What does green mean?

Man, have the Elements of Style changed. Okay, not those, but Holy crap. Is this evil? Because if it is, then… No lie, I want to have it on a wall in my house, a huge cellular automata simulating heat dynamics.

But it does go green before it goes blue, before it goes black; remind you of anything? I’m just sayin’.

Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria writes:

The financial industry itself is likely to shrink, and that’s not a bad thing, either. It has ballooned dramatically in size. Curry points out that “30 percent of S&P 500 profits last year were earned by financial firms, and U.S. consumers were spending $800 billion more than they earned every year. As a result, most of our top math Ph.D.s were being pulled into nonproductive financial engineering instead of biotech research and fuel technology. Capital expenditures went into retail construction instead of critical infrastructure.” The crisis will stop the misallocation of human and financial resources and redirect them in more-productive ways. If some of the smart people now on Wall Street end up building better models of energy usage and efficiency, that would be a net gain for the economy.

And I’m thinking quants – quantitative analysts – where did that come from? Then I remembered this short story from Technology Review from about a year ago:

This summer, as a meltdown in the subprime credit market spilled over into other markets, all eyes were on the mathematically trained financial engineers known as “quants.”

It’s stuck behind a paywall (we actually have one of these quaint, old thingies: a subscription), but the writer lays out, unintentionally I think, a pretty bleak picture of what these people described by Zakaria were up to, what pulled them into it and… kind of how the bathroom we all just woke up in was initially plumbed and wall-papered. It’s a dystopian existence all the way around, predicated on mere and seemingly harmless greed, infinite consumption and numbers… real and imagined.

So, we say green is used as slang for money, but we need to unpack that a little. Wealth should stand for much more than financial holdings. There is a wealth of highly educated people, or at least people with access to higher education, who simply want to see the money. And this is only some of the wealth we’re squandering; political ideologies program people, who in turn have little people whom they program. By programming these people only to look out for themselves, to move in for the kill as a career move, we’re cutting corners on key ingredients to democracy and civil, functioning society, green or otherwise. When we, through language, teach them to see their fellow citizens only as consumers, we’re making our own beds.

And if you think this sounds Socialist, listen to Soros say it.

Oh, and along these lines major props to Krugman today. Congratulations.

Former cabinet secretary Robert Reich says the Dow is tanking because (American) people are finally maxed out:

The central fact is this: Consumers in the real economy are coming to the end of their capacities to keep spending. They can’t take on any more debt. And with the costs of energy, food, and health insurance all soaring, they’re doing the only thing they can. They’re pulling in their belts. They’re leaving the malls. They’re not buying a new car or TV or anything else they can do without.

Of course I love the ‘what does… ‘ construction. So one set of players is fatally beleaguered, just as another set comes to grips with their own individual and collective irrationality. As another way to try to understand what was going on at the supposed high side, with the traders and fund managers, maybe an analysis of actual brain behavior is in order.

Because we assess risk and reward separately, and not as part of some unified Bayesian equation, we’re able to selectively inhibit those brain areas warning us of risk.

Something, whether it is the age of living on credit or the epoch of trading up on endless expansion, is coming to an end. As it appears that these are the means that transported us to the current enviromental, resource-depleted precipice, perhaps its not such a bad thing. If we had our choice, the party would have gone on forever, or at least until the liquor ran out. But it has run out, AND now we’re living too far from the pack-y to just run out and get some more. Will we sober up first before making a list of exactly what we need?

I’m not talking about things. Economies of scale, a living, human scale, would have to be the party of the first part – the goal of creating and recreating these is decidedly NOT pie in the sky. It’s all about  reconfiguring transportation policy (transit!) and high-density land-use, spending priorities that can set this direction at the federal, state and local level, much as we once set our societal compass toward living apart, in far-flung pockets. Most every sour bet that is being called in right now is the result of the over-leveraging that was required for us to live out of scale with our actual means.

When we’re out of balance, we re-balance. This is necessarily going to mean people. living. closer. together. And yes, all kinds. Having said all this and it being Friday, I’ll leave it with L-F Celine:

As long as we’re young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty and malice are required, just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the score, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you’ve come to. There’s no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you’ve lived this long, it’s because you’ve squashed any poetry you had in you. Life is keeping body and soul together.

Image: logs destined for saw mills stored along the Fraser River, Vancouver, BC

Saw a few minutes of the 60 minutes episode the other night about the electric car industry springing up in Silicon valley. It seems these tech bubble entrepreneurs are pouring many millions into car start-ups or making their dough available as VC. The Tesla coupe looks cool, beyond the concept-phase and they’ve already got a big backlog of orders. GM is getting on board with the Chevy Volt, but the troubles of the big three make this a sucker’s bet by them – too much like gambling really, like a last gasp, hail Mary. But hail Marys sometimes work.

For more Electric car pr0n, check out some of the offerings from the recent Paris Motor show. Slick.

But the whole thing brings up a bigger issue, what Kunstler refers to as the general American paradigm of “Happy Motoring.” The engine on which this model is based – cheap gas – is just not going to be able to continue. So whether electric cars are green seems to be academic when the model itself is pretty much over. But… are electric cars green?

It seems axiomatic to say that greenhouse emissions would drop considerably if we were plugging in our cars, even if they were running on energy from dirty coal plants. But it’s not true.

Coal generates more CO2 per unit of energy than petroleum. As a pure carbon, coal’s C atoms bond to each other. As a hydrocarbon, petroleum’s carbon atoms are also bonded to hydrogen atoms. These are the bonds that are broken in combustion (providing power), which releases molecules of, in the case of petro, H2O and CO2. In the case of coal, only CO2, because there is no H.

