FUTURE SOLUTIONS AND THE REGENERATIVE SCIENCES


Concentrating Solar Photovoltaic Farms
Will Provide Most of the Energy in The Future


The new paradigm must first solve the multiple crises of the Mechanistic Dilemma, including Global Warming and climate destruction. In the Global Curriculum, you will learn of exciting new advances in renewable energy, invented in 2005 and 2006, that will allow the world to solve global warming by stabilizing carbon in the next 10 years.

Just as the Industrial Revolution accompanied the Mechanistic Shift, the Organic paradigm shift has its own version of industrial change called the Regeneration Revolution. The Global Curriculum includes e-courses on the science, social change and technology underlying the main parts of the Regeneration Revolution:
  • The 4 Great Energy Breakthroughs of 2005-6 & Reversing Global Warming
  • 20% Energy and Water Conservation Through Community Development
  • Regenerative Economics & The Global Regeneration Plan
  • Regenerative Organic Agriculture Eliminates Dead Zones, Agro-Pollution
  • New Paradigm Health Reduces Prescription Drug Deaths
  • Regenerative Soil Science and Earth Restoration
Clearly the most pressing problem is global warming and the release of methane through our agricultural methods, which greatly contributes to global warming. The solution is to switch to renewable energy and regenerative agriculture, lowering carbon emissions and methane releases at the same time. Renewable Energy economics used to not be feasible but four great energy breakthroughs in 2006 have transformed the landscape, with reliable, concentrating solar photovoltaics at around $3 a watt rather than $8 a watt, along with now-inexpensive wind, mini-hydro and a powerful new breakthrough in tidal power.

With the Four Great Renewable Breakthroughs, energy conservation and a new way to actually cool the Earth with sulfur aerosols, solving global warming is suddenly more a matter of markets and will than technology or economics. Eventually, we can even shut down the dangerous nuclear power plants. They won't be needed anymore.

Economics will make the change in large utilities from this point onwards, politics, rebates and tax credits won't even matter, as solar power and wind power will cost the same as fossil fuel and nuclear. This cost-competitiveness is especially true if all the Big Picture costs such as poor health from coal pollution and tritium releases from all nuclear power plants are added in, not to mention all the scandalous subsidies Big Oil and Big Nuclear receive from governments around the world.

The 4 Great Renewable Breakthroughs and the economics behind them are nothing short of astonishing. They are literally going to change the world--and soon.


The Tesla Electric Car - Burn Rubber, Not Gasoline: Designed, built and tested by Silicon Valley billionaires and Venture Capitalists, Tesla Motors has a 21st Century sportscar that goes 135 mph, 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, and gets 250 miles to the 3 1/2 hour charge off of 6,138 laptop batteries. If everyone gets the sedan version of this electric breakthrough and charges at night, 85% of all passenger miles in the US could be replaced with nighttime base load energy that is there anyhow. This means we wouldn't have to build extra plants or burn extra fuel to charge the whole fleet (there is 30% extra off-peak capacity in most regions, except maybe Southern CA).


Tidal Power - There are now companies starting to field-test new powerful tidal power machines that rest on the ocean floor and work like wind turbines. The blades can be geared so they move slowly and still make lots of energy--so fish are not killed by the devices.


Wind Power Breakthrough - Clipper Wind now has a 16-gear turbine that has its own crane built into the tower for much cheaper maintenance. The blades are geared so they move slowly and still make lots of energy--so birds can not killed by the devices. These are 25% more efficient and can economically be placed in medium wind areas.


Concentrating Photovoltaics - One company is now out of R&D and will be producing in volume soon. They use a lens and optics system to concentrate 400 Suns on a special multi-junction chip. Rather than 11% efficiency, as with silicon panels, the device get 40%. Huge solar farms will soon be contracted out for this technology, which will quickly dominate the solar industry. The old obsolete silicon panels need 5 acres to make a Megawatt, while the new "CPV" at 40% only needs 1 acre, 80% less land.

