What do YOU think was the biggest sustainability news story of 2006?

Evo Morales and the people of Bolivia deserve a "Hats Off!" - He is the first indigenous president of Bolivia. The indigenous peoples all over the world lived in HARMONY with Mother Earth for thousands of years. We could learn from them. We could, but will we? The old ways were better: harder but better. Now, things are easier (for us) and worse (for Mother). But without Mother, we cannot survive. We need her. We need to respect her. God Bless You, Evo Morales!

MANDATORY RENEWABLE ENERGY – THE ENERGY EVOLUTION –R6

In order to insure energy and economic independence as well as better economic growth without being blackmailed by foreign countries, our country, the United States of America’s Utilization of Energy sources must change.
"Energy drives our entire economy." We must protect it. "Let's face it, without energy the whole economy and economic society we have set up would come to a halt. So you want to have control over such an important resource that you need for your society and your economy." The American way of life is not negotiable.
Our continued dependence on fossil fuels could and will lead to catastrophic consequences.

The federal, state and local government should implement a mandatory renewable energy installation program for residential and commercial property on new construction and remodeling projects with the use of energy efficient material, mechanical systems, appliances, lighting, etc. The source of energy must by renewable energy such as Solar-Photovoltaic, Geothermal, Wind, Biofuels, etc. including utilizing water from lakes, rivers and oceans to circulate in cooling towers to produce air conditioning and the utilization of proper landscaping to reduce energy consumption.

The implementation of mandatory renewable energy could be done on a gradual scale over the next 10 years. At the end of the 10 year period all construction and energy use in the structures throughout the United States must be 100% powered by renewable energy.

In addition, the governments must impose laws, rules and regulations whereby the utility companies must comply with a fair “NET METERING” (the buying of excess generation from the consumer), including the promotion of research and production of “renewable energy technology” with various long term incentives and grants. The various foundations in existence should be used to contribute to this cause.

A mandatory time table should also be established for the automobile industry to gradually produce an automobile powered by renewable energy. The American automobile industry is surely capable of accomplishing this task.

This is a way to expedite our energy independence and economic growth. (This will also create a substantial amount of new jobs). It will take maximum effort and a relentless pursuit of the private, commercial and industrial government sectors commitment to renewable energy – energy generation (wind, solar, hydro, biofuels, geothermal, energy storage (fuel cells, advance batteries), energy infrastructure (management, transmission) and energy efficiency (lighting, sensors, automation, conservation) in order to achieve our energy independence.

Jay Draiman
Northridge, CA. 91325
1-10-2007

P.S. I have a very deep belief in America's capabilities. Within the next 10 years we can accomplish our energy independence, if we as a nation truly set our goals to accomplish this.
I happen to believe that we can do it. In another crisis--the one in 1942--President Franklin D. Roosevelt said this country would build 60,000 [50,000] military aircraft. By 1943, production in that program had reached 125,000 aircraft annually. They did it then. We can do it now.
The American people resilience and determination to retain the way of life is unconquerable and we as a nation will succeed in this endeavor of Energy Independence.

Solar energy is the source of all energy on the earth (excepting volcanic geothermal). Wind, wave and fossil fuels all get their energy from the sun. Fossil fuels are only a battery which will eventually run out. The sooner we can exploit all forms of Solar energy (cost effectively or not against dubiously cheap FFs) the better off we will all be. If the battery runs out first, the survivors will all be living like in the 18th century again.

Every new home built should come with a solar package. A 1.5 kW per bedroom is a good rule of thumb. The formula 1.5 X's 5 hrs per day X's 30 days will produce about 225 kWh per bedroom monthly. This peak production period will offset 17 to 24 cents per kWh with a potential of $160 per month or about $60,000 over the 30-year mortgage period for a three-bedroom home. It is economically feasible at the current energy price and the interest portion of the loan is deductible. Why not?

Title 24 has been mandated forcing developers to build energy efficient homes. Their bull-headedness put them in that position and now they see that Title 24 works with little added cost. Solar should also be mandated and if the developer designs a home that solar is impossible to do then they should pay an equivalent mitigation fee allowing others to put solar on in place of their negligence.

