In 1971, Buckminster Fuller and a team of architects began the design for a new city. The project was called Old Man River City. It was to be a single community dwelling machine for 125,000 humans. The following description in Fuller’s own words is excerpted from the book Critical Path published in 1981:

Fuller’s mission was to: “To make the world work in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”  (06/29/08)
more…

In 2002, Dean Robertson
wrote: The United States, is heading at almost full steam, toward the
biggest calamity of it’s entire history, due, in part, I think, in the
very poor structure of our current government.

It would be much better,
if it really was a democracy, but alas, it is not. I could quote ream
on ream of various rhetoric, that has defined our current state of
affairs, but it would change nothing.

Someone with substantial
charisma, and a following of people, say 10,000 individuals, with many
many dollars, must build a sustainable community, from the ground up.

My home state Iowa, would be a good place, since there are some older
communities that are slowly disintegrating, as people move to larger
communities, making them larger still. In doing so, they must exceed
all building codes, that are in place, in any community, that currently
uses building codes. [ I know that, ( inroads ) have been made, in the
Universal building codes, by various builders and city engineers, that
are beginning to allow (off normal designs), that do exceed existing
code ]

At the present time, NO SUCH COMMUNITIES EXIST. And, NO amount
of RHETORIC will make it happen. Some people must actually make it
happen. (06/29/08)
more…

Bill McKibben writes: I ALMOST NEVER write about writing—in my aesthetic, the writing should disappear, the thought linger. But the longer I’ve spent working on global warming—the greatest challenge humans have ever faced—the more I’ve come to see it as essentially a literary problem. A technological and scientific challenge, yes; an economic quandary, yes; a political dilemma, surely. But centrally? A crisis in metaphor, in analogy, in understanding. We haven’t come up with words big enough to communicate the magnitude of what we’re doing. How do you say: the world you know today, the world you were born into, the world that has remained essentially the same for all of human civilization, that has birthed every play and poem and novel and essay, every painting and photograph, every invention and economy, every spiritual system (and every turn of phrase) is about to be . . . something so different? Somehow “global warming” barely hints at it. The same goes for any of the other locutions, including “climate chaos.” And if we do come up with adequate words in one culture, they won’t necessarily translate into all the other languages whose speakers must collaborate to somehow solve this problem. …

When the Northwest Passage opened amid the great Arctic melt last
summer, many scientists were stunned. James Hansen, our greatest
climatologist, was already at work on a paper that would try, for the
first time, to assign a real number to global warming, a target that
the world could aim at. No more vague plans to reduce carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, or keep it from doubling, or slow the rate of growth—he
understood that there was already enough evidence from the planet’s
feedback systems, and from the quickly accumulating data about the
paleoclimate, to draw a bright line.

In a PowerPoint presentation he gave at the American Geophysical
Union meeting in San Francisco last December, he named a number: 350
parts per million carbon dioxide. That, he said, was the absolute upper
bound of anything like safety—above it and the planet would be
unraveling. Is unraveling, because we’re already at 385 parts per
million. And so it’s a daring number, a politically unwelcome one. It
means, in shorthand, that this generation of people—politicians
especially—can’t pass the problem down to their successors. We’re like
patients who’ve been to the doctor and found out that our cholesterol
is too high. We’re in the danger zone. Time to cut back now, and hope
that we do it fast enough so we don’t have a stroke in the meantime. So
that Greenland doesn’t melt in the meantime and raise the ocean
twenty-five feet.

For me, the number was a revelation. (06/29/08)
more…

Michael Klare writes: At the hastily convened global oil summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on June 28, top officials of producing and consuming nations from around the world attempted to find a combination of solutions that would somehow extricate us from the current crisis over sky-high energy prices. These proposals ranged from increased output by major producers like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to restrictions on the activities of international oil speculators.

But all were based on the premise that the crisis can be resolved through the right mix of actions, thus restoring an environment of cheap and abundant oil – a premise that is fundamentally flawed. More and more, the evidence suggests that this is not just a temporary crisis. It is the beginning of the end of the Petroleum Age.

How do we know that the Petroleum Age is drawing to a close? Two key indicators tell us that this is so. First, many of the giant fields that have satisfied our massive thirst over so many years are experiencing diminished output. Second, although the major oil producers are spending more money each year to discover new reserves, they are finding less and less oil. Either of these factors by itself is cause for significant worry; the combination is deadly. Dangerous Reliance

Few people understand how reliant we have become on a relatively small number of mammoth fields for the lion’s share of our daily petroleum intake. Though the world possesses tens of thousands of operating fields, a mere 116 of them – each producing more than 100,000 barrels per day – together account for nearly one-half of total global output. Of these, all but a handful were discovered more than a quarter of a century ago, and most are showing signs of diminished capacity. Indeed, some of the world’s largest fields – including Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, Burgan in Kuwait, Cantarell in Mexico, and Samotlor in Russia – appear to be now in decline or about to become so. The decline of these giant fields matters greatly. Compensating for their lost output will take increased yield at thousands of smaller fields, and there is no evidence that this is even remotely possible. …

Consider: In 2030, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, world “liquids” demand is expected to reach 117.6 million barrels per day. Of this amount, unconventional fuels – synthetic liquids derived from tar sands, shale rock, and biofuels – may provide a total of 10.5 million barrels. That leaves 107.1 million to be supplied by conventional petroleum. But what if global oil output has fallen to 60-70% of that amount by 2030, as projected by many analysts? Under those circumstances, no amount of oil from Alaska or the outer continental shelf will be able to save this country (or the rest of the world) from a catastrophic energy crisis.

