Edward Piou's personal website

A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there's a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There's as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

Here's why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect -- warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka "methane hydrates" and "methane clathrates") is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there. If we see runaway methane from underneath the Siberian permafrost, we could see temperatures increasing far faster than even the most pessimistic CO2-driven scenarios -- perhaps as much as 8-10° C, very much into the global catastrophe realm. To put it in context: rapid methane releases have been implicated in extinction events in Earth's geologic past.

(Here's one piece of mitigating information: it's unclear how long this methane leak has been happening, or the degree to which the measured methane levels exceeds previous amounts. If we're lucky, this is actually a status quo situation, and we still have time before we reach a tipping point. But basing our strategy on "if we're lucky" is not very wise.)

Because of this tipping point/feedback process, a runaway methane melt won't stop on its own. When I've written before about desperation as a driver for the rapid (and risky) implementation of geoengineering, this is precisely the scenario I had in mind. If this news holds up, and if it can be shown that the methane leak is actually increasing, then I believe that we are certain to engage in geoengineering, and probably will do so before we have enough good models and studies to suss out any unwanted consequences. We'd be faced with a choice between guaranteed catastrophe or terrible uncertainty.

We'd probably try every geoengineering option available in the event of a methane runaway, but the one that most people would focus on would be the temperature management strategies: stratospheric sulfate injection, seawater cloud brightening, and (unlikely to happen but certain to get a lot of media attention) orbiting reflectors. But there's one more method we should consider. Understanding its potential requires a bit of science talk.

I noted earlier that methane is a "significantly more powerful" greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. More specifically, it's at least 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2; some reports (such as the first piece I linked to above) cite it as 30x stronger, and I've been seen as much as 72x stronger. The difference comes from how the effect is measured over time -- methane and carbon dioxide leave the atmosphere at very different speeds. Although CO2 takes upwards of a century to cycle out naturally, methane takes only about ten years. Why the difference? Chemical processes in the atmosphere break down CH4 (in combination with oxygen) into CO2+H2O -- carbon dioxide and water. In addition, certain bacteria -- known as methanotrophs -- actually consume methane, with the same chemical results. These processes have their limits, however; an abundance of methane in the atmosphere can overwhelm the oxidation chemistry, making the methane stick around for longer than the typical 8-10 years, and the commonplace methanotrophic bacteria evolved in an environment where methane emerges gradually.

These are pretty much the only two natural methane "sinks." There are a few small-scale human processes that can make use of methane (for the production of methanol for fuel, for example) and function as artificial sinks, but such efforts would be hard-pressed to capture methane released across two million square kilometers. So here's where we start to think big.

Both of the natural processes are, in principle, amenable to human intervention. The oxidation of methane into CO2 and water is a well-understood phenomenon, and relies on the presence of OH (hydroxyl radical); upwards of 90% of lower atmosphere methane is oxidized through this process (PDF). But OH is something of a problem chemical, in that it's also a key oxidation agent for many atmospheric pollutants, such as carbon monoxide and NOx. Although we could produce OH to enhance the natural chemical oxidation process, the side-effects of pumping enough OH into the atmosphere to oxidize all of that methane would be unpredictable, but almost certainly quite bad.

So what about methanotrophic bacteria? Such bacteria have long been recognized in freshwater areas and soil, and have had limited use in bioremediation efforts. Methanotrophic Archaea -- similar to bacteria, but a wholly different kingdom of organism -- were recently identified in the oceans; research suggests that methanotrophic Archaea may be responsible for the oxidation of up to 80% of the methane in the oceans. Methanotrophic microbes can also be temperature extremophiles, as they were among the various species found after the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed.

We recently began to learn much more about how methanotrophic bacteria function, as a team from the Institute for Genomic Research sequenced the genome of the methanotroph Methylococcus capsulatus. The scientists discovered that Methylococcus has the genomic capacity to adapt to a far wider set of environments than it is currently found in. They also looked at the possibility of enhancing the microbe's ability to oxidize methane, although admittedly for purposes other than straight methane consumption.

So here's the proposal: we need to deploy methanotrophic microbes at the East Siberian Ice Shelf. Methanotrophic Archaea appears to be best-suited for this task, but we don't know as much about them as we do about bacteria. If we need to modify the microbes (to consume methane more quickly, for example), we may need to work on Methylococcus bacteria, making them viable in extremely cold seawater. I suspect that working with the Archaea will probably be sufficient, but it's important to think ahead about different pathways. Either way, we should consider just how we could make use of methanotrophs to avoid a methane-melt disaster. Given the size of the region, we'll need lots of them, but that's one advantage of biology over straight chemistry: the methanotrophs would be reproducing themselves.

We need to be aware of possible unintended consequences, but at this point, it's not clear how additional methanotrophs would pose a larger risk; moreover, a mass of methanotrophic organisms would undoubtedly be helpful for reducing overall atmospheric methane beyond the Siberian release. Nonetheless, there are some crucial questions we need to answer before we could consider deploying natural or GMO methanotrophs:

Is it physically possible? Could a sufficient number of methane-eating bacteria even be produced to counter a fast release of methane from the Siberian ice shelf?

Is it biologically possible? Would methanotrophic Archaea survive in the Siberian ocean? Could a species of methanotrophic bacteria be engineered to be able to do so (as well as consume large quantities of methane)?

