Idea first floated at the TEDxOilSpill conference by Francis Belland of the X Prize Foundation and David Gallo of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute becomes real.

Since the BP gusher started spewing millions of gallons of crude oil and methane into the Gulf of Mexico more that three months ago, there have other high profile spills, including one of China’s largest, near the city of Dalian, that created a 170 mile slick. Closer to my home in Chicago, a pipeline break released over 800,000 gallons into western Michigan’s Kalamazoo river, which flows into Lake Michigan.

Last year, Australia took a one-two punch, first with a tanker spill that fouled 40 miles of Queensland’s coast, then an oil rig blow-out eerily similar to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In Nigeria, oil spills have become such an every day nightmare – an estimated 7,000 between 1970 and 2000 - that the tally is measured in units of “Exxon Valdez” (over 50 and still counting).

Clearly, if you drill, it will spill. Although the X Prize Foundation’s Oil Clean-up Challenge was developed in response to the mess in the Gulf, its importance goes far beyond our local oily waters. “The oil industry has focused on,”How do you drill deeper, further, more efficiently. Little money has actually been spent so far on “How do you clean it up properly?’, ” notes Peter Diamandis,  X Prize CEO.

With $1.4 million in incentive prizes provided by the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Challenge is designed to wrap up next summer, with demonstrations of the promising technologies at the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility (OHMSETT) in Leonardo, New Jersey.

RELATED READING:

“Introducing the Oil Clean-up Challenge,” by Wendy Schmidt, Huffington Post

“TEDxOilSpill: Surface Slicks, Deep Water Despair, Galaxies of Oil Platforms and Why We Really, Truly, Don’t Need Oil” by J.A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews Editor’s Blog

What happens when the future comes early? When does record-breaking weather segue from unfortunate inconvenience to an inconvenient truth?

Trailer from Al Gore's documentary on climate change

When…

• China reports massive floods affecting 75% of its provinces? The tally of dead and missing now tops 1,000, with the devastation said to affect 110 million people. 645,000 homes have been destroyed. The economic hit is estimated to at $21 billion – and rising. Or…

• Russia has a drought like it hasn’t seen in 130 years? The country’s breadbasket is toast: 20% of the wheat crop is lost at a financial cost that could easily exceed $1 billion.  Meanwhile, lack of air conditioning and love of liquor has led to thousands of “swimming while drunk” deaths. Or…

• Argentina and Uruguay shiver in below freezing temperatures? Hypothermia in the streets of Buenos Aires and snow reported in seaside resort town. Or…

• the Rio Grande actually looks like a big raging river? Some sections along the U.S. / Mexican border have risen 17 feet and more above flood stage, cutting off clean water supplies, affecting tens of thousands of people, destroying thousands of homes and triggering mass evacuations. Or…

• NOAA says 2010 is on track to becoming the hottest year on record? Earth has been on a hot streak for the last 304 months (a little over 25 years), with the average monthly global temperatures exceeding than the average for entire 2oth century. This past June was the hottest on record.

“Warmer than average global temperatures have become the new normal,” says Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which tracks these numbers. “The global temperature has increased more than 1 degree Fahrenheit [0.7 degree C] since 1900 and the rate of warming since the late 1970s has been about three times greater than the century-scale trend.”…

…”Frankly, I was expecting that we’d see large temperature increases later this century with higher greenhouse gas levels and global warming,” Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, who headed up the research, said in a prepared statement. “I did not expect to see anything this large within the next three decades.”

Was last Spring’s  Nashville flood, which took the region by surprise after 13 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, a local catastrophe or part of much larger trend? What about the 8 inch deluge than drowned Milwaukee last week? Or the second tornado ever to hit the Bronx?

WEATHER HAPPENS / CLIMATES CHANGE

If man-made greenhouse gases are behind the deadly weather, that’s good news: We can still do something about it. But as a new study of historic droughts in Asia shows, the ramifications of disturbed weather patterns can be devastating, no matter what the cause.

Scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory spent 15 years collecting samples from more than 300 sites across Asia to create an atlas of tree ring data for monsoon weather patterns. The correlations between major droughts and political unrest are striking, if not completely surprising. From the collapse of the Khmer civilization to the demise of the Ming Dynasty and the French Revolution, nothing topples a government faster than a desperate hungry mob.

Perhaps the worst drought, the scientists found, was the Victorian-era “Great Drought” of 1876-1878. The effects were felt across the tropics; by some estimates, resulting famines killed up to 30 million people. According to the tree-ring evidence, the effects were especially acute in India, but extended as far away as China and present-day Indonesia. Colonial-era policies left regional societies ill-equipped to deal with the drought’s consequences, as historian Mike Davis details in his book Late Victorian Holocausts. Famine and cholera outbreaks at this time in colonial Vietnam fueled a peasant revolt against the French.

The political opposition to the now crippled U.S. Climate Bill should be quaking in their boots. Given the staggering amount of scientific evidence linking human-generated greenhouse gas emissions to global warming and climate change, they will bear the blame for blocking action when it could have made a difference. (According to a new survey published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97% of scientists say climate change “very likely” has a man-made component.)

A BOUNTY OF BLIGHTS: CAUSE & EFFECT OR COINCIDENCE?

The cruelty of blight is uniquely insidious. Hopes, dreams and futures are destroyed along with crops. A blight is promise snatched away. In a matter of weeks, sometimes days, sometime hours, months of labor is laid to waste and investment is turned to debt.

It doesn’t take much: just a few invisible spores carried by the wind to a host plant. Once a botanical beach-head is established, blights – which thrive in the monocultures of modern agriculture – quickly become “community diseases,” spreading from plant to plant, field to field, region to region, painting once verdant fields black with the brush of death.

The first major victory in the The Green Revolution was genetic lab-tweak that made wheat impervious to a blight called stem rust, while also increasing yields – a rare and remarkable “two-fer” benefit. So significant was this breakthrough, plant biologist Norman Borlaug was award the Nobel Prize for it. The dream of eradicating hunger seemed within reach. Yet a little over a half-century later, the solution – crop protection provided by a single gene – has become part of the problem.

In 1999, a strain of rust was discovered in a wheat field in Uganda that had evolved past the genetic barrier. Dubbed “Ug99,” it has since splintered off into several strains or “races,” some of which are impervious to more recently developed multi-gene defenses. In a little over a decade, stem rust has traveled 5,000 miles and now threatens grain production in Africa and Asia, and indirectly threatens production everywhere else. From the pathogen’s perspective, all wheat has become more or less alike as diversity has been systematically bred away.

Wheat is the primary source of calories for millions of people worldwide, and accounts for around 30 percent of global grain production and 44 percent of cereals used as food. Globally, wheat provides nearly 55 percent of the carbohydrates and 20 percent of the food calories we consume every day.

- Dr. Mahmoud Solh, Director General of the Syria-based International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).

With so much at stake, an international collaborative effort, spearheaded by the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, is playing a frantic game of defense, developing resistant strains to deploy strategically as barriers to slow the blight’s spread. But the work requires the cooperation of countries otherwise at odds, such as India and Pakistan. And it takes money: steady, dependable funding and lots of it.

Stem rust isn’t the only globetrotting super-pathogen:

• An especially aggressive strain of brown streak virus is attacking Cassava, a staple for 800 million people in Africa, Asia and South America. In the 6 years since it was first spotted in East Africa, it has spread at pandemic speed. Cassava, a drought-tolerant plant that requires very little tending, is particularly important for regions beset with malaria and HIV/AIDS. Its loss means billions of dollars more needed for basic food aid.

• Late blight, a.k.a. the blight that caused Ireland’s Great Potato Famine, turns out to also have a taste for American tomatoes. Last year, its spores not only rode the wind, but took to the highways, hitching on seedling plants trucked to home improvement stores across the country. In only two years, it appears to have become entrenched.

• Stripe rust, another wheat  plague, was recently discovered to have an alternate host, the common ornamental barberry plant, on which the fungus sexually reproduces. The resulting genetic diversity of the fungus, set against the genetic uniformity of wheat, supplies the resilience that has made it so difficult to stamp out.

A warming world favors pathogens’ survival over winter, while shifting weather patterns can blow them into new territories. Human-mediated transport (trade and travel) clearly play a large role as well.

Whatever the drivers, these colliding trends of record-breaking weather / climate change and emerging plant diseases spell big trouble for global food security. In just the past month, wheat prices spiked 30%, due mostly to the Russian drought. Russia will still have enough for domestic needs, but higher prices are expected to drive up inflation, and there will be that much less for export. Stem rust primarily affects small farmers gowing for local consumption in the developing countries. Higher global commodity prices also translates into higher food aid costs.

According to the scientists at NOAA, the extreme weather of 2010 may very well be the “new normal.” Hotter, colder, wetter, drier. And way beyond inconvenient.

FURTHER READING

• “NOAA: June, April to June, and Year-to-Date Global Temperatures are the Warmest on Record,” NOAA data sheet (2010)

• “Climate Bill, R.I.P.” by Tom Wilkinson, Rolling Stone

• “Rust in the Bread Basket: A crop-killing fungus is spreading out of Africa towards the world’s great wheat-growing areas,” The Economist

• Al Gore’s Amazon books page
  

speaker bios, videos & news

The bottlenose dolphin swimming the Gulf of Mexico was “splattering oil out its blow hole.” The obscenity of such a thing was too much for marine conservationist, author and founder/director of the Blue Ocean Insitute, Carl Safina, whose voice broke as he told the story in the middle of a lecture at the TEDxOilSpill conference. No matter what BP may promise in its ubiquitous ads, there is simply no way to make something this horrible “right.” But as speaker after speaker noted, BP could start making things at least a little less wrong by coming clean with information.

