clean water

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The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'Homme

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, William Langewiesche

CHAPTER 9: ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK 99 Tom Porta: Congressional testimony, October 15, 2009: http://www.neiwpcc.org/email-newsletter/oct09/ASIWPCA-Porta%20Testimony.pdf. 99 James Oberstar: Charles Duhigg, “Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering,” New York Times, September 13, 2009. 99 Underfunded, overly politicized: Ibid. 100 fifteen hundred major pollution cases: Charles Duhigg, “Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act, Foiling E.P.A.,” New York Times, February 28, 2010. 100 John Rapanos filled fifty-four acres of wetland: “Rapanos Will Pay for Clean Water Act Violations,” Environmental News Service, December 30, 2008. 101 Douglas Mundrick: Duhigg, “Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act.” 101 Peter Silva: Congressional testimony, December 8, 2009: http://www.epa.gov/ocir/hearings/testimony /111_2009_2010/2009_1208_pss.pdf. 101 Jay Shimshack: Congressional testimony, October 15, 2009. 101 William Ruckelshaus: Ruckelshaus, “New Shade of Green.” 102 Kingston Ash plant: Shaila Dewan, “Tennessee Ash Flood Larger Than Initial Estimate,” New York Times, December 26, 2008. 102 Jackson, forty-six: Tim Dickinson, “The Eco-Warrior,” Rolling Stone, January 20, 2010. 103 Jeff Ruch: Ibid., and author’s e-mails with Ruch, 2010. 103 Robert F.

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In America, clean water seems limitless. This assumption is so ingrained that most of us never stop to think about it when we brush our teeth, power up our computers, irrigate our crops, build a new house, or gulp down a clean, clear drink on a hot summer day. It’s easy to see why. For most of its history, the United States has shown a remarkable ability to find, treat, and deliver potable water to citizens in widely different circumstances across the country. Since the seventies, America has relied on the Environmental Protection Agency and robust laws—most notably the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, which have been further enhanced by state and local regulations—to protect water supplies.

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Imagine what would happen if this place stopped working one day? Let’s just say it wouldn’t be pretty.” CHAPTER 6 Brave New World Trying to solve these [modern pollution] problems with the 1972 Clean Water Act is like trying to use a 1972 auto repair manual to repair a 2008 electric hybrid. —Paul Freedman, vice president of the Water Environment Federation SEEKING A PARADIGM SHIFT When the Clean Water Act was signed into law by President Nixon on October 18, 1972, it was hailed as landmark legislation. Over the next three decades, the law led to tangible, significant improvements in the quality of American water.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

One of us (Cutler) coauthored a paper fifteen years ago that estimated the impact on mortality of clean water across the nineteenth-century United States by using the relatively random timing of the introduction of new technologies, like water filtration, in different cities as a natural experiment. The paper concluded that “clean water was responsible for nearly half of the total mortality reduction in major cities, three-quarters of the infant-mortality reduction, and nearly two-thirds of the child mortality reduction.” The ratio of benefits to costs was 23 to 1, which makes clean water among the single best investments that any government has ever made.

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., 151, 155, 156, 323, 325 Caesar Augustus, 181 California, 17, 264–65, 336 California Education Code, 313–14 California Teachers Association (CTA), 313–14 Campbell, Bruce, 171 Canada health care spending in, 131, 141, 142, 143 health of urbanites in, 103 heart stents in, 146 public health spending in, 153 quarantine station of, 71 rationing of health care in, 148 testing for COVID-19 in, 156 cardiac technologies, 145, 146 Caribbean heritage, people of, 97 Carman, Harry, 213 Case, Anne, 123 Castro, Sal, 253 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) budget for, 58, 153 on drug overdose deaths, 123 and new infectious diseases, 55 and public health funding, 154 on risk factors for COVID-19, 106 and testing for COVID-19, 150 trust placed in, 57 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), 136 Central Piedmont Community College, 335 centrifugal/dispersing forces, 210, 214–18, 220 centripetal/urbanizing forces, 210–14, 223 Chauvin, Derek, 275–76, 293, 298 Chavez, Cesar, 254, 256 Chen, Keith, 159 Chetty, Raj, 216, 257, 276, 299–300, 302 Chevalier, Judy, 159 Chicago, 195, 210, 211, 214, 216, 217, 294 chimpanzees, 88 China Antonine Plague in, 32–33 Black Death in, 41 fight against mosquitoes in, 89 restrictions on movement in, 54 and travel bans of 2020, 41–42, 55, 149, 150, 163 and World Health Organization, 56–57 Chinitz, Benjamin, 199–203 cholera economic impacts of, 169 in India, 63–69, 80 and infrastructure investments of cities, 6 Jameson’s report on, 65–67, 86 in New York City, 71, 73, 74, 80 as ongoing threat, 320 spread of, between 1817 and 1923, 69–71 and strength of civil society, 244 Christians, 33 civil society, strength of, 10, 15, 45, 243–44, 321–22 clean water supply and aqueducts, 62–63, 74–75, 77, 79–80, 210 and cholera outbreak in India, 67, 68, 80 costs of clean water, 77–78 governments’ role in, 62–63, 75, 96 in Hyderabad, India, 94–95 last-mile problem for, 79–80, 83 in Lusaka, Zambia, 95–96 and mortality trends, 75 of New York City, 72–75, 83 public vs. private ownership of waterworks, 78–79 and sewer systems, 76 value of clean water, 75–76 Cleveland, Ohio, 1 Clinton, Bill, 281, 282 Clinton, DeWitt, 74 clothing and textiles, 53, 174, 176, 180, 188, 199, 217–18 collective vs. personal interests, 42–43, 44 commercial rents/real estate, 16, 17, 208, 238 Common Core State Standards Initiative, 304–8 communication, 221, 223, 224–27 competition among businesses, 178–79 compromise, value of, 10 computerization, 220, 223 Constantinople (Byzantium), 5, 20, 33–37, 39, 40, 41, 172, 244 construction workers, 192–93 consumer spending, 187 contact tracing, 155, 156, 164, 168 contagion theory of epidemics, 49, 50 Cooper, Peter, 82 cordon sanitaire, 39, 53–54 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES), 195 corporate relocations, 209 cost of living in urban areas, 235–36 Cothorne, Adell, 311 Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), 305 COVID-19 pandemic bats linked to, 88, 91, 92 deaths associated with, 87, 131–32, 319 and drug overdose deaths, 124 economic impacts of, 61, 96, 169, 197 and essential workers, 194–95, 229–30 estimated costs of, 11 failure to prepare for, 150–52, 153–56 federal aid programs, 195–96 in Florida, 197–98 and forward-looking prevention strategies, 326–29 and George Floyd-related protests, 276 hot spots for, 7, 175, 185 humans as primary vectors of, 86 job losses due to, 2, 169, 196, 197, 228, 229, 233 lack of PPE, 150–51 leadership failures in, 149–53, 163 leadership successes in, 163–67.

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The British elites living in Delhi’s suburban Civil Lines during the nineteenth century received clean water and sewers. During the twentieth century, the British could move into New Delhi, a segregated, modernized, Europeanized capital. But in old Delhi, where the poorer Indians lived, “until 1928 excrement and refuse were dumped within the city, in the ditch, and in pits close to town.” What Delhi needed then and what the cities of the developing world need now are the game-changing investments in clean water and sewers that were built, largely as a response to cholera, in the wealthy world. Sporadic, almost feeble, expenditures on new water tanks, or open sewers, could not protect nineteenth-century Delhi and cannot protect twenty-first-century poor world megacities from the scourge of contagious disease.

Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water by Peter H. Gleick

Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, John Snow's cholera map, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley

Daily stories about our deteriorating water resources added urgency to the drive for stronger federal oversight over our worsening environment, and in 1970 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created to centralize and standardize inconsistent federal and state laws for environmental protection. That same year, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, followed in 1972 by the Clean Water Act, and in 1974 by the federal Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).13 The Clean Water Act reduced uncontrolled dumping of wastes into surface waters, and the SDWA is the law that requires the U.S. EPA to protect tap water quality. To do so, the EPA sets health-based standards for naturally occurring and human-made contaminants that might be found in our water supplies, and it oversees the water agencies, municipalities, and states that implement the standards.

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This iconic image made Cleveland the butt of jokes for decades and, incidentally, led to a great Randy Newman song, “Burn on,” with the following lyrics: Cleveland, even now I can remember ’Cause the Cuyahoga River Goes smokin’ through my dreams Burn on, big river, burn on Burn on, big river, burn on Now the Lord can make you tumble And the Lord can make you turn And the Lord can make you overflow But the Lord can’t make you burn.1 This incident, however, also led to the federal Clean Water Act of 1972, the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Today, Lake Erie is far cleaner than it’s been in years, and Cleveland’s water system provides 90 billion gallons of high-quality potable water to customers every year. Two cents today will pay for nearly 30 gallons of water of a far higher quality than Benhu Johnson and his pony were able to deliver.

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As a result, many people seek out alternatives, and the bottled water industry is happy to take advantage of this distrust. They subtly and blatantly play on our fears to boost sales through advertising and marketing, and through campaigns to move consumers from tap water to the bottle. The irony is that, behind the scenes, most local water systems do a remarkable job of ensuring a clean water supply, most of the time. I never saw bottled water when I was a child. My mother never brought home water from the grocery store—and what a bizarre event that would have been. We drank milk or apple juice or New York City tap water. My friends, family, and acquaintances all drank tap water without a second thought.

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

Because RBC helped us with a logistical hurdle that we couldn't possibly have done in-house—processing millions of loose coins—more than 56,000 people received a sustainable source of clean drinking water, with wells dug and pump systems installed, community members trained in maintenance and repairs, and small businesses established to generate funds for any future repairs and expansion. Clean water scarcity still affects almost 40 percent of the global population, creating a host of sanitary and disease concerns. But clean water also has an economic benefit. The United Nations estimates that every US$1 invested in clean water translates into an average return of US$9, with those benefits being experienced specifically by poor children in disadvantaged communities.3 Canadian kids rolled up their sleeves to help impoverished children they'd likely never meet.

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Our time with Craig in Rajasthan showed all of this so clearly. We visited a one-room village school and helped build a wall for a new school that will provide multiple classrooms so more children will have the opportunity to learn. We helped families who had relied on polluted water sources carry clean water from their new community well to their homes. We attended a Lean In Circle meeting with women who are participating in a financial literacy program that has helped them save money and send their daughters to school for the first time. All of this is happening because WE Charity, a program started by Craig when he was just 12 years old, is working in these communities—and making a huge difference.

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All of this is happening because WE Charity, a program started by Craig when he was just 12 years old, is working in these communities—and making a huge difference. This book is about how we can all work to improve the lives of others. The problems in the world can seem overwhelming—5.9 million children under the age of five die each year of preventable or curable diseases,1 more than 700 million people still lack access to clean water,2 and 46 million people live in slavery.3 But even a single person can make a huge difference, as each of the authors of this book shows us every day. There are no simple solutions, but there are solutions that can be created and deployed. Companies, nonprofits, governments, and hybrid social enterprises each have their own role to play—and the authors of this book have been leaders in all these realms.

Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet by Ian Hanington

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Day of the Dead, disinformation, do what you love, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, Exxon Valdez, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl

Canadians and Americans who have travelled outside of the tourist resorts in nearby Mexico know that abundant and clean water is never taken for granted there. In the U.S., climate change is expected to reduce flows in major rivers, including the Rio Grande and Colorado, by as much as 20 per cent this century, according to a report by the Department of the Interior. With an increase in droughts over the past several decades, river basins in the western U.S. and other areas are already experiencing challenges in supplying growing populations with water for drinking, irrigation, power generation, and recreation. We often take our abundant and clean water for granted, but we shouldn’t.

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To start, metering and disincentives for high water use can help with conservation. But most importantly, governments must tackle the challenge of climate change. Along with protecting clean water supplies and human health, addressing climate change will strengthen the economy. An analysis conducted in 2010 by the Western Climate Initiative showed that addressing climate change and fostering clean-energy solutions could lead to cost savings of about US$100 billion by 2020 for the initiative’s member states and provinces. We can’t live without clean water. That’s something we all have to think about. UN knows that forests are vital to health THE UN GENERAL Assembly met in New York to declare 2011 the International Year of Forests.

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And because we are all connected to this fragile web, we need to protect animals and their habitat not just for their sake but for our own as well. Species loss is a silent epidemic SCIENTISTS WARN THAT the twin threats of climate change and wildlife extinction threaten our planet’s life-support systems, including clean air, clean water, and productive soil. Awareness about the causes and consequences of climate change is growing, leading some governments to look for solutions in areas such as clean energy. Species extinction, however, has gone largely unnoticed by government leaders. In a June 2010 article in the Guardian newspaper titled “Give Decision Makers Access to the Value of Nature’s Services,” France’s ecology secretary and the World Resources Institute’s vice-president of science and research argue that “unlike the impacts of climate change, biodiversity—and the ecosystem services it harbours—disappears in a mostly silent, local, and anonymous fashion.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The doctor didn’t quite understand the bacterial origins of cholera, but he correctly determined that the malady was being spread by infected water. Snow’s research offered early proof of a fact that now seems obvious: Cities must provide clean water to ensure urban health. Snow also provides us with an example of self-protecting urban innovation, cities’ ability to generate the information needed to solve their own problems. In the United States, city governments, driven more by intuition than by Snow’s science, had begun the Herculean job of providing clean water at the start of the nineteenth century. Somehow they grasped that foul water played a role in disease outbreaks, and for years they fought for cleaner water.

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Since the Manhattan Company didn’t solve New York’s clean-water problem, waterborne diseases kept reappearing. New York City would occasionally lose more than a half percent of its population to an epidemic during a given year, double the death rate in a normal year, as it did during the 1832 cholera epidemic. Finally, New York City followed Philadelphia and spent millions, as Hamilton had warned, on public water provision. The Croton Aqueduct, built at a cost of $9 million (more than $170 million in 2010 dollars), provided New York’s water after 1842, and that clean water quickly had an impact. After 1860, the mortality rate experienced a remarkable sixty-year decline, from more than thirty deaths per thousand at the end of the Civil War to around ten per thousand during the 1920s.

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In Paris, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann had used his virtually unlimited authority as the agent of Napoléon III to create a sewage system that still serves the city and attracts tourists to its tunnels. Economic historian Werner Troesken has done an enormous amount of research, which shows that investments in municipal waterworks significantly reduced deaths from typhoid fever and other diseases. Clean water has even reduced deaths from diseases that aren’t carried by water. Echoing centuryold research on the impact of clean water in Massachusetts, Troesken and his coauthor Joseph Ferrie found that, starting in 1850, lower rates of typhoid fever in Chicago generally went along with larger reductions in other diseases. Deaths from other ailments may have fallen because waterborne diseases were being mistaken for other diseases or because waterborne illnesses were weakening immune systems, which then failed when other ailments attacked them.

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anton Chekhov, Bob Geldof, Celtic Tiger, clean water, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pepto Bismol, Potemkin village, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Steven Pinker, urban planning

Hollywood star Matt Damon has launched the NGO H2O, whose mission is to “bring clean water to Africa.” In the music world, the rapper Jay-Z did a three-part series for MTV on the world’s water crisis. The rock singer Chris Martin is an ambassador for WaterAid. Not one celebrity ambassador, however, has made the obvious point. Dirty water is usually dirtied by feces. It is hard to supply clean water when that clean water is contaminated by overflowing pit latrines or filthy fingernails. “We can get celebrities to talk about water,” a WaterAid employee tells me. “But none of them want to be pictured on a toilet.” Clean water gushing from a new hand pump makes for great press coverage.

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It described Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, which caught fire twice that year, as “chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with sub-surface gases.” Consequently, the Clean Water Act of 1972 provided big money for municipalities to improve their sewage treatment. The construction and renovation frenzy that ensued was the largest public works project in the country to date. By its completion, the United States had 16,000 sewage treatment plants and an improved sewage treatment process. But cleaning sewage more efficiently meant removing more dirt. In other words, the Clean Water Act increased the amount of sludge being produced, which was mostly dumped at sea. Farmers like sludge because it has nutrients, but the same nitrogen and phosphorous can feed and breed algae that suck out water’s dissolved oxygen content, leaving it lifeless.

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The HarperCollins Dictionary of Environmental Science defines sludge as “a viscous, semisolid mixture of bacteria and virus-laden organic matter, toxic metals, synthetic organic chemicals and settled solids removed from domestic industrial waste water at a sewage treatment plant.” The Clean Water Act keeps it simple and calls it a pollutant. I have to use words like if and may because no one actually knows what’s in sludge. Technically, industries are supposed to pretreat hazardous chemicals and waste, but oversight is minimal. And anyway, no one regulates how thousands of chemicals might react with one another or with the pathogens floating alongside them. The most optimistic view of sludge is that it is a soup of unknowns. Others think it’s toxic and can’t be anything else. Cleaning water is done by removing contaminants and concentrating them in sludge.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

A flush toilet and water on demand out of a tap are certainly convenient, but are they fundamentally important to the story of twentieth-century growth? They absolutely are. Health researchers David Cutler and Grant Miller estimate that the availability of clean water explains fully half of the total decline in the overall US mortality rate between 1900 and 1936, and 75 percent of the decline in infant mortality. Historian Harvey Green calls the technologies of widespread clean water “likely the most important public health intervention of the twentieth century.” Plumbing was critical in the countryside as well as in the city. Before it came along, domestic work on farms could literally be close to backbreaking.

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Poverty pollutes, while affluence cleans up from its prior mistakes via public awareness and responsive government. A clear example of this is the effort by both government and industry in the United States to clean up the country’s lakes, ponds, streams, and rivers after the passage of 1972’s Clean Water Act. Economists David Keiser and Joseph Shapiro brought together 50 million pollution readings from 170,000 sites across the country and concluded that “water pollution has declined dramatically over time and that the Clean Water Act… contributed to this decline.” After ocean acidification and plastic trash, nitrogen pollution might well be the most serious problem facing the world’s waters. Nitrogen fertilizer that isn’t absorbed by crops can wash into rivers and oceans.

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and years of life lost have fallen even more quickly: Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “Air Pollution,” Our World in Data, April 17, 2017, https://ourworldindata.org/air-pollution. “Poverty is the biggest polluter”: Akash Kapur, “Pollution as Another Form of Poverty,” New York Times, October 8, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/world/asia/09iht-letter.html. “the Clean Water Act… contributed to this decline”: David A. Keiser and Joseph S. Shapiro, “Consequences of the Clean Water Act and the Demand for Water Quality,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 134, no. 1 (2018): 349–96. The results of this intervention were impressive: Zhenling Cui et al., “Pursuing Sustainable Productivity with Millions of Smallholder Farmers,” Nature 555, no. 7696 (2018): 363.

Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism by Sharon Beder

American Legislative Exchange Council, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, business climate, centre right, clean water, corporate governance, Exxon Valdez, Gary Taubes, global village, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, laissez-faire capitalism, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two and twenty, urban planning

Anderson and Leal juxtapose the market with the political process as a means of allocating environmental resources and argue that the political process is inefficient, that is it doesn’t reach the ‘optimal’ level of pollution, that is the level of pollution where costs are minimized: If markets produce ‘too little’ clean water because dischargers do not have to pay for its use, then political solutions are equally likely to produce ‘too much’ clean water because those who enjoy the benefits do not pay the cost. . . Just as pollution externalities can generate too much dirty air, political externalities can generate too much water storage, clear-cutting, wilderness, or water quality. . . Free market environmentalism emphasizes the importance of market processes in determining optimal amounts of resource use.68 ‘Too much’ clean water, it seems, is where the company polluting the water has to pay too much to clean up the mess they make.

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Index Abramsky, Sasha ref1–ref2 Accuracy in Media (AIM) ref1 acid rain ‘benefits’ of ref1 corporate responsibility ref1 debunking ref1, ref2, ref3 activism corporate ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8–ref9 employee ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 environmental ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8, ref9 Adatto, Kiko ref1–ref2 Adler, Jonathan ref1 The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) ref1 advertising advocacy ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 brand loyalty ref1, ref2 campaigns ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7–ref8 children targeted ref1–ref2 complaints ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5 consumerism as result of ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6 corporate bias ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 corporate sponsorship ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5 environmentalism ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6 green ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 influence of ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4 the ‘infomercial’ ref1–ref2 on the internet ref1–ref2 misleading ref1–ref2 in newspapers ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 Procter & Gamble ref1–ref2 pseudo-environmentalism ref1–ref2, ref3 regulation of ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5 research ref1 revenue ref1 in schools ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 soap operas ref1, ref2 strategies ref1–ref2 TV programs influenced ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5–ref6 Advertising Age ref1 Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4 advocacy advertising ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 AEI see American Enterprise Institute aerosol industry ref1–ref2 Agent Orange ref1 Agricultural Chemical Association ref1 agricultural industry ref1, ref2 air pollution ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy ref1 Alliance for the Responsible Use of Chlorine Chemistry (ARCC) ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5 Alterman, Eric ref1 Alton, David ref1–ref2 American Automobile Manufacturers Association ref1 American Coal Foundation ref1 American Council on Science and Health ref1, ref2 American Electric Power ref1 American Enterprise Institute (AEI) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 American Farm Bureau Federation ref1 American Freedom Coalition (AFC) ref1 American Nuclear Society ref1, ref2 American Paper Institute ref1 American Petroleum Institute (API) ref1, ref2, ref3 American Public Health Association ref1 American Society of Mechanical Engineers ref1 Amway ref1 Anderson, Paul ref1–ref2 Anderson, Terry ref1, ref2, ref3 Angel, Jeff ref1 animal testing ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8, ref9 anti-climate treaty campaign ref1–ref2 anti-environmentalism ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7–ref8, ref9 Apple Computers ref1, ref2 Arizona Republic ref1 Arnold, Ron ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7–ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Artzt, Edward ref1 ASA see Advertising Standards Authority Associated Newspapers ref1 ‘astroturf ’ ref1 Atomic Energy Commission ref1 Audubon Society ref1, ref2, ref3 Australia advertising ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 anti-environmentalism ref1, ref2 community advisory panels ref1 conservatism ref1–ref2 corporate activism ref1–ref2 corporate funding ref1, ref2 dioxin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5 education ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 environmentalism ref1, ref2, ref3 front groups ref1 government influence ref1, ref2–ref3 greenhouse gas emissions ref1, ref2, ref3 influence of economists in ref1–ref2 lawsuits ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4 the media ref1 MPs’ financial interests ref1 ‘New Right’ ref1–ref2 PR industry ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8–ref9 propaganda ref1–ref2 public opinion ref1, ref2, ref3 ‘revolving door’ syndrome ref1, ref2, ref3 think-tanks ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 trade associations ref1 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) ref1, ref2, ref3 Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) ref1 Australian Business Roundtable ref1–ref2 Australian Centre for Independent Journalism ref1 Australian Chamber of Commerce ref1 Australian Conservation Foundation ref1 Australian Defence Industries (ADI) ref1 Australian Institute of Petroleum ref1 Australian Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) ref1 Australian Petroleum Exploration Association ref1 automobile industry ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 automobiles ref1 Bagdikian, Ben ref1, ref2, ref3 Bailar, John ref1 Bailey, Ronald ref1, ref2, ref3 Baird, Bruce ref1, ref2, ref3 Baker, Dean ref1 Baliunas, Sallie ref1 Balling, Robert ref1 BANANA ref1 Bandow, Doug ref1 Barnett, Steve ref1 BASF ref1, ref2–ref3 BBC ref1–ref2 BC Council of Forest Industries ref1 Beder, Sharon ref1–ref2, ref3 Beef Industry Council ref1 Bell, Karla ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bell Potinger Communications ref1 Bennett, Lance ref1 Berlusconi, Silvio ref1 Bernays, Edward ref1, ref2 Beutler, Warwick ref1 Bevins, Anthony ref1 BGH ref1 BHP ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Biodiversity treaty ref1 Birnbaum, Linda ref1, ref2 Blackburn, Thomas ref1 Bland, Michael ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4 Block, Walter ref1 Blue Ribbon Coalition ref1, ref2 Blyskal, Jeff and Marie ref1, ref2 Bode, Thilo ref1, ref2, ref3 Body Shop ref1, ref2–ref3 Body Shop International ref1 Boff, Richard Du ref1 Bolivia ref1 Bonner, Jack ref1–ref2 Boren, Frank ref1 boycotts, consumer ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 BP Australia ref1 BP Company plc ref1, ref2, ref3 Brady, John ref1 Brent Spar ref1, ref2 Britain advertising ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6 anti-environmentalism ref1 corporate funding ref1–ref2 dioxin ref1, ref2–ref3 education ref1 environmental legislation ref1, ref2 environmentalism ref1 lawsuits ref1, ref2–ref3 the media ref1 media ownership ref1–ref2 MPs’ financial interests ref1–ref2 political alienation ref1 political coverage ref1 political donations ref1 PR industry ref1, ref2–ref3 ‘revolving door’ syndrome ref1 SLAPPs ref1–ref2 think-tanks ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7, ref8–ref9 British Nuclear Fuels ref1–ref2 British Plastics Federation ref1, ref2–ref3 Brody, Bill ref1 Brookings Institution ref1, ref2 Browner, Carol ref1 Browning-Ferris Industries ref1 Brunton, Ron ref1 Brzezinski, Zbigniew ref1 BSMG Workwide (UK) ref1 Buchanan, Pat ref1 Bulgaria ref1 Burger King ref1 Burson, Harold ref1 Burson-Marsteller ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8–ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 Burton, Bob ref1 Bush, George ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Bush, George (Jnr) ref1 Business Council for Sustainable Development ref1–ref2 Business Council of Australia ref1 Business Roundtable ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Business Week ref1–ref2 Button, John ref1 Cable News Network see CNN Caldicott, Helen ref1 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Cymru ref1–ref2 campaigns advertising ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7–ref8 fax ref1, ref2 letter-writing ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 litter ref1, ref2 media ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4 public relations ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7, ref8–ref9, ref10, ref11 telephone ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 by think-tanks ref1 Wise Use Movement ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 Canada advertising ref1, ref2 education ref1, ref2 environmentalism ref1 front groups ref1–ref2 grassroots organisations ref1–ref2, ref3 greenhouse gas emissions approval for ref1 lawsuits ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4 PR industry ref1–ref2 public opinion ref1–ref2 Share Movement ref1, ref2 think-tanks ref1 Wise Use Movement ref1, ref2 Canadian Nuclear Association ref1, ref2 Canan, Penelope ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 CAP see Civic Action Program capitalism ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 see also free enterprise carbon dioxide ref1, ref2, ref3 career opportunities for green leaders ref1–ref2 Carey, Alex ref1, ref2–ref3 Carlo, George ref1, ref2 Carmody, Kevin ref1 Carothers, Andre ref1–ref2 Cartmel, Robert ref1, ref2 cars see automobiles Carson, Rachel ref1 Cass, Penny ref1–ref2 Cato Institute ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 CEI see Competitive Enterprise Institute cement industry ref1 Center for Disease Control (CDC) ref1 Center for Strategic and International Studies ref1, ref2 Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7 Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change ref1 Central Newspapers ref1 Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) ref1–ref2, ref3 Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) ref1, ref2 CFCs ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7, ref8 CFE see Citizens for Full Evaluation Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Western Australia ref1 Chamber of Commerce (US) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Channel One ref1–ref2, ref3 chemical industry ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Chemical Manufacturers Association ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Chemistry and Industry ref1 Chevron Corporation ref1, ref2, ref3 Chicago Tribune ref1 children advertising targets ref1–ref2 brand loyalty ref1, ref2 consumerism ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5 environmental education ref1–ref2 green toys ref1 internet users ref1–ref2 television ref1 chloracne ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 chlorine ref1 banning ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 ‘benefits’ of ref1–ref2 defence of ref1–ref2 and dioxin ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6–ref7 industry ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5 in paper industry ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 PR defence ref1–ref2 products ref1, ref2–ref3 toxicity of ref1 Chlorine Chemistry Council ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7 Chlorine Institute ref1–ref2, ref3 Chlorophiles ref1, ref2, ref3 Chomsky, Noam ref1, ref2, ref3 Christian Science Monitor ref1 Ciba-Geigy AG ref1 Citigate Dewe Rogerson ref1 Citizen’s Advisory Council ref1 Citizen’s Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste ref1–ref2 Citizens for Full Evaluation (CFE) ref1 Civic Action Program (CAP) ref1, ref2 Claney, Stephen ref1 Clean Air Act (1968) ref1 Clean Air Act (1990) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Clean Water Act ref1, ref2 Clean Water Act (1973) ref1 Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research (CLEAR) ref1 climate change ref1, ref2 Clinton, Bill ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Clorox Corporation ref1 CNN ref1, ref2 CO2 see carbon dioxide coal industry ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) ref1 Coalition for Vehicle Choice ref1 Cockett, Richard ref1 Code of Advertising and Sales Promotion ref1, ref2 Cohen, Jeff ref1–ref2, ref3 Coles Supermarkets ref1 commercialism ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 Committee for Economic Development in Australia (CEDA) ref1 Committee to Preserve American Security and Sovereignty (COMPASS) ref1–ref2 Commoner, Barry ref1 communications industry ref1 communism ref1, ref2, ref3 Community Advisory Panels ref1–ref2 Community Projects Ltd ref1–ref2 Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 computers see information technology Congress Watch ref1 Connor, Desmond ref1–ref2 Conservation Foundation ref1 conservatism anti-environmentalism ref1–ref2 in Australia ref1–ref2 in education ref1–ref2 in the media ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 in the 70s ref1–ref2 think-tanks ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5 Conservative party (Britain) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6 Consumer Alert ref1 consumer boycotts ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Consumer Reports ref1 consumerism advertising results in ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6 of children ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5 planned obsolescence ref1–ref2, ref3 in USA ref1–ref2 Contract with America ref1, ref2, ref3 Control of Pollution Act (1974) ref1 Convention on Climate Change ref1 Cooler Heads Coalition ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Cooper, Mario ref1–ref2 Coors, Joseph ref1, ref2 corporate activism ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8–ref9 corporate culture ref1 corporate mergers ref1 Corporate Television Networks (CTN) ref1 corporations, government funded ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5 cosmetics industry ref1–ref2 cost benefit analysis ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 Costantini, Edmond ref1 Cotton Australia ref1 Coulter, Jane ref1 Council for Wildlife Conservation and Education ref1 Council on Economic Priorities ref1–ref2, ref3 Council on Foreign Relations ref1 Countrywide Porter Novelli ref1 see also Porter/Novelli Courier Mail ref1 Cox, Hank ref1 CPS see Centre for Policy Studies Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994) ref1 Croatia ref1 Cronkite, Walter ref1 ‘cross-pollination’ ref1 Crowley, Chris ref1 Cushman, Charles ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4 Czech Republic ref1 Dadd, Debra Lynn ref1–ref2 Daily Herald ref1 Daily Sketch ref1 Daimler-Chrysler ref1 Daly, Fred ref1 Davies, John ref1, ref2 Davis, Stanley Clinton ref1 Dawkins, Maurice ref1 DDT ref1, ref2 Dearing, Sir Ron ref1 democracy ref1–ref2 Democratic party (US) ref1, ref2 Desai, R. ref1 Detjen, Jim ref1 Detroit News ref1 Diesendorf, Mark ref1 Dillon, John ref1–ref2 dioxin Agent Orange ref1 ‘benefits’ of ref1 chloracne ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and chlorine ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6–ref7 defence of ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8–ref9 effects of ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 in the environment ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 environmental opposition ref1–ref2 EPA assessment ref1, ref2–ref3 experiments ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6–ref7 in the food chain ref1–ref2 lawsuits ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4 media defence ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4 natural mimics ref1–ref2 PR campaigns ref1, ref2–ref3 research ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5 risk assessment ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6 safety levels ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 scientific ‘evidence’ ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6 sources ref1 toxicity ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5–ref6 in Vietnam war ref1, ref2 Dioxin Working Group ref1 Direct Marketing ref1 Disney Corporation ref1, ref2 Dole, Bob ref1, ref2, ref3 Domino’s Pizzas ref1 Donohoe, Jenny ref1–ref2 Doolittle, John ref1 Dow Chemical Company dioxin ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 front group funding ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4 PR campaigns ref1 pseudo-environmentalism ref1–ref2 Superfund legislation ref1 Dr Seuss ref1 Du Boff, Richard ref1 Duchin, Ronald ref1, ref2 Dumanoski, Dianne ref1 DuPont Company ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Durnil, Gordon ref1 Durning, Alan ref1, ref2 Dykstra, Peter ref1, ref2 E.

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ref1, ref2 Earth Summit, Rio (1992) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8, ref9 Easterbrook, Greg ref1 Eastman Kodak ref1 Ecology Channel ref1 Economic Affairs, Institute see Institute of Economic Affairs Economic Development Committee (Australian) ref1 economic environmentalism ref1–ref2, ref3 Economic Incentives Taskforce ref1 The Economist ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5 economists, use of ref1–ref2, ref3 Ecos Corporation ref1, ref2–ref3 ecoterrorists ref1, ref2, ref3 Edelman Medical Communications ref1 Edelman PR Worldwide ref1 Edison Electric Institute ref1 education ref1 advertising campaigns ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6 commercialism in ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 conservative ref1–ref2 corporate propaganda ref1 corporate sponsorship ref1–ref2, ref3 environmental ref1–ref2 learning materials ref1–ref2 PR campaigns ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 privatisation ref1 Educational Alternative Inc ref1 EIJ ref1 Eisenhower, Dwight ref1 Ekins, Paul ref1 Electric Mutual Liability ref1 Electric Power System ref1 electric-utility industry ref1, ref2 electronics industry ref1 Eli Lilly ref1 ‘élite transfer’ see ‘revolving door’ syndrome employee activism ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 Employer’s Education Consortium of Victoria ref1 Empower America ref1 endangered species ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6 Endangered Species Act ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 energy bill ref1, ref2, ref3 Enterprise Australia ref1–ref2 Entman, Robert ref1–ref2 ENVIRON Corporation ref1 environment legislation ref1–ref2 public concern ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6–ref7 regulation ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8–ref9, ref10, ref11–ref12 Environment Agency ref1 Environment Writer ref1–ref2 Environmental Defense Fund ref1, ref2, ref3 environmental impact statement (EIS) ref1 Environmental Law Foundation ref1 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dioxin assessment ref1, ref2–ref3 environmental regulation ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 and GEC ref1, ref2 National Dioxin Study ref1 risk assessment ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5 Superfund legislation ref1, ref2 Environmental Research Foundation ref1 environmentalism activism ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8, ref9 advertising campaigns ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6 as ‘bearing witness’ ref1, ref2 children learning ref1–ref2 Clean Air Act (1968) ref1 Clean Air Act (1990) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Clean Water Act ref1, ref2 Clean Water Act (1973) ref1 as communism ref1, ref2 and conflict of interest ref1 as conservation ref1–ref2 Control of Pollution Act (1974) ref1 corporate activism ref1–ref2 corporate cooperation ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7–ref8 corporate influence ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 cost benefit analysis ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 costs of ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 debunking ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8–ref9 dirty tricks campaigns ref1–ref2 ‘ecofreaks’ ref1 economic instruments ref1–ref2, ref3 as ecoterrorism ref1, ref2, ref3 educational ref1–ref2 Endangered Species Act ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 as extremism ref1, ref2–ref3 free-market ref1–ref2 front group strategies ref1–ref2 future of ref1 General Electric ref1–ref2 Global Warming Prevention Act ref1 journalists’ treatment ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5 lawsuits ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 legislation ref1, ref2, ref3 marketing ref1, ref2–ref3 in the media ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7–ref8, ref9–ref10 merchandising ref1 ‘name-calling’ ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7 newsworthiness ref1–ref2 ‘paganism’ ref1, ref2 political influence ref1–ref2, ref3 PR campaigns ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7–ref8, ref9–ref10 as preservation ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 of Procter & Gamble ref1–ref2 property rights ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5 ‘racism’ ref1 as radicalism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 as a religion ref1, ref2, ref3 revisionist ref1–ref2 in the 1990s ref1–ref2 Solid Waste Disposal Act ref1 and a solutions-oriented approach ref1–ref2 sponsored ref1–ref2 on TV ref1–ref2 unemployment caused by ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 EPA see Environmental Protection Agency Epley, Joe ref1 Epstein, Richard ref1 Estonia ref1 Europe ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4 European Parliament ref1 experiments animal ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6–ref7 human ref1, ref2 in PR ref1–ref2 Exxon Corporation ref1, ref2 Exxon Valdez ref1, ref2 Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5 Falk, Jim ref1 Fallows, James ref1 Farm Bureau Federation (American) ref1 Farmers Federation (National)77 fast food industry ref1, ref2, ref3 fax campaigns ref1, ref2 Federal Trade Commission ref1 Festival Records ref1 Feulner, Edwin ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4 Filene, Edward ref1–ref2 Financial Times ref1, ref2 Fingerhut, Marilyn ref1 Fischer, Tim ref1 Fitzpatrick, George ref1–ref2 Fletcher Challenge ref1, ref2 food industry ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 see also fast food industry Forbes ref1–ref2 Ford, Gerald ref1 Ford Motor Company ref1, ref2, ref3 Forest Alliance of British Columbia ref1–ref2 Forest Industries Council (BC) ref1 Forest Industry Campaign Association ref1 Forest Protection Society ref1 forestry industry ref1, ref2 Fortune ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5 fossil fuel industry ref1, ref2 Foundation for Clean Air Progress ref1 Foundation for Public Affairs ref1 Fox Network ref1 Fraser Institute ref1–ref2 free enterprise ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4 environmental ref1–ref2 propaganda ref1, ref2 Free Enterprise Press ref1 free market see free enterprise Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ref1, ref2, ref3 Friedman, Andy ref1, ref2 Friedman, Milton ref1, ref2, ref3 Friends of the Earth ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5, ref6 front groups ref1 anti-environmentalism ref1–ref2 in Australia ref1 in chlorine industry ref1 corporate funding ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8–ref9 dioxin defence ref1, ref2, ref3 ‘experts’ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 fighting legislation ref1 grassroots organisations ref1–ref2 lobbying ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5, ref6–ref7 in the media ref1–ref2 PR support ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 pseudo-environmentalism ref1–ref2 scientific ‘evidence’ ref1–ref2 strategies ref1–ref2 Frontiers of Freedom Institute ref1 fuel consumption ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Fumento, Michael ref1 Gaffey, Bill ref1 Gardner, James ref1 gas industry ref1, ref2 Gelbspan, Ross ref1, ref2 General Electric Company ref1–ref2 General Foods Corporation ref1 General Motor Corporation ref1, ref2 George C.

