MOSS

From Tehran

2009-06-16T00:51:00.001-04:00

Video from Tehran today.

Amazing. And we see it from a cell phone video posted and shared around the world on Facebook.

No one can say what will ultimately come from something once it's started, from a network created to connect military computers (ARPnet, the precursor of the web) to an app created to connect college students (Facebook). Or the decision to step out on the streets of your city to demand freedom whatever the cost. All we can do is carry out each act we do in a spirit of love and intention.

We are with you, Iran, with love and solidarity. Your struggle is ours. The blood you have spilled feels as if it had flowed through our own veins. There is no failure in a struggle such as this, for it is out of such struggle that all freedom arises.

On and on and on, brothers and sisters. The world is watching and stands with you.

Bernie Sanders intros Single Payer!

2009-03-27T15:12:00.001-04:00

Bernie Sanders intros single payer in senate. Call your senators and tell them to get behind it. Good wrap up on Daily Kos.

Sans Blogging

2009-03-27T15:05:00.002-04:00

I've been very busy launching an exciting new environmental education media initiative with the folks at Climate Cartoons. More to come on that later. But it's meant a cessation of blogging.

As an attempt to address that, I've started micro-blogging on Twitter. Not very original, these days, but hopefully effective.

So if you're tuning in, expect lots more posts, 140 characters or less.

Or you can follow my posts directly on Twitter:

@haroldmoss

Climate Change Largely Irreversible

2009-01-27T17:45:00.003-05:00

A new study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration finds that the impact of increases in atmospheric CO2 are likely to last for centuries, even if we stop emitting CO2 altogether. In other words, we have already made major significant changes to global climate that will take decades to be revealed and last for centuries. Drought, rising ocean levels, decreased fresh water supplies, all are likely continue to persist for centuries. There is no catching up later on this issue. We need to use the opportunity of the current economic crisis and the attendant stimulus plan to shift away from a fossil fuel and CO2 spewing based economy.

Contact your congress people and let them know you want no money for new roads and bridges, and lots of funding for mass transit, clean energy, and energy efficiency. It's a start only, but a start our future depends on.

Watch Obama's historic inaguration live, with MOSS!

2009-01-17T15:23:00.004-05:00

We'll be at the studio watching as Barack Obama is sworn in as our Country's 44th president this Tuesday and we invite you to join us online at thinkmoss.com to watch live!

Click the image above to watch!

Voted Yet?

2008-11-04T08:35:00.004-05:00

The scale of changes we need are immense. The challenges we face to not only our nation, but to life on earth itself, are staggering. It is time for a transformational leader. Go vote for him.

But it is not up to him to bring the transformation. No person can do that. It is up to all of us to make the changes that need to happen. Our government and our future will only be as good as we the people make it by what we do, how hard we organize, how loudly we make our voices heard.

It's alright to feel hope. In fact, it is essential. But it is even more important to feel determination. To continue the hard work of learning to live with each other on this tiny planet, and live on it in such a way that nourishes this earth that gave us birth.

But for today? Vote. Help others vote. Make sure that votes are counted.

This is Huge

2008-10-22T14:49:00.002-04:00

Organic Farming “could feed Africa.”

While many have been pushing for Africa to build large scale industrial farms growing genetically modified (GM) crops (mainly those selling GM seeds and industrial fertilizers), a major new study for from the UN to be presented today shows that organic practices in Africa not only can raise productivity, but do it in a way that avoids the social and economic costs of shifting to those large scale industrial farms.

In other words, organic farming can feed people without simultaneously impoverishing them and making the land incapable of supporting them over the long haul.

Wars, Lies, and Elections: Our Newest Animation

2008-10-12T09:12:00.008-04:00

We obviously have an opinion on all these topics (wars, lies and elections that is), but always try to base our opinions on research and facts. Here are some sources for key facts in the cartoon. There are a lot more sources for each of these, but this is a good overview.

