Green Jobs, Green Shoots

These are two of the big catchwords of the year so far. What do they mean and, what is their relation to the Eco-logy/Eco-nomy mash-up from which they emerge?

Hard to say on either of these counts, without squaring the circle – that we have to cut down on consumption but keep on making things (have job for people to do). Not exactly business as usual.

Even as most of the new green jobs end up going to robots, we (third-person, sentient) still have to do certain things. This should settle back into two fundamental questions – what are these certain things, and of course, what does green mean?

Because as we settle on the parameters of the first, the elements of the second become more clear, or at least a matter debate. We can see how imposing costs on carbon dioxide emissions, for example, can trigger changes in the things we make and the ways we make them. Despite what you watch and hear, people are thinking about this. And despite what you watch, hear and read, this will require great amounts of thinking. And schooling. And cross pollination of everything we think about business and most of what know about technology, engineering, credit and risk.

In short, it could be sexy. It could capture the popular imagination and re-direct it toward more productive ends. I don’t mean to sound too optimistic on this count; things are as dire as we are lazy and easily amused. But we did go to the moon once, many years ago today.

So, who knows?

The Wow & the Now

Because picking out the common literary motifs across highly-developed agricultural systems is not something one could do over a lunch, or even two, it becomes necessary to highlight and infer. Here we bounce around the periodic table that is now, that often occasions a wow, however polite.

How could something not be about the environment? The case for more traffic roundabouts.

I think I mentioned something similar, or forgot to, recently. But… navigation systems destroying localized knowledge?

What’s a dynamometer, you ask?

One of my work colleagues was on the teevee talking about this concept last night, and he would definitely know. I figure the more said about this the better. ‘Urine my parking spot,’ indeed.

The Wow and the Now

New thematic posting alert, and I can’t promise this isn’t a slacker work-around to something a little more considered and original.

Nonetheless, two of the integrated sensations of living in our present age are the often-overlapping phenomena of “Wow, that’s amazing,” and “Now they tell us!” You can decide which is which.

Examples A-D:

A patent-pending device by which you can project your own bike lane.

Ant mega-colony has colonized much of the world, without becoming indifferent or uncivil to one another.

Having sex daily is the key to fertility.

A solar cell that can be tuned to the light of a particular latitude.

* * *

WDGM.net – combining exasperation with excitement since sometime last spring.

Unutilitarian Pursuits

Because I consider him an honorable mentionee for Quintessential Misanthrope, I am almost embarrassed by my affinity for Bertrand Russell. Almost.

The Why Work? site has his 1932 essay, In Praise of Idleness, in which there are so many nuggets, you’ll have a hard time choosing just one to post on your blog. But one thread from then to now – from the reality of his perceptions about work to what should be ours – is the perspective shift. If you took a cross section sample from their (early industrial) fascination with machines and what they could do for us and compared it to one from 2009, we should see elements of cliche and fatigue with the machine age, not to mention some not-so-subtle exasperation.

Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labour required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organisation of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organisation, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous.

It’s a highly informed discussion of surplus and leisure, all the while however, as certain elements of our fidelity to work remains unchanged, even in the face of the gargantuan contributions of machines of all sorts, it is also the story of our wastefulness, growing ignorance, passive recreations… in a word, how western civilization has become unsustainable. Mostly because of being too tired to understand our over-reverence for hard work.

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilisation and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will become bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.

And eventually he gets to the two ways in which we have ultimately been misled about “moving matter about” which has led us to the array of choices otherwise known as today.

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labour, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth’s surface.

Ouch. The new pleasure in mechanism… it sounds so quaint. What has this sly little combination turned into? Now that we are astonishingly terrified about the changes we have produced on the earth’s surface, to what do we turn to turn things around? Machines. Can I make this sound any more foolish? The crushing waste of time, resources and intellect involved in the creation of our present crisis can be no better summed up than in the last couple of lines of this A.O. Scott review of the new transformers movie.

