Month: December 2016

How Much We Once Knew

How much did we know about clean energy thirty five years ago? I’ve just dusted off a book called Energy, Earth, and Everyone from 1980 which reads like something from the near future if we get our act together, and that seems proof of how ridiculously far we have fallen behind. Here’s the cover, some excerpts from Bucky’s forward, a few other gems, and a partial list of references. Read for yourself how much we knew about clean energy before big oil took over the world.



It blows my mind how easy it is to find so much proof that we are intentionally be undermined, as a species, by a single industry. The fossil fuel corporations have intentionally and willfully obstructed the development of the very thing humanity needs most. CLEAN ENERGY IS ESSENTIAL TO OUR FUTURE.

SO much lost knowledge in the world. I’m beginning to wonder what this means about  where we are and where we are going right now, now that we are living in Trumplandia.

We simply must understand this history now. There is no time to repeat it. Again.

Floating Cities: Are We There Yet?

screen-shot-2016-12-09-at-3-44-04-pmBuckminster Fuller said he worked 50 years in advance. It was about that many years ago that he came up with his plan for a floating city named Triton. 

Today, with rising oceans, rising housing costs, and increasing homelessness – not to mention the desire for a sustainable, satisfying life — surely the time has come to take another look at Bucky’s floating city idea.

Bucky’s Triton City was co-created with a Japanese businessman, who shared Bucky’s concern about the importance of housing people in a way that gave them “a standard of living that really meant something.” The project took months of study. Bucky approached it scientifically. How to make maximum use of resources, and create a city that would be a joy to live in and also be able to sustain itself?screen-shot-2016-12-09-at-2-53-08-pm

The plan was that Triton would float like a ship on the waters of Tokyo Bay. Although it might be connected to land by bridges, the floating city would be completely independent, providing all its own services, wasting nothing, recycling everything. It would be shaped in a tetrahedron (of course!) to provide the greatest possible surface area for the space enclosed.screen-shot-2016-12-09-at-2-52-23-pm The sloped outside surfaces would make private terraced gardens possible for all occupants since this was a critical life enjoyment factor for most people. Shopping and common purpose areas would be located on the inside. Recreation, such as tennis and athletic fields, would be on the top deck.

When Bucky’s Japanese partner died in the mid-1960s, the US government asked him to complete the full design, but then the 1968 elections brought in Nixon, and new officials scrapped the “pie-in-the-sky ecotopia” plans. Some things never change.screen-shot-2016-12-09-at-2-51-56-pm

It is such a shame we have suffered another election set back, and the future is being put on hold once again. But there is hope because although Bucky’s project died, the idea has lived on in many, many ways.

Suddenly floating cities make a whole new world of sense.

Please Share BuckyIdeas to help bring Buckminster Fuller’s ideas back into the world.

‘We will have an emergence through emergency’ – Buckminster Fuller

Bucky predicted in 1982 that things would get ugly before we woke up, but that once we did there would be “an emergence of a more highly evolved humanity, which will begin to make all the right choices for all the right reasons.” Once we do that, Bucky said, switching to renewable energy will be a snap. His words came to mind when I snapped this photo at an Anti-Trump rally in San Rafael. Flick the fossil fools away.

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San Rafael, California – A small group of high school students put on a community protest rally themed LOVE TRUMPS HATE following the 2016 presidential election.

 

Keep in mind that THE ONE ISSUE which matters above and beyond all others — if you pay attention to the U.S. Pentagon which is tasked with humanity’s survival  — is climate change. The Pentagon and a vast majority of all actual climate scientists say Climate change action to control greenhouse gases is essential now.

If we don’t get this right, nothing else will matter.

Scientists are begging us to scream. The least we can do is focus.

#GreenNewDeal #cleanenergynow #dumpfossilfools #endfossilfuelsubsidies #carbontaxnow #SolarTrumpsOil #EndFracking #LeaveItInTheGround #350.org