The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture From a Journey of 71 Million Miles by Astronaut Ron Garan, Muhammad Yunus

Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, book scanning, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, fake it until you make it, global village, Google Earth, Indoor air pollution, jimmy wales, low earth orbit, optical character recognition, overview effect, private spaceflight, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, Stephen Hawking, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber for X, web of trust

Perhaps helping in 72â•…  L O O K I N G EARTH WARD one area creates problems in another. What if short-term assistance actually makes a situation worse in the long term? The worm’s eye view would attempt to solve a specific problem, such as providing access to clean water. The orbital perspective would see lack of access to clean water as one symptom of larger issues related to education, unemployment, and government infrastructure. In a medical response to a natural disaster, medical personnel taking the worm’s eye view would focus entirely on treating the patients right in front of them. The orbital perspective would treat those patients while also putting reconstruction projects in place to lessen the long-term risk that many more patients would end up “right in front of them.”

…

But as I looked down at the Earth—this stunning, fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us, and that has protected all life from the harshness of space—╉a sadness came over me, and I was hit in the gut with an undeniable, sobering contradiction. In spite of the overwhelming beauty of this scene, serious inequity exists on the apparent paradise we have been given. I couldn’t help thinking of the nearly one billion people who don’t have clean water to drink, the countless number who go to bed hungry every night, the social injustice, conflicts, and poverty that remain pervasive across the planet. Seeing Earth from this vantage point gave me a unique perspective—╉something I’ve come to call the orbital perspective. Part of this is the realization that we are all traveling together on the planet and that if we all looked at the world from that perspective we would see that nothing is impossible.

…

Facing a Common Enemy There are good people and organizations all over the world proving that if we all commit to working together we can live in a world without poverty, where no one dies from preventable and curable A S h i f t i n P e r sp e c t i v eâ•…  9 diseases, where everyone has access to clean water, where everyone’s children can be educated. We are limited only by our imagination and our will to act. In pulling back to the orbital perspective, it becomes clear that the first step toward solving our big challenges is to identify ourselves as a global community confronted with a common enemy.

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte

Alan Greenspan, clean water, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, working poor

It occurred to me late one night, as I sat peacefully on the floor surrounded by the remains of the day, that I knew something about where all this stuff had come from (particularly if it was food; the nation’s heightened health consciousness inspired a lot of ink on the provenance of foodstuffs) but almost nothing about where it went after it left my house. Much has been made, in certain circles, of humanity’s connection to the natural world. Enlightened consumers, we don’t want to eat endangered fish or buy rare hardwoods. We care about animal rights and clean water. But it wasn’t fair, I reasoned, to feel connected to the rest of the world only on the front end, to the waving fields of grain and the sparkling mountain streams. We needed to cop to a downstream connection as well. Our lifestyles took a toll on the planet, and that toll was growing ever worse.

…

In exchange for accepting 300,000 tons of waste a month, most of it from New York City, Welch would receive an $8 million fee from the development company, 367 jobs, and one wastewater treatment plant, a novelty for a county that, by dumping raw sewage into its creeks, had been in violation of the Clean Water Act since 1972. Only a handful of people had questions about the project, but just as the contract was about to be signed, a protest movement materialized. Much was made of the waste’s provenance: accepting garbage from New York and New Jersey, the landfill would surely be tainted with AIDS and by medical waste, it would be run by the mob, and “cocktailed” with toxic and nuclear dregs.

…

As of June 2003, 413 of the 1,571 sites on the EPA’s National Priorities List, representing the worst of the worst Superfund sites (which by definition contain hazardous waste) were landfills, a ratio of just over one in four. IESI Bethlehem wasn’t on the Superfund list, nor had it received any notices of significant violations of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, or Resource Conservation and Recovery Act within the last two years. But then I looked back a little further. I learned that IESI had owned the Bethlehem landfill only since 1999, when it had purchased it from Waste Management for $65 million and an agreement to pay Lower Saucon Township (which included the city of Bethlehem) a host fee of $460,000 a year.

Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson

biofilm, Boeing 747, Broken windows theory, clean water, deskilling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Jacquard loom, Own Your Own Home, sensible shoes, spice trade, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer

Mix one teaspoon of a neutral detergent (a mild detergent containing no alkalies or bleaches) with a cup of lukewarm water. Blot. Sponge with clean water. Blot. Raw Egg Mix one teaspoon of a neutral detergent (a mild detergent containing no alkalies or bleaches) with a cup of lukewarm water. Blot. Mix one tablespoon of household ammonia with a half-cup of water. Blot. Repeat step one. Sponge with clean water. Blot Earth (Dirt) Mix one teaspoon of a neutral detergent (a mild detergent containing no alkalies or bleaches) with a cup of lukewarm water. Blot. Mix one tablespoon of household ammonia with a half-cup of water. Blot. Repeat step one with the detergent. Sponge with clean water. Blot. Food Coloring or Dye Seek the help of a professional carpet cleaner.

…

Mix one teaspoon of a neutral detergent (a mild detergent containing no alkalies or bleaches) with a cup of lukewarm water. Blot. Sponge with clean water. Blot. Milk Mix one teaspoon of a neutral detergent (a mild detergent containing no alkalies or bleaches) with a cup of lukewarm water. Blot. Mix one tablespoon of household ammonia with a half-cup of water. Blot. Repeat step one. Blot. Sponge with clean water. Blot. Nail Polish Apply nail polish remover (acetone). Blot. Mix one teaspoon of a neutral detergent (a mild detergent containing no alkalies or bleaches) with a cup of lukewarm water. Blot. Sponge with clean water. Blot. Paint (Latex) Mix one teaspoon of a neutral detergent (a mild detergent containing no alkalies or bleaches) with a cup of lukewarm water.

…

Blot. Mix one teaspoon of a neutral detergent (a mild detergent containing no alkalies or bleaches) with a cup of lukewarm water. Blot. Sponge with clean water. Blot again. Urine (Fresh) Blot. Sponge with clean water. Blot again. Mix one tablespoon of household ammonia with a half-cup of water. Blot. Mix one teaspoon of a neutral detergent (a mild detergent containing no alkalies or bleaches) with a cup of lukewarm water. Blot. Sponge with clean water. Blot again. Vaseline Sponge with a small amount of dry-cleaning solvent. Blot. (Use small amounts to prevent any possible damage to sizings, backings, or stuffing materials.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

Meanwhile, as we scrape the last delicious morsels from our dessert plates—no one had said no to the strawberries and Brother Cappy had never reached for the Vidalia onion—Tritico makes a last try to bait his adversarial friend. “So Donny, how do you feel about crossing the I-10 bridge?” “If my kids weren’t with me,” Donny answers, smiling. “I’d drive fast.” 13 The Rebel: A Team Loyalist with a New Cause Handmade signs bob and lurch above the heads of the sparse crowd: “Clean Water for Baton Rouge,” “Friends of Lake Peigneur,” “Clean Water for Clean Seafood,” “Oil Companies: Fix What You Broke.” A rotund musician dressed in loose purple pants, a striped shirt, and a white fedora sits with his washboard, waiting to start his three-person Cajun band. A protestor walks about dressed as a large brown pelican.

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By 1987 several things had transpired that would affect the fishermen’s response to the edict. For one thing, PPG was not alone. Other industries had been polluting so much that Louisiana had become the number-one hazardous waste producer in the nation. For another thing, the U.S. Congress had established the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Clean Air Act (1970), and the Clean Water Act (1972). In addition, many small grassroots environmental groups had sprung up throughout the state, led by homemakers, teachers, farmers, and others appalled to discover backyard toxic waste, illness, and disease. Around the time of the advisory, local activists were rising up against toxic dumping around Lake Charles and nearby Willow Springs, Sulphur, Mossville, and elsewhere, part of the “front-porch”—or “kitchen-sink”—politics of the 1970s and 1980s.

…

We tried to meet state legislators, who ignored us as silly housewives.” As Frankland tells the story in her book Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement, “companies were treating our land and rivers like toilets, and we were standing up to it.” As Frankland, a Democrat, noted, “We could say, ‘Hey, there’s a federal law about clean water. You’ve contaminated our water. How’re you going to clean it up?’” But most of Frankland’s activists are now Tea Party Republicans and, like Lee Sherman himself, are averse to an overbearing federal government, and even to much of the EPA. There it was: the Great Paradox through a keyhole. In the meantime, the Louisiana Department of Health and Human Services posted warning signs about fishing and swimming, signs promptly riddled with bullets or stolen.

Liquid: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives by Mark Miodownik

3D printing, airport security, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, mass immigration, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, The Design of Experiments

Hence the sign in the hotel bathroom, reminding me that water is a valuable resource, and encouraging me not to request new towels every day. As the world population increases to ten billion over the next few decades it is estimated that access to clean water will be an increasing struggle in many parts of the world. Currently one billion people lack access to clean water, and a third of the global population experiences shortages through the year. Without access to clean water, we can expect an increase in poverty, malnutrition and the spread of disease. It should be emphasized that this issue affects big cities as well as rural communities. For instance, the Brazilian city of São Paolo experienced severe water shortages in 2015 when the strain of drought emptied its main reservoir.

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Their public baths were an important part of their culture, and relied on a sophisticated engineering infrastructure to provide hot and cold water. In Europe, after the Roman Empire collapsed, the infrastructure that kept the public baths going fell into ruin, and so bathing went out of fashion. In crowded cities and towns, without access to clean water, bathing was increasingly considered a health risk. During the Middle Ages, many Europeans believed that diseases were spread through miasma and bad air. They thought that washing, especially with hot water, opened up the pores and made a person more susceptible to diseases, such as the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death.

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It still goes on in modern times; for instance, as recently as 2014, the entire city of Flint, Michigan, in the USA, was poisoned by lead in the water due to government incompetence. The outbreak of cholera in Yemen, which began in 2016, and is now nearing one million cases, was caused by the breakdown of a clean water supply. Not surprisingly, the fear of mass infection and poisoning has become a common motif in fiction over time, perhaps most famously in the film Dr Strangelove, in which General Jack D. Ripper identifies the fluoridation of water in the USA as a Communist plot to undermine the American way of life: ‘I can no longer sit by and allow the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids,’ says General Ripper, before initiating a nuclear attack on the USSR.

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

A British nongovernmental aid organization called Water Aid, which receives funds from official aid agencies, had inaugurated a new project in this village. This agency seemed to be acting more like an explorer and less like a foreign aid planner. Water Aid had discovered a way to get clean water to some very poor villages in the Great Rift Valley. They built a water pipe to carry clean water from springs on top of the mountains bordering the Great Rift Valley to villages down in the valley. The project was run entirely by Ethiopians, with representatives from the villages sitting on the board of the agency. At a bustling water tap in one village, the villagers watered their cattle and collected drinking water for a nominal fee paid to Water Aid, to be used for maintenance of the system.

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Big Problems and Big Plans Almost three billion people live on less than two dollars a day, adjusted for purchasing power.5 Eight hundred and forty million people in the world don’t have enough to eat.6 Ten million children die every year from easily preventable diseases.7 AIDS is killing three million people a year and is still spreading.8 One billion people in the world lack access to clean water; two billion lack access to sanitation.9 One billion adults are illiterate.10 About a quarter of the children in the poor countries do not finish primary school.11 So Amaretch is enslaved to a load of firewood instead of playing and learning in a school yard. This poverty in the Rest justifiably moves many people in the West.

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Women and children walk up to eight kilometers to get spring water; some travel twenty-two kilometers on the bad roads to the nearest town to buy water.28 Some success stories show that aid agencies can make progress on problems like these. There have been successful programs feeding the hungry, which means children have been able to get food in Voluntad de Dios, Ecuador. Success on expanding access to clean water helped the villagers of Kwalala, Malawi. In Mbwadzulu, Malawi, in fact, the drilling of two new boreholes has allowed villagers to discontinue using polluted lake water, and has led to a decline in cholera.29 The Ethiopian man’s tragedy could have been avoided with cheap medicines. Brazilian favelas could get proper sanitation; in fact, there has already been progress there on sanitation compared with a decade ago.

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart by Tim Butcher

airport security, blood diamond, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, failed state, Live Aid, Livingstone, I presume, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade

In the pitch dark there was little for me to look at and so, after a few minutes of bumping and grinding behind Odimba, my mind started to work. We were about 100 kilometres from Kabambarre and needed to travel another 200 kilometres beyond to reach Kasongo. I had planned to be able to refill my water bottles with boiled, clean water overnight, but we had got there too late and left too early. I was sure I could get clean water in Kasongo, so that meant I had to eke out the remaining three bottles of water for 300 kilometres. Okay, I thought, that meant one bottle per 100 kilometres, and I can always ration further myself if things are getting tighter later on. Those 100 kilometres to Kabambarre felt painfully long.

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The history of this place is extraordinary - the slavers and their ivory, the Belgians who fought battles right here where the town now stands, and the wars since independence - but I have never met anyone who comes here just for history's sake. History is a luxury people cannot afford around here, where the more pressing things are where the next meal is coming from or the next drink of clean water.' He spoke slowly, concentrating hard on steering the jeep along the bouncy road into town, sitting forward in the driver's seat, anxiously trying to see over the bonnet to anticipate the next pothole. 'It's not the worst town in the country I have been to, but things are pretty basic here. The town is meant to get its electricity from a hydroelectric plant in the mountains north of here, built back in the 1950s - it's the one that Che Guevara attacked - but it's pretty intermittent these days.

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I found it heartbreaking that a man as decent and talented as Benoit was trapped in a Congolese life lurching from crisis to crisis. I tried to sound positive. 'If anyone can find a way, you can, Benoit. Thank you for everything.' Benoit could not be spared by Tom, but Odimba was available. I set oft from Kasongo once again riding as his passenger, surrounded by numerous plastic bottles of specially cleaned water. Careering along the track, nay head clattering every so often against Odimba's motorbike helmet, I thought more about Kasongo. During the slavery period it had peaked as a capital city, and during the colonial era its strong agriculture and tropical medicine hospital had kept it alive. But in the chaos since the first Mulele Mai uprising it had been slipping backwards.

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside by Dieter Helm

3D printing, Airbnb, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital map, facts on the ground, food miles, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, quantitative easing, rewilding, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

Water is for the companies a ‘crop’, to be harvested as a renewable that nature will keep giving them for free from rivers (and groundwater sources). The companies want ‘clean’ water and hence want to limit pollution from others. Cleanness in drinking water is a chemical concept: it does not necessary mean that it is biodiversity-rich, and indeed there are many organisms that water companies would rather not have in their water supplies. We want to drink clean water, pure H2O, not a host of other things that live in the river environments. Solving jointly for clean water and for biodiversity is not the same thing as just wanting the former. In providing us with clean drinking water, water companies abstract water, which reduces flows, and they discharge our sewage and the waterborne waste of industry, suitably treated.

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There are those who decry economic approaches to the environment; who claim that they overlook the beauty and spiritual values and intrinsic nature. They make a good point when the target is a narrow and crude cost–benefit analysis. But they are wrong in two key ways: prosperity is a broad, not a narrow, concept; and the value to people of nature and all its beauty is every bit as important as the health benefits of clean water. The conventional metric of economic success, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is a pathetically poor measure of what we get out of nature; and if conservation and enhancing the environment does not make economic sense then the evidence from the last two centuries at least is that it will be neglected.

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It is about the things we no longer see so often, like insects and butterflies, and about the once-common that is slipping from our grasp. How many people realise that the rabbits, which were ubiquitous, have now almost vanished from some areas? That the hares may follow? And how many have failed to notice that the swallows are harder to sight now? It means fertile and productive soils, lots of pollinators, clean water and clean air, and natural flood defences too. These rely on a host of creatures at the more microscopic level, and beneath the soils and under water. The focus is often on the more iconic species at risk, since these are usually easy to measure and easy to design conservation strategies for. In almost every case, what is required is a habitat within which they can thrive, and an end to persecution.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

Those who lived faced an enormous disease burden, mostly from diseases that we can control or cure. Few children had a chance to go to school or get a decent education, especially girls. The vast majority of people did not have access to clean water and basic sanitation. But that was then. Over the last several decades, there have been dramatic reductions in infant death, huge gains in fighting a range of killer diseases, big improvements in access to clean water and sanitation, and sizable increases in primary and secondary school enrollments. As with other dimensions of development, there is still far to go, and not everyone has been reached. But the facts are clear: there has been much greater progress in health and access to education across the world’s poorest countries over the last several decades than ever before.

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The average income for hundreds of millions of people in dozens of poor countries has more than doubled, 6 million fewer children die every year from disease, war and violence have declined significantly, average life expectancy has increased by six years, tens of millions more girls are in school, the share of people living in chronic hunger has been cut nearly in half, millions more people have access to clean water, and democracy—often fragile and imperfect—has become the norm rather than the exception in developing countries around the world. To be sure, the surge of progress in health, income, poverty, education, and governance has not reached everyone: many poor countries remain mired in poverty and conflict, and even in the countries moving forward, millions of people are still left behind, even if their numbers are shrinking.

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People born in developing countries live fully one-third longer, on average, than they did two generations ago. More children are enrolling in and completing primary education, especially girls. In 1980 only half of all girls in developing countries completed primary school; today four out of five do so. More people than ever before have access to clean water, basic sanitation, and some electricity. The changes go further, and include personal freedoms and political systems. Around the world, dictatorships have been replaced by democracies. There are fewer wars and less violence, and basic rights and liberties are far more likely to be upheld. In 1983 seventeen developing countries were democracies; by 2013, the number had more than tripled to fifty-six (excluding many more developing countries with populations less than 1 million, which I do not count here).

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

“A rule of thumb,” Ricardo said, “is that a dietary calorie takes a liter of water to be produced, meaning we each consume about 3,000 liters of ‘virtual’ water per day just in our food alone.” The lack of clean water kills far more people than warfare. The Blue Planet Network, a charity dedicated to organizing globally to bring safe drinking water to people around the world, lists some sobering facts. Six thousand children die every day for lack of clean water to drink. Diarrhea has killed more children in the last decade than all humans killed in armed conflict since World War II. Eighty percent of diseases in the developing world are caused by contaminated water, and half of all hospital beds are filled with people suffering from water-related illnesses.

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“It is estimated that 5.3 billion people, two-thirds of the world’s population, will suffer from water shortages by 2025.” See also “What Makes Clean Water So Important?,” accessed March 21, 2016, http://blueplanetnetwork.org/water. The twenty-five poorest countries spend 20 percent of their GDP on water: Dean Kamen, quoted in Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (New York: Free Press, 2012), 86. Also in Forbes: www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2012/01/26/abundance-why-the-future-will-be-much-better-than-you-think. More than a billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, and Six thousand children die every day for lack of clean water to drink, and African and Asian women walk an average of six kilometers each day to provide water: accessed March 21, 2016, http://econopure.com/drinking-water. 120 gallons of water to produce one egg: accessed www.amwater.com/learning-center/water-101/what-is-water-used-for.html.

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“This additional capability would prove invaluable in areas of the world where fresh water is a dwindling resource,” Lockheed reports. Energy, food, water. If we see outside our land-based blinders and take a planet-sized view, we can see renewable solar energy stored in the ocean, a thick layer of nutrient wealth covering the ocean floor, and clean water as a by-product from harvesting this abundance. “So the question is how many megawatts can you generate ultimately?” asks Takahashi. “The answer is, we don’t know. One of the engineers from the University of Hawaii, whom I hired a long time ago, came up with a figure of twenty-five terawatts [25 million watts] that you can sustainably draw from the ocean.

A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout by Carl Safina

addicted to oil, big-box store, book value, carbon tax, clean water, cognitive dissonance, energy security, Exxon Valdez, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jones Act, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Piper Alpha, Ronald Reagan

So shocked was America to see its waters on fire that the incident—along with an oil leak off Santa Barbara, California, the same year—helped precipitate the explosion of environmental laws that Republican president Richard Nixon signed in the early 1970s. (Note to the young: If you wonder why we need a Clean Water Act—a reasonable question, since you’re lucky enough not to have seen America’s waterways as they were before—consider that the Cuyahoga River had ignited about ten prior times in the last century, and also consider this description from Time magazine, August 1, 1969: Some river! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows.

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But despite “overseeing the operation” on our behalf, Allen seems to be doing nothing—incredibly enough—to ensure that we actually send down some instruments designed to get the best possible estimate of how much oil. I am not impressed with the Coast Guard so far. Admiral Thad Allen becomes to me a one-dimensional government talking head: the Thadmiral. Does he deserve to be a caricature? Of course not; does anyone? But in my anger, that’s what happens. Under the Clean Water Act, penalties are based on the number of barrels deemed spilled. Those penalties range from $1,100 to $4,300 a barrel, depending on the extent of the company’s negligence. At, say, 5 million barrels, and if BP were found willfully negligent, it could face a fine of over $20 billion. So, yes, the dispersant is “working.”

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BP shares lose 15 percent of their value on news that its attempted stop-from-the-top hasn’t worked, indicating that the leak—and BP’s liabilities for economic and environmental damages—will likely continue mounting for months. The Justice Department announces criminal and civil investigations into the Gulf oil disaster. “All possible violations of the law,” including the Clean Water Act, Oil Pollution Act, Endangered Species Act. About 15,000 barrels of oil a day begin finding their way out the high end of the pipe and into the ship Discoverer Enterprise. BP’s Tony Hayward, sounding like he’s trying to convince even himself, says the cap will likely capture “the majority, probably the vast majority” of the gushing oil.

30 Days to a Clean and Organized House by Katie Berry

big-box store, Broken windows theory, clean water, Indoor air pollution, Mason jar

If you're short on help cleaning up after meals, the hassle of dealing with the food storage container cupboard might be why! 1. Empty it: Put everything on the counter. 2. Wipe it: Clean the interior of the empty cupboard with a microfiber cloth dipped in warm, soapy water. Use a baking soda paste to scrub stubborn stains or spills. Follow with another cloth dipped in clean water and allow the cupboard to air dry. 3. Sort the contents: Match up same-sized containers and make sure you have lids for each. Set aside any stained containers; you'll clean them after the cupboard is organized. 4. Toss the trash: Throw away (or recycle) any lids that don’t fit your containers, and any containers without lids.

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As a general rule of thumb if it’s important for the medication to work, and the bottle says it expired more than a year ago, replace it. 1. Empty it: Remove everything from your medicine cabinet. If the shelves are removable, take them out, too. 2. Wipe it: Using a microfiber cloth dipped in warm, soapy water, wipe the inside of the cabinet, including the back of the door. Follow with a cloth dipped in clean water. Wash removable shelves in a sink of warm, soapy water and rinse them. 3. Sort it: Separate your cosmetics from your medicines, first aid supplies and other items. 4. Check it: Go through each group (cosmetics, pills, etc.) and toss expired items. With regards to makeup, mascara should be replaced every 2-3 months; foundation is good for 1 year; and powders expire after 2-3 years. 5.

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Follow with a clean microfiber cloth, leaving the toilet tank for last, and your surfaces should be nice and shiny. 6. Scrub then flush: Grab your toilet brush and scrub the toilet bowl, taking extra care to get beneath the rim in the front where urine often collects and causes odor-producing stains. Flush then swish the brush in the clean water before flushing a second time. Prop the brush between the lid and seat to let it drip dry. 7. Finish the floor: Sweep or vacuum the floors and mop them thoroughly. 8. Finish up: Give the mirrors a good polish using glass cleaner then shine the faucet fixtures, change the towels and take out the trash.

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Actually, had I asked people in a well-heeled part of London, the answers would have been little different. Then I asked what they thought about health. I was told that in poor countries, ill-health is the result of unsanitary living conditions and lack of health care. In rich countries, now that we all have clean water and safe toilets, they told me that ill-health is the result of difficulty getting to see the doctor and our own indulgent behaviour, we dreadful feckless drinkers, smokers and overweight sloths (I am translating slightly), or just plain bad luck in the genetic lottery. My point in writing this book is that my informants were not wrong about what is important for health, just too limited.

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Yes, it is important to improve the lot of the worst off, but the gradient demands that we improve conditions, and hence health, for everyone below the top. Not only do we need to reduce poverty, we need to improve society and have effort proportional to need. You may be thinking that a social gradient in health in Glasgow and in India are quite different. Thinking about Jimmy in Calton, described above, destitution does not come to mind. He has clean water and shelter and does not suffer from malaria, or dysentery. Surely in India it is different, where the basics are lacking. The basics are wanting, but in other respects it is not so different. Here is Gita. Gita sells vegetables on the street in Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat in India. She has no formal education, lives in an ‘informal settlement’ (a slum made of makeshift housing) and has two children who sit with her by the roadside as she sells her vegetables, and an older girl who helps with the vegetable trade.

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If you have little of it, money is crucial to your life and your health. For poor countries, small increments in income are associated with big increases in life expectancy. It makes sense. A country with a per capita national income of less than $1,000 can afford little in the way of food, shelter, clean water, sanitation, medical and other services – relief of what I have called destitution. With a small increment in income, more things are possible. FIGURE 1.3: RICHER AND HEALTHIER – UP TO A POINT Even more money, though, does not guarantee good health. Above a national income of about $10,000 there is very little relation between national income and life expectancy.

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

The historian Simon Szreter describes how, in the cities of the Industrial Revolution, fresh water was widely available, but to factories as a source of power, not to the inhabitants of the cities to drink.32 As is so often the case, the benefits of the new ways of doing things were far from equally distributed. And the factory owners, who were also those who paid taxes, had no interest in spending their own money on clean water for their workers. Szreter documents how new political coalitions of working men and displaced landholders successfully agitated to install the infrastructure for clean water, an agitation that was effective only after the Reform Acts enfranchised working men. Once the political balance had changed, the factory owners climbed on board, and cities began to compete with one another in advertising their healthfulness.

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Lives are longer and parents no longer routinely watch a quarter of their children die. Yet millions still experience the horrors of destitution and of premature death. The world is hugely unequal. Inequality is often a consequence of progress. Not everyone gets rich at the same time, and not everyone gets immediate access to the latest life-saving measures, whether access to clean water, to vaccines, or to new drugs for preventing heart disease. Inequalities in turn affect progress. This can be good; Indian children see what education can do and go to school too. It can be bad if the winners try to stop others from following them, pulling up the ladders behind them. The newly rich may use their wealth to influence politicians to restrict public education or health care that they themselves do not need.

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I tell the story of the fight to save the lives of children in the world that was left behind. This is a story of progress, mostly after World War II—a catch-up that would begin to close the chasm that had begun to open in the eighteenth century. It is a story with many great successes, in which antibiotics, pest control, vaccinations, and clean water saved millions of children, and in which life expectancy sometimes increased at (the apparently impossible rate of) several years each year. The chasm in life expectancy between the poor and rich worlds was narrowed, but not closed. There were also terrible setbacks, including a catastrophic man-made famine in China between 1958 and 1961, and the recent HIV/AIDS epidemic that, for several African countries, wiped out three decades of progress against mortality.

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Despite a wet 2015 El Niño year, the California drought is causing a fear that agriculture will have to be permanently curtailed, leading to long-term shortages of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Access to clean water is one of the most serious problems in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization, 1.8 million people die every year from diarrheal diseases.1 Of these victims, 90 percent are children under five, mostly in developing countries. Eighty-eight percent of these cases are attributed to unsafe water supply and sanitation. It’s not shortage of water per se that is the problem; it’s access to clean water. Water obtained from rivers and wells is infested with deadly bacteria, viruses, and larger parasites.

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12 Your Own Private Driver: Self-Driving Cars, Trucks, and Planes 13 When Your Scale Talks to Your Refrigerator: The Internet of Things 14 The Future of Your Body Is Electric 15 Almost Free Energy and Food Conclusion: So Will It Be Star Trek or Mad Max? Notes Acknowledgments Index About the Authors PREFACE Not long ago, I was very pessimistic about the future. I was worried about hunger and poverty, disease, overpopulation. I believed that the world would run out of clean water and energy and that we would be fighting world wars over scarce resources. Today, I talk about this being the greatest period in history, when we will solve the grand challenges of humanity and enter an era of enlightenment and exploration such as we saw in my favorite TV series, Star Trek. Yes, I grew up dreaming of tricorders, replicators, and androids and wanting to be an astronaut so that I could join Starfleet Academy.

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You will use a 3-D printer to build your house or a replacement kidney. Your grandchildren will have an astoundingly good education delivered by an avatar—and children all over the world, in every country, will have an equally good education. There will be no more poverty. We will have plenty of clean water for everyone. We will no longer fight over oil. We won’t have any more traffic lights, because the robo-cars won’t need them! And no more parking tickets, of course. Best of all, you will have far more time to do what you want to: art, music, writing, sports, cooking, classes of all sorts, and just daydreaming.

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

Then I’d sit in the little café sipping my café au lait, listening in on the conversations of businessmen and aid workers at neighboring tables, aware of the sparkling water in the pool, aware that my cup of coffee required about 36 gallons of water to produce, and acutely aware that the only reason that such a grubby person as me was permitted to spend twenty minutes in their fancy bathroom was the color of my skin and the American Express card in my pocket. I wondered how different life would be for those hundred thousand kids who would die from lack of clean water during the next twelve months, if they each had one of those cards, or even a safe tap in their yards. Having experienced the level of scarcity that is the norm for most of the world’s people, I am now more aware of the many ways that so-called advanced societies take for granted the one substance, after air, that we most need to survive.

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Already, about one-third of the world’s population lives in countries that are experiencing water stress.58 Despite all our technological know-how, at least one in six people doesn’t have access to safe drinking water. Every day, thousands of people—mostly children—die from preventable diseases contracted because they do not have access to clean water.59 In Asia, where water has always been regarded as an abundant resource, the amount of it available for each person declined by 40 to 60 percent between 1955 and 1990.60 Experts predict that by 2025, fully three-quarters of people on earth will experience water scarcity, a condition in which the demand for water outstrips the supply.61 Overuse of water, along with droughts, contamination, climate disruption, diversion for industrial or agricultural uses, and inequality in access to water all contribute to water scarcity.

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As civil rights and environmental justice activist Cora Tucker said, “People don’t get all the connections [when] they say the environmental is over there, the civil rights group is over there, the women’s group is over there and the other groups are here. Actually, all of them are one group, and the issues we fight become null and void if we have no clean water to drink, no clean air to breathe and nothing to eat.”150 With the movement gaining momentum globally, the first ever National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was held in Washington, D.C., in 1991. Soon after, in 1993 President Clinton signed an executive order that created the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council to the EPA.151 So by then, there was solid evidence of a racial bias in the choice of locations for polluting and hazardous facilities; there was a growing broad-based movement for environmental justice; and there was a presidential executive order and a special advisory council to the national Environmental Protection Agency.

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas

Airbus A320, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Negawatt, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, special drawing rights, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, We are as Gods

The next steps for Venter’s team—and other competitors rushing to pioneer novel methods in the same field—point the way towards a new technology of awesome power and potential. Once the function of every gene is understood, scientists can begin to build truly new organisms from scratch with different useful purposes in mind. Microbial life-forms could be designed to create biofuels or new vaccines, to bioremediate polluted sites, or to clean water. In the hands of a modern-day Bond villain, they might also be used to forge virulent new superbugs that could wipe out most of the world’s population. But the technology per se is ethically inert; it is just a tool. The purpose of a machine depends upon whose hands are wielding its power. Synthetic biology reduces the cell to a machine, whose components—once properly understood—can be assembled like blocks of Lego.

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Well-fed campaigners in rich countries may fantasize romantically about happy peasants living sustainably in self-reliant African villages, but the fact is that people across the developing world are desperate to increase their economic opportunities, security, and wealth. They want to have enough to eat, they want to have clean water and they want their young children not to die of easily treatable diseases—and that is just for starters. They want the benefits of being part of the modern world, in other words, which is why so many young people across the developing world are moving to cities in search of a job and a better way of life.

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Helping meet the nitrogen planetary boundary is probably the least compelling reason for tackling this injustice, but nevertheless one estimate suggests that delivering modern sewage facilities to everyone in poor countries could reduce reactive nitrogen pollution by 5 million tonnes a year.26 World Health Organization estimates suggest a cost of about $11 billion a year to provide both clean water and adequate sanitation to half the world’s population by 2015, as demanded by the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.27 Because of the lives saved, the reduction of health-care costs for preventable diseases, and the waste of productive time involved in fetching and carrying water, this expenditure would be strongly cost-positive.

The Atlas of Disease by Sandra Hempel

clean water, coronavirus, Easter island, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, trade route, wikimedia commons

Incidence Shigellosis is responsible for an estimated 165 million cases of severe dysentery a year Prevalence Shigellosis and amoebiasis are endemic throughout the world Prevention Clean water, good sanitation and good hygiene practices, particularly hand-washing Treatment Antibiotics for shigellosis and antiparasitic drugs for amoebiasis. Rehydration to replace fluids and body salts lost through diarrhoea. Global strategy Provision of clean water, efficient sanitation and promotion of good hygiene practices Illustration of a soldier suffering from dysentery, from a German publication on diseases, 1929.