Neighborhood Conservation Drives - Using Community Development techniques with block parties and regional newspapers, neighborhoods are organized to get everyone to pitch in, conserve and save the planet. This can produce 20% reductions in electricity and water usage very quickly and it is sustainable. Many positive benefits come from community development. Energy and water conservation are just two of the many actions that an empowered and awakened neighborhood can accomplish.

On top of all these great breakthroughs, there is the very real and inexpensive potential of mini-hydro and big hydro-electric power, with about 400 more Gigawatts worldwide. Based on the Four Great Breakthroughs and the available 400 GW of hydro-electric, a new Global Climate Stabilization Plan becomes possible. The Plan would have three main efforts:
  1. All world leaders declare a state of emergency in energy use and work together to gear up and manufacture the above breakthroughs and others on a war footing. Rationing would have to be implemented if people don't change their ways and conserve.

  2. Deploy Breakthrough Technology Globally Over The Next 15 Years - In a crash program lasting 30 years, there can now be Global Installations of 300 GW of CPV solar farms in the Southwest, North Africa, desert areas in India and the Gobi Desert, 400 GW of mini-hydro and retrofitting dams, 150 GW of wind power, 100 GW of tidal power and switch to the electric car. All of these technologies now exist and need only to be manufactured in volume. The resulting 950 total GW is more than current US installed capacity and will stabilize and then reduce carbon. In the following 15 years, 400 GW of CPV, 200 GW of tidal and another 200 GW of wind, so add another 800 GW to account for all new energy use by the emerging world. There would not be many more hydro sites left to install, so that would not happen in the second 15 years.

  3. Seed Stratosphere with Sulfur Particles to Buy Extra Time and Cool The Earth - This strategy, from the leading atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen, uses high-flying jets and costs $10 billion. It immediately cools the Earth by a half-degree Celsius for 2-3 years by reflecting sunlight and thus heat. Repeat if necessary. The sulfur cooldown theory should be tested as soon as possible to gain more time, lessen hurricane strength, and reduce glacier melt and peat bog melt. Earth's average temperature would return to normal.
There is hope, there is still time. Now we have the tools and the plan. We know what to do about global warming. We must have the will to act.

Then there are the other parts of the Mechanistic Dilemma that must be resolved. Vast environmental destruction and the continuing agro-pollution of our waters must be stopped and reversed. The enormous loss of topsoil and healthy soil "tilth" around the world must also be stopped and turned around, for this is the main cause of poverty for 2 billion people. Yet how do we restore a destroyed environment? We would have to bring dead soil back to life. Is that even possible? Fortunately, the answer is "Yes".

The Regenerative Sciences

Restoring the Earth has in recent decades become a science, or rather a combination of several sciences. Based on the ability of nature to restore that which has been lost or diminished, Regenerative Science has evolved over the past twenty years and is now taught in universities around the world. Examples of this near-miraculous phenomenon of restoration include natural recoveries from a range of catastrophes including forest fires to lakes, rivers and entire watersheds. Restoration, however, can also occur on purpose, by human hands. The Global Curriculum includes an e-course on Earth Restoration.

Perhaps most important of all for the planet is the natural ability of soil to regenerate itself. Regenerative Agriculture is based on restoring the soil health of poor and drought-ridden farmlands by regenerating micro-organisms and micro-nutrients through composting. Many farmers in emerging nations know little or nothing of simple composting methods. The result of merely adding composting to local agricultural practice is healthy food and improved soil health with each harvest. Farmers know when the quality of their soil and the value of their land is increasing and so they continue with the new composting practice.

Regeneration is defined as a technology or approach that helps to restore the Earth's environment or a region's economy and culture in an ecologically sustainable and economically beneficial way. Conventional farming and its use of chemicals is now seen as "degenerative", while organic farming designed to restore the environment is "regenerative". We now know that ecosystems are living things and that chemical agriculture and pollution disrupt and can even kill that living entity. Regenerative development provides spending within the economy to meet the basic needs of the population, rather than siphoning wealth off to other regions or the elite.

We can thus ask whether a given technology or method is "Regen or Degen". Does it help restore that which has been lost, or does it contribute to the further destruction of environment, culture and humanity of the world? Is it Regen or Degen?

