The Wisdom Of Crocodiles  

Bruce's latest Viridian Note (487) is a somewhat self-congratulatory one, but accurately points out "We Are Winning" - Davos has been converted courtesy of now obvious global warming and that means business is going green. On the downside it sounds like Viridian Notes won't be coming out for much longer - I wonder what Mr Sterling's attention will turn to next (as usual, for those who aren't familiar with them, Bruce's interjections are often marked with ((())) )...

Attention Conservation Notice: The Viridian struggle has met with success. We are winning.

(((The boiled frog is jumping. It turns out that a boiled frog always jumps. To think otherwise was a mere urban legend. The frog won't jump free from its dire, life-threatening menace at the first effort, but next year will be even hotter and scarier, and the frog will jump harder. From now on, the frog will jump all the time. Further urging to jump will not be required from the likes of us Viridians. The frog has gotten the message. We are winning!)))
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39985/story.htm

(((Here is the first Viridian Note. This is number 487. I doubt we will ever reach 500 of these. That won't be needed: because we are winning.)))
http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/1-25/Note%2000001.txt

(((The cogent quote from the first Viridian speech, eight years ago:)))

"Now let me explain to you why my 21st century design movement is going to be a great technical improvement over all previous art movements. Let me give you a tour of its many unique and innovative features.

"Number One. Perhaps most importantly, this movement has a built-in expiration date. The problem with previous art movements is this unexamined assumption that they have discovered some eternal cultural truth, and that they will therefore go on forever. In point of fact, no matter how much truth they discover, movements never do last very long.

"So, this is where our movement gets it built-in expiration date. The date is 2012, a date in the Kyoto accords, when people are supposed to be engaged in a serious decline in CO2 emissions."

(((We Viridians have beaten that clock. There is no need to wait for distant 2012 to declare victory in our war to make green trendy and to create "irresistible demand for a global atmosphere upgrade." Green will never get any trendier than it is this year. The atmosphere upgrade is on the way. That process won't be pretty, but it's going to happen.)))

(((The 2012 deadline for Kyoto is already a dead letter, because Kyoto was far too weak and too slow. We are going to see a series of monstrous efforts by large enterprises: private, local, state and national, to save whatever can be saved of the previous natural order. The primary motivator of this effort will be fear. The climate is changing much more quickly and more severely than anyone suspected it would. A rapid, ruthless, headlong clean-tech techno- revolution – in fact, a series of them – is the only global option with a ghost of a chance to save our smoldering planetary bacon. That's coming; it is under way.)))

((When the Davos Economic Forum steals your clothes, there's no reason left to wear them any more. We are winning. The Great and the Good agree with us. They're more scared than we ever were.)))
http://www.weforum.org/en/knowledge/Events/2007/
AnnualMeeting/KN_SESS_SUMM_19392?url=/en/knowledge/
Events/2007/AnnualMeeting/KN_SESS_SUMM_19392

http://gaia.world-television.com/wef/worldeconomicforum_annualmeeting2007/default.aspx?sn=19392&lang=en
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/3282
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/005912.html
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1582504,00.html

(((Even traditional green campaigners are getting smarter. Not a whole lot, but some.)))
http://www.greenmyapple.org/buzz

**Breaking News** (((not for us, but for others)))
"Ten Major U.S. Companies Join Environmental Defense and Others to Endorse Mandatory Limits on America's Global Warming Pollution. Watch press conference live this morning on CSPAN at 11:30am Eastern." (((These companies are demanding carbon regulation in order to punish their competitors. They have a jump in going clean, and their competitors, who were stubborn and fatally tardy, will be destroyed. Not in a week, no: but in five years they'll be deader than Enron. They have fatally misjudged the flow of events, they threw a war-for-carbon and lost it, they have no friends left and a million commercial enemies sharpening knives... they are doomed.)))
http://action.environmentaldefense.org/ct/Gp16sGE1hmuq/

"The companies involved in today's announcement are well-known Fortune 500 corporations: Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, DuPont, Florida Power and Light, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, Pacific Gas & Electric, and PNM Resources. They have joined Environmental Defense, the World Resources Institute, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and Natural Resources Defense Council to form an unprecedented alliance – the United States Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP)." (((If you are Exxon, what is your response when you see this? Your PR reaction is contempt. Your private response is anguish. Fear, and a desperate attempt to muddle and temporize. It's not just that Viridians are winning. Denialists are losing. Horribly. We win. They're toast.)))
http://action.environmentaldefense.org/ct/Gd16sGE1hm7C/ http://action.environmentaldefense.org/ct/Gp16sGE1hmuq/

(((Too late, Exxon. Now, at last, you struggle to move: but you made your bed of Procrustes and you will be torn to pieces. First, denial: you tried that for years. Then anger. You'll try that, that will be brief. Then resignation... and at last you'll beg for pity, but, although you're the world's largest and most profitable corporation, you have brought such fantastic suffering onto such vast hosts of other people that there will not be a drop of pity left for you.)))
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39815/story.htm

((("Corporate Green." Get used to this. It's what's for breakfast, lunch and supper. You're going to get Corporate Green whether you like it or not. Green is is sexy as it's ever going to get, right now, 02007.)))

(((When the brown alternative begins disappearing wholesale, when that's simply unavailable and we have to live Corporate Green, then green will not be sexy. No, Green will just be what there is. Brown could not be sustained. So Brown died. Green will work better eventually, but when we first get it, the alpha- rollout of a sustainable world... man, is that ever going to suck. I own some eco-chic shoes. I had to stop wearing them because they were rotting right off of my feet. It'll be like that, okay? Only more so. We're not gonna win pretty; we are gonna win kinda ugly, frankly – but we are winning.)))

http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2487
"This year's Greenbuild, the annual conference of the US Green Building Council (USGBC), was all about two things:

"Green has gone corporate – and that's exactly what everybody wanted. Past gatherings may have been intimate affairs, but this year's event, in Denver, was a full-scale trade show, with 13,000 attendees walking around with tan totes emblazoned with Honda on the side, lots of corporate-sponsored parties, and a sold-out exhibition hall, with 700 exhibitors hawking their green products. It left little doubt that green, at least as it's represented by the USGBC, isn't about the counter-culture anymore." (((Because it is not the "counterculture," it's the culture. We are winning.)))

(((The leader of the British Tory Party is quoting GBN futurist scenarios in the Financial Times. Cameron is framing the climate crisis in terms of immigration, national security and GNP. Margaret Thatcher's party agrees with us. We are winning.)))
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/49bca770-ab4f-11db-b5db-0000779e2340.html

(((Same goes for the Canadian conservative party. Good luck "conserving" that Arctic ice, Mr Prime Minister.)))
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39997/story.htm

(((Climate chaos in Europe. This has been happening year after year after year. It will continue to intensify no matter how it's spun by anybody. It is the new reality. It is methodically destroying the credibility, the options, the business, the basic future of anybody who ever denied it.)))
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39991/story.htm

(((Thank you, "Situational Science Man!" You are doomed. You were a tissue of fraud. You lose.)))
http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2007/db070114.gif

(((Watch yourself drown. You are looking at people here who will be seeking vengeance on the fossil enterprise. There are hundreds of millions of them who are currently occupying some of the most expensive real estate in the world, including the capitals of Britain, USA, and Japan. There is no resisting the political, economic, social, cultural effects of this. Everything will change.)))
http://flood.firetree.net/

(((Geeks green out at the Energy Innovation Conference. We Viridians always wanted 'em to do that. Well, there they go, then. We got what we wanted. We win.)))
http://www.energyinnovation.com/

(((Brazil, the ethanol Saudi Arabia. Hello, Brasilia Consensus.)))
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/40012/story.htm

(((The War For Oil becomes the War On Oil. Except Bush can't wage that war, because he can't win wars. Somebody will win; just not Bush. Bush has tainted and destroyed everything he touched, and since he was the poster-boy for anti-environmentalism, it will thrive in his absence. People do not yet understand the awesome extent of the ruin Bush has brought on himself and his supporters, but that will continue long, long after his absence from power.)))
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20070123/cm_huffpost/039326

The many, many, net-based heirs and successors of the Viridian Movement (1998-2007):

Worldchanging
http://www.worldchanging.com

Treehugger
http://www.treehugger.com/

EcoGizmo
http://www.gizmag.com/ecogizmo/
Hugg: User-Generated Green News. (((What,
huh? Really? Yeah.)))

http://www.hugg.com/
Celsias: "It pays to save the world."
(((What? It does? No kidding?)))
http://www.celsias.com/

Vivavi: contemporary sustainable furniture.
http://www.vivavi.com/

Inhabitat: good design is green design.
http://inhabitat.com/

Sustainable Style: look fabulous, live well, do good
http://www.sustainablestyle.org/

Eco Design Lab: fashion + design for the ethical
consumer
http://www.ecodesignlab.com/

Jetson Green:
http://jetsongreen.typepad.com/

Ecogeek: "EcoGeek monitors and explores the current explosion in technology designed to mitigate our impact on the environment." http://www.ecogeek.org/

Terra Rossa: Where conservatives consider a new energy future. (((Huh? Yes, they do that. Because otherwise they have no future at all. These are three stages in successfully changing culture: "That's ridiculous," "it's true but trivial," "I always said so." Terra Rossa are Christian white-green albedo right-wing greens. Do you understand what this means? The right cannot go away. The right you always have with you. When the right steals your clothes, that means you win. We Viridians have cruised through those three stages in jig time. We are winning.)))
http://www.terrarossa.com/

Evangelical Ecologist. I don't know their slogan, so I'll say "for maximum cognitive dissonance." Look at that awesome blogroll of lunatics you've never heard of. I wouldn't trust these clowns with a burnt-out match, but they're there because they HAVE to be there.
http://www.evaneco.com/

(((Okay: did we do all this ourselves? No, of course not. But it's a lot easier to get something done when you don't bother to take credit for doing it. Do all these people we claim as "successors" even know we exist? Maybe not. Likely not. And that's GOOD. That means we win.)))

(((This isn't the first time I've seen this happen. I remember when there was such a thing as "cyberpunk": visionaries in the early 1980s writing farfetched, daring stories that predicted that someday there would be a world rather like the late 1990s. We didn't create that world, but it was obvious. Now the prefix "cyber" has gone away – not because it failed, but because it is EVERYWHERE. There is nothing left now that isn't "cyber." The "virtual" is going away, too. The word "actual" is older than the word "virtual," so when the one subsumes the other, the virtual vanishes and becomes the actual.)))

(((We Viridians used to be a rather novel effort, virtual activists in a cyber space: today there is no other kind. It's all the same. There is no such thing as a political, aesthetic, cultural, literary, military, governmental or nongovernmental movement without a digital component. Such a thing is no longer possible, such things no longer exist.)))