Some say that any palliative is worth the expense as we head toward certain disaster. But this is not a logical response. Knowing that the age of petroleum is drawing to a close, it is far better to devote our talents and investment dollars on hastening the arrival of its successor, rather than prolonging the agony of oil’s decline. (06/29/08)
more…

BBC Environmental Science — Martian soil appears to contain sufficient nutrients to support life - Nasa scientists believe. Preliminary analysis by the $420m (£210m) Phoenix Mars Lander mission on the planet’s soil found it to be much more alkaline than expected. Scientists working on the spacecraft project said they were “flabbergasted” by the discovery. The find has raised hopes conditions on Mars may be favourable for life.

“We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life, whether past, present or future,” said Sam Kounaves, the project’s lead chemist, from the University of Arizona. Although he said further tests would have to be conducted, Mr Kounaves said the soil seemed “very friendlyÖ there is nothing about it that is toxic,” he said. “It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard - you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well.”

As well as being far less acidic than anticipated, the soil was also found to contain traces of magnesium, sodium, potassium and other elements. “We were all flabbergasted at the data we got back,” said Mr Kounaves. “It is very exciting for us.” …

The Arctic location where Phoenix touched down is thought to hold large stores of water-ice just below the surface. Last week, scientists said they were positive there was ice on the planet after eight dice-sized chunks were seen melting away in a series of photographs. But Phoenix has so far not detected organic carbon - considered an essential building block of life. (06/29/08)
more…

Fossil fuels are currently the primary source of the cheap
energy that powers our modern Industrial Civilization. If we are
running out of crude oil and natural gas, as some of the best
scientists and engineers in the energy field are telling us,  we have big problems.

Think back for a moment to the year 1801, only two hundred years
ago, that was a time when there was no gasoline, no refined oil, no
natural gas, and no electrical power derived from oil and gas. As a
thought experiment, try to  imagine what life was like at the beginning
of the 19th century. If you were transported back two hundred years,
how would the lack of petroleum affect your lifestyle?

While we might accurately imagine the loss of cheap energy
from petroleum, most of us would overlook the 70,000 products that are
manufactured using petroleum as a raw feedstock. This includes
plastics, acrylics, cosmetics, paints, varnishes, asphalts,
fertilizers, medications, etc., etc., etc..

Now, in addition to our loss of cheap energy and the 70,000
products that you and I have come to depend on, imagine our sharing
that impoverished Earth with six billion other humans?

Industrial civilization, as we know it, cannot exist without petroleum. We humans are facing an extinction level crisis. Any careful examination of the writings and papers of the world’s leading energy scientists will convince the reader of the validity of the fossil fuel energy crisis.

This problem is real and it is even worse than it appears. Writing in 1996, Richard Duncan, Ph.D. explained this crisis in what he called the Olduvai Theory:

“In 1989, I concluded that the life-expectancy of
Industrial Civilization is horridly short. This hypothesis was defined
in terms of a measurable index, world energy-use per person, and named
the “transient-pulse theory of Industrial Civilization.” I sketched its
maximum point at 1990, followed by a persistent decline. Ö By 1996,
however, I had successfully tested the Olduvai theory against numerous
sets of data. The following facts emerge.

• The broad sweep of human history can be divided into three phases.
• The first, or pre-industrial phase was a very long period of
  equilibrium when simple tools and weak machines limited economic
  growth.
• The second, or industrial phase was a very short period of
  non-equilibrium that ignited with explosive force when powerful new
  machines temporarily lifted all limits to growth.
• The third, or de-industrial phase lies immediately ahead
  during which time the industrial economies will decline toward a new
  period of equilibrium, limited by the exhaustion of nonrenewable
  resources and continuing deterioration of the natural environment.

more…

BBC Environmental Science — It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.

The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic – and worrying – examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer.

“From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important. There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole, not open water,” said Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado. …

The polar regions are experiencing the most dramatic increase in average temperatures due to global warming and scientists fear that as more sea ice is lost, the darker, open ocean will absorb more heat and raise local temperatures even further. Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, who was one of the first civilian scientists to sail underneath the Arctic sea ice in a Royal Navy submarine,said that the conditions are ripe for an unprecedented melting of the ice at the North Pole.

“Last year we saw huge areas of the ocean open up, which has never been experienced before. People are expecting this to continue this year and it is likely to extend over the North Pole. It is quite likely that the North Pole will be exposed this summer – it’s not happened before,” Professor Wadhams said. (06/26/08)
more…

Timothy Wilken, MD writes: You may have noticed that a lot of the world’s news is bad.

Making a living seems to be getting a lot a harder. A lot of people are out of work. Prices are really getting difficult.

