Has BP Ruined the Entire Atlantic Basin?

This video paints a dismaying picture:



Via Mother Jones, which says:

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) just released this horrifying animation of how ocean currents may carry all the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. According to their computer modeling of currents and the oil, the spill "might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer."

"I've had a lot of people ask me, 'Will the oil reach Florida?'" says NCAR scientist Synte Peacock in a statement accompanying the animation, which he worked on. "Actually, our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida, with impacts that have yet to be understood."

The models show oil hitting Florida's Atlantic coast within a few weeks, then moving north as far as about Cape Hatteras, N.C., before heading east.

One question I haven't seen answered is: at what level of dispersion is the oil no longer harmful? I assume that if a hundred million gallons were distributed evenly throughout the world's oceans, it wouldn't even be noticeable, and would biodegrade in no time. But somewhere between that, and the actual conditions we have - giant plumes and enormous sheens concentrated in the northern Gulf of Mexico - is the threshhold beyond which dispersion takes care of the problem. I don't know what that threshhold is - whether, for instance, the quantities shown swirling about in the mid-Atlantic in this animation would still be dangerous to ecosystems. At the least, though, this looks bad for pretty much the entire coast of Florida.

Whither the Spill?

Thither, according to an oceanologist from the University of South Florida College of Marine Science Ocean Circulation Group, which has modeled the forecasted trajectory of the spill:



The narrator is expecting the slick to get caught up in the loop current, which feeds into the Gulf Stream, which runs up the East Coast of the US. Says he:

It's not looking good for the whole Gulf and for the East Coast, really... All these arrows are pushing it toward the loop current and once that happens, well, all bets are off... I hope that the people on the east coast are getting prepared for this, and Florida 'cause it looks like it's gonna come your way. It looks like it's not just a Gulf Coast deal.

At the end he gives two pieces of advice: to say our prayers, and to keep the pressure on BP to "spend every dime they have" on the clean-up. I humbly encourage my readers to put more energy into the latter.

Spill, Baby, Spill

Proving that you don't have to have centralized government control of your economy to wreak environmental havoc, that oil rig that blew up last week off the coast of Louisiana is causing problems:



So says Eric Berger:

Officials from Louisiana to Florida remain concerned about oil leaking from a Transocean rig that exploded last week in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11.

As crews attempt to stop the flow of an estimated 42,000 gallons a day escaping from a pipe about 5,000 feet below the surface, the oil slick has been slowly expanding across the Gulf.

Satellite images have helped officials track the slick as it swirls around the Gulf. Here's the best, most recent image captured by NASA's Aqua satellite.

That's a thousand barrels of oil a day, leaking up from the bottom of the Gulf where the rig's pipe snapped off (those are technical terms). And it looks increasingly likely that the only thing that will work to stem the leakage is to drill a relief well, but that'll take months. (Part of the problem is that the well is 5,000 feet down, which complicates any potential engineering solution, as you can imagine - but those are the sorts of problems you run into when you're scrounging under the earth's proverbial sofa for the every last drop of fossil fuel resources you can find.) The slick is already 80 miles by 36 miles across and likely to reach land within days. This thing could get very ugly for the Gulf Coast.

UPDATE: Now it's 100 x 45 miles.



From the Times-Picayune.

So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish

The Aral Sea is just... about...



Gone. Another image of the sea from March 2010:



From the Huffington Post:

The drying up of the Aral Sea is one of the planet's most shocking disasters, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday, as he urged Central Asian leaders to step up efforts to solve the problem.

Once the world's fourth-largest lake, the sea has shrunk by 90 percent since the rivers that feed it were largely diverted in a Soviet project to boost cotton production in the arid region.

The shrunken sea has ruined the once-robust fishing economy and left fishing trawlers stranded in sandy wastelands, leaning over as if they dropped from the air. The sea's evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles.

The story of the Aral Sea is the sort of thing you want to point to when people argue that technology and human ingenuity will save us from our own self-inflicted crises. The Shrinkage started with the Soviet Union's plan to divert the Amu Darya and Syr Darya to grow a bunch of cotton in the middle of the desert. Hilariously, the Soviets knew the Sea would vanish as a result of this plan - but they did it anyway:

''It was part of the five-year plans, approved by the council of ministers and the Politburo,'' said Aleksandr Asarin, an expert at the Russian State Hydroproject Institute who angered his bosses by predicting, in 1964, that the sea was headed for catastrophe. ''Nobody on a lower level would dare to say a word contradicting those plans,'' he said, ''even if it was the fate of the Aral Sea.''