Installing renewable energy system on your home or business increases the value of the property and provides a marketing advantage.

It may be easier to reduce "best stories" to single issues, but the biggest and best story is the connections people are making between the war in Iraq, renewable energy, and climate change. In political language, this is a "three-fer" (a three-for-one issue) that could and should form the basis for domestic policy changes.

Please, Worldwatch, recognize that there are no sustainability stories that are separate from other sustainability stories--and that this is the real story.

As a new user, I had the same problem having to choose a single category under "Most interested in reading about in the future" in the log-in page. I find this simply wrong-headed. I want to see stories about how these issues are connected, not stories presenting them as single issues.

That said, I very much appreciate that Worldwatch is one of the few organizations I can comment to that will comprehend my concern, and could even address it.

Agenda 21 acts upon the presuppositional theories of our modern culture of scientific elitism, which not only rationalizes arbitrary and generalized aborion (vaccuuming unwanted unborn childeren) policies but pretends to know how evolution theory can give arise to genetic machines that actually manufacture living cells by means of DNA. This relatively new study, genetics, has revealed how little we knew about living organisms just 100 years ago. Darwin himself had not guessed at the extraordinary complexity at work within living cells. Sustainable development relies upon evolution theory as its polemic and philosophical foundation but how do we tell the emprorer that he has no clothes on. Evolution theory will not last beyond the next 2 decades where upon the theory shall come crashing down leaving a schismatic intellectual vaccuum, wherein deities and creation would make an unforeseen comeback. Unless of course, agenda 21 can slow down economic activity fast enough to completely halt intellectual and scientific development. All this to say that saving the planet for all life is not the ultimate ace card of all morality as the agenda 21 ideology insinuates. While we are all enfranchised together as life on earth, no one rationality can self-effectualize and by its on sense of immediacy trump all other freely held beliefs and freedoms and enterprises. There is no intellectual foundation by which one party may neutralize the rights of other parties even in the name of 'saving the planet'.
Further more, how long will it take for people to realize, skeptically, that agenda 21 is just repackaged communism.
subsynodic@yahoo.com

Maybe we World Watch readers think these were important stories, but it's not clear that the wider public is with us yet.

Check out http://pewresearch.org/obdeck/?ObDeckID=110 ...the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press....and their piece on "What Was and Wasn't on the Public's Mind in 2006"

None of the above stories are mentioned!

Jean MacGregor
Director, "Curriculum for the Bioregion" Initiative
Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education
The Evergreen State College Seminar II 2115
Olympia, WA 98505

In Tilburg, an 200.000 inhabitants city in the south of The Netherlands, the city council decided to give a free movie ticket for the movie "The Unconvinient Truth" to all 16-18 year old of the city. So 12.000 young people can see this movie for free and will now be able to see that the message from Al Gore is a serious one. A very good dicision. Maybe to have a follow up in other cities around the globe?

Have a nice 2007 to you all!

We cannot sustain our present way of life because it's based
so enormously on petroleum. Petroleum has been gushing for a century. Earth's limited reserves at at their all time peak platreau. Meaning that the peak of discoveries and the peak of extraction can/will never happen again. Without blaming it
all on those over-consuming Chinese, we are using more of a vanishing resource every time we drive our car. Meanwhile the
culture is in practical denial of "Peak Oil" (People say to me, "Pete Who?") Secondly, the hype about ethanol, bioenergy, Hydrogen, hybrids, shale oil, big off shore discoveries
are will-o-the-wisp straws in the major media's outpouring of
chaff. Yet, there's abundant material on all this, but it demands
a creative, independent pursuit of print and web sources. It's there. Read R.Heinberg,for instance! Look up ASPO. Just watch
"The End of Suburbia." Get the talks from the Third U.S.
Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions.

