at least like the figures to add up.

Meanwhile, Mexico's numbers are now on the JODI charts for January, as are Argentina and Ecuador's. The other producers, who I could have sworn were on here before (excepting Bolivia and Peru), all seem to be gone.

And meanwhile, despite this fundamental reshuffling of the OLADE statistics, its official output still sits at 3,160,000 barrels-per-day -- a number I previously assumed resulted from the omission of Mexico and Bolivia. Now... I don't know what to think.

My impression remains that we have suffered some very significant production drops in the last couple of months, and not all of it can be papered over or attributed to reluctant record keepers. Middle Eastern revolutions, obviously, are going to make keeping all this under wraps particularly hard, no matter how rapidly the official data shifts beneath our feet.

I hope everyone involved in this issue -- that is to say, everyone on Earth -- has a much more substantial plan than simply rewriting numbers indefinitely. Because that will not persist for much longer.

"Paper barrels" do not burn.

University of Berkeley Detects Trace Radiation -- No Health Risks

2011-03-21T23:30:00.001-04:00

The University of Berkeley in California has detected trace levels of radiation in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, but so far they are well below normal background radiation.

OPEC Oil Production in January -- Looking Grim

2011-03-20T08:21:00.016-04:00

Update: Well, apparently JODI decided to describe the OPEC and OLADE statistics as complete, when in fact they had not yet entered the numbers for the UAE, Mexico and Bolivia. Needless to say, I've spent much of the evening looking at the data available elsewhere to clarify the situation.

The figures are still cataclysmic, but we have a couple more months. I'll describe the changes, which still has OLADE losing about 10% of its output in January alone, despite the absence of significant civil unrest, major natural disasters, or even any notable losses from Cantarell.

But before I continue, there is something a bit more solid in the JODI database that shows just how precarious our situation is. If you look at the last 15 months, you will notice several small producers over the course of that period have simply stopped producing. These are evidently not late reports, but outright cessations of significant production.

To use the example of a country that has not quite ceased production, and is still reporting its output, South Africa went from producing 129,000 barrels-a-day to 4,000 barrels-a-day... in one month. That's a loss of over 96% of their oil output, in one month.

Many experts note that modern extraction technologies mainly just pull out the oil in a field faster, rather than expand the overall amount of extractable oil. Which means that when you come to the end of a field, that end can come very fast, even if you do not damage the field.

I understand that, but a 96+% drop in a substantial set of oil reserves -- in one month -- is honestly a bit terrifying. Not so much because it can happen, but because it might happen again, soon, and it might even be happening now. And depending on the country, we might never know.

By these figures, Barbados, Cuba, Guatemala and Trinidad & Tobago all seem to have crashed. They were never huge producers, but they also haven't been having the revolutions or tsunamis that might normally explain such a halt. Which might mean that simple geology, and the limits of practical extraction, are to blame.

Which brings us back to OLADE. If you add Peru's normal production of 44,000 barrels-a-day and Mexico's slightly lower 2,535,000 barrels-a-day to rest of the OLADE figures for January, you get 5,739,000 barrels-a-day, or 90.15% of the previous month's production. Or almost a 10% drop.

In one month.

In thousands of barrels-per-day, incidentally, the producing OLADE members totals for January look like this:

572 Argentina

44 Bolivia

2,187 Brazil

4 Chile

829 Colombia

494 Ecuador

2,583 Mexico

Meanwhile, throwing in the UAE -- assuming the same rate of production as in December, 2010 -- the modified OPEC numbers for January are much better -- showing an actual increase... of 0.178%.

Which sounds great, though we don't know how much of that production is actually countries claiming to have increased oil production in the face of climbing oil prices. However, such deceptions are generally not the problem when it comes to a rapid collapse (like a 10% drop in one month) because the "paper barrels" are often much the same from one month to the next.

And to be honest, before JODI insisted its incomplete OLADE and OPEC were fully updated, I was hoping the geological limits of OPEC production were the least of our problems.

As an aside: It's true I did not carefully study the breakdown of the JODI numbers before printing their summation of the OLADE and OPEC totals... for two reasons. The main reason was last month's data left quite a few country's statistics blank, even though JODI presumably had much of that data in hand if it was issuing reports. (That presumption may have presumed too much.) Because I could not disaggregate that data at the time, I did not try to do so yesterday. (Ironically, the statistics are actually clearer at the national level this time around.) The other, of course, was that I assumed a major statistical operation publishing critical data about the oil production of groups of nations -- especially OPEC -- would not leave glaring holes in its information.

Having said all that, while the pace is, fortunately, less terrifying, we are still looking at what seems to be a shocking month-by-month crash in oil production, one which may not necessarily stop in time to salvage conventional economic operations.

On the positive side of the ledger, modifications to the JODI numbers for December have shored up the overall production outlook for that month, and if you include the missing Chinese production numbers at the rate they were at right before they stopped reporting (granted, the highest they've been in 15 months), you get a fall from 67,582,000 barrels-a-day worldwide to 67,198,000, or 99.43% of the previous month, a decline of just over ½%.

Which sounds great, assuming events like the "Night Dragon" Chinese hacking of oil-company databases over the last three years, and ongoing questions about the real state of Chinese oil reserves, output and consumption, did not call those numbers into question.

But frankly, such deceptions, if any, do not radically change the real global production numbers, and if oil extraction collapses in China, we probably won't know about it for quite a while.

So where does that leave us in the rest of the world?

Obviously, the Libyan revolution will show up in our February numbers, and that will have an indisputable impact on oil extraction. Typically, countries that go through revolutions never return to the heights of their previous oil output, but we can hope.

But what else is going on?

Unrest and/or uprisings in Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Jordan, Iran, and Iraq. Saudi threatened intervention and troop deployments in response to Bahraini demonstrations, followed by a suppression of that unrest. And a number of persistent concerns about the stability of major oil producers and their neighbors in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Meanwhile, the Japanese are having to review their entire nuclear-energy program (as are a number of countries, even those with more stable geology). Natural-gas fracking is having a number of interesting side-effects ranging from carcinogens in the groundwater to possible localized earthquakes along some fault lines. And with food prices still inspiring discontent in the wake of a year full of major agricultural disasters.

And hovering over it all -- even more so than that 10% drop in OLADE's production -- is that curious question about South Africa. A 96% drop in production? In one month?

And if there, why not anywhere?

And given how many fields are being driven to their limits by our "best technology"...

Why not now?

--
End Update.
--

Alright. Not all of the JODI numbers totaling oil production for January, 2011 are in yet, but the OPEC numbers are.

Those numbers are not good.

JODI indicates that OPEC's production dropped from 30,342,000 barrels of crude oil in December, 2010 to 27,926,000 barrels in January, 2011 -- a fall of roughly 8% in one month.

Now, the good news is that OPEC's December production numbers were apparently revised in the last month, showing a slight improvement over their November numbers, instead of a slight decline.

The very, very bad news is that, even taking into account Saudi Arabia's reduction in exports, official OPEC production figures in December -- you remember, the month when the 90% of global production surveyed by JODI dropped 14% overall -- only declined by 2% (now revised). In other words, that dramatic drop of 14% must have resulted from production falling off elsewhere (mostly, it appears, in APEC). Now, in fairness, the revised numbers for November and December show 67,582,000 and 62,923,000 respectively -- an apparent global fall of only 7%, if these numbers can be trusted. (That's still devastating.)

But, you see, that drop was essentially a falloff in non-OPEC production, almost entirely in APEC.

But now we're looking at an 8% drop in OPEC production in January -- and that's only the beginning of our problems.

Why? Because of the countries experiencing major demonstrations and the beginnings of revolutions in January, only Algeria and Egypt are major oil producers -- and Algeria's oil production barely moved at all, while Egypt is shown to have zero production for both December and January. Now statistically, it's been demonstrated that oil-producing countries which endure major revolutions/disruptions almost never return to their previous heights of oil extraction.

Which means more substantial falls in production in certain OPEC countries could come over February, March and the months to follow.

Meanwhile, there is the question of what happened to the oil that ceased to be produced in December, perhaps the most fascinating element of all. You see, China abruptly went from almost 4 million barrels-a-day to zero from November to December -- a change so dramatic, given a lack of major disasters, it may very likely be a political decision, if one affected by declining rates of extraction. If so...

That may suggest the Chinese government has decided to either cease production and/or to stockpile what they produce, while meeting their petroleum needs on the comparatively cheap international market. This strategy would give China an oil supply capable of handling her basic requirements and buffering her from other international disruptions.

A fascinating action, if they have done this, but the Chinese leadership has evidently been aware of the risks of peak oil for some years now, and has supposedly been planning accordingly. On the other hand, we do not know how much of that precipitous drop is simply geology, and/or the limitations of modern oil-production technology.

Still, there is one more thing to consider. China was not the only dip in international oil production in December, and this January OPEC drop is precipitous, given that it precedes most of the disruptions of February and March. Which highlights the larger question: What will the APEC, Eurostat and IEA/OECD numbers tell us?

OPEC has experienced a sharp drop that is almost certainly driven by the practical limits of how much it can produce, given that most of its members have probably hit the peak of their production. OLADE has gone from 6,366,000 to 3,160,000 barrels-per-day. If those numbers hold, that is a drop of just over 50%.

Please note: While I have generally offered some optimistic possibilities on some of the more shocking descents in extraction, overall the situation looks extremely grim, especially given the ongoing upheavals in the Middle East and the way the OLADE and pre-revolution OPEC figures show how dramatically production can fall with very little warning.

Also note: Even if a few major countries such as Saudi Arabia or China have reason to hold back or restate their production for strategic reasons, very few nations have any motivation to make such dramatic public changes -- and yet we are seeing crashing flow rates regardless.

Which could portend many things, none of them good.

Paper on Using Resveratrol to Treat Radiation Exposure in Mice

2011-03-20T05:45:00.000-04:00

Here is a link to the researchers' summary of their study of using resveratrol to help protect mice from fatal doses of radiation, and to treat them immediately after such exposure.

Japan's Windpower Survives Earthquake/Tsunami Unharmed

2011-03-19T22:55:00.000-04:00

With all the attention on Japan's various nuclear reactors, especially the Fukushima Daiichi site, the fact that her various wind farms have apparently all survived unharmed.

But, I must point out, if one of those giant wind turbines had toppled in some distant field, it would not now be leaking radiation or melting down. And where is the excitement in that?

Radiation Found in Tokyo Tapwater

2011-03-19T21:59:00.000-04:00

The Japanese government has reported the presence of radioactive iodine in samples of Tokyo tapwater, but states that the levels found are well within safe limits for human consumption.

I have no recommendations for people living in the city of Tokyo who have no other place to go, but if I were living there, I would be taking potassium iodide (or some other source of healthy iodine) as a preventative at this point. You really do not want radioactive-iodine levels to be reported as dangerous after you have spent several days taking in that iodine.

The point is to avoid flooding your thyroid with radioactive iodine and thus to avoid thyroid cancer.

More About the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant

2011-03-19T07:57:00.000-04:00

First, an extensive set of satellite images of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Second, Japanese officials are discussing sealing away the entire plant in a sarcophagus of concrete or sand, as was done with Chernobyl. Unfortunately, there is a concern that simply dropping vast amounts of material on these buildings would overload and destroy them, thus releasing even more radiation, and that containing overheating rods in sand or concrete would simply cause them to heat up further, and melt through the mass meant to contain them.

And third, we should also remember that TEPCO itself is saying that the stored, spent fuel rods could go critical once, restarting a nuclear chain reaction and thus becoming an even more intense source of energy and a more dire threat.

Resveratrol Combined with Acetyl Can Protect Against Radiation

2011-03-19T07:16:00.001-04:00

A study has found that acetylated resveratrol can protect cells exposed to radiation and help prevent death. Resveratrol can be found in many places, including your local health food or drugstore, but the acetylated resveratrol used in the experiments is different from the normal version. The mice in the experiment received a body-cavity injection of the resveratrol ten minutes before being exposed to what is normally a fatal dose of radiation for a majority of the rodents. The most successful dosage was 10 mg/kg of body mass -- substantially reducing fatalities. But only 1 mg/kg of body mass actually resulted in a drop in the survival rate. (Editorial speculation: Perhaps an already severely irradiated mouse, receiving a body-cavity injection of an inadequate dosage of resveratrol, found it hard to deal with the additional trauma of the injection. I do not know, but would be very interested in finding out.)

What does the above information mean in terms of human dosages, in the event of human trials.

I have no idea. Be advised.

But given how many of the world's nuclear plants are built in earthquake zones, or are otherwise threatened by everything from major civil disorder to rising sea levels, this seems to be information well worth knowing. And the question I raised above, well worth answering.

Update: A summary by the researchers can be found here.

Japan May Encase Reactors in Sand and Concrete

2011-03-18T06:11:00.000-04:00

Apparently, Japanese engineers are considering the possibility of encasing the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in sand and concrete (the Chernobyl method), though they are still trying to regain control of the situation by other means. I suspect that sealing up the reactors may prove a monumental task, given the radiation levels involved, and related risks, but given tactics such as the one's I suggested here, materials could probably be dumped in large quantities on the site -- perhaps enough initially to allow properly garbed workers to approach on the ground and handle some tasks by more economical means.

We shall see.

Transition Initiatives -- Davie Philip on "The Good Life, 2.0"

2011-03-18T05:49:00.000-04:00

"Davie Philip, coordinator of the Irish Transition Towns network, sees the 'new emergency' as a 'once-in-a-species' opportunity to make a controlled, planned transition to a post-industrial society." A very interesting video, discussing some aspects of the work his network is doing to deal with peak oil, climate change and economic convulsions as people come together to "prepare for a low-carbon future."

Davie Philip – Developing a transition mindset to overcome the inertia of the familiar from Feasta on Vimeo.

The Fukushima Disaster -- Some Interesting Information

2011-03-18T04:50:00.000-04:00

Recombinomics notes:

The radiation released at the Daiichi plant is forecast to go east to the Aleutian Island, and the back over Russia, China, and Korea, where H5N1 is circulating in wild birds. Exposure of H5N1 to ionizing radiation can lead to rapid genetic change, which may increase the ability of H5N1 to transmit in humans.

Moreover, the earthquake and tsunami have led to overcrowding conditions in displaced persons, which would also favor viral spread.

I do not know if Recombinomics is correct in its assessment, but it seemed like something to be aware of.

Meanwhile, anyone in the U.S. presently obsessing over fallout from Japan's reactors may find the following sites of interest -- Radiation Network and the Online Geiger Counter Nuclear Radiation Detector Map. These maps both use volunteer Geiger-counter readings from across America, but are regularly updated.

Dropping Coolant from Helicopters -- When All Else Fails

2011-03-17T04:01:00.000-04:00

As word spread that Japan was trying to find a means of putting coolant on its critical reactors from the air without killing her pilots, I read a someone's comment on another site...

If this was a movie, right about now, someone would come up with a daring but risky plan that would just barely work. I'd really like to see life imitate art, but I don't think it's going to happen in this case.

To which I replied...

Remote control.

Take whatever DARPA has for remote controlled and autonomous vehicles, plus whatever the military and others have for aircraft, particularly helicopters.

See what kind of major earthmoving equipment you can get in there.

See what kind of guided helicopters you can move in that direction. Also, whether or not any blimps in the area could be remotely controlled, rigged up with a harness moving material, and then able to release that material while slowly moving over one of the reactors.

If you get desperate, or feel a mass of sand and/or boronic acid can't do too much harm, opening the bottom of an underslung box beneath a relatively fast-moving vehicle, such as a drone, might also get a ton or so of material on the target.

Finally, if none of that works, or is inadequate...

The reactors are in a line. Again, if you can drop the sand and/or boron safely by itself, could you take certain aircraft and start targeting each reactor with de facto payloads of whatever dampening/covering materials you were putting in place, assuming that you wouldn't be damaging reactor integrity further, and that near misses would mostly end up on other reactors, or nearby (perhaps covering other contaminants).

In that case, you could probably employ all kinds of hardened U.S. aircraft, possibly from safer standoff distances than helicopters can manage. U.S. bombers tend to be built with nuclear incidents in mind, and many transport and cargo aircraft can open their doors while in flight to release people or cargo.

Speaking of which, there's the old parachuting materials trick. The U.S. used to have a project for a retrojet cargo box that could be dropped from an airplane and which would slow its own descent using mini-jets. I don't know if that ever reached prototype stage, much less real use, but it could probably be guided if it existed.

But failing that, small, simple propellers or miniature jets or even basic controls (as with a glider or aircraft) could guide the descent of large, parachuting packages. If necessary, they could be made to pop open by remote order, or could simply be designed to break up on impact -- whatever turns out to be best for the circumstances and the location where they are being dropped.

Aside from that...

How radiation resistant are Harriers and hover-capable Joint Strike Fighters?

Could you attach cables or other supports to such a plane's weapons hardpoints, undersling some kind of relatively aerodynamic, robust container (without getting too close to the turbofan, when in use), and rig the systems so all the hardpoints could release at once, thus dumping a payload? If you really needed a slower vehicle for targeting your drops, these could at least get in and out of the area a lot faster, and the JSFs are probably a bit better shielded against radiation. Throw in protective gear and it might have a chance.

And failing that... you may honestly have to ask for a lot of volunteers for the high-risk option, and hopefully have enough that you can rotate them safely.

The “RTR” Medical Response System for Nuclear and Radiological Mass-Casualty Incidents

2011-03-16T06:36:00.000-04:00

For those curious about American disaster planning, here is: The “RTR” Medical Response System for Nuclear and Radiological Mass-Casualty Incidents. This document is the work of a Federal, interagency medical response planning group.

Twin Meltdowns: Saving the Japanese People & the U.S./EU Economies

2011-03-15T06:18:00.001-04:00

Japan, as is becoming increasingly clear, is facing an incredible crisis as one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded, followed by a massive tsunami, has led to critical damage to several reactors in the quake-stricken region, including as many as three reactor meltdowns and a risk to several hundred thousand spent fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi site.

Meanwhile, in seemingly unrelated economic news, high-risk national bonds sold by a number of European economies are now rolling over and have to be refinanced, in spite of the fact that a few of the countries offering them appear to be on the verge of bankruptcy and that the Japanese government -- the main buyer at the last round of European national-debt sales -- will now need to sell a great many assets, such as bonds, to deal with its staggering problems at home.

Neither situation can really be overstated at this point. Radiation from a multi-reactor meltdown, combined with the meltdown of most of the spent fuel on site (most of which was apparently stored directly above the reactors, including the four now either immediately threatened or in meltdown) could release enough radioactive isotopes to force the evacuation of a relatively nearby city -- greater Tokyo, with a combined population of 35 million -- and an unknown area of the home island of Honshu.

The European Union, on the other hand, is looking at a devastating economic and financial picture, with no effective way to roll over its national debts and an unstable currency. Though slightly less acute, the United States is also faced with major financing problems related to its debt, which the Treasury and Federal Reserve have generally managed to paper over.

Private-sector financial institutions in the U.S. and EU have mostly suffered great losses as a result of the meltdown of their real-estate industries and in many cases hold title to large numbers of "non-performing" mortgages (that no one is paying off) and foreclosed properties. And because the U.S., Britain and most other nations involved in the real-estate bubble now have considerably more properties than they can afford, there is no reasonable way to dispose of these properties without taking a massive loss.

