WorldChanging

Geoengineering: A Worldchanging Retrospective

Julia Steinberger — 2008-08-20T17:20:27-08:00

Worldchanging Executive Editor Alex Steffen has become a respected voice of dissent in the global conversation about geo-engineering strategies. This fall, he re-enters the debate as part of the cast of front-line innovators featured in a new docu-style series from Discovery and Impossible Pictures. The program, called Discovery Project Earth, launches this Friday, August 22.

The series will profile some pretty extraordinary experiments aimed at slowing global warming, generating alternative energy and restoring natural resources. Cutting-edge thinkers around the world, including scientists, engineers and other innovators, stand at the helms of these most ambitious projects, which face no small amount of uncertainty in their quest to save all life on Earth.

Alex was tapped to comment both generally on the wisdom of geo-engineering and specifically on several of the climate-hacking initiatives featured in Project Earth. These plans read like the scripts of science fiction movies, but they are being worked on right now, to address what is perhaps the biggest challenge the human race has ever confronted. According to a press release issued by Discovery Communications:

From covering acres of Greenland's glaciers in protective blankets to stop it from melting to constructing space rockets to send tiny reflective lenses into orbit to planting thousands of saplings via a mass aerial drop to reforest barren areas, these are experiments on an epic scale. Each one will push the boundaries of science and technology, but will they produce groundbreaking environmental results?

Make no mistake: we need thinkers who are willing to go beyond the norm; who are willing to imagine on an epic, legendary, mythological scale; who aim to be the heroes who preserve life on this planet.

But Worldchanging has always encouraged careful debate and long-term consideration when it comes to geo-engineering. Drastic measures that dramatically alter intricate systems and delicately balanced exchanges on the Earth, in our oceans, in our atmosphere and beyond are daunting, because altering the natural flow of ecosystems is how we created this disaster in the first place.

Whether or not you'll be tuning in to Project Earth, we've put together a gallery of Worldchanging's past coverage of geo-engineering. We hope that this modest anthology will help those who would like to follow the debate and our role in it, and to help many of you deepen your understanding of some of the most cutting edge, beyond-the-pale, and, we worry, the most dangerous ideas now in the arsenal for our fight against climate chaos.

And remember, Worldchanging is a discussion, not a lecture. Our readers are highly educated, engaged and concerned. So we strongly encourage you to read the comment threads for some lively debate.

How Do We Intelligently Discuss Politicized Geoengineering?
Posted by Alex Steffen on June 10, 2008

This is a dangerous moment, one where words count, and geoengineering is being used to very direct (and dishonest) rhetorical purposes. In a very real way, discussions of geoengineering play into the political hands of those in the U.S. who would like to see climate change action blocked.

But at the same time, in order to have a worthwhile discussion about how to confront climate change and other planetary problems, we need to acknowledge both the full extent of human influence on the Earth and the need for intelligent planetary managemet.

No Time For Singularity
Posted by Karl Schroeder on June 11, 2008

…This upward curve of technological development rides on something: it rides on the back of humanity, and we ride (largely for free, until now) on the back of the natural system that sustains us. Once serious environmental deterioration sets in, the curve of technological change will flatten, even if we develop 'godlike AIs,' for the simple reason that intelligence itself is not enough to sustain growth … If there's to be a miraculous transformation of human civilization, it has to be accomplished by us, right now, before we develop our miraculous nanobots, genetically engineered carbon-sucking trees, or polywell fusion reactors.

Planktos, Geo-Engineering and Politics
Posted by Alex Steffen on February 14, 2008

And here we are led to what may be to me the most damning shortcoming of geo-engineering: These proposals are not actually very smart or cutting edge. They are a set of 20th century proposals kitted out in 21st century drag. This is the response you'd get if you took a bunch of 1950s scientists with slide rules and crew cuts, put them in a room, and showed them An Inconvenient Truth. "First, we build a space mirror, then, if that doesn't work, we'll fall back to the artificial volcano... it may be a long shot, but nothing else will save the American way of life!"

GeoEngineering in the Anthropocene Era
Posted by Jon Lebkowsky on November 27, 2006

In his latest Viridian screed, WorldChanging ally Bruce Sterling refers to an article from Wired, "Rebooting the Ecosystem," which acknowledges that we humans have screwed up our planet, and this means we're responsible for repairing the damage, but stopgaps like carbon sequestration just aren't going to cut it.

Drastic Measures for Cooling the Planet
Posted by Sarah Rich on June 27, 2006

The approach raises serious ethical questions: what is the right way -- if there is one -- to massively alter or impose upon the natural world, with the guiding principles being averting climate disaster and saving the earth? … What it does lead us to, however, is the ever more widely accepted understanding that this crisis is real, it's massive, and it is indeed time to be thinking up solutions on a scale appropriate to the challenge.

Why Geo-Engineering is a Bad Fall-Back Strategy
Posted by Alex Steffen on March 10, 2006

Given our extremely limited understanding of (and thus ability to manage) the planet now, with more modest expectations and under comparatively stable conditions, debating geo-engineering may even provide a stalking horse for climate "skeptics"…

The Open Future: The Reversibility Principle
Posted by Jamais Cascio on March 6, 2006

It's likely that, should we be forced to consider such global-scale engineering to respond to climate disaster, few of the options will be reversible. The question then becomes which option -- including the option of doing nothing -- would in the worst reasonable scenarios result in the least amount of death and destruction, and which would give us the greatest opportunity for gradual mitigation of harm. Underlying the choices will be the need to make the ways the options as reversible as possible, even if full reversibility isn't plausible.

And our very first deep discussion on the topic was Jamais Cascio's four-part series, posted during the summer of 2005:

Terraforming Earth

Terraforming Earth, Part II

Terraforming Earth, Part III: Geoethical Principles

Terraforming Earth IV: The Question of Methane

I say this to preface a look at a set of proposed feats of ecological engineering on a scale never before attempted intentionally. They may not be the best courses of action -- they may not be wise, or evince a good balance of benefit and risk -- but we should not rule them out simply because they involve making big changes to the environment. We're already making big changes, only without any foresight or design; to paraphrase Stewart Brand's 1968 epigram, we are already terraforming Earth, and might as well get good at it.

Image credit: flickr/Dead Air, licensed by Creative Commons.

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(Posted by Julia Steinberger in Features at 5:20 PM)

Inside WCI: Federal Pre-emption

WorldChanging Team — 2008-08-20T13:11:33-08:00

What happens with a new president?

by Eric de Place

This is the eigth in a short series of posts that explain some important but often overlooked policy issues in the Western Climate Initiative -- the West's regional cap-and-trade system. (Much to readers' delight, this is the last installment I'm planning to write.)

