December 2005 Blog Archive
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
That's the bad news -- the good news is that it can only run
independently for 15 minutes, so far:
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) has completed the first prototype of an exoskeleton, Bleex
1, which will allow soldiers to carry 70 pounds of supplies on
their backs (in addition to the 100 pounds Bleex weighs) while
only feeing an extra five pounds of weight beyond their own. Carrying
a quart of military standard JP-4 gas, hydraulics power the exoskeleton
for 15 minutes of use where military vehicles can't traverse.
According to one
source, the next model will carry more weight and allow the
user to move at high speeds.
For a good analysis of the implications of this and similar technologies,
see the book Welcome to the Machine by
Derrick Jensen and George Draffan. (And on a related note, here
is an interview I did with George Draffan.)
Sunday, December 25, 2005
David Butcher's website has some really
interesting different bicycle-tech and off-the-grid electricity
projects. Some of my favourites include his pedal generator, a
bicycle style generator which he has used to generate electricity,
power mechanical pumps and fans directly, and to give electrical
power to a DC chainsaw in realtime (see videos of the device
in action). He's also built a micro photovoltaic
system and a pedal powered canoe.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
From an article
in the Independent:
Britain is to become the first country in the
world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded.
A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at
least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically
read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database
of vehicle movements so that the police and security services
can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
The network will incorporate thousands of existing
CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically
night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main
roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
I'm making note of this not because it is especially unique,
but because I think it is going to become an extremely headline
over the next decade or so. Reuters
reports:
Oil rose beyond $59 on Thursday after Shell
was forced to delay some exports of its Nigerian crude following
a pipeline attack in the southern Delta. [...] Shell was forced
to close a pipeline, which pumps 180,000 bpd, after unidentified
gunmen on Tuesday attacked it. Oil dealers said the hold-up could
last around six days. [...] U.S. distillate inventories, including
heating oil, fell by 2.8 million barrels last week, due to a 9
percent surge in demand and a slowdown in refinery activity...
Update: I came across an interesting and relevant
log of attacks on oil pipelines and infrastructure in Iraq from
summer of 2003 to now. The attacks have been almost continuous:
see Iraq Pipeline Watch. (The
broader analysis on that site is pretty terrible, though.)
Wednesday, December 21, 2005 (Winter solstice)
Another enormous toxic spill has occurred in China, just five
weeks after a massive
chemical spill at a petrochemical plant created an 80 kilometre
long toxic slick which is still working its way along the Amur
River. This time, a cadmium leak has poisoned the
water supplies of more than a million people:
More than a million people in a southern China
have been warned not to drink tap water after a factory dumped
poisonous cadmium into the water supply.
Dangerous levels of cadmium, a carcinogenic
metal widely used in batteries, were found earlier this week in
the Beijiang River near the city of Shaoguan, a city of 500,000
people in China's heavily industrialised Guangdong province, after
leaking from a zinc smelting factory.
Monday, December 19, 2005
I've long thought that industrial collapse will probably occur
in stages, and hand-in-hand with ecological catastrophies. I expect
that rather than a gradual winding down of the economy, a hurricane
here and an ice-storm there will cause damage to the physical
and economic infrastructure that will be increasingly difficult
to repair due to a lack of energy and fuels.
Recent disasters like in New Orleans, and possible near-future
disasters like rolling blackouts and natural gas shortages in
the American Northeast (as mentioned here earlier
this week), are reminders of why it is good to have an "exit
kit", a pre-prepared collection of supplies that will help you
to move quickly to another place, or adapt more smoothly to changing
circumstances, even in the event of a local (if temporary) industrial
collapse.
Some months ago I wrote up a draft
of exit kit checklists and I figure it is about time I shared
it. It has some shortcomings but is relatively thorough.It covers
various types of exit kits, and kits for individuals and groups.
As always, feedback and suggestions are welcome.
The first aid and medical kits in particular I have a lot of
information that I want to add or modify, and I'll do that in
the next couple of weeks.
An article
in Wired Magazine reports:
...multinational corporations are riding high
on the trend toward globalization by taking advantage of India's
educated work force and deep poverty to turn South Asia into the
world's largest clinical-testing petri dish. [...]
