Several things baffle me about panics like this. Firstly, people are now hoarding hundreds of packets of ‘anti nuclear-pills’ that have absolutely zero possibility of helping them, or preventing any sort of radiation poisoning. It seems as long as something can be taken in a pill form, it is pre-approved and justified for American consumption, regardless of whether it actually does anything or not. Remind me later to open up the first PlaceboTown Superstore.

But secondly, and even more stupefying, is that these very same people who are worried about trace amounts of radiation traveling halfway across the globe, are seemingly totally fine with drinking arsenic in their tap water. They are hunky-dory with eating PCBs and Bisphenol-A, and excreted hormones from hundreds of millions of ingested prophylactics. They have absolutely no objection to a multi-faceted poisoning from their daily routine, so long as these poisons are American-made. So throw me a pack of Marlboro’s and a fifth of Jack Daniels, and lets take the rest of the Jimmy Dean bacon-wrapped corndogs down into the nucular shelter to chase down our cache of potassium-iodide pills. That’ll show them Japanese particles whose boss.

Originally posted on Technorati.

Greg Runs the Gauntlet of the Spa Castle, Uniforms Vs. Au Natural: Fight!, To Every Horde, Turn, Turn, Turn, The Horror of Red Bumperman, The Joy of Having One’s Skin Ripped Off, and Zombie Kings.

Download Mep Report #125

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology claim to be one step closer to mimicking plant-like energy production in the lab. Apparently using a Cesium-Oxygen-Nitrogen mixture, they can create a potent fuel from scratch using concentrated sunlight as the only catalyst.

Exciting stuff. This would seem to get us out of the problem of our feeble solar battery storage capacities. And it would require only a moderate re-tooling of our current fueling infrastructure. What, you say? No apocalyptic predictions tonight? Hey, whaddya want? It’s almost the weekend/holiday of doom. I’m swamped already… To distract yourself, have some more information on Cerium:

Headlines Grate While Storey Updates, Bedbugs are Bed (Uh, Bad), Some People Call it a Unabomber…Russ Calls it a Beard (mmmhmm), Slide Whistles are Better Than Suicide, The Final Days of DAOC, The Second Coming (and Leaving) of Greg, Then Everyone Was a Jedi, and the Forecast is Partly Cloudy With a Chance of Apocalypse.

Download Mep Report #123

There is actually a smattering of evidence that this will work to cool the surrounding areas, as lighter colors reflect more light than the mountain’s natural hue. Whether this project will make any actual appreciable difference in ice formations, however, remains to be seen.

While I offer the Peruvians kudos for their outside the box thinking, it’s hard to see this endeavor as anything other than the last desperate flailings of a civilization that jumped the enviro-shark a long, long time ago. We exceed at destroying living things in our surroundings. More often than not, our species makes up for this shortcoming by crafting ersatz yet glittering replicas of the life we snuffed out.

In taking a cue from the Peruvians, why don’t we dump a few million tons of Blue Dye Number One Food Coloring into the Gulf of Mexico, and paint BP’s dead sea turtles Crayola Screamin’ Green. Plush toy dolphins and manatees will suffice as a teaching tool to our grandchildren who will probably lack the funds to access Baton Rouge Sea World, home of the last seven living Gulf Coast sea creatures.

After all, wildlife is usually prohibitively expensive to maintain. It’s much more efficient to mass produce useless chotchkies.

Originally posted on Technorati.

This battle hymn against the corporatists was composed by MOTU and performed at the Beach Barrier Blues Festival in Long Beach, NY.

By the way, I recognized the on-screen lecturer as Richard Muller, professor of physics at University of California, Berkley. I actually took his class “Physics for Future Presidents” via a free podcast available on the intrawebs. I highly recommend you check it out, if you’re a science buff.

It seems inevitable that our species’ faculties of curiosity and a sense of manifest destiny will lead us to settle off of Earth eventually. However, the longer we wait to plant the seed of humanity elsewhere, the longer we will have all of our eggs in one basket. And that basket is an increasingly dangerous one to linger in…

The Earth is becoming a less desirable place to live by the generation. Overpopulation, environmental degradation, and resource scarcity will plague our species in the next century. While some potential technological solutions are on the horizon, we have continually seemed to overplay our hand in expecting new technologies to erase centuries of poor planning and lack of foresight.