You can't talk about regional cap and trade very long before someone brings up the subject of pre-emption. What happens if the federal government creates a national cap and trade program? Would the regional programs disappear? And if so, why bother working on them?

First, let's get one thing straight: no one knows what will happen.

Seriously. No one has any idea -- and that includes me.

No matter how confidently anybody expresses an opinion on pre-emption, you can rest assured that the person is just speculating. And that uncertainty is precisely why it's so important to work on regional programs like WCI: regional cap and trade is what we've got -- and there's simply no guarantee we'll have a federal alternative soon.

Sure, we know that a new president will be elected in November. But while both McCain and Obama have proposals for a national cap and trade program, it is hardly a foregone conclusion that a serious policy will emerge intact in the near future. Here are a few ways that things could play out:

Let's say John McCain is elected. There's growing reason to worry that McCain may not make cap and trade a high priority -- see here, here, and here -- and even if he did, his current proposal leaves a lot to be desired. So it's entirely possible that a McCain presidency would mean no comprehensive climate policy or a very watered-down version.
What if Obama is elected? Even though, generally speaking, democrats have been more amenable to good climate legislation, there's absolutely no guarantee Obama's current (and excellent) proposal would see the light of day. Obama would have dozens of competing high priorities, including the wars, the economy, high energy prices, health care, and so on. So even with Obama as president, there's a high probability that comprehensive climate policy would be delayed, perhaps substantially so.
Congress will have a lot to say about whether legislation moves and what it looks like no matter who's elected president. It's really anybody's guess how the next Congress will treat energy policy. Certainly, there have been promising proposals, but none have garnered majority support in either house. And there are, of course, some powerful opponents who know a thing or two about killing legislation.

If a federal cap and trade program is delayed or sub-optimal, it may be critically important for large regions to pursue genuine climate leadership without guidance from Washington DC.

Is this too depressing? Fine, then let's be a more optimistic for a moment. Say that decent legislation gets approved by Congress and signed into law by the president. Even then the fate of regional cap and trade is an open question. A lot depends on how the legislative process plays out.

States could be given a choice about where to play in the cap and trade sandbox(much as with California tailpipe standards in which states can join the federal or California rules). It's easy to imagine that states could choose opt into a new federal system or remain with some other fed-approved regional system such as WCI. (State might be encouraged, but not required, to join a federal program, as the Boxer Ammendment to the recently deceased Lieberman-Warner bill would have done.)
Regional systems might stay intact while a new federal system would simply roll up the non-participating states into a new program. (Alternatively, the feds might just authorize one, or several, interstate compacts but decline to create a new federal program.) As I pointed out, with "linking," it's perfectly possible to create new federal, regional, or state programs without undoing what's already been done. Linking means that states don't have to agree about all the details of cap and trade in order to get along.
States might simply get pre-empted by federal policy. A new national cap and trade program could make the regional efforts illegal. (I think this is somewhat unlikely, but it is a surprisingly popular belief.) I should note too, that even if this were to happen, it's still important to work on regional efforts because they will inform the national debate, and help to set the standards by which future policy is judged.

I've been ignoring Canada so far, but Canadian and US policies interact in fascinating ways. Already, in the Western Climate Initiative, we've seen the beginnings of a genuinely bilateral system with nearly 59 million Americans and 26 million Canadians live in WCI jurisdictions. Any number of interesting things could happen in the next few years.

Ottowa could suddenly start displaying some leadership and initiate a national program for Canada. It's even conceivable that some US states might participate, or at least link with such a program. Just so, a US federal cap and trade program could be open to participation or linking from Canadian provinces.

Another intriguing possibility is that the Western Climate Initiative could morph or divide -- and that WCI would essentially become US or Canadian policy. It may sound far-fetched, but consider that nearly 80 percent of Canada's population is already within WCI. It wouldn't be a big leap to just make a new Canadian policy conform to WCI.

It's even theoretically possible for the same thing to happen in the US. While WCI only represents about 19 percent of the US population, there are rumors that Florida may soon join, boosting the share to 26 percent. And that's nothing compared to the potential addition of the Midwest Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord, which is reportedly following WCI's footsteps in many respects. The Midwest would raise the share to 39 percent of the US population. If the Northeastern states (which are politically inclined to treat climate policy seriously), expand their current RGGI system beyond electricity generators, they might follow WCI too. All told, that would mean 55 percent of the US would be participating in a non-federal system that would either be WCI, or at least be heavily influenced by WCI.

I'm not even counting WCI's "observer" states that include Alaska, Colorda, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, and Wyoming; nor the Midwest's observers of Indiana, Ohio, and South Dakota; nor Pennsylvania and DC, which are observers to RGGI. And I'm not counting the six Mexican states that are also observers to WCI; they'd lend yet more weight.

The point is: no one knows what will happen. Federal pre-emption could obviate regional cap and trade or pre-emption could be completely irrelevant. Or federal policy could be important but not over-riding. No one knows. And until we can predict the future, developing sound regional climate policy is of paramount importance for North America.

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

Photo Credit: Flicker User D80-Newbie, Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Politics at 1:11 PM)

Tired of Waiting for Efficiency

WorldChanging Team — 2008-08-20T11:57:22-08:00

Our right to know about fuel-efficient tires.

by Eric de Place

I'm always fascinated by the "1 percent solutions" to energy. It seems to me that in order to address both climate change and fossil fuel dependence, we'll need a few big structural changes, but we'll also need a lot of 1 percent solutions -- and maybe a bunch of quarter-percent solutions too. And the advantage of the 1 percent solutions is that they're often exceedingly easy; and so cheap that they actually put money in your pocket.

So I enjoyed Cindy Skrzycki's column this morning on low rolling resistance tires:

A study by the National Academies of Science in 2006 concluded it was feasible to reduce rolling resistance by 10 percent. This would increase the fuel economy of vehicles by 1 percent to 2 percent, saving up to 2 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel annually. Michelin said that over the past 15 years its energy-saving tires have reduced fuel consumption worldwide by about 2.38 billion gallons, compared with conventional tires.

Easy, right? The problem is, there's very little opportunity for consumers to evaluate the fuel-efficiency of tires (as Clark once discovered). Not only is there no rating system in place, but a national standard has actually been banned by Congress since 1996.

No kidding:

The congressional ban, first passed in 1996, said there could be no federal rule adding to existing grading standards that would require a certain level of fuel efficiency.

A 1998 Senate report explained that the prohibition covered "any rulemaking which would require that passenger car tires be labeled to indicate their low rolling resistance, or fuel-economy characteristics."

That's very helpful. Thanks, Congress.