The main branches of the Regenerative Sciences include:
  • The Philosophy of Regeneration
  • Regenerative Agriculture and Soil Science
  • Regenerative AgroForestry
  • Regenerative Economics
  • Regenerative Economic Development & Planning
  • Urban Regeneration
  • A series of regenerative technologies in construction, power and industry.
  • Earth Restoration
Regenerative Organic Agriculture views soil as a living organism, one that can be restored to health and fertility within a matter of months and years, depending on its degree of degradation and the inputs available to be used to restore natural processes. By inputting organic matter through natural processes, including nitrogen from the air, the natural bio-indicators of healthy soil return, restoring the natural nutrient cycles. There is then no need at all for chemical fertilizers.

Regenerative Agriculture and the raising of organic food and livestock are thus the foundation of "Regenerative Development". Beyond sustainable agriculture, regenerative agriculture is designed to actually restore the local soil and environment. In contrast, mere organic farming simply replaces inputs with non-chemical inputs, many times continuing soil depletion.

Regenerative Agriculture is thus the next step beyond organic farming--and with it we can restore the lost topsoil and tilth of the world's poorest regions, as well as the bread baskets of the First and Second Worlds. Is this then, the end-all answer to eliminating agro-pollution and being able to afford to feed ourselves at the same time? Yes, although it will take at least two decades of transition and training to transform and reform agriculture and forestry along ecological lines.

Regenerative Development is the next step beyond Sustainable Development. It is based on a new "Regenerative Economics" outlined by Robert Rodale in the 1980s. Regenerative Economics is designed to track and restore economic strength from the bottom-up rather than the old trickle-down or top-down strategies.

A "Regenerative Index" establishes relationships between different aspects of a region’s economy, and provides a planning framework which establishes a baseline and set of goals to be achieved. This process leads to the identification of mutually reinforcing activities to upgrade economic and social conditions to the highest level. In short, a Regenerative Index describes an ideal regenerated state, such as Full Employment (100% employment) compared to current levels of local employment. The same goes for health, energy, food, and so on.

We can measure how much money is lost by the Regenerative Zone when index levels are low, and when economic activities are “exported” from the region. Other economic sectors within the region suffer, along with health and other factors. The idea is to instead develop each region's regenerative sources in a single zone, unleashing multiple beneficial synergies across the Index. This will increase money circulation, as well as food and economic self-sufficiency. A total Regenerative Index number tracks overall regional development.

For each selected Regenerative Zone, a Development Plan is created with the participation of as many people from the region as possible. The idea is to match resources with local needs--as well as possible export foodstuffs and other products to bring in cash. At the same time, regenerative agriculture and micro-credit programs unlock the potential of the land and the villagers themselves. Rather than depleting natural resources, regenerative agriculture and micro-credit build them up.

Based on the restoration of soil health and wildlands, the Regenerative Zone progressively opens up more and more regenerative forces within the one region. This allows the natural, untapped synergy of the region to gather together--and make the needed leap to a new Agrarian/Information Age. Here the Internet can bring farmers and whole communities together, educating them, helping to heal them with tele-medicine, and sometimes increasing their income directly and indirectly.

Ending Poverty and Pollution: The Global Regeneration Plan

10,000 Regenerative Zones established around the world can lift the poorest 2 billion people out of abject poverty. Funded by a global version of the Marshall Plan, which saved Europe in the late 1940s, this Global Regeneration Plan would cost about $100 billion, 1/5 the eventual cost of the War in Iraq--and would dramatically reduce the main cause of terrorism: economic deprivation.

Regenerative agriculture--combined with simple zero-pollution aquaculture--will more than triple farm family incomes, changing all the dynamics within each zone. Cheap solar, wind and mini-hydro will bring electric power to remote villages and cities, replacing the polluting diesel generatores of today. This is a plan that can work--one that accomplishes its goal quickly, within 15 years (with a crash program to implement it).

The Global Curriculum is itself part of the Global Regeneration Plan, filling the global educational void for high school with a progressive enrichment curriculum. The Curriculum will be available on the Web for students from foreign countries, speaking in many different languages. It has been shown that education is the most effective way to lower the birth rate and stop the population explosion--which is already underway. As education has spread in parts of the emerging world, the growth rate of the global population boom has actually declined, steadily dropping in recent years.

