The Power Of Pizza And Beer  

TreeHugger has a post on Portland's peak oil taskforce.

Peak Oil seems to be an issue that really concentrates the mind. While climate change is certainly a terrifying prospect, it is still somewhat difficult for many people to grasp exactly what the melting of polar ice means for them. Tell them that gas is going to get more expensive, and you immediately have their attention.

While some ‘peak oilers’ tend to adopt a “head for the hills” mentality, predicting catastrophic social collapse, others are taking a pragmatic, community based approach. Witness our posts on community groups planning for peak oil in Portland, and in Totnes in the UK. For a concise rebuttal of the “head for the hills” position, read Rob Hopkins’ excellent “Why the Survivalists Have Got it Wrong”. Now the latest installment of Peak Moment TV, whose previous shows we have also featured here, gives us even more insight into potential community responses as it delves into the Portland Group in detail. In particular, the show explores how the group have managed to get the attention of policy makers at Portland City Hall.

The show is essentially a conversation with Brendan Finn, Chief of Staff to Commissioner of Public Affairs and Randy White, Peak Oil Task Force, Portland, Oregon. The two discuss how a small group of citizens started out talking about energy security over pizza and beer, and ended up persuading the city to set up the peak oil task force, the first of its kind for any city anywhere in the world. We also learn a little more about the issues that the task force will be exploring, and the two share advice on how groups in other cities can follow their lead. Just look what pizza and beer can do. Let’s just hope it was local and organic…

TreeHugger also has a post on using flywheels for energy storage.

the idea of using flywheels as energy storage medium has been around for a while; this gyrobus tooled around Switzerland in the early 50's. In the 80's volvo played with a sort of hybrid, with a small diesel engine charging the flywheel. The big flat wheels held a lot of power but the rim spun at 3,000 RPM and there was some concern about what would happen in accidents or malfunctions.

Now modern flywheels are being developed by Beacon Power that can be used to smooth out short-term variations in demand at power plants, which makes them more efficient, or more importantly, ganging them together for storing energy from variable sources like sun or wind. The units are available in various sizes, will last 20 years, have no chemicals- They are just big electric motors when you spin'em up and generators when they spin down. The California Energy Commission is impressed:"California has made a significant commitment to deploy renewable energy placing greater demands on the state's electric grid. Technologies such as Beacon's flywheel-based energy storage system provide attractive options."

They can put a lot of them together to store up to 20 megawatts "This full-scale facility is designed to provide an important revenue-generating service, while at the same time help facilitate increased use of renewable energy sources, reduce air pollution, and make the grid more reliable. Comprising 200 high-speed, high-energy flywheels and associated electronics, when fully equipped each plant will be able to provide 20 megawatts of “up and down” regulation – equal to a 40-megawatt swing."

Or can be packed into a shipping container like this 100Kw demonstration project -
"Housed in a transportable shipping container, the basic Smart Energy Matrix is a compact frequency regulation services system that could be located nearly anywhere on the grid. The system is remotely controlled and monitored for maximum flexibility. Depending on operator requirements, it could be placed at or near a substation or within the distribution system, where additional benefits such as voltage regulation, backup support, or reactive power could be provided for even greater value. Scale-power versions of this system are being demonstrated now in California and New York."

We really like the fact that the flywheel is tall and narrow rather than flat and wide, and that it is nicely encased in a solid steel cylinder- storing all of that electrical energy as kinetic energy can be a dangerous thing, which is why we probably won't see too many new gyrobuses or gyrocars. But what a great idea for wind and solar!

The Energy Blog has an interesting post on a zero energy Chinese skyscraper.

The 71-story, 2.2-million-square-foot Pearl River Tower, in the new city of Guangzhou, China, being built for the China National Tobacco Corp., is a “net”-zero-energy building designed by the storied architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), Chicago. The firm has set its sights on redefining one of its bread-and-butter project types, the corporate headquarters, into a model of high-tech sustainability.

The Pearl River Tower epitomizes the super tall corporate headquarters building of tomorrow as an iconic, high performance structure, that is designed so that it potentially produces as much energy as it consumes. The building’s form guides wind to a pair of openings at its mechanical floors. The winds push turbines that generate energy for the building’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. The openings also provide structural relief, by allowing wind to pass through the building instead of pressing against it.

Conservation, lighting efficiency, geothermal, and energy reuse techniques are required to enable the building to generate enough renewable power to meet its energy demands. This is done by four different methodologies:

1) Reduction of energy consumption - By orienting the building towards the east the tower takes advantage of midday sun while the effects of late-day sun on the larger, southern exposure are minimized. The south facade’s low-E-glass, double-layer curtain-wall system reduces heat gain, which leads to less demand on the HVAC systems.

2) Reclamation of energy in the building - the tower reclaims energy by routing each floor’s exhaust air into the south side’s double-layer curtain-wall cavity. This thermal barrier of hot dry air can then be reused on the mechanical floor for passive dehumidification. The chilled slab concrete vaulted ceilings in the typical offices enhance daylighting, as well as cool the air drifting up from the underfloor ventilation system, reducing energy used for cooling by 40 percent compared to a conventional HVAC system

3) Adsorption of energy external to the building - The main absorption strategy takes advantage of a geothermal heat sink, so 100 degrees Fahrenheit water in the mechanical system’s return loop can be cooled to 75 degrees Fahrenheit prior to feeding the cooling towers, reducing the size of the mechanical plant by about 30 percent.

The first three strategies reduce the building’s energy use by nearly 65 percent over a baseline of Chinese building codes. To reach the final goal of net zero energy, the design team incorporated three power-generating technologies: wind, integrated photovoltaics, and microturbines.

4) Generation of renewable power - The wind turbines take advantage of the prevailing winds from the south, which generate a negative pressure at the north side, of the building. The tower’s curvilinear structure helps to force air through four turbine inlets in the facade, which SOM’s wind studies have predicted will speed up the wind’s velocity two-and-a-half times. SOM estimates the turbines will produce nearly 15 times more electricity than a typical stand-alone wind generator.

The Energy Blog also has an update on the Tesla roadster.

Following the introduction of its first electric car, startup Tesla Motors on Jan. 8 dropped hints about a next-generation sports sedan for the 2009 time frame. The car will boast the equivalent of 110 miles per gallon and will continue to use off-the-shelf lithium ion batteries. According to Winding Road the sedan is said to take on the BMW 5-Series, the rear-drive vehicle will be sold globally, with a more ambitious volume target of 10,000-20,000 units per year. The as-yet-unnamed second model will likely ride on a chassis made of lightweight steel. The sports sedan will cost between $50,000 and $75,000 and have room for five adults and a full-sized trunk.

Roscoe Bartlett has delivered another peak oil lecture to the US House of Representatives.

Mr. Speaker, tomorrow we vote here in the House on an energy bill. And I thought it might be appropriate to spend a bit of time this evening looking at where we and the world are relative to energy. I have here a chart with some numbers on it that inspired 30 of our prominent Americans, Jim Woolsey, Boyden Gray, McFarland and 27 others, among them retired four star admirals and generals, to write to the President a letter which said, ``Mr. President, we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves. We consume 25 percent of the world's oil, almost two-thirds of which we import. And that presents a totally unacceptable national security risk. We really have to do something about that to free ourselves from the necessity of buying foreign oil.''

The President recognizes that this is a problem. In his recent State of the Union message he said that we are hooked on oil.

There are a couple of other interesting numbers here. We represent actually a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population. We represent about one person in 22 in the world. And with only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we are pumping 8 percent of the world's oil. What that means, of course, is that we are pumping our oil four times faster than the rest of the world. We have been pumping less oil each year now for several years, and with this high pumping rate that decline will accelerate.

How did we get here? To find how we got here, you have really got to go back about 6 decades. I didn't know last year on the 14th day of March, when I gave the first speech here on the floor about peak oil, that I was just 6 days beyond the 50th anniversary of what I think will come to be seen as the most important speech given in the last century. This was a speech given by M. King Hubbert, a Shell Oil company geologist, to a group of oil people in San Antonio, Texas. At that time, if you look back in your history books, you will see that we were the largest producer of oil in the world. We were the largest consumer of oil in the world, and we were the largest exporter of oil in the world.

And M. King Hubbert shocked his audience by telling them that in just about a decade and a half, roughly 1970, the United States would peak in oil production. And no matter what we did after that, our production of oil would decline.

I have here a curve which shows his prediction. His prediction is the small green symbols here, and the actual data points are the larger green symbols. And you see they reasonably followed his predicted curve. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan took office, we were already well down the other side of Hubbert's peak, and we knew very well that M. King Hubbert had been right about the United States.

Now, in 1969, M. King Hubbert predicted that the world would follow the United States in peaking in oil production about now. If he was right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about the world?

