Algae: A Panacea Crop?

By Dennis Bushnell
Algae and bacteria are the two most important biofuel technologies of the twenty-first century. As a replacement for oil, algae is extremely practical, utilizes mostly cheap and abundant resources like saltwater and wasteland, and has the potential to reduce global carbon-dioxide output tremendously. Unlike corn or even sugar ethanol, halophyte algae (algae that grow in saltwater) do not compete with food stocks for freshwater. Agriculturalists are told to think of salt as bad, but people living on the shores of India have had a saline-based agricultural system for hundreds of years. For halophyte algae, salt is good.

A number of countries already have seawater agriculture projects under way. The Chinese are producing genetically modified corn and rice in saltwater marshes. There’s no reason similar techniques couldn’t be used to raise algae in the energy-hungry United States. The Great Salt Lake could conceivably be turned into an algae pond to produce something on the order of $250 billion a year in biofuels.

People are looking at turning parts of the Pacific Ocean off of South America into algae ponds. Many deserts are near coasts, and these underutilized areas naturally lend themselves to algae cultivation. Irrigating desert terrain with saltwater would constitute an enormous and —many would argue— expensive public works project for whatever nation or nations took it on. But such a project need not be exorbitantly expensive. Indeed, when the cost of pumping ocean water into so-called “wasteland” regions such as the Sahara is factored in, the cost of halophytic algae biofuel is less than the cost of petroleum trading at $70 per barrel or higher. Because desert areas receive a lot of sunlight, halophyte algae farmers could use solar-powered pumps to move water up from sea level or even up from underground aquifers such as the Nubian sandstone aquifer system that sits beneath desolate regions of Libya, Chad, and Sudan. Suddenly, “wastelands” in western Australia, the Middle East, eastern Africa, the American southwest, and west Texas become valuable, productive real estate.

Algae require a lot of nitrogen, a mineral that is missing in most seawater. But genetic mapping of halophyte algae — a task already occupying geneticists around the globe — could lead to entirely new algae species that would derive their nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Biofuel from algae could be a direct petroleum replacement and is an extremely practical fuel source from a production standpoint. The refining process for algae is much simpler and less expensive than the current process for refining oil. Algae are lipids, comprising 30%–60% oil. With a mere olive press you can get a burnable fuel. Can we use biofuels in aircraft? In space? At NASA, we have looked into the question. The answer, emphatically, is yes. A global transition from oil to algae wouldn’t require the construction of an expensive, complicated new infrastructure, as a transition to a hydrogen economy would.

Halophytic algae, cultivated correctly, could lessen the world’s food and water shortages as well. Some 68% of the freshwater that is now tied up in conventional agriculture could instead go to thirsty populations rather than irrigating freshwater dependent crops. There exist more than 10,000 natural halophyte plant species, and some 250 of those are usable as staple food crops. You can get a great deal more fuel per acre with algae than you can with ethanol crops like corn, and you can use halophytes as a petrochemical to make plastic or as a feedstock for animals. Most importantly, algae are a renewable and CO2-neutral power source.

Halophytes and algae are only part of the overall solution space. We’ll use many approaches to combat global warming. However, the potential of this fuel can’t be stated forcefully enough. If humanity were to plow a portion of the Sahara Desert, irrigate it with saltwater from the Mediterranean, and then grow biomass such as algae, we could replace all the fossil carbon fuel that our species uses currently and provide food for a growing global population at low cost.

About the Author

Dennis Bushnell is the chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia 23681-2199. Web site www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/home/index.html .

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Google Searches Its Future

In 1998, a pair of Stanford University doctoral students named Sergey Brin and Larry Page ventured out into the wild, wild west of the early World Wide Web. They had but a few ideas about algorithmic Internet page-ranking and the daunting, self-given goal of “organizing the world’s information.” Eleven years later, their company, Google, is projected to earn $19 billion in 2009. Some 70% of all U.S. Internet searches take place through Google’s site, compared to 20% through Yahoo, and less than 6% through Microsoft’s MSN.

Is Google, by virtue its of visibility and the success it’s already achieved, destined to dominate the Internet era? Business columnist Randall Stross offers fresh insight in his recent book, Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know.

From its founding to its future, the picture Stross paints is of an enterprise that benefited as much from the savvy of its creators as the overconfidence of its two primary rivals. Indeed, if Google plays the scrappy, earnest underdog in Stross’s story, Yahoo and Microsoft are the bragging bullies who are brought down by their egos.

In the late 1990s, Yahoo was the heavy favorite to dominate the growing online service field. It had an established presence with plenty of money for advertising. It was also a one-stop-shop destination site offering classifieds, news stories, weather reports, and, of course, search-engine capability directly on its homepage. Users could type a query into the search box and receive results from a directory of Web sites rigorously culled and verified by trained technicians. Yahoo was convinced that an index assembled by humans was a great asset.

Brin and Page made it their mission to automate the process of finding new sites and ranking them. Their work soon caught Yahoo’s attention. Faced with too many new Web sites to record by hand, and too many search requests, Yahoo contracted the then much-smaller Google to analyze new Web pages in 2000. Yahoo paid the fledgling start-up relatively little for this service, and the search-engine results were displayed through Yahoo’s portal, thus denying Google even the opportunity to build name recognition. What Google gained was the opportunity to grow its own index, which allowed it to perfect its search model.

“Google understood, well before its chief rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft,… that an information collection that attempts to be complete expands on a scale far beyond anything that can be curated by human editors,” writes Stross. “Just as the human mind depends upon neural connections that develop spontaneously, so, too, digital collections of information will rely on interconnections that are created by software, without human agency. Software algorithms are created by humans, but the complexity of the end products far exceeds anything that human creators could produce manually.”

What is perhaps most significant (and terrifying) about the Google phenomenon is its self-replicating nature. As the company’s interconnected algorithms organize more information, the organizational process improves. As users get better at Googling, the company learns more about the pages being searched and its users. As the company’s revenue model proves more successful, it attracts more ads, in turn attracting more revenue to make acquisitions like YouTube, which attracts more ads and more revenue.

Google has since taken aim directly at the once-indomitable Microsoft by offering online word processing and spreadsheet applications through its Google Docs program. If all goes according to plan, users of the future will search, e-mail, and even do office work all through Google without ever stopping by Windows, Microsoft’s operating system, or even saving anything on their hard drives. This Internet-as-office idea is what tech-watchers call cloud computing: Your files are available to you wherever you go. Every computer becomes your computer. The popularity of the trend bodes ill for Microsoft.

“Microsoft’s on-off-on bids for Yahoo in 2008 were an expression of the company’s rather desperate wish to better meet the competitive challenge posed by Google by moving the place of battle from Microsoft’s home ground, office applications, to Google’s home ground, Web search and advertising. In May, when lack of agreement between the two companies about Yahoo’s valuation led Microsoft to withdraw its offer, Microsoft changed tactics, but no one doubted that its most pressing strategic challenge remained Google,” writes Stross. “As Microsoft devotes more attention — and more of its treasury — to its online businesses, no major software company will remain to defend the notion that personal data should remain physically close to the individual and scattered among different media and devices. Centralization of data seems inexorable, and as it proceeds, the concerns about protecting individual privacy seem likely to diminish.”

