State Of The World, 2008  

Bruce Sterling has done his annual "State Of The World" online chat at The Well (yes, I'm way behind on the news) - via Open The Future.

Well, it's an American election year. At the far-away end of it, anyhow.

I don't doubt we'll see a few 'critical changes' in 2008, but I'd be guessing they don't arrive through any power-player's focussed intent. They will be dreaded changes that are predicted, and watched in detail, and impossible to avert.

The political and economic landscape in 2008 is full of spinning, tottering Chinese plates poised on tall pool-cues. Wild-card stuff like currency collapses and international financial panics and loose Pakistani nukes.

I wouldn't have guessed this, but in 2008 it looks like even Al Qaeda has finally lost its dance-beat. They used to kill whole airliners and embassies and dance clubs and skyscrapers full of aliens and unbelievers. They had the world set on its ear.

But if you look at what they're up to lately, they're almost entirely obsessed with killing Sunni Moslems nowadays. They're killing so many Sunni Moslems that all the other parties who used to enthuse so about killing Sunni Moslems are losing interest. Because if Al Qaeda slaughters crowds of Sunni worshippers in Sunni mosques on major Sunni holidays, what can the rest of us do to keep up?

I'm sure that, in the jehadi camps, there's a lot of backpatting this holiday season over getting a Lion of the Resistance to liquidate Benazir Bhutto. Still: wouldn't it have been vastly more effective to assassinate, say, Angela Merkel the female Chancellor of Germany? Or kill Putin, maybe? They used to think so big!

If Angela Merkel had been killed by a suicide bomber the Europeans would be in fullscale antiterror lockdown right now. Whereas destabilizing Pakistan is like.... it's doable, but what gives there? Millions of pious Moslems die in a civil war in the birthplace of the Taliban? And this advances the general cause of piety in what way, exactly?

Pakistan could very easily smash to bloody pieces in 2008. If it does, nobody anywhere is gonna try and stitch Pakistan back together. Pakistan has a bigger population than Russia. It is just too big for any of the other power-players to handle. So if it ignites, it'll burn.

So they'll just blow up the local missile sites (if they can), and then watch in grim disbelief.

Some people still think that there's an "Islamo-fascist tyranny" somewhere that hates our freedoms and can organize Islam-dom into a coherent fascist state... There's just no way. Al Qaeda and the Taliban aren't true "fascists." Fascists can at least make trains run on time. Even Communists were better-organized. The mujihadeen have no organized army and no industrial policy and they don't know where to find any. Because God was supposed to handle all that for them. You're supposed to die nobly in a crowd of unwitting strangers, and then God's supposed to make that all better. That's the big plan.

But when you blow up the china shop, God doesn't reassemble the plates for you. Being faith-based doesn't trump reality. It's pretty good news that Al Qaeda is getting tired and losing its charisma. They've held center stage more than long enough.

I think "we" in the largest sense, planetary civilization, world culture or whatever, we're closer to a consensus idea of futurity than it's been since, say, 1997. It's a green futurity. People don't like it much, but they know it's coming anyway.

Ten years ago, there was a little Belle Epoque era of good feeling there when the "Washington Consensus" held its sway... and the thought among opinion-makers of the time was, you know, let the dot-com Long Boomers run that show. Everybody knew that what they were saying and doing didn't make much sense -- but at least there was plenty of pie there for the Formerly Free World.

Now the Americans have clearly lost the thread... the Americans are really just horribly out of it, they're like some giant fundie Brazil, nobody takes their pronunciamentos seriously or believes a word they say... Whereas the world is much more seriously global now. China and India are real players, they're part of the show and they matter.

Serious-minded people everywhere do know they have to deal with the resource crisis and the climate crisis. Becaus the world-machine's backfiring and puffing smoke. Joe and Jane Sixpack are looking at four-dollar milk and five-dollar gas. It's hurting and it's scary and there's no way out of it but through it.