The TEDxOilSpill Expedition team – photographers Duncan Davidson and Kris Krug, videographer Pinar Ozger and writer Darron Collins – were kept far from the water’s edge by BP’s private security firm, Talon,  whose staff controlled the beaches. When Collins literally crossed the line by stepping over a miles-long orange boom dozens of yards from the water line, he was accosted by a team right out of “Monsters Inc.,” who set about washing his feet and decontaminating his shoes with great flurry and fanfare.

The Fat Orange Line: Boom Barrier on the Beach in Grand Isle, Louisiana, June 2010; TEDxOilSpill Expedition, photo credit: Duncan Davidson (read, view more & donate!)

It took persistence, luck and a gutsy pilot to score a flight into the massive”no fly” zone to better see and document water set afire and oily sheen to the horizon.

What the photos can’t tell you is what it smells like. So let me describe it for you:  Walk into a garage. Take a case a motor oil and dump it onto the ground. Take a bunch of gasoline. Pour it on top of it. Now take a can of propane. Crack it open. Let the propane vent out into the air. Maybe take another and light it on fire. Now take some Windex. Throw it into the mix. That’s what it smells like when you’re orbiting the site.

- Duncan Davidson

ANOTHER GULF WAR

Photographs and video also can’t show what is happening beneath the surface – though what little we have seen, isn’t good: video of the broken pipe gushing clouds of oil and gas 24/7 on “BP cam”; video from 20 to 30 feet down taken by intrepid divers, among them Philip Cousteau, another of the day’s speakers, revealing sheets of red-brown “mousse,” undulating in the waves, blotting out the sun, blotting out life.

Yet it is the devils you cannot see that present the most insidious threat to recovery. “We have only explored about 5% of the world beneath the sea,” noted Dave Gallo, director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In the best of times, we barely have a clue what’s going on down there. “We don’t know how it works. Especially a mile deep.”

What has been glimpsed is humbling. Parts of the deep ocean – regions that have never seen a ray of sun – have more life in terms of density and diversity than a tropical rain forest.

No one has any idea what the effects of a massive oil spill or the massive use of dispersants will have on these ancient ecosystems, or, indeed, how these ecosystems fit into greater Gaian scheme of things.

“Who’s calling these shots?,” asked Gallo. “At the deep ocean, who’s in charge?” Fundamental questions remain unanswered: “What’s coming out that well? What’s the mix of oil, gas, the toxic elements? What’s the flow rate? … Where has it gone? Where is it going? … What will the impact be? … Why don’t we know?”

Some of the best ocean warriors I know are still sitting in their labs, wondering what’s going on… It is another war. It is another Gulf War.

Oil gushing from the Deepwater Horizon pipe - about the diameter of a sewer cover; Originally estimated by BP at 1,000 barrels per day, the volume of the flow is now guesstimated at an "Exxon Valdez" every 5 to 7 days

It is a war we are fighting blind, armed with a “fleet” of only a handful of small robotic submersibles. While up top, hearty souls such as the TEDxOilSpill Expedition team and John Wathen of the Waterkeeper Alliance (Keith Olberman interview), can try to run BP’s “no-fly” gauntlet to bag digital proof of horizon-to-horizon destruction, it is impossible for any independent observers to witness what is going on beneath the waves. Instead, we wait to see what floats to the top: dead whales, pods of sick dolphins, oil-soaked birds and turtles. But as BP sets fire to the sea, spreading the pollution even further into the atmosphere, whatever life, or struggling life, that may have floated to the top, is incinerated or sent to the depths, dead.

SILENT SPRING: MARITIME EDITION

Toxicologist Susan Shaw, founder and director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, wants to know what, specifically, is in Corexit, the oil dispersant BP has added to the Gulf by the millions of gallons. On June 8, over a month after the spill, BP released a list of ingredients peppered with the words “derivatives” and “distillates” to gloss over the details, knowing that only a handful of wonky chemists would notice. “These are whole big groups of many, many compounds,” Shaw pointed out. “They are not identified and why? Trade secrets, again. BP is running the show.”

Spraying oil dispersant, Corexit, on surface slicks in the Gulf of Mexico

Although the Environmental Protection Agency’s studies suggest Corexit is fairly benign, labeled “practically nontoxic” when half the shrimp or fish died at exposures of 130 parts per million and”slightly toxic” when the seafood went belly up at concentrations between 19 and 55 parts per million, those tests tested the wrong thing: The question is not what Corexit does in isolation, but in combination with oil.

According to Shaw, it is a nightmare. The dispersant makes it easier for oil to get into the skin and organs of animals and microbes because it breaks down the oily lipids protecting cells. In effect, it serves as a oil delivery system, transporting toxic compounds to where they can wreak the most havoc.

Government agencies and corporations often use the phrase, “the best science available,” which sounds cutting-edge and progressive. But when “the best science available” isn’t very good, it can be dangerous. What we don’t know can kill.

Diving in the slick goo of the Gulf, Shaw saw first-hand “the web of death” as small plankton at the base of the food chain were enveloped by globules of Corexit-treated oil.

* Read about Consensus Statement: Scientists oppose the use of dispersant chemicals in the Gulf of Mexico – drafted by Susan Shaw)

Naturally-occurring oil-loving microbes can make a faster meal out of smaller blobs, but they are slow eaters. Adding a dash of fertilizer can help speed up the feeding process, said Ron Atlas, a microbiologist who worked on the Exxon Valdez and several other spills. But “speedy” can mean 8 years instead of 10, he explained, and in a situation as literally fluid as this one, all bets are off.  By the time microbes might make a dent in the Deepwater Horizon gusher -  now measured in “Exxon Valdezes” (one every 5 to 7 days) – it will be a silent sea, with only a fraction of the life that filled it prior to the spill.

Corexit-treated oil also easily and sereptitiously slips past skimmers and booms, taking the “low road” to marsh and shore. Many now fear that a hurricane-driven tidal surge will transport this poisonous water inland, turning whole towns toxic.

For Carl Safina, the only explanation for its use is a cover-up. “Personally, I think the dispersants are an attempt to hide the body because we have put the murderer in charge of the crime scene.”

WE ARE ALL SEA CREATURES

The use of dispersants also baffled Sylvia Earle, a Time magazine “Hero of the Planet,” TED Prize-winner and all around emeritus: “If you were to write a recipe for good health for the Gulf of Mexico, for the lives of the creatures who live there, it would not include use of dispersants to clean up this mega-spill. It would not include the spills at all.”

Earle, who just returned from diving among whale sharks feasting on plankton about 70 miles off the Louisiana coast, is torn between delight at seeing more whale sharks than she could count and worry because these surface-skimmers are right in harm’s way. If the spill oozes into their feeding grounds, they wouldn’t be able to avoid either filtering gallons upon gallons of oil-tainted water, or soaking in harmful aerosols at the surface.

She is also worried about the devastating effects on fish populations that rely on the Gulf’s sargassum for nurseries. Lose the sargassum, which soaks up oil like a sponge, and fish populations, including bluefin tuna, will crash. If the slick is picked up by the Gulf stream, as many fear, it will threaten another vital nursery, the Sargasso Sea, a 5,000 square kilometer “liquid jungle” floating in the mid-Atlantic just south of Bermuda. Both are what Earle calls “Hope Spots,”which if protected could help restore the oceans to their former healthy bounty.

The Deepwater Horizon gusher is just the latest in a centuries-long marine assault that has led to the depletion of fish stocks and put fully one-third of all marine mammals in danger of extinction.

Now is the time. We have a little window before it is too late to take actions that will secure for – not just the creatures of the sea – but for all of us connected to the sea. We are sea creatures.

THE BIG LIE & NOT SO SIMPLE TRUTH

A "galaxy of oil rigs" in the Gulf of Mexico / Nearly 4,000 40-story tall rigs drilling 32,000 wells; map credit: NOAA

Out of sight and out of earshot, right off the shores of the Gulf Coast, is a sprawl of 4,000 drilling platforms tapping into 32,000 wells, stitched together by thousands of miles of pipeline, pumping 1.7 million barrels of oil each day. “This is our addiction. This is what it looks like,” said Mike Tidwell, founder and director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

It is “a galaxy” of platforms, vast yet so dense, ship captains navigate by “constellations.” Each platform rises from the water forty stories tall, powered by massive diesel generators whose locomotive sound defines the region. 30,000 mostly men work on the platforms, with thousands more running supply ships, running refineries or working in other support-related jobs.

Stunningly, even as oil and gas continue to spew from a broken pipe a mile-plus beneath the surface, a number of political leaders – many if not all beneficiaries of oil industry campaign largesse – have protested against any move to stop, or even pause, drilling. They have positioned themselves as defenders of jobs, and their constituents, with few other ready options, believe them.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Speaker after speaker hammered home the message that oil is a jobs-killer: Recycling fishermen into clean-up crew, trading nets for booms, doesn’t count. There is a brighter future, by every definition, they promised, in developing a clean energy economy: wind turbines, solar panels, biofuels, efficiency.

But as doable as doing without oil may be, the logistics are complicated by a world designed around cars and trucks. “We have designed a system where if you want to get and keep a job, it is much more important to have a car that runs than to have a GED,” noted Lisa Margonelli, energy policy analyst at the New America Foundation and author of “Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline.”

We don’t talk about the amount of oil that we use. We talk about energy independence. We talk about hydrogen cars. We talk about biofuels that haven’t been invented yet. Cognitive dissonance is part and parcel of how we deal with oil.