So… running cars on coal-fired power plants = double no good. But a long term advantage to developing electric cars is that they could and will be powered from a source of electricity other than coal.

So he was also inventor, which, knowing what we know about what he knew, shouldn’t surprise anybody. An electrical engineer in the UK is bringing back a design patented by Einstein that uses no electricity. The design replaces freon with ammonia, butane and water and

takes advantage of low air pressure to reduce the boiling point of butane. In order to achieve a cooling effect, butane is heated into a gaseous state and then mixed with ammonia before being passed through a water-filled condenser. Here, the ammonia dissolves and the butane is released, before the cycle begins again.

Again, look at the date on the design. 19 friggin’ 30. What have we been doing?

This photo, Arrested Demonstrators, Birmingham, Alabama, was taken by Bruce Davidson in May 1963 and is part of the exhibition, Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968, at the High Museum in Atlanta. We caught it this weekend, right before the show closes today.

The exhibition is a presentation of the work of many photographers, journalists and artist types alike, who put themselves on the scene at these pivotal events in our history. And that is what the prints reveal. The physical and moral courage of the people in the photographs is heartbreaking. Elizabeth Eckford, a fifteen year-old girl braving the segregationist savagery of Little Rock, epitomizes the grace that turned a gigantic page. The humanity on the faces of those who were able to withstand being beaten, sprayed, bitten, shot at – plus those who weren’t – is a stunning portrait of the history we are still living. What we cannot feel we will not be able to endure, and just as we are made stronger by their courage, so we live in the long shadow cast by their strength to act. That should be the real and living legacy of the era.

The show was punctuated by several different series of images where the photographer was able to capture a brief chronology of an unfolding drama. One series showed the events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the local sheriff gave protesters a two-minute warning to vacate the bridge. Before the two minutes were even up, their assault began, an assault that resulted in John Lewis and Amelia Boynton being beaten unconscious. The leaders of the SCLC and the SNCC, in tandem with the journalists and photographers, learned how to use the actions of their southern antagonists against them. It was in many ways the powerless leveraging the conscience of a nation to achieve their goals. The images and stories shocked and embarrassed the country and focused great attention on the injustice of an unequal society.

This savvy to use the media seems at first incongruent to the bravery and heroism of the people who marched valiantly, who were assaulted with hoses, dogs and clubs, who bled with dignity and who buried loved ones for a cause greater than any of them individually. But rather than being out of place, it was one tool among many employed to effect great and lasting change. Their righteous goals empowered the use of all means of resistance plus a few that perhaps did not up until that time and may no longer exist. They were on the right side of history, and when you’ve got justice on your side, who knows to what you might be availed?

This is a map of the world generated by estimated carbon damage due to emissions. It’s an amazing site, though it could be dangerous to your afternoon. Vas doucement.

So the NYT has gotten into the act – man, so many words seem loaded in this day and age – with their Green, Inc blog. I’m not going to link to it, for a variety of reasons not the least of which is the entry this morning was about hybrid… yachts. No, really. Making Brazillianaires feel better about themselves. I’ve heard of a hybrid yacht before, in fact they’ve been around for a while. They’re called sailboats.

The title of the post is a nod to ‘Gabo’, of course. I found one of his books in my office this morning while looking for something else of supposedly great importance. It was all I could do not to lock the door and dive in, obviously a sign questionable virtue and character on my part. Take from that what you might, but coming across that book kind of put things in perspective for me.

This is a map of the world generated by estimated carbon damage due to emissions. It’s an amazing site, though it could be dangerous to your afternoon. Vas doucement.

So the NYT has gotten into the act – man, so many words seem loaded in this day and age – with their Green, Inc blog. I’m not going to link to it, for a variety of reasons not the least of which is the entry this morning was about hybrid… yachts. No, really. Making Brazillianaires feel better about themselves. I’ve heard of a hybrid yacht before, in fact they’ve been around for a while. They’re called sailboats.

The title of the post is a nod to ‘Gabo’, of course. I found one of his books in my office this morning while looking for something else of supposedly great importance. It was all I could do not to lock the door and dive in, obviously a sign questionable virtue and character on my part. Take from that what you might, but coming across that book kind of put things in perspective for me.

There is a tight line between indulgence and responsibility which, especially when we let it go slack, runs the risk of self-strangulation. Think of any luxury – it need not be an extravagance, though they often are at first until we find just the right rationalizations – and you can at hint at what must eventually be reconciled in order to court it. You know who the piper is, in other words.

It’s easy to think about this in the context of the current financial turmoil, even in our trade deficit with China. We’re living on borrowed money and there will be a bill. A similar logic follows our infatuation with the automobile.

It sounds somewhat puritan but it’s only common sense; there is a commensurate price for an indulgence – indeed it’s one definition of an indulgence. Cars allowed us to conquer and use this continent in specific, splendid and often stylish ways, mostly to our benefit. Or so it seemed at first. Now, it looks like they will exact a terrible price from us for what appears to be the ability to live in far flung reaches, move about at our leisure, and siphon vast amounts toward heating the planet on the installment plan. It wasn’t all bad – submarine races by themselves almost acquit the entire mechanism. Almost. But there’s actually no case to be made about whether the invention of the car was good or bad; it simply happened and we bit, and we’re left to accept the consequences of moving our society forward via the automobile, literally, exactly to here.

So, untangle the line and connect what you do to what it requires, and understand that our alleged independence was a mirage. We start by becoming conscious of the small things and then we realize there really aren’t any. Your town becomes different when it’s a place you walk through, take the bus then bike across instead of drive through. They’re not even comparable. Onward, to more solid footing.