Which brings us to one partial solution to these seemingly unrelated crises. Japanese who need to be resettled can have homes and certain goods purchased for them, by their governments, in countries around the world, though in particular in Europe and North America. Whole developments of McMansions stand empty in even some of America's relatively viable large cities, and more to the point, whole towns in the fading counties of the Great Plains stand practically empty, and the city of Detroit, despite its favored position beside a Great Lake and its grand industrial history, has vast swaths of all-but-deserted neighborhoods.

But generally a host of homes, large and small, are available across the North American and European landscapes, so shopping for a few good properties should be relatively easy to accomplish. Also, a sudden injection of funds into all of these economies, from whatever source, and by whatever financial path, should create at least a temporary boom in most local economies.

Personally, I would emphasize the development of independent, mostly self-sustaining local economies in these settlements, whether free-standing or part of larger towns or cities. Given the extreme issues the world is now facing with regards to food and energy, as well as its overall economic and environmental crises, an emphasis on frugality -- both monetary and energy-wise -- and the local, sustainable, high-intensity production of sustenance, seems prudent. A mix of methods could be used to provide both food and energy -- low-impact farming, gardening, greenhouses, aquaponics and the planting of fruit and nut trees on the one hand, and geothermal, solar thermal, solar electric, and wind and micro-hydro turbines (among other tools) on the other. These options, obviously, could also be funded by the sale or barter of bonds.

And who would be willing to accept these national bonds in exchange for real estate and other goods of some presumed cash value? Well, in the U.S., the Federal government, the Federal Reserve and pretty much every bank in the country. Given a choice between dumping assets that in the present market and given the present size of the population have considerably less than their face value, and recovering something from what is otherwise a dead loss -- while staving off general economic catastrophe for the institutions in question... well, that will probably look like a good deal to quite a few organizations.

If I were managing such an operation, I would start quickly but do it in stages. If a relative trickle of people went out who were relatively mobile and ready to go -- like just about every college student with a vague grasp of English and a desire to visit an English-speaking country some day -- I would sweep those people up, send them off to their newly purchased apartments in the university towns where they might be taking classes, acquire for them some food stores -- purchased at bulk rates as a massive coop, with all the economic advantages that offers -- and shuffle them around later, if they end up studying or working somewhere else in their destination country. In the meantime, they can work on their English. And gardening, and/or other potentially useful skills, such as Arduino.*

Other obvious candidates would be farmers from stricken regions, who could not only help kick start new farming in relocation towns in, say, the Great Plains, but work with local farmers to learn about local conditions, and help direct other workers who showed up later to help expand these new farms. Translators, permaculture and aquaculture experts would be other obvious first arrivals.

Given that metals in irradiated areas can be washed free of fallout, trains (and some of their tracks) might also make an appearance in new host countries, perhaps deployed wherever they would make the most difference -- such as giving Detroit something it badly needs... a decent mass-transit system.

I should add... Many Americans have a very high opinion of the Japanese and their culture in general, and there is a wide familiarity with many products of Japanese mass culture, in particular manga and anime. While language would initially be a barrier, well-translated anime movies might be a way to help students of either language pick up the basics of the language faster than through study alone -- although obviously full immersion would probably be most effective, were many people not already shocked and overwhelmed by recent events.

Whatever path the Japanese choose to take, I wish them all the best. Like so many in the rest of the world, my heart goes out to them, and they remain in my prayers.

Live Streaming on the Earthquake/Tsunami/Nuclear Disaster in Japan

2011-03-14T23:46:00.002-04:00

The NHK news broadcast is being streamed live here.

A Site Showing Wind Conditions in Japan

2011-03-14T23:20:00.000-04:00

This site shows general wind conditions in Japan. I would caution readers to realize this information seems to show winds closer to the surface, as opposed to the higher atmospheric Jet Stream, which is flowing consistently across the Pacific and towards the United States.

This difference is critical if a meltdown sends large numbers of radioactive particles high into the atmosphere, where they could conceivably spread much farther -- in particular the highly poisonous plutonium used as part of the fuel mix in one of the reactors.

Nuclear Engineer: Fuel Rod Fire at Fukushima "Like Chernobyl on Steroids"

2011-03-14T23:14:00.000-04:00

From an article at the FireDogLake blog:

The Fukushima Daiichi plant has seven pools for spent fuel rods. Six of these are (or were) located at the top of six reactor buildings. One “common pool” is at ground level in a separate building. Each “reactor top” pool holds 3450 fuel rod assemblies. The common pool holds 6291 fuel rod assemblies. [The common pool has windows on one wall which were almost certainly destroyed by the tsunami.] Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods. This means the Fukushima Daiichi plant may contain over 600,000 spent fuel rods.

The fuel rods must be kept submerged in water. Why? Outside of the water bath, the radioactivity in the used rods can cause them to become so hot they begin to catch fire. These fires can burn so hot the radioactive rod contents are carried into the atmosphere as vaporized material or as very small particles. Reactor no 3 burns MOX fuel that contains a mix of plutonium and uranium. Plutonium generates more heat than uranium, which means these rods have the greatest risk of burning. That’s bad news, because plutonium scattered into the atmosphere is even more dangerous that the combustion products of rods without plutonium.

Some Information on Fukushima from the Japanese Government

2011-03-14T19:23:00.001-04:00

From a Japanese government news release regarding the Fukushima nuclear disaster:

Arduino Documentary

2011-03-14T04:58:00.000-04:00

From the Top Documentary Films site comes this half-hour story about the creation of Arduino, a kind of open-source hardware that makes building gadgets and developing inventions remarkably cheap. The Arduino board -- a microcontroller, which is a kind of simple computer used to control other machines -- has, in turn, helped kick start a larger movement to enable ordinary people to make much, and eventually, perhaps all, of the technology they use in their daily lives.

Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.

So, Video Footage of Protests in Saudi Arabia

2011-03-10T15:53:00.000-05:00

We shall see what this portends. But in the meantime, video footage of protests in Qatif, Saudi Arabia. And supposedly, Saudi police have fired on protesters.

Many analysts point out that King Abdullah is better liked by his people than the three governments recently facing revolution in the Middle East. Then again, a crash in Saudi oil exports would be globally devastating.

You will excuse me, but I have a few things to get ready, in particular with my book. Best of luck, everyone.

U.S. Poultry and Swine Consortium Makes Massive Grain Purchase

2011-03-10T05:40:00.000-05:00

A consortium of poultry and swine producers have ordered between 100,000 and 200,000 tonnes of feed-quality wheat from Canadian suppliers. This purchase is an excellent example of an organization that can invest in food because it can take delivery of the goods, and has a good reason for both obtaining and storing them.

As I have recently pointed out on this site, if the hammer falls on speculators, the people primarily at risk will be those bidding up the price of food or energy supplies who can in no way receive the goods they temporarily own, but who are merely placing bets in the hope of improving their own bottom line, to no one's benefit but their own.

On the other hand, importing wheat -- feed-grade or otherwise -- is the kind of action the U.S. government is only apt to applaud.

Incidentally, if your business relies on large purchases of food or fuel, and you have the cash, you should already be weighing very seriously the risks posed by this Friday's "Day of Rage" that some activists are attempting to launch in Saudi Arabia. Given the demonstrations and revolutions across the Middle East, even if the Saudis treat this event with a yawn, the larger dynamics overshadowing Mideast oil production appear very risky at the present time.

Combine this situation with the reported drop of 14% in global oil production (or at least of the 90% of production being discussed in the JODI figures by APEC, the IEA, the UN and OPEC) and, well... you weigh your entire operation very carefully. I personally would be considering how to operate my business in a world with significantly less oil in the very near future -- perhaps dramatically less in your country.

The Downside of Gold

2011-03-10T02:01:00.000-05:00

While I usually do not get into investment issues on this blog, I decided to comment earlier today about some potential downsides to continued investment in gold, given the extraordinary run up in its price over the last few years as investors sought any vehicle that offered relative safety. Bear in mind, nothing on this blog is intended as investment advice, and the issues I point out below do not have to happen. But they could, and in the interest of weighing future possibilities, I am pointing out a few potentials snares and pitfalls that may theoretically await someone who invests the bulk of their funds in precious metals, particularly gold.

First, one of the biggest problems for gold are the ongoing discussions between the Indian and Iranian governments about securing India's fuel deliveries. Earlier this year, India was talking about a payment plan that included buying fuel with gold. Lately, other means of making payments are now considered to be bypassing international sanctions and hence unacceptable to India's central bank, which presumably means gold is back on the table as an option... perhaps even as the primary option.

Think about that. Set aside the immediate circumstances involved -- Iran's inability to accept normal payments for her fuel. If countries have gold reserves that have greatly increased in value, but are otherwise facing serious financial problems and a critical shortfall in domestic supplies of energy and food... then they are apt to start selling gold. Once entire national gold reserves start showing up on the market, either gradually or all at once, it will have an impact on availability and price.

Second, what do you think happens if several Middle Eastern countries fall and their mansions and palaces are looted by an angry populace? A lot of gold suddenly ends up in the hands of people who need things other than gold -- such as food, for example -- and that could abruptly add a huge amount of gold to the Mideast market, and ultimately the world's. Especially in places, like Libya, where the wealthiest lacked either the time or the inclination to flee. And this will be happening just as oil and food become increasingly precious.

Third, there are countries out there, like China, who hold a lot of gold, but who are keenly aware of the value of other resources. I suspect China, in particular, sees gold as a hedge against other financial issues, but ultimately as a tradable commodity that could one day be exchanged for things that it really needs. They've had a chance to see that gold increase substantially in value, but have no reason to hold onto it if it's value may start declining or even crashing. They may look at a run up in oil prices, and sales by India or in the Mideast market, and choose to start getting out as well.

Fourth, quite a few individuals in the world, including Chinese and American citizens, have bought and held gold. Quite a few of those same people are facing increasing difficulty in getting the bare necessities in life, and they will probably find things even more difficult should Middle Eastern oil exports -- and the global oil trade in general -- collapse. In which case, they may also sell.

Finally, gold has had a huge run up in price, and now there are quite a few individuals and organizations with so much invested in it that they can not afford to lose their principle. And unlike, say, oil, there is no substantial base demand for gold that has to be met in a heavily damaged economy. All of which means... If investors start to dump gold, they could all get out in a rush, leaving quite a few stalwarts stuck holding depreciated, if not near-worthless, metal.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve

2011-03-07T02:54:00.000-05:00

Apparently, Congress is calling on the White House to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in response to rising gas prices. While Chief of Staff Daly has said all options are on the table, Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said they are monitoring the situation and warned against overreacting. I had the following responses...

A couple thoughts...

One, talking about tapping the strategic reserve in the U.S. is a bit like Saudi Arabia saying they'll increase production "soon." The difference, of course, being that the Saudis, when they have that production capacity, can play chicken with investors more than once before finally ramping up extraction -- theirs is a game of chicken where the other guys are massed on a tricycle, while they drive a tank. Or at least it was...

The other thing is: If oil production has really crashed to the extent suggested by the December numbers then the real "game" may be to keep things stable until crops can get planted in the Northern Hemisphere and a lot of crash conservation and renewable-energy programs can be put into effect.

The combination of a food and energy crash is likely stripping away everyone's illusions, worldwide.

Unless the numbers we're seeing are highly misleading, or several "someones" have vast reserves we don't know about...

It's go time, people.

And in reply to someone arguing that the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve should only be used if "things really break down," to get food delivered and so forth...

I suspect that's where the military and the Administration are positioned with the reserve as well, _______. The U.S. can ride out some serious shortfalls in global energy and food production simply by conserving what it has in country. But on the one hand, the simple prospect of rapidly rising gas prices gets people to start thinking about conservation in their own lives -- not just gas, but with everything they consume.

And on the other, just talking about the strategic reserve is another thing that makes straightforward speculation on oil prices that much harder.

Of course, the kicker for speculators is that if anything out there gets "confiscated," it's apt to be oil or food bought on speculation by individuals or organizations that can not take receipt of the goods. In other words, refineries and slaughterhouses should be just fine pre-ordering, Wall Street, not so much.

And the Energy Crash Goes Mainstream...

2011-03-07T00:10:00.000-05:00

This MSN article on the possibility that Americans could see $10 gas in the near future is hardly the only signal from major news providers that an energy crash may well be in the offing. But bringing up the idea of $10-a-gallon gasoline that soon and that frankly is a departure from what these discussions normally entailed, even 6 months ago.

The writer softens the blow a bit by mentioning that Alaskan villages already live with such high prices -- neglecting to add just how much trouble some of those villagers have faced trying to avoid starving or freezing to death during the last few Alaskan winters.

Honestly, I think pieces such as this one are an excellent way to get the ball rolling in helping your society adapt. Get people thinking about it, hopefully talking about it, and offer at least a few comments and partial solutions that may help guide their thinking.

Most countries have an enormous amount of intelligence and creativity to draw upon -- the trick is to tap it in time.

Incidentally, work continues on my book on dealing with the world's economic, energy and environmental crises, and I should have something in the way of a first edition/early draft out soon.

Speculation on the Speculation

2011-03-06T05:45:00.000-05:00

Well, the world may well be standing on the precipice -- given the present situation with both food and oil, ongoing revolutions in the Middle East, and with climate change looming in the background -- yet the quiet actions of the U.S. Federal Government remain fascinating to behold.

In light of the recent, formal declaration of a state of National Emergency over the Libyan revolution, I should clarify -- and ever-so-slightly correct -- something I just wrote about that state of emergency.

While presidential emergency powers can be quite sweeping, the additional powers accessed always depend on the nature of the crisis and the actions the President decides to explicitly take in response. Ever since the Watergate hearings, when Congress discovered the U.S. had arguably been in a continuous state of emergency since 1933, there have been requirements for these circumstances to be stated clearly and to be open to Congressional review. To be more accurate about the state of emergency declared over Libya, I am not certain which powers the President has accessed as a result -- a declaration may simply signal certain funds are being tapped, or actions are being undertaken, in response to a crisis (including some crises of a very narrow scope).

But let me clarify. Technically, we are still at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, so any power a governor may have to crush demonstrations or "insurrections" he or she deems disruptive to the rule of law is ultimately dependent on the President's acquiescence, at the very least. Furthermore, under the laws directing the National Guard as a whole, if the President agrees that "unlawful obstructions, assemblages, or rebellion make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State. This is another statutory exception to Posse Comitatus."

In other words, if the President publicly agrees that a problem of that severity exists within a state, he can immediately take control of its militia, and deal with the situation as she or he sees fit.

Hence we come to the very strange tactic that has surfaced since President Obama took office -- an idea that somehow the Commander-in-Chief will be fatally weakened if his would-be nemeses can push him into a position where the powers of his office dramatically increase -- and in which they, all too often, end up entangled in actions certain to bring down the full wrath of the government.

This recent declaration of emergency -- while its particulars remain obscure -- is notable for what it apparently does not do, and yet how powerful it has become, regardless.

With a stroke of the pen, the President has reminded any number of people that -- given the very real and very dire threats afoot in the world right now -- he can declare national emergencies in response to a wide range of events. A precedent set and repeatedly affirmed by a whole company of his predecessors.

Whatever the official chain of command may be for this or that element of our national-security forces, given the laws passed and organizations established in the last decade, the President can take control of pretty much all of it -- especially in the face of something as unwise as armed insurrection. And yet, an astounding number of people seem to be rooting for such an event, despite being incredibly unprepared merely to survive a full-scale rebellion in their region, much less to participate in one.

Similarly, there seems to be an economic blind spot with regards to the powers the President could tap in an emergency declared over Libya (or over crop failures, or Saudi Arabia).

Could the President draw on precedent to take drastic actions with regards to U.S. imports and exports? Certainly Franklin Roosevelt did, declaring a "bank holiday," banning transactions in foreign exchange and setting numerous regulations relating to the ownership and exchange of gold and silver.

All of which suggests that if the global food and fuel crisis worsens, the U.S. government could effectively take control over certain of its imports and exports... For example, swapping exports of food in exchange for Middle Eastern oil or Chinese solar panels or rare-earth elements.

Could such powers be used to crush speculation in certain commodities, particularly if speculators were seen -- accurately or otherwise -- as driving an economic crash? Quite possibly so, though I suspect that if the hammer falls on speculators, the first and perhaps only people who will have to worry about their goods being seized are those speculating traders who never take delivery of their goods, but who merely place bets on a material's value going up or down. Other participants in the system have legitimate needs for the commodities in question -- refineries processing oil, factories baking bread, and so forth.

But if speculators are seen as in any way driving a run up in energy or food prices, they run the risk of having their contracts annulled and their goods seized by any number of countries under various emergency rulings. And recourse, in many cases, would be limited, especially in the face of a public which viewed them as greedy, destructive and responsible for the crisis at hand.

All of which creates an interesting dilemma for speculators. The faster and more relentlessly profits rise in key commodities, the more dangerous it becomes to be holding vast amounts of those goods, especially if one can not take physical possession of them and has no use for them other than to speculate on their value.

Indeed, one thing that may be keeping prices restrained is that some or all of the major, private financial players may have informed of this situation, or have figured it out themselves.

Which brings us back to the fascinating stratagems of the present U.S. Administration. Whatever you may think of their policies or philosophy, their actions are extremely interesting. With one declaration, the President has reminded everyone paying attention of just how extensive his powers are, especially in the face of a real threat, and served notice to a great many economic and political players of just how swiftly and effectively he could answer economic or literal warfare, if anyone decided to target the country in that way.

And yet he has done this while doing very little, at least overtly, at all. Like so many warnings, it is the action taken, and the actions not taken, which speak volumes.

March 11 -- Will Middle-Eastern Oil Production Crash?

2011-03-05T04:33:00.000-05:00

As we approach the March 11, so-called "Day of Rage" some activists have planned for Saudi Arabia, an uncomfortable question emerges. Given that two governments in that region have already fallen, a third appears to be toppling and massive protests are supposedly planned in Saudi cities for the 11th, one has to ask: Will the Saudi government fall? Will overall oil exports from the Middle East crash, potentially down to nothing?

Given the rapid pace at which events are moving in the Mideast, having a contingency plan in place for an energy crash -- for your country, your business or just your family -- seems like a very wise idea.

Clearly, I'm working something a bit more extensive than my previous Southeastern Fuel Shortage disaster plan. But however far along my book is in the next few days, I'm looking at releasing an early, rough draft so that anyone who wants to include it in their planning can do so.

But in the meantime, even that simple discussion of a much more limited crisis covers some important points, and prudent strategists will want to consider what vulnerabilities they have to contend with and what resources they could bring to bear in the event of fossil fuels, in particular oil, suddenly becoming much harder to come by.

The U.S. National Emergency or... One Man, One Vote

2011-03-05T01:24:00.001-05:00

Given the host of agricultural disasters in the last year, the skyrocketing cost of food (and to a lesser extent, fuel) and the 14% drop in global oil production this December -- which, for all the public knows, could still be going on... Given all of these problems, and a host of others, I am often surprised by the number of people who are not only hoping for a dramatic collapse of civilization that wipes out vast numbers of human beings.

But I am even more surprised by the people who hope for such a cataclysmic period in the sadly mistaken belief that their particular set of skills, contacts and supplies will somehow enable them to "win the chaos." You will often meet people who think that because of the forewarning they have, they will manage to emerge as Dictator or Warlord or Chief Courtier in the new regime or anarchy built upon the bones of all that has gone before.