What are the unrecognized risks? What are we missing in an initial risk analysis? Saying "we don't know the risks" doesn't, in and of itself, mean "we should not attempt this," it means "we need to do more research." Clearly, if the risks from enhancing the methane consumption and environmental adaptation capacities of a methanotroph could lead (through species-hopping genes or simple mutation) to even harder-to-manage problems than gigatons of atmospheric methane, this isn't an option. Boosting OH levels in the region would be the fallback position, as we have more experience with managing CO and NOx pollutants.

If the frozen methane in the Siberian ocean is melting faster, our options are extremely limited. We'd no longer be in a position to stop the melting, even by ceasing all greenhouse gas production today; the temperature increases we're seeing now are the results of greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere decades ago. And when methane melts, it appears to do so quickly -- there are signs that past methane clathrate events took less than a human lifetime.

This is why I think that methane melt would inevitably mean geoengineering. But if this is the case, the pathway I suggest here may be the best option. The engineering options are enhancements of common natural processes, as opposed to something that emulates extreme conditions (such as sulfate injection). At least with current understanding, there would be few downsides to a greater-than-expected growth of the methanotroph population -- it might even be helpful in mitigating atmospheric methane coming from other sources, such as cattle.

A further advantage is that this is a process that could begin after we start to see significant methane output and could still have a measurably positive result. Using microbes for bio-"scrubbing" of methane from the atmosphere would work on methane that was a decade old as readily as methane fresh from the permafrost. We'd still see some effect from the methane that makes it to the atmosphere, but eventual removal would help to reduce that effect. This means that we still have time to get more certainty about the methane situation before we would need to use the methanotroph option; we don't necessarily have to rush past our better judgment in response. With a process of this magnitude, it's worth taking the time to get it right.

If we are seeing the beginning of a runaway methane melt, we would be facing a problem of a scale with few precedents in human history. No society on the planet would be unaffected; if left unmitigated, it would continue to affect the lives of our children, and our children's children, and generations beyond that. And remember, this is a fast process -- simply pushing a bit harder to reduce carbon emissions will do nothing to stop it.

Our choices are few, and the risk of not acting is (potentially) immense. We may well be on the brink of a new era in planetary management. Let's hope we're up to the challenge.

(Some of this essay reproduces text from my initial methanotroph proposal on Worldchanging back in 2005. At that point, it was speculation -- now, it's something we need to seriously consider.)

This piece originally appeared on Open the Future

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in Features at 2:24 PM)

Secretary Clinton’s recent speech on Internet Freedom has signaled a strong interest from the US State Department in promoting the use of the internet to promote political reforms in closed societies. It makes sense that the State Department would look to support existing projects to circumvent internet censorship. The New York Times reports that a group of senators is urging the Secretary to apply existing funding to support the development and expansion of censorship circumvention programs, including Tor, Psiphon and Freegate.

I’ve spent a good part of the last couple of years studying internet circumvention systems. My colleagues Hal Roberts, John Palfrey and I released a study last year that compared the strengths and weaknesses of different circumvention tools. Some of my work at Berkman is funded by a US state department grant that focuses on continuing to study and evaluate these sorts of tools and I spend a lot of time trying to coordinate efforts between tool developers and people who need access to circumvention tools to publish sensitive content.

I strongly believe that we need strong, anonymized and useable censorship circumvention tools. But I also believe that we need lots more than censorship circumvention tools, and I fear that both funders and technologists may overfocus on this one particular aspect of internet freedom at the expense of other avenues. I wonder whether we’re looking closely enough at the fundamental limitations of circumvention as a strategy and asking ourselves what we’re hoping internet freedom will do for users in closed societies.

So here’s a provocation: We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.

I don’t mean that internet censorship circumvention systems don’t work. They do – our research tested several popular circumvention tools in censored nations and discovered that most can retrieve blocked content from behind the Chinese firewall or a similar system. (There are problems with privacy, data leakage, the rendering of certain types of content, and particularly with usability and performance, but the systems can circumvent censorship.) What I mean is this – we couldn’t afford to scale today’s existing circumvention tools to “liberate” all of China’s internet users even if they all wanted to be liberated.

Circumvention systems share a basic mode of operation – they act as proxies to let you retrieve blocked content. A user is blocked from accessing a website by her ISP or that ISP’s ISP. She wants to read a page from Human Rights Watch’s webserver, which is accessible at IP address 70.32.76.212. But that IP address is on a national blacklist, and she’s prevented from receiving any content from it. So she points her browser to a proxy server at another address – say 123.45.67.89 – and asks a program on that server to retrieve a page from the HRW server. Assuming that 123.45.67.89 isn’t on the national blacklist, she should be able to receive the HRW page via the proxy.

During the transaction, the proxy is acting like an internet service provider. Its ability to provide reliable service to its users is constrained by bandwidth – bandwidth to access the destination site and to deliver the content to the proxy user. Bandwidth is costly in aggregate, and it costs real money to run a proxy that’s heavily used.

Some systems have tried to reduce these costs by asking volunteers to share them – Psiphon, in its first design, used home computers hosted by volunteers around the world as proxies, and used their consumer bandwidth to access the public internet. Unfortunately, in many countries, consumer internet connections are optimized to download content and are much slower when they are uploading content. These proxies could get the homepage at hrw.org pretty quickly, but they took a very long time to deliver the page to the user behind the firewall. Psiphon is no longer primarily focused on trying to make proxies hosted by volunteers work. Tor is, but Tor nodes are frequently hosted by universities and companies who have access to large pools of bandwidth. Still, available bandwidth is a major constraint to the usability of the Tor system. The most usable circumvention systems today – VPN tools like Relakks or Witopia – charge users significant sums annually to defray bandwidth costs.

