Posted on

For-profit Hate

How does one set of people loathe another whole set? Individuals, sure – it happens all the time, and some many deserve it. But it’s usually sincere, in that it doesn’t pay. You actually loathe them. But entire groups? Is something else at work? Can green mean stirring up resentments?

Steven Emerson has 3,390,000 reasons to fear Muslims.

That’s how many dollars Emerson’s for-profit company — Washington-based SAE Productions — collected in 2008 for researching alleged ties between American Muslims and overseas terrorism. The payment came from the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, a nonprofit charity Emerson also founded, which solicits money by telling donors they’re in imminent danger from Muslims.

Emerson is a leading member of a multimillion-dollar industry of self-proclaimed experts who spread hate toward Muslims in books and movies, on websites and through speaking appearances.

Leaders of the so-called “anti-jihad” movement portray themselves as patriots, defending America against radical Islam. And they’ve found an eager audience in ultra-conservative Christians and mosque opponents in Middle Tennessee. One national consultant testified in an ongoing lawsuit aimed at stopping a new Murfreesboro mosque.

But beyond the rhetoric, Emerson’s organization’s tax-exempt status is facing questions at the same time he’s accusing Muslim groups of tax improprieties.

“Basically, you have a nonprofit acting as a front organization, and all that money going to a for-profit,” said Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog group. “It’s wrong. This is off the charts.”

But a spokesman for Emerson’s company said the actions were legal and designed to protect workers there from death threats.

“It’s all done for security reasons,” said Ray Locker, a spokesman for SAE Productions.

Emerson made his name in the mid-1990s with his documentary film Jihad in America, which aired on PBS. Produced after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the film uncovered terrorists raising money in the United States.

Via Juan Cole. Hate to share this on a nice Friday. No groups or individuals, beyond the for-profit co-nationalists mentioned herein, were loathed in the writing of this post. And certainly not you.

Posted on

Windy names for fun

Why can’t the pharmaceutical companies

The United States is on the verge of a solar boom that could provide 4.3 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2020, according to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

There’s just a 12-figure catch: Investors need to put $100 billion into the solar industry to keep the generation of solar electricity growing by 42 percent a year for the next decade to expand capacity from the current 1.4 gigawatts to 44 gigawatts

directly fund sponsor desert wind farms?

Federal prosecutors in Boston yesterday said British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC agreed to pay $750 million to settle civil and criminal charges that it made and sold adulterated drugs, including the antidepressant Paxil, to Medicaid and other government payers

The settlement, one of the largest ever in a health care fraud case, burnished the reputation of the US attorney’s office in Boston as the premier federal office for investigating health care fraud. It has been responsible for recovering about $6 billion in health care fines and claims in the past decade, about 25 percent of all recoveries nationally.

If you think I’ve got it backwards, GlaxosmithKline’s share price only went down .14 (fourteen cents!) on news of the settlement.

Posted on

Greens and the Next-Bubble

I was passing around this video, via Grist, about ‘what french school kids eat’ to some friends of Mrs. Green this weekend and so I should share it here. Note the child-like presentation from CBS News, which says a lot about what they think of their audience. But also note that this was on CBS News. One of the most poignant philosophical lines in the report is when the chef says, “just because they can’t vote doesn’t mean we should shove crap in their face.” Touche’, mon frere.

Then there’s this article in the Washington Monthly on the Next Real Estate Boom. Guess where it’s going to be, and why:

The baby boom generation, defined as those born between 1946 and 1964, remains the largest demographic bloc in the United States. At approximately 77 million Americans, they are fully one-quarter of the population. With the leading edge of the boomers now approaching sixty-five years old, the group is finding that their suburban houses are too big. Their child-rearing days are ending, and all those empty rooms have to be heated, cooled, and cleaned, and the unused backyard maintained. Suburban houses can be socially isolating, especially as aging eyes and slower reflexes make driving everywhere less comfortable. Freedom for many in this generation means living in walkable, accessible communities with convenient transit linkages and good public services like libraries, cultural activities, and health care. Some boomers are drawn to cities. Others prefer to stay in the suburbs but want to trade in their large-lot single-family detached homes on cul-de-sacs for smaller-lot single-family homes, townhouses, and condos in or near burgeoning suburban town centers.