Remarkably, the people who believe such things tend to be exactly the people who would die the fastest in such a rapid and fundamental breakdown of civilization. Whether this individual is, say, a lobbyist who expects to be running the world from their K-Street office or the would-be petty warlord who plans to raid town after town upon his moped, gathering a horde of followers as he goes... Well, these people tend to be a bit deluded. And exactly the kinds of folks who would not last a week in such a ruinous time, much less a month or a year.

There are a whole host of reasons why such people would do very, very badly. Going from door to door, for example, looking for extremely well-prepared people so you can rob them means you are going to run into everybody with a weapon and the will or the desperation to defend themselves. And yes, people who have survivalist-level food stores often have even more invested in bullets than in beans.

So let's discuss, briefly, where the power really goes in an emergency in the U.S. -- whether a declared national emergency or a moment of mortal peril for the entire country.

Because of laws and executive orders put into effect under the Bush Administration, enormous powers converge in the President's hands the moment he declares a state of national emergency, a declaration which is completely at his discretion.

Some of these powers, while immense, do not even have to be actively exercised in order to have an impact on national events. For example, much was made of the fact that a U.S. governor was recorded making statements to the effect that his people had considered planting provocateurs in a crowd of protesters to justify a crackdown. This same governor had also threatened publicly to disperse these people using the Wisconsin state National Guard.

As of the declaration of emergency the Friday before last, the entire U.S. National Guard has moved from the control of each state's governor to the military chain of command. Hence, this governor's Guard units are no longer his to command until the President says otherwise. And the President is unlikely to dispatch them to crush peaceful protesters.

Though ostensibly over the Libyan situation, I suspect the State of Emergency has more to do with the aforementioned, possibly-imminent food-and-energy crash. This could indeed be a dramatic turning point, for good or ill, or some combination thereof, for the entire world. So it is not surprising that certain individuals and organizations may be positioning themselves to take some kind of advantage of it, while most of those around them are either oblivious or concentrating on survival.

But what is amazing is how many people see this situation as inherently an opportunity to subvert the legitimate government using... a truly pathetic handful of resources, many of which will disappear in a global crash or which are already fading now.

For example, that governor has so far lost control of his state Guard, alienated much of his police force and roused something of a popular (if peaceful) revolt against his policies. Whatever his intentions, and whatever you may think of his policies or believe about his goals, if he has even considered using his position to crush political opposition and assemble a power base (and one would hope he has not) then...

Things Are Not Going Well.

To sum up, then:
Everyone in the U.S. who thinks they can seize power from the existing, democratically elected leadership -- whether by forcing policies through by disastrous ultimatum, by gaining a stranglehold on critical resources, by assembling some kind of private army, or by launching a brutal rebellion should remember -- in an emergency, pretty much all the power flows straight to the President. Above and beyond the vast powers and resources already at his disposal.

Or to put it more simply:
We are now in an official National State of Emergency.

We have just moved to a One Man, One Vote system.

Obama is The Man, and he has The Vote.

Think about it.

More Sources of Open Source

2011-03-03T03:13:00.000-05:00

Here's a comment, quoted in full, from Bryan Bishop, one of many people working in the field of do-it-yourself and open-source technology, albeit one who has done a great deal to promote the concept in certain circles. Bryan has many insightful things to say, but given just how fragile our present, just-in-time industrial world is today, I thought I'd draw attention to this brief statement, made some days ago.

In brief, while there is a great deal more to be said about open source and DIY, here are a few interesting lines of thought to consider now.

The way I see it, open source paints a larger trend, not one of mere
transparency in our current politics, but rather a complete re-envisioning
of society entirely.

This is why we have individuals like Patri Friedman (Seasteading Institute)
working on a “startups of governments” framework. Transhumanists have known
Patri for some time now. He was recently re-elected to the board of
Humanity+ and has presented at these conferences before. His borrowed
concept is to make land out on the high seas available to “entrepreneurial
governments”. What would an entirely open source seasteading distribution
look like? There’s been no doubt that Debian and Ubuntu have been huge
forces in the free software world– will Seasteading Institute be as
influential in development?

This is also why we have Marcin Jakubowski (Factor E Farm)
working on the global village construction set. He’s creating the Global
Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance
technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50
different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable
civilization with modern comforts. Holy crap, mount that on Patri’s friggin’
seasteading platform. Marcin presented at H+ Summit 2009 in Irvine,
California. His farm out in Missourri has sort of been like a Zeitgeist or
Venus Project for people who have an urge to get down to business. He’ll be
presenting at TED sometime this year. And he really, really deserves his TED
talk.

This is why we have Adrian Bowyer (University of Bath) working on
RepRap,
an open-source 3D printer that hopes to one day make all of its own
components. It’s not really just Adrian now, but thousands of developers and
hundreds of repraps and derivatives, even businesses like Makerbot
Industries and MakerGear. This technology has ignited global, open
development. Humanity+ (this blog) thinks that open technology development
has tremendous acceleration benefits, especially in open
manufacturing.
I helped organize the Gada Prizes at Humanity+ including the
just-recently-announced Grand RepRap Prize .. and
there’s $80,000 at stake.

This is why Robert Freitas (Institute for Molecular Machinery)
has provided hundreds of hours of research in his book Kinematic
Self-Replicating Machines . For
many of the reprappers it (and Advanced Automation for Space
Missions)
has been a guiding star in both mechanical devices but also
nanotech.
I flip through these almost daily now.

Christopher Kelty once published an interesting seed of an idea about
recursive republics- societies that continuously use their technologies to
update their mandate in a giant feedback loop. At least, that’s the thought
he came to after chronicling the historical trends in the free software
movement  ...
er, which isn't his video.

((On a related note, it’s always amused me how Chris Peterson @ Foresight
Institute  was more involved in open
sourceback in the late 90s. There’s a few edge
cases in the transhumanist
communities, but in general, it seems that the futurists missed out on open
source. To be fair, open source isn’t easy to make. It’s hard work. But
nobody is going to hand-deliver you the future.
Biocurious(the
open source, DIY biohacking hackerspace) is ran by a few
transhumanists, so the future is looking bright for the Bay Area
transhumanists.))

The future of “open source politics” is going to be about technology
development. Don’t like your current government? You’ll get to spawn off a
spore and take a recent version of technological civilization with you- for
yourself, your family and your friends to go with you, if they think your
proposed system is worth leaving (just don’t “fork-and-forget”! ah, GitHub’s
one weakness). That’s the power of open source. But there seems to be a
chasm or disconnect between the events and trends I’ve outlined... and the
article’s take on Open Source, which is definitely crippling in dangerous
ways.

BTW: I’ll be in the Bay Area at the end of the month in case anyone wants to
hang out or, you know, feed me.

*Edit*: Also, there’s a BIL meetup in Long Beach, California on March
3rd-5th. Joseph Jackson has been recruiting lots of DIYbio folks to talk
about directed evolution, EEG, open source hardware projects, a mass
spectrometer project, etc. etc. (deets )

U.S. Declares National Emergency Over Libya

2011-02-27T22:39:00.001-05:00

Please don't panic.

But in light of the National Emergency President Obama just declared with regards to Libya, there's a bit more to be said.

First, probably the most responsible thing governments can be doing right now, before all else, is making sure that crops get planted in the Northern Hemisphere before any large agricultural producers can be truly rattled by sharp changes in oil's price or availability. If they are working behind the scenes to do this, well, good for them.

Second, the revolution in Libya is critical because that nation is one area not yet suffering dramatic declines in oil production, and because it produces a great deal of oil that can be processed by refineries in Europe that can not handle heavier, dirtier oils provided by many other sources. Which has no doubt had an effect on the price of oil rising faster there than in the U.S. Of course, the fact that the U.S. has fewer people and more oil production than Western Europe, and more waste to cut, has probably also affected those prices.

But overall, that 14% one-month drop bodes ill for us all, even if, hopefully, the nations who lost so much output can not decline much further.

Incidentally, I am assembling a brief ebook on how to handle a radical disruption in oil supplies, as well as a few other threats such as climate, weather and energy-driven food shortages.

Oh, And Why I Said "Six Months of Oil Left"

2011-02-27T00:32:00.001-05:00

Over the last few days, I responded to the stunning numbers on global oil production in December of 2010 by suggesting that we might only have six months of oil left. Why say something that dramatic?

First off, if world production really dropped 14% in December, and if roughly that rate of decline continued and is continuing, then six months -- for a variety of reasons -- might be optimistic.

Why?

In part, because this drop did not start when I posted my first comment on the data. If we take the November 2010 global production numbers as our baseline, then we began this rate of descent in December. Right now, we have two days left in February, which means we have gone through three months of production. We just have the statistics for only one of them.

Now, I've already discussed a few ways in which the one-month 14% drop in world production and the 4.9% drop in Saudi exports might not be quite as bad as they appear... but if that 14% drop or something roughly that bad continues on a monthly basis, we will be in a very bad place production-wise, with incredible speed.

There are numerous complicating factors in this situation, given that several Middle Eastern oil producers are much less stable than their Latin counterparts. The collapse of one or two or three key oil exporters could rapidly wipe out the global supply in even the best of times.

And then remember that if the 14% one-month drop is continuing, we are already three months into it. So when I said, "14%, of course, drops you to to 40% in six months, and a little over 16% in 12," it's important to remember that effectively those stages are three months and nine months away, respectively. Nine months after this situation began, if it persists, we will have a little under 26% of our production left. (Right now, after three months, we would be reduced to a little under 64% of our output, or just under 2/3.)

It's an open question as to whether the world can lose that much of its oil supply, that fast, and not go totally to pieces. Even if revolutions do not continue and spread, it will be difficult to maintain supply lines, spare parts and critical industrial infrastructure when that much fuel and synthetic feedstock has been pulled from the system.

But then, the options I'm assembling aren't necessarily conventional, though quite a few of them are cheap.

Some Further Thoughts on the Saudi Figures

2011-02-25T21:09:00.008-05:00

I've been weighing the figures discussed here and here on this site, and have come up with at least one slightly more positive interpretation of the Saudi numbers -- not enough to avert the main threat if the 14% drop in global output in month is both real and in any way sustained, but enough to perhaps change the options for at least some nations going forward.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has been quoted as saying, in effect, that he has ordered some new finds kept in the ground for the sake of his nation's children and their future.

While I am not entirely convinced that such a significant Saudi shortfall as 4.9% in one month is simply being "kept in the ground" any more than it was entirely consumed by the Saudi people, the dire global oil situation suggests one strong possibility other than a catastrophic collapse in the nation's production.

First, to be clear, the 14% drop in global oil production in December represented a net drop by producers totaling 90% of world production. The only hopeful news out of that drop is that OPEC only fell 2%, owing to the Saudi reduction in exports, and that the crashing nations, supposedly mostly in Latin America, did not have that far to fall and hence can not reduce net global production much further, no matter how badly their fields may go.

But...

If the Saudis were aware of the international industry's situation (and they very likely were), they might have deliberately and substantially cut back their exports -- "tough love," as it's called in America. In effect, by raising the price of oil now while building reserves in the Kingdom, they can help force a degree of life-saving conservation on the world economy at this point while holding back enough oil to sell later, when the situation becomes really dire.

And matters most likely will become incredibly bad, no matter what. Saudi Arabia has very likely peaked in terms of overall oil production, despite intense efforts within the Kingdom to keep oil flowing. But the Saudis need to feed their people, and major food exporters such as the U.S. are going to need at least some oil. Food for oil looks like a very logical exchange, especially given global food-production issues.

This situation may also explain a number of other national strategies, such as China's decision to keep her rare-earth supplies for internal production. The Chinese may need to trade for both extra food and oil, if only to maintain a safe stockpile, and the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are both apt to be willing to trade in exchange for shiploads of solar cells.

I should add, however, that even if the above possibility proves correct, the conventional food and energy markets are going to be incredibly tough if production continues to collapse. Remember, even if Saudi Arabia might have had a reason to hold back oil and spook the market to a more rational attitude, none of the nations indicated in the JODI data as having their production decimated had any such rationale.

Indeed, many of these countries did not even have data listed for the month of December in the JODI report... just a blank spot for each month.

Which seems almost as ominous as a one-month, 14% crash.

What a 2%, 5% or 14% Drop in Oil Production Means

2011-02-23T21:49:00.001-05:00

Something (now edited) I wrote on another forum in reply to a comment on my oil-production post...
--

"This has got to be a typo, this much drop in output."

I really, really hope so.

But again, I wouldn't bet my life on it.

Even if we can rule out a full 14% drop globally, that also leaves the 4.9% drop in Saudi exports, and the net 2% drop in OPEC exports. You can bet those aren't just typos.

2% a month, if that continues, is catastrophic in itself -- in 12 months you're down to less than 80% production. 5% takes you down to around 54% in the same time frame.

14%, of course, drops you to to 40% in six months, and a little over 16% in 12.

So that's bad.

The same commenter continued...
"Wait for a revision, and never draw a trend from a single data point."

You know, I'm really darned optimistic, but I really wouldn't just wait. Even if we somehow get upgraded to a mere 2% global drop, we're in trouble.

There are two happier possibilities regarding the numbers.

One, that the January figures represent a number of countries finally "coming clean" about their real production numbers all at once.

There are a few problems with that. One, why would that happen all in the same month? This program has been going on for some time, why not spread out your revisions over several months? Why not "smooth it out" -- include it in the data in the form of some back-revised numbers recalculating monthly production?

And finally, where are the January numbers? There's only a week left to February, and in an age of email, surely collecting the official numbers from participating governments and running them through Excel isn't that hard.

Two, and this is slightly more likely, though limited in its impact... Maybe the figures are real, but represent a bunch of countries rapidly crashing down to near-zero. In which case, they might stop falling because there's really nowhere else to go.

The downside to that is if Saudi Arabia's drop in December was really only a mere 2%, that represents a fall more catastrophic than Cantarell's. And if it presages a Saudi fall off the backside cliff of Hubbert's curve, it could go fast.

I mean, really fast.

So, We Have Only Six Months of Oil Left... Any Last Words?

2011-02-22T03:02:00.002-05:00

Seven international organizations, including the International Energy Agency, APEC, the United Nations Statistics Division and the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), have been keeping public data on global oil production and exports in the name of transparency in this strategic industry. They call this effort the Joint Organisations Data Initiative or JODI. The last set of figures they published said some very disturbing things.

As noted by Bloomberg News, the first thing they noted was that in the month of December, 2010, OPEC's exports dropped 2% as the result of a 4.9% drop in exports by Saudi Arabia. Word was put that the shortfall was entirely the result of a rise in internal demand. Yet that is a staggering rise in demand for only one month's time. However much Saudi demand impacted their monthly exports, most of that fall was almost certainly the result of a drop in their overall oil production.

Such a sharp drop in Saudi oil production in just one month, whether it was 4.9%, 4% or even 3 %, is of extreme concern because of the path repeatedly taken by countries who begin producing oil until it inevitably peaks and declines. Their rate of oil production follows the path of a bell curve, with a slow initial startup (a low but increasing oil output), a period of rapidly rising production, a slowdown in growth which levels off at a peak in their total annual production, followed by a slow decline or "bumpy" plateau in output and then precipitous drop to a much lower level that eventually tapers away into nothing.

What does that long bell curve mean? If Saudi Arabia's overall oil production is dropping at anything like 3% to 4.9% in a single month, then her overall production may not only have peaked, but may have passed over that bump at the top of the bell curve, straight into the precipitous drop stage of that nation's oil production.

Given that Saudi Arabia has long been the world's largest producer and exporter of oil, if she has gone over that edge, if a roughly 4.9% monthly shortfall in output becomes routine, or worse, accelerates, then global oil production is going to be absolutely hammered as a result.

There are other permutations to the Saudi story, in particular that the light, sweet crude produce by her fields, especially the Ghawar superfield, have a much, much higher Energy Return On Energy Invested -- EROEI, or the amount of energy you get back in exchange for the overall amount you spent finding, extracting, refining and shipping the oil you produce. Unconventional sources, such as Alberta's tar sands, usually have a very low EROEI, or worse, as in the case of the "oil shale" in the U.S., an effectively negative one.

Under normal circumstances, all of the above would be an earthshaking turning point for global oil production.

On the positive side, it's actually the minor story.

The big story is something else mentioned about oil production in the JODI figures -- total world output fell 14% from a month earlier, with the shortfall mainly resulting from non-OPEC sources, especially in Latin America.

Now, the JODI figures cover about 90% of global oil production, and we have every reason to believe that the remaining 10% of production is in countries near, at or past their peak in oil production as well.

But leaving that aside, a roughly 14% drop in global oil production in one month, at these prices (approaching and now over $100-a-barrel) is devastating.

Especially if it heralds a large number of major, mature oil producers going over the same cliff that Saudi Arabia seems to be descending. After all, 14% is devastating, but up to a point, some crashing producers could see their fall accelerate... until they hit that nice, calm, tapering-off-to-nothing stage.

What does all this mean? Well, when I said we have six months of oil left, I wasn't entirely exaggerating. In truth, I think global oil consumption is about to get conserved dramatically, by price if nothing else.

Now, is this The End of the World? Or The End of Civilization?

Not if we play our cards right. Many industrialized nations could cut back dramatically on oil consumption if they focused intently on the basics and a few longer-term investments. The U.S., for example, can probably keep its agricultural system running on what it still has internally, plus a few buses, while trading food for our further petrochemical needs, as we're more or less in the "slow, tapering stage." But that's trade for our needs, not wants. Our wants will only be supplied (and that to a limited degree) by radical change... probably radical change taking place on a number of fronts, including renewable energy, extremely judicious conservation, and a lot more sustainable, localized food production.

I will post further on this subject on this blog. For now, just in case anyone thinks that we're going to run out of oil in the next five minutes, I leave you with a disaster plan I formulated in haste in 2008 when it seemed possible that the U.S. Southeast, in particular, could suffer extreme, localized fuel shortages as a result of hurricanes disrupting America's fuel-distribution system. The above plan is not an exhaustive discussion, but it's a place to start in case you can not wait a day or two for the beginnings of a more advanced strategy.

--

One note: The Export-Land Model has proven to be consistently true thus far, and is worth pointing out. Basically, as oil-exporting countries become wealthier, they have a greater capacity and desire to use their excess oil internally, to meet their own people's demand. Which means that their exports reach a point where they are dropping off even more radically than their production levels.
Which is, I suspect, one reason America's offshore oil remains a potential reserve source, presently only partially tapped, but theoretically there if needed to help stave off disaster.

On Watson and AI -- Responses to the Responses

2011-02-19T03:55:00.001-05:00

I've had a few more comments on IBM's Watson, and thought I'd share the essence of the commentary as well as my responses, especially since I clarified a lot of details in those comments.

First, "Priest Valon" commented...

AI theoretics is in my wheelhouse

Decision and analysis in a complex space is not easily modeled, but relatively recent advances have done so.
Essentially, computers are very very fast, very very accurate calculators... but a traditional algorithm, even an adaptive algorithm will never operate at a level of decision making that approaches real world complexity.
The solution is quite simple, at an "atomic" level... constructs called neural agents. They operate using a finite algorithm, are smart (in that they are independent instances of a class object) and follow an independent solution path, and then compete with other agents for the correct solution. The group of highest ranking paths defines the "thought" of the system. Computational game theory is the foundation of this and is widely used in proprietary systems like stock analysis.

