Happy New Year, friends.

We’ll see you in 2009.

(Photo via LATimes.)

Tonight is probably the only night of the year during which public drunkenness is not only tolerated, but generally celebrated. Whether you’re attending a black-tie gala with endlessly bubbling champagne or slamming into a studio apartment with a small circle of friends, the pervading sentiment of the evening will likely be: Cheers!

And why not? It’s been a long year, one that I’m eager to bid a debauched fair well. But a crucial component of ushering in the new year is MAKING IT  to the new year.

So please, please, please don’t drink and drive.

Sure, cab prices are conspicuously higher than normal tonight, but they pale in comparison to the cost of a DUI—not to mention the unquantifiable cost of, say, killing someone.

Plus, if you’re in a cab, you can safely and lawfully send text messages—an activity that’s mere hours away from illegality in California.

On a slightly less dire (but equally wet) note, Cracked has a funny—if depraved—series of drunk myths debunked. And NotCot has a pretty collage of holiday-themed liquors (in case I’ve totally killed your buzz).

And here’s another look at GOOD’s video investigation of how much people actually imbibe.

Oh, and, Happy New Year.

(Image via Flickr user Mike “Dakinewavamon” Kline.)

Last year, the famous dropping ball at Times Square went “green” by switching to LED lights. This year, as the Times’ James Kanter pointed out the other day, they decided to supersize the thing, and keep it glowing all year round. Now, I’m no math genius, but doubling the ball’s size and increasing its glow time by a factor of 365 hardly sounds like a good way to conserve energy. Right?

Also commemorating the “greening” of NYE on 42nd Street are these new wind-powered billboards, and the tourists-on-bikes-powered 2009 signs that we read about over at Wired. Sounds greenwashy to me, but we’ll see.In the mean time, I’d like to know what the city’s plans are for the 1,000 balloons that will be left behind when a million-plus people decide go home for the night, to say nothing of the (literal) ton of confetti that will rain from the rooftops a couple minutes before the ball drops.

Alex Steffen says solving our current planetary crisis could lead to an unimaginably good future. Here’s how we get there.

as told to GOOD

We are at a moment unique in human history, when we are using the planet’s bio-capacity so quickly that we risk a catastrophic collision with ecological reality. Every creature and every biological system on Earth is now dependent, intentionally or unintentionally, on our management. We’ve never been in the position of managing the planet before and we have no idea how to do it.

It’s really serious. What’s at stake here is not just the ability of civilization to function in a way that we have come to take for granted, but possibly even the survival of human beings. And, unfortunately, the causes of the crisis are complex and everyone on Earth is involved. There’s a tendency for people to think that there’s an environmental crisis and a poverty crisis and a war and terrorism crisis, and so forth. But in reality they’re all the same big crisis. Right now we are coming to realize the magnitude of that big crisis.

We need people who change their thinking and not just their light bulbs.

The future toward which we are moving quickly is unthinkably bad. However, the kinds of things we need to do to solve these problems could lead to a future that is unimaginably good.

In 2009, we’re going to have what may well be the most important international summit of our lifetimes: the Cop15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Copenhagen, where we will decide what the successor to the Kyoto treaty will be. It is the last opportunity we’re going to have as a species to decide the degree to which we’re going to tackle climate change before it’s too late. And the United States will play a critical role, because we’ve been the ones holding up progress.

In the last five years the politically expedient form of environmental activism became privatizing responsibility, encouraging us to think that the future of the planet depends on us making small choices in our daily lives: recycling, buying organic shampoo, whatever. But most of the damage that we cause in our lives is caused by big systems we have very little control over as isolated individuals. We have this idea that changing the world ought to be reducible to simple steps, but it just doesn’t work that way; this isn’t that kind of a world. Even if we all followed every last eco-tip and simple step, we’d still be hurtling towards catastrophe.

If we want to avoid that catastrophe, we need to not just do fewer bad things: we need to do different things altogether. We need to reinvent the way our whole society works. We need bright green upgrades to our cities, our energy systems, industrial design and technology, farming and forestry—everything. It all needs to change, essentially immediately. That will take millions of people transforming their lives to pursue new solutions, to become more effective and innovative citizens, business people, investors, community leaders, and so on. We need people to actually step up and do big things. We need people who change their thinking and not just their light bulbs.