Everybody's reluctant to budge because they sense, probably correctly, that they have to wade through a torrent of mud, blood sweat and tears. Maybe, then, they emerge into the relatively sunlit uplands of something closer to sustainability.

So: I don't expect too much to happen in 2008: except for that intensified smell of burning as people's feet are held to the fire. "Nothing changes if nothing changes." But if nothing changes, then more and more china is going to flat-out shatter and break.

THEN they'll move. If they see somebody making money at it, they might move pretty fast. ...

Another report on the state of the world in 2008, albeit one focused on green business, is Joel Makower's "State of Green Business 2008" report from GreenBiz.com.

"The state of green business is improving, slowly but surely, as companies both large and small learn the value of integrating environmental thinking into their operations in ways that align with core business strategy and bottom-line goals," said Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com. "Green business has shifted from a movement to a market. But there is much, much more to do."

Makower and his fellow editors at GreenBiz.com compiled a set of indicators measuring various aspects of green business, ranging from paper use and toxic emissions to building energy use and employee commuting. The group then assigned each indicator a symbol to represent progress: a "sinking," symbol means a measure is losing ground; a "swimming" icon indicates progress is being made; and a "treading" symbol shows an indicator holding its own.

In half of the measures — 10 of the 20 indicators — the verdict was "treading," as progress was lacking or be slow, or at least too slow to address the magnitude of environmental challenges. They include pesticide use on U.S. farms, which hasn't changed much since 1999. The number of teleworkers is slowly gaining but there hasn't been much progress in getting employees to abandon their solo commutes to work. While publicly traded companies are more likely to publish corporate responsibility reports, the number of companies reporting totaled only 253 in 2007 — that's less than a 50 percent increase over five years.

There are bright spots, including eight indicators deemed "swimming." Clean technology investments in the U.S., for instance, soared to more than $48 billion in 2006, largely driven by a 132 percent increase in venture capital dollars going toward renewable energy, waste reduction, resource management and other activities that fall within the loosely defined area of clean tech. Related patents shined, too, with U.S. clean-tech patents accounting for nearly half of those issued worldwide.

The explosion of commercial green building projects also is heartening, with a 500 percent increase in the amount of LEED-certified office space between 2005 and 2007. The total amount of paper used in the U.S. has hit a plateau, while at the same time, the economy continues humming. Energy use, measured per dollar of gross national product, is declining, although the rate of improvement has slowed.

Packaging use of aluminum, paper, plastics and steel is making small but steady improvement in efficiency. And renewble energy generation, though increasing, may not grow fast enough to overcome the need to build more fossil fuel-fired power plants.

Two of the indicators were deemed "sinking." One was carbon intensity, measured as carbon dioxide emissions per unit of gross domestic product. Between 2005 and 2006, carbon intensity fell 4.2 percent, which, at first blush, appears encouraging. But it doesn't change the fact that the U.S. leads in both overall greenhouse gas emissions and per-capita emissions, or the need to significantly reduce absolute emissions.

And even though the amount of e-waste being recycled keeps growing, the absolute tonnage of electronics waste entering landfills or being sent overseas is staggering. But with no reporting mandates, federal e-waste laws or single clearinghouse for e-waste recovery data, it is difficult to determine exactly how much unwanted electronics is being recycled in a responsible way.

Another annual event I haven't had time to include in a post is The Edge Question of the year - this year's question: "What have you changed your mind about? Why?". Check the links for a range of interesting answers...

LAURENCE C. SMITH
Professor of Geography, UCLA

[The Impossibility of] Rapid climate change

The year 2007 marked three memorable events in climate science: Release of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR4); a decade of drought in the American West and the arrival of severe drought in the American Southeast; and the disappearance of nearly half of the polar sea-ice floating over the Arctic Ocean. The IPCC report (a three-volume, three-thousand page synthesis of current scientific knowledge written for policymakers) and the American droughts merely hardened my conviction that anthropogenic climate warming is real and just getting going — a view shared, in the case of the IPCC, a few weeks ago by the Nobel Foundation. The sea-ice collapse, however, changed my mind that it will be decades before we see the real impacts of the warming. I now believe they will happen much sooner.