What does Google’s gargantuan capability mean for its future? Google CEO Eric Schmidt — in a moment of extreme confidence about the company’s long-term viability — forecast that Google would succeed in its mission of organizing the world’s information “in about 300 years.”

Meanwhile, the company is looking toward further enhancing search.

“There are a lot of exciting things going on right now,” Google research director Peter Norvig told THE FUTURIST. He’s enthusiastic about Google’s burgeoning online translation tools, which allow users to parse text between any pair of 34 different languages in more than 1,000 combinations. But what excites him most is how Google is reinventing the search experience entirely. The company that made a fortune linking key words together is now looking beyond type, beyond the keyboard, for new ways to collect, organize, and present information.

“With our voice search you can now speak your queries, and I think we’ll see more uses of voice input and output in the near future,” says Norvig. “What if the information you want is not in words at all, but in images or video? We’re working on that, too. Of course we’ve had the ability for years to search for images or videos, but it was done by matching key words to the annotations that surround images and video, not to the content itself. We’re now starting to search the content. We already have face recognition in our Picasa Web Albums — you label a couple of faces as ‘Aunt Sally,’ and from then on we’ll label new pictures of her as you upload them. It won’t be perfect if there are severe shadows or if the view is not front-on, but it is a step towards understanding the content, and we’ll continue to progress in this direction.”

As to whether 300 years might be a realistic time frame to organize the world’s information, Norvig says, “I don’t think it makes much sense to try to speculate about 300 years in the future. Three hundred years ago, we had neither steam, internal combustion, nor electrical motors; it would have been hard to predict where technology would be today. I think Eric was saying that it would take 300 years if everything proceeds at the current pace. But we’ll probably have an accelerated pace of both the production of new information (because more people will be creating more permanently storable content, and because there will be more opportunity for creating richer media content, like video) and an accelerated pace of the indexing of that information (because more of it will be created digitally and available to be indexed right from the start).”

Read another way, Google is not only on track to meet its lofty goal; it’s actually ahead of schedule. — Patrick Tucker

Sources: Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know by Randall Stross. The Free Press. 2008. 275 pages. $26.

Personal Interview with Peter Norvig.

Repairing the World's Financial System

For globalization to endure, poor nations must stop lending, start borrowing.

In a recent poll, 60% of U.S. respondents said they believed an imminent economic depression was “likely.” Retirement accounts have lost more than $2 trillion in value over the past year, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped more than 30% from its apex in the fall of 2007.

Where do we go from here? Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times and author of the recently-released book Fixing Global Finance, has some surprising answers.

Futurist: Everyone is terribly concerned about the global economy. Investors have seen their stock portfolios decrease by 30 and 40%. What do you see the global economy doing in the next five years?

Wolf: The only honest thing one can say is that one doesn’t know. There are two or three very powerful reasons we don’t know. First, we really can’t forecast economies. Forecasters always miss turning points. They can tell you what will happen only if things remain as they are. Turning points are inherently unpredictable. The consequences when things do change are always unpredictable for the same reason, because a lot of other things are likely to change at the same time. That’s the first point.

Second point is that the forces now at work are unbelievably rare and, in this combination, have never been seen before. Ever. That makes looking back on anything that’s happened in history almost useless. It gives you some guidance; there are better and worse guides. But there is no clear guide that will give you more than a conceptual idea of what’s going on.

Third reason is that it really depends on what people, policy makers above all, actually do. There are choices to be made. So far, in the run up to the crisis and through this crisis, most of the choices made have turned out to be bad choices. Because they’ve been made they’ve been bad choices. We ended up with the worst of all possible worlds at the moment. If people go on making bad choices, we’re going to wind up with a depression lasting many years. If they make what I think are the right choices, we may still end up with a severe recession but we may avoid a severe depression. Those are, I think, the most important things to understand. Anyone who claims to know what’s going to happen is lying.

The forces at work, however, are at least moderately clear. We’ve got three gigantic things happening at the same time that are forcing the world in the direction of recession, or worse. First, for a very long period, household consumption in the United States and a number of other smaller developed counties, particularly the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, played a very large role in supporting demand around the world, at home and abroad, because these households were spending much more than their incomes consistently and borrowing, consistently, to make up the difference in an era of easy credit. This was supported by a series of asset-price bubbles, far-and-away the most important in this regard was the house price bubble in the recent years, which has ended in these countries starting in the United States in 2006. Because households are losing wealth, or have been losing wealth, reinforced by the collapse in equity markets, they are cutting back on their spending very quickly. If they do that, that guarantees an enormous recession. To give you a relevant example, the U.S. consumer has been spending all his or her income, borrowing a lot more besides, and savings rates have hit zero. The consumption has been a little over GDP, so it’s the principal source of demand in the U.S. economy. If households go back to saving at a more normal rate of their income, which will be somewhere in the neighbor of 6% to 8% of disposable income, that alone, if it happens quickly, will reduce GDP on the demand side by about 5 %. That will feel like a depression. It will certainly be worse than any recession since the war. The first thing that is happening is immense pressure on the high-spending households.

The second thing happening is an extraordinary expansion of the credit system and the financial sector in the world, particularly in these developed countries. By extraordinary, I really mean extraordinary. Over the last 25 years or so the balance sheet of the financial sector of the United States has grown about six times faster than GDP, generating an extraordinary increase in income for the people in the financial sector, and this has led to a massive increase in leverage and low capital ratios. This expansion of the balance sheet of the financial sector financed enormous indebtedness in household sectors in the United States and United Kingdom. Household indebtedness has doubled in relation to disposable income over the last decade.

As a result of the decline in asset prices and the losses associated with that, the feared losses given the very slow capitalization and the very small expertise-base of much of the sector, the financial sector is effectively decapitalized, i.e. bankrupt. And if it were properly, rigorously, evaluated, a large part of it would look bankrupt, and government would recapitalize. As a result, today’s financial sector wants to lend less, reduce its balance sheet, get people to payback the money it lent, and that leads to the third problem, which is that credit is much more difficult to obtain than it used to be as a result of what happened in the financial system.

You add these three things together and you have an enormous contractionary force operating in the countries that generated very large and buoyant demand growth over the course of the last decade. You have to ask yourself, if they save more and spend less what is going to offset it? What might offset it to get us out? When you think about that, you realize it can’t be investment. Companies invest less in recession. Companies will follow households. That leads you with two sources of demand, one is government, which will spend upwards. It might be financed by the printing press, even by the central bank. That is part of the short term solution in my view. Governments are credit worthy, everybody wants to lend to them. Government spending is a temporary solution. It’s a good one. It will help households to go through a period when they’re saving more, improving their balance sheet. It will take a long time. Household wealth is declining at the same time. The other thing that will help these countries is export growth. You look at U.S. growth in the last year or so, most of it has been generated by exports. That leads you to the final big problem; for exports to grow form the economies that are so big, you need very strong and rigorous demand from the countries which are not heavily burdened by debt. Unfortunately, most of these counties have shown no willingness to increase their spending at large rates, with the marginal exception of China, again, only marginal.

