Author Archive

Dynamic Duo: Green Energy and Cooperatives

by Editors @ Wednesday, May 9th, 2012. Filed under Economic Democracy, Energy, Green Energy, Solidarity Economy

Renewables Rise at the Grassroots

By Aaron Bartley
SolidarityEconomy.net via Huffington Post

May 7, 2012 - While the oil and gas lobby dominates at the federal level, communities across the United States are making great strides in gaining control of energy production.

They are doing so by advancing an impressive range of commercial-scale renewable projects that are heating homes and powering local businesses from Massachusetts to Oregon.

Municipal utilities, community-based co-ops, universities and other nonprofit institutions in both rural and urban settings are executing wind, solar, geothermal and biomass developments.

When combined with the innovative grassroots efforts to retrofit existing buildings for conservation purposes, these renewable energy production programs are placing community-led efforts at the forefront of American innovation. In the process, they are creating a blueprint that could be used to scale-up nationally when and if we develop a rational Federal energy policy fostering both the growth of the renewable sector and democratization of production on the German model.

In Hull, Mass., residents began a campaign to build large-scale wind turbines in 1996. The first turbine was completed in late 2001 and has produced more than 12 million kilowatts to date. A second, larger turbine, known as Hull II, was erected on top of the town's former landfill in 2006 and in its first year produced enough electricity to power all of the Hull's street lights while providing the town with an additional $150,000 from the sale of excess electricity. Hull's two turbines now generate enough electricity to power 1,100 homes as well as the town's street and traffic lights.

Similar community-controlled wind projects have sprouted up across the state of Iowa, placing seven municipalities and about a dozen school districts in control of their energy destinies. The 1.65 megawatt wind farm at Iowa Lakes Community College is among the largest of these community-developed projects, built in conjunction with the ILCC's launch of the first accredited wind turbine training program in the nation.

The Iowa Lakes Electric Cooperative, which operates independently of the college, provides power to more than 12,000 member-owners in eight rural Iowa counties and has developed two wind farms that generate more than 21 megawatts, projects for which it was named wind cooperative of the year by the DOE.

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Noam Chomsky on the Tasks Ahead

by Editors @ Tuesday, May 8th, 2012. Filed under Economic Democracy, Environment, Labor Movement, Solidarity Economy, Unemployment, Youth

Working Toward Factory Takeovers:

Plutonomy and the Precariat

By Noam Chomsky
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Nation

May 8, 2012 - The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead—because victory won’t come quickly—it could prove a significant moment in American history.

The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s—although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today—nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world—you could see it in the business press at the time—because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, “we’re gonna get out of it.”

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

On the Working Class

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today—the current level of unemployment there is approximately like the Depression—and current tendencies persist, those jobs aren’t going to come back.

The change took place in the 1970s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying factors, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Brenner, was the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. There were other factors. It led to major changes in the economy—a reversal of several hundred years of progress towards industrialization and development that turned into a process of de-industrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued overseas very profitably, but it’s no good for the work force.

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The Robot Revolution Is Just Beginning

by Editors @ Saturday, April 28th, 2012. Filed under Green Industry, High Design, High Road Economics, Technology, Unemployment

MIT’s Rodney Brooks outlines his vision of the future to student entrepreneurs.

By David L. Chandler
MIT News Office

April 24, 2012 - When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s — initially on automobile assembly lines — computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were designed to perform only the most rigidly predetermined set of repetitive movements.

Despite a half-century of exponential growth in computational power, that’s pretty much still the state of industrial robotics.

But according to Rodney Brooks, who last year left a tenured position as MIT’s Panasonic Professor of Robotics to focus on his latest company, that may not be true for much longer.

Brooks’s “lips are sealed,” as The Economist put it last week, about what exactly he and Heartland Robotics are up to in a converted warehouse in South Boston’s Innovation District. But venture capitalists have already gambled $32 million on the premise that whatever it is they produce, it’s going to set a whole new direction in the field.

Brooks, now the chairman and chief technology officer of Heartland Robotics, spoke at MIT on April 20, addressing a recently formed student entrepreneurship group called do.it@MIT.

In robotics, “today’s technology is going to look so incredibly primitive in a couple of decades,” Brooks told a crowd of about 400, mostly students, gathered at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. And, he added, “you’re the ones who are going to invent” the new robotic technologies that will transform the field.

