No really, I think it is. Judging from reading a multitude of blogs and real estate websites, and after talking with a real estate investor friend in L.A., it appears a tentative bottom may be forming in some of the worst hit areas. Is there more pain coming? Sure. But prices have dropped 30-40% in some areas, and that’s starting to interest investors. Call them vultures or call them long-term investors, but they are the ones who will create the bottom as they move in and start buying and holding for several years or to rent for income.

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Watched a documentary recently about the Black Death. The known world had death rates of 25-50%. Think about that. No family was spared. Things got completely psychotic for a while, what with flagellants whipping themselves publicly (when they weren’t partying with the fair maidens) and Jews being slaughtered (surely they must be to blame, let’s torture them until they confess.) But the Black Death did finally burn itself out. When it was over, the population size was much less, so there were no more food shortages. Thus, peasants didn’t have to indenture themselves to royalty any more, they simply moved on. With more spare time, culture began to flower, and this eventually led to the Renaissance.

What we’re going through now is a blip compared to the Black Death. Still, there are unsettling parallels. The slaughter and torture of innocents by frenzied mobs looking for someone to blame, happens too often in history. Religion can provide a rationalization for it too. We are to blame for letting the Jew spread the Black Death, so torturing him is only just and might save his soul too. Uh huh. Or maybe that Jew had been a moneylender and if he’s dead, then the debts never need be repaid, now do they?

Will our planet, currently straining to provide resources to all, have another Die-off? Or will climate change and peak oil will somehow lead to another flowering of culture and technology?

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A suburb eating robot.

The two front legs crush and process the suburban houses, and turn them into materials ready for recycling (naturally, being giant robots, the compacted materials are fired off in missiles to the recycling plants). The middle and rear-legs slowly but surely terraform the earth left behind. Flora and fauna are brought to the site via these behemoths, and Mother Nature is restored.

This would appear to be extreme technophilia being used in a Luddite manner, a high tech destruction of abandoned human habitat then restoring it to nature. Will the housing crisis, peak oil, and climate change actually result in a world where the suburbs are emptied out and people return, voluntarily or not, to the cities?

Or maybe, just maybe, we can combine clean, renewable power and transportation with smart energy conservation and avert such a Malthusian world.

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How exactly, does this work, you ask?

Quite simply: The Bank finances a fossil fuel project, involving oil, natural gas, or coal, in Poor Country A. Rich Country B asks the Bank to help arrange carbon credits so Country B can tell its carbon counters it’s taking serious action on climate change. The World Bank kindly obliges, offering carbon credits for a price far lower than Country B would have to pay if Country B made those cuts at home. Country A gets a share of the cash to invest in equipment to make fossil fuel project slightly more efficient, the World Bank takes its 13% cut, and everyone is happy.

Except the planet, of course, since this carbon credit shell game does little if anything to mitigate climate change.

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Burning The Future: Coal in America - Trailer from coalmovie on Vimeo.

Burning the Future: Coal in America, a brutally honest documentary film, examines explosive forces that have set in motion a groundswell of conflict between the Coal Industry and residents of West Virginia. Our heros demonstrate strength of character in their fight to arouse the nation’s help in protecting their mountains, saving their families, and preserving their way of life.

Website. Blog.

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“Not only will I, but I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem.”

– Sen. Barack Obama, quoted by ABC News, when asked if he would appoint Gore to a cabinet position to deal with global climate change.

Clinton and McCain also have said they will, if elected, work on solving climate change. But this statement by Obama is the clearest most unmistakable I’ve seen by any candidate that real action will be taken.

Perhaps a national initiative to create clean, renewable energy will be what pulls the country out of the economic doldrums.

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It just snowed in Seattle, and this is very late for them to have snow. Ditto for Vancouver. New Hampshire had more snow this year than in 135 years. Here in Connecticut we’ve had enormous amounts of rain, three to four times more than normal this winter. Plus, the sun hasn’t been out much and Spring still isn’t quite here yet.

This is why the name got changed from “global warming” to “climate change.” The weather will not just get hotter, rather it will be more extreme, with bigger fluctuations. Some areas will get drier and hotter, others will be cooler with more water.