For all these reasons, we can expect a deep and self-fulfilling recession--prevented from becoming a depression--by enormous increases in fiscal deficits to levels like 10% of GDP or more. This will be financed perhaps by borrowing from the central bank. It’s going to take a long time before demand grows in the private sector of these debt-afflicted economies, and I don’t see anything very strong coming from the rest of the world.

There are two other elements, one of which is promising, the other is sort of interesting. The promising one is we no longer have any inflation concern. Commodity prices are collapsing. That’s shifting income back to households, making it easier to save and spend more without cutting back on their consumption. But their real incomes are higher. It’s also removing income from the high-saving countries, which is helpful. It’s lowering inflation; that’s allowing banks to be aggressive in their interest rate policy, which should help households. That is really quite a positive element. The second element is what’s happening in the stock markets.

You’ve seen that we’ve been in a structural bear market at least since 2000. We had an enormous overvaluation, particularly the developed world in 2000, this foresees a long recovery because of the aggressive monetary policy of the fed which had the consequences we now see in terms of the balance sheet of the financial sector.

Their collapse is now leading to a further collapse in the value of stocks. But I do believe that on a fundamental basis, if you look at long-term underlying valuations, stock markets are beginning to look fairly valued or even cheap--not incredibly cheap, but cheap given the proper understanding of the risks. There was a reason there was an equity risk premium. So that may, in time, once we start stabilizing and the economy becomes better, induce people to start buying stocks, supporting them, giving some stability to stocks. Getting out of this will require aggressive action by governments to prevent total collapse in demand and a total collapse in the financial system. They’ve taken dramatic actions on the later. No body can reasonably think that core financial institutions... they have not done enough on the former to get demand growing again, To get much bigger fiscal boosts in my view to get it growing the deficit in the short run and much more aggressive action to make sure newly re-capitalized institutions at least provide financing to business.

So if those things all go well, ALL go well, I think we can avoid a depression, have just a very deep recession, and see weak recovery of some kind in 2010 or 2011. But this is bound to be the deepest global recession since the war, the first one on which all the developed countries are in recession. It’s going to be a very slow process.

Futurist: This issue of stimulating demand and what government can do to do it; one view says don’t increase the deficit too much it harms the national balance. Others say if you have to stimulate demand through stimulus and not issuing tax rebates. Is there some way government might work against the psychology a little more, like send out a stimulus of hundreds of billions but then say, in order to fight deflation, we’re going to institute a sales tax particularly on commodities and we may even experiment with wealth taxation, to prevent hording of stimulus, the way the government is now considering mandating that the banks lend the money they received as part of the bailout package? What else can government do to stimulate demand?

Wolf: There are some interesting points of view as to how to use the combination of monetary and fiscal stimulus in these situations. It should be understood that once you get into the current U.S. situation when interest rates are so low, you can’t separate monetary and fiscal policy. The best ways monetary policy can support the economy is not by lowering interest rates anymore, because they’re already so low, but either by directly lending to the business sector, which increasingly the FED is doing, or by lending to the government to spend. The government can avoid accumulating large debt by the simple expedient of financing its additional borrowing by borrowing short term from the banking system or borrowing from the federal reserve. In the present situation of extreme liquidity preference, where everyone wants to hold cash, there is no inflation risk associated with that whatsoever. In the long run, that may be different. It’s perfectly reasonable for the government to borrow short term and give it to people and things where they know it will be spent. They can spend on investment and projects that can be done quickly. That would be a good thing to do. They can finance the poor, who always spend money, employment compensation, that will be spent. There are plenty of things you can give money to people for that will be spent. Generalized income tax cuts, where most tax is paid by the well of, won’t be a useful way to lend to the economy. But it would at least give strength to the balance sheet of the household sector. The government should do all of theses things on an exceptionally large scale.

It’s important to remember that we got out of the Great Depression essentially by a huge public works project called the Second World War. I‘m not recommending war, but it’s a reminder of what can be done. There are some risks with such projects. If a country with a large current account deficit prints money like this, maybe the currency will be dumped. It would be better therefore if everyone does it at once. But in a deflationary situation like this, I think the United States, perhaps a bit less the United Kingdom, can get away with substantial increases in domestic liquidity money, because I don’t think other countries would dump U.S. currency; it would destroy their own competitiveness. If it forces them to destroy their own money supply, it would not be a very good thing. Now then there are lots of details you could start discussing. There are many ways to provide money to get it spent. Once we get the household sector back in shape, the stock market at a reasonable price, and people again start buying stocks and finance companies through the stock market or through debt, then you will want to see the government deficit start to diminish. That’s why I think the best forms of stimulating the economy have to be things the government wouldn’t ever do.

For instance, unemployment compensation is related to the Great Depression. Similarly, funding large scale investment programs which, once they’re finished, they’re finished. If you’re’ talking about large, permanent spending increases, say a reform to universal health-care systems, those must be funded by permanent increases in taxation or some reduction in spending. Not part of this package. In the long run, when everything gets back to being healthy, you would expect deficits to shrink. You would expect the private sector to spend more, revenue to improve. The government’s need to spend diminishes. It will all go away again.

In the end, it would be sensible to move back into surplus, withdraw the money you’ve printed, or you can start selling bonds to mop up the money. Clearly, at the very end of the process, government deficits will be higher than they are now but household indebtedness will be smaller, with luck. It’s important to understand this clear borderline between private and government indebtedness doesn’t work at the macroeconomic level. There’s a relationship between the two. When households have large amounts of debt they can’t pay, they stop servicing. It is the government that comes in by printing its own debt, which everyone will then want, and that’s what’s happening now. So I think the process will be reversible later on. It has always been possible to reduce deficits and debt provided the policy is reasonably discipled. Right now, it’s a question of spending and financing by borrowing from the system in the short term, and not worrying about bond finance and just making sure we get through the next two or three years without a total self-fullfing and reinforcing collapse in the economy.

Futurist: Looking ahead even more long-term, one of the thing I like about your book, you write that the United States is as much a victim of others’ misfortuntes. You talk about global savings and how developing nations in particular have fallen into this strange habit of giving surplus money to the United States in the form of loans, but really they should be spending it domestically, and developed nations should be spending more in developing nations. This is a much more healthy flow of capital. Did I sum up the point correctly?

Wolf: I think you’ve done it admirably. It is a central theme of my book. It’s an interesting point that nearly all serious professional economists--there are exceptions--would agree completely with me, yet this is seen as a controversial view. There are two big points in this book. The first is the United States is embedded in the global economy. It’s the biggest economy but its still smaller than the rest of the world. It’s roughly 1.4 of the economy and the rest is 3.4. What the rest of the world does actually has an enormous effect on the United States. It’s not just one way. It so happens that for reasons I lay out at length in my book, the rest of the world undertook a series of actions. In response to a financial crisis of an earlier decade, they pushed up deficits and gave themselves large export services and large export capital, to sustain large export surpluses particularly in the case of China but not only China. That, in my view, created strong deflationary and recessionary pressure in the United States You think about it, the import surpluses are withdrawal from a country, domestic demand going abroad. The U.S. Federal Reserve, not totally consciously, chose to offset this deflationary pressure by greatly expanding domestic demand; it was purely accidental. The same thing followed from the Bush tax cuts in the early part of his administration. The United States was responding to these external pressures. I don’t think it responded intelligently, unfortunately. It allowed this later financial mismanagement. And so, in the end, a large part of the domestic U.S. counterpart of this lending turned out to be borrowing by fundamentally insolvent households by assets that were fundamentally overpriced, intermediated by a financial system that turned out to be undercapitalized.

