Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage.
Why Wikileaks will be the death of big business and big government.
Noam Scheiber, The New Republic
… When people riff about the impact of Wikileaks, you typically hear how it’s forever changed diplomacy or intelligence-gathering. The more ambitious accounts will mention the implications for journalism, too. All of that’s true and vaguely relevant. But it also misses the deeper point. The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information. It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction.
At the most basic level, organizations have two functions: They make stuff (loosely defined) and they coordinate the activities of makers of stuff. The efficiency with which they do these things helps determine the organization’s size.
… Now consider what happens when you plug Wikileaks into this equation. All of a sudden, the very same things that made it more efficient to work with your colleagues—the fact that everyone had a detailed understanding of the mission and methodology—become enormous liabilities. In a Wikileaks world, the greater the number of people who intimately understand your organization,* the more candidates there are for revealing that information to millions of voyeurs.
Wikileaks is, in effect, a huge tax on internal coordination. And, as any economist will tell you, the way to get less of something is to tax it. As a practical matter, that means the days of bureaucracies in the tens of thousands of employees are probably numbered.
… That leaves these organizations with two options. The first is to tighten their security so as to disrupt or deter leaking. As it happens, some of the most brilliant minds in computer programming are hard at work on this problem. Unfortunately, as no less an authority than Zuckerberg has pointed out, these efforts are doomed to fail. “Technology”—which is to say, the technology that moves information rather than blocks it—“usually wins with these things,” he told Time’s Lev Grossman (inadvertently advancing the case for Assange as Person of the Year).
The second option is to shrink. I have no idea what size organization is optimal for preventing leaks, but, presumably, it should be small enough to avoid wide-scale alienation, which clearly excludes big bureaucracies. Ideally, you’d want to stay small enough to preserve a sense of community, so that people’s ties to one another and the leadership act as a powerful check against leaking. My gut says it’s next to impossible to accomplish this with more than a few hundred people.
Noam Scheiber is a senior editor for The New Republic and a Schwartz Fellow at The New America Foundation.
(27 December 2010)
A Physicist Solves the City
Jonah Lehrer, New York Times
… West illustrates the problem by translating human life into watts. “A human being at rest runs on 90 watts,” he says. “That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”
The historian Lewis Mumford described the rise of the megalopolis as “the last stage in the classical cycle of civilization,” which would end with “complete disruption and downfall.” In his more pessimistic moods, West seems to agree: he knows that nothing can trend upward forever. In fact, West sees human history as defined by this constant tension between expansion and scarcity, between the relentless growth made possible by cities and the limited resources that hold our growth back. “The only thing that stops the superlinear equations is when we run out of something we need,” West says. “And so the growth slows down. If nothing else changes, the system will eventually start to collapse.”
(17 December 2010)
The Biodiversity Blunder
George M. Woodwell, PhD, BioScience
… A shorthand developed; “biodiversity” emerged as a term consolidating all purposes in preserving species. Defending biodiversity in all its imaginable forms became conservation’s core objective.
It was an unfortunate choice. The emphasis on species was inadequate to the point of being misleading, both as a concept of science and as an objective for political action. This inadequacy appeared only over time as conservation slipped to the margins of human affairs and global biotic impoverishment soared. Biotic diversity was an attractive concept but it described everything—and nothing. It offered no implement, no tool in science, and no model; it provided no example of success and no clear cost of failure. It was not easily defined, measured, or conserved in practical, specific, understandable terms.
Even so, the concept of biodiversity was bolstered by books and compendia of papers written by scholars (I was one of them). Efforts were made to find evidence that the number of species present defined the structure and function of landscapes, and conveyed substance to ecology and succor in various forms to human interests. The search intensified as scholars recognized that there are large differences in biodiversity around the globe. “Hot spots” of bio-diversity were held to be more important targets for conservation than places less well endowed. But are they?
