A Mechanised Mordor  

Dan at The Daily Reckoning gets the award for best phrase today, with his description of the tar sands mines in Alberta as a "mechanised Mordor".

We begin today's Daily Reckoning about 209 kilometres south-east of New Orleans, at lease block 807 of the outer continental shelf, in the Gulf of Mexico. If you teleported there right now from rainy Melbourne you'd find yourself on top of the Mississippi Canyon formation. But for such a foreign and unlikely place to find an oil platform, you might as well call it Mars.

--Mars is the name of the tension leg oil platform built by Shell in 1989 at just this spot on the earth to produce an estimated 700 million barrels of oil and oil equivalent. From head to toe the platform is 990 metres high-nearly three times the height of Melbourne's Eureka tower. What's more, Mars produces oil drilled at a depth of nearly 900 metres below the waves of the Gulf.

--Gee. That is a lot of trouble to go to for tank of petrol, isn't it?

--This is what we've come to in this third great wave of industrialisation. Oil is the chief source of liquid and transportation fuels. You drill for oil where you can find it, even if it's hundreds of miles offshore and hundreds of metres below the surface of the ocean. If there were an easy substitute for oil that cost less to find and produce and delivered the same amount of useful, portable energy we'd be using it, wouldn't we?

--Shell is hungry for new oil reserves to add to its balance sheet. Kicked out of several major projects in Russia, it's come back to Australia eyeing Woodside (WPL:ASX). What's different between now and 2001 when Peter Costello nixed Shell's acquisition of Woodside? Well, Shell might be willing to pay more. And Shell - along with nearly every other oil major - is going to develop projects that just a few years ago were uneconomic at lower oil prices.

--And that's really the question at the heart of today's Daily Reckoning. What projects are going to be "economic" in the energy and resources sector for the next ten years? The answer to that question depends on your forecasts for energy and metals prices. That's a function of demand (from China and India) and supply (which includes issues like political risk and peak oil production.) ...

--Now that we have actually typed such vaguely new-era sounding stuff, it wouldn't surprise is if global financial markets collapse next week when private equity firm Blackstone goes public in New York. That's the danger of getting caught up in any new era. Once even the hard core skeptics accept the new gospel - and the lot here at the Old Hat Factory are pretty skeptical - the top must surely be in.

--Still, we think it's a scarcity issue as much as it is a demand issue. All the low hanging fruit in the energy and raw materials sectors has been picked in the last 100 years. High grade ore bodies are being exhausted faster than they can be found, just as the White Elephant oil fields face declining production, while no new ones are being discovered at all.

--You can still find oil, energy, and raw materials. But you have to take risks to get it. Risks that involve huge sums of money. Some of those risks are political, like doing business with African kleptocracies. Some are physical, like drilling for oil offshore. And then there are your normal business risks - that prices will fall and all your assumptions based on a higher price turn out to be worthless.

--Take the example of Canada's tar sands. Turning heavy bitumen into usable liquid fuel requires huge injections of energy and water, not to mention labour and capital. Yet much of Alberta now resembles a mechanised-Mordor, as a project that was once un-economic makes a little more sense in the global energy environment.

--The world will go on looking for energy in unlikely and unwelcoming places because it needs it. And it will also look to substitutes. ... At one end of the spectrum, we'll continue to look at alternative and renewable energies. These things - wind, solar, fuel cells - will never fully replace hydrocarbons. But a portfolio of energy solutions will make their way into your life. ...

The Rocky Mountain Institute has an interview with founder Amory Lovins.

What impact has RMI had over the past 25 years?

More than we often realize or dared to hope. We’ve created much of the basic intellectual capital — in technology, policy, and business strategy — that underpins natural capitalism (www.naturalcapitalism.org), the energy and water efficiency revolutions, green real-estate development, renewable energy, Factor Ten engineering (www.10xe.org), and profitable solutions to the oil (www.oilendgame.com), climate, and nuclear proliferation problems. We’ve been a key driver in saving over half the oil and natural gas, a sixth of the electricity, and two-thirds of the water that the U.S. now uses per dollar of GDP (vs. 1975), and similarly in dozens of nations.