Though it will be sacrilege to the ears of environmentalists, we may have to treat the Earth as our “practice” habitat. In the novels of Robert Heinlein, future Earth is always described as a highly undesirable place to live — a yellowed, diseased planet hosting 20 billion humans who lacked the courage to leave their planetary womb. This is set in contrast with the galactic frontier, a wonderland of new, pristine worlds to settle.

Of course, I would rather that Earth didn’t become a giant sludge ball that we are forced to abandon like Homer Simpson’s delicious hoagie left to decay behind the sofa. Optimally we would find a way to grow as a species without the massive, unending, unsustainable, growth of consumption. But that seems highly unlikely to happen without some calamity forcing our habits to change.

Perhaps it would simply be better to start over elsewhere.

How not to get it wrong.

I’m shocked–SHOCKED–by this headline:

“Obama oil response: aggressive as crisis unfolded”

“The Gulf region, ravaged five years earlier by Hurricane Katrina, was on the verge of a second ecological disaster. Would there be a repeat of the bureaucratic bungling that marked President George W. Bush’s response to the hurricane?

While the Obama administration has faced second-guessing about the speed and effectiveness of some of its actions, a narrative pieced together by The Associated Press, based on documents, interviews and public statements, shows little resemblance to Katrina in either the characterization of the threat or the federal government’s response.”

Yes, according to the Associated Press–not exactly the biggest fan of Obama’s administration–the White House’s response to the Deepwater disaster was light years away from the “let them eat cake” version we got with the incompetent jackass from the last administration.  And while most people aren’t likely to be surprised by the fact that Obama actually knows how to do his job, I hope it will help quiet down the peanut gallery on both the left and the right for a bit.  Obama could go a long way towards solidifying this performance by permanently ending the madness of drilling thousands of feet below the sea floor with no alternatives available if when it fails.  But in the meantime, I repeat my gratitude that we were able to follow up the worst president of the past century with one of the best.

Now this is Robert Gibbs, not Obama himself (though the President has indicated his own ability to lay down the hammer when necessary), and this response is much milder than questions of this level of idiocy demand. And calling anyone from Fox a “journalist”–especially incompetent hacks like Wendell Goler (who had the gall to get visibly annoyed at Gibbs’ response), who are pretty much the only kind of journalist Fox employs–is admittedly a big stretch. But we’ll take small victories when we can get them.

For Gulf Coast residents concerned about the massive, floating blob of toxins headed towards their shores, President Obama’s Sunday assurances may have rang a bit hollow.

Amidst weather-related wisecracks and vows to hunt down domestic terrorists (addressing the Times Square Van Scare), Obama gave the press corps one key sound byte to take to their respective papers. It was:

“I’m not going to rest…until the leak is stopped at the source, the oil on the Gulf is contained and cleaned up, and the people of this region are able to go back to their lives and their livelihoods…BP is responsible for this leak; BP will be paying the bill.”

Unfortunately, these bold words belie the realities associated with massive oil spills. In reality, residue from the infamous 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill is still clearly visible to travelers taking Alaska’s less-than-scenic shoreline tours. Also, some Alaskan fishing markets (herring, for one) have never recovered.

Some worst case scenario projections of the spill are even outside the bounds of Gulf Coast impact. With a less rosy estimate of the time it will take to plug the leak (a relief well should be completed in three months or so), the Great Gulf Coast Blob of Doom could wreak untold havoc on the US coastline. Should the Blob be shuttled up around Florida, it could conceivably suffocate and destroy Florida’s barrier reefs (the third largest coral reef in the world) while tolling deaths of marine life in the billions. And we have absolutely no way of fully comprehending the extent of the ecological consequences.

On the human side of things, if the Doom Blob happens to ride the Gulfstream northward, it could muck up exclusive beachfront property all along the East Coast just in time for summer tourism season. I hope those BP execs don’t have any beachfront houses on Fire Island or Martha’s Vineyard, as they may find those homes less of a refuge from their work life than they used to be.