So, this unusual winter could just be part of the normal variations or it could signal more climate change.

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The American West is heating up faster than any other region of the United States, and more than the Earth as a whole, according to a new analysis of 50 scientific studies.

Worse, the trend is expected to accelerate. What will this mean long-term for cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix. and Salt Lake City?

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Maui will soon have Hawaii’s first wave power project. May there be many more. Maui has also been developing sizable amounts of wind power. Makes sense for an island to produce their own clean power rather than ship in oil from the mainland to be used in power plants. Locally produced clean energy is the best kind.

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This professional 12 minute video, Ahead of the Curve, shows how major US corporations like GE, DuPont, J&J, Wal-Mart, and Duke Energy are not only investing millions in lessening their own carbon footprints, they are saving money and spinning off new products while doing so. In other words, it’s helping their business and bottom line.

Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers says in the video that the chances of federal regulation on climate climate in the next five years is “100%” and that those passing the bills will almost certainly be consulting with the companies that have already demonstrated leadership and action.

This kind of outreach on climate change to business titans (and just non-titan regular businesses) is extremely valuable — and the outreach needs to be in many forms, like this.

Business increasingly gets it. Come Jan. 2009 when Neanderthals no longer inhabit the White House is when the real change at the federal level will start.

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Not only are the homes zero emission, they appear to have a genuine sense of community there too.

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From 2001-2003, I was Co-coordinator of the Green Party of Los Angeles County. The GP was growing fast then, lots of voter registration drives and outreach. It was fun. Other parts were not so fun. In my role of Treasurer, I had a legal obligation to file a complaint against a Green Party member for his disposition of a $10,000 check. This caused ruptures that the California Green Party still hasn’t recovered from.

From there, I got active in the ANSWER Coalition, helping to build antiwar demonstrations, some of them quite massive. Got involved with the group behind them, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and learned about Marxism. Got purged from PSL quite recently for reasons I’m unclear of (and no longer care about) - so now I’m a free agent.

So, it’s been a turbulent several years. Quite exciting too, at times. Worked on the 2000 Nader campaigns and Peter Camejo’s run for governor in 2003. Helped build antiwar protests where tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands came. Drove the truck that led L.A. mass protests several times. I’ve learned a lot about politics, organizing, and people.

So what’s next for me?

Lately I’ve become increasingly interested in the political ramifications of global warming and peak oil. How do we organize for change here? To work towards solving these problems societies as a whole need to work together. We no longer have time for squabbling (or idiotic wars). Also, solutions will require huge amounts of money and resources as well as new directions for the planet. This means governments and business must become involved on a massive basis.

The Green Party absolutely played a huge role in getting global warming and renewable energy into the national consciousness. Whether they can survive the 2008 elections as a viable party is uncertain, but their contributions have been crucial.

I’m reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. It’s about how the planet is increasingly flattened by globalization, with work being done wherever it can be done the cheapest and most effectively. In it, he becomes startled when a Harvard political theorist tells him that his thesis, that the World is Flat, is almost precisely what Karl Marx wrote about in 1848. “The inexorable march of technology and capital to remove all barriers, boundaries, frictions, and restraints to global commerce.” Of course, Marx believed once that happened, workers worldwide would discover their exploitation and then rise up and throw off their shackles. (They might also just sit back in the La-Z Boy and think, I’m glad I’m not living in a mud hut any more.)

So, am I an ecosocialist now? Maybe. But as you might guess, I’m currently a bit burned out on -isms, so no labels for me for a while, thanks.

As mentioned, to solve global warming, we all really do need to work together. I’m looking around for new groups to become involved with. What’s your group doing?

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An independent audit said the growing of the yerba mate absorbed substantially more carbon than the processing and shipping used, making it a ‘carbon subtracting‘ product.

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Biofuel alternatives to oil are third-generation. The next step is life forms that feed on CO2 and give off fuel such as methane gas as waste, says biotech expert Craig Venter (who sequenced the human genome in 2001.)

He wants to create new organisms with synthetic genes that input CO2 and output methane. (The organisms would have a suicide gene so if they escaped from the lab, they couldn’t reproduce.)

He says “”We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy, we think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock.”