Robots down under

The former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) described growing up in in Adelaide, Australia. While he had never heard of MIT, he was an inveterate tinkerer who became intrigued early on by robotics.

In the early 1960s, Brooks recalled, he built

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‘High Road’ Capital in Clean Energy:

by Editors @ Thursday, April 12th, 2012. Tags: , , ,
Filed under Environment, Green Energy, Green Industry, High Design, Technology

The product: Molds holding half-sections of composite turbine blades fill the floor of TPI Composites' plant in Newton, Iowa. It makes blades exclusively for General Electric wind turbines. Photo by Daniel Cusick.

Wind Turbine and Blade Makers Grow Corn Belt Jobs

By Daniel Cusick
SolidarityEconomy.net via E&E reporter

April 11, 2012, WEST BRANCH, Iowa -- Were it not for the National Park Service's requisite brown sign directing highway travelers to the nearby Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, there would be nothing outwardly remarkable about this gas-and-go exit along Interstate 80 in the heart of Iowa flyover country.

Iowa City, the humming university town 8 miles up the road, offers far more to the discerning tourist. And just beyond is the commercial center of Coralville, where it's easier to book a hotel room or find a restaurant serving Iowa's signature food, pork tenderloin.

Looks deceive. As home to wind turbine manufacturer Acciona Windpower NA, West Branch has emerged as one of a handful of Midwestern communities on the vanguard of the U.S. clean energy economy. The small city of 2,300 has found an economic niche that's the envy of thousands of other small towns across the nation. Turbine blade molds

Herbert Hoover, the former Commerce secretary who later became the 31st president, might swoon at the economic pluck of his boyhood home, where the Spanish energy giant Acciona Energia invested $23 million in April 2007 to build its first North American manufacturing facility.

The decision by Pamplona-based Acciona to anchor its U.S. manufacturing operations at West Branch was made after an extensive review of potential sites, ultimately narrowed to a few locations in the Midwest.

"It was the geographic center of the wind industry," said Joe Baker, Acciona Windpower NA's CEO, who joined the company in 2010. "We're here because this is where the wind blows."

Iowa is also where major railroads running east and west meet major rivers running north and south, giving the state a logistical edge for the shipping of very large pieces of equipment that make up the core components of a wind farm -- the turbines, blades and towers. Its primary interstate highways, I-80 and I-35, are also less congested than those of its eastern neighbor Illinois, aiding in the transport of turbine blades that require special trailers to accommodate their 165-foot-long spans. Convenient to transportation.

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In the Big Picture, Natural Gas and ‘Fracking’ Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle

by Editors @ Wednesday, April 4th, 2012. Filed under Climate, Environment, Green Energy, Third World

How the Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn

the United States into a Third-World Petro-State

By Michael T. Klare
SolidarityEconomy.net via AlterNet.org

April 4, 2012 - The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land.

Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” -- deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. 

But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

Once upon a time, the giant U.S. oil companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the U.S. the planet’s dominant energy producer.  But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil.

Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America -- the Third World -- where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.

Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles.  It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.

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Empowering Workers through Economic Democracy

by Editors @ Saturday, March 31st, 2012. Filed under Economic Democracy, High Road Economics, Labor Movement, Solidarity Economy, Unemployment

By Nyegosh Dube
United Steelworkers Blog

We’re once again witnessing an American election campaign dominated by big money and wealthy candidates.

The Republicans are trying to sell unregulated, low-tax (for the rich), free-market capitalism as the solution to the nation’s economic woes, when in fact it’s exactly this system that has landed the country in deep water. They blame government, when the problem is Big Business and Wall Street – and their influence over government.

Newt Gingrich has accused Mitt Romney of “vulture capitalism,” but Gingrich and other Republicans have done everything in the past 30 years or so to give vulture capitalism free reign. The result is a major economic crisis that has badly affected tens of millions of middle and working class Americans.

What’s the real solution to America’s economic troubles? I believe it’s economic democracy, taking the economy out of the hands of the super-rich 1 percent (and the mega-rich 0.1 percent) who siphon off a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth.

Who makes the big investment, financial, production, and hiring decisions in America? An unaccountable, unelected oligarchy – wealthy owners, shareholders, investors, executives, bankers. They own and control the country’s corporations, banks and investment firms, and have tremendous power over the political system as a result.