Apparently Kazakhstan is working to revive what is now the North Aral Sea with some success. There's less hope for the southern sliver of the sea that remains. The water, already so salty as to have been rendered lifeless, continue to recede from the stranded fishing villages and rusting husks of Soviet-era fishing boats that used to subsist on the sea's bounty.

Who's Your Polluter?

The New York Times has another one of their ridiculously information-rich maps which shows all of the 200,000+ facilities around the US that have pollution discharge permits, viewable by state:



The orange dots are facilities that have been cited for violations, and you can mouse-over them to see who they are and how many times they've been cited.

All this information is thanks to the 1972 Clean Water Act. It makes you think: thank heavens for that progressive Nixon administration! If not for them, there'd be no Clean Water Act and no EPA. And given the paralysis of the political system these days, as the wealthy classes become ever more shameless about claiming their ever-larger slices of an ever-shrinking pie, even as a sense of social responsibility towards the society which allowed them to garner that wealth continues to erode, it seems very unlikely that political initiatives like that would be able to pass now.

An accompanying article starts off this way:

Jennifer Hall-Massey knows not to drink the tap water in her home near Charleston, W.Va. In fact, her entire family tries to avoid any contact with the water.

Her youngest son has scabs on his arms, legs and chest where the bathwater — polluted with lead, nickel and other heavy metals — caused painful rashes. Many of his brother’s teeth were capped to replace enamel that was eaten away.

Neighbors apply special lotions after showering because their skin burns. Tests show that their tap water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system.

“How can we get digital cable and Internet in our homes, but not clean water?” said Mrs. Hall-Massey, a senior accountant at one of the state’s largest banks.

Imagine if we didn't have the Clean Water Act.

The Happy Planet Index Redux

Not long ago, I did a post about the Happy Planet Index, a quantification of 'ecological efficiency' from the New Economics Foundation. Roughly speaking, it measures the satisfaction of basic human needs per unit of resource consumption, so that the "happiest" countries are those that achieve higher standards of living while minimizing environmental impacts.

Well, now the NEF has come out with a rather souped-up HPI 2.0, complete with think-tanky 64-page report. Here's the new map:




The NEF regards the equivocation of economic growth with human progress as a foolish fallacy, a position The Map Scroll heartily endorses. They make this observation in their report (pdf), which includes this fascinating paragraph:

For most of human history, economic growth was a minor phenomenon: a side effect, where it existed, of the pursuit of other goals. It only attained its quasi-mystical role when GDP was placed atop the podium of indicators with the development of the United Nations system of National Accounts in 1947. At that time, focusing on productivity growth made sense. Much of the world needed to be rebuilt following the war, and that required growing economies. Furthermore, economic growth helped avoid distributional debates. The rising voice of the working classes demanded more of the material cake. The only way elites could respond to that voice without having to give up anything themselves was by growing the cake.

Our needs have changed since then, but "systems carry their own momentum, and even the wealthiest countries still pursue economic growth as if they were still struggling to recover from the war."

And the report notes this: "once our basic material needs are met, more concumption tends to make little difference to our well-being." This should be obvious and common-sensical; the marginal utility of consumption or wealth decreases dramatically once our basic physiological and safety needs are met. But the negative environmental externalities of consumption only become very onerous when we're talking about further consumption; the man compensating for his low self-esteem and need for acceptance by driving his Hummer does far more damage to the planet than the Malian woman getting inoculations for her infant, though the latter's actions do much, much more to increase happiness and limit suffering. But of course, buying a Hummer contributes orders of magnitude more to economic growth than does getting inoculations. On one hand, this is tragic: all our Hummer-driving and cheeseburger-eating is destroying the planet, and at the same time isn't even contributing much to our collective well-being. On the other hand, it also represents an enormous opportunity: if we could just see this fact, and re-order our priorities in accordance with it, we have a lot of room to limit our negative impacts on the environment while maintaining, or even improving, our level of well-being.