Let’s assume that systems like Tor, Psiphon and Freegate receive additional funding from the State Department. How much would it cost to provide proxy internet access for… well, China? China reports 384 million internet users, meaning we’re talking about running an ISP capable of serving more than 25 times as many users as the largest US ISP. According to CNNIC, China consumes 866,367 Mbps of international internet bandwidth. It’s hard to get estimates for what ISPs pay for bandwidth, though conventional wisdom suggests prices between $0.05 and $0.10 per gigabyte. Using $0.05 as a cost per gigabyte, the cost to serve the Internet to China would be $13,608,000 per month, $163.3 million a year in pure bandwidth charges, not counting the costs of proxy servers, routers, system administrators, customer service. Faced with a bill of that magnitude, the $45 million US senators are asking Clinton to spend quickly looks pretty paltry.

There’s an additional complication – we’re not just talking about running an ISP – we’re talking about running an ISP that’s very likely to be abused by bad actors. Spammers, fraudsters and other internet criminals use proxy servers to conduct their activities, both to protect their identities and to avoid systems on free webmail providers, for instance, which prevent users from signing up for dozens of accounts by limiting an IP address to a certain number of signups in a limited time period. Wikipedia found that many users used open proxies to deface their system and now reserve the right to block proxy users from editing pages. Proxy operators have a tough balancing act – for their proxies to be useful, people need to be able to use them to access sites like Wikipedia or YouTube… but if people use those proxies to abuse those sites, the proxy will be blocked. As such, proxy operators can find themselves at war with their own users, trying to ban bad actors to keep the tool useful for the rest of the users.

I’m skeptical that the US State Department can or wants to build or fund a free ISP that can be used by millions of simultaneous users, many of whom may be using it to commit clickfraud or send spam. I know – because I’ve talked with many of them – that the people who fund blocking-resistant internet proxies don’t think of what they’re doing in these terms. Instead, they assume that proxies are used by users only in special circumstances, to access blocked content.

Here’s the problem. A nation like China is blocking a lot of content. As Donnie Dong notes in a recent blogpost, five of the ten most popular websites worldwide are blocked in China. Those sites include YouTube and Facebook, sites that eat bandwidth through large downloads and long sessions. Perhaps it would be realistic to act as an ISP to China if we were just providing access to Human Rights Watch – it’s not realistic if we’re providing access to YouTube.

Proxy operators have dealt with this question by putting constraints on the use of their tools. Some proxy operators block access to YouTube because it’s such a bandwidth hog. Others block access to pornography, both because it uses bandwidth and to protect the sensibilities of their sponsors. Others constrain who can use their tools, limiting access to the tools to people coming from Iranian or Chinese IPs, trying to reduce bandwidth use by American high school kids who’ve got YouTube blocked by their school. In deciding who or what to block, proxy operators are offering their personal answers to a complicated question: What parts of the internet are we trying to open up to people in closed societies? As we’ll address in a moment, that’s not such an easy question to answer.

Let’s imagine for a moment that we could afford to proxy China, Iran, Myanmar and others’ international traffic. We figure out how to keep these proxies unblocked and accessible (it’s not easy – the operators of heavily used proxy systems are engaged in a fast-moving cat and mouse game) and we determine how to mitigate the abuse challenges presented by open proxies. We’ve still got problems.

Most internet traffic is domestic. In China, we estimate (Hal’s got a paper coming out shortly) that roughly 95% of total traffic is within the country. Domestic censorship matters a great deal, and perhaps a great deal more than censorship at national borders. As Rebecca MacKinnon documented in “China’s Censorship 2.0“, Chinese companies censor user-generated content in a complex, decentralized way. As a result, a good deal of controversial material is never published in the first place, either because it’s blocked from publication or because authors decline to publish it for fear of having their blog account locked or cancelled. We might assume that if Chinese users had unfettered access to Blogger, they’d publish there. Perhaps not – people use the tools that are easiest to use and that their friends use. A seasoned Chinese dissident might use Blogger, knowing she’s likely to be censored – an average user, posting photos of his cat, would more likely use a domestic platform and not consider the possibility of censorship until he found himself posting controversial content.

In promoting internet freedom, we need to consider strategies to overcome censorship inside closed societies. We also need to address “soft censorship”, the co-opting of online public spaces by authoritarian regimes, who sponsor pro-government bloggers, seed sympathetic message board threads, and pay for sympathetic comments. (Evgeny Morozov offers a thoroughly dark view of authoritarian use of social media in How Dictators Watch Us On The Web.)

We also need to address a growing menace to online speech – attacks on sites that host controversial speech. When Turkey blocks YouTube to prevent Turkish citizens from seeing videos that defame Ataturk, they prevent 20 million Turkish internet users from seeing the content. When someone – the Myanmar government, patriotic Burmese, mischievous hackers – mount a distributed denial of service attack on Irrawaddy (an online newspaper highly critical of the Myanmar government), they (temporarily) prevent everyone from seeing it.

Circumvention tools help Turks who want to see YouTube get around a government block. But they don’t help Americans, Chinese or Burmese see Irrawaddy if the site has been taken down by DDoS or hacking attacks. Publishers of controversial online content have begun to realize that they’re not just going to face censorship by national filtering systems – they’re going to face a variety of technical and legal attacks that seek to make their servers inaccessible.

