Solutions & sustainability – May 6

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

The Hippies Were Right!
Mark Morford, SF Chronicle
Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time to give the ol’ tie-dyers some respect
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Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that’s happening right now in the newly “greening” America and don’t say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women or endless vile unwinnable BushCo wars in the Middle East lasting until roughly 2075 because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored sardonic optimism. OK?

I’m talking about, say, energy-efficient light bulbs. I’m looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I’m talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and non-phthalates dildos at Good Vibes and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation’s oddest status symbol. You know, good things.

Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth” and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, “it’s the right thing to do” (read: It’s purely economic and all about their bottom line because if they don’t start caring they’ll soon be totally screwed on manufacturing and shipping costs at/from all their brutal Chinese sweatshops).

There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit fitful, bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.
(2 May 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.

Accidental Sustainability and Why We Can’t Sustain It
Sarah Rich, WorldChanging
For those of you who haven’t heard yet, a portion of a highly trafficked freeway interchange in the San Francisco Bay Area collapsed early yesterday morning when a gasoline tanker lost control and exploded. The flames apparently reached temperatures nearing 3000F degrees, and a structure we ordinarily trust to be quite stable turned from an overpass into an asphalt waterslide.

To say that this event will disrupt traffic flow is a profound understatement.

…Thus, much of the benefit (from a traffic miles/ air quality standpoint) is likely to be temporary.

What does this say about our ability to make immediate, drastic change? When given no other option, it appears we’re superbly capable. So much money and effort goes into wrangling public cooperation towards baby steps, when the truth is, we can do a lot better, a lot faster, for a lot less money (repairing melted overpasses aside).

…Apparently, sustainable measures taken for reasons not directly pertaining to sustainability just don’t register as being a smart, viable, immediate solutions to ongoing problems. We prove to ourselves time and again that we can do more to tackle pollution, unsnarl urban roads and make cities more livable. We can even do it as fast as the accelerating threat of climate change. Or faster. But happy accidents are treated as accidents nonetheless and we shuffle back to baby steps. In the Bay, there’s no question that the collapsed overpass must be righted and reattached, because it’s a broken link in a generally functional chain. But maybe there’s a way to sustain the modified behavior of Bay Area residents such that a healed highway doesn’t send novice transit users running back to their cars.
(30 April 2007)

Ooh! Shiny!
Ethan Zuckerman, WorldChanging
My friend JC Herz spoke at the same State Department event I was attending in Washington yesterday, and came away with the best quote of the event: “For the most part, coverage of technology by journalists doesn’t get beyond ‘Oooh! Shiny!’”. This “shiny bias” means that journalists fall for stories that are “too good to check“, as Clay Shirky describes journalists’ largely uncritical coverage of Second Life.

(”Oooh! Shiny!” is one of the most charming lines uttered by Kaylee Frye, the adorable and spunky engine mechanic who keeps the starship Serenity running in Joss Wheadon’s late, great series, “Firefly”. But it’s a line that you could imagine attributed to Templeton, the crafty but charming rat who shares Wilbur’s pen in Charlotte’s Web. Or to any highly distractible animal who gets misled by flash and motion. You know, like journalists…)

JC argues that the stuff that’s shiny is often the least interesting technology and the tech that looks least shiny can be the most fascinating.
(30 April 2007)

News & Views Round-Up, April 2007
David Zaks, WorldChanging
We come across a lot of interesting ideas and innovative solutions, but we choose only a few to discuss in detail. The best of the stories we don’t cover get selected and collated as headlines in News and Views. It’s like a little Worldchanging news service, and if you haven’t noticed, the daily News and Views stories are now being delivered via RSS feed either with the other posts, or as a feed by themselves.
(1 May 2007)
Index to the approximately 120 stories that WorldChanging posted last month.

The Transformation of Manufacturing in the 21st Century
Lawrence J. Rhoades, National Academy of Engineering
The new industrial revolution will enable people to live where they like and produce what they need locally.
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Manufacturing has been defined as the human transformation of materials from one form to another, more valuable form. The transformation can be geometric or compositional, or both. Manufacturing encompasses both the production of man-made materials originating from naturally occurring raw materials and the production of discrete parts, usually from those man-made materials. …

Conclusion

Distributed digital production, a category of processes evolving from rapid prototyping, rapid manufacturing, free-form fabrication, and layered manufacturing, is a harbinger of twenty-first-century production, which is dramatically different from the kind of “manufacturing” we know today. The fundamental nature of distributed-digital processes-the construction of functional metal work pieces by assembling elemental particles, layer by layer, with no instructions other than the computer design files widely used to define objects geometrically-is based on different assumptions than those that drove manufacturing and distribution strategies throughout the twentieth century.

…As the costs and wait times of tooling, programming, and “designing for manufacturing” are reduced and then eliminated, the perceived advantages of high-production volumes, concentrated manufacturing sites, and complex distribution logistics will yield to the advantages of distributed digital production-products designed to meet the specific preferences of individual customers that can be produced on or near the point of consumption at the time of consumption (e.g., automotive spare parts produced at a dealership).

…Finally, because these processes are highly automated, the size of the workforce required to produce and deliver manufactured products to the customer will be greatly reduced. Consequently, low-cost, so-called touch labor will lose its competitive advantage in the production of physical objects.

The demand for innovative product designs will expand dramatically. And, because ideas will be delivered electronically, designers can be located anywhere. As design for manufacturing becomes less important, and because design superiority will be gained principally through understanding and responding to customers’ tastes, designers might want to be located near their customers.

Even if products are designed remotely, however, production will be done locally. Physical objects will be produced “at home” or “in the neighborhood” from locally recycled materials. Thus, cities will lose their economic advantage, and urban populations will be dispersed.

Although the revolution promised by these technologies could have great benefits for consumers in developing countries, the economic advantages of manufacturing in areas with comparatively cheap labor will be ultimately unsustainable, and workers in poor countries are likely to suffer. Consequently, our energy and creativity must also be focused on finding other paths to economic parity in the value of equivalent human labor to hundreds of millions of low-wage workers throughout the world.

Lawrence J. Rhoades is president and chief executive officer of Ex One Corporation.
(no date)
Contributor Big Gav writes:
This has a different spin to most relocalisation pieces (to say the least) but it is a future scenario worth keeping in mind.

Sadly, the author of the article just died in an accident April 21 (Obituary).