If you think of that combination, it was the worst way to do it. It would have been better for the United States to run bigger fiscal deficits in this period and invested the proceeds in bridges and roads and railroads and whatever capital investment makes sense. The investment it did undertake was to build houses that nobody needs. It’s a sad story. The big macro-picture is, as you describe it, an important indication of the way the United States is not master of its own fate.

This gets to the second big point, if--and I’ve already made this point--if we are going to get out of this cleanly, the U.S. economy needs to rebalance. We don’t have to go back to a big borrowing binge. We can’t run fiscal deficits of 8%-10% of GDP forever. That’s clearly unsustainable and will sooner or later destroy the credit and the currency. So the United States has to save more at home and it has to have a balance in the current account and reduce its debt that way. But the United States and the other countries can only do that without having a huge depression if other countries in the world voluntarily expand demand in relation to their financial supply and move into current account deficits themselves. These things have to work out.

The big question now is whether other countries with large surpluses understand that they are going to have to adjust to and expand demand because in fact, what is really happened here is the world has run out of large-scale, willing, and solvent debtors. Because it’s run out of them, except governments, there has to be adjustment everywhere. What’s not clear to me is that people around the world in China, Japan, Germany fully understand this. There’s a danger they won’t do enough. We’ll be reducing demand anyway. We’ll have a vicious downward spiral. It’s a big danger on the macroeconomic level, which could push us to a very deep and long recession or even a depression. It’s not just about financial system or expanding fiscal deficits, it’s also about having a view of how the longer-term adjustments in the world economy are going to happen. That will take American intellectual and political leadership, which has been totally lacking in this respect to the Bush administration. I do hope the people who take over will have a better appreciation. I know many of the economists on both sides and the economists who have been advising the Democratic side and I do think they appreciate this much better than their counterparts in the current [Bush] administration, though not in all respects. But if you don’t get a more balanced world economy, it may prove impossible to sustain a world with open capital; close it all and we will go back to the more self-sufficient financial systems and economies of fifty or sixty years ago.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST.
12.01.08

Imagining an American Utopia

Review by Arthur B. Shostak: Imagining America in 2033: How the Country Put Itself Together after Bush by Herbert J. Gans. University of Michigan Press. 2008. 210 pages. $24.95.

If ever a book warranted a place by the bedside of the next president of the United States (and his Cabinet appointees), Herbert J. Gans’s “utopian narrative” Imagining America in 2033 is it. Likewise, any futurist eager to learn how the American presidents from now through 2033 might craft a remarkably finer country (and, thereby, a much better world) have an indispensable primer here. Written in the form of an engaging novel, rather than a stuffy academic treatise, the book lightly instructs in policy studies, pragmatic reforms, and the gritty give-and-take of tomorrow’s White House realities.

Sociologist Gans’s scenarios explore possible offstage wheelings and dealings as four U.S. presidents (three Democrats and a Republican) work to shape the future. Each of the four successive administrations enables America to achieve a fairer economy, a more democratic polity, a reduced fear of terrorism, the assimilation of undocumented people, upgraded schooling and freedom from test-domination, creative adjustment to the ever-greater challenge of global climate change, along with scores of other such outcomes.

The chapter entitled “Democratizing the Polity” merits special attention, as it explains why and how a Democracy Project might, “in the longer historical perspective, prove the most significant innovation of the first third of the century.” The nongovernmental project, established in 2012, succeeds by 2033 in winning significant electoral reforms, changes in governmental structures, and citizen empowerment reforms that strengthened citizen representation beyond voting. At the book’s close, the Democracy Project is busy in 2033 campaigning to amend the Constitution to substantially update it; e.g., Supreme Court justices would serve an 18-year term, rather than for life.

Gans does not shy away from forecasting many controversial (if familiar) possibilities, such as birth-control technologies that virtually eliminate abortion, small and technologically imaginative K-12 classrooms, experimental housing, life-extension technologies, assisted suicide, and the acceptance of same-sex marriages. One major development Gans offers in his utopia is the creation of a White House Council of Long-Range Advisors in 2010. He also outlines several intriguing policies too impractical or unpopular to win enactment even by 2033, but well worth notice all the same.

Gans makes no explicit use of the futures literature and refers to no futurist advocates. That the book pays no attention to certain “Gee whiz!” developments — such as advances in nanotechnology, commercialization of fusion power, enhanced human intelligence with brain chips, and so on — may disappoint some surprise-focused futurists (like this reviewer). But working with a comparatively surprise-free scenario, Gans still manages to take a reader a dazzling distance ahead.

Gans wisely declines to “predict,” instead relying on “mixing estimation, projection, and imagination.” This is a creative formula well worth employing by forecasters of every political persuasion. He also relegates to second place the power of things to shape events (things like nano and machine intelligence) in favor of emphasizing human interaction as the prime lever of change. Ever cautious and realistic, Gans concludes that in forecasting, as in baseball, we can chart and project trends, but we cannot know “what will happen in the next inning.”

Futurists have at least four reasons to give this book careful attention. First, we can track the progress of these detailed and down-to-earth forecasts over the years ahead and learn much from their fate. Second, we can adopt Gans’s practice of employing sentences that end in periods rather than in exclamation points. He knows how much we cannot know about tomorrow, and he does not pretend otherwise. He is much too smart to use the three words that should be taboo in futuristics: will and will not. Third, he models a realistic and adult approach to his material. And finally, Gans takes a cautiously optimistic approach at a time when Cassandras hold center stage. In this he reminds us it is darkest before the dawn.
About the Reviewer

Arthur B. Shostak is professor emeritus of sociology at Drexel University and THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Utopian Thought.

New Greenhouse Gas Threat

What do solar panels and global warming have in common?

The answer: Both are produced with nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), a gas that is 17,000 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping atmospheric heat, according to geochemistry professor Ray Weiss and a team of researchers at the University of California–San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Weiss and his team expect NF3 to become a bigger problem in the near future because it is used in the manufacturing of three highly popular products: LCD televisions, computer circuits, and thin-film solar cells.

“There is a little irony in that, because thin-film solar is one of the ways we hope to reduce the fossil-fuel impact,” says Weiss.

Weiss’s study found an NF3 concentration of 0.02 parts per trillion in the atmosphere in 1978 and 0.454 parts per trillion in 2008. While it is now responsible for only 0.04% of human-induced global warming compared with the 60% attributable to CO2 emissions, its share could increase exponentially. The report notes that NF3’s atmospheric presence is growing by 11% a year.

United Nations officials share Weiss’s concerns. In 2008, the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate change added NF3 to a list of gases that the Kyoto Protocol should regulate. The Kyoto Protocol, which is due to be succeeded by a new climate treaty in 2012, currently sets no official limit on NF3.