• There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

• 9/11 panel found no link between Iraq Al Qaeda

• Powell admits there was no link to Al Qaeda

• Report on US Military casualties

• Iraqi of civilian casualties

• Iraqi Casualties Overall:
Lower Estimate (Lancet Survey)
Higher Estimate (Opinion Research Business)

• Estimated cost of war

Also, here are the credits for all the super-talented folks who helped make this cartoon:
• Written, Directed, Voice Over and Typography by Harold Moss
• Animation Direction, Story Boards and Animation by Phil Lockerby
• Music, Sound Design, Additional Writing and Voices by David Wilson
• Art Direction and Character Design by Zartosht Soltani
• Producer, Franklin Zitter
• Executive Producer, Tammy Walters
• Coordination and Research by Marcus Batista

A Garden Grows in Washington? It should do.

2008-08-08T13:15:00.003-04:00

During WWII, Americans grew 40% of the fruits and vegetables we ate in backyard Victory Gardnes. We need new Victory Gardens, this time to win the battle against global warming and environmental degradation. Right now food travels an average of 1500 miles to reach our plates, and consumes enormous amounts of fossil fuels even before it hits the road. We need to grow more of our own food so that our grandchildren have enough food to eat. What better place to highlight such an idea than on the White House lawn?

Here's a video making that modest proposal to the next president.

And a petition he's started to that end on his website promoting edible landscapes. Pretty. Yummy. What's not to like?

End the Junk Mail!

2008-08-08T12:52:00.002-04:00

Sign the petition to create a no-mail registry on the model of the no-call registry taking you off sales call lists. Save your time, save the environment.

Peak Oil Made Easy (but no less earth shaking)

2008-08-07T14:43:00.001-04:00

A wonderfully coherent, easy to understand discussion of peak oil, frrom the upcoming documentary What a Way to Go.

Once Again--Stop Using Food for Fuel

2008-08-01T10:55:00.003-04:00

There was some question lately about a leaked IMF report saying 70-75% of the recent precipitous rise in food prices was linked to the increasing use of food crops for bio-fuels. The IMF quickly came out and said that in fact it was a preliminary report. A months later, the report is out and says the same exact thing.

Grist has a good rundown on the report and the earlier hubbub.

The bottom line, however, is clear. We are facing the prospect of dramatic global warming and the possibility of having passed the peak supply of oil. We need alternatives, but policies based on money grabs by vested industrial industries, i.e. offshore drilling and crop based biofuels aren't going to be solutions. Just money grabs. We're subsidizing this process, encouraging it. Of course, we're also still subsidizing oil companies. It's time to stop.

Where Do All the Transport Dollars Go?

2008-07-23T16:01:00.004-04:00

Can we afford to massively fund public transit? My first response would be, with oil prices and global temperatures both continuing to rise, can we afford not to rapidly build out mass transit?

But this graphic, via Treehugger (with a good article to boot), shows we're already spending the money. It's just been going to highways. More and more money to highways. Enormous public subsidy of an automotive way of life that is paving over our land, bankrupting us to buy oil, shortening our lives with respiratory illnesses, and dangerously transforming our climate.

Hm, can anyone think of a better way to spend that money? Oh, right, mass transit.

Why is it that Amtrak and subway systems (like New York's MTA right now) are always on the verge of bankruptcy? It's time for the highways to go bankrupt. Let them earn their own keep.

Fresh Smells, Toxic Punch?

2008-07-23T12:43:00.005-04:00

Are those laundry sheets, air fresheners, and other "fresh smell" products hiding a toxic punch?

Nothing like vinegar, lemon, baking soda, and a little elbow grease to keep a home clean and safe.

Ed Begley also has Cradle to Cradle certified line of house cleaning products.

In other toxic smell news, there's a new report on which car interiors and child car seats have less toxic off-gassing laced in their new car smell.