Luckily, there's good news just around the corner. Congress has shifted gears and is now demanding a consumer-information program in place by next year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should have a rule in place by the end of 2009, though it's not clear when consumers will actually see the information in a standardized way.

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

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Resource - Politics at 11:57 AM)

DNA Forensics May Prevent Elephant Poaching

Ben Block — 2008-08-20T11:42:24-08:00

A shipment of forest timber traveled around the southern tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean before it arrived at the Hong Kong dockyards two years ago. During a routine X-ray examination, customs officials discovered an even more lucrative cargo hidden behind a false wall: 605 elephant tusks.

The $8 million seizure was the largest ivory catch in Hong Kong since a 1989 agreement banned the international ivory trade. Ivory seizures are on the rise , particularly in Southeast Asia; the Hong Kong catch was only about half the size of the largest in recent years. At least 68 tons of ivory have been confiscated over the past decade. The cause: illegal ivory has quadrupled in value since 2004, and anti-poaching resources are typically stretched thin.

Law enforcement officials investigating the source of the Hong Kong ivory had no clue where the stash originated before leaving Douala, a port city in the west African nation of Cameroon. DNA technology, however, was able to verify that many of the tusks once belonged to forest elephants that lived in southern Gabon, near the Republic of Congo border.

Extracting elephant DNA from confiscated ivory could be an important tool to take wildlife investigations a step farther and to stop poaching at its source. Such expensive forensic work may become necessary to protect dwindling elephant populations and curb the illegal ivory market before it grows completely out of control.

"In big seizures, there's a very strong tendency to ship ivory out of a different country than where it's poached... It's a bit of a red herring," said Samuel Wasser, director of the University of Washington's Center for Conservation Biology and the lead author of the study, published in this month's issue of Conservation Biology. "The methods we developed are very important in that regard because it focuses where the poaching is ongoing."

Wasser's team tested ivory from the Hong Kong sting and from a 6.5 ton ivory seizure in Singapore in 2002. After analyzing the samples' genes and comparing them against a complex elephant DNA map that covers much of Africa, the researchers were able to trace the Hong Kong samples to elephant populations in Gabon. The Singapore samples were linked to populations in southern Africa, mostly in Zambia.

Although some DNA source locations were scattered, the findings point to much more specific origins of illegal poaching than were previously available. The findings also contradict previous assumptions that ivory dealers would purchase tusks from throughout Africa as they become available. Instead, Wasser's paper suggests that "crime syndicates were targeting specific populations for intense exploitation, hitting them hard and fast to satisfy the demands of a particular consignment."

After it was revealed that most of the ivory seized in Singapore came from elephants in Zambia, that country's director of wildlife was replaced and its courts began to impose harsher sentences for ivory smugglers. "At the time of the analyses, authorities thought the ivory came from Tanzania and/or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Our analyses refocused the investigation, allowed authorities to point the finger at Zambia and get them to do something," Wasser said.

Despite the benefits of forensic testing for future investigations, funding for wildlife enforcement is limited. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the international body that oversees the ivory ban, received $7.5 million in support this year. This is about $2.5 million more than a decade ago, but it is not enough to support DNA investigations in developing nations.

The international police organization INTERPOL has developed an agency to facilitate global wildlife crime investigations, but it too lacks sufficient funding. "We're not in a position, given we have 186 countries [to oversee], to start to pay for their evidence handling on a case-by-case basis. We're certainly not a bank," said Peter Younger, the INTERPOL wildlife crime program manager.

A few laboratories across the world - the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's forensic lab in Oregon and Wasser's Center for Conservation Biology, for instance - have agreed to pay for DNA testing of stolen ivory and other wildlife evidence, such as illegally shipped old-growth trees. Wasser's lab paid $300 per sample to analyze the seized African ivory and construct its DNA map. In the 10 years it took to create the map, the lab processed more than 1,000 samples.

The limited funding for enforcement is costing elephants their lives. Before the ivory trade ban, poachers were killing about 7.4 percent of the global elephant population each year for tusks and other body parts. Now the rate is 8 percent, and populations are only getting smaller. Wasser's team estimates that elephants in sub-Saharan Africa could be "virtually extinct" across their range by 2020.

"Even though the number of elephants left is a third of what it was prior to the ban, and a higher proportion are being killed than before, you'd think the alarm bell should be going off," Wasser said. "As long as the public is so clueless about the situation, there is no incentive for governments with money to pay for it."

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

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(Posted by Ben Block in New Science at 11:42 AM)

REACTIVATE!! Atomized, virtual gardens.

Regine Debatty — 2008-08-19T16:50:53-08:00

The REACTIVATE!! exhibition at the at the Espai d' Art Contemporani de Castelló, near Valencia (Spain), being an almost endless source of wonders i tried to cover last week (see REACTIVATE!! Part 1, Urban reanimations and the minimal intervention and REACTIVATE!! Part 2, Instant urbanism), i still have a last story in my magic bag to share with you:

Some of the projects presented in Castellon were commissioned by the contemporary art center to engage in a site-specific fashion with the theme of 'remodeled spaces and minimal interventions.'

The most poetical installation was created by ex.studio, two Barcelona-based Mexican architects Patricia Meneses and Iván Juárez with an impressive portfolio chock-full of projects that investigate and experiment with new ways of relating space with society.

Designed as minimal spaces for auto-reflexion, the Refugios Urbanos are 6 suspended semi-transparent pods that temporarily invade the building of the EACC and its public space.

Looking like chrysalids, the flexible structure can only contain one person. Its very delicate walls allow the inhabitant to enjoy privacy as well as a softly blurred view of the surrounding world.

Refugios Urbanos proposes new ways to inhabit and imagine space where people are both part and parcel of the city and isolated from it in order to better contemplate it.

A second project worth its weight in blog ink is María Navascues, Ramón Francos and Celia García's Atomish Garden

It all starts with the Pet Garden! At the opening of the Reactivate!! exhibition, visitors were invited to adopt a piece of garden. Each of them would take home a plant or plot of land to take care of it. Like real pets, owners can take them along for a walk in the street. They also require a lot of care and attention.

The flower pot comes with a code giving pet owners access to the Petgarden website that gives them all the necessary instruction to pamper their botanical pet. Besides, they can share with other woners the story, health news and adventure of the plant on a blog. Current technologies enable thus the various parts of this 'atomized garden' to form a community able to stay in virtual but close proximity.