Let’s change this by democratizing the economy; for example, turning corporations into worker-owned cooperatives, like Mondragon in Spain (with whom the USW has teamed up – a laudable initiative), and by turning investment into a social mechanism that serves public priorities, rather than those of an oligarchy.

I’d like to go into more detail now about what economic democracy involves and how unions fit into the picture.

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Blimps for Wind Power Above the Birds

by Editors @ Thursday, March 29th, 2012. Filed under Environment, Green Energy, High Design

Steal This Idea: Floating Wind Turbines

to Produce Low Cost Renewable Energy

By Bridget Borgobello
SolidarityEconomy.net via Gizmag

March 28, 2012 - Altaeros Energies has announced the first testing of its Airborne Wind Turbine (AWT) prototype that resembles a sort of blimp windmill.

The test took place at the Loring Commerce Center in Limestone, Maine, USA where the AWT floated 350 feet (107 meters) into the sky and successfully produced power, before coming back to earth in a controlled landing. The turbine was deployed into the air from a towable docking trailer, while demonstrating that it can produce over twice the power at high altitudes than generated at conventional tower height. There are hopes to energy costs can be reduced by up to 65 percent by harnessing stronger winds that occur at and above an altitude of 1,000 feet (305 meters).

"For decades, wind turbines have required cranes and huge towers to lift a few hundred feet off the ground where winds can be slow and gusty," explained Ben Glass, Chief Executive Officer of Altaeros, a company led by alumni of Harvard and MIT. "We are excited to demonstrate that modern inflatable materials can lift wind turbines into more powerful winds almost everywhere—with a platform that is cost competitive and easy to setup from a shipping container."

The AWT features an inflatable shell that is filled with helium, allowing it to float to higher altitudes where winds are often five times more powerful than those closer to the earth’s surface. The employment technology has been inspired by aerostats, the industrial cousins of the well-known blimp, that commonly raise heavy communications and radar equipment into the air. Traditionally aerostats have survived hurricane-level winds and employ safety features that ensure a slow descent to the ground.

The AWT prototype, which has been developed in partnership with Doyle Sailmakers of Salem, Massachusetts, has been designed to have little impact on the environment while creating minimal noise pollution. When deployed, it's claimed that the AWT requires minimal maintenance and will displace expensive fuel used to power diesel generators at remote industrial, military, and village sites.

Source: Altaeros Energies



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One Graphic, 1000 Words: What Is the Solidarity Economy?

by Editors @ Thursday, March 29th, 2012. Filed under Solidarity Economy

 

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21st Century Socialism and Cooperatives

by Editors @ Sunday, March 11th, 2012. Filed under Cuba, Economic Democracy, Marxism, Socialism, Solidarity Economy

Cuba’s Alternative to Privatization

By Marce Cameron
SolidarityEconomy.net via GreenLeft Weekly

March 11, 2012 - Cuban President Raul Castro has urged the Caribbean nation's citizens to contribute to a free and frank debate on the future of Cuba’s socialist project.

For the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), the aim of this debate is twofold: to strive for consensus on a new Cuban model of socialist development and to empower Cuba’s working people to implement what has been decided.

In other words, to advance a socialist renewal process in the face of entrenched opposition from within the administrative apparatus.

It is first and foremost a debate about the economy. A draft policy document, the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines, was submitted to a national debate for three months before to its adoption by the Sixth PCC Congress in April last year.

The core principles and objectives of the draft were conserved, but the final version of the Guidelines was substantially modified on the basis of this public debate.

The PCC said total attendance at the 163,000 local debates held in workplaces, study centers and neighborhoods was about 8.9 million, with many people attending more than one.

More than three million interventions were noted and grouped into 781,000 opinions, about half of which were reflected in the final document. A summary detailing each modification and its motivation, and the number of interventions in favour, was published after the congress.

The Guidelines is not a theoretical document. The government commission responsible for overseeing its implementation has been charged with drafting, as Castro put it, “the integral theoretical conceptualization of the Cuban socialist economy”.

Rather, the Guidelines is a set of principles and objectives that point to a new Cuban socialist-oriented economic model.

Yet implicit in them is a reconception of the socialist-oriented society in Cuba’s conditions.

Transitional society

The ultimate objective of the socialist revolution is a global classless society in which technology enables minimal human labour to produce goods and services, allowing these to be freely distributed to satisfy people’s rational needs.

Socially owned, this system of production would free everyone from the compulsion to work for others. It would allow a flowering of the human personality that is stunted by capitalist exploitation and alienation, both of which are embodied in the capitalist market.