This clearly is more good news. We need, however, to make primary and secondary education universal over all the Earth--and the best way to do that is over the Internet.

Empowering the science and wisdom of the new paradigm with the global technology of the Web, the Global Curriculum is designed to unlock the potential of the new thinking and make it accessible to everyone who needs it. It will support all types of learners, from progressive home schoolers in the United States to students in emerging nations such as Zambia and Belize.

The two largest mega-trends of our time, the new paradigm and the Web, are thus synergistically combined in the Global Curriculum vision. We must create our own new educational environments for our changed world. We must teach all the children how to create a future that works.

The first step is to realize that as progressive new paradigm thinkers, we are now responsible for what happens next in human history. Do we create a world with not only a new way to create energy, but also with a new set of values toward the environment, toward humanity--and toward the future itself? Or do we just let the status quo continue until it really is too late?

Everyone who cares needs to learn that it is true what Gandhi said: "You must be the change you want to see in the world."

Discussion:Why are the 4 Energy Breakthroughs above so innovative?

Essay: Explain who Paul Crutzen is and what his plan is to restore Earth's temperature to normal.

Discussion: Which Regenerative science interests you the most? Why? If you were a Regenerative scientist what solutions to the Mechanistic Dilemma would you research?



Links: News Article on Dr. Paul Crutzen

Tesla Roadster

Kid's Regen

Rodale Institute

New Farm

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Discussion Group

AMORY LOVINS

Gales of Change: Global Annual Additions of Electrical Generating Capacity

In 2004, decentralized cogeneration and renewables, excluding big hydro dams (any over 10 megawatts), added 5.9 times as much worldwide net capacity as nuclear power added, and raised annual electricity production 2.9 times as much as nuclear power did.

By the end of 2004, these decentralized, nonnuclear competitors' global installed capacity totaled ~411 GW*--12% more capacity than global nuclear plants' 366 GW--and produced ~92% as much electricity.

Thus the "minor" alternative sources actually overtook nuclear's global capacity in 2003, rivaled its 2004 and will match its 2005 output, and should exceed its 2010 output by 43%. They already dwarf its annual growth.

Official and industry forecasts indicate they'll add 177 times as much capacity in 2010 as dwindling nuclear power will. And they're dwarfed in turn by demand-side opportunities, not graphed here because reliable global implementation data aren't available.

So the big question about nuclear "revival" isn't just who'd pay for such a turkey, but also...why bother? Why keep on distorting markets and biasing choices to divert scarce resources from the winners to the loser--a far slower, costlier, harder, and riskier niche product--and paying a premium to incur its many problems?

Nuclear advocates try to reverse the burden of proof by claiming it's the portfolio of non-nuclear alternatives that has an unacceptably greater risk of non-adoption, but actual market behavior suggests otherwise.

* About 266 GW (billion watts) of mostly gas-fired decentralized cogeneration (emitting ~30-80% less CO2, depending on fuel), 47 GW of wind, 47 small hydro, 37 biomass/waste, 10 geothermal, and 4 photovoltaics.

The world's nuclear plant vendors have never made money, and their few billion dollars' dwindling annual revenue hardly qualifies them any more as a serious global business.

In contrast, the renewable power industry earns ~$23 billion a year by adding ~12 GW of capacity every year: in 2004, 8 GW of wind, 3 GW of geothermal/small hydro/biomass/wastes, and 1 GW of photovoltaics (69% of nuclear's 2004 new construction starts, which PVs should surpass this year).

PV and windpower markets, respectively doubling about every two and three years, are expected to make renewable power a $35-billion business within eight years.

And distributed fossil-fueled cogeneration of heat and power added a further 15 GW in 2004; it does release carbon, but ~30% less than the separate boilers and power plants it replaces, or up to ~80% less with fuel-switching.

Windpower's 50+ gigawatts of global capacity, half of U.S. nuclear power capacity, paused in 2004 due to Congressional wrangling, but is expected to triple in the next four years, mainly in Europe, which aims to get 22% of its electricity from renewables by 2010.