All images courtesy of Espai d' Art Contemporani de Castelló.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 4:50 PM)

Museum of Jurassic Technology

Regine Debatty — 2008-08-19T16:47:33-08:00

I first came across the name of this extraordinary place in one of the BBC's Imagine-documentaries about German director Werner Herzog, who asked to be met in what he called one of his favorite places in Los Angeles, The Museum of Jurassic Technology. After locating it in Culver City, BBC's Alan Yentob remarks: "I begin to understand why Herzog likes it here. The exhibits in the museum cross the line between fact and fiction, between reality and imagination."

Front of the museum in Culver City, Los Angeles

The collections of the museum, which was founded in 1989 and is being curated by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Wilson, span over three little buildings and consist of pieces from about a dozen sub-collections which are often centered around a certain subject such as belief and knowledge or personalities like Athanasius Kircher and their work. But, unlike what one might expect of a technology museum, throughout all of the exhibits, the boundaries between history and fiction, magic and reason, narrative and scientific method are in fact completely fluid (and the curators pleasurably make no effort to make things more clear, even indulge in elaborate descriptions and allusions that make it even more mysterious).

Many of the pieces consist of wonderfully crafted models and often amazing analog visual tricks for superimposing images. As a result, the whole space turns into a magical wunderkammer like I've rarely seen it, and probably one of the most astonishing approaches to the culture of art and technology on the planet. A few examples from the collections:

Duck's Breath

Tell the Bees...Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition, is one of the newest additions and reflects on the relationship between ancient beliefs and recipes and how some of them still bear importance today. Yet, the application of lithium for neurological illnesses sits right next to the practice of letting children breathe in the cold breath of a duck or goose.

An especially intriguing practice refers to bees, which were understood to be related to and a manifestation of the muse from which comes the bees alter identity of the muse's bird. And, the practice of telling of the bees of important events in the lives of the family has been for hundreds of years a widely observed practice and, although it varies somewhat among peoples, it is invariably a most elaborate ceremonial. The procedure is that as soon as a member of the family has breathed his or her last a younger member of the household, often a child, is told to visit the hives. and rattling a chain of small keys taps on the hive and whispers three times: "Little Brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead."

The Conversion of St. Eustace at Mentorella

Another collection, titled The World is Bound with Secret Knots, is devoted to the life and work of 17th century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who dedicated himself to his parallel obsessions with magnetism, musicology, astronomy, archaeology, and linguistics, Kircher researched and compiled enormous amounts of data, invented innumerable optical, magnetic, and acoustic devices, composed music, poetry, and imaginative fiction. Created with the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum in Hagen, Germany, the exhibit consist of many gorgeous pepper's ghost-style dioramas which illustrate Kircher's range of fascinations and inventions, especially in relation to his theory of magnetism being the invisible force that binds all the universe together.

Garden of Eden on Wheels

One part of the permanent exhibition focusses on Geoffrey Sonnabend, who in his three volume work Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience. Sonnabend believed that long term or "distant" memory was illusion, but similarly he questioned short term or "immediate" memory. On a number of occasions Sonnabend wrote that there is only experience and its decay, by which he meant to suggest that what we typically call short term memory is, in fact, our experiencing the decay of an experience.

The Sonnabend Model of Obliscience

Sonnabend believed that this phenomenon of true memory was our only connection to the past, if only the immediate past, and, as a result, he became obsessed with understanding the mechanisms of true memory by which experience decays. In an effort to illustrate his understanding of this process, Sonnabend, over the next several years, constructed an elaborate Model of Obliscence (or model of forgetting) which, in its simplest form, can be seen as the intersection of a plane and cone.

As with many pieces in this exhibition, it's practically impossible to find out whether Geoffrey Sonnabend even ever existed, but then again that's part of it all. As Herzog puts it: "Inventions [in every sense of the word] have a deeper reach, a deeper stratum of truth quite often than we'd like to admit. And that's the beauty of the museum here."

Many more photos here, and an interview with David Wilson.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 4:47 PM)

Danke!

WorldChanging Team — 2008-08-19T14:01:05-08:00

We just got our fall catalog from our German publisher, and look what they put on the cover:

We were so excited that we could hardly tear our eyes off it, until we saw pages 1-4:

Thanks to Worldchanging readers and contributors in Germany for your support of our book! In appreciation, we dove into our archives for some of our best recent posts on German innovations and leadership:

The Autobahn's Future and One-Liter Class Racing

Decoding the World's Best Energy Policies

The Afterlife of German Coal Mining

Enjoy! And if you'd like your own copy of the book, click here.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 2:01 PM)

Affordability and the City

Clark Williams-Derry — 2008-08-19T08:48:54-08:00

Downtown housing affordability is an international problem.

Interesting article: Alan Ehrenhalt argues in The New Republic that cities throughout North America are undergoing a "demographic inversion," in which the center city is once again becoming home to the well-off rather than the poor.

Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.

That certainly rings true for Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, too. In fact, Ehrenhalt discusses Vancouver, with its "forest of slender, green, condo skyscrapers," at some length. So apparently, the problems of urban housing affordability aren't just local ones; they're international in scope. (At least we're in good company.)

The article also makes a trenchant observation: the recent North American view of the city as a dumping ground for people who are too poor to escape is something of a historical anomaly. More typically, cities have been magnets for wealth, not repositories for the impoverished. Recent trends are, as much as anything else, a return to historic norms.

Still, Ehrenhalt argues that the urban resurgence is being driven by some ahistorical demographic shifts: later childbearing, professional couples choosing fewer (or no) kids, more empty nesters in good health. Those kinds of shifts are likely to persist -- which will mean plenty more people will opt for urbanity over suburban living. And high demand will likely mean higher prices for homes close to downtown.

So my question in all of this is: given that people with lots of disposable income are choosing to move closer to downtown, is there a good way -- or, indeed, any way -- to retain decent, affordable housing for middle- and lower-income folks close to downtown jobs?

I used to think that the best answer was simply to build more housing close to downtown, in part by getting rid of unhelpful restrictions on development. Build enough housing, I figured, and supply and demand would meet at a more amenable price point. But I'm no longer sure how much that will help; Vancouver's center city has grown enormously, but prices haven't moderated. It could be that downtown development is a virtuous cycle with a vicious edge: as the city gets wealthier, its amenities get better and better, attracting even more wealth -- and making it harder and harder for middle-income folks to find a decent, affordable place to live that doesn't require a long and fuel-wasting commute.

I'm not sure that there's a simple solution here. I think it's worth a look around. Has any city -- from Paris to Chicago to Vancouver -- found a good antidote to high housing costs near the city center? If anyone knows of effective, tried-and-true models for urban housing affordability, I'm all ears.

Then again, this is not the worst sort of problem for a city to have. Consider the alternative. For decades, wealthy folks avoided downtown, and many urban centers became concentrated enclaves of deep poverty. The results -- economic segregation of the inner city -- fostered far worse social ills than housing affordability presents today.