It has now been 27 years since we knew, in 1980. We are already 10 years down the other side of what is called Hubbert's peak. And we knew that he was right about the United States and he had predicted that the world would be peaking about now.

If he was right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about the world? And shouldn't we have been doing something about anticipating this world peaking oil production?

Technology Review has an article on creating ethanol from trash.

A new system for converting trash into ethanol and methanol could help reduce the amount of waste piling up in landfills while displacing a large fraction of the fossil fuels used to power vehicles in the United States.

The technology, developed originally by researchers at MIT and at Batelle Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNNL), in Richland, WA, doesn't incinerate refuse, so it doesn't produce the pollutants that have historically plagued efforts to convert waste into energy. Instead, the technology vaporizes organic materials to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide, a mixture called synthesis gas, or syngas, that can be used to synthesize a wide variety of fuels and chemicals. The technology has been further developed and commercialized by a spinoff called Integrated Environmental Technologies (IET), also based in Richland, WA. In addition to processing municipal waste, the technology can be used to create ethanol out of agricultural biomass waste, providing a potentially less expensive way to make ethanol than current corn-based plants.

The new system makes syngas in two stages. In the first, waste is heated in a 1,200 °C chamber into which a small amount of oxygen is added--just enough to partially oxidize carbon and free hydrogen. In this stage, not all of the organic material is converted: some becomes a charcoal-like material. This char is then gasified when researchers pass it through arcs of plasma, using technology developed in the 1990s at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. The remaining inorganic materials, including toxic substances, are oxidized and incorporated into a pool of molten glass, made using PNNL technology. The molten glass hardens into a material that can be used for building roads or discarded as a safe material in landfills.

The next step is a catalyst-based process for converting syngas into equal parts ethanol and methanol. Ethanol is now widely used as a fuel additive, and it can also be used as a substitute for gasoline in some vehicles. Methanol is important for producing biodiesel and is currently made from methane in natural gas.

There is enough municipal and industrial waste produced in the United States for the system to replace as much as a quarter of the gasoline used in this country, says Daniel Cohn, a cofounder of IET and a senior research scientist at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

Steven Hawking says that we must recognise the catastrophic dangers of climate change.

Climate change stands alongside the use of nuclear weapons as one of the greatest threats posed to the future of the world, the Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking has said.

Professor Hawking said that we stand on the precipice of a second nuclear age and a period of exceptional climate change, both of which could destroy the planet as we know it.

He was speaking at the Royal Society in London yesterday at a conference organised by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which has decided to move the minute hand of its "Doomsday Clock" forward to five minutes to midnight to reflect the increased dangers faced by the world.

Scientists devised the clock in 1947 as a way of expressing to the public the risk of nuclear conflagration following the use of the atomic weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War.

"As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate change, scientists have a special responsibility, once again, to inform the public and to advise leaders about the perils that humanity faces," Professor Hawking said. "As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth.

"As citizens of the world, we have a duty to share that knowledge. We have a duty, as well, to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change.

"We are here today to outline the results of the Bulletin's recent deliberations and to warn the public about the deteriorating state of world and planetary affairs by moving the hand of the clock," Professor Hawking said.

"Lord Rees of Ludlow, president of the Royal Society, said humankind's collective impacts on the biosphere, climate and oceans were unprecedented. These environmentally-driven threats ­ 'threats without enemies' ­ should loom as large in the political perspective as did the East-West political divide during the Cold War era.

Technology in the 21st century could offer immense opportunities to everyone but it would also present new threats that were more diverse and more intractable than those posed by nuclear weapons, Lord Rees said.

"To confront these threats successfully ­ and to avoid foreclosing humanity's long-term potential ­ scientists need to channel their efforts wisely and engage with the political process nationally and internationally.

WorldChanging has a post on "Massive Change and the City" which collects some opinions on the question "What tool, model or idea do you see as being the key to bright green cities?".

In conjunction with the Massive Change exhibit that recently ended in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the City of Chicago Department of the Environment organized a one-day symposium that brought together experts in urbanization, energy, evolution, information, wealth and politics. The symposium explored the impact of urban life around the world, and laid out visions for a sustainable urban future. Sustainable cities will be built from a mix of the disciplines these changemakers are armed with. We asked each of them the same question, and they gave us a really diverse, yet complementary set of answers.

What tool, model or idea do you see as being the key to bright green cities?

Bruce Mau is the creative director of Bruce Mau Design, Inc. and a founder of the Institute without Boundaries.

It needs to be education. Education is the way to solve these kinds of problems because of the resistance of an installed adult population. If we design ways for kids to first of all engage with life itself, as E.O. Wilson suggests, to actually engage with living things and living systems and not be completely separate, and secondly to build ways for that to be a part of education in society, they start being green from the base instead of as an extra goal. That is a very different idea.

Jimmy Wales is the founder and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation that operates Wikipedia and other projects.

The thing that I see being critically important is understanding how the radical changes that we are seeing to our telecommunications infrastructure—the ability of billions of people to communicate—can and should impact our understanding of intellectual property away from a model of very long term, very draconian copyright protections to a model that is really more about sharing information, not locking it up. Understanding the deep impact that the information commons can and will have, as long as we don't get in the way of it. We see this in a lot of different areas from copyright terms that keep getting longer and longer to protect Disney, and the abuse of the patent system in areas like software, where it is easily demonstrable even to the big players in this business that software patents are not a tool to encourage innovation. They are a tool that heavily stifles innovation. We see Microsoft's great innovations, and I give them credit for this, were not built on the patent model at all. Now that they are the dominant player and trying to defend themselves and they are not very innovative anymore, they are patenting out to stop everybody else from coming into that market. For me, the big issue is that our old understanding of intellectual property law really has to change radically.

John Todd is the founder of John Todd Ecological Design and the president of Ocean Arks International, which focuses on restoring municipal and industrial wastewater.

What is the scale that we organize at? Do we rebuild cities neighborhood by neighborhood, or do we find some watershed component to organize around? Do we use energy or transportation as the organizing principle, or is there some way that we can draft all of them together at the same point? The city has a lot of tools at its disposal to get at massive change, and this particular city [Chicago] has some very brilliant people that are beginning to set the agenda, including the mayor and his assistant, Cathy Hudzik, and the commissioner of the environment, Sadhu Johnston. These are people with guts and a mayor who will back them up, and that is pretty unusual. So it's possible that the power of the person can be brought to bear and somehow not conflict with the messiness of local politics. The question really is whether the sleepwalking is so powerful that people don't realize that we are at the end of an empire, and whatever evolves could be very different. It could be very beautiful, very wonderful. It is within our power to do that. There is a group of billionaires who are willing to put a lot of money behind the first one or two universities who step up to the plate and say, “We’re interested in becoming carbon neutral quickly and interested in engaging our cities in a dialogue that results in significant change and we are willing in engage our whole state.” Furthermore, and this is the kicker, “We're willing to reorganize how we educate people in the future towards this whole systems, high level of ecological literacy permeating it.” What I am most worried about is that the little things that we do collectively may be presented to us as much bigger than it really is. What I hope is that we have enough momentum so that if an economic collapse happens we will be able to create new forms of organization.

Hazel Henderson is an evolutionary economist, futurist, syndicated columnist and consultant on sustainable development.

Fix the malfunctioning economic source code that is lurking in the hard drives of all our institutions, and in a lot of people's heads. That has been a thirty-year crusade for me getting people to understand that economics is not a science. It is politics in disguise. What is encouraging is that the politics of money is now becoming visible all over the world, thanks to the Internet. I have been following barter groups, global exchange trading systems, and local currencies, and use them as a leading indicator of how dysfunctional central banks work. What is happening now is that people can see more and more clearly that we need to redesign money. We cannot leave economists in charge of money anymore because most of them work for financial organizations. The problem is to shift from economics to multidisciplinary systems models, and my first experience with that was being an advisor in the 70's to the Office of Technology Assessment, where my crusade was getting the economists out of the picture because we needed to have models and scorecards of different disciplines and different metrics rather than all of the economic ones, which are based on money. The extraordinary thing to me is that money is illusory. Money is not wealth, it is simply a tracking system. Now we can have pure information based exchanges, and people all over are getting this now. Whether it is Craigslist or ebay or prosperity.com, people are forming clubs and lending money to each other without needing banks. I see this as the greatest underlying paradigm shift of all. The last piece of the puzzle is to get people to understand that this global financial system is still making it hard for cities to operate.

Dayna Baumeister is a biologist in the field of biomimicry, an educator and design consultant. She is the co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild.