The costs drop to the bottom line: Families with two children living on $50,000 per year spend more on their car and fuel than on taxes and health care, Margonelli pointed out. “Gasoline costs are a tremendous drain on the American economy. They are also a drain on individual families. And it’s kind of terrifying to think about what happens when prices get higher.”

Key to fixing the system is changing the game so that the rules quit favoring oil consumption. That means charging drivers who drive more higher insurance rates. It means providing more and better public transportation options so we can all drive less. It means adding a small gas tax to make gas less desirable, and fund greener alternatives. It meas adding a surgeon general’s-style warning to the bill to help consumers connect the true-cost dots:

The National Academy of Sciences estimates that ever gallon of gas you burn in your car creates 29 cents in health care costs.

THE WAY FORWARD

Few have focused as intently or as long on turning fossil fuel companies into fossils as Amory Lovins,  co-founder and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute. His latest initiative, Reinventing Fire (RF), builds on more than three decades of research:

Imagine fuel without fear. No climate change. No oil spills, dead coal miners, dirty air, devastated land, lost wildlife. No energy poverty. No oil-fed wars, tyrannies, terrorists. No leaking nuclear wastes or spreading nuclear weapons. Nothing to run out. Nothing to cut off. Nothing to worry about. Just energy abundance. Benign and affordable for all. Forever.

Although Lovins wasn’t able to attend TEDxOilSpoil in person, he created a video for the conference with background on RF research, which is still in progress.

________________________________________________

Christen Lien’s layered viola compositions brought the crowd gathered at D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre – along with hundreds who watched  the conference via livestream – literally back from the brink of despair. There was little good news from the Gulf and only daunting tasks ahead. Meanwhile, the oil keeps gushing, the clock keeps ticking, the death tolls keeps mounting, the social costs keep rising and now hurricanes are coming.

Twitter satirist @bpglobalpr / Leroy Stick, who has ridden the razor’s edge of plausible corporate idiocy to 180,000+ follower fame, summed it up with trademark brevity: “If you think the status quo is unacceptable, then don’t accept it.”

Easier said than done, perhaps. But what else are we going to do?

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* NEW 7/29/10: X PRIZE: WENDY SCHMIDT OIL CLEAN-UP X CHALLENGE

Since the BP gusher started spewing millions of gallons of crude oil and methane into the Gulf of Mexico more that three months ago, there have other high profile spills, including one of China’s largest, near the city of Dalian, that created a 170 mile slick. Closer to my home in Chicago, a pipeline break released over 800,000 gallons into western Michigan’s Kalamazoo river, which flows into Lake Michigan.

Last year, Australia took a one-two punch, first with a tanker spill that fouled 40 miles of Queensland’s coast, then an oil rig blow-out eerily similar to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In Nigeria, oil spills have become such an every day nightmare – an estimated 7,000 between 1970 and 2000 - that the tally is measured in units of “Exxon Valdez” (over 50 and still counting).

Clearly, if you drill, it will spill. Although the X Prize Foundation’s Oil Clean-up Challenge was developed in response to the mess in the Gulf, its importance goes far beyond our local oily waters. “The oil industry has focused on,”How do you drill deeper, further, more efficiently. Little money has actually been spent so far on “How do you clean it up properly?’, ” notes Peter Diamandis, X Prize CEO.

With $1.4 million in incentive prizes provided by the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Challenge is designed to wrap up next summer, with demonstrations of the promising technologies at the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility (OHMSETT) in Leonardo, New Jersey.

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RELATED READING / VIEWING / RESOURCES

• “A Tank of Gas, A World of Trouble” – Paul Salopek / Chicago Tribune
• “Dudley: BP Intends to Meet Commitments in the Gulf ‘For Many Years’” – Ray Suarez  / PBS (video/print)
• “Ten Myths about the Deepwater Spill, Busted by Oceana” - Rachel Kaufman / National Geographic
• “Drilling Down: Conversations on the Gulf’s Disaster” - Need to Know / PBS (video/print)
• “Multi-million Dollar Oil Spill Cleanup X Prize Announced at TEDxOilSpill”
• Gulf Coast Fund
• Gulf Restoration Network
• Mission Blue (Sylvia Earle’s TED wish)
• Consortium for Ocean Leadership
• Blue Ocean Insitute
• “Carl Safina on The Colbert Report”
• Oceana
• The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation
• Institute of Maritime History
• Earth Institute, Columbia University
• Greenpeace
• Carbon War Room
• STRONG America 2020 (Strategies to Reduce Oil Dependency Now), New America Foundation
• Louisiana Bucket Brigade (mapping)
• Grassroots Mapping
• Oil Reporter (crowdsourced data collection tool)
  
• Farai Chideya
• “Veins in the Gulf,” produced by Ted Hardin and Elizabeth Coffman, Long Distance Productions

• Carl Safina, TEDxOilSpill talk

"Burning oil on the Gulf of Mexico," from the TEDxOilSpill expedition, June, 2010, photo credit: James Duncan Davidson; For more information on June 28 event: http://www.TEDxOilSpill.com

Despite my general rule that once a day is designated for a cause, the cause is likely lost (or at least in serious trouble), I found myself rooting mightily last Saturday for Solarday. Missed it? It is only in its second year, but with global aspirations and the power of the sun on its side.

The power of new sun that is, not the fossil kind captured by plants millions of years ago and transformed into oil, coal and gas. Old sun is best left underground, underwater, under salt seals, in mountains and far, far away from tail pipes and smokestacks. Old sun warms the Earth in all the wrong ways. New sun offers a way out of Dodge.

The “teachable moment” in the Gulf, now stretching into its third month and threatening to stretch for years, frames the debate in the starkest of terms: oils spills versus sun spills. Which one would you prefer to soak up?

We have loads of clean / cleaner energy options beyond solar (photovoltaic, water heating):

• wind power (macro and micro)

• wave power

• fuel cells (e.g., the Bloom box)

• efficiency (less is more, more for less, instant savings and sure-fire competitive edge)

• biofuels (check out Willie Smits’  on tapping sugar palms sap for ethanol - no tree-cutting required)

• Bill Gates’ scheme for what he promises is  better, safer version of nuclear

• distribution (distributed power generation and smarter grids)

Every week journals burst burst with news on ever-niftier applications for existing technologies (the solar light bulb) and breakthrough improvements, such as MIT professor Daniel Nocera’s efforts to biomimick photosynthesis for “personalized energy,” all the while improving water use and quality:

Energy start-up Sun Catalytix aims to scale up Nocera’s work in the lab for real-world application.

DEMAND: THE OTHER PART OF THE EQUATION

As Nocera points out, unless we get a hold of demand, energy supply is always going to be a game of catch-up – as it is for resources of every kind. Casting the issue in terms of per capita usage actually provides a perverse incentive for over-population.

Rather, the question isn’t how to most equitably divvy up a finite fossil fuel pie, but how much energy is needed for people to live happy, healthy, productive, environmentally-compatible lives.

The education of women in developing countries, which has been shown to correlate to family-planning, along with easier access to contraceptives, are key for a successful global energy strategy.

Business-as-usual means that “every three years, a new Saudi Arabia needs to be discovered and exploited just to maintain the level of output,” according to Antony Froggatt, a senior research fellow at British think tank, Chatham House and co-author on a new report co-produced with insurance giant Lloyd’s of London on business-smart energy strategies: Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business.

Global energy use is expected to climb a staggering 40% over the next two decades. Even if there were no risks or downsides to deep water drilling and tar sand mining, this would be a tall order to fill. “In an energy insecure world, resilience is an absolutely key function,” says Froggatt.

So how do we put more “bounce” back in the system?  Clearly not by continuing to pour money into vulnerable pipelines, pirate-friendly tanker ships, inefficient central power generation plants, “dumb” grids and top-down one-size-fits-all answers driving an ever-depressing downward spiral, greased by oil spills.

How do we transition to the dazzling variety of better technologies that are either already on the shelf or on the near-term horizon? This is a business and logistics question, not a technical question (which is not to say that substantial and steady R&D funding isn’t required – it most definitely is).

If the Chatham House report is right, things will start to get really dicey by 2013, when China’s domestic oil production is expected to peak and competition for global supplies becomes even more fierce.

REINVENTING FIRE

Few people have been as tenaciously focused on saving the world from its fossil fuel addiction as Amory Lovins, chief scientist and cofounder of the Colorado-based “think and do tank,” Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). For over 30 years, Lovins, a geek’s geek, has relentlessly and with trademark statistic-laced cheer, shown how saving energy is almost always cheaper than generating it (“negawatts” and “negabarrels”) and how thoughtful design can translate, often immediately, to the bottom line.

When Detroit declared that cars were as efficient as they were ever going to be, Lovins set about reinventing the auto as a “Hypercar,” experimenting with carbon-composite plastics (light-weighting and saves on “paint shop” costs), LED lights, hydrogen fuel cells, better insulation to cut A/C needs and low drag design.  While the team was at it, they did away with the steering wheel in favor of joystick, too. Voila! 100 mpg.  Many of the technologies (though, so far, not the joystick) have been adopted by major manufacturers (video).

Green building design has always been a central part of the RMI’s work, starting with Lovins’ own home, The Banana Farm, nestled in the Rockies of Snowmass, CO. The most ambitious project so far: a $13.2 million retrofit of the Empire State Building, designed to save just under $4 million in energy costs per year.

As impressive as these projects are, they are the warm up for what may very well be Lovins’ masterwork: Reinventing Fire. RF, a new research initiative just getting underway,  builds on work from an earlier project, “Winning the Oil Endgame,” a business-driven road map for weaning the U.S. off oil by 2050. Lovins explains in this TED talk from 2005:

For Reinventing Fire, once again Business is targeted as the engine of change, with competitive edge as the carrot motivating Business. CO2 and pollution reduction are almost incidental benefits. Rather, RF aims to make virtuous circles possible: Do the right thing and all kinds of good things follow.

