The featured opening night movie of the Sausalito Film Festival tells an amazing and true story about the development of a solution to the problem of providing the entire world with clean drinking water.
The movie is called SlingShot. It is about the man who invented the Segway, Dean Kamen, and no, he is not dead as was rumored, but has spent the last fifteen years working quietly to solve the world’s drinking water crises, and — spoiler alert — he has done it!
Not only has this funny charming guy who will remind you of Phil Dunphy built a portable machine that distills even wretched canal water into purified drinking water, Dean Kamen has partnered with Coca Cola to distribute his magical SlingShot machines all over the world.
The backstory is beautifully told. He felt beaten when the Segway was laughed at, so he went away and focused on the world’s biggest problem instead. As long as Coca Cola lives up to its promise, the most significant health problem humanity may be on its way to being solved.
Bucky would love this solution, and the brilliant and funny movie about it.
If Bucky had lived to see the Chia Pet commercials in 1992, he might have said, “Now there is a good idea for Earth. All we need to do is green it up.”
If you missed Chia Pet is, see the commercial here. (Warning: It may make you embarrassed to remember you once sang along.)
But seriously, to green up the earth, we should obviously be planting as much as we can, wherever we can. On rooftops. On vacant lands. Creating urban oases wherever carbon release is the highest. We should select the plants that do the best job of sucking carbon out of the air, like vegetables and row crops, and natural forests.
Other ways to green up the earth are being looked at by the United Nations IPCC, including new geoengineering technologies that suck carbon dioxide out of the air, and solar geoengineering, which involves spraying sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect the sun and cool the planet. Another great idea that should be scaled up is the Marin Carbon Project in Marin County, California.
The problem is, as Bucky said, “Man knows so much but does so little.”
Even though the United Nations IPCC forecasts that it may require “large-scale deployment” of these technologies to keep global warming below temperature rises of 2C, these ideas are not exactly being pursued with gusto by our energy corporations, or our governments, since the corporations have yet to find a way to meter the sun, and most of our governments are owned by the same corporations.
If Bucky were alive today, he would encourage massive investment in these new clean energy technologies, and tell us to demand action now from our federal, state and local governments to make this happen.
And then Bucky would get down on his knees and beg us to wake up, and stop decimating our planet by destroying our natural lands so thoughtlessly, since they are the lungs of the planet. He would implore us to instead turn the whole darn United Spaceship Planet Earth into a (ch-ch-ch-) Chia Pet, before it is too late.
While America’s people are calling overwhelmingly for less money in politics, our Supreme Court is moving in the opposite direction. 
Here are a couple of courtroom renderings by the Daily Show, depicting this week’s proceedings: 
Is there any other explanation for the SUPREME mess in America today? Please, somebody, make it make sense. Bucky is spinning in his grave.
Who would have imagined that a thin layer of compost, spread over grasslands, would be able to suck massive amounts of carbon out of the air, all while helping the land retain more water and be more productive for agriculture?
The Marin Carbon Project in Marin County, California, is a new carbon sequestration program which is said to provide ecological benefits to farms, improve agricultural productivity and economic sustainability, all while helping to mitigate global climate change by sequestering carbon.
Field testing by MCP indicates we could offset most of the greenhouse gases produced by commercial and residential energy use in California by applying the program to just half of its grasslands. See MCP’s test results here.
The MCP project has received a grant from the USDA to develop a countywide agricultural carbon sequestration program to serve as a model for other regions in California, the western US, and the nation.
MCP launched its year-long carbon farming program last Fall (2013) on three farms in West Marin: Stemple Creek Ranch (700 acres), Straus Dairy (500 acres), and Corda Ranch (in the San Antonio Creek watershed). 
After performing extensive baseline soil sampling and rangeland assessment on these farms, close to 4,000 cubic yards of compost supplied by West Marin Compost was applied on nearly 100 acres of rangelands on these farms.
This program, which pulls carbon right out of the air, could make a difference not just in California, but also in our global search for climate solutions.
We need more ideas that suck the way this one does.
The greenhouse effect has been well understood for over a century, and by 1982, conclusive proof was delivered to the US Congress that global warming was a real threat, and that our use of fossil fuels was the primary cause. So says former NASA scientist James Hansen, who testified before Congress back in the 1980s. Hansen gave scientific proof back then that greenhouses gasses were acting like a blanket over the Earth, and that increasing levels of carbon would exacerbate both ends of the weather extreme. His report predicted more heat, floods, droughts, fierce storms, rising oceans, melting icecaps, all things happening now as carbon levels continue to rise.
Hansen was attacked for his statements, especially when he pointed out that the White House had altered transcripts of his testimony. “I decided to go back to being a scientist, and leave the communication to others,” he says. But a couple of years ago, Hansen realized that nothing was happening. Our governments were continuing to force us to subsidize fossil fuels. This made Hansen feel he needed to speak out again, motivated by love for his grandchildren, who he said “did not deserve to inherit a climate that was spiraling out of control”.
In a 2012 Ted Talk, Hansen brilliantly proposes a simple fee and dividend system, instead of a tax, that would be paid by the fossil fuel companies directly to the American people. Putting a price on carbon, which more accurately reflects its true cost to the world, Hansen says, is the chief requirement for making a transition to clean energy in time to avoid a collapse of our climate.
Hansen patiently explains that the longer we dither the more expensive and difficult it will become: “If we’d done this in 2005,” Hansen says, “we would have only needed a 2 percent reduction in carbon to regain a balanced environment.” By 2013, he says it would have taken 6 percent. A few more years from now and it will be fifteen percent, which will be very difficult, painful and expensive to accomplish.
