[p2p-research] a must read essay on climate change, why the battle is already lost, and how cities can still save us

[Michel Bauwens]

Vinay,

any chance that you formulate this in a reaction I can post?

Michel

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 7:10 PM, Vinay Gupta <hexayurt at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://nanosolar.com
> Panel cost of manufacture is said to be $0.30 per watt.
>
> Panel cost at retail is around $1.
>
> Price of a machine which will print panels: $0.16 per panel per year.
>
> There's no energy crisis. If we work on scaling plastic solar panel
> manufacture, we'll cut human CO2 emissions by 40% (the proportion currently
> produced by coal) in 20 years because it will simply be uneconomic to keep
> the coal plants burning.
>
> Really, seriously, it's time to focus on solutions, and that's not about
> people whining about behavior change and regulation, it's about taking the
> technologies which will sort it out and getting them into terawatt-scale
> mass production as fast as possible.
>
> We have a solution. It's done. Let's get people informed.
>
> Vinay
>
> PS: http://konarka.com thinks their panels will be about 1/3 the price of
> nanosolar. In about a year or so we'll see if they can deliver on that.
>
>
> --
> Vinay Gupta
> Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
>
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>
> http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
> http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
>
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>
> "If it doesn't fit, force it."
>
> On Feb 11, 2009, at 12:01 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
> *(Eric and Nikos: I'm publishing this on the 17th and would welcome your
> commentaries)
> *
>
> *
> *
>
> *Essay: Who Will Build the Ark? The Utopian Imperative in an Age of
> Catastrophe<http://brechtforum.org/who-will-build-ark-utopian-imperative-age-catastrophe?bc=>by Mike Davis in Telepolis
> *
>
>
> **
> *From
> http://brechtforum.org/who-will-build-ark-utopian-imperative-age-catastrophe?bc=
>
> *
>
> *This is one of the most riveting and interesting essays I have read in a
> long while. I strongly recommend it as a indispensable must-read.*
>
> This essay by Mike Davis has two parts.
>
> In the first, Pessimism of the Intellect, he reviews the evidence for
> climate change, as well as attempts to change the situation and finds that
> most worst-case scenarios imagined by the scientists have already been
> exceeded, which means that we may have already reached the tipping point
> which makes dislocation inevitable. Because the solution would demand an
> enlightened reaction by the privileged, it is highly unlikely that the
> necessary changes will take place. In fact, there is evidence that the
> elites are already preparing lifeboat scenarios for their entrenched
> survival amidst global chaos.
>
> In the second part, the author switches to the Optimism of the Imagination
> and finds an unlikely possibility: the greening and democratic reform of
> city life. He outlines both the negative and positive aspects of cities from
> an environmental point of view.
>
> *Here are the positive ones:*
>
> *urban growth preserves open space and vital natural systems*
>
> *well-defined boundaries between city and preserved countryside;*
>
> *waste is recycled, not exported downstream*
>
> *strict regulation of automobile use*
>
> *environmental economies of scale in transportation and residential
> construction;*
>
> *the substitution of public luxury for privatized consumption;*
>
> *the socialization of desire and identity within public space;*
>
> *affordable access to city centers from periphery*
>
> *egalitarian public services*
>
> *large domains of public or non-profit housing*
>
> *ethnic and income heterogeneity at fractal scales of city*
>
> *powerful capacities for progressive taxation and planning in the public
> interest*
>
> *high levels of political mobilization and civic participation*
>
> *public landscapes designed with children, seniors and special needs in
> mind*
>
> *rich dialectics of neighborhood and world culture;*
>
> *the priority of civic memory over proprietary icon;*
>
> *spatial integration of work, recreation and home-life."*
>
> *Mike Davis:*
>
> *1.*
>
> *"Such sharp demarcations between 'good' and 'bad' features of city life
> are redolent of famous attempts in the previous century to distill a
> canonical urbanism or anti-urbanism: Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, Frank
> Lloyd Wright and Walt Disney, Corbusier and the CIAM manifesto, the 'New
> Urbanism' of Andres Duany and Peter Calthorpe, and so on. But no one needs
> 'urban theorists' to have eloquent opinions about virtues and vices of the
> urban built environments and the kinds of social interactions they foster or
> discourage. Especially here in Munich, with a rich conjugation of different
> periods and conditions.*
>
> *What often goes unnoticed in such moral inventories, however, is the
> consistent affinity between social and environment justice, between the
> communal ethos and a greener urbanism. Their mutual attraction is magnetic
> if not inevitable. The conservation of urban green spaces and waterscapes,
> for example, serves simultaneously to preserve vital natural elements of
> urban metabolism while providing leisure and cultural resources for the
> popular classes. Reducing suburban gridlock with better planning and more
> public transit turns traffic sewers back into neighborhood streets while
> reducing greenhouse emissions.*
>
> *There are innumerable examples and they all point toward to a single
