GoogleMobile - The Search For The Flex-Fuel Plugin Hybrid  

Google's philanthropic (if that is the right word for a for-profit organisation) arm Google.org has announced that one of its ventures will involve the production of a plug-in hybrid car with the goal of "reduce dependence on oil while alleviating the effects of global warming".

So well done to Larry and Sergey (and whoever else was involved in this decision) - while it will no doubt be a good business to be in over time its still encouraging to see the tech industry plunging in and trying to solve the most important problems of our time. Further comment can be found at Grist and TreeHugger.

The ambitious founders of Google, the popular search engine company, have set up a philanthropy, giving it seed money of about $1 billion and a mandate to tackle poverty, disease and global warming.

But unlike most charities, this one will be for-profit, allowing it to fund start-up companies, form partnerships with venture capitalists and even lobby Congress. It will also pay taxes.

One of its maiden projects reflects the philanthropy’s nontraditional approach. According to people briefed on the program, the organization, called Google.org, plans to develop an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline.

The philanthropy is consulting with hybrid-engine scientists and automakers, and has arranged for the purchase of a small fleet of cars with plans to convert the engines so that their gas mileage exceeds 100 miles per gallon. The goal of the project is to reduce dependence on oil while alleviating the effects of global warming.

WorldChanging has a post called "Viridian Redux" that reprints Bruce's original Viridan Manifesto.

The environmental movement can be boring, strident, depressing; this is why I never quite became an environmental activist despite my initial interest and commitment in the sixties. It struck me as too burlap and granola. It felt reactionary (despite the great calendars). I think Bruce Sterling found himself in a similar quandary when, after researching Heavy Weather, he realized there was a significant climate problem. Who was going to take it on? Certainly not the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Conservancy, organizations cycling cash and promoting the great outdoors but not equipped to generate real soltuions to a problem like global warming. And certainly not the U.S. and other governments, whose attitudes are reflected by the Murray Hamilton character in the movie "Jaws." Lifesaving solutions are fine, but they have to wait til the tourist season is past.

Sterling figured design movements like futurism and dadaism had been effective in disrupting the lazier aspects of our consciousness and perception and driving new ways of thinking about the world and its problems, so he started the Viridian Design movement, beginning with the Manifesto of January 3, 2000

We have a worldwide environmental problem. This is a truism. But the unprecedentedly severe and peculiar weather of the late 1990s makes it clear that this problem is growing acute. Global warming has been a lively part of scientific discussion since at least the 1960s, but global warming is a quotidian reality now. Climate change is shrouding the globe in clouds of burning rain forest and knocking points off the GNP of China. Everyone can offer a weird weather anecdote now; for instance, I spent a week this summer watching the sky turn gray with fumes from the blazing forests of Chiapas. The situation has been visibly worsening, and will get worse yet, possibly very much worse.

Society has simply been unable to summon the political or economic will to deal successfully with this problem by using 20th century methods. That is because CO2 emission is not centrally a political or economic problem. It is a design and engineering problem. It is a cultural problem and a problem of artistic sensibility.

New and radical approaches are in order. These approaches should be originated, gathered, martialled into an across-the-board cultural program, and publicly declared -- on January 3rd

WorldChanging is one spinoff from the Viridian work, which continues apace at http://www.viridiandesign.org/.

It's worthwhile to reread the Viridian agenda at the end of the manifesto... which I duplicate here, encouraging comments and suggestion from today's perspective – six years later, post 9/11, post Katrina.

The Media

Today. Publishing and broadcasting cartels surrounded by a haze of poorly financed subcultural microchannels.

What We Want. More bandwidth for civil society, multicultural variety, and better-designed systems of popular many-to-many communication, in multiple languages through multiple channels.

The Trend. A spy-heavy, commercial Internet. A Yankee entertainment complex that entirely obliterates many non-Anglophone cultures.

The Military

Today. G-7 Hegemony backed by the American military.