Of course, some folks are opposed to gentrification in any form; but it's worth remembering that back in the 1970s and 1980s -- when cities had far less little wealth and economic vitality -- life for downtown residents was pretty lousy. Idealizing that past is a mistake. In comparison, current trends in downtown revitalization -- despite the affordability problems -- are in many ways a breath of fresh air.

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user hfabulous.]

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(Posted by Clark Williams-Derry in Urban Design and Planning at 8:48 AM)

Calling For Reader Reports: Cool Conferences this Fall

WorldChanging Team — 2008-08-18T15:50:27-08:00

As much as we'd love to, we can't be everywhere that interesting discussions, conferences and events are taking place, even nearly as often as the opportunities pop up.

We do, however, have a uniquely intelligent, connected and engaged audience. And yes, we're talking to you. Since one of our main goals is to get smart, visionary people around the world to connect with one another, we encourage you to share your experiences with the Worldchanging community by posting thoughtful submissions.

Since our founding, we have always relied on our team at large: the 100-plus volunteer contributors from all over the globe to lend their insights, research and visions. They do it because they understand that when more people know about the solutions that are out there, we have a much better chance of rallying the necessary support to achieve sustainability -- and prosperity -- on a systemic scale. And we thank them.

This summer, a few members of Worldchanging's global audience have volunteered to write "Reader Reports" from conferences, workshops and other world changing happenings they've attended. So far, our readers have blogged from the audiences of OSCON in Portland, Ore. and the World Cities Summit in Singapore.

We love hearing and publishing your take on these events – both because we like to let others know what happened at these meetings of great minds, and also because we like to know that our readers are getting out there and swapping big and brilliant ideas with the best thinkers on the planet.

We've started a wish list of cool conferences, coming this fall, which we're dying to get an inside scoop on. If you're attending and would like to contribute your own report, please email editor[at]Worldchanging[dot]com.

2nd International Sustainability Conference
August 21-22 in Basel, Switzerland

AIA Danish Modern: Then and Now
August 31-September 4
Copenhagen, Denmark

COPENMIND (Focus on Cleantech)
September 1-3
Copenhagen, Denmark

Sustainable City and Creativity
September 24-26
Naples, Italy

Sustainable Cities and Communities
September 30-October 1
Geneva, Switzerland

CAET Alternative Energy Symposium
October 2-3
Chicago, USA

Education for an Open Architecture
October 19-22
Muncie, IN, USA

Pop!Tech 2008
October 22-25
Camden, ME, USA

If you'd like to write for Worldchanging in any capacity, we'd love to hear from you! Send your ideas to editor[at]worldchanging[dot]com.

Photo credit: flickr/Jacob Botter, licensed by Creative Commons.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 3:50 PM)

Misunderstanding Cyberwar

Ethan Zuckerman — 2008-08-18T08:24:33-08:00

There’s nothing like the term “cyberwar” to capture a reader’s attention. For those who grew up on “Wargames”, “Sneakers” or William Gibson novels, the term conjures up images of heroic hackers in shadowy basements, frantically tapping on keyboards in a life and death struggle against the enemy on the other side of the glowing CRT screen.

It’s a vision that was compelling to senior people in the US Air Force, including former USAF Secretary Michael Wynne, who was fired earlier this year over the scandal of mishandled nuclear weapons. Before his departure, Wynne launched the Air Forces’s “Cyberspace Command” with a television ad that portrayed the Air Force as the defender of the Pentagon against an onslaught of digital attacks. The Pentagon has stopped funding and now may cancel the initiative.

Wynne argues that the current military faceoff between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia is an instance of cyberwar, saying “The Russians just shot down the government command nets so they could cover their incursion. This was really one of the first aspects of a coordinated military action that had cyber as a lead force, instead of sending in air planes.”

That’s the sort of speculation tech reporters live for. It raises the possibility that, instead of reporting on venture capital deals and the kudzu-like spread of Facebook, they might get the chance to be war reporters without the complication of being shot at. In the past week, in-depth articles on cyberwar have graced the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Salon.

The best of these articles have a common conclusion: it’s very hard to know what’s actually gone on. Call it “the fog of cyberwar”. Better yet, please don’t. As the dust settles, it’s unclear whether “cyberwar” is even an appropriate term for what’s taken place online as an actual war - the kind with guns and dead people - has transpired in Georgia. It’s worth remembering that in this “cyberwar”, the most serious consequence is that a website becomes temporarily inaccessible to viewers - it’s a war being fought with paintballs, not with live rounds.

Here’s what’s known: many Georgian websites have been difficult or impossible to access for several days. In response, the Georgian government has moved some vital email addresses and websites to Google, and other Georgian websites have sought help from Estonia. Here’s what’s not known: whether these attacks were directed by the Russian military, as Georgia’s Foreign Minister has speculated, by shadowy criminal gangs, or just by kids with a grudge against Georgia and too much free time. The last of these scenarios is looking increasingly likely.

Some of the most dramatic reports of cyberwar have come from an anonymous blog (RBNexploit) that tracks the Russian Business Network. RBN is a source of great concern to many in the computer security community - it’s a very successful producer of tools used for spam, identity theft and malware. The RBNexploit bloggers asserted that RBN hackers - on behalf of the Russian government - had taken control of backbone routers that delivered traffic to Georgia via Turkey, effectively cutting Georgia off from the Internet.

While this would have been dramatic and exciting, it doesn’t appear to be true. Earl Zmijewski, a vice president at internet monitoring company Renesys, has been watching connections into Georgia very closely and reports, “During the hostilities, we’ve seen no significant changes in routing. In particular, we saw no apparent attempts to limit traffic via Russia, but then again, most traffic from Georgia seems to currently transit Turkey. ”

What’s knocked some Georgian websites offline are denial of service attacks. These attacks are the equivalent of harassing a person by calling her on the phone as often as possible and hanging up when she answers. On the web, this involves sending a request to a web server over and over, hoping to overwhelm it and make it incapable of serving pages to legitimate users. In a more sophisticated version of the attack, dozens or hundreds of people call the same number - load the same webpage - which might make even a modest-sized corporation impossible to reach for the duration of the attack. These more complex attacks are called distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), and they have become frustratingly common since CERT (Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Emergency Response Team) first warned of them in 1999.

