World Changing

Our allies at SPUR recently released a report, Growing green: How San Francisco can become a leader in the cleantech boom, which while focused on San Francisco (as you might have gleaned from the title) makes some points worth considering by anyone looking to drive economic development strategies in their cities in a bright green direction:

Every region has an “innovation pipeline.” This pipeline is the aggregate of public and private research, study and discovery; the development of discoveries and innovations into new technologies and products; and the deployment of these products into the marketplace.

The discovery portion of San Francisco’s innovation pipeline consists of research universities, institutes and laboratories. These institutions are centers of research, and generate scientific publications and intellectual property. They also train students and workers. The development system is made up of companies that harvest discoveries from their own research as well as research by outside sources, from which they develop technology and products in their own laboratories. The development portion also includes startups — companies that are newly founded upon the potential of one or more discoveries. The deployment system consists of companies and their marketing, sales and distribution partners.

Innovation is the key requirement for the growth of many cleantech firms. Over one third of firms surveyed for this study indicated that proximity to innovation centers was extremely important to their location decisions. Over 40 percent stated that it was somewhat important.

For more, listen to the second half of this great Smart City Radio podcast, where SPUR leader and Worldchanging friend Gabriel Metcalf talks about the limits of economic development planning, smart growth and climate, and the role of civic groups in the present debate.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Urban Design and Planning at 7:46 PM)

Watching the U.S. presidential debates felt like an exercise in describing the problems of another planet altogether.

Consider this exchange:

QUESTION: Sen. McCain, I want to know, we saw that Congress moved pretty fast in the face of an economic crisis. I want to know what you would do within the first two years to make sure that Congress moves fast as far as environmental issues, like climate change and green jobs?

MCCAIN: Well, thank you. Look, we are in tough economic times; we all know that. And let's keep -- never forget the struggle that Americans are in today.

But when we can -- when we have an issue that we may hand our children and our grandchildren a damaged planet, I have disagreed strongly with the Bush administration on this issue. I traveled all over the world looking at the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, Joe Lieberman and I.

And I introduced the first legislation, and we forced votes on it. That's the good news, my friends. The bad news is we lost. But we kept the debate going, and we kept this issue to -- to posing to Americans the danger that climate change opposes.

Now, how -- what's -- what's the best way of fixing it? Nuclear power. Sen. Obama says that it has to be safe or disposable or something like that.

Look, I -- I was on Navy ships that had nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is safe, and it's clean, and it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs.

And -- and I know that we can reprocess the spent nuclear fuel. The Japanese, the British, the French do it. And we can do it, too. Sen. Obama has opposed that.

We can move forward, and clean up our climate, and develop green technologies, and alternate -- alternative energies for -- for hybrid, for hydrogen, for battery-powered cars, so that we can clean up our environment and at the same time get our economy going by creating millions of jobs.

We can do that, we as Americans, because we're the best innovators, we're the best producers, and 95 percent of the people who are our market live outside of the United States of America.

BROKAW: Sen. Obama?

OBAMA: This is one of the biggest challenges of our times.

And it is absolutely critical that we understand this is not just a challenge, it's an opportunity, because if we create a new energy economy, we can create five million new jobs, easily, here in the United States.

It can be an engine that drives us into the future the same way the computer was the engine for economic growth over the last couple of decades.

And we can do it, but we're going to have to make an investment. The same way the computer was originally invented by a bunch of government scientists who were trying to figure out, for defense purposes, how to communicate, we've got to understand that this is a national security issue, as well.

And that's why we've got to make some investments and I've called for investments in solar, wind, geothermal. Contrary to what Sen. McCain keeps on saying, I favor nuclear power as one component of our overall energy mix.

But this is another example where I think it is important to look at the record. Sen. McCain and I actually agree on something. He said a while back that the big problem with energy is that for 30 years, politicians in Washington haven't done anything.

What Sen. McCain doesn't mention is he's been there 26 of them. And during that time, he voted 23 times against alternative fuels, 23 times.

So it's easy to talk about this stuff during a campaign, but it's important for us to understand that it requires a sustained effort from the next president.

One last point I want to make on energy. Sen. McCain talks a lot about drilling, and that's important, but we have three percent of the world's oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world's oil.

So what that means is that we can't simply drill our way out of the problem. And we're not going to be able to deal with the climate crisis if our only solution is to use more fossil fuels that create global warming.

We're going to have to come up with alternatives, and that means that the United States government is working with the private sector to fund the kind of innovation that we can then export to countries like China that also need energy and are setting up one coal power plant a week.

We've got to make sure that we're giving them the energy that they need or helping them to create the energy that they need.

Note that neither candidate, both supposedly standard-bearers for straight talk and change, puts the planetary crisis in anything like the proper perspective. Both candidates gave pandering, half-answers: for supposed climate champions, neither gave the kind of answers that will either inspire the American people nor prepare the kind of mandate we'll need to take action of the proper scale.

Now, of course, being an armchair candidate is the easiest thing in the world, but still, I wish one of them had said something more like this:

"Thank you for that question.

We hear a lot about climate change and other environmental problems these days, and that makes sense, because we place a planetary crisis of historic proportions. Humanity's future is at stake.

We know that we must change our economy, if we're going to avoid catastrophe. We need to slash our greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts, and that means we're going to have to change the ways generate energy. We're going to have to change how we get around. We're going to have to change the way we build. We're going to have to change the way we grow food, and manage forests, and run our factories. We're going to have to change everything.

To the people of another country, that might be scary. But we're Americans, and we know that the changes we need to make offer us the best opportunity we have to also change the things about our country that aren't working as well as we'd like. If we commit to building an economy that grows by protecting the environment, we will create whole new industries and millions of jobs, develop technologies and products we can sell overseas, rebuild our cities and infrastructure, and bring prosperity back to our farms and forest-dependent communities.

When I am elected president, one of my first actions will be to hold a top-level "climate crisis summit" to develop a comprehensive plan to move America into the carbon-neutral, bright and green economy of the future, so that we avoid catastrophe and renew our nation."

Because here's the thing: whichever candidate wins, he is going to need to stand up in front of the American people and tell them that we face an emergency, if we are going to have any chance of acting quickly enough on climate and other planetary problems to stave off disaster. It'd be nice to see that leadership now, and not just hope it blooms after 1/20/9.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Columns at 6:07 PM)

Because there's no such thing as clean coal.

by Eric de Place

Apparently, everybody loves clean coal. Barack Obama loves it and John McCain loves it. Joe Biden really loved it during his VP debate -- and Sarah Palin loved it too.

But here's the problem. Clean coal is very much like a unicorn: it doesn't exist.

And because it doesn't exist, it will not save us from climate change.

Via Kate Sheppard, Carolyn Auwaerter of 1Sky nails it:

"Clean coal" is a contradiction in terms. Conventional coal-burning power plants are the leading cause of global warming pollution in the United States. Coal lobbyists will immediately reply that they can develop coal plants in the future that will capture and sequester carbon pollution.

But this is misleading. Carbon capture and sequestration is unproven, dangerous, and exorbitantly expensive. At best, the technology will not be commercially available until 2030 and the U.S. Department of Energy calculates that installing carbon capture systems will almost double plant costs, which won't provide any relief to Americans' soaring utility bills.

Exactly.

Allow me to elaborate. There are basically two meanings of "clean coal." The first is new conventional coal plants, which can indeed be more efficient and cleaner than the awful old ones. But even the new ones are a disaster. New coal plants are "clean" in the same way that it's "healthy" to switch from Marlboro Reds to Camel Lights.

The other meaning of "clean coal" is happy talk about futuristic coal plants that will capture and sequester carbon. I hope these arrive someday -- truly I do -- but at the moment they're far beyond the engineering horizon. The technology to capture and sequester carbon would be an excellent thing. And I'm all for it. But the potential arrival of this technology is much too risky to bet on.

I really hope that all this "clean coal" nonsense is just empty pandering to coal-producing swing states. That's my best case scenario. Because we need a serious carbon cap right about now. And it's pretty hard to see how coal jibes with any realistic climate protection.

Speaking of carbon caps, that's another thing that Obama, McCain, Biden, and Palin all profess to agree on. But if we're going to hitch our climate strategy to clean coal, there's just one thing left to do: shut our eyes tight and wish with all our heart for the magic global warming unicorns to fly to our rescue!

