Author: alan

There are some forms of optimism that make pessimism redundant.

Oil companies engaging in a charm offensive ahead of announcements of record profits would be one of these; another would be the way we calculate, and revere, GDP even though we count some negatives and costs as positives for growth. Go figure.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s multi-billion dollar Superfund Clean-up Program of waste and toxic sites will take over 3 decades to complete, during which time the economic activity generated and expenditure for the clean-up will be added to the GDP. The initial economic activity used to generate the waste was added to the GDP, the ensuing clean-up will again add to the GDP. Thus, polluting the environment is seen as an economic benefit through the prism of GDP.

Information pollution is not a little connected to this problem. And yet power laws and fractal geometry tell us that non-local, indirect effects are the most common, most powerful, and most problematic for us. Understanding the dynamics of our economic networks, or any networks, is crucial to acting rationally within them. We consult and consort with bogus information (Consumer Price Index, anyone?) at our peril, but it’s not the case that it helps no one. Historical knowledge is a prerequisite to present understanding. Developing a true relationship to complexity, its costs and benefits, is fundamental to problem-solving in sutainable societies. To the extent that we want to become one, leveling with ourselves becomes more or less important.

Along the lines of James Fallows’ subversive panda, consider the (still) evolving love affair between money and feeling. How we spend/invest is tied to our general mental well-being, and realizing this is simply a part of becoming cognizant about the world. This extends to how we feel about the world and what we are doing to it. Theodore Roszak’s The Voice of the Earth concerns the state of the psychology needed to support our mental-eco-state:

What the modern cultural environment has required of us is an enormous extroversion of attention and energy for the purpose of reshaping the Earth into a global industrial economy. For two centuries we have been subordinating the planet and our deepest personal needs to that project. This great act of collective alienation, I have suggested, lies at the root of both the environmental crisis and individual neurosis. In some way, at some point, a change of direction, a therapeutic turning inward, had to take place within a culture as maniacally driven as ours has been by the need to achieve and conquer.

Many artists and writers have touched on this, from Adorno to Tarkovsky, who was very explicit about how there is in fact no freedom except internal freedom – it’s just that no one is interested in that kind. We’ve gotten ourselves to a place where we lavish a string of empty experiences on ourselves and call them riches; then find ourselves foraging in the most unlikely places for some meaning beyond these so-called riches. Most fools could see that these aren’t riches at all. Poverty is not about what you have or do not have, but about social status. The lack of civilizing elements to our daily life is poverty that cannot be overcome with a million shopping sprees. Civilize your mind, find solace in the power of knowledge to liberate your impulses from feeding among the merest desires to soaring among the highest and most noble. You might notice that these will conform not to buying and excess but, oddly, a kind of conservation that can save more than just the planet.

Ezra Klein unpacks the local food debate along public policy lines, and brings up a seminal point about the ways localism is portrayed as such a good thing, food-wise:

But the food movement has developed a relentless emphasis on localism, and for little reason. It’s not the best way to cut carbon emissions (as you can see in the graph on the right, where “delivery” and “freight” are those tiny slivers of color at the beginning of the bar, and the various shades of production dominate the rest of the image). It won’t have massive public health effects (except insofar as you substitute processed food with produce, but you could do that at Safeway). It’s not an easy thing to do. It is, arguably, the most delicious change we can make to our diets, and if we all started eating local it would have profound effects on the nature of American agriculture (demand for local foods grown sustainably would create supply of local foods, grown sustainably), but it can scan as a bourgeois virtue that folks are trying to recast as a pressing policy solution. So far as food policy goes, localism is small, trucked-in potatoes compared to eliminating corn and soy subsidies, pricing carbon, or cutting meat consumption. Indeed, unlike cutting subsidies, localism isn’t something government can actually do.

It’s one thing to think about what individuals can do as opposed to, as Klein points out, what government should. Changing the way we think about sustainability is, often, necessarily connected to the systems we presently rely on; the extent we are tethered to them bears an inverse relationship to the degree to which we are willing to entertain replacing them with new ideas or new systems which will be more sustainable. It would ostensibly be better to think about the changes that are coming down the pike for our society as positive steps forward, rather than restrictions on our lifestyles.

Food is a perfect example, but transit is another. Both are encapsulated in the southern European lifestyle with which we are already familiar, and many know quite well. A rural, farm-centric network of villages connected to the central cities by a modern, efficient rail system. We already know what it looks like; we also, and many are the number, have a built-in affinity for it. These issues, policy determinations that affect regional and national food availability and individual gastronomic tastes, are different yet convergent, largely around the approaching reality of regional and local sustainability.

We already want to live this way; we should embrace change as if it was our preference.

Dunkin’ Donuts is opening it’s first LEED certified store in St. Pete, Florida, complete with 80 pounds of earthworms to eat waste from the store.