With the clear-headed cunning that comes from decades at the front lines, the RMI team has carefully chosen its battles:

In the web of interconnections spanning how energy is produced, transported, distributed and used, all the points along the way are fair game for intervention. But decades of research into how energy moves from fossil-fuel sources to uses have revealed key leverage points in four sectors: transportation, buildings, industry and electricity.

Although RF’s focus is on the U.S., the lessons can be applied anywhere and everywhere. The good news only gets better.

SMALL PEOPLE POWER

There is no need for the rest of us to wait on the sidelines while Business gets its profit-priorities in gear. Plenty of revolutions – maybe most – start with “the small people,” as English-as-a-second-language-challenged BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg dubbed us.

In addition to seeking out energy-smart products, insulating our homes and lobbying for more and better public transportation options, we can begin to think more about what we eat and where it comes from.

Much of what appears an America’s dinner plates took thousands of miles to get there. Calves born in Florida might be “finished” in a feedlot in Nebraska and shipped as hamburger to a grocery story in Illinois. Fresh fruits and vegetables are no longer about the bounty of season, but flight logistics. The loss of shrimping in the Gulf from the oil spill doesn’t only mean lost jobs, it means more imports from overseas.

From running farm machinery, to inputs for pesticides and herbicides and, of course, shipping, an enormous amount of fossil fuel goes into food. It is time we put a fork in it: “Small people for locally or regionally-produced food!” If we can up the percentage to just 25% of our collective plate, not only would it force a change in production logistics, but we would be healthier for our efforts. A lot of vitamins get lost in transit…

The urban agriculture movement, which puts farms in the middle of cities, shortens the loop about as much as it can be shortened. As pioneered by MacArthur fellow Will Allen at Milwaukee- based Growing Power’s flagship farm, fish can be added to the harvest through a closed loop aquaponics set up where plants filter water while fish fertilize plants (see TrackerBlog post: “The Farm Next Door”).

BP: BEYOND PROPOGANDA

In a recent interview with the New York Times, the wife of a Gulf coast oil worker spoke about her conflicting feelings between the need for  jobs right now and the high environmental costs of drilling.

“I mean, eventually we might figure out a way to switch over to something else for us to use for energy,” she said. “But is it going to be affordable for everybody?

If we remain loyal to oil, it is a sure thing that it will not be affordable for all. There is simply too much global competition, too much geopolitical risk and no deadline for “eventually.”

Jon Stewart / "The Daily Show": Presidents promising energy independence...

Imagine what the present would have looked like if Nixon (!) had delivered on his promise for energy independence by 1980. Or his successors been a bit more successful pushing green alternatives. What wars might have been averted? What industries would be creating jobs? What would Nigeria look like? And what hole in the ocean floor wouldn’t be gushing?

There is no time left for “eventually.” You want that better future back? Let’s go get it.

RELATED READING/VIEWING:

• TEDxOilSpill: June 28, 2010 – livestreaming from Washington D.C.

• “The Spill, the Scandal and the President” by Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone

• “Obama’s Sherriff” by Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone

• “Far From Gulf, a Spill Scourge 5 Decades Old” by Adam Nossiter, New York Times

• “Energy (R)evolution: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook” - Greenpeace website / pdf report

]]> http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/06/20/the-future-fossil-fuels-are-so-yesterday/feed/ 0 J.A. Ginsburg Bookmark and Share oiltedxoilspill oilpresdailyshow http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/06/08/when-tipping-points-collide/ http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/06/08/when-tipping-points-collide/#comments Tue, 08 Jun 2010 07:28:32 +0000 J.A. Ginsburg http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/?p=1297 ]]>

Graphic justice: from the Greenpeace BP logo competition

If only there were a rewind button.

From the first, almost cheerfully do-able estimate of 1,000 barrels of oil spewing daily into the Gulf of Mexico to a…

• jaw-dropping 5,000 barrel revision

• horrifying 19,000 barrel update

• are-you-kidding-me? 25,000 barrel recalculation

• and an it’s way-way-way-more-than-the-Exxon-Valdez admission

…the bad news on the BP catastrophe has gone so far off the dial, it has zoomed past “worst case scenario” to “pretty much the worst case ever.”

ABC News: Sam Champion & Philippe Cousteau don Hazmat suits to dive into the muck: "This is...what BP does not want you to see."

Dispersants that present environmental issues of their own have only made the situation more complex. “We’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil,” according to Admiral Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander in charge of the clean-up. It will takes months to scrub the surface. Years at least to scrub the wetlands.

The situation beneath the waves is even murkier, with massive underwater plumes comprised of tiny oil droplets hundreds of feet thick, stretching for dozens of square miles. They cannot evaporate or be burned off  and concerns run high that they are death traps for almost anything that swims by.

Specialized oil-loving microbes – either naturally occurring or lab-concocted – work slowly, especially in cold or low-oxygen waters. They also give off CO2 in the process, adding their microbial 2 cents to ocean acidification, and soak of oxygen, potentially to the point where nothing can survive: a Silent Spring beneath the waves.

THE DEAD ZONE

The BP geyser isn’t the biggest (at least for now) or even the longest-running oil-driven disaster in the Gulf. For over 60 years, chemical fertilizer-laced farm run-off has flowed into the Mississippi, then down to the Gulf where it annually triggers massive algal blooms, followed by equally massive algal die-offs. Microbes on decomposition duty soak up so much oxygen over an area averaging 6,000 square miles, the water turns into a lethal “dead zone.” (the size of the zone depends on a variety of factors, including which way the wind blows).

Crime Scene: Watersheds contributing to Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone"

America’s famous bumper corn crops are in large part thanks to chemical fertilizers. Since fossil fuel is a key ingredient in the manufacture of artificial fertilizers, it is a key ingredient in the production of corn-based ethanol. Oil’s would-be replacement requires…oil.

Writer Michael Pollan has spent a career tallying the costs of an agricultural system tipped so far out balance, there is almost nothing natural about it. Short term gains, measured in bountiful harvests and weed-free fields, have collectively blinded us to the full costs, unsustainability and sheer craziness of it all:

From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink petroleum directly, because there’s a lot less energy in a bushel of corn (measured in calories) than there is in the half-gallon of oil required to produce it. Ecologically, this is a fabulously expensive way to produce food–but “ecologically” is no longer the operative standard. In the factory, time is money, and yield is everything.

- What’s Eating America

SUPERWEEDS: NATURE BATS LAST…AGAIN

But the end of the era of easy bushel-busting gains may be over. All around us, the “ag bubble” is deflating. Fertilizer isn’t the only thing coursing down the nation’s waterways. So is topsoil. By the ton. And the more topsoil that’s lost, the more dependent crops become on fertilizer, which means the more dependent they become on…oil.

NYT: Spread of Roundup resistant weeds. “It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen.”

Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds were sold, in part, as a way to reduce topsoil erosion. The genetically modified seeds were designed (and patented, but that’s another story) to be impervious to the company’s proprietary herbicide, Roundup. Farmers could stop tilling the soil – reducing erosion – and simply spray their weed-troubles away. Man-engineered genetic selection, however, turned out to be no match for the old-fashioned natural kind. Roundup-defiant “superweeds” have now invaded millions of acres in the U.S. and they are just warming up.

ABC News: Hardy pigweed defies chemical assault."There is no rhyme or reason how we can control it"

Like a rural touring company of “The Little Shop of Horrors,” giant pigweed plants dot farmers’ fields, growing as much as three inches per day, sucking up water and nutrients, threatening tractors and devouring livelihoods. Not only must farmers till the soil once again, but also apply a witch’s brew of poisons in an escalating battle for control of the fields.

Since petrochemicals are ingredients in herbicides and pesticides, the more crops need to be treated, the more dependent they become on…oil.

ENGULFED

NYT: Oil disaster timeline, updated regularly

Back in the Gulf, the magnitude of the devastation caused by a hole in the sea floor roughly the size of sewer cover goes beyond words, and even beyond maps. The now iconic New York Times infographic, updated regularly and viewable as a disturbingly long, mesmerizing time animation, only shows the story on the surface. Data are harder to come by for the deeper story, and what little is known isn’t encouraging.

While waves of oil and “mousse” wash up on beaches, ooze into marshes, and devour sea-life and shorebirds, deep-sea droplet-plumes flirt with Altlantic-bound currents, threatening to spread the disaster straight up the Eastern seaboard. Although progress is finally being made toward diverting the oil, if not stopping the flow, the devastation continues to cascade. Entire food chains are on the line. From micro to macro, wildlife face either direct annihilation or a slower, equally grim fate marked by illness and starvation. The biochemistry of the Gulf itself could be forever altered. What was once may never be again.

The damage isn’t confined to water and wetlands, or even to a region. Migrating birds, including those currently nesting in blissful ignorance in my Chicago neighborhood and as far away as the Canadian arctic, will find themselves in harm’s way when they fly south again for the winter.

The entire planet could feel the effects. New research suggests that marine dead zones can trigger an an increase in the amount of nitrous oxide filtering into the atmosphere. That might be kind of funny – it’s laughing gas – except that N2O, per unit weight, is nearly 300 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. It also contributes to the development of the ozone hole, increasing the planet’s exposure to UV light. So, more climate change and skin cancer. Great. Just great…

WHATEVER IT TAKES – WHATEVER THAT IS

Skimming, burning, setting booms around hundreds of miles of coastline, dredging insti-sand berm islands, collecting the hairy/furry leftovers from nation’s hair-cuts and pet trims to make oil-absorbant materials, spreading hay across the water’s surface – in the face of such overwhelming disaster, the only right answer is “all of the above.” (And if all else fails, there is always “Stephen Colbert’s Oil Containment Solution Randomizer.”)