To which I replied...

This is an excellent point, and something...

I wanted to discuss, in a slightly different way, about AI. While I am open to the idea of an eventual, sentient AI (or something very like it) being possible, it's in many ways the fact that we can break down important, complex tasks into a series of steps that we program computers and/or design other machines to accomplish.
In addition to various methods of problem solving -- evolving problem-solving agents, sifting through existing archives of options -- there are all the things we can design a machine to do.
For example, how complex is it to do your taxes, really? If all of the data could be inputted through the receipt of pre-entered data, or scanned from standardized forms, could your computer (or "Muse") do your taxes for you, and within reason pay them, without even involving you? How many tasks have we already broken down sufficiently that a reasonably competent AI could step in and handle the gruntwork itself?
Note, both of the computers I've mentioned which are already doing scientific research are essentially taking tasks that involve a large number of repetitive steps and automating them. In contrast to your example of neural agents, the designers essentially found a method or set of methods that worked -- which in some cases they knew already worked -- and implemented them on a massive scale.
To be blunt, I think Watson's potential ability to "just follow orders" is going to be huge, because so much labor can be broken down into discreet steps already, without requiring terribly complicated decision-making skills, just the capacity to understand what is being asked for.

"Valon" makes s
ome further points about the tricky nature of understanding everything from syntax to motivations in trying, for example, to do someone else's taxes on TurboTax. He also points out that you can train someone with multiple attempts at a task, but only if they have some metrics by which to differentiate success from failure.
To which I replied...

Indeed, which is why Watson's ability to understand the odd phrasing and fuzzy logic of Jeopardy questions is such an important first step. Other issues -- voice recognition, facial recognition, text scanning, handwriting recognition -- are well along already. But if you can consistently understand what humans living in the real world want without having to ask, and especially without their having to laboriously explain it, you can take a huge number of tasks off their shoulders.
Because we've already simplified and standardized those tasks already -- but someone still has to do them. But soon, that someone may be named Watson.

Oh, and this leads into another issue that of the limited AI executing its program in a highly focused, anti-social way that ends up obliviously killing off the ecosystem around it. While this point is often made about many shortsighted corporations, I'm reminded of the rapidly evolving, voracious micro-corps of Accelerando, who ended up adapting to a fiercely competitive environment by feeding on each other and killing off the more advanced AIs. These fast-thinking, semi-sentient micro-corps kept evolving to fill any available economic niche, with only their ability to seize resources and destroy competitors mattering in their "social system" and sense of "morality."

Eventually, they wiped out every civilization that gave birth to them, and themselves as well.
One thing that gives me hope about new social networking systems like Facebook is that being a bully or a troll is not automatically rewarded over being a good person.
I think people are starting to make more active judgment calls about who they really want to be associated with in real life and online, and on who they want to cut out of their lives.
Which makes us all that much harder to manipulate, or undermine, or thwart, or destroy.

Regarding the potential, further displacement of human jobs by automation...

The fact that so much human labor can be replaced is one reason I keep bringing up human enhancement and human augmentation.

To be blunt, how many human beings do we have who already live up to their full potential? How many are doing truly satisfying, meaningful work? How many are being listened to, and having their creativity and other gifts fully tapped by their present work, and their present lifestyle?
I would say... very few.
Simply changing that one aspect of life would likely be one of the most dramatic augmentations we'll ever see. Not only in terms of ending all the waste of human potential we have now, but in the flowering of civilization made possible by billions of people reaching even their most basic intellectual, artistic and human capacity, right now.

And on the same subject, with the further concern that our society is in no way prepared to handle it...

Well yes... and no...

You have a very good point about a lot of jobs getting automated away and not necessarily replaced.
I would point out two things. One, our present peaking fossil fuel production, climate-change disruptions, harvest shortfalls and general economic issues make a lot of investment to replace workers who can be had increasingly cheaply in so much of the world a bit iffier of a proposition. Not that it can't happen, especially if we can change our energy sources and work through the rest of our problems, but there it is.
The other thing is... I think a lot of people are starting to look more seriously at how they live their lives, and whether they value simply having more and more electronic, motorized and other "stuff" in bigger and bigger piles... Or whether they want a life that is more connected with nature, with their community and with their family and friends. And in which their possessions and the services they receive are more personalized and meaningful.
If the latter... Or if resource constraints force us to change, or both...
Then I suspect we'll be looking at more localized food production -- more local farms, gardens, orchards, aquaponics, urban gardening, community gardening -- more handmade items (especially local ones, or made by oneself or one's friends), and so forth. Simply how people live their lives, and whether they value those around them for moral, aesthetic or basic insurance reasons, has a huge impact on whether we keep people employed, and employed at meaningful jobs, or not.

Another poster argued that I was not offering enough attention to the social-learning "growbot" strategy for developing AI, and that overpopulation and climate change made a major die off in our global population inevitable...

Well, that brings up quite a few issues...

With AI, there are actually a number of different prevailing theories (how many depends on how seriously you take each one and each permutation of each one).
I mean no offense to the "growbot" perspective or any other. My point with Watson is that we appear to at last have a basic, general AI -- not perfect, not omnipotent, but capable of understanding our requests well enough to soon begin handling a lot of tasks with minimal supervision.
In fact, it's exactly the huge amount of work that has been done by humans with computers and other systems that suggests that a cheaper, more powerful Watson could soon be the controlling interface "just following orders" which thereby revolutionizes a wide array of efforts.
You know how modern computers have operating systems (OS)? Think of this as potentially an operating system's operating system.
If that tremendous amount of work were not already in place -- tax software to do your taxes for you, Droid phones that can make restaurant reservations, Google as well as Watson, and so much more -- then IBM's effort would be far less impressive. As it is, we seem to be looking at a turning point in AI -- not an earthshattering change, but a step that will lead to others.
As for the challenges facing humanity...
Though I wish to stay out of the political discussion of what happened in Cairo, I think the young people of Egypt made a huge statement insofar as their revolution was practically bloodless in spite of those determined to see it crushed.
So far, the young of this world are not playing by the cynical playbook that so many insist is their only option. I don't think they intend to.

To a poster who felt that Watson was not a basic AI, but no more important than speech recognition or an ordinary chess-playing computer...

I have a different perspective...

Just about every Jeopardy question is some kind of a basic joke, or riddle, or otherwise murky way of phrasing the "question" -- which is a non-question in itself.
If you've read through what I've posted on this subject, then you know we already have two computers doing scientific research on their own, and that a host of other functions have already been automated. Some of which I've described, but I've left out some of the most formidable, such as completely automated manufacturing from a set of plans and inputted raw materials.
Watson, as I've said elsewhere, can understand relatively obscure phrasing and determine what it is you're asking for. That's huge, because there's already a host of fully automated functions out there which it could perform, if it -- or its successor -- can handle the most basic function: Understanding what you're asking for and acting on that request.
Effectively, as I've noted, Watson is potentially an operating system of operating systems. Just as your laptop or smartphone provides an OS and a platform within which its various sub-programs work, Watson could be the master program that interprets what you say when you ask a question or give an order and then acts accordingly. Does it matter if Google is better at searching the entire Web if your computer pulls up that information and filters the results for its owner? Does it matter if TurboTax does your taxes if Watson pulls down the data from your digital and hardcopy records and effectively does your taxes for you?
There are steps to be filled in, but like an iMac or iPhone, or even a supercomputer, it's not just the hardware and the operating system, it's the applications. But this is so impressive because so many of those applications already exist, we're just oblivious to them.
Now if you believe that an AI must be a godlike, recursively self-improving, fully sentient intelligence, then I acknowledge that by your definition, Watson is in no way an AI. But that is by your definition, not mine.

A remark that once our backs are to the wall on energy, or food, we should finally see real change in how governments handle these issues...

One thing that gives me hope is that I see a lot of people acting, and not in the frantic, panicked, destructive way so many observers seem to expect from the public. Instead, whatever you may think of recent unrest, it's impossible to note that a major Middle Eastern power just fell in an essentially bloodless revolution organized by smart, non-fanatical, pragmatic young people.
You know, the very people who are supposed to be dis-empowered and radicalized.
Could it be that -- gasp -- our bigoted assumptions could actually be Wrong?

Because the Future Is Coming Fast

2011-02-17T16:53:00.000-05:00

I am reactivating this Future Imperative blog for a number of reasons, but most importantly because the future itself seems even more pressing, more imminent and more radical than it did five years ago. There are many powerful forces at work in the world today, and this blog will be looking more and more at the currents that are seemingly invisible, but which can rise up like a surfer's wave or shift into a deadly riptide. And unlike the tides you find at the seashore, these powers are neither charted nor widely understood.

Indeed, many people do not even realize some of them exist. This blog will be about more than just enumerating the problems, however, but ways they can best be dealt with. But in order to meet these challenges, we must first know that they exist, be able to take their measure.

So to begin, we have...

Peak Energy

Peak oil is a straightforward concept -- we have a limited amount of oil and other non-renewable fuels, and one day each of these resources will run out. Peak oil tells us that at some point in the process of exhausting those resources, we will hit a moment in which we are extracting the most of that material (per day or per year) that we ever will. This turning point (particularly for oil) usually comes at roughly the midpoint of extraction, when only about half that resource is left. Worse, the first half of that resource -- be it oil, coal or natural gas -- is invariably the easiest half to extract. The latter half always takes more time, energy and raw materials (such as drilling rigs and pipelines) to tap, and in the case of oil and coal becomes increasingly dirty as well.

What most people do not understand is how heavily dependent the world is on its three key fossil fuels: especially oil. Oil not only provides the overwhelming majority of modern transportation fuel, but is raw material behind plastics, pharmaceuticals and most synthetics. Natural gas, on the other hand, is the source of most of the world's inorganic fertilizers.

The world is almost certainly near, at or just past this point of peak oil production, with coal and gas getting ever closer to peaking as well. While I am generally an optimist, very little in the way of renewable-energy alternatives are in place in most of the industrialized world, and after an initial slow drop or plateau of production after peaking -- as seen again and again in the peaking of oil production in every nation that has experienced it -- the drop off in production becomes quite precipitous. Our world, on the other hand, lacks the skills and infrastructure to simply go back to a low-energy lifestyle... among other problems, many regions are far more heavily populated than they were in pre-industrial times. Britain, for example, has around ten times its pre-industrial population.

Which brings us to our next concern...

Climate Change

There are a number of dire threats related to climate change, from rising sea levels to species extinction to a fatal acidification of the oceans to an outgassing of methane that could drive us into a runaway heatup of the entire planet. But for now, I will only discuss one situation -- food production.

For some time, climatologists have warned that shifts in climate and unstable weather could severely hurt crop production worldwide. These predictions, however, were usually set sometime in the nebulous future -- if specified at all, then typically indicated as being years if not a few decades away. And yet if the series of horrendous weather events we have seen in 2010 and early 2011 is any indication -- and not merely a bizarre confluence of highly improbable events -- then this time of faltering and then falling food production may already be upon us.

The droughts in Russia, the flooding in Pakistan, the drought in western Australia and the floods in eastern Australia, the desertification of cropland in China, the collapse of the "fossil" water tables in India... combined with more minor events, such as the Midwestern ice storm affecting winter wheat in the U.S., and major damage to vegetables in Mexico and southern China, these suggest a planet whose agriculture is already in crisis. In many less wealthy nations, people normally spend up to half of their income on food, and food prices have risen dramatically in the last year. Some will point to financial speculation as a culprit, and I will not try to unravel how much of the price of rice or wheat is work of investors and how much is driven by underlying conditions. What is clear is that underlying conditions have become dire, and need to be either dealt with, or grimly endured.

The Economy

Needless to say, the disastrous consequences of radical financial speculation are only aggravated by factors such as rising energy costs, resource depletion, an inflation in food costs combined with a drop in its availability, not to mention dealing with large-scale natural disasters from Haiti to Russia to Pakistan to Australia, and the existence or threat of war, terrorism and/or violent revolution in many unstable regions.

The economy is an odd beast, and very often becomes healthier when "starved" of its excesses. But all too many people seem to feel that the food eaten by others, or the clothes on their backs, are an egregious excess, rather than a necessity, or do not think about such issues at all. Hence, unhealthy forms of competition are all too prevalent. And, of course, the economy needs a certain level of resources to operate lest its existing structures all collapse catastrophically. And many individuals and organizations resist radically reforming or shutting down wildly inefficient industries and practices until it is too late to do either gracefully.

Yet as the dangers posed by energy, environmental and economic threats have become impossible to ignore, a host of tactics and strategies have emerged in response to them. Further, some forces already in motion have been responding to the global crisis (or crises) as it has become more pressing, whether due to foresight, inherent flexibility, or some combination thereof.

Crowdsourcing, Opensource, DIY Technology, Ebooks, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet

These six could each be their own category, but together they symbolize something larger than what they are today. Crowdsourcing -- letting the public complete tasks for you on their own initiative, such as creating smartphone and other software apps -- and opensource -- a conscious cooperative effort to create software, often major software such as Linux... these are forms of cooperation which have transformed software research. Google, Apple, Microsoft -- the titans of the computer industry have all embraced crowdsourcing for creating phone apps, because having potentially thousands of bright, talented programmers lending you hand for little or no money and with no gatekeepers to keep them from initiating a project... Well, that quirk alone is transformative.

But you could argue quite a few breakthroughs today have been opensourced, from peaceful revolutions in North Africa to SETI@Home's use of private PCs for breaking down and processing masses of data to DARPA's open competitions for key technological achievements. The more minds that can be effectively and intelligently leveraged, especially to a constructive end, the more powerful this technique becomes.

Similiarly, opensource research has produced some formidable projects, most notably computer operating systems other than either Windows or Apple's OS. Indeed, this technique is a subculture in itself, wherein pride in one's contribution and private recognition are typically the only rewards available.
Do-it-yourself technology, featured on sites such as Make and Instructables, has also tapped a pool of volunteer gadgeteers, inventors and experimenters to make physical technology and scientific research available to individual creators, tinkers and visionaries as never before. Whether using Arduino pre-programmed microcontrollers or DIY biotech data archives and prepared "bio-bricks" of standardized biological feedstocks, or simply using websites or YouTube to show how to use these or other tools to build innovative technologies... the DIY technology movement has gotten the painstaking details out of the way so that you can go ahead and be creative, and accomplish whatever you are trying to do.
Speaking of getting things out of the way, Ebooks have become a major new force in the publishing world. As one writer told me, "You sell each book for less money. But the writer gets much more per sale than they ever got for a paperback. It used to be that of all the people making money off of a book, the writer always got the least. With Ebooks, you get almost all of it." This change is interesting for any number of reasons, but in addition for cutting out the "middlemen" who absorb so much money with each conventional sale, while adding very little of value, the other profound change is an elimination of "gatekeepers." Or rather, once you can get your book out in front of the public, every individual who might get a chance to buy it becomes their own gatekeeper. The change is profound, in part because it is symbolic. I will discuss this factor further in other posts. But for now, it worth realizing that as individuals and organizations become more empowered, there are fewer and fewer gatekeepers to tell them "no" when they work towards something constructive. Which means the limits to your accomplishments have more and more to do with the resources available or accessible to you, and the talent and drive with which you use them.

Which brings us, of course, to the Internet. So much has been said about the Web that little more needs to be discussed here. Suffice to say that it is making a host of new interactions possible, not just a narrow spectrum of pop-up ads and global outsourcing. But in the end, it is only a tool. The quality of what is said upon it, and the degree to which the better ideas it transmits get noticed, in the end means everything.

Still, remember that all the crowdsourcing, opensourcing, DIY movements and Ebooks would be far less potent or even impossible without the medium of the Net, a power which also feeds the fierce competition between a host of long-standing and newly emerged tech giants, and the startup operations to follow. So long as it remains with us -- and there are plenty of ways to keep it up even in dire regional or global circumstances -- it will continue to foster this competition of ideas, and its own strange quest for human attention.

I have discussed IBM's Watson project elsewhere, but AI is one more tool that will be empowered by the Web. Watson appears to be a basic artificial intelligence, or something close enough. In essence, Watson or its immediate descendant will be able to follow orders. A machine that can understand the vague, imprecise language of a human and respond to it in a consistently intelligent way will be able to take the host of designs and tools and apps we have already standardized for human use and increasingly be able to use them at the spur of the moment for its human owner. Which is yet another force clearing away the detritus that slows useful human activities, especially many of the most productive ones, which once again changes the game for us all.

And that brings me to those most affected by, and those who will most effect, all of the above resources...

Human Enhancement and Human Augmentation

Essentially two phrases saying much the same thing, human enhancement means techniques and technologies that help human beings become better -- healthier, smarter, stronger, faster, better -- whereas human augmentation does much the same thing, only with an emphasis on methods that physically intrude upon and significantly alter the human body. But these two fields are incredibly fuzzy in terms of what truly makes them up.

For example, almost any medical research can be plausibly described as having human enhancement as a secondary use, because in understanding things well enough to heal them, we also learn how they can be improved. Meanwhile, arguably almost anything profoundly helpful could be described as "enhancing" a human -- what do you call an incredibly enlightening teacher or education, or the elite training of modern Olympic athletes?

But here is where human enhancement and human augmentation, however strictly defined, come to impact on us all. We already have humans of extraordinary conventional abilities, including no few geniuses within their respective fields. What happens if those people can be substantially enhanced in terms of their intelligence, their creativity, their ability to learn new information and new skills?

What happens if not just the elite scientist, or the rare genius can be enhanced, but if powerful enhancements become widespread? What happens to all those "common folk" -- whether common or brilliant -- who are out there developing smartphone apps or DIY technologies? What happens to the speed with which they do so, the quality of the technology they produce... and the significance of the problems they choose to address in the first place?

What happens then?

Tim O'Reill once wrote of author Frank Herbert:

One of his central ideas is that human consciousness exists on--and by virtue of--a dangerous edge of crisis, and that the most essential human strength is the ability to dance on that edge. The more man confronts the dangers of the unknown, the more conscious he becomes. All of Herbert's books portray and test the human ability to consciously adapt. He sets his characters in the most stressful situations imaginable: a cramped submarine in Under Pressure, his first novel; the desert wastes of Dune; and in Destination: Void the artificial tension of a spaceship designed to fail so that the crew will be forced to develop new abilities. There is no test so powerfully able to bring out latent adaptability as one in which the stakes are survival.

The truth is that our age is now a test, one in which the stakes are survival.

Now we must decide whether to consciously adapt, or to fall into rage or despair or oblivion... until oblivion claims us.

How Facebook and Cell Phones Can Stop Street Crime and Corruption in Egypt, and Everywhere Else...

2011-02-15T23:44:00.003-05:00

Street level crime, especially the corruption of law-enforcement, is a common concern reported from the streets of Cairo, as mentioned here. But in the wake of a revolution organized by cell phones, Facebook and Twitter, Egyptians may find their phones and Facebook accounts could prove potent tools against such criminal activity.