There’s quite a bit publishers can do to increase the resilience of their sites to DDoS attack and to make their sites more difficult to filter. To avoid blockage in Turkey, YouTube could increase the number of IP addresses that lead to the webserver and use a technique called “fast-flux DNS” to give the Turkish government more IP addresses to block. They could maintain a mailing list to alert users to unblocked IP addresses where they could access YouTube, or create a custom application which disseminates unblocked IPs to YouTube users who download the ap. These are all techniques employed by content sites that are frequently blocked in closed societies.

YouTube doesn’t take these anti-blocking measures for at least two reasons. One, they’ve generally preferred to negotiate with nations who filter the internet to try to make their sites reachable again than to work against them by fighting filtering. (This attitude may be changing now that Google has announced their intention not to cooperate with Chinese censorship.) Second, YouTube doesn’t really have an economic incentive to be unblocked in Turkey. If anything, being blocked in Turkey (and perhaps even in China) may be to their economic advantage.

Sites that enable user-created content are supported by advertising traffic. Advertisers are generally more excited about reaching users in the US (who’ve got credit cards, more disposable income and are inclined to buy online) than users in China or Turkey. Some suspect that the introduction of “lite” versions of services like Facebook are designed to serve users in the developing world at lower cost, since those users rarely create income. In economic terms, it may be hard to convince Facebook, YouTube and others to continue providing services to closed societies, where they have a tough time selling ads. And we may need to ask more of them – to take steps to ensure that they remain accessible and useful in censorious countries.

In short:
- Internet circumvention is hard. It’s expensive. It can make it easier for people to send spam and steal identities.
- Circumventing censorship through proxies just gives people access to international content – it doesn’t address domestic censorship, which likely affects the majority of people’s internet behavior.
- Circumventing censorship doesn’t offer a defense against DDoS or other attacks that target a publisher.

To figure out how to promote internet freedom, I believe we need to start addressing the question: “How do we think the Internet changes closed societies?” In other words, do we have a “theory of change” behind our desire to ensure people in Iran, Burma, China, etc. can access the internet? Why do we believe this is a priority for the State Department or for public diplomacy as a whole?

I think much work on internet censorship isn’t motivated by a theory of change – it’s motivated by a deeply-held conviction (one I share) that the ability to share information is a basic human right. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The internet is the most efficient system we’ve ever built to allow people to seek, receive and impart information and ideas, and therefore we need to ensure everyone has unfettered internet access. The problem with the Article 19 approach to censorship circumvention is that it doesn’t help us prioritize. It simply makes it imperative that we solve what may be an unsolvable problem.

If we believe that access to the internet will change closed societies in a particular way, we can prioritize access to those aspects of the internet. Our theory of change helps us figure out what we must provide access to. The four theories I list below are rarely explicitly stated, but I believe they underly much of the work behind censorship circumvention.

The suppressed information theory: if we can provide certain suppressed information to people in closed societies, they’ll rise up and challenge their leaders and usher in a different government. We might choose to call this the “Hungary ‘56 theory” – reports of struggles against communist governments around the world, reported into Hungary via Radio Free Europe, encouraged Hungarians to rebel against their leaders. (Unfortunately, the US didn’t support the revolutionaries militarily – as many in Hungary had expected – and the revolution was brutally quashed by a Soviet invasion.)

I generally term this the “North Korea theory”, because I think a state as closed as North Korea might be a place where un-suppressed information – about the fiscal success of South Korea, for instance – could provoke revolution. (Barbara Demick’s beautiful piece in the New Yorker, “The Good Cook“, gives a sense for how little information most North Koreans have about the outside world and how different the world looks from Seoul.) But even North Korea is less informationally isolated than we think – Dong-A Ilbo reports an “information belt” along the North Korea/China border where calls on smuggled mobile phones are possible from North to South Korea. Other nations are far more open – my friends in China tend to be extremely well informed about both domestic and international politics, both through using circumvention tools and because Chinese media reports a great deal of domestic and international news.

It’s possible that access to information is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for political revolution. It’s also possible that we overestimate the power and potency of suppressed information, especially as information is so difficult to suppress in a connected age.

The Twitter revolution theory: if citizens in closed societies can use the powerful communications tools made possible by the Internet, they can unite and overthrow their oppressors. This is the theory that led the State Department to urge Twitter to put off a period of scheduled downtime during the Iran elections protests. While it’s hard to make the case that technologies of connection are going to bring down the Iranian government (see Cameron Abadi’s piece in FP on the limitations of using Facebook to organize in Iran), good counterexamples exist, like the role of the mobile phone in helping to topple President Estrada in the Philippines.

There’s been a great deal of enthusiasm in the popular press for the Twitter revolution theory, but careful analysis reveals some limitations. The communications channels opened online tend to be compromised quickly, used for disinformation and for monitoring activists. And when protests get out of hand, governments of closed societies don’t hesitate to pull the plug on networks – China has blocked internet access in Xinjiang for months, and Ethiopia turned off SMS on mobile phone networks for years after they were used to organize street protests.

The public sphere theory: Communication tools may not lead to revolution immediately, but they provide a new rhetorical space where a new generation of leaders can think and speak freely. In the long run, this ability to create a new public sphere, parallel to the one controlled by the state, will empower a new generation of social actors, though perhaps not for many years.

Marc Lynch made a pretty persuasive case for this theory in a talk last year about online activism in the Middle East. It’s possible to make this case by looking at samizdat (self-published, clandestine media) in the former Soviet Union, which was probably more important as a space for free expression than it was as a channel for disseminating suppressed information. The emergence of leader like Vaclav Havel, whose authority was rooted in cultural expression as well as political power, makes the case that simply speaking out is powerful. But the long timescale of this theory makes it hard to test.