So, if we take Obama at his word on this one, Joe Biden may have to take the America’s reigns in a month or so when the President begins to experience his first flashes of insomnia-induced hallucination. Given the massive scale of this disaster, President Obama may not rest for the better part of two or three decades.

Oh, and that bit about BP footing the bill and paying for all this? Here’s some food for thought: ExxonMobil kept the Exxon-Valdez claimants in litigation for nearly 20 years, before the Supreme Court reduced its liability from $5 billion to just under $508 million, in 2008. In that time, over a quarter of the original plaintiffs died. There is no reason to believe that BP won’t take exactly the same callously litigious course of action.

So, it appears that both the humans and non-humans of the Gulf Coast are in the same boat. And that boat has sprung a massive leak.

Originally posted on Technorati.

Image Source

Entitled “Simcity 3000 – ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM,” the creation video relays tales of a three-year construction period executing Da Vinci-like designs scrawled on reams of parchment. Magnasanti sports a population of over 6 million, a crime rate of zero, no roads (mass transit only), and a flawless integration of commercial, industrial, and residential zones modeled after the Bhavacakra, or Tibetan wheel of life.

While some Reddit commentators dismissed the project as a “colossal waste of time,” others noted that it could serve as a juicy resume item for an application to an urban design or architectural graduate program.

In my view, the designs of Magnasanti may not be culturally relevant for centuries. In the year 2790, however, a post-apocalyptic survivalist clan may discover it amidst the debris of kitten piano videos and Star Wars fan spoofs on a salvaged YouTube server cluster found under the rubble of Mountain Viewtopia, the irradiated former capital of Googlestan. (Feel free to credit Dr. Laserfalcon when you inevitably steal this screenplay idea).

Or that may just be the effect the video’s epic theme music has on my brain.

Originally posted on Technorati.

While I’m certainly no physicist, ESolar’s method of solar power seems a great deal more efficient than the traditional silicate-based fuel cell model. My understanding is that traditional solar cells max out at 40-50% efficiency and most run a great deal lower than that. The mirror array, on the other hand, is cheaper, more flexible, wastes nothing, and requires very little advanced technology (other than the computer program that coordinates the array). ESolar’s mirror array is the 21st century equivalent of a wood stove powering a steam engine. This seems like a much more sustainable and scalable form of solar power. Too bad these guys are not a publicly traded company.

Upon hearing of this morning’s devastation in Chile, I began to wonder whether all of this recent continental plate shifting in the news is connected. Is this, perhaps, the beginning of the Tectonapocalypse?

In a word: No. Haiti’s earthquake and Chile’s occurred on completely different plates, along completely independent fault lines. In fact, according to geophysics professor, Tim Dixon, the Earth gets a 7 magnitude earthquake approximately once a month, and an 8.8 range approximately once a year. Since humans, for the most part, don’t dwell in deep submarine caverns, or underneath the ocean floors, we experience few of these massive earthquakes firsthand. If your only source of information was cable news networks, however, you might begin connecting the dots and assuming that we’re in for some kind of “Pangea’s Revenge” disaster scenario.

One more thing about the Richter scale… I’d always known it was an exponential scale, but I didn’t know that each level actually represents a 1000% increase from the previous level. In other words, Chile’s 8.8 (were we to round off at 9) would be about 100 times more powerful than the 7.0 earthquake that rocked Haiti.

Given that information, one cringes at the potential devastation that is just starting to be reported in Chile. This could get very, very ugly.

I dun heard that the they gonna stop makin Hummers, so I wrote this here ditty, that I might not get the punching fits.

Ode to my Hum-V

Soaring eagles cried today
Cause Hum-V is goin away.
I begged GM to help it stay,
but the Chinese welched, they must be gay.

So goodbye to you, my trusty truck
Once you’re in car heaven, you won’t be stuck
with no more gas and no more bucks
to spend on it. That part always sucked.