Of course you know my answer, biomimicry! Taking us out of nature and consolidating in urban centers furthers the artificial divide between humans and nature, as if they are two separate things. It does not occur to us that we've been on this planet for a mere few seconds if you look at the age of the earth, yet we think that these big brains are all that it takes to figure out how to live. Nature has been around for 3.85 billion years, and that is exactly what we need to do, to ask nature how it does it. We need to ask the whale how to do it. How do you transport such a large biomass thousands of miles on just fractions of energy? We need to ask the gecko how to climb walls without glue. How does an ecosystem filter water? Can we mimic them? With six or seven billion of us, the only way we can live on this planet is to have a substantial proportion in the cities, but cities cannot function like the way they do today. We need to have cities themselves mimic ecosystems. Flow is everything. Ecosystems work because flow is fostered by the form of the system. The forms of our cities today do not foster flow. That is where redesign comes in. I think emergent systems like slums—if you aren't imposing hierarchical human hubris on top of that system—will evolve to become working, functional systems, but we have to create the conditions to allow natural evolution to occur as opposed to creating artificial constructs that hinder flow and the form and pattern that we need.

Gunter Pauli is a sustainability educator and entrepreneur who founded and directs Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI).

The only model is nature. There is no other model. The only framework that we can use is to understand how physics, chemistry and biology are affected by flows. The model that we need to understand is determined by non-linear mathematics. Anyone who doesn't study non-linear mathematics is bound to become an unsustainable individual in whatever he tries to do. We have to go beyond the excitement of having a biodegradable plastic. When you are eating mushrooms, because you don’t want to eat meat because you are worried about the animal, you might be responsible for the destruction of the oak forest in China. I think the main model that we can learn from nature is that everything is so interconnected, so intertwined, there are so many feedback loops, there are so many variables. Nature never repeats itself. Nature always finds something new with a little adaptation here or there and moves on. We humans are always looking for a model that we can keep applying. We love to be copycats. Copycats are good for brain-dead people, but we are blessed with a brain that can find so many new interesting angles, and that is what we need. Our model is discomfort. Our model is to move people outside their comfort zones, not to go through crisis but to go through discomfort, and by going through discomfort to find new connections. The second model is to look for excitement, look for things that fascinate you. Respond to that innate response you get from yourself when you see something. People see a piece of art and it’s nothing. People see another piece of art and they get excited. Well, don't try to understand rationally why you get excited. Follow the flow, because these flows are energies, and that is what natural systems do as well.

The Age reports that a NSW south coast community group is promising to halve its shire's energy consumption by 2020.

Bega Valley's Clean Energy for Eternity group has launched the 50-50 by 2020 campaign, which also aims to ensure only 50 per cent of the energy used in the shire is from non-renewable sources.

The area's first steps toward tackling climate change were made in Tathra, where the first surf club to be entirely powered from renewable sources was unveiled.

"We're looking at tackling this at every level," Clean Energy for Eternity chairman Matthew Nott said. "Climate change is such a critical issue that it demands individual action like turning light switches off, driving slower and buying fluorescent light bulbs. But we're also looking at community based solutions like setting up the surf club with renewable energy and then turning that into a national campaign to get all 305 surf clubs in the country set up with renewable energy." ...

Bega Valley Mayor Tony Allen, whose council will also part-fund two similar projects in Pambula and Bermagui, says the cost is heavily offset by the long term benefits. "Sure, initially the production of green energy may be a little bit expensive," Mr Allen said. "But if you're looking at the greater good, if you're looking down the track at a sustainable society and a sustainable humanity, it may be a very small price to pay."

The Independent reports that one third of fish species in the yellow river have died out.

Human encroachment, pollution, overfishing and dam-building have killed one third of fish species in the Yellow River, China's second-longest waterway. Its increasingly desperate plight is also threatening economic growth.

The mighty Yellow River once made its away along 3,395 miles through nine provinces, supplying water to more than 150 million people and watering 15 per cent of China's scarce agricultural land.

Where once the river teemed with many different types of fish, it now is a graveyard. "The Yellow River used to be host to more than 150 species of fish, but a third of them are now extinct, including precious ones," an official from the Agriculture Ministry told the People's Daily newspaper.

The basin was the cradle of Chinese civilisation more than 5,000 years ago, but the river's fate is closely linked to China's future because without water, economic development in the north of the country cannot continue at its current breakneck pace.

The river runs from the Qinghai-Tibet plateau in the west across the parched northern provinces of China, through the flood plains of Shaanxi, where it passes through the coal district picking up hefty quantities of pollutants, and into Henan and Shandong provinces.

The Yellow River was known as "China's sorrow" because it would regularly burst its banks and flood surrounding farmland. It is sometimes called the world's muddiest river because of the amount of silt it carries.

These days environmental degradation means the river often runs dry before it reaches the sea at the Gulf of Bohai. Its flow hit historic lows for 10 months last year. Fishing catches have fallen by 40 per cent.

"It can be mainly blamed on hydropower projects that block fish migration routes, declining water flow caused by scarce rainfall, overfishing and severe pollution," the ministry official told the newspaper.

What fish there are in the river are often inedible. In November, parts of eastern China banned the sale of turbot after carcinogenic residues were discovered inside some of the species.

Last month engineers diverted water from the Yellow River into Baiyangdian Lake - the "pearl of north China" and the largest freshwater lake in the northern region - as part of efforts to restore the river's ecological functions.

Recent years have seen a frenzy of dam-building in China as the country seeks to shift away from dirty, expensive coal-fired power plants towards hydroelectricity. The Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze, which opened last year, is the world's biggest. Hundreds of smaller projects are being built on other rivers, including the Yellow River. Dams also help to check flooding during the rainy seasons.

Hopefully the penny soon drops that neither coal fired power nor massive hydro-electric projects are the solution for China's energy needs.

The Australian has a report on the Chinese getting tough on green design - so they are making some progress.

THE Chinese Government is tightening its construction rules to produce a new generation of green buildings - and is warning developers who fail to comply "will be severely punished".

Qiu Baoxing, Vice-Minister at the Ministry of Construction, said yesterday that China's economic surge into urbanisation would double the number of new buildings in 15 years. "So we are now at a critical historic point to save resources and create an environmentally friendly society," he said.

This would occur through the use of renewable power, including solar panels, and through intelligently designed, well-insulated buildings likely to use more steel and less cement. ...

Renovating existing buildings to comply would cost about $250 billion over the next 15 years - if the rules were strictly imposed. "This is a tremendous market," he said. Such improvements would save the annual equivalent of half of Britain's total energy consumption.

The priority would be on introducing new, low-energy buildings. The standards would cost developers up to an extra $25/sqm - "a low proportion of average construction costs". ...

A new Beijing office building of the Ministry of Science and Technology intended to demonstrate new green technologies consumed just 7 per cent of the energy of "usual buildings", said Mr Qiu. ...

In Beijing each winter, volumes of energy are consumed equivalent to 22.4kg of coal per square metre of each building, he said. This was the same figure as Germany's use 20 years ago. Since then, Germany's consumption has been cut to 9kg per sqm, about 40 per cent.

The Chinese also seem to be getting more assertive militarily, successfully demonstrating an anti-satellite weapon.

China last week successfully used a missile to destroy an orbiting satellite, U.S. government officials told CNN on Thursday, in a test that could undermine relations with the West and pose a threat to satellites important to the U.S. military.

According to a spokesman for the National Security Council, the ground-based, medium-range ballistic missile knocked an old Chinese weather satellite from its orbit about 537 miles above Earth. The missile carried a "kill vehicle" and destroyed the satellite by ramming it. ...

The official said that U.S. "space tracking sensors" confirmed that the satellite is no longer in orbit and that the collision produced "hundreds of pieces of debris," that also are being tracked. The United States logged a formal diplomatic protest. ...

The United States has been able to bring down satellites with missiles since the mid-1980s, according to a history of ASAT programs posted on the Union of Concerned Scientists Web site. In its own test, the U.S. military knocked a satellite out of orbit in 1985.

Under a space policy authorized by President Bush in August, the United States asserts a right to "freedom of action in space" and says it will "deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so."

The policy includes the right to "deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests."

Low Earth-orbit satellites have become indispensable for U.S. military communications, GPS navigation for smart bombs and troops, and for real-time surveillance. The Chinese test highlights the satellites' vulnerability.

GristMill has a post on biofuels in Uganda.

Imagine a place where women must average seven children in their lifetime while risking infection from a fatal sexually transmitted disease (passed to the human population by eating other primates) that has left almost seven percent of those children orphaned.

This place experiences extreme climate shifts, cyclically throwing vast numbers of people into chronic starvation.

This place has been ravaged by constant civil war, wherein rival religious factions like the Lord's Resistance Army enslave and rape the populace while others cajole them to stop using contraception.

This place is home to some of the last of the 380 wild mountain Gorillas, two of which were just eaten.

This place has a ruler who is about to turn over to developers nine more tropical forests to grow biofuel stock (sugarcane and palm oil) instead of food.