> unifying principle: namely, that the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far
> more than any particular green design or technology, is the priority given
> to public affluence over private wealth. As we all know, several additional
> Earths would be required to allow all of humanity to live in a suburban
> house with two cars and a lawn, and this obvious constraint is sometimes
> evoked to justify the impossibility of reconciling finite resources with
> rising standards of living. Most contemporary cities, in rich countries or
> poor, repress the potential environmental efficiencies inherent in human
> settlement density. The ecological genius of the city remains a vast,
> largely hidden power.*
>
> *But there is no planetary shortage of 'carrying capacity' if we are
> willing to make democratic public space, rather than modular, private
> consumption, the engine of sustainable equality. Public affluence -
> represented by great urban parks, free museums, libraries, and infinite
> possibilities for human interaction - represents an alternative route to a
> rich standard of life based on earth-friendly, carnivalesque sociality.
> Although seldom noticed by academic urban theorists, university campuses are
> often little quasi-socialist paradises around rich public spaces for
> learning, research, performance, and human reproduction.*
>
> *The utopian ecological critique of the modern city was pioneered by
> socialists and anarchists, beginning with Guild Socialism's dream
> (influenced by the bioregionalist ideas of Kropotkin, and later, Geddes) of
> garden cities for re-artisanized English workers, and ending with the
> bombardment of the Karl-Marx-Hauf - Red Vienna's great experiment in
> communal living - during the Austrian Civil War in 1934. In between are the
> invention of the kibbutz by Russian and Polish socialist, the modernist
> social housing projects of the Bauhaus, and the extraordinary debate over
> urbanism conducted in the Soviet Union during the 1920s.*
>
> *This radical urban imagination was a victim of the tragedies of the 1930s
> and 1940s. Stalinism, on one hand, veered toward a monumentalism in
> architecture and art, inhumane in scale and texture, that was little
> different from the Wagnerian hyperboles of Albert Speer in the Third Reich.
> Postwar Social Democracy, on the other hand, abandoned alternative urbanism
> for a Keynesian mass housing policy that emphasized economies of scale in
> high-rise projects on cheap suburban estates, and thereby uprooted
> traditional working-class urban identities.*
>
> *Yet the late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century conversations
> about the 'socialist city' provide invaluable starting points for thinking
> about the current planetary crisis. Consider, for example, the
> Constructivists. El Lissitzy, Melnikov, Leonidov, Golosov and the Vesnin
> brothers are probably not familiar names, but these brilliant socialist
> designers - constrained by early Soviet urban misery and a drastic shortage
> of public investment - proposed to relieve congested apartment life with
> splendidly designed workers clubs, people's theaters, and sports complexes.
> They gave urgent priority to the emancipation of proletarian women through
> the organization of communal kitchens, day nurseries, public baths, and
> cooperatives of all kinds. Although they envisioned workers clubs and social
> centers, linked to vast Fordist factories and eventual high-rise housing, as
> the 'social condensers' of a new proletarian civilization, they were also
> elaborating a practical strategy for leveraging poor urban workers' standard
> of living in otherwise austere circumstances.*
>
> *In the context of global environmental emergency, this Constructivist
> project could be translated into the proposition that the egalitarian
> aspects of city life consistently provide the best sociological and physical
> supports for resource conservation and carbon mitigation. Indeed, there is
> little hope of mitigating greenhouse emissions or adapting human habitats to
> the Anthropocene unless the movement to control global warming converges
> with the struggle to raise living standards and abolish world poverty. And
> in real life, beyond the IPCC's simplistic scenarios, this means
> participating in the struggle for democratic control over urban space,
> capital flows, resource-sheds, and large-scale means of production.*
>
> *I think the inner crisis in environmental politics today is precisely the
> lack of bold concepts that address the challenges of poverty, energy,
> biodiversity, and climate change within an integrated vision of human
> progress. At a micro-level, of course, there have been enormous strides in
> developing alternative technologies and passive energy housing, but
> demonstration projects in wealthy communities and rich countries will not
> save the world. The more affluent, to be sure, can now choose from an
> abundance of designs for eco-living: but what is the ultimate goal: to allow
> well-meaning celebrities to brag about their zero-carbon lifestyles or to
> bring solar energy, toilets, pediatric clinics and mass transit to poor
> urban communities?"*
>
> *2.*
>
> *"Tackling the challenge of sustainable urban design for the whole planet,
> and not just for a few privileged countries or social groups, requires a
> vast stage for the imagination, such as the arts and sciences inhabited in
> the May days of Vhutemas and the Bauhaus. It presupposes a radical
> willingness to think beyond the horizon of neo-liberal capitalism toward a
> global revolution that reintegrates the labor of the informal working