Generation Y has a different story. The second-largest generation in the country, born between 1977 and 1994 and numbering 76 million, millennials are leaving the nest. They may sometimes fall back into the nest, but eventually they find a place of their own for the first time. Following the lead of their older cousins, the much smaller generation X (those born between 1965 and 1976), a high proportion of millennials have a taste for vibrant, compact, and walkable communities full of economic, social, and recreational opportunities. Their aspirations have been informed by Friends and Sex in the City, shows set in walkable urban places, as opposed to their parents’ mid-century imagery of Leave It to Beaver and Brady Bunch, set in the drivable suburbs. Not surprisingly, fully 77 percent of millennials plan to live in America’s urban cores. The largest group of millennials began graduating from college in 2009, and if this group rents for the typical three years, from 2013 to 2018 there will be more aspiring first-time homebuyers in the American marketplace than ever before—and only half say they will be looking for drivable suburban homes. Reinforcing that trend, housing industry experts, like Todd Zimmerman of Zimmerman/Volk Associates, believe that this generation is more likely to plant roots in walkable urban areas and force local government to fix urban school districts rather than flee to the burbs for their schools.

Posted on

How Slow Can You Go?

This Wall Street Journal article uses an example I’ve brought up before to say that guilt is the route to greener behavior. No, it isn’t.

Washington, D.C., imposed a five-cent tax on every disposable bag, paper or plastic, handed out at any retail outlet in the city that sells food, candy or liquor, effective Jan 1. But more important than the extra cost was something more subtle: No one got bags automatically anymore. Instead, shoppers had to ask for them—right in front of their fellow customers.

The result? Retail outlets that typically use 68 million disposable bags per quarter handed out 11 million bags in the first quarter of this year and fewer than 13 million bags in the second quarter, according to the district’s Office of Tax and Revenue. That may help explain why volunteers for the city’s annual Potomac River Watershed Cleanup day in mid-April pulled 66% fewer plastic bags from the Anacostia River than they did last year.

District Councilman Tommy Wells doesn’t believe it is the nominal cost that’s keeping shoppers from using bags, but rather the expectation—made clear in a very public way in every transaction—that they could make do without. “It’s more important,” he concludes, “to get in their heads than in their pocketbooks.”

This is a decent example that draws the wrong conclusions. Yes, there are measurable returns from using pricing to effect behavior – and we definitely should use them. But the green aspect of this is about as lame as you can possibly expect. Using guilt isn’t the best way to get anyone to do anything and so should be given no quarter here. Peer pressure is perhaps a different story. But invoking guilt makes this just another marketing campaign destined to lose steam after a while – or worse, avail people of a work around. Because we will find ways to feel good about who we are and what we do, even if denial is one of them. And this is a far more powerful force than any guilt that can be summoned to make you use less, walk more, take a train, turn someone instead of something on at night.

Here is our greatest possibility. We’re interested in sexy and are powerless before it. So when slow is sexy (deja, already!), and the two get connect (Hook up!*) in people’s minds, we’ve got a renewable hold on being green. We just don’t yet think about it that way.

But, take your time, fer chrissakes. With everything.

* Good grief – the  bus and billboard campaigns literally write themselves – a young man, a nipple: “Turn it off – and Turn her On!”

Posted on

Transformational Means

Also known as Getting Green(tm), or the means to transform the way a region (or country, or planet) is powered:

WASHINGTON — Google and a New York financial firm have each agreed to invest heavily in a proposed $5 billion transmission backbone for future offshore wind farms along the Atlantic Seaboard that could ultimately transform the region’s electrical map.

The 350-mile underwater spine, which could remove some critical obstacles to wind power development, has stirred excitement among investors, government officials and environmentalists who have been briefed on it.

Google and Good Energies, an investment firm specializing in renewable energy, have each agreed to take 37.5 percent of the equity portion of the project. They are likely to bring in additional investors, which would reduce their stakes.

So, in the span of a week PK writes about the non-existent stimulus spending, and the tunnel that won’t be built (not in a day, not in a year or 10) and so we should begin to get a genuine idea of what a lack of progress looks like by now – with more where that came from. But the problem is one of perception and purposeful misunderstanding. We’re basically using money as prism but seeing all the wrong things through it. Yes: projects are expensive. But they put people to work and we have no other choice but to constantly improve and fine-tune our physical infrastructure anyway. And while it’s easy to demagogue supposedly high-dollar fiascos like the financial bailout of last year, how about recognizing the fact that it will actually cost $0? Why, you ask? Now you’re getting green.

Posted on

Objective Annihilation

As objective annihilation passes into more or less likely scenarios dependent on what actions we take – vs. other scenarios (Cold War) which had to take into account the actions others might take against us, we begin to look for signals about how the culture is handling the ‘actions we take’ thing. In the round, it’s largely what this blog is, or should be, about.

Certainly, many now say that terrorists belong to the later scenario outlined above. But their actions have done nothing if not emphasize their belief in the former as the best way to bring western society to its knees.

But whether we’re taking measures to change things, and whether these even measures matter, becomes a matter of great concern, locally but especially to corporate business interests highly invested in selling us things. The perceptions of either might even be considered more important than the answer on both, at least to these larger, multi-tentacled entities.