I don’t think that we have ever experienced, at least in American history, a transformation of political opinion like the one we’ve seen in the past several years on the environment and climate. Young people understand that the world we’re talking about is the world they’re going to raise their kids in, that this isn’t a distant reality, that the ice caps are melting now. While that gives me hope, the gap of understanding between those people and the 70-year-olds who are in the U.S. Senate is staggering. It’s a generation gap that makes everything the boomers talked about in the 1960s look like a disagreement at a tea party.

I really think that the biggest political difference on the planet right now is what time frame you define moral responsibility in. Most politics is really all about hoping the good times last until the rich old people die. There’s even a denial that we can do anything about the problems. It’s all about delay, fake debates, and encouraging cynicism, inducing apathy.

But there’s another political force growing fast, and that’s the politics of optimism. It’s a politics that says transformation is not just a duty, it’s an amazing opportunity. We might, instead of doing nothing and leaving our kids a ruined planet, decide to build them an awesome future and spend the rest of our lives enjoying it. That’s the choice we wake up to every day now: cynicism or change.

Don’t say Uncle Sam never did you any favors. If you’re wondering where your tax dollars have been going, check this out: a helpful list of suggested New Year’s resolutions you probably won’t keep, care of the U.S. government. Given the sorry state of the economy, though, the number of ongoing wars, and the fact that the planet is burning, we think “Lose weight” and “Drink less” maybe isn’t going to cut it. So we’re opening up the floor to you.

What’s your resolution? Here are a few to get the ball rolling…

1) Get around to composting, even though I don’t have a backyard.

2) Make potluck dinners cool again.

3) Get a real live penpal who maybe lives somewhere I don’t know much about.

4) Go to the gym every day! (Just kidding about the last one.)

Let us know what you have in mind.

Remember the rocks that absorb CO2?

Well, today the Guardian reports that British engineering firm Novacem has developed a new cement that does the same—and produces far less CO2 in production than traditional cement. If this technology can find scalability it would be a truly huge innovation, as cement making is presently one of the single largest sources of global carbon-dioxide emissions (the Guardian cites it as 5% of of all CO2—more than the entire aviation industry).

Here’s the Guardian’s simple description of how Novacem’s new concrete is different from our regular concrete:

Standard cement, also known as Portland cement, is made by heating limestone or clay to around 1,500C. The processing of the ingredients releases 0.8 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of cement. When it is eventually mixed with water for use in a building, each tonne of cement can absorb up to 0.4 tonnes of CO2, but that still leaves an overall carbon footprint per tonne of 0.4 tonnes.

Novacem’s cement, which has a patent pending on it, uses magnesium silicates which emit no CO2 when heated. Its production process also runs at much lower temperatures – around 650C. This leads to total CO2 emissions of up to 0.5 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of cement produced. But the Novacem cement formula absorb far more CO2 as it hardens – about 1.1 tonnes. So the overall carbon footprint is negative – i.e. the cement removes 0.6 tonnes of CO2 per tonne used.

Click here for the full article.

(Image above shows The Portland Cement Factory in Aalborg, Denmark)