The solution is a simple one. Most cell phones now have the ability to take pictures, and quite a few are able to take video as well. Criminals in a high-density city -- such as Cairo or Alexandria -- are unable to watch in every direction at once, much less to notice every open cell phone on the sidewalk, or in doorways or windows. When you see someone demanding a bribe or committing a major crime (such as violent assault, or robbing a home or store), take a video if you can, or a photo if you can not. Most crimes are best recorded using video, preferably with understandable sound if words are exchanged (especially threats and demands for bribes). But even a photo begins to build evidence against someone. Still, this act is only the beginning.

Most users of Facebook have noticed that when they show up in photos on other people's pages, the system can automatically recognize their features and connect them to those images. The same facial-recognition technology could be used to connect people in one photograph or video after another. This tracking would connect criminals with not just one crime, but every crime for which you had video or photographic evidence. (Images taken from the best moments (or "frames") of a video would give the software the picture from which it would scan the criminal's face.) In effect, you would have created a "dossier" on this individual, linking them to misdeeds throughout the city, the country, or potentially even the world.

What you need once you have these photos is a host to maintain the images gathered on a particular individual, and a source of facial-recognition software that could link them and file them in the first place. Obviously, if Facebook cooperated in this endeavor, that would be the easiest and most obvious solution. Without Facebook's permission, however, the company would probably look dimly upon people signing up an account for a named or unnamed criminal in order to post incriminating photos about them. Google, of course, can offer facial recognition of your pictures through its free Picasa software, though it obviously does not maintain the equivalent of Facebook pages as an easily browsed summary of them. Though more laborious, iPhones iPhoto software can tag images that can then be searched using Spotlight. Finally, Sony's free Picture Motion Browser can also search through video images and link recognized individuals. OpenCV, free software that include facial recognition, is another option, though also lacking Facebook's autotagging of images. Other organizations, however, could maintain such a dedicated site and database, if they had the identified and tagged images. Another option, of course, would be to have people employed as law enforcement sign up willingly for their own Facebook account, and to post a photo of themselves on their profile.

Obviously, local "citizens watch" groups in Egypt could have their own servers capable of processing and storing this data, and of putting it up on a website. There are advantages, however, to placing the core of such an operation (or at least a copy) beyond the reach of any local criminal, no matter how well connected. Hence, cooperation with one or more international organizations, such as a few human rights groups in a number of different countries, under the oversight of different governments, would help you to archive your information through site mirrors, even if you decided to have one or more databases maintained in-country.

Such cooperation might prove surprisingly easy to arrange. You see, if you can make this work, then it could become popularized around the world and then could be duplicated by people and organizations tracking major human rights violations all over the planet, as well as those opposed to crime and corruption on the local scale. Cell phones are nearly ubiquitous, and Internet access is becoming more common all the time. Once you have proved the concept, it can spread.

What do you do with this information once you have it?

Well, once you have this kind of information about an individual, especially a serial offender, you can bring this to the attention of any number of authorities, human-rights groups, and international observers. Ordinary criminals will likely be brought down by any honest law enforcement you may have, or by anyone trying to at least appear to be honest and diligent. Where official corruption is concerned, your most egregious officers and officials are apt to fall first, as few people responsible to the public will risk much for individuals caught again and again in videos, blatantly demanding bribes or otherwise abusing their positions. Bringing these people to international attention, especially on websites where everyone from diplomats to officials approving foreign-aid money can see them, will exert a steady, powerful influence over the long-term. Even if every dishonorable person is not brought down, everyone involved in extorting money and other questionable acts will understand they are being watched, and that their deeds could be recorded and go out internationally at any time.

And rest assured, they will notice.

Meanwhile, links to the pages that sum up their activities can be sent to judges, their superiors, Parliamentary investigations, community groups and other interested parties. Again, the worst will fall first, but everyone will take notice.

Regarding Interruptions in Internet Access

Needless to say, the above plan relies on being able to access the Internet at least sporadically, and ideally whenever you need it. Given that blackouts and other disruptions can easily cut off Internet access at inconvenient times, I am including links to three different resources that could enable cooperating people to maintain their own Internet locally and even, if necessary, internationally. These three articles -- from PC World, Wired, and Anonymous -- all discuss options that could be used to either circumvent normal interference and/or to build an alternate local Internet using, say, meshed wireless networks. This list covers open source ad-hoc network and routing protocols and platforms, though these are all still works in progress.

One Final Note

Acquiring facial-recognition technology adequate for this purpose is trickier without Facebook's cooperation, Google searches, or Apple or Sony software, but it is by no means impossible, or even necessarily that difficult. The open-source software movement puts together basic technologies such as this all the time, especially when they have been around for years, and the Egyptian revolution is exactly the kind of crowd-sourced, Internet-organized kind of drama that would be apt to galvanize these volunteer programmers. Still, I would try the other options first, especially the free ones, as they are already built and ready to go, and you can find plenty of people who will already know the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Responses to "So, IBM Has an AI (Artificial General Intelligence)" -- Part II

2011-02-15T03:42:00.001-05:00

Below are some summarized comments on my blog post on IBM's new AI, and my responses...

In answer to one comment dismissing Watson as trivial as compared to software allowing data sharing between robots over the Internet (with the idea of creating a "cloud-based" AI as a result):
There are a number of impressive technologies out there -- the ones I cited above are only a few. But I wouldn't underestimate this step. It's not so much being able "to play a game" -- we had that with Deep Blue. It's being able to interpret and understand human language in such an open-ended way, both in comprehending questions and searching for answers, that make this such a game changer.
Rest assured, there are still major hurdles to overcome to achieving an AI with anything like the full range of basic human capabilities. But this is huge. So much of the progress we've seen so far has related to artificially circumscribed questions -- crunching numbers, inputting pre-formatted data, comparing fingerprints or facial structures, or narrowly interpreting language. Some breakthroughs have already gone beyond this, as I've noted above. This one is so potent because it implies an entity -- if only a huge and incredibly expensive entity -- capable of making complex, open-ended judgments.
I'm sure it has limits, but this is an incredibly impressive baseline to start with, rather than to merely be shooting for.

In response to someone who felt Watson was not really intelligent:

The trick is if you can answer Jeopardy questions with a high level of accuracy in the space of a second or so, you're probably at a level where you can "start following orders" -- even if those orders aren't inputted in highly precise, programming friendly language by a trained expert.
You may still hesitate to entrust an unsupervised machine with a nuclear reactor or loaded weapons, but the ability of this system to act on orders -- including the ability to automatically sift through over 200 million pages of accurate data looking for the answer that is both relevant and correct -- is a game changer.
Oh, it probably won't knock you out of a job in the next six months, but even what they have now is incredibly valuable for organizations struggling with information overload. And just about everybody with more than a 56K modem and an IBM 386 already is...

And further:

This machine may not laugh and dance and weep from the depth of its soul, but its level of problem solving -- at least in understanding and answering questions -- appears to be at least "human comparable." It won't be answering phones at a help desk near you -- or near Bangalore -- anytime soon, not given its size and cost. But there's a host of organizations that would already pay for what IBM has, if they can afford it.
Which means that future iterations will pay for themselves. Which means it will only get better. And smaller. And cheaper.
And continue... to change the game.

Responses to "So, IBM Has an AI (Artificial General Intelligence)" -- Part I

2011-02-15T03:24:00.007-05:00

The previous report on IBM's de facto AI, Watson, generated a few direct and indirect responses worth mentioning. First, The New York Times followed up the article linked in my last post with an analysis which actually acknowledged Watson is a more or less a basic AI. Whether or not this admission was a response to this blog's comments, it's interesting to see a major news organization noting this fact. The Times writer also discussed the race between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation (AI versus IA).

While seeing these issues discussed in the public square was undoubtedly interesting, I'm afraid the quick overview provided may have an in fact understated what is going right now, in terms of these two complementary technological paths, and also the other resource and competitive pressures being brought to bear not just on the computer industry, but on the entire human race.

I will go into these subjects more thoroughly in this blog in the near future, but for now, let me clarify.

As the Times notes, AI in Watson's league is a step towards eliminating a lot of expert consultation, at least when it comes to asking questions with relatively straightforward answers. But the greatest insights usually involve far more than just a rote answer. Knowledge certainly plays a role, and a great deal of that information can and has been assimilated into books or databases. A gifted professional may well be bringing together sensory information, "gut instinct" and a wealth of information that comes from having lived in the real world and having a deep understanding of it. Some symptoms picked up by an attentive doctor, for example, may be easily checked by a machine -- blood pressure, pupil dilation, heart rate. Others, such as subtle psychological cues, or insights made possible by a long familiarity with someone's personality and general lifestyle, may prove much harder.

Truly major discoveries, on the other hand, could be much more difficult for an unassisted, simple AI to accomplish. Something like Einstein's theories of relativity were not merely a shift in the paradigm of physics -- in order to find the answers you had to understand that the questions even existed in the first place.

You might read the above qualifiers and think that I am now minimizing the impact of a Watson. Actually, no. The ability to give meaningful, even expert-level answers in a second or two when asked a question, especially when sifting vast databases, is potentially an immense change in itself.

Consider. If Watson is that capable of understanding murky questions and responding to them accurately, then a scientist or inventor could ask for information on a whole host of questions and then receive accurate and almost immediate replies. In effect, a huge part of the trivial, mentally draining, unrewarding and unprofitable work that an elite research team has to do... goes away. Or is rather handled speedily and invisibly by the machine in question.

But this is only the beginning. As I noted previously, we already have two computers out there doing research -- sifting articles for secondary drug uses and analogues in one case, and determining the effect of each gene in a simple animal's genome in the other. Meanwhile, there are other powerful means of coming up with scientific discoveries or technological innovations, such as evolutionary algorithms.

Because Watson can understand and act upon generalized questions, it's likely that soon an AI will be able to understand and act upon other orders, such as a command to begin a new line of basic research, to focus its drug searches on specific diseases or enhancements, or to find the ideal design (evolved from its algorithms) for a specific piece of technology. It's not just whether you can dispense with hiring a new expert for your team; it's that you may have gotten a specific, seemingly major task done in a matter of hours, minutes, or seconds because your automated systems were able to understand exactly what you were asking for.

The expertise you can tap in simply searching for existing answers can be equally formidable for decision makers. A country facing shortages in its food supplies could, in a matter of moments, draw up information on foragable plants, various ways to produce more food (especially fast, high-yield and/or cheap methods), and what organizations might be willing to supply significant food (for free, for an acceptable cost, or for barter (wheat for oil, or what-have-you)). These searches might miss some options (the roots of those daylily plantings lining your highways, even in the dead of winter, for example), but at least leaders would no longer be at the mercy of the information and prejudices of the experts they have on hand. And who, really, has a host of top-notch professionals on hand in every field, for every question?

This kind of breadth and speed could critically improve decision making. But, once again, it's not only the answers you get, but what questions you ask in the first place. For instance, many researchers in the fields of human enhancement and human augmentation -- the study of how to help people be smarter, healthier and otherwise "better than normal" -- seem oblivious to related, complementary developments in sub-fields other than their own and perhaps one or two others. Even though, ironically, some of that work is going on in extremely well-established disciplines. So an AI researcher might keep up with cybernetics, especially work on human-computer interfaces, and yet be unaware of much more mature fields such as nootropic drugs and nutrients, biofeedback, cranial electro-stimulation, self-hypnosis, accelerated learning and sensory-deprivation tanks... or even the full benefits of better nutrition and cardiovascular exercise or the damage caused by sleep deprivation and stress. Or quite a few other interesting discoveries.

Lacking this knowledge can lead to some odd missteps. When last polled, for example, 20% of American scientists admitted to using a drug to improve their thinking... and remarkably, the two main pharmaceuticals employed were Ritalin and Adderall -- two substances with limited uses and well-established and often dangerous side effects. With relatively safe nootropics like Piracetam and general alertness-enhancers such as Modafinil available, seeing that many of America's scientists making such a questionable choice is surprising.

Then again, the Times' followup article on Watson in describing intelligence augmentation speaks exclusively of useful software that can assist elite scientists and engineers, rather than the more formidable option of directly improving the intelligence, learning ability and creativity of the researchers themselves. In fairness, the full extent of intelligence-augmentation experimentation may have been beyond the parameters of the piece, but more frequently this oversight results from sources who are themselves unaware of dramatic progress. Sources who may also harbor prejudices against specific lines of research, such as a dry nanotech or AI triumphalist who feels an unspoken contempt for biological or psychological augmentations.

Once again, it's a matter of the questions you ask, and how frequently you ask them, not just the quality of the information available to you. Our greatest discoveries are often made at the borders of our ignorance, not just at the pinnacles of our understanding.

Which brings us to an interesting twist to all of the above. There are many forces driving dramatic change in the world today. Some of these are new technologies, new opportunities and new competitive forces, but others are grave challenges that are coming fast.

There are really too many of these factors to sum up here, so I will only touch on a few. The intense competition of the computer industry is in many ways the quest not so much to dominate a long-standing market but to create new ones. If you look at some of the major products and/or companies to have emerged in the last two decades, you see Amazon and eBay, Google, the iMac, iPad and iPhone, the Droid smartphone, the crowdsourced software "apps" for smartphones, a host of open-source software (Mozilla, Ubuntu, Python), Playstation and XBox, blogging, e-readers such as Kindle, Facebook and Twitter, and, of course, IBM's Watson. And more.

Quite a few of these innovations were sneered at, yet computer games' revenues now exceed those of the U.S. film industry, and Facebook and Twitter have been used by enterprising, educated young people as the organizational means to overthrow two Middle Eastern governments. Further, the ability to cooperate and compete over the Internet and throughout global markets, and to exchange software based "goods" in seconds, has sharpened these competitive pressures. To return to the above list: How many of those innovations were the work of companies that were either viewed to be fading or on life support, or which had only just come into existence?

But that furious commercial battle is only one tiny part of the larger picture. The debate about whether to pursue intelligence augmentation versus artificial intelligence has for a long time missed the point... Right now, we already have intelligence augmentation, and brilliant human minds that can use it. Our computational breakthroughs, whether AI-related or not, have thus far been most spectacular at advancing research into enhancing humans -- whether by decoding the human genome, assaying new nootropic drugs, scanning the mind with improved MRIs and algorithms, putting the world's scientific journals online in searchable formats, and so on. Granted, it helps that just about any medical research is "dual-use"; as virtually any medical advance can be applied to enhancing some aspect of the human condition. Alzheimer's research equals memory enhancement, intelligence enhancement, and nootropic and longevity research. Parkinson's research equals intelligence and nootropic and longevity research. Artificial limbs mean cybernetic advancements. Repairing brain damage means advances relating to cybernetics, intelligence augmentation and artificial intelligence. And so on and so forth. And, of course, much of this work is not only a theoretical augmentation. Merely keeping existing, brilliant minds functioning at their best for a few more years effectively augments global scientific and technical research. Now imagine how much more could be done to assist those minds directly.

In other words, the scientific and technical competition existing in any number of "hot" fields, and quite a few complacent ones, could be intensified simply by augmenting the intelligence and creativity of their leading researchers. Clearly if, as of several years ago, one fifth of American scientists were taking some kind of drug to amplify their intellect, then this transformation is already underway.

The other half of this changing competitive picture are all of the new people competing -- both a broader slice of the public in countries with established tech industries, and throughout the world. Whether open-source programmers on Linux, hobbyists providing apps for iPhones, or startups emerging out of nowhere, the host of new minds involved in solving problems and/or creating new products is staggering. Now, imagine if all, or even a majority, of those minds could be radically augmented in terms of their gifts, and empowered in terms of the knowledge and resources they could tap and the ease with which they could bring products and companies into existence.

But perilous changes are also taking place in our world, which provide their own kind of "competitive challenge." The world consumes over a cubic mile of oil a year, and vast quantities of natural gas and coal. Those supplies are not only limited, but the energy required to find, extract, refine and ship them to market, particularly in the case of oil, have been steadily increasing over the last century. And our production of oil is almost certainly near, at or just past our ultimate global peak in overall production by volume (and probably well past in terms of net energy).

Rising energy prices feed through into everything, particularly in oil's case, as it happens to be a feedstock in a huge number of products, in particular almost anything made out of plastic. Rising prices and/or falling profits for virtually all goods and services puts financial pressures on everything, which is bad news in a global economic downturn as severe as this one.

Meanwhile, climate change is well underway. Some of those dire impacts supposed pessimists felt could happen in just a decade or two, such as disruptions to our food production, may already be here. Severe drought in Russia, parts of China and India and in western Australia, severe flooding in Pakistan and eastern Australia, and very hard frosts and ice storms in Mexico, southern China and some localities in the U.S. will almost certainly damage global food supplies in 2011. In countries where the average household spends 40% to 50% of their income on food, doubling food prices means economic ruin if not starvation for many, many people.

We should not be surprised that dramatically higher food prices have helped drive revolutions in the Middle East. Nothing makes people believe in change like seeing the end coming.

But ironically, being driven to the wall may prove to be our greatest evolutionary hope. When you no longer have any excuses, delusions or options, you have no choice but to change. That change may be for good or for ill, but at some point it becomes inevitable. Our mission, then, is to make the best choices we can with the information and opportunities before us, and to help provide better alternatives to others, so that when they are forced to leap headfirst into change, they choose to leap in the wisest direction.

So, IBM Has an AI (Artificial General Intelligence)

2011-02-10T18:52:00.003-05:00

IBM is pitting Watson, a de facto artificial intelligence the size of an RV, with a library of 200 million pages of assimilated information, against the top two Jeopardy champions of all time. Whether or not their supercomputer -- using 2,500 processing cores capable of handling 33 million operations per second each -- actually wins, the very fact that an AI now exists which is capable of answering Jeopardy questions is a turning point in the quest for advanced, human-equivalent and human-superior artificial intelligence.

The key is ambiguity and specificity. Jeopardy "questions" are known for throwing in odd and offbeat humor and metaphors while demanding that contestants sort through that in an average of 3 seconds and come back with the specific answer required (phrased as a question). Whether Watson succeeds or fails, IBM will have produced more than a search engine, but an AI capable of sifting through vast data archives to draw out not just a meaningful answer, but the answer, in context, that the user is looking for. A user (Alex Trebek) who will apparently be interfacing by way of verbalized questions.

If this is possible, and clearly it is, Watson will provide governments and research centers the ability to sift data automatically, with an AI not merely capable of "running a search," as Google's algorithms accomplish, but thinking about the question and weighing potential answers -- all in the space of a second or less, and all without requiring a live human to oversee the process, but only its end result.

Consider this fact in the larger context. We already have two computers doing scientific research -- one which sifts through medical journals looking for secondary uses of pharmaceuticals and their analogues. The other can take the genome of a simple animal such as a nematode and sort through its genes one-by-one, conceiving, designing and performing experiments to test the properties of each one of thousands of genes, handling the process effectively all by itself until the task is done.

Meanwhile, we have Google's mighty search engine, a Droid app which can make reservations at some restaurants at the imprecise verbal command of its owner, and a host of publicly developed apps for the iPhone. What we have, in effect, is a rapidly evolving version of what the science-fiction game Eclipse Phase would call a "Muse," a basic artificial intelligence that is with its owner from its earliest years, and which handles essentially all of its meaningless digital "paperwork" and other tedious jobs.

But between the emergence of that technology and Watson, we have all the tremendous strides forward in between. Given that we already have computers doing real scientific work and now capable of searching the world's collective memory, those steps are apt to be substantial indeed. Already, a bit of crowdsourcing apps and off-the-shelf technology might make a primitive Muse possible, and of course computers are already adept at operating within the artificially limited parameters of the Web.