But only microbes have what it takes to break apart oil and get things back on ecological track.

Communities of naturally-occurring microbes, evolved to dine on oil burbling up from natural seeps (of which there are many across the world’s oceans), have, so far, proven more effective than any microbes developed in the lab. “A superbug fails because it competes with this community that is adapted to the environment,” notes Ron Atlas, a microbiologist who worked on the Exxon-Valdez spill and has co-written one of the definitive books on the subject, Bioremediation.

That hasn’t stopped researchers from trying, yet even GMO bugs need a dollop of nitrogen and phosphorous – the same ingredients found in the fertilized run-off behind the Gulf’s dead zone – to pick up their naturally slow pace. Getting it to them in the middle of the open ocean isn’t so easy.

Enter NASA.

In 1992, a failed attempt to create liquid crystals in zero gravity led to the discovery of microspheres, bubbles of gas trapped in tiny crystalline structures. NASA Tech Hall of Famer, Petroleum Remediation Product (PRP) is based on this technology and designed to soak up oil spills. The sphere-lettes, less than 100 microns across, are made of beeswax, which is naturally full of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. Beeswax is also oleophilic, which means it binds with oil. PRP has been used to clean up everything from boat bilges to driveway stains. Once the oil is gone, PRP biodegrades and that’s that.

But wait a minute. Bees are dying from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). For the fourth year in a row, more than a third of the hives in the U.S. failed to survive the winter. No one has been able to pinpoint a single cause, though suspicions run high on a perfect storm of pathogens and chemical exposures. Dozens of pesticides have been identified in samples of bees, wax and pollen. Herbicides are another concern – and petrochemicals are in both. Could bees be yet another species doomed by oil? And since bee pollination is essential for so many crops, what does this mean for us?

THE NETWORK

Although humans may not be able to plug into the planet Earth as literally as the Na’vi on Pandora in Avatar, we are as inextricably linked to greater whole. The oil spill in the Gulf brings this into sharp focus. There is no escape: what goes around, comes around.

Have we reached a point where the resilience of the planet’s network of elegantly interlaced ecosystems has been stretched to the limit? In a few short centuries, we have taken a good deal of the “bounce” out of the system  And once tipping points start to collide, there is no predicting what could happen next.

Perhaps – finally – this is the “teachable moment” where something actually gets learned. In one form or another, fossil fuel plays a part in every one of these grim scenarios. There are alternatives. Yet somehow those greener, smarter, environmentally-friendlier, job-creating technologies only seem to get hauled out for display on Earth Day, World Environment Day, or during political campaigns to give us all a rosy glow about the promise of brighter tomorrow.

Even BP had hung its corporate hat (top hat?) on a greener, cleaner future, spending millions of dollars on a sunny logo and a “beyond petroleum” ad campaign.

Well, yes, now that you mention it, I would like a world beyond petroleum.

As soon as possible.

Boston.com "Big Picture" slideshow

RELATED READING / VIEWING:

• Interview with Philippe Cousteau / Diving into the Spill: Today Show (video)

• “Oil plumes, Gulf’s unseen disaster”: Rachel Maddow interview with Samatha Joye (video)

• “What the Spill Will Kill”: Sharon Begley / Newsweek

• “Slick Solution: How Microbes Will Clean Up the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill”: David Biello / Scientific American

• “Small Things: First Responders to Oil Spills”: D. Jay Grimes & Ronald M. Atlas / Small Things Considered / ASM blog

• “Bangor Scientists’ Plan to Clean Up Oil Spills”: BBC (print / video)

• “How Long Will the Spill in the Gulf of Mexico Last?”: David Biello / Scientific American

• “Despite promises to fix it, the Gulf’s dead zone is growing”: Bruce Eggler / Times-Picayune
  

• “Dead Zone Study”: KRIS TV (video)

• “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”: Michael Pollan (book)

• “The lowdown on topsoil: It’s disappearing”: Tom Paulson, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

• “The Vanishing of the Bees”: documentary trailer (video)

• “Dennis vanEngelsdorp: a plea for bees”: TED partner series (video)

• “High Levels of Miticides and Agrochemicals in North American Apiaries: Implications for Hony Bee Health”: PLoS One (research paper)

• “Beyond Propaganda”: John Kenney, New York Times (op-ed)

• “Gulf Pipelines Face Damage as Gulf Eats Oil Marshes?”: Christine Dell’Amore, National Geographic News

• Reinventing Fire: Rocky Mountain Institute initiative

As long as I kept the dialog to “buon giorno,” “uno” (when pointing to a particularly remarkable pastry), “grazie” (when buying said pastry) and “sera” (turns out “buona” is optional), the illusion was perfect. I was Roman. So what if I had only the sketchiest of mental maps of the city and came across the Trevi Fountain by chance? Or that my  concrete-coddled American legs were no match for the Eternal City’s infernal paving stones? I was Roman enough to have paid my respects at Julius Caesar’s surprisingly humble tomb at the Forum:

In ricordo della Idi di marzo

But two or three times a day, someone would burst my bubble with a babble of Italian, forcing me to admit that I was but a clueless American, more lost than they. That is until the undaunted Eva, who announced she was Dutch, spoke English and asked one of the few questions for which I actually had an answer: “Do you know the way to the Piazza Navona?” “Si, si! Just heading that way myself…”

Built on the site of a first century stadium, the piazza is a long irregular oval, punctuated by three fabulous fountains and filled with artists of varying talent doing their best to sell paintings. On one side sits a massive 17th century basilica built above the tomb of St. Agnes, not far from the brothel where she was martyred 1,700 years ago (Sant’Agnese in Agone). On the other, a row of so-so restaurants offering better view than food. A rotating cast of “living statues” rounds out the regulars, including the inevitable King Tut (I must have seen 8 of them working various piazzas). The afterlife, it turns out, is funded by tourists.

Another day, another euro: Morning on the Piazza Navona - King Tut suiting up and The Headless Man waiting for tourists...

Into this delicious mix of past, present, saints, sinners, art and artifice, Eva and I strolled as dusk dimmed and the piazza’s evening crowd began to gather. She turned out to be a frustrated international studies grad student who had found a program in Rome that, unlike others closer to home, hadn’t been fussy about her bachelor’s degree in psychology. It was a deficiency they felt she could overcome.

At TrackerNews we celebrate the mix and the match, crossing disciplines every chance we get, firmly believing in the the serendipity of collaboration.

It is just plain easier to think outside the box when at least one person isn’t in it. It also improves the odds for generating new ideas and breakthrough answers. The rest of Eva’s class was full of the usual round of poly-sci, history and econ majors. How could the addition of someone with a little background in psychology be anything but a plus?

TrackerNews was designed with the Eva’s of the world in mind. The typical news aggregator skews to dateline or popularity. TrackerNews skews to contextual relevance, focusing on connections. We seek out what automated RSS feeds routinely miss: research papers, older news stories, author interviews, the brilliant one-off’s. The mission is quality over quantity in the day-to-day and archival depth over time.

THE LESSONS OF LEONARDO

When I bought my Kindle a few months back, in the pre-iPad era, I knew it would turn out to be the “8-track cassette” of e-readers: a good-enough idea until something less idiosyncratic came along. Its klutzy set-up for creating and accessing notes has indeed proved annoying, but still not a bad way to haul around a lot of books.

I traveled through Italy reading Fritjof Capra’s, “The Science of Leonardo” – which, ironically, was made possible by the quirky fate-twist that as a bastard offspring, he skipped university. This lack of formal education was a sore spot at the time, but allowed him the freedom to think in new ways. Eventually, he read all the classic texts on his own, but was spared the tests proving he had interpreted them “correctly.”

Instead, after what sounds like a fairly idyllic childhood spent roaming the Tuscan hills pursuing his interests as a budding naturalist, Leonardo was apprenticed to a sculptor in Florence. The studio was where Art met Science and Engineering. Practical issues such as how to weld, how to cast, how to hoist, how to handle different materials and how to design for durability were simply part of the job. It was a perfect spot for a natural-born “systems thinker” with a talent for spotting patterns that could be applied from one field to another.

…Leonardo da Vinci was the first in an lineage of scientists who focused on the patterns interconnecting the basic structures and processes of living systems. Today, this approach to science is called ‘systemic thinking.’ This, in my eyes, is the essence of what Leonardo meant by farsi universale. Freely translating his statement into modern scientific language, I would rephrase it this way: ‘For someone who can perceive interconnecting patterns, it is easy to be a systemic thinker.’

It wasn’t just static patterns that fascinated Leonardo, but patterns of transformation. Change over time was integral to his thinking, whether analyzing the flow of water or the development of a fetus, or the mathematics that allows one geometric shape to become another. In a world of snapshot thinkers, Leonardo was talking video.

BACK ON THE PIAZZA: CHINA, GENDERCIDE, CONGO, CLIMATE CHANGE  & A THESIS

Eva listened attentively to my soapbox rant on TrackerNews, Leonardo and the endless benefits of omnivorous curiosity and multi-faceted perspective. How, she asked, might that apply to a somewhat pressing personal and very specific problem, namely, coming up with a thesis topic: “Something about China.”

“Easy,” I replied. “Find a couple of major trends that look likely to intersect and analyze the implications. Take a multi-disciplinary approach, look for patterns and try to figure out how all the moving parts will interact and change over time. Think like Leonardo!”

So… China. No shortage of material there. I suggested two trends we’ve covered on TrackerNews: demographic skew and natural resource depletion.