Let's put the 2007 sea-ice year into context. In the 1970's, when NASA first began mapping sea ice from microwave satellites, its annual minimum extent (in September, at summer's end) hovered close to 8 million square kilometers, about the area of the conterminous United States minus Ohio. In September 2007 it dropped abruptly to 4.3 million square kilometers, the area of the conterminous United State minus Ohio and all the other twenty-four states east of the Mississippi, as well as North Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Iowa. Canada's Northwest Passage was freed of ice for the first time in human memory. From Bering Strait where the U.S. and Russia brush lips, open blue water stretched almost to the North Pole.

What makes the 2007 sea-ice collapse so unnerving is that it happened too soon. The ensemble averages of our most sophisticated climate model predictions, put forth in the IPCC AR4 report and various other model intercomparison studies, don't predict a downwards lurch of that magnitude for another fifty years. Even the aggressive models -the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) CCSM3 and the Centre National de Recherches Meteorologiques (CNRM) CM3 simulations, for example — must whittle ice until 2035 or later before the 2007 conditions can be replicated. Put simply, the models are too slow to match reality. Geophysicists, accustomed to non-linearities and hard to impress after a decade of 'unprecedented' events, are stunned by the totter: Apparently, the climate system can move even faster than we thought. This has decidedly recalibrated scientist's attitudes — including my own — to the possibility that even the direst IPCC scenario predictions for the end of this century — 10 to 24 inch higher global sea levels, for example — may be prudish.

What does all this say to us about the future? The first is that rapid climate change — a nonlinearity that occurs when a climate forcing reaches a threshold beyond which little additional forcing is needed to trigger a large impact — is a distinct threat not well captured in our current generation of computer models. This situation will doubtless improve — as the underlying physics of the 2007 ice event and others such as the American Southeast drought are dissected, understood, and codified — but in the meantime, policymakers must work from the IPCC blueprint which seems almost staid after the events of this summer and fall. The second is that it now seems probable that the northern hemisphere will lose its ice lid far sooner than we ever thought possible. Over the past three years experts have shifted from 2050, to 2035, to 2013 as plausible dates for an ice-free Arctic Ocean — estimates at first guided by models then revised by reality.

The broader significance of vanishing sea ice extends far beyond suffering polar bears, new shipping routes, or even development of vast Arctic energy reserves. It is absolutely unequivocal that the disappearance of summer sea ice — regardless of exactly which year it arrives — will profoundly alter the northern hemisphere climate, particularly through amplified winter warming of at least twice the global average rate. Its further impacts on the world's precipitation and pressure systems are under study but are likely significant. Effects both positive and negative, from reduced heating oil consumption to outbreaks of fire and disease, will propagate far southward into the United States, Canada, Russia and Scandinavia. Scientists have expected such things in eventuality — but in 2007 we learned they may already be upon us.

The most heated debate of last week was the battle between the infamous Staniford and the "reversalists", with pretty much everyone one having their say. Jeff Vail has a thoughtful essay at The Oil Drum which moves beyond the ""dismissive and partisan language of 'reversalism'" to look at the core issue of factors affecting centralisation in agriculture in the face of rising energy prices prices.

I'll make my usual point here - assuming energy prices are on a one way trip upwards as a result of peak oil is a big assumption. If we switch to a clean energy economy, energy prices will stabilise and eventually start falling - which will reinforce the economic factor underlying industrial agriculture.

This doesn't imply that what some term the "agrarian anarchist" vision of decentralised and sustainable agriculture is wrong or won't eventuate (as Jeff puts it "There are, after all, reasons why people go on vacation to Tuscany instead of Kansas"), just that the economic basis for it may not exist.