Our syntheses of new approaches to energy, cars, hydrogen, security, and several other fields are starting to be adopted. Our reframings — end-use/least-cost, the right size for the job, resilience — now inform many disciplines.

Hundreds of our alumni/ae are making important contributions. And thousands of people I meet all over the world say we’ve inspired them to rekindle hope and commit to action.

What are the major environmental challenges that RMI is best equipped to address?

RMI isn’t an environmental group, but creating abundance by design has profound environmental benefits. Probably 90 percent of the problems that U.S. EPA is supposed to worry about go away if energy, farming, and forestry are done right.

Just the advanced energy efficiency techniques we’ve developed can profitably stabilize the earth’s climate; so can the competitive “micropower” and other supply techniques we’ve fostered. Just our Hypercar®, vehicle-to-grid, and hydrogen-transition concepts can profitably resolve close to two-thirds of the climate problem. And from conventional air and water pollution to coal-stripping, from global poverty to geopolitical instability, many of the world’s toughest puzzles are unlocked by our versatile energy “master keys.” ...

What do you see as the best strategy RMI can undertake to ensure that its ideas go to scale in the market?

Hypercar RevolutionSo far we’ve implemented our efficiency concepts mainly by helping early private-sector adopters succeed so conspicuously that their rivals are forced by competitive pressure to follow suit or lose share. We’ve begun to use the “demand pull” of huge organizations like Wal-Mart and News Corporation to change wider market behavior. We’ve begun to get better at injecting new business models into troubled industries at critical moments, to practice institutional acupuncture, and to inform the enormously powerful private capital market. But we’re always seeking more and better trimtabs.

Our biggest puzzle is how to make natural capitalism (www.naturalcapitalism.org) into a beneficial social virus that propagates itself exponentially with network mathematics, rather than our having to introduce it to one company at a time, which works well but isn’t fast enough. ...

What’s your wildest project so far?

Kanzi, Iowa Primate Learning SanctuaryHelping design a new house for some much higher primates — talking bonobos and signing orangutans — with them on the team, because you can ask them what they want and they tell you (See: Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary, www.IowaGreatApes.org). Interspecies design is quite a trip (see RMI Solutions, Summer 2003). I’m happy to report there is intelligent life on earth. Sorry it’s not us, but the search continues, and is starting to turn up some promising specimens…some of them brachiating around our passive-solar banana farm in the Rockies!

John Stauber at PR Watch has an interview with Paul Hawken.

My first introduction to author Paul Hawken's work was his 1994 book The Ecology of Commerce. It is essential reading for anyone grappling with issues surrounding capitalism, social justice and ecological sustainability. Hawken is, among his plethora of accomplishments, a highly successful businessman, but The Ecology of Commerce pulled few punches in its criticism of even those companies truly trying to set and reach a higher standard of business social responsibility.

I met Paul in person the first time in early 1999 over dinner in his hometown of Berkeley, California, some months before the now-legendary "battle of Seattle" protest, a world-changing event that catalyzed his thinking and eventually led to his newest book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.

The November 30, 1999, anti-corporate protests at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) became a global media moment, a highly visible but inaccurately reported coming out party for the movement Hawken documents and touts in Blessed Unrest.

"More than seven hundred groups, and between forty thousand and sixty thousand individuals, took part in protests against WTO's Third Ministerial in Seattle, constituting one of the most disruptive demonstrations in modern history and, at that time, the most prominent expression of a global citizens' movement resisting what protesters saw as a corporate-driven trade agreement. The demonstrators and activists who took part were not against trade per se. ... Their frustration arose because one side held most of the cards; that side comprised heads of corporations, trade associations, government ministries, most media, stockholders and WTO. From the point of view of those on the streets, WTO was trying to put the finishing touches on a financial autobahn that would transfer income to a small proportion of the population in wealthy nations under the guise of trade liberalization."