So that's the insight behind the HPI, and it's reinforced by some of their findings. Life expectancy correlates with higher GDP/capita, but not perfectly; Cuba, which is much poorer than the US, has a life expectancy that's nearly as high. And, the report says, "the most important gains in terms of both life expectancy and life satisfaction occur over the first 10,000 pounds of GDP distribution - beyond that there is little systemic difference between nations." This is evident in the map of life satisfaction by country:



The country with the greatest value of "happy life years" (a combination of life expectancy and satisfaction) is Costa Rica, with a GDP/capita about one-fourth that of the wealthiest countries. Even countries like Vietnam and China do better than the fairly wealthy Portugal.

The measures are set against the ecological footprint, a measure of resources used per capita. This is measured in terms of global hectares; the world average is 2.1 global hectares per person. The poorest countries have the lowest gha consumption; the largest ecological footprint is Luxembourg's, at 10.2 gha. The US is third, at 9.4. Here's the map of ecological footprints:



There's a broad correlation between wealth and ecological footprint, but it's not like all wealthy countries are interchangeable on this metric. South Korea uses only 3.7 gha, and the Netherlands uses only 4.4.

The map at the top of this post assigns countries a valuation of 'good,' 'middling,' or 'bad' for each of the three components of the index: life expectancy, life satisfaction, and ecological footprint, with a further very bad category for countries with exceptionally large ecological footprints. Countries that score poorly on life ecpectancy and satisfaction, like many of the poorest countries in Africa, show up as red even though they have small footprints. Coutries with high life expectancy and satisfaction, but very large footprints, are also red.

Comparing happy life years to ecological footprint yields some interesting regional patterns:



Where you want to be on this chart is in the upper left-hand corner: high on the happy life years scale and low on the ecological footprint scale. Most of the countries that come closest to that ideal are Latin American, with a few East Asian and Middle Eastern countries in that group as well. Sub-Saharan Africa tends to be low on both scales, and Western nations tend to be high on both.

Overall, the report says, the world has a life expectancy of 68.3 years, a life satisfaction of 6.1, and an ecological footprint of 2.4, for an overall HPI score of 49 out of 100. In other words, as a global society we're overshooting our resource limits, and we're not even all that happy. Hopefully we'll learn to look to places like Costa Rica to see how to find a balance between our desire to lead happy and fulfilling lives and our need to preserve that same opportunity for future generations, rather than blithely drive our SUVs over the precipice of catastrophe. And when you frame it that way, the choice we ought to make seems obvious. If only we weren't humans, I'd feel pretty confident that we'd make the right one.

More on the Happy Planet Index

As promised, here's more on the Happy Planet Index. This is from their map of Europe (note that it uses a different scale than the world map for the sake of intra-regional comparison):



Note that the European HPI is calculated differently than the world HPI: the Euro version uses carbon footprint as the denominator in the index, whereas the global HPI uses overal ecological footprint (details here). (And can I make a modest suggestion to the folks at the New Economics Foundation? If you have two indexes - one for Europe and another for the world - that don't use the same variables, perhaps you shouldn't use the same name for those two indexes.) As is just about always the case, the Scandinavians lead the way, followed by Italy, Spain, and a few others. (Presumably they aren't leaders in a global sense, though; Europe, though thriftier than the US, still consumes a lot by global standards.)

Now back to the global HPI. As I mentioned in the previous post, I like the concept behind this index. As with the Human Development Index, it seeks to take a broader measure of well-being than can be obtained by simply looking at cumulative economic activity. In particular, it assigns a value to ecosystems and the life of the planet which, being that which sustains us, is of some importance. Another way to put this is that the HPI is an economic indicator which incorporates certain external costs - the costs of economic activity which are not paid by those directly involved in a given transaction. Economists - especially those legions that have come out of the University of Chicago - for some reason tend to be incredibly myopic about such things. I don't know why; I guess they find mathematical models more elegant than the real world, with all its knotty complications, but those models don't do so well at taking into account the big picture - the social and environmental consequences of economic activity.

So I appreciate the effort here. But at first glance some of the results seemed counter-intuitive, e.g., the "happiest planet" countries being located in Central America. As a commenter said in the previous post, "The real question is Mexico. American companies move to Mexico to avoid our environmental laws, most Mexicans are quite poor, and while the government isn't necessarily mistreating them, drug cartels evidently are, but Mexico is ecologically efficient?" My concerns were along similar lines - it seems that these countries are subject to considerable ecological exploitation. But actually, the HPI accounts for this in their measure of ecological footprint:

The ecological footprint measures how much land area is required to sustain a given population at present levels of consumption, technological development and resource efficiency, and is expressed in global-average hectares (gha). The largest component elements of Footprint are the land used to grow food, trees and biofuels, areas of ocean used for fishing, and ­ most importantly ­ the land required to support the plant life needed to absorb and sequester CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.

