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The Technium: The Most Powerful Force in the World
Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth's land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.
The Urbanophile
The Urbanophile is about the intersection of urban policy, architecture and design, strategy, transportation, economic development, talent acquisition, branding, arts and culture, and demographics as applied to the future of the Midwestern and American city.
The Fog of Numbers - Clusterfuck Nation
The number problems we face are now hopeless. America will never be able to cover its current outstanding debt. We're effectively finished at all three levels: household, corporate, and government.
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ity to really care about the place they called home.
It's especially ironic that given our preoccupation with numbers, we have arrived at the point where numbers just can't be comprehended anymore. This week, outstanding world derivatives were declared to have reached the 1 quadrillion mark. Commentators lately -- e.g. NPR's "Planet Money" broadcast -- have struggled to explain to listeners exactly what a trillion is in images such as the number of dollar bills stacked up to the planet Venus or the number of seconds that add up to three ice ages plus two warmings. A quadrillion is just off the charts, out of this world, not really subject to reality-based interpretation. You might as well say "infinity." We have flown up our own collective numeric bung-hole. -
While extremely allergic to paranoid memes and conspiracy theories, I begin to wonder about the impressive volume of World Wide Web chatter about an upcoming bank holiday -- meaning that the US government might find itself constrained to shut down the banking system for a period of time to deal with a rapidly developing emergency that might prompt the public to make a run on reserves. God knows, there are enough black swans crowding the skies these days to blot out the sun. I hesitate to suggest that readers who are able to should consider stealthily withdrawing a month's worth of walking-around money from their accounts.
The week past, some so-called "conservative" political action groups (read: brownshirts pimped by corporate medical interests) trumped up a few incidents of civil unrest at "town meetings" around the country, ostensibly to counter health care reform ideas. The people behind these capers may be playing with dynamite. It's one thing to yell at a congressman over "single payer" abstractions. It'll be another thing when the dispossessed and repossessed Palin worshippers, Nascar morons, and Jesus Jokers haul the ordnance out of their closets and start tossing Molotov cocktails into the First National Bank of Chiggerville.
Personal Responsibility - Toby's People
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Consider the modern environmental movement. We take personal responsibility; we accept the role we, individually, have played in destroying the environment, so we focus on the things we can do, individually, to at least not participate in it anymore. You know the litany as well as I do: eat organic, reduce, reuse, recycle, use incandescent light bulbs, take shorter showers, carpool, drive a hybrid, ride a bicycle, et cetera ad infinitum.
And yet, despite this, we know that even if everyone in the world heeded this advice, if we all achieved enlightenment tomorrow and a flowering of global consciousness put us all in tune with a higher frequency or whatever other spiritual or philosophical metaphor you’d prefer, it would not alter our present ecological course.
Open Left:: "Energy Determines Biological Success"
Links to a number of Richard Heinberg videos on peak energy.
Reserved Place: Is this really a great global recession?
In contrast, this post presents an unconventional indicator of global economic activity that shows no sign of truly global recession yet. This indicator is the seasonally adjusted atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Admittedly, the rate of carbon dioxide emission varies between different industries, and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is affected by natural variables such as sea surface temperature, making it a noisy indicator of economic activity
SpringerLink - Journal Article
Increasing urban albedo can reduce summertime temperatures, resulting in better air quality and savings from reduced air-conditioning costs. In addition, increasing urban albedo can result in less absorption of incoming solar radiation by the surface-troposphere system, countering to some extent the global scale effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Pavements and roofs typically constitute over 60% of urban surfaces (roof 20–25%, pavements about 40%). Using reflective materials, both roof and pavement albedos can be increased by about 0.25 and 0.15, respectively, resulting in a net albedo increase for urban areas of about 0.1. On a global basis, we estimate that increasing the world-wide albedos of urban roofs and paved surfaces will induce a negative radiative forcing on the earth equivalent to offsetting about 44 Gt of CO2 emissions.
THE PEAK OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTION and the Road to Olduvai Gorge
World energy production per capita from 1945 to 1973 grew at a breakneck speed of 3.45 %/year. Next from 1973 to the all-time peak in 1979, it slowed to a sluggish 0.64 %/year. Then suddenly —and for the first time in history — energy production per capita took a long-term decline of 0.33 %/year from 1979 to 1999. The Olduvai theory explains the 1979 peak and the subsequent decline. More to the point, it says that energy production per capita will fall to its 1930 value by 2030, thus giving Industrial Civilization a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years.
The Elusive Green Economy - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)
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Exhilaration over clean energy has so thoroughly swept Silicon Valley that it has transformed the local culture. Conspicuous consumption has given way to conspicuous conservation. The favored status symbol is no longer the giant yacht or the sprawling mansion but the home designed to be so ruthlessly energy-efficient that it generates its own power
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produces a surplus that can be selflessly fed back into the grid. One top venture capitalist who showed me his Portola Valley home had embarked on such a project and then, after choosing the reclaimed stone and composting toilets, had succumbed completely to environmentalist fervor and kept right on going, contracting with a local nursery to grow the flora necessary for a “native play meadow” and bringing in a team of wildlife biologists, equipped with motion-sensitive night-vision cameras, to lure back to their natural habitat the elusive riverine tortoise and dusky-footed wood rat that once roamed the property. A documentary film is in the works. -
The nut of the problem traces all the way back to Jimmy Carter’s choice of tax credits as the vehicle for subsidizing renewable energy. Direct grants would have been simpler. But Congress had recently changed the federal-budget process to keep closer track of how much money was being spent. It suddenly became easier to spend indirectly, by manipulating the tax code. Although no one realized it at the time, Carter’s decision to use tax credits lit the very long fuse on a bomb that detonated last fall and nearly took down the entire renewable-energy industry in America.
The trouble with tax credits is that in order to make use of them, you must owe taxes, and most start-ups struggling toward profitability do not. So while a company looking to build a wind or solar facility would qualify for valuable benefits, it had no means of realizing this “tax equity.” The work-around was to partner with someone who did, someone large enough to finance a $500 million facility and profitable enough to incur a large tax bill. Having witnessed two decades of busts and bankruptcies, traditional U.S. banks wanted no part of this. European banks, going by their more positive experience, were comfortable funding large renewable projects, but didn’t qualify for U.S. tax credits. The perversity of the government’s incentives demanded a big balance sheet, huge profits, and an indifference to risk.
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