Our economy seems not simply to be slowing into a recession, in fact it seems to be genuinely broken.

Our leaders are not very reassuring. They have lots to say, but none of it makes much sense. Their actions seem only to make things worse.

Our planet seems broken too. Our biologists tell us that a lot of the plants and animals are dying. Our atmosphere is getting ever more contaminated, and at times difficult to breathe.

And yet we humans just keep making the same choices over and over again, including making many more of ourselves.

Our population is predicted to reach seven billion in 2012. This doesn’t seem to be making things any better. If we are running out of clean water, healthy food, and cheap energy, do we need more mouths to feed — more bodies to clothe — more individuals to shelter and transport?

I believe that tomorrow’s challenges will require that we make our choices much more carefully, and select actions that are much more intelligent.

In
my search to better understand human behavior, I have discovered seven
states of mind that when accomplished increase human intelligence, they
are:  calmness, awareness, synergy, validation, motivation, adaptability & responsibility. 

I think you might want to understand and nurture these states of mind in yourself, in your family, and in your friends.  (06/23/08)
more…

James Howard Kunstler writes: The telling moment last week was Robert Hirsch’s appearance on the
CNBC morning “Squawkbox” financial show in which he proposed the
probability of $500-a-barrel oil within “a three-to-five-year
time-frame.” Squawkhead Becky Quick was clearly nonplussed by the
stolid Mr. Hirsch, author of a (then)-startling 2005 US Dept of Energy
report (since referred to as the Hirsch Report and buried by the
Secretary of Energy) that warned of dire effects on the American way of
life as the Peak Oil predicament gained traction.

Perhaps more
reality-challenged was the uber-idiot Larry Kudlow on CNBC’s night-time
money show, who kept repeating the mantra “drill, drill drill” when
presented with signs that something other than “oil speculators” was
driving up the price and creating global scarcity. These idiots always
return to the shibboleth that “there’s plenty of oil out there.” What
they don’t get is that even while the world is enjoying the all time
peak of production (somewhere around 85-million barrels-a-day), that
same world is demanding at least 86-million barrels — so even though
there’s more oil than ever, there’s not enough. And the gap is only
bound to get bigger.

The difference between what’s available
and what’s demanded is being felt by poor countries and poor people in
richer countries. Third world nations lacking their own oil are simply
dropping out of the bidding, and the lower classes in the US are having
to choose between buying gasoline and velveeta. The floods in the corn
belt will surely aggravate the problem here in the USA. Lunch breaks
may soon be a thing of the past for WalMart Associates. Maybe they’ll
just play video games on their cell phones in the parking lot to allay
their hunger. (06/23/08)

more…

Tom Engelhardt writes: It’s been a curious experience, each evening recently, turning on the NBC or ABC nightly news, with historic levels of flooding in Iowa as the lead story. (”Uncharted territory,” National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Pierce called these floods.) After all, there are those stunning images of Cedar Rapids, a small city now simply in the water. The National Weather Service has already termed what’s happened to the city an “historic hydrologic event,” with the Cedar River topping its banks at, or above, half-millennium highs. (That’s an every 500 year “event”!)

But here’s the special strangeness of this TV moment: Network news loves weather disasters, and yet, as with historic droughts in the Southeast or Southwest, as with the hordes of tornadoes coursing through the center of the country, as with so many other extreme weather phenomena of recent times, including flooding in Southern China and the Burmese cyclone, when it comes to the Midwestern floods, night after night no TV talking head seems ever to mention the possibility that climate change/global warming might somehow be involved. (Nor, by the way, are our major newspapers any better on the subject.) As an omission, it’s kinda staggering, really, for an event already being labeled “a Midwestern Katrina.”

All that soggy Iowa acreage and an estimated 20% of the corn and soya crops in the region already lost — forget ethanol, but think soaring food prices — and yet not a word. Of course, it’s true that no single weather catastrophe like this one can be simply and definitively linked to climate change — and undoubtedly some may have nothing to do with it. But when the weather is this extreme, wouldn’t you want, as a reporter or news editor, to make sure the subject was at least raised and considered? Or is it simply: been there, done that?

My theory of life is that, when you see a four-legged, black-and-white striped horse-like animal on a savannah, you should call it a zebra until evidence proves otherwise. You would certainly think that, this late in the game, this post-Al Gore, this post-all those melting icebergs, icecaps, iced-over seas, and glaciers, such levels of denial might have abated a bit, but no such luck, it seems.

And in this case, where the mainstream media leads, Americans seem inclined to go. So, can we be truly surprised that an April poll from the Pew Research Center actually found a modest decline since January 2007 in “the proportion of Americans who say that the earth is getting warmer”? Or that, while a majority of the world, in Pew’s latest Global Attitude Study, blames the U.S., at least in part, for accelerating global warming, we are one of the countries “where majorities do not define global warming as a very serious problem.”

Fair warning, then. Think of this as the Tomdispatch equivalent of the Surgeon General’s caveat on a cigarette pack: If you value the health of your state of denial, you will read the following remarkable piece by John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus and Tomdispatch regular, slowly, carefully, and at your peril. Tomdispatch takes no responsibility for what may happen. (06/23/08)
more…