Footprint takes account of the fact that in a global economy people consume resources and ecological services from all over the world. Therefore, a Chiquita plantation in Costa Rica will not count towards Costa Rica’s Footprint, but rather towards the Footprint of those countries where the bananas are consumed. For this reason, a country’s Footprint can be significantly larger than its actual biocapacity. The Footprint of a country is thus best understood as a measure of its consumption, and its worldwide environmental impact.

That seems sensible. And it helps to explain the situation for countries like Mexico, where the ecological costs of a lot of industrial and agricultural activity are borne by the US and Canada (as far as the HPI is concerned, at least!), Mexico's NAFTA buddies which are the destination for the lion's share of Mexican goods. But this means that the maps of HPI aren't reflective of the ecological health or sustainability of practices in a country; they're more like a measure of countries' responsibility for ecological costs (which in the real world may often be borne in countries with some of the highest HPI scores).

And for all that, most of the low-consuming countries of Africa still score very low on the HPI:



Not only do they not consume much, their consumption contributes disproportionately little to their life expectancy and well-being.

The Happy Planet Index

The New Economics Foundation has come up with something called the Happy Planet Index that categorizes countries based on their relative ecological efficiency. It doesn't actually have much to do with happiness, per se, and it's not to be confused with this map, but it's a snappy enough title. Here it is:



So what do they mean by ecological efficiency? And what do those colors indicate? Well, here's some of what they have to say:

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is an innovative new measure that shows the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered around the world. It is the first ever index to combine environmental impact with well-being to measure the environmental efficiency with which country by country, people live long and happy lives.

The Index doesn’t reveal the ‘happiest’ country in the world. It shows the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens. The nations that top the Index aren’t the happiest places in the world, but the nations that score well show that achieving, long, happy lives without over-stretching the planet’s resources is possible. The HPI shows that around the world, high levels of resource consumption do not reliably produce high levels of well-being (life-satisfaction), and that it is possible to produce high levels of well-being without excessive consumption of the Earth’s resources. It also reveals that there are different routes to achieving comparable levels of well-being. The model followed by the West can provide widespread longevity and variable life satisfaction, but it does so only at a vast and ultimately counter-productive cost in terms of resource consumption.

Sound a bit vague to you? Here's the HPI described in somewhat more concrete terms:

The HPI reflects the average years of happy life produced by a given society, nation or group of nations, per unit of planetary resources consumed. Put another way, it represents the efficiency with which countries convert the earth’s finite resources into well-being experienced by their citizens.

Still dubious? Try this:



There: variables expressed in Greek. So you know it's serious.

Actually, the principle here seems like a good one to me; I'll have a bit more to say about it later. For now I only ask: could Guatemala and Honduras really be among the most "ecologically efficient" countries in the world? I don't know - I'm really just asking. But it does surprise me a bit.

Organic Farms in the US

Via The Map Room, The New York Times maps organic farms in the US.



For comparison, the Times also has a map showing the locations of all farms in the US:



Says the Grey Lady:

The map of organic farms in the United States is clustered into a few geographic centers, a strikingly different pattern than the map of all farms, which spreads densely over many regions, breaking only for the Rockies and Western deserts [sic].

Areas in the Northeast and Northwest have many small organic farms that sell produce directly to consumers. Large organic farms, which some call organic agribusiness, have flourished in California.

I leave it to the reader to decide if there's a significant correlation between the map of organic farms and this map.

Green Energy Potential in the US

The Natural Resources Defense Council has a new ugly map of green energy potential in the United States.



In the map layer shown above, darker shades of blue indicate higher wind energy potential. You can click on wind turbine icons to see details on individual facilities; it's a lot of good information, even if it is unattractively presented. It also has layers showing cellulosic biomass, biogas, and solar energy potential. The detail on the left shows the very high solar potential in the Southwest. The NRDC also has profiles on a few selected states, with more profiles in the offing.