Normally, as a rule I try to ignore the nonsense that fuzzy head college grads come up with, but THIS particular hijink was too good to pass up…
Now then, we all have a primal fear of being maimed and eaten by a predator of some type, be it a bear, a mountain lion or even a shark and therein lies the basis of this article.  Seems that the fuzzy heads at the University of Tampa in Fla have been endeavoring to conduct experiemtns as to just HOW STRONG A SHARKS BITE IS…UH HUH!  Yeah, THAT’S THE TICKET…seems like they have failed to conduct these so called experiments due to THE EXPERIMENTAL INTRACTABILITY OF THESE ANIMALS…well…duh…and NO SHIT!  but it gets BETTER my dear brain dead readers… the maniacally moronic and skillfully stupid fuzzy heads at the University of Tampa have reasoned that a sharks bite is actually WIMPY…Yeah…right!  THEY claim that POUND FOR POUND, SHARKS DON’T BITE HARD AT ALL…
OOOOOOOOOOKAY!  and HERE is where it gets even more raucously and rambunctiously IGNORANT…their conclusions come from using BIOMECHANICAL MODELS…and…they also KNOCKED OUT SMALL SHARKS such as sand sharks and THEN STIMULATED THEIR JAWS WITH ELECTRICAL SHOCKS…then the maniacs have stated that “Our analyses show that large sharks do not bite hard for their body size but simply do a lot of damage because THEY HAVE SHARP teeth..well…NO SCREAMING DOG SHIT there Prof…!  But they do go on to say that that a twenty foot GREAT WHITE can and DOES BITE THORUGH ANYTHING IT COMES ACROSS…REALLY?…I say this, put the fuzzy heads into a tank with a hammerhead, a tiger and a bull shark, throw some blood in the water and let the FUZZY HEADS FIND OUT HOW FRIGGIN’ HARD A SHARK REALLY DOES BITE.  Then that way, there can be no question amid their agonized dying screams as they are bitten and eviscerated.  Here’s ONE MOREthing, this IS WHERE precious grant money goes instead of trying to find a way to feed the homeless or provide medical for the indigent.  Any parents out there that want to send their kids to college so they won’t be brain dead, DO NOT SEND THEM TO THE UNIVERSITY OF TAMPA, Fla…they may be used as shark bait or educated in stupid pursuits…

There are good and less good sources on the bloodshed in Gaza. Then there are sources like these: Laila El-Haddad is a Palestinian journalist, a mother, and a tireless blogger whose dispatches are among the closest we’ve found to getting what it’s like on the ground in Gaza right now. (more…)

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (whose stated mission is to “to sustain the health, diversity and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations”) was all set to auction off about 150,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas companies on the Friday before Christmas.

The whole auction was rushed to make sure it happened before the Obama administration takes office. Environmental activists were not happy, but despite Robert Redford’s best efforts it looked like a done deal.

Enter University of Utah student Tim DeChristopher. From Democracy Now:

While many environmental groups launched campaigns to oppose the sale of the land, one student in Salt Lake City attempted to block the sale by disrupting the auction itself. Twenty-seven-year-old Tim DeChristopher posed as a potential bidder and bid hundreds of thousands of dollars on parcels of the land, driving up prices and winning some 22,000 acres for himself, without any intention of paying for them.

The Bureau of Land Management must now wait over a month before it can auction off these properties, but by then the bureau will no longer be run by the Bush administration.

So Tim, who probably has a few grand in outstanding college loans, hilariously owes the Bureau of Land Management $1.7 million. He’ll likely go to jail, but it seems like he’s cool with the trade-off. And anyone who’d rather have pristine land than oil rigs around Arches National Park owes him a thank you card.

It looks like he’s saved thousands of acres of public land and he did so without damaging people or property. All those folks who go around setting new Hummers on fire or spiking redwoods or standing up in Congress in costume and shouting should take note.

(Image from Conservation Value Notes)

Way back on December 18th, we held GOOD Design: LA as the second to last night of the GOOD December happenings here at the community space below our offices in Los Angeles.

Together, with design writer and frequent GOOD contributor, Alissa Walker, we gathered seven local designers and design-minded people we very much admire (Artecnica, Frances Anderton, Barbara Bestor, Materials and Applications, Geoff McFetridge, Rene Daalder, and Stefan Bucher) asked each to put together a short presentation about solving a very LA problem (Tacos, Traffic, Ugliness, Water, Pollution, Isolation, and Acts of God, respectively). The collection of people and ideas was wonderfully diverse, and offered some fun, serious, and occasionally totally outlandish things to think about as how to make LA an even better place.

We’ll be pulling together videos of the presentations and posting them in the new year.  In the meantime, you can read a nice and full account of the evening on Alissa’s design blog, Gelatobaby.