This week, BLDGBLOG featured Remnants of the Biosphere, a series of portraits of what was once one of the most ambitious scientific projects in human history. Biosphere 2, constructed in the Arizonian desert, was billed as the first large scale enclosed eco-system designed by humans. It is now little more than a run-down tourist center.

Though its wikipedia entry is noncommittal, nearly all observers considered the project to be an unequivocal failure. The original live-in crew turned from hope-inspiring pioneers to starving, oxygen deprived malcontents in a matter of months.

Even the wiki article does acknowledge that the best lesson derived from the experiment was that, “small, closed ecosystems are complex and vulnerable to unplanned events.”

That may be the wiki-understatement of the year.

The failure of Biosphere 2 brings with it some irresistible symbolism. After all, the project was named after Earth’s ecosystem, the original Biosphere. And, adjusting timelines proportionally to size, Biosphere 1 is on an identical path.

The crew of Biosphere 1 is itself growing short on breathable air, palatable water, and nutrient-rich food. The atmospheric conditions on Biosphere 1 are slowly going out of whack. Its built-in safeguards are beginning to fail. And like its successor, Biosphere 1 has an inept command crew who have not prepared for any of the inevitable disastrous contingencies.

As on Biosphere 2, scientific rigor and conscientious stewardship have succumbed to fear mongering, demagoguery, and willful ignorance. Like Biosphere 2, marketing prowess and investor confidence is valued higher than knowledge and expertise.

Once we acknowledge the impending failure of our Biosphere 1 project, perhaps we will have the technology to import outside resources (via interstellar import programs) to replace those that the Biosphere can no longer produce. Perhaps, like Biosphere the Second, we will demand that the keepers let us out of this decaying, uninhabitable, deathtrap and seek our fortunes elsewhere. Perhaps we will be able to lease our Biosphere to an intergalactic home developing conglomerate who will find some commercial tourism value in its remnants. Perhaps by then, galactic sprawl will have populated the Milky Way and provided homes for trillions of space tourists who would pony up a few credits to see the fetid remains of a once glorious and confident planetary civilization. Perhaps they’ll think of the throngs of human refugees as a race of Pauly Shores. Perhaps they will see the humans as a people who have their adorable foibles and who persevere obliviously through adversity until they are inevitably bailed out by wiser, saner outside forces. Perhaps our lovable incompetence will be our saving grace, after all.

If you’re one of those people who thought digital photography’s advent was going to kill the art of the picture, here’s a good counterargument.

I’m not as into photography as I used to be, but picture series like this always make me contemplate giving up the words for a while to go in search of these allegedly kiloword packages. I really had a knack for it as a kid, but I probably never would have been capable of stuff like the highlights in this National Geographic photo contest.

It’s in depictions of nature like this (if not actually being out in it directly) that I find some of the strongest proofs for the existence of God. You can believe all this beauty develops by random dice-rolls if you want, but it just doesn’t wash for me.

What, you didn’t think I could write a whole post that was just about “look at this link I found on the internet and how pretty it is,” did you? All speech is political.

Uh oh – turns out that the planet isn’t getting warmer after all!

Just as the dire predictions that hurricanes would relentlessly bash every American coast in the years after 2005 proved laughably false in the face of some of the lightest hurricane seasons on record that actually followed, so it turns out that the planet has actually cooled since 1998.

I’m going to repeat that, just in case Al Gore or his followers are listening: 1998 remains the hottest year on record. Every subsequent year has been cooler than 1998.

1998, b-t-dubs, for those scoring at home, was over a decade ago.

So how have we become a culture obsessed with global warming? A society that, instead of focusing on species preservation or deforestation or the destruction of the world’s oceans, has mortgaged the entire environmental farm for a few degrees? It’s almost enough to have me starting to think conspiracy. That, despite global warming sometimes seeming like a noble lie (I’m no fan of emitting things into the atmosphere, even if the consequences are less dire than Gore would have you believe), the lie might not be so noble after all.

The nobility of the lie hinges on the question I discussed in my prior post on this subject and whether the micro “solutions” being proffered to the first-world public are really just distractions from the real agents of environmental destruction or not. It’s starting to feel like no accident that the “green” movement is more about buying new technology than actually reducing any waste in a meaningful or broad-based way. Yay, lightbulbs! That’ll stimulate the economy and convince people that capitalism is compatible with being “green”!

