The New Statesman has just published an article about the Isle of Wight entitled "A Paradise in the Making"!  They make this bold claim because David Green's EcoIsland Partnership has recently been launched with a fair amount of fanfare in a large marquee just outside the Houses of Parliament in London.

As Stephen Stead from Toshiba International describes the project:

The Isle of Wight is known for many qualities: its outstanding beauty, 13 award winning beaches and 500 miles of footpaths through unspoilt scenery, making it a favourite holiday destination for many. What it is not so widely recognised for – for the time being at least – is its pioneering approach to sustainability. It is, or at least it will be, with the help of several partners, a smart community – England's first EcoIsland.

At a time when many commentators struggle to define what a smart grid is, the prospect of describing a smart community is an even more daunting task.

Undaunted Stephen goes on to say that:

A smart community… can be considered as a community that exploits technology to provide cost and efficiency benefits. In the main, it is becoming increasingly aligned to one specific societal need – that of energy sustainability.

Whilst we wait to see whether Chris Huhne can achieve his stated goal of  a global "legally binding agreement under the United Nations" aimed at ensuring energy sustainability at the COP17 meeting in Durban, part of the UK Government's current drive in that direction is a target of 30% of the UK's energy to be supplied from renewable sources by 2020. Unfortunately, as the New Statesman article points out:

Renewables are, by their very nature, intermittent and unpredictable; extensive periods of depressed generation can be followed by excess production. Currently, at times of peak demand, alternatives such as dirty diesel, standby oil-fired power stations, or other equally unattractive options are employed. However, the majority of these are both expensive and bad for the environment.

Coupled with this is the problem faced by the distribution networks. These were not built to cope with either the levels or patterns of generation and demand connected to them. Nor were they built to handle the concept of local generation, such as solar and wind, feeding power back up lines which were only designed to have power flowing down them.

Solving that problem is where EcoIsland can help!

Toshiba and IBM are working with the island and other companies to develop innovative ways in which demand and supply can be managed and controlled in order to maximise potential use of renewable power sources – something it is hoped will reduce emissions and waste, while at the same time cutting the Isle of Wight's fuel bills by up to 50 per cent.

Stephen explains how all this might work by introducing his readers to the concept of:

The Negawatt, which provides hypothetical negative energy consumption by reducing usage at a given point in time. As energy prices rise, as reliance on intermittent generation increases and network constraints become more prevalent, the Negawatt will provide a significant balancing tool and will, somewhat ironically, become a key part of our energy mix.

However all this exciting new technology, along with its innovative new buzzwords, is not enough on its own. According to Stephen Stead once more:

The real key to sustainability is the engagement of individuals, companies and communities.

The EcoIsland Partnership does indeed appear to have managed to engage all these groups, along with national and local government.  We wish them well on the long road to 2020, by which time David Green anticipates that not only will EcoIsland be energy self-sufficient, it will be in the enviable position of being:

Able to export energy to "The Big Island to the North"!

Note that Stephen's article is also available in a New Statesman supplement sponsored by IBM, which you can download from the EcoIsland web site. Expect more articles from us on some of the other topics discussed therein in the near future.

Exeter Quakers by Jem Southam

On Monday December 5th Exeter Quakers issued a press release. Here it is in full:

Exeter Quakers express their support for the occupation on Cathedral Green

Exeter Quakers support the peaceful protest on cathedral green and share Occupy Exeter’s concern for global economic justice and sustainability.

‘We agree that our current economic system is unsustainable and that the world’s resources should go towards caring for people and the planet, rather than the military or corporate profits. We are impressed by the peaceful nature of the occupation on Cathedral Green and are glad that the cathedral authorities have not made any attempt to evict the campers. We hope this co-operation continues’ said Alison Mitchell, Clerk of Exeter Quaker Meeting.

