We travelled up to Bristol yesterday to hear Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows talk on their one stop in England on the Venus Project World Lecture Tour.  Unfortunately we arrived late, after enduring traffic hell on the M5 motorway northbound from Devon.  We missed the start of Roxanne's talk, but we did get to hear all of Jacque's talk and the subsequent  Q&A session.  During his talk Jacque had made it quite clear that he thinks a lot of people talk bullshit, including politicians, psychologists and lovers! He had occasionally used some four lettered vernacular also. We got surprised in the foyer after his lecture by Jacque himself, who unexpectedly emerged to shake our hands and enquire if Kasia had been offended by any of his fruitier language. She assured him she hadn't been!  Having been sat near the back during the main presentation it was great to see him up close and chat briefly, even if he did take the opportunity to illustrate one of his points by suggesting that my prior conditioning might lead me to punch the guy opposite me on the nose!

It seems like quite has lot has happened since my first blog post about Jacque's proposals for a resource based economy.  The lecture in Bristol was organised by the Zeitgiest Movement, which is now "the activist arm of The Venus Project", for example. There also now seems to be lots of controversy about Jacque's ideas at a variety of locations on the internet!  Here's a few of the things Jaqcue himself had to say yesterday:

There's no such place as "Utopia" – Everything changes

Man cannot think or reason

There's no such thing as "Human Nature"

You and I are merely "Consumers" – Our values are shaped by the existing monetary system.

We don't talk TO each other – We talk AT each other

90% of schools are run by "Horse's Arses"

Children should be taught to be "Problem Solvers"

Don't be "Polite" – The only way to learn is through confrontation

Even the wealthiest people of today will have "a better standard of living" following a change to a resource based economy

If you don't do anything, nothing will change

Plenty more food for thought in amongst all that.  His talk did raise at least one question in my own mind, which I never actually got to ask Jacque because he and Roxanne had to rush off to talk to the press.  Here it is:

Personally I'm not very keen on elites, but it sounds like experienced engineers like myself, apparently already conditioned to "consume" and to "punch people on the nose", might very well become a new elite following a change to a resource based society. Personally I'm not too keen on committees either. How would the members of Jacque's proposed "survey committees" be selected? At random? By virtue of being part of a new elite? By some other mechanism?

Yesterday Google and other members of The Climate Group sent an open letter to President Barack Obama urging him to:

Adopt the goal of giving every household and business access to timely, useful and actionable information on their energy use.

Studies and experience show that when people have access to direct feedback on their electricity use, they can achieve significant savings through simple behavioral changes. Investments in home energy efficiency, along with automating appliances and other devices, can lead to even greater savings.

Google have been working along these lines for some time with their PowerMeter project, which aims to provide:

A free energy monitoring tool that allows you to view your home's energy consumption from anywhere online.

Recently Google have added a "social" element to the project, by enabling you to share details of your personal energy consumption logged on Google's servers with "your friends, the Joneses".  Google assure their readers that:

All sharing is completely opt-in and your privacy will still be protected.

Whilst I am a firm believer in providing people with feedback on their personal energy consumption, I can't help thinking that many people won't be too wild about the idea of Google, let alone the Government, having access to vast amounts of data about their energy consuming habits.

Following on from their letter to Mr. Obama, Google and The Climate Group held an event on the topic in Washington DC today, which included a presentation by Carol Browner, the White House energy adviser. As well as their own blog, Google are using social media website Twitter to spread the word about the event.  According to comments on Twitter I'm not the only one concerned about smart grid privacy and security issues. Apparently Leslie Harris of the Center for Democracy and Technology thinks that:

There will be a consumer backlash to smart meters if consumers aren't in control of their energy data.

I wonder if Google or other members of The Climate Group are working on a means whereby people will be able to keep track of their personal energy consumption and expenditure in a user friendly way, but without Google and/or "the Joneses" being able to access it?

Earlier this week Dutch energy consulting and certification company KEMA announced that the Hoogkerk "PowerMatching City" had been officially opened by the mayor of Groningen. According to KEMA:

Hoogkerk is the first microgrid project in Europe to integrate a full-scale, operational “smart” residential community energy system. The community includes 25 interconnected residential homes equipped with micro-cogeneration units, hybrid heat pumps, PV solar panels, smart appliances and electric vehicles, and additional community-based power produced by a wind farm and a gas turbine.