WTO Seattle: WTO protests in Seattle, 1999. Courtesy of Portland IndyMedia.WTO Seattle: WTO protests in Seattle, 1999. Courtesy of Portland IndyMedia.Hawken penned an insightful and widely read first-hand account of the Seattle protest, an event typically depicted by a surprised and shocked mainstream media as a violent anarchist uprising right out of a bad Hollywood movie. "Most accounts of the Seattle demonstrations refer to them as 'riots,' even though they were 99.9 percent nonviolent," Hawken writes in Blessed Unrest. He relates how a Newsweek reporter in Seattle asked him who the leaders were of this uprising. He named names -- Vandana Shiva, Jerry Mander, Lori Wallach, Maude Barlow -- but was interrupted by the reporter who said "Stop, stop, I can't use these names in my article because Americans have never heard of them." Instead of the many real leaders of the Seattle protests, Newsweek placed on its cover Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, although of course Kaczynski had absolutely nothing to do with Seattle's protests, but he epitomized the corporate media's defaming image of how they chose to portray the event and the movement behind it.

The WTO protests sparked Paul Hawken's investigation to better understand the global movement he is part of, its size and depth, its leadership, its goals, and its potential for birthing fundamental political, social, economic and environmental changes to remedy the intertwined crises of social injustice and ecological collapse. His best estimate is that there exist many more than one million organizations worldwide in this movement that "has no name." Blessed Unrest is his "exploration of this movement -- its participants, its aims and its ideals." Through his own non-profit organization the Natural Capital Institute, he has launched an ambitious new website at www.WiserEarth.org to catalog the movement, give it visibility, and to better enable groups to find each other and work together online. ...

STAUBER: Twelve years ago when I was writing Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, I quoted your book The Ecology of Commerce. You criticized the fundamental structural problems of business and you wrote, "Rather than a management problem, we have a design problem that runs through all business."

It struck me reading Blessed Unrest that you do not address in it the issue of replacing the business corporation as the dominant engine of economic activity, with new forms of economic structure that can be more accountable to human needs, human rights and ecological sustainability.

Business corporations are structurally incapable of meeting human and ecological needs, and the largest corporations dominate global politics. Isn't the movement's meta-challenge to bring about democratic structural change in both the economic and political spheres, to make business and government accountable to people and the planet?

HAWKEN: Yes! Absolutely! There is a pervasive subtext to most of the issues NGOs focus on: the abrogation of rights, the damage to place, and the corruption of political process by business. I didn’t address the idea of replacing the corporation because the book was about civil society. It is about the largest movement in the world. It is not about what I think the movement should do nor is it about what I think we should do about corporate charters. My record is pretty clear on this in previous writings. I was being more an anthropologist, trying to figure out where this movement came from and how it works.

STAUBER: Thomas Friedman uses and abuses the term "economic democracy" to describe the corporate globalization he promotes. I would like to rescue and revitalize "democracy" and make it meaningful. Do you think that "democracy” is a common theme in the movement for ecological and social justice, and how do you see the movement's relationship with democracy?

HAWKEN: My sense is that the word and concept of democracy has lost much of its meaning. We have these winner-takes-all slugfests in the US where there are truly no ethical or moral limits and have the audacity to call it democracy because there were voting machines. Our democracy is corrupt from the top down and I think this movement is forming from the bottom up to correct the lack of process and governing principles that inform democratic movements. Although most of the media thinks this unnamed movement is about protest, my guess is that more than 98% of it is about solutions, and these are usually about solutions to problems in regions or communities. To achieve this requires the creation of what I call handmade democracies, processes that are not win-lose, and it requires a quality of interaction, respect, and listening that is now lost in US politics.