… The fact is that for continuity of function, the global environment is dependent on the totality of its elements—not only species but all ecotypes and communities of plants and animals, on land and in the global waters. It is the totality and integrity of life that is now threatened with systematic impoverishment as the biotic feedbacks of climatic disruption slide beyond control. Catastrophes such as the contamination of the entire Gulf of Mexico by one oil well join a global explosion of chronic disturbances—the erosion of climate and an untold profusion of industrial toxins—to leave us with systemic environmental corruption. The remnant human survivors a thousand years from now will read the sedimental record and marvel at the stupidity of a culture that could so effectively march from Eden into oblivion.
The enemy is chronic disturbance, cumulative and irreversible, that moves the world systematically down the curve of biotic impoverishment, place by place, until the effects fuse and end this phase in the evolution of the biosphere. The cure is the loud and relentless pursuit of the restoration and preservation of the physical, chemical, and biotic integrity of Earth—all of Earth—as the special preserve of this civilization. That step requires the elevation of global conservation to a level competitive with other political and economic interests.
Conservation, focused tightly on preserving biodiversity, has been effectively defined to be outside the core of governmental function at the very moment when preserving the conditions that have succored all life should be at the core. We, scientists and conservators of life and environment, have been engaged in a perpetuating a monstrous, unnecessary, and possibly fatal, blunder.
George M. Woodwell is founder, director emeritus, and senior scientist with the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts
(December 2010)
Out with the old politics
Laurie Penny, The Guardian
… The young people of Britain do not need leaders, and the new wave of activists has no interest in the ideological bureaucracy of the old left. Their energy and creativity is disseminated via networks rather than organisations, and many young people have neither the time nor the inclination to wait for any political party to decide what direction they should take. The Liberal Democrats represented the last hope that parliamentary democracy might have something to offer the young, and that hope has been exquisitely betrayed – no wonder, then, that the new movements have responded by rejecting the old order entirely.
What we are seeing here is no less than a fundamental reimagining of the British left: an organic reworking which rejects the old deferential structures of union-led action and interminable infighting among indistinguishable splinter parties for something far more inclusive and fast-moving. These new groups are principled and theoretically well-versed, but have no truck with the narcissism of small differences that used to corrupt even the most well-meaning of leftwing movements.
At the student meetings I have attended in recent weeks, ideological bickering is routinely sidelined in favour of practical planning. Anarchists and social democrats are obliged to work together alongside school pupils who don’t care what flag you march under as long as you’re on the side that puts people before profit.
… Of course, the old left is not about to disappear completely. It is highly likely that even after a nuclear attack, the only remaining life-forms will be cockroaches and sour-faced vendors of the Socialist Worker. Stunningly, the paper is still being peddled at every demonstration to young cyber-activists for whom the very concept of a newspaper is almost as outdated as the notion of ideological unity as a basis for action.
For these young protesters, the strategic factionalism of the old left is irrelevant. Creative, courageous and inspired by situationism and guerrilla tactics, they have a principled understanding of solidarity.
(24 December 2010)
There were similar ideas in the 60s, when the New Left arose out of the ashes of the Old Left. Reply to this article at the Guardian: Student demonstrators can’t do it on their own. -BA
US embassy cables: Ireland grappling with climate change and energy
US State Department, Guardian
Wednesday, 30 April 2008, 06:59
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 DUBLIN 000228
SIPDIS
SIPDIS
EO 12958 DECL: 04/02/2018
TAGS ENRG, EPET, ECON, PREL, PGOV, KGHG, SENV, EI
SUBJECT: IRELAND GRAPPLING WITH CLIMATE CHANGE AND ENERGY
ISSUES
REF: 07 DUBLIN 907
Classified By: DCM Robert J. Faucher. Reasons 1.4 (b/d).
1. (C) Summary: The Irish government is developing policy measures to deal with environment/energy concerns, including climate change, energy security, and power generation and distribution. A lack of indigenous energy resources has focused the government on a mix of energy efficiency and renewable power sources. The Irish government has not written off traditional fossil fuels, having “fast-tracked” the approval process for an LNG regasification terminal. It remains hopeful that significant gas fields will be uncovered in the North Atlantic. While planned additional electricity generating capacity looks sufficient to meet rising demand, the government will need to significantly upgrade the transmission system. A strong sense of urgency to tackle these issues, however, is lacking. End Summary
(22 December 2010)