The more ideas like this, the better. Eventually some of them will go mainstream and clean, renewable energy will then become commonplace.

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(Image from Robert Paterson’s Weblog)

This Feb. in CT was officially the wettest on record as well as having the least amount of sun that anyone can remember. Ptui. And it was only a few months ago we were officially in a “severe drought.”

Sure, some of this can be normal fluctuations in weather pattern, but climate change also means highly variable weather, not just increased heat.

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Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber has been criss-crossing the world in support of Abu Dhabi’s $15 billion Masdar Initiative, which aims to build a zero-carbon, zero-waste city with a population of 50,000 in hopes it can “re-engineer the way cities are built.”

Meanwhile, in that apparent cleantech backwater called the United States, reactionary forces continue their losing battle to fight for their right to despoil the atmosphere and deplete resources.

Yes, there are plenty of highly progressive cleantech initiatives in the US, often championed by huge corporations like Wal-Mart, and lots of venture capital and funding for cleantech too. But on the political level, the US remains an anachronism, stuck in the past, almost proudly refusing to change.

Maybe the next U.S. president will change all that. Let’s hope so.

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Taped at Davos 2008. Google is in the forefront of working to remediate global warming and is spending lots of money to do so, including their nonprofit, Google.org, which targets other issues like poverty too. One of their primary goals is to make renewable energy cheaper than coal, with an initial emphasis on solar thermal, deep geothermal, and high altitude wind.

36 minutes and worth listening to.

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Yet this Pentagon version of what global warming will bring is so doom-laded and apocalyptic that it makes Peakists and others of their ilk seem positively jolly.

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

Dunno, but this report is so over the top and out of line with other predictions, even dire ones, that I’m guessing it’s a ploy for the Pentagon to get themselves trillions more in appropriations. Yes, I freely admit to being a teensy bit suspicious of the Pentagon’s motives.

But it’s definitely good that they understand that global warming is real. Meanwhile, business is investing hundreds of billions into finding answers. Wouldn’t it be great if the Pentagon and the US government were to follow? It was Pentagon funding of ARPANET that led to the Internet, and space shuttles were where fuel cells were invented. Now it’s time for them to do the same with cleantech and renewable energy.

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Private sector pumping hundreds of billions into cleantech

Key quote, referring to a UN report

“Increasingly, combating climate change is being perceived as an opportunity rather than a burden and a path to a new kind of prosperity as opposed to a brake on profits and employment,” said the report, which credits the emerging “green” economy with “driving invention and innovation on a scale not seen since perhaps the industrial revolution.”

Yes! The fear and the resistance to change is becoming a thing of the past. The companies that get it will invest big time in cleantech and some will become the next ExxonMobil. (It’s a given that the reactionary dinosaur that is ExxonMobil will not be the next ExxonMobil. But rather that some upstart cleantech company will dethrone them. Heck, it might even be the spawn of Google.org that does it…)

Equally important is that business now sees global warming and cleantech this as opportunity, and indeed, an entire new economic structure for the planet may result because of this. Locally-produced decentralized power will be a large part of the solution, and as that happens, political structures will become decentralized too.

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Excerpts from an online chat with futurist / sf author Bruce Sterling on the State of the World 2008.

Moderator: The real question is how adaptable or fragile civilian institutions are to a rapid rise in the price of oil/rapid decline in supply

Sterling: I agree, but my problem with Peakists is that they’re desperately eager to prove that civilian institutions are fragile, mostly because they’re weird cranks who’ve never found one they like.

Some of whom seem positively wed to and delighted by the possibility of the end of society as we know it. Like some End Timers and Marxists, they want the current order to collapse, seemingly unaware that it will fall on them too.

M: Will the financial system go into cardiac arrest?

S: It might, but the financial system isn’t the heart of a civilization. Communism went into cardiac arrest. The GDP of Russia dropped something like 30 percent, the whole shebang was privatized to mobsters… The Asian financial system went into cardiac arrest a couple of years ago.

Yet they all just kept on keeping on, didn’t they?

M: Would we be able to raise sufficient quantities of food and get them to market?