What We Want. A wider and deeper majority hegemony with a military that can deter adventurism, but specializes in meeting the immediate crises through civil engineering, public health and disaster relief.

The Trend. Nuclear and biological proliferation among minor powers.

Business

Today. Currency traders rule banking system by fiat; extreme instability in markets; capital flight but no labor mobility; unsustainable energy base

What We Want. Nonmaterial industries; vastly increased leisure; vastly increased labor mobility; sustainable energy and resources

The Trend. commodity totalitarianism, crony capitalism, criminalized banking systems, sweatshops...

WorldChanging also points to Nature Magazine's Energy Technology Compilation.

The most pressing technological problem facing the world is uncoupling the provision of energy from the production of carbon dioxide. Developed countries no longer need to increase their energy use in order to increase the size of their economies, but developing countries do. And yet to add more carbon dioxide to the Earth's atmosphere is to increase inexorably the chances of climatic chaos.

To highlight this issue Nature is assembling a suite of feature articles and associated material which will outline the promises and, where necessary, the pitfalls of new energy technologies. From mainstream possibilities like the expansion of nuclear power to more offbeat subjects such as microbial fuel cells and schemes for combining biofuel with fertiliser manufacture, this regularly updated Nature web focus will provide a comprehensive overview of the energy landscape.

Most of the "Nature" content is paywalled, but they do have free access to an article on the solar renaissance in silicon valley.

The Sun provides Earth with as much energy every hour as human civilization uses every year. If you are a solar-energy enthusiast, that says it all. No other energy supply could conceivably be as plentiful as the 120,000 terawatts the Sun provides ceaselessly and unbidden. If the tiniest fraction of that sunlight were to be captured by photovoltaic cells that turn it straight into electricity, there would be no need to emit any greenhouse gases from any power plant.

Thanks to green thoughts like that, and to generous subsidies from governments in Japan and Germany, the solar-cell market has been growing on average by a heady 31% a year for the past decade (see chart, below). One of the most bullish industry analysts, Michael Rogol, sees the industry increasing from about US$12 billion in 2005 to as much as $70 billion in 2010. Although not everyone predicts such impressive growth, a 20–25% annual rise is widely expected. The market for shares in solar-energy companies is correspondingly buoyant.

And yet in the projections of energy supply made by policy analysts and climate wonks, solar remains so marginal as to be barely on the map at all. At the moment, the world's total installed solar cells have a capacity of about five gigawatts. That looks small compared with almost 400 gigawatts for nuclear power and much more than 1,000 gigawatts for coal. And that's before taking into account the fact that solar cells do not produce electricity at their peak rating all the time. Even within the world of renewables, solar is dwarfed by wind power and hydroelectricity, simply because the technology is much more expensive. And expert opinion does not expect growth in the field to change the picture very much: a 25% annual growth in installed capacity for the next 15 years would still see solar photovoltaics producing just 1% of the world's energy.

Reconciling the solar-cell industry's optimism with global indifference is basically a matter of perspective. Seen from the viewpoint of a small industry, solar's recent decade of expansion is indeed extraordinary. But even heady growth is not enough to spur a radical overhaul of energy infrastructure when you start such a long way behind your competitors. So, although no one doubts that solar electricity will become cheaper in the future, few expect it to do so fast enough to force radical change.

Few worldwide, that is. In California's Silicon Valley, the corridor of land along the southwest side of San Francisco Bay, the outlook is more optimistic. Home first to the semiconductor boom and then to the Internet boom, the valley is perhaps the most fertile environment for new technologies in the world. As well as an extraordinary density of successful technology-based companies, it boasts world-class research universities, abundant capital, and a cultural fixation on getting to the future first and making money from it. The dot.com bust of 2000 did relatively little to dent the valley's fundamental strengths and attitudes; instead, it left the area's entrepreneurs and venture capitalists looking for somewhere else to put their millions.

