Daniel’s Comments (group member since Jun 23, 2012)

Daniel’s comments from the Q&A on "The Blueprint: Averting Global Collapse" with Daniel Rirdan group.

We have to work within the confines of the planetary ecosystem—much as pilots have to work with the fact that they’ve got gravity on their hands, and much for the same reasons.
The first priority of the ecologically available natural resources and activities should be applied to the creation and maintenance of infrastructure facilitating our basic needs. Insofar as the balance of the environmental footprint we can exert, it could be apportioned among all the people of the world to be used as each sees fit. People would be given a monthly allotment of footprint and this would hem in, define, the outer limits of their consumption activities. This quota would be determined by a global body. Every month, footprint credit is added to one’s account, adjusted to the current state of the planetary system and the number of people alive.
The introduction of a footprint allotment for each person fundamentally alters the thrust of the marketplace. The incentive would be to purchase, and therefore produce, commodities and services that have a lower footprint price tag. It also means that a twenty-room mansion is far more of a liability than an asset. This wouldn’t just be a socially-contrived principle; this really is the case.

I ran a simulation on every temperature, cloud coverage, solar radiation, humidity, and wind parameter of every hour of the year in a number of key locations around North America: in all, about sixty-five different meteorological parameters for each hour of the year for each location. I used a meteorological data set that had been carefully chosen to typify the weather in given locations sampled over decades. I optimized the hourly power output for every hour of the day, for every month of the year, and for every one of the five different regions. Then I combined it all into one energy-generation composite and reviewed the resultant hourly energy outcome against anticipated demand for every hour of the year. The damn thing works.
and the price tag? a few hundred thousand square kilometers--which can be trimmed considerably once we introduce sidekicks such as wind turbines and energy storage caverns.

The existing governing bodies are not cut out to handle the global crisis; bank bailouts and running a national vaccination program are about their speed. They are too pedestrian or otherwise acting as water carriers for various powerful interest groups. At the end of the day, the heads of state are glorified public relations people. None of them possesses the breadth of vision to see what needs to be done—or the balls to back it up.
The most significant administrative division of our world is that of countries. These make up about two hundred squabbling, gun-toting administrative regions, each looking out for and holding fast onto its respective territories. In turn, each of these turfs is mired by the pull and tug of myriad interest groups. The political arena of our world is more of a Middle Eastern bazaar with armed militia patrolling the alleyways than a Zion Council of elders in the movie The Matrix.
I propose a total makeover of our political setup.
I propose two things:
First, we need to gradually bring down the fences to separate us. Second, we need a transnational body formed expressly to deal with the planetary exigencies. To that end, this agency is to have the executive and legislative powers necessary for carrying out its mandate. This government is to be independent of and have supremacy over all other governing bodies.

Every year, there are about seventy-eight million more people walking the streets and frequenting the food stores. Every week, a population the size of San Diego is coming online—once those who die are accounted for. Every four years, the equivalent of the entire United States population is added on.
Within a living system that has finite production capacities, it has always been a matter of what we indirectly force out of existence and of when much is too much. Do we really want to win the human race—a human habitat from sea to shining sea standing at the finish line with an unraveled, simplified planetary ecosystem tumbling about our collective ears? Under the already heavily degraded planet, short of reducing our numbers to under a few million, the question would become not whether our presence impinges on the planetary ecosystem but what is an acceptable degree of degradation.
I call on bringing our numbers down to 1 billion people--and I have a fairly good idea what it takes and how fast we can get there.
The short of it is this: Under a two child policy, we would be able to get there around 2175.

anything and everything you are curious about, want me to clarify, and the such