What blocks this transition is not a lack of technology, but private ownership of most productive wealth and the class rule of the corporate rich over society.

The transition from capitalism to socialism is marked by tension between planning and the market. Democratic planning to meet social needs first becomes increasingly dominant, then ultimately the sole determinant of economic activity.

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In Some States, a Real Socialism Will Be on the Ballot—and It’s Not Obama

by Editors @ Wednesday, February 29th, 2012. Filed under 2012 election, African-American, Organizing, Socialism

If You Like, You Can Make Your Vote Count for Socialism

By Scott Tucker
SolidarityEconomy.net via Truthdig.com

Feb. 28, 2012 - Stewart Alexander believes fair elections are worth a fair fight and he’s asking for your vote. The Occupy Wall Street movement encouraged a more honest discussion of class and capitalism in this country, but Alexander is not simply a critic of big banks and high finance. He is a democratic socialist, a military veteran opposed to militarism, an African-American community activist and the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party in 2012.

Alexander believes the candidate of “hope and change” is a defender of the status quo and of corporate rule. In his words:

“The phrase that came to mind immediately upon hearing President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech is ‘too little, too late.’ After spending the last few years coddling the banks and the richest 1 percent, Obama has the nerve to now call for ‘economic fairness.’ To him, this means tweaking payroll taxes and making a rhetorical call to reverse the Bush tax cuts for the rich. For working people in America, real fairness means the right to a job, a guarantee of health care for all and an end to the military-industrial complex. Obama won’t deliver this. That’s why I am running for president against him.”

The boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism require a semblance of representative government, even though Congress has become the front office of the corporate state. Even the most “progressive” reforms of the tax code now proposed by career politicians remain a form of institutionalized robbery of the working and middle classes.

“This is why,” Alexander says, “we propose creating a progressive tax structure where the rich pay far more than the average working person. In a democratic socialist society neither Obama nor Romney would be allowed to pay an effective tax rate of 26 percent and 17 percent, respectively. Corporate taxation, financial gains taxes and personal income taxes will be modernized—all loopholes will be closed and the rich will pay a steep tax on their income. This is what economic fairness looks like to a socialist.”

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Public Banks as Structural Reform

by Editors @ Tuesday, February 28th, 2012. Filed under Banks, Economic Democracy, High Road Economics, Wall Street

Move Our Money: New State Bank Bills

Address Credit and Housing Crises

By Ellen Brown
SolidarityEconomy.net viawebofdebt.wordpress.com

Feb. 26, 2012 - Seventeen states have now introduced bills for state-owned banks, and others are in the works. 

Hawaii’s innovative state bank bill addresses the foreclosure mess.  County-owned banks are being proposed that would tackle the housing crisis by exercising the right of eminent domain on abandoned and foreclosed properties.  Arizona has a bill that would do this for homeowners who are current in their payments but underwater, allowing them to refinance at fair market value. 

The long-awaited settlement between 49 state Attorneys General and the big five robo-signing banks is proving to be a major disappointment before it has even been signed, sealed and court approved.  Critics maintain that the bankers responsible for the housing crisis and the jobs crisis will again be buying their way out of jail, and the curtain will again drop on the scene of the crime.

We may not be able to beat the banks, but we don’t have to play their game.  We can take our marbles and go home.  The Move Your Money campaign has already prompted more than 600,000 consumers to move their funds out of Wall Street banks into local banks, and there are much larger pools that could be pulled out in the form of state revenues.  States generally deposit their revenues and invest their capital with large Wall Street banks, which use those hefty sums to speculate, invest abroad, and buy up the local banks that service our communities and local economies.  The states receive a modest interest, and Wall Street lends the money back at much higher interest.

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Marx, Keynes and China Today

by Editors @ Friday, February 10th, 2012. Filed under China, Economic Democracy, Marxism, Socialism
Deng Xiaoping and John Maynard Keynes

12 02 05 Deng & Keynes

By John Ross Jiao Tong University, Shanghai

Introduction

The international importance of China’s economy is twofold. The first is practical - the scale of China’s economic growth, its global impact, and the consequences for the improvement of the social conditions of China and the world’s population. The second is theoretical, including the potential international applicability of conclusions drawn from China’s economic policies.