The map complements this one, which they released a month ago, that looks at areas that would be harmed by the development of new renewable energy infrasructure. It appears to be the continuation of an effort on the part of the NRDC to try to define the terms of the debate as plans to invest in renewable energy go forward. Seems like a savvy thing to do.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory also has several good maps on green energy potential.

Environmentalists vs. Environmentalists

The Natural Resources Defense Council has worked with Google to create a Google Earth mapping tool which shows environmentally sensitive areas of the American West.



The NRDC, like a lot of environmental groups, is especially concerned about the potential damage to wildlife and ecosystems of developing the region's prodigious energy potential. The irony is that much of this energy is in the form of wind and solar power - the very resources which need to be developed if we have any chance of doing anything about global warming. Obama has made some pretty bold moves to invest in those renewable energy resources in the west: a big chunk of the recent stimulus was devoted to building up the infrastructure that is sorely needed if that energy is to be brought to market.

The problem is that that infrastructure - the wind towers and solar panels, and all the high-voltage electrical lines that will connect them to the national grid - can cause problems for wildlife. From a New York Times article on the NRDC map:

The wind industry publishes photos of cows grazing placidly around towers, and argues it is compatible with nature. But Brian A. Rutledge, executive director of the Audubon Society of Wyoming, said wildlife and domesticated species were different. “We have species of birds, for example, that won’t nest within 200 yards of a road, period,’’ he said. Some prairie birds will not venture anywhere near a vertical object like a tower or a power-line pylon, he said, probably because they are genetically imprinted to avoid natural vertical features, like trees, where predators perch. The lesser prairie chicken, he said, will not cross under a power line, even between widely spaced towers. “It becomes like a river down the middle of their population base,’’ he said.

One such species is the sage grouse, the range of which sits right in the middle of an area where a lot of new transmission lines are likely to be needed.

As the Times puts it, the map amounts to the "battle lines being drawn" by the NRDC and like-minded organizations - a declaration of where they intend to fight development. It depicts areas that are prohibited, such as natural parks and wilderness areas, where devlopment is already prohibited; restricted areas, where rules on the books limit development, often because of threatened species; and "areas that should be avoided" - where, in other words, development may be permitted, but the NRDC is prepared to fight it.

I'm sympathetic to the NRDC, and we should all hope that development takes place in the most ecologically sensitive way possible, yadda yadda. But this framing, from the Times article, really seems to miss the forest for the trees (or the world for the forest):

And while the battle lines are quite literally available with a few mouse clicks, the intent is not entirely hostile, with the national groups recognizing that the issue is environmental balance, pitting prairie species like the greater sage-grouse against animals like the polar bear, which lives on ice that is melting because of global warming, some of it probably caused by coal-fired power plants that wind and sun could partly replace.

What a trivialization of what global warming is all about! Polar bears pulling a dodo is the least of our worries when it comes to global warming. It's not the sage-grouse vs. the polar bear; it's the sage grouse versus massive ecological calamity and the possible meltdown of entire ecosystems, not to mention famine and the mass dislocation of human populations. I'm all for sage or any other kind of grouses; but if legal wrangling over their protected status holds up the development of one of the few promising options we have for getting off of fossil fuels, then I will be mighty annoyed.

But because I am a fair man, I will let the sage-grouse have the last word. Here is a detail of their range from the Google Earth map.

On the Other Hand, We Did Already Save the World Once...

All right, so that last post was a bit of a downer. Here's some news of a more upbeat nature, from Science Blogs: we've saved the ozone layer. Some researchers

ran two scenarios in the same climate model, and charted the evolution of stratospheric ozone in each. The first model was based on the current (low) emissions of ozone-destroying chemicals resulting from the implementation of the Montreal Protocol; in the second, rather poetically named "world avoided" model, CFC emissions increase by 3% a year ("business as usual") after 1974, when the ozone alarm was first sounded (and was presumably ignored in this parallel universe).

Their results are published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. This is what they found:



In this animation, put together by the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, reds denote high concentrations of stratospheric ozone; blues denote lower concentrations. The Earth on the right is what would have happened if the Montreal Protocol, which banned CFCs, had not been signed. By the middle of this century, the difference is pretty shocking, as you can see in these images captured by Chris Rowan:






So, no future of dressing our children in astronaut suits to walk a scalded earth. That's one dystopia avoided; only a few more to go...

CO2

An incredible map animation of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States:



The Purdue U. researchers who put this together are also working to recapitulate the effort on a global scale with something they call the Hestia Project. Should be even more fascinating.