This piece originally appeared on the Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Energy at 3:08 PM)

The excuse for my visit to Paris was SmartCity, a conference organized in the frame of the festival Emergences. Emergences is an 'international festival of electronic cultures and new art forms'. However, one must accept that in a city like Paris the word 'international' doesn't necessarily that tacit rules will be respected and that the activities and conferences will be held in any other language than french. That's probably why i enjoyed the event so much. While both the issues discussed and the quality of the speakers invited to the panels were definitely of international relevance, the festival had a homely feeling with an audience ready to participate and dialog, un-refrained as they were by any lack of knowledge of the ubiquitous english.

The conference focused on urban activism and artistic interventions in public space, a theme which offered a splendid contrast with the venue of the conference: the very chichi Maison Internationale at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris.

Perfect venue to discuss alternative uses of urban space

There were some good moments but the one that got me glued to my seat, pen in the hand and eyes on the screen was the presentation of mOmentoMoNUMENTO, a joint project by Brazilian collective Coloco & French experimental architects of Exyzt whose pavilion at the Venice architecture biennale of 2006 i had enjoyed so much.

Exyzt's works engage mostly with temporary interventions, ephemeral constructions and the presence of diversity in urban space. They have recently joined forces with Coloco to submit to the institution Cultures France a project that will be part of the official programme of the French Year in Brazil (February-July 2009).

When located in urban centers, skeletons provide opportunities

The final project stems from a research started in 2001 by Coloco.
The Brazilian collective observed, analyzed and documented a phenomenon called 'skeleton dwellings': in big cities, groups of people decide to occupy then inhabit buildings which were left unfinished and abandoned because of economic crisis, ups and downs of the estate market, war, cataclysm, etc.

Result of the dead-end of the estate market

The desire of these people is to live in the center of the city, close to the services. They organize the general functioning of the building: bathroom and garden for the collectivity are installed, trash collection is organized, spaces on ground levels are reserved for the elderly, etc. Sometimes, the dwellers are kicked out of the building but in some cases, they manage to reach an agreement with city officials (conscious that the abandon of the center of a city for the suburbs is a growing problem) and their dwelling become permanent and 'legitimate'.

Coloco came to consider that these inhabited skeletons of buildings give way to an unexpected collaboration between the construction industry and invention prompted by necessity. This idea is at the origin of the skeleton dwellings: a safe and assembled structure is supplied to a group of inhabitants-builders. It can be improved according to the needs and resources of its occupants, who contribute their labor, advised by professionals.

Prestes Maia (Sao Paulo): This building has been abandoned 20 years ago. Its debt in taxes almost equals its value

The skeleton dwellings derive from a logic of opportunity, being easily inserted in dense urban areas and diversifying the supply of low-cost urban housing.

Building their dwellings, recycling these abandoned structures

Neighbours organize themselves informally

Prestes Maia (Sao Paulo): Each family lives in roughly 20 sqm

Gloria, Rio de Janeiro: Even after renovation, some facades can't hide their history

Meanwhile, Exyzt is also working on the rehabilitation of disused spaces and on alternative and cheap forms of dwellings.

A first project they presented is République Ephémère where 450 architectural students from Europe were given some rudimentary tools and materials to organize for 2 weeks their life as a big community in the enclosed space of the two wharehouses?

The challenge took the form of a one-to-one scale construction game that doubled as a laboratory of architectural and social research. The conceptor team built the main collective equipment (kitchen, washrooms, a hotel) beforehand. The rest would be a village autoconstructed and automanaged by its inhabitants.

Each student was untrusted with a survival kit, including a construction manual and security instructions, and a defined quantity of scaffolding and textiles. Geometrical problems could arise, as this amount of scaffolding, sufficient to build one cubic room could then be combined with others: for example, 2 kits put together could give rise to 3 dwellings.

Video:

The affinities and exchanges between the participants were gradually translated into architectural terms. More complex, personalized structures were developed over time. The implantation looked like a cross between an organic. medieval village and a refugee camp. It kept transforming itself, not only on the level of the individual sphere, but also on the level of the collective organization.

The second project Exyzt spotlighted was an intervention inside and outside of the Palast der Republik, a gigantic relic of the communist era, now demolished and about to be replaced by the (very tacky imho) reconstruction of its predecessor, the Berlin Stadtschloss.

Der Berg (image southwarklido)

Under the menace of a demolition act, Raumlabor, one of the most brilliant group on the German architecture scene, decided to occupy and open the monument to the public. They called Exyzt to give them a helping hand.

Der Berg (in german: the mountain) is an artificial mountain, a surrealist architectural performance built to react to the absurdity of making a tabula rasa of a part of Berlin's history in order to build the replica of a long disappeared building.

This collaboration resulted in a 20 meters high triangulated structure made out of scaffolding and fiber glass textile. The installation invaded the theater, while another team made it spread through the roof and onto the front porch of the building. Der Berg became a monument inside a monument.

Movie:

After this introduction, Exyzt and Coloco focused on mOmentoMoNUMENTO, the project they are working on for the official programme of the French Year in Brazil (February-July 2009). The idea is to follow on the steps of the French tradition to 'offer' monuments to foreign countries (think of the Statue of Liberty). This monument, however, is already on site. Well, sort of. The architects have obtained the help of the city of Sao Paulo to spot one of the many skeletons that have been standing for years in the city center, waiting to be reconquered by Exyzt and Coloco.

Saõ Paulo: an apartment building for the wealthy overlooks a favela, ironically called Paraisópolis (Paradise city). Photo: Luiz Arthur Leirão Vieira (bigger view)

The building they've set their sight on was built in 1965. It is the first building with a facade entirely made of glass. Occupied at some point by the federal police it has now been left to decay. The main problem the architect have to solve is that living inside the building is almost un-conceivable without air conditioning which has been dismantled in the meantime. The whole electrical setting has to be re-installed as well (especially if one wants to have access to the top floor by lift.)

The project responds to Sao Paulo government's desire to find new solutions that will inject life back into the center of the city: inhabitants have moved to the edge of the city, leaving many abandoned buildings and a thick infrastructure of roads behind them.

The building is left at the disposal of the architects for one year. If at the end of the project, the result is deemed good enough by the city, it could become a space left permanently occupied by cultural organizations, art galleries, artists residencies, etc.

Exyzt and Coloco want to make the rooftop (originally planned as a landing spot for helicopters) accessible to the public.

The project is currently self-funded. Any help and feedback would be most welcome.

Related: Global Cities, The Morrinho Project at the Venice Biennale and Juan Freire - From the Analogue Commons to the New Hybrid Public Spaces.

This piece originally appeared on Regine Debatty's blog, We Make Money, Not Art.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 3:03 PM)

Polymeme, my favorite source for news that’s not all Palin, all the time, led me to a fascinating set of photos this morning. They’re from Ilakaka, Madagascar, a town that’s grown from little more than a truck stop into a wild west mining town in about a decade. Ilakaka is currently the source of roughly 50% of the world’s sapphire, and it’s a fascinating case study in what happens when something very valuable can be pulled out of the ground without much capital investment - you get a gold rush.

The main street of Ilakaka, October 2008. Photo by Roberto Schmidt, AFP

What I appreciated about the Globe story - and, as it turns out, several other stories I found on Ilakaka, is that most of the authors avoided, “this is terrible, something must be done” narrative that characterizes so much northern reporting about Africa. Ilakaka is clearly a tough place - Jonny Hogg writing for the BBC focuses his narrative primarily on the dangers of the town - but Schmidt’s photos are much less predetermined. He’s got shots of kids working the mines, which are hard to see, but also shots of kids playing, a reminder that mining in these towns is likely far more lucrative than other forms of employment in Madagascar, which helps explain why families are drawn to Ilakaka. I appreciate the ambiguity of the photos and of the frame Alan Taylor puts them in for the Globe.

And then there are the gem blogs. Having almost no interest in precious stones, I hadn’t realized that there were gem bloggers. The answer may be that there’s Vincent Pardieu and people who travel with him. Pardieu and Richard Wise offer a thorough sapphire and ruby tour of Madagascar, touring the forest ruby camp of Moramang as well as the desert around Ilakaka. Richard Hughes, with Pardieu and Dana Schorr, offers the excellent “Sorcerors & Sapphires“, a comprehensive look at corundum in Madagascar.

My favorite observation in this latter piece is the observation that it makes perfect geological sense that Madagascar is blessed with sapphires and rubies. So are Tanzania, Sri Lanka and parts of southern India. And if we go far enough back in geologic time, these countries are close neighbors. (Looking at this map, I’m tempted to research the possibility of gem mining on the Indian Ocean coast of Antartica.)

