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Currency

Typically characterized as hard, or cold. This, too, is one of the loaded meanings of green, of course, and not keeping some handle on it would be not only remiss but cause the other meanings to crash into a field of mere literal connotations. In that spirit, this article in the Times on the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles caught my, um, eye.

So first thing, the headline, Soaring in Art, Museum Trips over Finances, doesn’t past the smell test. You should know something is awry when art and finance are used in the same phrase in a newspaper. And not because anything is sacred, fer chrissakes. But finance in newspapers always means shareholders and art, alas, can’t even get its mouthpiece in before the first haymaker.

And sure enough, a couple of graphs in, the MOCA is in trouble – and has been for years. Bad management, shrinking endowment used for operational expenses, big donors bolting the board… I’m being redundant.

Yet by putting art ahead of the bottom line, the Museum of Contemporary Art has nearly killed itself. The museum has operated at a deficit in six of the last eight years, and its endowment has shrunk to about $6 million from nearly $50 million in 1999, according to people who have been briefed on the finances.

So, contemporary art… what have they been showing? Their permanent collection boasts Rauschenberg and Ruscha, but money problems at museums make me think of much more complexicated™ interstices of art, marketing and commodity than mere paintings, printmaking or collage. What’s the word… oh yes… Installation. And sure enough they get to it.

And at times the museum has secured financing for exhibitions in ways that many other museums would shun. To help pay for last year’s Takashi Murakami exhibition, the museum solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from art galleries that represented the artist and therefore stood to gain from any related career boost.

Fair enough, I actually see little wrong with this supposedly nefarious ploy, as if our shackles should rise merely on the cross-branding. I mean, where is the lost innocence? No, I’m much more interested in who and what is Takashi Murakami. And a .0002567-second interweb search brings video of the Times coverage of his exib at the Brooklyn Museum last year. Murakami, a Japanese pop artist likened by the video reporter to Andy Warhol because “he works at the intersection of pop art, mass design and high fashion.” Excellent.

He’s known for his work – there’s that word again – with Louis Vuitton; in fact there was a functioning LV boutique inside the museum. What’s that game? Oh yeah. Keno!

But let’s go to the man himself. Reporter: do you think a purse with a logo on it can be considered art work? (Don’t answer that. She’s trying to trick…)

Murakami: I think so.

Okay, okay. LV creative director Marc Jacobs makes the point that art is fundamentally unnecessary, that “with art, there is no right or wrong, only opinions.” The extent to which he actually believes this confirms the self-fulfilling nature of his point.

So back to the financial problems at the LA museum. Alternately, there could have been some sort of foundational flaw in the building itself to cause it to physically collapse and everyone would stand around the pile of rubble lamenting the decision to go with the architect who fathered the structural  imperfection, signed off on the drawings that ultimately destroyed what they were designed to protect. “People deserve better!” the elegantly appointed mob might chant.

Instead, it is teetering on the verge of a similar collapse because of what? Some design flaw that reinforces how unnecessary it is? In the post-judgment judgment environment, if art or ecology can be mixed with commerce, then they must be. It seems to be the only rule. So let’s no kid ourselves about the consequences.

But discerning what it is and is not necessary is all about one of these. Can you guess which?

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This should help

According to Columbia Journalism Review, CNN will eliminate its entire science, technology and environment news staff, including its chief correspondent.

A source at the network, who asked not to be named, said the move is a strategic and structural business decision to cut staff, unrelated to the current economic downturn. Financially, “CNN is doing very, very well,” the source said, and none of the health and medical news staff has been cut. Yet the big question, of course, is whether or not the reorganization will decrease the overall amount of CNN’s science, technology, and environment coverage. CNN says no, but it’s hard to imagine that it won’t—Anderson Cooper or not, fewer people is fewer people.

Absolutely brilliant and could not be more timely, as people seem especially fed up with all of the public emphasis on and coverage of the environment, particularly as it relates to new technology. It’s oversaturation, something must be done about it and CNN is stepping up. This. Is. CNN.

Via.

Oh crap… there’s a funnier line further down in the article. And not funny “ha ha”.

CNN is not the only television network that has been slashing science jobs. According to The Washington Post, “NBC Universal made the first of potentially several rounds of staffing cuts at The Weather Channel [last week], axing the entire staff of the “Forecast Earth” environmental program during the middle of NBC’s ‘Green Week,’ as well as several on-camera meteorologists.”

?

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Five Mississippi’s

Before we can rush the QB.

Cheat or die

M: There’s also the case made in the book [by the Earth Policy Institute’s Lester Brown] for a large-scale transference of manufacturing in the U.S. from auto to things like wind turbines. How realistic do you think that is?

GD: I think Lester Brown is a saintly person who is not entirely of this world, as saintly people often are not. And while it makes a great rhetorical point, those factories would not just have to be re-opened, they’d have to be hugely re-tooled. So, I quoted Lester Brown and then I immediately argued with him. I like that man, but I don’t really think he’s my guide on these matters.

M: But there is a kernel of truth there.