AI advancing at this pace will have tremendous impacts on employment, shifting career and business opportunities, technological development and other issues I will go into more extensively on this blog. But I leave you with one thought...

Formidable as this technology is, how much more potent does it become in the hands of extraordinarily gifted human beings, who are working to tap their own fullest potential in terms of not only the machines they use, but the skills they practice, the personal enhancements they embrace, and the lives they live?

Power Armor for the Masses

2008-11-12T01:53:00.004-05:00

I hope all you mecha enthusiasts out there haven't missed this one from Cyberdyne... =)

That's the full-scale version of their exoskeletal system, which is supposed to amplify the strength of its wearer. You can already rent the leg-only versions in Japan.

It's funny. I've conceived of a way to create a lighter-than-air shell that would be many times stronger than steel and have other useful defensive properties -- combined with something like this HAL device, it would make for quite the suit of "Supercop" power armor.

Future Imperative

Southeastern Fuel Shortage -- A Disaster Plan Draft

2008-09-14T18:12:00.001-04:00

The following is a draft copy of an emergency plan for ways in which state and local governments, businesses and individuals can deal with the immediate impacts of an energy shock... such as the fuel crisis presently afflicting the Southeastern U.S. This is only a draft – a more refined version of this plan, as well as strategies for handling the larger issue of Peak Oil, will be made available here. If you have suggestions, please post them below.

For governments, businesses and individuals in a growing swath of the United States, the shortages of fuel are becoming an increasing concern. In many smaller cities and towns, there is a real concern that an extended supply failure could endanger local economies in a cascade effect.

The short version of this nightmare is that motorists abruptly realize there is a shortage of fuel, or even the threat of one. They go en masse to fill up, and America’s already minimal operating inventory, further strained by Hurricane Gustav’s shutdowns, is wiped out locally – spurring more rumors of shortages in the surrounding region.

Not only can this effect snowball, consuming all the excess supplies that might have gone to staunch these wounds, but the situation encourages hoarding on the one hand, and can not be deflected by simply producing more fuel until more of our refineries are back online (and the public has begun to calm down).

Meanwhile, with fuel supplies tied up by frantic consumers, critical shipments of food, spare parts and other supplies begin to go astray after a few days, threatening companies dependent on Just-In-Time business models. Restrictions on travel caused by inevitable rationing and gas lines (and high prices), have a severe impact on restaurants and shops already facing difficult times as their customers sharply cut back on discretionary driving and spending. And food deliveries – the typical piece of American food traveling an average of 1,200 miles before reaching a dinner plate – could end up being cut off altogether to some out-of-the-way locations.

Clearly, many small towns, if cut off from their traditional fuel sources long enough, will see their economies go belly up if they persist in trying to do things they way they did when gas was plentiful and cheap. Which means some new thinking is called for, and quickly.

Fuel Crunch – Governments
So if you are running a local government, consider a few quick options to conserve your fuel supplies.

First, give the kids a day off. Your school buses do not have to roll every Monday through Friday just to get the kids to public school. If you’re facing a grave shortage of gas and diesel, consider giving your school kids a day off or even several (like a few snow days) and conserve that fuel.

If you do use your school buses, ideally you’ll be using them to transport your adult workforce – by reassigning them to your public transportation network, you can greatly expand the range of your existing public transit system. Or else you can create such a system from a standing start, using your school buses alone. (And remember, most diesel engines can run on bio-diesel with little or no modification, and bio-diesel is essentially vegetable oil that has had its glycerin stripped away in a mixer by ethanol or methanol. Many agricultural areas, armed with the right equipment and few other options, could easily produce all the bio-fuel they needed to run a minimal number of buses, small tractors and produce trucks.)

Second, give your non-essential workers the day off. Stocks of refined diesel and gasoline will take time to rebuild, and telling employees not to come in to work – especially if they won’t have much work to do anyway – is a simple way to reduce your area’s daily fuel consumption. You may have to shift to a four-day workweek for the immediate future, as well.

Third, if you must have certain people working, see if they can reasonably do their job from home. In some cases this will take a secure network setup, in others, just a phone, an email account and a laptop. Naturally, the local Internet will probably experience some strains if enough people are working and playing on it simultaneously, so ask the public to limit their discretionary use of the Net until the immediate emergency has passed.

Fourth, if you absolutely need certain personnel not only working but at your worksite, have them come in, if at all possible, either by walking or biking, or, failing that, by mass transit or as part of a carpool. Remember, sharing is the most powerful form of conservation.

Fifth, yes, remember all your standard conservation measures. Don't leave your car idling in parking lots. Inflate your tires properly. It all helps, especially if thousands of people do these things together. And yes, local and state governments can do more than just suggest good habits -- they set the speed limits, after all, and can mandate more fuel savings at any time. (And no, I won't even mention the word Rationing -- the Policy-that-Must-Not-Be-Named...) But leaving aside those more political decisions for the moment...

Next, remember that, ironically, transportation fuel is not your area’s most critical resource. Water, food and electricity are all at least as important, and many areas are dependent on lifelines either directly maintained by diesel and gas (such as the trucks that deliver their groceries) or indirectly supported by them (such as the electrical grid that is constantly being repaired by gas and diesel-powered vehicles and equipment... a grid that also supplies most towns’ water).

While you may not be able to shore up all of the weaknesses in your town’s electrical system, simply being aware of the most critical parts of that grid let’s you redistribute your resources more effectively. For example, you may have plenty of backup generators or solar panels clustered around city hall or the police and fire stations, and nothing around the water pumping station or the water treatment plant. Other important electrical needs include major, refrigerated food storage sites and life-saving medical equipment. Consider what your community most needs to live, and deploy your equipment accordingly.

As you do so, keep electrical conservation in mind as well as fuel conservation. While everyone’s minds are focused on the oil predicament, many of our complex systems will be under strain during this energy shortage, including our much beleaguered grid. Make a point of taking austerity measures, shutting down unnecessary lights, computers and other appliances after hours, and cutting back even necessary uses where possible. If you can, recharge batteries and otherwise power things at night using the excess charge maintained on the grid during the "downtime" when no one is normally using it.

Where food is concerned, see how much food you can buy from local sources who will be shipping over much shorter distances. If a farm is located just outside your town, you are far more likely to receive its produce than you are if a trucker has to bring that food on a several hundred mile trek through territory with increasingly spotty diesel supplies.

Finally, make a point of communicating with your citizens, as calm, logical planning and discernable progress are the best antidotes for panic. Use the local newspapers, television broadcasts, websites and radio stations to get your message out.

Fuel Crunch – Businesses
The first step for businesses is to protect their staff, and their core business. Depending on your company, you may be able to fold up shop and wait a major oil shock out, or you may already be in triage, shedding unnecessary workers or marginal business locations in an effort to get your enterprise down to scale manageable and profitable enough to survive the current environment.

Obviously, you have to make sure the employees you keep on are able to handle the financial crisis stemming from the supply disruption, and that they are still able to work for you, whether or not all of them can make it to work. (See the employee suggestions for governments, above.)

After that, "Know your game plan." What preparations have you made if the sky falls? How will you continue to operate? Will you? Those are not rhetorical questions – while some businesses will go into hibernation during a shock, or radically restructure, other, failing organizations will simply be forced to face reality and pull the plug – hopefully while there’s still something to salvage from the ruins.

Ask yourself, What bare minimum do you require to stay in business – customers, spare parts, energy, water, raw material, employees, transportation? Can you meet those demands if the energy situation persists? If not, simply be aware that you may have to make some painful decisions in the near future... or circumstances will make them for you.

Next, "Choose your ground." Of course, you’ve already chosen your ground at this point, but if you’re fighting to keep your footing – and possibly paring down excess locations or markets – you still have the chance to decide where to deploy your resources. Where do you think your best bets are, especially if this short term "crash" continues? In the event of catastrophic reversals of any kind, where you are has a dramatic impact on the threats and opportunities facing you.

Ask yourself some basic questions about your present location or locations. What dangers does your geographic position expose you to? Not all the perils here are energy related. Are you exposed to major storms and hurricanes, particularly in the event of global-warming-driven climate change? Flooding?

How about water shortages? Will climate change endanger your local water supply – springs drying up, reservoirs (which are vulnerable to evaporation) draining or simply running dry? Are you in or near a city that could be fatally disrupted by an interruption in its supplies of food, water and energy?

What resources are available as a result of your location? We often think of geographically dependent resources in terms of metals, energy supplies such as oil or perhaps timber or other agricultural products. But for some, the most critical element is people – many businesses could not survive without being located in a city that can supply the necessary employees and/or customers. Even more require at least some kind of urban area – if only a small town or much trafficked crossroads or off-ramp supply their requisite customers.

But even in terms of physical resources there is more to think about than steel, oil, timber and grain. Water, of course, is important for more than just keeping your population alive. Is your farm dependent on some level of irrigation? (Probably yes, unless you’re a cactus wrangler.) How strong are your local communities and institutions? The degree to which your town or city or county is able to hold together and keep functioning, and to which its neighbors can also hold together, is a major factor in assessing your risks during a serious disaster.

Does your urban or rural community have any plans for dealing with problems on this scale, especially if they continue? How well will your local businesses and institutions hold together, particularly those providing law-enforcement and other major service providers (electricity, fuel, water)? Do local organizations need to be alerted to these issues? Or alternatively... Should you move?

Fuel Crunch – Individuals
For individuals, your biggest immediate option is to simply be as responsible as possible in your use of fuel and other vital resources, such as food and electricity. And you’ll want to start looking just a bit further into the future.

Ask yourself, can you get to work without your car? Can you ride the bus or subway? Carpool? Ride a bike? Ride an electric-assist bike? Walk?

Where will you get food if huge trucks are no longer delivering your groceries to supermarkets every day like clockwork? There’s only a three-day supply of food on the average city’s market shelves. What happens when that "Just-In-Time" system fails? I suggest you find your local farmer’s market, and for that matter, any other local farmers you can bargain with. And feel free to plant a winter garden if you haven’t done so already. No, that won’t fix your present quandaries, but it may give you a little piece of mind.

And while you’re looking for the local farming community, now would be a good time to start looking for the rest of your local community, and trying to make friends. When our technology fails, all we have to fall back on is each other, and prayer. But that’s one safety net all of us would do well to start weaving together.

Future Imperative

CBS News -- U.S. Gas Heading to $6 a Gallon in Next Few Months

2008-06-09T01:27:00.000-04:00

*
CBS says gas will be heading to $6 a gallon in the next few months, as $139 a barrel oil works its way through the supply chain.

Of course, famed oilman Matthew Simmons apparently feels every $20 per barrel of oil comes to another $1 in gas prices, so by that reckoning they should move closer to $7, assuming oil doesn't rise any further. And it probably will.

The problem is peak oil. The world burns/consumes roughly one cubic mile of oil every year, and keeps increasing demand, but can't increase supply of what is, after all, a finite resource. It doesn't help that we've used up all the easily found and extracted oil, such that the ratio of energy used for finding, extracting and refining oil has gone from 100 barrels gained for every one used in that process in the 1850s, to 4 or 5 barrels gained for every one used today.

Coal is similarly providing us with decreasing power, though its volume continues to increase -- the cleaner, higher energy coal sits on the top of deposits, and is always the first to get mined out.

I realize some people find the suggestion that they should avoid using as much oil as possible irritating, so those folks can go right on driving themselves into bankruptcy and ignore all this.

But for those of you who don't want to lose everything you own trying to drag around thousands of pounds of metal and plastic to every place you go... some suggestions.

One, find out where the buses, subways and any other public transit are in your area. Can you use them? Can you drive somewhere, park, and use them?

Two, if you have to drive, is there a more efficient way of doing so? The obvious trick is to drive a smaller car, especially for longer journeys. The other obvious tactic is to carpool. But have you tried a bicycle? An electric-assist bicycle? A velomobile? A scooter? A motorcycle? A three-wheeled, possibly covered motorcycle?

Three, if you can change the source of energy powering your travels to something renewable, and then invest in creating that renewable power yourself, you may find it far more economic to move yourself around. For example, outside the Southeast (and even in the Southeast's Appalachian Mountains), there's quite a bit of windpower around. There's also micro-hydro, tidal, solar, etc. If nothing else, you can always put some windblades on your alternator and stick it up on a 'tower'/flagpole. If you have decent average windspeeds, a few car batteries can form a storage system.

If you can power your electric scooter yourself, then technically, you never have to 'run out of gas.' Then again, the same is obviously true of a bicycle. An electric-assist bicycle is basically a bike that can kick in some extra motor power for speed or to get you up hills. Velomobiles are covered bicycles, though they often have electric motors to move you about.

Motorcycles use far less gas than almost any cars, and some of them are diesel powered.

Biodiesel, by the way, is essentially a mixture of alcohol and vegetable oil. In Hawaii, kukui or 'candlenut' is apparently an extremely plentiful source of such oils. Elsewhere, walnuts are highly productive. But trees take a while to grow, so you may find other sources, such as sunflowers or rapeseed (canola) to be better interim bets.

And above all things, finally, store some food, and if at all possible, grow a garden. Fossil fuels go into many, many things, including almost all of our fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and, oh yes, diesel fuel for our tractors and trucks. In a sense, we basically 'eat oil.' So you can expect your food bills to start skyrocketing any time now.

There. I hope that wasn't too painful. But if it was, don't worry. You can always look forward to paying for $6 and $7 a gallon gas, if that makes you feel better. =)

Carbon Offsets – Trees and Gardens – The Other Low-Hanging Fruit

2008-05-24T13:26:00.000-04:00

My first article in this series described a new, public-domain innovation -- how charitable foundations could dramatically impact climate change, peak oil and the credit crunch while taking the sale of conventional carbon-offsets and turning them into immense profits. They can do this by picking financially stable cities in areas with a surplus of renewable energy sources and offering them loans at incredibly favorable rates -- 2% interest on loans repaid in the first few years, 0% if repaid in a year to 18 months, and 10% of the loan would be forgiven if repaid within one year. Because of the time horizon on peak oil and climate change, they would also be forgiving 20% of loans repaid within nine months and 30% of loans repaid within six.

This strategy enables immense profits, because unlike normal carbon offsets, you're not buying the renewables or energy efficiencies outright, but loaning governments the money to make the necessary changes, quickly. And if these funds support projects which "pay for themselves" in the grace period that a government has to repay you, then they make these profitable changes using money that is never "on the books" in terms of tying up their their own cash flow.

In effect, for the governments, these changes are free. But only if you choose "low-hanging fruit," improvements of such remarkable value that a mere 12 months, nine months or six months is enough time to repay you for your investment.

Which brings us to our latest harvest of fruit.

The basic reforestation carbon-offset option, on its face, seems obvious – many organizations are involved in planting trees, and it is one of the two most common ways for companies to provide voluntary carbon offsets to their customers. There are, however, many unexplored ways to leverage the impact of reforestation and the resources devoted to such work.

Let us first consider an option for the industrialized world – planting trees where you can use a built-in, local support system to take care of their maintenance beyond that first planting. In this option, you pay for the seedlings themselves, but probably little else.

Version 1: Schools. Here the seedlings may be planted by students learning about agriculture and global warming. Digging holes, shoveling peat moss and laying down mulch are not complicated activities, and neither is watering a plant during droughts and dry spells. Combined with lessons on rainwater harvesting and, in some cases, with a highly efficient underground watering system, you can teach students many critical, if basic, lessons in sustainable horticulture.

Planting a wide variety of fruit- and nut-bearing trees reduces the risk of blights and parasites adapted to the vulnerabilities of one particular species of tree, and also insures a more diverse and interesting crop. These trees would soon produce a little supplementary food for kids’ and teens’ snacking (dwarf trees in particular grow quickly) and, if planted next to the school, provide shade as well (a well-known method for reducing air-conditioning bills). A large enough orchard could, in time, even provide either some funds from the public sale of fruit, as a resource for school fundraisers, or even to accomplish other municipal goals, such as improving the diet of impoverished children or of the poor in general. To the school, removing a bit of carbon from the atmosphere might be considered a secondary benefit of the exercise. (You would, of course, carefully consider questions like growing space and each tree’s resistance to fire when determining where to plant them.)

Finally, in the United States, the average piece of food travels well over a thousand miles from large industrialized farms before reaching the consumer. Producing food practically at the point of consumption not only eliminates the associated carbon emissions, but in this world of ever-rising fuel prices, should make these fruits and nuts more affordable than any alternative being shipped over such vast distances.

Version 2: A foundation could provide trees to community gardens, eco-developments and certain public buildings (libraries, police departments, city halls, hospitals) – again bearing a diverse crop of fruits and nuts. These new owners, in addition to helping plant the seedlings, already have incentives to take care of the trees, which offer them food and shade. They also already have people engaged in taking care of such agricultural work – community garden volunteers, landscapers, environmentalists, gardening fans, etc. This option can be used by any city with the above amenities.

Version 3: Clearly, planting trees does not have to be for just the industrialized world. The Third World is expected to take the brunt of the damage from global warming, at least initially. In practice, that means equatorial regions – especially Africa – are apt to be facing an agricultural collapse. Already today, the rising price of energy, limited water supplies for irrigation and increased demand for bio-fuels has driven up the cost of food considerably.

Widespread and diverse plantings of food-bearing trees – if done early enough – would greatly enhance the survivability of communities hit by serious climate change, by providing a source of food that can endure drought more easily than most crops (thanks to a deeper taproot). If the trees provided by carbon-offset funds were integrated into existing relief and development projects with their own international support, and contacts and/or trained workers on the ground, most of the organizational requirements and overhead would already be taken care of. Which would mean most of the funds invested could be saved for the trees themselves instead of being frittered away on unnecessary overhead.

And this low-tech, locally controlled reserve food source is particularly suited to regions such as Africa, which can not afford the technologies or food shipments still available in much of the world.

Further, an active charitable foundation’s existing work lets you tread lightly in tree-planting projects. If you already have employees doing good work on the ground who have contacts and are familiar with the area, then you can probably integrate a bit of tree planting into your other relief/development efforts. The trees simply become an additional side project, easily scattered throughout a village or neighborhood. Your people will hopefully also take the time to investigate what local, non-invasive species are available for this initiative, so they can acquire a diverse array of cultivars.

Finally, a fourth option involving trees can be seen in this video.

This permaculture-based desert reclamation – championed by Geoff Lawton – is described here. This technique employs hardy desert trees that produce no fruit, simply because of the benefits these plants brought to the overall project of reclaiming the soil. But the bulk of the trees involved did produce a harvest (in spite of very harsh conditions), and the additional benefit of restoring fertility to a desert landscape can not be underestimated.

Finally, trees are not the only potential source of food that can significantly reduce carbon emissions. As noted earlier, American food travels such immense distances that a school which chose to raise a significant portion of the food provided to their students on campus, either on open school land or in rooftop gardens, could see a reduction in their food budget while producing fresher, more nutritious food, and the organization funding this change could claim a reduction in the school’s "carbon footprint" as well. By the same token, bushes can offer a harvest of berries, even if they hardly provide the carbon sink you have in an orchard full of growing trees.

