Climate Change: A Shameful Lack of Urgency

It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Read it all here in The New York Times.

Mega Regions Rule

"When people talk about economic competitiveness, the focus tends to be on nation states, but this focus is off the mark. The real driving force of the world economy is a new and incredibly powerful economic unit: the mega-region.

While there are 191 nations in the world, just 40 significant mega-regions power the global economy. Home to more than one-fifth of the world's population, these 40 megas account for two-thirds of global economic output and more than 85% of all global innovation.

The world's largest mega is Greater Tokyo, with 55 million people and $2.5 trillion in economic activity. Next is the 500-mile Boston-Washington corridor, with some 54 million people and $2.2 trillion in output. Also in the top 10 are mega-regions that run from Chicago to Pittsburgh, Atlanta to Charlotte, Miami to Tampa, and L.A. to San Diego. Outside of the U.S., you can find megas around Amsterdam, London, Osaka and Nagoya, Milan, Rome and Turin, and Frankfurt and Stuttgart."

All this is certainly not new, but still: interesting findings from Richard Florida.

America 2050 is here.

Brand New Global Warming Solutions Unavoidable

Jeffrey D. Sachs is economist and the head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. In a recent article in Scientific American he states:

“Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.”

Being Human 2020

By 2020 the terms "interface" and "user" will be obsolete as computers merge ever closer with humans.

It is one prediction in a Microsoft-backed report drawn from the discussions of 45 academics from the fields of computing, science, sociology and psychology.

Article plus movie here.
Report plus crew info here.
Report itself here.

RECESSION The Movie

From the guys who brought you "The Iraq War", comes a sequel unlike anything you've ever seen: RECESSION !
Here.

COMMON WEALTH Economics for a Crowded Planet

The challenges of sustainable development - protecting the environment, stabilizing the world's population, narrowing the gaps of rich and poor and ending extreme poverty – will render passé the very idea of competing nation-states that scramble for markets, power and resources.

Read this letter to Jeffrey Sachs.

Hillary Clinton: recession here now

President Bush, seeking to bolster faith in the economy amid fears of a recession, acknowledged on Friday the United States was going through hard times but said growth would resume over the long run because economic fundamentals were sound.

Democratic presidential candidate Clinton countered that much of the country was already in a recession.

With oil prices at record highs, the mortgage market on the verge of meltdown and the specter of recession looming, Bush has been scrambling to halt the slide in the economy.

Read it all here.

The End of Oil As We Know It

From the New York Times:

The Age of Oil is at an end. Maybe not this year. Maybe not for five years. But signs of the coming collapse are evident.

Start at the White House. There, a week ago, President Bush touted tax breaks for oil companies that have just posted the largest profits in the history of American business. Yet he was dumbstruck when asked about the prospect of $4-a-gallon gasoline, a price that will force many families to choose between food and basic travel.

“Wait — what did you just say?”, the president asked after a reporter solicited his advice for Americans facing that price, which was predicted by many analysts.

Ten Emerging technologies 2008

Technology Review presents the 10 technologies that they think are most likely to change the way we live.

1 Modeling Surprise Combining massive quantities of data, insights into human psychology, and machine learning can help manage surprising events, says Microsoft's Eric Horvitz.

2 Probabilistic Chips Krishna Palem thinks a little uncertainty in chips could extend battery life in mobile devices--and maybe the duration of Moore's Law, too.

3 NanoRadio Alex Zettl's tiny radios, built from nanotubes, could improve everything from cell phones to medical diagnostics.

4 Wireless Power Physicist Marin Soljacic is working toward a world of wireless electricity.

5 Atomic Magnetometers John Kitching's tiny magnetic-field sensors will take MRI where it's never gone before.

6 Offline Web Applications Adobe's Kevin Lynch believes that computing applications will become more powerful when they take advantage of the browser and the desktop.

7 Graphene Transistors A new form of carbon being pioneered by Walter de Heer of Georgia Tech could lead to speedy, compact computer processors.

8 Connectomics Jeff Lichtman hopes to elucidate brain development and disease with new technologies that illuminate the web of neural circuits.

9 Reality Mining Sandy Pentland is using data gathered by cell phones to learn about human behavior.

10 Cellulolytic Enzymes Frances Arnold is designing better enzymes for making biofuels from cellulose.

Read it all here.

One 100 Dollars A F*ckin Barrel !

H O L Y $ H I F T . . .

Tech Pioneers 2008

Here.

Sudden Climate Shifts Expected

Many of Earth's climate systems will undergo a series of sudden shifts this century as a result of human-induced climate change. A number of these shifts could occur this century. Society should not be lulled into a false sense of security by the idea that climate change will be a gradual process.

The work by an international team appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.