Superstruct is a web-based massive multiplayer game produced by the Institute for the Future to think through some of the possible challenges of the future.  It's your chance to participate in a scenario planning exercise on a global level.  Should be an interesting experiment.

Below are directions to the preview.

Thomas Casten of Recycled Energy Development spoke at MIT on September 9, 2008.  He's the author of Turning Off the Heat: Why America Must Double Energy Efficiency to Save Money and Reduce Global Warming and has been working on efficiency and local energy generation for thirty years.

What he had to say was hopeful and exciting.  It wasn't sexy.  It wasn't new technology.  It was nuts and bolts and common sense. He talked about efficiency, specifically efficiency in electrical generation.  He believes, based upon thirty years of successful business practice, that the USA can significantly reduce costs and carbon emissions by applying already available technology to existing power plants today.  

This is not a fantasy by a theorist but a business proposal from someone with a long track record.  The only reasons we haven't done it already are regulatory barriers, a failure of imagination, and a cultural prejudice towards the new and sexy over the old and boring.

Thomas Casten was talking about Second Law energy economics.  I loved it because he used the word "exergy" but that was only because he was at MIT.

Now that Obama has evidently won the tire gauge battle it is time to press that advantage.  The Obama campaign or another group should produce commercials that go farther.  Even a few interested people could make such ads and get them placed on TV through an organization like SaysMeTV, the group that the Get FISA Right group is now working with to place their ads.

Here's the draft for one such spot I'd like to see:

Even John McCain admits that keeping your tires properly inflated will save you gas and save you money.  Immediately.  
You can save more gas and more money through proper maintenance of your vehicle:  
change your oil regularly,
replace your air and oil filters,
get regular tune-ups,
and keep your wheels aligned.  
We know these measures work.  
Today.  
Sometimes the change we can believe in is the change that is simply common sense.

I went to the reception for the International Development Design Summit at MIT on Wednesday, August 6.  It is the second year for this project which brings together people from all over the world to work together on what we used to call appropriate technology, affordable technology for people in the poorest countries of the world, innovative solutions for persistent problems that almost everybody can use.

This year over 50 students worked on nine different projects for four weeks.  They didn't produce papers.  They produced prototypes and presented them to an SRO capacity audience in the Bartos Theater at the Media Lab.

Their motto is "Help me and let me help you."  The idea of co-creation, collaboration between the designers and the users, is at the core of their method.  It shows.

I wasn't going to read Elizabeth Kolbert's "New Yorker" piece on the Danish island of Samsø because I'd covered it already and because I heard her talk on the radio;  but a friend sent me a copy and I found that the second half of the article was all about the 2,000-Watt Society, a very interesting idea and a concept I'd been looking for.

2,000 Watts per person per year (or 17,520 kWh) is what we produce now.  It is a baseline for sustainability, at least, this is what the scientists of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology believe.  This 2,000 Watts includes all activities - working, eating, traveling, and investment in common infrastructure.  Currently, Switzerland is a 5,000 Watt society and most other Western European countries are 6,000 Watt societies.  The USA and Canada consume 12,000 Watts per person per year.

"At first glance, the objective of a 2,000-watt society appears unrealistic, but the necessary technology already exists,"  says Moritz Leuenberger, head of the Swiss Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy, and Communications.

This house has been solar heated for nearly 28 years now, the glazed black box on the south wall pumps heat into the living room whenever the sun shines, consistently and reliably.  It was built in the Riverside neighborhood of Cambridge, MA in 1980.

This solar collector is an air heater that takes air from the kitchen,

moves it past the black absorber plate with a fan,

and then exhausts the solar heated air back into the living room.  

Sometimes on sunny winter days, the people who live there have to flip the damper and dump the collector's air outside to prevent overheating.  

It has worked unfailingly all these years without any major maintenance, even for the fan and the thermostat that turns it on and off.

crossposted at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/7/5/153147/7413
and
http://www.globalswadeshi.net

I met Robert Lange at MIT at a lecture on international development.  He's a Brandeis physics professor who has been working since November with Jongowe village on the island of Tumbatu about a mile from Unguja, one of the major islands of Zanzibar.  There are no roads, electricity, cars, or bikes on Tumbatu but there are two villages.  Jongowe is one of them and consists of 625 households with several thousand people.

Through the International Collaborative for Science, Education, and the Environment, Inc. (The  ICSEE) and its Village Projects, Professor Lange is helping the village install more efficient stoves then certifying and selling the resulting carbon credits to buy small solar electric systems, a process already proven in Eritrea and Ghana.

These solar electric systems cost about $100.

Diary rescue by Migeru

For nearly two decades, there was a nonviolent army, an army of satyagrahis, organized along military lines.  It was made up of Pashtun people of the then Northwest Frontier of the British Empire, now Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same places where the Taliban remain active today.  They were called Khudai Khidmatgars, Servants of God, or Red Shirts because of the color of their uniforms, and were established by Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Badshah Khan, an associate of Gandhi's.

Badshah Khan started building schools for his people, girls as well as boys, in 1910 and by 1930 there were enough graduates to make up the Khudai Khitmatgars.  The organization lasted until 1947 when it was outlawed and disbanded by the Pakistani government.  

Nonviolent Soldier of Islam:  Badshah Khan, a Man to Match His Mountains by Eknath Easwaran
Tomales, CA:  Nilgiri Press, 1984/1999
ISBN 1-888314-01-x