In the name of corporate profits, jobs and economic growth, products like light bulbs, automobiles, clothing and computers are designed to break. This is known as planned obsolescence.

The documentary below, The Lightbulb Conspiracy, is an interesting story about the real conspiracy between light bulb manufacturers in the 1930′s to limit the life span of bulbs to 1,000 hours. During the Depression, one Congressman even tried to make planned obsolescence the law of the United States. Well meaning, but insane.

For us to live sustainably, the things we make or buy for ourselves need to maximize their useful lifespan. This holiday season, buying quality second hand gifts at sites like eBay.ca is a good way to keep useful items out of landfill and in the hands of someone who will love them.

The pressing reality of living on an island is that land is a finite resource and eventually we run out of space to put our garbage. Transforming some of our garbage to fuel and soil is one step toward sustainability.

If you don’t want to wait for the city to get its ducks in a row, you can start composting today.

Source: Montreal Gazette

Quebecers have a growing garbage problem. Landfill sites are filling up, and the rotting garbage in them can leach contaminants into groundwater and produce a gas composed of methane and carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

Quebecers produce about 810 kg of garbage per person every year, but the province wants to get that down to 700 kg by 2015. One of the biggest components of our garbage is organic materials. An estimated 44 per cent of the garbage we produce every year could be composted. As part of the garbage diet it has planned for Quebecers, the province has banned organic waste – including food waste – from landfills by 2020…

…Green waste can also be transformed into natural gas through a process called biomethanation, but no food waste is now being transformed into biofuels in Quebec, according to Récyc-Québec…

..After two years of scouting for locations, the city has chosen four sites it thinks are suitable for building compost-treatment centres. Under the city’s plan, biogas plants would be built in Montreal East and LaSalle, and composting centres in St. Michel and Dorval. They would handle organic waste from across the island, reducing the number of trucks carrying garbage off the island to landfills.

The plan is for compost collection to be in place for all buildings on the island with eight units or less by 2014, city officials said. Yard and food waste would be collected in the same bin on the western half of the island; on the eastern end there would be separate collections of food and yard waste.

The trajectory of our modern economy is clear: people are redundant.

Corporations would rather buy robots to make things. They are cheaper, more efficient, more accurate in most cases and won’t unionize or commit suicide in defiance of poor working conditions.

Corporations are making enormous amounts of money not hiring people and why should they when machines will do the job faster, cheaper and better? Apple (AAPL) sits on about $76 billion of cash, Intel (INTC) about $20 billion and Microsoft (MSFT) about $40 billion. They won’t hire a single person unless they can make money from that hire. That’s just the nature of business.

This isn’t news if you’ve been paying attention. The real question then becomes: how do we feed, clothe and house people who do not serve any corporate interest outside of consuming corporate goods?

How do we sustain people who no longer are a cog in the capitalist wheel? And do not assume that you are immune from such a fate. Practically any job title besides “Owner” can be outsourced or replaced by a machine.

Source:  Xinhua

Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots in three years to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency, said Terry Gou, founder and chairman of the company, late Friday.

The robots will be used to do simple and routine work such as spraying, welding and assembling which are now mainly conducted by workers, said Gou at a workers’ dance party Friday night.

The company currently has 10,000 robots and the number will be increased to 300,000 next year and 1 million in three years, according to Gou.

Source: The New York Times

Climate change and the larger issue of environmental sustainability are another challenge, Ms. Coyle argues, in which the balance between our actions today and our responsibilities to the future is out of whack. One does not have to look far to find evidence of depleting fishing stocks, accelerated extinctions of species, water shortages and atmospheric changes to realize that we are using up natural resources at a rapid rate.

What will this depletion, which is fed by current consumption, mean for future generations? Ms. Coyle writes that we “do want more in order to be happier — but how much more is feasible without destroying the natural and social environment, and how much more is fair to the people who will come after us?”

Borrowing from the future this way shows our inability, or refusal, to assume responsibility for the impact of today’s choices on tomorrow’s prospects, Ms. Coyle says.

Three elements — measurement, values and institutions — are needed to bring about a better balance between the present and future, she writes.

In the area of measurement, she says we must adopt broader, longer-term measures of economic well-being than G.D.P. Such metrics would account for health, education, the environment, employment, purchasing power and other conditions. They might also measure the stocks of the world’s resources — from fish in the ocean to human capital — in addition to the annual flows of national income calculated in G.D.P.