STAUBER: On pages 64-65 of Blessed Unrest you write about the PR flack E. Bruce Harrison, whose attacks on Rachel Carson in the early 1960s on behalf of the chemical industry gave rise to greenwashing and the tactic of coopting of groups like Environmental Defense to partner with polluters. Given your examination of greenwashing, corporate PR, and front groups, I was surprised that no where in Blessed Unrest do you analyze the shortcomings and contradictions of these Big Green Groups that raise and spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars annually, pay their executives six-figure salaries, partner with corporations, place corporate executives on their boards, and have no meaningful accountability to anyone except a small elite group of funders. You lump these groups with the hundreds of thousands of smaller grassroots groups. Why did you not try to better differentiate groups that are under-funded, grassroots and voluntary, from groups that are essentially large, sophisticated non-profit corporations that, while staffed by well-meaning people, often undermine and thwart fundamental change?

HAWKEN: I don’t believe I am lumping. I am describing a movement that is more complex and diverse than any prior social movement. Its strength and resiliency derives from this complexity. I understand your concerns, but I was describing something, not evaluating groups in order to announce to the world which ones I think are good and which are bad. I made it clear that some of the organizations that arose from what I attribute to George Perkins Marsh’s influence are wealthy and very establishment oriented, and those that are Emersonian/Thoreauvian in origin tend to be smaller and under-resourced.

We tend to be uncomfortable with contradictions, we want the world to be the way we want it be, and are not happy when it veers. But the world is never the way one person wants it to be. That would be hell. That is why I included Barry Lopez’s quote in the beginning: "One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light." I do not like where we are, but I believe in my heart that we will have to figure this out together, and that we will not get out of the situation we are in by throwing each other overboard.

STAUBER: You often make the point that the movement is "leaderless" in terms of a King or Gandhi type leader. Yet obviously some form of leadership and accountability exists and better leadership and coordination are necessary if the movement is going to prevail, as you believe it will. Could you elaborate on this issue of leadership in the movement, and how more leadership might emerge that can begin to better coordinate, synergize, and cross pollinate within the movement, and make the parts more aware of the whole?

HAWKEN: My point is that it does not have a charismatic leader in the traditional sense, that there is no one person or group of persons who speak for it, and thus it can be overlooked by the media that thrives on that kind of centrality. I believe there are thousands and thousands of leaders, stunning in their qualities, courage, and faithfulness to principle. I agree with the sense of your question, that it is time to link and connect up in more powerful ways. The movement is atomized because that is how it came into being. It now has the communication and technological tools to work far more closely and effectively.

TreeHugger has a post on Google Teaming Up With °Climate Group for Carbon Offsets.

Boy, howdy, Google’s Greening is sure getting up a head of steam. Their endeavours are coming thick and fast these days. In just the past few weeks alone, we’ve reported on CAD, servers and cars. Now we learn they’ve teamed up with the °Climate Group to help the company reach its target of being carbon neutral by 2008. “Innovation goes to the heart of what Google does,” said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and Chief Executive of Google. “By investing in new technologies and by working in partnership with others, we can make a meaningful contribution to the environment. This is just a start. We are actively looking for more opportunities to help tackle climate change.” Beyond that sound bite thingy that is obligatory in any self respecting press release, it seems that the Climate Group will find credible carbon offset schemes for Google to invest in, to cover any shortfall that their internal energy efficiency and 50 MWs of renewable energy programs don’t mitigate against

The ABC has an interview with Roger Bezdek (co-author of the Hirsch Report) on the "economic threat of peak oil".

ALI MOORE: Well, as we said earlier, the price of oil reached a 10 month high yesterday making a debate about the realities of peak oil timely. Peak oil is when the world's oil production literally peaks before going into terminal decline with dramatic ramifications for global economy. Just when that time will come is the subject of intense debate, though the issue receives far less coverage than the related focus on climate change. One man who's urging global action is Dr Roger Bezdek, president of the Washington-based research firm Management Information Systems. He's written two reports for the US Department of Energy on how to mitigate the possible effects of peak oil and he's spending the next two weeks in Australia talking to Government and industry leaders. He joined me from our Canberra studios earlier this evening.

ALI MOORE: Peak oil is a theory first talked about in the 1950s. Are we there yet?

