I haven’t been posting lately because we’re doing a redesign of the blog and moving it to a WordPress template on my company’s servers.
I’m also tightening my focus to water-related issues. I’ve always been interested in how climate change is affecting us on a personal level, right now, and water is one of the very early indicator issues. It is related intimately with weather issues, another subject I find fascinating. One of the reasons I’m choosing water issues stems from one simple fact: In China only one in 500 people has free access to safe drinking water.

Water will become the most valuable commodity on the planet, surpassing oil, in the next few years. In many places it already is. The oil wars of the second decade of this century will probably be eclipsed by water wars in the next decade, particularly if we don’t take worldwide action right now. It is my hope these conflicts are economic rather than violent as economic conflicts create business opportunities, which in turn, create incentives to resolve the issue (driven by profit motives). Violent wars also present opportunity but this opportunity only results in the creation of weapons which have no positive economic effect and death of innocents. This is a path we cannot allow humanity to go down.
Watch for our new look in the very near future and please contribute your views and stories.

Thanks,
Martin Edic

Blade Runner opens up with street scenes in old LA where at ground level smog and constant drizzle create a hellish vision of a future where those on the literal bottom of society live in an environmental purgatory. When Deckard take flight to visit the offices of the CEO of the android factory he is lifted above this constant cloud into a sunlit aerie of penthouse offices and apartments above huge pyramidal arcologies. This striking contrast was director Ridley Scott’s 1980 vision of a not too distant future. Today in 2007 that future is now:
- The NYTimes has an extensive feature on the vast and permanent smog and pollution in China including this horrifying slide show.
- Only 1 in 500 Chinese has access to clean drinking water
- Greece has lost 50 people to forest fires and declared a national emergency
- Flooding in the midwestern has claimed more than 50 lives with no end in site
- The deaths of miners and rescue workers in Utah due to dangerous mining practices driven by greed and high prices for coal eclipses the story of over 200 miners dying in China at the same time

This is just a sampling of the weather and environmental disasters in place, right now worldwide, yet we still argue about causes and blame. Those arguments are fueled by the vast denial matrix created and funded by energy cartels who, because they are the most advanced practitioners of scenario planning, know the horrifying truth about what we’ve done to this planet already.
Is there a positive story to counter this? Not yet. Barring some amazing breakthrough in cheap, clean and scalable energy production, this feedback loop will accelerate.

This trailer is a compelling brief look at a film that may eclipse An Inconvenient Truth in relevance right now. I am not a celebrity cause fan but by all reviews de Caprio has made a very important film that is frightening, provocative and relentlessly positive in its belief that we can change the world for the better. I can’t wait to see it.

It is hot here today and the weather across the planet is alarmingly extreme- NYC subways flooded, my friend told me today she had to walk 20 blocks to work this morning in stifling humidity and heat- no cabs available.

WSJ has an article (behind the paid wall) about how people have started buying summer homes in Newfoundland: Oceanfront average house goes for $40k, average temps up 4 degrees F, 123 days with average temps of 77F. They’re marketing to Brits because it’s faster to fly there from london than it takes to get to similar coastal properties in the UK and Ireland- similar summer climate.

I’ve been up there- it is a long way from everything! Nice in a barren Atlantic storm-beaten way.

Update: The first tornado ever recorded in the NYC area hit Brooklyn yesterday.