Meanwhile, in other CO2-related news, Western forests are dying at an increasing rate:

Jan 23rd, 2009 | GRANTS PASS, Ore. -- Trees in old growth forests across the West are dying at a small, but increasing rate that scientists conclude is probably caused by longer and hotter summers from a changing climate.

While not noticeable to someone walking through the forests, the death rate is doubling every 17 to 29 years, according to a 52-year study published in the Friday edition of the journal Science. The trend was apparent in trees of all ages, species, and locations.

"If current trends continue, forests will become sparser over time," said lead author Phillip J. van Mantgem of the U.S. Geological Survey's Western Ecological Research Center.

The West is a brittle environment to begin with. And this sort of thing has the potential to catalyze some nasty feedback loops:

These thinner and weaker forests will become more vulnerable to wildfires and may soak up less carbon dioxide, in turn speeding up global warming, they said...

Warmer temperatures may be encouraging pine beetles and other organisms that attack trees, the researchers said. That, along with the stress of prolonged droughts, may be accelerating death rates.

Frightening. And we're still waiting for the first wisp of evidence that humanity is remotely capable of dealing with this issue...

UPDATE: Paul Rosenberg has more on the Western forests.

High-Speed Rail and the Economic Stimulus

Well, the US House's economic stimulus plan is out. I was hoping for a big investment in mass transit and rail to finally get the US moving towards something resembling a modern, balanced transportation infrastructure. So what does the plan offer?

· $30 billion for highway construction;

· $10 billion for transit and rail to reduce traffic congestion and gas consumption.

Not great. And only $1.1 billion of that transit/rail money is for new projects. Of course, we don't know yet where in particular those funds are going, but it's clearly not sufficient to move towards a comprehensive plan like this one:




This is the plan of Andy Kunz, an urban designer and director of New Urbanism.org. The map shows planned routes for high-speed rail, and it really is like a win-win-win-win-win proposition. Consider that such a plan would:

- reduce our reliance on foreign oil
- help curb global warming
- provide tons of jobs, especially in places like the industrial midwest, Florida, and California, which have been hurt so badly hurt by the housing crisis and recession
- promote the development of an industry in the US where the country has fallen far behind the EU and Asian economic powers
- help prepare us for the era of peak oil.

There are, though, a couple of things I would change about this plan. First, I don't know that a Denver-Salt Lake City-San Francisco route makes a lot of sense. Those are some vast distances with really low population densities; I would substitute a regional line for the Colorado piedmont running from, say, Fort Collins down to Pueblo, and maybe even extending it down to El Paso. I would keep the southern route but I'd run it from San Antonio through El Paso. And I'd connect Houston to Austin.

Unfortunately, you get the sense that the US has sort of reached this point of inertia where we just can't make these sort of major investments to reshape our country anymore. It seems that our institutions have just become too ossified, our economic interests have become too established and enmeshed with the political power structure, and the public has become at once complacent and despairing - not liking the way things are, but also not caring enough to change them, or not feeling like they could change. In other words, it feels like we've entered a period of national decline in which these sorts of plans are untenable.

This could all change, of course. The malaise of the last couple of decades may prove to be a cyclical phenomenon. Maybe things will change again. Maybe the US will become a global leader at something other than financial trickery once more. But if it's going to happen, this $1 trillion economic stimulus - a once-in-a-generation opportunity to re-orient our priorities - would be an excellent place to start. And so far, the indications that we are going to do so are mixed, at best.

UPDATE: By the way, if you're wondering what a rising power investing in the future looks like:

In an amazing move towards converting their entire country towards sustainability, China is underway rebuilding its entire transportation system from the ground up. They now realize that cars and oil have no future. China is building an amazing 5,000 miles of brand new high speed trains comparable to the French TGV (200+ mph), all of which will be open for business in just 2 short years! In addition, China is building 36 brand new, full size metro systems - each to cover an entire city. The new Shanghai metro system will be the largest in the world when complete - larger than London's extensive system. China's massive, fast track green transportation construction project is unprecedented in the history of the world, and will completely transform China towards sustainability by drastically reducing their need for oil and cars.

Human Footprint: Africa

Here's another human footprint map. This one's of Africa:



The level of detail on this National Geographic map is really astonishing. It's actually quite beautiful, but it elicits - in me, at least - a certain degree of despair.