Welcome to Children of Men in real time.

GristMill also has a post on a new global warming movie called "Everything's Cool".

Greetings from Park City, Utah, where it's cold, but not as cold as it used to be, and where Mormons and film nuts coexist peacefully each year in the name of independent filmmaking. I'm here this week covering the premiere of Everything's Cool, the new film on global warming. I'm double-timing, reporting for Grist and helping with audio for Toxic Comedy Pictures (the film company behind Everything's Cool), so I'll be dispatching updates from the festival as frequently as I can plug into wi-fi.

Everything's Cool, directed and produced by Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand (of note for their previous film, Blue Vinyl), is an insightful, funny, and inspiring look at some of the folks on the ground in the battle against climate change. From a biodiesel-enthusiast ski resort snow-maker to Rick Piltz, a government employee who blew the whistle on stifled science, the film puts several faces on the mother of all problems humans are confronting today. And Grist even makes an unexpected appearance in the film!

Last night, an exclusive prescreening for funders of the Sundance Preserve, people who know Robert Redford, and hapless interns like me opened the opening of the festival, since it technically starts today. The filmmakers had put the finishing touches on it just the night before, concluding in time to rush out to Utah. Though the festival doesn't usually host this sort of pre-screening screening, Sundance Institute directors and Redford himself had seen clips of the film earlier and wanted to give it some special hype.

Yet more from Grist - Dave Roberts has a post on Dirty hippie bashing, quoting a number of articles that try and marginalise global warming activists as alarmist dirty hippies. While there are some people who are alarmist and/or overly political about global warming, I think Dave's analysis of the political framing going on here is correct - I read Cathy Young's article in Reason earlier today and almost quoted it, but couldn't come up with a section that I thought was honest criticism - however it does hold together quite well if you just skim it, which is the best sort of propaganda...

In the Boston Globe, Cathy Young -- a contributing editor at Reason magazine, funded by the libertarian Reason Foundation -- makes good use of Pielke Jr., Mooney, and Kleiman in a state-of-the-art piece of agit-prop. She says global warming skeptics are always getting yelled at, so why is no one yelling at the dirty hippies, for whom "environmentalism has become a matter of not just ideology but quasi-religious zealotry"?

She quotes Mooney saying that sometimes "environmental groups and their ilk oversell the science." She quotes Kleiman saying that the dirty hippies' "eagerness to believe the worst is just as evident as the right wing's denialism." And to cap it off, she cites Pielke Jr.'s "'nonskeptical heretics' -- those who believe that human-caused global warming is a real problem, but one that can be met in part with technological management and adaptation." And to boot: "Mooney has come to embrace such a viewpoint as well."

This is a classic of the genre, lifted straight from template. Note carefully what's happening: The denialists have been discredited. Now, the right wing is eager to cast the debate as having two equivalent sides, "alarmists and deniers." That way they use the marginalization of denialists to marginalize advocates. It's really a clever piece of judo, one the right's become incredibly adept at using.

It relies, of course, on everyone accepting that there are "two sides." That way, having given up the ghost of denialism, the right can now turn to advocating weak, industry-friendly policies and calling them the "sensible middle."

It's bullshit. Once more for the cheap seats: there is no equivalence between denialists and global-warming activists. None. Their motives are not the same. They do not have equal credibility or deserve equal respect. They are not "two sides" of anything. There are people within the reality-based community who disagree with one another over the proper way to communicate about climate change and the proper way to respond to it. But those internal disagreements are microscopic compared to the disagreement between denialists and reality.

To their credit, both Mooney and Kleiman realize what's been done to them. In a follow-up post, Mooney says that Young "appears to have put me in a box that I don't wish to occupy." He says that ...

... after reading it, one might get the impression that I think (as Young apparently does) that the "industry" and "environmentalist" sides are equally culpable when it comes to misusing science in the global warming debate. In fact, however, I don't think that at all.

Misinterpreted? Oops!

In a follow-up post of his own, Kleiman says "Young and I don't agree nearly as much as the column suggests." He say she's "carrying even-handedness a little bit too far," and insists:

I was careful to say, in anticipation of such a misinterpretation, that the two sides aren't "equally wrong," and to point out that on this issue the stubbornness of the right in denying the problem has robbed it of credibility when it comes to discussing solutions.

Misinterpreted? Oops!

Mooney and Kleiman both adopt a tone of bemusement, as though Young has innocently misconstrued them. Are they really so naive? Young is following a right-wing script that dates back decades.

This is how the far right colonizes the debate: they caricature a far-left strawman position, attribute it to "some" on the other side, and then cast their own position as the "center" between the far-right position and the mythical or marginalized far-left position. They've done this dozens of times, on a whole panoply of issues.

To help in the process, they enlist the aid of people on the left who bash other people on the left. Sure, Pielke Jr., Mooney, and Kleiman all had their own idiosyncratic reasons for bashing dirty hippies. But do you think it's an accident that Young stripped all those idiosyncratic reasons away and left only the hippie-bashing? Far from it. That was her whole intent.

That's where conservative ideologues get their "ammunition" -- from progressives who, in a vain attempt to bolster their own credentials as moderates, use activists as strawmen against which to define themselves. It's the self-appointed centrists who are giving the right the ammunition it most needs. ...

Gar Lipow is also talking about "dirty hippies" at Grist, in a piece I'm not so convinced by (heretic quasi-libertarian that I am) - "On global warming, dirty hippies offer the most practical politics" (for starters, calling George Monbiot a leftist with a "strong preference for market solutions" doesn't match my understanding of Monbiot's politics - much as I like him, I wouldn't call him a free market advocate in most circumstances). While I agree that a broad coalition is required to make meaningful progress on climate change, I don't think large amounts of regulation beyond carbon taxes are required (it is my belief that a strong enough price signal really does provide enough incentive to adopt the necessary efficiency measures and conversion to clean energy sources, without having to go out and mandate a whole lot of prescriptive measures in particular sectors of the economy). I'm also dubious that the coalition should be an entirely "progressive" or left wing one - the countries which are making real steps towards reducing carbon emissions are the ones with a consensus across left and right, not the ones where global warming is a partisan political issue. But maybe I'm just in denial about how deeply entrenched stupidity and corruption are within most of the conservative and (big L) Libertarian movements in the US.

I don't think I have to persuade anyone reading this blog to forget about informed, competent insiders trying persuasion from the inside. Romm tried that with both government and business since the early '90s. Al Gore spent decades as a Senator and Vice President of the U.S. playing insider baseball on the issue. Amory Lovins has been pursuing the "appeal to rational business self-interest" strategy since 1976!

The only thing will make change is a bunch of ordinary people getting together and exercising their democratic rights as citizens. And it is not just us dirty hippies saying that. Non-hippie former VP Al Gore says:

Yes, the new majority in Congress will be much more receptive on the importance of global warming. That's the good news. But I know from personal experience that the only thing that will make Washington really take notice and do more than give lip service to the problem of global warming is the prospect of millions of committed citizens taking action.

Non-hippie Joseph Romm writes at the end of of Hell and High Water:

... the public -- you -- could simply demand change. This is vastly preferable to waiting for multiple disasters. Global warming is the gravest threat to our long-term security. More and more people are coming to this realization every day. When people ask me what they should do, I reply, "Get informed, get outraged, and then get political."

Even Paul Hawken, co-author of Natural Capitalism and maybe the ultimate non-hippie environmentalist, says:

The single biggest influence on corporate behavior is activism, and they will be the last to let you know that. Anything activists do to make people in organizations feel that they're employed by a pariah is effective.

I'm pounding home a point that I think is pretty much settled: If we want to fight global warming, we need a serious grassroots movement.

At least part of that change has to be putting a price on carbon. That includes some sort of carbon tax, to end the subsidy of being able to emit carbon without bearing the full cost of doing so. It also includes ending other subsidies for carbon, like tax breaks for oil producers.

The mainstream is also starting to catch up with something dirty hippies have known for a long time: putting a price on carbon alone won't do it. For various reasons, markets do not respond quickly or fully to price signals when it comes to energy. (This is known as inelasticity. That demand for some goods is partially inelastic in response to price signals may not be taught in Economics 101, but is well known once you get past the introductory courses.)

George Monbiot -- a leftist with a strong preference for market solutions -- ends up admitting in his new book Heat that decarbonization will need massive rule-based regulation and public initiatives in addition to some way of charging for the social costs of carbon.