Maybe it’s just another, more nefarious green that’s behind this whole co-option of the movement. So people will continue to eat meat and fish and contribute to overconsumption (buying 600 tote bags!) while the planet cools by itself and corporations continue to act with impunity. Hooray.

Man, my posts always end up being such downers.

We all want to believe the little myth that people are spreading about global warming, that somehow a small band of intrepid environmentalists can bring down a planet-wide behemoth of a disaster by making small marginal choices like replacing perfectly good lightbulbs with headache lamps and maybe biking to work once a week.

It’s a good story and it’s probably even got some noble-lie elements (well, excepting the fluorescent lights of course, which are the manifestation of all that is wrong with our society) in encouraging people to do good things for the wrong reasons. But kids, and you may want to sit down for this, it’s bunk. You can’t make a difference.

Why? For one thing, you (and by you, I mean collectively, because this includes every single individual residential American) just don’t do enough polluting and wrecking the Earth to matter. As this graph illustrates, residential and commercial factors combine to make up about 10% of the total contributions to greenhouse warming. And the graph here says that residential sources use 21% of the power generated in the USA. That same graph says 17% of power is used by commercial sources, so we can apply the 21:17 ratio to the 10.3% in the first graph, making it almost exactly 4.5%. So we add that to 21% of the 21.3% from power stations and we get another 4.5%… 9% total.

There’s a little bit from driving too, though a vast percentage (can’t find a source, but it’s intuitively obvious) of this is either for commercial trucking or people driving to work, which itself is commercially driven and generally not something people feel they have a choice about. So, say we tack on an extra 3% total for driving factors.

What does this mean? If all individuals stopped driving except to get to work, never used electricity, and never polluted at all from their houses, we’d only have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 12%. Say it’s 15% for extra fun. Do you think this is going to make a dent in the meteoric upwelling of emissions and corresponding heat?

And that’s if everyone cut their usage to zero. Not a few people replacing a few lightbulbs or turning off the TV an hour early or unplugging one vampire appliance. That’s every man, woman, and child in America throwing away their refrigerator because they don’t get power to their house. Changes of that caliber in everyone’s personal life and 85% of the deadly juggernaut is still coming for us.

I wish people understood this, that it’s the giant commercial-industrial complex of the market that’s really driving contributions to greenhouse warming. And while you can pretend that a little boycott or rally is going to do something about that, no amount of “consumer action” is going to change the way businesses do business substantially enough to dent that remaining 85% of emissions, any more than holding a couple Nader rallies is going to bring down the two-party monopoly in our pseudo-democracy. You can boycott a bigger polluter and buy from someone who pollutes 5% less (or is 25% better at not getting caught polluting), but this kind of incremental musical chairs is going to have zero ultimate impact on the general upward spiral.

You can’t make a difference on a problem this big. You just can’t. There’s no marginal impact that you are having. You can stop driving and stop flying and move into a hovel with no electricity, but unless you’re going to convince corporate America to do the same, it makes no difference whatsoever. You can stop eating beef and rice (the raising of cattle and farming of rice are huge biomass contributors to greenhouse gases), but you alone are not going to move the bar on a spiraling planetary epidemic. Not gonna happen.

By far the best thing for global warming would be an end to the American economy. We would then possibly have to shut down all the commercial and industrial operations that really contribute to pollution and even stop mining for natural resources and chopping down trees. We’d have plenty of houses extant in which to house everyone and would return to a sedentary agrarian system of being. That may be our only hope.

So maybe you can make a difference. Go out and short some stocks. Refuse to participate in the economy. Quit your job. Boycott America. Then there may be some hope of saving this planet after all.

If, you know, global warming exists in the first place.

And frankly, who are we to stop them? The full-clip involves a statewide Schwarzenegger reassurance immediately followed by the apocalypse. Good times.

Looking for a way to perk up your work week? Why not update yourself on the impending enviropocalypse?

