Franke,
Once again you’ve outdone yourself- I sent it around at the agency I work for.
I’m not giving up my car but I am seriously thinking about buying one of these electric bike kits. The motor is mounted in the front rim so you can easily switch it back to being a bike. I have a seven mile commute but most of it is along the Erie canal so I could cruise along the canal path. You can pedal too. I think I might do it.
I didn’t have a car for several years. Lived in downtown Rochester but there are no, as in zero, places to buy groceries. Being single at the time, I just ate out all the time.
When I bought a car it was an incredible luxury- I immediately got in and drove to the Adirondacks. Didn’t even pack anything, just drove straight from the dealership.
Someday we will look back upon our current lifestyle as a period of unimaginable luxury and wastefulness. I just don’t see any other option.
Being creative, we have to see this as the ulitimate creative challenge- to change our immediate world in every imaginable way (while we wait for cold fusion to save our asses!).

The climate science consensus calls for up to 16 inches of rise in ocean levels by the end of this century. To put that in perspective, 16″ of rise would mean approximately 4000 feet of shoreline lost in low lying areas like Florida (basically all of the newest development in Miami).
Today, satellite observations have identified 14 fresh water lakes beneath Antarctica’s massive ice shelf, some as deep as 2300 feet below the ice’s surface. Scientists don’t understand this phenomena nor do they know if this is unusual.
There are a couple of reasons why this is disturbing. First, the lakes are dumping huge quantities of fresh water into the ocean. Fresh water infusions are believed to have the potential to disrupt global ocean currents which would be catastrophic. Second, should this be an indicator that the ice shelf is weakening and could collapse, we’re screwed. Because this is a shelf, its collapse would displace enough sea water to raise worldwide ocean levels 16 feet. Goodbye virtually every coastal city in the world.
These feedback loop effects are the great unknown in climate science. Despite the commonality of agreement by global climate science mentioned earlier, the disclaimer that should attend announcements of a 16″ rise in ocean levels should read like this: There is the possibility that this rise could take place in less than ten years due to factors we don’t currently fully understand.

Update

“NASA’s state-of-the-art satellite instruments are so sensitive we are able to capture an unprecedented three-dimensional look at the system beneath the thick ice sheet and measure from space changes of a mere 3 feet in its surface elevation. That is like seeing an elevation change in the thickness of a paperback book from an airplane flying at 35,000 feet.”

Here is the NASA article on the lakes.

More info:
“We didn’t realise that the water under these ice streams was moving in such large quantities, and on such short time scales. We thought these changes took place over years and decades, but we are seeing large changes over months. The detected motions are astonishing in magnitude, dynamic nature and spatial extent,” Dr Fricker said.”
That’s Dr. Helen Fricker at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. When things start moving much fater than any glaciologist knew, we have a very serious potential problem, one it is unlikely that we can do anything about except observe the results.

I love this kind of innovation. Greenfuels is one of several companies utilizing algae (think pond scum) as a source for biofuels like biodesiel, gas and ethanol (algae are a much better source than corn). The innovation is that the algae are ‘fed’ carbon dioxide from the output of powerplants. Two tons of algae can ’sequester’ one ton of CO2. Once they’ve taken in the CO2, the algae use photosynthesis to convert it to plant matter which can, in turn be converted to fuel.
Greenfuels and the state of NY are building a test plant in Dunkirk, NY, a small city south of Buffalo.

A few weeks ago, before the polar air dropped on us like a hammer from the north, I was walking through a local marina looking at used sailboats. No one was around and I was doing a little fantasy window-shopping. The boats, on their cradles for the winter, ranged from brand new 40 + footers to 25 year-old daysailors. The further you walked away from the trailer that serves as the boat broker’s office, the older the boats seem to get until you reach those that are never going to see the water again.
These boats are abandoned-looking and the elements have taken their toll with broken rigging, rotting hatches and trim and clumps of weeds growing out of bits of dirt that have accumulated here and there. However, they are not going anywhere for a long time. Unlike the old wooden boats we played in as kids, these fiberglass hulls won’t disintegrate into the ground. They are going to be here a very long time. Even if broken up, their pieces will end up in a landfill like virtually everything else we have manufactured in the past 50 years.
In many third world countries, even the worst of these broken boats would be put to use, patched up and repurposed to create a living for someone. Here, old yachts are a burden to those who inherit them.
Bruce Sterling, in his pamphlet Shaping Things, puts forth the natural progression of things that we, as humans, make and use. Those things made with tools, one at a time, he calls Artifacts. The next stage are those made via mass production which he calls Products. He moves next to Gadgets, which are inherently technology but technology which has limited use. Finally he suggests the next category which he dubs Splimes (I don’t know the origin of the term) which are useful tools that use data to adapt and change their usefulness as our needs changes. These Splimes are also easily reconfigured or broken down into reusable components. Sterling makes the convincing case that all design must focus on this stage, that we simply cannot consume resources to make things that have shorter and shorter useful lives.
So the wooden boat is an Artifact, the ‘classic plastic’ glass boat a Product and the shining new techno-boats are simply huge Gadgets which will become outdated as new gee whiz features arrive in new models. The challenge is to design a boat (or car or computer or living unit) that is a platform that runs a system that can be updated or reconfigured rather than destroyed. Sometimes this reconfiguration design may be simply mean using easily recycled materials for parts that will become outdated. Eventually we will have materials that can be reconfigured physically to accommodate design breakthroughs like new hull shapes or sail profiles. We might unplug an engine and plug in some new kind of drive or tell a hull material to reshape itself (nanotech).
This is not sci-fi. It is a survival mandate for human design. With 6 billion on the planet now and another three billion to be added in the next 40 years, we can’t keep tossing stuff into the trash, especially stuff made of increasingly scarce materials like petrochemicals.

PS: The recently announced iPhone from Apple has raised the bar and may be an entry into this type of design. Several observers have voiced the thought that these phones, being reconfigurable via software and having few moving parts, may break the cycle of physical phone upgrades. Instead of selling us a new piece of hardware, thus dooming the old one to the junk pile, we can simply update the software. That’s an early Splime.