Resilient Cities - Summer Program at SimCenter

The San Diego SimCenter, a project of the Global Energy Network Institute, is holding its annual summer conference series. The subject for the 2014 season is "Resilient Cities", and every Thursday evening, June 12 - August 28th, we will explore and analyze subjects & solutions to our urban planning environments.

Don't miss it!

Topics in Each Week:

• Resilience vs. Sustainability
• Systems Stressors within the region and from the outside
• Interconnected sub-systems: (Economic, Social, Environmental, and the built environment)
• Innovation as solution: food and water security, transportation and transit, energy and efficiency, network technology, social inclusion, waste streams, buildings and urban design and technology
• Policies to prepare and Leadership that fosters change

Thursdays, 6-8	Weekly Schedule: June 12 - August 28, 2014
June 12	How Global Climate Trends Affect Local Communities
June 19	Sustainability and Resiliency = Mitigate + Adaption
June 26	Geography and Demographics: Where are our Risks?
July 3	Building Resilient Water Systems
July 10	Building Resilient Energy Systems
July 17	Building Resilient Transportation and Transit
July 24	Planning Resilient Agriculture and Food Systems
July 31	Designing Resilient Waste Systems
August 7	Planning for Public Health Stresses
August 14	The Economics of Resiliency. Is it Affordable?
August 21	Resilient Polices and Regulations: Getting Rules Right
August 28	Resilient San Diego and a Platform for other Cities

WRSC.org

The Archimedes windmill

A quiet, powerful, and visually stunning solution to urban wind power. The Archimedes Windmill.

San Diego Fracking Forum - County Supervisor, Dave Roberts

Billed as a "frank, honest, and balanced forum", today, in the old City Council chamber of County Administration building on San Diego Bay, County Supervisor, Dave Roberts held a Forum on Fracking in California.

Other than the few dozen gray haired environmentalists from SanDiego350.org the press and a few county employees, there were few in attendance.

Although, there were no representatives from the Fracking Industry on the panel, the forum began with a video produced by Marathon Oil Company, an industry leader. The film claimed that fracking was 'safe' and uses secure pipe casing technology, to keep groundwater from contamination.

Among other experts on the Fracking, Geology, and the Energy Industry, were;
* Damon Nagami, Senior Attorney and Director of the Southern California Ecosystems Project for the Natural Resources Defense Council, serves as lead on Fracking in California
* Ken Weinberg, Director of Water Resources for the San Diego County Water Authority
 
They each commented on the Fracking industry, giving their perspectives of the facts with special attention to the reality that we are a carbon-energy economy, and that of existing fuels, natural gas is both domestically abundant & cheap, and pollutes less than coal, oil, and perhaps even nuclear.
All those in attendance were in agreement that we would prefer a renewable energy economy, and the questions were one sided when it came to the Fracking industry. Although none on the panel would make claim to being carbon fuel suppliers, none would rule out the use of Fracking Technology as a mining technique, either. 

The consensus on the day was that we should be circumspect with regard to Fracking in California, as all the current information about the Fracking in other states leads us think that there are potential long-term public health and environmental costs that are beyond our current understanding. Plus, there are some unknown variables that need to be taken care of by public policy and state legal regulations before the people of our state can be secure in the use of such Fracking technologies, so that we know the potential for groundwater pollution. Among them are:

1. What exactly are the secret proprietary fracking chemicals being injected into our environment? 
2. What is the state of our ground water and aquifers prior to fracking mining in each local? 
3. What the permeability of the rock just beneath our ground water-tables? 

Some Counties, like San Bonito, are now banning fracking exploration, and the National Resources Defense Council has called for a moratorium upon fracking in California until the appropriate studies can be done and regulations are in place.

Among the issues that need to be defined before fracking for hydrocarbons, include:

• Public Human and Animal Health Risks and Costs

• Environmental Justice effects and costs

• Effect of using up our domestic energy stores 

• The carbon pollution effects

• Potential for Earth Quake effects (especially who will pay for the repairs to private property and infrastructure if a connection to fracking is proven)

• Potential direct and indirect effects upon water supplies, groundwater, and pollution of aquifers

• The potential effects on property values around fracking wells

• The disposal of fracking waste products, toxins (especially in the ocean)

• The use of injected acid into fracking wells, and it's potential environmental effects

According to the energy industries, 18% of new wells have casing failures within the first 18-months and the chemicals used in fracking have known endocrine and cancer effects. As I left the building and entered our new county building park, I was struck with all the children playing in the water fountain. 