It becomes apparent that resolving the centralization vs. decentralization of agriculture dispute requires balancing these factors—more specifically, balancing these factors at a given cost of energy. I don’t think that it can be reasonably disputed that, at some cost of energy, it is more efficient to centralize agriculture.* As a hypothetical, if energy is free, there is no substantive barrier to total centralization of all agriculture. Likewise, I don’t think it can be reasonably disputed that, at some cost of energy, it is more efficient to decentralize agricultural production. As a hypothetical, if energy is so expensive as to be totally use-prohibitive to all parties (e.g. nothing but human labor is available), then centralization that requires food transportation of a greater distance than a human can walk before the food spoils, or that requires more calories for a human to transport to market than the cargo contains, is infeasible. Obviously, we are faced with the challenge of balancing centralization vs. decentralization for some real cost of energy between free and use-prohibitive.

This analysis also confronts some significant knowledge gaps. Centralized agriculture is currently engaged in practices that are widely considered non-sustainable. Industrial farming practices are rapidly depleting topsoil and rely on non-renewable chemical inputs. Conversely, methods of decentralized agriculture exist that are widely considered fully sustainable—permaculture, Fukuoka method, and John Jeavon’s biointensive method, just to name a few. It may well be possible to adopt industrial-scale methods that are equally sustainable, but the efficiency loss in doing so is unknown. It seems unfair to compare an unsustainable method with a sustainable one, but no data currently exists sufficient to bridge this gap. Another factor to be addressed is the opportunity cost of time spent in decentralized agriculture/horticulture. If there are abundant opportunities to earn high wages relative to food costs—something true in today’s Western economies, but uncertain at best in a future scenario of $300/barrel oil—then the opportunity cost of spending personal time laboring in a garden weighs heavily against decentralized agriculture. However, if there is massive unemployment and it isn’t possible for most to earn enough to buy necessary food due to the embodied cost of energy inputs, then it is more rational to spend time gardening no matter how efficient centralized agriculture is.

Furthermore, it is necessary to consider the sunk cost and subsidies supporting centralized agriculture. ...

Reuters has an update on the first commercial trial of the SkySails system.

The world's first commercial ship powered in part by a giant kite is recording fuel savings of between 10 and 15 percent midway into its maiden voyage across the Atlantic, the shipping company told Reuters on Friday. The 10,000-tonne 'MS Beluga SkySails' left Germany on January 22 for Venezuela and its computer-guided kite system was only fully deployed after it reached the trade winds near the Azores, said Verena Frank, Beluga Shipping's SkySails project manager. The 10 to 15 percent reduction in bunker consumption, which amounts to $1,000 to $1,500 per day savings, is in line with projections made by the shipping company and SkySails.

The SkySail system, which is also designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions, had never before been used on a ship as large. "Everything has worked out as we had planned," Frank told Reuters. "There's still a lot of testing, adjusting and experimenting taking place. The aim is to have the kite operational for about 50 percent of the entire first journey." Once the bugs have been ironed out and the crew's expertise with the 500,000-euro ($745,000) high-tech system improves, fuel savings are projected to be up to 20 percent.

Frank said the kite system had never before been tried under such difficult conditions as found in the mid-Atlantic. They were working on improving the coordination of the system. "We're adjusting, programming, testing, fine-tuning, and working on the stability," wrote Captain Lutz Heldt in a cable to the Beluga home office in Bremen on Friday. Heldt had picked a traditional windjammer route south of the Azores.

As the link hopper is getting full, its time for one of those periodic link dumps :

TreeHugger has a post on the combination of "Peak Oil + Peak Money" leading to "McMansion meltdown" as people who have bought houses on the outer urban fringes find the combination of rising energy prices and rising interest rates too difficult to deal with and walk away from their mortgages and their energy inefficient housing. Kunstler gets some positive press, with the closing line being "James Howard Kunstler predicted this at TED four years ago".

