Slutty carbon

Sure, it will bond to any old thing – just a fun-loving, good time chemical element with the symbol C and atomic number 6. Call anytime.

And though carbon is not magnetic, it does attract kooks. Okay, no harm there, chacun à son goût and all that. We’re not all kooks. We even devise ways around it – solar, wind, other means of generating that dirty dirty electricity that we enjoy so much. And you won’t believe what happens next:

This scene from the village council meeting in June helps to explain why opponents of three solar projects proposed in Pickaway County, Ohio, can say they have the support of nearly every local elected official. It shows how a committed group of local residents have dominated the debate by packing county, village and township meetings, and making their displeasure known if officials don’t fall into line.

The prevailing emotion is fear, whether it’s fear of the solar projects—or fear of upsetting the people who oppose the projects.

And the local fight has broad implications. The world needs to increase its reliance on renewable energy, an essential part of avoiding the most destructive effects of climate change. Local opposition shows some of the disconnect between global needs and the concerns of some of the people who don’t want to live next door to wind and solar projects.

It’s a little beyond as well as different from traditional NIMBYism, though also quite similar in several ways, as the locals literally don’t want to be living next to utility-scale solar. They don’t want to see it and they don’t want to hear it. Though it’s not a discussion about energy and how they get it at all. “Just leave us alone,” they might say, then step back inside and to watch the ballgame. And there’s the rub.

Whether we blame them for not wanting to connect their own usage of dirty energy to their passions for their freedom not to see it, or blame the local school district that benefits from the increase in tax revenue for not being more vocal in their support for the solar projects, the moment and the conflicts should be noted. The difficulty of telling nominally self-governing people what to do when their own understanding of any right thing is itself in conflict with abstractions like freedom is certainly one of the more devious tricks slutty carbon has played on us.

It’s sort of a next-level struggle with renewables that has nothing to do with energy – because focused on how we’re gonna watch the game or dry the clothes, or even live that far from the grocery store [don’t get me started], the question changes entirely. At least the NIMBYism is familiar.

Image: Carbon–carbon bonds get a break | Nature

Triple Bottom Line

There’s a backdoor reference to this in next week’s Hustle, so I thought it might bear out some explication.

Sometimes written as ‘TBL’ or ‘3BL’, triple bottom line simply stands for

People

Planet

Profit

In the language of sustainability, triple bottom line describes the environmental and social impact of an organization’s activities. The profit, therefore, is seen not in the usual context of being maximized no matter what – the lone and ultimate measure – but in harmony with the other two. Exactly. Sounds antithetical to what we’ve been slipped. The phrase was coined by John Elkington, co-founder of the business consultancy SustainAbility, in his 1998 book Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business.

Triple Bottom Line is the acknolwedgement of a very natural limitation to the way business has been “done” for the last couple of hundred years. Absent people and planet there’s really little profit to be realized. How we’ve gotten so far removed from this speaks to many factors but there is little doubt about the institutional contempt in which corporations have held simple traits like honesty, which are fundamental to TBL. It speaks to the way the words are supposedly elevated, eptomized in the way that advertisers tout words like ‘sincerity’, ‘honesty’ or, my favorite, ‘trust’ in their ads like these are some kinds of freakish overlay concepts that come with an embedded voice over. It’s understood that if the business is solid and cutthroat as it should be, these will be nowhere else found.

And yet TBL is all about an honest profit, taking into account the effect of your endeavor on the human and natural capital required by it. In this context, the ‘single bottom line’ is nonsensical, like applying a balance sheet to a landscape. To have a net anything, discounting all transactional and opportunity costs, itself reeks of the finality that is the flipside of sustainable activity.

TBL is not a greenwash, but an accounting practice underpinning how a green business operates and, by extension, how society becomes sustainable.

So, with apologies to Howe Gelb, several cheers for Madame Triple Bottom Line.

Triple Bottom Line

There’s a backdoor reference to this in next week’s Hustle, so I thought it might bear out some explication.

Sometimes written as ‘TBL’ or ‘3BL’, triple bottom line simply stands for

People

Planet

Profit

In the language of sustainability, triple bottom line describes the environmental and social impact of an organization’s activities. The profit, therefore, is seen not in the usual context of being maximized no matter what – the lone and ultimate measure – but in harmony with the other two. Exactly. Sounds antithetical to what we’ve been slipped. The phrase was coined by John Elkington, co-founder of the business consultancy SustainAbility, in his 1998 book Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business.

Triple Bottom Line is the acknolwedgement of a very natural limitation to the way business has been “done” for the last couple of hundred years. Absent people and planet there’s really little profit to be realized. How we’ve gotten so far removed from this speaks to many factors but there is little doubt about the institutional contempt in which corporations have held simple traits like honesty, which are fundamental to TBL. It speaks to the way the words are supposedly elevated, eptomized in the way that advertisers tout words like ‘sincerity’, ‘honesty’ or, my favorite, ‘trust’ in their ads like these are some kinds of freakish overlay concepts that come with an embedded voice over. It’s understood that if the business is solid and cutthroat as it should be, these will be nowhere else found.

And yet TBL is all about an honest profit, taking into account the effect of your endeavor on the human and natural capital required by it. In this context, the ‘single bottom line’ is nonsensical, like applying a balance sheet to a landscape. To have a net anything, discounting all transactional and opportunity costs, itself reeks of the finality that is the flipside of sustainable activity.

TBL is not a greenwash, but an accounting practice underpinning how a green business operates and, by extension, how society becomes sustainable.

So, with apologies to Howe Gelb, several cheers for Madame Triple Bottom Line.