Author Archives: L J Furman, MBA

About L J Furman, MBA

Analyst here and Director of Information Technology with an MBA in Managing for Sustainability.

Barack Obama, a Systems Thinker in the White House

President Barack Obama.

President Barack Obama.

In his State of the Union Address <video, transcript Englsh, en español>, President Obama said “The best anti-poverty program is a world classeducation

.” He described a positive, or reinforcing, feedback loop. Education enables people to accomplish more, earn more, and better educate their children, who also accomplish more and earn more. It is one of the most important differences between the populations of New Jersey and West Virginia. This is described in detail in Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows<link>, (C) 2008, published by Chelsea Green<link>, ISBN 978-1-60358-055-7.

The President also asked for a better health care plan. I can answer that in five words: “Single Payer; Medicare For All” <link>  just approved by the California Senate. Medicare works for my octogenarian father. Health Insurance Care doesn’t work for a 20-something friend of mine. He just graduated from college. He has no job and therefore no medical insurance. If he was a full-time student he’d be covered on his parents’ insurance. A simple reform would cover recent graduates until they find a job that pays a living wage and provides health insurance benefits. Another would be by expanding Medicare to cover all citizens. This is much easier said than done. Our medical care system cannot adequately care for approximately 50 million people – one out of six. This can’t be changed overnight – we need to train more doctors and nurses, and build more hospitals, but it must be changed.

Image showing mountain strip mined for coal.

Mountain strip mined for coal. Chris Dorst, Charleston, WV Gazette.

Energy is another set of systems problems. No one who has seen a once pristine valley after strip mining or “mountain-top removal”  uses the term “Clean Coal.” Countries like Denmark, Ireland, Israel, Japan, and Sweden built their economies with education not extraction of natural resources. As the President alluded to, conservation and clean, renewable energy technologies – solar, wind, geothermal, hydro – can be implemented faster, at a lower cost, and with fewer negative economic externalities than traditional fuel intensive resource based technologies like fossil fuel and nuclear power. This suggests another of the differences between New Jersey and West Virginia – the “Blessings of Education” versus the “Resource Curse” <link> from which economies built on extraction of natural resources suffer.

Arklow at Sunset

Arklow Bank Wind Park, off Arklow Bay, Ireland. Image courtesy Oneworld.net, UK.

The President needs economic advisors who start think in terms of ecological economics <link1 / link2>, of metrics like the Genuine Progress Indicator, GPI <link>, rather than Gross Domestic Product, GDP <link>. Simply put, ecological economics is neoclassical economics with a better understanding of the long term and of costs. Spending one dollar – or one trillion dollars – to clean up a mess is not as good as allocating those resources to build factories, houses, libraries, museums – the infrastructure, culture, and community of a nation.

God, Keynes, and Clean Energy

Columbia University

Columbia University

NY. Jan. 25. Mark Fulton, “Climate Change Strategist” Deutsche BankAsset Management, spoke at Cary Krosinsky’s class in Sustainable Investing at the CERC, the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, Earth Institute, Columbia University.

Krosinsky, Vice President of Trucost, recently co-edited and wrote the book Sustainable Investing: The Art of Long Term Performance with Nick Robins of HSBC. He is an Advisory Board member of the Association of Climate Change Officers (ACCO) and founder director of InvestorWatch. Trucost has built and maintains the world’s largest database of carbon emissions and other environmental impacts as generated by the world’s largest public and private companies. Their data and expertise is used by leading global fund managers and asset owners to manage carbon risk. Continue reading →

Nuclear Fusion: Cleaner Energy – Tomorrow

The Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX) reactor is housed inside a 16-foot-diameter steel structure in a building on the MIT campus that also houses MIT’s other fusion reactor, a tokamak called Alcator C-mod.

The Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX) reactor, Photo courtesy of the LDX team

A team of scientists led by Jay Kesner at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center and Michael Mauel at the Columbia University Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science announced the “first significant results” from the Levitated Dipole Experiment, LDX. (Click here for the MIT news release). Continue reading →

New Mission for Guantanamo – Aid to Haiti

Pallets of Bottled Water bound for Haiti

Pallets of Bottled Water bound for Haiti

As covered in The Guardian, UK, and by WAVY-10, Virginia Beach, the  disaster in Haiti as a result of the recent earthquake is giving the American base at Guantanamo Bay two new missions: supplying aid and potentially detaining thousands of Haitian migrants.

The U.S. has designated Guantanamoas the hub of the aid operation. Dozens of helicopters and planes take off daily to ferry supplies and personnel to the stricken country or to American ships off the coast.