S: Cuba had a peak oil experience when the Soviets stopped shipping it. The average Cuban lost thirty pounds, or so I’m told. It was a calamity of sorts, they called it the “special period.” Cuba is still there.

Cuba by necessity then went to organic gardening and locally produced food on a mass scale. That’s how they fed themselves now and once the blockade is lifted, will genuinely have quite a lot they can teach the rest of us about low petroleum farming.

M: Presumably there is a rate of change in price/supply that society can accommodate fairly gracefully, and no doubt a point at which the rate of change becomes uncomfortable, and another point at which it becomes catastrophic.

S: There’s also a rate of change of zero when oil is no longer consumed, and that would be the victory condition. So, anxiously wondering whether a loss of oil is merely bad or catastrophic is a little short-sighted. Oil has to go away like whale-oil went away.

M: Which scenarios are most likely? Is there anything we can do to influence the likelihood of a better outcome — and if so, how much influence can we have?

S: Stop using oil. Coal is worse, mind you.

M:What about the possibility of exporting economies like Mexico simply consuming all the oil they produce as they grow?

S: Texas does that already.

Texas also has their own internal electricity production and grid. They don’t need power from anyone else. Smart.

M: Examining the end stages of the Third Reich doesn’t provide us with much guidance.

S: If you wanna talk catastrophe, it’s important to have a coherent understanding of genuine historical catastrophes, not make-believe pipe-dream catastrophes that serve to feed somebody’s cornball apocaphilia.

Or, if you wanna explore the mental space of ALL POSSIBLE catastrophes, you can try this:

http://openthefuture.com/2006/12/an_eschatological_taxonomy.html

in which peak oil would barely register as a “class zero.”

This is Sterling’s key point. The human race will survive global warming and peak oil. Indeed, governments and private industry are just now beginning a huge mobilization and shift to a low carbon, renewable energy economy. This process will continue and speed up. Will there be speed bumps along the way? Sure. Like the human race hasn’t faced lots of them before?

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“The technical challenge of selectively removing carbon dioxide has been overcome [by using Zeolitic Imidazolate Frameworks]. Now we have structures that can be tailored precisely to capture carbon dioxide and store it like a reservoir, as we have demonstrated. No carbon dioxide escapes. Nothing escapes — unless you want it to do so. We believe this to be a turning point in capturing carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere.”

The reservoir is inside the zeolite structure. I’m still unclear how the zeolites would then be stored and how stable they are, ie what’s their “shelf life”?

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This is wonderful. Fun, playful, and it delivers the message.

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New Carbon Finance predicts the US carbon trading market could be worth $1 trillion by 2020, with carbon trading for $45 a ton by then, extrapolating from plans in Congress now. It trades at $10-20 a ton now.

If those proposed plans allowed trading with foreign carbon markets, then the price might only be $30 a ton, saving U.S. consumers billions. American exceptionalism, yet again, is proven to be a bad idea.

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New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters Monday that global warming is as big a threat to humanity as terrorism, according to Reuters.

Does everything have to be equated to terrorism before this country can act on it? Is Bloomberg saying we should do regime change on stray carbon emissions or maybe blow the atmosphere to smithereens trying to eliminate the evildoer emissions?

“Terrorists kill people, weapons of mass destruction have the potential to kill enormous numbers of people, global warming has the potential to kill everybody” Bloomberg said.

Well then, global warming is thus a far worse threat than terrorism ever could be. And deserves a reasoned and coherent response, not one that implies a military-like response. We don’t need a War on Global Warming complete with scare tactics and fear, instead we need to develop renewable energy and clean transportation and have a optimistic approach.

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Nuclear fusion will move from the lab to reality in a few years, a noted venture capitalist says.

A Canadian company believes they can build small fusion reactors that will produce power at 4 cents a kilowatt, about the same as coal. Fusion reactors do not have the dangers that current fission reactors have.

Lithium, a fairly inexpensive and plentiful metal, gets converted to helium in a reaction that generates lots of power and leaves only a harmless gas as a byproduct.

This is yet another example of how R&D into cleantech may reap huge rewards. I have little doubt that clean energy, maybe produced in numerous ways, will be cost-competitive with coal in the near future. And that will change everything.

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