(((This means that it is becoming necessary for us to vanish. Not because we are losing. If we were losing – like the Arts and Crafts movement lost, like Modernism lost – then we could complain for the next dozen decades. Viridian is winning. We threw a match or two, and less than a decade later the planet is consumed in prairie fires. The smart thing to do is to stop.)))

(((Then what happens? There are two choices. You can attempt to seize control, or you can get out of the way. Oh wait, there's a third choice: getting cold feet and apologizing for having won. I didn't mention that option because that one didn't occur to me.)))

(((We are winning because we were ahead of the curve: we Viridians were an avant-garde who understood, almost ten years ago, that something like this was bound to happen. That does not make us the proper people to actually carry it out. First, we don't have the scale, the resources, or the ability. Second, and let me be very clear to you here: the primrose path to sustainability, even it is construed as sexy, trendy and stylish, will be dark and thorny. Behind Corporate Green is its darker, bloodstained cousin, Khaki Green, and we'll be seeing a lot of that. Sustainability will be a comprehensive revolution in the tenor of daily life. There will be blood on the hands of the people who bring it about. Not because they are bloodthirsty. But because there is so much blood.)))

(((Genuine climate mayhem is underway. It is intensifying fast. People are going to die: of heat, of disease, freezing, starving, drowning and dying of thirst. Not in mere tens of thousands as they did in the Paris heatwave, but in hecatombs. We have a global climate crisis. A real one, not a futurist speculation. People are going to make agonizing sacrifices in increasingly frantic efforts to ameliorate that and redress that crisis. Then, next year, they will discover that the situation is vastly worse than then imagined, and the spillage of blood and treasure and sacred honor that they thought would surely help is a fraction of what was necessary.)))

(((Two thousand people on an email list are not the masters of a global situation. We're going to be sucked into it just like everybody else is. Nevertheless, we are winning. And that's good news.)))

(((The climate crisis is in its Neville Chamberlain phase right now. People still imagine that a concern with the climate is trendy, and that a judicious head-nod here will mean peace in our time. Those people are not merely mistaken, they are delusionary. They are nodding in disdain at the basic laws of physics. The human race has spent two industrious centuries unearthing the planetary dead and setting them aflame in the sky. There is hell to pay for an affront like that, and it's all ahead of us in this century. We are in in 2007 and we are about seven percent of the way into very, very deep and very, very hot water.)))

(((Nevertheless, the frog will jump from that hot water. We are winning.)))

(((I wish, very much, that we were not winning on those awesome and frightening terms, but we are winning. Our ideas are becoming mainstream ideas. Our approaches and assumptions will be mainstream approaches and assumptions. Our ideas are becoming truisms. They are being absorbed at such a deep and irrevocable level that they'll become cliches. The victory condition for successful prophecy is not prophecy. It's cliche'. Viridian is becoming cliched. Our sensibility is becoming mainstream sensibility. And that is good news.)))

(((That means it is time to declare victory. Further rhetorical effort on this line is not required, and the cleverest activist tactic when you get what you want is to take it and vanish into the woodwork. A strutting triumphalism will only annoy people who are doomed to end up thinking like us anyhow. So, the sooner we can vanish and let them get on with the hard, sweaty labor of jumping from a boiling pot, the better off the world will be.)))

(((I am thinking hard about what comes next. Some different enterprise should build on this achievement. It'll take me a while to understand that, but it should be as far ahead of 2007 as Viridian was ahead of events in 1998. Likely a little farther.)))

(((I'm good at thinking ahead: the track record shows that my speculations, even the daffiest and most sarcastic ones, do tend to be crowned with some success. Still, I tend to oversell my own foresight: Viridian shows that events and developments that I imagine are twenty years out, are only about eight or nine. As a futurist, I'm clearly not trying hard enough. Next time, I'll try to take a bigger bite.)))

Time has "a tour of the energy future" at Davos, looking at some innovations from MIT.

At a certain point during this year's World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos — just after the politicians and business potentates explained how to fix global warming, just before they stabilized Iraq and solved the Israel-Palestine conflict — the gusts of self-regard became a little too much to bear. I found myself wondering whether any of this high-minded talk was worth a dime. Fortunately, that's when something came along to remind me of what Davos is good for.

My breakthrough session turned out to be a guided tour of the future, held in the little basement fonduestube of a 137-year-old hotel. MIT had organized a dinner featuring three of its scientists and their alternative energy technologies, and you knew it was a hot ticket when you walked in the door. The grotto held only about 60 people beneath its vaulted stone ceiling, but among them were venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, Google co-founder Larry Page, and the shaggy, newly minted YouTube billionaire Chad Hurley. First Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist with a gift for the marketing of ideas, riffed about the coming clean-energy revolution." Green is the new red, white and blue," he said, "and this is not your parents' energy crisis." Once he'd warmed up the crowd, the MIT scientists took turns presenting their visions of the future. Professor Vladimir Bulovic, an electrical engineer who reveals miraculous stuff with an impish smile, introduced us to photoconductive fiber (why shouldn't your solar-powered suit be able to charge up your PDA?). Professor Greg Stephanopoulos, a no-nonsense chemical engineer, talked about lowering the cost of the enzymes needed to turn biomass — wood chips, switch grass and cornhusks — into ethanol to fuel cars. This is crucial work: cellulosic ethanol, as this stuff is called, is far more enviro-friendly than the corn-based brew, and the price of the enzymes needed to break down biomass has already dropped to 30 cents a gallon from as high as $3 per gallon; when the price falls to ten cents a gallon, Stephanopoulos said, it will be fully cost effective. He figures that will take five to ten more years. If he's right — and VC's like Khosla are betting that he is — we'll have a cheap, sustainable, carbon-neutral energy source that send petrodollars to the Midwest, not the Middle East. And that's not just talk.

Most amazing of all was Professor Angela Belcher, a young genius who is teaching bugs how to become batteries — in other words, she's genetically modifying viruses so that they learn to store energy. She began working with what she calls" biologically inspired manufacturing techniques" in the mid-1990s, when she was a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara. She discovered that abalone builds its extraordinarily strong and beautiful shell by using proteins to form nanoscale tiles of calcium carbonate. She figured that using a similar process, other organisms could be taught to create other kinds of nanostructures — perfect microscopic building blocks that she calls" evolved hybrid materials." At the University of Texas and then at MIT, she got down to work: She exposed viruses to semiconductor materials and watched to see if any adhered. When one did, she inserted it into bacteria so it could replicate, then exposed the subsequent generations to the same semiconductor material, strengthening the binding trait. It's a forced and accelerated evolutionary process, and she showed us high-res slides of the result: perfect nanowires that can carry current, biologically directed organisms that can store electrical energy and should someday make superior laptop batteries, solar cells, and fuel cells for transportation. Amazing, amazing stuff.

MIT themselves also have a post on building small batteries using viruses.

MIT scientists have harnessed the construction talents of tiny viruses to build ultra-small "nanowire" structures for use in very thin lithium-ion batteries. By manipulating a few genes inside these viruses, the team was able to coax the organisms to grow and self-assemble into a functional electronic device.

The goal of the work, led by MIT Professors Angela Belcher, Paula Hammond and Yet-Ming Chiang, is to create batteries that cram as much electrical energy into as small or lightweight a package as possible. The batteries they hope to build could range from the size of a grain of rice up to the size of existing hearing aid batteries.

Batteries consist of two opposite electrodes -- an anode and cathode -- separated by an electrolyte. In the current work, the MIT team used an intricate assembly process to create the anode. Specifically, they manipulated the genes in a laboratory strain of a common virus, making the microbes collect exotic materials -- cobalt oxide and gold. And because these viruses are negatively charged, they can be layered between oppositely charged polymers to form thin, flexible sheets.

The result? A dense, virus-loaded film that serves as an anode.

Business 2.0 has a look at a number of coming green technologies, and is wise enough to realise the importance of smart grids. Also at Business 2.0, "Go Green, Get Rich".

California utility Pacific Gas & Electric is developing the electricity grid of the future, one that will look more like the Internet - distributed, interactive, open-source - than the dumb, one-way network of today that pushes dinosaur molecules from a carbon-spewing power plant to your home. Hal LaFlash, PG&E's director of renewable-energy policy and planning, gave Business 2.0 a preview of the technologies and energy sources that utilities will tap for the power grid of tomorrow.

* Solar stations Large-scale plants using new thermal and photovoltaic technologies will operate in Southern California and the desert Southwest.
* Solar buildings As solar cells are integrated into rooftops, walls, and windows, homes and office towers will become miniature power stations, generating their own electricity and feeding excess power back into the grid.
* Wind power Anywhere the wind blows is a potential site for a turbine, but the Great Plains is the place utilities are eyeing for giant wind farms.
* Wave power PG&E is looking at the Northern California coast for potential sites for wave energy generators. The Northeast coast is another prime source of as-yet-untapped wave power.
* Cow power California has 1.7 million cows and more than 2,000 dairies. A dozen dairies have already installed methane digesters to turn cow manure - a source of one of the most destructive greenhouse gases - into electricity. The digester extracts methane gas from cow poop and uses it to power an electricity-generating turbine. Other dairies have plans to produce a bovine biogas that will be piped to power plants.
* Car power PG&E is developing technology that will allow future "plug-in" hybrid vehicles not only to recharge their batteries but also to feed electricity back into the power grid during peak demand.
* Clean-coal plants Located mainly in the East and Midwest, these plants will gasify coal, stripping it of pollutants. Carbon dioxide will be captured before it can be released into the atmosphere.
* Smart grids Interactive power grids will communicate with smart agents embedded in household appliances, allowing power to be distributed where it is needed most.

The Times has issued the "last warning" on climate change.

Scientists say rising greenhouses gases will make climate change unstoppable in a decade
THE world has just 10 years to reverse surging greenhouse gas emissions or risk runaway climate change that could make many parts of the planet uninhabitable.

The stark warning comes from scientists who are working on the final draft of a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report, due to be published this week, will draw together the work of thousands of scientists from around the world who have been studying changes in the world’s climate and predicting how they might accelerate. They conclude that unless mankind rapidly stabilises greenhouse gas emissions and starts reducing them, it will have little chance of keeping global warming within manageable limits.

The results could include the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef, the forced migration of hundreds of millions of people from equatorial regions, and the loss of vast tracts of land under rising seas as the ice caps melt. In Europe the summers could become unbearably hot, especially in southern countries such as Greece, Spain and Italy, while Britain and northern Europe would face summer droughts and wet, stormy winters.


