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the ‘classic plastic’ glass boat a Product and the shining new techno-boats are simply huge Gadgets which will become outdated as new gee whiz features arrive in new models.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.

D’oh!
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was released this morning to great media hooha. Apparently it is official that mankind is the guilty party (really? You’re kidding…). IMHO, I’ve always thought this aspect of the global warming/climate change debate was ridiculous because it is a distraction from the far more pressing concern- what to do about it.
The ocean levels rose from six to nine inches during the 20th century and the report estimates another 8-12 inches this century with a 1 in 10 chance that it could be much more (they went conservative on those odds).
The good news here is that this report was created by a very large number of climate scientists and should stop real debate on the causes, moving us to the real issue of changing what we’re doing worldwide.
I hope.

Exxon Mobil recorded the greatest profit ever recorded by any business of any kind, ever, for 2006: $40.9 billion. In a year that saw consumer energy prices more than double, one can only regard this as profiteering based on the war in Iraq, Katrina and the war on terrorism. If these and other events caused a rise in the cost of their goods (oil) and they legitimately only passed that increase onto their customers, then they should see no unusual spike in profits. The fact that they have this enormous increase means one thing and one thing only: They raised their prices far higher than required by an underlying increase in cost of goods sold. And given no other options, we paid.
In a time of war and a globally unfolding environmental disaster, taking advantage of unstable conditions by raising prices and profits is criminal. Yet no one seems to be concerned. This affects every one of us. At what point do people start to get angry? $8/gallon gas? Seniors freezing to death because they can’t afford heating oil? These things are already taking place in Europe and they will happen here.

Update: Here’s some interesting news on what they’re doing with all that cash (hint: denial)

I am a writer by profession so I have some clue about the power of words. Today, in Paris, climate scientists from all over the planet have gathered, under the auspices of the UN, to finalize their comprehensive report on global warming and climate change. The 1500 page report is by all accounts extremely alarming in its nearly unanimous agreement that things are literally heating up much faster than previously predicted. One hopes that this will put the final nail in the coffin of the deniers. But it won’t.

The Executive Summary: Watering Down the Message
Today the scientists are dealing with the politicians as they prepare the executive summary of the report. The summary, a 30-50 page document, is critical because 99% of all the coverage the report gets worldwide will come from the summary. As a result the political hacks are converging on this process and doing everthing they can to change its language to support their country’s political stance on global warming. As one scientist said today, they have completed 30% of the summary but used 60% of their available time to do so, all because of wrangling over words.

‘Global Climate Change’
This is the phrase Bush used in the State of the Union address last week. It is notable because the word ‘warming’ is conspicuously absent. This is intentional. If we know one thing about this White House it is that they are very conscious of the power of a phrase: Mission Accomplished, Stay the Course, etc. They can’t use ‘warming’ because that word points a finger directly at the energy industry and also offends some fundamentalists who regard any implication that we caused this mess as a slap in the face of mankind’s inalienable right to do whatever we want. This is the mindset that is driving the process of watering down the message in Paris.

Whether you are a journalist, a blogger or an active reader, it is your duty to tell these politicians that they need to call a spade a spade. No more spinning of language to divert attention away from the most important challenge in mankind’s brief history on this planet. The truth needs to be told as clearly and directly as possible.