When the siren sounds from well-educated, highly paid business managers and entrepreneurs, you know the party is  over (R.I.P. Don Meredith).

It has been clear, for anyone who cared enough to notice, that our modern economy generally could be classified into a few self-destructive categories: resource exploitation (mining, agriculture, construction), labor exploitation (service industries), death management (health care), technology (cell phones, PC’s, game consoles) and entertainment.

Luckilly, some awake individuals have sat up and noticed the unsustainable treadmill that society is on and have decided to jump ship (I am enviously watching them swim away).

Source: Management Information Exchange

I’d suggest that today, nothing characterizes industrial age business like the Five P’s. Business is Pedestrian (in its vanishing smallness of ambition), Predictable (in its furious obsession with the trivial), Predatory (in it’s hyperaggressive selfishness), Pompous (in its unvarnished self-importance), and Pointless (in its lack of usefulness to people and society). What it really excels at is pumping out inauthentic, unsustainable, illusory value–instead of the real thing.

Does this sound harsh? Consider some recent, everyday, humdrum headlines.

*GM using bailout money to fight higher fuel standards
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/10/AR2009031003310.html)

*Banks having destroyed the mortgage title process perhaps irrecoverably
(http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/foreclosure-fraud-for-dummies-1-the-chains-and-the-stakes/)

*Cigarette makers fighting global regulation
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/business/global/14smoke.html?src=me&ref=business)

*Marketing by almost literally brainwashing
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/business/14stream.html)

You might, then, begin see my point. Predictable, pedestrian, predatory, slightly pompous, and, effectively pointless. Argue with me if you like, add a nuance here and there, bring the hoary B-school 101 defensive arsenal to bear if you want, but I’d suggest that the institutions of business as we know them might just have outlived their faded triumphs. In fact, I dare you: pick up the business section–and ask yourself how many articles don’t meet most, if not all, of the five P’s.

Of course, I’m not the only one who finds himself brain-crushingly bored of predictable, pedestrian, predatory, pompous, pointless business as usual. The people formerly known as “consumers,” once easy-to-placate investors, legions of snoring managers, tuned out “human resources,” scores of low-cost global competitors, thousands of fed-up startups–they are too. Apathy is skyrocketing. Activist investors are doing less fist-pumping with boardrooms–and more fist-punching at them. Entire new categories of insurgents (think social entrepreneurs), hell-bent on revolutionizing capitalism as we know it, are starting to succeed.

I don’t intend to pick on Westmount since every community on the island probably has a similarly large ecological footprint.

Westmount's Ecological footprint is the red, outer-most border

Nevertheless, it is just amazing when you look at the map above. The BLUE border is the physical size of Westmount. The RED border is the ecological footprint, or the size of the Earth’s resources it devours. The GREEN border represents the “ideal ecological footprint” according to some academic (see the full research here).

What’s the #1 source of this enormous ecological footprint? WASTE with 59% of the entire footprint! Waste has to be carried far away by gas powered vehicles and then stored in a place that takes space away from farms, towns and other productive spaces.

So, the #1 way to reduce your ecological footprint is to Compost! Yea, compost! It’s easy, it’s fun and you get empowered in the face of this ecological train-wreck called “modern, western life.”

This “plan”, whose goal is to have 9 billion people “living well, within the resource limitations of the planet”, was created by corporations in an effort to preserve their usefulness in the face of Peak Everything. While there are some good ideas here to be pursued, such as reducing our carbon footprint and doubling agricultural production, there is no mention of any practical ways to achieve these goals.

For example, in their executive summary they claim that the assets to achieve their ambitious goals already exist: “The participating companies strongly believe that the world already has the knowledge, science, technologies, skills and financial resources needed to achieve Vision 2050…”

Well, that’s great, but they didn’t mention how to provide the basics of life needed to sustain 9 billion people: energy, topsoil and water. Where will they come from? Another planet? The report basically says very little. How is that so much energy gets put into writing something so large that is so useless?

Source: Smart Planet

A new book by Tim Jackson “Prosperity Without Growth” focuses upon our new reality: economics needs to shift its focus from growth and towards new definitions of prosperity.

Gross National Product (GDP) is one of the statistics economists have used for 50+ years to define economic growth and prosperity. However, there are alternatives to a definition of prosperity based upon growth. The tiny country of Bhutan, for example, measures economic progress by Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH)  and ignores traditional GDP.