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Virtually non-existent in developed countries Prevention Provision of clean drinking water and efficient sewers; oral vaccines in high-risk areas Treatment Oral rehydration in mild cases; rapid treatment with intravenous fluids and antibiotics in severe cases Global strategy The World Health Organization (WHO) aims to reduce cholera deaths by 90 per cent by 2030. Strategy includes: specialist treatment centres and better access to clean water, effective sanitation and waste management; good hygiene and food safety practices; and public information. Satirical lithograph of John Bull (the personification of Britain) defending his country against the invasion of cholera, c. 1832. Cholera has probably been endemic to India for centuries.

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Typhoid Causal agent Bacterium Salmonella Typhi Transmission Contaminated food and water Symptoms Fever, fatigue, headache, nausea, abdominal pain, constipation or diarrhoea and sometimes a rash Incidence and deaths Estimated 11–20 million cases and 128,000–161,000 deaths a year worldwide Prevalence Global but mainly parts of Africa, the Americas, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific Prevention Vaccination; provision of clean water, good sanitation and food hygiene Treatment Antibiotics but drug resistance is growing Global strategy US$85 million funding made available from 2019 for routine vaccination of children in countries where typhoid is endemic Illustration of a man suffering with typhoid, from a German publication on diseases, 1929.

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The satisfaction of the material needs of food and water and shelter is not an obstacle to but rather the precondition for the modern appreciation of the nonhuman world. Between 1945 and the mid-1970s, the standard of living for virtually every American improved consistently and dramatically. By 1970, affluent, comfortable, and secure Americans were strongly interested in quality-of-life concerns, which included things like clean air; clean water; and local, state, and national parks. America’s unprecedented postwar prosperity created rising expectations for greater personal fulfillment and a sense that greater material wealth alone could not provide it. Social scientists often label these quality-of-life concerns postmaterial, because they emerge only after individuals and societies have met their basic material needs.

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In the stories they tell about their movement’s birth and in the politics they make for its future, environmental leaders steadfastly ignore the central role that evolving values play in shaping society and politics. They see the postwar increase in outdoor activities as evidence of something ancient rather than something new. They view their movement as a reaction to new, visible pollution problems, such as the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969. They treat their policy victories, such as the Clean Water Act, as rational responses to new pollution problems of industrialization, and they overlook the ways in which the act was a manifestation of changing social values made possible by industrialization. And they credit the nonhuman sciences for having revealed to the public environmental degradation and ignore the social and political environment that supported the public’s faith in science. 7.

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In private conversations, meetings, and discussions, we often hear progressives lament public apathy and cynicism and make statements such as “Things are going to have to get a lot worse before they get better.” We emphatically disagree. In our view, things have to get better before they can get better. Immiseration theory—the view that increasing suffering leads to progressive social change—has been repeatedly discredited by history.24 Progressive social reforms, from the Civil Rights Act to the Clean Water Act, tend to occur during times of prosperity and rising expectations—not immiseration and declining expectations. Both the environmental movement and the civil rights movement emerged as a consequence of rising prosperity. It was the middle-class, young, and educated black Americans who were on the forefront of the civil rights movement.

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, British Empire, call centre, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, fear of failure, glass ceiling, high net worth, income per capita, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Marc Andreessen, microcredit, Own Your Own Home, random walk, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Ballmer

Let’s say, for example, that your cause is to bring clean water to villages in Africa where children are dying of diseases that nobody should be killed by in this modern world. Below are two statements that you could make while talking to a potential donor or board member about aiding your nascent organization: STATEMENT #1: My dream is to bring new wells and clean water to at least 25 villages in Kenya over the next three years. STATEMENT #2: The scale of the water problem in Africa requires bold solutions, because millions of people die of diseases that they would not contract if they had clean water. So I want to help at least 10,000 villages, throughout Africa, to have clean water within ten years.* The latter statement is probably going to scare some people away.

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So I want to help at least 10,000 villages, throughout Africa, to have clean water within ten years.* The latter statement is probably going to scare some people away. This is fine—after all, you don’t want people who think small or who are afraid of big challenges. The second statement will also attract the attention of potential donors. One of the biggest frustrations that funders have is that “we are spending all this money, yet so little seems to change as a result.” Therefore, when they meet someone who declares a bold set of goals, they are likely to take notice and you’ll be in a position to “get the meeting.”

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Story after story you hear from the locals about how this house was home to two parents and five kids and now there is only one child left…or how a father lost all six of his children and wife. Everybody lost someone near and dear to them that quiet Sunday morning. There are refugee camps everywhere and temporary tents line the streets. People have tents, clean water, and food in ample supply thankfully. But people complain that nothing else has happened. They have heard much was given but they have received little to rebuild their lives. The government and international relief agencies are plentiful in the south where there are good roads (tourist beach area) and it is a government-controlled area.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

That same child, connected to the bandwidth explosion heading her way, will soon be able to spin up thousands of processor cores belonging to any number of cloud-based services, and tap into everything from the billions of hours of free entertainment on YouTube to our ever-thriving gig economy. Conveniently, the poorest nations on Earth are also the sunniest and with that sun—and the ever-increasing spread of solar—comes the opportunity for abundant energy. With energy comes the power to provide clean water and with clean water comes massive increases in health and wellness, which together with increased education and lower birth rates, can help stem the tide of overpopulation. To be clear, there will still be terrorism, war, and murder. Dictatorship and disease won’t go away. But the world will quietly continue to get better.

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See: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/drinking-water. Kamen had just made a handshake deal with Coca-Cola: Coca Cola Corporate, “Coca-Cola Announces Long-Term Partnership with DEKA R&D to Help Bring Clean Water to Communities in Need,” September 25, 2012. See Coca-Cola’s press release about their agreement here: https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/deka-partnership-announcement. See also: “EKOCENTER & Slingshot Clean Water Partnerships,” https://www.coca-colaafrica.com/stories/sustainability-water-ekocenter#. “Freestyle Fountain Beverage Dispenser”: Ted Ryan, “From Big Idea to Big Bet: How the Coca-Cola Freestyle Fountain Dispenser Came to Be,” December 6, 2017.

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By the end of the nineteenth century, we broke forty for the first time. It was at the turn of the twentieth that real acceleration emerged. Everything from the discovery of germ theory and the creation of antibiotics, to the implementation of better sanitation and the increased availability of clean water, radically improved childhood mortality. In 1900, 30 percent of all deaths in the United States were children under five. By 1999, it was 1.4. In parallel, the green revolution and better transportation networks increased average caloric intake, thus increasing lifespan yet again. The end result was a net gain of nearly thirty years, with average lifespan hitting seventy-six by the turn of the millennium.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

., “China Wrestles with Power Shortages,” Power Magazine, May 1, 2013, https://www.powermag.com/china-wrestles-with-power-shortages/; Rajesh Kumar Singh and Saket Sundria, “India Nears Power Success, But Millions Still in the Dark,” T&D World, May 2, 2018, https://www.tdworld.com/utility-business/india-nears-power-success-millions-still-dark; Project Partner, “China’s Clean Water Shortage Intensifies the Poverty Crisis,” https://projectpartner.org/clean-water/chinas-clean-water-shortage-intensifies-the-poverty-crisis/; Rina Chandran, “163,000,000 People in India Don’t Have Clean Water. This Is Why,” Global Citizen, April 25, 2018, https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/india-day-zero-clean-water-access-shortage/; Hannah Daly, “1.1 billion people still lack electricity. This could be the solution,” World Economic Forum, June 20, 2018, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/1-billion-people-lack-electricity-solution-mini-grid-iea/. 37 Ted Nordhaus, “Impossible Environmentalism: Green groups promote utopian fantasies,” USA Today, September 7, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/09/07/impossible-environmentalism-does-not-address-sustainability-ted-nordhaus-column/570651001/. 38 Lewis Page, “Renewable energy ‘simply won’t work’: Top google engineers,” Register, November 21, 2014, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/; Lewis Page, “Renewable energy can’t do the job.

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One problem is that a Malthusian approach to demographics and economics tends to favor those who are already rich, to empower the clerisy, and generally to reinforce social hierarchy.34 Moreover, the measures taken by Western nations are unlikely to affect climate change much when virtually all the growth in emissions comes from developing countries, led by China.35 Poorer developing countries also must accommodate the needs of large populations living in poverty and lacking basic amenities such as adequate electricity or clean water. Globally over one billion people lack reliable electricity. Leaders in countries such as India tend to be more concerned about the availability of energy than about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.36 Investing in Resilience In order to ind effective solutions to climate change and other problems, the environmental movement needs to give up “utopian fantasies,” writes Ted Nordhaus, a longtime California environmentalist, and “make its peace with modernity and technology.”37 Given existing technologies, the much-anticipated shift to solar and wind energy seems largely impractical as a way of cutting emissions without dramatically raising energy costs, reducing reliability, and increasing poverty.

Grow Green: Tips and Advice for Gardening With Intention by Jen Chillingsworth

carbon footprint, clean water, food miles, Indoor air pollution, Kickstarter, Mason jar

EGGSHELLS (BIODEGRADABLE) Perfect for herbs and salad seeds. Eggshells can be planted directly into the soil and as they decompose, they provide plants with additional nutrients. Gently tap the top of the egg and, peel away the shell, then pour the egg into a bowl and set aside. Wash the empty shell in clean water and leave to air dry. Carefully pierce a small hole in the bottom of the shell for drainage (a needle or an awl works well for this). Return the empty eggshells to their egg carton and gently spray them with water. Fill each eggshell with seed potting compost and plant seeds as directed on the packet.

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This hole is where the root will come from. Stick three toothpicks into the top part at a 45-degree angle, evenly spacing them out and avoiding the lines that run around the pit. Use an old jam (jelly) jar or Mason jar and sit the avocado pit in the jar, top side facing upwards. Fill the jar with clean water. The bottom of the avocado should sit in the water, with the top suspended out of the water with help from the toothpicks. Place the jar in a sunny spot. Top up the jar with water as needed or use fresh water if discolouration occurs. Once you have lots of roots, transplant the avocado to a container filled with good-quality potting compost.

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However, if there are fragments of soil stuck to the skewer, there is enough moisture in the pot and the plant does not need watering. » Humidity: Some houseplants require a damp and humid atmosphere to survive. To increase the level of humidity, mist plants every day with water or place pots on a saucer or tray filled with pebbles. Fill the saucer or tray with water halfway up the pebbles. Empty and refill the saucer or tray with clean water regularly to prevent pest infestations. » Fertilizing: Most houseplants will appreciate a regular feed of an organic liquid fertilizer throughout the growing season. For zero waste options, use the leachate from a worm farm or make a batch of banana peel tea. Cacti succulents, citrus and orchids require specialist fertilizing products.

The More of Less: Finding the Life You Want Under Everything You Own by Joshua Becker

clean water, follow your passion, helicopter parent, mortgage debt, sharing economy

Riding the momentum, Ali established a nonprofit organization called With This Ring that calls men and women into radical generosity, boldly asking them to part with their most prized possessions for the sake of others. To date, With This Ring has collected over a thousand rings and has provided clean water for tens of thousands of people in Africa, Central America, and India.2 Ali has experienced joy in giving and fulfillment in generosity. Indeed, she would attest that it is far better to give than to accumulate. You may never feel moved to give up your wedding ring for the sake of providing clean water to people in Africa. Ali would be the first to admit that hers was a rare first step toward generosity. But each of us should feel moved to care for the poor and the needy, not just for their sake but for ours as well.

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This experience changed my view of minimizing and forever changed my advice to others embarking on the journey. Rather than sell your unwanted items, give them away. Practice generosity with them. There’s no lack of opportunity. Countless charitable organizations around the world meet real and urgent needs. They provide food and shelter to those without. They deliver clean water to villages lacking a well. They protect battered women. They place orphans in loving families. They offer educational assistance and job training to people who need help getting a start. And much, much more. By giving your unneeded possessions to such organizations, you can make a real difference quickly and easily.

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There are countless charities and causes that need your support. And some of them are directly in line with your most compelling passions. What are you most passionate about? Is it the environment, poverty, or religion? Maybe it’s world peace, child nutrition, or animal rights. What about education, civil rights, or clean water? Identify what passions already move you, find a committed organization working in that area, and then joyfully help them in their work. 5. Spend time with a generous person. Once, I found myself out to lunch with an older gentleman whose generosity I had admired for years and decided to ask questions about the practice in his life.

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

In 2012, Via Campesina began to push the United Nations to adopt an International Declaration of the Rights of Peasants to enshrine rights to land, clean water, and freedom from violence.2 “In most regions where Via Campesina is present, the leaders are women,” Mpofu says. Women are “the backbone of agriculture” and have been at the forefront of farm protests. In South Africa in 2012, women grape pickers sparked the largest farmworker strike the country had seen in decades. In the Western Cape Winelands, thousands laid down their hoes and scythes to demand gender and race equity in pay, clean water, decent housing, and an end to sexual harassment and violence. By strike’s end, they had nearly doubled their wage to $10 daily.

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But workers said picking quotas were brutal and the hours inhuman.4 Lack of clean water was what finally moved them to organize. “They say what they offer is safe,” said Alexandra, “but it tastes like pond water and it has green slime on it.” People get “a tremendous sore stomach” from drinking it. Decades of industrial agriculture had drained the aquifer till salt seeped into San Quintín’s groundwater. Workers’ children got sick when they drank it and developed rashes when they used it to bathe. In the spring of 2015, San Quintín pickers formed the Alliance for Social Justice. Their first demand was clean water.5 But they soon moved beyond that.

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I began this work because I felt called on in a time of globalization, as an ever-spreading flood of capital transforms our world, to better understand how low-wage workers are starting to resist, to think and act globally as well as locally. Since that time, I have spoken to many workers about what moved them to rise against poverty wages. These conversations transformed what I see, think, and feel every time I buy a shirt or a flat of berries, shop at a big-box store, check out of a hotel, or drink clean water from my kitchen faucet. Researching this book was revelatory. I traveled across the United States and to parts of the world I had never before visited. I drove, flew, walked, rode in open-air tuk-tuks and on the backs of motorcycles. With photographer Elizabeth Cooke, I conducted interviews in windowless worker dormitories, union offices, and on the streets, at protest marches, in city council hearing rooms, in brightly lit restaurants and shaded back rooms, in elegantly shabby colonial hotels, at factory gates, by phone and via Skype.

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness by Dan Dimicco

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, California high-speed rail, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, digital divide, driverless car, fear of failure, full employment, Google Glasses, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, manufacturing employment, Neil Armstrong, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

Other countries don’t have the stringent rules we have. China’s environmental protections are paper-thin. That puts us at a massive disadvantage. I can anticipate the objection, which is often something along the lines of, “What are you saying, DiMicco? You want to repeal the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and bring back acid rain?” For the record, no, I do not want to repeal the Clean Water Act or Clean Air Act, and I’m not a fan of acid rain. I’m not in favor of turning back the clock 30 or 40 years. But that’s not where the discussion is today, anyway. When we talk about environmental regulations in 2014 we’re often talking about whether it’s absolutely necessary to add another multi-billion-dollar burden to industry by tweaking the emissions standards on certain fine particles, defined as 2.5 micrometers and smaller.

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A new, wider bridge reopened about five months later, three weeks ahead of schedule and at a cost of $7 million. What happened in California is a great example of public-private partnerships in action. Sure, a private company made some money, but taxpayers came out ahead, too. Now, I’m not saying the president should declare a state of emergency, waive the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and throw out 80 years of labor laws with a stroke of a pen. I don’t think he would even if he could—can you imagine the outcry from unions and environmental groups? But I am saying infrastructure is, relatively speaking, one of the easiest things we can do to get the economy back on track.

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Myers, 173 Carnegie, Andrew, 7, 74–75, 78 Carter, Jimmy, 54, 58 Caterpillar, 59, 70, 95 China accountability and, 117–19 “Buy American” and, 136–37 currency manipulation, 101, 107 economic growth, 63–72, 99–100 environment and, 195, 198, 209–10 free trade and, 13, 96, 99–107, 135 impact on international trade, 30, 63–74, 88, 117, 192–93, 213–18, 220–21 infrastructure and, 162, 166, 170 innovation and, 114, 116–17 intellectual property and, 117 Kyoto Protocol and, 195 labor costs and, 64 manufacturing and, 17, 158, 205–6 regulation and, 147–49 skills gap and, 122, 125 space program, 52 steel industry and, 109 U.S. stimulus and, 95, 135–37, 145 WTO and, 216–18 Clean Air Act, 174, 209 Clean Water Act, 174, 209 Clinton, Bill, 65–67, 140 Cold War, 45, 63 construction sector, 2, 15, 33–34, 72, 75, 85, 89, 102, 104, 131–36, 155, 157, 169, 171–74, 178, 197, 202, 221 Consumer Electronics Association, 114 copyright, 119, 213 counterfeiting, 214 Dana, Charles, 4 Datong, 118 DiMicco, Dan, 3–19 direct reduced iron (DRI), 154, 156, 158, 186, 192–93, 222 Dodd, Chris, 180 Duke, Mike, 22 Durbin, Dick, 36 Eagle Ford shale formation, 197 economic crisis Americans leaving labor force, 26 importants statistics, 25–33 lessons learned, 39–41 overview, 21–25 path to full employment, 28 political leadership and, 35–39 real unemployment rate, 29 sectors that need jobs, 33–35 youth unemployment and student debt, 31 education author and, 5 Bush and, 23 career and, 30 Eisenhower and, 45 government spending and, 93, 124, 196, 212, 227 Kennedy and, 48 manufacturing and, 212 National Defense Education Act, 45 skills and, 14, 48, 79, 124–32 U.S. public schools, 14, 45, 48, 79 see also student debt Eisenhower, Dwight, 45, 47, 164 Emanuel, Rahm, 23, 140 energy resources “all of the above” strategy, 169, 190–95 costs and benefits, 196–99 domestic production of, 87, 89 government policy and, 17–18, 39 green energy, 143–47, 157 job creation and, 157 natural gas production, 90, 184 overview, 183–90 steel and, 103 trade deficit and, 87 U.S. oil production, 185 Enron, 12, 77 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 152–53, 156 Evans, Don, 110–11 Farouk Systems, 214 federal budget deficit, 11, 21–22, 83, 133 Feinstein, Dianne, 36–37 fiscal cliff deal, 40, 83, 88, 141, 226 Forbes, 9, 83, 197 Ford, Gerald, 54, 58 Ford, Henry, 4 Ford Motor Company, 97, 130 free trade, myth of impacts of China’s currency manipulation, 101 need for government-to-government solutions, 109–12 overview, 93–95 standing up to cheaters, 107–8 why free trade doesn’t work, 96–107 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 102, 106 General Electric, 26, 46, 49, 59, 95, 114, 146 General Motors, 37, 130 Gospel of Wealth, The (Carnegie), 74–75 Great Depression, 47, 55, 134, 164 Great Recession areas hardest hit by, 122 causes of, 203 effect on US economy, 1–2 global impact of, 11 Nucor and, 8 Obama and, 2, 22–23, 191–92 green energy, 143–47 see also energy resources Greenpeace, 191 Hagel, Chuck, 180 Hazeltine, Barrett, 48–49 health care, 22–23, 34, 140–41, 181, 196 Hoover Dam, 164 housing bubble, 12, 76, 121, 132, 203 Hutchison, Kay Bailey, 180–81 I-Bank, 180 see also infrastructure Immelt, Jeffrey, 114 infrastructure China and, 162, 166, 170 expediting spending on, 72–74 global competitiveness of US, 165 job creation and, 169 national infrastructure bank, 178–81 needs, 168–71 overview, 161–68 paying for improvements, 175–78 return on spending, 163 state vs. federal spending on, 176 innovation, myth of areas hit hardest by Great Recession, 122 education and training, 124–32 jobs in innovative industries compared to manufacturing, 115 Kindle’s impact on US trade deficit, 118 overview, 113–19 skills gap myth, 120–23 irrational defeatism overview, 81–88 realism vs. mythology, 88–91 Iverson, Ken, 7, 9, 62, 78, 222, 223–25 Jarrett, Valerie, 22 Jindal, Bobby, 155–56 job-training programs, 123, 130 John Deere, 95, 130 Jordan, Jim, 151 Kaiser, Henry, 4 Kellogg-Briand nonaggression pact of 1928, 106 Kennedy, John F., 44–48, 52 Kerry, John, 38, 180 Keystone XL pipeline, 192 Kindle, 117–18 see also Amazon Kozlowski, Dennis, 76 Krywko, Mark, 213 Kyoto Protocol, 148, 195 Lay, Ken, 76 layoffs, League of Nations, 106 Lehman Brothers, 43, 76 liquefied natural gas (LNG), 187–88 Locke, Gary, 114 Madoff, Bernie, 76 manufacturing sector accelerating a manufacturing renaissance, 204–7 accountability and, 219–20 anti-dumping initiations since 1999, 217 economic multiplier of, 202 fostering innovation in, 220–23 overview, 201–4 relationship between government and business, 208–12 risk and, 223–27 signs of renaissance, 212–18 tax rates by country, 211 Mars, 43–44, 52 see also NASA; space exploration Marshall Plan, 54, 56, 134 McCain, John, 143, 167 McDonald’s, 84 McKinsey, 84, 121 Medicare, 21 mercantilistic policies, 14, 65, 68, 99–102, 107, 198, 217 Mexico, 17, 66, 95, 190, 198 multiplier effect, 137–38, 190, 202, 207, 216 myths that distract us American industrial policy, 156–59 “Buy American,” 136–37 federal spending, 133–35, 140–42 infrastructure, 138–40 Nucor’s experience in Louisiana, 153–56 overview, 133–40 regulation, 147–53 stimulus and green jobs, 143–47 see also free trade, myth of; innovation, myth of NASA, 5, 44, 46, 49–52 see also Mars; space exploration National Defense Education Act, 45 Nissan, 54 Nixon, Richard, 54, 58 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 66 Nucor, 3–10, 15, 18, 51, 54, 61–63, 77–80, 82, 84, 103, 110–12, 127–30, 134, 145, 151, 153–56, 158, 165, 186, 189, 192–93, 204, 209, 219, 221–27 Obama, Barack attempts to fix US economy, 22–26, 38, 143, 150 China and, 106–7 conflict with business leaders, 150 economic stimulus, 15, 93, 134–35, 172 education and, 127 energy exports and, 187–88 exports under, 40 Great Recession and, 2, 22–23, 191–92 green energy and, 145–46, 191 infrastructure projects and, 172, 174, 180–81 innovation and, 114 international trade and, 95, 106–7 Keystone XL pipeline and, 192 NASA and, 51–52 private industry and, 219–20 regulation and, 157 skills gap and, 120 unemployment numbers and, 26, 39–40, 93, 114 OECD, 211 O’Neill, Paul, 110 O’Neill, Tip, 59 Palin, Sarah, 167 patents, 117, 119, 213 Plaza Accord, 58–63, 108 Procter & Gamble, 105 Reagan, Ronald, 47, 59–60, 63–65, 108 Reid, Harry, 36 Republican Party “Buy American” and, 95 economy and, 38–39, 86, 141, 144 government spending and, 11, 133 infrastructure and, 167, 181 national debt and, 11, 35–36 regulation and, 151 stimulus and, 86, 91, 93, 95 Rockefeller, John D., 74 Rocketdyne, 46 Romney, Mitt, 88, 107, 120, 191 Russia, 45, 47, 51, 95, 102, 116, 135, 147 Schultz, Howard, 22 Schumer, Chuck, 36–37 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 136, 143 Seidenberg, Ivan, 22 September 11, 2001, 23–24 sequester, 40 service industry, 10, 12, 15, 18, 33–37, 51, 76, 89, 127, 203 shale, 17, 39, 157–58, 183–85, 189, 191, 194, 196–97, 199 Shami, Farouk, 214 Shapiro, Gary, 114 Sharan, Sunil, 146 Sierra Club, 191, 193 Sleek Audio, 213 Smith, Adam, 65, 101–2 Social Security, 24, 32 space exploration Apollo program, 46 Cold War and, 45 history of, 43–47 inspiring a generation, 48–52 Kennedy and, 44–46 Obama and, 51–52 public-private partnerships and, 46–47 Soviet Union and, 45–46 see also Mars; NASA Sputnik crisis, 45, 116 Stahl, Leslie, 94–95 Starbucks, 22 steel industry “Buy American” and, 135–36 Carnegie and, 7, 74 China and, 102–4, 118, 218 energy and, 186–88, 192 flat-rolled, 9 infrastructure and, 90, 139 innovation and, 221 international trade and, 14, 58, 95–97, 102–4, 109, 218–19 irrational defeatism and, 84–85 Nucor and, 3–10, 51, 62–63, 82, 145, 153–56, 186, 221–24, 226 Plaza Accord and, 62 regulation and, 145, 149, 153–54 Republic Steel, 5, 50 skills gap and, 125, 128–30 stimulus and, 135–36, 139 U.S. manufacturing and, 3, 6, 109–12 Vulcraft and, 7 WTO and, 219 Yamato Steel, 221 stimulus “Buy American” and, 94–95, 135–37 China and, 95, 135–37, 145 failures, 15, 134–35 green initiatives and, 35, 143–47 infrastructure and, 93–95, 166, 172 passage of, 15 politics of, 91, 134 Republican Party and, 86, 91, 93, 95 subsidies, 35 taxes and, 94–95, 135, 137–38 unemployment and, 93–94, 146 student debt, 30–32 Summers, Larry, 114 tariffs, 60, 63, 67, 96, 98, 102, 106, 111, 206 taxes Bush and, 23 environmental issues and, 145, 148–50 federal government and, 73–74 fiscal cliff deal and, 226 free trade and, 96 gas tax, 176–77 Great Recession and, 83 infrastructure and, 90–91, 163, 173–76 innovation and, 86, 180, 220–21 international trade and, 68–69, 71, 96, 100, 102, 117, 205 manufacturing sector and, 68–69, 86, 204, 210–12, 220 politics and, 36, 93 public-private partnerships and, 46–47 revenue from, 19, 40, 46, 140, 155, 183, 196–99 stimulus and, 94–95, 135, 137–38 tax credits, 86, 145, 221 tax cuts, 23, 36, 93 tax rates by country, 211 Tianrui, 118 Toyota, 37, 54, 60 Trumka, Richard, 135 unemployment age and, 30–32 construction sector and, 2 decline in, 2, 27 education and, 30–31, 127 energy sector and, 196 Great Recession and, 3, 22, 25–30, 36, 93–94, 122 innovation and, 114 measuring, 25–27 politics and, 39, 212 real unemployment rate, 29, 39 skills and, 85, 205 stimulus and, 93–94, 146 student debt and, 30–31 see also job creation United Nations, 106, 198 U.S. foreign trade adult conversation, 56–58 changes in global manufacturing and, 57 China’s impact on, 63–72 competitive advantages, 72–74 growth of financial sector, 75 low labor costs and, 64 Plaza Accord, 58–63 public view of, 53–54 real wealth and its opposite, 74–80 US foreign aid and, 55–56 U.S.

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

In the United States, these diseases are a spectre of times past: Swamp drainage, pesticide spraying, and massive sanitation infrastructure projects to supply clean water and safely dispose of waste have essentially eliminated these diseases from wealthy countries. The foundation is pursuing a faster, potentially easier, route to eradicating disease in poor countries. The Gateses argue that with advances in biotech and logistics we can develop vaccines for these diseases instead of getting tripped up on the bigger hurdles of providing clean water, sanitation infrastructure, and nutritious food. But the pharmaceuticals industry, concentrated in wealthy countries, has not developed such vaccines and is not particularly interested in doing so.

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But, as some of these billionaires have acknowledged, the world has not benefited equally. Absolute poverty and childhood mortality are declining in many countries, but starvation and chronic hunger afflict more than a billion people. Every year millions of children die from preventable diseases and a third of the planet lacks clean water and access to a toilet. When Bill Gates came up for air in the late 1990s after creating the Microsoft empire he looked around and was “shocked” and “revolted” by the fate of poor people around the world. “We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

The inventor Dean Kamen has developed two affiliated machines—each the size of a dishwasher—that together can provide electricity and clean water to rural villages or shantytown communities that lack both. The power generator runs off a readily available fuel—cow dung—though Kamen says it will run off “anything that burns.” Its output can power up to seventy energy-efficient bulbs. The ambient heat from the generator can be used to run the water purifier, which Kamen nicknamed Slingshot. The device accepts any form of water, including raw sewage, and extracts the clean water through vaporization. Kamen’s prototype includes a “manual” featuring a single instruction: just add water.

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The writer Robert Neuwirth puts it best in his mesmerizing account of squatter culture, Shadow Cities: “With makeshift materials, they are building a future in a society that has always viewed them as people without a future. In this very concrete way, they are asserting their own being.” But that hope needs to be tempered with caution. The squatters still face significant obstacles. Arguably the most pressing obstacle is the one that confronted London a century and a half ago: the lack of clean water. Over 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water; nearly 3 billion—almost half the planet—do not possess basic sanitation services: toilets, sewers. Each year 2 million children die from diseases—including cholera—that result directly from these unsanitary conditions. And so the megacities of the twenty-first century will have to learn all over again the lessons that London muddled through in the nineteenth.

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One cannot be unduly optimistic about how these megacities will face their potential crises in the coming years. There may be new technologies that enable the squatter communities to concoct public health solutions on their own, but governments will obviously need to play a role as well. It took industrial London a hundred years to mature into a city with clean water and reliable sanitation. The scavenger classes that Mayhew analyzed with such detail no longer exist in London, but even the wealthiest cities in the developed world continue to face problems of homelessness and poverty, particularly in the United States. But the developed cities no longer appear to be on a collision course with themselves, the way London did in the nineteenth century.

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community by Karen T. Litfin

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collaborative consumption, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, degrowth, glass ceiling, global village, hydraulic fracturing, intentional community, megacity, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, publish or perish, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, urban planning, Zipcar

Karen Collins, the young woman running the facility, walked me through the various anaerobic and aerobic tanks that transform wastewater into clean water in just four days. At the far end of the Living Machine was an impeccable garden with a lovely fountain with sparkling clean water flowing from it. I was curious to learn about Karen’s technical background. Was she a biologist? “No,” she said. “I’m a grade school teacher and a mom. Here, it’s been on-the-job training. You don’t need to know the science of bacteria; you just need to know how the system works. I work here alone 16 hours a week, with outside help for heavy work now and then.” The electricity from Findhorn’s windmills pumps 10,000 gallons of clean water uphill to the community every day.

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By working together, the villagers simultaneously build a cooperative spirit and enhance their material wellbeing. As one Sarvodaya activist told me, “We build the road, and the road builds us.” I traveled to Gunambil, a Sarvodaya village in the rugged hill country near Kandy, to see these ideals put into practice. Even though rain is plentiful, remote villages like Gunambil lack clean water because the rain runs off and the government will not plumb such steep terrain. In 1980, Gunambil held its first shramadana camp to build a gravity-fed system. Six months later, thanks to the backbreaking work of fifty volunteers, most households were receiving fresh water. Each family pays less than a dollar each month to the caretaker, the Shramadana Society’s only employee, who services the system.

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With an awareness that affluence is neither sustainable nor the fast track to happiness, ecological economists are devising alternatives to GDP/capita to measure progress.6 In 2012, the Happy Planet Index, which measures sustainable wellbeing, ranked Costa Rica as No. 1 and the United States as No. 114.7 National governments, including the United Kingdom’s Office of National Statistics, are taking this work seriously and developing means other than GDP/capita to measure national wellbeing.8 Like governments, ecovillages subsidize what they value. Ecovillages create a viable future by supporting common spaces and amenities, healthy food, access to clean water, and strong relationships. For reasons ranging from entrenched ideologies to corporate lobbying, governments often end up bankrolling a highly undesirable future. Think, for instance, of the trillions of dollars spent on militarizing the Middle East. A major step toward creating a positive future would be to end subsidies for programs that foster fossil-fuel dependency, a move that is particularly urgent in the United States and Canada.

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, clean water, glass ceiling, hindcast, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), LNG terminal, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, profit motive, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method

We’ll look at all major measures of environmental quality in chapter 8, but for now let’s look at clean air and clean water. Both have increased substantially. Here are measurements from the EPA of six major air pollutants. As fossil fuel use goes up, they go down. Figure 1.6: U.S. Air Pollution Goes Down Despite Increasing Fossil Fuel Use Source: U.S. EPA National Emissions Inventory Air Pollutant Emissions Trends Data And here are international data for the percentage of people in the world with good water quality, which has gone up dramatically in the last 25 years as countries have used more and more fossil fuels. Figure 1.7: More Fossil Fuels, More Clean Water Sources: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014 Overall, the improvement is incredible.

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How much of a positive difference does fossil fuel energy make to environmental quality? Let’s look at modern trends in four key areas of environmental quality: water, disease, sanitation, and air. Here’s water quality—measured by the percentage of world population with “access to improved water sources.” Figure 6.1: More Fossil Fuels, More Clean Water Sources: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014 Fossil fuel energy was essential to this improvement. It enabled us to transform once unusable water into usable water. Most of Earth’s surface is covered with water.

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This was rarely intentional, and early civilizations did construct sewer systems to isolate human waste, but natural, unrestricted water flows usually lead to a certain amount of mixing between the human waste and the nearest freshwater source—particularly as more and more people group together. Today, sewage is not only kept separate from clean water sources, but it is also extensively treated to render its most dangerous elements harmless so that it can be disposed of safely, in some cases used as a fertilizer or even, thanks to the latest technology, turned into drinking water.7 The technology of sewage treatment is another advance made possible by industrialization, and it is yet another energy-intensive process for transforming our environment.

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The major change, though, came with the effective filtering and chlorination of water supplies in the first half of the twentieth century, after the germ theory of disease had been accepted. Life expectancy increased more rapidly in the USA during this period than in any other period in American history, and the introduction of filters and chlorination shows that clean water played a decisive role. One study found that clean water was responsible for forty-three per cent of the total reduction in mortality, seventy-four per cent of the infant mortality reduction and sixty-two per cent of the child mortality reduction.11 This technological shift came late to low- and middle-income countries, but once begun, it happened faster than it once had in the wealthiest countries.

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By 2015, this had increased to 0.98 for primary and secondary education and 1.01 for tertiary education.19 This is an astonishing accomplishment, and important not just for justice and equal opportunities, but also because child mortality falls as women’s level of education increases. Part of this can be explained by the fact that education often leads to a job, a higher income, and better access to food, hygiene, and clean water. However, the effect goes beyond what can be explained by these factors indicating that better-educated mothers will assume more active responsibility for their children’s health than those who believe that illness and death are controlled by God or destiny. Few individuals have borne more powerful witness to the power of literacy than Frederick Douglass, the African-American slave who later became a celebrated orator and reformer.

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She would have had five to seven siblings, and she would already have seen at least one or two of them die. The chance that her mother would survive childbirth was smaller than the chance that the present generation will meet their grandparents. She would have been brought up under conditions we consider unbearable. Her family would not have had access to clean water or a toilet. Chances are that they did not even have a latrine; they would have used a ditch or gone behind a tree. Her surroundings would have been littered with garbage and faeces, contaminating water sources and devastating lives. Her parents would live in constant fear that she would be taken away by tuberculosis, cholera, smallpox or measles – or starvation.