• One of the most important sit-up-and-take-notice stories of the decade, if not the century, is  The Economist’s “The Worldwide War on Girls,”which takes a hard look at the consequences of a China’s one-child policy and boy-centric tradition. Beyond the disturbing ethical issues of sex-selective abortion and infanticide – “gendercide” – it is estimated there will soon be 40 million more Chinese men of marriageable age than Chinese women for them to marry. That’s enough extra men to fill 5 New York Cities. What will become of them?

• An equally disturbing story is Richard Behar’s 2008 6-part tour de force for Fast Company, “China Storms Africa.” The Chinese, flush with of cash but running low on natural resources,  are on a raw materials buying spree, with serious global power-shift and environmental ramifications. Although the specter of oil palm plantations is only a tiny part of a much larger story, it has the potential to affect the entire planet. Consider: The island of Borneo has slashed and burned its way to the #3 spot of global CO2 emitters, right behind the U.S. and China, by clearning rain forests to make way for these biodiversity-annihilating plantations. In the summer of 2009, a Chinese company announced plans for 1 million hectare – 3,800 square mile – operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Will China’s man-surplus be funneled into an ever-expanding military machine? Will they be deployed around the world to defend the nation’s growing foreign interests? What does this mean for Africa over the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years? For global climate change? For the global economy? What happens to China? Will the extra men marry foreign women? Will Chinese women find themselves in a position of power, sought after and valued? Or shut out of a giant boys’ club? What kind of political force will these extra men present?

******

Poor Eva was taking notes as fast as she could, as I realized how deeply curating TrackerNews for the last year has affected my thinking. Tangents eventually connect, stray thoughts find kindred thoughts, ideas collide and spark epiphanies.

We stood in the piazza riffing for almost a half hour. These big picture issues don’t come up nearly enough in the conversations of humanitarian aid workers, social entrepreneurs, environmentalists or policy-makers. What a kick it would be if this accidental conversation actually led to Eva’s thesis.

Why it would be just the kind of thing we would post on TrackerNews…

ADDITIONAL READING / LISTENING / VIEWING:

• “Willie Smits restores a rainforest” (TED talk – video)

• Fritjof Capra interview / “The Science of Leonardo” (NPR – audio)

• Leonardo da Vinci bio (Wikipedia)

]]> http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/04/18/lessonsofleonardo/feed/ 0 J.A. Ginsburg caesarstomb livingstatues scienceofleonardo leonardos http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/02/10/treesandcharcoal/ http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/02/10/treesandcharcoal/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:10:01 +0000 J.A. Ginsburg http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/?p=1201 ]]>

Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project (HTRIP)

On link between environmental health & public health; Rebuilding Haiti from the soil microbes up; A humanitarian aid petri dish; Jared Diamond’s checklist for collapse & Haiti as vision what could be in store for the rest of us; Charcoal cartels, Amy Smith’s better answer & Nicholas Kristof’s compost toilet tour

Small farm plots on hilly terrain had been stripped bare of soil-stabilizing cover (2/3 of the the country is on land that slopes 20% or more). No soil means no food means malnutrition means disease, illness, death.

“Practically every medical problem in Haiti is poverty-related,” notes Dr. Vehnita Suresh, the hospital’s CEO. “The never-ending cycle of deforestation lead(s) to more ecological damage, more compromised farming, more poverty and more hunger. It goes on and on and on.”

Public health and environmental health are so tied together, you simply can’t have the former without the latter. “We can go on giving health-care forever,” says Dr. Suresh, “It would never really touch even the brim of the problem here.”

So they plant trees. The Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project (HTRIP) has begun to reverse centuries of devastation that literally skinned the country alive, leaving hillsides such as the ones surrounding the Artibonite Valley where the hospital is located barren and bleak.

Documentary on The Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project, the Hopital Albert Schweitzer's reforestation effort

In the aftermath of the earthquake, reforestation has taken a back seat to the urgency of treating the injured (you can donate directly to support the hospital’s work). But over the long term, any real “Hope for Haiti” means planting trees – literally rebuilding the country from its soil microbes up.

AVOIDING COLLAPSE: LAB HAITI

Haiti has been teetering at brink of breakdown for as long as anyone can remember, but it took the quake to focus  global attention, sparking an unprecedented outpouring of support and a largely spontaneous explosion of technical can-do innovation. From CrisisMappers and Crisis Commons hackers to the collaborative Haiti Rewired network, Twitter hashtag-enabled mash-ups and teams of volunteer architects, engineers, doctors,  veterinarians and other professionals, this has been an all-hands-on-deck emergency.

In a sense, Haiti has become a sort of petri dish for humanitarian action. The stakes couldn’t be higher. If, somehow, this “Exhibit A” for all that Jared Diamond says spells doom for a culture/country’s prospects is rescued from the abyss of complete collapse, the implications go far beyond Haiti.

Haiti, in all its deforested, polluted, cartel-corrupted, disease-riddled impoverishment, is a vision of our planet’s future if we continue to devour natural resources beyond replenishment, downplay the seriousness of climate change, spike efforts at family planning and ignore the integral importance of environmental health. As goes Haiti, so go we all.

“The most important thing we need to do about the world’s environmental problems,” says Diamond, “is trying to forget about there being any most important thing we need to do. Instead, there are dozen things and we’ve got to get them all right.”

EDEN WRECKED

The Haiti/Dominican Republic border; Completely deforested on the Haitian side; "Charcoal cartel" beginning to make inroads on the Dominican side

Where did all the forests go? The stats are as numbing as the satellite photos are stark:

• 1492: Columbus stops by. 75% of what would become Haiti covered in trees

• 1664: The French West India Company formed. Millions of trees chopped & harvested to create massive plantations. African slaves by the tens of thousands are imported to provide labor.

• 1825: French agree to recognize Haiti’s freedom, won in 1804, in exchange for 150 million francs (later reduced to 90 million). This puts the country in deep debt from which it never recovers. Much of the country’s timber wealth (mahogony) ships out for a song.

• 1940: An estimated 30% of country still forested

• 1970: Only 10% forested. People depend on charcoal made from wood for cooking. By contrast, government subsidizes gas stoves in the Dominican Republic

• 2010: Less than 1% forested. “Charcoal cartels” start chopping down trees across the Dominican border. Eroded land silts up lake, floods key road to Port-au-Prince. $40 million need to build alternate road.

LOW TECH / LOW COST: SOLUTIONS IN PROBLEMS

In a twist of dust-to-dust poetry, some of the answers to Haiti’s most intractable problems can be found in the one thing that Haiti has in abundance: waste.

About 10 years ago, MIT D-Lab founder Amy Smith, took a group of students to Haiti, where they were inspired by a local entrepreneur who had developed a way to make charcoal briquettes from scrap paper.  Smith’s team improved the process, using agricultural waste as feedstock. In 2006, she presented the results at the TED conference.

The upsides are stunning: No trees cut. A better product. Makes money for the producers. And since charcoal generates less smoke than wood, fewer cases of cooking fire smoke-induced acute respiratory illness, the leading cause of death for those under 5 years old in developing countries.

The process continues to be improved. Here is a step-by-step DIY field demo by Smith:

SHIT HAPPENS – THAT’S GOOD NEWS

SOIL, a small American non-profit operating in Haiti, has a plan for turning one of the country’s foulest, most intractable public health issues into a plus: transforming smelly poop into fragrant fertile compost. “Instead of potting soil, potty soil.”

Composting toilets themselves are nothing new, but developing a sustainable community-supported model for their use is – and  key to the group’s over-arching mission to reduce poverty via “liberation ecology.” With the likes of Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer and The Land Institute’s Wes Jackson on their all-star advisory board, they have a better shot than most at getting the plan to work.

In March, 2009, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof took a tour with SOIL staffers Sasha Kramer and Sarah Brownell:

SOIL’s approach parallels MacArthur genius Will Allen‘s vermiculture-based urban farms. The flagship 3-acre Growing Power farm, located just a few blocks from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project, is a stunning example of ecosystem-thinking applied to intensive agriculture. And it all begins with worms chowing down on municipal waste, turning garbage into fertile black gold. Allen also weaves in aquaponics – a freshwater closed loop fish-operation (perch, tilapia). Plants are nourished by fish-poo water, which filters down back to the fish. Could such a system work in Haiti? It certainly seems worth investigating.

HIGH TECH HELP

Tree-planting, briquettes, compost toilets and urban farming don’t require a lot of complicated moving parts or all that much money. Their simplicity is an essential part of why they might make a real difference. But high tech tools can help make these good ideas even more effective.

• Mapping: Tools to track and predict deforestation, including illegal logging, and to help identify good sites for reforestation projects.

• Communications: Connecting charcoal briquette producers with ag waste sources and with customers; Web-based how-to guides on how to make charcoal briquettes, tree-care tips, etc.

• Fundraising: M-giving and other philanthropy tools, e.g., develop a game where players grow a cyber-forest – download proceeds to support a real forest.