“The next 10 years are crucial,” said Richard Betts, leader of a research team at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for climate prediction. “In that decade we have to achieve serious reductions in carbon emissions. After that time the task becomes very much harder.”

Among the scientists’ biggest fears is that rising temperatures and levels of greenhouse gases could soon overwhelm the natural systems that normally keep their levels in check. About half the 24 billion tons of carbon dioxide generated by human activities each year are absorbed by forests and oceans — a process without which the world might already be several degrees warmer. But as CO2 levels rise and soils dry, microbes can start breaking down accumulated organic matter, so forests become net producers of greenhouse gases. The sea’s power to absorb CO2 also falls sharply as it warms.

The latest research suggests the threshold for such disastrous changes will come when CO2 levels reach 550 parts per million (ppm), roughly double their natural levels. This is predicted to happen around 2040-50.

The US contribution to the IPCC report has been to insist that consideration be given to lobbing mirrors or sulphur into the atmosphere instead of limiting carbon emissions. I guess we should be greateful they aren't insisting we rely on the power of prayer, or some other faith based approach to global warming mitigation.

THE US wants the world's scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming.

It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be "important insurance" against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a UN report on climate change, the first part of which is due out on Friday).

The US has also attempted to steer the UN report, prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), away from conclusions that would support a new worldwide climate treaty based on binding targets to reduce emissions. It has demanded a draft of the report be changed to emphasise the benefits of voluntary agreements and to include criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol, which the US opposes.

The final report, written by experts from across the world, will underpin international negotiations to devise an emissions treaty to succeed Kyoto, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft of the report last year and invited to comment.

The US response says the idea of interfering with sunlight should be included in the summary for policymakers, the prominent chapter at the front of each panel report. It says: "Modifying solar radiance may be an important strategy if mitigation of emissions fails. Doing the R&D to estimate the consequences of applying such a strategy is important insurance that should be taken out. This is a very important possibility that should be considered."

Scientists have previously estimated that reflecting less than 1 per cent of sunlight back into space could compensate for the warming generated by all greenhouse gases emitted since the industrial revolution. Possible techniques include putting a giant screen into orbit, thousands of tiny, shiny balloons, or microscopic sulfate droplets pumped into the high atmosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption. The IPCC draft said such ideas were "speculative, uncosted and with potential unknown side-effects".

The Sydney Morning Herald has a look at the sad neglect of solar power in Australia, with some pioneers in the field of solar thermal power giving up and moving to the US, in the face of the government's determination to tie the country to a dirty energy future - which likely means our being relegated to economic also-rans as the rest of the world turns to clean energy. I guess thats the price you pay when your "leader" just wants the 1950's to return.

On Thursday David Mills will board an airliner and fly to the United States to help build something that will exploit the clean and limitless energy source - solar power - that can replace our addiction to energy heroin, which is what oil and coal have become.

What is disturbing about this Australian success story is that Mills and his company, Solar Heat and Power Pty Ltd, are moving to America, where one US investor has just put $42 million into the company. "We are relocating the headquarters of our company in the USA," Mills told me.

"We will be a global company and are planning a number of large solar plants overseas. Some of the largest investors and power companies in the USA have realised that solar thermal power is a probable replacement for coal, nuclear and oil. They believe this will be very big business and power companies are willing to provide the large amount of initial equity to get the industry moving."

His departure is the latest variation on a depressing local theme. "No one here is listening to him," Michael Mobbs told me. Mobbs is an environmental lawyer best known for building the most sustainable, energy-efficient urban home in Australia, his famous "Chippendale house".

Given Australia is the No. 1 nation in the world in terms of available land and available hours of sunlight to develop solar energy, given Australia once led the world in solar energy research, given our appalling level of greenhouse emissions, and given one of the most advanced companies in the field of solar thermal energy is Australian, you might think this would be the place to build an industrial-scale solar power plant. But no.

"Australian business does not offer the risk equity we need, especially under the current climate in which the Government clearly favours existing coal and nuclear options based around mineral resources," Mills told me. ...

Since Flannery's book, The Future Eaters, first published in 1994, sounded the warning, climate change and global warming have mobilised opinion across the political spectrum. For example, I first encountered David Mills at an energy symposium at Sydney Town Hall last year. It was organised by Michael Mobbs, hosted by the Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, chaired by Alan Jones, addressed by Malcolm Turnbull, and Mills delivered the dinner address. An eclectic crew.

Mills explained that solar thermal power was very different from the solar panels we are familiar with, which use solar photovoltaic power but which "are far too expensive for large-scale use". Good for the home, but not for the main electricity grid. In contrast, solar thermal power creates steam, the engine of all power stations. While the retail price and initial plant construction costs of solar thermal energy are higher, once carbon emissions and energy inputs are accounted for, solar thermal power is cheaper and, obviously, incomparably cleaner over the long term.

As for supposedly clean nuclear power, once carbon emissions, long-term operational costs, and the removal and storage of radioactive waste are factored in, solar thermal power is far cheaper and cleaner. Yet the only politician championing Mills's technology is the Deputy Lord Mayor of Sydney, Chris Harris, a member of the Greens.

"The lack of discussion in Australia about solar thermal power reminds me of the same lack of interest shown by the media, by experts and politicians 15 years ago when I was the consultant to the parliamentary inquiry into Sydney Water," Mobbs told me. "Most of them said we couldn't use rainwater in Sydney and we couldn't reuse sewage. So I built my house to show we can."

We don't have another 15 years. The metaphor for Australian policy is the imminent departure of Mills and Solar Heat and Power, having developed their technology at a plant in Singleton, in the Hunter Valley, the heart of big coal, with all its political connections and Labor Party strings.

To its credit, the NSW state government has been promoting green power a lot on TV lately - along with ads about its desalination plant plans (so they aren't avoiding the topic entirely before elections), which note that they are going to power the thing with renewable energy, along with their requirement for 15% green power by 2015. So Labor are well ahead (in spite of their alliegance to the coal industry) of the Rodent's merry men on the issue at this point, even if they could be doing more.

Peter Garrett says the IPCC report is a "wake up call" for the Rodent.

The federal Opposition says new research on climate change commissioned by the world's governments should be a massive wake-up call for Prime Minister John Howard.

A Sydney newspaper has published the report, which is to be presented to an inter-governmental panel in Paris next week. The report was commissioned by 180 countries and suggests that the greenhouse gases emitted in the 21st century will continue to warm the world for the next 1,000 years. The research also suggests that there is a 90 per cent chance that human activity is to blame for global warming.

Opposition climate change spokesman Peter Garrett says the report paints a grim picture and should be a wake-up call for the Howard Government. "I think this report is the most serious warning we've had yet on climate change," he said. "It means that the bell is tolling on our way of life, on our economy, on the health of the planet, and it means that the bell is tolling on the Prime Minister to stand up and actually show that he's got a policy that will address climate change."

Mr Garrett says Labor would immediately establish a national carbon trading emissions scheme as a first step in demonstrating its serious commitment on climate change.

If you want to see more global warming news than you can probably read in a week, check out the latest weekly summary of global warming news at "A Few Thing Ill Considered" by H.E Taylor.

One sunny country that isn't stupidly looking to the past is Portugal, which is aiming to get 50% of its energy from renewable sources (up from 36% in 2005) - and not a nuclear power plant in sight (but that's impossible, say the radiation addicts !). Unfortunately they are a little too bullish about biofuels, but at least they are aiming high.

Portugal wants renewable energy sources like wind and wave power to account for nearly half of the electricity consumed in the country by 2010, Prime Minister Jose Socrates said Wednesday.

The Socialist government will work to ensure that 45 percent of the nation's electricity output in three years comes from renewable sources, he said during a debate in parliament, up from a previous target of 39 percent. "This new goal will place Portugal in the frontline of renewable energy and make it, along with Austria and Sweden, one of the three nations that most invest in this sector," said Socrates, a former environment minister.

To achieve the goal the government will simplify the licencing rules for new wind parks, encourage greater use of biofuels and expand the capacity of three existing hydroelectric dams as well as construct new ones. Fifty-four percent of Portugal's total hydroelectric potential has not yet been tapped, the prime minister said "Portugal is one of the nations in the world with the most hydroelectric potential still left to explore," the prime minister said.

The government wants biofuels to account for 10 percent of all fuel used for transportation by 2010, a decade before European Union member states are supposed to meet this target, he added. "Biofuels are going to be one of our main energy bets," said Socrates.

Thirty-six percent of Portugal's electricity output was from renewable sources in 2005, the last year for which statistics are available. Portugal, which is highly dependent on imported oil and gas, has stepped up its efforts to develop reneweable energy since Socrates' government came to power in March 2005. Portugal built 36 new wind parks in 2006 which boosted its total wind power capacity by 60 percent, giving it the second highest growth rate in the use of the energy source in the EU, the prime minister said.

Last year the world's largest solar power plant began operating in the nation's sunny south while the world' first commercial wave power station is planned for the country's northern Atlantic coast.

The BBC reports on a plan for everyone else to get half their energy from renewables by 2050 as well.

Half of the world's energy needs in 2050 could be met by renewables and improved efficiency, a study claims. It said alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar, could provide nearly 70% of the world's electricity and 65% of global heat demand. Following a "business as usual" scenario would see demand for energy double by 2050, the authors warned.

The study, by the German Aerospace Center, was commissioned by Greenpeace and Europe's Renewable Energy Council. The report, Energy Revolution: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook, provided a "roadmap" for meeting future energy needs without fuelling climate change, said Sven Teske from Greenpeace International.

"We have shown that the world can have safe, robust renewable energy, that we can achieve the efficiencies needed and we can do all of this while enjoying global economic growth," he said. He added that the strategy outlined in the report showed that it was economically feasible to cut global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by almost 50% over the next 43 years.

'Solar generation'

The report calls for ageing fossil fuel and nuclear power plants to be replaced by renewable generation when they reach the end of their operational lives.

"Right now, we have five main sources of energy - oil, coal, gas, nuclear and hydro. In our scenario, we have solar, wind, geo-thermal, bio-energy and hydro," Mr Teske told BBC News. He added that they had developed 10 regional scenarios to highlight which renewable sources would be most effective in particular parts of the world. "Of course, for the Middle East we have a lot of solar power, while northern Europe and North America will have a lot more wind energy in the mix. We also dissect it by sector," he added. "Renewables will dominate the electricity sector, and the heating and cooling sectors. By 2050, in our scenario, the majority of fossil fuels will be used in the transport sector." ...

The IEA meanwhile, is warning the world faces a dirty energy future.

The world could be dependent on "dirty, insecure and expensive" energy by 2030, an influential report has warned.