Other organic alternatives leap to mind, but attempts to create a source of raw materials in combination with a monoculture "crop" such as pine stands or bamboo should be weighed very carefully, especially if your chosen plant is an "invasive species" – something foreign to your local environment. Given the slowdown in construction and manufacturing apt to follow the mortgage crisis and present energy shortfalls, a new source of raw materials may be far less important to your community than affordable food. Your carbon-offset initiatives should be prioritized accordingly, and you should remember, once again, that people buying carbon-offsets will usually be extremely sensitive to environmentally damaging actions and not easily mollified in the face of even a small disaster paid for with their money. Given how many safe offset options are out there, such downsides should loom even larger. Be warned.

Public Relations:
Custom Customer Reports: Whatever you call them, there is an advantage to giving major donors a report (with photographs, video, etc) on one or more major projects accomplished as a result of their donations. Say, 10,000 trees planted in India, a city’s water purification needs dealt with in Indonesia, and seven hospitals taken off the grid using renewable solar and tidal power in San Diego.

These can be useful not just for an individual’s sense of pride, but for purposes of morale and public relations for most for-profit companies as well. Even charities and governments have a vested interest in getting vivid images and reports on all the good their particular offsets are buying.

Plenty of organizations claim to be carbon neutral, but how many can point to major projects undertaken and certified by a respected international charity using their carbon-offset payments? Such images and reports can be shown on company or government websites, included in press releases and otherwise shared with the public. In so doing, they can provide both the purchaser and the seller of offsets with considerable goodwill and free advertising.

This reputation may extend beyond the usual domestic audience. A carbon-offset project credited to a particular company may in fact help an organization that wants to make a good impression on an international customer in that country. It’s a great icebreaker, if nothing else. National governments who are funding major projects to meet carbon-reduction goals may also find substantial diplomatic benefits.

And of course, any particularly enthusiastic, upscale donor/carbon-offset purchasers are a source of further contacts – friends and acquaintances who might be interested in turning their lives and businesses carbon-neutral in such a socially conscious fashion. So giving them something to be particularly enthusiastic about, and something concrete to show to those contacts when it comes up, can only assist you in seeking new funding.

The flip side of this equation is rounding out the articles/segments of both major and minor news providers. Your positive reports on ways in which people of limited means are confronting issues of hunger, water shortages, costly energy (with your organization’s able assistance) can be used to round out the articles of science writers discussing global warming issues, business writers looking at ways to get around the economic crunch of declining fossil fuels and resources depletion, or international reporters discussing dire conditions in this or that region of the world.

Lots of facts and figures coupled with photos helps with newpapers, and a certain amount of key data wedded to video is useful to news networks. All of this public exposure can also be used to collect more contributions, thus expanding the range of the foundation’s good works, and enabling them to become active on an even larger stage (with even more donors).

Naturally, all this PR will create exposure for these offset innovations. The more your organization breaks new ground and draws the public’s attention to your work, the more individuals and organizations will become familiar with solutions they can make use of in their own lives. But if your primary motivation is to create a positive change in the world, you will rest assured that you are doing so, and that many places will still remain which need your help, even if a majority find they can pull this work off without your financing.

Bear in mind, this strategy is not the sole province of present-day sellers of carbon-offsets. Many existing international relief and development organizations would be particularly formidable instruments for this work – or extremely helpful partners. Their inherent competitive edge in these kinds of activities – as explained previously – is considerably greater than that of any for-profit enterprise. And not only do they not require a profit on their humanitarian activities, not only do they have an existing set of projects, contacts, personnel and experience in their relief and development efforts, but their donors will be far more willing to see it make an egregious ‘profit’ than a profit-driven corporation – so long as those excess funds go to other good works, and not to padding salaries or other overhead.

Of all these advantages, perhaps the most easily overlooked is that of having an existing network of projects and contacts, and plenty of experience on the ground. Because of this capacity, sellers of carbon-offsets may be well-served to work with other charities – even if they have existing relief and development projects of their own. Given the funding levels that could be involved in a successful operation, a foundation may soon find its revenues and demand for new projects to be rapidly outstripping its capacity to find new recipients for its largess. Rather than do things poorly or sloppily, they may find it wiser to do a lot of small projects through credible charities with their own management, employees and internal auditing. This option avoids the overhead of creating dozens of small-scale projects for "nothing but carbon-offsets" and the temptation to do vastly oversized projects for the sake of managerial simplicity.

In the same vein, and out of deference to the value of local consultation, organizations may wish to develop a menu of carbon-offset options for specific beneficiaries/project managers to select from. These would be means of offsetting carbon emissions that would be within their technical and financial means. Obviously, this range of options would be apt to expand as larger contributions came in and the foundation experimented with a wider range of techniques. But by offering a menu, and some explanation of each option, you would get immediate feedback on what was best suited for a locality from professionals already (hopefully) embedded in the existing culture and environment.

I make no claims for any of these concepts, only to tell you they are here and they can now be used by anyone. Thank you for listening.

Ralph Cerchione

Renewing the Earth: Public Domain Inventions for a Sustainable Future Solar desalination, solar steel, reversing global warming, etc.
Future Imperative -- A broad look at human enhancement, from gene therapy to accelerated learning, from neural implants to smart drugs, from posthuman evolution to the wildest flights of human imagination.

Carbon-Offsets that Keep On Giving... Energy and Food – The Low-Hanging Fruit

2008-05-24T13:19:00.000-04:00

For those who missed it, my last article described -- a new, public-domain innovation -- how charitable foundations could dramatically impact climate change, peak oil and the credit crunch while taking the sale of conventional carbon-offsets and turning them into immense profits. How? By picking financially stable cities in areas with a surplus of renewable energy sources and offering them loans at incredibly favorable rates -- 2% interest on loans repaid in the first few years, 0% if repaid in a year to 18 months, and 10% of the loan would be forgiven if repaid within one year. Given the time horizon on peak oil and climate change, we also allow for the forgiveness of 20% of loans repaid within nine months and of 30% of loans repaid within six.

How does this give a charity, but not a for-profit corporation, immense "profits"? Because unlike normal carbon offsets, you're not buying the renewables or energy efficiencies outright, but loaning governments the money to make the necessary changes, quickly.

And if you loan these funds to support projects which "pay for themselves" in the grace period that a government has to repay you, then they make these profitable changes using money that is never "on the books" in terms of tying up their their own cash flow. In effect, for the governments, these changes are free. But only if you choose "low-hanging fruit," improvements of such remarkable value that a mere 12 months, nine months or six months is enough time to repay you for your investment.

Your charity, on the other hand, was obligated to take one ton of carbon emissions out of the atmosphere in exchange for a fee (usually $4 to $40). But once your loan has accounted for the tons you have committed to eliminating, you get to keep the 70%, 80% or 90% of the principal when it is paid back to you. In effect, you are being given someone else's money to offer as a loan, and when most of the money is paid back to you, your organization gets to keep that remainder. And only a charitable foundation, plowing its earnings back into its good works, can get away with such egregrious profit margins. Indeed, if you keep putting the money into such loans, helping cities and towns reach the goals of these "low-hanging fruit," you may well become celebrated for your accomplishments, as you use those original carbon-offset funds over and over again.

What are the low-hanging fruit? Well, we will be discussing some of these in later columns, including a simple, inexpensive, scalable, solar-based method for desalinating water, and two renewable-based techniques for moving water (one integral to this desalination system, the other capable of functioning independently and requiring almost no resources whatsoever). These innovations will be useful both in the undeveloped world and in places like California, where the water pumps supplying Los Angeles with water are apparently the biggest energy expenditure in the state. Imagine being able to supply most if not all of that demand with almost no energy expenditure, and using extremely low-cost equipment to do so.

But in the meantime, let’s look at some other options that qualify as this low-hanging fruit. One of the most obvious is to simply paint the roofs white on buildings in cities and towns in most temperate and all equatorial regions. This simple change will dramatically reduce energy spent on air conditioning for those buildings that have that equipment, and make those which do not far more livable. You will be increasing either your energy efficiency or overall productivity either way. Because most asphalt roofs, in particular, are dark and absorb heat, you will also be having a significant impact on global warming by reducing the overall albedo effect (absorption of sunlight) in your cities, not to mention the world. This will help reduce the warming of the planet, without even considering the carbon emissions that will no longer be required as you reduce the need for air conditioning.

Alternatively, the first thing you do when installing a renewable-power system in any home or business is to do an inventory of the location’s energy expenditures. Regardless of whether you are putting solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and/or micro-hydro sources, in order to avoid buying a system two or three times greater than you really need, you have to look over the building to find ways of tightening up your energy use. In particular, you have to look for "energy hogs" and eliminate them.

Realistically, everyone controlling any sort of an organization, be it a business, a government or a non-profit, should take the above step as soon as they can. Why? Because whether or not you have the resources to add a single renewable power supply, every bit of conservation you undertake as a result of this energy inventory will save you energy and thus money. These extra funds can be turned to acquiring renewable power, but even without those devices, you will have lessened your exposure to energy price spikes and begun conserving critical resources, as well as having done something to slow peak energy and climate change.

A third tactic is to hire (or otherwise motivate) large numbers of people to do work that reduces energy demands and climate change using extremely inexpensive techniques that generate dramatic benefits for their communities. For example, imagine that you hired a small group of people who knew a great deal about gardening and planting orchards, and others familiar with work such as energy audits, renewable installation or simple painting. What if you then hired a large number of part-time high school students and other people willing to work for a modest wage, and then went around planting community gardens and fruit-and-nut-bearing trees, painting roofs, energy auditing buildings and organizations and installing renewable energy sources (such as solar panels, wind turbines or micro-hydro turbines). You could use this method to mobilize quite a few people to make rapid changes that might otherwise take a very long time, while reducing unemployment. You would also be training your employees in many useful skills, and those who were interested could be promoted to full-time status as supervisors teachers (especially if you expanded the program) or else seek employment in other organizations, with some useful training and experience on their resumés. And the work they would be doing could enormously impact the "carbon footprint" of your city or town. (We will discuss the full value of gardening and food-producing trees later in this series, but rest assured, it’s considerable.)

A fourth option is eventually loaning to a broader class of customer, businesses marked by the sustainability of their operations – in particular offering microfinance or microloans to support initiatives that will notably reduce atmospheric carbon. For example, most of the work just described "planting community gardens and fruit-and-nut-bearing trees, painting roofs, energy auditing buildings and organizations and installing renewable energy sources" would be suitable for carbon-offset funding. This can be trickier to support if you have absolutely no experience in this field, and may work best in partnership with credible microfinance operations such as the Grameen Bank.

A fifth possibility is taking certain critical infrastructure "off the grid" even if the cost of installing renewables is not less than the savings returned before the loan is repaid. Normally renewables that offer such dramatic savings are very easy to promote. But there may be circumstances in which the population sees a clear need for the upgrade in and of itself because of past crises.

For example, during the recent Florida blackout, CNN was showing pictures of a city whose transportation grid had almost immediately shut down. Imagine promoting LED stoplights, even solar-powered LED stoplights, in such a city. Not only would your relatively cheap, financed solution be extremely welcome, you could probably tap into other government disaster-relief/preparation funding, and perhaps even local, private contributions. And even if such funds were limited, the local government’s motivation to avoid being immobilized again would make such an offer extremely attractive.

As a further example, during the California wildfires, Reuters and others reported that the city of San Diego was nearly cut off from the rest of the nation's power grid, a situation that would have made the municipality vulnerable to major blackouts. Given that San Diego, as the southernmost city in California and one positioned on the seacoast, has ready access to at least two major sources of alternative power (solar and tidal), the area could easily be an ideal place to initiate the kind of renewable-power-upgrade program described in this series.

On Dedicated Power:
Why build this emergency capacity into your core infrastructure? First, if your grid goes down, then obviously you want the functions most critical for the survival of your city or town to go on unimpeded or at least somewhat effectively. But second, one of the ironies of our present power-distribution network is that it fails to discriminate between users. This seeming democratization of power usage means that blinking neon lights at a local strip mall or a kid’s Playstation receive power at the same priority level as hospital incubators or pumps supplying a municipality with water.

Now while the latter equipment may have backup generators keeping them online in a blackout, the fact remains that in the event of sustained disruptions of power and fuel supplies, they go out right along with more frivolous uses.

To be blunt, we can not save every strip mall, videogame console and giant SUV on Earth from blackouts or fuel shortages, nor should we want to. But as local and national leaders survey the question of how to deploy renewable-energy resources, they should not be paralyzed by the unanswerable question of how to instantly provide unlimited power to every single user in their country, no matter how indiscriminate. Instead, they should focus on the most absolute needs – providing water, food, medical care and other basic necessities in livable quantities to their populations.

Further Notes:
In doing this work, it is important to avoid the appearance of "greenwashing" – making a project, product or business seem environmentally sound when it is not. Remember that your most likely pool of donors will tend to be well-informed about environmental issues, and that you can’t afford to alienate them. They will also be aware of other potential problems, such as bio-fuels that produce no net energy, or planting monoculture orchards instead of encouraging bio-diversity.

Another variation on this plan is to allow for a form of earmarking – permitting donors to specify that funds should be used first in a local area of their choice (but in which the organization is already operating or planning to operate) for any credible projects in those areas. After one or two or more cycles through that area, the remaining funds can be moved into other projects as needed. This earmarking should be something the donor checks off on a form (with the above conditions clearly specified). The donor will also write in the name of the county or municipality (or province or country) where they wish for these earmarked funds to be used.

This variant should extremely useful when seeking the donations of people who are deeply committed to the welfare of their community or of a recently beleaguered area (such as New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina).

I make no claims for any of these concepts, only to tell you they are here and they can now be used by anyone. Thank you for listening.

Ralph Cerchione

Renewing the Earth: Public Domain Inventions for a Sustainable Future Solar desalination, solar steel, reversing global warming, etc.
Future Imperative -- A broad look at human enhancement, from gene therapy to accelerated learning, from neural implants to smart drugs, from posthuman evolution to the wildest flights of human imagination.

How Charities Can Fight Global Warming, Peak Oil and the Credit Crunch and Make Billions...

2008-05-24T13:13:00.001-04:00

The following is an innovation – a simple plan by which many charities could earn tremendous "profits" (to be plowed back into their humanitarian efforts) while dramatically reducing the impact of global warming and peak oil, and also easing financing problems faced by many cities and communities worldwide. This system is one of a series of inventions I am putting into the public domain for anyone to use freely, with or without attribution.

This plan may seem on its surface to be nothing more than another conventional way to tap the carbon-offset market to put in a few trees or solar panels somewhere. It is not. Rather, charitable organizations which employ this strategy will be able to earn a profit of 60% to 90% (less some minor expenses) on their carbon-offset investments. Yet this plan is not, for reasons that will become obvious, nearly as well suited for profit-seeking enterprises.

First, a summary of the issues involved. For those not following current events very closely, key warning signs (such as the rapid melting of Arctic summer sea ice, and severe forest fires and droughts linked to climate change) indicate that climate change (aka global warming) is emerging ever-more-rapidly as a dire threat. Meanwhile, global oil production appears to be on the verge of peaking (the highest rate of production we will ever see) if it has not already and much of the world is experiencing shortages of either food or water, even in the United States. Finally, grave issues surrounding the mortgage markets in the U.S. have damaged the global financial system, creating a level of uncertainty in which many creditors are unwilling to lend... even to low-risk customers like cities and towns.

Clearly, most people would like to do something about these issues.

Carbon offsets are one way in which some organizations are trying to help. A conventional carbon offset amounts to a promise from a company or charitable trust to remove or reduce carbon emissions by one ton for so many dollars (prices usually range from $4 to $40 per ton, depending on the entity). They typically try to fulfill this promise by either capturing or eliminating carbon emissions at the source (often installing renewables), by planting trees, or both. Some organizations even have a "carbon calculator" to help customers estimate how much carbon their lifestyle has generated, and hence how much they should feel obligated to pay for. And because most nations’ power grids are interconnected, determining how much carbon is generated on average by each kilowatt of power consumed from the grid is actually fairly easy. Calculating the CO2 released by a gallon of gasoline is even easier (it’s a known quantity). Many businesses and organizations simply use the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to determine what they need to offset. This carbon-offset market is potentially a vast source of funds. As noted in The Financial Times, "The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period." Present economic circumstances may cut into that latter estimate, but even a fraction represents a huge fundraising opportunity for most foundations, and if the carbon-credit market begins to inject funds into the following system, the impact on global climate and energy will be even more profound.

But unfortunately, as The Financial Times has pointed out, "some organizations have been selling carbon credits that yield few if any environmental benefits." The great irony is that, if done properly, it should be easy to overperform in terms of carbon captured or eliminated, while making far more than just a sliver of "profits" from each contribution – assuming, in the latter case, that you are a charity. And here’s why...

Assume, for the sake of the argument, that you run a small charity which has taken in some carbon-offset contributions. Offer a small loan to a financially stable city in the U.S. with ready access to one or more strong sources of alternative energy (solar, wind, micro-hydro, geothermal, tidal, etc). This loan would pay for an upgrade to a key piece of that city’s crisis-management infrastructure – either a permanent source of renewable energy or an improvement resulting in tremendous energy savings. Obviously, this would cut the "carbon footprint" of that infrastructure, but again, the real benefits are in the details.

First, contributors would know their money was going to a truly essential part of the city in question, a hospital, water treatment plant/pumping station, or a police or fire department. (As opposed to, say, merely padding the profits of a local strip mall.) And you would work with cities to choose projects not only ideal for their environment (solar in sunny climes, micro-hydro beside rivers, and conservation everywhere), but which will also be extremely productive to undertake, so that much of the money invested will be repaid in a very short period of time. (More on such financially hyper-efficient initiatives below.)

Second, the loan would be low-interest, say, 2% if repaid in the first few years, 0% if repaid in a year to 18 months, and 10% of the loan would be forgiven if repaid within one year. Given the time horizon on both peak oil and climate change, it may be necessary to include two further categories – the forgiveness of 20% of loans repaid within nine months and of 30% of loans repaid within six. (You can adjust these time periods and percentages to whatever the market and circumstances suggest is ideal.) These incentives would encourage cities to repay you as quickly as possible, enabling you to get most or all of the money back in a year (if not less), so you could then recycle the funds in question. Yes, technically that original pool of dollars from the first loan would diminish in time, but how many contributions do you normally get to spend over and over again? And meanwhile, the remaining 70%, 80% or 90% of that loan, less some small expenses, would amount to pure profit for your institution.

Third, if the cities you work with apply for relevant homeland-security or disaster-relief funding as appropriate, you may find loans for major projects are repaid much faster when governments are only borrowing part of the money from your foundation, thus enabling you to accomplish many good deeds quickly, while reclaiming the bulk of your investment each time for new enterprises. For example, a city could easily make the case that in the event of a disaster, it would want to have adequate backup generators at a particular hospital. If a federal grant to this city in, say, Florida were adequate to pay for half the cost of a full solar power system (perhaps with panels from Nanosolar), and your organization’s loan covered the other half, then the city would really only have to pay for half the overall cost (actually only 90%, 80% or 70% of that half (or 45%, 40% or 35% of the full price)).