RELATED READING / VIEWING:

“After the earthquake: Haiti’s deforestation needs attention” by Moises Velasquez-Manoff (Christian Science Monitor)

“Agroforestry and sustainable resource conservation in Haiti: A Case Study” by Nathan McClintock

U.S. Senate Bill 1183: Haiti Reforestation Act of 2009 introduced by Senator Dick Durbin

“Haiti and the Dominican Republic: One Island, Two Worlds” by Jared Diamond (excerpt from “Collapse”)

“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond (book)

“Jared Diamond on why societies collapse” (TED talk – video)

The Charcoal Project (website)

Growing Power (website)

“The Farm Next Door: Urban Agriculture, Biomimicry, Aquaponics, Why Worms are Priceless & How Will Allen Aims to Fix the World” by J.A. Ginsburg (Trackerblog)

“Google Earth boosts deforestation monitoring capabilities” by Rhett A. Butler (Mongabay.com)

A special TrackerNews page with news, info and resources relevant to Haitian relief and reconstruction; A prototype “sketch” for a personal aggregation tool; Hi-tech meets What-tech?; Haiti’s legacy

At TrackerNews, we tell stories by collecting and connecting links. Unlike most aggregators  that are driven by by dateline or popularity, we are interested in context, mixing news stories and research papers, conference videos and book sites, archived articles and blog posts from the field. Typically, between 4 and 6 story groups about health (human / animal / eco), humanitarian work and technology are on the site at any given time, setting the stage for the alchemy of cross-disciplinary insight. Eventually, everything ends up in a searchable database. Day by day, link by link, a broadly defined beat becomes a richer archive, a deeper resource.

Very occasionally, major breaking news stories  – a hurricane, disease outbreak, political unrest, climate conference – have taken over the entire site. But the Haitian earthquake stands apart with its mix of staggering devastation, technological hope, massive global response, cascading threats (disease, looting, hurricanes), ecological horror (the fertile skin of  the land has literally been stripped bare from deforestation) and the glimmering potential to right more than three centuries of unspeakable wrongs rooted in the slave trade.

For two weeks, dozens upon dozens of Haiti-related links have coursed through the TrackerNews columns. More have been tweeted via @TrackerNews. Now we have created a special permanent TrackerNews: Haiti resources page.

As is the TrackerNews style, it includes a mix of links to news stories, organization websites, web tools, wiki’s, apps, books, reports, magazines and blogs. It is a work in progress and covers the following categories (to start -more can be added as needed):

• Aid/Funding
• Disaster Tech / Mapping / Mobile
• Earthquakes
• Food & Agriculture
• General News (MSM)
• Haiti
• Heath: Human / Animal
• Human Rights
• Humanitarian Design
• Light / Power
• Money / Microfinance
• Reforestation / Charcoal
• Shelter / Infrastructure
• United Nations
• Water / Sanitation

The drop down box beneath the “red bar” is the easiest way to navigate around the page.

As encompassing as the approach may be, this is not intended as a be-all, end-all list. Wherever possible, we link to sources that have more detailing listings on a particular subject (e.g., Charity Navigator, UNHCR’s List of NGO partners, the ICT4Peace list of mapping sites, etc.).

On the other hand, there are links you likely won’t find elsewhere, or find easily. For example, last March, the Canadian Foundation for the Americas published a special all Haiti edition of its magazine, Focal Point, which included link to economist Paul Collier’s report to the U.N. on Haiti’s development prospects (see “Rebuilding” subcategory under “Haiti”).

There is also a link to another report detailing lessons learned from three decades of humanitarian response to earthquake disasters. (This one was gleaned from a tweet by TED conference director Chris Anderson – sources are everywhere!)

There are several links about urban agriculture – a perennial TrackerNews favorite – including a couple of stories on nearby Cuba’s success (see “Urban Agriculture” subcategory under “Food / Ag”)

From solar cell phones to microwind technology, from crisis-mapping to eco-toilets, TrackerNews: Haiti covers the gamut. You may not find exactly what you are looking for, but chances are good there will be a link to another site that will get you closer.

Frankly, however, the site isn’t nearly good enough. It is limited by inevitable editor bias and filter and by language. That’s why we are working to develop a tool that would allow anyone to curate, aggregate and share groups of links set within a graphically intuitively and flexible template. Imagine creating as many categories and sub-categories as needed, and arranging them however made the most sense to you.

Or imagine if categories prepared in advance of a disaster by experts in various areas of humanitarian response. A special TrackerNews page could be put together within a matter of hours, crowdsourced and customized – which is just a taste of what we hope to be able to provide in the future.

In the meantime, we hope you find the Haiti page useful, and that in some small way it helps Haiti.

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HI-TECH MEETS WHAT-TECH?

Within hours on the 7.0 earthquake on January 12, space satellite cameras began snapping the ultimate in aerial views, while videos of the enormous dust cloud floating above a crumbled Port-au-Prince began posting to YouTube and CNN’s Anderson Cooper dashed off to the airport.

Within days, text message philanthropy had bloomed into a national obsession and an Israeli team managed set up a best-in-class field hospital, complete with electronic medical records, telemedicine hook-ups and a neonatal unit, while everyone else sat waiting for supplies. Google set up a “Person Finder” service in English, Kreyol, French and Spanish.

Within a week, Ushahidi, a “crisis mapping” website born of a corrupt Kenyan election, and Reuters’ newly-minted Emergency Information Service  (EIS) had launched a sort of “911″ text service for Haitians to type for help by cell phone (#4636). “Crisis Camps” began sprouting up all over the country, attracting candy-fueled, sleep-starved coding crusaders by the hundreds.

Translations into Haitian Kreyol? Crowdsource! Injured, trapped and waiting for rescue? There’s an app for that! A global fund-raiser? Call George Clooney and MTV, write a song and sell albums (lots of them) via the iTunes store!

And yet, for all the bountiful, brilliant and sometimes bizarre can-do technical triumphs, the grim reality of Haiti’s disastrous condition before this latest catastrophe means there will be no quick fixes.

Case in point: food delivery. The never-was-very-good infrastructure of Port-au-Prince is so shredded, the World Food Program had to nix air food drops in the city for fear that wind generated by helicopters would further weaken quake-cracked buildings. Roads are wrecked and hundreds of thousands of people are on the move. What do you do?

Or consider shelter. While aftershocks continue to jangle masonry and nerves, an estimated one million newly homeless sleep outdoors beneath makeshift tents. Aid groups say tens of thousands of real tents are needed. But with hurricane season only a few months away, tents are a short-term solution at best.

The reconstruction effort is expected to cost billions of dollars and take at least 10 years – but that’s only if there are no more major earthquakes or killer storms. Even if Haiti is spared, there will be other disasters elsewhere that will demand the world’s attention.

Perhaps the legacy of the Haitian tragedy will be that the world didn’t leave it stranded, that life for Haiti’s people actually improved and that some of the tech developed and lessons learned from this nightmare were able to help others in the future.

In the meantime, here is a list compiled by the Foundation Center’s blog, Philantopic, of who’s doing what where. They could all use some support.

On biomimicry and the answers right in front of us; Photosynthesis & personal power; Urban farming, tropical agroforestry and (eco)system modeling; A carbon negative idea with fertile perks; Population balance

Waiting for diplomats to resolve the global climate crisis may take so long, it won’t matter. So what do we do in the meantime?

At TrackerNews, we have highlighted all kinds of promising green energy ideas, from micro-wind and solar textiles to vast arrays of concentrated solar collectors and giant “sea snakes” harvesting wave energy.

We love them all and their heartening range of ingenuity and resourcefulness. But none of them – or even all of them taken together – can do much to move the global thermostat in the near term, especially without the political will and the investment that results to grow them to scale.

We began to wonder whether there were any ideas that could make a difference, that could actually help stabilize our feverish planet within a matter of years instead of decades. We found five – an encouraging start. Notably, all take their design cues from nature and offer multi-faceted benefits. Nature, notes Janine Benyus of the Biomimicry Institute, relies on technologies that have been field tested for millions of years, the ultimate in iterative design. It works. Every time.

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1) TAKING A LEAF FROM NATURE

MIT chemistry professor Daniel Nocera says he can solve the world’s energy needs with a little bit water – and while he’s at it, make a dent in the water crisis. Although the most theoretical of the four ideas, Nocera’s breakthrough could lead to a quick and decisive global conversion to a hydrogen-based economy.

He began by calculating global energy needs past and future (best case and business-as-usual scenarios), comparing them with the most optimistic projections for energy generated from non-carbon sources (wind, solar, nuclear) and noting the physical limitations that prevent significant improvement in battery storage.  Disturbingly, even if we all did everything possible to minimize per capita energy consumption and the number of “capitas” was kept in check by educating poor women – the fastest way, according to Nocera, to reduce the birth rate, the future looks pretty gloomy.

In the hopes of rosying things up, he studied how plants make energy by splitting water molecules. For years researchers had focused on finding catalysts that could survive the process. Nocera noticed that nature didn’t bother, instead using catalysts that simply reassembled themselves. The system was “self-healing.” Then he came up with a way to do the same thing.

Within  “8.1254 years, ” Nocera envisions homes outfitted with solar panels tied into  inexpensive water-splitting systems (no pricey precious metals such as platinum required – common pvc pipe will do). The resulting hydrogen will be stored on site to take care of the home’s energy needs and recharge electric cars.  Each building will become its own power station, with no grid  – and no coal-powered central power stations – required. As a bonus, the catalyst is hardy enough to handle dirty water, so the system  can be set up almost anywhere. And if you reverse the process, reuniting hydrogen with oxygen, presto, clean water.

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2) AN (ECO)SYSTEMS APPROACH TO URBAN AGRICULTURE

Growing Power, agriculturist and MacArthur fellow Will Allen’s flagship farm in Milwaukee, has become the “go to” lab for urban agriculture. Even in sub-zero, snow-packed dead of winter Wisconsin, the suite of greenhouses spread over 3 acres a few blocks from the city’s largest public housing project produces harvest after bountiful harvest. It is literally a green oasis in the middle of a food desert.