High oil prices have helped Exxon to yet another world record profit - the latest one being over US$40 billion. I guess if the US budget deficit gets too high they can always impose some UK style windfall taxes...

Robert Hirsch of ASPO USA has some comments on the WSJ article on CERA's oil decline study, and significance of decline rates for currently producing fields.

Jeremy Rifkin has an interview with EurActiv pleading for the EU to lead the way towards a "Third Industrial Revolution" to deal with climate change and peak oil. He wants investment in the full gamut of renewables, in energy storage technology and in a EU wide smart grid.

New Scientist has a report on a study that says the US drought is man made - a result of global warming, not natural variation in climate.

The LA Times reports that California is considering a strategy to boost the use of green chemistry.

The LA Times also reports that China is planing to halt rain in Beijing for the Olympics using weather modification techniques.

Technology Review has an article on a company called Nanoptek that is developing a new process which uses sunlight and a nanostructured catalyst to "inexpensively and efficiently generate hydrogen for fuel".

PhysOrg has an article on Screen-printed solar cells - these are manufactured using an organic dye in combination with nanoparticles - due to the small size of the nanoparticles, the modules are semi-transparent, and thus can potentially be for used as a coating on glass as well as other building surfaces.

Planet Ark reports that Indonesia is planning to set up a state owned geothermal power company.

Groovy Green has a post on a company making "ducted wind turbines" for urban environments called Marquiss Wind Power.




The Oil Drum (Europe) has a post on understanding the current energy crisis in South Africa, looking at the current wave of blackouts and anticipated electricity shortages in future.

Following on from the Barton Biggs tale earlier in the week, The Times has a look at wealthy Londoners (and other Europeans) cashing up and buying farmland in the UK (as Jim Rogers put it recently - things might be gloomy for Wall Street, but farmers are about to get rich).

After Gutenberg has a post on porous pavements, which allow water to drain through into the soil below, rather than running off into storm water drains. Somewhat disconcertingly, JCWinnie has now labelled me the "Tantric Kangaroo Sausage". I'm thankful I'm too dense to understand what this means.

This week's pick of sustainable buildings from Inhabitat is some anti-smog architecture proposed for Paris.



Past Peak has a nice piece from Wendell Berry's essay "The Idea of a Local Economy".

Celsias has bid farewell to the now extinct Panamanian Golden Frog.



AutoBlogGreen has some interesting videos - one on storing energy in magnetic fields, the other of motors powered by sound (via Free Energy News).

Simon Jenkins at The Guardian has a look at the "war on terror" (cough), noting "From the law courts of America to the mosques of west London and the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the war on terror has been lethally and predictably counter-productive. It embodies the new stupidity in international affairs. ... It is leaders, not bombers, who have the power to balk the advance of freedom. Already those leaders have used the war on terror to introduce the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay and a $1.5 trillion war in Iraq. In Pakistan they have used it as an excuse for emergency rule, the imprisonment of senior judges, and the provocation of unprecedented insurgency in the north-west frontier territories. In Britain leaders have used the war as an excuse for 42-day detention without trial, the world's most intrusive surveillance state, and not one but two contested military occupations of foreign soil.".

Boing Boing has a rogue copy of a leaked UK gov't document that "reveals a plan to "coerce" Brits into a national ID register".

Privacy International has issued its annual report on leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World. "Leading the way in systematic surveillence are Russia, China, The US and the UK. What would Orwell say ?

Grist reports that the CIA is going green - building a new campus that is LEED certified and features a green roof, preferred parking for carpoolers, energy-efficient equipment, waterless urinals, and more.

There has been a spate of undersea telecoms cable cuttings in the Mediterranean, leaving the middle east and India with reduced internet access. There is a rumour on reddit that Iran has been cut off completely - however it seems to be untrue. Cryptogon thinks this is all related to the opening of the Iranian oil bourse.