But that’s the perverse genius of Michael Bay. Despite the tediousness of his stories and inanity of his visual ideas, he always manages to keep you laughing and shaking your head in disbelief at the outlandishness of his cinematic spectacles, with their orange explosions, armament fetishism and even their noxious stereotypes. The man just wears you out and wears you down, so much so that it’s easy to pretend that you’re not ingesting 2 hours and 30 minutes of warmongering along with all that dumb fun.

Maybe my dislike of Russell is itself a kind of misanthropy, but in reverse, turned against just him for calling us all out so clearly.

Four. Hours. A. Day.

Trans-substantiation

Far be it for me or anybody to tell you that you must take the train, walk to work, know or care anything about the food you buy and feed your kids. I mean, what’s the difference between a choice and a mandate? I can’t get you to consider spirituality when you insist on being religious; we’re talking past each other. The same goes for precious arguments about whether or not the climate is changing – more immediate concerns are either much more important or hardly matter at all. We can’t see rising oceans, after all – wait.

Nonetheless, just because something doesn’t look the same way to you as it does to me does not mean we are not seeing the same thing. The idea of parallax, where an object’s changed appearance is actually due to a change in perspective, is perhaps instructive. As we move through time, embracing or putting off measures to insure (either way) certain outcomes, our relation to, and hence our view of, the world we live in likely will change. Indeed this is the basis, for some, of waiting until conditions are sufficiently dire and all doubt is erased that we are &^%*ed before any remedies are attempted. I’ll leave this absurd fear of doubt for another time. But how to engender changes of perspective, if that is agreed to be one of the keys to planetary-preservation?

In the parallax, example
Parallax.gif

objects in the foreground appear to move very quickly, while those in the background much less so.  In the case of how our lifestyles impact the planet, what would be some of the objects in the foreground? The methods we use to move about, keep warm or cool, eat, for amusement; when we visualize our lives in a mind’s eye, is it about sitting in a car on a crowded road? Walking up to a school in the morning with your child? A lot of people would be appalled with a mere confrontation with how much time they have spent sitting at a drive through window, without ever considering what they were even buying there. Just that image, and a subtotal of minutes, and its reflection of the priority and our acceptance of it might be enough to create a pause.

Because that, a pause – any pause – seems to be what we strive to avoid. You don’t have to get dystopian about it to see the relation. When we take the time to prepare a meal, for example, we become concerned about ingredients, kitchen implements, the preference of those we’re feeding… the list goes on. Whether see this as a pleasure or a hassle, and the faster you condense the overall activity, the less you need to think about the different elements. Until you skip cooking altogether – and here we are again, sitting in the drive through.

So there’s no reason to demonize ordering a number 4 (again), in order to see it as another object between us and the background of the world we live. It moves quickly, alleviating us of certain concerns maybe, meanwhile our ideas about whether the world is changing seem to move so slowly as to not affect us. But creating pause, with the danger of a change in perspective, is perhaps the only way we ever become concerned about any of the ingredients to our lives, the ones that determine our perspective, the only ones we can change.

Two Things

We’ve solidly on the cusp of Gemini, school’s getting out most everywhere and the Administration makes some hardly recognizable sounds about raising CAFE standards. Coincidence? I think not.

But really, when you consider things that ordinarily do not go together, new CAFE requirements and the drop in new home starts should not be among them.

New home construction fell to its lowest pace on record in April, the government reported on Tuesday, disappointing forecasters, who had hoped for a modest increase. Building permits fell to record lows and construction on new multi-family units plunged.

And

“The writing’s on the wall in the construction industry,” said Joseph Brusuelas, director at Moody’s Economy.com. “This is a function of the oversupply in the market. There’s just simply too much supply on the market, and construction starts will have to continue to contract.”

Aw. Everyone hates disappointment, especially so close to summer. But it remains the case that there was an extensive boom in housing construction over the last nineteen-plus years and most of it was the wrong kind of houses built in the wrong kinds of places.