Smart Cities, Digital Nations by Caspar Herzberg

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, business climate, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hive mind, Internet of things, knowledge economy, Masdar, megacity, New Urbanism, operational security, packet switching, QR code, remote working, RFID, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart meter, social software, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, X Prize

The World Health Organization stated in 2014 that 1.8 billion people rely on contaminated water sources, and that half of the world’s population will live in a “water-stressed” area by 2025. Among all the threats to human progress, clean water shortages are the least discriminating, affecting the city and village alike. See also Rececca Borison, “The Guy Who Invented the Segway Is Working with Coca-Cola to Bring His Water Distilling Invention to Third World Countries.”Business Insider, June 2014. http://www.businessinsider.com/segway-inventor-coke-spread-clean-water-2014-6. 3 Timothy Ogden, “Techno-Optimists Beware,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2012, https://ssir.org/book_reviews/entry/techno_optimists_beware1. 4 Moore’s Law is cofounder of Intel Gordon Moore’s 1965 supposition that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits will double every year into the foreseeable future. 5 The challenges facing the implementation of technology are illustrated by iBOT’s declining fortunes.

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Singapore is contrasted favorably with Mumbai; the former is “tall and connected,” while Mumbai, like much of India, is burdened by building height restrictions that require its slums to spread out and increase commuting time and congestion. He also makes the point that basic infrastructure should come first: “One curse of the developing world is that governments take on too much and fail at their core responsibilities. Countries that cannot provide clean water for their citizens should not be in the business of regulating currency exchanges.”10 By the same token, a reliable Internet service delivery platform is an essential component of green- or brownfield development. Because IoE technology has the capability to deliver resources and services with greater efficiency, it should be designed and implemented as a primary tool for providing those “core responsibilities.”

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“Like skilled people, skilled cities also seemed to be better at reinventing themselves during volatile times.”11 Dubai, once again, is an excellent example. A strong Internet platform and connectivity is imperative to the flexible city of the twenty-first century. In terms of economic competitiveness, it is nearly as important to provide a data network and security features as it is to provide clean water. Meanwhile, much of the flexibility of cities will depend on their ability to provide and manipulate information. By Glaeser’s thinking, the city is the best vehicle for smart services, simply because it provides the density we need for innovation and to counteract the twentieth-century, mostly American, predilection for sprawl, suburbs, car culture, and other sources of environmental degradation.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

It is one of the ten poorest countries, with more than one-third of the population living below the poverty line on less than $0.40 per day and half of children under 5 malnourished. Around 90% of Nepalis live in rural areas, many depending for survival on subsistence plots too small to support them, with little or no access to electricity, clean water, sanitation, education or health care, and national shortages of everything from rice to kerosene. More than a decade of Maoist insurgency and civil unrest has wrecked the economy and crippled infrastructure. Nepal has been incapable of even basic governance over the past few decades, and relies on an army of aid charities to avoid mass starvation – the number of NGOs in the country soared from 220 in 1990 to more than 15,000, now contributing around 60% of GDP.

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This social structure, which has produced such an undeniably clean and functioning society, owes its success to the unique way the village manages and shares its most valuable resource: water. And that is due in no small part to Jadeja’s ingenuity and foresight – he decided some thirty years ago that clean water and sanitation were essential to underpin development, and that his village should have them. After each monsoon, the village wells would fill, indicating that the underlying aquifer here is rain-fed. The problem was that most of the monsoon rains were wasted, streaming off and disappearing before reaching the aquifer.

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Since oil was found, parts of their tribal land have become no-go areas given over by the government to oil prospectors without the communities’ consent. But the wind farm’s project’s leader, Carlo van Wageningen, insists his development will bring opportunities, including jobs, infrastructure and electricity, to the north-east for the first time. He says that the consortium will establish fisheries at Lake Turkana, and clean-water projects that could end the interethnic conflicts over water. A promised new clinic could give these isolated people real health improvements. Some people here are already benefiting from electricity for the first time, thanks to the desert’s other major power source: the sun. A couple of the El Moro men have solar-powered mobile phones, which are sold cheaply in Nairobi, and one of the straw huts in the village has two solar panels on its roof.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Austerity himself—when large parts of his country were underwater from historic flooding in February 2014 and the public was enraged that his government was not doing more to help.7 Listening to Navarro Llanos describe Bolivia’s perspective, I began to understand how climate change—if treated as a true planetary emergency akin to those rising flood waters—could become a galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well. The resources required to rapidly move away from fossil fuels and prepare for the coming heavy weather could pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty, providing services now sorely lacking, from clean water to electricity. This is a vision of the future that goes beyond just surviving or enduring climate change, beyond “mitigating” and “adapting” to it in the grim language of the United Nations. It is a vision in which we collectively use the crisis to leap somewhere that seems, frankly, better than where we are right now.

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But desperate people can be counted on to do desperate things—which is why we all have a vested interest in taking care of one another so that many fewer communities are faced with those impossible choices. That means rescuing the idea of a safety net that ensures that everyone has the basics covered: health care, education, food, and clean water. Indeed, fighting inequality on every front and through multiple means must be understood as a central strategy in the battle against climate change. This kind of carefully planned economy holds out the possibility of much more humane, fulfilling lifestyles than the vast majority of us are experiencing under our current system, which is what makes the idea of a massive social movement coalescing behind such demands a real possibility.

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It shows, he claimed, “what can happen when a country runs out of options. The world is headed down a similar path with the relentless burning of coal and oil, which is altering the planet’s climate, melting ice caps, making oceans more acidic and edging us ever closer to a day when no one will be able to take clean water, fertile soil or abundant food for granted.” In other words, Nauru isn’t the only one digging itself to death; we all are.22 But the lesson Nauru has to teach is not only about the dangers of fossil fuel emissions. It is about the mentality that allowed so many of us, and our ancestors, to believe that we could relate to the earth with such violence in the first place—to dig and drill out the substances we desired while thinking little of the trash left behind, whether in the land and water where the extraction takes place, or in the atmosphere, once the extracted material is burned.

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

In other words, climate changes are expected to both harm and help water availability in different parts of the world, whereas population and economic growth harm it nearly everywhere.206 So even if our climate-change problems could somehow disappear tomorrow (and they won’t), we would still face enormous challenges to water supply in some of the hottest, most crowded places on Earth. Drinking Sh** It’s hard to imagine the world behind those red maps. To most people—especially living in cities—clean water is like oil and electricity: one of those things upon which they depend mightily yet give barely a passing thought. In my own city of Los Angeles, everyone will gladly pay a hundred dollars a month for cable television, yet would roar in protest if forced to pay that much for life’s elixir piped directly into their homes.

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For two months of clean drinking water, snared from faraway sources and delivered to my house by one of the world’s most expensive and elaborate engineering schemes, I was charged $20.67. I spend more on postage stamps. If only everyone could indulge such ignorant bliss. While eight in ten people have access to some sort of improved water source,207 this globally averaged number masks some wild geographic discrepancies. Some countries, like Canada, Japan, and Estonia, provide clean water to all of their citizens. Others, especially in Africa, do so for under half. The worst water poverty is suffered by Ethiopians, Somalis, Afghanis, Papua New Guineans, Cambodians, Chadians, Equatorial Guineans, and Mozambicans.208 Even their statistics hide the most glaring divide—between cities and rural areas.

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Perhaps in part because most people who read articles such as this find it hard to imagine defecating daily in plastic bags, buckets, open pits, agricultural fields, and public areas for want of a private hygienic alternative, as do some 2.6 billion people. Or perhaps they cannot relate to the everyday life of the 1.1 billion people without access to even a protected well or spring within reasonable walking distance of their homes.209 Most experts agree that getting clean water to the world’s poorest people is largely a matter of money. According to the United Nations, the price tag for everyone to have safe, clean drinking water would be about $30 billion per year. But in the poorest countries, building water treatment plants and a network of pipes to move it is still prohibitively expensive, especially for rural areas.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

He first came to the market as an 11-year-old, and quickly spotted a way to make money. Despite the proximity of such a mighty river, Kinshasa has no proper supply of clean drinking water. Gombe, the rich suburb, is tiny and outside it few homes have taps that are safe to drink from. Selling small plastic bags filled with clean water is a major industry here, and as a teenager Christian worked out a scheme to buy clean water cheaply in bulk, allowing him to make around 1,000 Congolese francs (60¢) each time he sold 20 water sachets. He worked his way up, first as a market porter, then opening his own retail store and finally moving into wholesale trade, which is more lucrative and more stable, he says.

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Some things are worse today, she says: the traditional houses were preferable in style to the new ones (they were wooden and had upper floors with balconies, whereas the replacements are concrete bungalows). But the big change is having your own toilet. Before the disaster the village lacked a basic sewerage system, with the nearby river providing clean water and taking dirty water away. The modern homes have plumbed-in bathrooms, cutting out time-consuming walks to the river. As the rebuild continued, the notion of ‘building back better’ became a well-known phrase, referring to the policy of using modern designs and materials to improve the local infrastructure.

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Soon Kutamisa had built a business buying and selling used phones. Things went so well that he was able to use the profit to enrol in university. ‘But I had to stop,’ he says. ‘While I was at classes my staff were eating my profit.’ Resigning himself to a life of trading on the street, he moved into the forex business. Like the sale of sachets containing clean water, this industry results from an acute shortage – the absence of a stable currency. The runaway inflation and rapid exchange-rate depreciations of Mobutu’s years are still seen in modern Kinshasa. In mid-2016 one dollar bought you 900 Congolese francs; by the summer of 2018 almost half the franc’s value had evaporated, with a dollar buying 1,650 francs.

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

Snow published his findings in an 1849 essay, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, but he was summarily dismissed – and in some case ridiculed – and his theory of cholera as a water-borne disease was not widely accepted until nearly two decades later. (He is now recognised as the father of modern epidemiology.) Snow spent his final years trying to convince his peers that a clean water supply could prevent future outbreaks, but few would listen, and Snow died on 10 June 1858. By then, the heatwave had already begun. * * * That summer, London boiled. An unseasonably dry spring stretched into a summer-long drought. In mid-June temperatures reached 34°C in the shade, setting a new record in the city, and by early July the rivers feeding the Thames had slowed to a trickle.

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And despite the relative sterility of the modern city, the World Health Organization estimates that one in ten people consumes wastewater – that is, sewage – every year, either via unclean drinking water or contaminated food. Diseases of waste are still killing countless people. Every day about 2,200 children die of diarrhoea, most of them without access to reliably clean water.25 Every year, poor sanitation kills more children than AIDS, malaria and measles combined.26 When Bazalgette designed London’s sewer system in the 1850s, the city’s population was 2.5 million. He could have built a sewer system with the capacity needed for the time, but instead he doubled it, anticipating that the city would continue to thrive and grow in the centuries to come.

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The process also acts to break down ammonia, a toxic pollutant found both in faecal matter and urine. ‘In crude sewage, the ammonia might be over 50 milligrams per litre. Once it’s been through the aeration lanes, that’s then down to less than one milligram per litre,’ Dina says. Finally, after a last round of settlement in smaller tanks, the cleaned water is expelled back into the river. Several times a day, on-site scientists test the water quality for pathogens and chemical content, to ensure they are below government-mandated safety levels. Sewage, like trash, can tell you a lot about a city’s population: its eating habits, its flushing habits, and even its health.

The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman

air gap, British Empire, clean water, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, haute cuisine, James Watt: steam engine, period drama, trade route, upwardly mobile

Smith’s book contained only one recipe for a traditional thick pease pottage but seven recipes for wet-boiled pea soups. Ellis, reporting from his wood-burning neighbourhood, collected one pease pudding recipe that incorporated a wet-boiling method, calling for the dried peas to be soaked, put into a pudding bag and boiled in clean water until three-quarters cooked, then withdrawn from the pot, beaten into a mash, returned to the cloth and the pot, and boiled for a little longer. In contrast, he offered a barrage of thick pease porridge recipes, three from the wives of farmers and one from ‘A Poor Man’s Family’. Their accounts were full of instructions ‘for thickening it, and making it the more hearty’.

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But beginning around 1570, a significant proportion of Londoners lacked sufficient ash supplies, and by 1600, with the conversion to coal almost complete in the capital, ash was very hard to come by. Black soap, bought in pots and jars for a halfpenny a pound, was the next best thing, and it did the job so long as you dissolved it in hot water. Washing-up as we know it today had arrived. To use black soap effectively, the cleaning water first had to be heated. The soap was added and stirred about, and then dishes were immersed in the hot soapy water and rubbed with a linen cloth or a handful of horsetail to dislodge stubborn dirt. Afterwards, the dishes were rinsed in clean cold water and dried with a clean dry dish cloth or wiper.

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Dung may perhaps be particularly surprising as a cleaning agent, but it does work. Somewhat obviously, you do not use the dung directly as it falls from the beast. Instead, you lay it in a bucket of water overnight and strain off the liquid the next day. This liquid both loosens grease and bleaches stains. Understandably, you must be very thorough in rinsing your laundry in clean water afterwards. William Harrison in his Description of England (1587) mentioned the practice with noticeable distaste: ‘In some places also women do scour and wet their clothes with their [pig] dung, as others do with hemlock and nettles, but such is the savor of the clothes touched withal that I cannot abide to wear them on my body, more than such as are scoured with refuse soap, than the which (in mine opinion) there is none more unkindly savor.’

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

But a glut of Toms shoes disrupts the businesses of local shoe manufacturers and shoe retailers, much as donated clothing from the United States has damaged the local retail trade in many African markets. Toms are also not appropriate in many situations and climates, but Toms shoes are what Toms gives out. And as I saw in Kenya, they tend to make their way into the hands of people who already have shoes, but might not have, say, electricity or clean water. The same critiques apply to virtually all in-kind donations of food, clothing, schoolbooks, water jugs, and sanitary items, even ones commonly thought of as productive, like the animals given out by those donate-a-cow charities. They also apply to many charities that do things like build schools, supply water pumps, and give out seeds.

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In Mexico, Prospera benefits one in four families, asking for similar commitments to education and public health. Of course, cash is not a panacea—not for charities and not for governments either. It is no substitute for the development of public goods, like schools, courts, highways, electrical grids, clean water, and health facilities. It is also not a substitute for development priorities like widespread immunization or ending violence against women. Moreover, it is not yet clear whether cash transfers have long-range benefits after families stop receiving them, though the study of some programs suggests that they might.

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In the United States’ NIT studies, primary earners spent more time with their children and their rates of homeownership increased. Poverty would become less of a burden, with people using the funds as they needed. As I saw so vividly by Lake Victoria, soccer nets do nothing for people who are hungry. School fees do nothing for people who need clean water. Water jugs do nothing for towns that could use farming equipment. Money, on the other hand, is universally useful and universally fungible. Just giving people money would mean that a single mother would not have to trade her food stamps for cash to keep the heat on. It would mean that she would not have to tussle with the complicated Section 8 system when what she was really struggling with was transportation costs.

The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters by Sean B. Carroll

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, clean water, discovery of penicillin, Fellow of the Royal Society, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Skype, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship

The Independent, August 3, 2014; “Division of Water Treatment.” City of Toledo website. http://toledo.oh.gov/services/public-utilities/water-treatment/. 156You’re glumping the pond: Seuss (1971). 156Spurred by the dire condition: “History of the Clean Water Act.” United States Environmental Protection Agency. http://www2.epa.gov/laws-regulations/history-clean-water-act. 156In 1972, the United States and Canada: Large Lakes and Rivers Forecasting Research Branch. “Detroit River-Western Lake Erie Basin Indicator Project. INDICATOR: Algal Blooms in Western Lake Erie.” United States Environmental Protection Agency. http://www.epa.gov/med/grosseile_site/indicators/algae-blooms.html. 156The recovery of Lake Erie: Egan, D. (2014) “Toxic Algae Cocktail Brews in Lake Erie.”

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No more can they hum, for their gills are all gummed. So I am sending them off. Oh, their future is dreary. They’ll walk on their fins and get woefully weary In search of some water that isn’t so smeary. I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie. Spurred by the dire condition of Erie and other lakes, the US Congress passed the 1972 Clean Water Act that authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the discharge of pollutants into waterways and to set the acceptable limits for water quality for humans and aquatic life. In 1972, the United States and Canada also signed the Great Lakes Water Agreement, which promoted a coordinated effort to reduce the loads of chemicals that were being dumped and washed into the Great Lakes.

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See rinderpest Caughley, Graeme, 166 cell growth, regulation of, 49 Centers for Disease Control, 206 Charcot, Jean-Baptiste, 51, 54 Chissano, Joaquim, 188 chitons, 119 cholesterol: discovery of link to heart disease, 75–77; feedback regulation and synthesis of, 49, 77–81; HDL and, 79, 81; LDL and, 79–81, 85–87 cholesterolemia, 77–78, 86 chromosomes: blood disorders and, 92–93; Down syndrome and, 92; E. coli, 65; human number 9, 98–100, 99f; human number 13, 100; human number 22 (Philadelphia chromosome), 93, 98–100, 99f; leukemia and, 92–95, 98–100, 99f; retinoblastoma and, 100–102; translocation of, 93 chronic myelogenous leukemia, 93–95, 94f, 98, 102–104 Ciba-Geigy pharmaceutical company, 102–103 cisco, 176 citrinin, 82 civil wars, 186–187, 187f, 208 Clean Water Act, 156 clinical trials, 7 CML (chronic myelogenous leukemia), 93–95, 94f, 98, 102–104 coalitions, power of, 209–210 coffee, shade-grown, 196–197 collectivization of agriculture, 138 Collett, Robert, 40–41 communities, food chains as currency of, 43–46 Community Education Center (Vila Gorongosa), 196 “Community Structure, Population Control, and Competition” (HSS), 116 compactin, 82–84, 85–86 competition, population size and, 143–144, 150 complexity, reducing, 10–11 constitutive enzyme production, 64 consumers, 115–116, 117f.

Extreme How-To: The Quick & Easy Home DIY Manual: 321 Tips by Matt Weber, The Editors Of Extreme How-To

clean water

NAP ¼ inch USES Smooth surfaces on new walls, ceilings, doors, and trim ⅜ inch USES Smooth to lightly stippled walls ½ inch USES Most walls and medium-rough surfaces, including textured plaster and concrete ¾ inch USES Rough surfaces such as textured walls, concrete, and masonry 032 CLEAN UP There’s nothing worse than crusty brushes and other tools, so be sure to clean up promptly and correctly. Roller cages and paint trays can be cleaned with either clean water or mineral spirits, depending on the type of paint. Disposable roller covers should be discarded after use. Brushes can be a little trickier. When using water-based latex paint, it’s smart to clean your brushes every 2 hours. Here’s how. STEP 1 Remove excess paint from the bristles with the edge of a paint scraper and then rinse the bristles with water.

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Any kind of porous material that shows visible signs of mold should be thrown away. CLEAN UP Surface mold growing on any nonporous materials can usually be cleaned. Thoroughly scrub contaminated surfaces using hot water, non-ammonia soap, detergent, or commercial cleaner. Use a stiff brush to scrub out all contaminants. Rinse with clean water, and collect the excess rinse water and detergent with a wet/dry vacuum, a mop, or a sponge. DISINFECT Apply a bleach solution or antimicrobial cleaner to surfaces that show any mold growth. An effective way to eliminate mold and musty smells in large or inaccessible spaces is to use a “cold fogger.”

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Even better yet, you can undercut the edges with a chisel and hammer. STEP 2 Use a wire brush to scrape away crumbling materials and to roughen the surface if it has been finished smooth. The repair product should not be applied over painted surfaces. Clean away all debris and rinse with water. STEP 3 Before application, dampen the area with clean water. STEP 4 Apply the mix with a trowel, using heavy trowel pressure to force it into the crack. Overfill it slightly and then trowel it smooth to match with the surrounding concrete. If the cracks are deep it may be necessary to apply in a series of ¼-inch-deep layers, allowing the mix to dry for 2 hours between layers.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

The tank is filled with contaminated local well water and cleaned with chlorine. The shopkeepers then sell the clean water for four cents per ten liters—a day’s worth of water. If you wanted home delivery, as many did, it would cost you five cents. Idiom then designed a local transportation system to deliver clean water to families outside the village and designed a new ten-liter plastic jug and a bicycle “saddle” that could hold six liter-size water containers. For a family living within three kilometers, clean water can be delivered for eight cents a day. In the first six months of operation, in 2012, village medical expenses for diarrhea and other waterborne diseases dropped dramatically.

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Members of the higher castes control access to water where it’s available; in one instance, according to Polak, when someone from the “Untouchable” caste touched a faucet in a village, members of the higher caste insisted that the tank be drained, “purified,” and refilled. Where water is scarce, higher caste farmers call upon political connections to build dams that funnel clean water to their villages. Polak’s ability to see the hole in the conventional wisdom led to a different kind of solution. The system was rigged and irrigation was expensive, yes, but purification was cheap. He set up a private company, Spring Health, and with the help of Indian design consultancy Idiom designed a business plan: Spring Health pays for a $100 concrete water tank to be set up next to one of the two local kiosks called “kirana shops” that exist in every village.

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With millions of kirana shops in India, the potential to replicate this model throughout the country is huge. The Acumen Fund, founded by Jacqueline Novogratz, is now investing in Spring Health to scale it. Polak hopes it can reach 5 million villagers in three years and 100 million in ten. Many, if not most, of the beneficiaries will be Untouchables handling their own clean water, some for the first time in their lives. Polak thinks Spring Health could be the first billion-dollar business specifically designed for the demographic C. K. Prahalad dubbed the “bottom of the pyramid.” None of this would have been possible without Polak’s deep domain expertise developed over decades of work in the field.

Drowning in Oil: BP & the Reckless Pursuit of Profit by Loren C. Steffy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shock, peak oil, Piper Alpha, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh

A BP worker on the line called West in Seattle and told him, “There’s oil everywhere.” Had tranisit line breakage happened in the summer, when the ground was thawed, it could have been a major environmental disaster. In March, when the tundra was still frozen, the oil was easier to contain. Because it had soiled a lake, West intended to prosecute BP under the Clean Water Act, which assesses fines based on the amount of oil spilled. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Transportation, which regulates pipelines, ordered BP to begin using smart pigs to inspect all the transit lines. R T h e P r i c e o f F a i l u r e 107 When it did finally send pigs down the lines, the results were stunning: 16 miles of pipe had corroded to the point where leaks were a serious threat.

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R BP’s three-pronged plea agreement had come together months earlier, in late 2007, as part of a sweeping pact with the Justice Department to settle all of the company’s outstanding criminal 141 1 42 D R O W N I N G I N O I L investigations. In addition to the Texas City case, a BP subsidiary in Alaska pleaded guilty to misdemeanor violations of the Clean Water Act related to the pipeline leaks, admitting that its corrosion monitoring and oversight had been inadequate. The company also agreed to pay a $12 million fine, accept three years’ probation, and pay $4 million in restitution in the form of funding for environmental research. In the trading case, BP America admitted that it had manipulated propane prices in 2004, had attempted to do so in 2003, and had failed to properly oversee its trading operation.

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The political backlash from the spill posed two threats to the company’s future: the cost of its liability from the accident and the prospect of losing access to its lucrative oilfields in the Gulf. It still had dozens of potentially profitable deepwater prospects to explore, and it couldn’t afford to allow the Obama administration to deny it new drilling permits or ban it from U.S. waters. It also faced the potential for huge fines under the Clean Water Act, which regulates water pollution. The amount of the fine is determined by, among other things, the amount of oil that leaks. If the well was leaking 60,000 barrels a day and BP was found to be grossly negligent in its oversight of the spill, it could face fines of as much as $4,300 for each barrel—roughly $140 million for each day that the leak persisted.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

But others did not—the transition from tenements to suburban single-family homes largely resulted from the positive income elasticity of housing square feet, as well as from the development of credit institutions that allowed working-class families to buy their own homes. Higher incomes also spilled over to affect other types of purchases that did not necessarily require innovations, including public expenditures on clean water and education. This distinction between innovation-driven and income-driven progress should be qualified: The demand for residential space required transportation innovations to make suburbs possible, while clean water depended on filtration and chlorination technology. The coexistence of industries experiencing rapid productivity growth (e.g., manufacturing) and those with little or no productivity growth (e.g., house-building or education) is summarized by the paradigm of “Baumol’s disease,” in which the relative price of the innovation-intensive industries, e.g., the production of computers, declines over time while the relative price of the noninnovative industries, e.g., the playing of a string quartet, increases over time.

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It was far different before indoor plumbing, when a bath was taken in a large metal container after a tedious process of carrying water into the home and heating it.33 The primary goal of the public health movement of the late nineteenth century was to create universal clean water supplies and sewage systems. In fact, clean water technologies have been labeled as “likely the most important public health intervention of the twentieth century.”34 Empirical research based on a comparison of cities in 1890 and 1900 shows that the extent of construction of waterworks, measured by miles of waterworks per person and per acre, have a significant negative correlation not just with infant mortality, but also with adult mortality.

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Home filters “had been available since the mid-1850s but did not become common items in the home until the 1870s.”37 These authors estimate that clean water filtration and chlorination systems explain half of the overall reduction in mortality between 1900 and 1936, as well as 75 percent of the decline in infant mortality and 67 percent of the decline in child mortality. PASTEUR’S GERM THEORY AND THE TRANSITION FROM ADULTERATION TO REGULATION Even the Cutler–Miller results leave room for a complementary set of additional explanations of the reduction in mortality before 1940 beyond the rapid diffusion of urban sanitation infrastructure. There were other goals of the public health movement besides clean water and sewers, including “general street cleaning, improvements in slum housing, inspections of food and milk, use of quarantine and disinfection practices, and the distribution of diphtheria antitoxin.”38 A set of scientific discoveries together have been called the “Pasteur Revolution,” in which during 1880–1900 “pathogenic organisms were discovered at the average rate of one a year.”39 Experiments in the latter decades of the nineteenth century identified the bacterial causes of numerous diseases, a scientific revolution that occurred with amazing speed.40 Although much of the initial research had been carried out in Germany, by 1900, the United States became a leader in the implementation of preventive measures against germ disease.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

But between these two sets of boundaries lies a sweet spot – shaped unmistakably like a doughnut – that is both an ecologically safe and socially just space for humanity. The twenty-first-century task is an unprecedented one: to bring all of humanity into that safe and just space. The Doughnut’s inner ring – its social foundation – sets out the basics of life on which no one should be left falling short. These twelve basics include: sufficient food; clean water and decent sanitation; access to energy and clean cooking facilities; access to education and to healthcare; decent housing; a minimum income and decent work; and access to networks of information and to networks of social support. Furthermore, it calls for achieving these with gender equality, social equity, political voice, and peace and justice.

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They are all included in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals – agreed by 193 member countries in 2015 – and the vast majority of these goals are to be achieved by 2030.23 Since the mid-twentieth century, global economic development has already helped many millions of people worldwide escape deprivation. They have become the first generations in their families to lead long, healthy and educated lives, with enough food to eat, clean water to drink, electricity in their homes, and money in their pockets – and, for many, this transformation has been accompanied by greater equality between women and men, and greater political voice. But global economic development has also fuelled a dramatic increase in humanity’s use of Earth’s resources, at first driven by the resource-intensive lifestyles of today’s high-income countries, and more recently redoubled by the rapid growth of the global middle class.

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If universal access to markets is to become a twenty-first-century norm, along with universal access to public services, then so too should universal access to the global commons – particularly to Earth’s life-giving systems and to the global knowledge commons. Given what we now understand about planetary boundaries, the integrity of the living world is clearly and profoundly in the common interest of all: clean air and clean water, a stable climate, and thriving biodiversity are among the most important ‘common pool’ resources for all of humanity. ‘The great task of the twenty-first century,’ writes the ecological thinker Peter Barnes, ‘is to build a new and vital commons sector that can resist enclosure and externalization by the market, protect the planet, and share the fruits of our common inheritances more equitably than is now the case.’96 One way of achieving this, he proposes, is to create an array of Commons Trusts, each one endowed with property rights enabling it to protect and steward a particular realm of Earth’s commons – be it a local watershed or the global atmosphere – to the benefit of all citizens and future generations.

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald

23andMe, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Floyd, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, microbiome, mouse model, ocean acidification, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Skype, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, TED Talk, the scientific method, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

In the late 1950s, a surge in the demand for electricity called for an expansion of the power supply in Hawai`i. The Hawaiian Electric Company built a new oil-powered facility on the western side of Oahu, about eighteen miles from Honolulu. Like many power plants, it was situated on the shoreline so that it could use seawater to cool its turbines. When it passed in the 1970s, the Clean Water Act required that the electric company develop a monitoring program to document how the discharged water, which could be as much as 6°C warmer than the surrounding seawater, affected the coral reefs. Two young researchers at the Hawai`i Institute of Marine Biology took the monitoring job. Paul Jokiel had just moved to Hawai`i from Illinois on a teaching fellowship and was hoping to study coral.

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And like us, microbiomes shift when corals are stressed. Populations of Vibrio bacteria (relatives of the bacterium that causes cholera in humans) increase when a coral bleaches but return to normal levels after a coral recovers. One species of coral shifted its microbiome when transplanted from clean water to more polluted surroundings. It then shifted back when returned to the healthy environment, recovering its original bacterial entourage. Corals also shift their microbial communities in the summer and the winter, something that’s been observed in humans too: bacteria that cause bad breath and flatulence peak in January, those that cause foot odor in February, and those that cause underarm odor in July.

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When Hardin wrote about the Tragedy of the Commons, power plants were spewing sulfates and nitrates into the air, causing acid rain. Cancer-causing chemicals like DDT were being dumped into rivers and soils. As a nation, we solved these tragedies of our commons through a raft of environmental measures. Passed in the early 1970s, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts went a long way toward maintaining the commons that are our shared air and water, a legacy we still enjoy today. For too long, we have failed to recognize CO2 in this same way, creating a legacy that will haunt our children. The future of the coral reefs requires reckoning with the Tragedy of the Commons.

Learn Descriptive Cataloging Second North American Edition by Mary Mortimer

California gold rush, clean water, corporate governance, deskilling, illegal immigration, machine readable, Norman Mailer

Guadalajara (Mexico) Guadalajara (Spain) New York (N.Y.) New York (State) Chapter 14 HEADINGS FOR CORPORATE BODIES 161 E XERCISE 14.1 Write these names in the correct AACR2 form. After you have decided, check them in LCA. a. ICI Limited b. Music Educators National Conference c. Duke University of Durham, North Carolina d. Missouri Clean Water Commission e. The Lao People’s Democratic Republic f. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) g. Native Plant Society of Oregon h. The Reference Book Division of the National Underwriter Company i. The New York Times newspaper j. The Australian newspaper Subordinate Bodies (24.12) If the name of a corporate body is distinctive, it is entered directly under its own name.

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a subordinate body entered indirectly under the name of a government Chapter 14 HEADINGS FOR CORPORATE BODIES MARC 167 Corporate names are coded in the same way as personal names, by referring to the MARC codes at the back of the book (or the MARC manual if you have access to it). First you need to know whether the name is a main or an added entry, and then use the tag, indicators and subfield codes you need. E XERCISE 14.4 Here are some names from Exercises 14.1 and 14.2. Code them as main entries. a Native Plant Society of Oregon 110 b. Missouri. Clean Water Commission 110 c. Imperial Chemical Industries. Organics Division 110 d. United States. Interstate Commerce Commission. Section of Energy and Environment 110 e. National Computer Security Center (United States) 110 E XERCISE 14.5 Here are more names from Exercises 14.1 and 14.2. Code them as added entries. a.

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Ayrshire (Scotland) l. East Pakistan (Pakistan) see also later heading Bangladesh Bangladesh see also former heading East Pakistan (Pakistan) E XERCISE 14.1 a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h. i. 253 Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. Music Educators National Conference (U.S.) Duke University Missouri. Clean Water Commission Laos UNICEF Native Plant Society of Oregon National Underwriter Company. Reference Book Division New York Times Company 254 LEARN DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGING j. Australian (Newspaper) E XERCISE 14.2 a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h. i. j. United States. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development American Stock Exchange.

398 DIY Tips, Tricks & Techniques: Practical Advice for New Home Improvement Enthusiasts by Ian Anderson

air gap, clean water, en.wikipedia.org, The Spirit Level

Generally, do this… Scrape away any old flaky layers of old paint. Clean paintwork with a ‘house cleaner’ detergent, with a mould killer element if there are green of black spores on the paintwork. A bucket of cleaner and another of clean water and a couple of sponges work well indoors. Wipe over with one sponge and detergent and ‘rinse’ with the other sponge and clean water. Outdoors, careful use of a pressure washer to pump cleaner onto the paintwork works well (don’t go too close). Scrub with a small brush on a long handle and afterwards rinse everything away being careful with the angle you use (avoid getting water behind anything), mimic how the rain would hit the surface to be safe.

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, rotate the brush between your palms as fast as you can (like a boy scout starting a fire…). Done properly this flings out any water in the brush. Double check with the old ‘brush above the shoulder and a couple of sharp flings down’ technique (as if you’re throwing a knife into the ground). Best do this outside though… Easily clean water-based paint from your brush at the end of the day using a wire brush (just like combing your hair) and lots of warm water. A pinch of soap doesn’t hurt either Lastly and once again (because it’s that good!), buy the best brushes you can find and look after them. It’s a nightmare to get a good finish with cheap (throwaway) brushes and they’ll shed bristles too, driving you crazy. 301.

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker

airport security, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, BRICs, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, global village, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Masdar, Murano, Venice glass, open borders, out of africa, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sustainable-tourism, the market place, union organizing, urban renewal, wage slave, young professional, éminence grise

Multiply this by those 400 ships cruising year-round and you have a sense of the magnitude of the problem. But there are no accurate studies of how well that waste is disposed of because the ships are not required to follow any state or national laws once in international waters. Cruise companies won an exemption from the Clean Water Act’s requirement for waste disposal discharge permits that apply to the resorts and hotels. Waste disposal discharge permits are given out by the Environmental Protection Agency, which decides what waste they can discharge and the sewage treatment required to limit and reduce the damage of pollution to water.

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Their cruise ships, which sailed through some of Alaska’s most sensitive harbors and coastal waterways, including the Inside Passage, were caught illegally dumping bilge water containing waste oil and hazardous chemicals. The bilge water routinely dumped by the cruise ships was sufficiently toxic that the U.S. Clean Water Act forbids its discharge within 200 miles of the coast because it endangers fish and wildlife and the habitat they depend on. Royal Caribbean was convicted in 1999 of a “fleet-wide conspiracy” to rig their ship’s piping system to avoid using pollution treatment equipment and then lying to the Coast Guard about it.

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Sweeting of the Royal Caribbean said the company’s ships are being outfitted with advanced waste treatment systems that transform human waste into watery discharge that is “as good as or better than municipalities.” At the same time, the industry has forcefully opposed the Clean Cruise Ship Act, sponsored by Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, which would require sewage and gray water discharges to be controlled by the Clean Water Act. The legislation would also require cruise ships to use advanced treatment systems and to sail beyond the current 12-mile limit before discharging treated sewage. The U.S. Coast Guard is charged with enforcing existing laws and standards in American waters, but it has done a lackluster job, largely because inspecting sewage from cruise ships is close to the bottom of its to-do list.

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

airport security, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Elisha Otis, out of africa, The Soul of a New Machine

“There are many ways in which poverty finds its way into the bodies of the destitute.” This was a favorite saying of Bududira’s. He traveled widely through his territory, visiting many hills, and he would talk to Deo and the other boy about what he saw, especially about the almost universal need for clean water and medicine. He told them he was distressed at the great numbers of impoverished children who joined the army at twelve or thirteen, and told them about his campaign to build alternatives in the form of technical schools. At the end of eleventh grade—high school ended with thirteenth—Deo started his own project, an attempt to build a clinic in Sangaza that would serve the surrounding hills.