Perdieu also has an excellent solo article on gems in Madagascar complete with videos of mining sites and photo sets. In all three articles, there’s a good sense of humor about the difficult travel and living conditions associated with these mines - I take this as a reflection on the fact that most mining towns aren’t easy places to work, and that while Ilakaka may be a tough place, it’s got more than a little in common with northeastern Burma or parts of Afghanistan.

How do we get stories from places like Ilakaka, remote locations in Africa with no permanent press presence? Historically, we’d have to wait for something bad to happen - a mining disaster, an outbreak of disease. I see the photos in the Globe as evidence of what might be a healthier form of storytelling - a picture of a place that’s fascinating, whether or not it’s especially “newsworthy” today. The gembloggers are an interesting complement to this sort of reporting. In some corners of the world, the majority of citizen media comes not from locals, but from missionaries and aid workers living and working in these communities. Some, like Sleepless in Sudan, become important spokespeople for these communities.

The hope, of course, is that we start getting reports and perspectives from people who live and work in these communities. Our friends at FOKO Club are working with Rising Voices to help Malagasy youth report on their communities via blogs. I don’t know if it’s realistic for FOKO to work in Ilakaka, but it’s pretty exciting to think about the possibility.

This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman's excellent personal blog, My Heart's In Accra.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Media at 4:51 PM)

A Chilean wine palm, one of the world’s southernmost palm species and endemic to Chile, spills sweet sap as it is cut. It falls to the ground, where up to 800 litres of the sugary liquid are then extracted and boiled to concentrate the sugar, making seventy kilograms of 'Miel de Palma', or palm honey.

The indigenous peoples of Chile once extracted the sap while leaving the palms intact. But shortly after European conquistadores colonised the wild austral land, this destructive method of cutting the trees began. Although there have been improvements in management, the felling of palms for this purpose still continues. But the humble honeybee could just end this practice... depending on its tastes.

Originally, the Chilean wine palm (Jubaea chilensis) was found throughout Chile´s central valleys. In the 19th Century it was estimated that there were 500,000 in just one region. Now there are only 120,000 in the whole country and its status is listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Central Chile is one of the world’s twenty five biodiversity hotspots, that is, the biologically richest but also most threatened areas on the planet. Central Chile´s flora, over half of which is endemic (not found elsewhere in the world), is under threat. As people seek to make a living from the land, native vegetation is cleared for farming, vineyards and plantations of faster-growing exotic tree species. So the critical question remains - how to balance conservation while still ensuring economic survival?

Javier Salvatierra, a Masters student at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile has been investigating how apiculture could offer a way to integrate the conservation and use of native plant species. If he can prove that a type of honey has a pollen content of forty five percent or more from a given species, it will be recognised as monofloral honey. This classification of purity also adds commercial value to the product, providing a financial incentive to locals to conserve the native flora for its nectar.

La Reserva Ecológica Oasis de La Campana is a private reserve and Javier’s field study area, hosting numerous native species of flora, including the Chilean wine palm. Some allotments have been sold for holiday homes within the reserve and while the palms still remain, Javier is keen to secure their future. Over the summer of 2007 – 2008, Javier donned a beekeepers suit to collect weekly honey samples from a number of beehives dotted throughout the 2500-hectare reserve. From these honey samples, he must then identify from which flora species the nectar has come from. This is done by determining the proportion of pollen types present in the honey samples.

Back at the university, Javier shows me around the lab where he meticulously identifies each of the minuscule pollen grains that are stored on a stack of microscope slides. While Javier has yet to find a sample containing more than forty five percent of wine palm pollen, twenty-three of the twenty-six samples contained monofloral honey from other native species, particularly Quillay. Currently, Chile exports honey in 360 kilogram barrels with no differentiation of type or area of origin. With these results, honey from this region could be identified as monofloral and marketed much in the same way as popular New Zealand monofloral honeys.

The question of producing Chilean wine palm bee honey still remains unanswered. But Javier is confident that further research could reveal a superior method for obtaining the product. If honey is collected more frequently to precisely coincide with the palm´s flowering period, a higher proportion of palm pollen could be found. Also, scientists are still determining the average number of pollen grains for a set volume of nectar for each plant species. If, in comparison with other plants, the palm has more nectar per pollen grain, the likelihood of finding monofloral palm honey will increase.

Javier, whose last name ‘Salvatierra’ suitably means ‘save the earth’ is more than aware of the social and political realities of conservation: “The ideal would be for them to protect the area fully, but it just isn’t profitable. At least by introducing bees it is offering an alternative form of income that is not as harmful on the environment.”

When I first arrived in Chile, not knowing what it was, I was curious to try this 'Miel de Palma'. Thankfully I refrained from an impulsive purchase that would have supported a destructive practice. Now, each time I pass a can of 'Miel de Palma', I am comforted by the thought that it could soon be replaced by a multitude of rich, unique monofloral honeys that help to sustain the astounding natural heritage and beauty of this country. And hopefully one of them will bear a picture of the majestic palm, standing upright until nature decides its time to fall. Consumers, in Chile and their export destinations, could then support conservation in a way that leaves a sweet taste in their mouthes.

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(Posted by Josephine Howitt in Columns at 3:21 PM)

By Scott Smith

The sustainable future will be a networked future: technology will be the glue that binds the green city together. One voice among those pushing this idea comes from communication equipment giant Cisco, which is staking the claim that sustainable cities are not just about grass roofs and vertical farming, but about using the IT skeleton of the urban environment -- its web of communication systems, connected transport systems and networked living and working environments -- to tie the whole city together in an integrated, controllable, monitored community.

As a step on this road to fully networked city environments, last month Cisco and the City of Amsterdam held the second Connected Urban Development (CUD) conference to highlight the Dutch city's inclusion as one of three initial cities, alongside San Francisco and Seoul, in its CUD initiative. CUD's creation in 2006 was driven by Cisco CEO John Chambers' involvement in the Clinton Global Initiative, and held its first summit in San Francisco last year. This year's event also marked the inclusion of four additional cities as CUD testing ground: Madrid, Hamburg, Lisbon and Birmingham, England.

Kicking off the conference, Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen pointed out that his city has several obvious reasons for being interested in looking more deeply into using IT to do its part to help slow climate change: not only because it is a low-lying city that would be strongly impacted by rising sea levels, but also because it has a tech-centric economy, with 12 percent of employment linked to IT and new media. With major traffic problems (and increasingly tech-based solutions) in his city as well as around the Netherlands in general, Cohen said Amsterdam felt not only pressure but an obligation to cut carbon emissions, and has set C02 reduction targets for 2029 at 40 percent lower than 1990, which will require aggressive action. Population density is a core issue the Dutch have had to face in recent years, as the country ranks 23rd in inhabitants per square kilometer worldwide, even higher if only land mass is taken into consideration.

Despite very high usage of alternative transport, Amsterdam still faces carbon problems driven by population density.

Cisco Europe's Chris Dedicote also pointed to IT as a potentially powerful tool in helping cities lower emissions and achieve greater levels of sustainability by linking transportation, energy, built environments and other urban infrastructure, but only if use of technology itself is better understood for its own potential for negative impact on the environment. Dedicote said an estimated 2 percent of global carbon emissions can be traced back to unmanaged use of IT, and that his company was itself trying to better understand its own internal carbon consumption in order to establish carbon budgets alongside financial budgets. "You have no idea how much energy a department or an office uses," Dedicote said in his keynote. "In the same way we know how much money [a department] spends, if we also know how much energy they use, it has an incredible impact on the way they work." Dedicote pointed to refining monitoring and sensing technologies as the next key step in getting to this level of transparency across companies, buildings and entire cities.

Larger IT and communication companies have placed a main focus on the topic of energy-efficiency strategies as a competitive advantage. Cisco and one of its largest competitors, Nortel, have both been focusing on the energy consumption levels of their own networking equipment and benefits of green IT. Nortel's latest ad campaign targets Cisco directly, claiming its own gear's lower energy consumption amounts to an "energy tax" on those who use Cisco equipment. Cisco itself appointed a director of green engineering earlier this year to drive the company's efforts in the area.

