A US organisation is hoping a plan to create cities which float on the ocean will see them not only produce their own food but establish their own governments.

The Seasteading Institute says it hopes the floating microcountries will allow for experimentation with new ideas which current governments are too large to try.

Seasteading communication director Joe Quirk says the floating cities create room for "start-up governments".

"When you consider that nearly half the world's surface is a blank slate, unclaimed by existing governments, you see the potential in creating a thousand start-up governments in the sea," he said.

"Seasteading comes from a very Silicon Valley perspective, that basically we don't think 193 national governments represent the range of ideas that 7 billion creative people have produced.

"We think we need a sort of start-up sector for the government, a sort of Silicon Valley of the sea, where 21st century ideas for governance can be tried.

"We're creating, literally, a platform for anyone to try whatever kind of nation they want."

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When you consider we're stuffing up the planet for food, resources and air quality, one has to ask "what on earth?" are some people thinking... What are these people going to do? Basket weaving? GM food engineering? Stock sellers? Money traders? Bankers... Mind you they might get their energy from renewable sources such as wave, wind and solar... which would be better than what we're doing at the moment. Making them floating cities would also minimise exposure to rising sea level... Hey this is a great idea! I know a lot of retirees who have made it their way of life, on cruise ships...

See also:  cosy small talk with electrostatic detritus collectors...

Radical imagination

So why does the citizen feature so little in the radical imagination? In part we can trace its eclipse, in Europe at any rate, to the conflict between Marxism and radical republicanism in the 19th century. In part, the actually existing republics, the United States above all, have successfully used democratic forms to preserve the substance of rule by the propertied. Above all, the dominant institutions in the state and the private sector - the political party and the large corporation - are both committed to radical and deepening inequality.

The politician and the corporate executive alike aspire to power without responsibility, to a world in which both the customer and the voter are reduced to a condition of perfect predictability. Individuals and groups can be noticed separately and set against one another in the service of this predictability. But citizenship as the shared exercise of public power terrifies and disgusts our rulers. Those that successfully achieve citizenship in any substantial sense must have their achievements denied or explained away.

There are plenty of problems with radical republicanism in practice as well as theory. There is more to being human than mere citizenship. But the principles of civic equality and popular sovereignty together provide irreplaceable resources to movements seeking radical change in the structure of society. They are also deeply incompatible with the exclusivity and secrecy that characterise our current arrangements.

Ask what a sovereign public needs and, whether you are an anarchist, a socialist or a social democrat, you have the beginnings of a shared programme. And then, before you know it, you'll have the charisma that comes from knowing what you want.

Daniel Hind is the author of The Threat to Reason and The Return of the Public. His third book, The Magic Kingdom, will be published in September.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/06/problem-with-radical-republicani-20146981448403493.html

Of course knowing what we want has been cleverly shaped by the system itself. Often what we want is what the system wants us to want. The process of extracting ourselves from the treadmill needs a very powerful way to remove ourselves as cogs and analyse what else we could do or want.

One of the major issue here for example is energy. We know, should we listen truthfully to scientists, that our wants are "slowiy" (fast) killing the planet. They are, no ifs and butts about it. So how do we modify our wants? How do we know what our want should be, while we are enticed by powerful advertising about more and about supersizing? Can we for one minute stop the enticing merry-go-round of debt? Nupe... We've already mortgaged the future by 25 years with our debts, in a system that created our wants... Our only choice now is a mass revolution, or becoming bushrangers (outlaws) individually or going to prison for defaulting... or carry on as if we did not care...

Since the end of the 19th century, the United States has had a presence in Asia. Today it circulates as many as six carrier strike groups throughout the region and has bound itself to defend its Asian allies: South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and, to some extent, Taiwan. President Obama recently completed a tourof the region during which he sought to assure allies that the United States is there for them. But as nationalisms collide in East Asia, and a rising China seeks its historical sphere of influence, the end of the story is by no means clear. Will the balance of power shift peacefully? Or will there be conflicts and fitful wars, with the United States as a party?

If China rises in the 21st century as America rose in the 19th and 20th, conflict in East Asia is likely, Kaplan warns. In its rise, the United States sought to exclude European powers from the Americas and to acquire additional territories. Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American War were all part of this process. The United States became a regional hegemon through the force of its arms, as John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago has argued. Today, a rising China is seeking regional hegemony in East Asia. If it acts as the United States acted, it will seek to exclude extra-regional powers (i.e., the United States), spread its influence, and acquire disputed territories.