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You could look down to the east and see Tanganyika’s waters, like a cerulean sky. To the west, your eyes climbed tiers of mountains, often shrouded in mist, though not today. Unlike Switzerland, of course, the place lacked just about everything necessary and useful for health: sanitation, medicine, mosquito nets. Most of the people here had no access to clean water. No one had electricity. “Here you are in the land of Joe Conrad,” said Deo. “This is the heart of darkness right here.” On the other hand, there was an elementary school, just up ahead. While working at PIH, Deo had managed to save enough of his salary to send about one thousand dollars for that school’s reconstruction—money went a long way here.

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There were greetings—chants of “Amahoro”—and speeches, which the villagers cheered, and more speeches, and during the course of all this, Deo exclaimed to me, “I am so happ-ee!” He said, “I really get so excited when I see people so excited.” Religious people, I’m told, have their meanest thoughts in church. I found myself thinking that tomorrow morning Kayanza’s residents would wake up and still have no doctor or nurses or clean water nearby, just this misplaced pile of rocks. I felt for a perverse moment like reminding Deo of all this. But it was good to see him happy, as always. And after all, he knew far better than I the obstacles he faced. As we drove away, the figures of the villagers receding in the SUV’s back window, Deo said to us, his American friends, “Thank you so much.”

Paris Revealed by Stephen Clarke

clean water, gentrification, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, rent control, sexual politics, trade route

After the Prussian siege, when water supplies were even less reliable than usual, the price of drinking water went up alarmingly, so that many people began quenching their thirst with wine. And unlike the toffs, they didn’t have access to high-quality Champagne—they were quaffing vinegary gut-rot. It was no surprise that when the first Fontaine Wallace was connected up in August 1872, there was a small riot as people literally fought to get at the clean water. Today, there are over 900 public drinking fountains in Paris, including three rather special ones that provide genuine French mineral water for free. The fountains in the place Paul Verlaine in the 13th arrondissement, the square Lamartine in the 16th and the square de la Madone in the 18th tap into a spring 500 metres below the city, and you can often see people filling up bottles to take home.

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The fountains in the place Paul Verlaine in the 13th arrondissement, the square Lamartine in the 16th and the square de la Madone in the 18th tap into a spring 500 metres below the city, and you can often see people filling up bottles to take home. The water is very soft (unlike Parisian drinking water), and is therefore said to give a purer taste to tea and coffee. These fountains also take the Parisian need for free drinking water to its logical French conclusion. They can’t be content with plain clean water—they want eau minérale. La vie est une plage The Parisian love affair with water comes into full fruition in summer, during Paris Plage (Paris Beach), the festival started by Mayor Bertrand Delanoë in 2002. For four weeks, from around 20 July to 20 August, a sizeable chunk of the city’s population can be seen streaming down to the river banks.

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Although that might only be to avoid having them float in through the windows of the Louvre. Perhaps the most dramatic measure of all in Plan Neptune is that Paris’s transport company, the RATP, plans to deliberately flood métro lines running alongside the river, presumably on the grounds that it’s better to drain off clean water than dirty. Though of course the water would no longer be clean when the flood receded—someone would have to collect up all the dead rats, mice and accumulated rubbish. It is to be hoped that Plan Neptune includes a few pairs of rubber gloves. Throughout 2010, the city expressed this obsession with flooding in a series of exhibitions about the events of 1910, and at each one Parisians could be seen studying maps of the flooded area to see if their current address was in there.

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, dumpster diving, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, food desert, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban decay, wage slave, white flight, women in the workforce

Rob Goodwin, “Report from Citizens’ Inspection of Coal River Mountain,” Coal River Mountain Watch, http://www.crmw.net/crmw/content/report-citizens-inspection-coal-river-mountain (accessed 27 Dec. 2011). 20. “Electric Power Monthly,” http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly (accessed 10 Sept. 2013). 21. “A One-Two Punch in the Fight for Clean Water,” Appalachian Voices, http://appvoices.org/2012/08/23/a-one-two-punch-in-the-fight-for-clean-water/ (accessed 10 Sept. 2013).\ 22. Naomi Spencer and Rosa Lexington, “The Social Crisis in Appalachia Part 3: Environmental Disaster and Private Profit,” World Socialist Web Site, July 27, 2010, http://www.wsws.org/en/artcles/2010/07/app3-j27.html (accessed 27 Aug. 2013). 23.

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Massey, the third-largest coal company in the country, has, over the past decade, leveled an area the size of Delaware—1.4 million acres—and left behind a poisoned and dead landscape. Coal companies like Massey rack up appalling safety and environmental violations. Yet for such companies, it is less expensive to pay the fines than comply with the strictures of the Clean Water Act or mine safety standards. The EPA office in West Virginia rarely enforces the fines, and when Massey was fined for violations over a six-year period by the federal EPA office, the company paid $20 million,54 less than one percent of what was required under the law. The Sylvester lawsuit brought the town $100,000.

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“Elk Run Completes Coal Stockpile Dome,” Coal Age 170, no. 9 (2002), 4. 52. Shirley Stewart Burns, Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal on Southern West Virginia Communities (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2007), 111. 53. Shirley Stewart Burns, et al., Coal Country, 237–238. 54. “Massey Energy Company, Inc. Clean Water Act Settlement,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/compliance/resources/cases/civil/cwa/massey.html (accessed 31 Dec. 2011). 55. “25 Miners Dead in WV Coal Mine Explosion, Massey Energy Mine Cited for Hundreds of Safety Violations,” Democracy Now!, April 6, 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/6/25_miners_dead_in_wv_coal. 56.

The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky

clean water, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, East Village, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

On the Fourth of July, former mayor Philip Hone wrote: T h e C ra s s o s t re a s n e s s o f Ne w Yo rk e r s • 145 It is a lovely day, but very different from all the previous anniversaries of independence. The alarm about the cholera has prevented all the usual jollification under the public authority. There are no booths in Broadway, the parade which was ordered here has been countermanded, no corporation dinner and no ringing of bells. Cholera victims were literally begging for clean water. By October, five hundred New Yorkers had died. The city responded with a ten-year project, damming the Croton River, a tributary of the Hudson, creating a reservoir, and building an aqueduct. With the project’s completion in 1842, the city announced that water needs had been secured for the next one hundred years.

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A company that pollutes shellfish beds and poisons fish populations is, according to this legal argument, impeding the long-recognized right of residents to fish their wild waters. In the 1970s, some forty acts of Congress were passed for the protection of the environment. Among the most crucial for the waters of New York was the 1972 Clean Water Act, which gave a deadline of 1985 for all bodies of water in the United States to be swimmable and fishable. In the 1980s, the city proposed to do what it had been doing ever since Dutch times, creating more Manhattan real estate by filling in the coastal waters. In this case, it was a highway called Westway that was to cut into the Hudson River bed.

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But the Hudson is rich in fish, and for Enduring Shellfishness • 277 all its continuing faults, especially PCBs, it is now considered one of the healthier estuaries in the North Atlantic. Today, all of the Hudson River and almost all of the waters of New York Harbor are swimmable and most are fishable, as the Clean Water Act mandated, but the fish that are caught are not all edible. Health authorities do not recommend eating most New York Harbor fish, though some people do, with a great deal of the fish consumed by poor people who are probably eating poisoned food. Shad is an exception, because it spends its time in the Hudson so obsessed with sex that it does not eat.

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

These insights are important for building an understanding of the ways that intra-human inequality and oppressions function and how they intersect with human-nonhuman oppression.”38 I must confess, it is difficult to keep up with the number and kind of alleged and proclaimed maladies supposedly unleashed by the most diverse, beneficent, tolerant, successful, and free nation ever established by mankind. But it would certainly seem that this movement has attracted them all. So much for clean air, clean water, and polar bears. Skipping ahead, Pellow informs us that the third pillar “is the view that social inequalities—from racism to speciesism—are deeply embedded in society (rather than aberrations) and reinforced by state power, and that therefore the current social order stands as a fundamental obstacle to social and environmental justice.

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It states, in part: Whereas climate change, pollution, and environmental destruction have exacerbated systemic racial, regional, social, environmental, and economic injustices (referred to in this preamble as “systemic injustices”) by disproportionately affecting indigenous communities, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this preamble as “frontline and vulnerable communities”); …Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that— (1) it is the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal— (A) to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers; (B) to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States; (C) to invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century; (D) to secure for all people of the United States for generations to come— (i) clean air and water; (ii) climate and community resiliency; (iii) healthy food; (iv) access to nature; and (v) a sustainable environment; and (E) to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous communities, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as “frontline and vulnerable communities”); (2) the goals described in subparagraphs of paragraph (1) above (referred to in this resolution as the “Green New Deal goals”) should be accomplished through a 10-year national mobilization (referred to in this resolution as the “Green New Deal mobilization”) that will require the following goals and projects— (A) building resiliency against climate change-related disasters, such as extreme weather, including by leveraging funding and providing investments for community-defined projects and strategies; (B) repairing and upgrading the infrastructure in the United States, including— (i) by eliminating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as much as technologically feasible; (ii) by guaranteeing universal access to clean water; (iii) by reducing the risks posed by flooding and other climate impacts; and (iv) by ensuring that any infrastructure bill considered by Congress addresses climate change; (C) meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources, including— (i) by dramatically expanding and upgrading existing renewable power sources; and (ii) by deploying new capacity; (D) building or upgrading to energy-efficient, distributed, and “smart” power grids, and working to ensure affordable access to electricity; (E) upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximal energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification; (F) spurring massive growth in clean manufacturing in the United States and removing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing and industry as much as is technologically feasible, including by expanding renewable energy manufacturing and investing in existing manufacturing and industry; (G) working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible, including— (i) by supporting family farming; (ii) by investing in sustainable farming and land use practices that increase soil health; and (iii) by building a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food; (H) overhauling transportation systems in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in— (i) zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; (ii) clean, affordable, and accessible public transportation; and (iii) high-speed rail; (I) mitigating and managing the long-term adverse health, economic, and other effects of pollution and climate change, including by providing funding for community-defined projects and strategies; (J) removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and reducing pollution, including by restoring natural ecosystems through proven low-tech solutions that increase soil carbon storage, such as preservation and afforestation; (K) restoring and protecting threatened, endangered, and fragile ecosystems through locally appropriate and science-based projects that enhance biodiversity and support climate resiliency; (L) cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites to promote economic development and sustainability; (M) identifying other emission and pollution sources and creating solutions to eliminate them; and (N) promoting the international exchange of technology, expertise, products, funding, and services, with the aim of making the United States the international leader on climate action, and to help other countries achieve a Green New Deal; (3) a Green New Deal must be developed through transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses; and (4) to achieve the Green New Deal goals and mobilization, a Green New Deal will require the following goals and projects— (A) providing and leveraging, in a way that ensures that the public receives appropriate ownership stakes and returns on investment, adequate capital (including through community grants, public banks, and other public financing), technical expertise, supporting policies, and other forms of assistance to communities, organizations, Federal, State, and local government agencies, and businesses working on the Green New Deal mobilization; (B) ensuring that the Federal Government takes into account the complete environmental and social costs and impacts of emissions through— (i) existing laws; (ii) new policies and programs; and (iii) ensuring that frontline and vulnerable communities shall not be adversely affected; (C) providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States, with a focus on frontline and vulnerable communities, so those communities may be full and equal participants in the Green New Deal mobilization; (D) making public investments in the research and development of new clean and renewable energy technologies and industries; (E) directing investments to spur economic development, deepen and diversify industry in local and regional economies, and build wealth and community ownership, while prioritizing high-quality job creation and economic, social, and environmental benefits in frontline and vulnerable communities that may otherwise struggle with the transition away from greenhouse gas intensive industries; (F) ensuring the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement, and administer the Green New Deal mobilization at the local level; (G) ensuring that the Green New Deal mobilization creates high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages, hires local workers, offers training and advancement opportunities, and guarantees wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition; (H) guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States; (I) strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment; (J) strengthening and enforcing labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards across all employers, industries, and sectors; (K) enacting and enforcing trade rules, procurement standards, and border adjustments with strong labor and environmental protections— (i) to stop the transfer of jobs and pollution overseas; and (ii) to grow domestic manufacturing in the United States; (L) ensuring that public lands, waters, and oceans are protected and that eminent domain is not abused; (M) obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous people for all decisions that affect indigenous people and their traditional territories, honoring all treaties and agreements with indigenous people, and protecting and enforcing the sovereignty and land rights of indigenous people; (N) ensuring a commercial environment where every businessperson is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies; and (O) providing all people of the United States with— (i) high-quality health care; (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing; (iii) economic security; and (iv) access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and nature.66 Milton Ezrati at Forbes rounded up some of the cost estimates for this proposal.

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It states, in part: Whereas climate change, pollution, and environmental destruction have exacerbated systemic racial, regional, social, environmental, and economic injustices (referred to in this preamble as “systemic injustices”) by disproportionately affecting indigenous communities, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this preamble as “frontline and vulnerable communities”); …Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that— (1) it is the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal— (A) to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers; (B) to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States; (C) to invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century; (D) to secure for all people of the United States for generations to come— (i) clean air and water; (ii) climate and community resiliency; (iii) healthy food; (iv) access to nature; and (v) a sustainable environment; and (E) to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous communities, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as “frontline and vulnerable communities”); (2) the goals described in subparagraphs of paragraph (1) above (referred to in this resolution as the “Green New Deal goals”) should be accomplished through a 10-year national mobilization (referred to in this resolution as the “Green New Deal mobilization”) that will require the following goals and projects— (A) building resiliency against climate change-related disasters, such as extreme weather, including by leveraging funding and providing investments for community-defined projects and strategies; (B) repairing and upgrading the infrastructure in the United States, including— (i) by eliminating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as much as technologically feasible; (ii) by guaranteeing universal access to clean water; (iii) by reducing the risks posed by flooding and other climate impacts; and (iv) by ensuring that any infrastructure bill considered by Congress addresses climate change; (C) meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources, including— (i) by dramatically expanding and upgrading existing renewable power sources; and (ii) by deploying new capacity; (D) building or upgrading to energy-efficient, distributed, and “smart” power grids, and working to ensure affordable access to electricity; (E) upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximal energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification; (F) spurring massive growth in clean manufacturing in the United States and removing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing and industry as much as is technologically feasible, including by expanding renewable energy manufacturing and investing in existing manufacturing and industry; (G) working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible, including— (i) by supporting family farming; (ii) by investing in sustainable farming and land use practices that increase soil health; and (iii) by building a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food; (H) overhauling transportation systems in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in— (i) zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; (ii) clean, affordable, and accessible public transportation; and (iii) high-speed rail; (I) mitigating and managing the long-term adverse health, economic, and other effects of pollution and climate change, including by providing funding for community-defined projects and strategies; (J) removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and reducing pollution, including by restoring natural ecosystems through proven low-tech solutions that increase soil carbon storage, such as preservation and afforestation; (K) restoring and protecting threatened, endangered, and fragile ecosystems through locally appropriate and science-based projects that enhance biodiversity and support climate resiliency; (L) cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites to promote economic development and sustainability; (M) identifying other emission and pollution sources and creating solutions to eliminate them; and (N) promoting the international exchange of technology, expertise, products, funding, and services, with the aim of making the United States the international leader on climate action, and to help other countries achieve a Green New Deal; (3) a Green New Deal must be developed through transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses; and (4) to achieve the Green New Deal goals and mobilization, a Green New Deal will require the following goals and projects— (A) providing and leveraging, in a way that ensures that the public receives appropriate ownership stakes and returns on investment, adequate capital (including through community grants, public banks, and other public financing), technical expertise, supporting policies, and other forms of assistance to communities, organizations, Federal, State, and local government agencies, and businesses working on the Green New Deal mobilization; (B) ensuring that the Federal Government takes into account the complete environmental and social costs and impacts of emissions through— (i) existing laws; (ii) new policies and programs; and (iii) ensuring that frontline and vulnerable communities shall not be adversely affected; (C) providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States, with a focus on frontline and vulnerable communities, so those communities may be full and equal participants in the Green New Deal mobilization; (D) making public investments in the research and development of new clean and renewable energy technologies and industries; (E) directing investments to spur economic development, deepen and diversify industry in local and regional economies, and build wealth and community ownership, while prioritizing high-quality job creation and economic, social, and environmental benefits in frontline and vulnerable communities that may otherwise struggle with the transition away from greenhouse gas intensive industries; (F) ensuring the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement, and administer the Green New Deal mobilization at the local level; (G) ensuring that the Green New Deal mobilization creates high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages, hires local workers, offers training and advancement opportunities, and guarantees wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition; (H) guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States; (I) strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment; (J) strengthening and enforcing labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards across all employers, industries, and sectors; (K) enacting and enforcing trade rules, procurement standards, and border adjustments with strong labor and environmental protections— (i) to stop the transfer of jobs and pollution overseas; and (ii) to grow domestic manufacturing in the United States; (L) ensuring that public lands, waters, and oceans are protected and that eminent domain is not abused; (M) obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous people for all decisions that affect indigenous people and their traditional territories, honoring all treaties and agreements with indigenous people, and protecting and enforcing the sovereignty and land rights of indigenous people; (N) ensuring a commercial environment where every businessperson is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies; and (O) providing all people of the United States with— (i) high-quality health care; (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing; (iii) economic security; and (iv) access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and nature.66 Milton Ezrati at Forbes rounded up some of the cost estimates for this proposal. Here are figures for just some of its goals: “The proposed expansion of renewables to provide 100% of the nation’s power needs would, according to respected physicist Christopher Clark, cost about $2 trillion or approximately $200 billion a year for ten years.

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer, Jim Mason

agricultural Revolution, air freight, biodiversity loss, clean water, collective bargaining, dumpster diving, food miles, Garrett Hardin, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, means of production, rent control, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Whole Earth Review

The air and water pollution caused by factory farming was also in the news, sparked partly by the legal efforts of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Waterkeeper Alliance, and the Sierra Club. Kennedy, acting for several farm and fishermen's groups, won a major victory against Smithfield Foods that suggested that almost all American factory farms were violating the Clean Water Act. (The Bush administration thereupon instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to weaken the rules and curtail its investigations of factory farms.)2 Naturally, when I came back to the States, Jim and I met again and talked about this new surge of interest in the issues we had raised in our earlier book.

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Factory farming spread because it seemed to be cheaper than more traditional forms of farming. We have seen that it was cheaper to the consumer, but only because it was passing some of its costs on to others-for example, to people who lived downstream or downwind from the factory farms and could no longer enjoy clean water and air and to workers who were injured by unsafe conditions. Now we can see that this was only the small stuff. Factory farming is passing far bigger costs-and risks-on to all of us. If chicken were taxed to raise enough revenue to pay for the precautions that governments now have to take against avian influenza, again we might find that factory farm chicken isn't really so cheap after all.

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The day was pleasant, and the sun had lost the sting it has at the height of summer, but once the cattle had moved into the new pasture, they soon found the shade cast by a row of cypresses, and most of them stood under the trees. Though the youngest calves were six months old, they were still keeping company with their mothers. The lives of these cattle were, it seemed, entirely comfortable. They had what cattle need: plenty of grass, clean water, shade, and their own social group. Patrick told us that he prefers to sell his cattle direct from the farm to the slaughterhouse, but there are times of the year when he doesn't have enough grass on his pasture to get them ready to market. Then he sells them to a feedlot for short-term fattening.

The Death and Life of Monterey Bay: A Story of Revival by Dr. Stephen R Palumbi Phd, Ms. Carolyn Sotka M. A.

California gold rush, clean water, glass ceiling, land tenure, Ronald Reagan, Works Progress Administration

When the Hopkins Marine Station first opened its new science labs on China Point in 1917, the next-door canneries dumped all their waste and guts (officially known as offal) in the nearby waters, and China Point floated with “globs of fat and oil,” making it extremely difficult to work among the rocks. A 1925 report to the Pacific Improvement Company, which owned the railroad in Monterey, lambasted the “foul condition of the water caused by the canneries discharge of sewage and waste.” Cannery operators exacerbated the problem when they cleaned their machines, flushing the offal-laden cleaning water into the bay. No one has ever accused fish processing of being a tidy, clean business, and the millions of pounds processed daily took a serious toll on the local environment. Few statistics of the pollution impact of the Monterey canneries exist, but Hopkins Marine Station professor Dr. Rolf Bolin complained that “the fumes from the scum floating on the waters of the inlets of the bay were so bad that they turned lead-based paints black.”

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“Like pandas,” she said with a wistful look, “sea otters are enchanting creatures.” These enchanting creatures took up residence at the Hopkins Marine Refuge and began transforming Julia’s protected area back into the kelp forest it had been before otters were hunted. Where the 1930s and 1940s saw a polluted coast next door to one of the world’s biggest canneries, clean water and sea otters re-created the ecological community that the area typically had. It took more than three decades for Julia Platt’s stubborn advocacy to lay the foundations of this change, and maybe otters would have found an enticing home at Hopkins even if the shore had been stripped of abalone and mussels.

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They were teachers and students of ecology and conservation, and they were the first generation at the Hopkins Marine Station to think that the recovery of the life of the bay was normal. Throughout the United States, the environment and the science of ecology were becoming an important part of the social culture, spawning national laws in the 1970s such as the Clean Water Act and national events such as Earth Day. Ecology as a research topic overtook the Hopkins station too, and there were suddenly more students diving in the new kelp forests than there were laboring in the old biochemistry labs. For the first time in a century, the ocean environment in front of the marine station was beginning to thrive, and the students of marine biology who worked there were in a golden moment of nature discovery.

Alcohol: A History by Rod Phillips

clean water, conceptual framework, European colonialism, financial independence, GPS: selective availability, invention of the printing press, Kickstarter, large denomination, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, New Urbanism, profit motive, restrictive zoning, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

To reduce fire hazards even more, some cities stipulated that breweries should be built of stone rather than wood.1 In the Netherlands, urban governments controlled the sale of gruit (the herbs used for bittering and flavoring ale), which they sold at inflated prices. There were savings in bulk purchases, but only commercial brewers could take advantage of them. Good ale also needed plenty of fresh, clean water, but brewers also polluted water with their refuse, to the extent that some English towns (like London, Bristol, and Coventry) forbade brewers access to sources of public drinking water.2 Regulations such as these, many imposing considerable costs on brewers, made the survival of small-scale, domestic brewing in the medieval city increasingly difficult.

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One seventeenth-century proposal for supplying London with “good and cleare strong water” noted that the prevailing supply was foul and muddy and “not fit for many uses.” It called for the construction of a closed aqueduct to provide the city with “excellent good water, fit for any use, either for dressing of meate, for washing, baking, brewing, or drinking.”41 Maybe it is significant that drinking was placed last in this list of purposes to which clean water would be put. The same period also threw up proposals for desalinizing (removing the salt from) seawater, a process that would have been invaluable for the navy and merchant marine. Long voyages at sea were becoming more and more common as Europeans explored the rest of the world; established settlements in the Americas, Africa, and Asia; and fished as far from Europe as the cod-rich seas off the coast of Newfoundland.

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Inhabitants of the poorer districts of Leeds, in northern England, had no water within a quarter of a mile of their dwellings, and very few even had vessels in which they could fetch water.31 The drinking water of Brussels, in Belgium, was described in the 1830s and 1840s as having a “disgusting flavour,” a “foul odor,” an “extremely disagreeable smell of rotten wood,” and a “nauseating taste.” An 1844 study of Paris concluded that barely 10 percent of the water drawn from the public fountains was drinkable.32 From the mid-1800s, central and urban governments began to address the water problem by constructing systems that piped clean water to cities. They were driven by several considerations. First, there were waves of epidemics of waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever between the 1830s and 1850s. An outbreak of cholera in the Soho district of London in 1854 killed more than 500 people in ten days.33 Second, the ruling classes believed that the urban masses needed the means to keep themselves and their environments clean and hygienic, and that meant providing water suitable for washing as well as sewage systems to carry waste away.

Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly, Margaret Lazarus Dean

Apollo 11, clean water, dark matter, game design, inventory management, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, Skype, space junk, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, Virgin Galactic, Y2K

The lettuce we will grow later in the year is a study for future space travel—astronauts on their way to Mars will have no fresh food but what they can grow—but it is also teaching us more about growing food efficiently on Earth. The closed water system developed for the ISS, where we process our urine into clean water, is crucial for getting to Mars, but it also has promising implications for treating water on Earth, especially in places where clean water is scarce. This overlapping of scientific goals isn’t new—when Captain Cook traveled the Pacific it was for the purpose of exploration, but the scientists traveling with him picked up plants along the way and revolutionized the field of botany.

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I pull out the broken distillation assembly, double-bag it, label it, then store it in the PMM (Permanent Multipurpose Module, sort of a storage closet off Node 3) until it can be returned to Earth on a SpaceX. Engineers on the ground will examine it and, if they can, repair it to be sent up again. The next step is to fit the new assembly in place and torque it to a specific value. I start hooking up the fluid lines again very carefully, making sure not to combine clean water and urine lines, then connect the electrical cables. I am taking pictures of all of my work so the ground can later verify I did everything properly. As I’m working, the ground tells us Progress has officially been declared lost. With a sinking feeling, I float over to the Russian segment to confer.

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“What are you going to do?” she asks, then points out that she will likely exceed the world record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, 195 days. When I finally finish the huge job of changing out the urine processor, it is satisfying knowing that we will be able to process urine and make clean water. But it’s also strangely unsatisfying in that all I’ve done is put everything back the way it usually is. I reinstall the kabin, making sure all the tools are stowed properly, downlink the photos, then run on the treadmill for half an hour. While I’m running, a smoke alarm annunciates loudly. The treadmill under my feet stops automatically.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Each day, more than a billion gallons of water flow into Manhattan along two tunnels from upstate New York. A third tunnel has been under construction for forty years and is due to be completed in 2020. In the developed world, 98 per cent of city dwellers now have access to clean water. In the developing world, however, nearly a third of urban households do not have clean water, a figure that rises to 60 per cent in informal settlements. But urban plumbing is just one, albeit vital, aspect of the city’s infrastructure. The remarkable technological systems on which modern urban life depends are a reminder that the city is a uniquely human achievement: an artificial environment forged by our ingenuity and skill.

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Their reclaimed chinampas, or floating gardens, produced at least two harvests a year, their fertility boosted by regular treatments with human manure collected in the city. Each day a flotilla of perhaps fifty thousand canoes – each cut from a single tree trunk – swarmed to and from the great metropolis carrying produce from these hydroponic gardens and from further afield, the life blood of the city. But as well as food, clean water was essential, as it is for any city. Skilfully engineered aqueducts brought fresh water in from the surrounding mountains. Canoes then dispensed the water to individual residences. The city itself was divided into four by grand avenues which converged on a central walled complex of palaces and temples.

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Indeed, immigration has always been essential to the economic growth of cities (although new arrivals did not have immunity to urban diseases and so were more likely to fall victim to epidemics). Along with improved medical services and treatments such as vaccination, creating adequate infrastructure to provide clean water and to dispose of waste and sewage was an essential stage in the development of healthy cities. By the 1850s, London’s population had risen to two and a half million, in a city thirty miles in circumference. Even a modern planned city would struggle to cope with a situation in which its population more than doubled in fifty years.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

And when the money system collapses, if you already do not depend on money for some portion of life’s necessities and pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition for you. The same applies on the social level. Any form of natural wealth, whether biodiversity, fertile soil, or clean water, and any community or social institution that is not a vehicle for the conversion of life into money, will sustain and enrich life after money. I am referring to money as we know it. I will soon describe a money system that does not drive the conversion of all that is good, true, and beautiful into money.

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This book will describe a concrete way to back money with the things that are becoming sacred to us today. And what are those? We can see what they are through people’s altruistic efforts to create and preserve them. The money of the future will be backed by the things we want to nurture, create, and preserve: by undeveloped land, clean water and air, great works of art and architecture, biodiversity and the genetic commons, unused development rights, unused carbon credits, uncollected patent royalties, relationships not converted into services, and natural resources not converted into goods. Even, indeed, by gold still in the ground.

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If it is oil, then an incentive will be created to pump more oil—the amount needed for fuel, plus an additional amount for money. Generalized, the principle is, “The use of any thing for money will increase the supply of that thing.” Chapter 11 draws on this principle to create a money system to increase the supply of things we agree are positive goods for humanity and the planet. What if money were “backed” by clean water, unpolluted air, healthy ecosystems, and the cultural commons? Is there a way to encourage the creation of more and more of these in the same way that the social agreement of gold’s value drives us to mine more and more of it? Just as the monetization of gold causes us to covet it and seek to produce more of it, and to relinquish it only to meet a real, pressing need, so also might the use of these things for money cause us to create more of them, to create a more beautiful planet, and to sacrifice them only for a well-considered reason, only in response to a real need, only to create something as valuable as what has been destroyed.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

., “Ten Thousand Commandments 2019,” Competitive Enterprise Institute, May 7, 2019, https://cei.org/10kc2019. 14. For the official version of the regulation and its consequences and modifications in 2020, see “Documents Associated with the 2015 Clean Water Rule,” United States Environmental Protection Agency, www.epa.gov/cwa-404/documents-associated-2015-clean-water-rule; cf. farmer anger: Ledyard King, “Trump’s EPA Washes Away Obama-Era Clean Water Rule That Farmers, Manufacturers Hated,” USA Today, September 12, 2019, www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/09/12/epa-repeals-obama-era-waters-u-s-rule-criticized-overreach/2301997001. In general, see James Copland, The Unelected: How an Unaccountable Elite Is Governing America (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), 52–54. 15.

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Even if our 535 elected federal representatives knew the details of the 214 bills they passed, there is no way they could master the 3,853 new bureaucratic edicts that they did not pass.13 One example was the creation by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of a new regulation in May 2015 known as the Clean Water Rule. The unelected EPA decided that under its new statute, it could now extend the law protecting “navigable waters” (streams and wetlands) from pollution and defilement to cover even standing water on private property. The law even extended to local irrigation district canals and ditches that run across private farm property but are neither navigable streams nor wetlands.14 Sometimes EPA regulators singled out farmers with low ground that collected temporary storm runoff or with irrigation ditch laterals, arguing that such temporary stagnant pools or tiny weed-filled ditches were subject to water analyses and possible punitive action.

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The EPA acted as a combined legislative, judicial, and executive entity that by fiat infringed on the citizen’s private property. The aggrieved, of course, could always go to federal court to sue the federal government for overreach, but with limited means in comparison to the bureaucracy’s legal resources. The Clean Water Rule was just one of many efforts by federal government employees to harass small business owners, on the false premise that myriads of new regulations were cost-effective to society—or reflected proper and vital agendas that only experts such as themselves, certainly not an otherwise ignorant public, could appreciate.

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa by Calestous Juma

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, double helix, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, export processing zone, global value chain, high-speed rail, impact investing, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, land tenure, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, non-tariff barriers, off grid, out of africa, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, Recombinant DNA, rolling blackouts, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, total factor productivity, undersea cable

Developed by US-based Seldon Laboratories, these products require low energy usage to filter various pathogens and chemical contaminants and are already in use by aid workers in Rwanda and Uganda.33 One of the most promising applications of nanotechnology is low-cost, energy-efficient water purification. Nearly 300 million people in Africa lack access to clean water. Water purification technologies using reverse osmosis are not available in much of Africa, partly because of high energy costs. Through the use of a “smart plastic” membrane, the US-based Dais Analytic Corporation has developed a water purification system 56 THE NEW HARVEST that could significantly increase access to clean water and help to realize the recent proclamation by the United Nations that water and sanitation are fundamental human rights. The capital costs of the NanoClear technology are about half the cost of using a reverse osmosis water purification system.

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The focus of dominant policies was to subsidize consumers in urban areas.3 This policy approach prevailed in most African countries and was associated with the continued decline of the agricultural sector. In 2005, over half of the population in Malawi lived on less than a dollar a day, a quarter of the population lacked sufficient food daily, and a third lacked access to clean water. This started to change when Malawi’s wa Mutharika took on food insecurity, a dominant theme in the history of the country.4 His leadership helped to revitalize the agricultural sector and provides an inspiring lesson for other figures in the region who wish to enable and empower their people to meet their most basic needs.

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The system is modular and can be readily scaled up on demand. A first-generation pilot plant opened in Tampa, Florida, in 2010, to be followed later in the year by the deployment of the first fully operational NanoClear water treatment facility in northern China. The example of NanoClear illustrates how nanotechnology can help provide clean water, reduces energy usage, and charts an affordable course toward achieving sustainable development goals.34 The potential for technologies as convenient as these would revolutionize the lifestyles of farmers and agricultural workers in Africa. Both humans and livestock would benefit from disease-free, contaminant-free water for consumption and agricultural use.

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, BRICs, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, data science, decarbonisation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fear of failure, geopolitical risk, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Ocado, ocean acidification, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, systems thinking, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, University of East Anglia, warehouse automation

As we’ve swept across the world in just ten thousand years, we have established a quality of life for billions of people that was unimaginable at this scale even just a few hundred years ago. Of course, still left behind are many more billions, many of whom live in grinding, soul-destroying poverty. While we strive for larger televisions, DVD screens in our cars, and the perfectly grilled tender steak, they die for a glass of clean water or a bowl of rice. We will return to this cancer on humanity’s soul, but for now let’s stay with those of us who are, by comparison, filthy, stinking rich. We have done well. Our needs are met. We have the capacity not just to make our lives comfortable, but to explore space, to develop extraordinary scientific knowledge, to cure diseases, to invent amazing technologies that will help us and future generations live even better lives.

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Activists were joining together as a connected network, with cheap technology enabling anyone to send a message to corporate headquarters via the media. So suddenly behavior anywhere was public everywhere. The best organization in the world at doing this in the late 1980s was without doubt Greenpeace. I joined them in 1989 to lead the Clean Waters Clean Seas campaign in Australia, which focused on exposing the more outrageous examples of corporate pollution. It was a classic Greenpeace pipe-plugging campaign, with our first direct action being to send divers to plug up the underwater discharge pipes that an oil refinery used to discharge toxic waste into the ocean.

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We face threats to our food supply because of excessive degradation of land and changing rainfall patterns brought about by climate change. We face further risks to food supply because of the potential collapse of fisheries both through overfishing and through broader damage to ocean ecosystems. Billions of people face increasingly urgent issues about access to fresh and clean water, both for everyday consumption and to supply industrial and agricultural processes. These and many other issues will have a direct impact on economic growth, on geopolitical and domestic security, and on our quality of life. The flow on effects of any one of these trends, let alone a number of them in combination, will be dramatic.

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

“They said, ‘Oh, I don’t give to charities, charities are ineffective, they’re bureaucratic, the CEO is probably just trying to make millions of dollars for himself and driving a Mercedes-Benz around.’ ” In that cynicism, Scott saw an opportunity. He would launch a nonprofit designed to bring clean water to the world and inspire generosity by tackling cynicism head-on. The nonprofit he created, Charity: Water, was based on a three-pronged plan. The organization would commit to total, radical transparency about where every penny of donated money was being spent; he would guarantee that 100 percent of public donations went directly to the water projects; and he would create a brand that inspired—one that used photos and videos to tell the kind of true stories that people would yearn to be part of, stories they would share with others.

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The organization would commit to total, radical transparency about where every penny of donated money was being spent; he would guarantee that 100 percent of public donations went directly to the water projects; and he would create a brand that inspired—one that used photos and videos to tell the kind of true stories that people would yearn to be part of, stories they would share with others. Scott would make positivity the very fabric of Charity: Water. “We would have these sayings at the organization, Hope, not guilt. Invitation, inspiration. The images that we would take would be people getting clean water—not the child drinking dirty water. We would say, ‘Here is what we’re about, we’re providing this life-giving party and there’s before the water and there’s after the water. Do you want to be a part of that solution?’ ” As chief evangelist for his company, Scott knew he had to spark a global virtuous cycle with Charity: Water.