And surely, even the non-trivial rise in CAFE standards has its limits, mainly as it does nothing about used cars and leaves the price of gas untouched. But the CAFE rules are just one tool among many; they were too low for too long and the automakers screamed every time they were even mentioned. Now that the automakers don’t really exist as such any longer, the screams will be the same, but we should hear them differently. And the longer new homes starts lag, maybe that stat begins to serve as a different kind of indicator to home builders, developers, planning commissions and the like. The age of driving fuel inefficient cars to far-flung suburban houses is mercifully taking a pause. We can take the time to re-think the entire fancy that led to both as if it’s deliberate and not at the point of pain. Like wer’e doing it for our own green future good.

Two forms of sacrilege

When we live as though certain things do not matter, we should not be surprised at the result. What do you have to learn from beauty? From the essay by Roger Scruton:

Those thoughts return us to my earlier argument. We can see the modernist revolution in the arts in Greenberg’s terms: art rebels against the old conventions, just as soon as they become colonised by kitsch. For art cannot live in the world of kitsch, which is a world of commodities to be consumed, rather than icons to be revered. True art is an appeal to our higher nature, an attempt to affirm that other kingdom in which moral and spiritual order prevails. Others exist in this realm not as compliant dolls but as spiritual beings, whose claims on us are endless and unavoidable. For us who live in the aftermath of the kitsch epidemic, therefore, art has acquired a new importance. It is the real presence of our spiritual ideals. That is why art matters. Without the conscious pursuit of beauty we risk falling into a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration, a world in which the worthwhileness of human life is no longer clearly perceivable.

The paradox, however, is that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to a cult of nihilism. The attempt to defend beauty from pre-modernist kitsch has exposed it to postmodernist desecration. We seem to be caught between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams, the other in savage fantasies. Both are forms of falsehood, ways of reducing and demeaning our humanity. Both involve a retreat from the higher life, and a rejection of its principal sign, which is beauty. But both point to the real difficulty, in modern conditions, of leading a life in which beauty has a central place.

Read the whole thing, especially the bit between the lines. Unfortunately, kitsch represents the ultimate in sustainability. Fortunately, remedies abound.

Thanks, Andy.

The Twelve Principles of Green Engineering

As a spectral wavelength whose connotations reflect both hope and envy, and also youth, calm and sickness, green is the word for everything that ails us as well as a kind of catch-all for the cure.

But the abstracted semantic debate is only so interesting without any stringent technical guidelines to introduce tension between our wayward intents and limited amounts of energy and materiel. Not to worry, though; enter the American Chemical Society.

The Twelve Principles of Green Engineering

  1. Inherent Rather Than Circumstantial
    Designers need to strive to ensure that all materials and energy inputs and outputs are as inherently nonhazardous as possible.
  2. Prevention Instead of Treatment
    It is better to prevent waste than to treat or clean up waste after it is formed.
  3. Design for Separation
    Separation and purification operations should be designed to minimize energy consumption and materials use.
  4. Maximize Efficiency
    Products, processes, and systems should be designed to maximize mass, energy, space, and time efficiency.
  5. Output-Pulled Versus Input-Pushed
    Products, processes, and systems should be “output pulled” rather than “input pushed” through the use of energy and materials.
  6. Conserve Complexity
    Embedded entropy and complexity must be viewed as an investment when making design choices on recycle, reuse, or beneficial disposition.
  7. Durability Rather Than Immortality
    Targeted durability, not immortality, should be a design goal.
  8. Meet Need, Minimize Excess
    Design for unnecessary capacity or capability (e.g., “one size fits all”) solutions should be considered a design flaw.
  9. Minimize Material Diversity
    Material diversity in multi-component products should be minimized to promote disassembly and value retention.
  10. Integrate Material and Energy Flows
    Design of products, processes, and systems must include integration and interconnectivity with available energy and materials flows.
  11. Design for Commercial “Afterlife”
    Products, processes, and systems should be designed for performance in a commercial “afterlife.”
  12. Renewable Rather Than Depleting
    Material and energy inputs should be renewable rather than depleting.

They’re not the twelve Apostles, but neither will they fit on a license plate. Bumper stickers, however, would be an entirely different story.