Joseph Romm -- a centrist Democrat who has worked with some of the world's largest corporations -- concludes that building, auto efficiency, and industrial efficiency standards will have to be part of any solution. Even the Stern Report(large PDF) reluctantly admits that:

Policies to price greenhouse gases, and support technology development, are fundamental to tackling climate change. However, even if these measures are taken, barriers and market imperfections may still inhibit action, particularly on energy efficiency. These barriers and failures include hidden and transaction costs such as the cost of the time needed to plan new investments; lack of information about available options; capital constraints; misaligned incentives; as well as behavioural and organisational factors affecting economic rationality in decision-making. These market imperfections result in significant obstacles to the uptake of cost-effective mitigation, and weakened drivers for innovation, particularly in markets for energy efficiency measures.

In short, anyone who seriously looks at the economics of tackling climate change comes to the conclusion that regulation (over and above putting a price on carbon) is required. Most end up supporting public initiatives as well.

This is needed even to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at 550 parts per million, let alone the 450 parts per million most scientists agree is necessary.

This has political implications. Adding a price to carbon mainly threatens the carbon lobby: the fossil fuel companies, the auto industry, possibly the utilities as well. But when you add rule-based regulations, you threaten additional constituencies: the construction industry, which does not want to face tougher building codes; the real estate industry, which doesn't want the cost of its products raised; appliance manufacturers, who don't want new appliance standards; manufacturers in general, who won't want to face new requirements for industrial efficiency. Plus you have the whole ideological constituency, which runs from glibertarians to centrist Democrats. "Regulation, ick! Old fashioned command and control! Tax and spend! Socialism! Dirty hippies!"

If you include public policy initiatives -- long distance transmission lines, for example -- you get even more opposition, because funding such initiatives will require cuts in war spending or raising taxes, probably both.

In short, once you move into what even a minimal solution requires, you take on quite an array of opponents -- the vast majority of those with money and power, not merely the carbon lobby.

...

The only way for a movement that fights global warming strongly enough to come into existence fast enough is as part of a larger movement -- one that explicitly supports other goals besides the environmental. I can't see that movement being conservative, libertarian, or centrist, given that conservatives, libertarians, and centrists share anti-government biases that won't let them accept strong rule-based regulations and higher taxes to fund new government initiatives. So I see no alternative but for an anti-warming movement to be part of a larger progressive movement -- to join with liberals and leftists in seeking various goals, stopping global warming among them.

In short, there is no time for consensus building; we need to engage in majority building.

Most of the needed changes are essentially economic -- taxes, regulation, public spending. Does that mean we should network only with other groups who base themselves mainly in economics - unions, health care groups, fair taxation organizations, social security preservation, and so forth?

We might also consider social justice, which includes but is not limited to economics. Women, gays, and racial minorities face economic discrimination, but regardless of class, they are also subject to various forms of direct violence. There is also the practical issue that women, racial minorities, gays, and the disabled tend on average to be further left than the U.S. population as a whole. It is a tendency, not a rule; there are many exceptions. But alienate these groups and you alienate a base you will need to win; building that majority becomes harder, not easier.

This need for allies does not just hold for environmental causes; it applies to any progressive group with demands that would require major social or economic changes. But I think what is required to minimize the global warming disaster is larger than for almost any other issue. We need unity with other groups more badly than your average lefty cause. And it is time to face the fact: it will remain a lefty cause. Yes, sensible conservatives may come to face the reality of global warming, as sensible centrists already have. I doubt they will go on to support tough new regulations over a large part of the economy and tax increases to support new public initiatives -- at least I doubt they will do so and remain conservatives and centrists.

Switching tack, Reason has a post on a Republican congressman who is proposing a bill to make Bush ask Congress before he attacks Iran (not that he pays attention to laws of course, so if it passed I'm sure it will be dispensed with via a signing statement, but at least they are trying to exert some checks and balances - and he called Tony Snow a lapdog).

I just got out of a House of Representatives press conference led by Republican Rep. Walter Jones, featuring Democratic and Republican co-sponsors of his binding resolution to demand congressional approval before any military action in Iran. The money bit:

Absent a national emergency created by attack by Iran, or a demonstrably imminent attack by Iran, upon the United States, its territories, possessions or its armed forces, the president shall consult with Congress, and receive specific authorization pursuant to law from Congress, prior to initiating any use of force on Iran.

Confession: I didn't come out of the presser with the sense this was going to be rushed to the floor. For one, Ron Paul is supporting it, and I'm way too used to Paul supporting good ideas that don't work. He sounded almost as heartsick about Jones at the possibility of war. "What we're doing here is constitutionally redundant, but very necessary," he said. "Let's consider the possibility of a Gulf of Tonkin incident." And he pointed to the free-flowing "rumors" always trickling out from the Middle East about Iran's meddling in an attack on Americans or its readiness for war.

Another reason I'm pessimistic: the men behind the Jones Resolution talk much more diplomatically about Iran than the leaders of either party. Hawaii Democrat Neil Abercrombie thundered against the Bush administration for refusing to dialogue with Iran and Syria, and said the government of Iraq would be perfectly justified in talking with them: "They have issues with their neighbors just as we have issues with Canada over the lumber trade." A great message, but if the Jones Resolution breaks through the lobbyists' spiderweb and moves ahead, they'll probably hone it.

On the way out, after getting buttonholed by a LaRouchie, Abercrombie got asked if he'd heard Tony Snow's dismissals of congressional resolutions on the war. "I haven't talked to the ASPCA today," Abercrombie said. "I don't know what's going on with the lapdogs."

After noting yesterday that I'd never read anything by Robert Anton Wilson I came across this article yesterday on ideology, religion and the perils of "Correct Answer Machines". I liked it (mostly because it coincides with some of my thoughts) so I'll post it here even if its completely off topic (yeah, yeah - what's new you say).

Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective

by Robert Anton Wilson

Our esteemed editor, Bob Banner, has invited me to
contribute an article on whether my politics are "left" or
"right," evidently because some flatlanders insist on
classifying me as Leftist and others, equally Euclidean,
argue that I am obviously some variety of Rightist.

Naturally, this debate intrigues me. The Poet prayed that
some power would the giftie gie us to see ourselves as
others see us; but every published writer has that dubious
privilege. I have been called a "sexist" (by Arlene Meyers)
and a "male feminist . . . a simpering pussy-whipped wimp"
(by L.A. Rollins), "one of the major thinkers of the modern
age" (by Barbara Marx Hubbard) and "stupid" (by Andrea
Chaflin Antonoff), a "genius" (by SOUNDS, London) and
"mentally deranged" (by Charles Platt), a "mystic" and
"charlatan" (by the Bay Area Skeptics) and a "materialist"
(by an anonymous gent in Seattle who also hit me with a
pie); one of my books has even been called "the most
scientific of all science-fiction novels" (by _New
Scientist_ physics editor John Gribbon) and "ranting and
raving" (by Neal Wilgus). I am also frequently called a
"Satanist" in some amusing, illiterate and usually anonymous
crank letters from Protestant Fundamentalists.

I can only conclude that I am indeed like a visitor from
non-Euclidean dimensions whose outlines are perplexing to
the Euclidean inhabitants of various dogmatic Flatlands. Or
else, Lichtenstein was right when he said a book "is a
mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out."
Of course, we are living in curved space (as noted by
Einstein); that should warn us that Euclidean metaphors are
always misleading. Science has also discovered that the
Universe can count above two, which should make us leery of
either/or choices. There are eight--count 'em,
eight--theories or models in quantum mechanics, all of which
use the same equations but have radically different
philosophical meanings; physicists have accepted the
multi-model approach (or "model agnosticism") for over 60
years now. In modern mathematics and logic, in addition to
the two-valued (yes/no) logic of Aristotle and Boole, there
are several three-valued logics (e.g. the yes, no and maybe
Quantum Logic of von Neumann; the yes, no and po of
psychologist Edward de Bono; etc.), at least one four-valued
logic (the true, false, indeterminate and meaningless of
Rapoport), and an infinite-valued logic (Korzybski). I
myself have presented a multi-valued logic in my
neuroscience seminars; the bare bones of this system will be
found in my book, _The New Inquisition_. Two-valued
Euclidean choices--left or right of an imaginary line--do
not seem very "real" to me, in comparison to the versatility
of modem science and mathematics.

Actually, it was once easy to classify me in simple
Euclidean topology. To paraphrase a recent article by the
brilliant Michael Hoy [_Critique_ #19/ 20], I had a Correct
Answer Machine installed in my brain when I was quite young.
It was a right-wing Correct Answer Machine in general and
Roman Catholic in particular. It was installed by nuns who
were very good at creating such machines and implanting them
in helpless children. By the time I got out of grammar
school, in 1945,1 had the Correct Answer for everything, and
it was the Correct Answer that you will nowadays still hear
from, say, William Buckley, Jr.

When I moved on to Brooklyn Technical High School, I
encountered many bright, likeable kids who were not
Catholics and not at all right-wing in any respect. They
naturally angered me at first. (That is the function of
Correct Answer Machines: to make you have an adrenaline
rush, instead of a new thought, when confronted with
different opinions.) But these bright, non-Catholic
kids--Protestants, Jews, agnostics, even
atheists--fascinated me in some ways. The result was that I
started reading all the authors the nuns had warned me
against--especially Darwin, Tom Paine, Ingersoll, Mencken
and Nietzsche.