This makes sense as Guantanamo is a US Base so we have control over it, and it is about 200 miles from Haiti, so proximate to the disaster.

In a related story, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the World Bank says it plans to extend an additional $US 100 million in emergency aid to Haiti to help recovery and reconstruction from the devastating earthquake.

El Nino Batters Southern California

Evidence of Climate Change?

Floods in Los Angeles, California, Jan. 2010.

Over 300 residents of Los Angeles were ordered to evacuate because of the threat of mudslides from the rains. These rains are related El Niño, a warm ocean current from the South Pacific, according to CNN meteorologist Chad Myers  (click here). The effects of El Nino and the Southern Oscillation are amplified by the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the oceans, which has increased from approximately 250 parts per million to 390 ppm in the last 150 years, due primarily to burning coal, oil, and other fossil fuels.

Clouds and Rain over Los Angeles, California
Clouds and Rain over Los Angeles, California

City and county officials warned Tuesday that significant rainfall on already saturated soil could cause mudslides and debris flows, especially below the steep slopes that burned last year.

Evacuations in La Canada Flintridge, La Crescenta and parts of Glendale were scheduled to begin Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010. Officials hope to have everyone out of danger by the time the third storm in as many days hits Southern California.

For details on El Nino and the Southern Oscillation on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA web-site click here . For an overview on Popular Logistics, click here and here . Refer also to William James Burroughs’ reference text, Climate Change, A Multidisciplinary Approach, 2nd Edition, 2007, Cambridge University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-87015-3 or 978-0-521-69033-1.

California Brown Pelicans in an IBRRC shelter. Photo courtesy IBRRCThe rains are also stressing the California brown pelican. Bird rescue experts at the International Bird Rescue Research Center, IBRRC, are fighting to save over 100 cold, wet California Brown Pelicans, as more hypothermic birds keep coming. Their Waterproof feathers usually allow pelicans to float and stay insulated from weather changes, the current massive runoff from storms has brought even more grease, car oil sheen, fish oils and other forms of surface pollution into the coastal areas where these birds feed.  “Many brown pelicans have been found soaking wet and in a critical condition,” says IBRRC Director Jay Holcomb, “and since the storms kept coming, one after another, the wet birds did not have time to dry off and feed, and are becoming weak and hypothermic.

Evidence of Climate Change?

Is the drought of the last few years, followed by this years heavy rain and flood a shift in the weather or a change in the climate?

Google v China, and Baidu v Iran

Google announced that it believes that China is responsible for cyber attacks on Google China. Google is now unwilling to censor search results in China (The Guardian).

Google China

Google China. by Phillipe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, about to begin a tour of Asia, said “We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation.” (The Guardian / NY Times).On their blog (here), in a post entitled “A New Approach to China” Google said:

“In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.” Continue reading →

Obama and The People Fight Terrorism

President Barack Obama

In response to the Christmas Day attempted terror attack, President Obama’s actions and former Vice President Cheney’s comments highlight the differences between the two administrations: The Bush Administration was famous for not being “Reality Based” (NY Times). The Obama Administration investigates first, thinks, and ACTS(Reuters), while accepting responsibility for any failures.  “Ultimately, the buck stops with me,” Obama said. “As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people.” (CS Monitor)

On 12/29/9, President Obama said it was a systemic failure (Christian Science Monitor). On 1/3/10, he said the attack was planned in Yemen (NY Times). We also know he approved US counter-terror strikes in Yemen, which occurred on 12/24/09 (NPR /  NYTimes) and which killed Al Queda Terrorists. Continue reading →

Nuclear Power Development Costs Skyrocket

This is not exactly “news.” Nuclear power plant  construction is synonymous with cost overruns.

(This is a “systems problem.” Anytime you have a 10 to 15 year project in the $Billion range you will find several reinforcing feedback mechanisms that increase the cost and few, if any, balancing feedback mechanisms that keep the costs at a steady state. A brief delay or a minor increase in inflation will cost $Millions.)

Radioactive SymbolCosts of the proposed nuclear plants in San Antonio, TX, have skyrocketed, even tho construction has not yet begun. Originally forecast at $2 Billion per gigawatt (gw) of capacity, roughly the cost of wind power, it is now clear that they will cost between $4.5 Billion and $6.5 Billion per gw of capacity – $12.1 billion to $17.5 billion for the reactors. Continue reading →

Copenhagen, India, China, the US, and GAIA

I’m beginning to think that Copenhagen was what it had to be, what it could only be. It fulfilled its Buddha-nature. Thus, I don’t consider it a failure. Nor do I consider it a success. It was what it was, what it could have been, what it had to be:

A gathering of emissaries from the 64 corners of the earth.

