Talkin' 'bout a revolution!
I attended the third day of West Coast Green today.
Thoughts, musings, political rants and squeeing below the cut. Warnings, this may get long.
The cut title is indeed a jab at the Republican National Convention slogans, and I'll expound more on that later.
Warning, I'm on record as a tree-hugging liberal, and this post will not be very Republican friendly.
So, West Coast Green is a green-building conference. There's a full 3 day program for professionals, and industry people, and the last Saturday is also a homeowner day with a trade show wherein homeowners can come to exhibitors and see what great and nifty eco-frienly and sustainable products are available, from green building materials to solar panels to efficient water heaters and drought resistant native landscaping and all the stuff that should be patently obvious but isn't.
My family and I attended two years ago in San Francisco (sadly, AFTER we finished the major remodel) and got some good info on sustainable wood and architecture strategies and a whole host of other environmental issues. That got me on a mailing list that informed me that this year, the Saturday Keynote Address would be given by Vice President Al Gore. Needless to say, I began geeking out and voluntarily gave up a Saturday of frisbee to go to the conference. That statement alone should tell you how excited I was.
Now, California, and the Bay Area in particular, is probably one of the most green and progressive places in the country. So, attending the conference put me, for once, solidly in my demographic politically, which was nice. The attendees of the conference represented the diversity of the place I live, and the attitudes were generally in line with mine. This is one of the places you go to solidify your beliefs as opposed to challenging them.
I've never actually been to a political rally, but this was probably as close to one as I've gotten. And, to be fair, the attendees of this conference were probably Mr. Gore's base. In fact, the majority of people who filled the auditorium were probably only at the conference to hear him speak. So we first heard from California Attorney General and former Governor Jerry Brown. I didn't know he was speaking until a few days ago, but was excited nonetheless. As Governor, he helped pass many of California's building codes that have led to California remaining flat in per-capita electricity usage in the past 20 years while the rest of the nation has gone up by 80% (yeah, if I didn't mention it, I know we're rude and unfriendly and superficial and obnoxious and smug and condescending and we're bad drivers, but I'm proud to be a Californian). As Attorney General, he has been involved with extensive litigation against the auto industry and by the auto industry on California's fuel efficiency standards, and with the EPA over the recent administration's efforts to block California's new carbon standards. Attorney General Brown was a surprisingly passionate and energizing speaker, talking about California's leadership role in establishing tough regulations and standards, standards that have been fought by the Federal Government dating back to the days of everyone's favorite Republican President, Ronald Regan (you know, the guy who first hired the cast of shady characters who ended up in the administrations of Bush 1 and Bush 0.5). One of Atty. Gen. Brown's most salient points was about urban planning. We've come to accept this system wherein we build homes miles away from work centers where land is cheap, tying people to their cars, forcing them to drive upwards of an hour or more each way to get to work. He called this practice "human garaging." And it's scary. Listen to people talk about their jobs:
"How long is your commute?"
"About 40 minutes?"
"That's pretty good."
...
Are you shitting me? This is good? In what way? America, for many years, has been about building these cookie cutter communities of track homes out in cheap land, which is cheap because there's nothing out there, the weather is terrible and there's no water, and it has to be pumped out of rivers and into places where people aren't supposed to live, and we need to plow over more soil with ashphalt which kills both the overall water table and the ability of the soil to absorb carbon, you know, that nasty stuff that's going into the atmosphere and slowly killing out planet, and actually raises temperatures, making people have to use more HVAC which burns more fossil fuels which dries up our rivers faster which makes us have to pump more water which kills the rivers which makes less water which kills us faster and, oh man, this is getting a bit long, isn't it?. To stop with the rant, the point is this: Ecology and Economics share a root word in "Eco" which can be translated to mean "the household." Economics is the study, then, of the inner workings of that household, be it a single home, or a nation. Ecology is the study of the "logos" or the rational function of that household.
In modern America, we've shifted our economy to a finance and service based economy, rather than a manufacturing economy. In case you didn't get the memo, that economy is failing. We're trying to come up with a $700,000,000,000 bailout package to that economy because that economy thought it could take high risk, sub-prime mortgage debt, securitize it into large packages, and then buy and sell that debt for profit. People will tell you that this economic crisis is complicated. It's very simple actually. This economy was a get-rich-quick scheme. The white-collar folks thought they could make money out of nothing. Someone forgot to tell them that you can't do that. But, I guess it's not entirely their fault. At some point, we stopped making new thingamajigs to sell to people, so, they had to start figuring out other things to sell. Securitized Prime-mortgages were actually making a decent profit, and there weren't enough out there to satisfy the greed of Wall St. So, the solution, make more mortgages. Sell houses to people who couldn't afford them. Take away the simple precautions like, oh, I don't know, figuring out if people have enough money to pay back the mortgage. As long as the interest rate goes up in 2 years and you collect more money, you're peachy keen, right? So, obviously, as the financial sector would like us to believe, this is all the fault of those nasty independent mortgage brokers who sold these bad subprime loans to innocent folks, never suspecting that they might default. Nevermind the fact that Wall St. demanded more subprime mortgages to buy and sell.
MOAR MOAR MOAR!!! It's not a recipe for success people.
The economics trumped the ecology. We went from Blue Collar to White Collar. We went from selling things to selling things on paper.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for a revolution.
America's economy is sagging. Our national security is threatened. And we're killing the planet we live on. Believe it or not, the solution is tied together.
Go Green.
Want to grow the economy? Want to stop funding our enemies because we need their product? Want to save the whales?
Go Green.