As in nature, there is no waste, only recycling. And the more complex the system, the more robust and stable it becomes. Worms – millions of red wrigglers – convert mountains of municipal waste into castings of remarkable fertility. Fish poo feeds plants that filter water for the fish in closed loop aquaponics set-ups. Rainwater is captured and stored. Compost berms insulate and heat greenhouses. Over 150 crops – vegetables, fruit, poultry and fish – dovetail in dense exuberance, collectively generating from $5 to $30 per square foot, which is super-star status by traditional farm metrics.

Among the climate benefits:

• No petrochemical fertilizers required

• Much shorter “farm to fork” distribution chains, so a significantly reduced carbon footprint

• Growing plants that sequester carbon

Additionally, water is recycled wherever possible, so less is required overall. In regions facing climate change-related droughts (retreating glaciers, shifting rain patterns), this is a significant advantage.

With over half the world’s population now living in cities, urban farming has become a world-wide phenomenon. From small rooftop plots that also help curb the “urban heat island effect” (localized warming caused by the mix of heat absorbing asphalt and auto-exhaust-fueled particulate pollution), to sophisticated integrated greenhouse operations, urban farms offer the benefits of a distributed system: local, modular, adaptable, scalable. Since food is fresher when it reaches the consumer, it is also more nutritious.

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3) TROPICAL AGROFORESTRY

Willie Smits, a Dutch-born forestry scientist working in Indonesia, is, to a certain extent, doing the same thing as Will Allen, only on a rainforest scale.

For the last 30 years, he has focused much of his work in Borneo, which now has the dubious distinction of being the world’s 3rd highest emitter of greenhouse gases, right behind China and the United States. This is due almost entirely to the wholesale destruction of  its rainforests to make way for palm oil plantations. Deforestation has also dealt at crushing blow to the island’s biodiversity, turning great swaths of land into superficially green monoculture bio-deserts. The loss of coastal forests has also led to inland droughts. Trees that transpired massive amounts of water vapor into the air are gone, so oceans winds blow dry and hot.

The scourge of palm oil plantations is now spreading to Africa, where there are plans for a one million hectare (~ 3,800 square mile) operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Smits’ solution? Trade in the oil palm for the polyculture-loving, biodiversity-friendly, marginal land-suited, local economy-boosting, altogether superior sugar palm. He has developed a method to process the notoriously fast-fermenting sap (a.k.a. “juice”) before it begins go alcoholic. The juice, which can be turned either into sugar or ethanol, is only one of series of forest-based products, ranging from food to furniture. The scheme, however, can only succeed with local support to assure a vested interest in protecting the land. It is as much about preserving the stability of human cultures and local economies as it is restoring forests to thriving productivity.

So far, Smith has tested his ideas at two sites, one in Borneo and the other in nearby North Sulawesi. Over the last decade, millions of trees have been planted, thousands of jobs created, local micro-climates stabilized, hillsides stabilized, river health improved, wildlife populations restored and tons upon tons of carbon sequestered. The system is scalable, replicable and could just save the “lungs of the planet.”

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4) GOING (CARBON) NEGATIVE: MAYA-MIMICKING SOIL

If someone were to tell you that there was a way to sequester carbon while improving soil fertility, would you bite?

Biochar, charcoal produced in a low oxygen burn, was first used by Amazonians at least 1,500 years ago as a soil amendment (called terra preta or black earth). Its porous structure attracts microbial colonization, which  attracts other soil life forms, which improves the recycling of nutrients. Little did the Amazonians realize, but biochar is also very good at sequestering atmospheric carbon and nitrous oxide (which molecule for molecule, packs roughly 300 times the greenhouse gas punch).

Tim Flannery (“The Weathermakers“) thinks biochar may be “the single most important initiative for humanity’s environmental future,” while James Lovelock (“The Revenge of Gaia“) suspects it may be our only chance.

It is not, however, without controversy, with some wondering how burning biomass could possibly help the environment. Proponents point out that it also improves soil moisture retention, so crops don’t require as much water – a big plus from regions hit with climate-driven drought – while reducing the need for petrochemical fertilizers.

If entrepreneurs such as Jason Aramburu are right, not only could biochar dramatically improve crop yields in developing world, its production could generate enough energy to power a village. Scaled up globally, it could bring us back from the brink of climate catastrophe. “If we can get two billion tons of CO2, two gigatons out, in year,” says Araburu, “we could roll back emissions to pre-1982 levels in just 10 years.”

Araburu uses plant waste to make biochar – the same material MIT’s Amy Smith and her D-Lab students use to create a clean burning charcoal alternative to cheap cooking oil (ironically, palm oil). Did they reach essentially the same answer for two completely different problems? Very possibly. In which case this virtuous circle just gets better and better.

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5) POPULATION BALANCE

When a population of anything – bacteria, bugs or bunnies – grows beyond its supplies of food, water or shelter, or pollutes its environment to the point it becomes poisonous, there will be die-offs. The species may survive. Or not. This is Nature’s ultimate feedback loop and there is no negotiation.

In 1900, the global human population was 1.65 billion. In 2000, it was just over 6 billion. In another 40 years, the U.N. estimates it will be over 9 billion. And if something isn’t done fast to slow or reverse climate change, at least 250 million of them are expected to be “climate refugees.”  These will be people whose island homes or coastal cities have been submerged by rising seas. Fresh water supplies will have been fatally fouled. Others will have fled drought-scarred lands left dry and desolate by the retreat of glaciers. Still others will find their homelands flooded by ever more frequent and fierce typhoons, hurricanes and tornadoes.

As a species, we are running out of everything: food, water, shelter, clean air and especially time. But we can buy at least a little time if population growth can slowed.

Daniel Nocera is right: Investing in the education of poor women (along with providing ready access to contraceptives) is a critical part of addressing the energy crisis and, by extension, climate change. Women who attend school have fewer children because they are in a better position to make decisions about their families and their futures. According to WHO, there are 51 million unplanned children born in the developing world each year. That’s 1/6 of the population of the United States. Each year.

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NATURE BATS LAST

Each one of five ideas offers the extra bonus of multiple bottom lines: Save the climate and provide energy / clean water / food / jobs / habitat restoration / education. We can either learn from nature and biomimic our way to a more promising future, or defy it and suffer.

The really good news: We don’t have to wait for politicians. We can start to make a difference right now.

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RELATED READING / LISTENING / VIEWING

• “Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action” (TED talk – video)

• Biomimicry: Nature as Model, Measure and Mentor (Benyus’ website)

• “Chemistry and Personalized Solar Power” (NPR “Science Friday” interview with Daniel Nocera- audio)

• “The Farm Next Door: Urban Agriculture, Biomimicry, Aquaponics, Why Worms are Priceless & How Will Allen Aims to Fix the World” (TrackerBlog post)

• Tapergy: Willie Smits’ business to commercialize the sugar palm and related rainforest products (website)

• “Google Earth Hero: BOS, Borneo rain forest – Willie Smits” (video)

• “The Carbon NEGATIVE Option: Why Tim Flannery & James Lovelock Love Biochar” (TrackerBlog post)

• re:char – Jason Aramburu’s biochar business (website)

• “The Way Forward: Researching the Environment and Migration Nexus” (report by the Institute for Environment and Human Security, United Nations University – pdf)

The last-minute, cobbled-together, non-binding, specifics-lite COP15 “accord” managed to unify almost everyone in disappointment, though perhaps not in surprise. Many, including climatologist James Hansen and economist Jeffrey Sachs, have for months called the drawn-out politically-driven process “broken.” When there was no time to waste, time was wasted. The representative from the fast-sinking island of Tuvalu noted forlornly that the fate of the world was “being decided by some senators in the U.S. Congress.”

Really? Just a handful of senators? A few people out of a few dozen determining the future of six billion? If true, then as a species perhaps we deserve ourselves – though our fellow travelers on this blue dot planet certainly deserve better.

Tom Friedman, never one to shy away from clever turn of phrase, has called on “Father Greed” to save us from the political inertia letting  Mother Nature run amok. He wants to see a sort of green tech “arms” race between the U.S. and China, the two largest emitters responsible together for spewing half the greenhouse gases mucking up the atmosphere. To the winner will go economic advantage, an innovation edge and millions of jobs.

To the loser – well, there are no losers. With the world’s two largest economies leading the way, Friedman is certain the rest of the world will follow. Developing countries will build low-carbon energy infrastructure from the get go and a variety of disasters will be scaled back, if not altogether averted:

• Global CO2 levels will steady at safe-ish levels

• There won’t be quite as many record-breaking snow-storms, floods, droughts and famines

• The advance of vector-borne diseases into temperate zones will slow (anything that involves a mosquito, gnat or tick)

• Glaciers will return to an appropriately glacial crawl, slowing their retreat, possibly advancing and assuring millions of people living down-slope of reasonably predictable seasonal water supplies

• Oceans won’t turn lethally acidic, so corals and the fish that depend upon them will survive

• Oceans won’t rise as fast or as high as worst-case predictions, which will spare islands and coastlines from worst-case devastation

• Fewer forests will be blistered by drought, so won’t be incinerated in super-hot, soil-scorching mega-fires

• Fewer species will go extinct

• Climate refugees will number in the tens of millions instead of the hundreds of millions by 2050

The good news will be less bad news, which doesn’t have either much political cache or headline appeal, which is why the cynically optimistic Friedman is banking on greed: “(T)he way you get big change is by getting the big players to do the right things for the wrong reasons. If you wait for everyone to do the right thing for the right reason, you’re going to be waiting a long, long time.”

Time? Who’s got time?

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RELATED READING / LISTENING / VIEWING

• “The Fate of My Country Rests in Your Hands” (GOOD blog post / video)

• “Jeffrey Sachs: ‘Copenhagen expectations unlikely to be fulfilled’” (EarthSky podcasts / audio)

• “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity” by James Hansen (book website)