For my good friend and colleague, Muhammad Yunus, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize is an amazing feat because it signals that microcredit is becoming not only a viable, but now recognized strategy for societal change. Having worked with my Brigham Young University students over the years, we've implemented 40-plus global programs in the Third World to transform human suffering. Of those, the 16 largest projects were eventually spun off from the university as independent nonprofit foundations. Collectively we and our partners raised $8 million in 2005 alone, trained over a hundred thousand microentrepreneurs in simple, small business skills, and gave out microloans to more than 470,000 impoverished families, mostly in India, Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines. For critics to sit in their comfortable First World surroundings and complain about microfinance as a form of exploitation is naive, at best, and cynical at worse.

There are numerous studies on the viability and tremendous positive impacts of microcredit within poor families. The careful, independent field studies we have carried out in the past decade with numerous MFIs show clear and convincing results—that microfinance is correlated with rising incomes, better access to healthcare, more schooling for children, improved food security, better housing, and greater social capital for poor women. Hundreds of other studies verify these conclusions. To assume the worst, that microfinance is just a new practice used by loan sharks, is ludicrous, indeed. Microcredit arose precisely to liberate the Bangladeshi poor! It was designed to free them from the onerous burden of 5/6th lenders who controlled the price of one’s goods, and charged outrageous interest rates.

To the skeptics today who doubt, or disbelieve without data, I suggest you get beyond your armchair comfort zone and go to the villages of the poor. You’ll be blown away by their success, sense of dignity, and stories of human transformation. Microcredit isn’t just another weapon in the arsenal of the global war on poverty. It has empowered millions of impoverished families to rise above the socio-economic realities they suffered as the world’s have-nots. The growing reality is that microcredit also inhibits the emergence of human conflict in many of today’s war-torn nations. Finally, there’s even an innovative new trend known as “Green Microfinance” which strives to reduce toxic production processes in microenterprises, develop ecological mindsets in the heads of microentrepreneurs, and design and launch more sustainable microcredit systems. Rather than distort the many positive features of microfinance by suggesting the straw man known as a loan shark, let’s assess the data and recognize the actual realities of the movement. Long live Muhammad Yunus! Long live the Grameen Bank!

While the microfinance story has hopeful public relations notes; there is a second story circulating. The thrust of the story is that loan sharking has developed a good enough PR presence to get a Nobel prize for loan sharking. The high interest rates that are charged, and the offering of credit to projects doomed to fail has in some (many?) cases acted to perpetrate a social story of economic bondage among the poor and female in underdeveloped countries.

Remember to ask questions; do not accept rosy colored answers blindly.

I chose the story of China adopting renewable energy laws because it denotes reason and hope in the world's most populated nation, and might shame the US into being more progressive and rational. But the multitude of stories is the real story. Education and political action on all of them is the imperitive. That suggests that reality-based education and a diverse independent media is really a primary issue.

Other candidate motivational stories include resumption of the whale kill, resumption of nuclear war doctrine, corporate ownership of patents on life-form genes, leakage of genetically modified organisms that include the suicide gene, the re-emergant assertion of populism in South Amaerica to perhaps oppose environmentally devastating exploitation by international corporations, nuclear waste dissemination, and the great uncertainty about the risks of nano-technology materials from inadvertant exposure or new bioterror weaponry.

Ask more questions; do not teach answers, teach the practice of asking questions.

Although a proposal is not a done deal, it is an important time to put this on everyone's radar screen. I would imagine that the big auto industry and businesses that rely heavily on fossil fuels will bring out all their big guns to fight against this proposal. If we are vigilant and methodoical, we can create that "tipping point" of change in slowing CO2 emissions that so many of us hope to see.

At Earth & Sky, we speak to scientists daily, and we've noticed in the past year that more and more young scientists are interested in working toward a sustainable Earth. That is a big change. In the past, in science, it seemed as if scientists felt that the more abstract their research, the more glamorous. But now that has changed, and the younger scientists seem very dedicated to the tasks at hand. That seems very hopeful to me!