According to the UNFCC, manufacturers use NF3 as a “chamber-cleaning gas” in production processes to clean unwanted buildups on microprocessor and circuit parts as they are being constructed. A gas called hexafluoroethane, which Kyoto does regulate, used to corner this market, but NF3 became a strong competitor due to its lower costs and its absence from the Kyoto Protocol. NF3 production has consequently increased 15%–17% a year, from 1,000 tons produced in 1992 to a projected 8,000 tons in 2010.

Most of the NF3 is destroyed during these processes, but a remnant escapes into the atmosphere where it can linger for up to 740 years. The amount of NF3 reaching the atmosphere varies from 2% to 16%, depending on what types of emissions-control systems the manufacturers use.

Manufacturers have many options for controlling emissions. Emissions-reduction systems on the market today can capture the escaping NF3 for later reuse or destroy it before it can leave the facility. Manufacturers can also substitute more earth-friendly chemicals. The UN report notes that Toshiba Matsushita Display, Samsung, and LG all opt for fluorine, which has no greenhouse-gas potential and no life-span in the atmosphere.

Fluorine has drawbacks, though, in cost and legal liability: It is highly toxic and cannot be transported off-site. The UN report evinces skepticism that most companies are going to emulate Samsung and voluntarily adopt fluorine as an alternative.

“Smaller LCD manufacturers might not want to bear the costs of switching, and any accidental release of fluorine could also be a problem,” the report notes.

Weiss says that solar-cell manufacturers can use silicon instead of NF3, but they do so also at greater expense.

“If you’ve spent several million dollars to make a microprocessor or something like that, you’re not going to trash it, because that doesn’t make business sense,” says Weiss.

The only hope, he concludes, is to add NF3 to the greenhouse gases proscribed by Kyoto (or its successor).

“If we don’t, there will be an artificial pressure to use it more, because other gases are in Kyoto and it is not,” he says. — Rick Docksai

Sources: Ray Weiss (interview). University of California–San Diego, News Service, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093. Web site http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/10-08GreenhouseGas.asp.

“Kyoto Protocol,” United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Web site http://unfccc.int.

Tommorow In Brief

Capturing Energy Under the Sea

Slow-moving ocean and river currents may be a new source of reliable and affordable power. Most of the world’s water currents move slowly (under three knots), but to capture energy, turbines and water mills require currents at nearly twice that speed to operate efficiently. A machine called VIVACE (Vortex-Induced Vibrations for Aquatic Clean Energy), developed by University of Michigan marine engineer Michael Bernitsas, enhances the slow currents by creating vortices, then capturing their power. The device works much like the way fish use each other’s wake to propel themselves through water. Besides providing renewable energy, the device would also be less likely to harm marine life than dams and water turbines, says Bernitsas.

Source: University of Michigan, News Service, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109. Web site www.ns.umich.edu .

Liquid-Wood Toys

A bioplastic made of renewable “liquid wood” rather than petrochemicals could be an ideal component for toys. No matter how roughly a child treats the toy, it releases no heavy metals or other ingredients that would cause harm. The material, known as Arbofoam, was developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology ICT in Germany. Though bioplastics using cellulose from wood have been used in other products, they have been unsuitable for toys because of additives such as sulfur. Arboform’s sulfur content was reduced by 90%; the next challenge was to find suitable additives that keep the bioplastics from dissolving in water—a big problem since children tend to suck on their toys or leave them out in the rain.

Source: Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology, Joseph-von-Fraunhofer-Strasse 7, 76327 Pfinztal, Berghausen, Germany. Web site www.ict.fraunhofer.de .

Hospitals and Patients Seek Alternatives

More than one-third of American adults and 12% of children use some form of complementary or alternative medicine, such as herbal and dietary supplements, according to a report from the National Institutes of Health. Therapies showing significant increases in popularity in the past five years are deep-breathing exercises, meditation, massage therapy, and yoga. Hospitals are responding to increased patient demand for these services, reports the American Hospital Association. More than 37% of hospitals surveyed indicated that they are integrating complementary and alternative services with conventional treatments, largely due to patient demand.

Sources: National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health, www.nih.gov .

American Hospital Association, www.aha.org .

Toward a More Multilingual Military

The U.S. military needs to improve its foreign-language and cultural skills to operate more effectively, according to Congressman Vic Snyder (Democrat-Arizona), chairman of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. “In today’s and tomorrow’s national security environment, the demand for these skill sets may be even greater, given the range of missions our military personnel can be called on to perform,” he says. “Language and cultural skills can save lives and even prevent conflict.” The Subcommittee’s report calls for increased support for foreign language study in the U.S. educational system, though it did not make clear how schools are to predict where future military interests may be.

Source: U.S. House of Representatives, House Armed Services Committee, 2120 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515. Web site http://armedservices.house.gov .

Word Watch: Pre-vivor

New words often offer clues to new trends. The term pre-vivor—meaning an individual who takes extreme preventive measures to ensure survival—suggests a new, more extreme level of proactivism or initiative. As used by Baylor Medical Center breast surgeon Valerie Gorman, the term refers specifically to women at risk of developing breast cancer who opt for preemptive bilateral mastectomies, or those who have developed cancer in one breast choosing to remove the remaining healthy breast as well.

Comment: Becoming a pre-vivor may seem extreme, but as change accelerates and complexity grows in all areas of life, risk assessment is becoming more and more imperative. The sooner that a risk is identified and acted upon, the more likely survival becomes.

Source: Baylor Health Care System, Marketing and Public Relations, 2001 Bryan Street, Suite 750, Dallas, Texas 75201. Web site www.baylorhealth.com .

Futurist Bookshelf

The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude by P. M. Forni. St. Martin’s Press. 2008. 166 pages. $19.95.

It’s a rude world, but there are ways to help make it more polite, says literary professor Forni. He notes that polite people may be overwhelmed by the rudeness that confronts them every day—loud cell-phone conversations, aggressive drivers—and can feel tempted to be rude in return. Forni discourages this reaction, and shows ways to civilly answer an inconsiderate action or remark with more than one hundred examples that span the whole range of human interactions with family members, coworkers, friends, relationship partners, salespersons, and others. He explains rudeness, how it works, and how we can defend ourselves against it politely.

The Competition of Ideas: The World of the Washington Think Tanks by Murray Weidenbaum. Transaction Publishers. 2008. 118 pages. $34.95.

Having served five major think tanks as analyst, speaker, and writer, Washington University economics professor Weidenbaum is highly knowledgeable about what is right and wrong with these influential but little-understood institutions. He shares his wisdom in this commentary of think tanks’ operations, funding streams, functions, influence over public policy, and the fundamental attitude changes they must make to stay relevant and helpful to national policy discussions.

Think tanks are vital sources of information and expertise. But their positions are often predictable, and they compete too fiercely with each other for resources and visibility, Weidenbaum notes, and the war of ideas often obscures the search for truth. He calls upon think-tank leaders to enhance their quality of scholarship, become more relevant, and cooperatively share research with each other. With substantial reorientation of their activities, they can help Americans achieve badly needed common ground amid deep partisan divides.

Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West by James Lawrence Powell. University of California Press. 2008. 283 pages. $27.50.

Water shortages loom like circling buzzards over the great North American desert metropolises of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, according to physical-sciences professor Powell. He eyes signs of the trouble ahead in Lake Powell, bordering on Utah and Arizona, which has atrophied to less than half its original size under the strains of a dam and reservoir system that continually releases more water than the lake receives, as well as a burgeoning population and escalating farm industry that both consume too much of the Colorado River, Lake Powell’s mainstay.

The problem is likely to worsen due to global warming and warming-related drought, the author warns. Developers built the dams and reservoirs in the nineteenth century to direct the river’s water toward thirsty communities; those communities thrived as a result. Only in hindsight, Powell says, we are realizing that the system’s developers grossly overestimated the river’s capacity, and did not anticipate either population booms or a warming climate. Business as usual cannot continue, he argues. Public officials at all levels will have to effect change—reformed water-management policy locally, and decisive action against global warming nationally—lest their populations suffer an arid future.

Evolution’s Edge: The Coming Collapse and Transformation of Our World by Graeme Taylor. New Society Publishers. 2008. 306 pages. Paperback. $24.95.

Our global system is about to collapse and be replaced by a budding new one, according to sustainable-development consultant Taylor. Our current ways of greed, overconsumption, and violence are not sustainable, he asserts; we must therefore make a fundamental evolution toward conservation, cooperation, and equality or become victims of our own success like the many great civilizations that have come and gone before us.

That evolution is already taking place, says Taylor. We can see it in the institutions and organizations around the world that are shifting toward holistic ideas, values, and technologies. He explains why their shift represents the crucial evolution that our world must undergo, and presents the actions we can take to accelerate it.

Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature Is at Odds with Economics—And Why It Matters by Peter A. Ubel. Harvard Business School Press. 2009. 240 pages. $26.95.

How free should we really be? Ubel, a physician, examines this question while considering the many patients he has treated for conditions that arose from their poor decision making: overeating, excess alcohol consumption, smoking, and other behaviors. Though some of his patients’ behaviors are genetic, much more of them are due to their susceptibility to modern marketing advertising, he argues. People often choose things that are not good for them. In a free marketplace, one is free to make unhealthy decisions.

Ubel encourages a societal reexamination of freedom and self-control. Government should put some restrictions in place for the sake of people’s well-being, but people should in turn learn to practice sufficient self-control and long-term thinking so that it may not have to.

Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years by Vaclav Smil. MIT Press. 2008. 307 pages. $29.95.

Geographer Vaclav Smil discusses the factors that will shape the next 50 years of life on Earth in both positive and destructive ways. Change comes about in gradual trends as well as in sudden catastrophes. Gradual trends in demographics, economics, and resource consumption will substantially impact the futures and fortunes of every prominent player on the world stage: Europe, Japan, the Middle East, Russia, and the United States.

If we do not pay close attention to the trends, we may be surprised by consequent catastrophes such as viral pandemics, terrorist attacks, and wars. It is crucial that we keep aware of change, says Smil; if we do, we may be able to reverse the negative trends and minimize future catastrophes.

Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth by Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener. Wiley-Blackwell. 2008. 290 pages. $24.95.

Happiness is healthy, but only in moderate doses, according to psychology professor Ed Diener and his son, psychologist Robert Biswas-Diener. The duo share the findings of the latest research on human happiness: the benefits of happiness, what makes people happy, what does not, and ways we can become happier.

A sunny outlook can benefit your physical health, enrich your social relationships, increase your income, lengthen your life span, and make you more altruistic. But too much happiness is not so good for you; you need to be happy for the right reasons and in the right ways, the researchers warn. This means seeking long-term life satisfaction, or psychological wealth, and not limiting oneself to short-term euphoria. The authors describe what psychological wealth entails and how to get it. A truly feel-good read.

Imagining America in 2033: How the Country Put Itself Together after Bush
by Herbert J. Gans. University of Michigan Press. 2008. 210 pages. $24.95.

In this utopian scenario, it is 25 years since the 2008 elections, and the excesses of the Bush administration are a distant memory. Sociologist Gans imagines a hopeful future scenario for an America that is freer, more humane, and more just. Its citizens, their elected officials, and the three succeeding Democratic presidencies leading them have made the economy more equitable, the democratic process more participatory, and all institutions more responsive to the needs of the people they are meant to serve. People are less polarized, less angry, less paranoid, more trusting of others, and more confident in their government.

Gans lays out a step-by-step process for how this better time might come into fruition, including the policies that three hypothetical Democratic administrations succeeding Bush might pursue—and political battles they might wage—in the realms of domestic, foreign, and social policy.

In the Name of Justice: Leading Experts Reexamine the Classic Article “The Aims of Criminal Law” edited by Timothy Lynch. Cato Institute. 2008. 176 pages. $35.

Criminal justice needs to evolve, argues a panel of judges and scholars in essays compiled by Lynch, project director on criminal justice for the libertarian think tank Cato Institute. The essays weigh in on the congested court dockets, voluminous legal codes, overcrowded prisons, and other trends that raise concern within the U.S. criminal justice system, as well as the unique challenges posed by terrorism, drug trafficking, and sexual predators. They identify a problem of “overcriminalization,” or too many laws and too little public awareness of them; millions of well-meaning adults are technically criminals and don’t even know it. The writers conclude that communities need to work with courts to design an upgraded system that is simpler, clearer, and more respectful of individual liberty.

Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity by Gary Cross. Columbia University Press. 2008. 316 pages. $29.50.

The “boy-man” is everywhere in American society today, according to historian Cross: boyfriends who never commit to marriage, professional males who obsess over video games, fathers who fight with their sons’ Little-League umpires, husbands who prefer tinkering with their cars to family interaction, and leaders of business or government who exhibit garishly immature behavior. All are symptoms of deep confusion among men about what “maturity” is and whether they want to achieve it, Cross writes. Too many opt to live like teenagers forever, shirking marriage and personal commitments while reveling in comic books, extreme sports, and the endless pursuit of personal experience and self-gratifying thrills.

The problem is historic: Members of the “Greatest Generation” were steady providers but emotionally aloof, whereas the baby boomers were very sensitive and expressive but ambivalent toward steady providing. Generation X dismissed both models and dived into cynicism and sensuality that negated growing up. And while rejecting old models of maturity, the Gen Xers failed to generate any new ones. It is up to today’s young people to find a new ethos that reconciles personal desire and ethical adulthood, Cross argues. Men need to recognize their adult responsibilities to their partners, families, and communities. A thought-provoking read for men and women of all walks of life.

Networked Publics edited by Kazys Varnelis. The MIT Press. 2008. 176 pages. $35.

Are we more connected than ever, more isolated, or both? Architecture professor Varnelis and 11 other scholars from a cross-section of disciplines explore the ways that communications technologies are transforming human society for better and worse. The technologies are great democratizers of media and information access, but they have the power to undermine democratic society and corrode public discourse. They can empower an individual to take on many commitments, but only at great cost to his or her non-digital commitments.