DR ROGER BEZDEK: We're getting - we're probably getting close. As far as the experts can tell, it will probably occur within the next 10 or 12 years, probably sooner rather than later. However the point is that the implications are so severe that even if it's as long as 15 or 20 years away, it's almost too late to take many of the measures that are required to deal with it.

ALI MOORE: That said, there have long been predictions, haven't there, of the imminent depletion of oil supplies. It was said it would happen in the '70s and it didn't. The man who came up with the peak oil theory said it would happen in 1995, and it didn't. US Department of Energy says we won't be there even by 2030.

What makes you right?

DR ROGER BEZDEK: You are correct, for the past 150 years there have been many false predictions of the world running out of oil or running short of oil or peaking oil. Some of the predictions have been correct, for example, King Hubbard, in 1957, predicted that US oil production would peak about 1970. It actually peaked in 1971. The problem is now that we've had 50, 60, 70 years of exploration of - the entire earth, the entire world, has been explored for oil. For the past 25 years the world has been consuming much more oil than it has been finding and the ratio is getting worse rather than better. For example, last year the world discovered about 6 billion barrels of oil and consumed about 28 billion. This can only go on for so long and is why I'm relatively pessimistic that we'll see world oil peaking within about the next decade or so.

ALI MOORE: So you don't see or believe the argument that the greater the technology, the greater the technological development, the more likely that not only will we find more, but previously impossible wells will become viable?

DR ROGER BEZDEK: There's no doubt that technology will assist us and we'll find more and more oil. The problem is that the world is already consuming, producing about 87 million barrels a day of oil. Projections are the world will need, by 2030, 120 million barrels a day. The new giant fields simply aren't out there and most of the world's oil-producing regions have already peaked - are in decline, declining at the rate of 2 or 3 or 4 per cent a year. Right there it tells you you have to discover at least 2 or 3 million barrel a day every year, just to stay even. And we can't stay even, the world requires 2 or 3 per cent more oil per year. It's just an unsustainable trend.

ALI MOORE: Even with the focus on climate change and the impetus that's giving to finding alternatives and I guess also to making alternatives more competitive?

DR ROGER BEZDEK: Well, climate change is indeed a very serious problem and I would say that climate change and oil peaks are the two most serious, intractable long term problems that the world faces. Many of the problems with climate change are contrary to what is required for solving the peak oil problem. For example, one of the solutions or partial solutions to peak oil is ramping up production of colder liquid fuels which happen to produce a lot of greenhouse gases. So if you're trying to solve one problem independently of the other you can't do it, they have to be viewed and solved in tandem.

ALI MOORE: So how do we mitigate this threat?

DR ROGER BEZDEK: The mitigation of peak oil is required on both the demand side and the supply side. On the demand side we have to make the world stock of vehicles much more fuel-efficient as soon as possible. We also have to introduce policies and incentives that will make the world's population less dependent upon driving vehicles and automobiles. Increased use of mass transit, rail system, smart growth, what have you. On the supply side, we have to pursue all of the supply options that are out there for liquid fuels, including oil shale, oil sands, colder liquids, renewable technologies, biomass, bio-diesel, electrical vehicle, plug-in electrical vehicles, et cetera. So a massive effort is required both for the supply side and the demand side to address the problem. ...

Popular Science has a look at biodiesel from algae - the "Greenest Green Fuel ". Assuming it turns out to be practical of course...

Algae seems a strange contender for the mantle of World’s Next Great Fuel, but the green goop has several qualities in its favor. Algae, made up of simple aquatic organisms that capture light energy through photosynthesis, produces vegetable oil. Vegetable oil, in turn, can be transformed into biodiesel, which can be used to power just about any diesel engine. (There are currently 13 million of them on American roads, a number that’s expected to jump over the next decade.)

Algae has some important advantages over other oil-producing crops, like canola and soybeans. It can be grown in almost any enclosed space, it multiplies like gangbusters, and it requires very few inputs to flourish—mainly just sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. “Because algae has a high surface-area-to-volume ratio, it can absorb nutrients very quickly,” Sears says. “Its small size is what makes it mighty.”