'Cleantech' of all sorts, from water purification to biofuels, is currently the place they want to be. In 2005, $1.6 billion in venture capital went into cleantech, a growth of 35% year on year according to the Cleantech Venture Network, an umbrella group. The high-profile venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers is putting $100 million of its latest $600-million investment fund into cleantech start-ups. Bill Joy, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who used to be chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, says that the firm will look at perhaps 1,000 different cleantech ideas in the next year. And amid all these opportunities, photovoltaics seem to resonate most with Silicon Valley's history and culture.

.
The Age has an article on a visiting scientist warning that Australia may miss the solar power boom.

Australia faces missing out on a booming solar energy industry in the next three years unless it regulates to create the environment for business to invest in it, a visiting Greenpeace campaigner says.

Dutch engineer Sven Teske, who has specialised in solar photovoltaics (PV) for 10 years, says the technology worldwide is now in a transition phase between a niche market and mainstream.

"Basically, within the next two or three years, it will be decided if and who is leader of that industry," Mr Teske said. "Right now, it's a competition between Japan, Germany and the US."

Mr Teske, who works mostly in Amsterdam and Berlin but has also been involved in campaigns in China and Israel, will release a Greenpeace and European PV Industry Association report which says the market in PV cells and modules is booming, with a sustained growth rate of almost 40 per cent over the past 10 years.

The report projects, on current growth rates, that more than 3.2 million people worldwide will have jobs connected with solar power by 2025.

TreeHugger has an interview with noted peak oil and global warming writer Jeremy Leggett, who is also CEO of Solarcentury.

eremy Leggett has been described by Time Magazine as "one of the key players in putting the climate issue on the world agenda." He is the CEO of Solarcentury, the UK’s leading supplier of solar photovoltaic systems and equipment. Prior to setting up Solarcentury he was an award-winning scientist, oil-industry consultant, and Greenpeace campaigner. His first book, "The Carbon War", has been described by the Sunday Times as "the best book yet on the politics of global warming." His second book "Half Gone" is now available via Amazon, previewing the looming global energy crises, while signposting a safe exit opportunity. He is a director of the world's first private equity renewable energy fund, Bank Sarasin's New Energies Invest AG and serves on the UK Government's Renewables Advisory Board. He has been a prominent critic of central government’s energy policies; you can read Jeremy’s blog in the news section of Solarcentury’s website. In this brief interview he shares his thoughts on energy descent, the future of solar, the importance of efficiency, and the UK government’s support, or lack of support, for micro-generation.

TreeHugger: You have written about the looming energy crisis in your book “Half Gone”. To what extent do you believe this crisis can be averted by forward thinking policies today?

Jeremy Leggett: I think on balance that diminishing oil supply will happen so fast after the peak that no combination of energy technologies will be able to close the gap with demand. If the peak is later rather than earlier, say 2010 instead of tomorrow, then we may have a chance if we launch sustained Manhattan and Apollo project equivalents on renewables and efficiency.

TH: Many local authorities in the UK are beginning to mandate that new buildings derive a percentage of their energy from on-site solar or other renewables. What are the chances of central government adopting such forward-thinking measures across the country?

JL: Central government behaves in a way that encourages the conspiracy theorists who say that minimal support for microrenewables is a precondition for a nuclear renaissance. I no longer trust government in its rhetoric. I look to local government for leadership.

Jeff Vail notes that OPEC has abandoned production quotas - a signpost of the arrival of peak oil if the behaviour of the earlier generation of oil cartel, the Texas Railroad Commission, is any guide - especially given the rapid fall in oil prices recently, which wouldn't normally encourage a cartel to abandon a quota system.

"[OPEC's President and Nigerian Oil Minister Edmond] Daukoru said: There is no quota, no, either up or down."

This is a significant move away from the previous 28 million barrel per day quota. While it is largely recognized that the quota has had no meaning for some time now, its formal abandonment is significant. The same action by the Texas Railroad Commission (the Texas oil & gas regulatory body) in the early '70's is viewed, with the benefit of historical hindsight, as the turning point signifying a peak in oil production.