GD: There’s certainly more than a kernel of truth in it. This is not a hard problem to solve. This is a straightforward problem. You’ve got to get out of fossil fuels. We have the alternatives. Go. If the political will is there, that will happen. I think, therefore, it will happen, sooner or later. The problem is, it’ll probably be later.

M: Do you think it will be too late?

GD: I think it may be, in which case you need some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card, to win yourself a couple of more decades to get your emissions down. So you don’t want to go beyond two degrees Celsius, you’ve got too much carbon dioxide in the air which will take you past two degrees Celsius, and you still haven’t got your emissions down as far as you should. What do you do?

M: Blast sulfur dioxide into the air?

GD: That’s right, that sort of thing. Just to win time. You’re not solving the problem, you shouldn’t imagine you’re solving the problem. You’re winning yourself time to solve the problem, the right way. So when I include that in the picture, there is a way to cheat, then I can feel more optimistic about the future.

The M is the Montreal Mirror and GD is Gwynne Dyer, author of the recently released Climate Wars. From an interview between the two.

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Five Mississippi’s

Before we can rush the QB.

Cheat or die

M: There’s also the case made in the book [by the Earth Policy Institute’s Lester Brown] for a large-scale transference of manufacturing in the U.S. from auto to things like wind turbines. How realistic do you think that is?

GD: I think Lester Brown is a saintly person who is not entirely of this world, as saintly people often are not. And while it makes a great rhetorical point, those factories would not just have to be re-opened, they’d have to be hugely re-tooled. So, I quoted Lester Brown and then I immediately argued with him. I like that man, but I don’t really think he’s my guide on these matters.

M: But there is a kernel of truth there.

GD: There’s certainly more than a kernel of truth in it. This is not a hard problem to solve. This is a straightforward problem. You’ve got to get out of fossil fuels. We have the alternatives. Go. If the political will is there, that will happen. I think, therefore, it will happen, sooner or later. The problem is, it’ll probably be later.

M: Do you think it will be too late?

GD: I think it may be, in which case you need some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card, to win yourself a couple of more decades to get your emissions down. So you don’t want to go beyond two degrees Celsius, you’ve got too much carbon dioxide in the air which will take you past two degrees Celsius, and you still haven’t got your emissions down as far as you should. What do you do?

M: Blast sulfur dioxide into the air?

GD: That’s right, that sort of thing. Just to win time. You’re not solving the problem, you shouldn’t imagine you’re solving the problem. You’re winning yourself time to solve the problem, the right way. So when I include that in the picture, there is a way to cheat, then I can feel more optimistic about the future.

The M is the Montreal Mirror and GD is Gwynne Dyer, author of the recently released Climate Wars. From an interview between the two.

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Local motion

On the energy front, that is. LA Times lays out the situation of subsidized commercial rooftop solar vs. private investment. Much of the action is going to be on the regulatory front.

Consumer activists object. They say Edison should be looking to cheaper sources of renewable power, such as large solar and wind farms and geothermal plants. They contend that Edison International shareholders, not utility ratepayers, should finance the company’s huge bet on photovoltaic rooftop solar, one of the most expensive forms of clean energy.

An independent advocacy group has asked the Utilities commission to reject the ratepayer-financed plan, fearing unfair advantage over private sector entrepreneurs. But isn’t it the case that if the Edison plan creates demand for materials (and the power these materials generate), more materials and their power will appear? What is the uniqueness of renewable energy production that it will not obey or at least adhere to the rules of the marketplace? While not perfectly analogous to coal-fired power production, is it really exceptional?

Again, as much of this will be decided through sober, commission-type deliberations as will have to be amended later, as we learn more about and become familiar with the nature of distributed power generation. But the pre-conceived notions (free-marketeer or egalitarian) that guide these at the beginning will mean a lot.

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Blue Planet

was the title of an excellent I-MAX documentary I saw at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum years ago. Now it is also the name of a foundation that got a big shout-out from the NYT editorial page this morning.

There, in a nutshell, is the motivation behind a new campaign to wean Hawaii from fossil fuels in 10 years. The project is Hawaii’s own moon mission, led by the Blue Planet foundation and not by the state’s political establishment, which tends to prefer the slow and tortured way to change (a long battle over a new commuter rail system was bogged down by a ferocious debate over whether it should have steel or rubber wheels).

Blue Planet, a private foundation, is the creation of Henk Rogers, a software entrepreneur who made a fortune in Tetris. Reassessing his life after a heart attack two years ago, he decided to pursue a goal that for decades has been as elusive as it is drop-dead obvious.

If I understood the editorial correctly, though it has abundant clean-energy sources, Hawai’i imports petroleum for ALL of its electricity(!).

More (lauditorials, entreprenuers, foundations) like this, please.