Credit Where It's Due

2008-07-22T15:32:00.003-04:00

At triplepundit, a nice piece on one piece of legislation attempting to do what I mentioned in an earlier post--reduce the impact of fuel prices on families while trying to re-orient us to more sustainable energy usage and policies. Last week, Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore) introduced H.R.6495, the “Transportation and Housing Choices for Gas Price Relief Act.”

The Doin It Themselves Blog

2008-07-22T15:13:00.002-04:00

Home Grown Evolution is a very cool blog by a couple of urban homesteaders growing there own food and making their own stuff. Good for the spirit, body and environment. Imagine what we could make our cities look like if we laid less pavement for cars and had more spaces for things to grow--like food and children.

Urban homesteading is also not a bad set of skills to develop, as a post oil world may push us all more in this direction.

Ford, Small Cars, and the Hard Truth Behind Gas Prices

2008-07-22T12:55:00.003-04:00

Ford, which led the way in the boom of gas guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks, is now bowing to the inevitable in the face of rising gas prices and shifting production towards small cars. I'd like to draw out a couple of thoughts from what would have only recently been astonishing news.

As congress whips up a flurry of proposals to try to contain gas prices, from offshore drilling, tapping into our strategic oil reserve, and trying to legislate away oil speculation, there are two uncomfortable points we must keep in mind.

First, these efforts are doomed to failure. While there will certainly be fluctuations in the price of oil, as the last week has shown, none of the proposals floating around will have any real effect on long term gas prices. Oil is expensive because: a) we are probably running out of the stuff, and b) even if we're not yet running out, skyrocketing demand from places like India and China mean that demand will continue to outstrip the supplies, and oil prices will stay high.

The second uncomfortable fact is that oil should be expensive and any policy successfully limiting gas prices, as unlikely as such a policy is, would be a disaster. It is true that gas prices are hurting folks. High oil costs are certainly contributing to high food prices, though not as much as the misguided crop based biofuel insanity. Rising oil costs are also contributing to a global economic slowdown, though not as much as the US's ridiculous series of bubbles bursting.

But rising oil costs have also been the only force in history successfully starting to shift our behavior around fossil fuel consumption. We are buying less SUVs. We are riding more mass transit. A serious conversation about alternative energy sources has begun. We've known about global warming for 20 years, and were aware of the threat that dependency on oil imports posed to our economic and physical security for even longer, but we did nothing.

Instead, we allowed oil to be kept artificially cheap. The true costs of an oil based economy, including environmental degradation and global warming, subsidies to industry, military expenditures to protect supplies, subsidizing the highway system and auto industries, have all been hidden. Gas should be $10-15 per gallon, as it has been in much of Europe for some time. We need to let gas get more expensive, not less, and start looking at the deeper changes required to live in a world of expensive oil, rising temperatures, environmental degradation, and rising populations.

What congress should be doing is looking at reducing long term demand by implementing a crash program for alternative fuels and putting policies in place to cushion the blow of rising prices for those who can't afford it.

Our cheap fossil fuel based way of life is changing. That's OK. Change is the only constant in the universe. High oil prices are not the problem, they are just a constant reminder of this underlying truth. Now we must tackle that hardest of things for human beings, changing consciously, not simply as a reaction to events. We have to imagine a different kind of world where our presence nurtures the land rather than poisoning and depleting it.

Paradise Unpaved

2008-07-22T12:51:00.002-04:00

The lovely illustrated story of a canadian artist who sold her SUV and turned her driveway into a garden.

via Treehugger

The Selfish Environmentalist

2008-07-21T14:42:00.002-04:00

I look at the earth as a gorgeous and rich ecosystem that does not need to justify its value. Life in all its diversity, abundance and wonder is its own justification. Until we realize that, we run the risk of destroying billions of years of evolution and are left leading lives detached from the wellspring from which we sprung. Thus we risk continued spiritual impoverishment even as we squander the wealth of geological ages.

But even if you take a very different view, that the earth is here to be exploited by humanity and the biosphere is a resource most properly bought and sold on the market, you may find we end up at a similar place on the questions of the environment.