Whilst 25 homes seems to me to be stretching the definition of "a city" a bit far, it seems that:

The project seeks to develop a market model for a smart grid, creating an industry reference standard to help enable wide-scale smart grid implementation. In the live phase, research into the community members’ energy use behavior will be undertaken to gain insight into the “smart” energy consumer. Data will be collected on how, how much and when electricity is used and analyzed to explore consumer willingness to exchange comfort for flexibility based on financial incentives.

This project is a "high tech" solution to future sustainability, of the sort being promoted by a variety of giant corporations, notably IBM with their "Smarter Planet" initiative. It seems that IBM have identified cities as the biggest hurdle standing in the way of a sustainable future, and they suggest "Smarter Cities" as a solution. As IBM put it:
More on Visions of a Smarter Planet

This week's edition of The Economist magazine includes an article about Haiti entitled "Island in the sun", which begins by saying that:

It might seem callous in the aftermath of 230,000 deaths in January’s earthquake to talk about the opportunity offered by the rebuilding of Haiti. But merely restoring the most benighted country in the Americas to its previous misery would be culpable. Among the opportunities is to improve Haiti’s energy infrastructure.

Even the online version of the Economist's statistics on global economic activity don't include Haiti, so we need to look somewhere else to try and find out what they mean by the term "benighted country". The Thompson Reuters Foundation AlertNet site gives us an idea of how "benighted" Haiti actually is. It uses Gross National Income per capita as a measure of standard of living, and this is what it reveals. The standard of living in Haiti is so low you can barely make it out on the chart. For 2006, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, the numbers are as follows:

1. United States – GNI per capita $44,830
2. United Kingdom – GNI per capita $40,660
3. France – GNI per capita $36,710
4. Haiti – GNI per capita $490

By this measure the standard of living in the United States was almost 100 times greater than in Haiti even before the recent earthquake.

One side effect of this lack of gross national income is that before the earthquake:

Lacking domestic fossil-fuel supplies, Haiti was spending some $500m a year importing them. Its energy infrastructure was dismal, most Haitians having no access to electricity. Of those who do, perhaps half are hooked up illegally. The grid lost about half the generated energy, and missed out swathes of the country.

Again according to the Economist:

A recent declaration by ministers at a UN Environment Programme meeting in Indonesia urged the UN to rebuild Haiti in an environmentally friendly manner.

and

Jigar Shah, the bumptious chief executive of the Carbon War Room, a ginger-group in Washington, DC, who formerly ran SunEdison, a solar power company, hopes to get a great deal more solar investment committed at a donor meeting to be held at the United Nations later this month.

Richard Branson is one of the founders of the Carbon War Room, and he certainly has a reputation for getting things done. Nonetheless it is perhaps fortunate in all the circumstances that it is not necessary to wait for the UN to deliberate on this issue, because "solar investment" is already taking place in Haiti. The Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF for short) and Partners In Health (PIH) have already started converting PIH clinics in Haiti to use solar power instead of diesel generators.

In February 2005  I went on a surfing trip to the Caribbean. Since I speak English rather than French I went to Barbados rather than Haiti, and made a pilgrimage to Bathsheba on the east coast. According to Kelly Slater, the "Tiger Woods" of surfing, and 9 times world champion:

I’ve been going for over 20 years, and I’d put Soup Bowl as one of the top three waves in the world.

I didn't discover this until later, but I arrived just after Kelly had left, and as luck would have it Soup Bowl was still firing on all cylinders. According to photographer Dustin Humphrey (usually abbreviated to D. Hump), quoted in an interview in Transworld Surf magazine about his  Sipping Jetstreams project:

In the Caribbean, we shot Kelly's all-time best sessions ever.

Whilst in Barbados I read some local papers and visited an art gallery or two, but I didn't go to the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies. The Principal there is Sir Hilary Beckles, who in 1980 received a PhD in Economic History from Hull University here in the UK. Sir Hilary recently wrote an article in the Barbados Nation News about the history of Haiti and the devastating earthquake that took place there on January 12th. He entitled it "The Hate and The Quake". According to Sir Hilary:

For too long there has been a popular perception that somehow the Haitian nation-building project, launched on January 1, 1804, has failed on account of mismanagement, ineptitude, corruption.