The Happiness of Pursuit

What if you woke up one day and found that this, or any, site you read had undergone a for-profit makeover? Being that it would have to be something very subtle, in order to establish continuity with the day before but represent a turn toward selling you something, would you/we even notice? You’d think, sure. But a better question might be, how would we notice? Of course, you would expect there to be tell-tale signs – more ads, maybe a flashier graphic or a graphic flash file to get things going right at the top (wow, a flash header – why didn’t I think of that?) The point being that the site would want you to know, because of course, we’re reassured by the profit motive – it’s the last honest and pure thing we’ve got.

Worry not. I have not yet begun to sell out. At least not yet. I only thought back around to this upon being pointed to this site (thanks, Ben), which to me seems like a full-throated expectation of (still) being able to sell green living. It’s an excellent idea and I’m as encouraged by it as I’m surprised we’re still right there. I guess since there is no viable internet business model, maybe that’s what all of this amounts to. But at its heart I don’t really believe that. Not yet. At this point the medium seems less than useful for that one sacred mission, and so of course seems of great utility. We can expect this ratio to diminish along such an inverse relational plane, but only to give way to another new one or return us to a renewed emphasis on an old one.

But… the continued optimism about what we can sell goes quite a bit beyond earning a living and circles back on us when it comes to sustainability, as in the way we think about a more ostensibly altruistic goal, like saving the whales. We could and perhaps should reflect on this not as a selfless extention of human empathy for a fellow creature, per se, but a rather direct notion toward saving ourselves. This extends to the oceans, all water, all land, then the air… the ocean within the fish, as they say. All routes to self-preservation, expressed through a more urgent concern for a more directly endangered entity. Endangered by us to be sure; but marked in a but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-we kind of way that we understand better than we let on. Maybe it’s the shroud of inevitability that we just can’t shake, that hasn’t worked its way up to profit making, but once it does and that comes to be percieved as clearly endangered as it surely is today, most of our efficiency and sustainability initiatives will become finally and absolutely mandatory. The we’ll really have something to sell. What a day of strange rejoicing that will be.

Hat Jumps Out of the Rabbit

So, this is a little bit insular, a little bit out-sular, in an Osmond kind-of-way, but following the green by definition can have no limits.

The Google’s purchase of the The YouTube last year is costing it over $1.6 million per day to host all those citizen-to-citizen chef d’ouvres, as the comrades say. To deliver a little byte of all that content to each of us, Google is bleeding money in many areas, including bandwidth, content acquisition (they pay the likes of Sony for some of the fancier footage), revenue share and storage costs. This just goes to say that even a seemingly genius interweb business model merger like this remains an unfinished masterpiece, at best.

But why is that? We can concieve of the logistical issues involved of hosting/serving such mass quantities of unfiltered freedom, such that it would be necessary to imagine that there must be a God in there somewhere. But where mighteth she reside? Advertising is a lousy mistress in this scenario, and most among us will not admit that we’ve moved beyond selling in the classic sense, even as our wave is queenish and perfunctory. What we absolutely do-not-under-no-circumstances-no-matter-what want to contemplate is that we’ve moved beyond buying, in any sense.

But have we? The web is a classic attention economy, whereby people use different tactics to compete for attention. But an HP study reaches an uninteresting conclusion that becomes more compelling as a kink in the genius model above.

… a study of the success of videos uploaded to YouTube suggest that quality has little affect on success and persistence seems to actually reduce it.

Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman at HP Labs in Palo Alto, studied the hit rates of some 10 million videos uploaded by 600,000 users before 30 April 2008. They classified a success as a video that is among the top 1 per cent of those viewed.

Their rather depressing finding is that “the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold.”

Hmmm. The real question should be why you might find this depressing. And that’s only a chin-scratcher if you thought the internet was going to be some ultimate breakthrough against the general tilt (of anything) toward elitism – that it would (finally) enable quality-through-lottery scenarios. I hope that reads as foolish as it sounds. This expectation may be the basic structural flaw of the entire endeavor. Whatever fateful day-after when we reconsidered what we had wished for had this been at all possible would have been a sad one indeed. I am glad to take what the HP researchers consider to be bad news to be merely a restatement of the painfully obvious: popularity no equal quality.

Interested literary agents, please write for more details.