Change.org – Online petition tool

I grew up in NH, where town meetings happen every March to approve the town budget.  My hometown has 1600 people in, and people still say Aye and Nay to practically every line of the budget.

Change.org holds my heart steady – this online petition tool uses the power of the internet to communicate agreement of a body politic on an issue.

All in favor, say Aye!

Feedback Loops, why fossil fuels are financial candy

One of my favorite thought experiments involves the oil industry.

Supply Side Feedback Loop:  Even though fossil fuels are a finite trust fund of stored up solar energy, unlike most other resources, when harvested, it provides energy to harvest more of itself.  Fossil energy is one big positive feedback loop.  Estimates suggest that its energy return on investment (EROI) is a 5:1 ratio.  That is, it takes 1 unit of energy to pull up 5 units, for a net of 4 units.  One can pay back the first unit and combust those 4 harvested units to mine 20 new units. The oil industry has exponential growth written all over it.  This densely-rich fuel source is a no-brainer for any business person.

Demand Side Feedback Loop:  Mining oil, has many co-products.  The most valuable are for synthesis of organic compounds – the long carbon-chains in fossil resources are a chemical engineer’s wet dream. Then there is jet fuel, and diesel fuel and petroleum.  It’s a long list, including a processing ‘waste product’ we now call tar.  So Ford invents the business plan to get every person a car.  The cars start driving, slowly, on bumpy roads.  As more cars drive slowly on bumpy roads, a co-product of petroleum starts to amass – tar.  So some resourceful supply chain engineer says, Wo-ah, lets make asphalt.  We essentially landfill this asphalt on our highways resulting in smoother driving and better gas mileage bc the friction has gone down. In these more pleasant conditions, citizens drive faster to more places and longer distances.  We learn the American cliche of “Freedom” and “Power” and “Speed”. Every doubling of speed results in a quadroupling in air resistance which lowers gas mileage.  Citizens use more fuel, and generate more tar, creating more roads to drive more miles.

Now here’s the kicker.  I’m no economist, but applying the supply and demand charts to oil just screams cash cow.  First, there is an increase in supply (remember, oil is internally accountable to itself, it is the source of energy to mine more of itself, generating oodles of cheap energy), which society relentlessly entertains itself with.  This results in an increase in demand.  Sure the price fluctuates, but an oil baron doesn’t care, bc implicitly the oil company already has a 5:1 return on investment just within the system of fuel extraction, say nothing of mark up.  Cheap or expensive to the end-user, the company is in the clear.  Now, add scarcity, or the perception of scarcity to a society that has grown dependent on oil (to boil the water, get kids to school, power the computer, cool the refrigerator, run the A/C, and light the bathroom).  The oil company doesn’t care, bc the demand is so high, scarcity makes the price go up and they’ll mine until it’s no longer profitable and the trust fund runs out.  They’re going to milk that cow until it’s bone dry.

Sure, alternative energy can’t compete w cheap oil; oil is trust-fund privilege and renewable energy is blue collar hard work.  So how do we convert over to a more efficient energy-society with renewable fuels?  Like any venture, we invest in it.

Supply Chain Transparency

Sourcemap is a collaborative mapping tool, for individuals to map out where things come from and encourage Supply Chain Transparency.  It would be great if there were maps to illustrate where things go.

I’m going to target you sourcemap.  Supply chains are key to this aspiring think tank.

Brain Spores- the advantage of 7 billion people

So, the world turned 7 billion.  Anxiety for a finite planet? or a hot bed of brain spores.

I’m terribly fond of mushrooms for all kinds of reasons.  For example, a mushroom in Oregon may be the world’s largest single organism.  “This 2,400-acre (9.7 km²) site in eastern Oregon had a contiguous growth of mycelium before logging roads cut through it. Estimated at 2,200 years old, this one fungus has killed the forest above it several times over, and in so doing has built deeper soil layers that allow the growth of ever-larger stands of trees.” —Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running

Mushrooms don’t have seeds; mushrooms drop spores.  The dispersed spores land like birdshot on a field of resources.  Then the spores look for each other and connect by hyphae.  Like any node (spore) and edge (hyphae) configuration, as the nodes connect edges, the ability to extract and allocate resources across the field increases as the network becomes more connected.

Today is Day of the Dead – and mushrooms know how to dance on the grave.  That is, mushrooms thrive by working the reciprocal relationship of exponential growth with exponential depletion.  Mushrooms understand and thrive on a steady state economy.  What is so exquisite about this mycelial mat, is that the mushroom mat can kill and eat a tree that is floundering in a shady area and move those resources to feed another tree in a brightly lit area.  That is, the system gleans and allocates from across a large landscape for the success of the overall system.

R Williams estimates the human brain has about 100 billion (10¹¹) neurons and 100 trillion (10¹⁴) synapses.  Multiply that by 7 billion brains; we have a force of nature.

While our collective population is a force of nature currently pushing toward the limits of our finite system in myriad ways (e.g. exponential increase in energy use causes exponential depletion of oil reserves which is directly related to exponential increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases thus exponentially increasing heat retained from the sun and disappearing ice pack reserves…), we are a reflective species.  In the same way we can learn how the exponential function is a way to access resources, it is also the means by which we can understand that growth is predicated on depletion in a closed system.  Geometrical cause and effect.  We can begin to change our focus of vitality based on the abstract monetary system of economic growth to one of steady-state ecological stewardship of our material home.  Economics and Ecology both come from the Greek oikos “house, dwelling place, habitation”.

What I’m trying to talk about here is how each and everyone of us is a witness of the state of our home.  Embodied within the global citizenry are perspectives, ideas, and solutions to global problems to redefine these status quo behaviors and inform sustainable solutions. This think tank project liberates, combines and sequentially layers ideas from people who might be geographically remote to each other to generate solutions that impact the global ecosystem.  By releasing these ideas, we will have a greater capacity to respond to our rapidly changing environments.  We can harness the power of the exponential to redefine civic action.

Let’s mat together.