I found myself floating in a void of incertitude, a
sensation that was unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable. I
retreated back to robotism by electing to install a new
Correct Answer Machine in my brain. This happened to be a
Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine, provided by the
International Socialist Youth Party. I picked this Machine,
I think, because the alternative Correct Answer Machines
then available were less "Papist" (authoritarian) and
therefore less comfortable to my adolescent mind, still bent
out of shape by the good nuns.

(Why was I immune to Stalinism--an equally Papist secular
religion? I think the answer was my youth. The only
Stalinists left in the U.S. by the late '40s were all
middle-aged and "crystalized" as Gurdjieff would say. Those
of us who were younger could clearly see that Stalinism was
not much different from Hitlerism. The Trotskyist
alternative allowed me to feel "radical" and modern, without
becoming an idiot by denying the totalitarianism of the
USSR, and it let me have a martyred redeemer again as I had
in my Catholic childhood.)

After about a year, the Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine
began to seem a nuisance. I started to suspect that the
Trotskyists were some secular clone of the Vatican, whether
they knew it or not, and that the dogma of Papal
infallibility was no whit more absurd than the Trotskyist
submission to the Central Committee. I decided that I had
left one dogmatic Church and joined another. I even
suspected that if Trotsky had managed to hold on to power,
he might have been as dictatorial as Stalin.

Actually, what irritated me most about the Trots (and now
seems most amusing) is that I already had some tendency
toward individualism, or crankiness, or Heresy; I sometimes
disputed the Party Line. This always resulted in my being
denounced for "bourgeoisie tendencies." That was irritating
then and amusing now because I was actually the only member
of that Trot cell who did not come from a middle-class
background. I came from a working class family and was the
only genuine "proletarian" in the whole Marxist
_kaffeklatch_.

At the age of 18, then, I returned to the void of
incertitude. It began to seem almost comfortable there, and
I began to rejoice in my agnosticism. It made me feel
superior to the dogmatists of all types, and adolescents
love to feel superior to everybody (especially their
parents--or have you noticed that?). Around the same time as
my Trotskyist period, I began to read the first Revisionist
historians, whom I had been warned about by my high school
social science teachers, in grave and awful tones, as if
these men had killed a cat in the sacristy. My teachers were
too Liberal to tell me I would go to Hell for reading such
books (as the nuns had told me about Darwin, for instance),
but they made it clear that the Revisionists were Evil,
Awful, Unspeakable and probably some form of Pawns of the
Devil.

I recognized the technique of thought control again, so I
read all the Revisionists I could find. They convinced me
that the New Deal Liberals had deliberately lied and
manipulated the U.S. into World War II and were still lying
about what they did after the war was over. (In fact, they
are still lying about it today.)

The Revisionist who impressed me most was Harry Elmer
Barnes, a classic Liberal who was a til of a Marxist (in
methodology)--i.e., in his way of looking for economic
factors behind political actions. I was amused and disgusted
by the attempt of the New Deal gang to smear Professor
Barnes as a right-wing reactionary. Barnes, in fact, was an
advocate of progressive ideas in education, economics,
politics, criminology, sociology and anthropology all his
life but the New Deal Party Line had smeared him so
thoroughly that some people have heard of him only as some
cranky critic of Roosevelt and assume he was a Taft
Republican or even a pro-Nazi. In fact Barnes supported most
of the New Deal's domest policies, and dissented from
Liberal Dogma only in opposing the spread of American
adventurism and militarism all over the world.

Charles Beard, another great historian of classic Liberal
principles, agreed that Roosevelt deliberately lied to us in
World War II and was smeared in the same way as Professor
Barnes. This did not encourage me to have Faith in any Party
Line, even if it called itself the modern, liberal,
enlightened Party Line.

(I have never been convinced by the Holocaust Revisionists,
however, simply because I have met a great many Holocaust
eye-witnesses, or alleged eyewitnesses, in the past 40
years. Most of these people I seemingly met by accident, in
both Europe and America. A conspiracy that has that many
liars planted in that many places--or has always paid such
special attention to me that it placed these liars where I
would meet them--is a conspiracy too omnipotent and
omnipresent, and therefore too metaphysical, for me to take
seriously. A conspiracy so Godlike in its powers could, in
principle, deceive us about anything and everything, and I
wonder why the Holocaust Revisionists still believe that
World War II occurred, or that any of past history ever
happened.)

I reached 20 and became an employee (i.e. a robot) in the
McCarthy Era and the Eisenhower years; my agnosticism became
more total and so did my suspicion that politics is a
carnival or buncombe (as Mencken once said). It seemed
obvious to me that, while Senator Joe was a liar of stellar
magnitude, a lot of the Liberals were lying their heads off,
too, in attempts to hide their previous fondness for
Stalinism. That was something I, as a former Trotskyist,
knew about by experience. In _bon ton_ East Coast
intellectual circles, before McCarthy, Stalinism was much
more "permissible" than Trotskyism; it was almost _chic_. If
I still regard the McCarthy witch-hunt of the 1950s as
abominable, I also remember that some of the victims had
engaged in similar witch-hunts against the Trotskyists in
the early 1940s.

It is probably impossible for a social mammal to be totally
"apolitical." Even if I was allergic to Correct Answer
Machines, my mind kept searching for some general social
ideas that I could take more or less seriously. For a while
I dropped in and out of colleges and in and out of jobs and
searched earnestly for some pragmatic mock-up of "truth"
without a Correct Answer Machine attached. And yet both Left
and Right continued to appear intellectually bank rupt to
me.

****

Coming from a working class family, I could never have much
sympathy for the kind of Conservatism you find in America in
this century. (I do have a certain fondness for the classic
Liberal Conservatives of the 18th Century, especially Edmund
Burke and John Adams.) After I married and had children to
support, the abominations of the Capitalist system and the
wormlike ignominy of the employee role began to seem like
prisons to me; I was a poor candidate for the Conservative
cause. On the other hand, the FDR Liberals, I was convinced,
had lied about World War II; they first smeared and then
blacklisted the historians who told the truth; and they had
jumped on the Cold War bandwagon with ghoulish glees.

I was anti-war by "temperament" (whatever that means--early
imprints or conditioning? Genes? I don't know the exact
cause of such a deep-seated and life-long bias). Marxist
dogma seemed as stupid to me as Catholic dogma and as
murderous as Hitlerism. I now thought of myself as an
agnostic on principle. I was not going to join any more
"churches" or submit to anybody's damned Party Line.

My agnosticism was also intensified by such influences as
further reading of Nietzsche; existentialism; phenomenolgy;
General Semantics; and operational logic. There have
remained major influences on me and I want to say a few
words about each.

Nietzsche's philosophy of the Superman did not turn me on in
youth; coming from the proletarian, I could not see myself
as one of his aristocratic Uebermenschen. On the other hand,
his criticism of language, and of the metaphysical
implications within languages, made a powerful impression on
me; I still re-read one or two of his books every year, and
get new semantic insights of them. He is, as he bragged, a
hard nut to digest all at once.

Existentialism did not convert me back to Marxism (as it did
to Sartre); it merely magnified my Nietzschean distrust of
capitalized nouns and other abstractions, and strengthened
my preferences for sensory-sensual ("existential")--modes of
perceptionconception. The phenomenologists--especially
Husserl and the wild man of the bunch, Charles
Fort--encouraged my tendency to suspect all general theories
(religious, philosophical, even scientific) and to regard
human sense experience as the primary datum.

My polemics against Materialist Fundamentalism in _The New
Inquisition_ and the Aristotelian mystique of "natural law"
(shared by Thomists and some Libertarians) in my _Natural
Law; or, Don't Put a Rubber On Your Willy_ are both based on
this existentialist-phenomenologist choice that I will
"believe" in human experience, with all its muddle and
uncertainty, more than I will ever "believe" in capitalized
Abstractions and "general principles."

General Semantics, as formulated by Korzybski, increased
this anti-metaphysical bias in me. Korzybski also stressed
that the best sensory data (as revealed by instruments that
refine the senses) indicates that we live in a
non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean and non-Newtonian continuum.
I have practised for 30 years the exercises Korzybski
recommends to break down Aristotelian-Euclidean-Newtonian
ideas buried in our daily speech and retrain myself to
perceive in ways compatible with what our instruments
indicate about actuality.

Due to Korzybski's neurolinguistic training devices, it is
now "natural" for me to think beyond either/or logic, to
perceive the unity of observer/observed, to regard "objects"
as human inventions abstracted from a holistic continuum.
Many physicists think I have studied more physics than I
actually have; I merely neurologically _internalized_ the
physics that I do know.

