Parachuting Cats
This, from the Rocky Mountain Institute, that sees the need for "vision across bounaries" so sadly lacking in most political platforms or cultural visions of the future. We have a shot--and it must be on the mark--at making large decisions that will impact the future of earth and man in enormous and far-reaching ways. It would serve our descendents to provide solutions that don't turn into problems.
In the early 1950s, the Dayak people of Borneo suffered from malaria. The World Health Organization had a solution: it sprayed large amounts of DDT to kill the mosquitoes that carried the malaria. The mosquitoes died; the malaria declined; so far, so good. But there were side effects. Among the first was that the roofs of people's houses began to fall down on their heads. It seemed that the DDT was also killing a parasitic wasp that had previously controlled thatch-eating caterpillars. Worse, the DDT-poisoned insects were eaten by geckos, which were eaten by cats. The cats started to die, the rats flourished, and the people were threatened by potential outbreaks of typhus and plague. To cope with these problems, which it had itself created, the World Health Organization was obliged to parachute 14,000 live cats into Borneo. (See "How Not to Parachute More Cats.")The true story of Operation Cat Drop--now nearly forgotten at WHO--illustrates that if you don't know how things are interconnected, then often the cause of problems is solutions. On the other hand, if you understand the hidden connections between energy, climate, water, agriculture, transportation, security, commerce, and economic and social development, then you can often devise a solution to one problem (such as energy) that will also create solutions to many other problems at no extra cost. Crafting solutions so that they multiply is RMI's credo and the basis of its success."
I think about this now especially as "we" commit to an electical future dependent on the construction of even more Appalachian mountaintop-fed, coal-fired power plants and spend enormous amounts of energy to suck an unknown amount of trapped oil from far out and far down in the Gulf of Mexico. Are these solutions that will become problems that might be avoided or reduced with other "solutions"? We truly need vision for the long haul and must find and elect leaders unbeholding to carbon-based empire to make it happen now.
Comments
So correct. We are very short sighted culture. Mostly just for the now and the me society. Sad..what will we really be leaving our grand children to deal with. Love that bug from yesterday..
Posted by: sharonb | September 6, 2006 9:07 AM
Today, an on-target comment from another site regarding appropriate technology that seems to fit the RMI "parachuting cats" post on FFF, thanks for permission by its author, Brian Lavelle, to include his comment in its entirety below.
Tomorrow, a link to the article that inspired it, and to other commenters who have left ideas there for discussion.
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There is a new paradigm shift which will play out in the coming months and years, and it is this: Power can, should, and will be produced at the point of use. Transmission lines will become the dinosaurs of our time. The vaunted icon of top-down sales and distribution is being toppled. It will not leave the stage quietly, but leave it must.
All the hoopla about synthetic liquid fuels, ethanol. butanol,switch weed,coal sands and tars, is wishful thinking by vested interests. The old powers(automakers and Houston oil patch pirates) did not take long to get firmly behind a national ethanol program, which has a lot of steam presently. Sad fact is that using food to produce transportation fuels will drive up the cost of food, hurting mainly the poor.
The old axiom "nature bats last" is very appropriate to our energy decisions today. We are at a critical crossroads for the very survival of homo sap and the thousands of other global life forms whose demise we don't even acknowledge. Recent announcements of massive new oil and gas discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico come with mixed emotions.....we can worship the automobile a while longer, even as we foul our own nest.
There may be only one chance to get it right. Massive investments in the wrong direction will leave us crippled for a second attempt. There is one tactic which seems logical and it is the same one that Amory Lovins at Rocky Mt. Institute and David Morris at Institute For Local Self Reliance have been urging for decades: First conserve, then point-of-use production on a massive scale. Solar pv and wind electric production are quickly becoming cost competitive, even with the uneven playing field dictated by coal and oil. And even without a carbon tax, which, incidentally will all but kill the carbon industry.
As Lovins points out, building redundancy into a widely dispersed production platform renders the energy sector virtually "terror-proof". Doesn't that fact, by itself, have quantifiable value? Big wind projects = big transmission lines= vulnerabibity to Murphey's law and/or sabotage. It's time to replace the top-down scenario with small pv and wind projects...electric vehicles rechargable from our homes and businesses, which are power producers.
All this is possible right now with off the shelf technologies. PV electric production has the added benefit of being easily expandible. The future holds promise for improvements in electric battery technology. Significant discoveries in this critical field will bolster small wind and PV projects. Since the two cleanest renewables(wind and solar) are so complimentary, often one is producing while the other is resting, the next big leap in storeage capacity could spell the end of the electric utility. RIP. --Brian Lavelle
Posted by: fred1st | September 6, 2006 9:45 AM
And there may be many more pockets of oil as big as the one Chevron just found, which would set the whole "peak oil" theory back up on the dusty shelf for a while.
Posted by: Jim | September 6, 2006 10:14 AM
Jim, I wouldn't spend that MAYBE OIL just yet, nor would I be willing to gamble any extra margin to peak will be more than a short gasp of illusion, especially if conservation and energy efficiency do not go hand and hand with transition into new technologies. An extra cup in the barrel doesn't mean the barrel no longer has a bottom.
Posted by: fred1st | September 6, 2006 10:35 AM
Fred, I just had a vision of Tsuga running on a treadmill generator powering up your blog. 86% of current power production is carbon-based, so we need to make a lot of changes. Hope we make the right investments.
Oh BTW, there are already large federal, state, and local taxes applied to gasoline. You Virginians are currently paying at about 37 cents per gallon in tax. The majority of these taxes are dedicated to road maintenance and development, so someone would need to figure out how that would be funded in the absence of gas. It seems the inter-connectedness you mention pervades the world of money as well.
Posted by: Jim | September 6, 2006 12:26 PM
Of course there are taxes on gasoline, and not so curiosly, the taxes go to encourage and sustain highway travel. A better tax for the future might be some combination of use-per-mile tax (isn't Californina already considering this?) AND a carbon tax (so that those who use non-carbon-based travel pay less per mile than hydrocarbon users.
Posted by: fred1st | September 6, 2006 5:01 PM
"An extra cup in the barrel doesn't mean the barrel no longer has a bottom."
AMEN!
Posted by: kenju | September 6, 2006 6:19 PM
Definitely agree that a usage tax is the right way to go and aptly charges the users. Toll roads are doing this now, but I would like to see the automation of the flow of traffic so as not to cause jams around point of charge. I also have a wary perception of the "Big Brother" effect of someone having data on all of my comings and goings (cause I'm sneaky like that).
Posted by: Jim | September 6, 2006 8:48 PM