What does green mean?

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.

Much to the chagrin of their preferred stockholders The New York Times Atlantic Monthly Flagpole Magazine has seen fit to publish a variant of the musings on this site in a column, called Eco Hustle and to be renewed each fortnight. The first one is here. Welcome Flagpole readers.

Much to the chagrin of their preferred stockholders The New York Times Atlantic Monthly Flagpole Magazine has seen fit to publish a variant of the musings on this site in a column, called Eco Hustle and to be renewed each fortnight. The first one is here. Welcome Flagpole readers.

As a country we’ve made a living bragging about how ambitious we are, how audacious our concepts of freedom, liberty and happiness are as to make their fulfillment just a matter of conquering a lesser will.

Well, here’s the way to defuse most every geopolitical conflict for the next century or so, at least until things even out and Republicans can get elected again and start whining about socialism or how unjust their tax burden is. Cheap desalination powered with clean energy is the key to making the fossil fuels conundrum exit stage left. As the article points out hese are massive public works projects with very sophisticated interactions with the natural environment; The question is not will they work, but do we have the will to make them work.

In the speech by House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi yesterday that had all the Republican house members whining and crying with hurt feelings, she recalled that people around the world constantly tell her that the greatest emerging market in the world is rebuilding the public infrastructure of the United States of America. She said it could be done in a fiscally responsible manner. Even with only what we know how to do right now, it could also be done in a highly innovative manner, geared toward sustainably shifting our transportation and land-use conventions in the permanent direction of clean water and low-carbon power.

Building a green house isn’t green, but takes a lot of green. The reviewer says it at the end:

Maybe the real meaning of being green is closer to what modest Kermit had in mind: learning to make the best of what we already have rather than having to create, spend and construct something “eco-friendlier.”

Yes it is. One household living off the grid does not a difference make; we need to get the grid off the grid. Meanwhile, live close to work, know where your food comes from, spend and buy accordingly.

We already have experience with this, if we thought about it. The way we close military bases, for example, is an orderly, deliberative process that recognizes obsolescence in the system and gives expression to eliminating it. Some stakeholders yell and scream, but calm prevails as we reconcile resources and needs. It is and should be a constant re-alignment. These bases are usually re-purposed to our advantage. A Navy Supply Corps School in our town is going to eventually become a medical school. So re-casting other obsolete elements in our society isn’t such a unthinkable prospect, only a matter of acknowledging the disconnect between original intent and present/future needs and opportunity costs. Imagine how powerful it might feel to begin abandoning a few roads here and there.

And speaking of power, there is a not-insignificant degree of helplessness wound around our dependence on extra-territorially derived transportation fuel, aka foreign oil. Well, throw your weight around. Saudi Arabia believes that $100/barrel oil is too high; meanwhile countries with more shallow reserves want to get as much for their oil as they can while it lasts. Why this disconnect? Long-term demand. The House of Saud knows high prices are tamping it down and are concerned with the many alternatives at our disposal. They’re actually afraid we might start walking to work or to the grocery, much less all the consequences that will spin out beyond that.

The winners and honorable mentions of the Science magazine and NSF sixth annual International Science and Engineering visualization challenge. Note the lack of irony in the remark from panel of finalist judges member Malvina Martin: “I remember studying very basic cell biology and being bored to death, but the fact that it was an interactive computer game you could get your hands on and see direct results of too much sun and not enough sun was very pertinent in this day and age when folks are so far removed from the plant and the planet.”

Perchlorate is a toxin; the term itself is a shorthand reference to potassium perchlorate and ammonium perchlorate. The EPA is a government agency tasked with protecting the environment, thus the name being more than mere semantic parry. Efforts to address widespread contamination of ground and ground water by perchlorate have led to the development of some very innovative methods (phytoremediation) that have opened onto a better understanding of how to address a host of complex and seemingly irreversible environmental threats, including biological dead zones that appear in ponds and lakes when contaminant levels surpass a tipping point.

Now the EPA has devised a clever way around the questions of how to regulate, clean up and hold guilty the parties (hint: a shape with five sides) responsible – they will simply refuse to say how much is too much.

Genius.  Oh, and then others in the know are apparently shocked at the continued rapid rise in greenhouse gases. The PRC ordered up blue skies for the Olympics; now they’re back off the wagon and the skies are again cloudy all day.

I doze in the mornings and am awakened at night by the elusive question, what we are doing? And then, after a while they come to me, some words of others, ostensibly about a whole other thing. In this case, John Ruskin, in his essay on architecture, The Stones of Venice:

It is not, therefore, that the signs of his affections, which man leaves upon his work, are indeed more ennobling than the signs of his intelligence; but it is the balance of both whose expression we need, and the signs of the government of them all by Conscience; and Discretion, the daughter of Conscience. So, then, the intelligent part of man being eminently, if not chiefly, displayed in the structure of his work, his affectionate part is to be shown in its decoration; and, that decoration may be indeed lovely, two things are needed: first, that the affections be vivid and honestly shown; secondly, that they be fixed on the right things.

1853

Shoulders of giants… they look like ants from here.

Image of Zinc Oxide nano ribbons reproduced with permission.

Stuffed: Obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in the United States, and over 60 percent of us are considered overweight. Starved: Worldwide, nearly a billion people are starving to death, and 35 million Americans went hungry at some point last year.

“We cannot shop our way to a better world,” thus spake Raj Patel, former WTO official and author of the book Stuffed and Starved, which tells the tale of the global food system.

All sorts of choice bits in a podcast of his interview with Dan Imhoff of the Commonwealth Club. To wit:

Is Coke or Pepsi actually an example of free choice?

Instead of our food being made for us – how we are being made for our food.

What is the convenience of food?

Only 3 out of 10 Americans have a normal body weight. 35.5 million Americans went hungry in 2006, though the USDA no longer permits itself to use the word hungry, and instead refers to such people as suffering from food insecurity.

Why fertilizer bombs?

It’s a lot of gloom but he also talks about Agro-Ecological alternatives, the three sisters – squash, beans and maize – and how they replenish the environment as opposed to the way conventional farming methods destroy it and then need to build it up again from scratch. Also, this stuck out at me – In the 2000 years before the British came to India, there had been one famine approximately every 120 years; after the British arrived, and reformed the feudal agricultural system they found, there was a famine every 4 years. Patel explains what the creation of markets had to do with this.

Think small, live large.

Is the financial crisis worse than the climate crisis?

Not even close.

via.

Is the financial crisis worse than the climate crisis?

Not even close.

via.