Current trends showed that demand for power was set to grow by 53% by 2030, the International Energy Agency said.

But if governments deliver on promises to push cleaner and more efficient supplies, growth in demand could be restrained by about 10%, it suggests.

Kerry Emmanuel has a good history in The Boston Review of global warming called "Phaeton's Reins - The human hand in climate change".

Two strands of environmental philosophy run through the course of human history. The first holds that the natural state of the universe is one of infinite stability, with an unchanging earth anchoring the predictable revolutions of the sun, moon, and stars. Every scientific revolution that challenged this notion, from Copernicus’ heliocentricity to Hubble’s expanding universe, from Wegener’s continental drift to Heisenberg’s uncertainty and Lorenz’s macroscopic chaos, met with fierce resistance from religious, political, and even scientific hegemonies.

The second strand also sees the natural state of the universe as a stable one but holds that it has become destabilized through human actions. The great floods are usually portrayed in religious traditions as attempts by a god or gods to cleanse the earth of human corruption. Deviations from cosmic predictability, such as meteors and comets, were more often viewed as omens than as natural phenomena. In Greek mythology, the scorching heat of Africa and the burnt skin of its inhabitants were attributed to Phaeton, an offspring of the sun god Helios, who, having lost a wager to his son, was obliged to allow him to drive the sun chariot across the sky. In this primal environmental catastrophe, Phaeton lost control and fried the earth, killing himself in the process.

These two fundamental ideas have permeated many cultures through much of history. They strongly influence views of climate change to the present day.

The myth of natural stability

In 1837, Louis Agassiz provoked public outcry and scholarly ridicule when he proposed that many puzzles of the geologic record, such as peculiar scratch marks on rocks, and boulders far removed from their bedrock sources, could be explained by the advance and retreat of huge sheets of ice. This event marked the beginning of a remarkable endeavor, today known as paleoclimatology, which uses physical and chemical evidence from the geological record to deduce changes in the earth’s climate over time. This undertaking has produced among the most profound yet least celebrated scientific advances of our era. We now have exquisitely detailed knowledge of how climate has varied over the last few million years and, with progressively less detail and more uncertainty, how it has changed going back in time to the age of the oldest rocks on our 4.5-billion-year-old planet.

For those who take comfort in stability, there is little consolation in this record. Within the past three million years or so, our climate has swung between mild states, similar to today’s and lasting from ten to 20 thousand years, and periods of 100,000 years or so in which giant ice sheets, in some places several miles thick, covered northern continents. Even more unsettling than the existence of these cycles is the suddenness with which the climate can apparently change, especially as it recovers from glacial eras.

Over longer intervals of time, the climate has changed even more radically. During the early part of the Eocene era, around 50 million years ago, the earth was free of ice, and giant trees grew on islands near the North Pole, where the annual mean temperature was about 60°F, far warmer than today’s mean of about 30. There is also some evidence that the earth was almost entirely covered with ice at various times around 500 million years ago; in between, the planet was exceptionally hot.

What explains these changes? For climate scientists, the ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica provide the most intriguing clues. As the ice formed, it trapped bubbles of atmosphere, whose chemical composition—including, for example, its carbon dioxide and methane content—can now be analyzed. Moreover, it turns out that the ratio of the masses of two isotopes of oxygen locked up in the molecules of ice is a good indicator of the air temperature when the ice was formed. And to figure out when the ice was formed, one can count the layers that mark the seasonal cycle of snowfall and melting.

Relying on such analyses of ice cores and sediment cores from the deep ocean, climate scientists have learned something remarkable: the ice-age cycles of the past three million years are probably caused by periodic oscillations of the earth’s orbit that affect primarily the orientation of the earth’s axis. These oscillations do not much affect the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth, but they do change the distribution of sunlight with latitude. This distribution matters because land and water absorb and reflect sunlight differently, and the distributions of land and water—continents and oceans—are quite different in the northern and southern hemispheres. Ice ages occur when, as a result of orbital variations, the arctic regions intercept relatively little summer sunlight so that ice and snow do not melt as much.

The timing of the ice ages, then, is the combined result of the earth’s orbit and its basic geology. But this combination does not explain either the slow pace of the earth’s descent into the cold phases of the cycle or the abrupt recovery to interglacial warmth evident in the ice-core records. More disturbing is the evidence that these large climate swings—from glacial to interglacial and back—are caused by relatively small changes in the distribution of sunlight with latitude. Thus, on the time scale of ice ages, climate seems exquisitely sensitive to small perturbations in the distribution of sunlight.

And yet for all this sensitivity, the earth never suffered either of the climate catastrophes of fire or ice. In the fire scenario, the most effective greenhouse gas—water vapor—accumulates in the atmosphere as the earth warms. The warmer the atmosphere, the more water vapor can accumulate; as more water vapor accumulates, more heat gets trapped, and the warming spirals upward. This uncontrolled feedback is called the runaway greenhouse effect, and it continues until the oceans have all evaporated, by which time the planet is unbearably hot. One has only to look as far as Venus to see the end result. Any oceans that may have existed on that planet evaporated eons ago, yielding a super greenhouse inferno and an average surface temperature of around 900°F.

Death by ice can result from another runaway feedback. As snow and ice accumulate progressively equatorward, they reflect an increasing amount of sunlight back to space, further cooling the planet until it freezes into a “snowball earth.” It used to be supposed that once the planet reached such a frozen state, with almost all sunlight reflected back to space, it could never recover; more recently it has been theorized that without liquid oceans to absorb the carbon dioxide continuously emitted by volcanoes, that gas would accumulate in the atmosphere until its greenhouse effect was finally strong enough to start melting the ice.

It would not take much change in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth to cause one of these catastrophes. And solar physics informs us that the sun was about 25 percent dimmer early in the earth’s history, which should have led to an ice-covered planet, a circumstance not supported by geological evidence.

So what saved the earth from fire and ice?

The Economist has an article on Chinese energy usage, noting that its economy requires 4 times as much as energy per unit of GDP than that of the US. I would have thought this mostly demonstrates the energy requirement for (1) a huge infrastructure building boom, and (2) an economy oriented towards manufacturing rather than providing services - both trends that will dissipate eventually.

Now there really is a giant sucking sound—not one made by the flight of jobs, but by China ferociously hoovering up commodities and raw materials. Although it accounts for roughly 4% of global GDP (measured at market exchange rates), China consumes 30% of the world’s supply of minerals and other raw materials. This time around, the world has not only heard the sucking sound, but has also felt its effects, as the prices of commodities such as iron ore, copper and zinc have soared, doubling or tripling in just a couple of years.

How has China suddenly developed such a big appetite? The economy has been growing at a dizzying rate, recently by double digits. Much of this growth is driven by fixed-asset investment, which now accounts for more than 50% of GDP a year—a higher proportion than that of any other country at any time in history. This relentless capacity for expansion has created an insatiable demand for raw materials.

China also wastes a lot. Take energy consumption. China required 4.3 times as much energy as America in 2005 to produce one unit of GDP, up from 3.4 times in 2002. It can be argued that much of China’s new investment has not yet reached optimal efficiency. That may be true, but it does not explain why things are getting worse: China consumed 15% more energy per unit of GDP in 2005 than it did in 2002. India, also a rapidly expanding economy, consumes only 61% as much energy as China per unit of GDP.

China’s wasteful growth has brought joy to commodity producers and their bankers and shareholders worldwide. With rising profitability and stock prices, they have been happily expanding mining operations and acquiring or merging with rivals. But there are reasons to believe that the surge in commodity prices worldwide has run out of steam.

WorldChanging has a look at Jaime Lerner's "urban acupuncture" approach.

Speaking at the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2007 briefing in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Lerner said that tackling urban problems at appropriate “pressure points” can cause positive ripple effects throughout entire communities.

Lerner noted that even the poorest cities can boost their standards of living by using techniques like bus rapid transit (BRT), designing multiuse buildings, and encouraging residents to live closer to their workplaces. Although many cities spend decades building underground rail systems or other costly long-term projects, “Every city can improve its quality of life in 3 to 4 years,” Lerner asserted.

Lerner is best known for his efforts to introduce BRT to the world, after launching the first successful rapid bus system in Curitiba in the 1970s. He now heads his own architecture and urban planning firm. “We have to use everything we have” to make transportation, a significant emitter of greenhouse gases, more pleasant and sustainable, he told participants at Wednesday’s briefing. The key to future mobility, Lerner believes, is not necessarily to get rid of cars, but to ensure that the many forms of transport currently available—bus, rail, cars, walking, and biking—are not competing for the same space.

Lerner says it is vital that communities seek to adopt urban designs that do not separate the places residents live from where they work, play, and shop. Instead, all these elements should be present in the same area, so people are not as dependent on cars to live their daily lives. Lerner also encourages greater efforts to turn chronic urban problems into innovative solutions. Curitiba, for example, converted an old landfill into the Open University for the Environment, a school that provides environmental education to citizens and policymakers at little-to-no cost. “In the city, there is no frog that can’t be turned into a prince,” Lerner says.

One city that looks in need of some acupuncture is Cincinnati, which apparently has a forgotten subway system buried underground.

WorldChanging also has an interview with Ed Mazria of Architecture 2030 and the 2030 Challenge.

Last year, Ed Mazria and his New Mexico-based non-profit organization, Architecture 2030, revealed that architecture – or the building sector, more generally – is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions, worldwide.

To help prevent "catastrophic" climate change, then, the building sector must become carbon neutral. Reaching that state before the year 2030 is what Mazria calls the 2030 Challenge.

In an effort to speed things along, Mazria will be co-hosting an event, on February 20th, called the 2010 Imperative. This will be a "global emergency teach-in" broadcast live on the web from New York City. The 2010 Imperative – discussed in more detail, below – has been specifically organized around the idea that "ecological literacy [must] become a central tenet of design education," and that "a major transformation of the academic design community must begin today."

I recently spoke to Mazria about climate change, sustainable design, and carbon neutrality; about the present state, and future direction, of architectural education; about suburban development, Wal-Mart, and SUVs; and about the 2030 Challenge itself.

What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Geoff Manaugh: First, how did you choose the specific targets of the 2030 Challenge?

Ed Mazria: Well, let's see. The way we developed the 2030 Challenge was by working backward from the greenhouse gas emissions reductions that scientists were telling us we needed to reach by 2050. Working backwards from those reductions, and looking at, specifically, the building sector - which is responsible for about half of all emissions - you can see what we need to do today. You can see the targets that we need to reach so we can avoid hitting what the scientists have called catastrophic climate change.