The theory we accept shapes our policy decisions. If we believe that disseminating suppressed information is critical – either to the public at large or to a small group of influencers – we might focus our efforts on spreading content from Voice of America or Radio Free Europe. Indeed, this is how many government forays into censorship circumvention began – national news services began supporting circumvention tools so their content (painstakingly created in languages like Burmese or Farsi) would be accessible in closed societies. This is a very efficient approach to anticensorship – we can ignore many of the problems associated with abusing proxies and focus on prioritizing news over other high-bandwidth uses, like the video of the cat flushing the toilet. Unfortunately, we’ve got a long track record that shows that this form of anticensorship doesn’t magically open closed regimes, which suggests that increasing our bet on this strategy might be a poor idea.

If we adopt the Twitter Revolution theory, we should focus on systems that allow for rapid communication within trusted networks. This might mean tools like Twitter or Facebook, but probably means tools like LiveJournal and Yahoo! Groups which gain their utility through exclusivity, allowing small groups to organize outside the gaze of the authorities. If we adopt the public sphere approach, we want to open any technologies that allow public communication and debate – blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and virtually anything else that fits under the banner of Web 2.0.

What does all this mean in terms of how the State Department should allocate their money to promote Internet Freedom? My goal was primarily to outline the questions they should be considering, rather than offering specific prescriptions. But here are some possible implications of these questions:

- We need to continue supporting circumvention efforts, at least in the short term. But we need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that we can “solve” censorship through circumvention. We should support circumvention until we find better technical and policy solutions to censorship, not because we can tear down the Great Firewall by spending more.

- If we want more people using circumvention tools, we need to find ways to make them fiscally sustainable. Sustainable circumvention is becoming an attractive business for some companies – it needs to be part of a comprehensive internet freedom strategy, and we need to develop strategies that are sustainable and provide low/zero cost access to users in closed societies.

- As we continue to fund circumvention, we need to address usage of these tools to send spam, commit fraud and steal personal data. We might do this by relying less on IP addresses as an extensive, fundamental means of regulating bad behavior… but we’ve got to find a solution that protects networks against abuse while maintaining the possibility of anonymity, a difficult balancing act.

- We need to shift our thinking from helping users in closed societies access blocked content to helping publishers reach all audiences. In doing so, we may gain those publishers as a valuable new set of allies as well as opening a new class of technical solutions.

- If our goal is to allow people in closed societies to access an online public sphere, or to use online tools to organize protests, we need to bring the administrators of these tools into the dialog. Secretary Clinton suggests that we make free speech part of the American brand identity – let’s find ways to challenge companies to build blocking resistance into their platforms and to consider internet freedom to be a central part of their business mission. We need to address the fact that making their platforms unblockable has a cost for content hosts and that their business models currently don’t reward them for providing service to these users.

- The US government should treat internet filtering – and more aggressive hacking and DDoS attacks – as a barrier to trade. The US should strongly pressure governments in open societies like Australia and France to resist the temptation to restrict internet access, as their behavior helps China and Iran make the case that their censorship is in line with international norms. And we need to fix US treasury regulations make it difficult and legally ambiguous for companies like Microsoft and projects like SourceForge to operate in closed societies. If we believe in Internet Freedom, a first step needs to be rethinking these policies so they don’t hurt ordinary internet users.

The danger in heeding Secretary Clinton’s call is that we increase our speed, marching in the wrong direction. As we embrace the goal of Internet Freedom, now is the time to ask what we’re hoping to accomplish and to shape our strategy accordingly.

Thanks to Hal Roberts, Janet Haven and Rebecca MacKinnon for help editing and improving this post. They’re responsible for the good parts – you can blame the rest on me.

This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My Heart's In Accra

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Community at 3:54 PM)

Greetings Worldchangers!

By becoming a fan of Worldchanging on Facebook or by following (and retweeting) us on Twitter, you are helping to spread the word about positive solutions.

Each day we post new ideas to our site that can help make cities better places to live, help move us more quickly toward a zero-impact economy and help us live together harmoniously. As part of the Worldchanging network, you'll always be up-to-date on our latest projects and fresh streams of thought. You can connect easily with active network members and start discussions with others about articles online.

When you connect with us, you connect with the reality that positive solutions exist, and that people everywhere are working toward a brighter future -- necessary information in sometimes seemingly hopeless times.

To receive our newsletter straight to your inbox each week, sign up here.

Click one of the boxes below to connect on Twitter or Facebook.

You can also follow our Executive Editor Alex Steffen directly by following him on Twitter.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 2:10 PM)

(February 2010)

Top stories from our Canadian blog:


On-street rumble strips for bike paths—removing barriers to active transportation in the Winter City | Rod Edwards "The best idea I heard was to use rumble strips—make the strip as wide as the painted line on the street, and drivers suddenly have a great haptic reminder when they invade the bike lane. And, rumble strips won't get scraped off by snowplows, won't wash away like paint, don't interfere with cross-traffic (like curbs), and still allow for parking."

Visions Desirable, Present and Future | Mark Tovey

"Here at WorldChanging, we often have conversations about how best to envision desirable futures. .... Alex Roman's masterfully rendered film, The Third & The Seventh, points the way. .... Herein we find a ravishing portrayal of a the play of light and shadow created by wind turbines (7:24), an enchanting subterranean reflection pool with a green roof (7:57), and a gorgeous forest dwelling, seemingly self-sustaining (8:32)."