‘Those of us from Exeter Quaker Meeting who have visited the camp have been welcomed and have respect for the way it is run. Everyone’s voice is heard before decisions are taken; there is no hierarchy and no one leader. This is similar to the way Quaker business is conducted. The process initiated by the Occupy movement, both in Exeter and beyond, is helping to create a path towards a more democratic and egalitarian future’ said Gerald Conyngham, Assistant Clerk.

Quakers have a long tradition of struggling for social justice, equality and simplicity, including involvement in the campaign against slavery and against all forms of violence, including opposition to nuclear weapons. Locally in Exeter, Quakers are trying to live in a more sustainable way both as individuals and as a meeting.

Exeter Quaker Meeting House is in Wynards Lane; we meet at 10.30 on Sunday mornings: everyone is welcome to join us.

It seems that none of the media organisations contacted by Exeter Quakers have thus far felt this news to be worthy of comment or publication.

This isn't the first time, that econnexus.org.uk begs to differ.

P.S. We've now also recorded an interview with Alison Mitchell from Exeter Quakers. Here she explains why they support the peaceful protest by Occupy Exeter on Exeter Cathedral Green.

Andy and Jim discuss social justice and inequality

We here at econnexus.org.uk rather fortuitously found ourselves filming events on Exeter Cathedral Green on the afternoon of Sunday 27th November 2011. After filming a conversation with photographer "Stone" Naylor we then listened to Nicci Wonnacott from the International Women's Arts Group explain why she had helped organise the Women Occupy Exeter "happening".

Amongst many other things Andy told us that:

There are homeless people and people who do have homes to go to… camping out every night here.

Mainly we're here because we're against financial inequality, but it's also an attempt to show an alternative model of democracy. A more direct and participatory form.

There is no leader… Everyone has as much authority as everyone else here.

We are against inequality, and we're for social justice.

To watch and listen to the complete interview, please click here.

As recorded in the minutes of their General Assembly meeting on December 1st 2011, Occupy Exeter would like to talk to musicians, performance poets (and I would suggest visual artists and performance artists of all shades also) who might be willing and able to support the movement by adding some "fun stuff" to the area of Exeter Cathedral Green.  For the moment at least, if that idea appeals to you then please do get in touch using the econnexus contact form.

In case it helps stimulate some ideas, here's one example of what they have in mind, kindly supplied by the International Women's Arts Group with their Women Occupy Exeter "happening" last weekend:

Women Occupy Exeter on Exeter Cathedral Green, by "Stone" Naylor

Here's another sort of art that is currently on loan to the Occupy Exeter site by an anonymous benefactor. It's a "statue" that we haven chosen to call "The Fallen Angel". If anyone knows the whereabouts of its creator(s) and/or the work's official title please let us know.

Fallen Angel

According to those same OE minutes mentioned at the start of this article, musician Dave Clinch has offered to do a free gig on the Occupy Exeter site. More details as soon as we have them.

In the meantime here's some poetry to be going on with.

Nicci from the IWA group at "Women Occupy Exeter"

Yesterday's post about photographer "Stone" Naylor explains how econnexus.org.uk happened to be filming events on Exeter Cathedral Green on the afternoon of Sunday 27th November 2011.  After talking with Stone we also listened to Nicci Wonnacott from the International Women's Arts Group explain why she had helped organise the Women Occupy Exeter "happening".

Amongst many other things Nicci told us that:

Our overall aims at International Women's Arts stand for multiculturalism and peace.

To watch and listen to the complete interview, please click here.

"Stone" Naylor talks to econnexus.org.uk

To cut a rather long story short my partner Kasia is a member of the Exeter based International Women's Arts Group. The group recently created a Facebook page entitled "Women Occupy Exeter", and expressed their desire to "support the 99%" by:

Creati[ing a] space for women to discuss visions for positive social change Sunday 27th November. Our plan is to make an afternoon occupation and bring some colour, fun and love to the camp. Please come and perform, make art, drink tea, look beautiful and bring a small gift from nature to help us enshrine a space.