The proof is in the numbers. About 140 billion gallons of biodiesel would be needed every year to replace all petroleum-based transportation fuel in the U.S. It would take nearly three billion acres of fertile land to produce that amount with soybeans, and more than one billion acres to produce it with canola. Unfortunately, there are only 434 million acres of cropland in the entire country, and we probably want to reserve some of that to grow food. But because of its ability to propagate almost virally in a small space, algae could do the job in just 95 million acres of land. What’s more, it doesn’t need fertile soil to thrive. It grows in ponds, bags or tanks that can be just as easily set up in the desert—or next to a carbon-dioxide-spewing power plant—as in the country’s breadbasket.

Sears claims that these efficiencies will allow Solix Biofuels, the company he founded, to create algae-based biodiesel that costs about the same as gasoline. But like any start-up trying to carve a niche in the post-oil age, Solix must struggle for answers before it can sell a thing: Which species of algae will produce the most oil? What’s the best way to grow it? And not least, how do you extract the oil from the algae once it’s grown? The research and debate at Solix is so fierce that it has already claimed one casualty—my guide, Jim Sears. ...

Alex Steffen at WorldChanging has a post called "Limits and Brilliance", considering Charlie Stross' recent argument that settling the solar system is just an unattainable fantasy (not the sort of thing you normally hear from a science fiction writer).

Of course, the dead with whom we are speaking when we engage in this nostalgic futurism are the dead visions of an earlier age, and they compel us so strongly precisely because our own visions elude us, offering as yet only terrifying glimpses of a ruined planet. When we look ahead, the skies darken, and we see not aluminum cities of flying cars, but a "global Somalia."

No wonder, then, that we cling like a monkey with a wire-brush mama to the idea of a future in which engineering conquers the human condition, where we can leave off serious worrying about the planet until the godlike AIs get here, and in which, in any case, we can always jump ship and scuttle off to another planet if things get too hot.

Unfortunately, wishing doesn't make it so. Indeed, more and more of our best futurists, science fiction writers and big thinkers are trying to get us to dump our threadbare inherited tomorrows into the recycler, if only so we can start to think seriously about the real challenges we face today. A great example is Charlie Stross' brilliant post The High Frontier, Redux, in which he eviscerates the whole idea of space colonization:

Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants by disease has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive.

Here's a handy metaphor: let's approximate one astronomical unit — the distance between the Earth and the sun, roughly 150 million kilometres, or 600 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon — to one centimetre. Got that? 1AU = 1cm. (You may want to get hold of a ruler to follow through with this one.)

The solar system is conveniently small. Neptune, the outermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at a distance of almost exactly 30AU, or 30 centimetres — one foot (in imperial units). Giant Jupiter is 5.46 AU out from the sun, almost exactly two inches (in old money).

We've sent space probes to Jupiter; they take two and a half years to get there if we send them on a straight Hohmann transfer orbit, but we can get there a bit faster using some fancy orbital mechanics...

The Kuiper belt, domain of icy wandering dwarf planets like Pluto and Eris, extends perhaps another 30AU, before merging into the much more tenuous Hills cloud and Oort cloud, domain of loosely coupled long-period comets.

Now for the first scale shock: using our handy metaphor the Kuiper belt is perhaps a metre in diameter. The Oort cloud, in contrast, is as much as 50,000 AU in radius — its outer edge lies half a kilometre away.

Got that? Our planetary solar system is 30 centimetres, roughly a foot, in radius. But to get to the edge of the Oort cloud, you have to go half a kilometre, roughly a third of a mile.

Next on our tour is Proxima Centauri, our nearest star. ...But Proxima Centauri is a poor choice, if we're looking for habitable real estate. While exoplanets are apparently common as muck, terrestrial planets are harder to find; Gliese 581c, the first such to be detected (and it looks like a pretty weird one, at that), is roughly 20.4 light years away, or using our metaphor, about ten miles.

Try to get a handle on this: it takes us 2-5 years to travel two inches. But the proponents of interstellar travel are talking about journeys of ten miles.