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The soft landing

That people hope for, that is. Nice article on the ten biggest green energy myths. One favorite:

Myth 8: zero carbon homes are the best way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions from buildings

Buildings are responsible for about half the world’s emissions; domestic housing is the most important single source of greenhouse gases. The UK’s insistence that all new homes are “zero carbon” by 2016 sounds like a good idea, but there are two problems. In most countries, only about 1% of the housing stock is newly built each year. Tighter building regulations have no effect on the remaining 99%. Second, making a building genuinely zero carbon is extremely expensive. The few prototype UK homes that have recently reached this standard have cost twice as much as conventional houses.

Just focusing on new homes and demanding that housebuilders meet extremely high targets is not the right way to cut emissions. Instead, we should take a lesson from Germany. A mixture of subsidies, cheap loans and exhortation is succeeding in getting hundreds of thousands of older properties eco-renovated each year to very impressive standards and at reasonable cost. German renovators are learning lessons from the PassivHaus movement, which has focused not on reducing carbon emissions to zero, but on using painstaking methods to cut emissions to 10 or 20% of conventional levels, at a manageable cost, in both renovations and new homes. The PassivHaus pioneers have focused on improving insulation, providing far better air-tightness and warming incoming air in winter, with the hotter stale air extracted from the house. Careful attention to detail in both design and building work has produced unexpectedly large cuts in total energy use. The small extra price paid by householders is easily outweighed by the savings in electricity and gas. Rather than demanding totally carbon-neutral housing, the UK should push a massive programme of eco-renovation and cost-effective techniques for new construction.

I like the term eco-renovated, and better, I like how all this information is leaking out with anecdotal evidence from so many portals. It’s almost as though the conventional wisdom doesn’t quite have enough time to gel, though that, too, maybe CW in its way.

But what Goodall writes here is solid. There are many things you can do less expensively than building a zero carbon house. Investing in new windows, insulation and especially installing a radiant barrier when you get a new roof, which you have to do eventually anyway, all make a real difference in energy efficiency. And when that nano-solar roofing material becomes available (who can install that stuff?), you’ll be ready to start supplying (some of) your own decreased total energy needs.

No need to get excited about this; it’s just practical. Another step in understanding how a society’s problem-solving abilities can change, especially when they have to.

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Tea, just my cup of

The most well-know of the Chinese green teas is Longjing from the province of Hangzhou, which means dragon well. Fake Longjing is apparently very common, with most tea on the market coming from Sichuan province.

Green tea has many unproven claims, from reducing the negative effects of cholesterol to stopping neurodegenerative diseases to weight loss. With little to no scientific validation to speak of, the boxes tumble off grocery store shelves and into shopping carts like unsecured rubble in a light tremblor. Maybe because it’s just good, especially the caffeinated versions. Some even prefer brands blended with Kombucha, the immortal health elixir from the Qin Dynasty – whose health effects I likely neutralize by adding soy milk. But… delicious.

In the Sexagenary cycle, there are ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches. The year 1984 began the present 60-year cycle. This traditional calendrical system is used for numbering days and months across Asia. Calendars are also referred to as time-reckoning systems, and certain of their aspects in different countries ebb and flow with the rise and fall of political power. Tibet, for example

became subject to a new centralised administration under the Mongol Emperor, Qublai Khan (1215-1294CE) which involved numerous reforms in Tibet including that of the road, ranking and postal system.

It also meant the reform of the calendar. Chogyal Phagpa of the Sakya sect held authority at the time over the administrative sections of Tibet’s “three regions” (Tib: chol kha gsum) and its 13 myriarchies (Tib: khri skor bcu gsum).

He oversaw what was the increased centralisation of Tibet, fulfilling the need for a unifying framework but allowing for local difference as part of the political design. Phagpa’s vision was essentially imperial in character and he was also responsible for the design of the reformed Tibetan calendar.

Phagpa’s task vis-à-vis the design of the new Sakya-Yuan calendar was challenging. Buddhism had been declared the state religion of the Mongolian empire which carried with it the Kalachakra calendar. At the same time the Mongol Empire also presided over China which had its own time-reckoning system. Up to this point, the Tibetan calendar had been largely derived of Chinese time-reckoning systems but also operated in the cultural milieu of Indian time-reckoning systems, not including the Kalachakra calendar.

…

Also, the Sakya-Yuan calendar’s year-beginnings continued according to the Chinese calendar, as had been the case in the previous Tibetan calendar. The latter’s first lunar month was named drug (dragon) based on the Chinese calendar’s 12 lunar months which were named according to the Chinese calendar’s 12 Earthly Branches commencing from the winter solstice. Drug was the Chinese calendar’s fifth Earthly Branch, chen (dragon) and third lunar month: the latter coincided with the time of Tibetan New Year set by the sidereal zodiac.

And some would say it’s only December 1. Now, time for another cup.

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Needful diversions

This is a little late but, Thanksgiving was formally established as an observed holiday by Abraham Lincoln. A year and a half into the civil war, on October 3, 1863, he issued this proclamation

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

Apparently written by his Secretary of State, William Seward.

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Needful diversions

This is a little late but, Thanksgiving was formally established as an observed holiday by Abraham Lincoln. A year and a half into the civil war, on October 3, 1863, he issued this proclamation

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

Apparently written by his Secretary of State, William Seward.