They also said:

FILM MAKER NEEDED!

This Sunday from 12.00 filming on Cathedral Green, Art Action, Women Occupy Exeter event.

Perfect opportunity for student film maker or for someone who wants more experience.

Whilst it's a very long time since Kasia and I were "students" in the conventional sense of that word, we definitely want more experience at making films. By 11 AM on Sunday morning nobody else seemed to have volunteered, so we packed our handycams into our trusty rucksacks and headed off to the appointed place at (slightly belatedly!) the appointed hour.  We also took with us some flowers, some fruit, some Xmas cards, and perhaps most importantly of all in the circumstances, some hot tea!

By the time we left it was starting to get dark, and we'd snapped some stills, and recorded a couple of DV tapes worth of video. We'd also listened to lots of people from the Women Occupy Exeter group, the Occupy Exeter movement itself, as well one or two passers by, some of whom were more vociferous than others! I had also been invited to participate in the Occupy Exeter General Assembly, but my somewhat ageing little grey cells couldn't get to grips with the necessary protocols in the brief time available. Nonetheless my presence at the assembly was duly minuted.

All in all we now have a lot of material to sift through, but nonetheless our first rather hastily produced video is now available for all to see. Photographer "Stone" Naylor has won awards for his pictures of events at the Glastonbury Festival over the last 21 years. He was on Exeter Cathedral Green along with all the rest of us on Sunday afternoon, and he took some pictures of Women Occupy Exeter too. However we learned that Stone had another reason for being there at that place at that time. To watch and listen to his reasons for deciding to "Occupy Exeter" this week, please click here.

Regular readers will know that the  17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change  begin in Durban, South Africa in less than a week. At the same time and place the 7th Session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties (CMP7) to the Kyoto Protocol will also take place.  The question now is what if anything all these discussions will achieve apart from a modicum of global warming from all the hot air that will doubtless be emitted by the attendees?

Today Chris Huhne, the UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary, set out the UK Coalition Government's position on energy efficiency and energy security in a speech at The Grantham Institute for Climate Change. Amongst a variety of other things Mr. Huhne said that:

In transport, heating, and industry, in generation and efficiency, we must renegotiate the terms of our relationship with energy. If we succeed, our climate will be safer, and our economy more competitive. Change on this scale cannot be achieved by Government alone. Yes, we have a role to play: we must set a clear policy direction, using the right combination of incentives and regulation to drive down emissions, build investor certainty, and encourage green growth.

Businesses must also respond. Only the private sector can provide investment and innovation at the scale we need. New products and technologies must make their way to market.

Individuals have a responsibility too. We must all think again about the energy we use – and the energy we waste.

Each part of this energy equation must be balanced: otherwise, we cannot hit our carbon targets cost-effectively.

Mr. Huhne then went on to discuss a variety of "market failures":
More on Chris Huhne Says "The State is Obliged to Correct Market Failures"

We reported at the beginning of the month on the sudden demise of MF Global Inc.  If you recall Jon Corzine, an ex "Democratic" governor and senator, and (coincidentally?) also an ex CEO of Goldman Sachs, presided over the seventh largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.  The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, one of the regulators charged with keeping an eye on shady dealings on Wall Street on behalf of U.S. taxpayers, has just released a long statement about the affair. Amongst other things CFTC Commisioner Scott D. O’Malia has this to say:

Segregation of customer funds is fundamental to our markets. The Commodity Exchange Act expressly prohibits intermediaries like MF Global from (i) commingling customer and proprietary funds (i.e., house funds) and (ii) using customer funds to support proprietary transactions. It appears that MF Global failed this fundamental responsibility.