The Haitians fought for their freedom and won, as did the Americans fifty years earlier. The Americans declared their independence and crafted an extraordinary constitution that set out a clear message about the value of humanity and the right to freedom, justice, and liberty.

In the midst of this brilliant discourse, they chose to retain slavery as the basis of the new nation state. The founding fathers therefore could not see beyond race, as the free state was built on a slavery foundation.

The water was poisoned in the well; the Americans went back to the battlefield a century later to resolve the fact that slavery and freedom could not comfortably co-exist in the same place.

The French, also, declared freedom, fraternity and equality as the new philosophies of their national transformation and gave the modern world a tremendous progressive boost by so doing.

They abolished slavery, but Napoleon Bonaparte could not imagine the republic without slavery and targeted the Haitians for a new, more intense regime of slavery. The British agreed, as did the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese.

All were linked in communion over the 500 000 Blacks in Haiti, the most populous and prosperous Caribbean colony.

As the jewel of the Caribbean, they all wanted to get their hands on it. With a massive slave base, the English, French and Dutch salivated over owning it – and the people.

The people won a ten-year war, the bloodiest in modern history, and declared their independence. Every other country in the Americas was based on slavery.

Haiti was freedom, and proceeded to place in its 1805 Independence Constitution that any person of African descent who arrived on its shores would be declared free, and a citizen of the republic.

For the first time since slavery had commenced, Blacks were the subjects of mass freedom and citizenship in a nation.

I urge you to read Sir Hilary's article in full, as well as the long list (currently 147) of comments it has attracted, if you would like to better understand how Haiti came to be in it's present predicament. As another eminent scholar Robert Farris Thompson, Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, once put it:

We might very well be speaking French in the United States had not the Haitian slaves been successful.

The chart below shows month to month variations in the climate at Port au Prince, the capital of earthquake stricken Haiti.  Look carefully at the dark green "precipitation" graph:

Port-Au-Prince, Haiti Climate graph contributed by climatetemp.info

The month of January when the earthquake hit is the driest of the year. By the time May arrives average rainfall is seven times as much.

An early foretaste of the rainy season to come happened last Thursday. According to Reuters:

The overnight downpour and a noisy, early morning protest by several hundred Haitians at the U.N. mission headquarters brought into sharp focus simmering anger over the dire need for shelter in the poorest country in the Americas.

Haiti is in a race against time to move survivors from the rudimentary homes they have fashioned out of plastic tarps, bedsheets and panels of corrugated zinc.

"They've been collecting money for Haiti around the world. Many millions have been collected. But we are still in misery," Jean-Max Seraphin, 25, said as he stood near the sodden cotton bedsheets that serve as his home in downtown Port-au-Prince.

"If millions have been collected, why don't they buy tents? Our children will be sick. We will be sick. And more people are going to die."

Here's the problem. If the hundreds of thousands of homeless people in Haiti don't get decent shelter before the tropical rainy season arrives in a few short weeks they will find themselves paddling in other peoples excrement. The rainy season is then followed by the Caribbean hurricane season.

Sanitation in the nearly 500 spontaneous encampments that have grown up around teeming, chaotic Port-au-Prince is woeful and health officials say they are seeing increasing cases of tetanus, dengue and other ailments.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said this week the government has "no clear vision" of how to move 1 million people into better temporary shelters, and said it could be a decade before Haiti can build 250,000 homes to replace those destroyed.

If you would like to do what you can to help then please take a look at our suggestions for how to help Haiti.

This weeks edition of the Economist contains a long article on the suddenly hot topic of "Open Data". The subhead sums up the issue like this:

In several countries more official data are being issued in raw form so that anybody can use them. This forces bureaucrats and creative types to interact in new ways.

and the article points out that:

The governments of America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand have all produced collections of machine-readable data.

In several countries political leaders now talk the same language as campaigners for transparent government. On his first full day in office, Barack Obama signed an open-government directive. David Cameron, the leader of Britain’s Conservatives, wants to increase his country’s transparency to tame the over-mighty state, for which he blames the present Labour government. In Australia Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party also took power with a strong commitment to open government.