But first, here are some highlights from the speakers along with notes scanned from GOOD’s own Beth Stone which offer a bit more flavor:

Enrico Bressan on TACOS:
Enrico a principal of the furniture and accessory design company  Artecnica (profiled in GOOD Issue 006) took on the subject of street vendors in LA.  From taco trucks, to fruit stands, to the invisible figures behind a pile of balloons drifting down the sidewalks, street vendors are, or can be, a wonderful part of Los Angeles, yet they are increasingly threatened by retailers who don’t want them around and new laws pushing them out. Enrico proposed that we start a conversation between the vendors and community they are serving. He sketched out a website that could match the needs of certain neighborhoods to the offerings of different vendors and even suggested that we tack on community service functions such as recycling or sidewalk cleaning or landscaping to the requirements of the the vendors.

Frances Anderton on TRAFFIC:
Frances Anderton, host of KCRW’s DNA and regular Dwell-contributor, shared with us that some crazy amount of morning traffic (25%!) is caused by parents driving their children to school, and so she offered the painfully obvious solution of: Walk! (or Bike!)  Sometimes it is that simple.

Barbara Bestor on UGLINESS:
Architect Barbara Bestor, made the interesting and hopeful observation, that as we head into this recession and the funding dries up for the kind of grand civic architectural projects we have seen in recent years (the Caltrans building and new BCAM extension to LACMA being two of her main LA examples), now is the time for more renegade public art and architecture—projects that can be just as fulfilling for the city, if not more so (the Watts House Project being her big example here). Bestor’s personal passion is to take on the the ubiquitous, totally unremarkable LA strip mall, and make something remarkable out of it. (She ended by asking if anyone out there knows anyone who has a strip mall for her; so, if you do, try to track down Barbara here.)

Ingrid Mattson from Materials and Applications on WATER:
Pretty much everyone knows, LA has a water problem—namely, that we don’t have enough of it. What Ingrid explained is a different side of our water problem—that because the earth of LA is more or less entirely covered with buildings or roads, when we do get rain, it enters a system built to get it from the ground to the sewers to the ocean as quickly as possible. This obviously makes for terribly polluted oceans in the days following our infrequent rain. Materials and Applications, has been working on green roofs and other ways of helping the system. The basic premise of all the storm water solutions is pretty simple: Slow It. Spread It. Sink It.

Geoff McFetridge on POLLUTION:
Graphic artist Geoff McFetridge took on the LA concern of visual pollution, specifically embodied in his distaste for vinyl signs. As a long time LA resident, Geoff spoke to his love for the bleakness of the city, yet seeing the impersonal, mass produced vinyl signage ascend as the defacto medium for retail self-expression is the wrong kind of bleak. To counter this movement, Geoff called for LA’s merchants to pick up a paintbrush and ladder and do it themselves. We think of vinyl as the cheap-and-fast solution, but by giving his five-minute talk over a real-time video of himself painting a “NAIL SALON” sign, Geoff succintly illustrated that we might just have things all wrong.

Rene Daalder on ISOLATION:
Rene Daalder, flimmaker and recently the creator of the very cool web project Space Collective, offered a nice counterpoint to a lot of the very local ideas put forth by the presenters when he challenged everyone to think big. Rene, who has been ardent believer in the internet and the virtualization of many of the facets of our real world for decades, suggested we radically rethink how we use space in an urban built environment. When we picture the entire 20-something miles or so of the National Archives physical collections collapsed onto hardrives that can fit in a closet (and think about the space devoted to film storage in LA), and you get a sense of the kind of space we’ll be recovering from old uses to put to new ones. Similarly, “You used to have to go to the office because that’s where the files were, that’s where the IBM Selectric typewriters were.” he said.”Now all that stuff is available from anywhere from your computer.” So, “Why are we still going to offices?” he asked, “Why are we still building office buildings?”

Stefan Bucher on ACTS OF GOD:
Stefan, of 344 Design, and Daily Monster, recognized that small earthquakes are fun and “keep the weenies out of LA.” It’s the big ones, that are the problem, and so he offered a comprehensive plan for how to do away with them. While you can pick up some of his thoughts from Beth’s notes above, for the rest, you’ll have to wait for the video, as I would only ruin it by trying to explain.

–

And that was the lineup. I want to express my thanks for all the speakers for coming out and putting their fantastic presentations together, and Keith Scharwath for illustrating the awesome intro slides. It was a great time had by all, and definitely something we hope to do again in near future.

As noted above, keep on the look out for video of the event and other GOOD December happenings in early 2009.