To the the uninitiated it sounds a lot like the CFTC were failing in one of their fundamental responsibilities also, since what they "expressly prohibit" happened anyway. Addressing that point Mr. O’Malia has this to say:

While it’s tempting to compare the MF Global proceedings to the Lehman Brothers Inc. (“LBI”) bankruptcy, it is important to keep in mind that MF Global is unique because customer funds are missing from the segregated account. In the LBI bankruptcy, there was no shortfall in the segregated account, which meant that selling the segregated account, with its customer positions and funds, to Barclays was a straightforward process. In contrast, since the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (“SIPC”) placed MF Global into insolvency on October 31st, MF Global customers with positions have received an inadequate percentage of their total funds. Customers that thought it prudent to liquidate their positions prior to the insolvency (the “Cash-Only Customers”) have received none of the funds used to secure their trading at all. The inability of MF Global customers as a whole to access their funds has affected trading in futures markets, and has shaken public confidence in our customer protection regime.

With the public's confidence duly shaken, the CFTC propose:

To renew public confidence in segregation and to assure the public that MF Global is an isolated incident, the Commission should immediately take action.

To the uninitiated this sounds a lot like closing the stable door after the horse has already bolted. It seems:

The Commission should also take longer-term actions to increase public confidence. Without disclosure to its customers, MF Global dramatically changed the risk profile of its proprietary operations and its incentives relating to customer intermediation. That is unacceptable. The Commission should adopt improved transparency measures to give customers more comprehensive information on the risk profiles of the intermediaries with which they entrust their hard-earned money.

The Commission must use MF Global as its own teachable moment and reconsider its final and proposed rulemakings under the Dodd-Frank Act. First and foremost, we must reconsider the proposal that would limit investments of segregated customer funds. Somewhat prematurely, this proposal is being hailed as the solution to the MF Global problem. At this time, we have not identified the cause of the segregation shortfall, and any action that we take obviously cannot be the solution until we have greater clarification on what caused the problem.

The uninitiated wonder if The Commission have noticed that many people were unhappy about "the risk profile of [financial firms] proprietary operations" and the associated "transparency measures" long before MF Global disappeared down the drain. Possibly The Commission might ask itself if that's one reason why some of those uninitiated in the ways of The Masters of the Universe are currently occupying Wall Street and other streets around the Globe?

In conclusion Commissioner O’Malia states that:

Many have said that the failure of MF Global was not systemic and that we are lucky. I don’t view it in the same light. I am certain that the thousands of individuals who have lost money or can’t get access to their rightful property don’t share that sentiment either.

Your humble reporter hasn't personally lost any money courtesy of Jon Corzine and MF Global, but nonetheless he doesn't feel lucky either. All this makes him wonder once again "What if the globe wasn't governed by politicians and bankers?". Surely it couldn't be any worse, could it?

I've been involved in quite a few debates in various places around the web over the last week or so, and I've been revisiting those conversations and reflecting on what our glorious Group of 20 leaders achieved in Cannes last week, particularly regarding what they refer to as "Global Governance".

UK Prime Minister David Cameron presented a report to the G20 entitled "Governance for Growth", which the G20 say they "welcomed". The title itself rather gives the game away. Here's my explanation of the rules of this game for some of my Facebook friends last week:

Capitalism works by having millions of marketers persuading billions of people to buy countless things they don't need.

If you don't much care for Capitalism the action to take seems self evident to me. Stop screwing Spaceship Earth. Stop buying stuff you don't need.

An unfortunate corollary of such action under Capitalism as Currently Constituted (CCC for short) is that millions of people will find themselves out of work, and thus unable to afford the things they really do need.

It's a treadmill formed into a vicious circle. If you slow it down a bit the whole thing falls apart, so the G20 are frantically trying to keep it running at a sufficiently high speed. Hence the emphasis on "Governance for Growth". How about "Government of the people, by the people, for the people" instead for a change? It's not a new idea after all!