Operational logic (as formulated by the American physicist
Percy Bridgman and recreated by the Danish physicist Neils
Bohr as the Copenhagen Interpretation of science) was the
approach to modern science that appealed to me in the
context of the above working principles. The Bridgman-Bohr
approach rejects as "meaningless" any statements that do not
refer to concrete experiences of human beings. (Bridgman was
influenced by Pragmatism, Bohr by Existentialism.)
Operationalism also regards all proposed "laws" only as maps
or models that are useful for a certain time. Thus,
Operationalism is the one "philosophy of science" that warns
us, like Nietzsche and Husserl, only to use models where
they're useful and never to elevate them into Idols or
dogmas.

Although I dislike labels, if I had to label my attitude I
would accordingly settle for
existentialist-phenomenologist-operationalist, as long as no
one of those three terms is given more prominence than the
other two.

In the late '50s, I began to read widely in economic
"science" (or speculation) again, a subject that had bored
the bejesus out of me since I overthrew the Marxist Machine
in my brain ten years earlier. I became fascinated with a
number of alternatives--or "excluded middles"--that
transcend the hackneyed debate between monopoly Capitalism
and totalitarian Socialism. My favorite among these
alternatives was, and to some extent still is, the
individualist-mutualist anarchism of Proudhon, Jossiah
Warren, S.P. Andrews, Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker.
I do not have a real Faith that this system would work out
as well in practice as it sounds in theory, but as theory it
still seems to me one of the best ideas I ever encountered.

This form of anarchism is called "individualist" because it
regards the absolute liberty of the individual as a supreme
goal to be attained; it is called "mutualist" because it
believes such liberty can only be attained by a system of
mutual consent, based on contracts that are to the advantage
of all. In this Utopia, free competition and free
cooperation are both encouraged; it is assumed persons and
groups will decide to compete or to cooperate based on the
concrete specifics of each case. (This appeals to my
"existentialism" again, you see.)

Land monopolies are discouraged in individualist-mutualist
anarchism by abolishing State laws granting ownership to
those who neither occupy nor use the land; "ownership," it
is predicted, will then only be contractually recognized
where the "owner" actually occupies and used the land, but
not where he charges "rent" to occupy or use it. The
monopoly on currency, granted by the State, is also
abolished, and any commune, group, syndicate, etc., can
issue its own competing currency; it is claimed that this
will drive interest down to approsximately zero. With rent
at zero and interest near zero, it is argued that the
alleged goal of socialism (abolition of exploitation) will
be achieved by free contract, without coercion or
totalitarian Statism. That is, the individualist-mutualist
model argues that the land and money monopolies are the
"bugger factors" that prevent Free Enterprise from producing
the marvelous results expected by Adam Smith. With land and
money monopolies abolished, it is predicted that competition
(where there is no existential motive for cooperation) and
cooperation (where this is recognized as being to the
advantage of all) will prevent other monopolies from
arising.

Since monopolized police forces are notoriously graft-ridden
and underlie the power of the state to bully and coerce,
competing protection systems will be available in an
individualist-mutualist system, You won't have to pay
"taxes" to support a Protection Racket that is actually
oppressing rather than protecting you. You will only pay
dues, where you think it prudent, to protection agencies
that actual perform a service you want and need. In general,
every commune or syndicate will make its own rules of the
game, but the mutualist-individualist tradition holds that,
by experience, most communes will choose the systems that
maximize liberty and minimize coercion.

Being wary of Correct Answer Machines, I also studied and
have given much serious consideration to other "Utopian"
socio-economic theories. I am still fond of the system of
Henry George (in which no rent is allowed, but free
enterprise is otherwise preserved); but I also like the
ideas of Silvio Gesell (who would also abolish rent and all
taxes but one--a demmurage tax on currency, which should
theoretically abolish interest by a different gimmick than
the competing currencies of the mutualists.)

I also see possible merit in the economics of C.H. Douglas,
who invented the National Dividend--lately re-emergent,
somewhat mutated, as Theobold's Guaranteed Annual Wage
and/or Friedman's Negative Income Tax. And I am intrigued by the
proposal of Pope Leo XIII that workers should own the
majority of stock in their companies.

Most interesting of recent Utopias to me is that of
Buckminster Fuller in which money is abolished, and
computers manage the economy, programmed with a prime
directive to _advantage_ all without _disadvantaging_
any--the same goal sought by the mutualist system of basing
society entirely on negotiated contract.

Since I don't have the Correct Answer, I don't know which of
these systems would work best in practice. I would like to
see them all tried in different places, just to see what
would happen. (This multiple Utopia system was also
suggested by Silvio Gesell, who was not convinced he had a
Correct Answer Machine; that's another reason I like
Gesell.) My own bias or hope or prejudice is that
individualist-mutualist anarchism with some help from Bucky
Fuller's computers would work best of all, but I still lack
the Faith to proclaim that as
dogma.

There is one principle (or prejudice) which makes anarchist
and libertarian alternatives attractive to me where State
Socialism is totally repugnant to my genes-or-imprints. I am
committed to the maximization of the freedom of the
individual and the minimization of coercion. I do not claim
this goal is demanded by some ghostly or metaphysical
"Natural Law," but merely that it is the goal that I,
personally, have _chosen_--in the Existentialist sense of
choice. (In more occult language, such a goal is my True
Will.) Everything I write, in one way or another, is
intended to undermine the metaphysical and linguistic
systems which seem to justify some Authorities in limiting
the freedom of the human mind or in initiating coercion
against the non-coercive.

...and then came what Charles Slack calls "the madness of
the sixties." I was an early, and enthusiastic, experimenter
with LSD, peyote, magic mushrooms and any other compound
that mutated consciousness. The result was that I became
even more agnostic but less superior about it. What
psychedelics taught me was that, just as theories and
ideologies (maps and models) are human creations, not divine
revelations, every perceptual grid or existential
reality-tunnel is also a human creation--a work of art,
consciously or unconsciously edited and organized by the
individual brain.

I began serious study of other consciousness-altering
systems, including techniques of yoga, Zen, Sufism and
Cabala. I, alas, became a "mystic" of some sort, although
still within the framework of
existentialism-phenomenology-operationalism. But, then,
Buddhism--the organized mystic movement I find least
objectionable--is also existentialist, phenomenologist and
operationalist....

Nietzsche's concept of the Superhuman has at last become
meaningful for me, although not in the elitist form in which
he left it. I now think evolution is continuing and even
accelerating: the human brain is evolving to a state that
seems Superhuman compared to our previous history of
domesticated primatehood. My favorite science is
neuroscience, and I am endlessly fascinated by every new
tool or technique that breaks down robot circuits in our
brains (Correct Answer Machines) and spurs creativity,
higher intelligence, expanded consciousness, and, above all,
broader compassion.

I see no reason to believe that only an elite is capable of
this evolutionary leap forward, especially as the new tools
and training techniques are becoming more simple. In
neuroscience as in all technology, we seem to follow Bucky
Fuller's rule that each breakthrough allows us to do more
work with less effort and to create more wealth out of less
raw matter.

Once I broke loose from the employee role and became
self-supporting as a writer, the "horrors of capitalism"
seemed less ghoulish to me, since I no longer had to face
them every day. I became philosophical, like all persons
free of acute suffering. I prefer to live in Europe rather
than pay taxes to build more of Mr. Reagan's goddam nuclear
missiles, but I enjoy visiting the U.S. regularly for
intellectual stimulation....

I agree passionately with Maurice Nicoll (a physician who
mastered both Jungian and Gurdjieffian systems) who wrote
that the major purpose of "work on consciousness" is to
"decrease the amount of violence in the world." The main
difference between our world and Swift's is that while we
have stopped killing each other over religious differences
(outside the Near East and Northern Ireland), we have
developed an insane passion for killing each other over
ideological differences. I regard Organized Ideology with
the same horror that Voltaire had for Organized Religion.

Concretely, I am indeed a Male Feminist, as L.A. Rollins
claimed (although seeing myself often on TV, I deny that I
simper; I don't even swish); like all libertarians, I oppose
victimless crime laws, all drug control laws, and all forms
of censorship (whether by outright reactionaries or
Revolutionary Committees or Radical Feminists).

I passionately hate violence, but am not a Dogmatic
Pacifist, since I don't have Joan Baez's Correct Answer
Machine in my head. I know I would kill an armed aggressor,
in a concrete crisis situation where that was the only
defense of the specific lives of specific individuals I
love, although I would never kill a person or employ even
minor violence, or physical coercion, on behalf of
capitalized Abstractions or Governments (who are all damned
liars.) All these are matters of Existential Choice on my
part, and not dogmas revealed to me by some god or some
philosopher-priest of Natural Law.

