Totally Boom/Doom Solartopian Green by 2030

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/26/2115/

An interesting article with a possible postive outcome.


Published on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 by Common Dreams
Totally Boom/Doom Solartopian Green by 2030
by Harvey Wasserman
We are all now desperate runners in the epic race between doom and boom. It’s a global- warmed dead heat between apocalyptic ecological collapse, versus a Solartopian green-powered prosperity.

Defeat is defined by a death spiral that decimates our planet. Victory means the wealth, jobs and organic well-being that can come with renewables, efficiency and a post-pollution prosperity.

A middle ground is likely along the way, but would almost certainly happen by dividing humankind even further between rich and poor. That polarization is ultimately unsustainable, and will demand correction, one way or the other.

The “tipping point” where climate chaos becomes self-accelerating and irreversible may be as close as ten years away. Some believe we’re already over the edge.

The global economy runs parallel. Any system addicted to huge inputs of irreplaceable, monopolized resources whose prices are soaring must soon collapse.

The cure is clear—a technological, economic and social revolution built around the transition to green power.

Despite the nay-sayers, such a Solartopian transformation is physically and financially do-able. But can we do it by 2030?

The answer: Ecologically, and economically, we have no choice.


http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/26/2115/

:think: :think: :think: :think: :think: :think:

interesting stuff . . .

http://www.solartopia.org/AreYou.php

To save the Earth, are YOU a Solartopian?
May 29, 2007

In the global campaign to save the Earth, a shared vision is vital.

" Solartopia" foresees a democratic, green-powered 21st Century civilization. Our economic and ecological survival depend on it.

Technologically, the vision rests on four simple pillars:

1. Total renunciation of all fossil and nuclear fuels. In a sustainable, survivable future, they are a 20th Century pox, neither green nor clean.

2. All-out conversion to renewable energy, led by the "Solartopian Trinity" of wind, solar and bio-fuels. Mother Earth gives us the natural power we need.

3. Complete commitment to maximum efficiency, including revived and solarized mass transit and passenger rail systems. Our automotive "love affair" is a hoax.

4. Zero tolerance for production of anything that cannot be re-used or recycled, including chemical-based food. Solartopia is an organic, post-pollution world.
Along with wind, solar and bio-fuels, Solartopian energy comes from the waves, currents, rivers and tides; from the geothermal heat beneath the earth's crust; from the interplay of solar-heated water at the oceans' surface and the frigid deep.
Hydrogen and electricity are the chief power carriers, but they are always produced by clean Solartopian means.
The efficiency revolution drives Solartopian energy consumption levels ever downward. Compact fluorescent bulbs are transcended by Light Emitting Diodes. An evolving armada of efficiency devices, many invented in backyards and garages, spreads at warp-speed through a hyper-linked global community.

Advanced methods of organic food production get us past the "silent spring" of chemical pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and genetically modified crops.

The ever-evolving Internet fuels a geek-driven torrent of Solartopian innovation---and the raging e-network of green grassroots democracy (http://solartopia.org/Links.php).

In our 21st Century global economy, renewable technologies are already on the whole more profitable than the obsolete King CONG "alternatives" of coal, oil, nukes and gas.

But from bio-fuels to wind, from hyper-efficiency to organic farming, no green technology is without costs and limitations. All demand vigilance, limitation, regulation and innovation to stay clean, current and useful.
When done right, the Solartopian revolution spawns the decentralized wealth, full employment, and community-based economic power of a prosperous, socially democratized society.

Homes, buildings, communities and farms control their own energy. Power and prosperity are widespread, not concentrated in the hands of King CONG and its corporate minions.

Indeed, Solartopia can't happen without transcending some primary barriers:
5. Corporations can no longer enjoy human rights without human responsibilities. Revised corporate charters must break the grip these giant economic organizations have held on our political, economic and ecological systems.

6. Population is the province of women, who in Solartopia are empowered, educated and equally paid. In synch with Mother Earth, they bring us the number of children She wishes to accommodate.

7. Where everyone has a right to the basic necessities of life, including free education, nobody starves. The Solartopian rich may be plentiful, but no civilization thrives unless all have access to sustenance and dignity.

8. Big Money is barred from the campaign process. Free and fair elections and referenda power non-violent community-based evolution. The universal right to ballots on recycled paper means accurate vote counts and recounts for all.

Solartopia demands that business serve society and the planet, rather than vice versa. Capitalism may be one thing, but Enron cannibalism is quite another. Balancing competition and the profit motive with human and ecological need, the Solartopian vision demands accountability, efficiency, service and justice.

The switch to renewables defunds global terrorism. Atomic reactors are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction. Shutting them ends the fear of apocalyptic disaster by both terror and error. Transcending coal and cars cures much of global warming.

But everywhere we turn, the King CONG corporations build barriers. They use government subsidies and media disinformation to prolong their failed investments in obsolete technologies and the fossil/nuke fuels that run them.
Inseparable from those fuels are authoritarian power structures that produce wars for oil, financial imbalance and social chaos, leading to biological extinction.

By contrast, Solartopia is the diverse, democratic, organic place we go to survive and thrive.
Born of hyper-linked grassroots non-violence, empowered by post-pollution prosperity in synch with Mother Earth and all her children, Solartopia is the 21st Century vision of our necessary future.

Are YOU a Solartopian?

http://www.solartopia.org/AreYou.php

I agree with everything Wasserman talks about with the possible exception of his inclusion of biofuels as a sustainable energy source.

His dream will not come to fruition in this cycle of civilization, though. This is due to a combination of the genetic drivers of human behaviour, the extent to which this civilization cannot function without fossil fuels, the fact that there are still large quantities of easily extractable fossil fuels remaining, and the entrenched power of those who call the shots. However, the social and physical environment in which the next cycle of civilization arises will be vastly different.

When the planet's resources have been depleted sufficiently, the social structures they now support will have a chance to decline and the human population will reduce itself to a sustainable number. That reduced population will be faced with physical constraints that will preclude building a new civilization based on the kind of rampant exploitation we have seen in the current one. They will also need to develop a set of values that will even make it possible to have a civilization in a such a resource-poor, pollution-rich and climatically altered world. These values will necessarily be those now espoused by the world's largest social movement, the two million or more independent, globally distributed, locally acting environmental and social justice groups that are surreptitiously terraforming planetary society under our very noses - the movement I call the antibodies in Gaia's bloodstream. Their value set includes cooperation, consensus, sustainability, egalitarianism and respect for other life - all traditional values of matriarchal societies.

It is pointless to wish for Wasserman's dream to come true in general this time around. However, I think he has had a glimpse through a crack in time and has caught a view of what things will look like in a couple of hundred years. What we need to do now is to set up as many isolated outposts as possible that embody these values, even though they will not be able to save the world we know. They will act as seeds for a saner and less profuse re-flowering of the perennial we call humanity. There is no greater act we can perform for the planet and the species on it, including our own.