It requires very little technical expertise to carry out a simple DoS attack - hit reload on your web browser every few seconds and you’ll be carrying out an (ineffective, primitive) attack. Belarussian tech journalist Evgeny Morozov was curious how much technical skill it would require to participate in a more organized attack. In a brilliant article for Slate, he describes visiting sites like StopGeorgia.ru, where he discovered a webpage that, saved to his desktop and opened in a browser, made thousands of requests an hour to 18 Georgian websites. Presto - “cyberwar” for dummies. A bit more poking led him to a set of instructions for DoSHTTP, a utility that can easily be misused to perform efficient denial of service attacks.

The technical solutions Morozov found weren’t especially sophisticated - one relied on a dozen lines of Javascript code, the other on a widely available off-the-shelf tool. These attacks can be effective not because they’re using especially sophisticated technology, but because they leverage a “social hack” - they rely on the actions of individual, patriotic Russians organized via sites like StopGeorgia, which hosts a “scoreboard” displaying which Georgian sites are reachable and unreachable. Look too hard for shadowy political forces and esoteric technology and “we risk underestimating the great patriotic rage of many ordinary Russians, who, having been fed too much government propaganda in the last few days, are convinced that they need to crash Georgian Web sites. Many Russians undoubtedly went online to learn how to make mischief, as I did.” (Morozov is very clear that his sympathies don’t lie with the Russians in this conflict, and that his attacks were conducted very briefly, for research purposes.)

The attacks on Georgian websites are probably not just coming from angry Russians hitting reload. Some are likely coming from “botnets”, large sets of computers that have been infected with malware, software that allows a computer to be controlled remotely by a third party. Russian hacker network RBN controls one network, the Storm botnet, but many others exist. It’s now possible to “rent” a botnet - Bill Woodcock of internet research consultancy Packet Clearing House estimates that botnets can be rented to perform DDoS attacks for as little as four cents per machine. It’s possible that some hackers have rented botnets and turned them against Georgian websites, or that some operators have decided to “donate” attacks to the anti-Georgian cause.

The rhetoric of “cyberwarfare” has a reassuring implication: we understand how to fight wars, so surely we can win a cyberwar. Unfortunately, the truth is more complicated. There’s no magic “cyberspace command” solution the USAF can unleash to defeat a botnet. The administrators trying to bring Georgian webservers back online are doing precisely what any sysadmin does confronted with a DDoS - they are blocking traffic from the IP addresses that are launching the attacks, and sharing these blocklists with administrators confronting the same problems. If they can block addresses more quickly than the attackers can recruit more participants, they’ll win. This strategy is known by the complex technical term “Whack-a-Mole”, and it’s roughly as frustrating as the fairground game of the same name.

What’s frightening about the online attacks against Georgia is not that they’re organized by shadowy Krelmin forces, but that they’re coming from a loosely organized group of individuals. In his new book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations", Clay Shirky notes that one of the characteristics of the contemporary internet is that it enables “ridiculously easy group formation.” Once formed, these groups can organize potluck dinners or spread propoganda. Chinese netizens, angered by what they perceived as anti-China bias in western media, organized a campaign to challenge media narratives on sites like Anti-CNN.com. Individuals have flooded YouTube with videos exposing errors in CNN and BBC’s China coverage and arguing that Tibet is a part of a multi-ethnic, federated China. Most western media reports assume this effort is organized by the Chinese government, a charge participants angrily deny.

The shift from a world where power comes solely from governments and militaries to one where power can come from loosely organized, adhoc groups is a hard one to grasp. It’s easy to understand why the press and the military would misunderstand the situation in Georgia as a new type of military attack. The truth may be more intriguing and frightening - we’ve entered an era where individuals can organize their own “cyberwar” campaigns online, in concert with or in opposition to their governments.

Reuters was kind enough to ask me for my thoughts on this matter - a version of the piece is available on their website.

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

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Media at 8:24 AM)

Can the Dead Sea Be Brought to Life?

WorldChanging Team — 2008-08-18T08:17:14-08:00

by Hannah Doherty

The Dead Sea has been a religious and cultural landmark of the Middle East for thousands of years. Saltier than the oceans, the lake is like none other in the world.

But in the past 30 years, the Dead Sea has lost about a third of its surface area. As much as 95 percent of the flow of its main tributary, the Jordan River, has been diverted for agriculture and domestic use. Excessive mineral mining for potash and magnesium chloride is removing water at a rate of 150 million cubic meters per year. As water levels drop by as much as one meter per year, the combination of diversion and evaporation is threatening both economic development and the natural oases that support the Dead Sea's unique ecosystem.

In an effort to halt the sea's rapid disappearance, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, with the help of the World Bank, are proposing a project to import water from the Red Sea in the south. While dramatic engineering may be necessary to save this timeless attraction, environmentalists warn that less-risky alternatives are being ignored.

If built, the Red-Dead conduit is expected to cost $15 billion. Projects of this scale are not unprecedented, especially as water demand grows rapidly in many regions of the world. According to the United Nations World Water Development Report, water withdrawals have increased sixfold since the 1990s, twice the rate of population growth. Costly projects to meet demand - the $60 billion Chinese South-North water transfer, for example - have come under fire by environmentalists for failing to address the underlying causes of water stress, such as a lack of conservation.

The World Bank says the proposed 180-kilometer conduit would carry 2 billion cubic meters of water to the Dead Sea. It would also provide desalinated water, generate energy, and build a symbol of peace and cooperation between Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Territories, the Bank says.

"Given the fact that the flow of the Jordan River is largely appropriated for what are viewed as key economic and social uses, good water management within the basin may have to be combined with a water transfer from outside the Jordan Basin to restore the Dead Sea level to a reasonable level," the World Bank noted in a background document.

By introducing water of a different density and composition to the Dead Sea, however, engineers may drastically alter the very thing they are trying to save. The Dead Sea is rich in calcium, while the Red Sea is rich in sulfate; mixing the two could create a surface layer of gypsum. New algae growth might also change the buoyancy of the water and alter its blue water to appear red. These critical changes could damage the tourism industry in both Israel and Jordan.

Two weeks ago, the World Bank held three public hearings in Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority as part of its preliminary study into the feasibility of a Red-Dead transfer. The Bank came under intense fire from a coalition of six organizations: the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, Tzalul, Life and Environment, Friends of the Earth Middle East, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, and Green Course.

The environmentalists said the project's feasibility study, to be completed in 2009, is not dedicating enough resources to researching the environmental implications of the water transfer and assessing alternative methods for resuscitating the Dead Sea. These critiques coincide with a recent World Bank internal review reporting the Bank's insufficient attention to long-term sustainability.

Separate from the feasibility study, the World Bank is conducting an environmental assessment of the water transfer, led by a team of three specialists nominated by each country and selected by the Bank. But some environmentalists and water experts argue that the assessment should be performed not by representatives of the three governments already in favor of the project, but by independent, international consultants. "It's like asking a cat to guard a bowl of milk," Gidon Bromberg, Israel director of Friends of the Earth Middle East, told the Jewish Review.