Like the United States sought to dominate the Caribbean, the sea in its backyard, so China desires to dominate the South China Sea. The incentives are not simply geographic. The Malacca Strait, Kaplan wisely observes, is the equivalent to the Panama Canal: a gateway of trade, yet also a place for potential instability—a place China must guard in order to protect the valuable shipments of energy that pass through it. China also has powerful historical motivations, motivations the United States did not have, to project its influence. For millennia China was a great civilization and power. But beginning in the 19th century, this came to an end. Western powers humiliated and divided China even as it fought the bloodiest revolution in world history (the Taiping Rebellion). Then the Japanese began half a century of exploitation and destruction. Finally, Mao himself devastated China. Only since the time of Deng Xiaoping’s preeminence—some 35 years—has China begun to recover. And the Chinese say: “never again.” China will be strong; it will once again become East Asia’s great power.

Yet as China slowly seeks to dominate its Caribbean, it encounters a problem. America’s alliances in East Asia guarantee the security of nations like the Philippines and Japan, and support others like Taiwan. Furthermore, nationalism is the animating force of East Asian politics, and at the heart of nationalism is land. In East Asia, this takes the form of rivalrous claims over uninhabited and often submerged lands (notably the Pratas, Paracel, and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, the Senkaku/Diaoyu in the East China Sea, and Dokdo/Takeshima in the Sea of Japan). The islands themselves have little value. There are rumored to be great energy reserves submerged in the seas, but this remains uncertain. More immediately important, their fertile fishing grounds give maritime control greater importance. Nonetheless, claims of sovereignty can mobilize the passions of entire nations. That the disputes will be settled outside of international law seems quite certain: the competing legal and historical claims for territorial rights (12 miles) and exclusive economic zones (200 miles) do not seem capable of legal adjudication. This makes the realities of hard power more important than ever.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/confronting-chinas-rising-tide/

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Much of what can be said here on the subject of "influence" is that by mid-century (2050), global warming would have changed a lot of human dynamics and allegiances. Vietnam will need China. Japan may need China more than the USA.... Obama is trying to influence the world's thinking on the subject of global warming, while our Canberranean Turd is doing all he can to stop anything done about the problem. It is a problem.  A MAJOR  problem. We could feel a bit too complacent because life is still "comfortable" and like the frog being slowly boiled, we cannot feel the incrementations.

But the way things work, we should know our present climatic comfort won't stay permanent between now and 2100.

The Chinese know that. They know they have to tackle climate change. A couple of small recent "weather' events have highlighted this need: In France for example, they are preparing for extreme hot summer weather. A couple of days ago, many regions were already basking in 35 degrees C plus. As well, recently there were flooding "as never seen before" in Serbia and some major flooding "of the century" in the north of Afghanistan. Here is Australia, our Autumn has beaten all temperature records since records have been kept. This after a long line of broken temperatures for the last two years. 

By my own calculation, 2032 will prove to be a major upheaval in climate change, after a few difficult years, 2014-16, 2021-22, 2025-27. The major chaotic disruption to climate is penned for 2045-47 by serious scientist who have computed a lot of observations on the high end of the prediction scale (most computer models for climate change are designed to be very conservative and have been shown to be about ten years behind observations).

Fear not: this is not the end of the world. But cosy is not going to be the name of the game in 2150. By 2100, Sydney will experience a few days of temperatures of 50+ degrees C during summer. Most of the temperatures will oscillate between extreme of heat and cold (as Antarctica accelerates its melting, the horizontal vortex of the southern convection system plus the eddies of lows could bring bitter record cold northward, even during summer.)

The Chinese are smart people, much smarter than our primal minster impostor — I say impostor because Tony lied to get where he is.

Like Australia, the USA, Europe, Latin America, China will (is already bearing) bear the brunt of warming. "Canadia" will be defrosting... Harper's bad deed to the rest of the world would have been done today.