"Not only are research costs low, but there
is a skilled work force to conduct the trials," he said. In the
rush to reap profits, Philpott cautions that drug companies may
not be sensitive to how poverty can undermine the spirit of informed
consent. "Individuals who participate in Indian clinical trials
usually won't be educated. Offering $100 may be undue enticement;
they may not even realize that they are being coerced," he said.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
The Independent reports that the world is now hotter than
it has ever been since prehistoric times. There is also more
carbon dioxide in the air than at any time in millions of years:
Professor Sir David King, the [British] Government's
Chief Scientist, has said the last time levels of the gas were
that high was 60 million years ago. And that was during a period
of rapid warming in the Palaeocene epoch, which caused a massive
reduction in life on Earth.
The past year was also the costliest in terms of economic damage
caused by extreme weather, with financial losses of more
than US$200 billion.
Among the many awful effects of drastic climate change, it has
now been observed that polar bears
are drowning because melting ice in the arctic has forced
them to swim much greater distances than before:
New evidence from field researchers working
for the World Wildlife Fund in Yakutia, on the northeast coast
of Russia, has also shown the region's first evidence of cannibalism
among bears competing for food supplies. [...]
As the ice pack retreats north in the summer
between June and October, the bears must travel between ice floes
to continue hunting in areas such as the shallow water of the
continental shelf off the Alaskan coast — one of the most
food-rich areas in the Arctic.
However, last summer the ice cap receded about
200 miles further north than the average of two decades ago, forcing
the bears to undertake far longer voyages between floes.
Friday, December 16, 2005
Instructables is
a relatively new site with a collection of user-made tutorials
in on a great variety of subjects:
Instructables is a step-by-step collaboration
system that helps you record and share your projects with a mixture
of images, text, ingredient lists, CAD files, and more. We hope
to make documentation simple and fast. Show your colleagues how
to operate a machine, show your friends how to build a kayak,
show the world how to make cool stuff.
If you click explore you can find over
200 different neat tutorials for various geeky and DIY projects,
with tonnes of bicycle related technology, as
well furniture and clothing and many other ideas (and off-topic
for this site, even video of a deliciously nerdy 3D
chocolate printer made from LEGO).
Thursday, December 15, 2005
A few recent news articles have predicted a risk of serious oil
and natural gas shortages this winter both in the US and Great
Britain (see Frugal
use of electricity urged [Maine], Winter
may bring rolling blackouts [Boston], Winter
fuel crisis [Britain]).
Now the situation is looking like it might be more urgent than
some have predicted. An article from US News suggests a "winter
fuel crisis of high prices and shortages could darken homes and
factories" across the northeastern United States:
Damage to rigs, pipelines, and processing facilities
means a shortage of natural gas, the fuel that heats 52 percent
of U.S. homes. The industry says 2.3 billion cubic feet per day,
or 23 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's natural-gas production,
will be offline through March. But even before the deadly storms
struck, the country was consuming more natural gas than it produced
and prices were at record highs. Demand grew nearly 16 percent
from 1990 through 2004, driven mainly by the companies that generate
electric power. Policymakers viewed natural gas as cleaner than
coal and more palatable than nuclear, so it was easy to get required
government approvals to build much-needed electric power plants
that run on natural gas. And everyone bet heavily--and incorrectly--that
prices would stay cheap. The United States now relies on Canadian
imports by pipeline and has begun to call on a new source, tankers
from Africa and the Middle East filled with liquefied natural
gas, or LNG. But the imports haven't been enough. "The hurricanes--they
hit a sick patient," says Roger Cooper, executive vice president
of the American Gas Association, representing utilities. "We're
vulnerable. If we were hit in the 1990s, we would not have been
in this situation. But when you are consuming 100 percent of your
supply, there's not much room to maneuver." [...]
Hundreds of factories will be similarly forced
to lay off workers or freeze or cut wages because of high natural
gas prices this winter, says the National Association of Manufacturers.
[...]
The article also notes the risk of "a severe electricity shortage
in the Northeast." And since New York City imports such vast quantities
of energy as both electricity and fuel, it may be at special risk:
A winter failure could prove catastrophic,
because any extended loss of heat could cause water pipes to burst
in residential and commercial buildings alike. Also, the thousands
of "traps" where steam escapes (and billows from manhole covers)
could freeze and fail, causing distribution pipes to crack or
lose pressure. Former Central Intelligence Agency chief Jim Woolsey,
now active on energy issues, argues that parts of the city "could
resemble a frozen New Orleans."
In the state of Pennsylvania a long-standing law against winter
heating shut-offs has been struck down, mean that low-income people
there are much
more likely to have their heat turned off this winter.
Biopiracy is the unauthorized and uncompensated theft of biological
"resources" or knowledge by a private body or corporation. For
example, a private company have attempted to patent the medicinal
use of the spice tumeric without the permission
of, or compensation to, the people who have traditionally cultivated
and used it as a medicine. It has been an increasing problem in
India and other majority
world countries in recent years.