I prefer the various Utopian systems I have mentioned to the
Conservative position that humanity is incorrigible and I
also think that if none of these Utopian scenarios are
workable, some system will eventually arrive better than any
we have ever known. I share the Jeffersonian ("Liberal"?)
vision that the human mind can exceed all previous limits in
a society where freedom of thought is the norm rather than a
rare exception.

Does all of this make me a Leftist or a Rightist? I leave
that for the Euclideans to decide. If I had to summarize my
social credo in the briefist possible space, I would quote
Alexander Pope's _Essay On Man_:

For forms of Government let fools contest;
Whate'er is best administered is best:
For modes of Faith let graceless zealots fight;
He can't be wrong whose life is in the right.

I also liked this article in Reason from a few years ago, which noted that like it or not, we're living in Robert Anton Wilson's world.

Robert Anton Wilson is the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics, and commentary. (His late co-author has left less of a mark: Many of Wilson's books have cult followings, while the only Shea effort to make a big splash was the trilogy he wrote with Wilson.) Allusions to Wilson's work appear in places both classy and trashy: There's a Wilsonian stamp on films as diverse as Magnolia, The Mothman Prophecies, and Sex and Lucia, and it's because of Wilson and Shea that the Illuminati, a secret society that once lurked only in right-wing conspiracy tracts, became the villains of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Now Wilson's the star of a lively documentary, Maybe Logic, that's being screened at film festivals and distributed on DVD.

Wilson is a primary source for the ironic style of conspiracism, a sensibility that treats alleged cabals not as intrigues to be exposed or lies to be debunked but as a bizarre mutant mythos to be mined for laughs, metaphors, and social insights. If you were an amused aficionado of conspiracy folklore in 1963, you were a lone hobbyist or specialist. By 1983, you could turn to a number of fanzines, comics, and weirdo institutions such as the Church of the SubGenius, a satiric cult founded by some Illuminatus! fans. By 1993, you were a target market for several half-joking mass-market conspiracy tomes; your sensibility was reflected regularly in magazines such as Mondo 2000 and The Nose; and two brand new pop juggernauts were about to enter your heart: The X-Files and the World Wide Web.

And by 2003, this was all standard background noise. These days, choosing your politics is a matter of choosing who you're more afraid of, the Washington cabal that's openly trying to erase your freedoms or the various foreign cabals that are openly trying to kill you. Like it or not, we're living in Robert Anton Wilson's world. ...

While I'm totally off-topic, here's an article from New Scientist on a cheap, safe cancer cure.

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died (Cancer Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.ccr.2006.10.020).

Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump don’t get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly (see diagram). In order to survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis.

Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become “immortal”, outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die.

“The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play: they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,” says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

The phenomenon might also explain how secondary cancers form. Glycolysis generates lactic acid, which can break down the collagen matrix holding cells together. This means abnormal cells can be released and float to other parts of the body, where they seed new tumours.

DCA can cause pain, numbness and gait disturbances in some patients, but this may be a price worth paying if it turns out to be effective against all cancers. The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap. ...

And while I'm on the subject of medical advances, here's an article by Chris Floyd on The Biochemistry of Hope.

More war in Iraq. A new front in Somalia. Ships, troops and planes lurking on the borders of Iran. Every day seems to deepen the shadow over the dark valley of our times. Driven by a reckless regime in Washington and the increasingly strident reaction it provokes, and by growing financial and social inequities stranding billions of people in poverty and despair, the geopolitical scene appears locked in a cycle of conflict and chaos that nothing can break.

But a quiet announcement at London's Hammersmith Hospital at the turning of the new year heralded a breakthrough that has the potential to be one of the most transformative developments ever seen in global affairs: a positive change on a par with - or even surpassing - the world-altering malignancies of war, greed and strife. But this boon could be strangled in its cradle by the vast corporate interests threatened by its radical new approach to both health care and business.

The approach is called "ethical pharmaceuticals," and it was unveiled on January 2 by Sunil Shaunak, professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College, and Steve Brocchini of the London School of Pharmacy, the Guardian reports. Their team of scientists in India and the UK, financed by the prestigious Wellcome with technical assistance from the UK government, have developed a method of making small but significant changes to the molecular structure of existing drugs, thereby transforming them into new products, circumventing the long-term patents used by the corporate giants of Big Pharma to keep prices - and profits - high. This will give the world's poorest and most vulnerable people access to life-saving medicines - now priced out of reach - for mere pennies.

But the breakthrough is not merely biochemical. Shaunak's team is proposing a new model for the pharmaceutical business. The patent of the transformed drug they have developed is held by non-profit Imperial University. And because their methods are hundreds of millions dollars cheaper than the mammoth development costs of the big pharmaceutical companies - whose spending on marketing and advertising often dwarfs their funding of scientific research - Shaunak and his colleagues can market their vital medicines for infectious diseases at near-giveaway levels, yet still stay in business. How so? By forgoing the profit motive as the ultimate value of their work.

"People in academic medicine have a choice," Shaunak told an Imperial College journal. "They can use their ideas and creativity to make large sums of money for small numbers of people, or they can look outwards to the global community and make affordable treatments for common diseases."

The first drug developed by the team is a new version of interferon, the main treatment for Hepatitis C, a debilitating disease that afflicts 200 million people worldwide. Yet only 30 million can afford the medicine. That leaves the rest to face the chronic liver disease and premature death that the illness inflicts. The cost of Hepatitis C treatment in the UK is approximately $13,000 per patient per year, New Scientist reports. Nor can a cheaper version of the existing interferon be made, because Big Pharma players Hoffman-La Roche and Schering Plough hold patents not only on the drug but also on the standard way of adding the special molecules needed to enhance its performance.

So Shaunak and Brocchini invented a new way attaching the molecules - from the inside, not the outside - that went around the patent restrictions and produced a medicine that "appears to be as effective as the existing product," according to Nature, the leading scientific journal. Their novel methods could also be adapted to extend the effectiveness of "drugs for other conditions such as HIV," at a fraction of current costs, Shaunak told New Scientist. Big Pharma says it costs an average of $800 million to create a new drug; but without the need to produce ever-expanding profits for shareholders or use glitzy ad campaigns to push their pills - or lay out the vast political patronage that Big Pharma dispenses each year to keep its favored politicians sweet - Shaunak says his team can now develop essential medicines for only a few million dollars each.

In fact, while their Hepatitis C medicine undergoes government-funded clinical trials in India, Shaunak and Brocchini have been asked by Médecins Sans Frontières to work on treatments for another ailment: Leishmaniasis, a parasitical disease also known as black fever. It "occurs in the poorer parts of the world: India, around the Mediterranean, South America, Sudan," Shaunak told Spero News. "Again, there is a treatment that cures the disease but in places like Bihar, India, the cost of the drug is 80 percent of a person's annual income. What we are going to do is make a version of the drug which will be stable in hot climates and which will cost about 10 percent of the price of the existing medicine."

The potential benefits and geopolitical implications of this approach are almost limitless. Imagine a world where the most downtrodden can be rescued from the ravages of chronic disease that now beset them, generation after generation. A world where they don't droop and languish, where their energies are not consumed and exhausted in the struggle for survival. A world where their children are born to healthy mothers, with all the proven advantages for future development, both physically and mentally, that such a birth provides. Imagine a world where the preventable deaths and epidemics that break down societal bonds, devastate communities, cripple local economies, destroy families and make any kind of political action almost impossible are a thing of the past. Whole new polities, new movements, new philosophies, new centers of power would be created as the majority of humanity - the untold multitudes who simply "don't matter" now, who live and die on the ragged margins, in the mega-slums and shattered villages, the industrial wastelands and war-scarred regions - are finally liberated from the tyranny of chronic disease. Imagine the kind of politics that could emerge from millions of long-forgotten people suddenly given more strength, more longevity, more time and energy to seek political change and redress of grievances rather than merely fighting to stay alive.

It would be the political, social and cultural equivalent of the discovery of the "New World," which transformed global affairs forever. Only this time, the "natives" would be healed and empowered by the encounter, not decimated and marginalized by disease and dispossession.

We're not speaking here of "miracle cures" for all ailments, but simply of access to the kind of basic health care that is considered normal in the developed world. Of course, millions in these more privileged countries also suffer needless debilitation from the firewall of profit and price that surrounds so many medical advances. And here too, "ethical pharmaceuticals" could also have a large political effect. Once the drugs pass medical trials in India and elsewhere, they can be sold in many nations in the developed world. Britain's National Health Service, for example, would be able to use the Shaunak-Brocchini treatment for Hepatitis C, saving tens of millions of dollars for the public health service every year: money that could then be used for treating other diseases, for preventive care, for improving facilities - a virtuous circle rippling outward through society. ...