Two articles today from Science Daily towards that common ground. The value of our wilderness is not best realized by chopping it down for forestry products or razing and filling it for crops and development. It provides services incalculably more valuable when allowed to thrive.

Case in point--the world wetlands hold as much CO2 as exists in the atmosphere as a whole, prevent flooding, clean our water, amongst a host of other valuable services. Global warming threatens their existence while we continue to destroy them through development and pollution.

Forests similarly provide much greater value in producing clean water, preventing erosion, and sequestering CO2 than could ever be realized by their destruction.

An honest marketplace would reflect the true value of places like our wetlands and forests, which would make their short term profit making plunder economically unviable. When politicians want to open up pristine areas to development and logging, be certain you'll find a money trail leading to the crooks who want to steal these precious services from us for pennies on the dollar.

The Future is Burning

2008-07-21T14:29:00.003-04:00

It seems more and more likely that the worsening wildfire situation in the American West, with a fire season that is longer and fires consuming more acreage, is linked to global warming. The West has warmed more in the last 60 years than any other region besides Alaska.

There are other factors, including the practice of suppressing small fires and land use issues, but the changing weather is likely playing a key role. This also points us towards ever increasing fires as the climate continues to warm.

photo by Jeff Turner

Peak Oil on CNBC

2008-07-21T12:07:00.003-04:00

Via Treehugger, Matt Simmons, head of oil investment bank Simmons and Company International, talks straight about a future of declining oil CNBC's Fast Money. He says, quite rightly, a disaster is coming if we don't address the hole we've dug with our addiction to oil. The stunned faces of the CNBC talking heads is priceless.

Well worth the watch. He offers some initial ideas on what to do. Massive investments in alternative energy, tele-commuting, living in villages.

This should, of course, be the conversation happening on every hour of news. Instead, I wonder if Simmons will ever be invited back. We'd rather talk about speculators and dream of a future that looks like our past of artificially cheap gas. In fact, we've near run through a billion years of stored energy in the form of oil and other fossil fuels, and have dangerously heated the planet in the process. These facts won't change by our ignoring them. Doing something, like Al Gore's call for a fully renewable powered electric grid in 10 years, that might make a difference.

More on the "Nuclear Illusion"

2008-07-18T17:44:00.002-04:00

A report from the Rocky Mountain Institute on The Nuclear Illusion, looking at why no one wants to invest in new plants--they don't make any sense from an economic stand point.

Imagine

2008-07-18T16:42:00.002-04:00

The folks at World Changing ask us to imagine what comes after green.

Talking Cradle to Cradle

2008-07-18T16:10:00.003-04:00

Here's the leading light in the new industrial revolution, the architect William McDonough, giving a talk in 2005 at TED on his practice of Cradle to Cradle design. He asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account "all children, all species, for all time." It is a question we must answer if we have hopes of continuing as a species. McDonough is busy answering it with buildings and products that nourish the ecosystems that give us life and leave behind no waste, only function and beauty.

Texas Goes for Big Wind

2008-07-18T11:52:00.004-04:00

Texas has approved a plan to be able to accommodate 18,500 MW of wind power by 2012, enough to power 3 million homes. Texas is a big, windy state, but it still shows the potential. If one state can produce enough power from just one alternative energy source to power 3 million homes by 2012, it starts to put Al Gore's call yesterday for a carbon free electrical system within 10 years in context. We can do it.

Of course generating the power is only half the equation. The cheapest form of alternative energy is increasing fuel efficiency. Reducing the energy used in each home by 50% would mean that same power would supply 6 million homes. This is a very achievable goal. Lester Brown outlines some good ideas on significantly increasing energy efficiency in Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. This is an incredibly important book I will be coming back to. The idea of Factor 10 Engineering goes even further, seeking to increase resource productivity by a factor of 10-100. In other words, using 1/10th to 1/100th the energy and raw materials to make the things we use. Hey, the first industrial revolution did the same thing for labor productivity, so no reason the next industrial revolution can't do that for resource productivity.