One element of Amsterdam's strategy is the development of networked co-working centers, the first of which opened last week in Almere. The fast-growing satellite city to Amsterdam's east is typical of sprawl that has emerged as the Netherlands’ population has grown in the past few decades. Created in 1971 in part to ease crowding in Amsterdam and now home to 185,000, Almere is expected to double in population by 2030, according to the city's mayor, Annemarie Jorritsma. The Smart Work Centre provides working space for area commuters, including meeting space and fiber-based videoconferencing facilities, taking advantage of the massive fiber network infrastructure that has been laid under the Netherlands in the past decade. The city of Amsterdam uses the co-working space, as does IBM, but it will take many such centers to make a significant impact on working and commuting patterns in the region, and even then proponents will have to break through a traditional work culture built around 9 to 5 presence under management's eye.

Almere's mayor Annemarie Jorritsma speaks with Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen and others via a fiber-based video link.

CUD's next stop is next spring in Seoul, where it will take stock of the initiative's progress. Based on the plans and case studies discussed at CUD, sights are set high among government leaders, technologists and urban planners. With major projects ranging from San Francisco's Treasure Island redevelopment to Abu Dhabi's futuristic technology project of Masdar City -- both presented at the conference -- those hatching new mega-developments globally are feeling increasingly pushed to put sustainability front and center in order to achieve the scale of their project plans. Where a diverse set of city departmental managers once sat in different facilities watching traffic or power grid performance disconnected from one another, concepts discussed at CUD point toward a future where integrated "dashboard" views of a city's vital statistics -- a la Sim City -- will redefine the nature of city management.

Scott Smith is a futurist and founder of Changeist, a human foresight consultancy, and project director of Smartspace, a research initiative to map development of integrated intelligent communities worldwide.

Photos taken by the author.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 8:45 AM)

Worldchanging ally Andy Lubershane believes that comics are a Worldchanging medium. A childhood fan of educational cartoons like Larry Gonick's "The Cartoon Guide to…" series, Lubershane values comics for their unique ability "to provide information quickly and humorously" to audiences of all ages.

Combining his artistic talents with his passion for sustainability and innovation, Lubershane created an original series of comics called Earthly Ideas, designed to explain popular concepts and inventions clearly and with a hefty dose of imagination. Worldchanging is thrilled to be the first to publish these entertaining and informative pieces of artistic storytelling.

We'll be releasing one of Lubershane's original comics each week from now until the end of the year. While many of the issues covered in the comics have been discussed on Worldchanging in the past, we hope that you'll be able to use this new medium in a different way … whether it's in your classroom, on your office wall, or to help explain ideas to friends and family.

This first illustration looks at the concept of carbon footprint labeling. Want to read more about this idea? Click for Jeremy Faludi's post on the Eco-Nutrition Label.

(click image to enlarge)

Andy Lubershane researches, writes and cartoons about sustainability from his home in Boston. He can be reached at alubershane[at]gmail[dot]com.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 10:14 PM)

Thanks to everyone who attended our 5th Anniversary bash on Wednesday night at the Sole Repair Shop! We were thrilled to celebrate with so many old and new friends.

We'd also like to share our enthusiasm for the standing-room-only crowd at Cafe Presse both last night and last Friday evening, where we gathered to watch the first of the debates leading up to the November election (photo above). We were truly impressed by the turnout, but even more impressed by the way everyone stood in (mostly) silent attention listening to our presidential and VP candidates discuss and disagree. It's exciting to see the public so engaged, informed and involved.

This week on the local blog, we've been excited to discuss two very specific plans for new sustainable developments – a rural methane digester for Skagit County, and plans for the country's largest urban swale in South Lake Union. We've also posted some notes on designing cities for car-free living, and followed up with a few more profiles from our Seattle to the World series of best local innovations. Check out the details:

Lecture Notes: What to Do About the Automobile?
The classic ideal of personal car ownership is tumbling from its pedestal. Last Friday, Worldchanging editor Julia Levitt heard Seattle policymakers, designers and developers discuss solutions for building communities that are less auto-centric.

Manure-to-Energy in Skagit County
Renewable energy startup Farm Power Northwest was recently awarded a $500,000 grant from the USDA to help fund a methane digester that will turn dairy farm refuse into power for the local grid.

Seattle to the World: Green Factor
Raising the standard for landscaping in Seattle's neighborhood business districts has motivated developers to incorporate green roofs, pervious pavement and other smart details in their new designs.

Seattle to the World: A Better Plan for the Viaduct
Sometimes when we live with a problem for too long, we forget that it is a problem. Such seems to be the case with the Alaskan Way Viaduct…

Vulcan Announces the "Swale on Yale"
Seattle will see a new advance in low impact development (LID) with a two-block biofiltration swale in the heart of the South Lake Union neighborhood.

Are you here in Seattle? We'd like to hear from you! Check out the local blog and leave comments, or contact editor[at]Worldchanging[dot]com if you have ideas or would like to write.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 3:11 PM)

The urbanist journal Next American City is on my short list of critical urban resources. In comparison to many policy- and planning-oriented magazines, it's routinely intelligent, passionate and forward-looking -- I sometimes disagree with the perspectives they offer on the future of cities, but I nearly always learn something from the experience.

It's also a good looking pub, so I was glad to read that it's just won an Ozzie.

Congrats, NAC! Keep up the good work.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Urban Design and Planning at 8:54 PM)

The Daily Telegraph published a handful of cartograms yesterday from The Atlas of the Real World, the latest book from big-picture focused professors and worldmapper.org creators Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford.

The Atlas of the Real World includes 366 digitally modified maps ‘depicting the areas and countries of the world not just by their physical size, but by their demographic importance on a vast range of subjects.’

The book focuses on a 'variety of subjects ranging from population, health, wealth and occupation to how many toys we import and who’s eating their vegetables.' The Daily Telegraph picked up Land Area, Aircraft Travel, Rail Travel, Mopeds and Motorcycles, Nuclear Weapons, and both the Increase and Decrease in Emissions of Carbon Dioxide. Here are a few I found most interesting:

Aircraft Travel: the size of each territory indicates the total distance flown by aircraft registered there.

Nuclear Weapons: As of 2002, eight countries are known or suspected to have strategic nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Israel, India and Pakistan.

Increase in Emissions of Carbon Dioxide: Between 1980 and 2000, nearly three-quarters of all territories saw an increase in carbon dioxide emissions, with China, the United States and India leading the way.

Decrease in Emissions of Carbon Dioxide: Between 1980 and 2000, 28 per cent of countries reduced their emissions. Almost half of reduction were made in territories of the former Soviet Union, while Germany (15 per cent), Poland (eight per cent) and France (six per cent) also made substantial cuts.

With almost 400 pages displaying new ways of looking at the world, The Atlas of the Real World provides us many spots at which to stand to gain a new perspective. Seeing the areas and countries of the world manipulated in this way gives a simplistic elegance to the complicated topics they address; they make clear in one image what some books take hundreds of pages to explain.

This collection of delicious mind candy will no doubt be proudly displayed on the coffee tables of cartography geeks and info-fiends alike for years to come, and will hopefully infiltrate the libraries and classrooms of schools throughout the world. If you're hungry for more information like this, and need instant satisfaction, I would highly recommend geeking out for a few hours on the Worldmapper site.

Images from The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live by Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford, published by Thames & Hudson

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Planet at 3:10 PM)

by John de Graaf

There’s a problem with today’s health care debate in America. It’s way too focused on health care.

It’s true that the American health care system is on life-support. Priced at nearly $8,000 a year per American, and soon to be 20 percent of our GDP, it’s more expensive by 40-60 percent than health care systems in any other industrial country and totals nearly half the health care budget of the entire world. Yet it leaves 48 million Americans uncovered by health insurance and produces remarkably poor results.

Americans rank 45th in life expectancy, right there with Albania. After age 50, they are nearly twice as likely as western Europeans to suffer from chronic illnesses. Even in the hospital, US patients face unusual dangers. As many as 275,000 of them die each year from “healthcare” itself--errors or infections during treatment. So the system is broken. But fixing it will require a far more holistic approach than has been discussed in the health care debate.

HEALTH CARE: THE ROOF OF THE HOUSE

Let’s consider American health as a house. Health care is the roof, the final protection against illness. In our case, it’s an expensive roof, gold plated yet with 48 million holes.

In some ways—vaccinations, for example—it’s a preventive system, but mostly it’s sickness care.

In most other countries, the roof is a simpler affair, asphalt shingles on a fiberglass mat but with hardly any leaks. These health care systems rely more on prevention; less on high tech treatment. Yet the people in the house live longer, healthier lives. That’s because in those other countries, the foundation and the walls of the house are stronger, with fewer cracks to let in the cold.

