Excellent:

Cars are the new smoking.

Hattip: Tim O’Reilly

Super cool! An electric chopper. From the flickr set posted by COOP:

L1090690.JPG

Originally uploaded by COOP666.

UPDATE: Coop’s description of riding the bike:

To make it go, you merely twist the throttle, no clutch or gears, and the damn thing is almost totally silent, the chain whirring on the sprocket the only real noise at full throttle. It is pretty unreal to go fast in total silence like that…

I found this little eye-opener on BBC World:

Former US military leaders have called on the Bush administration to make major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

In a report, they say global warming poses a serious threat to national security, as the US could be drawn into wars over water and other conflicts.

They appear to criticise President George W Bush’s refusal to join an international treaty to cut emissions.

Bruce Sterling has written an op-ed for the WaPO on the green future:

In 1998, I had it figured that the dot-com boom would become a dot-green boom. It took a while for others to get it. Some still don’t. They think I’m joking. They are still used to thinking of greenness as being “counter” and “alternative” — they don’t understand that 21st-century green is and must be about everything — the works. Sustainability is comprehensive. That which is not sustainable doesn’t go on. Glamorous green. I preached that stuff for years. I don’t have to preach it anymore, because it couldn’t be any louder. Green will never get any sexier than it is in 2007. Because, after this, brown will start going away.

It is a short, educational and amusing read.

When you start to look at climate change you realize that the stake are high. But I never fully understood how high:

For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable future will be global warming. Other threats like terrorism may well be damaging, but no other conceivable threat or combination of threats can possibly destroy our entire system. As the recent British official commission chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern correctly stated, climate change “is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.”

The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report’s recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.

If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.

That’s everything folks, your strawberries in winter at one end and your democratic rights at the other.

On the plus side… I am reminded of a comment by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn). In a recent podcast he said that the best market to enter into was one with no competition and the second best was one that had slothful competitors. Our traditional systems are full of slothful competitors who are ostensibly trapped with a particular world view (one which Stern says is responsible for “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen“).

If everything is at stake, then everything is up for questioning. Time to tackle some BIG questions I think :-D.

src: The Washington Note.

… or $25 mil to help solve the problem:

Millions of pounds are on offer for the person who comes up with the best way of removing significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson launched the competition today in London alongside former US vice-president Al Gore.

…

He said if the planet was to survive, it was vital to find a way of getting rid of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

He said he believed offering the $25m (£12.5m) Earth Challenge Prize was the best way of finding a solution.

The Celsias Blog is rapidly becoming one of the top climate change blogs in the world:

New Zealand-based global warming blog, www.celsias.com/blog, has zoomed from obscurity to the top 0.1% of worldwide blogs, according to the blog-ranking organization, Technorati. And it has done it in less than eight weeks.

Well done Craig! Awesome job.

Check out the technorati data.

Deep within the guts of the latest Viridian Note is a reference to Celsias! Geekier than me standing on a Segway and very cool!

Plant hardiness data, 1990 v 2006. Roughly speaking, areas suitable for growing traditional food crops are slowing moving north.

Global Warming Trend

Originally uploaded by jbdelong.

Found this over at Salon:

…the 10 executives, representing major utilities, aluminum and chemical companies and financial institutions, said mandatory reductions are needed and that “the cornerstone of this approach” should be a cap-and-trade system.

The officials, expected to elaborate on their plan at a news conference later Monday, include the chief executives Alcoa Inc., PB America Inc., DuPont Co., Caterpillar Inc., General Electric Co., and Duke Energy Corp.