Can Slums Save the Planet? | Madeline Ashby

"Obviously, the gist is not that we should all convert to slum life. But Brand imagines certain aspects of it (the density, the upcycling, the walkability) can combine with bright green technologies to make urban centres more liveable and sustainable."

Mapping the USA's Food | Garry Peterson

"The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has introduced the Food Environment Atlas, a new web-based data visualization tool. The atlas is an interactive online tool that allows people to visualize various food related information at the USA county level."

If you're from Canada, we'd love to hear from you! Check out worldchanging.ca and leave comments, or suggest a story via the WorldChanging Canada contact form.


Image Credit: Belo Horizonte

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Mark Tovey in Features at 1:28 PM)

A group of MIT nanotechnology researchers has discovered a new way of generating electricity:

Like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface by waves traveling across the ocean, it turns out that a thermal wave — a moving pulse of heat — traveling along a microscopic wire can drive electrons along, creating an electrical current.

The key ingredient in the recipe is carbon nanotubes — submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a chicken-wire-like lattice of carbon atoms. These tubes, just a few billionths of a meter (nanometers) in diameter, are part of a family of novel carbon molecules, including buckyballs and graphene sheets, that have been the subject of intensive worldwide research over the last two decades.

This so-called "thermopower" may or may not be an interesting breakthrough with some clean energy applications: it's always very difficult to predict how quickly or to what extent a new insight can bring forth new innovations. It is a reminder, though, of how rapidly the frontier of knowledge is still advancing. What is possible today is not what will be possible next year, much less in 20 years. This is particularly true when it comes to nanotechnology (which I think it's clear will have some major implications for materials design, smart zero-waste systems and post-ownership in particular).

At the same time, it's also worth seeing the complexities inherent in a story like this.

For one thing, this is not (despite tweets to the contrary) the "solution" to our sustainability problems. It's pretty clear that barring truly revolutionary discoveries (ones that change our understandings of physics, pretty much), no new technologies are going to make the Swap possible. Too many aspects of the current suburban American version of prosperity are simply unsustainable (for reasons that don't appear to be changeable) to make it likely that even big improvements in some of the component technologies can save the whole system. The technofix is not a menu option.

The other thing is that nanotechnologies like thermopower are almost certain to create their own attendant problems. Second-order effects come with the territory. We will need new regulatory systems to anticipate and control those impacts, certainly. But on many, many questions -- like How serious a threat is nanopollution? -- we don't even know enough yet to know how to sensibly regulate deployment, and since that means we also don't know how to undo any damage we might cause, we probably ought to be defaulting to a precautionary stance. The alternative is trying to respond to unanticipated nanoindustrial catastrophes. We ought to get the frameworks we need in place before we find ourselves dealing with buckyjunk or brain-abrading nanoparticles (or gray goo for that matter).

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Alex Steffen in New Science at 12:15 PM)

It's understandably common for people working on bright green issues to be dispirited these days. We're currently living in the wake of the failure of climate talks in Copenhagen, the miring of climate legislation in the swamp of the U.S. Senate and what seems like a steady torrent of bad news (from methane melt to the tragedy still unfolding in Haiti). We're not only failing to move rapidly enough towards zero-impact economies, we often seem to be losing ground these days, both because of political attacks by entrenched interests and because as the science of planetary boundaries is better understood, the problems look worse than they did before.

In private conversations, more and more people I respect have told me that they suspect the war for humanity's future is un-winnable.

But it's worth, in dark times, getting a little historical perspective. Consider November, 1941.

In November, 1941, many people around the world thought that Germany, Japan and their Axis allies were almost certainly going to win the War.

Things did, indeed, look grim. France had fallen. Essentially all of Continental Europe was controlled by Axis powers, their allies (Vichy France, Hungary, Bulgaria) or countries friendly to them (like Spain, Finland and Sweden). The Blitz had pounded London flat. Having invaded Russia in June in the largest military operation in history, the Germans had driven easily across European Russia, taken Kiev, surrounded Leningrad and were at the gates of Moscow. Things were so bad in Russia that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made a direct appeal to the people for resistance -- only his second public appeal ever (in general, his style was more "prison camp" than "public relations"; that he felt the need to appeal to the people was a sign of how bad things had gotten).

As the Nazi's rule took hold in occupied territories, it became even more clear what fascism really meant. Organs of state repression became ubiquitous across Europe: occupation spurred a wave of arrests of intellectuals, dissidents and political "undesirables"; censorship was absolute; abduction, torture and political murder were daily commonplaces; reprisals against civilians for resistance acts increased. In November 1941, general deportation of Jews and Gypsies became common, Himmler ordered the arrest of all homosexuals and the death camps began full operations, with 12,000 people a day being murdered. Mobile murder units called "Einsatzgruppen" killed 1,000,000 people in Ukraine and Russia during the months of September, October and November alone: whole villages burning, miles of mass graves filled with bodies.

Things weren't much better in the Pacific Theater. Japan controlled Korea, Vietnam, and much of Northern and Coastal China. The Chinese army was near collapse, being beaten badly in every fight with the Japanese, with some observers estimating it would disintegrate within months; meanwhile Chinese Nationalists and Communists were nearing civil war, threatening to make the Japanese invasion of China a three-sided fight. Millions had died in the fighting or in Japanese atrocities, and millions more were refugees; famine and disease were spreading. There seemed little reason to assume the Japanese wouldn't conquer China, and perhaps even India, in the coming years.