THE FOUNDATION

Let’s start with the foundation. That’s the head start toward health that children in most other rich countries receive. There’s a stronger focus on pre-natal care, for example. In part because of this, infant mortality in all other industrial countries is lower than in the United States, which ranks 42nd in the world, according to the CIA. Every other rich country does better.

In every country in the world except, believe it or not, the United States, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea, mothers, and often, fathers, are guaranteed paid time off from work to take care of newborns. In many cases, such “family leave” extends for up to a year or more. In the US, by contrast, parents often return to work when children are only a few weeks old.

Paid family leave, and the parental bonding it ensures, pays off in terms of children’s health—fewer childhood illnesses, fewer problems with attention-deficit disorder, less obesity. Most countries find that such a taxpayer investment in early childhood results in lower health costs and other problems as children grow up.

A recent UNICEF study ranked the United States 20th out of 21 rich nations regarding children’s welfare. While our rich enjoy a marble floor, and our middle class, a wooden one, poor Americans have a dirt floor, with rain leaking through the holes in the roof and puddling up in the corners.

WALL NUMBER ONE—LIFESTYLE

If Democrats talk almost exclusively about universal health care as the solution to our health problems, Republicans tend to focus on wall number one—lifestyle choices. It’s a matter of personal responsibility, they say. Americans should simply stop smoking, eat properly, avoid over-eating, and excessive alcohol consumption, exercise regularly and sleep enough. Of course, this is sensible advice.

But it isn’t all a matter of personal responsibility. Policy changes would help here as well. Our tax system subsidizes producers of sugars and fats and our marketing system relentlessly advertises unhealthy foods. At the same time, Americans tend to work longer hours than people in other rich countries. Europeans, for example, work 300-350 fewer hours each year on average. Laws guarantee them sufficient time off, including a minimum of four weeks of paid vacation a year, and shorter weekly working hours. This leaves them more time to select foods carefully, eat more slowly—and, as a result, eat less—while exercising and sleeping more.

WALL NUMBER TWO—STRESS-RELIEF

It’s no secret in the field of public health that stress is a killer. Several factors make American life particularly stressful. We are among the most competitive of wealthy capitalist countries and have the widest gap between rich and poor. Fewer people on top; more on the bottom. Studies clearly show that whether it’s humans or baboons, the lower your status, the higher your stress levels. More economically egalitarian societies, like Sweden or Japan, for example, are clearly less stressful and more healthy.

Stress is also the result of insecurity. As the American social safety net has been gutted in recent years (with more of us losing health and pension benefits, for example) and job protections have been reduced, life in America is far more insecure than in other rich countries, where strong social safety nets remain in place. Danes, for example, can be fired as easily as Americans, but they receive generous unemployment benefits, job training and government jobs if they are unable to find a position in the private sector. Insecurity also leads to anxiety, a mental illness. American rates of anxiety are double or triple those in western European countries. Europeans say their social safety net gives them a feeling of peace of mind. It’s certainly good for their health.

Finally, stress is the result of time pressures and overwork. More breaks from a stressful workplace are seen by Europeans as yet another way to improve health. It’s unlikely that we will be able to quickly change the levels of hierarchy and inequality in the US, or that our safety net will be suddenly strengthened. But policies offering shorter work time and longer vacations, clear stress reducers, could be enacted more easily and quickly, and they should be.

WALL NUMBER THREE—SOCIAL CONNECTION

It’s a given in the field of public health that social connection strengthens immune systems and improves physical well-being. In fact, it may be the most important single factor in health outcomes. One of the worst things you can do for your health is to be lonesome. Yet America is an increasingly lonely country. More and more people, and especially older Americans, live alone, far more than in other rich countries. A recent study found that the average American has only two close friends he or she can turn to. A quarter of us have none at all. Loneliness quickly turns into depression. As with anxiety, Americans are two to three times as likely to suffer from depression as western Europeans.

A National Institutes of Health study comparing frequency of chronic illness in the United States and the United Kingdom found that Americans are nearly twice as likely to suffer from chronic illnesses such as heart disease in old age. Such diseases account of a huge part of our health care costs. The study found, surprisingly, that poor Britons are as healthy as rich Americans. It didn’t find that eating fish and chips makes you healthier. The major reasons for the difference were related to the fact that the British had more security and more free time, which they used to exercise more, but especially to socialize more.

WALL NUMBER FOUR—A SAFE ENVIRONMENT

Americans, according to the UNICEF study, rank at the bottom in child safety, with the highest rates of accidents among children. Partly, time pressure on American parents leave them less able to supervise their children. Other studies show extremely high rates of accidents in the workplace compared to other nations. Preventable death rates in the US, including deaths from automobile accidents, are the highest among industrial countries. Moreover, the European Union has stricter controls on the release of toxic chemicals into the environment. On average, Americans breathe in air pollution at double the levels of western Europe.

Finally, and this is no small matter, every other industrial country guarantees its workers paid time off from work when they are sick; only the US does not. In many cases, as much as a month of leave is allowed. These countries know that without paid time off, workers will come to work sick, as many American workers do. They will get others sick and stay sick longer, often requiring more expensive treatment for their illnesses. This is not rocket science. Most Americans get this immediately. That is why more than 80 percent of them favor a law that would guarantee paid sick days for workers.

WHAT CAN WE DO TO IMPROVE OUR HEALTH?

To achieve better health outcomes, Americans must begin to see health as a holistic matter, like the house I describe. Right now that house has a foundation that is part marble, part rotting wood and part dirt. It has four walls that are a mixture of teak, balsa wood and bamboo, all of them in sorry shape. And finally, it has a gilded roof with millions of holes.

It is not enough to talk of making the roof all gold and eliminating the holes, though we do need to eliminate the holes. We need to eliminate the gold as well, taking the profit and costly complexity from the system and expanding a program like Medicare to cover everyone, potentially at less cost. Such a system must rely more on preventive methods than high tech cures.

If we also pay attention to the foundation and the walls, we can assure better outcomes also at lower cost, as is the case in other rich nations. We can:

Strengthen the foundation by improving pre-natal care and providing at least three months or more of paid leave to all parents of babies or very young children. Make the Family and Medical Leave Act a paid provision and extend it to all workers.

Strengthen the wall of lifestyle by encouraging consumption of whole grains and vegetables, teaching children the value of eating healthy foods, eliminating subsidies to the purveyors of sugars and fats, and especially, reducing working hours to give Americans more time for exercise, sleep and healthy eating.

Strengthen the wall of stress relief by re-instituting tax policies that narrow the gap between rich and poor, re-building our social safety net and adopting policies like paid vacation time (the US is the only industrial nation without a law guaranteeing paid vacations) that can assure Americans periodic relief from the stress of our hyper-competitive and long-hour workplaces.

Strengthen the wall of connection by reducing working time and by stimulating, through programs like national service, greater volunteer involvement with our neighbors and communities.

Strengthen the wall of safety by improving OSHA and other protections for workers, building more pedestrian and bicycle friendly cities, and regaining the environmental zeal of the early 1970s, which led to much cleaner water and air for all Americans. Pass the Healthy Families Act, guaranteeing seven paid sick days to American workers.

All of these changes, taken for granted in other nations, will make the United States healthier, and almost certainly at less cost than our current system. Improving our health outcomes is less a matter of better science and more money than of political will and an ability to see the connections between things.

Many business leaders (though certainly not all!) will object to these ideas on the grounds that they will cost too much and make us less competitive in the world economy. But the cost of poor health will be far greater than the price tag for such reforms. If there is one thing more than any other which makes it harder for American businesses to compete, it’s the escalating cost of health care.

We can do better. We owe it to ourselves and our children to make these changes without delay.

John de Graaf is a documentary filmmaker, Executive Director of Take Back Your Time and co-author of Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic.

Photo credit: Flickr/kden604, Creative Commons license

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 1:01 PM)

The Bioneers conference, an old staple of the conference circuit for many greens, will once again be held two weeks from now, a little ways north of San Francisco. But this year there's an additional new event, put together by the Biomimicry Institute (with whom I've worked): it's a day-long seminar the day after Bioneers finishes, called Biomimicry’s Climate-Change Solutions: How Would Nature Do It?

We've long touted biomimicry as an excellent tool for green design, and Worldchanging ally Janine Benyus was one of TIME's Heroes of the Environment in 2007. How can biomimicry help climate change? Here are a few examples from their press release:

Filters modeled on human lungs sequester over 90% of the CO2 in flue stacks. Wind turbines designed after humpback whale flippers show a staggering 32% reduction in drag over conventional blades. Biofuels grown as diverse, native plants akin to prairies produce 238% more bioenergy than conventional monocultures.