Charlie goes on to quote Ally #1 Bruce Sterling's comments on space colonization:

I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.

To which Charlie responds, "Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter — then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!"

Space ain't the final frontier. The physical frontier is closed -- as Norman Mailer puts it "shut, damn shut, shut like a boulder on a rabbit burrow" -- and we live now, and probably forever (at least in culturally meaningful terms) in a world of physical limits. And despite promises of medical immortality, it looks like we may not live forever after all, while the smart robots don't seem to be coming to save us.

Some see, in the loss of this Machine Age dream of the conquest of nature and all natural limits, the loss of possibility. That seems silly to me: the possible still lies stretched out all before us. I believe, in the core of my being, that H.G. Wells was right when he said ""All the past is but the beginning of the beginning: all that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening" If we survive this crisis, humanity has ahead of it vast seas of time to create and grow and deepen. We may even one day find the technological equivalent of the alchemist's stone, and bend the physical stuff of the universe to our purposes (hopefully without destroying ourselves in the process) -- but in the meantime, we're at home on Earth and staying here, and all good work needs to respect the limitations a single planet places upon our endeavors.

There is still plenty of room for heroic ingenuity. Just because we disdain the possibility of magical, consequence-free technofixes doesn't mean we don't admire and seek good tools (in fact, quite the opposite, if we're sensible -- realizing that the task is much harder than thought by the technofixers, we realize we'll need every tool we can get our hands on). Similarly, recognizing that space colonization is no answer to our planetary problems doesn't mean that we don't want to explore space, and learn as much about our planet and its surroundings as possible (the whole Greens in Space argument). Indeed, with the explosion of private space tourism efforts, we need to begin thinking seriously about space law. A sustainable civilization will be even more technologically advanced than our own, and remarkably more sophisticated in its thinking about science, technology and progress.

And that's just the point: change has accelerated, just not in the direction our grandparents and great-grandparents expected. We still need to think ahead. Learning to see the shortcomings in these antique tomorrows we're still dragging around with us may make us more intelligent creators of new visions. If we can let go of the way the past saw the future, we may be able to think anew about what is to come.

Links:

ABC - Desalination plant ad campaign vital, says Bracks. Victorian water prices to double in 5 years. Why not implement water recycling and further encourage water tanks everywhere instead of adding to the global warming feedback loops ?
TreeHugger - Australia to Build Huge Desalination Plant
Peak Oil Premonitions - Yahoo Finance: The Railroad Industry-Warren Buffet's Latest Big Bet. You don't get as rich as Warren is by being a fool. Railroads are the next most energy efficient form of transport after ships.
Smart Grid News - Why Interoperable Grid Software Will Pay for Itself
Forbes - Congress Wants To Cut Your Electric Bill. By encouraging smart metering and demand response.
EnergyPulse - The Utility Industry's Approach to Global Climate Change. A set of carbon stabilisation wedges proposed by the US utility industry.
The Oil Drum - The Behavioral Aspects of Peak Oil: Basic Contingencies
Grist - We Can't Bear to Look - U.S. Senate squares off on ambitious energy bill
Grist - U.S. EPA challenges California company's plankton-seeding plan. Trying to sink Planktos - Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution: "It's far-fetched to claim you help ocean ecosystems by disturbing them."
Joel Makower - 'Climate Counts' Reveals Which Companies Are Walking the Walk
BBC - Vertical farming in the big Apple. While I'm a fan of green roofs, I've never understood the "vertical farm" concept - how do the plants get sufficient sunlight to grow properly ? A 30 story building wouldn't seem likely to get anywhere near as much sun as the same area of flat farmland.
Futurismic - The Fabbing Revolution Is Just Around the Corner
GreenCycles - Man violently assaulted and tased by police at Minneapolis airport for leaving by bicycle. Broke no laws.
TreeHugger - China Paves Road To Mount Everest
Past Peak - Rudy And The Iraq Study Group
The Tyee - The Plan to Disappear Canada. All your oil, gas and water are belong to us.