If you do that, you see that we need an immediate, 50% reduction in fossil fuel, greenhouse gas-emitting energy in all new building construction. And since we renovate about as much as we build new, we need a 50% reduction in renovation, as well. If you then increase that reduction by 10% every five years - so that by 2030 all new buildings use no greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuel energy to operate - then you reach a state that's called carbon neutral. And you get there by 2030. That way we meet the targets that climate scientists have set out for us.

That’s how we came up with the 2030 Challenge - meaning a 50% reduction today, and going to carbon neutral by 2030.

GM: When you say that the building sector is responsible for half of all greenhouse gas emissions, though, do you mean that in a direct or an indirect sense? Because surely houses aren't just sitting there emitting carbon dioxide all day - it’s the power plants that those houses are connected to.

Mazria: It's direct. The number is actually 48% of total US energy consumption that can be attributed to the building sector, most of which - 40% of total consumption - can be attributed just to building operations. That's heating, lighting, cooling, and hot water. There are others - running pumps and things like that. But 40% of total US energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed just to building operations.

GM: What’s the other 8%?

Mazria: The other 8% is greenhouse gas emissions released in producing the materials for buildings - materials that architects can specify - as well as during the construction process itself.

But the major part, you see - 40% - is design. Every time we design a building, we set up its energy consumption pattern and its greenhouse gas emissions pattern for the next 50-100 years. That's why the building sector and the architecture sector is so critical. It takes a long time to turn over - whereas the transportation sector, on wheels, in this country, turns over once every twelve years.

GM: Speaking of which, you've pointed out elsewhere that SUVs only represent about 3% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the US - yet they receive the brunt of the media's attention and anger. The real culprit is wastefully designed architecture.

Mazria: People must remember, though, that this doesn’t let the US automobile industry off the hook! Cars and SUVs are still part of the problem - and we need to attack that part of the problem.

And there are solutions. One of the solutions, for example, is to use plug-in hybrid flex-fuel technology. Plug-in meaning you can collect energy on your rooftop, with photovoltaic cells, and then plug your car into a battery at night, and drive 30-50 miles on a charge. Then you can use hybrid technology to get incredible miles; then you can use flex-fuel - so you put high-cellulose alcohol or ethanol into the tank, rather than fossil fuels. So there are solutions in that sector. ...

Ford has announced a new plugin hybrid, which is a welcome step forward from a company that is struggling. Ford is one of those companies that is hard to get a grip on - they obviously have some clues (both this announcement and their massive plant regeneration designed by Bill McDonough point to that) even though by and large they have continued to rely on big, inefficent cars and SUVs (and are now paying the price for it), but they also fund creeps like the global warming deniers at the CEI. Somewhat disconcertingly, they also invited me to become a "Ford Blogger" today, which I guess is a positive sign - maybe my regular reader(s) at Ford get the message and want to move the company towards plugin hybrids - and a bright future - too.

Ford also has some weird history, which appeals to my taste for the offbeat, ranging from their leading role in the rise of mass production, their seminal court case with Dodge which featured in the book "The Corporation" (Henry being the good guy in this one and losing), Henry Ford's attachment to Hitler (and funding of various anti-communist armies in Europe in the 1920's) and Ford's bizarre habit of putting a copy of "The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion" in the glovebox of every new Ford for a period of time.

Ford used the Washington D.C. Auto Show to unveil a new car equipped the HySeries Drive powertrain, which is a fuel cell-based, hybrid power system. The HySeries Drive was also used in Ford's Airstream concept car. According to AutoBlog, the system utilizes a lithium ion battery pack that initially receives power from a standard wall outlet, and once that initial charge is drained (in about 25 miles) a fuel cell system begins sending power to the batteries. Those batteries are hooked up to an electric motor, which propels the Edge up to a maximum speed of 85 MPH. Once the fuel cell begins making power, it can provide an additional range of 200 miles and, in some applications, up to 40.

From today's "Daily Reckoning", some notes on metal thieving in Singapore, and the lever of fear in the over-leveraged West - interest rates. Trying to work out who controls this lever in any given country is always an interesting exercise.

--There are plenty of other assets besides shares, and some of them you can pick right up off the ground, if you're in Singapore. "Thefts of drain covers, prayer urns, copper cables, and other metal items doubled in Singapore last year...While the overall crime rate in Singapore dropped 10 per cent last year, metal-related thefts jumped, with 1,092 cases in 2006 compared with 566 cases in the previous year," reports Reuters. And this despite the 40% correction in copper prices from their July high of last year.

--If you don't feel like stealing storm drain covers or prayer urns, you could try buying a house in Australia, but frankly becoming a legal homeowner in Australia may be more difficult than becoming an illegal copper-possessor in Singapore. The average first time Australian home buyer now needs, "in excess of 30 per cent of their disposable income to service minimum monthly payments on a new mortgage," according to the Housing Industry Association.

--The Association's news release on the affordability crisis reports that, "The monthly loan repayment needed on a typical first-home mortgage rose from $2,194 to $2,132, an increase of 6.3 per cent. Mortgage payments now account for 30.7 per cent of total first home buyer income…As a proportion of disposable income, the ratio was up by 1.8 percentage points."

--Do you get the feeling that the age-old wisdom of buying a home when you're young may be fatally challenged by rising home prices? What is a young family to do? Loaded with debt from university, your would-be homeowner can't afford to sock away enough for a down-payment to begin with. But assuming he could, he'd then have to live like a pauper in order to pay his mortgage. Is this a good trade, trading a balance sheet asset for a real-world liability and effectively becoming an indentured servant to the bank for the next thirty years?

--You might be better of renting and then investing what you would have payed on a mortgage in some of those go-go assets driving the share market to record highs. Of course the stock market is not a saving account any more than a house is. But a man has to do something with his money doesn't he? And if you can't get richer buying a house or buying stocks, how *can* you get rich?

--Scary answer? Maybe, for the average guy, you can't, at least not doing the average thing. "America's median household income is lower than in 2000, despite the economy growing by 12% in real terms. The median income has barely shifted since 1973 but inequality has increased," reports James Mawson in an article forwarded to us. The obvious conclusion here is that while people feel richer as home-owners with big mortgages, they're take home income is about the same today, in nominal terms, as it was in 1973.

--Normally we are suspicious when we see statistics like this. After all, when you look around you people seem richer. They drive newer, bigger cars (which they pay loans on.) They live in bigger houses (which are heavily mortgaged.) And they fill those houses with things by 'withdrawing' equity from the house. Look around you and people seem to be richer than 33 years ago. The economy is bigger, there are more gadgets, more choices, bigger portions, and greater signs of enormous wealth.

--But it's beginning to look like globalisation has made the very rich in the West much richer and the very poor in Asia much richer. But the middle-class Westerners…we're not so sure. They have more debt and less equity. They can buy more things cheaply, but they must do so with credit. And job security is as antiquated a term in Western capitalism as "please and thank you" at the family dinner table. Families don't eat dinner together anymore. They are too busy working.

--What does it all mean? In a symbol of just how financialized our age is, everything depends on interest rates. As long as they are low, middle-class debt and the lifestyle it affords are sustainable. If they rise…watch out. That's when all sociological hell breaks lose, as people suddenly find they are "worth" less than they thought.

The Daily Reckoning also has a Byron King article on the unpleasant interaction of oil and food prices in a world seduced by the siren song of grain based ethanol.

Last week The Daily Reckoning reported on the ‘Tortilla Crisis’ in Mexico. That is, the increasing price of corn has caused the price of tortillas, a staple of the Mexican diet, to rise as well. This has strained the social harmony in some impoverished parts of that land, to the point where food riots were threatening. After the police were called out, and the politicians offered the usual bromides, several of Mexico’s major food distributors, from GRUMA to Wal-Mart, agreed to keep a lid on prices charged for corn and tortillas. ...

And in the past week, no less an authority than the New York Times has run several articles on the difficulties that U.S. farmers and cattle ranchers are having in feeding livestock, due to the increasing price of (what else?) grain. Even the price of humble hay is rising due to the competition for something to feed the cattle, this market issue coupled also with a series of severe droughts that have afflicted the U.S. Midwest in the past years, and prairie fires, and the bad weather of late.
So what we are seeing is the confluence of the oil and grain markets. Just as the rising price of oil has priced many of the world’s poorest souls out of the oil age, so is the increasing use of grain to manufacture ethanol also pricing the poorest of the world’s poor out of the modern age of relatively abundant and affordable food. This is, I believe, just the bow wave of a coming phenomenon.

If the U.S. maintains its policy impetus and industrial momentum to manufacture large amounts of ethanol from grain, certainly the 20% replacement of U.S. gasoline supply within 10 years forecast by President Bush in his State of the Union speech, it may not be just poor Mexicans and distant Iranian villagers who are priced out of the grocery stores.

And finally from the Reckoners - a ground level view of our oil war in Iraq.

"Who the hell is shooting at us?" an American sergeant wants to know. Quoted in the International Herald Tribune, Sergeant Biletski was under pressure. He and his men were trying to conduct an operation in Baghdad. They were trying to suppress 'insurgents.' But they didn't know who the insurgents were...where they were...or what they were doing. Either the Sunnis were shooting at them. Or the Shiites. Or the Iraqi army. Or just people who are sick of having their doors smashed in by foreigners. All they knew was that people seemed to be shooting at them from all directions...and their Iraqi allies had vanished.

"This place is a failure," Biletski suggests.

If it weren't for people getting killed and maimed, the whole thing would be a farce. For reasons of pure vanity, the U.S. invaded the place. All we had to do was to knock that wicked Saddam Hussein off his perch and white doves would come out everywhere in the Mideast. And now, poor Sergeant Biletski, sent to a dreadful place to do dreadful work, finds out the truth.

The Iraqis, even those who are supposed to be sympathetic to the invaders, don't fight like Americans. Can you believe it, dear reader? These people fight...well...like Arabs! After all these generations; they have still not learned the 'Western way of war.' Instead, they hit and run...they stab us in the back...they take potshots and go back to drinking their disgusting tea. They kill each other...and then, when we intervene, they all turn on us.

Who would have imagined? Who could have guessed? Who could have known?

Even the warmongers are trying to wash their hands of the whole business...

"I for one have become disillusioned with dreams of transforming Iraqi society from the top down," says David Brooks in the New York Times. The delusional hawks now say they are moving on to new illusions.

That is how it works. The world improvers don't fight their own wars. That's for others. And let others pay the taxes, too. Then, when the whole adventure inevitably goes bad, they are on to the next new thing.

Soldiers...taxpayers...voters - somebody's got to hold the bag.

Sgt. Biletski, you're on your own now.

The LA Times points out the reaction to 911 has been a little bit of an over-reaction, pointing out cars kill more people every 2 months than Osama and co managed.

IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.

It also raises several questions. Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies' objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

Yet a great many Americans, particularly on the right, have failed to make this distinction. For them, the "Islamo-fascist" enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler's implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy. The conservative author Norman Podhoretz has gone so far as to say that we are fighting World War IV (No. III being the Cold War).

But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down.

Even if one counts our dead in Iraq and Afghanistan as casualties of the war against terrorism, which brings us to about 6,500, we should remember that roughly the same number of Americans die every two months in automobile accidents.

The Huffington Post has a post from Congressman John Conyers about an anti-war rally in Washington.

I appeared today at the peace rally in Washington and want to report to you that there is tremendous energy out there. Celebrities joined many activists and Members of Congress to call for an end to the fighting now. There was a very big crowd on the mall and most media coverage has been pretty positive.

Jane Fonda returned to the peace movement, calling upon Americans not to forget the lessons of Vietnam. I had a chance to speak to Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, who have also used their celebrity as movie stars to bring the media focus to the growing anti-war movement.

PDA, Code Pink and the Institute of Policy Studies all made significant contributions to the events today.

But perhaps the most powerful voices heard today were those from military families, grieving for lost loved ones. Their personal stories cut at your heart like nothing else.

I spoke with some filmmakers doing a piece for the Huffington Post today so I am hoping that you may get to hear directly from some of these military families on the pages here later.

So, as we take stock of our efforts today, I wanted to sum up the myriad of challenges that lay before us and the opportunities we have to make things right again in this country.

The Bush Administration has given us:

* Voter Intimidation and suppression and worse costing us two presidential elections.
* The Downing Street Minutes, manipulation of intelligence, and going to war under false pretenses.
* Outing a CIA agent as an act of political revenge.
* Warrantless wiretapping, outside of the law and the Constitution, and creating an unauthorized data base of millions of innocent Americans.
* Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding, and other forms of illegal torture.
* Racial Profiling, Rendition, and Secret Prisons.
* An imperial president who takes it upon himself to issue signing statements which change the law to take away our rights.
* Intimidating the press, and firing government whistleblowers.
* Operating a government in secret, above the law and outside of court or congressional scrutiny.
* More than 3,000 Americans dead, scores of thousands of Iraqi's dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, and a cost of more than one trillion dollars.
* And now a massive escalation, disguised as a "surge," with no end in sight.

Today, and every day, we need to let this President know and let the Congress know that we have had enough.

Given my propensity to note various forms of blog monitoring services I see in the logs, here's a new one - this one apparently from a French company - DigiMind Evolution.

Continuing my recent exploration of the thoughts of Robert Anton Wilson, here's some snippets from an interview with him from a few years ago.

RMN: What was it that first sparked your interest in consciousness enhancement?

ROBERT: Korzybski's Science and Sanity. I was in engineering school and I picked up the book in the Brooklyn Public Library. He talked about different levels of organization in the brain-animal circuits, human circuits and so on. And he talked a lot about getting back to the non-verbal level and being able to perceive without talking to yourself while you're perceiving.

It was 1957. I was very interested in jazz at that time, and I told a black friend about some of Korzybski's exercises to get to the non-verbal level, and he said, "Oh, I do that every time I smoke pot." I got interested. I said, "Could I buy one of these marijuana cigarettes from you?" He said, "Oh hell, I'11 give it to you free." And so I smoked it.

I found myself looking at a quarter I found in my pocket and realizing I hadn't looked at a quarter in twenty years or so, the way a child looks at a quarter. So I decided marijuana was doing pretty much the same thing Korzybski was trying to do with his training devices. Then shortly after that I heard a lecture by Alan Watts, and I realized that Zen, marijuana and Korzybski were all relating the same transformations of consciousness. That was the beginning.

DJB: Many of your books deal with a secret society called the Illuminati. How did your fascination with this organization begin?

ROBERT: It was Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley who founded the Discordian Society, which is based on the worship of Eris, the Goddess of Chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy and international relations. They have no dogmas, but one catma. The catma is that everything in the universe relates to the number 5, one way or another, given enough ingenuity on the part of the interpreter. I found the Discordian Society to be the most satisfactory religion I had ever encountered up until that point, so I became a Discordian Pope. This is done by excommunicating all the Discordian Popes you can find and setting up your own Discordian Church. This is based on Greg's teaching that we Discordians must stick apart.

Anyway, in 1968 Jim Garrison, the D.A. of New Orleans--the jolly green Frankenstein monster, as Kerry later called him--accused Kerry at a press conference of being one of the conspirators in the Kennedy assassination. Garrison never indicted him--he didn't have enough evidence for an indictment-so Kerry never stood trial, but he brooded over it for years. Then he entered an altered state of consciousness. I'm trying to be objective about this. Kerry, who served in the same platoon as Oswald, became convinced that he was involved in the assassination and that when he was in the Marine Corps, Naval Intelligence had brainwashed him.

Kerry decided Naval Intelligence had also brainwashed Oswald and several others, and had been manipulating them for years, like the Manchurian Candidate. He couldn't remember what had happened, but he had a lot of suspicions. Then he became convinced that I was a CIA baby-sitter and we sort of lost touch with each other. It's hard to communicate with somebody when he thinks you're a diabolical mind-control agent and you're convinced that he's a little bit paranoid.

Somewhere along the line, Kerry decided to confuse Garrison by sending out all sorts of announcements that he was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. That got me interested in the Illuminati, and the more I read about it, the more interested I got. So eventually we incorporated the Illuminati into the Discordian Society. Since the Discordian Society is devoted to promoting chaos, we decided that the Illuminati is devoted to imposing totalitarianism. After all, a Discordian Society, to be truly discordant, should have it's own totalitarian branch that's working against the rest of the Society.

Pope John XXIV threw out six hundred saints on the grounds that they never existed. They threw out Santa Claus and a whole bunch of these Irish saints. The Discordian Society accepted them on the grounds that we don't care whether these saints are real or not. If we like them, we'll accept them. And since these saints were without a home, being thrown out of the Catholic church, we accepted them. In the same way we accepted the Illuminati, too, since nobody else wants them.

Then, I appointed myself the head of the Illuminati, which led to a lot of interesting correspondences with other heads of the Illuminati in various parts of the world. One of them threatened to sue me. I told him to resubmit his letter in FORTRAN, because my computer wouldn't accept it in English and I never heard from him again. I think that confused him.

RMN: Who do you think the Illuminati really were--or are?

ROBERT: The Illuminati has been the label used by many groups throughout history. The Illuminati that is believed in by right-wing paranoids is a hypothesis that leading intellectuals of the eighteenth century were all members of the Bavarian Illuminati which was working to overthrow Christianity. I don't think that's quite accurate; I think there's a lot of exaggeration in that view. I don't think that Jefferson was a member of the Illuminati; he just had similar goals. Beethoven was probably a member, but Mozart probably wasn't. Voltaire probably wasn't, although he was a Freemason. Anyway, to the extent that the Illuminati conspired to overthrow Christianity and to establish democracy, I'm in favor of it.

DJB: What were the Illuminati out to achieve?

ROBERT: The historical Illuminati of the eighteenth century, as distinguished from all other Illuminati of previous centuries, had as it's main goals, overthrowing the Vatican, overthrowing monarchies, establishing democratic republics and giving a scientific education to every boy and girl. Most of these goals have more or less begun to be achieved. Compared to what things were like in the eighteenth century they've largely succeeded, and I think that's all to the good.

RMN: Many formerly held secrets known only to a select group of initiates, perhaps like the Bavarian Illuminati, are now available at the local metaphysical bookstore. What do you think are the sociological implications of such information exchange?

ROBERT: Oh, I think it's wonderful. I believe very much that secrecy is the main cause of most social evils. I think information is the most precious commodity in the world. As a matter of fact, I think that information is the source of all wealth. The classical economic theory is that wealth is created by land, labor and capital. But if you have a piece of land, and you've got capital, and you hire labor, and you drill for oil, and there's no oil there--you won't get rich. What makes somebody rich is drilling for oil where there is oil, and that's based on having correct information. I'm just paraphrasing Buckminster Fuller here. All wealth is information. So therefore, all attempts to impede the transfer, the rapid transmission of information, are making us all poorer.

DJB: Why do you think it is then, that it took so long for occult knowledge to come out of secrecy and into the open?

ROBERT: Well, that's largely because of the Catholic church. Anybody who spoke too frankly for many centuries was burned at the stake. So the alchemists, hermeticists, Illuminati and other groups learned to speak in codes.

DJB: So you think it was the fear of persecution, rather than a feeling that most people weren't "ready" for the information quite yet?

ROBERT: Well, I think that's a rationalization, You can't find out who's ready, except by distributing the information. Then you find out who's ready.

RMN: The wars in the Middle East and the rising fundamentalism in the West have been seen by some as the death screams of organized religion. Both Islam and Christianity, however, have survived many "Holy Wars." What do you think the fate of organized religion will be?

ROBERT: I would like to think that organized religion is on it's way out, but I've been doing a lot of research on the eighteenth century for my historical novels. Voltaire thought that the Catholic church would be gone in twenty years, and it's hung around for two hundred years since then. When the Pope disbanded the Jesuits, Voltaire said that's the end, the Catholic church is falling apart. Well, a few years later they reorganized the Jesuits. The Knights of Malta are running the CIA apparently, and the Catholic church just refuses to die. Fundamentalism has staged a comeback. It's fantastic.

I'm a big fan of H.L. Menken. He was a very funny social critic of the 1920's. His books went out of print for a while, because the things he was making fun of didn't exist anymore. Now his books are coming back into print because all those things exist again. He was making fun of the same type of thing that Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, and that whole crowd stand for. It's astonishing the way that this seemingly dead historical institution came back, like the Frankenstein monster. Every time you think it's dead, it rises up again to afflict us. The Ayatollah. The Grey Wolves. The Grey Wolves are the biggest heroin dealers in the Mid-East because they believe Allah wants them to kill Jews and they can't get enough money to buy guns without selling heroin. That makes about as much sense as most of the Christian theology I've heard.

I'm a mystical agnostic, or an agnostic mystic. That phrase was coined by Olaf Stapledon, my favorite science fiction writer. When I first read it, it didn't mean anything to me, but over the years I've gradually realized that "agnostic mystic" describes me better than any words I have found any where else.

DJB: How about "transcendental agnostic"?

ROBERT: Yeah. The word agnostic has gained the association of somebody who's just denying, but what I mean is something more like the ancient Greek concept of the zetetic. I find the universe so staggering that I just don't have any faith in my ability to grasp it. I don't think the human stomach can eat everything, and I'm not quite sure my mind can understand everything, so I don't pretend that it can.