It seems that Mr. Cameron neglected to point out that the UK's present Labour government has in fact just taken a huge step in his desired direction. Last month a website cryptically entitled data.gov.uk entered public beta testing.  As the Economist points out the US equivalent site, strangely enough called data.gov, has been around for a while longer. Open Government initiatives, including Open Data, are taking the world by storm!  According to the Economist:

All these exercises seek to merge two cultures: the risk-averse ethos of the civil service, and the free-wheeling spirit of open-source developers, who seek continuous incremental change and see failure as a step to improvement. In a way that would baffle most old-time bureaucrats, independent developers like to collaborate over long distances and make their exchanges public.

In the US the "young technocrats" in the Obama administration responsible for trying to merge these two apparently incompatible cultures are chief information officer Vivek Kundra and chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra, whom the Economist dub "America's First Geeks".  The Economist article mentions one of Britain's First Geeks also, the talismanic Sir Tim Berners-Lee. So talismanic in fact, that in the original version of the article the Economist credited Sir Tim with being "inventor of the internet", rather than "merely" inventor of the world wide web. For some unaccountable reason the Economist neglects to mention Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Britain's other first geek and colleague of Sir Tim's in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, where coincidentally I spent as long as I possibly could in my younger days.

Here at econnexus.org we are as excited as Gordon Brown by the prospect of vast quantities of open data becoming available for analysis by anyone who so chooses. In fact we've already come up with an exciting new project of our own to help us in making that often difficult decision about whether it's worth going surfing or not.

We'll keep you posted on how things develop, for all the Open Data initiatives as well as our own experiments in mining something useful from this newly available mountain of extremely raw information.

Way back in May 2009 the Guardian reported that:

The Obama administration took on the powerful farming interests in America's heartland today, making clear it does not see corn-based ethanol as part of the long-term solution to climate change.

The new proposals on the biofuel – in the face of intense pressure from agricultural companies and members of Congress from corn-growing states – were seen as the first test of Barack Obama's promise to put science above politics in deciding America's energy future.

A couple of weeks ago the Guardian reported that:

The Obama administration faces a challenge in Congress that could strip it of its powers to cut greenhouse gas emissions, barely a month after committing to action at the Copenhagen climate change summit.

An Alaska Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski, is expected to put forward a proposal for a vote as early as tomorrow that would seek to prevent the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Now according to the Los Angeles Times:

The Obama administration gave a boost to the corn and coal industries Wednesday, announcing a series of moves to accelerate biofuel use and deploy so-called clean-coal technology on power plants.

Unveiling the actions in a meeting with energy-state governors at the White House, President Obama said the steps would create jobs in rural areas, reduce foreign energy dependence and curb the emissions that scientists blame for global warming.

Unfortunately it now looks likely that the new political realities in the United States following the loss of the previously safe Democratic Senate seat of  Massachusetts will involve President Obama in further U-turns over the coming months.

Today we've added two new sections to our website.  The first contains our current suggestions about how best to help get relief to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.  According to Haitian President René Préval the most urgent need is shelter for 800,000 homeless people before the rainy season starts in about a month's time, so we focus on that problem to start with.

In addition Peter Gabriel's record company Real World have generously given us permission to quote the lyrics from one of Peter's songs, which we feel is particularly relevant to the relief effort in Haiti. If you're the sort of person who prefers to read rather than watch videos please take a look at our new "Songs" section.

Our apologies to recent visitors to the econnexus website. At some point over the weekend we were hacked, and you may have seen warnings similar to the following if you tried to access this site recently:

Avast complained about: JS: Small-C [Trj]

AVG complained about: JS/Downloader.Agent

We have fixed the problem, and we have also taken the "opportunity" to transfer the site to a new hosting provider and upgrade to version 2.9.1 of WordPress and a new theme. Please contact us if you discover any parts of the site that still do not appear to be working correctly.

For any geeks amongst you the hackers managed to insert a JavaScript trojan into our theme's header.php file. The problem is now fixed, but it does lead one to question the morality of those who are no doubt able, but also willing, to disrupt the activities of others attempting to assist the victims of the enormous natural disaster that has occurred in Haiti.