Earth & Sky Radio Series "A clear voice for science"

Reports of the end of debate on climate change in America are premature. As long as we have dinosaurs like Senator Imhofe in office and lobbyists who convince congress that pollution is good for business we're unlikely to have the kind of action that is needed to change the slope of the CO2 vs time curve. The previous writer and Einstein are right about needing new means of thinking to solve the problems brought about by the accelerating pace of technology and population growth, much less achieving sustainability. But I'm preaching to the Worldwatch choir...

Pls do not simplify by asking a few positive developments, which may mislead to the conclusion that there were some hopeful developments that were indications of reaching to a sustainable environment.
Sustainability also requires reversing deforestration, desertification, land degradation, loss of fertile, arable land,
water, air, soil pollution, loss of biodiversity, ozone depletion and UV stress, increasing poverty, unplanned and controlled population concentration at metropoles, litter production....
Ecological footprint, environmental sustainability index calculations prove that the pressure on the environment already exceeded the ecological capacity of the world.
As Einstein put it: "We shall require a substantially new means of THINKING if mankind is to survive." Bits and pieces is and will not be sufficient at all. Sustainability is a digital concept: 1 or 0

Tahoe Valley Lines- "Second Dimension Surface Transport Logistics Platform" First things first- "Needful Things"...

It must occur to even the casual observer going into the Oil Interregnum that the scattergun approach is an exercise in futility. Overlooking the fact that the rail network in the USA is a shadow of the pre-1950 footprint, while patting ourselves on the back for the exertion of screwing in long-life bulbs is, er, delusional... Villages are a pipe dream without Franklin's "Post Roads" guarantee of SOCIETAL & COMMERCIAL COHESION- railways- codified in the July 10, 1838 Act of Congress!

Railways seem irrelevant to the modernists, who want solutions that they can carry around in a laptop or an I-pod... Sorry- the food needs acreage and fuel and water and mild weather and fertilizer & transport thruout the whole cycle of events and especially the distribution! The plain fact that trucking will have to fall back to the short run chores, and the rails will do the long hauling and final warehousing interface is obvious. The question for WorldWatch, Mr.Flavins, is when will the Sustainability Movement rediscover the railway mode, call for Parallel Bar Therapy? Ever hear of the "Retail Railway" Concept, talk to Christopher Swan? How long can the environmental orgs of the USA keep up the dance with the transport status quo before the intellectual honesty gap is unbearable?

See (Peakoil.net) article 374. Talk to Mr. Matt Simmons about the rail freight role in the Peaking Oil / Global Warming solution set. Get the USA associations of City Officials: City Managers, Mayors, Councilmembers, Planners, Chambers of Commerce- HELLO! You-All! Where are the rail-trucking interface, warehousing/farmers markets going to relocate in Your Downtown, your suburbs? Need help... refer to the mid-century Thomas Bros. Maps for your respective locales... College students, help these guys out- their jobs admittedly, but your asses on the line when the draft comes back!

Hybrids & fuel-cells, great for stretching mileage, an exercise in futility if used to excuse more solo miles, be honest now! Maybe big cars and SUV's are better if more seats are filled and fewer trips to the store... We have proven more than once that it is not possible to conduct military operations without economic impact- are we now going to expect to pass thru the Oil Interregnum without a change in lifestyle? Come ON, you know better!

China & India & Saudi Arabia are NOW building great and comprehensive railway engineering projects. Mexico!! not the USA or Canada, even, will have the first High-Speed Rail project in North America. What would we expect, we have difficulty in repairing the New York skyline...

How about it, Mr. Flavins- give us your expert take on the WorldWatch view of the application of Parallel Bar Therapy to sustainability?!

www.ecoyouth.org is a web site where stories about young people working to restore our planet are being acumulated. Eventually they will be indexed so others can find them readily. Later, there will be a Message Board where youth can post questions.

BMW introduced a hydrogen/hybrid car this year with a maximum speed of 230 km/hour!

Peter Daub
vrijeconsumenten.nl

1. Climate change debate ends in the United States.

2. China embraces landmark renewable energy law.

3. Fighting in Lebanon triggers oil spill in Mediterranean.

4. Scientists warn global fisheries could collapse by 2048.

5. Microfinance movement recognized with Nobel Peace Prize.