As an alternative to the diversion project, environmentalists and local geologists propose rehabilitating the Jordan River. According to Dan Zaslavksi, a former Israeli water commissioner, regenerating the flow of the river to bring water to the Dead Sea will cost no more than $800 million, substantially less than the $15 billion estimated for the Red-Dead plan, Al Jazeera reported. Critics also suggest reforms in the chemical industries on both sides of the sea.

Alexander McPhail, task-team leader of the Red-Dead feasibility study, said the Jordan River rehabilitation plan, as well as alternatives such as a Mediterranean-Dead Sea canal or a water pipeline from Turkey, have merit. Should no solution be found, there is also the alternative of doing nothing, McPhail notes in the China Review.

The World Bank will use the results of its feasibility study to determine whether the Red-Dead plan is a viable solution to save the Dead Sea. But without objective research into the plan's environmental consequences, wrote Friends of the Earth's Bromberg in a recent op-ed, "the World Bank vision may lead to ecological disaster."

Hannah Doherty is an intern with the Worldwatch Institute. She can be reached at hdoherty@worldwatch.org.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Biodiversity and Ecosystems at 8:17 AM)

Toilet to Tap or Perfectly Potable? California Uses New Treatment Technology to Increase Water Resources

Sarah Kuck — 2008-08-15T13:51:51-08:00

Pressed for water resources, California's Orange County has spent millions of dollars to build and recently open a state-of-the-art water treatment system that processes and transforms formerly flushed sewage into drinkable tap water.

The Orange County Water Replenishment System cost about $480 million and took about a decade to build. But the lengthy construction period had more to do with mindset than actual development obstacles, as Bottlemania author Elizabeth Royte recently wrote in the New York Times:

The stumbling block was psychological, not architectural. An aversion to feces is nearly universal, and as critics of the process are keen to point out, getting sewage out of drinking water was one of the most important public health advances of the last 150 years.

But as the population swells, the aquifers dry up and the surrounding area snowpacks melt, southern Californian's -- whether they think it's great or gross -- are running out of options, and will have to continue to look for new ways to reduce and reuse:

Saltwater from the Pacific Ocean was entering the county’s water supply, drawn in by overpumping from the groundwater basin, says Ron Wildermuth, who at the time we talked was the water district’s spokesman. Moreover, population growth meant more wastewater, which meant building a second sewage pipe, five miles into the Pacific — a $200 million proposition. Recycling the effluent solved the disposal problem and the saltwater problem in one fell swoop. A portion of the plant’s filtered output is now injected into the ground near the coast, to act as a pressurized barrier against saltwater from the ocean. Factor in Southern California’s near chronic drought, the county’s projected growth (another 300,000 to 500,000 thirsty people by 2020) and the rising cost of importing water from the Colorado River and from Northern California (the county pays $530 per acre-foot of imported water, versus $520 per acre-foot of reclaimed water), and rebranding sewage as a valuable resource became a no-brainer.

As we move into an age of tighter and tighter ecological limits, choices (and controversies) like this one will become increasingly common...plus it's pretty interesting to read how the process works.

Photo credit: Dwight Eschliman for the New York Times

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Water at 1:51 PM)

Virtual Transgender Suit, Avatar Termination and Other Online World Tales

Regine Debatty — 2008-08-15T13:14:18-08:00

You might remember that a year ago Marc Owens designed the Avatar Machine, a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.

His reflections on identity and gaming didn't stop there, during the Royal College of Art Summer show, the Platform 11 graduate was exhibiting his latest game-inspired works.

A study by psychologists at Nottingham Trent University has found that 54 percent of all males and 68 percent of all females "gender swap"--or create online personas of their opposite sex.

A real life manifestation of that practice, the Virtual Transgender Suit replicates the aesthetics of the typical virtual female form and catapults them within a real world context. The piece was specifically designed for men to wear in the real world, creating a bridge between real (where cross-dressing is not really socially accepted) and virtual.

Another of Owens' projects, Sabre & Mace - Second Death, was concerned more specifically with the online environment Second Life.

Collaborating with Tony Mullin, he created SABRE & MACE, a company that offers virtual characters the opportunity to experience death as a way to close their user account permanently. The project examines the notion of feeling sentimental toward a virtual character and examines the link between sentimentality and tangibility.

While researching the project, the designers discovered that a great deal of second life residents have multiple avatars, some stay in favour for a long time while others loose their interest. One guy who they spoke to had 14. He said that he used a many of them as platforms for different sides of his real life personality, and for others he invented entirely new fantasy personalities. However he admitted that some of his created avatars had fallen by the wayside and he no longer used them.

The service works as follows: Having discovered the Sabre&Mace site on-line (unfortunately the website had to be taken down after the show) or through one of the virtual adverts in Second Life, the prospective customer teleports to the company headquarters.

There, the client meets a manager who explains the full process and guides him or her through the signing of two contacts. Contract 1 - states that at some point (completely random) in their second life the avatar will be collected by a Sabre & Mace officer and taken back to the headquarters for termination.

Contract 2 is in fact the client's 'Last will and Testament' where he or she outlines how they wish their virtual moneys, land and assests to be distributed once they have been terminated.

The client continues to live their second life until one day, a Sabre & Mace officer appears and informs them that the final proceedings are about to begin. The client is collected and taken to the Sabre & Mace HQ.

The client meets again with the client manager, to discuss the final process. At this point the client reveals their 'account password', which is the means by which the avatar is terminated.

The client is led through the cryogenic chamber, where the virtual physical forms of past clients are stored. Upon arrival at the 'Termination Room', the client is instructed to walk through the 'white noise' door. Once he crosses the threshold of the door his Second Life game crashes, giving a Sabre & Mace member of staff time to change the clients password - effectively terminating the character.

The client's former avatar is immortalised as a golden statue. Information about the avatar can be read on the plaque which sits on the monument. Should the client visit the Sabre & Mace memorial gardens he would see his own statue as well as the monuments of previous clients.

Images courtesy of Marc Owens (except the shot of his works at the RCA show.)
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 1:14 PM)

U.K. Biofuels Sources Are Largely Unknown

Ben Block — 2008-08-15T13:09:33-08:00

As biofuels imports increase in the United Kingdom, policymakers remain largely uninformed about the true environmental and social costs of producing these fuels, posing a significant challenge for efforts to mandate their sustainable use.

In the first report since a U.K. mandate required that 2.5 percent of road transport fuel be supplied by biofuels, the independent agency charged with tracking the country's biofuels resources, the Renewable Fuels Agency, acknowledged last week that suppliers have been unable to prove the production methods for 80 percent of the country's biodiesel and ethanol.