Source: The Guardian

“Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must.” And that is the core mission of this perfectly timed book. Had he published it before the financial crisis, he would probably have been dismissed as another green idealist, at best. But in the wake of the crisis, more people are questioning the primacy of growth at all costs. President Sarkozy, the Nobel-prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz and elements of the Financial Times’s commentariat are among those now arguing that prosperity is possible without GNP growth, and indeed that prosperity will soon become impossible because of GNP growth. A new movement seems to be emerging, and this superbly written book should be the first stop for anyone wanting a manifesto.

Jackson, who is economics commissioner on the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission, skilfully makes the relevant economic arguments understandable to the lay reader. He is not slow to simplify where that is warranted: “The idea of a non-growing economy may be an anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is an anathema to an ecologist.”

This is the core of the debate. Endless growth is a ridiculous notion to the typical ecologist because we live on a planet with finite resources, the mining and use of some of which is undermining our planet’s life-support systems. But the typical economist believes we can “decouple” GNP growth from resource use through the increased efficiency that tends to be intrinsic to capitalism: that we can grow our economies and reverse environmental degradation too. Tesco, as it were, can keep building more stores for ever, provided they are increasingly resource-efficient.

Jackson argues compellingly that such “decoupling” is a myth. A key area of argument, as with so much else in the current world, involves climate change. If we keep growing GNP, Jackson explains, then we fail to cut greenhouse gases deeply. This means we stoke destruction of prosperity beyond the short-term horizons – “next quarter’s growth figures” and all the rest – on which we routinely put such emphasis today.

An excellent view of the challenges we face from a man who has been a comic and inspirational force. For those who choose not to read the full article, here is a summary of trends he sees:

1. Hope will fuel a mini “euphoria” for the first few months of the Obama Presidency, then reality will set in. He expects the Dow Industrial Stock Average to end up at 4000 sometime in 2009.
2. Thousands of companies will fail and millions of jobs will be lost. Downsizing will occur at all levels of society: government, business and family.
3. A new “servant class” will be created as domestic workers will start moving in with their employers.
4. A massive return to home gardening: “Gardening is the new Golf”
5. Oil and gas prices will rise and there may be spot shortages
6. The U.S. dollar will be 40% of it’s current value by the end of 2009
7. An end of robust globalism – the world is round after all, Tom Friedman.
   

Via: Clusterfuck Nation

There are two realities “out there” now competing for verification among those who think about national affairs and make things happen. The dominant one (let’s call it the Status Quo) is that our problems of finance and economy will self-correct and allow the project of a “consumer” economy to resume in “growth” mode. This view includes the idea that technology will rescue us from our fossil fuel predicament — through “innovation,” through the discovery of new techno rescue remedy fuels, and via “drill, baby, drill” policy. This view assumes an orderly transition through the current “rough patch” into a vibrant re-energized era of “green” Happy Motoring and resumed Blue Light Special shopping.

The minority reality (let’s call it The Long Emergency) says that it is necessary to make radically new arrangements for daily life and rather soon. It says that a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources. It says that the “consumer” era of economics is over, that suburbia will lose its value, that the automobile will be a diminishing presence in daily life, that the major systems we’ve come to rely on will founder, and that the transition between where we are now and where we are going is apt to be tumultuous.

My own view is obviously the one called The Long Emergency.

Since the change it proposes is so severe, it naturally generates exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance that paradoxically reinforces the Status Quo view, especially the deep wishes associated with saving all the familiar, comfortable trappings of life as we have known it. The dialectic between the two realities can’t be sorted out between the stupid and the bright, or even the altruistic and the selfish. The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another. But I have long maintained that life is essentially tragic in the sense that history won’t care if we succeed or fail at carrying on the project of civilization.

more…

From Culture Change:

With the IEA’s [International Energy Agency] World Energy Outlook’s assessment of depletion (including other factors such as sabotage) at 9.1% of the “natural rate,” and given the economic downturn’s momentum, we are looking into the gaping maw of collapse. This is the end of the industrial revolution and the agricultural revolution. Why am I choosing to sound so dramatic, and not call today’s “recession” a retreat from growth that we can recover from? The reason is we will be going all the way down in the trough after our rise to the top of consumption. It is the Category 5 storm we have unleashed. Now lash yourself to the mast or be swept overboard by the monster wave.

As Culture Change readers learned, agriculture is not sustainable for large populations. [Peter Salonius, author and soil scientist] And what gave us the industrial revolution? Answer: the easy coal and gushing, cheap petroleum.