A score of brilliant thinkers from the worlds of engineering, biology, chemistry and venture capital will speak on the state of the art in bio-inspired design that increases efficiency, reduces toxicity and increases the abundance of renewable energy and materials. Some that we've mentioned here before are the small startup formed by University of Delaware researchers who make circuit boards out of chicken feathers and soy plastic; solar cells that mimic photosynthesis; and Pax Scientific. If you're new to biomimicry or already a fan, this would be a great event to be fire-hosed with knowledge and get connected to those doing great things in the field.

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(Posted by Jeremy Faludi in Events at 8:22 PM)

The Worldchanging Team-at-Large is enormous. Scores of writers from around the world share their work and research here on a regular basis; respected institutions on the leading edge of sustainability and social innovation are our allies; and our active network of hundreds of thousands of readers contribute smart comments, suggest new ideas and spread the word through their work.

But here at Worldchanging headquarters in Seattle, a small core staff keeps the doors open, the lights on, the blog updated and the ideas cranking. We've welcomed several new faces to the Worldchanging headquarters since spring, and we're happy to say that after plowing through an exciting summer full of new opportunities, our new staff members have settled into their roles, made them their own and have already brought about big changes, with more on the way. We're proud to introduce the newest additions to the Worldchanging staff, and we'd like you to get to know them:

Office Manager Mayling Chung has brought a much-needed sense of calm to our world with her organized approach. She keeps things flowing by managing Alex's tour schedule, handling logistics, official records and communications, and constantly inventing new ways to keep our systems tidy. This Colorado College grad, who earned her BA in Sociology with a minor in Art Studio, held jobs at a video art lab in Colorado, TOPS Veterinary Rehabilitation in Illinois and at Great Harvest Bread Co. in Seattle before joining the team. She continues to feed her passion for food, farming and human and animal welfare with volunteer work, and has given her time to Lettuce Link, Seattle Tilth, Sustained Dialogue, Mother's Choice and C.L.A.W.

Mayling is both inspired by, and impatient for, smart innovations. As she tells it, while on vacation with her family in Australia in 2000, "I discovered the half-moon vs full-moon flush buttons on the toilet, and I wanted to know why such things didn't exist everywhere! Wait, why don't they still?" But she's happy to be in a place to help people learn what's possible. "There are so many interesting and thoughtful ideas out there that nourish independence, connections, and true balance. I love that powerful moment when somebody meets a solution that fits them."

Worldchanging Design Intern Morgan Greenseth landed in Seattle after earning her Bachelor's at the Art Institute of California-San Diego, and completing her Masters of Interior and Living Design at the Domus Academy in Milan, Italy and the University of Wales. Her creative and colorful mind makes her a whiz at communicating Worldchanging ideas and stories through graphics.

"As words are to the editorial staff, colors, shapes and forms are to me," she says. In addition to creating original graphics and compilations, Morgan helps organize local events, researches articles for the editorial staff, and has even spruced up our office layout to make our days more pleasant and productive. When she's not brightening up the Worldchanging office, she's designing interiors with downtown firm Dynamik. In her free time she rarely passes up an opportunity to soak up city culture, whether she's visiting a new exhibit or art gallery, attending a concert or trying out a new vegan restaurant.

Managing Director Brittany Jacobs, who holds an MBA from the cutting-edge Bainbridge Graduate Institute, first encountered Worldchanging in 2006 when she helped organize our book tour. She now returns, after most recently flexing her marketing, managing and networking muscles as Communications Director for Interra, a non-profit organization focused on strengthening local economies. Sitting at the helm of Worldchanging's business development, this Oklahoma native has her capable hands full managing various projects, crunching numbers, fielding proposals and planning fabulous parties and events.

While the rest of us are often happy to end the workday with veggie stew and a glass of wine, Brittany (who bikes up a big hill to the office, mind you) spends most of her free time climbing, skiing, backpacking, kite-boarding, running and otherwise maxing out her enjoyment of the gorgeous Pacific Northwest. Her endless energy motivates the team even better than our daily dose of locally roasted coffee. But what fuels Brittany better than anything is the very real quest for a better world. As this internationally savvy traveler puts it, "We look beyond our backyard and bring a global perspective to the solutions on which we report. I see this type of responsible reporting as a tool that can help shape the future in which we want to live."

Associate Editor Sarah Michelle Kuck is, in her own words, "inordinately obsessed with making the world a better place." This Midwest ex-pat moved from Wisconsin to the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 2003 to attend Western Washington University's prestigious environmental journalism program. After graduation she moved to Bainbridge Island to work as an editorial assistant for Yes! Magazine, then took this knowledge to the mainland where she co-founded the online magazine seattleDIRT and community organization Sustainable Wallingford before joining Worldchanging. Our resident yoga instructor can now often be found upside-down, as she does her best thinking while handstanding against the office wall.

You can catch some of Sarah's infectious enthusiasm in her regular posts about new solutions and inspirational people, and you can thank her for keeping you in the loop by updating our social networks and managing our weekly newsletter. An avid traveler who has conducted interviews as far from home as Kenya, she says she loves her job "because it allows me to write from a perspective of both intelligence and optimism. Being able to participate in a discussion with some of the world's most brilliant thinkers and most passionate visionaries helps me realize on a daily basis that we can in fact build the world we need and want to live in."

Managing Editor Julia Levitt sees journalism as her all-access pass to the most exciting people and ideas on the planet. She got her first real sense of how big the sustainability conversation was as a student, when she covered a social controversy over land preservation in a farming community in northeastern Brazil. Since graduating from Northwestern University, she has let her curiosity and attraction to change-makers lead her to jobs at the Medill Innocence Project, Steppenwolf Theater Co., and green start-up A Fresh Squeeze, in addition to traditional editing and writing gigs. She's thrilled to be overseeing relationships with Worldchanging's international team of writers, managing original content and editing our newest site, Worldchanging Seattle.

This Ohio native is inspired by the possibilities of merging classic values like local business and safe, walkable streets with cutting-edge goals like living buildings, zero-waste and sustainable transit to create cities that are prosperous and environmentally sound. Julia holds to the hope "that the United States is at a turning point, where an increasingly loud majority from all corners are ready to demand a future that's smarter and more efficiently powered, more fair, more resourceful and more connected." When off the clock, she loves traveling, hiking and skiing with her husband, singing loud, teaching yoga, working with kids and starting new projects on her sewing machine.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 5:30 PM)

A few months ago, we started to wonder about what you, our readers, were up to.

When we sent out our Worldchanging Readers’ Survey in July, more than 1,000 of our readers responded to tell us about themselves, how they use Worldchanging, and how they feel about the site. Since it’s our five-year anniversary, and we are announcing a lot of exciting news, we thought we would share some of the responses that greatly helped us make some incredibly important decisions. Here are some highlights:

We found out that the average reader is between the ages of 25 and 34. Our audience is split almost evenly between men and women.

From your responses we learn that you are highly educated and actively engaged people. Almost 50 percent of you hold graduate degrees, while many of the rest report that you are still in school studying subjects related to sustainability, foresight and innovation.

Almost 80 percent of you told us that sustainability, foresight and social innovation is a part of your job or will be quite soon, and nearly 60 percent of you might be reading this while at your desk.

Many of you reported that you hope to connect with other readers, and that you would like to meet each other through a Worldchanging-hosted event. The idea of a Worldchanging conference, in particular, was wildly popular. We hope bring that about in the very near future.

You told us some things you would like to see change: a new look, a more global view, new ways of accessing content. We heard the message loud and clear, and we are currently hard at work to make those things happen.

In addition to lots and lots of great critical feedback and intelligent suggestions, you also told us somethings you like about us: our character and our smart, fresh, optimistic, diverse, visionary and creative style. You like our variety, our thoughtfulness, and our big picture look at what is on the forefront of the environmental debate.

In your own words:

“I like Worldchanging's forward-looking attention towards sustainability and ethical social engineering. I like that Worldchanging gives hope that even as the quality of living trends downward, there are still ways to live well and help others.”

“Forward thinking, innovative, informative, accurate, insightful, and inspiring: and all this made possible by a fantastic cohort of people who really are the best of their kind around.”

“It's a refreshing change from the usual "green movement" stuff - it challenges my own views and has a very bold way of getting the message across.”

“It is the ONLY website that is comprehensive, solutions-based, far thinking, thorough, etc.”