During the discussion, it was revealed that any existing oil well has the potential to use fracking techniques, and that there are currently 30 such wells active in San Diego County. This seems insignificant compared to the literally tens-of-thousands of Fracking wells in Kern and Los Angeles Counties, but since San Diego county is dependent upon our water supplies from other areas, any potential risk to their watershed is an indirect risk to ours. With the potential for OFF SHORE DRILLING and Fracking using HORIZONTAL drilling techniques, San Diego could still be in some risk of groundwater or ocean contamination. Ever surf on a contaminated beach?

Other issues that came up included the economic effects of reducing our natural gas exploration. There is the potential for a spiraling feedback loop if our least expensive energy increases, effecting all our energy intensive industries from industry to water transportation. However, I believe that these increased costs would motivate and inspire not only new energy sources like renewables, but education and research into efficiency and conservation techniques.

California State Bill 1132, the Fracking Moratorium Bill, comes up for a vote on Friday, May 30th, so contact your state representatives.

Apparently there is also a San Diego - Science Advisory Board - and I'm trying to identify, if you have any information please use the comments section to inform us. 

Michael Tellinger - UBUNTU A World Without Money

What we in America call "MONEY" is actually a set of tools: a medium of exchange that makes trade efficient (i.e. currency), a store of value that saves the wealth generated by our work over time (i.e. savings), a measure of debt based upon the credit or potential value of future work (i.e. debt/credit), and probably a few other tools depending upon which currency of which nation you are trading upon. Redistributing the power to create these tools to the people, either individually or in small groups is a good idea to democratize control, but we already have a system for that, it's called the stock market. Every corporation, weather owned by one person or a million, can print and trade in stock, which is nothing less than printing it's own money. The value of that money depends directly upon the productivity of the business and the value it creates. The owners of that stock benefit directly. 

He seems to blame the tool, instead of the concept of ownership of natural resources and the artificial scarcity that concept creates. Defining natural resources such as air, water, land, energy as 'CAPITAL' is the problem, not the concept of currency or savings or credit or debt. Wealth is a measure of the value of our work, it is infinite, but the resources of this planet are not. There is no way to create 'absolute abundance' on a finite planet. You need an infinite number of planets, and we can't get interstellar without working together. "Money" creates a just system of trade to help us work together efficiently, without ceding control, power, autonomy to dictators. Consensus of judgement and true liberty can only happen if each person has the ability to control the value of their work. The merit of your choices is defined by the benefit to others, but the choices must be made by individuals, else we are not free. 
My contribution would be to sire children to create abundance of children, 3 hrs./week. I'll create my own society by following my passion and start the domino effect. Ubuntu Vegas!

New Harvard Study targets Bayer Neonicotinoids as cause of Colony Collapse Disorder

The bee colony collapse disorder mystery has been solved.
In spite of denials that claim neonicatinoid pesticides are not lethal to bees, a new Harvard study fingers neonics as the key driver of colony collapse disorder. The experiment couldn't have been simpler. Working with nearby beekeepers, Harvard researcher Chensheng Lu and his team treated 12 colonies with tiny levels of neonics and kept six control hives free of the popular chemicals. All 18 hives made it through summer without any apparent trouble. Come winter, though, the bees in six of the treated hives vanished, leaving behind empty colonies—the classic behavior of colony collapse disorder. None of the six control hives experienced a CCD-style disappearing act, although one did succumb to a common-to-bees gut pathogen called nosema.

This year, beekeepers in Ohio, for example, reported winter losses of 50 percent to 80 percent.

Last year, Europe placed a two-year moratorium on most neonic uses, pending more research on their effect on honeybees. The US Environmental Protection Agency, for its part, is reviewing its registration of the chemicals, and won't be done until 2016 at the earliest.
http://www.bulletinofinsectology.org/pdfarticles/vol67-2014-125-130lu.pdf

Timothy Geithner Extended Interview

Timothy Geithner Extended Interview: Former Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner discusses his book "Stress Test," and suggests that the bailout was necessary to avoid a depression.

From Bill Moyers and Company

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Eight Pseudoscientific Climate Claims Debunked by Real Scientists

May 16, 2014

by Joshua Holland

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Jonathan Tucker in a cave beneath a glacier. (Photo: Rex Features via AP Images)

Most people who deny that human activity is warming the planet just dismiss a massive body of scientific evidence as a big hoax.

But there’s a more sophisticated set of climate “skeptics” who make arguments that, at least to the lay ear, sound like they’re grounded in scientific evidence. And because most of us lack the background to evaluate their claims, they can muddy the waters around an issue that’s been settled in the scientific community.

So, as a public service, we gathered eight of the most common of these pseudoscientific arguments and asked some serious climate scientists — all working climatologists who have been widely published — to help us understand what makes these claims so misleading.