> classes, as well as the rural poor, in the sustainable reconstruction of
> their built environments and livelihoods.*
>
> *Of course, this is an utterly unrealistic scenario, but one either
> embarks on a journey of hope, believing that collaborations between
> architects, engineers, ecologists, and activists can play small, but
> essential roles in making an alter-monde more possible, or one submits to a
> future in which designers are just the hireling imagineers of elite,
> alternative existences. The planetary 'green zones' may offer pharaonic
> opportunities for the monumentalization of individual visions, but the moral
> questions of architecture and planning can only be resolved in the tenements
> and sprawl of the 'red zones.'*
>
> *From this perspective, I believe that only a return to explicitly utopian
> thinking can clarify the minimal conditions for the preservation of human
> solidarity in face of convergent planetary crises. I think I understand what
> the Italian Marxist architects Tafuri and Dal Co meant when they cautioned
> against "a regression to the utopian," but to raise our imaginations to the
> challenge of the Anthropocene, we must be able to envision alternative
> configurations of agents, practices and social relations, and this requires,
> in turn, that we suspend the politico-economic assumptions that chain us to
> the present.*
>
> *I speak, of course, as an aging Socialist, who still believes in the
> self-emancipation of labor with the same fervor with which Governor Palin
> believes in shooting caribou. But utopianism isn't necessarily
> millenarianism, nor is it confined just to the soapbox or pulpit. One of the
> most encouraging developments in that emergent intellectual space where
> researchers and activists discuss the impacts of global warming on
> development has been a new willingness to advocate the Necessary rather than
> the merely Practical. A growing chorus of expert voices warn that either we
> fight for 'impossible' solutions to the increasingly entangled crises of
> urban poverty and climate change, or become ourselves complicit in a de
> facto triage of humanity.*
>
> *Thus I think we can be cheered by a recent editorial (11 September 2008)
> in Nature. Explaining that the "challenges of rampant urbanization demands
> integrated, multidisciplinary approaches, and new thinking,' the editors
> challenge the rich countries to finance a zero-carbon revolution in the
> cities of the developing world. "It may seem utopian," they write, "to
> promote these innovations in emerging and developing-world megacities, many
> of whose inhabitants can barely afford a roof over their heads. *
>
> *But those countries have already shown a gift for technological
> fast-forwarding, for example, by leapfrogging the need for landline
> infrastructure to embrace mobile phones. And many poorer countries have a
> rich tradition of adapting buildings to local practices, environments, and
> climates - a home-grown approach to integrated design that has been all but
> lost in the West. They now have an opportunity to combine these traditional
> approaches with modern technologies."*
>
> *Similarly, the 2007/2008 United Nations Human Development Report warns
> that the 'future of human solidarity' depends upon a massive aid program to
> help developing countries adapt to climate shocks. The Report calls for
> removing the "obstacles to the rapid disbursement of the low-carbon
> technologies needed to avoid dangerous climate change. … the world's poor
> cannot be left to sink or swim with their own resources while rich countries
> protect their citizens behind climate-defence fortifications." *
>
> *"Put bluntly," it continues," the world's poor and future generations
> cannot afford the complacency and prevarication that continues to
> characterize international negotiations on climate change." The refusal to
> act decisively on behalf of all humanity would be "a moral failure on a
> scale unparalleled in history."*
>
> *If this sounds like a sentimental call to the barricades, an echo from
> classrooms and studios of forty years ago, then so be it. Because if you
> accept any of the evidence presented in the first half of this talk, then
> taking a 'realist' view of the human prospect, like seeing Medusa's head,
> would simply turn you into stone."*
>
>
> --
> The P2P Foundation researches, documents and promotes peer to peer
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>
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>
> Basic essay at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; interview at
> http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/09/p2p-very-core-of-world-to-come.html
> BEST VIDEO ON P2P:
> http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=4549818267592301968&hl=en-AU
>
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>
>
>


-- 
The P2P Foundation researches, documents and promotes peer to peer
alternatives.

Wiki and Encyclopedia, at http://p2pfoundation.net; Blog, at
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net; Newsletter, at
http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p

Basic essay at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; interview at
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/09/p2p-very-core-of-world-to-come.html
BEST VIDEO ON P2P:
http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=4549818267592301968&hl=en-AU

KEEP UP TO DATE through our Delicious tags at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens

The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
http://www.shiftn.com/
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