Courtesy of NASA

Earth From Space, Copyright NASA

Isaac Asimov observed in Foundation (ISBN: 978-0553293357) that “diplomacy, is the art of speaking for a long time without saying anything.” Most of the diplomats in Copenhagen had multiple agendas. Unfortunately for billions of the world’s poorest, the public agendas of sustainability and the abstract “Gaia Hypothesis” were distant fourth and fifth behind the private agendas of power, money, and influence.

The inconvenient truth is that much of Bangla Desh, California, Louisiana, Southern Florida will disappear, submerged, like the mythical Atlantis. China will continue to build 2 coal plants per week. And people will die.

But disregarding this notion, a Chinese diplomat Continue reading →

Copenhagen, Climate Change, China, and Dessert

Sea IceEarlier today one of my friends handed me a copy of some satire published in the New York Post, a tabloid in the tradition of the London rags, on the subject of “Climate-Gate.”  At about the same time, Roger Saillant, co-author of Vapor Trails, who heads the Fowler Center for Sustainable Value at Case Western Reserve University pointed me to Elizabeth May’s post on the hacked computers and stolen e-mails at East Anglia University. Ms. May leads Canada’s Green Party.

Patrick Michaels, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is really a public relations arm of Exxon Mobil, was once a scientist at the University of Virginia.  He is famous for giving testimony attacking Dr. James Hansen to the U.S. Senate. However, when interviewed by Elizabeth May on Canada’s CBC Sunday Morning’s “Kyoto on Trial” in 2002, Michaels admitted to redrawing Hansen’s graph to make it wrong. Michaels, who has traded the scientific method for Stanislavsky’s acting method, admitted to perjury in his testimony before the United States Senate.

The graph shows the amount of sea ice from July thru November from 1979 to 2000, then in 2005, 7, 8, and July thru Sept., 2009. It is from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder Colorado (here) published Oct. 6, 2009. The dark gray line shows Arctic sea ice from 1979 to 2000. The gray band shows 2 standard deviations from the mean. The colorful lines show that Arctic sea ice is at or well below two standard deviations from the mean levels of 1979 to 2000.  Clearly there is less ice in the Arctic then there used to be. Continue reading →

Myth and Science on Global Warming

Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense

This article presents and debunks myths about climate change.

Evidence for human interference with Earth’s climate continues to accumulate

By John Rennie, Scientific American, November 30, 2009

“On November 18, U.S. Sen. James R. Inhofe (R–Okla.) took the floor of the Senate and proclaimed 2009 to be “The Year of the Skeptic.” Had the senator’s speech marked a new commitment to dispassionate, rational inquiry, a respect for scientific thought and a well-grounded doubt in ghosts, astrology, creationism and homeopathy, it might have been cause for cheer. But Inhofe had a more narrow definition of skeptic in mind: he meant “standing up and exposing … the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism.”

Continue reading →

Jobs, National Security, Energy, Environment, Economy

Architecting a Clean, Secure, Sustainable, Non-Carbon and Non-Nuclear Energy Future

Middelgrunden, Denmark, near Copenhagen

Middelgrunden, Denmark, near Copenhagen

  • 100 Gigawatts offshore wind. $300 Billion.
  • 100 GW land based wind. $200 Billion.
  • 50 GW solar. $325 Billion.
  • 250 GW Clean, renewable, sustainable Energy.  $825 Billion.
  • Save the World: Priceless Continue reading →

Who Will Speak for the Child?

Constitution Day

US Flag, Constitution, Eagle Statue of Liberty

Human Rights at Home and the Convention on the Rights of the Child

Roughly a year ago, the American Constitution Society for Law & Policy (ACS) published Catherine Powell’sHuman Rights at Home: A Domestic Policy Blueprint for the New Administration.  In this plan for reaffirming and implementing the US commitment to human rights, many recommendations were made, including a call for “the ratification, accompanied by fully adequate implementing legislation, of important human rights treaties to which the United States is not yet a party.”  Continue reading →

The Nine Principles of Sustainability

The Brundtland Commission defines sustainability as “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” How do you do it? Harnessing processes, not consuming resources. (click here). In Making Sustainability Work, 2008. ISBN 9781906093051, Marc Epstein describes how to do it; the corporate structures needed.

We’ll get there, if the Earth holds out.  Continue reading →

Coal Miner Deaths

In China, 407 Coal Miners Died THIS YEAR

. 104 Died THIS WEEKEND in the Xinxing coal mine – described by Chinese authorities as a SAFE

mine. 528 miners were underground at the time of the explosion – in which 19.7% of the miners were killed! China Mine Disaster Continue reading →