Around the globe, the Allies were taking a beating. Rommel was driving across Africa, and it looked like North Africa and the Middle East would soon be in the Axis sphere. U-Boat wolfpacks were loose in the North Sea, hunting convoys, with massive losses of Allied shipping; German raiders had spread out across the oceans, sinking ships from Argentina to Australia (the sinking of the HMAS Sydney on November 19th, 1941, with the loss of all hands, remains Australia's worst naval disaster). Countries from Mexico to Iraq were declaring friendship with the Axis, many seeing opportunities to change the balance of power with developed nations, and some worried that a wave of colonial revolutions was imminent, which would further damage the Allied war-making capacity. It was truly a World War, and the Allies were losing, badly.

Less than four years later, the Allies had won completely.

What happened between -- after America entered the War because of Pearl Harbor and the Russians and Chinese made almost unfathomable sacrifices against the German and Japanese armies -- is a story for a different time. The point is that it might've been very hard for a person of good conscience, a believer in democracy, opposed to the march of Fascism, to read a newspaper in 1941 and believe that anything other than utter ruin and 1,000 years of darkness were in store.

What if this is the November 1941 of the sustainability movement? What if the tide may turn far faster than we think? What if five years from now, the political landscape has been transformed? Certainly, things are grim: but isn't it perhaps worth remembering that others have been through far worse, and triumphed?

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 1:35 PM)

We've written before about the danger that climate change will lead to the thawing and release of methane frozen on the ocean floor, and indeed the worrisome news that some scientists were observing patches of Arctic sea foaming with gas bubbles from "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor.

Now, researchers in Alaska have found a similar process underway:

Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the university and a leader of the study, said it was too soon to say whether the findings suggest that a dangerous release of methane looms. In a telephone news conference, she said researchers were only beginning to track the movement of this methane into the atmosphere as the undersea permafrost that traps it degrades.

But climate experts familiar with the new research reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science that even though it does not suggest imminent climate catastrophe, it is important because of methane’s role as a greenhouse gas. Although carbon dioxide is far more abundant and persistent in the atmosphere, ton for ton atmospheric methane traps at least 25 times as much heat.

Until recently, undersea permafrost has been little studied, but work so far shows it is already sending surprising amounts of methane into the atmosphere, Dr. Shakhova and other researchers are finding.

Last year, scientists from Britain and Germany reported that they had detected plumes of methane rising from the Arctic seabed in the West Spitsbergen area, north of Scandinavia. At the time, they said they had begun their work hoping to gain data to predict future emissions and had not expected to find evidence that the process was under way.

It is “indispensable” to keep track of methane in the region, Martin Heimann of the Max Planck Institute in Germany said in a commentary accompanying the Science report. So far, Dr. Heimann wrote, methane contributions from Arctic permafrost have been “negligible.” He added: “But will this persist into the future under sustained warming trends? We do not know.”

In an e-mail message, Euan G. Nisbet of the University of London, an expert on atmospheric methane, said the situation “needs to be watched carefully.”

Atmospheric concentrations of methane have more than doubled since pre-industrial times, Dr. Heimann wrote. Most of it comes from human activities including energy production, cattle raising and the cultivation of rice. But about 40 percent is natural, including the decomposition of organic materials in wetlands and frozen wetlands like permafrost.

Dr. Shakhova said that permafrost in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, peat land that flooded as sea levels rose after the last ice age, is degrading in part because runoff from rivers that feed the Arctic Ocean is warmer than in the past.

She estimated that annual methane emissions from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf total about seven teragrams. (A teragram is 1.1 million tons.) By some estimates, global methane emissions total about 500 teragrams a year.

Dr. Shakhova said that undersea methane ordinarily undergoes oxidation as it rises to the surface, where it is released as carbon dioxide. But because water over the shelf is at most about 50 meters deep, she said, the gas bubbles to the surface there as methane. As a result, she said, atmospheric levels of methane over the Arctic are 1.85 parts per million, almost three times as high as the global average of 0.6 or 0.7 parts per million. Concentrations over the shelf are 2 parts per million or higher.

A huge release of one-frozen methane is (potentially) almost the definition of a feedback loop, perhaps even a tipping point into runaway climate change.

Luckily, we're not there yet. Scientists have been very clear to say that while these field observations are surprising and disturbing, they do not yet indicate a catastrophe. We need to wait for more data to figure out if it's time to panic yet.

In the meantime, we need to focus even more strongly one four solution spaces:

1) Getting to a zero net emissions economy as quickly as possible. It's very clear now that we can do this at a net gain for society, with more (and more wide-spread) prosperity for most people, and that it's largely the opposition of entrenched interests that's preventing us from making huge strides forward: this needs to change.

2) Implementing climate-adaptive ecological restoration, safeguarding ecosystem services and researching soil carbon sequestration and other practices that have multiple benefits while pulling greenhouse gasses from the air. We need to be helping the planet's natural systems heal towards resilience as much as we possibly can.

3) Engaging in a stronger and more realistic debate about geoengineering, its limits and its politics, especially since news of potential tipping points always accelerates calls for geoengineering research, even deployment. Geoengineering's main use in the climate debate at the moment is as a propaganda tool by those seeking to stall action on emissions reduction; that doesn't mean that we don't need to discuss what mega-scale answers might be possible should we find tipping points sliding past more quickly than we feared.

4) Building psychological resilience in the face of huge and alarming planetary changes. News like this is disturbing. We need to find ways, as a culture, as communities and as individuals, to understand disturbing changes without losing our balance. Psychologically wrecked people are no good to themselves, others or the planet. We need to promote the capacity to be healthy and happy despite monumental challenges.