“I find that it is more reliable than other environmental blogs on the internet. That is, the focus is on changing the way we live rather than changing how we buy. It also takes a holistic view on how to change the world, and recognizes how only a multifaceted approach can hope to truly accomplish this goal.”

“It gives the public access to crucial discussions that would never appear in traditional media”

“It gets to the heart of things. It stays abreast of what is happening around the globe and in America. I feel like I'm getting leading edge insights.”

Thank you to those who took the time to give us some feedback! Here’s to the years ahead!

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 5:02 PM)

Here at Worldchanging, solutions are our business. We've spent the last five years exploring the world's most innovative ideas for addressing the planet's most pressing problems. Today's our birthday, so we thought we'd take this chance to let you know about our new plans.

Until now, we've largely focused on discrete innovations. Even our book is a compendium of individual insights, solutions and approaches. We've assembled a larger and larger pile of pieces to the puzzle of how to build a better future, but we've never really attempted to put those pieces together, instead allowing the existence of those puzzle pieces to imply that an assembled puzzle is possible. We've written much about the tools for building a better future, and not enough about that future itself.

But people need a new future. In fact, one could reasonably argue that people need a new future now more than any time in the history of the species. Our present way of living is an ocean liner colliding catastrophically with the iceberg of ecological and economic reality -- a collision that threatens to essentially destroy civilization -- and yet we cling to it with white knuckles, in large part because we can't really imagine another way of living. Given the choice between a sinking ship and dark uncertainty, most of us tend to hold tight to the rails and hope for the best.

If we are going to convince large numbers of people to embrace the kinds of creative, large-scale change sustainability demands, we need to offer them something more than scattered, loosely connected possibilities. We need to show them a new, brighter future, a plausible, inspiring, achievable -- and sustainable -- future towards which people can aim their aspirations. We need to invite people to abandon that sinking ship and swim for a future that works.

Imagining that future still strains our foresight, but more and more clearly it lies within the boundaries of possibility. We have much of the toolbox of solutions we need to build a bright green future: designs, technologies, policies, practices and insights that we can use to ratchet down the ecological impacts of nearly any aspect of our civilization. Some large gaps remain -- no one has yet invented a realistic sustainable model of the aviation industry, for instance -- but between solutions that already exist and new innovations leaping off the drawing boards now, we can at very least trace a plausible path from here to a bright green future.

That future is simply unattainable without America's wholehearted commitment. To begin with the obvious, we Americans are intimately connected with the causes of much misery, from our climate emissions and runaway resource use to our rogue-state diplomacy, and the simple cessation of that stupidity would go a long way towards making possible the good. But that's not the limit of the leadership the United States can offer. Simply, America remains the epicenter of possibility in the human imagination. No other nation has as thorough a sense of idealism and open-hearted mission, no matter how badly worn it may seem today. We are, even now, despite it all, still the place where many people who want to change the world struggle to arrive. What Emerson said in 1844 remains true today: “America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.”

If the world is going to figure out one-planet prosperity, a bright green way of life that can lift everyone out of poverty while averting catastrophe, to some very serious extent, we Americans will need to invent our own version of it first.

Of course, America is far from sustainable today. Upper-middle class Americans, whose idea of prosperity is increasingly emulated around the world, often have ten-planet ecological footprints. Even middle class Americans weigh in at four to five planets (almost twice the ecological impact of the average European).

We need to show the possibility of a way of life every bit as prosperous as -- indeed, more attractive than -- the lives of today's American upper-middle class, but lived within reasonable ecological limits: prosperity with a small enough environmental impact that it could be shared by every person on the planet. We need to show that way of life, demonstrate its realism, and distribute tools for building it.

That is exactly what Worldchanging intends to do in the next twelve months, with four new projects.

We're launching a major book, tentatively titled Bright Green. With clarity, forceful arguments and concrete proposals this heavily illustrated book will show the American people that the tools exist, the thinking exists, the solutions are possible to build a country that's more prosperous, more just, more creative and so green that its practices could be emulated by every person on Earth without destroying the planet. Even more, it will show that transformation can be accomplished not in centuries or a number of decades, but in years, quickly enough that the model we create can spread around the world. It will illustrate that if we do it right, we will have better lives and be safer, happier, healthier and more connected to our friends, families and communities.

We're also concluding negotiations to put out a second edition of our first book, Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century. This updated edition won't just highlight the world's best new innovations, it'll include an increased emphasis on global implementation -- on politics, business and social entrepreneurship -- showing how we can all come together to actually make global sustainability happen.

You'll also be seeing major changes on the Worldchanging site itself, improvements we'll be unveiling in stages over the next six months, but which add up to more original writing, better resources, more community and a stronger focus on the amazing people in our network and the work they do. Look for new columnists and features in the coming days.

Finally, we're planning a major conference and North American tour for late 2009.

Together, these four new projects will add up to a major acceleration of our work to bring the best thinking from the frontiers of change into a deeper conversation with a much larger audience. We hope you'll join us in growing that conversation and exploring those innovations.

Photo credit: flickr/Jared Zimmerman, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 3:12 PM)

by Christopher Flavin

The following is adapted from a speech given by Worldwatch Institute President Christopher Flavin at a high-level United Nations event on September 25, 2008.

I want to commend the UN Secretary-General for his decision to focus on environmental sustainability as one of the three cross-cutting pillars of the Millennium Development Goals. Environmental sustainability may have seemed peripheral to meeting human needs when these goals were adopted in 2000. But the world has changed.

The health of the world's ecological systems will be decisive in determining our ability to meet all of the Millennium Development Goals. Environmental sustainability is not just another policy goal. The human economy is wholly contained within the global biosphere-and if the biosphere's productivity is undermined, the human economy will suffer.

Just as some parts of our economy have accumulated unsustainable fiscal debts, the global economy has accrued a massive ecological debt - a debt that must be settled if we are to sustain economic development and meet the needs of the 1.4 billion human beings who are still mired in severe poverty.

Today, our planet supports 6.5 billion human beings. Those numbers are growing by 70 million people each year, and global consumption levels are soaring, as China and other countries enter the consumer age. The economic model that has supported unprecedented economic progress for several hundred million people in industrial countries over the past half century cannot possibly meet the growing needs of the more than 8 billion people who will live on this planet by the middle of this century.

The events of the past year have provided graphic reminders that collapsing economic systems have real human impacts-and that the world's poor, who are most directly dependent on natural resources, will suffer first and suffer most:

*
In Haiti, the impact of three large hurricanes this summer was magnified by the vast deforestation that has left millions of people vulnerable to floods and landslides.
*
In West Africa, the decline of local fisheries has left thousands of poor families without a livelihood and in some cases with no source of affordable protein.
*
Across large areas of the Indian subcontinent, diminishing supplies of fresh water are undermining food production and leaving people with inadequate drinking water.

And from the Arctic to the Equator, the world's climate is changing rapidly - and undermining ecological systems on every continent, from forests to oceans and fresh water. Many scientists believe that a dangerous climate tipping point may be near-unleashing a runaway greenhouse effect that would feed on itself for centuries to come.

The bottom line is clear: the inefficient, carbon-intensive, throwaway economy that was so successful in an earlier era is not suited to today's world. Our planet in now in mortal danger of an ecological collapse whose human impact would dwarf the financial collapse the world is now seeking to avoid.

Stabilizing the world's climate and dramatically reducing our dependence on fossil fuels is the central challenge of our generation. Building a new energy system is essential to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, a fact that is reinforced by the devastating impact that rising prices for oil and other fossil fuels have had on the world's poor in recent years. These fuels are no longer sufficiently abundant to provide the reliable, affordable energy supplies needed to fuel economic development.

It is therefore urgent that we build a sustainable low-carbon economy that meets all human needs and is in balance with the world's natural resources. This effort could jumpstart a powerful new engine of economic development, creating thousands of industries and millions of jobs in rich and poor countries alike.

In the eight years since the Millennium Development Goals were launched, the world has come a long way in its understanding of the fundamental importance of environmental sustainability to human well-being. It is time for world leaders to embrace this understanding and begin building a green economy for the 21st century.

Christopher Flavin is president of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C. His forthcoming report, Low-Carbon Energy: The Way Forward, will be released in November.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Sustainable Development at 2:02 PM)

$700 billion still goes a long way.

by Eric de Place

I just can't help wondering what else we could do with $700 billion.

According to the United Nations, the entire debt for the entire continent of Africa was about $320 billion in 2003. Adjusting for inflation and further accumulated debt, let's call it an even $350 billion.