Fourth, because the city would not be carrying any of the initial cost, by the time it had to repay a significant part of the loan, it would already be seeing a net savings due to the reduction in its power bill. In other words, if you choose a sufficiently cost-effective project, this is a win-win or win-win-win situation for all parties. The federal government (if involved) will have taken concrete action to make the city’s key operations safer, the city will have done likewise and also saved substantial money possibly without having invested a dime to make it happen. You will literally be carrying most or all of the short-term costs of making these long-term savings. The money saved on their energy budget will quickly dwarf the small payments they are making on 90/80/70% of the loan’s principal, even if they do not have any state, federal or other private money supporting a specific project. Freed of the burden of that particular energy bill, with only minimal upkeep on the ruggedized equipment required, the city will quickly make a net profit as a result of cooperating, and have all the more incentive to do so again. And your foundation will have done a good deed, gotten most of its seed money back, and only enhanced its credibility in this field and its experience in managing such partnerships. All of these benefits will simply encourage cities to present practical, well-designed upgrade projects a charity would be willing to fund with offsets and to seek supplementary funding (such as homeland-security support) on their own.

Fifth, traditionally, installing an alternative power source goes hand-in-hand with looking over your home or institution’s energy requirements and seeing what power demands can be most easily met through conservation rather than an ever-larger electrical supply. The functions of looking over buildings for wasteful problems, correcting those problems, and installing the new systems, are all jobs that can not be outsourced. As has been pointed out in The New York Times, these "green-collar jobs" may well be the wave of the future – particularly for disadvantaged youths who have few career or educational opportunities. Not only could an ongoing project of this kind in a greater metropolitan area serve as a valuable training program, but it could in fact be a further source of funds, as organizations with an interest in education, job training, economic development and related matters might choose to support that aspect of this larger design. Furthermore, depending on the quality of the energy auditors you have access to, just paying to have an audit done of major buildings (like hospitals) or city operations (like water treatment and pumping) might prove to be one of the "hyper-efficient projects" mentioned above – the kind of low-cost, high-yield efforts that would quickly pay for itself. Perhaps even before the city had to repay its loan.

Sixth, by first approaching solvent, stable local governments of sizable urban areas in a wealthy nation, you increase the odds of finding reliable partners. Most Western cities rarely declare bankruptcy unless faced with major long-term fiscal problems or disasters on the scale of Katrina. They also tend to have longer-term needs than simply improving their energy efficiency at one or two or a dozen sites. Imagine the number of hospitals, transportation hubs, police departments, water-treatment facilities and so forth that a mayor and city council might consider critical infrastructure in, say, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta or even Charlotte.

What you as an organization want to do is home in on the "low-hanging fruit" – every simple change that offers near-term savings as great as the percentage of the loan the city will be repaying... preferably yielding these savings as quickly as they choose to repay (most of) the loan. This may sound like a tall order, but remember, as fossil fuel prices continue to rise, savings of fuel and electricity will become increasingly valuable. Something that made no sense at $25-a-barrel and that was barely logical at $60-a-barrel may become absolutely essential at $150 or $200-a-barrel. We will be discussing, in later columns, extremely inexpensive public-domain inventions which can easily meet this standard – a high level of savings in exchange for a low level of investment.

Furthermore, as you develop experience in this field and as conventional energy costs become even more prohibitive, you will be able to expand your range of operations to include cities and towns with slightly less access to plentiful renewable power, to businesses and non-profits engaged in work critical to their communities’ survival (such as organic farms producing affordable food for local consumption) and ultimately to somewhat less stable cities and towns around the world. You will still want most of your loans to be as secure as reasonably possible, but once you are established in this work you will have the flexibility to take a few risks where success would yield great benefits.

A note on the advantages of being a relief organization in the voluntary carbon-offset field:

1. A genuine non-profit obviously has no need for profit, only for sufficient revenues to handle overhead and the talent to make the best use of available funds. Hence, if a charitable trust that invests the great majority of its contributions into actual relief work (as opposed to overhead and fundraising) begins to make enormous "profits" from their work, there is no backlash against them. So long as those excess funds are devoted to good works, whether global-warming/peak-oil related or otherwise, donors will merely be pleased to see that their funds are being stretched so far and used so well. In other words, a 60% or 70% profit margin that gets diverted as far afield as children’s vaccinations will be far more accepted than a corporate profit of 20% that goes to the CEO’s annual bonus and the investors’ bottom line.

Giving an "unfair advantage," ironically, to the institutions traditionally least interested in competing for profitability.

2. Well-known and respected non-profits have greater credibility than a for-profit enterprise. The simple fact that many established charities are known for doing good works in sustainability and disaster relief, have verifiable track records to that effect and have no ulterior motive in terms of reaping huge profits from an initiative, both carbon-offset customers, typical contributors and other organizations are apt to take their pronouncements and initiatives much more seriously than if they were seen as yet more "money-grubbing corporations."

3. International charities already have ready access to the relief infrastructure, contacts and personal experience that other, less practiced organizations would have to develop on their own. All of which means that they could step right into carbon-offset reforestation or emissions reduction without missing a beat, simply by adding the work to existing efforts.

The above options are just a couple of ways in which purchases of carbon offsets could provide a dramatic new influx of funds into a charity. These funds could then be leveraged to raise their profile by performing far more good works than anyone could normally ever manage.

Now you may ask: "What if some government gets in the act, and takes over this kind of work, pushing us out of the business?" Simple, you smile, step back, and appreciate the fact that you’ve helped stimulate real progress, but that someone with far greater resources is stepping in now, thus completing the mission of upgrading critical infrastructure in the country or region in question. If anything, this is a result you will want to encourage. Rest assured, there’s plenty more to be done. Until the entire planet has been reached by these kinds of services, there will not only be more "markets" to open in other places, but there will be plenty of "low-hanging fruit" to be exploited, unfortunately, for some time to come. And once that fruit is gone, higher conventional energy costs will have brought an even larger harvest into easy reach.

I make no claims for any of these concepts, only to tell you they are here and they can now be used by anyone. Thank you for listening.

Ralph Cerchione

Renewing the Earth: Public Domain Inventions for a Sustainable Future Solar desalination, solar steel, reversing global warming, etc.

'Keep Our Fuel Mix Diverse' -- A Look at U.S. Energy Sources, State by State

2008-05-24T03:50:00.000-04:00

Just run your cursor over this map, and see what mix of power sources each U.S. state uses, broken by their percentages. Who knew Vermont only used fossil fuels for 0.1% of its energy, or that it used such an enormous amount of nuclear power?

An interesting glimpse into the stresses each of these places will face in the next few years in the face of oil production 'peaking,' coal and natural gas running increasingly short, and some rivers partially drying up from global warming. And an even more interesting glimpse if you happen to live in one of them.

Renewing the Earth: Public Domain Inventions for a Sustainable Future Solar desalination, solar steel, reversing global warming, and other useful innovations.

Vast Cracks Appear in Arctic Ice

2008-05-23T23:43:00.000-04:00

And so the BBC reports:

Dramatic evidence of the break-up of the Arctic ice-cap has emerged from research during an expedition by the Canadian military.
Scientists travelling with the troops found major new fractures during an assessment of the state of giant ice shelves in Canada's far north.
The team found a network of cracks that stretched for more than 10 miles (16km) on Ward Hunt, the area's largest shelf.

Dr. Derek Mueller of Trent University explains:

"It means the ice shelf is disintegrating, the pieces are pinned together like a jigsaw but could float away..."

Another expedition member, Dr. Luke Copland of the University of Ottawa, notes:

"We're seeing very dramatic changes; from the retreat of the glaciers, to the melting of the sea ice.
"We had 23% less (sea ice) last year than we've ever had, and what's happening to the ice shelves is part of that picture."

The cracks in this particular ice shelf have to be looked at in light of that larger picture -- yet another step in the overall meltdown of our polar regions. Even as this piece of the Arctic icecap has begun to break apart with little notice, so could something more significant, like Greenland's vast reserve of frozen freshwater. Which gives us all the more reason to solve our climate crisis, before our coastal lands and cities end up under that unexpected deluge.

Renewing the Earth: Public Domain Inventions for a Sustainable Future Solar desalination, solar steel, reversing climate change, etc.

Home Heating with Windpower -- Public Domain 'Invention'

2008-05-23T16:44:00.001-04:00

Note: Originally Posted on Another Forum

Given the cost of heating homes in many colder climates, quite a few homeowners could use a cheap, renewable source of warmth to get them through the winter.

So, take a small wind turbine like the ones once used (and occasionally still used) in the Midwest to pump water from wells. Use a belt to transfer momentum from the turbine down into your house, possibly using a pipe of some kind as a shaft to shelter said belt and the route it takes into your house from the elements. If you need this shaft to rotate in order to provide freedom of movement to the mini-windmill above, put another pipe inside the first, secured with spinning rotor rings at each end.

At the bottom of this shaft you'll have two things. One, a copper disc driven by the belt that will spin in tandem with your wind turbine. Two, a 'U'-shaped bar magnet. You set the bar magnet up so that it can be locked in place when needed, and unlocked and removed (or simply flipped back if you have it on some kind of a hinge) when it is unneeded, the apparatus is overheating or your automatic thermostat is regulating the temperature.

The first electromagnetic generator, the Faraday disc, used exactly this setup to produce electrical current.

The downside, owing to the fact that the current tended to immediately redistribute to the area of the disc away from the magnet, was that it generated very little usable power, and the movement of electricity in the disc created a lot of heat due to resistance.

In your case, you would not be tapping the current, but rather employing the excess heat generated by all of that current impelled within the disc to supplement your normal heating methods. Obviously, you would have to be very careful not to burn or shock anyone or set anything on fire with this setup. You may want to put some kind of a fire-resistant cage, mesh or grill around it to keep debris and curious onlookers back. An electrically insulated barrier may also prove wise, depending on the charge generated (possibly some shatterproof glass would be useful, but it all depends on how much electricity your system can generate at top speed). Of course, magnets will lose their magnetic properties when heated past specific temperatures, but this point is pretty high for most magnetic materials, and will reverse again once they cool.

This technique may not heat your entire house, but depending on wind strength and consistency, may provide a very substantial degree of warmth for whatever room you have it installed in. Without knowing anything about the windspeeds you will be experiencing, I can make no estimates regarding how effective this system would be in your particular house. If you are curious, however, I would suggest getting a device that can measure windspeed above your residence (you may be able to get one on loan from your local university). If local wind conditions seem promising, you might then set up your heater temporarily outside, just to see how much heat it can produce before cutting a hole in your roof to install it. Remember, of course, that the heat will disperse much faster in the open while the wind is blowing.

But if you then find your wind-thermal system to be worthwhile, you may choose to have it installed professionally. In that case, good luck.
--

And, of course, if the above all seems too complicated, use a waterwheel or water turbine to provide the motive power... assuming you're living next to a substantial source of water power, or could divert one for a micro-hydro project.

--
Update:

To clarify, since there seems to be some confusion about this invention...

Ultimately what you have here is a U-shaped bar magnet, a rotating disc of copper, and something to turn that disc. Your source of motive power can be wind, micro-hydro or a couple of teenagers working out on a stationary bike (easily rigged up from an old bicycle as needed).

But the point of the system is that someone with very limited resources could find a way to make that disc turn and then only requires a few parts that are relatively easily bought or salvaged (despite recent increases in the price of copper). Why is this important?

Because with fossil fuel prices skyrocketing in the face of peak oil and other economic issues, there are a lot of people who will not be able to afford heating oil this year, and who can not burn enough wood to stay warm in their houses. I have put this 'invention' into public domain because it could make a great difference in some people's lives -- perhaps even save a few. If you do not see it as being the most elegant technical solution possible, in many respects, you are correct. It is only elegant insofar as it is a cheap means for the relatively poor but capable to survive a difficult winter without heating oil.

A further note:
Yes, there are other ways to transfer power into your house besides a belt -- that is just a common method a lot of people have experience with. I am not even sure if the classic water-pump windmill uses a belt.

But having said that, a vertical axial wind turbine could easily spin a rod that descends into your home through a much narrower hole. So long as you waterproof said hole and avoid frictional overheating, that should work out just as well for you... assuming you can rig up a simple vertical axial turbine.

But again, to repeat, all of this is easily within the capacity of a capable handyman with a few parts and scraps. My apologies to any who felt this necessarily replaced their much more advanced generators, and their 12,000-mile supply lines back to China.

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I am hereby placing the above technique into public domain for anyone who would like to use it.

I make no claims regarding the above concept, only to tell you it is here and can now be used by anyone. Thank you for listening.

Ralph Cerchione

Renewing the Earth: Public Domain Inventions for a Sustainable Future Solar desalination, solar steel, etc.

Comparing IPCC Models to an Even Grimmer Reality...

2008-01-06T00:22:00.000-05:00

One of the hallmarks of global-warming denial is to attack the scientific models predicting the grave threat of climate change. So, in fairness to those critics, here is a chart of how reality has deviated from IPCC predictions... by being consistently worse than anticipated.

Future Imperative

Study Finds Humans Still Evolving, and Rapidly...

2007-12-19T22:49:00.000-05:00

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The LA Times had this fascinating article on the furious rate of human evolution over the last 40,000 years:

The pace of human evolution has been increasing at a stunning rate since our ancestors began spreading through Europe, Asia and Africa 40,000 years ago, quickening to 100 times historical levels after agriculture became widespread, according to a study published today.

By examining more than 3 million variants of DNA in 269 people, researchers identified about 1,800 genes that have been widely adopted in relatively recent times because they offer some evolutionary benefit.

Until recently, anthropologists believed that evolutionary pressure on humans eased after the transition to a more stable agrarian lifestyle. But in the last few years, they realized the opposite was true -- diseases swept through societies in which large groups lived in close quarters for a long time.

Altogether, the recent genetic changes account for 7% of the human genome...

It's a cliche of modern bio-ethics and human enhancement research that humanity now has the power to radically alter and accelerate its own evolution. But it would appear that our ancestors beat us to the punch millenia ago. Or to put it another way, the very act of forming settlements, raising food, domesticating animals and living together in large numbers has already dramatically impacted human evolution.

The real question is: How much more do we want to speed it up, if at all, and where do we want to direct it?

Do we want to be healthier, smarter, stronger, faster, better looking? Do we want to live longer, in the prime of our youth? But whatever answers we give to these questions, one thing we do know -- we will not be choosing to live in some "natural state of man" like our ancestors thousands of years removed. They weren't "natural humans" either. The only difference -- so far -- is a matter of degree.

But another question leaps to mind. Given how much humanity definitively altered its evolution over the last 40,000 years, how much have we altered ourselves in the last two generations? A mingling of the gene pools from all over the world, the transformation of human diet, the development of vaccines, the unbelievably rapid evolution of bacteria spurred by the overuse of antibiotics, the drugs and other chemicals in our environment -- and the social evolutionary pressures that impact procreation, such as ideals of beauty, masculinity, femininity, intelligence, strength of character and perceptions of wealth and power... how do all these things affect human evolution today?

Future Imperative

Record Arctic Melting Has Experts Very Worried...

2007-12-12T01:29:00.000-05:00

As noted on Yahoo News, the Arctic is melting down far faster than widely anticipated:

An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.

Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

So scientists in recent days have been asking themselves these questions: Was the record melt seen all over the Arctic in 2007 a blip amid relentless and steady warming? Or has everything sped up to a new climate cycle that goes beyond the worst case scenarios presented by computer models?

The article notes that an Arctic meltdown affects global sea levels, and in the U.S. could result in less precipitation in the drought-stricken Southeast and more rain and snow in areas like Colorado.

• 552 billion tons of ice melted this summer from the Greenland ice sheet, according to preliminary satellite data to be released by NASA Wednesday. That's 15 percent more than the annual average summer melt, beating 2005's record.

• A record amount of surface ice was lost over Greenland this year, 12 percent more than the previous worst year, 2005, according to data the University of Colorado released Monday. That's nearly quadruple the amount that melted just 15 years ago. It's an amount of water that could cover Washington, D.C., a half-mile deep, researchers calculated.

• The surface area of summer sea ice floating in the Arctic Ocean this summer was nearly 23 percent below the previous record. The dwindling sea ice already has affected wildlife, with 6,000 walruses coming ashore in northwest Alaska in October for the first time in recorded history. Another first: the Northwest Passage was open to navigation.

• Still to be released is NASA data showing the remaining Arctic sea ice to be unusually thin, another record. That makes it more likely to melt in future summers. Combining the shrinking area covered by sea ice with the new thinness of the remaining ice, scientists calculate that the overall volume of ice is half of 2004's total.
• Alaska's frozen permafrost is warming, not quite thawing yet. But temperature measurements 66 feet deep in the frozen soil rose nearly four-tenths of a degree from 2006 to 2007, according to measurements from the University of Alaska. While that may not sound like much, "it's very significant," said University of Alaska professor Vladimir Romanovsky.

- Surface temperatures in the Arctic Ocean this summer were the highest in 77 years of record-keeping, with some places 8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, according to research to be released Wednesday by University of Washington's Michael Steele.

More on this to come.

Future Imperative

William Gibson on Why the Present Is Stranger than the Future

2007-11-22T02:29:00.000-05:00

Rolling Stone has a great interview with science-fiction novelist William Gibson:

You made your name as a science-fiction writer, but in your last two novels you've moved squarely into the present. Have you lost interest in the future?
It has to do with the nature of the present. If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It's too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they'd not only show you the door, they'd probably call security.

Future Imperative

The Missing Ice

2007-11-10T01:49:00.000-05:00

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This image shows the average sea ice extent in September 2007 (in white), compared to the long-term median sea ice extent from 1979-2000 (in magenta) for the end of the melt season.

Consider how much reflective ice has disappeared in that time, particularly in the last seven years. Now add to that certain other factors capable of accelerating global warming, such as the increasing release of methane in the Arctic (a greenhouse gas 22.6 times as powerful as CO2).

Future Imperative

Time Is Short -- In More Ways than One

2007-10-29T00:27:00.000-04:00

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The following came out of a conversation I was contributing to on the World Transhumanist Association listserv regarding accelerating rates of change...

The real problem is that so many things are rushing to a climax at breathtaking speed. On global warming, so many of the so-called pessimists are still talking about major changes happening in a century, or half a century, or in a decade or two, and meanwhile dozens of U.S. cities have less than a hundred days of water of left in their reserves and methane (22.6 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2) is bubbling out of Russian, Canadian and Alaskan lakes, one of several accelerating factors threatening a runaway global meltdown. Agriculture has been taking massive hits, worldwide, though commentators like to blame some of the shortages on ethanol production rather than intense, multi-year droughts such as the one expanding from its base in America's Southeast and Southwest (one reason for the water shortages in New Jersey) and also assailing agricultural exporters like Australia, even as massive flooding hits other regions.

On the other hand, something as prosaic as a last-gasp attack on Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz (see supersonic Sunburn missles), collapse world oil supplies, and bring on an energy crisis for which we are all-but-unprepared.

With regards to intelligence augmentation, our main question, barring colossal disaster (see above) is which field or combination of fields will make dramatic breakthroughs first, and how soon. Because of the very real threats now breathing down our necks, a race is on, and it doesn't require any rogue nanotechnology or AIs to pose a grave or even existential threat to our survival. Fortunately, the weather and, even more obviously, the availability of clean water for drinking, cleaning, cooking and other uses are such overwhelming issues when they come to a head that many people are starting to focus on them as real concerns that can't just be put aside for 'more important things.' We have to settle at least the most dramatic threats, or die.

Unless of course you have uploaded, and can survive without drinking water or the grid. In which case, good for you. =)

Future Imperative