This soft spoken Midwestern scientist is asking for all our help in communicating the need to put a price on carbon NOW, before it is too late.
He’s doing it for his grandchildren. I’m doing because I don’t want to be part of the first generation to know conclusively that we screwed it all up, even though the solution was right in front of us.
Hansen’s Ted Talk has under a million views. It should have at least one billion.
Thank you for all the Facebook shares. I hope you and your friends will follow Buckyworld — to help keep these important ideas alive.
My brilliant young friend pitched a book this weekend at the San Francisco Writers’ Conference about the need for an environmental revolution. A New York literary agent interrupted him. “Don’t you realize people read to escape all that?” She was right of course. There are no bestsellers about how Earth’s ecosystem is shutting down, even though it is. It doesn’t help to rehash the negatives about how far behind the Earth has fallen, or about how geniuses like Buckminster Fuller predicted the state of the world today. Nobody wants to hear it. The challenge is to find a positive spin, something people will want to read, and then give them a meaningful (not too demanding) call to action.
My guess is there are thousands, maybe a million writers working on this. Let’s hope someone figures it out.
In the meantime, there is some positive news Bucky would like. John Kerry’s bold proclamation this week that climate change is the world’s most fierce “weapon of mass destruction” was a blast of fresh political air. Bucky would give Kerry’s Indonesia speech a standing ovation, saying that the State Department’s mission to protect the security of our country by reckoning with all enemies, both foreign and domestic, is finally being addressed. But what will actually come of this? Will he and President Obama still approve the KXL pipeline? Are they not begging us to support their stance against the awesome power of the fossil fuel industry? Might we be on the verge of understanding, at long last, that today’s “weapons of mass destruction” are the oil, gas and coal reserves now safely under ground? How do we get these “resources” reclassified as enemies of life on earth? Bucky would say that the answer to this is simple: Speak out. Speak truth to power. Let them know the political will exists. Don’t just think about it. Do it. Write John Kerry right now.
Bucky woke up every day wondering what he could do to help all of humanity thrive on Earth. Today he would call on us all to simply lean into the ongoing evolutionary shift, away from weaponry and toward “livingry”. He would encourage each of us to be a “trim tab”, the tiniest rudder that helps turn even the greatest ship around. He would remind us that the little individual has the freedom to accomplish things no government or corporation can. He might also say it’s time to flip the famous Franklin D. Roosevelt quote on its head: “The only thing we have to fear is not enough fear.”
But back to the positive! We can also celebrate China’s decision one year ago today, to tax carbon pollution. Yes, Virginia, there is a carbon tax in China. Despite this, the number one argument you hear from Americans about why nothing can or should be done about climate change is that countries like China and India will ruin the Earth no matter what Americans do. Put this in the “everything you know is wrong” column. Bucky would kindly say that Americans should make an effort to see America the way the world does, that we are the ones who still believe we are too big to fail. We are the ones Fracking our lands and water to ruin.
But there is hope from ideas springing up all over the world that exemplify Bucky’s ‘design science revolution’. One close to my home in Marin County, California, is the Marin Carbon Project, an agricultural experiment to learn just how much carbon the dirt can hold, and what influence that might have on crops. The answers are: more than anyone thought, and wow, it makes a huge difference. You can read more about the magic of mulch in an op-ed piece in the Marin Independent Journal.
A panel of world leaders – Ban ki Moon, Bill Gates, Paul Polman, Al Gore and others – concluded at the World Economic Summit in Davos that we are on a path toward a new “Climate Change Economy” which will phase out fossil fuels and help eradicate world poverty.
At last a stated objective from world leaders to live up to Bucky’s vision of “a world that works for everybody, without harm to the environment”.
What’s happening now, according to the panel, is not a government process, but a partnership of concerned entities and citizens to create a more just and sound economy AND a healthier climate. They spoke of phasing out fossil fuel subsidies worldwide, of progress being made in agriculture, urbanization and financing of clean energy development.
A representative from Nigeria explained her country’s “Domestic Resource Mobilization” program, which is working to help that country marshal its own resources toward clean energy and poverty reduction. Isn’t that something that could be used everywhere, including here in America?
“We must break the false paradigm of thinking that we cannot solve climate change and world poverty at the same time. We can and are,” said Paul Polman. Polman said the emerging partnership between governments, business and citizens is “a partnership based on morality” and that today’s “incredibly complex” and urgent situation creates “a unique opportunity to join and work collectively”.
Buckminster Fuller predicted in 1982 that it would take an “emergence through emergency” for humans to muster the will to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. It is gratifying, at long last, to hear that this may actually be starting to happen. Al Gore says we are almost at the tipping point, politically speaking this time, when “the will will exist” for 100% clean energy.
There are many brilliant and shining examples in the world every day of how a peaceful, just, and clean energy planet may be coming. The photo above is of Singapore’s solar powered super trees. (The link is for a CNN report about them.) These trees create energy, capture rainwater and carbon. And here’s a link to an even more exciting idea from a company that is modeling energy solutions on the wisdom of trees.
As of today, after watching the Davos panel and reading up on what’s new, I am a born-again optimist. It’s a Bucky kind of day!
Just couldn’t resist reposting this great little story about how “responsive architecture” is changing the way buildings are built, and making it possible to create the kind of sustainable, lush ecosystem Bucky always said was possible. CLICK HERE FOR STORY.
BUCKYIDEAS 