One-fifth of Denmark's power now comes from wind; German and Spanish windpower are each adding as much capacity each year (2 GW) as the global nuclear industry is annually adding on average during 2000-10. No country has had or expects economic or technical obstacles to further major wind expansion.

The International Energy Agency forecast in 2003 that in 2010, wind could add nine times as much capacity as nuclear added in 2004, or 84 times its planned 2010 addition. Eight years hence, just wind plus industry-forecast PVs could surpass installed global nuclear capacity.

The market increasingly resembles a 1995 Shell scenario with half of global energy, and virtually all growth, coming from renewables by mid-century--about what it would take, with conservative efficiency gains, to stabilize atmospheric carbon.

Whenever nuclear power's competitors (even just on the supply side) were allowed to compete fairly, they've far outpaced central stations.

Just in 1982-85, California utilities acquired and or were firmly offered enough cost-effective savings and decentralized supplies to meet all demand with no central fossil-fueled or nuclear plants. (Alas, before the cheaper alternatives could displace all those plants--and thus avert the 2000 power crisis--state regulators, spooked by success, halted the bidding.)

Today's nonnuclear technologies are far better and cheaper. They're batting 1.000 in the more competitive and transparent processes that have swept most market economies' electricity sectors and are emerging even in China and Russia. A few Stalinist economies like North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Belarus still offer ideal conditions for nuclear sales, but they won't order much, and you wouldn't want to live there.

No wonder the world's universities have dissolved or reorganized nearly all of their departments of nuclear engineering, and none still attracts top students--another portent that the business will continue to fall, as Nobel physicist Hannes Alfvén warned, "into ever less competent hands," buying ever less solution to any unresolved problem than in the days of the pioneers.

Their intentions were worthy, their efforts immense, but their hopes of abundant and affordable nuclear energy failed in the marketplace.

- Amory Lovins

Competitors To Nuclear: Eat My Dust

Beyond Organic Farming By Bob Rodale, 1982.

The idea of regenerative agriculture-and the name itself-came to me one day at a meeting of a farmland preservation group. I have attended many such meetings in the past few years, and as I learned more about the ideas and techniques used by people involved in that movement, I became increasingly frustrated and disturbed.

There was a preoccupation with tax wrinkles, legalities, regulations, bond issues, and here and there a possible new law. But there was absolutely no effort to think holistically. Food was not considered. Farmers? When mentioned at all, they had all the dynamic qualities of cut-out paper figures.

There was little interest in trying to understand the monetary farm economy, the biologic farm economy, or how our human economy relates to the availability and use of undeveloped land.

"Can't these people see how incomplete their thinking is?" I asked myself. "Are their eyes so nearsighted that they can only look at one portion of the surface of the problem?"

...

"Regeneration of agriculture" That's what we've got to start thinking about, I told myself.

And we've got to regenerate a new kind of agriculture, not just bring back the type of farming that was there before. You can't go back. Forward is the only way to go.

...

Let's say for the sake of discussion that the average grain and row crop field in the U.S. loses 10 tons of topsoil a year. Farm that field organically and it may lose only two or three tons a year. The USDA says that is an "economically sustainable" loss. But it's still a loss, and even organic farming probably can't eliminate it.

...

Start by applying the concept of regeneration directly to our thinking about farm soil. The land can be regenerated. If the farmer quits farming and just goes away, in temperate regions wild plants will move in and regenerate the soil on their own. Can land regenerate only when we're not around? I think not.

There must be a way for us to participate in that process, to hasten it along, in fact. And if we can hasten regeneration effectively enough, maybe there'll be something left over for us to harvest. And maybe that harvest will be enough to meet our needs, and will cost very little.

...

Why shouldn't we say that our aim is to regenerate a ton of topsoil per acre each year? Perhaps that will be difficult to do. There is even the possibility that soil regeneration on that scale is impossible under the necessary agricultural conditions, and we will fail.

But our failure could limit us to regenerating only 100 pounds of topsoil per acre, or perhaps none at all. It doesn't take much imagination to see that such a failure would be a resounding success, in the context of present ways of looking at soil.