As more countries worldwide implement similar biofuels mandates, the ability to require suppliers to prove the source and sustainability of their "renewable fuels" will be key for biofuels to replace fossil fuels without causing more environmental damage.

The U.K. government set a goal that 30 percent of the country's biofuels must meet environmental and social standards by the end of this year. The standards are meant to ensure that production of the fuels' feedstock does not result in biodiversity losses, carbon leakage, soil degradation, pollution, or violations of workers' rights. During the first month of the biofuels mandate - April to May of this year - only 19 percent met the standards.

"There is no obligation to provide this information yet. There's no penalty...so obviously they are not getting a lot of information," said Barbara Bramble, a senior international affairs advisor at the U.S.-based National Wildlife Federation.

The mandate is part of a European Union directive for biofuels to supply 10 percent of the region's fuel by 2020. European countries advocate biofuels as a tool to lower their greenhouse gas emissions - the region has vowed to cut emissions 20 percent by 2020. But two landmark studies published in the journal Science this year suggest that if natural habitats are converted to cropland, the carbon released through clearing the land may outweigh the carbon dioxide emissions the biofuels were meant to avoid.

The U.K. report said that nearly half of the country's imported biodiesel in the April-to-May period was derived from soybeans. Nearly a third of this came from the United States and about 3 percent from tropical regions such as Brazil, Indonesia, and Malaysia (the rest was from Germany, Canada, and domestic sources). While all of the Malaysian biodiesel imports met the majority of the standards, only half of Indonesian imports met some of the standards, and no Brazilian suppliers could prove any compliance. The report said the county of origin was unknown for 50 percent of the imports.

The Renewable Fuels Agency has also been tasked with tracking the greenhouse gas emissions avoided by using biofuels in place of fossil fuels. For the 87 million liters of biofuel used in the U.K. during the April-to-May period, this usage avoided 42 percent of the emissions that would otherwise have been released through fuel burning, the report said. However, this figure excludes emissions from indirect land conversion, such as the removal of grasslands or forests to produce biofuels. "The Agency has recommended that indirect effects are included in future sustainability reporting and is working with the government to identify a way to do this," a press release said.

In response to the report, several environmental groups repeated their growing opposition to the U.K. biofuels mandate. "The shocking admission that we are unable to identify the origin of nearly half the biofuels used in the U.K. means that the government cannot assure the British people that the biofuels in their petrol tanks have not destroyed rainforests," said Asad Rehman, biofuels campaigner for Friends of the Earth-UK.

European politicians are showing signs that they may relax the region's biofuels mandate, in part due to suspicions that competition for farmland from the fuels contributed to the sharp rise in food prices this summer. Countries are also preparing more stringent "sustainability criteria."

As more suppliers face hard questions about their biofuel production, this will likely improve the poor compliance reflected in the U.K. report. "Britain will get more information as they increase production," Bramble said. "It is really good that they're asking these questions now when [the mandate] is a very small amount."

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

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(Posted by Ben Block in Energy at 1:09 PM)

Who Wants What? Google Insight on Spam, Pirated Software and Other Fun Stuff

Ethan Zuckerman — 2008-08-15T11:08:21-08:00

Oh man. Google Insights for Search is good fun. I’m supposed to spend this week finishing a number of writing projects. But I spent almost all today running different searches and being basically stunned at how much data’s available through the interface.

I mentioned earlier today that Google makes “related” search information available - there’s much deeper information available through the CSV interface, giving fifty associated terms for most searches. I have high hopes of playing with this data to revive my clustering tools, trying to explore the “freudian web” of associations between search terms.

My friend and research partner Hal Roberts has been playing with the trending functions of Insights - similar to those offered by Blogpulse, but covering a much broader search population. He’s got an interesting comparison of searches for “digital cameras” - cyclical, with spikes around Christmastime, but decreasing in intensity over the years - and “nigeria” - a steady, low-level of interest.

I think what’s most exciting to me (at least right now) is the geographic information available within the system. Andrew Chen has an excellent post, looking at searches for different social media sites and their distribution throughout the US. He observes that well-established sites like Digg are searched for by pretty much the entire US (the northern plains states seem immune from Digg-interest… and, oddly enough, there are lots of folks searching for Reddit in South Dakota.) Other sites, like TechCruch, are primarily searched for by Californians… (The folks at TechCrunch point out that this shows the disparity between searches for “techcrunch” and “techcrunch.com”.)

What’s really fun, IMHO, is using the location features of Google Insight to find out what topics are popular in what countries. Google won’t give you a list of most popular searches worldwide… but they will give you that list for an arbitrary nation, like Australia or Zimbabwe. We’ve had similar information available via Alexa in the past, measuring what sites are popular in what countries. But the search data has the potential, I think, to be extremely revealing.

Hal points out that one of the most popular searches in Nigeria is for “Email Extractor Lite 1.4″, a web-based tool designed to extract email addresses from a large piece of text, probably copied and pasted from the source of a forum page. Actually, variants of this search are the 2nd through 6th most popular searches in Nigeria.

As Hal notes, there’s pretty much no way to explain the result other than concluding that there’s a disproportionate interest in that particular spamming technique in West Africa. Here’s a map of interest in the search “Extractor Lite 1.4″, a spam cluster with a strong concentration in West Africa, but some interest in North America, the Middle East, Western Europe and Southeast Asia.

I’m wondering what other pockets of “undesirable” behavior are mappable via this technique. For instance, searches for “keygen”, a popular site that offers serial numbers and software keys to enable pirated software shows a heavy concentration the former Warsaw Pact nations, with some strength in Southeast Asia as well.

Searches for “torrent” also have an interesting concentration: a heavy concentration in central Europe and Scandinavia. Suspecting a connection to the Pirate Bay, I searched for that term as well, but discovered interest in Pirate Bay is tightly clustered in Scandinavia. Is it possible that interest in torrents in Central Europe, as compared to Africa or the former Soviet Union, is connected to significantly higher bandwith capacities?

There’s no end to the fun you can have with these sorts of maps. Google doesn’t include sexually suggestive terms in the lists that come up when you poll a country, but you can search for those terms specifically and come up with some fascinating maps. A search for “youporn” - an amateur pornography site that now ranks #35 on Alexa’s list of most popular websites, outpacing Flickr, Friendster and Craigslist - gives this map, with an interesting Mediterranean cluster:

Legendary French epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are.” What do we know about a country based on what they’re searching for? Is there something you’d like to tell us, Italy?

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 Emerging Technologies at 11:08 AM)