RAND’s list of emerging challenges

Here’s a good list of driving forces and wild cards for your scenarios.

Eleven emerging challenges

To celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the RAND Corporation and to uphold its tradition of taking on the big issues of tomorrow, a call went out to all RAND staff around the world, inviting them to propose essays on “important policy issues not currently receiving the attention they deserve in the public debate” — issues, in other words, that might be on the back burner today but will likely become front-burner issues within the next five years.

More than 100 issues were raised. The final product: the 11 essays published here. These were selected either because they highlight major public policy problems that have eluded the mainstream media radar or because they point toward major public policy solutions that have been likewise overlooked — or both.

The Aging Couple Corporate America’s Next Big Scandal Innovative Infrastructure The Day After: When Electronic Voting Machines Fail Reality Check for Defense Spending A New Anti-American Coalition

The Future of Diplomacy: Real Time or Real Estate? Corporate Counterinsurgency Beating the Germ Insurgency A Second Reproductive Revolution From Nation-State to Nexus-State

Along with less stuff, less house…

Here’s compelling article about living in smaller houses. Of course we’ve always lived in a small house. It’s efficient in so many ways, and leaves more time and money for other more important things.

Living with less stuff

Boy, do I wish I could live more like this… (from Kevin Kelly, from Merlin Mann):

Sample excerpts:

Imagine the life you want to live. I cannot think of a sentence that has had more impact on the lives of people I have worked with. … When clutter fills your home, not only does it block your space, but it also blocks your vision.

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You need space to live a happy, fruitful life. If you fill up that space with stuff for “the next house,” your present life suffers. Stop claiming your house is too small. The amount of space you have cannot be changed — the amount of stuff you have can.

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I know it sounds strange, but if you start by focusing on the clutter, you will never get organized. Getting truly organized is rarely about “the stuff.”

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This is the bottom line: If your stuff and the way it is organized is getting you to your goals… fantastic. But if it’s impeding your vision for the the life you want, then why is it in your home? Why is it in your life? Why do you cling to it? For me, this is the only starting point in dealing with clutter.

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Add sanitation to the list…

From Green Car Congress:

Behind Food, Energy and Climate Crises Looms Water and Sanitation

Modes of sanitation for the global population. Click to enlarge. Data: SIWI.

The World Water Week in Stockholm concluded with 2,400 scientists, leaders from governments and civil society declaring that slow progress on sanitation will cause the world to badly fail the Millennium Development Goals while weak policy, poor management, increasing waste and exploding water demands are pushing the planet towards the tipping point of global water crisis.

This theme of the 2008 World Water Week was “Progress and prospects on water: for a clean and healthy world”. Eight workshops had two parallel directions. One set were sanitation-related and referred to safe handling of human excreta; the other related to water-carried pollutants and how to address water pollution abatement, wrote Professor Malin Falkenmark of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) in a summary of the week.

The scale of the sanitation issue is “unbelievable” wrote Falkenmark. Out of a world population of 6.7 billion, only 1.1 billion have access to conventional sewage. Three billion use other types of toilets from pit latrines to poor flush/cess pits, while the remaining 2.6 billion use simple open defecation.

Why is sanitation so fundamental? Beyond human dignity and defecation security, the main reason is that human health critically depends on safe handling of human excreta—the origin of pathogen-related diseases. The disease link makes sanitation and hygiene nothing less than an imperative for any society to function properly.

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Here we go again

From the National Hurricane Center. See detailed analysis at the Wunderground blog .

Asilomar dance party…

The Summer Study was busy and great as usual, and I will post some notes, but until I do, here is Craig Sieben once again knocking the house down with his harp at the thursday night dance party (with Perry and the Plumpers):

Blogging from Asilomar

This the Sunday night plenary talk–Hal Harvey talking about climate policies (via iPhone…).

Coal is the problem…

Jim Hansen recently published a report (link to pdf) on a visit to Europe, which Joe Romm summarizes. These graphs tell many stories:

Coal is rising dramatically in China and India, but it is rising everywhere except Russia. Hansen is especially depressed at this because the key climate solution is reducing carbon emissions from coal use (not necessarily coal use itself).

Oil price forecasting follies

Kevin Kelly skewers the EIA for this oil price forecast (“Another Intelligence Fiasco”):

Oil price forecasting, like all forecasting, is difficult. But the DOE’s oil prices forecasts for decades have reflected a Disney-like “wishing will make it so” element, which has had a huge negative effect on government decisions on R&D investments and other public policies. Forecasts are always wrong, and the solution is to redo them regularly to capture the best information. But in that process it’s essential to not let optimism overtake serous thinking about the consequences of being wrong. Today with oil at $120+ and the global economy staggering, we can look back and say–shouldn’t we have seen this coming? Serious scenario thinkers certainly did.