David Suzuki - Tree: A Life Story

Iceland harnesses volcanic power for export

Opgør med vækstparadigmet.

Vi lever på en endelig planet og derfor er de ressourcer vi kan tage i anvendelse selvfølgelig også begrænsede af denne endelighed. Alligevel synes idealet om en konstant fortsættelse af den økonomiske vækst at have karakter af et ganske fasttømret dogme som kun alt for sjældent spørges ind til og problematiseres. Hvad er eksempelvis målet med konstant økonomisk vækst? Hvorfor har vores samfund brug for at blive rigere i material forstand? Hvori består det bæredygtige i dette vækstideal i lys af den konstante forøgelse af belastning på biosfæren og dens begrænsede bæreevne?

Det er derfor opmuntrende at Information igår publicerede en kronik af Enhedslistens parlamentarikere Frank Aaen og Per Clausen hvori det herskende vækstparadigme indenfor mainstream-økonomien problematiseres. De skriver:

"Forestillingen om vækst som samfundets højeste værdi og et ubetinget gode er nok den mest udbredte borgerlige ‘sandhed’, som en ny regering må gøre op med.

Alle vismændene betragter vækst som så essentielt, at det end ikke er til diskussion. Det må vi gøre op med, og det kan bl.a. ske ved at inkludere økologiske og socialistiske økonomer blandt vismændene.

Vores vismandsreform skal altså ikke ses som et opgør med borgerlige smagsdommere, sådan som det er blevet udlagt i pressen. Det skal ses i sammenhæng med vores forslag om en bæredygtighedskommission.

Baggrunden for begge forslag er, at vi ønsker at gå fra et fokus på økonomi og vækst til et fokus på demokrati og bæredygtighed."

Russia Today Interview - Peter Joseph (April 2011)

VANDANA SHIVA: Traditional Knowledge, Biodiversity and Sustainable Living

New Advances in Renewable Energy Technologies.

Splitting water to create renewable energy simpler than first thought?

(PhysOrg.com) -- An international team, of scientists, led by a team at Monash University has found the key to the hydrogen economy could come from a very simple mineral, commonly seen as a black stain on rocks.



New solar product captures up to 95 percent of light energy.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Efficiency is a problem with today's solar panels; they only collect about 20 percent of available light. Now, a University of Missouri engineer has developed a flexible solar sheet that captures more than 90 percent of available light, and he plans to make prototypes available to consumers within the next five years.

New omni-directional wind turbine can capture wind energy on building rooftops.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Katru Eco-Energy, headed by founder and inventor, Varan Sureshan, has developed a new kind of wind turbine meant to capture the winds that fly in all directions atop big buildings, and unlike conventional devices, the IMPLUX, as it’s called, can capture wind from any direction as it stands; meaning without having to be repositioned or pointed. The IMPLUX achieves this feat by means of horizontal turbine blades that sit atop a vertical axis and are turned by wind that is pushed up through what Sureshan calls a "fluid dynamic gate."

David Korten: "Living Buildings, Living Economies, and a Living Future."

In another excellent piece by Dr. David Korten, former professor of economy at Harvard Business School, he states that:

We humans, in a fit of adolescent hubris, have sought to liberate ourselves from the responsibilities of life in community. We are in denial of our fundamental nature as living beings—forgetting that because of the way life manages energy, living beings exist only in active relationships to other living beings.

We have so confused individual autonomy with personal liberty that we have created economies that reduce caring human relationships to soulless financial exchange and structured our physical space around buildings and auto-dependent transportation systems that wall us off from one another and nature. In isolation from nature we have sought to dominate and control rather than work with nature’s natural generative processes. We have paid a terrible price.

As we restructure our physical and economic relationships to achieve true economic efficiency and reduce the human burden on the biosphere, we will see even more clearly our interdependence with one another and the place we live. We will know where our food, water, and energy come from. We will know where our wastes go. And most of all we will be constantly reminded of the extent to which our happiness and well-being depend on our active engagement with the generative living community of which we are a part.

The challenges we face in making the transition are enormous. But so too is the opportunity to create and secure a living future for ourselves and our children for generations to come.

Read all of it here.

Why Nuclear Energy Isn't Going to Power the World.

A quite interesting analysis by Derek Abbott, Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide in Australia, concludes that nuclear energy isn't a very promising alternative to the fossil fuel based economy due to a number of factors.

Dokumentar: Fuel.

Dokumentar: END:CIV - Resist or Die.

New Artificial Leaf and Photosynthesis.

Yet another new breakthrough in low cost solar energy just made its debut, and this one is a doozy: a solar cell the size of a typical leaf, that actually creates energy the same way a leaf does: with photosynthesis. No, for real. You just park it in a bucket of water and it generates enough electricity to power household devices… eventually (more on that below). The announcement was made by the lead researcher on the MIT-based project, Dr. Daniel Nocera, who said, “A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of science for decades.”

Source: CleanTechnica.

Tim Jackson on Prosperity Without Growth.

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100.

This extraordinary ramping up of global economic activity has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology on which we depend for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems. For the most part, we avoid the stark reality of these numbers. The default assumption is that – financial crises aside – growth will continue indefinitely. Not just for the poorest countries, where a better quality of life is undeniably needed, but even for the richest nations where the cornucopia of material wealth adds little to happiness and is beginning to threaten the foundations of our wellbeing.

The reasons for this collective blindness are easy enough to find. The modern economy is structurally reliant on economic growth for its stability. When growth falters – as it has done recently – politicians panic. Businesses struggle to survive. People lose their jobs and sometimes their homes. A spiral of recession looms. Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less than $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems on which we depend for survival. It has failed, spectacularly, in its own terms, to provide economic stability and secure people’s livelihoods.

Today we find ourselves faced with the imminent end of the era of cheap oil, the prospect (beyond the recent bubble) of steadily rising commodity prices,the degradation of forests, lakes and soils, conflicts over land use, water quality, fishing rights and the momentous challenge of stabilising concentrations of carbon in the global atmosphere. And we face these tasks with an economy that is fundamentally broken, in desperate need of renewal.

In these circumstances, a return to business as usual is not an option. Prosperity for the few founded on ecological destruction and persistent social injustice is no foundation for a civilised society. Economic recovery is vital. Protecting people’s jobs – and creating new ones – is absolutely essential. But we also stand in urgent need of a renewed sense of shared prosperity. A commitment to fairness and flourishing in a finite world.

Delivering these goals may seem an unfamiliar or even incongruous task to policy in the modern age. The role of government has been framed so narrowly by material aims, and hollowed out by a misguided vision of unbounded consumer freedoms. The concept of governance itself stands in urgent need of renewal.

But the current economic crisis presents us with a unique opportunity to invest in change. To sweep away the short-term thinking that has plagued society for decades. To replace it with considered policy capable of addressing the enormous challenge of delivering a lasting prosperity.

For at the end of the day, prosperity goes beyond material pleasures. It transcends material concerns. It resides in the quality of our lives and in the health and happiness of our families. It is present in the strength of our relationships and our trust in the community. It is evidenced by our satisfaction at work and our sense of shared meaning and purpose. It hangs on our potential to participate fully in the life of society.

Prosperity consists in our ability to flourish as human beings – within the ecological limits of a finite planet. The challenge for our society is to create the conditions under which this is possible. It is the most urgent task of our times.

From "Prosperity without Growth" by Tim Jackson, Economics Commissioner, Sustainable Development Commission, March 2009.