Regarding the latter it is necessary to clearly state that no country can mechanically copy another. As China’s political leaders and economic theorists stress its economy has unique ‘Chinese characteristics’. This was formulated as a cardinal principle by the initiator of China's economic reform, Deng Xiaoping: ‘To accomplish modernization of a Chinese type, we must proceed from China’s special characteristics.’  (Deng, 30 March 1979) Therefore China must: ‘blaze a path of our own.’ (Deng, 21 August 1985).

As recently reiterated by Justin Yifu Lin, Chinese Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank: ‘we can never be too careful when it comes to the application of a foreign theory, because with different preconditions, no matter how trivial they seem, the result can be very different.’ (Lin, 2012, pp. 66 - emphasis in the original) In that sense, therefore, there is no ‘Chinese model’. However as Lin simultaneously states: ‘Some may think that the performance of a country as unique as China, with more than 1.3 billion people, cannot be replicated. I disagree. Every developing country can have similar opportunities to sustain rapid growth for several decades and reduce poverty dramatically if it exploits the benefits of backwardness, imports technology from advanced countries, and upgrades its industries.’ (Lin, 2011)

There is, however, no contradiction between these different statements. The fundamental structural elements of which an economy is composed (consumption, investment, savings, primary industry, secondary industry, tertiary industry, trade, money etc.) are universal. However the particular way in which these elements combine and are interrelated in any economy is unique and entirely specific both in place and time – which is why no country can copy another’s economic policy, while it can learn from other economies. As analyzed below, China has solved in practice problems stated in general macro-economic theory. For that reason such elements, in very different forms and combinations, are of major importance for economic policy elsewhere. However the specific forms and combinations in which such policies are applied are entirely unique both in each country and at different points in time.

The practical impact of China’s economic rise have been considered extensively elsewhere.1 The focus of this article is on the theoretical economic issues. In particular it aims to relate China’s economic performance to Western economic theory which will be more familiar to most readers.

China and macro-economic theory in Keynesian and Marxist terms

China’s ‘reform and opening up’ process under Deng Xiaoping was, of course, formulated in a Marxist economic framework. It can indeed be clearly outlined in those terms – see the appendix below, for a more detailed account of Chinese discussions on these issues see (Hsu, 1991), but an alternative statement in Western economic terms, those of Keynes, is considered here.

Stated briefly in Marxist terms, China’s reform policy included a critique of Soviet economic policy that this had made the error of confusing the ‘advanced’ stage of socialism/communism, in which the regulation of the economy is ‘for need’, and therefore not market regulated, with the socialist, or more precisely ‘primary’ developing stage of socialism, during which the transition from capitalism to an advanced socialist economy takes place and in which market regulation takes place. This transition should be conceived as extending over a prolonged period. The final formulation arrived at was that China’s was a ‘socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics’. Contrary to suggestions by some writers, for example (Hsu, 1991), such an analysis is in line with Marx’s own writings although, as shown below, it is not necessary to be a Marxist understand it - a more detailed analysis is given in the appendix.

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How Can You Build A Smart City?

by Editors @ Thursday, February 9th, 2012. Tags: , , ,
Filed under Environment, High Design, High Road Economics, Urban Problems, Youth

Step one: Make your city appealing to young innovators.

Step two: Make your city a major investor in the technologies they build.

By Boyd Cohen
SolidarityEconomy.net via Fast Company

In prior discussions about smart cities, including the global rankings I published on Co.Exist a few weeks ago, I believe many of us have under-emphasized the importance of cities in creating an enabling environment for emerging technology companies.

This was a key issue addressed at the first-ever Cities Summit held in Vancouver earlier this month. Mayors of 35 cities around the world joined with executives and consultants in an intense day and a half of panels discussing open cities, digital cities, urban laboratories, smart-city financing, and startup cities. Editor’s Note

Vancouver didn’t quite make it into Co.Exist’s list of the 10 smartest cities in the world, and San Jose was nowhere to be found. But given their current paths, perhaps we’ll see them next year.

One of the most interesting conversations was about "Startup Cities." Nanci Klein of San Jose spoke about the five different industrial areas that the city is promoting, as well as the role of the city in supporting the local startup community. One of San Jose’s early insights was addressing the bureaucratic hurdles in their procurement process by creating a demonstration program that bypasses some of the traditional constraints that usually prevent the government from innovating.