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And it tapped into the fact that people build their strongest emotional relationships with other people, not brands or charities. “The idea just exploded as people of all ages started giving up their birthdays,” says Scott. The birthday initiative went on to become one of Charity: Water’s signature methods of fundraising. In 2014, they raised $45 million and helped a million people get clean water that year—twenty-five hundred every day of the year. Charity: Water’s donations soared for years…until they didn’t. “The problem for our organization,” says Scott, “was that people did one birthday for Charity: Water, then said, ‘I did it, I built my well, I raised my $1,000.’ We didn’t have any sort of repeatability in that.”

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, carbon footprint, clean water, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lyft, megacity, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

But a compromise was achieved, and subsequent Republican presidents—Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—ended up expanding the programs during their terms. (This prompted Nixon’s famous “I am now a Keynesian in economics” line.) There was the formation of Medicare and Medicaid, and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and the War on Poverty. All of them were worked on as compromises. In 1986, Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act was sponsored by Dan Rostenkowski, who was a Democratic representative. The art of compromise—really, the art of the executive branch of government working with the legislative one to conquer evil, fix problems, and respond to constituents—continued all the way into Bill Clinton’s second term.

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Mayors and cities began to repurpose old industrial sites, turning them into playgrounds and parks. They focused on reducing car traffic by rebuilding mass transit systems and making cities more walkable and bikeable. Cities were the primary beneficiaries of the Clean Air Act (in the 1960s) and the Clean Water Act (in the 1970s), which have improved air quality and cleaned up waterways. (The Cuyahoga River is no longer flammable. Los Angeles’s air quality has dramatically improved. When I was growing up, we used to have to run into the water, dive underneath, hold our breath, and swim thirty feet to get past all the dead fish that had washed ashore.

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After Barrett and I talked about how to further revive Great Lakes cities, he came up with a term for the area—the “Fresh Coast”—that I loved. “ ‘Rust belt’ just has such negative connotations,” he says. “Here we are on the shores of 20 percent of the world’s freshwater supply. In reality what defines us is access to the Great Lakes and clean water. We need to rebrand our entire coast.” Barrett sold the rest of us Great Lakes mayors on an initiative that ended up being not just about marketing but about fighting for cleaner water and recreation. It was a brilliant piece of rebranding. And it’s starting to work on tourists and, maybe more important, our inhabitants.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

It seemed odd, I said, given all this seismic activity, that superrich Silicon Valley technologists were supposedly apocalypse-proofing themselves by buying up land down here. “Yeah,” said Anthony, “but some of them are buying farms and sheep stations pretty far inland. Tsunamis aren’t going to be a big issue there. And what they’re after is space, and clean water. Two things we’ve got a lot of down here.” It was precisely this phenomenon—of tech billionaires buying up property in New Zealand in anticipation of civilizational collapse—that constituted our shared apocalyptic obsession. This was the reason I had come down here, to find out about these apocalyptic retreats, and to see what New Zealanders thought of this perception of their country.

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Tolkien, and his interest in New Zealand was not unconnected with the fact that Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings had been filmed there. This was a man who had named at least five of his companies in reference to Middle Earth and fantasized as a teenager about playing chess against a robot that could discuss the books. It was a matter, too, of the country’s abundance of clean water and the convenience of overnight flights from California. But it was also inseparable from a particular strand of apocalyptic libertarianism. To read The Sovereign Individual was to see this ideology laid bare: these people, the self-appointed “cognitive elite,” were content to see the unraveling of the world as long as they could carry on creating wealth in the end times.

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Another couple he knew of, a pair of Bitcoin billionaires, had bought a large lakeside estate on which they were constructing a gigantic bunker. This was the first I’d heard since coming here of an actual bunker being built. From the point of view of the modern apocalypticist, the whole appeal of the country—its remoteness and stability, its abundant clean water, its vast and lovely reaches of unpeopled land—seemed to be that it was itself a kind of reinforced geopolitical shelter, way down there at the bottom of the world. If wealthy foreigners were buying land here and building literal bunkers, fortifications beneath the ground of this country that had welcomed them in the first place, what did that say about their motivations, their view of life?

The Polytunnel Book: Fruit and Vegetables All Year Round by Joyce Russell

clean water, Kickstarter, working poor

Wherever you put the barrels, try to choose a point close to the polytunnel, so that you don’t have to walk miles to fill a watering can. Alternatively, if you elevate the container, it might be possible to create a gravity feed to pipe the water down to where it is needed. Don’t let water stand too long without using it. The idea is to have a good, fresh, clean water supply. Top Tip Put barrels of water inside the polytunnel to help raise temperatures through the winter months (see November). Electricity An electricity supply can be essential if you want to operate propagators, soil warming cables, lights, etc. However, the combination of electric sockets and a damp environment isn’t ideal.

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Fill a large bucket, or even a wheelbarrow, with warm water and an environmentally friendly washing liquid. Add some algae remover, or Citrox, or tea tree oil. Then find a nice sunny spot in the garden, sit down and start to scrub. A washing-up brush works well for getting into the corners and removing all debris. Spread the washed pots out on the ground and hose them off with clean water. Once they are dry pots can be stacked and stored in boxes. They will be clean, disease and pest free, and all ready for the growing year to come. Soil health Gardeners expect a lot from the patch of earth inside a polytunnel. It gets little rest and is often expected to crop on a year-round basis.

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Clear water running through the pipe will be perfectly fine for cleaning over the top – just scrub a little with the brush. 5. Use a hosepipe to rinse the polythene with clear water. 6. Repeat the process on the inside of the tunnel, but remember to wear a waterproof jacket with the hood up! The long-handled brush should reach to the top, but it will drip. 7. Give any growing plants a quick squirt of clean water. 8. Stand back to admire the effect, but also to check for any bits that you have missed. Repairing doors Galvanized metal doors will last for years, although they might need re-covering with polythene. Wooden ones might fall apart and rot. If a new wooden door is needed, it isn’t hard to make one.

Home Maintenance Checklist: Complete DIY Guide for Homeowners: 101 Ways to Save Money and Look After Your Home by Ian Anderson

air gap, clean water, en.wikipedia.org, operational security

Preparation is critical, just slapping on new stuff simply won’t protect the material, even if it looks good initially. Generally… Scrape away any old flaky layers of the old finish. Clean down with a ‘house cleaner’ detergent, with a mould killer element if there are green or black spores on the surface. A bucket of cleaner and another of clean water and a couple of sponges work well indoors. Wipe over with one sponge and detergent and ‘rinse’ with the other sponge and clean water. Outdoors, careful use of a pressure washer to pump cleaner onto the surface works well (don’t go too close). Scrub with a small brush on a long handle and afterwards rinse everything away being careful with the angle you use (avoid getting water behind anything), mimic how the rain would hit the surface to be safe.

Living in a Material World: The Commodity Connection by Kevin Morrison

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, energy security, European colonialism, flex fuel, food miles, Ford Model T, Great Grain Robbery, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, young professional

‘Now, we are putting the water back that was previously drained,’ said Ryan, who draws a parallel to the Dr Seuss story of the ‘Sneetches’ and the cycle of trend: where something that was previously popular (the Sneetches putting stars on their bellies) suddenly becomes unpopular again. The wetland business was born following a tightening in US environmental laws with the introduction of the Clean Water Act of 1970 (Anderson and Snyder, 1997) that was ushered in following environmental campaigns of the late 1960s, when awareness of these issues increased. The Federal Clean Water Act has halted any further net wetland loss and created a market mechanism for wetland regeneration. People like John Ryan can earn credits from creating a new wetland reserve, which he can sell to developers wishing to encroach on wetland elsewhere.

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., J. 254 arsenic 205 Artists’ Project Earth173 n. 28 Asian currency crisis 7 Asian Development Bank 9 World Outlook 2007 9 Associated British Foods 147 Atlantic Richfield 226 n. 43 Aykroyd, Dan 256 Azuriz 164, 165 Babcock, Bruce 56, 57 Bacon, Louis 237, 238 Ballard 193 Baltic Exchange 212, 213 Bath, Henry 226 n. 41 Battery Ventures 266, 267 Bell, Alexander Graham 73 Belmans, Professor Ronald 194 Benton, Oren 42 Berzelius, Jons Jakob 43 Bettelheim, Eric 146, 148 BHP Billiton 13, 200, 205, 211 biodiversity 155–7 BioEnergy 81 292 | INDEX biofuels 11, 38, 44, 55–60, 69, 71–3, 95, 116–18 see also corn Biofuels Security Act (US) 80 biomass 35–6 Birol, Faith 26 Blackstone 266, 267 Blair, Tony 39, 142 Blenheim Capital Management 237 Bolger, Jim 59 Boulle, Jean-Raymond 199 BP 57, 79, 226 n. 43, 261 Brazil sugarcane production 90–4 Brent 138 Brin, Sergey 38 British Transport Police (BTP) 182 Bronks, Richard (Dick) 259, 260 bronze 180–1 Brown, Robert 55, 56 Browne, Sir John 261 Bryce, Colin 259, 260 Bubeck, David 107 Bükk National Park 145 Bunge 89, 234 Bush, George H. 27 Bush, George W. 28, 29, 30, 31, 55, 71, 75, 79, 116, 129, 142, 143, 192 Butter and Cheese Exchange of New York 251 Butter, Cheese, and Egg Exchange of New York 251 Butz, Earl 115 California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calipers) 244 California Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate 54 Canadian oil sands 49–50 cap-and-trade systems 138–40, 143, 172 n. 23 carbon capture and storage (CCS) 152–3 Carbon Capture and Storage Association, The 176 n. 50 carbon credits 154 carbon dioxide 25–6, 27, 129, 131–2, 170 n. 8, 170 n. 9, 170 n. 10 trading 137, 138–9, 140, 144 carbon economy 145–7 carbon emissions 128–9 carbon footprint 126, 128 carbon market 137–8 carbon pricing 3, 11, 29 carbon sequestration 31, 135, 150 carbon sinks 152–3 CarbonNeutral Company, The 144 Cargill 89, 234 Carnegie, Andrew 215 Carter, President Jimmy 30, 73, 116 Caruso, Guy 38, 53 Carver, George Washington 102, 120 n. 14 Case of Deferred Mitigation (CDM) 151–2, 175 n. 46 Cashman, Eugene 231, 233, 234, 270 Castro, Fidel 92, 219 cattle 87–8 Caxton Associates 237 cellulosic ethanol 56–7 Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) 151, 152 Charles, Prince of Wales 147 Chavez, Hugo 45 Chemurgic Council 95 Chernobyl disaster 40 Chevron 261 ChevronTexaco 79 Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) 99–100, 139, 146, 232–3, 234, 236, 246, 247, 248, 249, 253, 255, 257, 266, 269, 270 Chicago Climate Exchange 143, 146, 154, 155 Chicago Mercantile Exchange 245, 246, 248, 249, 256, 264, 267, 269 chicken 84–7 Chile copper production 195–8, 199, 203–10 nitrates 198–9 Chile Copper Company 197 China car market 18–19, 61 n. 2 coal 20–1, 24 demand for metals 12 electricity 19–20, 187–8 energy consumption 25, 61 n. 5 Forbidden City 17–18 lifestyle 17–18 meat consumption 83–4 migration 6–7, 19 nickel 218 pollution 25 population 6–7, 19 standard of living 6 supermarkets in 89 China Institute of Financial Derivatives 249 INDEX Chinatown 162 Chiquita Brands International 239 chlorodifluoromethane (HCFC-22) 152 Cisco Systems 263 Citigroup 242 Clean Air Act (US) 1990 74 Amendments 139 Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) 172 n. 23 clean coal technology 31–3 Clean Water Act 1970 (US) 156 Climate Care 144 Climate Change Registrar 174 n. 35 climate change cost of 134–5 history 127–8 Climate Exchange Plc 146 Clinton, President Bill 80 Clinton, Hillary 80, 116, 143 CME Group 165, 232 co2balance.com 144 Coady Diemar Partners 141 Coady, Pat 141 coal 10–11, 20–3, 24, 25–6, 26–9, 131 China 20–1, 24 clean technology 31–3 liquid 33–4 pollution controls 27–9 UK 22–3 US 20–1 Coalition of Rainforest Nations 151 Coase, Ronald 138 Codelco 10, 203, 207, 213 Cohen, gary 259, 262 Coldplay 145 Collins, Keith 117 Coltrane, John 183 Columbus, Christopher 97, 225 n. 40 Comex 213, 253, 256, 268 Commodities Corp 247 Commodities Corporation 238, 239 Commodities Futures Trading Commission 245 Commodity Exchange Act 1936 (US) 245 Commodity Exchange Inc.

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(Comex) 255 Commodity Future Trading Commission (CFTC) (US) 74, 253, 263 commodity indices 240–2 commodity market manipulation 245–7 Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs) 238 Congo, copper in 201, 202, 210–11 | 293 Connaughton, James 29, 31 ConocoPhilips 57, 79 Conservation International 93 Continental Power Exchange (CPE) 257, 258 Cooke, Jay 198, 222 n. 18 copper 4, 9, 11 applications 187–90 Congo 201, 202, 210–11 cost 211–13, 214–17 demand 182–5 electrical applications 186–7 in electricity generation 194–5 history 185–6 prices 199–201, 222 n. 17 production 195–8, 199 recycling 183, 184–5 theft 179–82 trade 211–13 under-sea extraction 217 in vehicles 190–4 Copper Export Association 201 Copper Exporters Incorporated 201 Copper Producers’ Association 200 coralconnect.com 260 corn 68–84, 96–8, 98–9, 99–101 hybrids 101–3 GM 104–6 diversity 106–10 Corn Products 233 cotton 166 Countryside Alliance 146 credit crisis (2007) 7 Crocker, Thomas 138 Cruse, Richard 111 D1 Oils 57, 58, 59 Dabhol gas-fired power plant 35 Dales, John 138 Daly, Herman 136 Darwin, Charles 67 Davis, Adam 157 Davis, Miles 183 Day after Tomorrow, The 15 n. 1 De Angelis, Anthony ‘Tino’ 245 De Beers 200, 210 De Soto, Hernando 136 Deere, John 100 deforestation 87, 147 Dennis, Richard 237 Deripaska, Oleg 199 Deutsche Bank 246, 261 294 | INDEX Diamond, Jared 97 DiCaprio, Leonardo 130 Dimas, Stavros 160 distillers’ dried grains with solubles (DDGS) 81 Dittar, Thomas 231 Donchian, Richard 237–8 Donson, Harry 199 dot.com bubble 7, 14, 241, 243 Doud, Gregg 82, 83 Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index 240 Dresdner Kleinwort 47 Drexel Burnham Lambert 254 Dreyfus, Louis 89 Duke Energy 258 Dunavant, Billy 237 DuPont 102 E85 79 Ealet, Isabelle 259, 260 Earth Sanctuatires 157 Earth Summit Bali 142 Rio 1992 141 Ebay 38 Ecosystem Marketplace 157 Edison, Thomas 17, 95, 186 Ehrlich, Paul 13, 14, 16 n. 9 Population Bomb, The 14 Eisenhower, President 40 El Paso 258 Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) 153 electric vehicles 54, 191–3 11th Hour, The 130 Elf 261 Elton, Ben 135 Emissions Trading Program 139 Energy Information Administration (EIA) 38 Energy Policy Act 2005 (US) 28 energy security 28–9 Energy Security Act 1980 (US) 74 Enron 35, 164, 165, 213, 246, 257–64 Enron Online 213, 225 n. 40, 257, 258, 259 Environmental Protection Agency (US) 27, 62 n. 17, 75, 139 ethanol 69–70, 73–81, 92, 119 n. 6 see also biofuels Eurex 262 European Climate Exchange 146 European Union 142, 158, 160 Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) 185 Evelyn, John 127 exchange-traded funds (ETFs) 13, 270 Exxon 32, 50, 52, 261 ExxonMobil 13, 79, 242, 254 Faraday, Michael 186 Farm Credit Administration 76 farm debt crisis 114–15 farm payments 115–16 farm sinks 154–5 Fearnley-Whittingstall 86 Federal Bureau of Investigation 246 Federal Clean Water Act (US) 156 F-gases 131 Firewire 260 Fisher, Mark 266, 269 Fleming, Roddy 219 flex-fuel cars 92–3 Fonda, Jane 114 Food and Agricultural Organization 148, 159 Ford, Bill 267 Ford, President Gerald 30, 115 Ford, Henry 73, 95, 195 Fordlandia 195 forest economics 149–50 forestry carbon credits 147 forests 147–51 Forrest, Andrew 199 Forward Contracts (Regulations) Act 1952 (US) 249 Forward Markets Commission (FMC) 249 Four Winds Capital Management 149, 159, 184 Franklin, Benjamin 157 Freese, Barbara 27 Friedland, Robert 199 Frost Fairs 127 fuel cell vehicles 53, 192–3 Futures Inc. 237 futures trading 235–6, 245, 247–50 gas 21–2 Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) 61 n. 8 gasohol 73 gene shuffling 105 General Atlantic 267, 269 General Motors 53, 54, 191, 193 INDEX genetically modified organism (GMO) seeds 105–6 Glencore 199, 211 Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005 148 Global Initiatives173 n. 28 Global Positioning Systems (GPS) 191 global warming 24–6, 75 Globex 267 glycerin 82 Golder and Associates 206 Goldman 255, 260, 261 Goldman Sachs 57, 146, 254, 259 Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI) 240, 241 Goldstein Samuelson 245 Google 37, 38 Gore, Al 16 n. 5, 28, 38, 126, 129, 143 Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) certificates 146 Grant, President Ulysses S. 214 Greenburg, Marty 269 greenhouse effect 131 greenhouse gas emissions 25, 131 see also carbon dioxide; nitrous oxide Greenspan, Alan 244 Gresham Investment Management 242, 243 Guggenheim brothers 197 Guttman, Lou 251, 255, 259 Hamanaka, Yasuo 246 Hanbury-Tension, Robin 146 Harding, President Warren 103 hedge funds 23640 Henry Moore Foundation 180, 181 Herfindahl, Orris 215, 226 n. 46 Heston, Charlton 15, n. 4 Hezbollah 46 Hi-Bred Corn Company 102 high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) 89–90 Highland Star 219 Hill, James Jerome 215 Homestead Act 1862 (US) 100 Honda 53 Howard, John 133, 171 n. 16 Hu Jintao, President 219 Hub, Henry 257 Humphries, Jon 181 Hunt Brothers 245 Hunter, Brian 246, 247 | 295 Hurricane Katrina 135 Hurricane Rita 134 Hussein, Saddam 48 hybrid cars 53 hydroelectric power 34 hydrogen cars 54 hypoxia zone 111 iAqua 165 IEA 32 IMF 16 n. 6 Inconvenient Truth, An 16 n. 5, 129 Indonesia palm oil 93–4 Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) 31–2 intelligent lighting 38 IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) 246, 261, 262, 265, 266, 267 Intergovernmental Council of Copper Exporting Countries (CIPEC) 203, 204 International Bauxite Association (IBA) 203 International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP) 144 International Commercial Exchange (ICE) 273 n. 15 International Copper Cartel 201 International Energy Agency (IEA) 19, 25, 26, 40, 140–1, 153, 194 International Monetary Fund 57 International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (UN) 24, 132, 134, 147, 149, 170 n. 3 International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) 250, 256, 257, 262, 263, 264, 265 International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) 41 International Tin Council 203 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture 107 Iowa Farm Bureau 36, 76, 155 Iowa Stored Energy Park 36 Japanese car market 18 Jardine Matheson 225 n. 40 Jarecki, Dr Henry 242, 243, 244 jatropha 57–9 Jefferson, Thomas 109 Jevons, William Stanley 20 Joint, Charles 181 296 | INDEX Joint Implementation (JI) 151 Jones, Paul Tudor 237, 238 Kabila, Joseph 210 Kanza, T.R. 211 Katanga of Congo 201, 225 n. 37 Kennecott Copper 199 Kennedy, Joseph (Joe) 264 Khosla Partners 38 Khosla, Vinod 37 Kitchen, Louise 258 Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers 37 Kooyker, Willem 237, 238 Kovner, Bruce 237, 238 Krull, Pete 81 Kyoto Protocol 24, 27, 50, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 151, 169 n. 2, 194 clean development mechanism (CDM) 151 Lamkey, Kendall 112 Land and Water Resources, Inc. 155 Land Grant College Act (US) 101 Lange, Jessica 114 lead credits 172 n. 20 LED (light-emitting diodes) 38 Lehman brothers 241 Leiter, Joseph 245 Leopold II, King 210 Liebreich, Michael 39 Liffe 267 Lincoln, President Abraham 69, 100, 101, 119 n. 1 Lintner, Dr John 243 liquid coal 33–4 London Clearing House 263 London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (Liffe) 262 London Metal Exchange (LME) 16 n. 10, 43, 196, 204, 212, 213, 246 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) 247 Louisiana Light Sweet 253 Lourey, Richard 166, 168 Lovelock, James 131 Lyme Timber Company, The 149 Mackintosh, John 232, 234, 270 Madonna 6 malaria 156 Malthus, Thomas 130 manure lagoons 154–5 Mao, Chairman 210 Markowitz, Harry 243 Marks, Jan 268 Marks, Michel 252, 253, 254, 268 Marks, Rebecca 164, 165 Mars, Forrest E., Jr 60 Matheson, Hugh 225 n. 40 Matif 262 McCain, John 80 McDonalds 89 Megatons to Megawatts programme 42 Melamed, Leo 249–50, 264 Mendel, Gregor (Johann) 102, 122 n. 30 Merrill Lynch 241, 246 Mesa Water 163–4 methane 128, 131, 152, 154 methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) 74 Microsoft 13 Midwestern Regional Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord 143 milk 88–9 Milken, Michael 254 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Board 156 Mittal, Laskma 212 Mobile 261 Mocatta Metals 242 Monsanto 106, 108 Montéon, Michael 199 Montgomery, David 138 Moor Capital 237 Moore, Henry 179, 182 Morgan, J.P. 246 Morgan Stanley 254, 255, 259, 260, 261 Muir, John 125 Mulholland, William 162 Murphy, Eddie 256 Murray Darling Basin 165–6 Musk, Elon 38 Nabisco 238–9 Nanosolar 38 Nasdaq 262 Nassar, President 210 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 192 National Alcohol Programme (Brazil) 92 National Cattlemen’s Beef Association 82 National Commission on Supplies and Shortages (US) 7, 16 n. 5 National Corn Growers’ Association 80 National Energy Policy (US) 28 INDEX National Petroleum Council (NPC) 30, 50 National Security Space Office (NSSO) (US) 39 NCDEX 248, 249 Nelson, Willie 115 New Deal Farm Laws 103 New Deal for Agriculture 76, 89 New Energy Finance 39 New Farm and Forest Products Task Force 95 New York Board of Trade 240, 255 New York Cocoa Exchange 255 New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange 255 New York Cotton Exchange 237, 252, 255 New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex) 43, 156, 246, 248, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269 New York Metal Exchange 226 n. 42 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) 198, 253, 255, 256, 264, 268, 270 Newman, Paul 265 Nicholson, Jack 162 nickel 217–18, 227 n. 50, 227 n. 52 nitrates 110–11 nitrogen oxide emissions 139 nitrous oxide 131, 139, 140, 152 Nixon, President 27, 30, 115, 231, 252 Noble Group 199 North, John Thomas 198, 199, 209 Norton, Gale 163 nuclear energy 34 nuclear power 21, 39–44 Nuexco Trading Corporation 42 Nybot 255, 256, 265 Obama, Barack 79, 80, 143 obesity 121 n. 19 O’Connor, Edmund 231 O’Connor, William 231 OECD 158, 159 oil 44–53 energy content 51–2 palm 93 prices 8–9, 10, 52–3 sands 49–50 shale 50–1, 64 n. 33 shocks 5, 7 soya 82 trading 250–5, 266 Oliver, Jamie 86 onion futures trading 245 | 297 Ontario Teachers’ Fund 244, 272 n. 8 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) 4, 9, 10, 22, 44–7, 203, 204, 251, 254 over-the-counter (OTC) trading 16 n. 8, 254–5 Owens Valley rape (1908) 162 Pachauri, Dr Rajendra K. 59 Page, Larry 38 Paley Commission 8 palm oil 93 Palmer, Fred 62 n. 14 Parthenon Capital 156, 267 PayPal 38 Peadon, Brian 165 perfluorocarbon 131 PGGM 244 Phaunos Timber Fund 149 Phelps Dodge 199 Phibro 254 Pickens, T.

The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World by John Robbins

Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, clean water, complexity theory, do well by doing good, double helix, Exxon Valdez, food miles, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, profit motive, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, telemarketer

According to Dale Van Voorst, spokesman for one of the largest poultry producers in the United States, "The modern poultry producer manages manure so that none of it enters the waters of the area. There may be occasional accidents, as there are in any industry, but animal agriculture operates in strict accordance with the Clean Water Act. No one is out there trying to pollute. Everyone who is supposed to obtain a discharge permit is doing S0.1135 WHAT WE KNOW Number of poultry operations (according to the General Accounting Office) that are of sufficient size to be required to obtain a discharge permit under the Clean Water Act: About 2,00036 Number (according to the General Accounting Office) that have actually done so: 3937 Number of the 22 largest animal factories in Missouri required to have valid operating discharge permits that actually have them: 2" The volume of waste produced by factory farms is so enormous and so toxic that it is challenging to describe.

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This is what happens when the human spirit is activated. One hundred and fifty years ago, slavery was legal in the United States. One hundred years ago, women could not vote in most states. Eighty years ago, there were no laws in the United States against any form of child abuse. Fifty years ago, we had no Civil Rights Act, no Clean Air or Clean Water legislation, no Endangered Species Act. Today, millions of people are refusing to buy clothes and shoes made in sweatshops and are seeking to live healthier and more Earth-friendly lifestyles. In the last fifteen years alone, as people in the United States have realized how cruelly veal calves are treated, veal consumption has dropped 62 percent.

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Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists tells us that the amount of water pollution generated in producing a pound of meat is a staggering 17 times greater than that generated in producing a pound of pasta.42 The Water You Drink It is terribly sad to see our species polluting our water. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of clean water on Earth. Water blesses our planet and makes it appear beautifully blue from space. It is the presence of liquid water that clearly distinguishes Earth from all other known planets and moons. Water covers three-quarters of our planet's surface. And water makes up three-quarters of our own bodies.

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World by Paul Stamets

clean water, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, Exxon Valdez, invention of gunpowder, Louis Pasteur, phenotype, precautionary principle

Pour 1 liter of hydrogen peroxide into 1 gallon of fresh water, then pour onto the straw, thoroughly mixing and, preferably, submerging the straw into the peroxide bath. Cover and soak for 24 hours. Rinse the peroxide-saturated straw with fresh, clean water, submerging the straw, and then drain. Rinse and drain again. After rinsing the second time with clean water, immediately introduce mycelium to the straw, evenly distributing it mixing with your hands. Make sure your hands are clean and moist before you touch the mycelium. Perforate the sides and bottom of the plastic bag with holes every few inches or, if using a bucket, every 4 inches; perforate the top of either the bag or bucket every 4 inches to allow for some passage of air.

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In addition, many of these societies are associated with universities with which they share resources. I see these educational organizations as key in helping communities coordinate a mycological response to local toxic issues. Here is another promising application of mycoremediation, this one for cleaning water leaching from heavy metal–contaminated soil: Arica and fellow researchers (2003) used turkey tail (Trametes versicolor) and phoenix oyster (Pleurotus pulmonarius var. ‘sajor-caju’) mycelia to remove 97 percent of mercuric ions from water. They did this by combining the water with small beads essentially composed of the mycelia, which selectively absorbs mercury, and a salt called alginic acid, which simply speeds the transfer of mercuric ions from the water to the mycelia.

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(Larger bags become unwieldy due to their weight.) This method works best if the burlap is hot-water pasteurized, sterilized, or chemically treated using hydrogen peroxide to reduce spores of competitor fungi in the fabric. If burlap is soaked using hydrogen peroxide, make sure it’s thoroughly rinsed with clean water after treatment, lest the residual peroxide harm your implanted mushrooms spores. (For more information on the use of hydrogen peroxide, see here.) Once spores germinate into mycelium, however, residual peroxide levels are usually not detrimental to the implanted fungus, as the mycelium’s digestive enzymes contain natural peroxides.

Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea by Steven Callahan

clean water, Kickstarter

I hated the sea's snapping off shots of heavy rifle fire next to my ear, rolling heavy stones over me, ripping wounds open, beating me, winning. Weeks on end, no bells, no rounds, continued onslaught. I even hated the equipment that saved my life—the primitive raft that was an aimless, drifting pig of a boat, the wretched tent that turned clean water foul. I hated having to catch drinking water in the same box I had to defecate in. I hated having to haul aboard lovely creatures and tear into their flesh like a beast. I hated counting minutes for thirty-two days. I hated ... I hated... I did not know a man could have so much hatred and so much longing within him.

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I get about a pint, but upon tasting it I find that it's still badly tainted with foul orange particles from the canopy. My catchment cape isn't as effective as I had hoped. There's still too much water draining down the canopy. This foul water drains through the same hole in the canopy as the clean water from the catchment cape. Maybe the foul water will be drinkable if I cut it with good water. I try a fifty-fifty ratio. It's still so gross that it's all I can do not to barf. Maybe if I cut it again with water from the still... The sun peers out from behind the wall of gray and sets the solar still to working.

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Tainted canopy water, along with clear water caught in the space blanket, pours through the observation port drain when it rains. I push a piece of plastic tubing into a low point of drainage in the blanket and secure it with sail twine. A cloudburst at night sends water pouring in. I drain most of the foul water off on the kite and let the clean water drain from the tube into the Tupperware box. It's a gigantic success. I collect two and a half pints of water, still a bit tainted, but drinkable. If my last solar still blows completely, I'm not necessarily done for. I envision the dorado struggling for life on the end of my spear, twisting this way and that, this way and that.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

They in all likelihood would be appalled by the conditions faced by industrial workers, but if they came back at the turn of the next millennium they would find that the rapid expansion in society’s productive capacity had dramatically improved the living standards of even the poorest members of British society, with the constant threat of starvation and premature death replaced by a universal expectation of clean water, access to health services, and protection from criminality. The precise chain of events that led industrialization to occur when, where and how it did is a topic of endless debate among scholars. One explanation emphasizes a shift in agricultural practices and land rights that increased the profits available for landholders to invest in manufactured goods and freed up the necessary supply of labour to produce those goods.

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Most residents lack a private toilet, and tend to rely on communal pits or even open spaces.40 Many lack garbage collection services, which means rubbish may be left by the road or burned near the home. Reliance on traditional fuel sources such as kerosene, charcoal and candles for light, cooking and heating creates a fire risk that is compounded by population density and an absence of fire services. Access to clean water is patchy and tends to rely on communal taps shared by many families. The control exercised by monopolistic businesses or gangs over many informal settlements often compounds the problem, as residents are forced to pay prices for basic services well above fair market rates. The internal migration driving the growth of these settlements reflects the grim reality that living conditions in rural areas are even worse.

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These would not only make it possible for those living there to invest in improving their homes, but also allow them to more easily take out loans for setting up small businesses or educating their children. While seen as a magic bullet by some, the results of land titling programmes have often been underwhelming, suggesting they are far from the panacea hoped for.51 There are no quick fixes to the challenge of informal settlements. Ensuring access to essential services – clean water, sanitation and electricity, alongside healthcare and education – is essential, though often difficult for governments with meagre finances. Even more important is creating the types of decent-paying jobs that can allow residents to escape from poverty. Doing that requires understanding and addressing the root causes of urbanization without development.

How to Clean Your House by Lynsey, Queen of Clean

clean water, microplastics / micro fibres

DELICATE ITEMS OR AREAS THAT YOU CAN’T SEE WELL Delicate items or hard-to-see areas can be vacuumed with a pair of old tights placed over the vacuum nozzle. This will collect the dust but eliminates the risk of sucking up valuables or other items you don’t want vacuumed up or damaging delicate things such as ceiling light fittings. For all your stylish ornaments and other intricate items where dust can get trapped, lightly mist with clean water and gently brush with a clean natural-bristled paintbrush or a make-up brush. Vents Use your vacuum with the brush attachment to suck up the dust in air vents. If the space is really small, another good trick is to use an old mascara brush! Keyboards Use the sticky edge of a Post-it note to pick up gunk between the keys on keyboards.

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If necessary, use a damp cloth to clean up any spills and allow to dry before replacing the contents. Keep drawers smelling fresh by adding a little bag of lavender. Cooker-hood fan Place your filters in a clean sink filled with very hot or boiling water and add a large spoonful of bicarbonate of soda. Soak for 30 minutes, then carefully remove and rinse with clean water. Allow the filters to dry before replacing. Sliding door and window tracks Remove loose debris by vacuuming and use an old, dry toothbrush to dislodge the rest. If necessary, sprinkle with a light dusting of bicarbonate of soda and spray with a mixture of white wine vinegar and water. Leave for 5 minutes, then wipe away the grime with a clean microfibre cloth.

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, business cycle, clean water, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, full employment, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, global village, haute couture, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market clearing, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Pareto efficiency, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, working poor

For example, one wasteful aspect of the sumptuary laws was the indiscriminate way they required cutbacks in consumption, even from those with a passionate attachment to the forbidden product or service. The original Clean Water Act was wasteful in an exactly parallel way. Whereas the goal of an intelligent environmental policy is to achieve a given reduction in pollution at the lowest possible cost, the Clean Water Act required the same 90 percent cutback from producers for whom curtailment was costly as from others for whom curtailment was cheap. Other early environmental legislation empowered regulatory agencies to issue specific requirements regarding the kinds of equipment companies could use and the kinds of fuels they could burn.

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In the consumption domain, individual spending decisions have only negligible effects on community consumption standards. But in each case, the aggregate effects of individual actions are far from negligible. Our first attempts to solve the problem of excessive pollution were much like our first attempts to solve the problem of excessive conspicuous consumption. The Clean Water Act of 1971, for example, established a deadline by which each producer had to remove 90 percent of its base-year emissions of toxic wastes flowing into the nation’s rivers. By issuing an across-the-board prohibition on specific acts of pollution, this law was essentially like the early sumptuary laws, which issued across-the-board prohibitions on specific forms of consumption.

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See under Luxury spending Children of drug-abusing parents, 61-62 lead ingestion by, 54 of the poor, 255-56 Chinese sumptuary laws, 199 Christina, The (yacht), 5 Cigar Aficionado, 31 Cigars, charm premium for, 30-31 Cirignani, Mario, 28 Civility, economic growth and, 103-6 Classroom size, student performance and, 59 Clean Water Act (1971), 208 Collectibles, markets for, 119-20 Collectively managed economies, 270 Colonial America, luxury taxes in, 203-4 Commitment problem in bargaining, 137-39 emotions and, 127-28 Commons, tragedy of the, 157, 237-38 Community consumption standards current trajectory for, 276-77 effect on savings rate, 233-34 Commuting through traffic, 80-83 Comparisons, interpersonal, 119, 164 Competition, 146-58 breakdown of barriers to, 42-43 Darwin on, 147-48 among females, 157-58 individual?