The Chinese are already planning ahead... The US are trying to follow... The planet needs the US to firmly lead or at least fully participate on this issue. All other issues of territorial disputes will become secondary. It's not a fallacy. Climate change (aka global warming) is a long term problem that needs immediate solutions, otherwise the pay-off will be devastating.

from Ockham’s Razor 

The world's population is now well over seven billion and growing. We have reached a stage where the amount of resources needed to sustain our population exceeds what is available, argues Professor John Guillebaud from University College London.

Many years ago, as a second year medical student, I attended a lecture on human population by my tutor at Cambridge, Colin Bertram. He argued as a biologist that relentless population increase by any species is always ultimately unsustainable; numbers increase to the limits of the carrying capacity of their environment and when they overshoot this, their numbers always collapse. If we allow unremitting population growth to continue we humans cannot escape the same fate; however cleverly we might adapt to all the different environments on earth, we only have one finite planet to live on and 70 per cent of it is salt water, and half of the remainder is desert, mountain, icecap or fast-disappearing forest.

Dr Bertram’s lecture startled me and established the direction of my medical career. I felt some guilt that doctors had inadvertently caused the population problem through vastly better death control while birth rates remained high. I decided that, as an about-to-be doctor, I should try to restore balance, and what more appropriate medical specialty could there be than family planning? So I arranged higher training in gynaecology (specialising in hormonal and intrauterine contraception) and also in surgery (hence my career total of 5000 vasectomies and ongoing research into a new male pill).

"On a finite planet sustainability is not an option, it’s just a matter of how it is achieved. Will the imbalance be corrected by literally billions of deaths or by fewer births?"

None of us in those days was worried specifically about climate change. As we’ve just been reminded by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that environmental problem is terrifying enough, especially given the risk of runaway positive feedbacks, caused, for example, by methane release from permafrost. Even so, that is far from being the only life-threatening global problem. The UK government’s chief scientist and the last president of the Royal Society have highlighted the imminence of a ‘perfect storm’: water, food and fossil fuel scarcity. Reliable reports on the planet's health such as The United Nations' Global Environment Outlook have found water, land, plants, animals and fish stocks are all 'in inexorable decline'. Already by 2002 it was calculated that 97 per cent of all vertebrate flesh on land was human flesh plus that of our food animals (cows, pigs, sheep etc), leaving just three per cent for all wild vertebrate species on land. Not to mention the obliteration of wild life in the oceans through acidification, pollution and massive over-fishing.

Regarding human numbers there is some  good news: the total fertility rate or average family size of the world has halved since 1950, when it was over five, to about 2.5 (where 2.1 would be replacement level). The bad news is that despite this, the 58 highest fertility countries are projected to triple their numbers by 2100. In a majority of all countries there is also persistent population momentum created by 'bulges' of young people born in high fertility years.

Therefore, the UN warns bluntly that world population, now well over seven billion 'has reached a stage where the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available'. The annual population increase of over 80 million equates to a city for 1.5 million people having to be built, somewhere, every week—with, inevitably, ever more greenhouse gas emissions and the continuing destruction of forests and wetlands, with their multiple habitats for the web of life on which all species depend.

This is not exactly a bundle of laughs, yet it is solidly evidence-based, as any impartial scientific observer will attest. Those who are not so impartial routinely prefer to ‘shoot the messenger’ or behave like an ostrich.

The Worldwide Fund for Nature calculates that by 2050, humankind will need 100 per cent more of the planet’s total biocapacity (forestry, fisheries, croplands) than there is. What are the prospects of finding another planet for humans to plunder by 2050? On a finite planet sustainability is not an option, it’s just a matter of how it is achieved. Will the imbalance be corrected by literally billions of deaths or by fewer births? How strange, given the evidence, that population growth and contraception remain largely taboo.

Those who consume way beyond their share, the rich over-consumers in every country, must certainly massively reduce their environmental footprints, but the 'number of feet' is also relevant. Often statements like this are assumed to refer to the poor, but our organisation, Population Matters, stresses that affluent parents must also seriously consider having one less child than they may have planned. The guideline is just two for replacement.

Listen: Apocalyptic concerns over world population not new

All this is hardly rocket science: indeed you could hardly have a better example of Ockham’s razor. Surely, continuing business as usual involves far more unrealistically optimistic assumptions than the precautionary approach. The precautionary approach requires proper resourcing of voluntary family planning services, which still receive a derisory less than one per cent of world aid for reproductive health, and the removal through education and the media of the many barriers that continue to stop millions of women from having the choice to access methods of contraception. This is not an alternative to the other crucial precautionary measure: reducing the size of humanity’s mean environmental footprint. Both are vital; they are two sides of the same coin.

