NeoFiles Interviews Jamais Cascio  

RU Sirius has a great interview with WorldChanging's Jamais Cascio up at NeoFiles (via TreeHugger). The interview is quite enlightening - I never realised the WorldChanging team had worked for the Whole Earth Catalogue during its final days.

He talks about energy issues at some length - with his view being summarised as "It's a three-point agenda: renewables, distribution, and efficiency". The interview even covers memetic engineering, which has been one of my quirkier interests for quite a while (peak oil being a good example of a meme that's undergoing some grassroots engineering effort, though I hope Jamais doesn't view it as necessarily toxic). Go and read the whole thing - its a lot longer than the excerpts below.

In a way, this story begins with (who else?) Stewart Brand. In 1968, he started The Whole Earth Catalogue, suggesting that rather than just bitching about "the system," countercultural and other maverick types could take up tools and information and make life solutions happen for themselves. While the Whole Earth had the funky smell of the "back to the land" movement, Brand was always open to a wide variety of inputs and solutions. "High" technology was part of the Weltanschauung.

Some thirty years later, Jamais Cascio and Alex Steffen were working guest editing an edition of that very publication (now called Whole Earth Review) when they came upon an idea that they realized could only be realized on the web. The idea was to create an open source network for problem solving on a global scale — WorldChanging.com. In the words of their mission statement: "the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us … plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected … the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present … another world is not just possible, it's here. We only need to put the pieces together."

...

JC: To give you a sense of the potential for renewable energy, researchers at Stanford just published a map of global wind power potential in the Journal of Geophysical Research. They found that the total wind power potential using current wind turbine technology in locations with optimal wind speeds is 72 terawatts. Last year, the planet as a whole used less than 12 terawatts. Now, nobody's going to stand for putting up wind turbines everywhere possible, but that should hint at the potential these energy sources have.

Solar has been stalled at about ~25% efficiency for a couple of decades now, but some recent nanotechnology breakthroughs look to push it well above 50% efficiency. Moreover, there have been some really interesting announcements just this last year in the production of flexible photovoltaics, from plastics to paints to even cloth. They're lower efficiency, in the 10-15% range, but enormously useful as a source of additional power. We're going to start thinking of surfaces not simply in structural terms, but in terms of energy generation potential. You aren't going to drive an electric car powered by rooftop solar cells any time soon, but the added electricity recharging the batteries of your hybrid would certainly help; same with home power — you don't get all of your power from photovoltaic paint, but it makes a significant contribution.

But I actually think that ocean power will probably be the dark horse in all of this. Tidal and wave power have some advantages over other renewables: they're less visually obtrusive than wind towers, and (unlike solar) will operate 24/7. There's enormous potential for power generation from tides and waves. One researcher figured that about 600 or so "hydrokinetic" turbines stuck in the Gulf Stream could produce sufficient power for all of the United States. Another research group calculated that wave power along the US coasts could amount to about ten times the electricity production of all dams in the country.

...

NF: I'm interested in the idea of toxic memes, or detoxifying memes. In some ways, World Changing seems to me to be a meme exchange, and one in which some memes are intended to be concretized as problem-solving activities. I also wonder how you contend with the attractiveness of toxic or ugly memes in a media age. As I always say, nobody wants to watch a movie about a bunch of people sitting around being tolerant. (I suppose that's two questions)

JC: There's definitely a bit of memetic engineering going on at WorldChanging, although I suppose the current vogue is to refer to it as "reframing." Negative scenarios are seductively easy to create, and it seems a particular pathology of progressives to focus on the various disastrous possibilities we may soon face. WorldChanging has at its core a drive to focus on solutions rather than the problems — there are already thousands of places to find out the myriad things wrong with the world. Moreover, we emphasize the interconnections between solution sets, the ways in which ideas from one area (say, open source) can be useful and influential in other areas (say, developing world economics).

That said, it's really hard sometimes not to dwell on the awful and the frustrating. There's a lot of crap happening, a lot of bad decisions and foolish choices being made. It would be so easy to catalog the various disasters that could hit us, the relentless march of idiocy we all see all around us. But that just makes the challenge of WorldChanging — focusing on solutions and new ideas — all the more appealing.

The way to deal with "toxic memes" and terriblisma (the attraction of the terrible) — a wonderful Renaissance Italian term Alex dug up awhile back — is not to pretend that the problems don't exist. Focusing on solutions doesn't mean living in a Panglossian illusion of being in the best of all possible worlds. We could very well fail. But pretending that there are no solutions, that our only possible futures are nasty, brutish and short is as bad as pretending that there are no problems.

Jamais also notes in the comments on TreeHugger that his example in the interview of how increasing our efficiency of energy usage can have a big payoff is needs to be corrected a little:

Thank you for linking to this. But I would be remiss if I didn't correct something in what I wrote (and you excerpted). Reviewing the data from the California Energy Commision, I discovered that I had slightly misstated the numbers. It doesn't detract from the overall point, but I want to make sure people don't miss that point because of the error. Here's how that first quoted paragraph should read:

"With 1% annual improvement, population stabilizing as around 10 billion, and overall increase in standards of living to EU levels, the globe would still be using four times as much energy in 2100 as today. By bumping up overall efficiency improvement to 2% averaged over the next century, we'd cut that down to just 40% more than the present. And if we could push to 3% averaged over the century -- still very possible, and less than we've managed in the recent past -- we'd actually end up using half our current levels of energy."

As you can see, the argument's the same -- a slight improvement in efficiency can have big results -- but the numbers are, if anything, *more* dramatic.

Technorati tags: peak oil