RMN: In Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade, she proposes that there has been a cultural transformation from a cooperation between the sexes to the dominion of male over female. She says that we're now at a stage when men should be learning from women. What do you think about this?

ROBERT: Curiously, 1 was an early advocate of the theory of the primordial matriarchy. I got turned onto that by Robert Graves when I was in high school. I read The White Goddess, and then I happened to read a little-known book by a Scottish psychiatrist named Ian Suttie called The Origin of Love and Hate, in which he used the model of history evolving from matriarchy to patriarchy and back to matriarchy. Some of these ideas have been around my head for about forty years.

Currently I tend to agree with Eisler. There's no evidence of a matriarchy at all. There's evidence of a partnership society. It's been coming back for the last two hundred years. Arlen calls it "stone-age feedback." As European civilization conquered and exploited the Third World, ideas from these places came drifting back to Europe. Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, the whole enlightenment was influenced by the ideas of these "primitives" having a more natural and happier way of life than we do. Democracy, socialism, anarchism, and all the radical ideas of the last two hundred years were inspired by studying stone-age cultures from the first proto-anthropologica1 reports.

I've been an advocate for a partnership society for years, before Eisler used that term. The term I used was "voluntary association" which comes out of the American Anarchist tradition. This was a school of philosophical anarchists in New England in the nineteenth century who are very little known. I got fascinated by them in the sixties and read most of their books. The idea of voluntary association migrated to Europe and became syndicalism, only the syndicalists added to it the idea of overthrowing the existing system by violence, so the whole idea developed a bad reputation. I think the basic idea of voluntary association, or partnership, is the one towards which we should aspire. It's the most human, just, fair, decent and intelligent form of society.

RMN: Do you have hope that we can achieve it?

ROBERT: Yes, I do, in spite of the evidence we see on all sides of stupidity, ignorance, bigotry and the seemingly inexhaustible lust of the masses to be trampled on by Fuhrer figures and father figures. I see the last two hundred years as a staggering, groping, fumbling toward a partnership society. ...

RMN: The whirlwind ecstasies of the sixties have, for many, settled down into a gentle breeze. What do you feel were the fleeting and lasting effects of this cultural phenomena, and how have your attitudes developed since that time?

ROBERT: Well, we were just talking about that this morning. What survives of the sixties? What survives in different forms? I think Bucky Fuller hit the nail on the head. He said that around 1972, the brighter people realized that there are more effective ways of challenging the system than going out in the streets and running their heads against policemen's clubs. So they got more subtle. People are working on different levels and in different ways, and it's become less confrontational, but I do believe there are still a lot of people working for the ideals of the sixties.

DJB: You mean like in the movie industry?

ROBERT: Yeah, and in television, in computers, in banking, all over the place.

DJB: Really, in banking?

ROBERT: Yeah. I've met a couple of bankers who are really very hip people.

DJB: Timothy Leary and Aleister Crowley both played similar roles in history and both had a significant influence on your evolving belief systems. Tell us about the effect these two people have had on your understanding of consciousness.

ROBERT: Well Crowley was such a complicated individual that everybody who reads Crowley has a different Crowley in his head. There's a million Aleister Crowleys depending on what part of him people are able to understand and integrate. Crowley, as the leader of the Illuminati and the Argentum Astrum the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), was continuing the project of overthrowing Christianity and added his own twist of reviving Paganism (which goes back to Giordano Bruno who wanted to do the same thing). Crowley is an interesting figure and has had a bigger historical impact than most people realize. The NeoPagan movement is bigger than anybody knows, except the Fundamentalists, who think it's a Satanic movement -- which from their point of view, I guess it is.

The Crowley who interests me is the scientific Crowley. He traveled all over the world, got initiated into every secret society he could, studied every occult system, studied Sufism in North Africa, Taoism in China, Buddhism in Ceylon and he tried to understand them all in terms of organic chemistry and physiology. He laid the groundwork for the scientific study of mysticism and altered consciousness. That's the Crowley I'm fascinated by--Crowley the scientist, who co-existed with Crowley the mystic, Crowley the poet, Crowley the adventurer and Crowley the Great Beast.

RMN: The Golden Dawn from which Crowley got much of his inspiration was a mystical school which is still lively today. Have you found this system able to remain flexible enough to adapt to the cultural and psychological revisions that have occurred since the Order was first established?

ROBERT: There are several Golden Dawns around, like there are several OTO's and several Illuminatis and so on. All of these things are fractionated, and of course, everybody with a power drive involved in these things claims to be the leader of the real and authentic Secret Chiefs. The Golden Dawn which I find most interesting is the one of which Christopher Hyatt is the Outer Head. He's a fully qualified clinical psychologist with a good background in Jungian and Reichian therapy and a great deal of theoretical knowledge of general psychology.

He was trained in the Golden Dawn system by Israel Regardie who was also a psychologist as well as a mystic. I think Hyatt knows what he's doing; I think he's got his head on right. He doesn't have delusions of grandeur. He's not a prima donna and he's free of most of the deviant and aberrant behavior that's chronic in the occult world. What are the goals of the Golden Dawn? Unleashing the full positive potential of human beings.

RMN: What are the methods involved?

ROBERT: The original Golden Dawn in the 1880's used Kabbalistic magic. Crowley revised it to include Kabbalistic magic and yoga and a bit of Sufism. Regardie revised it to include a great deal of Reichian bodywork, and an insistence that anybody who enters the Order should go through psychotherapy first. He became aware that people who get into Kabbalistic-type work, especially in the Golden Dawn tradition, who haven't had psychotherapy, are likely to flip out or scare themselves silly. Regardie also insisted that they should know General Semantics, which is interesting since it was General Semantics which got me interested in the study of alternative consciousness.

RMN: Why did Regardie want this to be included?

ROBERT: General Semantics is a system that is very useful in clarifying your thinking. If you understand the rules of General Semantics, you're more or less immune to most of the errors that are chronic at this stage of civilization. One of the rules of General Semantics is avoid the is of identity, which is a rule I just broke when I said "General Semantics is..." It's very hard to avoid the is of identity in speech. We all use it all the time. I'm getting pretty good at avoiding it in my writing. Whenever you're trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with my thinking? Why can't I get to the bottom of this? Why am I confused about this problem? Write it down and take out every "is" and reformulate it in some other way. You'll find that your thinking has been tremendously clarified.

It's like the celebrated problem in quantum physics in the 1920's. The electron is a wave. The electron is a particle. Those two things contradict each other totally, which led to a lot of physicists saying that the universe doesn't make sense, the universe is irrational and so on. If you reformulate it without the "is" of identity, there's no paradox at all. The electron appears as a wave when we measure it in certain ways. The electron appears as a particle when we measure it in other ways. There's no contradiction. There are a lot of other ideas in general semantics that are equally useful in clarifying thought.

DJB: That's one of the claims of the recent technology of brain machines. What experiences have you had with them, which ones do you find the most promising and what kind of potential do you think they hold for the future?

ROBERT: The most outstanding experience I've had with a brain machine was with the first one, the Pulstar. I had an out-of-body experience which registered as flat brain waves on the EEG, and that fascinated me. That was the first objective sign I had ever seen that something was going on in out-of-body experiences besides heightened imagination. I don't see much difference between a lot of the brain machines around. Some are demonstrably inferior, and out of charity I won't mention their names. Some claim to be very superior to all the others, but as far as I can see, most of them function pretty much the same.

At present, I'm more interested in the light and sound machines than I am in the electro-magnetic machines, because there is some legitimate cause for concern that sending electro-magnetism into your brain too often may not be good for you. The whole field is growing very fast. There's a bunch of tapes put out by Acoustic Brain Research in North Carolina. They use only sound, but they combine it with subliminals and Ericksonian hypnosis in a way that I find very effective. They're using sound at the same frequencies that you find in the electro-magnetic machines, or the light and sound machines.

The Graham Potentializer does seem a little more powerful than any of the other machines, but I wouldn't guarantee it because I haven't had enough experience with it yet. What T want to see is more controlled, double-blind studies of these machines, because everybody has their own anecdotal impressions, but we don't really know yet which are the best. Which wave forms are the best? We don't know that yet. Why do some people respond better to one than to others? We don't know why. There's a lot mure to be learned and I'm very eager to see more research.

RMN: Do you think that the use of brain machines requires an accompanying discipline?

ROBERT: I suspect so. One manufacturer told me that the return rate is about fifteen percent. I think these machines are much easier than the biofeedback machines, but they still require some discipline. I think they require some previous experience with Yoga, or Zen, or some consciousness-altering work. You need some kind of previous experience or you just won't know how to use the machine. I don't think the machine really works as an entrainer unless you practice between sessions, trying to revive the state without the machine. A lot of people can't do that, they just assume that the machine will do all the work for them, which is kind of like thinking that you just get in the car and it'll take you where you want to go.

DJB: The potential of nanotechnology seems far more vast. How do you think it's development will affect human consciousness in the future?

ROBERT: I haven't thought much about that. That's an interesting question. It's going to change everything. Nanotechnology is a much bigger jump than anything else on the horizon. It's bigger than space colonization, bigger than longevity. It's a million times bigger than the industrial revolution. It's going to change things so much that I can't begin to conceive how much; but everything's going to get dirt cheap. The ozone layer will get repaired rapidly. We could create redwoods as fast and as many as we want, and then there's star-flight. I don't know; it's just a whole new ballgame, and it leads directly into immortalism.

DJB: How about new ways to alter the brain?

ROBERT: Oh, of course. Eric Drexler, in his book on the subject, talks about constructing micro-replicators that, if you let them loose in the body, they run all over the place, inspecting every cell. If it's not functioning properly they go back, get information from the main computer and repair it. You can obviously do the same thing with brain circuits. It'll probably replace psychiatry. Nanotechnology is so staggering, we can't think about it without hyperbole, and it's coming along rapidly. The Japanese are spending fantastic amounts on that kind of research.

RMN: What do you think about the idea than many inventions are actually rediscoveries of technologies that have already existed in the past?

ROBERT: That's always seemed very implausible to me. There are some cases--the steam engine was discovered in Greece and forgotten until Watt rediscovered it--but I doubt that there are many. Most things weren't discovered until they could be discovered, until there was the time-binding heritage, or until the information accumulation had reached the necessary level. This is why you have so many cases of parallel discovery in science, where in five years three people patent the same thing in different countries. As Charles Fort said, "It's steam engines when it comes steam engine time."

RMN: What if there were times when the information had accumulated but not the political or social climate necessary to appreciate it? Libraries have been burned and knowledge chased underground by authoritarian forces.

ROBERT: Well, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should remain silent."