The authors discuss issues of privacy, net neutrality, intellectual property, the Internet’s effects on political expression and mobilization, and many more. The book is the collaborative result of a year-long fellowship program at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green. Bloomsbury. 2008. 298 pages. $27.

Changing the world is big business, Economist editor Bishop and development-expert Green report in Philanthrocapitalism. The two authors take stock of the new generation of wealthy humanitarians such as Bono, Bill Gates, George Soros, and Angelina Jolie, who invest vast fortunes in social change and promote their causes through business and marketing strategies. They mark a sharp break from the philanthropists of yesteryear, who only donated funds.
These new philanthropists are investors, not donors, the authors observe. These investors donate funds and then commit their career lives to keeping their beneficiaries accountable and successful, and the world owes them for this work.

In decades ahead, as governments struggle to meet environmental and societal challenges despite shrinking tax bases, philanthrocapitalists may be a crucial force for good. Bishop and Green weave together personal profiles and anecdotes with big-picture analyses.

The Power of Sustainable Thinking: How to Create a Positive Future for the Climate, the Planet, Your Organization and Your Life by Bob Doppelt. Earthscan. 2008. 218 pages. $29.95.

Resolving the climate crisis will require major changes in the way we think, according to psychologist Doppelt. He psychoanalyzes the world’s socioeconomic status quo and identifies destructive patterns of thinking running rampant throughout: overcompetition, individualism, short-term thinking, a make-take-waste view toward resources, cheaper-is-better, blind faith in technology, and others. Humanity must reframe its thought patterns and embrace a new logic of personal, social and environmental costs and benefits.

Doppelt proposes a stage-based recovery program that individuals, teams, organizations, and society as a whole can adopt to develop sustainable mind-sets and motivate others to do likewise.

Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country by Sudeep Chakravarti. Viking. 2008. 352 pages. $24.

India’s much-hyped economic growth masks persistent and widespread social inequalities, according to futurist-journalist Chakravarti, who tells the story of the Maoist insurgency that has been waging combat in cities, jungles, and villages against their nation’s capitalist system since the 1960s. The “Naxalists,” as the insurgents are called after their home base in the West Bengali village Naxalbari, grew over time from a local militia movement into a present-day leftist political phenomenon that unites peasants and sympathetic intellectuals across 15 of India’s 28 states. Naxalite-organized strikes and counterstrikes in which demonstrators and police are killed have become common news fodder in India’s daily press.

Chakravarti recounts his travels through Naxalite zones and his discussions with Naxalite leaders and sympathizers, combining interviews and anecdotes with extensive background history to present a grim behind-the-scenes view of India and the dangers that lie ahead for it. Followers of economic and world news will find this an enlightening and disturbing account.

Space Enterprise: Living and Working Offworld in the 21st Century by Philip Robert Harris. Springer Praxis. 2008. 616 pages. $39.95.

Governments around the world are now pooling their resources to explore, and one day colonize, outer space. International management professor Harris details how their endeavors might unfold. He examines the current efforts in China, Europe, Japan, Russia, and the United States toward achieving space-based living, and assesses the challenges to continued progress—technical difficulties, physical and psychological hazards, coordination among sometimes hostile nations—and what it will take to overcome them.

Harris delves into the nitty-gritty commercial, legal, and political complications, and the long-term ways that global space exploration will transform the world’s cultures, economies, and political systems. Appendices speculate on particulars such as a Declaration of First Principles for the Governance of Outer Space Colonies, a Lunar Solar Power System, the development of space-based health-care teams, and the plans for the International Lunar Observatory, now under construction and expected to be operational within the next two years.

Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey with Eric Hagerman. University of California Press. 2008. 283 pages. $27.50.

Our best defense against mood disorders, learning disabilities, addictions, and the symptoms of menopause and Alzheimer’s is not a new drug—it’s aerobic exercise, according to physician Ratey. He explores the many scientifically demonstrated ways that exercising boosts brain activity. Our brains gain strength when we stay physically active. There is much truth to the old aphorism of “a sound mind in a sound body,” and Ratey thoroughly demonstrates it with a complete list of reasons for us all to take exercise seriously.

Too Free for Our Own Good?

Review: Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature Is at Odds with Economics — And Why It Matters by Peter A. Ubel. Harvard Business Press. 2009. 240 pages. $26.95.

In a free market, it’s much too easy to make choices that endanger our health and wealth, observes Peter A. Ubel, a primary-care physician, in Free Market Madness. In a free market, we are free to overeat, smoke, drink excessively, ruin our credit, and not save enough for retirement.

Inundated by eye-candy ads, we buy products that harm our health and make spending decisions that carry severe long-term consequences, such as losing our homes by defaulting on mortgages.

“We humans are too easily manipulated by other humans,” Ubel says. “We are too easily seduced by the multitude of choices we face in our fast-moving market economies.”

Not coincidentally, he says, the country with the highest rate of obesity in the industrialized world — the United States — is also the country that has the largest proportion of its GDP spent on advertising. Obesity is much lower in Europe, where governments regulate food ads more aggressively.

“Such regulations have been shown to statistically predict the rate of obesity in any given country,” Ubel writes.

He argues that it’s not always people’s own decisions to drink, eat, and spend. Studies indicate the human will is a lot more malleable than we would like to think. Ubel offers this evidence:

• Finite self-control. Exerting self-control in one area of life leaves less self-control available for other areas. One study seated test subjects in front of plates of cookies and required that they not give in to eating them. Afterwards, participants attempted to solve difficult math problems. They gave up more quickly than members of a group who did not have to undergo the first exercise. This explains why obesity rates are highest among low-income groups: The stresses of dealing with poverty leave little will power for eating right or exercising.

• Default bias. We are partial to the default option — what we get if we take no action. Countries in which hospitals harvest organs from the deceased unless the families request otherwise have significantly higher rates of organ donors than countries that count on individuals to volunteer to donate. This passivity spells trouble for retirement savings, which require that people choose to set money aside.

• Social pressure. Smoking and overeating are contagious. If one of your friends gains weight, you will be more likely to gain weight. People who associate with smokers will be more likely to take up the nicotine habit in turn. This is no surprise to most parents, who know that, once one child has a new toy, every child at school wants it.

Where will is weak and threatens the public’s health, Ubel argues, governments can help citizens choose more wisely with policies of “soft paternalism” that encourage good decisions but don’t coerce them.

“I hope and believe that the government can help us tackle a problem like obesity without causing us to slide toward a cholesterol-free police state,” Ubel writes.

Soft paternalism could take the form of tax rebates to people with healthy body weights and subsidies of healthy foods, matched with taxes on unhealthy foods.

“Some people, faced with the higher price, would shift to a cheaper alternative,” he writes. This approach would engage consumers’ interest through ad campaigns that play to emotions, and not just their intellects. “Such an approach would go beyond boring statistical displays of calorie information or tedious data about carbohydrates and fat calories, to labeling food with evocative images that create aversions to foods that aren’t healthy.”

It would also provide citizens with the resources necessary to adopt healthy lifestyles: designing neighborhoods and park systems that make it easy for people to walk or play outside, subsidizing fitness centers and transit to and from them, and encouraging employers to create opportunities for employees to exercise during work hours.