A couple of days after making that post on Facebook I found myself engaging in a conversation over at The Economist about "the Luddite Fallacy". The modern version goes like this, according to The Economist:

If the pace of technological progress is accelerating faster than ever, as all the evidence indicates it is, why has unemployment remained so stubbornly high—despite the rebound in business profits to record levels? [Because of] a crucial change that economists are loth to accept, though technologists have been concerned about it for several years. This is the disturbing thought that, sluggish business cycles aside, America's current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much. The evidence is irrefutable that computerised automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete.

Whether people want to continue to consume countless things (and thus screw Spaceship Earth) or not is quickly becoming irrelevant. Under CCC ever larger numbers of them won't be able to afford to very soon.

"Spaceship Earth" is a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, known as Bucky for short. Amongst numerous other inventions and designs, Bucky designed the World Peace Game, later to be shortened to simply the World Game. In an interview about his World Game published in 1971 Bucky revealed how he came to the conclusion:

That kids understood you . . . you didn't have to talk down to a kid. You did have to talk down to grown-ups. Particularly to the rich grown-ups who weren't even listening to the news. They were even more difficult to talk to.

Here is a (slightly edited) conversation in which Bucky does not talk down to 3 children, originally published in 1984, in which he elucidated some of those prescient ideas:

BENJAMIN: I understand that you believe there's enough food and energy, enough resources, for everyone, and that everyone should have what they need. If that happened wouldn't there be people who would just be laying around and doing nothing?

BUCKY: Well, I think there are a lot of people who already do that. There are a lot of rich people who do nothing else. I see nature developing over time, and it probably takes 2 or 3 generations to get things set up so that a human being can do something. It takes a whole lot of enormous social activity for any given thing to happen evolutionarily. But I think it will happen.

JOHNATHAN: You say there's already enough to go around, and that most people feel forced to go to jobs they don't like out of a fear that they need to "earn a living." When do you think man will evolve to a state of mind where he doesn't feel forced to go to a job he hates?

BUCKY: Today we have the words "earn a living" because we've been assuming there's not enough for everyone. If there's not enough for everyone, if there's not enough to go around, you have to earn the right to get in on the life support, the food, energy, shelter and so forth. But if we create the distribution you would never have to "earn a living" again. You would be doing whatever you do because that's what you want to do, and not because somebody else says that's what you've got to do to earn a living.

The minute you stop equating what you do as part of "earning a living," you'll be doing things because you see something that needs to be done and you feel like doing it; because you like to do it well and want to demonstrate that you can do it better than anyone else. So whatever people do will not be because of "earning a living".

RACHEL: If all the world were to decide that they were going to live under one government and they didn't know what is was going to be yet and they came to you for advice, what would you tell them?

BUCKY: That's a very good question! I would say…. a world government that would work like this. We will hire, not elect, people who are skilled at handling mass information, and who have a good voice and appearance for broadcasting. We will have these people presenting propositions [ideas to be voted on] to the whole of humanity…. And as human beings around the world hear these propositions, they will react positively or negatively, and then our satellite sensors will be able to read their electromagnetic fields and report back to us. "67% of humanity if for this, 18% against, and 15% is not reacting." So you will have a direct world-around readout instantaneously.

Whilst I'm not sure that the technology yet exists for satellites to "read human's magnetic fields" they can certainly read people's mobile phones. Such devices also currently permit "enormous social activity" to take place.

Finally please note that the technology certainly already exists for Stanford University to deliver online lessons free of charge to anyone who might be interested in learning about Artificial Intelligence and/or Machine Learning. I'm one person who is interested in doing just that, and thousands of other people around the Globe are also doing it at this very moment. One suspects, however, that the G20 leaders won't be amongst them. They're too busy keeping the treadmill rolling to spare the time to learn about the capabilities of modern technology.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, but by the time they reach adulthood engineers understand technology better than politicians. If this is not self-evident to you, dear reader, please watch the presentation given by Jacque Fresco in Bristol, UK on August 21st 2010. Jacque's views on politicians are forcefully expressed at around 44:44 into the 3 and a bit hour video:

More on An Open Letter From Croyde to the G20 in Cannes