Sultana, a writer and social engineer in Nigeria, wins a MacArthur Geneius award to develop a framework for defining a person’s ideal energy budgets.

With further study, this idea could be scaled up to figure out how much a society needs to attain various levels of economic growth, potentially unearthing surprising findings as efficiency gains enable prosperous communities to live on fewer resources than ever before. Congratulations, Sultana.

Congratulation, Grainger — you have won a Heisenberg Award for having the biggest impact on the conversation.

Software project manager Grainger scoured the card stack for interesting ideas and played dozens of investigation, adaptation, antagonism and momentum cards each, successfully pushing other players to elaborate on intriguing ideas and consider alternate scenarios.

Here’s a screenshot of Grainger in action… pushing the limits of foresight from every possible direction:

Be sure to click through to Grainger’s profile for a full view of his contributions to this experiment.

The Ventner award goes to micro-forecasts that make the biggest paradigm shift. Ta, a cartoonist from Istanbul, receives this award for a forecast that harnesses the growing noise that surrounds us:

Congratulations, Ta! This goes to show that science and technology breakthroughs can come from unexpected and sources.

Egeriicw played a card with the idea that the perceived consumption of virtual goods would allow us rapacious humans to continue feeling like we’re consuming without actually depleting the planet in an era of scarcity. TheChromaticSedition elaborated on the idea, suggesting that augmented reality could combine the physical world (where we work, manage our server farms, feed our children) with a fully parallel virtual world. This isn’t just something we’d like to see because of the competition between water and energy resources. We want this because it sounds awesome! And, er, useful and productive.

But these players are not blind techno-optimists. Cfrenz challenged the players by asking:

… and then pointed out that China and Africa are already struggling with the significant environmental burden of e-waste. Egeriicw came back by suggesting that low-power organic electronics could dominate, and Cfrenz countered that only OLEDs have gained any traction in the real world. But in ten years, who knows? This thread was a fascinating example of how a broad idea that may at first seem less related to the “water vs. energy” debate can unearth the beginnings of an action plan and merge with broad technological goals.

Hot off the server, it’s the raw card data for the past 22 hours. (Download the Excel file – 1.2 MB.)

What can you make of these 5,000 forecasts?

Share your analysis and visualizations in the comments!

Quite a few players have suggested that a water market will force people to become more efficient in their water usage. Perhaps an equal number have argued otherwise — that something other than a market will compel consumption changes. On the pro-market side, we have, for instance:

And from the other-than-market side:

I’m not going to come down on the “market versus no market” question here, but let me just mention a few things that have happened in the water market in Australia. There, water users (farmers, irrigators, municipalities, etc.) who need more water beyond a certain base allocation (which depends on how much water is currently available; during the recent drought, there was one year when the base allocation in some areas was zero) must buy it on the open market. Because of the variability of rain from year to year and within a given year, prices can fluctuate pretty drastically. In 2007, a particularly dry year in New South Wales, prices swung from $300 to $1200 per megaliter in some places.

The farmers I interviewed in New South Wales readily admitted that the market has made them much more cautious about how they use water and that they’re doing water-saving things like laser leveling their fields and, where possible, switching from flood irrigation to drip irrigation. (Both laser leveling and drip irrigation, though, carry some energy penalty — but that’s a discussion for another time…)

However, the water market has also made an already risk-ridden livelihood even more risky. Here’s why.

Imagine you are a New South Wales farmer who doesn’t have a lot of extra cash lying around (and what farmer does these days?) and you’re trying to decide whether you’ll plant 100 hectares of wheat this season, or 400, or none at all, and therefore how much irrigation water you’ll need to buy. You’ve no idea how much it’s likely to rain during the season or how water prices might fluctuate, so you don’t know whether now is a good time to buy water or later, when prices might drop. It’s been pretty dry, though, so you make your best guess that the dry weather will continue, and you buy most of your water at the start of the season. But lo and behold, the skies open up, and you now own a lot of water that you don’t need and whose price has dropped by two-thirds.

Another thing to consider: not all water users are equal — industrial users and electricity generators have much deeper pockets than, say, your average small-scale citrus farmer, so the former can afford to pay a lot more for water, thus pushing up prices beyond the farmer’s reach.

So here’s the challenge: If you do support a water market, what more might be needed so that cash-poor water users still have access to water? And if you don’t think a water market is the way to go, what other mechanism do you suggest to compel people to use less water? Post your idea in comments, or better yet, play a card in the game! And, to build on the “personal best” theme described below, give us your take on how you personally will work toward a better future.

Sometimes the best way to solve a global challenge is to make it every individual’s problem. For example, we could have:

Player Sultana elaborates that this Pavlovian approach would make kids mindful of their energy use. Ok, that might be a dark, dystopian-but-plausible scenario. But we could use these baby sensors in a different way. As player SVerma suggests, humans could be judged by their efficiency in the professional world (though we’d have to set a baseline or make allowances for the increased consumption that accompanies a middle-class lifestyle and physical fitness).

In the Lab, chain reactions are clusters of follow-on cards that develop a basic micro-forecast. For example, an intriiguing chain reaction about roadways suggests several innovations that could use transportation to solve water and energy problems rather than create them:

POSITIVE IMAGINATION:
All roofs on building will hold solar cells. All roads will be paved with the latest solar cells that can survive the stress of the traffic

MOMENTUM
Embed water lines in roads, close to the surface ina reas that rarely freeze–deliver hot water straight to the house.

Or in very high traffic areas, piezoelectric crystals to generate power from the contact stress of the tires.

Cars and trucks too. All this power would feed into a grid and supply the area with power.

ANTAGONISM
The energy and water costs of refining silicon and producing PV wafers and infrastructure costs are so high this would never happen

ANTAGONISM
The costs are decreasing rapidly despite comparatively mnimal investment or govt incentives. By 2020 cost will not be an issue

Solar cells use more nerg during production than the gain from it? Is this a myth?

ANTAGONISM
This is an old myth: This is an old myth. http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/    35489.pdf

INVESTIGATION
Thanks for clearing that up!

INVESTIGATION
Could roadways and trucks, each with solar cells, transmit electricity back and forth as a single “grid”?

INVESTIGATION
Maybe if the tires weren’t made of such good electric isolators?

INVESTIGATION
What if conductors were placed in the tire with direct connection to the roadway which is coated with conducted material over the PV cells.

INVESTIGATION
I believe this would work. Question would be, do we have the  tech for this? And what would be the cost of it?

The easiest way to find chain reactions is to go the Live Dashboard and look for all the cards that have Follow-On cards.

So how do we know that what we eat, drink, and use is ethical? One major topic that’s emerged in the E=H20 game concerns how we’d change our habits if we knew the water, energy, and carbon footprints of all our products. As devcat, a contributor living in Switzerland and Italy, points out, the most successful attempt to flag the ethical value of consumer goods is with the fair trade label. Player Grainger comments that Germany has issued an ethical buying guide. But the bigger question is:

Several players have commented on the need for education — if we were taught as kids about the long-range impacts of our actions, we’d care more about maintaining a global balance of resources. But how do you make planet-wide problems local? How do you make the water cycle personal? The first step is a thorough accounting of how goods are made. Companies are rewarded, perhaps with tax breaks, for building sustainable supply chains. As for how we figure out what’s sustainable, we make our best guesses. We prioritize health and well-being for all. We also acknowledge we may never truly grasp the full picture. Even so, as devcat notes:

Several players–engineers, no doubt–proposed applying ISO standards to goods, to prove that they comply with global guidelines. Who would start this process?