Kunstler was in town yesterday and, sitting among the crowd, I wondered how much of what he was saying sounded new and alarming to the assembled, whether was speaking to the converted or what. In other words I was thinking more about the listeners than the talk. There were enough silences in the crowd at various junctures to think that he had attracted more than a few not-yet-believers, but he was pretty demonstrative on several points, not the least of which was that the commercial airline industry would go out of business for good within three years. He thinks we (America) needs to rebuild our rail system if for no other reason than to prove that we are smart enough to do so. In light of this, sustainable Dunkin’ Donuts seem like a silly pasttime. But someone’s going to have to make all that coffee for the RR workers.

It’s no stretch to say that a controversy might erupt were the consensus theories about peak oil production or climate change shown to be misstated or, worse, wrong. Green would be the new red, as in red-faced, and yet another potential crisis ( Y2K) will have been proven to be a marketing construct. As much as there are deniers and refusniks of climate change and peak oil, these folks are generally construed to be shills, or worse.

But, s’up with gas prices dropping? What’s that all about? OPEC is not going to stand around and do nothing as prices fall. But it gets complicated in a stagnant economy, and their options are limited. Will low(er) gas prices kill the electric car again? All of these are related and work together: the limited supply of oil, the oversupply of housing and the widespread accumulation of bad, bad debt. The “deterioration” of prices is all that concerns the oil producers. With all the upturns and the downturns, we need to worry about how it all works together. For instance, will the nascent and baby-teeny-weeny progress on alternative energy initiatives be snuffed out by world economic turmoil?

It is important to unpack and disconnect some of these issues, otherwise we will never escape the way we have been driven by them and them alone onto hyper-consumptive paths of lease resistance and their ecological consequences. Can we continue to use less oil/gas even if the price drops back into the neighborhoods we grew up in? What about the infrastructure and economic development plans based on reduced carbon footprints and homegrown renewable energy? There were are many more reasons than running out of gas to change the way we’ve been doing things.

The question is whether we will have enough discipline toward the self-preservation instinct, even if it’s not immediately cheaper. Green is all about keeping your eye on the ball – the big blue one we’re living on.

How low does a presidential candidate have to go on Intrade before they get de-listed?

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9:47 PM – “Senator Obama will tell you, as the extreme environmentalists do, [nuclear energy] has to be safe.”

Both via.

New Flagpole column. Wherein I broach the topic of systems, how that our living in a closed system may run counter to the idealized versions of our potential and destiny and how that’s just too bad. And quote GW Carver.

I know, I know: Amazing.

I’ve been getting too far away from the marketing end of this phenomenon; there are just too many tall weeds in every direction, it’s like fishing from a submarine. So let’s over-correct.

Evidently, consumer recall of ‘green’ (I’m beginning not to know which word to put in quotes) messaging is very high, with more than a third saying they are in the pocket and know what they companies mean when they say it. Nonprofits have know this for a while. Greenpeace took it’s very name from combining two words outside of their common usage. And remember, they’ve been around since 1971. Fashion brands, like the Diesel ad above, have been going meta on this for a while, offering their products as ‘global warming ready’ and similar tripe, spooning what remains of cheeky glamour onto the crisis just for good measure. No wonder, I mean we seem ripe for it and the extent to which they’re sure we already understand the concept necessarily means they in turn must now include a blast of detached irony with every pair of jeans.

But the non-news that it works to identify your product with this new NEW, as it were, is essentially what our own little virtual inland empire here is all about, that we should define green before it becomes the old new, or whatever. The added folly is that what the ad trends are latching onto IS actually about something that matters, a something that could contribute to the solution though it – conservation, knowing where your stuff comes from – will necessitate the disappearance of most of the products now touting greenery. How’s that for ironicality.

Case in point. To demonstrate at least the partial failing of the truth above, I saw a couple of versions of a green TV ad this weekend, I think it was IBM but I can’t remember(!). Anyway, the commercial/video, which took place in an elevator with an attractive young woman and dorky guy, said very little about green other than IBM or HP was going green. No big surprise that it neither described much less explained what or how they were going envy or young or enviro. But they were advancing the ball down field, and like the surveys report, I’m sure more than a solid third noticed.

They didn’t need to talk about green; it was embossed in the commercial with a cartoon tree and animals chirping around in the elevator. Things were changing, she explained to the dork. And indeed they are.

The style was very much like this. They might be the marketing genii who are bringing the green, but it can’t be just them. So watch for this sorta new imprimatur on more and more ads. The ad companies are realizing that they should just take stylistic shortcuts with things they can’t or don’t want to explain, as if that’s all you need or want to know anyway.

Not to say that stylistic shortcuts aren’t legit, as you can see.

They just need to choke up on the side of substance, then swing for the fence.