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

We need to overhaul our political systems to limit access to government by big business. We need citizens’ assemblies to allow ordinary people to decide the scale and pace of transition on the basis of independent scientific advice. We need new laws to prevent ecocide – the destruction of the insects, plants and ecosystems that humanity needs for food, pollination, clean water and healthy oceans. Every parliament, state legislature and local authority needs to declare a climate and ecological emergency, following the lead of ninety-one councils in the UK, including London and the UK Parliament, and to start allocating resources differently. The reality is that politicians and powerful elites who benefit from ‘business as usual’ are not going to stop their destructive practices or loosen their grip on the financial and economic levers.

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The melting ice caps, the scorching heatwaves and the staggering declines in animal and insect populations are the direct result of failures by people in power. Irreversible changes to the natural world are taking place because our economy is built on the assumption that precious minerals, fresh air, clean water and rare species can magically regenerate themselves in an instant. That somehow the Earth will expand to meet our insatiable appetites. But the reality is we’ve stretched our planet beyond its limits – and without a bold reimagining of our economy and the power structures that sustain the status quo, it won’t be able to spring back into shape.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

For thousands of years the best way of improving the quality of human life was to raise material living standards. When the wolf was never far from the door, good times were simply times of plenty. But for the vast majority of people in affluent countries the difficulties of life are no longer about filling our stomachs, having clean water and keeping warm. Most of us now wish we could eat less rather than more. And, for the first time in history, the poor are – on average – fatter than the rich. Economic growth, for so long the great engine of progress, has, in the rich countries, largely finished its work. Not only have measures of wellbeing and happiness ceased to rise with economic growth but, as affluent societies have grown richer, there have been long-term rises in rates of anxiety, depression and numerous other social problems.

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Put crudely, second-rate goods are assumed to reflect second-rate people. Possessions are markers of status everywhere, but in poorer societies, where necessities are a much larger part of consumption, the reasons why more equal societies do better may have less to do with status issues and more to do with fewer people being denied access to food, clean water and shelter. It is only among the very richest countries that health and wellbeing are no longer related to Gross National Income per person. In poorer countries it is still essential to raise living standards and it is most important among the poorest. In those societies a more equal distribution of resources will mean fewer people will be living in shanty towns, with dirty water and food insecurity, or trying to scrape a living from inadequate land-holdings.

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., there are, at the same time, also companies trying to expand markets for tobacco in the developing world in the sure knowledge that they will cause millions of extra deaths. There are companies which have caused needless deaths by encouraging mothers in developing countries to buy powdered baby milk instead of breast feeding, despite lack of access to clean water or basic hygiene. There are others which continue to destroy ecosystems, land and water supplies, to exploit mineral resources where governments are too weak or corrupt to stand up to them, and still others use their patents to prevent life-saving drugs being sold at affordable prices in poorer countries.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

For example, if you want to ensure that everyone in the world has access to clean water, a nonprofit called charity: water is one of just a handful of organizations that have created space for that work. When its founder, Scott Harrison, looked at the water crisis ten years ago, he didn’t see an organization approaching it the way he wanted to—as a storyteller. So he started from scratch. charity: water would become the place to participate in the reinvention of philanthropy. Early innovations like being able to see where your money went in the field—knowing that a particular village or individual was drinking clean water because of you—electrified a new generation of donors.

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Early innovations like being able to see where your money went in the field—knowing that a particular village or individual was drinking clean water because of you—electrified a new generation of donors. Today more than seven million people have clean water because Scott planted a flag and made some space. When you commit to changing your OS, you’re taking on the challenge of creating a liminal space. And as we’ve discussed, continuous participatory change requires a boundary in which everyone can feel both safety and disruption. That space could be as small as a cross-functional team or as large as an entire firm. But drawing a circle around a group of people is just the beginning. Creating space means ensuring that everyone on the team is committed to taking risks together and supporting one another.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The Open Architecture Network (OAN) is a virtual space in which architects post their drawings for the public to examine, download and build. By June 2007 the network had 400 designs, 40 chapters of architects around the world and almost 6,000 contributing members. The OAN runs open design competitions on challenges facing the world’s poor, such as the quest for low-cost clean water and sewerage systems, and provides up to $250,000 for the implementation of a winning design. OAN designs include The Clean Hub, a solar-powered water harvester, electricity generator and composting toilet that costs $15,000 to install, and the In(out) side House, an environmentally-friendly family house that would cost about $125,000 to build.

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The ideas to guide such collaborative, self-help solutions are already at work, for example in the Barefoot College created by Bunker Roy in 1972. Roy had turned his back on life in a wealthy Delhi family with the aim of creating an institution that would give India’s illiterate villagers greater control over their lives, by helping them to provide heat, light, clean water and food for themselves. He could not afford to employ professionals to teach the villagers, and city-based experts had little understanding of village life anyway. So Roy trained a small group of villagers to become teachers and engineers. They taught others, who in turn became engineers, teachers and doctors in their own villages.

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By 2007 two generations of some families had become professionals, thanks to the college. In the villages around the college, each evening more than 4,000 children who tend cattle by day attend night classes with teachers in education centres lit by solar-powered lanterns installed by engineers. They drink clean water from one of the more than 1,737 hand-operated water pumps that have been installed since 1979 and are maintained by 1,200 mechanics, and which provide water for more than 325,000 people. In Roy’s world, demand can generate its own supply: people who need light can become lighting engineers; learners can become teachers.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

With little thought devoted to land management and driven by an almost limitless reliance on water, the environmental impact has been staggering. For decades, India and China have been digging wells and damming rivers from one end of Asia to the other. The dams have displaced millions. Wells have liberated a generation of farmers from their dependence on rain, but clean water doesn’t flow forever. As the population grows, particularly in the world’s two most populous countries, the freshwater dwindles, and that leaves people with just one choice: dig. Drill too deep, though, and saltwater and arsenic can begin to seep into the ground, and when that happens nothing will grow on that land again.

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Finally, people said, ‘Let’s redesign the factories so that they don’t make that crap.’ ” (In fact, the fire that erupted just outside Cleveland, Ohio, on the Cuyahoga River in June 1969 became a permanent symbol of environmental disaster. It also helped begin a national discussion that ended in the passage of the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and many other measures.) “Let’s say I was a whimsical futurist,” said Endy—although there is nothing whimsical about his approach to science or to the future. “We are spending trillions of dollars on health care. Preventing disease is obviously more desirable than treating it.

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., Eugenics and Other Evils children, synthetic China: cotton industry in environmental issues in isolationism of rice in rising income in tea in chloroquine cholera cholesterol chondroitin Church, George civilizations, emergence of Clark, William (explorer) Clark, William C. (professor) Clarke, Arthur C. Clean Water Act Cleveland Clinic Clinton, Bill Clinton, Hillary Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth Coca-Cola Company Collins, Francis S. Colten Snyder v. HHS common ancestor complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), see alternative medicines Complete Genomics Condit, Celeste conspiracy: assumptions of confusion among theorists of Continental Army, vaccination of cordyceps corporate greed cowpox cox-2 inhibitors (coxibs)- Creation Museum Crick, Francis Crohn’s disease crystal meth Cuba, agriculture in Cuyahoga River, afire cyclooxygenase-2 DALYs (disability-adjusted life years) Darwin, Charles deCODE genetics Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) denialism: arguments used in and conspiracy theories distortion of facts in forms of and loss of control use of term DES (diethylstilbestrol) diphtheria disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) disease, see illness disposable biological systems, creation of DNA: capacity of tools for study of comparisons of components of cost of processing decoding sequences of do-i t-yourself research on and genome studies Internet sales of open-source biology of personal analysis of and polio virus research recombinant technology resurrecting self-re plicating structure of synthetic Dole, Bob Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Drazen, Jeffrey drosophila Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) drug metabolizing enzymes drug resistance Duesberg, Peter DuPont Corporation Dyson, Freeman echinacea education Ehrlich, Paul, The Population Bomb Einstein, Albert eleuthero (Siberian ginseng) Elizabeth I, queen of England Emanuel, Ezekiel encephalopathy Endy, Drew energy, new sources of energy drinks Enlightenment Enriquez, Juan environmental issues: and agriculture and genetics pollution solutions to ephedra ETC Group eugenics Every Child by Two evolution common ancestor in and genetic modification and human genome intelligent design as alternative to of machines manipulation of natural selection rejection of the idea of and survival theory of extinct animals, bringing back to life falciparum parasite Falk, Gary W.

That Wild Country: An Epic Journey Through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands by Mark Kenyon

American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, clean water, Donald Trump, land tenure, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan

It was an unfortunate and large oversight—a 640-million-acre oversight, in fact. To put that in perspective, the acreage of our federal public lands is equivalent to the entire country of Germany seven times over. These lands provide space for hunting, fishing, and leisure activities; wildlife habitats; clean-water protection; sustainable industry; and much more. All for the public. It’s about as profoundly American an idea as you can find: the democratization of land and resources and food and recreation and wildlife and scenery and space and solitude. After graduating college, I wised up to the inexpensive adventure national parks and other public lands afforded and soon made my way toward the setting sun.

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It seemed to me that taking such an aggressive position threatened to disenchant an important and powerful base of Republican support. Was the pressure on these politicians from certain industries really worth making this new set of enemies? But even more than that, I struggled to understand how and why public lands, outdoor recreation, clean air, and clean water had to be divisive political issues at all. I hated to see public land—such a clear example of American exceptionalism—being pushed to one side of the partisan divide. Regardless of political affiliation, if any group or individual was taking a stance against public lands, I’d have to push back.

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When the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was created to “encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment; to promote efforts which will prevent or eliminate damage to the environment and biosphere and stimulate the health and welfare of man; to enrich the understanding of the ecological systems and natural resources important to the Nation; and to establish a Council on Environmental Quality,” public-land managers were suddenly mandated to produce an “environmental impact statement” that would provide “a ‘hard look’ at the potential environmental consequences of [any] proposed project.” Part of the NEPA process required a public review of any proposed management project. In practice, this opened up public-land decisions to public critique, and even lawsuits. Other environmental legislation followed in the seventies, such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act, and each required new protections for the public estate. By the end of the seventies, the sweeping changes resulted in a significantly more carefully managed public-land system, with a much more diverse set of values and stakeholders guiding that management. While the public-land legislation leading up through the fifties had been primarily focused on setting aside land from development, the sixties and seventies saw tighter regulation and clear requirements placed on those lands.

A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, biofilm, carbon footprint, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, Easter island, epigenetics, food desert, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, precautionary principle, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, South China Sea, the built environment

“They were just filling up five-gallon buckets,” says Tunnell, who’s also the director of the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve at the University of Texas. Previously, in 2019 the petrochemical company Formosa Plastics agreed to pay $50 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of dumping billions of pellets into Texas waterways,49 the largest settlement of a Clean Water Act suit ever brought by private citizens.50 Nurdles escape at any link in the supply chain. They spill when they’re loaded into containers at a production facility, and when they’re loaded onto ships or railcars. Then they fall out of those ships and railcars: in 2012, a typhoon knocked containers off a vessel near Hong Kong, 29 30 a poison like no other spilling 330,000 pounds of nurdles, which gathered on beaches like snow.51 In 2021, a ship cruising through the Indian Ocean caught fire and sank, losing 87 containers full of nearly 4 million pounds of nurdles—the largest plastic spill ever—which piled six feet high on the Sri Lankan coastline.52 Upping the toxicity of the spill, scientists discovered that many of the nurdles had burned in the wreck, making them three times as chemically complex as virgin plastic.53 Nurdle spills are oil spills, essentially, only they travel much farther.

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The microfiber-rich water from your laundry machine flows to a wastewater treatment facility, where it’s pumped through screens to remove large debris, then sent to a “grit chamber,” in which sand and stones settle to the bottom.62 The water then moves to a sedimentation tank, where the human waste and other organic material settle out, and then to another tank in which microbes further break down organic material left in the water. Finally, chlorine is added to 31 32 a poison like no other kill any remaining nefarious bacteria, and the (relatively) clean water is pumped out to a river, lake, or ocean. Wastewater treatment facilities aren’t specifically equipped to filter out microfibers, but just by accident through all these processes, they’ll capture anywhere between 83 and 99 percent of the tiny pollutants, depending on the equipment. But we’re flushing so many microfibers to these facilities that even a single percent of them escaping into the environment is a huge problem.

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Post and Courier (Charleston). https://www.postandcourier .com/news/sc-plastic-pellet-spill-lawsuit-settled-for-1-million/article _5330d994-7b96-11eb-b4e7-b7b8ca40fc27.html. Fernández, Stacy. 2019. “Plastic Company Set to Pay $50 Million Settlement in Water Pollution Suit Brought on by Texas Residents.” Texas Tribune (Austin). https://www.texastribune.org/2019/10/15/formosa -plastics-pay-50-million-texas-clean-water-act-lawsuit/. NOAA Office for Coastal Management. n.d. “Historic Pollution Settlement Awards $1 Million to Nurdle Patrol.” https://coast.noaa .gov/states/stories/historic-pollution-settlement-to-nurdle-patrol.html. Reuters. 2012. “Hong Kong Government Criticized over Plastic Spill on Beaches.” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-spill/hong -kong-government-criticized-over-plastic-spill-on-beaches-idUSBRE 87306J20120805.

Hope for Animals and Their World by Jane Goodall, Thane Maynard, Gail Hudson

carbon footprint, clean water, David Attenborough, Easter island, Google Earth, Maui Hawaii, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa

But there was also a pig farm, which Maja felt was not appropriate. The government agreed to move the pigs. Then they had to block access for a stream that flowed through the area, since it was horribly polluted. They dug nine little wells to provide water for the animals and embarked on the major project: filling the lake with clean water. The new arrivals deserved the best the Chinese could give them. But there was another major problem. The officials in charge of building the required quarantine sheds insisted that they be designed like the traditional stall for cows or horses—with a half door. No matter how often Maja explained that deer were different, and would immediately leap over a half door, the Chinese would not, or could not, believe her.

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“It’s quite the same thing really,” he said. “Fish get sick, too, and instead of helping individual animals, I get to help a whole pond of them!” After graduating, he applied successfully for a job at the Shei-pa National Park. “Because the Formosan landlocked salmon is a finicky species, needing clean water at the right temperature, and very particular about its diet, trying to restore them to the natural environment is difficult,” said Liao, “but our team was determined to make it happen.” They racked their brains to think of ways to increase the number of fry, and then spent sleepless nights persuading the young fish to feed.

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It was almost as though nature herself was sending me a message of hope to share with the world. They gave me a feather, found near one of the three peregrine nests, as a symbol of all that can be done to heal the scars we have inflicted on Planet Earth. Before I left Sudbury, I had the joy of releasing a brook trout into the clean water of a stream that had, until recently, been dank, poisoned, lifeless. Water Is Life The pollution of our streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans is one of the more shocking results of the use of chemicals and other damaging agents in agriculture, industry, household products, golf courses, and gardens, since much of this poison is washed into the water.

The Great Lakes Water Wars by Peter Annin

clean water, Donald Trump, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), off grid, Ronald Reagan, urban sprawl

Stanley Chagnon, emeritus chief of the Illinois State Water Survey, captures this anger in a comprehensive report he edited and partially wrote for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1994: Few would argue that through the late 1800s, Chicago residents faced serious health problems due to the quality of their drinking water. Few would argue that Chicago residents deserve, as much as any other people, clean water for household use. Many, however, have argued that Chicago (through the [Sanitary District] and often with the blessing of state and federal governments) did not have the right to divert water from Lake Michigan for its own use and then return that water in a contaminated state and to pollute other waters….

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“So the lesson, my lesson, out of all of that was push ahead and do it and don’t try to make everyone happy because it ain’t gonna happen.” Mr. Ledin also defended the decision to quietly approve a new return-flow diversion to Menomonee Falls in 1998. The approval was part of a decades-long sustainable water-planning effort to help the greater Milwaukee area comply with the federal Clean Water Act. He said that through litigation the DNR had forced Menomonee Falls to abandon its own sewage-treatment system and connect to Milwaukee’s. As part of that deal, Menomonee Falls was allowed to connect to Milwaukee’s Lake Michigan drinking water system, even though part of the suburb was outside the Great Lakes Basin.

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The City started with its current water-supply service area, but then expanded the area to include sections of four neighboring communities. The reason? State law required that sewer service areas match up geographically with water-supply service areas so that the urban plumbing that delivered clean water to a community matched up with the pipes that took dirty water away. In many instances throughout the state, the sewer service area was much larger than the water-supply service area, which was the case in Waukesha. Its delineated sewer area stretched beyond its municipal boundaries and overlapped with sections of four neighboring communities: Pewaukee, Genesee, Delafield, and the Town of Waukesha (which is a different municipal jurisdiction from the City of Waukesha—see map on page 287).

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

The business community was reeling from the birth of the environmental and consumer movements, which spawned a host of tough new government regulations. Following the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, exposing the devastating environmental fallout from irresponsible chemical practices, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and other laws creating the modern regulatory state. In 1970, with strong bipartisan support, President Nixon signed legislation creating both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, giving the government new powers with which to police business.

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“Koch just runs over these people and then discards them as trash,” Elroy said. Asked about Green’s allegations, neither Moorman nor the spokesman for Koch Industries responded. But as allegations concerning pollution mounted nationally, federal prosecutors began to piece together an enormous case against the company for violating the Clean Water Act. In 1995, the Justice Department sued Koch for lying about leaking millions of gallons of oil from its pipelines and storage facilities in six different states. Federal investigators documented over three hundred oil spills during the previous five years, including one 100,000-gallon crude oil spill that left a twelve-mile-long slick in the bay off Corpus Christi, not far from where the Koch refinery was located.

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You can’t believe anything they say. They definitely don’t play the game the way other companies do,” she says. On January 13, 2000, O’Connell’s division at the Justice Department prevailed. Koch Industries agreed to pay a $30 million fine, which was the biggest in history at that point, for violations of the Clean Water Act. The EPA issued a press release accusing Koch Industries of “egregious violations” and trumpeting that the huge fine proved that “those who try to profit from polluting our environment will pay the price.” But O’Connell, who retired from the Justice Department in 2004, was still haunted by the damage from the oil leaks a decade later.

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Facing reelection in 1972 and expecting that his opponent would be the pro-environment senator Ed Muskie, Nixon felt he had to respond to the public’s demands. In his memoirs, Nixon later claimed credit for enactment of the Clean Water Act, but in fact he vetoed that legislation. Muskie had been eliminated in the Democratic primaries, and once Nixon saw that he could easily beat the Democratic nominee, Senator George McGovern, he no longer worried about the environmental vote. He felt free to veto the Clean Water Act. After the election, Congress with its strong bipartisan majority on green issues passed the bill over his veto and then armed Ruckelshaus with a raft of new laws imposing strict pollution limits and specifying penalties for violators.

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The Nixon administration was swept along by the popular tide. Even more than Democrat Lyndon Johnson, Nixon presided over major expansions of federal regulatory powers, creating several new regulatory agencies and commissions. The most high-profile was the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with its laws on clean air, clean water, safe drinking water, and control of pesticides and other toxic substances. Nixon created other agencies as well, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), charged with ensuring safety in the workplace; the Consumer Product Safety Commission; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; and the Mining Enforcement and Safety Administration.

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But on the environment, Congress and the Nixon White House moved with astonishing speed. During his first year, President Nixon set up a White House Council on Environmental Quality, naming environmentalist Russell Train as its chairman. Solid bipartisan majorities in Congress rushed through a flow of environmental legislation under Nixon: the Clean Air Act; the Clean Water Act; a bill establishing the Environmental Protection Agency; the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act; the Noise Pollution and Abatement Act; the Coastal Zone Management Act; the Marine Mammal Protection Act; the Endangered Species Act; and the Safe Drinking Water Act. More environmental legislation was passed under Gerald Ford after Nixon resigned in 1974.

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

But political controversies over impurities in the water are unlikely to be settled at a scientific level when passions can be whipped up in the name of non-existent “clean water.” No matter how pure the water becomes, someone can always demand the removal of more impurities. And, unless the public understands the logical and economic implications of what is being said, that demand can become politically irresistible, since no public official wants to be known as being opposed to clean water. It is not even certain that reducing extremely small amounts of substances that are harmful in larger amounts reduces risks at all. Even arsenic in the water—in extremely minute traces—has been found to have health benefits.{657} An old saying declares: “It is the dose that makes the poison.”

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However, this new additive tended to leak from filling station storage tanks and automobile gas tanks, polluting the ground water in the first case and leading to more automobile fires in the second.{661} Similarly, government-mandated air bags in automobiles, introduced to save lives in car crashes, have themselves killed small children. These are all matters of incremental trade-offs to find an optimal amount and kind of safety, in a world where being categorically safe is as impossible as achieving 100 percent clean air or clean water. Incremental trade-offs are made all the time in individual market transactions, but it can be politically suicidal to oppose demands for more clean air, clean water or automobile safety. Therefore saying that the government can improve over the results of individual transactions in a free market is not the same as saying that it will in fact do so. Among the greatest external costs imposed in a society can be those imposed politically by legislators and officials who pay no costs whatever, while imposing billions of dollars in costs on others, in order to respond to political pressures from advocates of particular interests or ideologies.

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While there are many decisions that can be made more efficiently through the marketplace than by government, this is one of those decisions that can be made more efficiently by government than by the marketplace. Even such a champion of free markets as Milton Friedman acknowledged that there are “effects on third parties for which it is not feasible to charge or recompense them.”{649} Clean air laws can reduce harmful emissions by legislation and regulations. Clean water laws and laws against disposing of toxic wastes where they will harm people can likewise force decisions to be made in ways that take into account the external costs that would otherwise be ignored by those transacting in the marketplace. By the same token, there may be transactions that would be beneficial to people who are not party to the decision-making, and whose interests are therefore not taken into account.

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

For example, in the United States the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, about the effect of pesticide use on bird populations, is credited as one of the early seeds of the environmental movement. The Cuyahoga River in northern Ohio caught on fire in 1969, spurring a number of environmental measures including the 1972 Clean Water Act (with limited impact, the Love Canal scandal later in the 1970s would suggest). But there was a new tide of concern about the global environment, the big picture, in other Western countries, too. Seeing the Earth from space had given us a vivid new perspective. Perhaps prosperity itself created the opportunity to reflect on the effects of growth.

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Abramowitz, Moses, 113 Africa, 31–33, 72, 93, 138 Anders, William, 68 art, 127–28, 132 assets, contributing to sustainability, 134–35, 137 austerity measures, 23 Australia, 73, 109, 118 automation, 128–29 Bangladesh, 53 base year, in GDP calculations, 31, 33–34 Baumol, William, 127 Benford’s Law, 3, 143n3 Berners-Lee, Tim, 81 Bhalla, Surjit, 53 Bhutan, 112 Bos, Frits, 47–48 Boskin Commission, 35, 88 Brazil, 94, 125 Bretton Woods system, 48 BRIC economies, 94, 96 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 128–30 Burundi, 73 business, purpose of, 95 Campaign for Happiness, 112 Canada, 73, 89, 109 capabilities, 72–73, 134 capital consumption, 131 capitalism: 1970s crisis of, 59–75; 2008 crisis of, 93–118; achievements of, 5–6; innovation as hallmark of, 91; investment and depreciation, 131–33 capital widening, 132 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, 69 centrally planned economies, 46–47, 56, 60, 66–68 Central Statistical Office (United Kingdom), 18 Chad, 73 chain-weighted price indexes, 33–34 China: economic growth of, 94, 96–97; economic limitations of, 96–97; GDP of, 51–53, 96, 97; living standards in, 51, 57, 96; manufacturing and exporting in, 82, 97, 125; U.S. relations with, 97 Christophers, Brett, 104, 105 circular flow, 26–27, 27f, 57, 63 Clark, Colin, 12, 13, 17, 50, 84 Clean Water Act (1972), 69 Clegg, Nick, 110 Cobb, John, 116 Cold War, 46–47, 60, 66 communications technology, 81–82 communism, 46–47, 60, 66–68, 96 compound arithmetic, 64, 83, 130–31 comprehensive wealth, 133, 135 computers, 80–82, 87–88 conspicuous consumption, 112 consumerism, 45, 112 consumer spending (C), 27–28, 45 consumer surplus, 130 customization, of goods and services, 123–25 Cuyahoga River, 69 Daly, Herman, 116 Darling, Alastair, 102 dashboard approach, 118, 136 data collection, 33, 37, 51–53, 137–38 Data Resources, Incorporated (DRI), 21 Davenant, Charles, 8 David, Paul, 79 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 81 defense spending, 14–16 deferred stock options, 37 deflators, 31 Defoe, Daniel, 9 DeLong, Brad, 86, 117 Democratic Republic of Congo, 54, 73 Deng Xiao Ping, 96 depreciation, 25, 30, 131–33 developed/high-income countries: GDP of, 72, 93; informal economy in, 107 developing/low-income countries: economic growth/stagnation in, 61, 71–72; GDP of, 32–33, 51, 71–72; informal economy in, 107, 109; and PPP, 50–53 development aid, 72, 74 digital products and services, 129–31 disasters, GDP growth after, 43 Domar, Evsey, 55 double-entry bookkeeping, 8 Easterlin, Richard, 111 Eckstein, Otto, 21 econometric models, 20–21, 23 economic growth: critiques of, 60; in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 12; lack of, in developing countries, 61; meanings and measures of, 15; meanings of, 123; potential rate of, 82–83; problems arising from, 63–64; real, 30–31; significance of, 135–36; sustainable, 71, 116, 137; theories/models of, 55–57, 78–81; virtuous circle of, 57, 59, 64, 73, 79; well-being and welfare aided by, 135 economics, challenges to conventional, 59–61 economic welfare.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

the right to organize unions? a minimum wage? the length of patent protections?); (3) under what conditions (uninsured derivatives? fraudulent mortgages? mandatory arbitration of disputes?); (4) how to repay what’s owed (debtor’s prison? bankruptcy? corporate bailouts?); (5) what’s private and what’s public (clean air and clean water? health care? good schools?); and (6) how to pay for what’s deemed to be public (corporate taxes? personal income taxes? a wealth tax?). These rules do not exist in nature. They are human creations. Governments don’t intrude on free markets. Governments organize and maintain markets. The system is created by people.

…

As I’ve noted, twenty-one of the CEOs signing your statement preside over hugely profitable corporations that didn’t pay a cent of federal income tax in 2018, in part due to the corporate tax cut you and they successfully lobbied for. Your bank, JPMorgan Chase, got a whopping tax cut, too. The programs you’ve initiated for worker training and affordable housing are commendable, but they’re insignificant compared to those tax cuts. How do you expect our communities to pay for the schools, roads, clean water, and social services they need unless you and your colleagues push for higher taxes on corporations and yourselves? If you and the other members of your Business Roundtable were serious about becoming responsible to all your stakeholders, you’d use your formidable political power to reduce your power relative to them.

The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, Internet Archive, laissez-faire capitalism, market design, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

(The contract lasted only until 1994, however, when Coke sold its Florida orange groves, which effectively ended union representation in the state.) On some level, Austin’s rhetoric about changing the world was genuine. Under a principle he dubbed the “halo effect,” the company launched new initiatives on recycling and acquired a company called Aqua-Chem to produce desalinization plants to provide clean water in the Middle East— even though the subsidiary never turned a profit. The company’s new so­ cial thrust, however, wasn’t completely uncalculated. Now that love beads and folk music were safe cultural touchstones, Coke glommed on to the hippie movement for its biggest transformation in decades. The company had already gone from a medicinal cure-all to sign of good breeding, from refreshing pause to all-American icon.

…

In Nestlé’s case, the company was tapping underground aquifers around the United States, as citizens from Maine to California and Michigan to Texas complained about dried-up streams and dropping water levels around their plants. But at least Nestlé could legitimately call its “spring water” a unique T H E B O T T L E D WAT E R L I E 125 beverage. Coke and Pepsi were bottling municipal tap water, passing os­ tensibly clean water through additional purification processes, and then selling it for a huge markup. Meanwhile, Coke’s huge advertising cam­ paign touting Dasani’s “purity” further undermined public confidence in tap water, they argued, leading to more bottled water sales and less invest­ ment in public infrastructure.

…

Within just a few weeks, it signed on several thousand people, celebrities among them, including actor Martin Sheen. In late 2007, actors Sarah Jessica Parker and Lucy Liu supported a project to charge $1 for tap 1 32 THE COKE MACHINE water in New York City restaurants to raise money for UNICEF’s clean water efforts abroad. They raised $100,000. By that fall, Nestlé had joined Pepsi in revealing the source of its water on its labels—and went even further by including detailed water quality information on its website for all brands by 2009. Alone among the Big Three bottled water producers, Coke held out.

Escape from Hell by Larry Niven; Jerry Pournelle

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, out of africa, the long tail

Chapter 2 The Tenth Circle Ice * * * Whereat I turned me round, and saw before me, And underfoot a lake, that from the frost The semblance had of glass, and not of water. The grotto looks jeweled; it’s brighter than it ought to be. It’s not very large. I took a tourist trip to Lourdes once and it reminds me of that. A stream of clean water runs through it. I had a drink from it, the first cool, sweet water I’d tasted since I died. The grotto is at the very bottom of Hell, through the lake of ice and down. There are two ways out. One is straight up, and if Dante’s right, that’s a four–thousand–mile climb to the Earth’s surface. That’s the way Benito took, dwindling to a dark mote on a bright dot, then gone.

…

The stairway behind us was invisible, and we weren’t really leaving any kind of trail. The way got tougher as we went. There were laurel trees and kudzu vines everywhere, and the farther we went the thicker they got. The fog got thicker, too, and it stank. It was hard going, crashing through the laurel thicket and kudzu. If I’d seen clean water … well, we were both still filthy from the Circle of Gluttons. We reeked. It bothered her more than me. She’d been fastidious about her appearance even back in the Vestibule. The ground was getting soggy. Soon enough we were wading, but it wasn’t water you’d use for washing. A shape rose out of the swamp, a giant, all muscles and no neck.

…

She hurried toward the door he’d indicated. “Thank you. I’ll be right back.” We waited. No one paid me the slightest heed. The office was large, with bookcases and file cabinets, very much a working office. After what seemed a long time, Rosemary came out. She looked well groomed, very professional. She’d obviously found a comb and clean water but no makeup. Her hair was brushed straight back and down, giving her a rather severe look. She’d also washed all the stains out of her robe. Rosemary sat at the table. “Thank you, James.” “You’re welcome.” “You want me to be your Lead Deputy Prosecutor. With how large a staff?” “As many as you like.

The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure by Joseph Jenkins

Albert Einstein, clean water, Y2K

The impacts of polluted water are far-ranging, causing the deaths of 25 million people each year, three-fifths of them children.22 Half of all people in developing countries suffer from diseases associated with poor water supply and sanitation.23 Diarrhea, a disease associated with polluted water, kills six million children each year in developing countries, and it contributes to the deaths of up to 18 million people.24 At the beginning of the 21st century, one out of four people in developing countries still lacked clean water, and two out of three lacked adequate sanitation.25 Proper sanitation is defined by the World Health Organization as any excreta disposal facility that interrupts the transmission of fecal contaminants to humans.26 This definition should be expanded to include excreta recycling facilities. Compost toilet systems are now becoming internationally recognized as constituting “proper sanitation,” and are becoming more and more attractive throughout the world due to their relatively low cost when compared to waterborne waste systems and centralized sewers.

…

No electricity is needed and no water is required except a small amount for cleaning purposes. One gallon of water can clean two five gallon receptacles. It takes one adult two weeks to fill two five gallon toilet receptacles with humanure and urine, including cover material. This requires one gallon of cleaning water for every two weeks of humanure toilet use as opposed to the standard thirty gallons per person per day used to flush a water toilet. The compost, if properly managed, will heat up sufficiently for sanitation to occur, thereby making it useful for gardening purposes. The composting process is fast, i.e., the humanure is converted quickly — within a few days if not frozen — into an inoffensive substance that will not attract flies.

…

Testing the Waters VIII: Has Your Vacation Beach Cleaned Up Its Act?. Washington, D.C.: Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.; NRDC Worldview News. (1998). Pollution Persists at US Beaches. Washington, D.C.: Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. 16 - Whitaker, Barbara, Federal Judge Rules Los Angeles Violates Clean Water Laws, N. Y. Times, Dec. 24, 2002 17 Bitton, Gabriel. (1994). Wastewater Microbiology. New York: Wiley-Liss, Inc., p. 368-369. 18 National Resources Defense Council. (1997). Bulletin: Stop Polluted Runoff - 11 Actions to Clean up Our Waters. http://www.nrdc.org/nrdcpn/fppubl.html. 19 - Wastewater Microbiology, p. 86. 20 - Ralof, Janet. (1998 March 21).

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

It goes without saying that the settlements of the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) allowed the state to control the mix of export crops, to monitor production and processing, and to set producer prices in order to generate revenue. The publicly stated rationale for planned settlement schemes was almost always couched in the discourse of orderly development and social services (such as the provision of health clinics, sanitation, adequate housing, education, clean water, and infrastructure). The public rhetoric was not intentionally insincere; it was, however, misleadingly silent about the manifold ways in which orderly development of this kind served important goals of appropriation, security, and political hegemony that could not have been met through autonomous frontier settlement.

…

As in the "unimproved" forest, the existing patterns of settlement and social life in Tanzania were illegible and resistant to the narrow purposes of the state. Only by radically simplifying the settlement pattern was it possible for the state to efficiently deliver such development services as schools, clinics, and clean water. Mere administrative convenience was hardly the only objective of state officials, and that is our second point. The thinly veiled subtext of villagization was also to reorganize human communities in order to make them better objects of political control and to facilitate the new forms of communal farming favored by state policy.

…

However enthusiastic they were in spearheading their campaign, the political leaders of Tanzania were more consumers of a high-modernist faith that had originated elsewhere much earlier than they were producers. What was perhaps distinctive about the Tanzanian scheme was its speed, its comprehensiveness, and its intention to deliver such collective services as schools, clinics, and clean water. Although considerable force was applied in seeing the scheme through, even then its consequences were not nearly as brutal or irremediable as those of Soviet collectivization." The Tanzanian state's relative weakness and unwillingness to resort to Stalinist methods" as well as the Tanzanian peasants' tactical advantages, including flight, unofficial production and trade, smuggling, and foot-dragging, combined to make the practice of villagization far less destructive than the theory."'

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Their children, who have no stake in this battle, are supposed to suffer, and their parents are supposed to watch? Is that the lesson we are passing on—that poor children are inherently undeserving of a basic provision in one of the richest countries in the world? A Third World Problem? U.S. citizens denied clean water often compare their situation with that of distant, disenfranchised lands. “It’s frightening, because you think this is something that only happens somewhere like Africa,” a mother in Detroit told the LA Times. “It’s like we’re living in a Third World country,” a West Virginian told The New Yorker.

…

Water is a right, and denial of water is a form of social control. In Ukraine, water and electricity were cut off in certain regions following the Russian incursion. In Syria, multiple political groups manipulated the water supply at different times, leaving roughly one million people without access to clean water or sanitation. In Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lack water, including those living in hospitals and refugee camps. On July 15, citizens of Detroit held a rally in solidarity, holding signs that said, “Water for all, from Detroit to Palestine.” A basic resource has become a distant dream, a longing for a transformation of politics aimed at ending suffering instead of extending it.

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science by Paul Krugman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, declining real wages, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, new economy, Nick Leeson, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, trade route, very high income, working poor, zero-sum game

It isn’t as easy to summarize federal regulation as it is to summarize federal spending, but the basic point is similar: Most of what the government does is actually serving, not opposing, the public’s will. Lots of people snicker at snail-darter jokes, but only a small minority wants to see a repeal of the clean-air or clean-water laws. And the voters are prepared to punish those politicians whom they suspect of belonging to that minority. Of course, the federal government wastes a lot of money; so does the private sector (have you read “Dilbert” lately?). But the kind of oppressive government, run by meddling elitists, that Bob Dole tried to tell us about in San Diego exists only in the conservative imagination.