When the camel collapses with a broken back, the last straw did not really do it. It was the fault of all the straws. To achieve environmental sustainability, everyone must be involved.

When a field of common land is right at the point of being over-grazed, Garret Hardin called it 'the tragedy of the commons'. This is because each herdsman continues to find it advantageous, personally and for his family, to put yet one more cow on the land, and another and another—even if the later new arrivals are thinner and less productive than before—right up to the point that the grazing limit is finally exceeded and all the cows die and all the families suffer. Fishermen behave similarly when there is a nearly over-exploited fishery. Given any resource that is held in common, the private gain of the individual is thus at the shared cost of the whole group, progressively and ultimately catastrophically.

Hardin said the way to avoid these tragedies was 'mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon', meaning everyone agreeing to be regulated by peer-pressure, along with agreed fiscal incentives and disincentives. So in the fishery example, each fisherman takes an agreed smaller quota, which is sustainable. However, not every relevant thing that happens in the environmental commons can be so regulated. The multiple decisions made by each individual about cycling or walking rather than going by car, switching off air conditioners or choosing to have a small family are difficult to influence. When push comes to shove—especially when we see so much continuing gluttony in energy use by large corporations—all of us can feel wonder what the point of helping the environment is when it seems like nobody else does

Which brings me to my own project, the Eco Time Capsule. Generally, time capsules record a particular time and place for posterity, and are buried without any future date for unearthing in mind. The time capsules we buried in 1994 were different. The concept came to me through that well-known saying: 'We have not inherited the earth from our grandparents, we have borrowed it from our grandchildren.'  I reflected on how angry our grandchildren are likely to be if we continue to wreck their loan to us. With 25 years as the usually accepted average duration of a generation, our grandchildren would be people living 50 years ahead. So this project was addressed to the people of 2044.

The time capsules contained environmentally-relevant items and were buried with letters of apology at significant sites around the world: in the Kew Gardens in London and Ness Gardens near Liverpool, in Mexico, Pietermaritzburg in South Africa, the Seychelles and at Mount Annan near Sydney.

Children were—and still are—central to this project, since they are the prime stakeholders for a decent, sustainable future. In 1994 more than 1,000 entered two competitions, one for the best brief letter or poem addressed to the finder in 2044; the other for the most striking and original ideas for appropriate artefacts to go in the capsules. My own choices for sustainability symbols were a bicycle pump and a packet of contraceptive pills.

We felt it was essential to apologise. However, more important and empowering was the pledge to do everything possible to save the planet by individual and united action. The goal is that the finders of the capsules in the year 2044 will wonder why we apologised.

John Guillebaud is Emeritus Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health at University College London. Ockham’s Razor is a soap box for all things scientific, with short talks about research, industry and policy from people with something thoughtful to say about science.

From John Pilger in regard to Peter Coleman's uttering on Q&A...

...

In 2012, the Co-ordinator-General of Remote Services for the Northern Territory,Olga Havnen, was sacked when she revealed that almost $80m was spent on the surveillance and removal of Aboriginal children compared with only $500,000 on supporting the same impoverished families.

She told me:

"The primary reasons for removing children are welfare issues directly related to poverty and inequality. The impact on families is just horrendous because if they are not reunited within six months, it's likely they won't see each other again. If South Africa was doing this, there'd be an international outcry."

http://www.independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/australias-assimilation-shame-still-stealing-indigenous-children,6570

See also article at top about Q&A, where I say... :

Q&A last night was not about the usual politico-bum fights, but about the wisdom of the elders. And there were some tremendous points made by the likes of the Aboriginal elder Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, Jane Goodall and Stuart Rees. Then Coleman started to blurt. He tried to dispute the fact that 95 (97?) per cent of scientists agree on global warming. Or that global warming was not happening... I am not too sure why he tightened his butt cheeks. 