In my opinion, interesting times are ahead. I don't see any catastrophic collapse or similar events in the next few years, but I do think that at current prices there now is a historical buying opportunity for oil.

Mobjectivist has an update to oil shock model following the recnet much ballyooed GOM oil discovery.

I have waited for data corresponding to something like the recent deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GOM) find for a while. This discovery has the right elements of right-wing business hyperventilation and media overkill to make a significant point -- namely that in the greater scheme of things, contributions such as Jack 2 and its siblings remain insignificant for our future global oil production outlook.

Industry analysts estimate that the GOM discovery could add 5 to 15 gigabarrels of oil to our reserve. In terms of the oil shock model, the discovery provides an additional stimulus to that model's world estimate. Putting the two together and using the optimistic value of 15 GB, the new out-year estimate appears below. (Recall that the oil shock model uses a stochastic estimator, so the new curve provides a probability view of expected production and ultimate depletion).

Mobjectivist has also collected some world depletion model curves from Khebab and added an oil shock overlay.

Khebab has aggregated a bunch of world peak oil predictions on to a single graph and posted the results to TOD. I added the data points from my oil shock model from last year to his plot below:

The oil shock model sits right dab in the middle of the other pessimistic estimates, nearly matching Staniford's median logistic model in the out years.

If you're in the mood for looking at a whole lot of depletion graphs, Roberto Canogar at GraphOilogy has a stunning array of individual country graphs up called "The Hubbert Parabola".



Past Peak points to an interview with Henry Groppe, the "Dean of Energy Analysts".

Groppe, whose name rhymes with copy, has no crystal ball but does claim to see the future and has, in fact, an excellent record on long-term energy forecasts, according to people in the industry.

"We are entering an unprecedented event in world economic history," he said. Oil production is straining to meet demand at a time when China and India are developing huge consumer classes relatively overnight, and hundreds of millions more people will have vastly increased demands for energy.

In the future, he said, "perhaps the biggest geopolitical conflicts will involve the U.S. against the rest of the developing world, including China and India, over oil."

Groppe sees oil hovering in a range of no less than $55 to $65 a barrel for the next 10 years and likely much more because unforeseeable political unrest and weather will drive prices up.

He has hung his hat — he always wears a hat when outdoors — for more than 50 years at Groppe, Long & Littell, a firm that has, he says, "successfully forecasted every change of direction [in the oil markets] in the last 30 to 40 years."

His clients have included Shell Oil Co., Chevron Corp. and Apache Corp.

"He has as deep and broad an understanding of the global energy picture as anybody on the planet," said Donald Evans, former secretary of commerce under President George W. Bush and CEO of the trade association Financial Services Forum. "He has been directionally correct on energy prices since I have known him."

"Historically, he's been very accurate," said Gary Petersen, a partner at EnCap Investments, a firm that manages money for major U.S. institutions with investments earmarked for the oil and gas business.

Peterson described Groppe as "a senior statesman for the industry." [...]

Working with others, he is playing a key role in establishing the Energy Institute at the University of Texas, which will have a mission of fostering research to develop a sustainable energy supply. The institute is in the formative stage, pending final approval. [...]

He and his partners at Groppe, Long & Littell rely on research they've gathered since 1955.

His energy views are not shared by the U.S. Department of Energy, which forecasts that production will continue to rise during the next 24 years.

To avoid a global crisis, Groppe thinks that Americans should use the next 10 years, a time in which production output is expected to peak, to transition into new energy-usage habits.

"We must rely more on nuclear power and alternative energy supplies and use all energy more efficiently," he said.

He is no fan of ethanol, which he calls "pure farm-bloc subsidy." The energy spent on producing it is greater than the output, he said, "not to mention depletion of the topsoil."

Some analysts said that after U.S. military action, oil production in Iraq would rise, but Groppe predicted instability, disruption and lower oil production for at least eight years.