RMN: A lot of people feel that technology is at odds with their ecological thinking. What do you think is the evolving role of the science of Ecology.

ROBERT: The first book I ever read on ecology was way back in the forties. It was called The Road to Survival. I've always been fascinated by ecology because I'm fascinated by whole systems. That's why Bucky Fuller fascinates me. He always starts with the biggest whole system and works his way down. I've written a lot of satirical things about pop ecology because I think a lot of people have got on the ecology bandwagon who don't know their ass from their elbow about science, and it's turned into a kind of late Christian heresy like Marxism. It's become a new blame game, where people go around laying guilt trips on other people. Guilt is very fashionable in Western civilization.

Albert Ellis said the most popular game in Western civilization is finding and denouncing no-good shits. I found that so impressive I've incorporated it into a couple of my own books. Every generation picks out a group of no-good shits. In the Victorian age it was adolescent boys who masturbated, and now it's cigarette smokers. There's always got to be some no-good shits for people to denounce and persecute, and to the extent that ecology has degenerated into that, it arouses my satirical instinct. But of course the science of Ecology itself is tremendously important, and the more people who know about it, the better.

RMN: The methods of science and art are beginning to achieve some wonderful things together. What do you think created such a chasm between the two disciplines in the first place, and why do you think they are now merging?

ROBERT: Science and art. Now what created such a chasm between them? Why the hell did that happen? I think I'm going to go back and blame the Inquisition. Science had to fight an uphill battle against the Inquisition and this created a historical hangover in which scientists had acute hostility to every form of mysticism, not just to the Catholic church which had been persecuting them. I think that rubs off onto art, because there's something mystical about art no matter how much you try to rationalize it. If you get a bunch of artists together talking about where they got their creativity from, they sound like a bunch of mystics.

Then there was the rise of capitalism. I'm inclined to agree with Karl Marx about that, that every previous form of society has had different values, a hierarchy of values. Capitalism does tend to reduce everything to just one value--what can you sell it for? And as Oscar Wilde said, "All art is quite useless." The value of art depends on who's manipulating the marketplace at the time. It's spooky. Art is the Schrodinger's cat of economics.

All of a sudden, an Andy Warhol is worth a million, and nobody knows how that happened. Then it's somebody else the next year. Picasso never paid for anything in the last twenty years of his life. He just wrote checks which never came back to his bank. People saved them because they knew that the signature was worth more than the sum of the check. They knew it would be worth even more in twenty years, and so on.

Somebody asked a Zen master, "What's the most valuable thing in the world?" and he said, "The head of a dead cat." The querent asked "Why?" and the Zen master said, "Tell me it's exact value." That's a good exercise if you're into creative writing. Write a short story where the hero's life is saved by the fact that he could find the value of the head of a dead cat. It could happen. Everything has a fluctuating value.

In capitalism, everything gets reduced to it's immediate cash value. Citizen Kane, to take one egregious example, is generally considered one of the best films ever made. It lost money in it's first year, so Orson Welles had extreme difficulty for the rest of his life getting enough money to make other movies. Yet Citizen Kane made more money than any other movie made in 1941, if you count up to the present, because it gets revived more than any other movie. But the bankers who own the studios aren't interested in profit in twenty years, they want profit next June. They want Indiana Jones not Citizen Kane.

In an earlier RAW piece I quoted he mentioned the need for alternative currency models like that proposed by Silvio Gesell to support some the libertarian / anarchist style utopias he was interest in, so this piece in the (UK) Telegraph caught my eye - it seems that Gesell's ideas live on in Germany and Austria and are still getting a small workout.

The rise of the regios dates exactly from the abolition of the D-Mark, replaced in turn by a stateless technocrat currency ever further removed from local life.

A pure coincidence, said Prof Gerhard Rösl, author of the Bundesbank paper. "The assumption that this springs from a general scepticism towards the euro is not valid."

Rather, the movement is a rejection of "capitalist globalism", pushed by idealists fighting to save regional cultures. The currencies are "luxury" scrip that flourish most in areas with the lowest unemployment. They offer users a "prestige gain" in their neighbourhoods, and a glow of good feeling.

School teacher Christian Gelleri launched the Chiemgauer, with the help of pupils, as an experiment in January 2003 at a rate of 1:1 against the euro.

Four years later, it spans two districts and is accepted by 550 shops, firms, and companies, including eight supermarkets and four co-operative banks. It has 40 issuing offices, and usage is expanding by 70pc a year. Monthly turnover is still a miniscule €135,000 (£88,000) - or rather C135,000.

"People have taken to it because it is a way of supporting good causes," said Mr Gelleri.

The Chiemgauer is designed to lose 2pc of its value every quarter, generating a profit for the issuing body as shops claim back the euros. Some 60pc of the profit is used for local charities, sports clubs, kindergartens and such.

Shops accepting the money take a loss of up to 5pc, akin to interchange fees paid when credit cards are used. "Merchants pay the cost, but they go along because they don't want to lose business," said Mr Gelleri.

The idea stems from the century-old writings of Silvio Gesell, a German economist who believed that interest and rent charged on capital is pernicious. He argued that usury aggravated economic downturns because the wealthy began to horde cash.

Austria's Tyrolean community of Wörgl launched a scheme based on his theories, in 1932, reputed to have slashed unemployment at the height of the Depression. It was watched by Keynes and Irving Fisher, who saw a fast-depreciating currency as a possible answer to the 1930s "liquidity trap".

"I came to the idea by studying Keynes and Fisher, but for us it is more a way to build regional strength. We're not enemies of Europe," said Mr Gelleri.

The Wörgl experiment was declared illegal by Austria's central bank when a further 200 other communities launched copycat currencies, threatening the authority of the state. Though article 35 of the Bundesbank's founding law forbids the circulation of "quasi-currencies", the experiments are being treated as a harmless eccentricity.

However, they are a remarkable expression of people power, and a subtle threat to the established order. Would they be sprouting with so much energy if the Germans still had the D-Mark in their pockets? One suspects not.

I'll close with a roundup of comments on Ron Paul's candidacy for US President. The argument in the comments is quite interesting, in light of Mr "Mainstream Libertarian"'s recent appearance in my comment section, declaring that the rise of Blackwater (described by Chris Hedges in one of his pieces on "American Fascists" that I quoted) is exactly what Libertarians want to see - much to my shock. Why a private militia run by a fervent fundamentalist getting fed vast sums of taxpayer money is a "Libertarian" concept boggled my mind - it seems to be a clear example of fascism in my book. If the militia wasn't taxpayer funded that would be a different story - but that's where libertarianism starts to become somewhat anti-democratic in nature and its probably time to draw what the Prometheus Institute people would describe as "pragmatic" boundaries.

Since Lew Rockwell’s public posting about 2 hours ago, political blogs across the Internet have started buzzing about the possibility of a Ron Paul presidential campaign.

First up is Wonkette...

While Democrats and Republicans on the Hill continue their “Yeah but now I’m against it” routine, Texas Congressman Ron Paul doesn’t have to issue any apologies. He was always against the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and he’s running for president.

Paul is a libertarian Republican who constantly enrages the GOP because he actually believes in a small federal government and sound fiscal policies. He’s anti-death penalty, anti-drug laws, anti-police state, anti-Patriot Act and anti-anything that’s not authorized by the Constitution. Texas Dems now love him for his “principled anti-war stance,” while pro-abortion voters don’t need to worry about the obstetrician/gynecologist’s strong pro-life stance — he knows the federal government has no right to get involved in such stuff. And as California just proved, states can figure out universal health care and global-warming rules while the federal government can’t do anything.

In 1988, Paul got the third-most votes after Bush 41 and Dukakis. It was only 0.5%, but still! Plus, Ron Paul writes a great column and goes on the Alex Jones show now and then and freaks out everybody.

Antiwar.com states the following…

The news is good — for once. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the libertarian congressman whose dedication to principle is one of the wonders of the world, is running for the GOP presidential nomination (hat tip: Lew Rockwell).

At last — a Republican who opposes our interventionist foreign policy (consistently and articulately) and who has this to say about the Iraq war. Rep. Paul opposed this rotten war from the very beginning — and, what’s going to be delightful, is that he is not going to be outdone by any Democrat regarding the Iraq issue.

Better yet, this will exacerbate the split in the GOP over the war and give antiwar activists a banner around which to repair during an election season that would otherwise feature the same rogues gallery of warmongers, fence-straddlers, and all-too-familiar faces.

The Liberty Papers adds…

It’s not clear if this is an actual filing by or on behalf of Congressman Paul himself or a move by someone trying to convince him to run. Also unclear is whether Paul would run as a Republican or Libertarian. He probably wouldn’t have a chance, but he’d a great addition to the race.

Chris Hedges also has a followup post called "The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair.

The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker's paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

During the past two years of work on the book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I kept encountering this deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast food restaurants and dollar stores I often got vertigo, forgetting for a moment if I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centers such as Ohio, that resemble the developing world, with boarded up storefronts, dilapidated houses, pot-hole streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an abstraction to many Americans....

In the United States we have turned our backs on the working class, with much of the worst assaults, such as NAFTA and welfare reform, pushed though during President Clinton's Democratic administration. We stand passively and watch an equally pernicious assault on the middle class. Anything that can be put on software, from architecture to engineering to finance, will soon be handed to workers overseas who will be paid a third what their American counterparts receive and who will, like some 45 million Americans, have no access to health insurance or benefits.

There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a steady Weimarization of the American working class. The top one percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about our democracy. As Plutarch reminded us "an imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."

The stories believers such as Learned told me of their lives before they found Christ were heart breaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope. The real world, the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world where all events, news and information were not filtered through this comforting ideological prism, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits, betrayed them.

They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me towards those who challenge this belief system, to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible, was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.

The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.

Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve.

Those who lead the movement give their followers a moral license to direct this rage and yearning for violence against all those who refuse to submit to the movement, from liberals, to "secular humanists," to "nominal Christians," to intellectuals, to gays and lesbians, to Muslims. These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism.

All radical movements need a crisis or a prolonged period of instability to achieve power. And we are not in a period of crisis now. But another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a series of huge environmental disasters or an economic meltdown will hand to these radicals the opening they seek. Manipulating our fear and anxiety, promising to make us safe and secure, giving us the assurance that they can vanquish the forces that mean to do us harm, these radicals, many of whom have achieved powerful positions in the Executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the military, will ask us only to surrender our rights, to pass them the unlimited power they need to battle the forces of darkness.

They will have behind them tens of millions of angry, disenfranchised Americans longing for revenge and yearning for a mythical utopia, Americans who embraced a theology of despair because we offered them nothing else.