You could install solar panels on 20 million American homes for $300 billion. (I'm ballparking a rather conservative $15k for full installation of enough solar infrastructure to fully power an average American house; the price would surely come down drastically at that scale.) By the way, 20 million houses is more than one-quarter of the entire stock of occupied detached houses in the U.S.

Of course, the solar panels would actually pay for themselves pretty quickly. Under this plan, lucky homeowners (or renters) would then pay nothing for their new solar electricity -- we just footed the entire bill. It might be nice to target low-income folks, who generally inhabit the least efficient buildings. Even better, because the sunniest parts of the US are also, generally speaking, some of the most coal-dependent we'd shut down coal plants across the Sun Belt. So it's a huge win for global warming to boot.

That still leaves $50 billion lying around under the couch cushions.

We could install ground source heat pumps for 5 million American homes for $50 billion. (I'm ballparking a mildly conservative $10k for enough GSP installation to fully heat an average house.) Again, this would also pay for itself pretty fast. Plus, lucky low-income folks in the colder climates would be looking at a lifetime of carbon-free (and money-free) heat for their homes. One good place to start would be in places like the northeast where expensive and inefficient oil heating is common.

Pretty sweet. I just retired every cent of Africa's crushing debt. Then using conservative estimates, I provided an eternal supply of free electricity or heat to 25 million households -- thereby drastically reducing US carbon emissions.

Alternatively, some credible analysts have suggested that paying the full cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol for the entire world would run $716 billion. (I should mention that other credible estimates are much, much lower.) And this figure doesn't count the tremendous savings from avoiding the potential costs of climate change impacts -- estimated at trillions of dollars just for the U.S.

This piece originally appeared on The Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Bright Green Economy at 1:52 PM)

How to actually deliver green-collar jobs to those who need them.

by Alan Durning

Converting the Pacific Northwest over the next few decades to a place of compact, walkable communities that run on superefficient, renewable energy system—a climate-safe economy—will be a lot of work: paid work. But for all the exciting announcements of solar jobs and green-tech investment that pepper the newspapers, the skill sets of today’s workers are not yet aligned with the needs of this future.

In previous posts in this series, I have described three good uses for revenue from the auctioning of carbon permits: dividends for all, buffering the incomes of low-income families, and upgrading the energy efficiency of working families’ homes. A fourth good use for cap-and-trade auction revenue is to spend a portion of it training a green-collar workforce for the clean-energy trades. In many sectors of the economy right now, a limiting factor on seizing the opportunities of the new energy economy is a shortage of mid-skill labor. For example, low-income weatherization programs across the Pacific Northwest are currently crippled by a scarcity of crew chiefs qualified to supervise retrofits on job sites.

A mid-skill worker is neither a laborer nor someone with a four-year degree. Rather, he or she is a tradesperson or technician, usually with an apprenticeship credential, an associate’s degree, or a vocational certificate. For unskilled, low-income workers, a pathway to mid-skill work is the best route out of poverty, but many obstacles loom. Finding the time and money to study is the day-to-day challenge. The larger challenge, not only for workers individually but for society’s poverty-reduction goals overall, is to integrate work with studies into a “career ladder” of steadily rising competence, experience, education, opportunity, and earnings.

According to a study by the Community College Research Center, to grow green-collar jobs for disadvantaged, low-skill workers, auction revenue might best be spent on expanded public funding for narrowly focused training programs in community and technical colleges that lead to vocational certificates or degrees in the trades: carpenters trained in green building, plumbers capable of installing commercial-scale solar water heaters, electricians educated in photovoltaics and advanced energy-system controls, machinists who can produce windmill turbines and carbon-fiber aircraft parts, metalworkers skilled in forging bicycle frames and the ultralight components for the automobiles of the future, and forest managers knowledgeable about carbon sequestration.

Such programs are already sprouting in two-year institutions around the Pacific Northwest. Columbia Gorge Community College now offers an electronics engineering technician program. Many graduates of the first cohort are already working in the wind industry, earning from $35,000 to $60,000 a year, according to the New York Times. Lane Community College, in Eugene, Oregon, trains renewable-energy technicians in a two-year program that teaches students how to improve the energy efficiency of homes and businesses and install solar-power and wind-power systems. In Washington, Bellevue Community College and Cascadia Community College offer similar programs.

Still, for the clean-energy transition to become a chance for workers to achieve economic security, much more needs doing. The national organization Green For All has published the most detailed road map. Called Greener Pathways, it identifies the specific programs that northwesterners can use to build a ladder from poverty to climate-safe prosperity for low-skill workers.

Many of these approaches are integrated well into Washington State’s 2008 Climate Action and Green Jobs Act. The law puts green-collar jobs at the center of the state’s response to climate change. It directs the state Employment Security Department to conduct a detailed assessment of green-collar job potential in the state and to identify jobs that pay family wages and could grow rapidly. The law also establishes a process for coordinating the assessment of, and planning for, workforce development needs in several industries through the creation of panels that include representatives of businesses, trade associations, labor unions, educational institutions, and others involved in the labor market. Finally, it authorizes a grant-funded set of investments in workforce training programs (typically, at community colleges) that target jobs prioritized by the industry-specific panels. This approach is a national model, because it so carefully targets public spending to training programs that actually help low-income workers get qualified for high-demand, family-wage jobs. Although the 2008 law authorizes the creation of training grants, the state has yet to fund them—an obvious use for carbon auction revenue.

This piece originally appeared on The Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Bright Green Economy at 1:35 PM)

In South Korea, wind power would be a likely resource to help the world's tenth largest energy consumer meet government goals to lower fossil fuel dependency through greater investment in renewable energy.

Yet efforts to build wind turbines in South Korea have met fierce opposition, even among environmentalists, due to the lack of open land in the densely populated country. Only about 100 megawatts (MW) of wind power are installed nationwide despite plentiful wind resources and government price controls that keep renewable power competitive with traditional energy sources.

The solution might be found off the Korean peninsula's shores, and South Korea is not alone. As more countries seek to increase their renewable energy ratios, many consider off-shore wind a potential solution to provide clean energy without affecting local landscapes and communities.

Off-shore wind has so far taken a back seat to on-shore wind farms during the current boom in wind energy development. Off-shore turbines are more difficult to maintain, and they cost $.08-$0.12 per kilowatt-hour, compared to $.05-$.08 for on-shore wind.

But off-shore wind farms offer several benefits over their land-based counterparts. Strong ocean winds allow one off-shore turbine to generate substantially more power than one on-shore turbine. Also, if an off-shore wind farm is located near a coastal city, clean energy would be available without dedicating land to new transmission lines.

Denmark installed the first off-shore wind farm in 1991. Since then, slightly more than 1 gigawatt (GW) has been installed worldwide, mostly in the North Sea, according to the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). An additional 3.8 GW is expected in the next four years, forecasts British energy firm Douglas-Westwood, Ltd. Based on their estimates, annual installations are set to increase from 419 MW in 2008 to 1,238 MW in 2012, with the United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and China leading the way.

In Europe, about 80 percent of the off-shore wind market will be concentrated in Denmark and the United Kingdom by the end of this year, with 1 GW planned by the two countries combined, EWEA said in a policy recommendation report. The association predicts that 50 GW of off-shore wind will be operating in Europe by 2020.

In Asia, China installed its first off-shore wind farm in November. The country plans to add more than 1.5 GW of off-shore projects. Feasibility studies are under way in South Korea and Japan.

Along North America's coasts, a handful of projects are moving forward, and several more are tied down in local site disputes. According to a U.S. Department of Energy report, more than 900 GW of off-shore wind power could potentially be tapped from U.S. shores, mostly along the northeastern and southeastern seaboards. The United States is expected to finalize its leasing rules for off-shore wind farms this year.

Similar to concerns that on-shore wind farms threaten bat and bird populations, off-shore wind farms could disrupt marine ecosystems. The initial construction may kill organisms on the seafloor, and transmission cables create magnetic and electric fields that may disrupt fish orientation.

But researchers are still unsure what damage might occur, and several studies suggest that turbine construction and operation would pose minimal threats. Some experts suggest the turbines would benefit marine life by creating artificial reefs.

Weather may also be a limiting factor. Harsh winds often prevent construction during winter months, slowing development. Turbines are designed to sustain winds as strong as 200 miles per hour, but so far few have experienced intense hurricanes.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be contacted at bblock@worldwatch.org.

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(Posted by Ben Block in Energy at 1:16 PM)