Crikey has a good roundup of the shrinking tribe of global warming deniers in Australia - hopefully a species that will soon be extinct (or t least confined to a few obscure insane asylums). They forgot to include the crazed rantings of "flamboyant" TV and radio jock Alan Jones, who was frothing away about the global scientific conspiracy on national TV on Friday morning.

Al Gore stepped off his jet and straight into a torrent of abuse from our nation's leading global warming sceptics this week.

But the majority of scientists in Australia believe that reasonable debate about the substance of global warming ended some time ago. What remains at issue is potential rates of change and the scale of destruction, a problem many have moved onto addressing. But even in the most optimistic scenarios, the news is not good.

Which means the doubters are starting to reduce to a small, exclusive clique. Crikey has compiled an unofficial membership list of the Global Warming Sceptics Club -- meet the commentators who don't see what all the fuss is about:

William Kininmonth – Recently wrote an op-ed for The Australian entitled "Don't be Gored into going along." Former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation. Author of Climate Change: A Natural Hazard (Multi-Science Publishing Co, 2004), which was launched by the Lavoisier Group (see below), a group closely associated to the mining industry.

The Lavoisier Group – Founded in 2000 by Ray Evans, then an executive at Western Mining Corporation (WMC), who was also involved in founding the HR Nicholls Society and the Bennelong Society. Their website states: "We are of the view that the science behind global warming policy is far less certain than its protagonists claim..."

Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of The Australian: Some recent editorials on global warming include "It's not the end of the world" and "An inconvenient cost", which did concede that "Gore successfully challenges the thesis that global warming is a part of a cyclical weather pattern rather than a man-made phenomenon" but said "the frustration of Mr Gore's film is that he fails to grapple with the real cost of tackling climate change..." The paper recently earned the ire of one of the world's leading science magazines, Scientific American, which accused The Oz of misrepresentation and "topspin" for its report "Science Tempers Fears on Climate Change."

Terry McCrann – News Ltd business writer, his latest column on global warming entitled "Al Gore's Day After Tomorrow sequel" jokingly suggested a tax on flatulence.

Andrew Bolt – In "Bulled by a Gore." the Herald Sun columnist labels Gore "one of the worst fact-fiddling Green evangelicals..." Made an impression on the recent News Ltd Pebble Beach conference by heckling Gore about his doco. Crikey understands that Herald Sun editor Peter Blunden rejected an offer of an interview with Gore after the Gore camp refused to be interviewed by Bolt...

The Observer reports that the US is being accused of covert operations in Somalia. Surely not.

Dramatic evidence that America is involved in illegal mercenary operations in east Africa has emerged in a string of confidential emails seen by The Observer. The leaked communications between US private military companies suggest the CIA had knowledge of the plans to run covert military operations inside Somalia - against UN rulings - and they hint at involvement of British security firms.

The emails, dated June this year, reveal how US firms have been planning undercover missions in support of President Abdullahi Yusuf's transitional federal government - founded with UN backing in 2004 - against the Supreme Islamic Courts Council - a radical Muslim militia which took control of Mogadishu, the country's capital, also in June promising national unity under Sharia law.

Evidence of foreign involvement in the conflict would not only breach the UN arms embargo but could destabilise the entire region.

Islamo-fascism is one of those meaningless phrases (used instead of the correct term "islamic fundamentalism") that gets my goat - so I was glad to see that Jeff Vail is having none of this doublespeak, mostly from the mouths of genuine fascists, either.

Islamo-Fascism. The latest talking point issued from the Bush administration, something straight out of "Triumph of the Will." This isn't exactly the most timely response (well, nothing on this blog has been especially timely of late), but I hope to address the issue in a manner that has not yet been covered by the mainstream media.

Consider for a moment, what is the point of making the painfully consicous effort to parade about a "new and improved" phrase such as "Islamo-Fascism"?? Is it more descriptive, something new and helpfull in the public understanding of Salafi Jihadism (because an understanding of that phrase, however accurate, requires a greater attention span than can be realistically expected of "the public" at this point)? The phrase's proponents would certainly like to suggest that this new phrase has some greater explanatory power. But therein lies the falacy of "Islamo-Fascism."