Now a group in India is fighting back by creating a massive
encyclopedia of traditional medicine:
"Soon the world will know the medicine, and
the fact that it originated from India," [Jaya Saklani Kala] says.
With help from software engineers and patent
examiners, Ms Kala and her colleagues are putting together a 30-million-page
electronic encyclopaedia of India's traditional medical knowledge,
the first of its kind in the world. [...]
The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional
Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopaedia of the
country's traditional medicine in five languages - English, French,
German, Japanese and Spanish - in an effort to stop people from
claiming them as their own and patenting them.
I can't wait to see the finished product!
To find out more about biopiracy around the world you can read
Vandana Shiva's excellent book on the subject, Biopiracy : The Plunder of
Nature and Knowledge.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
I've reconfigured the site layout to make the site easier to
use, and draw attention to the most important parts.
One of the most compelling reasons to dismantle industrial civilization
as soon as possible is the so-called "methane burp". Vast quantities
of methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times as potent carbon dioxide,
are frozen in cold locations like the Arctic tundra and the bottom
of the seas. However, industrially-caused global warming could
(and is very likely to) release them, causing a runaway greenhouse
effect and mass extinction. Geologist John Atcheson writes that:
A temperature increase of merely a few degrees
would cause these gases to volatilize and "burp" into the atmosphere,
which would further raise temperatures, which would release yet
more methane, heating the Earth and seas further, and so on. There's
400 gigatons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - enough
to start this chain reaction - and the kind of warming [currently
predicted] is sufficient to melt the clathrates and release these
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
You can find a very detailed examination of the problem at Killer
in our Midst: Methane Catastrophes in Earth's Past and Near Future:
If a methane catastrophe were to happen in
the near future, it is likely that not only would a considerable
percentage of existing plants and animals be killed off, but a
large percentage of the human population as well, as a result
of the climate change and significantly more hostile environmental
conditions. Yet we are heading toward such a catastrophe. It will
happen because we continue to warm the planet by our burning of
carbon fuels, and particularly fossil fuels. It is against the
background of global warming that a methane catastrophe will take
place. [...]
A methane catastrophe is abrupt because it
can be initiated by a major submarine landslide, which can happen
in a matter of days or even hours, or by the venting of vast quantities
of seafloor methane over a period of decades. These events can
take place in a geological eyeblink.
The climate can take a long time to respond to greenhouse gas
emissions, and even if industrial societies stopped emitting greenhouse
gases immediately global temperature would still continue to increase
for a time before levelling off. Unfortunately, that means that
even if industrial civilization collapsed completely next week,
it would still be possible for a massive and rapid methane burp
to happen decades down the road. (So the sooner emissions stop
or are massively reduced, the better.)
I've been sidetracked and behind on my email from this site for
a while. I'm currently trying to work my way through it. If you
emailed me a little while ago, and didn't receive a response,
please feel free to email me again.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Columnist George Monbiot
has an interesting new
article out. After previously writing that the "adoption
of biofuels would be a humanitarian and environmental disaster",
he now writes that he "underestimated the fuel's destructive impact"
and the the situation is worse than even he thought:
Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable
discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to
the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have
been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained
a belief in magic. [...] The idea that we can simply replace this
fossil legacy – and the extraordinary power densities it
gives us &#S211; with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction.
There is simply no substitute for cutting back.
He goes on to underline the futility and destructiveness of efforts
to replace oil with biodiesel in his article "Worse
Than Fossil Fuel".
Monbiot has been writing insightful articles about fossil fuels
and climate issues for some time now. Years ago he observed that
"either we lay hands on every available source of fossil fuel,
in which case we fry the planet and civilisation collapses, or
we run out, and civilisation collapses." ["The
Bottom of the Barrel"]
I've decided to start a blog-style page to keep track of page
changes and site updates, as well as current events, interesting
analysis, and useful resources.
Partly I think it's a useful way of keeping the site more current
when I'm busy, and partly it's just a really useful way of aggregating
information.
At least for now it will be low traffic with a few posts per
week. Maybe we'll see more in the future; if you come across something
you think should be on here, let me
know.
I have some hesitations about the fact that digital activism
doesn't necessarily do anything beneficial to in the actual world,
and I don't want to get bogged down in something I don't feel
is effective. That's why I'd be interested to hear what you
are doing to deal with some of the issues that this site discusses.
Let me know, and I can post it on here and share it with the thousands
of people who read this site each week.
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