I think his views were that coal is a cheap source of energy and can help alleviate poverty in third world countries, solve health problems, etc... Of course we all know that a lot of pollution in China is caused by burning coal. We all know that small particles from burning coal can have detrimental effect on the health of people and most of us know that coal burning produces lots of CO2 which is a greenhouse gas. But that did not deter Peter Coleman, a right-wing writer former right-wing politician to argue the value of coal burning "because it's cheap"... This was the start of the downhill run by Coleman.

On the subject of Utopia, Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, was asked about her own aboriginal experiences and she brought many twittering accounts to tears. Coleman had something to say about that. He was in favour of assimilation and of diluting the Aboriginal race until it blended in — I suppose like a light white chocolate colour. 

Who knows, he may want to do the same with the middle eastern "race" or the Chinese, but I won't go there. What is scary is that his solution to the Aboriginal "problem" is very much in line with the present right-wing thinking in this country. The rightwingers don't say as much so overtly these days, otherwise they might be "Bolted"... But their version of assimilation is their own form of eugenics: make the problem disappear with the old Tasmanian solution, including eradication. I had punch ups with a few right wing geezers who presented this same "solution" to me in the early 1980s. I mean real punch ups. We got bruised... Most of these rightwingers had never seen an Aborigine and never wanted to see one. Anyway, Coleman also misunderstood the way Aboriginal kids were "institutionalised" for the "best" — basically removed from their parents, a process referred to now as the stolen generation. He also mentioned people such as Noel Pearson as if Pearson was on his wavelength... I don't think so.  

The bucket list has a lot to answer for up north. Many grey nomads’ desire to tick off places on their bucket lists has contributed to a massive increase in hospitalisations of older travellers across northern Australia.

Many want to see Broome before they die. But the effort of getting there is often too much, says Dr Sue Phillips, the senior medical officer at Broome Health Campus in Western Australia. A week ago, three seriously ill elderly patients, who had come to Broome in pursuit of their bucket lists, were hospitalised and waiting to be evacuated by the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

“They work really hard to drive here in their caravan – ‘I’ve got to get to Broome, got to get to Broome, got to get to Broome!’ – and then they promptly decompensate and have their [heart attack] as they are coming down the Broome Highway," Dr Phillips said.

Emergency rooms in hospitals across the Savannah Way, the 3700 kilometre route that links Cairns to Broome, are filled with grey nomads who have headed north in campervans and caravans for the warm weather.

Broome's 60-bed hospital had an increase of 287 per cent more patients aged 70 to 79 from April to August than the rest of the year, and 233 per cent more people aged 60 to 69 years. South of Broome, Exmouth Hospital's emergency department sees 50 per cent more older travellers at this time of year. On the other side of the continent in Cairns, another bucket list destination, the emergency room also has to deal with growing numbers of grey nomads who have driven north for sun and adventure. 

An article published in 2010 by researchers from the United States, Germany and Austria concluded that if the world’s population reached only 7.5 billion people by midcentury, rather than more than nine billion, in 2050 we would be spewing five billion to nine billion fewer tons of carbon dioxide into the air.

This alone would deliver 16 to 29 percent of the emission reductions needed over the next four decades to keep the global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above that of the late 19th century, the threshold scientists predict could lead to severe disruptions to the climate.

Slower population growth could bring other benefits. The World Resources Institute has been looking into how the world will feed itself in 2050 without busting the carbon budget.

On current demographic and economic projections, food production would have to increase 70 percent by 2050. “Population growth is responsible for about one-half of increased food consumption,” said Tim Searchinger of the World Resources Institute. “The other half comes from higher incomes and richer diets.”

Much of the expected population growth is set in stone, but sub-Saharan Africa, expected to add 1.2 billion people by 2050 on top of its current 900 million, is an exception.

If fertility in sub-Saharan Africa slowed more rapidly than projected — declining to 2.1 children per woman in 2050 from 5.4 today — feeding the most undernourished region in the world would be a lot easier. And sparing African forests and woodlands from even greater deforestation would substantially reduce the amount of carbon entering the atmosphere.

For all the benefits of slower population growth, population policies remain a highly touchy subject.

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/business/economy/population-curbs-as-a-means-to-cut-carbon-emissions.html?_r=0

We know that at one point, population will HAVE TO BE CURBED... It will happen by whatever means, but continuing population growth is UNSUSTENABLE. can you imagine 100 billions human beings on this tiny planet?...

See also : remember when...