Put simply, this is classical symbolic translation, something that I have discussed with regard to American "Patriotism" in Love Your Nation-State. Basically, some agreed upon "good" quality of a nation, such as freedom, is associated with a symbol, such as a flag. Then, through symbolic translation, the flag can now be held up as a substitute for some underlying, actual freedom, and the actual freedom can be conveniently dispensed with. "Islamo-Fascism" is similar in many respects. "Fascism," as a word reminiscent of a mythology (mostly, admittedly, quite deserved) that has been built up in popular culture about war-time attrocities and abuses of Hittler's Germany, is a symbol to which much negative sentiment has been effectively attached. This symbol, when attached to the modifier "Islamo-" serves to attach that negative sentiment to a current enemy.

This much is rather obvious, but the logical fallacy that seems to be passing unseen is that the new term Islamo-Fascism ONLY expands upon our existing understanding ofSalafi Jihadism to the extent that the former FALSELY attributes characteristics to the latter. To the degree that the public can be educated about the attrocities and abuses of Salafi Jihadists, and hence to the extent that the new label is accurate, they have already incorporated understanding of those abuses and attrocities into their understanding of the Jihadist phenomenon before the addition of the new symbolic language. Therefore, the only value added by the actual articulation of this new "Islamo-Fascism" label is falsity--it is the association in the public perception of attributes and attrocities of Nazi Fascists that are in fact not accurate when attributed to Salafi Jihadists. And it is in that sense that labels such as "Islamo-Fascism" are the purest of propaganda--they serve no purpose but deception. Leni Riefenstahl would be proud.

Speaking of Nazis, while I was away in Western Australia being devoured by sandflies, I read a slightly obscure book called "Himmler's Crusade", which looked at a number of SS expeditions sent to explore Tibet in the 1930's and the subsequent activities of the expeditioners during World War 2. The author seems to have been motivated to write the book after producing a documentary series on Atlantis myths and becoming frustrated at the weaving of these into various "Aryan" supremacist and new age memes (there seems to be a large subset of particularly dubious conspiracy theories that fit into this category that I leave well alone).

While I don't have time to write a decent review, it did touch on a number of intriguing subjects (above and beyond the sheer bizarreness of the Third Reich and Himmler and his numerous weird obsessions).

Worth checking out if you are interested in Tibet (and the game between China and the British Raj), the infighting in Germany in the 1920's (I never knew there was a "Soviet" republic in Bavaria for a brief time in 1919 for example, or about various browshirt armies like the "Freikorps" that extinguished it), the religious undercurrents of Nazism (more around the occult aspects that the SS followed - see Wewelsburg Castle and "The Spear of Destiny", which generates all sorts of strange tales, for a flavour of this - than the "New Christianity" peddled to the masses) or some of the medical atrocities performed in the concentration camps.

From the Amazon review:

Why would the leader of the Nazi’s dreaded SS, the second-most-powerful man in the Third Reich, send a zoologist, an anthropologist, and several other scientists to Tibet on the eve of war? Himmler’s Crusade tells the bizarre and chilling story one of history’s most perverse, eccentric, and frightening scientific expeditions. Drawing on private journals, new interviews, and original research in German archives as well as in Tibet, author Christopher Hale recreates the events of this sinister expedition, asks penetrating questions about the relationship between science and politics, a nd sheds new light on the occult theories that obsessed Himmler and his fellow Nazis.

Combining the highest standards of narrative history with the high adventure and exotic locales of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Himmler’s Crusade reveals that Himmler had ordered these men to examine Tibetan nobles for signs of Aryan physiology, undermine the British relationship with the ruling class, and sow the seeds of rebellion among the populace. Most strangely, the scientists–all SS officers–were to find scientific proof of a grotesque historical fantasy that was at the center of Himmler’s beliefs about race.