According to an exhaustive study by the Global Footprint Network, September 25th was the day that the planet used all of the available planetary resources that it could replenish in a year (otherwise known as Earth Overshoot Day). For the rest of the year, we’ll be culling, reaping, and utilizing that which won’t grow back.

Ever the optimist, I like to look at the impending death of our home planet as an opportunity to try out other levels of existence. Farming, fishing, manufacturing, and reproducing can get quite monotonous after a few hundred generations. So, as I see it, here are our options:

The first option is to figure out a way to exist in bio-friendly hibernation pods, as the new movie Surrogates seems to suggest. Now, this may be with the help of Matrix-like robotic overlords, or it may be as autonomous dwellers in an expanded Internet or Multiverse. Incidentally, Surrogates seems to pull heavily from Snow Crash, a novel whose characters spend most of their free time on a fully-immersive giant virtual reality internet. The environmental benefits to this type of lifestyle are clear, with the added bonus of living life in a giant video game. I have high hopes for this potential reality.

Our second option is to dispose of our planet like a used diaper and seek out life on another potential dumping ground elsewhere in the galaxy. For those ingrained into the deficit spending culture, this may be the only satisfying solution. Many sci-fi tales, including Robert Heinlein’s, Farmer in the Sky set the scene for human colonization of other worlds. These are tales of future explorers homesteading on nearby habitable planets. While playing Galactic Oregon Trail sounds like a real hoot, it doesn’t come without its own share of problems. Firstly, this reality sticks us with the farming, fishing, and reproduction toils that we were trying to get out of. And secondly, this future path assumes that humans will have the smarts to build things, grow things, and live without electricity while we break in our new environment. Not bloody likely.

The third option is much less fun, as it involves heeding the constant whinings of our scientific community. Cutting down on global consumption just feels wrong. It would be the equivalent of declaring defeat in the War Against Nature, which we know our political leaders could never bear. And I for one, don’t like losing to an unconscious pile of dirt and brine. Doesn’t sentience count for anything anymore? So, no, I refuse to lay out the potential of slowly weening ourselves off of our highly consumptive habits. It’s just wrong. Surely there must be a more extravagant, American way to go about doing this. Perhaps we can keep our day-to-day abuses intact and simply jettison some of our more extravagant behaviors.

I bet that putting an end to NASCAR and Entourage would roll us back to a level of existence short of Earth Overshoot. And if that doesn’t work, we can always choose some toothless, symbolic action that represents our commitment to fixing our leaky planet when we decide to get around to it. In that vein, I propose that we recycle Tyra Banks into organic mulch. At least this would make our dying planet an infinitely more palatable place to live.

In what surely isn’t a sign of the impending apocalypse, a giant as-yet-unidentified organic mass is floating past Alaska this week, heading for warmer waters and possibly looking for retribution.

According to the North Slope Borough’s Planning and Community Services Department, the mass is “thick, and dark and gooey,” with hairy strands running throughout, and feeds on six-pack holders and sea lions.

Usually, when it comes to giant floating aqua-blobs, experts can attribute the object’s origins to oil spills, or algae or the like. It is a little bit freaky that, in this case, no one has yet ever seen something like this before. Did I mention that one patch of it is 15 miles long? And that it seems to have ingested several birds that have landed on it?

I’ve seen enough Blob-genre movies to know that we should stop allowing this thing to feed. And letting it slowly warm itself as it drifts down from the Arctic isn’t the best idea either. It’s time to start hoarding CO2 fire extinguishers and maintaining a vigilant eye for any neighborhood objects resembling liver.

Screw global warming. You want some planetary catastrophe? How about this new study released that estimates a 1% chance that Jupiter’s gravity will alter the orbit of Mercury to the point that it causes the collapse of the entire inner solar system.

Did I mention that this process is supposed to take place over the next 5 billion years? Hmm, suppose I forgot that part. That’s around the same timeframe that it will take for the sun to balloon into a red giant, snuffing out this part of the solar system anyway.

Meh. I suppose it’s not as scary as swine flu or Rhianna’s red carpet outfit, but I can dream, can’t I?

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