We won’t have the money or cheap energy needed to fix this slowly collapsing legacy of steel, concrete, and macadam. We will fill the potholes, and rebuild the occasional bridge, but we are going to have to imagine new transportation and energy approaches that leave the current infrastructure to fall down.

via Our Failing Infrastructure | Underpaid Genius.

Stowe Boyd has some solid thoughts on our infrastructure situation.  The issue goes beyond transportation and energy, though they attract most of the attention. Water supplies, drainage, and flood control are equally vulnerable to deterioration – and our national water systems are in notably poor shape.  Certainly conservation can help, and while “smart” materials can also help in terms of   future utility, so can some older tech.

This comes at a time when a leading Republican candidate for President says she believes the states should be responsible for repairs. It’s hard not to read that as indicating that infrastructure spending will continue to be blocked at the national level.

At the same time, there is increasing pressure on cash-strapped municipalities to privatize their infrastructure, as Dylan Ratigan has reported so well. It’s not unreasonable to assume that, absent Federal funds, these sales will tend to occur in the net-deficit states. Many of which, not so coincidentally, are  more dependent on transportation, flood control, and energy infrastructure than most of the rest of the country.

The privatization trend is about as non-resilient economically for a region as it can get. Private investment is designed to make a profit, and that means additional funds flowing out of the region, rather than being reinvested locally. At best, this makes a region marginally poorer – at worst, it turns it into an economic colony.  Any municipal region in these circumstances needs to think hard about how to deal with the likely fallout in the near future.

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Except the graphic to the left is from the report they referenced. It’s not that each of those markets is growing faster than California – it’s that altogether they FINALLY are.

A bit depressing that Dixie is still nearly solar-free, and New Mexico is not taking advantage of one of the few renewable assets it has to the degree it should. Poor states don’t do solar, apparently.

http://www.blogdash.com/publication/blog_claim/blog_claim.png?s=e671626c0d5d7b6432f0ea034d3ed877

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via The Land Art Generator Initiative: Fields of Windstalks Harvest Kinetic Energy From the Wind.

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Group IB, Russian cyber-security research company, publishes [ru] Russian Cyber-Crime Market in 2010 report. According to the research, Russian hackers commit nearly 35 percent of all cyber-crimes. DDOS-attacks (from $90 to $300 per day of attack) are falling in price which makes this method of cyber-warfare more accessible to online actors.

Sourced from: Global Voices in English

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Water has long been the poor relation in the sustainable development family.   Although diarrhea caused by dirty water is the second biggest killer of children under five, funding for water and sanitation declined from an already low 8% of total development assistance to just 5% between 1997 and 2008, according to a 2010 UN report.  And most of that does not go to the world’s poorest countries, or people.  Providing water and basic sanitation to those most in need clearly remains a low political priority.  But without it communities will never escape poverty, and money spent on other sectors, such as education and health, may ultimately be in vain.

Turning the Tides on World Water Day.

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‎”But already they’ve proved the simple technique can knock down one of the major roadblocks to fuel cell use: cost.

Platinum, which represents at least a quarter of the cost of fuel cells, currently sells for about $65,000 per kilogram. These researchers say their activated carbon nanotubes cost about $100 per kilogram.”

Sourced from: EurekAlert! – Chemistry, Physics and Materials Sciences

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‘Where does the sea water drain?’ he asked. ‘This is now radioactive waste water. Has there been any measurement of its radiation effect?

‘I am interested to know how this water is being disposed, if it is being disposed or just allowed to drain to sea. That is the hidden part of this catastrophe.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1368357/Japan-tsunami-Staff-evacuated-smoke-rises-nuclear-reactor.html#ixzz1HGjcIDU4

This is, indeed, a hidden part of the disaster. Another issue is the land itself – if the soil is or has been saturated with seawater since the tsunami, particles can disperse horizontally in a much wider area than the plant.

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“I think we may just be scratching the surface of what can be achieved by combining existing knowledge and data from the climate and agriculture communities,” Lobell said. “Hopefully this will help catalyze some more effort in this area.”

http://news.discovery.com/earth/climate-change-and-corn-a-bad-combo-in-africa-110321.html

While the results of this are not promising for the staple crop in East Africa, I want to highlight the way these things came together. Often it’s cross-discipline collation or the juxtaposition of two or more pieces of information that yields useful answers. And how to do that – the skills and practices of  ”be a generalist” – aren’t much taught anymore. Bucky Fuller used to point out that the US Naval Academy once taught generalism, but it too has succumbed to the specialist notion.

The loss of generalists is increasingly expensive in lost opportunities. But because these are “forward” losses instead of direct financial losses, they don’t show up on anyone’s balance sheet.  if our society was run by generalists, or strategists, we might have noticed that a while ago. Since it’s run by economists, we’re completely unaware of the issue.

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Posted via web from Genius Now

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