Set against the exquisite backdrop of the majestic Himalayas, this fast-paced and engaging narrative provides new and troubling insight into one of the strangest episodes in the history of science, politics, and war

I'll close with Alex from WorldChanging on the conflict diamond trade and how to fight it (a tricky task where these seem to be an alternative currency in the mercenary - ooops, sorry - I mean private security - industry) - "Blood Diamonds, Transparency and the Emerging Power of Global Citizen Action".

Diamonds, like barrels of oil, are worth cash money everywhere, and, again like oil, the international trade in diamonds has destabilized whole regions and promoted criminal regimes. They have helped fuel the genocidal Congo wars and kept Angola in chaos. They are intimately tied to the black market in weapons. Terrorists even traffic in them to finance their plots. And these "blood diamonds" are sold in large numbers, by the billions of dollars, on the diamond bourses of Antwerp and other cities.

This is a classic example of a place where our choices -- buying a diamond to catch the eye of one's intended, for instance -- fuel destruction and suffering in far-off lands, but where the connection is kept hidden from us by secretive corporations. When it comes to most commercially available diamonds, it is almost impossible to know if your dollars are funding the enslavement of children or the murder of entire villages. There's simply no way of knowing in many retail outlets.

London's Global Witness wants to change all that. They're bound and determined to end the trade in blood diamonds -- and the methods they've been using illustrate the growing power of international advocacy networks to change the world.

People increasing demand global transparency. Corporations which behave opaquely not only magnify the damage they do to their reputations if they're caught acting unethically, but increasingly raise the odds that they will be caught. As William Gibson says:

"It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future... will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did."

Diamond merchants depended on a veil of secrecy about the origins of their stones to protect them from the consequences of their trade. Global Witness realized that if it could tear down that veil, consumers would react with horror and disgust to the reality they saw, so GW began with awareness-building tactics familiar since the Abolition movement: lobbying, letter-writing, the issuing of reports. But it wasn't until their 1998 report, A Rough Trade, that their impact began to be felt.

...

Not only are concerned citizens around the world more connected to each other, in a movement-as-network sort of way, they're also getting better at convincing their fellow citizens to pay attention. Bloggers, for instance, have become integral to the human rights movement, while small bits of viral video can reach millions in days -- and the tools for producing them are spreading rapidly. (All of this, by the way, plays into the recent moves by repressive governments to stifle Net freedom and is why all of us should care about the freedom to connect.)

And these international advocacy networks are growing in reach and sophistication. One sees this in the One Campaign and in the growing availability of tools to help citizens act effectively as networked observers. Already, anti-sweatshop campaigns have not only forced change in multinationals' practices, but have actually raised working standards in non-multinational owned shops as well, according to the UN.

It would be easy, and foolish, to overstate the victories here. After all, Antwerp is still awash in blood diamonds. Torture, extra-judicial arrest and secret imprisonment are now routinely practiced by several nations which once were strong advocates for human rights. China censors the Internet. People are still dying by the thousands in Sudan, the DRC and elsewhere.

But it would also be wrong to underestimate the power of the trend here, or precisely how much influence informed and connected citizens can actually exert today, or how much that leverage could grow.

Yesterday, my friend and I walked the grounds of the Dachau concentration camp, outside of Munich, where the Nazis murdered at least 30,000 people. It was a clear, crisp sunny Bavarian day, which somehow magnified the horror of the place. And what stood out for me most was that the camp was run for a dozen years, and was still a shock to Americans when it was liberated. Many people, Americans and Germans alike, either didn't know or were allowed to be complacent in the face of knowledge of exactly how monstrous the Nazis were. The victims of Dachau -- socialists, homosexuals, prisoners of war, Jews -- died invisible to the world, just as the victims of Darfur do today.

Burke said that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing. Perhaps today we should change it to read all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people see nothing -- and more eyes are opening now than ever before.