Earth Witness  

WorldChanging's Jamais Cascio gave a good speech at the TED conference on "sustainable, collaborative and, well, worldchanging solutions to the planet's biggest problems", which describes an idea he calls "Earth Witness".

As a born-in-the-mid-1960s GenX'er, hurtling headlong to my 40th birthday, I'm naturally inclined to pessimism. But being part of WorldChanging has, much to my own surprise, convinced me that successful responses to the world's problems, while difficult, are nonetheless possible. Moreover, I've come to realize that focusing only on negative outcomes can blind one to the very possibility of success.

As Norwegian social scientist Evelin Lindner has observed, pessimism is a luxury of good times. In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence. The truth is, we can build a better world, and we can do so now. We have the tools -- you saw a hint of that a moment ago -- and we're making new ones all the time. We have the knowledge, and our understanding of our planet continues to grow by leaps and bounds. And we have the motive -- we have a world that needs fixing, and nobody's going to do it for us.

Many of the solutions I and my colleagues seek out and write up have some important aspects in common: transparency, collaboration, an appreciation of science and a willingness to experiment. The majority of models, tools and ideas posted on WorldChanging encompass combinations of these characteristics.

Let me give you some concrete examples of how these principles combine in worldchanging ways.

The WorldChanging team seem to be getting plenty of exposure lately, with Alex Steffen scheduled to talk at the Commonwealth Club.

MIT Technology Review has a lot of good articles recently related to energy. Examples include: a piece on early technological efforts at traffic avoidance (one way to reduce oil consumption is to help people aovid wasting fuel in traffic jams), an article on the process of cellulosic ethanol production, a look at "the next prius which examines European moves towards diesel hybrid manfacturing, a pair of posts on battery breakthroughs and an article on harnessing hot rock geothermal energy in Europe.

Renewable Energy Access has articles on - US efforts to block offshore wind farms, an Israeli project to create an entirely solar powered village in the Negev desert and a pair of articles on the PV solar industry.

The Energy Blog also has a post on offshore wind farm madness, along with one on the first IGCC plant project getting the go ahead in Florida, another on the expansion of the Chinese nuclear power industry and one of the virtues of thin film solar power technology.

In local energy news, Santos is looking to expand exploration for gas in the Timor sea.

The rapid acceleration of the Timor Sea gas search - in areas that are under Australian jurisdiction - is a further indication that the market for natural gas in Asia and North America is set to soar during the next decade.

Federal Resources Minister Ian Macfarlane believes Australia will be the supplier of choice for LNG into North America in the next 10 years, and says there are huge prospects for brownfields development of both Darwin LNG and the North West Shelf gas project, already Australia's biggest resources development.

Darwin LNG, which has only one production train with a capacity of 3.5 million tonnes a year, this month became the second Australian export LNG development, with its first shipment about to arrive in Japan. Its gas supply comes from the small Bayu Undan fields in the joint petroleum development area of the Timor Sea, which means 90 per cent of government revenues from production are transferred to East Timor.

But the site on Darwin Harbour has a production licence for 10 million tonnes a year.

And to close, some links on the Big Brother theme - Bruce Schneier notes that the Houston police (state) department's idea of putting surveillence cameras in private homes is "so nutty that I wasn't even going to blog it - but too many of you are e-mailing the article to me". Dan Gillmor's post on the same topic is called "How Police States Emerge" (I actually think this is about step 5 - dismantling a lot of laws protecting individual freedoms while cultivating a state of fear make up the early stages). George Monbiot has an article called "Children of the Machine" which starts off with the recent report of some workers getting RFID tag implants in their arms then goes on to look at the stream of programs to get us all (to varying degrees) to carry some sort of RFID based identification (the final stage of that process presumably being people being required to carry national (RFID tagged) id cards).

William Greider notes that the bout of hysteria of the UAE buying 21 US ports is a case of the fear monger in chief becoming a victim of his own propaganda campaign.

David Brooks, the high-minded conservative pundit, dismissed the Dubai ports controversy as an instance of political hysteria that will soon pass. He was commenting on PBS, and I thought I heard a little quaver in his voice when he said this was no big deal. Brooks consulted "the experts," and they assured him there's no national security risk in a foreign company owned by Middle Eastern Muslims—actually, by an Arab government—managing six major American ports. Cool down, people. This is how the world works in the age of globalization.

Of course, he is correct. But what a killjoy. This is a fun flap, the kind that brings us together. Republicans and Democrats are frothing in unison, instead of polarizing incivilities. Together they are all thumping righteously on the poor president. I expect he will fold or at least retreat tactically by ordering further investigation. The issue is indeed trivial. But Bush cannot escape the basic contradiction, because this dilemma is fundamental to his presidency.

A conservative blaming hysteria is hysterical, when you think about it, and a bit late. Hysteria launched Bush's invasion of Iraq. It created that monstrosity called Homeland Security and pumped up defense spending by more than 40 percent. Hysteria has been used to realign U.S. foreign policy for permanent imperial war-making, whenever and wherever we find something frightening afoot in the world. Hysteria will justify the "long war" now fondly embraced by Field Marshal Rumsfeld. It has also slaughtered a number of Democrats who were not sufficiently hysterical. It saved George Bush's butt in 2004.

Bush was the principal author—along with his straight-shooting vice president—and now he is hoisted by his own fear-mongering propaganda. The basic hysteria was invented from risks of terrorism, enlarged ridiculously by the president's open-ended claim that we are endangered everywhere and anywhere—he decides where. Anyone who resists that proposition is a coward or, worse, a subversive. We are enticed to believe we are fighting a new Cold War.

...

So why is the fearmonger-in-chief being so casual about this Dubai business?

Because at some level of consciousness even George Bush knows the inflated fears are bogus. So do a lot of the politicians merrily throwing spears at him. He taught them how to play this game, invented the tactics and reorganized political competition as a demagogic dance of hysterical absurdities, endless opportunities to waste public money. Very few dare to challenge the mindset. Thousands have died for it.

Also at Tom Paine, a post on Ted Koppel's article about the Us being willing to fight for oil but not being willing to debate the merits of this course of action.

Lastly, it looks like our Justice Minister has caught the torture bug from Dick Cheney and his merry men in Washington - Crikey reports:

Federal Justice Minister Chris Ellison dropped a proverbial bomb at the Law Summer School in Perth yesterday during a debate on the lofty topic of the juxtaposition of anti-terrorism laws and the rule of law.

Lord Justice Kennedy and Professor HP Lee spoke, followed by a panel discussion including John North (Law Council president), Alexandra Richards QC and Senator Ellison, among others.

Eventually the subject was raised about what courts do with evidence obtained by torture. Lord Justice Kennedy responded in terms of an English House of Lords decision. Then came the Ellison bombshell when our Justice Minister openly declared that he had a policy of not asking if information was obtained by torture – the information was paramount, not the means of it being obtained.

He went on to say that the AFP would love to be able to torture people to get information if there was a bomb attack pending and they needed to know the details.

The rather stunned audience was then told that Amrosi and some of the other Bali bombers were convicted on evidence obtained by the Indonesian police using torture, but the AFP abided by Australian law in the investigation.

Gee, thank goodness for that. And this man is a Minister of the Crown in whom we place our trust !