…

Environmental issues, however, more or less by definition involve situations in which the price is wrong—in which the private costs of an activity fail to reflect its true social costs. Let me quote from the textbook (by William Baumol and Alan Blinder) that I assigned when I taught Economics 1 last year: “When a firm pollutes a river, it uses some of society’s resources just as surely as when it burns coal. However, if the firm pays for coal but not for the use of clean water, it is to be expected that management will be economical in its use of coal and wasteful in its use of water.” In other words, when it comes to the environment, we do not expect the free market to get it right. So what should be done? Going all the way back to Paul Samuelson’s first edition in 1948, every economics textbook I know of has argued that the government should intervene in the market to discourage activities that damage the environment.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

In remote areas, the billion people who had no electricity at the start of the twenty-first century now have energy generated by their own rooftop solar modules or by wind-powered minigrids in their communities. This new access opened the door to so much more. Entire populations have leaped forward with improved sanitation, education, and health care. People who had struggled to get clean water can now provide it to their families. Children can study at night. Remote health clinics can operate effectively. Homes and buildings all over the world are becoming self-sustaining far beyond their electrical needs. For example, all buildings now collect rainwater and manage their own water use.

…

Two extremely useful articles on this subject are Jonathan Rowe and Judith Silverstein, “The GDP Myth,” JonathanRowe.org, http://jonathanrowe.org/​the-gdp-myth, originally published in Washington Monthly, March 1, 1999; and Stephen Letts, “The GDP Myth: The Planet’s Measure for Economic Growth Is Deeply Flawed and Outdated,” ABC.net.au, June 2, 2018, https://www.abc.net.au/​news/​2018-06-02/​gdp-flawed-and-out-of-date-why-still-use-it/​9821402. 65. United Nations, “About the Sustainable Development Goals,” https://www.un.org/​sustainabledevelopment/​sustainable-development-goals/. These goals are: No Poverty; Zero Hunger; Good Health and Well-being; Quality Education; Gender Equality; Clean Water and Sanitation; Affordable and Clean Energy; Decent Work and Economic Growth; Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure; Reduced Inequalities; Sustainable Cities and Communities; Responsible Consumption and Production; Climate Action; Life Below Water; Life on Land; Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions; Partnerships for the Goals. 66.

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

In fact, every 20 seconds, another child dies from a waterborne disease—and more have perished than the total number of people who’ve died in all the armed conflicts since World War II. This is why the second commitment of SwipeOut is to swipe out waterborne disease and provide clean water for as many children as possible worldwide. There are a variety of organizations with sustainable solutions out there, and some require as little as $2 a person to provide these children and their families with a reliable supply of clean water. WHAT’S THE PRICE OF FREEDOM? Throughout this book, we’ve been working to make sure that you can achieve financial freedom. What about investing a tiny fraction of what you spend each month to help secure freedom for one of the 8.4 million children in the world trapped in slavery?

…

I provide fresh water for 100,000 people a day in India—it’s one of my passions. Wouldn’t it be amazing for us together to provide 3 million people with clean water a day and grow it from there? Or how about together freeing 5,000 children who had been enslaved, and supporting their education and a path to a healthy life? That’s what the power of just 100,000 of us can do. Just as I built my foundation, this mission could grow geometrically. If over a decade or more we could find a way to grow to a million members, that would be a billion meals provided each year, 30 million people with clean water, or 50,000 children freed from slavery. These figures would be extraordinary, but in truth, even one child’s life saved would be worth all the effort.

…

Lack of fresh water is one of the biggest concerns for populations growing like crazy in dry regions of the planet, and shortages are everywhere, from Los Angeles, California, to Lagos, Nigeria. According to the UN, more than 3.4 million people die each year because of water-borne diseases. But new desalinization technologies are turning seawater into tap water from Australia to Saudi Arabia. Already an Israeli company called Water-Gen is manufacturing a machine that extracts clean water out of air, and it uses only two cents’ worth of electricity to produce each liter of water. And in remote villages that have no electricity, there’s a new kind of water tower that uses only its shape and natural materials to pull moisture out of the air and turn it into drinking water. The amazing inventor Dean Kamen (best known for the Segway scooter) has partnered with Coca-Cola to bring the world an energy-efficient machine the size of a dorm-room refrigerator that vaporizes dirty water and makes it clean and safe.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

The pattern of our lives is set by the span we hope to live: we know how much time we can allot to education, and we can tell the prime of our lives, and if we’re brave enough to acknowledge it, we can prepare for our approaching death. It’s true that the average human life span has increased, mostly because far fewer babies die and because advances such as basic sanitation have dramatically reduced disease. Researchers studying chlorination have found that clean water led to a 43 percent reduction in mortality in the average American city, a reminder of what happens when we work together.1 But the people who live the longest aren’t living any longer. A hundred and fifteen years appears to be pretty near the upper edge, a boundary set by the so-called Hayflick limit on the number of times human cells can divide; so far it has been as inviolate for humans as the speed of light.

…

That unprecedented display of concern (and some subsequent electoral defeats for politicians tied to polluters) jolted Washington. With the usual balance of power upended, for a few years, major corporations lost one battle after another: Richard Nixon, no environmentalist, had little political choice but to sign the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the other environmental laws still in effect today. But success can sap movements. The organizations that had taken to the streets now retreated to big Washington offices, where they concentrated on lobbying. For a while, that strategy worked, because that first Earth Day had put enough juice in the battery to run a powerful motor for a decade or two.

…

., and cognitive ability and drought and extinctions and heat trapping and increase in natural gas vs. coal and nutrients in crops and oceans and oil industry research and permafrost and rainfall and reducing U.S. footprint and sea level and “Carbon Dioxide: They Call It Pollution” (TV ad) carbon taxes Cargill Carnegie, Andrew Carson, Rachel Carter, Clint Cas9 enzyme cattle ranching cedars of Lebanon Center for Genetics and Society Center for Libertarian Studies Center for the Study of Public Choice Centers for Disease Control cereals CertainTeed Corporation Charpentier, Emmanuelle Chattanooga, Tennessee Chaucer, Geoffrey chemotherapy Cheney, Dick Chevron Oil China chlorination chlorofluorocarbons choice Christianity Church, George Churchill, Canada Churchill, Winston CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile CompaniON) Citizens United civil disobedience civil rights movement Clean Air Act Clean Water Act Cleveland Clinic climate change. See also atmospheric temperature, rise in; oceans; and specific energy sources; and impacts advanced nature of antigovernment ideology and difficulty of solving global rally of 2009 and Hansen on heat trapping gases and human nature and impact of Koch brothers and leverage and nonviolence and oil industry and politics and scientific consensus on slowing down Thatcher on Trump and climate change deniers climate scientists Clinton, Bill cloning coal coastal communities Collapse (Diamond) colonialism Columbus, Christopher Comfort, Nathaniel Common Cause commons, theory of communism community.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

But you also need to nurture the recovery of scientific investigation and provide the most worthwhile kernels of knowledge to begin exploring.* We’ll start with the basics and see how you can provide the fundamental elements of a comfortable life for yourself after the Fall: sufficient food and clean water, clothes and building materials, energy and essential medicines. There will be a number of immediate concerns for the survivors: cultivable crops must be gathered from farmland and seed caches before they die and are lost; diesel can be rendered from biofuel crops to keep engines running until the machinery fails, and parts can be scavenged to reestablish a local power grid.

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Bottled water can be scavenged from supermarkets and from water coolers in office buildings. Other reservoirs of water you’ll be able to drain include hotel and gym swimming pools, as well as the hot water tanks in any large building. In time, you’ll come to rely on water sources you’d normally have wrinkled your nose at. Every survivor will need at least three liters of clean water every day, and more in hot climates or with exertion. And keep in mind that this is for rehydration alone, and does not include water necessary for cooking and washing. Water that doesn’t come from a sealed bottle must be purified. A surefire method for sterilizing water of pathogens is to bring it to a hearty boil for a few minutes (although this offers no protection against chemical contamination).

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Even something as historically devastating as cholera is not actually directly lethal: you die from rapid dehydration resulting from the profuse diarrhea, losing as much as 20 liters of body fluid a day. The treatment, therefore, is astoundingly straightforward, even though it was not widely adopted until the 1970s. Oral rehydration therapy (ORT) consists of no more than a liter of clean water with a tablespoon of salt and three tablespoons of sugar stirred in, to replace not only the water lost in the sickness, but also your body’s osmolytes. To survive cholera you don’t need advanced pharmaceuticals, just attentive nursing. CHILDBIRTH AND NEONATAL CARE Without modern medical intervention, childbirth will once again become a dangerous time for both mother and child.

The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches by Marshall Brain

Amazon Web Services, basic income, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, digital map, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Garrett Hardin, income inequality, job automation, knowledge worker, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Stephen Hawking, Tragedy of the Commons, working poor

What the aliens discover about the human species as a whole would shock them: Three billion of the people on the planet – approximately half – are destitute. They live in shocking poverty. There are 10 million children dying of easily preventable causes every year - things like starvation, thirst, cholera. Billions of people lack any form of health care. Billions of people lack access to basics like clean water, adequate food and safe housing. Environmentally, we are raping the planet in hundreds of ways. A mass extinction event is looming on the horizon, yet we appear unmotivated to do anything at all to prevent it. Humans are constantly at war, constantly killing one another somewhere in the world.

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We should create Heaven on Earth for every human being - seven billion people living together peacefully, comfortably and without suffering. We try to get as close to that goal as possible, in an environmentally sustainable way. What would Heaven on Earth mean in reality? It would mean that each and every person on the planet has access to an an abundant supply of healthy food and clean water. That each and every person has access to luxurious housing and clothing. That we are all safe. That we can all communicate with everyone. That we all have free and open access to education and entertainment. That cutting edge health care is available freely to everyone, and the cutting edge is advancing as rapidly as possible, curing more and more diseases and ailments as fast as we can.

Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food by Steve Striffler

clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, longitudinal study, market design, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Foster Farms, the largest poultry company in Toward a Friendlier Chicken 159 the West and a top-ten producer nationally, pled guilty in  to “negligently discharging approximately  million gallons of storm water polluted with decomposed chicken manure into the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge in violation of the Clean Water Act.” The company agreed to pay a criminal fine of $,. In January , Central Industries, along with its five subsidiaries (including BCR Foods, a top-twenty poultry producer), were indicted in Jackson, Mississippi, for violating the Clean Water Act. The company processes thousands of tons of poultry by-products, some of which, including untreated blood, bypassed the rendering plant and went directly into a wastewater lagoon, eventually seeping into local rivers.

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Parkinson's law, post-war consensus, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, technological determinism, Thomas Malthus, urban sprawl

Yet the number in abject poverty today is as great as all mankind in 1901.64 By the end of the twentieth century, the world’s three richest individuals (all of whom were Americans) had a combined wealth greater than that of the poorest fortyeight countries.65 In 1998, the United Nations calculated that US$40 billion, spent carefully, could provide clean water, sanitation, and other basic needs for the poorest on earth.66 The figure may be optimistic, and it may have grown in the past six years. But it’s still considerably less than the funds already set aside for the obscenely wasteful fantasy of a missile shield that won’t work, isn’t needed, yet could provoke a new arms race and the militarization of space.

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The three were Bill Gates (Microsoft), Helen Walton (Wal-Mart), and Warren Buffett (investor), with US$51 billion, $48 billion, and $33 billion, respectively. The report estimates that a child born in the United States, Britain, or France will, in its lifetime, consume and pollute more than fifty children do in the poor nations. It also estimates that in 1998, only $40 billion was needed to bring basic health, education, clean water, and sanitation to the world’s poorest citizens. Gates alone could afford that and still have $11 billion left; he also owns more than the poorest 100 million Americans combined. Other sources indicate that within the United States, the ratio between the salary of a CEO and that of a shop-floor worker has soared from 39:1 in the late 1970s to about 1,000:1 today.

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

When the UN launched its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) in 2015, for example, it laid them out as a series of little coloured boxes with a logo on each one. Not all were directly climate change related – no poverty, zero hunger, and quality education were among the goals, for example. Others included climate action, affordable and clean energy, and clean water and sanitation. Fund managers now often say that their fund is investing in line with one or more of these goals. The well-designed logos have proven particularly impactful in marketing materials. ‘The person who invented those icons should be given a job at [advertising giant] Saatchi, as every investment manager is using them,’ jokes Michael Lewis, head of ESG thematic research at DWS, the German asset manager.

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But there is also a view in the investment industry that some managers create products that might be compared to spaghetti – throwing them at the wall to see what sticks – in order to take advantage of a trend. One fund manager gives the example of water funds that say they invest in line with the SDG goal of clean water and sanitation. The goal is to address the lack of sanitation and improve access to safe drinking water, mainly in poor countries. Yet many water funds are stocked with Western utility companies, which, the manager says, ‘are processing rich people’s sewage when the problem is a lack of drinking water in the Third World.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

Remember, energy price is often what determines economic viability, and as a result we likely discount the other things that are possible as energy is reduced in price. An underlying reason for refugee crises and pressure on immigration in developed countries around the world is the scarcity of basic resources like food and water. With lower-cost or free energy, why couldn’t there be there be an abundance of clean water? It’s not that technology doesn’t exist to convert salt water to fresh water. It has been around for decades; it just comes down to cost. The paradox of many coastal communities around the developing world is that even though they are surrounded by water, it is not usable for drinking or irrigation because of its salt content.

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Desalination—the removal of salt from sea water—is much more efficient today through the large-scale use of reverse osmosis, a process whereby salt water is pumped through a water-permeable membrane. But though readily available, it’s not widely commercially viable because it takes a lot of energy: the operating pressures required are between 800 and 1,000 psi.40 Lower-cost energy completely upends that dynamic, bringing with it clean water and all the other accompanying benefits for society—including helping to prevent the environmental conditions that can lead to wars and refugee crises. Clean energy will stop adding more carbon dioxide to our environment, of course. Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have taken levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere to levels never before seen in human history: 415 parts per million.

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation by Michael Chabon

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, clean water, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, land tenure, mental accounting, microdosing, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, off grid, off-the-grid, Right to Buy, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

And they can’t see family members in the West Bank and Israel. In Gaza, they can scarcely find work. And every few years, it seems, Hamas engages in a disastrous fight with its infinitely more powerful Israeli neighbors, and this further limits Gazan civilians’ ability to move in and out of Gaza, and curtails their access to goods, clean water, electricity, and opportunities. Basilah and many other Gazans I met refer to Gaza as an “open-air prison,” and it’s difficult to argue with the description. On Gaza’s northern border there is a twenty-five-foot wall separating Gaza from Israel. This barrier is forty miles long, and long stretches of it are thirteen feet higher than the Berlin Wall, and far more heavily fortified.

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Along with the solar panels, the tank was supplied to the people of Susiya by the nonprofit Palestinian-Israeli organization Community Energy Technology in the Middle East (Comet-ME). Comet employs Ahmad, who holds a degree in laboratory science from al-Quds University. Its mission is to supply renewable energy and clean water services to some of the most impoverished and marginalized people in the occupied Palestinian territories. Including Susiya, Comet currently serves about thirty villages in the South Hebron Hills. These small hamlets are mostly composed of clans of shepherds and farmers who dwell in caves and tents, living much as their ancestors have for centuries, separating the wheat from the chaff, except that in recent history they’ve had the bulk of their land grabbed.

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Nasser referred to the agreement reached twenty years earlier in the Oslo accords, after which there were to be no new settlements built. The number of settlers has tripled since that time. “It’s illegal for Mekorot and the Israel Electric Corporation to supply outposts like this, and yet they do it all the time.” I asked Nasser how access to clean water and electricity through Comet had affected his family. He gushed about how it had made life easier, but still emphasized the differences in Susiya (the Palestinian village) versus Susya (the Israeli settlement). “The revolution of electricity is like a river that can’t be stopped. This has given our dark life more light.

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

Conversely, a barber in the stagnant upstate New York city of Gloversville, where my mother grew up, lamented to me that post–World War II population loss meant “ten thousand fewer haircuts every year.” Many individuals who write about environmental problems prefer to live in growing cities teeming with people and ideas. But at the macro level, global population growth makes it difficult to address climate change, species extinction, and lack of availability to clean water. Viewed through a wide-angle lens, the curve of human population growth since the birth of our species remained practically flat for tens of thousands of years but, after 1860, spiked dramatically upwards in a nearly vertical line, prompting some on Wall Street to refer to human population growth as the “ultimate bubble.”

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Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), meanwhile, deemed the wise management of natural resources essential to economic growth.11 As historian Paul Milazzo has shown, the pursuit of economic growth played an influential role in the environmental policy making of the 1950s–70s, especially in the promotion of clean water.12 At the same time, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations embraced the new postmaterialist, quality-of-life sensibility, becoming the only administrations in US history to make the quest for beauty a priority.13 From this point of view, the population surge was primarily a problem of abundance.

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See Council of Economic Advisers, “The American Economy in 1961: Problems and Policies,” Statement of the Council of Economic Advisers before the Joint Economic Committee, March 6, 1961, Papers of President John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, President’s Office Files, Departments and Agencies, Box 73, Folder “Council of Economic Advisers Testimony, 3/6/61”; and Paul Charles Milazzo, Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945–1972 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). 125. See, for example, John Maurice Clark, “Common and Disparate Elements in National Growth and Decline,” in Universities-National Bureau Committee on Economic Research, Problems in the Study of Economic Growth, 30–32. 126. Potter, People of Plenty, 59. 127.

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons by Peter Barnes

Albert Einstein, car-free, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, dark matter, digital divide, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, hypertext link, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, jitney, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, new economy, patent troll, precautionary principle, profit maximization, Ronald Coase, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

Some of the easements are purchased, others are donated by owners in exchange for tax benefits. Here again, owners keep their land but agree to forgo nonforest development and to harvest trees sustainably. PFT’s goal is to protect not only forests themselves but the many species that live in them, as well as the ecosystem services— such as clean water and carbon absorption—that forests provide. As with MALT, some of PFT’s money comes from public sources. In return, the public gets healthy forests for considerably less than it would cost to buy and manage them outright. Valves and Their Keepers One job of common property trusts is to preserve habitat and landscapes, but such trusts can also play another role—controlling the flow of pollution into ecosystems.

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His bestselling book Progress and Poverty catapulted him to fame in the 1880s, but mainstream economists never took him seriously. By the twentieth century, economists had largely lost interest in rent; it seemed a trivial factor in wealth production compared to capital and labor. But the twenty-first century ecological crisis brings rent back to center-stage. Now it’s not just land that’s scarce, but clean water, undisturbed habitat, biological diversity, waste absorption capacity, and entire ecosystems. This brings us back to common property rights. The definition and allocation of property rights are the primary factors in determining who pays whom for what. If, in the case of pollution rights, pollution rights are given free to past polluters, the rent from the polluted ecosystem will also go to them.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

It has a recycling system—duck manure is used as fish food, cold-water hyacinth beds are sold as organic fertilizer, and the sun energy lights up the duck coop to maintain the egg production.” So giggling children attend school, even during flood months, and their families can produce food and clean water despite the deluges. In this way, if monsoons or conflicts push people from their homes, the flotilla creates lifesavers of education, medicine, food, lighting, and communication. Rezwan can’t single-handedly fight climate change, but his brilliantly simple solution is helping people adapt. The words “adaptation” and “mitigation” are appearing more and more often in the lexicon of climate scientists, who use them to cover practical (and impractical) responses to climate change.

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Despite the cold breeze there’s a warm afternoon sun. Soon the tide will be walking in and the pink-legged seagulls skimming the shoreline. In a few months the summer crowds will arrive to eat fresh seafood, attend the puppet theater, fall asleep to the slurred voice of the ocean, and enjoy the ecstasy of coastal life and clean water, with time strapped to their wrists. PART II IN THE HOUSE OF STONE AND LIGHT ASPHALT JUNGLES Watching Budi tumbling and climbing, at play with ball and shadow and iPad alike, I marvel at the road the human race has traveled. Open your imagination to how we began—as semiupright apes who spent some of their time in trees; next as ragtag bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers; then as purposeful custodians of favorite grains, chosen with mind-bending slowness, over thousands of years; and in time as intrepid farmers and clearers of forests with fixed roofs over our heads and a more reliable food supply; afterward as builders of villages and towns dwarfed by furrowed, well-tilled farmlands; then as makers, fed by such inventions as the steam engine (a lavish power source unlike horses, oxen, or water power, and not subject to health or weather, not limited by location); later as industry’s operators, drudges and tycoons who moved closer to the factories that arose in honeycombed cities beside endless fields of staple crops (like corn, wheat, and rice) and giant herds of key species (mainly cows, sheep, or pigs); and finally as builders of big buzzing metropolises, ringed by suburbs on whose fringes lay shrinking farms and forests; and then, as if magnetized by a fierce urge to coalesce, fleeing en masse into those mountainous hope-scented cities.

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I’ll warm your apartment today, you’ll warm my schoolroom tomorrow. It’s effective and homely as gathering together in a cave. Sometimes there’s nothing like an old idea revamped. It’s hard not to admire the Swedes’ resolve, but it wasn’t always this way. During the 1970s Sweden suffered from pollution, dying forests, lack of clean water, and an oil habit exceeding any other in the industrialized world. In the past decade, through the use of wind and solar power, recycling of wastewater throughout eco-suburbs, linking up urban infrastructure in synergistic ways, and imposing stringent building codes, Swedes have axed their oil dependency by a staggering 90 percent, trimmed CO2 by 9 percent, and reduced sulfur pollution to pre–World War I levels.

Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell

Anthropocene, carbon footprint, clean water, Google Earth, gravity well, liberation theology, nuclear paranoia, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the scientific method, young professional

There are duck blinds, and a duck-identification chart from an organization called Ducks Unlimited, and a good number of actual ducks present on the lake, possibly including several I had recently failed to murder. So ducktastic was it that I began to wonder whether Suncor was trying to stick it to poor old Syncrude, with all its duck problems, just up the road. Surely some Suncor PR rep had hoped for a newspaper headline proclaiming, “Suncor, Neighbor to Duck-Destroyer Syncrude, Offers Clean Water, Reeds, at Waterfowl Haven.” I set out on my hike, keeping the lake on my right, ambling through a spray of purple wildflowers. There were dragonflies, again, and mosquitoes, too—snarling, clannish mosquitoes of the Albertan variety, with thick forearms and tribal tattoos. But I was ready. Don had lent me a bug jacket—a nylon shirt with a small tent for your head and face—and I had armed myself with enough spray-on DEET to poison a whole village.

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Driving south, I passed the occasional clot of trash—a shattered television on the shoulder, a pink recliner submerged to its forehead in a placid side channel. Cormorants and pelicans wheeled by, and cranes and herons, and other long-necked beasties. Here and there, men sat by their pickup trucks and fished. The fish were not biting, they told me. Of course they’re not biting, I thought. You’re fishing in clean water. Finally I spotted a pair of SUVs parked by the canal that ran parallel to the road. It was Rhonda’s crew. I had caught them in the act. The pelican was already in the water, floating next to the reeds on the far side of the channel, maybe fifty feet away. I walked up to Rhonda and her three colleagues.

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And he wanted to make sure I had my story straight. “People used to drink Yamuna to purify themselves,” he said. “Now you can’t even touch it. Recently some pilgrims drank some Yamuna water and had to be hospitalized that same night.” The villages along the river couldn’t use it as a water source anymore. “Can’t government provide people clean water?” he demanded. “If the government can put a Metro train a hundred feet underground, it can do this.” He chopped one hand against the other. Someone had to purify the purifier. “Until Yamuna is clean, we are not going to back off. This is higher than religion. Higher than human beings.” Hiking with the sadhus is cheaper than taking the bus, and more scenic, but you will have to come to terms with crapping in the open, which for Westerners can be profoundly difficult.

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World by Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Paul Slovic

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, experimental economics, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kenneth Arrow, Loma Prieta earthquake, London Interbank Offered Rate, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Oklahoma City bombing, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, social discount rate, source of truth, statistical model, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

We must not only protect the countryside and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities. Our conservation must be not just the classic conservation of protection and development, but a creative conservation of restoration and innovation. Johnson’s administration was responsible for the following items of legislation:• Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments • Wilderness Act of 1964 • Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966 • National Trails System Act of 1968 • Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968 • Land and Water Conservation Act of 1965 • Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965 • Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965 • National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 • Aircraft Noise Abatement Act of 1968 • National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 Many of these were the predecessors of legislation that today still forms the backbone of America’s environmental policy: The Endangered Species Preservation Act is the forerunner of the Endangered Species Act, and the Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments set the framework for the air and water quality legislation that we have today.

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Johnson’s administration was responsible for the following items of legislation:• Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments • Wilderness Act of 1964 • Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966 • National Trails System Act of 1968 • Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968 • Land and Water Conservation Act of 1965 • Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965 • Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965 • National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 • Aircraft Noise Abatement Act of 1968 • National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 Many of these were the predecessors of legislation that today still forms the backbone of America’s environmental policy: The Endangered Species Preservation Act is the forerunner of the Endangered Species Act, and the Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments set the framework for the air and water quality legislation that we have today. At times, Johnson was passionate on environmental issues: He commented that “[t]here is no excuse for a river running red with blood from slaughterhouses. There is no excuse for paper mills pouring sulfuric acid into the lakes and streams of the people of this country.

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Your fad is going right now. Get what you can, and here’s what I can get for you.”4 And he proceeded to get a remarkable amount for them. His legislative achievements include the National Environmental Policy Act, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, the banning of DDT, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. All of this legislation has continued to form the basis of our environmental policy for the last three decades, and no subsequent president has come close to this level of environmental activism. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no evidence that the state of the environment actually mattered personally and emotionally to Richard Nixon, as it clearly did to Teddy Roosevelt.

Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations by Arnold van de Laar Laproscopic Surgeon

Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, placebo effect, the scientific method, wikimedia commons

The wind blew through the cracks in the doors and window frames, the walls were wet from rising damp, and the snow came in under the front door. There was little to be done about it, so people always wore thick clothing, day and night. Rembrandt’s portraits show people in fur coats wearing hats. In those days people were not able to take a daily bath in clean water. The water in the canals was sewer water. Dead rats floated in it, people defecated in it and threw their waste into it, and tanners, brewers and painters discharged their waste chemicals in it. The canals in the Jordaan district of the city were little more than extensions of the muddy ditches that passed through the surrounding pasturelands, so that cow manure flowed slowly into the River Amstel.

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This dead tissue is referred to as necrosis and provides an ideal breeding ground for all kinds of bacteria. But, because of the lack of oxygen in the wound, the Clostridium perfringens bacteria will thrive the most. That is how gas gangrene starts. For anyone who knows all this, the solution is relatively simple. Clean the wound as quickly as possible. Rinse it out with clean water (for example, the crystal clear sea water in the bays of Saint Martin) and leave it open. Then use a sharp knife to cut away all the dead material until you come to healthy tissue. There are fine-sounding surgical terms for this: debridement or nettoyage in French, anfrischen in German, or necrosectomy in English (from the Latin/Greek).

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Both complaints are more common in men than women, and perianal fistulas mostly develop at a slightly later age – between thirty and fifty – than pilonidal cysts. Louis was forty-eight. Perianal fistulas can sometimes be caused by Crohn’s disease, inflammation of the bowel, but the cause is mostly unclear. In Louis’s case, the unhygienic conditions at Versailles may have played a part. Due to a lack of clean water and refrigerators, people living at the court had just as much chance as everybody else of suffering regularly from diarrhoea, caused by food poisoning. Moreover, the Sun King did not wash. He smelled so badly that once, when being visited by an ambassador, he was friendly enough to open a window himself so that his guest was not offended by his bodily odour.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

When John Nagl served in Baghdad in 2003, he found that while his young, inexperienced soldiers had the authority to kill, he – a major with a doctorate and a decade of experience – didn’t have the authority to print his own propaganda pamphlets to counteract the clever PR camign that the local insurgents were running. The commander of US forces in Baghdad in 2004 found that he couldn’t tap into the massive USAID budget to provide electricity, clean water, jobs and other assistance to the locals. The budget had been assigned in Washington DC to the Bechtel Corporation, which had been commissioned to carry out a few very large, long-term projects instead. The commander could see immediate needs but had no authority to act. Over time, the Army learned to decentralise these essential decisions to the same extent that they had decentralised the authority to shoot people.

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We may have booming universities and armies of knowledge workers, but when it comes to producing new ideas, we are running to stand still. This is particularly worrying because we are hoping that new technology will solve so many of our problems. Consider climate change: Bjorn Lomborg, famous as ‘the sceptical environmentalist’ who thinks we worry too much about climate change and not enough about clean water or malaria, argues that we should be spending fifty times more on research and development into clean energy and geoengineering. If that’s the demand from someone who thinks climate change is over-hyped, we are entering a world in which we expect much, much more from new technology. 5 The problem with patents The obvious place to turn for solutions is to the market, where countless companies compete to bring new ideas into profitable shape, from start-ups to giant innovation factories such as Intel, General Electric and GlaxoSmithKline.

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Consider the PlayPump, a clever-sounding idea in which a deep well is connected to a pump powered by a children’s roundabout as a way of bringing fresh water to isolated communities. As the children play, the roundabout spins, and the pump fills a large tank that can be tapped as needed. The PlayPump removes the need both for unreliable electrical pumps and for hours of labour from hardworking women: clean water simply appears as a by-product of innocent play. Or does it? Because it’s a pricey and mechanically inefficient alternative to a hand-pump, the PlayPump justifies itself only if the village children really do spend much of their time playing on it. From the pictures sent back from rural Africa, it seems that they do.

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cass Sunstein, charter city, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, experimental subject, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, land tenure, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, microcredit, moral hazard, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, tontine, urban planning

Thus, if malaria indeed reduces earnings in Kenya by 50 percent, a $14 investment will increase incomes by $295 for the 30 percent of the population that would have gotten malaria without the net. The average return is $88 every year over the child’s entire adult work life—enough for a parent to buy a lifetime supply of bed nets for all his or her children, with a chunk of change left over. There are other examples of highly effective health investments. Access to clean water and sanitation is one of them. Overall, in 2008, according to estimates by WHO and UNICEF, approximately 13 percent of the world’s population lacked access to improved water sources (typically meaning a tap or a well) and about one-fourth did not have access to water that is safe to drink.9 And many of these people are the very poor.

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What the lack of demand underscores is perhaps the fundamental difficulty of the problem of health: The ladders to get out of the poverty trap exist but are not always in the right place, and people do not seem to know how to step onto them or even want to do so. The Desire for Better Health Since they do not seem to be willing to sacrifice much money or time to get clean water, bed nets, or for that matter, deworming pills or fortified flour, despite their potentially large health benefits, does that mean the poor do not care about health? The evidence suggests the opposite. When asked whether there was a period of a month in the recent past when they felt “worried, tense, or anxious,” roughly one-fourth of the poor in both rural Udaipur and urban South Africa said yes.20 This is much higher than what we see in the United States.

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THE VIEW FROM OUR COUCH The poor seem to be trapped by the same kinds of problems that afflict the rest of us—lack of information, weak beliefs, and procrastination among them. It is true that we who are not poor are somewhat better educated and informed, but the difference is small because, in the end, we actually know very little, and almost surely less than we imagine. Our real advantage comes from the many things that we take as given. We live in houses where clean water gets piped in—we do not need to remember to add Chlorin to the water supply every morning. The sewage goes away on its own—we do not actually know how. We can (mostly) trust our doctors to do the best they can and can trust the public health system to figure out what we should and should not do.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

‘Water from the pond comes in,’ he says, pointing to a pipe. ‘Then we harvest the algae out of it.’ ‘Algae are very cool,’ enthuses Vicki. ‘Those algae have been feeding on contaminants in the water. By removing them, we’re most of the way to turning wastewater into fresh clean water,’ Mark continues. ‘We put the water through a few more steps but the algae do the initial hard work.’ ‘Clean water is the major part of the business,’ says Vicki. Mark takes me to the end of the second blue container, where a green sludge that looks like a cross between pesto and snot is dropping off a roller. ‘This is algae paste. We process it to create something we call “biocrude” that can be made into fuels.’

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There are thousands of varieties of algae and they vary depending on the time of year.’ ‘You work with what nature already puts in the pond? You’re algae sluts?’ Vicki laughs. ‘Yeah, when it comes to algae, we’ll go with anyone! But what that means is that we can turn any municipal waste pond into a manufacturer of cheap clean water and biofuel.’ It’s a pretty cool idea and one that will no doubt find its place. In fact, a few months after my visit to Blenheim, the company announces a partnership with the United States Gas Technology Institute to ‘demonstrate the conversion of algae biomass directly to gasoline and diesel fuel.’

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty by Peter Singer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, Cass Sunstein, clean water, do well by doing good, end world poverty, experimental economics, Garrett Hardin, illegal immigration, Larry Ellison, Martin Wolf, microcredit, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Peter Singer: altruism, pre–internet, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, union organizing

More die, like that small boy in Ghana, from measles, malaria, and diarrhea, conditions that either don’t exist in developed nations, or, if they do, are almost never fatal. The children are vulnerable to these diseases because they have no safe drinking water, or no sanitation, and because when they do fall ill, their parents can’t afford any medical treatment. UNICEF, Oxfam, and many other organizations are working to reduce poverty and provide clean water and basic health care, and these efforts are reducing the toll. If the relief organizations had more money, they could do more, and more lives would be saved. Now think about your own situation. By donating a relatively small amount of money, you could save a child’s life. Maybe it takes more than the amount needed to buy a pair of shoes—but we all spend money on things we don’t really need, whether on drinks, meals out, clothing, movies, concerts, vacations, new cars, or house renovation.

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Organizations often put out figures suggesting that lives can be saved for very small amounts of money. WHO, for example, estimates that many of the 3 million people who die annually from diarrhea or its complications can be saved by an extraordinarily simple recipe for oral rehydration therapy: a large pinch of salt and a fistful of sugar dissolved in a jug of clean water. This lifesaving remedy can be assembled for a few cents, if only people know about it.3 UNICEF estimates that the hundreds of thousands of children who still die of measles each year could be saved by a vaccine costing less than $1 a dose.4 And Nothing But Nets, an organization conceived by American sportswriter Rick Reilly and supported by the National Basketball Association, provides anti-mosquito bed nets to protect children in Africa from malaria, which kills a million children a year.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Donald Davies, double helix, Hernando de Soto, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, negative emissions, ocean acidification, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Three years later, biologists at the station succeeded in getting one of the carp—now grown—to spawn. Thousands more fingerlings resulted. Pretty much immediately, some escaped. Baby carp made their way into the White River, a tributary of the Mississippi. Later, in the 1970s, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission found a use for silver and bighead carp. The Clean Water Act had just been passed, and local governments were under pressure to comply with the new standards. But a lot of communities couldn’t afford to upgrade their sewage-treatment plants. The Game and Fish Commission thought that stocking carp in treatment ponds might help. The carp would reduce the nutrient load in the ponds by consuming the algae that thrived on the excess nitrogen.

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When Chicago solved its sewage problem by digging the Sanitary and Ship Canal, a portal opened up, and the two aquatic realms were connected. For most of the twentieth century, this wasn’t much of an issue; the canal, loaded with Chicago’s waste, was too toxic to serve as a viable route. With the passage of the Clean Water Act and the work of groups like the Friends of the Chicago River, conditions improved, and creatures like the round goby began to slip through. In December 2009, the Corps shut down one of the electrical barriers on the canal to perform routine maintenance. The nearest Asian carp was believed to be fifteen miles downstream.