In 2008, San Jose created a “Framework for Establishing Demonstration Partnerships” which allows the city to work towards a more sustainable future--including the creation of 25,000 new green jobs--by enabling local companies to use municipal facilities as urban laboratories to test out new clean tech, sustainability, and mobility technologies. Rather than having to jump through the typical arduous and bureaucratic hoops, the demonstration allows the fast-tracking of pilot projects from local companies. "Rather than having to jump through the typical arduous and bureaucratic hoops, the city fast-tracks pilot projects."

San Jose’s website explains: “The City may consider partnerships that temporarily utilize City owned land, facilities, equipment, rights-of-way and data, provide financial assistance and/or absorb some costs for project implementation, require agreement to non-disclosure statements and request City Council to exempt the project from certain City Policies.”

Throughout the two-day summit, I reflected on how smart cities not only use technology in ways that improve the quality of life and reduce the ecological and carbon footprint of their citizens, but also how they can leverage their procurement dollars to serve as urban laboratories and incubation engines.

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Cyber-Tactics: From Seuss’s Lorax to the Bank of America

by Editors @ Sunday, February 5th, 2012. Tags: , ,
Filed under Environment, Global Justice, Youth

After Recess: Change the World

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
SolidarityEconomy.net via NYTimes

Feb. 4, 2012 - A BATTLE between a class of fourth graders and a major movie studio would seem an unequal fight.

So it proved to be: the studio buckled. And therein lies a story of how new Internet tools are allowing very ordinary people to defeat some of the most powerful corporate and political interests around — by threatening the titans with the online equivalent of a tarring and feathering.

Take Ted Wells’s fourth-grade class in Brookline, Mass. The kids read the Dr. Seuss story “The Lorax” and admired its emphasis on protecting nature, so they were delighted to hear that Universal Studios would be releasing a movie version in March. But when the kids went to the movie’s Web site, they were crushed that the site seemed to ignore the environmental themes.

So last month they started a petition on Change.org, the go-to site for Web uprisings. They demanded that Universal Studios “let the Lorax speak for the trees.” The petition went viral, quickly gathering more than 57,000 signatures, and the studio updated the movie site with the environmental message that the kids had dictated.

“It was exactly what the kids asked for — the kids were through the roof,” Wells told me, recalling the celebratory party that the children held during their snack break. “These kids are really feeling the glow of making the world a better place. They’re feeling that power.”

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From Dirty to Green–and the Sooner, the Better

by Editors @ Saturday, January 28th, 2012. Tags: , ,
Filed under Environment, Green Energy, Green Industry, Technology, militarism

The Essentials for the Necessary

Transition to a Renewable Energy Economy

By Jon Rynn
SolidarityEconomy.net via AlterNet.org

Jan 28, 2012 - Fossil fuels are going to disappear, whether we like it or not. Petroleum, natural gas, and coal are becoming scarcer, harder to extract and a greater danger to the global climate.

If we proceed with business-as-usual, energy companies will take advantage of increasing scarcity to dominate the world economy by vacuuming up more money from the 99%. They will be able to ally with military and financial institutions to construct an energy-military-financial complex that could eventually reduce most of the rest of us to a form of debt peonage.

On the other hand, if we could possibly elect a government that does what governments do best – build infrastructure – we can avoid a world of global warming and economic collapse by building enough wind farms, solar panels, and geothermal systems to power our economy and ignite a sustainable, broad-based period of economic growth. Of course, this will require a sea-change in the direction of the political system, along the lines of the Occupy movement, but there is too much at stake to throw up our hands in despair.

The unfolding energy drama presents progressives with several dilemmas. Some are suspicious that oil scarcity can be used as a ruse by the oil companies and speculators to spike prices. Roger Altman recently argued that a larger supply of fossil fuels will lead to less international tension. More generally, progressives sometimes fear that advocating for less oil use will be seen by the public as an attack on the American Dream of a car in every garage and a single family home for every family.

But in addition to problems of scarcity and extraction, fossil fuels are bringing us towards extremely dangerous climate change. We need to have some answers or else the Right will simply keep up with the chant of “Drill baby drill.” It's time to counter with, “Build, build, build!"

Dirty fuels Create an Unsustainable economy

The question of the future of the supply of fossil fuels is not an easy one to answer. Oil producing nations, for instance, are not at all transparent about their supplies. Technologies constantly change, and so do environmental hazards. However, if we look at the current state of fossil fuel industries, it should be clear that we are in trouble.

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