Which is all to ask, what do people believe about corporate attempts/postures on ‘going green’? Even that term is still evolving, slower than we’d like, of course – we want to see change in 140 characters or we’re convinced it isn’t happening. But it is, maybe becoming more plain and tangible or more insidious, depending on how you brew your cynicism.

But is it still growing, or was it just a fashion and have we seen the zenith of eco-concern? (Annihilation vogue?) This is a real question, pointing to perception beyond the actual events. The hockey stick has been re-confirmed again, for example, but the constant badgering of the fossil fuel confederate right wing has an affect. Most Republicans now believe the president is a Muslim, after all.

The question of ‘do you think it’s working’ confers a much more nefarious kind of survey.

Posted on

Blocking out the Sun

Which we haven’t done yet. Though growing small crops inside dramatizes, among other things, just how much actual dirt land area is necessary, but it isn’t the future of farming.

At St. Philip’s Academy, leafy greens are planted in a cloth bed and irrigated with a nutrient-infused mist. Light is provided by LED lamps, which are more energy-efficient than conventional lighting and can be placed closer to the beds. The LED lamps also provide pest control, said AeroFarms’ chief executive, Ed Harwood, because they can be set to emit certain wavelengths that disrupt insects’ breeding.

AeroFarms is leasing the machine, which stands 7 feet tall by 10 feet long, to EcoVeggies for use in the pilot project at St. Philip’s. It can produce about 20 pounds of produce per harvest, Mr. Charles said.

Maybe they point that out as a kind of public service message. After all, this is a well-meaning, for-profit concern. The “former three Wall Street technology workers” [sic] is funny – how’s that for a pedigree? But it could just as easily be some good PR for actual farms – which it is, also. Plus the kids are probably picking up on it, too, as kids unintentionally do.

Farms still have to be dirty, stretch for miles and burn your arms in the sun.

Posted on

Fill’er UP

Man, I love this.

It seems like we get everything from automated vending kiosks these days, from cash to DVDs to postal service to gasoline. The French have simply taken the next logical step. Putting a modern (and greener) spin on an old way of doing business, a French vendor has begun selling wine by volume from 500- and 1,000-liter vending pumps in French supermarkets. All customers need is a container.

Reaching back to a time when wine was sold in exactly the same fashion – that is, out of huge casks from which customers drew their desired quantity into their own containers for transport – the wine pumps achieve two separate goals that are often at odds with one another by providing at inexpensive product that also has a decreased carbon footprint. The wine goes for something like $2 a liter and, because it cuts down on costly packaging materials as well as packaging mass, it’s greener to transport as well.

When Mrs. G and I lived in the Vaucluse years ago, the pre-kid purpose of the kid’s seat on the bike was so that we could ride into the village and get the 5-liter jugs re-filled with red and rose at the local co-op. Yum-delicious and cheaper than water. And you would order from the attendant: “No. 11 and No. 8, SVP.” Young and light Cote du Rhone’s out of a gas nozzle; the question here now is where would such product will be coming from? Certainly capitalism in all its might can figure this out.

Then we’ll really be getting somewhere.

Posted on

I’ll Second That

Atrios on 9/11:

A tragic day which brought out the worst in our country. Not right away, but once evil people saw opportunity to exploit it for their own dreams of destruction.

War, plus/too/and, all things Green got crammed with ‘energy-security’ sugar plums to dance in our heads, meanwhile… bombs. Even the renewables rhetoric had to go militant, presto/macho – we must envision a grand Manhattan Project to wean us off of foreign oil, instead of you know, just doing it.

Down here, the PTB have been talking about a brain-train from our burg to ATL for at least a decade, instead of just buying the rights-of-way and building a high-speed rail fun ride to the airport.

Stupid. Thanks, terrorists.

Posted on

Cranking Up The Wurlitzer

Does a noise machine run on renewable energy?

Chairman Henry A. Waxman and Subcommittee Chairman Bart Stupak today released information from BP regarding its spending on corporate advertising and marketing following the April 20, 2010, explosion at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

At the suggestion of Representative Kathy Castor, on August 16, 2010, the Chairmen sent a letter to BP requesting details on the company’s spending on corporate advertising and marketing relating to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and relief, recovery, and restoration efforts in the Gulf of Mexico.

Today the Chairmen sent a letter to Representative Castor, summarizing BP’s response and acknowledging her leadership on this issue.  According to BP, the company spent over $93 million on advertising between April 2010 and the end of July 2010—more than three times the amount the company spent on advertising during the same period in 2009.

This really can’t count toward their expenditures for repair and recovery in the Gulf… can… it? Yikes. Within the single bottom line format, that question is self-answering and probably tax-deductible. I guess there is no difference between advertising and dispersants, between messaging and (lowering the)oil booms, between, well you get the picture. Let’s just re-inforce the frame.

via TPM.