This approach could promote wise financial decisions as well. It could encourage employers to make retirement accounts the default option so that employees automatically have retirement savings. It could mandate better information about financial transactions, such as adjustable-rate mortgages and rent-to-own deals.

“Free markets fail if consumers don’t have easy access to important information relevant to their purchasing decisions,” Ubel writes.

At times, officials might take firmer approaches: ban vending machines from schools, require restaurants to cut trans fats from their recipes, and limit aggressive marketing practices like children-friendly advertising or the direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals.

“Carefully calibrated restrictions on our freedom are a small price to pay for a happier, healthier populace,” Ubel concludes. — Rick Docksai

Visionaries

Two British researchers offer an ambitious plan to save the world from global warming.
By Patrick Tucker

There are thousands of ways to battle climate change, from supporting solar and wind power to buying low-energy appliances to simply consuming less. But what if these measures, taken en masse and individually, come up short? If humanity just can’t be bothered to save itself before runaway climate change takes over, is there a Plan B?

Perhaps.

British atmospheric physicist John Latham and engineer Stephen Salter have come up with a scheme to attack global warming directly. By blasting seawater droplets into the air from wind-powered ships, they believe stratocumulus clouds could be made thick and white enough to bounce more solar radiation back into space to change the earth’s temperature.

THE FUTURIST magazine talked to Latham about changing the climate, for good.

THE FUTURIST: Why do you think your idea is receiving special attention right now? Would you call something like this a desperation measure to be implemented only after all else has failed?

John Latham: I think the increased attention results from increasing public consciousness and concern regarding global warming. If our idea works as computations indicate, it could hold the earth’s temperature constant in the face of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations for at least 50 years.

The best solution by far is to reduce CO2 emissions to the point where any temperature rise is not dangerous. I do not think this will happen, so we need to develop (hopefully not deploy) stopgap measures to stabilize temperature for however long it takes to develop a clean primary energy source. It is, in a sense, a desperation measure, but it is also an attempt to restore climate as best as possible to how it was before the warming.

FUTURIST: You’re seeking funds right now to test the idea. How might you go about testing it?

Latham: [We would have] a limited-area field experiment in which selected areas of a region of marine stratocumulus clouds are seeded with seawater particles, whilst adjacent areas are not.… A range of instruments are used to determine if seeding causes an increase in cloud brightness, and if so, how much.

FUTURIST: The challenges to implementing such a system must be enormous. What are the biggest ones?

Latham: It actually is not a very daunting prospect. The costs are such that economists say they can be regarded as zero in comparison with those of damage caused by unbridled warming. The largest current problem is developing the spray technology.

FUTURIST: You have discussed the possibility of unintended consequences to such a system. What might they be?

Latham: It is inevitable that our scheme will modify global temperature, rainfall, and wind distributions to some degree. It is vital, therefore, to examine fully — largely by major global modeling — all possible ramifications of its possible deployment. If there are significant adverse ones which cannot be eliminated, the scheme should not be deployed.

FUTURIST: Was there any particular moment of epiphany where you were considering the effects of saltwater in the atmosphere and realized you had happened upon an idea that might one day save the entire world?

Latham: About 35 years ago, my 10-year-old son Mike and I were watching a gorgeous sunset over the Irish Sea from a Welsh mountain. He asked why the clouds were gleaming, and I told him they were reflecting sunlight, like mirrors. He laughed and said, “soggy mirrors.” That comment stuck with me and I think provided, almost 20 years later, the stimulus that gave rise to my 1990 Nature paper first proposing the idea.
About the Interviewer

Patrick Tucker is senior editor of THE FUTURIST and director of communications for the World Future Society.

For more information, contact: The National Center for Atmospheric Research, www.ucar.edu.

Algae: A Panacea Crop?

By Dennis Bushnell
Algae and bacteria are the two most important biofuel technologies of the twenty-first century. As a replacement for oil, algae is extremely practical, utilizes mostly cheap and abundant resources like saltwater and wasteland, and has the potential to reduce global carbon-dioxide output tremendously. Unlike corn or even sugar ethanol, halophyte algae (algae that grow in saltwater) do not compete with food stocks for freshwater. Agriculturalists are told to think of salt as bad, but people living on the shores of India have had a saline-based agricultural system for hundreds of years. For halophyte algae, salt is good.

A number of countries already have seawater agriculture projects under way. The Chinese are producing genetically modified corn and rice in saltwater marshes. There’s no reason similar techniques couldn’t be used to raise algae in the energy-hungry United States. The Great Salt Lake could conceivably be turned into an algae pond to produce something on the order of $250 billion a year in biofuels.

People are looking at turning parts of the Pacific Ocean off of South America into algae ponds. Many deserts are near coasts, and these underutilized areas naturally lend themselves to algae cultivation. Irrigating desert terrain with saltwater would constitute an enormous and —many would argue— expensive public works project for whatever nation or nations took it on. But such a project need not be exorbitantly expensive. Indeed, when the cost of pumping ocean water into so-called “wasteland” regions such as the Sahara is factored in, the cost of halophytic algae biofuel is less than the cost of petroleum trading at $70 per barrel or higher. Because desert areas receive a lot of sunlight, halophyte algae farmers could use solar-powered pumps to move water up from sea level or even up from underground aquifers such as the Nubian sandstone aquifer system that sits beneath desolate regions of Libya, Chad, and Sudan. Suddenly, “wastelands” in western Australia, the Middle East, eastern Africa, the American southwest, and west Texas become valuable, productive real estate.

Algae require a lot of nitrogen, a mineral that is missing in most seawater. But genetic mapping of halophyte algae — a task already occupying geneticists around the globe — could lead to entirely new algae species that would derive their nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Biofuel from algae could be a direct petroleum replacement and is an extremely practical fuel source from a production standpoint. The refining process for algae is much simpler and less expensive than the current process for refining oil. Algae are lipids, comprising 30%–60% oil. With a mere olive press you can get a burnable fuel. Can we use biofuels in aircraft? In space? At NASA, we have looked into the question. The answer, emphatically, is yes. A global transition from oil to algae wouldn’t require the construction of an expensive, complicated new infrastructure, as a transition to a hydrogen economy would.

Halophytic algae, cultivated correctly, could lessen the world’s food and water shortages as well. Some 68% of the freshwater that is now tied up in conventional agriculture could instead go to thirsty populations rather than irrigating freshwater dependent crops. There exist more than 10,000 natural halophyte plant species, and some 250 of those are usable as staple food crops. You can get a great deal more fuel per acre with algae than you can with ethanol crops like corn, and you can use halophytes as a petrochemical to make plastic or as a feedstock for animals. Most importantly, algae are a renewable and CO2-neutral power source.

Halophytes and algae are only part of the overall solution space. We’ll use many approaches to combat global warming. However, the potential of this fuel can’t be stated forcefully enough. If humanity were to plow a portion of the Sahara Desert, irrigate it with saltwater from the Mediterranean, and then grow biomass such as algae, we could replace all the fossil carbon fuel that our species uses currently and provide food for a growing global population at low cost.

About the Author
Dennis Bushnell is the chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia 23681-2199. Web site www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/home/index.html .