Gil Friend

Lester R. Brown and Jonathan G. Dorn suggest that it may be "The Beginning Of The End For Coal," and offer a "detailed timeline" of A Long Year in the Life of the U.S. Coal Industry.

They comment:

With concerns about climate change mounting, the era of coal-fired electricity generation in the United States may be coming to a close. In early 2007, a U.S. Department of Energy report listed 151 coal-fired power plants in the planning stages in the United States. But during 2007, 59 proposed plants were either refused licenses by state governments or quietly abandoned. In addition, close to 50 coal plants are being contested in the courts, and the remaining plants will likely be challenged when they reach the permitting stage.

What began as a few local ripples of resistance to coal-fired power plants is quickly evolving into a national tidal wave of opposition from environmental, health, farm, and community organizations as well as leading climate scientists and state governments. Growing concern over pending legislation to regulate carbon emissions is creating uncertainty in financial markets. Leading financial groups are now downgrading coal stocks and requiring utilities seeking funding for coal plants to include a cost for carbon emissions when proving economic viability.

On March 11, 2008, Representative Henry Waxman of California introduced a bill to ban new coal-fired power plants without carbon emissions controls nationwide until federal regulations are put in place to address greenhouse gas emissions. If Congress passes this bill, it will deal a death blow to the future of U.S. coal-fired power generation. Yet even without a legislative mandate for a moratorium, the contraction in financial support for new coal-fired power plants is escalating toward a de facto moratorium. The timeline that follows is witness to what may well be the beginning of the end of coal-fired power in the United States.

When I wrote No More Coal? seven months ago -- arguing that it made more economic sense to write off the industry than to continue to subsidize it -- I thought people might see it as an extreme argument. Little did I suspect that so much momentum would build so quickly.

Van Jones, founder of Green For All and Ella Baker Center co-founder, holds his own on the Colbert Report -- talking about green collar jobs, and "building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty".

Thank you Gristmill!

I'll be speaking at tonight at Yuri's Night 08 -- NASA's World Space Party-- or more precisely, 189 parties in 50 countries on 7 continents on 2 worlds. (I'll be at the one at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field.)

The theme: Radical Technology for a Sustainable World.

My topic: Regional Sustainability Dashboards: How Sports, Neighbors and Cybernetics Can Help Turn the Tide on Global Warming -- and the "Climate Game Plan" initiative. (Background here, here and here.)

I'm going on at about 11:30pm (despite what it says on the program), sharing the stage with Will Wright, Jaron Lanier and other cyberluminaries. See you there! (By his socks shall you know him.)

In a disturbing piece titled How Hunger Could Topple Regimes, Time magazine comments:

World Bank president Robert Zoellick noted last week that world food prices had risen 80% over the past three years, and warned that at least 33 countries face social unrest as a result.

This is a reminder that the biofuels strategy can't be answer if demand keeps growing. Substitution of renewable resources for fossil resources is a step in the right direction, but insufficient in itself. The real leverage will be in redesign of systems to meet growing human needs with ever less stuff.

The technical challenges of radical resource efficiency are hard enough, but they're tractable -- moreso if we look not just at things, but their interaction in systems, and systems of systems (challenging enough in an investment world focused on IP).

The real hard part will be inventing business models that profit from decoupling and dematerialization.

" When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? "

- John Maynard Keynes

Lots on my mind these days, but not much time to write about it. (Business is busy!)

You can check in on some of what I'm thinking about at the EcoCity World Summit (Masonic Auditorium, San Francisco) this Friday (Apr 25), where I'll be speaking on:

Regional Sustainability Dashboards:
How Sports, Neighbors and Cybernetics Can Help Turn the Tide on Global Warming

(Things are moving fast; the info at the end of that link is no longer fully up to date. But soon will be.)

Jane and I are at a presentation by UC Berkeley geographer Gray Brechen about the incredible legacy of the New Deal and the Works Progress Administration on the public life of the United States -- and the incredible legacy it left us, of so much of the fabric of our lives that we take for granted, and that has been looted and dismantled -- "murdered," in Brechen's words -- by the "shrink [government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" crowd.

It strikes me that there may be some Roosevelt in Obama. FDR didn't have the New Deal in his platform, apparently, but experimented his way into in -- convening the widest possible diversity of smart folks and encouraging them to try, fail, learn and try again -- knowing that "the noblest motive is the public good". Without, of course, a monstrous military budget draining the life out of most everything else.

It's all around you, but you don't see it. You use it every day, but you don't know it. It may have saved your own family seventy-five years ago when your grandparents joined with millions of others to build it.

It's California’s public landscape of the New Deal — schools, hospitals, parks, roads, sewers, airports, amphitheaters, bridges, golf courses, aqueducts, power stations, city halls, art works, and more —constructed by a half dozen federal agencies. They were created by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to lift the country out of the Depression. We have been enjoying and prospering from this legacy ever since.

California’s Living New Deal Project is a collaborative venture documenting and interpreting the impact of New Deal programs on the State. We invite you to join the California Historical Society, the California Studies Center, and U.C. Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Library in identifying and discussing these indispensable public buildings and sites. Through this rediscovery, we will explore the history of the New Deal and consider timeless questions of civics in a living democracy. Learn more.

It has long seemed to me that the recently fashionable attacks on "government" are attacks on the commons, the common wealth and the common will -- and on the very notion of people joining together to meet their own needs. But it is our cooperation to create the worlds we aspire to that makes human society -- and perhaps that makes us human.

PS: Brechen is building an inspiring photo archive of WPA projects -- "the public landscape of the New Deal." There are bound to be projects right where you live, maybe right where you are right now. Snap some pictures -- with people in them, please -- and send them to him (or, even better, post them to flickr, tagged WPA.)