We'll be returning to all these ideas again in the near future.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Climate Change at 9:35 AM)

by Elizabeth Press

"Fixing the Great Mistake" is a new Streetfilms series that examines what went wrong in the early part of the 20th century, when our cities began catering to the automobile, and how those decisions continue to affect our lives today.

In this episode, Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White shows how planning for cars drastically altered Park Avenue in New York City. Watch and see what Park Avenue used to look like, how we ceded it to the automobile, and what we need to do to reclaim the street as a space where people take precedence over traffic.

This piece originally appeared on Streetsblog

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Cities at 10:00 AM)

Social innovation is booming, but not many organisations take it seriously – yet. What's needed is a way to bring it all together.

by Geoff Mulgan

Waste is a pressing problem: the need to reduce it led to the formation of Freecycle. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

How should you go about finding new answers to the challenge of an aging population, unemployment, mental illness or cutting carbon emissions? Social innovation has started showing up everywhere, with EU programmes, networks, funds and even an office in the White House. But how should it best be done? Once you leave the rhetoric and the sometimes self-serving case studies behind, what actually works in achieving change?

All over the world, social innovation is tackling some of the most pressing problems facing society today – from fair trade, distance learning, hospices, urban farming and waste reduction to restorative justice and zero-carbon housing. But most of these are growing despite, not because of, help from governments. One example, which grew out of the need to reduce waste and free landfills, is Freecycle. Freecycle groups match people who have things they want to get rid of with people who can use them. It now has 5 million members in 85 communities worldwide. Another example of a creative use of the internet is Pledgebank, an online platform that helps people come together to take collective action. One person signs a pledge to do a certain thing if a number of other people agree to take the same action, for example, "I will start recycling if 100 people in my town do the same". The creator of the pledge then publicises their pledge and encourages people to sign up. Pledgebank is now global, with users in 60 countries. And there are many more examples from all over the world, ranging from Forum Theatre in Brazil, complaints choirs in Finland and Pratham's grassroots education in India to mobile banking in Africa, social currencies in Japan and innovation labs within the government in Denmark.

At one level, social innovation is an extraordinarily creative field – and one that is having a global impact. But it's also a field that is only just taking shape and moving beyond anecdotes. There are thousands of experts in business, medical and technological innovation, but only a few scattered organisations are beginning to take social innovation seriously. The Open Book of Social Innovation and its website will aim to bring together the hundreds of methods in use around the world, and provide an evolving resource for practitioners, with pointers to what works best, whether in finance, design or scaling up.

The Open Book of Social Innovation launches on 8 March and is available from the Young Foundation.

This piece originally appeared on The Guardian

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Social Entrepreneurship at 2:44 PM)

World of Giving, by Jeffrey Inaba and C-Lab*

(available on Amazon USA and UK.)

Lars Müller Publishers says: In this important exploration of the sentiments of our time, World of Giving explains the motivations for why we give and offers examples of individuals, foundations, governments, multinationals and NGOs helping others. Jeffrey Inaba and C-Lab provide an understanding of the process of working toward a greater good by describing actions that build bridges between goodwill and need, intention and realization. The authors show that gifts form the foundation of all kinds of human interaction with each one establishing a unique relationship between giver and receiver. They illustrate that the gift too alters in meaning and value, detailing how it transforms as it circulates through what are at times a complex series of transactions.

In place of the pursuit of personal wealth, World of Giving presents a mindset that is based on generosity and revolves around the gesture of giving. The book argues that giving is a powerful act that gains social momentum, benefiting not just the immediate recipient but typically others as well. Acknowledging that each of us is inclined to give, this illuminating publication reveals how a beneficent deed contributes to an environment of increasing generosity in addition to enhancing the capabilities of its recipient. As a shared value, giving can grow to be a meaningful collective force that affects the world in surprising ways.

Read also the introduction to the book by Jeffrey Inaba.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie donated $ 1 million to aid Haiti quake relief, Swiss supermarket Migros bestows 0.5 % of its retail and 1 % of its wholesale turnover to art and culture as part of a programme called Migros Culture Percentage.

On the other end of the generosity spectrum, Italy's billionaire prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, had proposed to put up in three of his own houses some of the thousands of people made homeless by the earthquake that shake Abruzzo in April last year. The offer has often been regarded as nothing more than a PR move (rumours has it that he never even respected his promise.)

The book World of Giving navigates the world of generosity with brio and erudition. Whether they are good old christian charity, sincere kindness or corporate philanthropy, acts of generosity are everywhere you'd care to look.

From the velvet monkey that puts its own life at risk by emitting calls to warn other troop members of the approaching predator to the welfare pioneers of the Calvinist Dutch Republic. From the rise of US philanthropy to Communism's re-conceptualization of the act of giving, etc. World of Giving explores generosity through times and cultures.

Philosopher, and historian David Hume described men as being fundamentally altruistic. Philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith believed that men are motivated chiefly by self-interest, even when they display some generosity. World of Giving has a more balanced approach. Far from being a mere attempt to substitute Gordon Gekko's 'Greed is good' with a call for openhandedness, the book uncovers the mechanisms and strategies of giving. And its economics, as anyone involved in thebusiness of giving away free digital goods can confirm.

Jeffrey Inaba / INABA / C-Lab, Donor Hall (detail), 2007

* i can't recommend enough their Volume magazine.

This piece originally appeared on We Make Money Not Art

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 2:22 PM)