Big Business and The Right will tell you that going green is a moonbeam hippie notion that will send more jobs overseas and will hurt us economically. Bullshit. Utter and complete bullshit. We negotiated the trade agreements that don't factor in sustainability. And EVERYONE is paying.
Yeah, labor is cheaper in China and Mexico, because they aren't nearly as green as us. Is this good for us? No. Ask anyone whose job got outsourced. Is this good for China or Mexico? The Right will tell you yes because they have the jobs now. Fine. Take a closer look. China is rapidly approaching environmental crises of every size, shape and flavor. Pollution is causing rising rates of asthma. 150,000,000 people depend on the drying Yangtzee River for their water. Industrial pollution is decimating this river, and bad well water practices are causing the water table in China to drop nearly a foot per year. There are a billion people in China competing for dwindling resources. China isn't winning.
Going Green CREATES jobs where it might otherwise take them away. Going Green means we don't have to bow to Saudi Arabia's every whim because we don't need their oil, and it means Hugo Chavez can't avoid his critics because he doesn't have to tax his people to fund his disasterous policies, and it means the rebel groups in the Niger Delta can't sell oil to buy the guns they use to kill innocent people. Going Green means we recognize that we are intimately tied to the fate of this beautiful blue and green planet, and we have to do what it takes to make sure we survive. The Earth will far outlast us, even if we kill ourselves. If we keep polluting the planet and starve ourselves and freeze ourselves by starting a new ice-age, the Earth will endure. It just will do so without us. It's US we have to save. Earth will take care of itself, one way or the other. I'd much rather Earth keep sheltering us though.
These points were all underscored when Vice President Gore spoke. The self-described "Recovering Politician, currently on step 9," was warmly greeted by the audience. Once again, as we all watched him on stage, I'm sure I wasn't the only one who looked up and thought "What if..." But as he himself said, you can't go back and change the past. We have to look forward. He opened with an interesting analogy, describing the sub-prime debacle. The financial system basically assumed that it could securitize subprime mortgages and basically ignore the risk by lumping them together. That has turned out to be a fraud of the highest order. There is another assumption that is about to go splat. And that is that we can take subprime carbon assets and deposit them in the atmosphere. This is also a fraud. You don't need an economist to tell you this (and who trusts economists anymore these days?). Science, peer reviewed, scrutinized, reproduced, and accepted, is telling us that this assumption is fatal. And yet, big oil, big coal, big car makers and the politicians they buy are deaf to these cries. Very much unlike the ozone crisis of 15 years ago when the world listened to the scientists (which, as VP Gore said was a novel concept as opposed to the current policy of censoring scientists that the powers that be are taking) and made a change that prevented a crisis from escalating. We went CFC free by making it a moral cause and changing the way we looked at how we did things. We went from relying on CFCs to clean circuit boards, to making circuit boards that required no cleaning, and we did it in 4 years instead of the 7 we thought it would take.
We know how to do this. Why aren't we doing it?
We're willing to put $650,000,000,000 into a war started on a lie and operated by Haliburton and Blackwater for enormous profit, and exploited by OPEC which can tell us that the war is making supply unstable. We're willing to put $700,000,000,000 into a financial system that sold us snake oil. But a few million for a future in which we are green and sustainable? The Right will tell us it's wasteful spending and a poor usage of taxpayer dollars.
The Right wants to drill, so that we're no longer dependent on Foreign Oil. Never mind that you won't see a change in the market for at least 10 years, and even then only fractionally. Never mind that drilling makes us MORE dependent on Oil overall by stifling growth in alternative energies. Never mind that burning more oil while deforesting the planet to satisfy our need for beef and other wasteful products and destroying the ocean's ability to photosynthesize carbon is going to destroy us. Drill Baby Drill! Send the Advocate for more Nukes and the Governor elected on Oil Money so we can Drill Baby Drill! Put Country First!
Give me a break.
Thinking that making us slaves to the same oil driven system that had our parents willing to drive from Suburbia to The City and buys our oil from hostile regimes on money borrowed from China is a loser of a proposition. Explain to me how any of that puts Country First.
Country First to those people is putting a fence around America, and exporting fear, mistrust and condescension, something we've done quite enough of these past 8 years. Let's remember that 7 years removed from the attacks of September 11th, 2001, America has basically no standing as a world leader. And yet, such is the potent power of America that in the past 5 years, developing nations now account for over half of worldwide carbon emissions. America remains the highest emitter per capita by far. But still, if "developing nations" cut their carbon emissions, we'd make real progress. But, without fail, each of those nations will point to America and say, "America is not doing it. Why should we?"
As much as seed change in excited attendees of this conference matters, leadership is required. We've lacked that the past 8 years. VP Gore reminded us that we can't wait for a new administration to make changes, but it certainly won't hurt, and that we have to vote for a leader who is for change in the right direction.
At this point, he quipped, "Now, I'm not here to talk politics or anything, but..." and then he leaned over and gave a very melodramatic and theatrical conspiritorial wink, which of course had the crowd rolling. He followed up with, "As I told the Democratic National Convention, I'm all for recycling, but this is ridiculous."
Most days these days, I'm sad for the world. Domestically, the economy is crap. The achievement gap is widening, healthcare is out of reach for most people, prisons are getting more and more full, and everything is falling apart. Worldwide, there are wars, refugee crises, violations of human rights and womens' rights and war crimes and a general lack of hope.
Going green represents hope. We can make jobs to increase the standard of living. We can live healthier so that we don't need as much healthcare. We can export hope to the world like we used to do. The Marshall plan worked and Germany and Japan are valued allies now. America was, is and can be a world leader. Going green breaks the shackles of the oil and finance system that enslaves the world. It brings value to places both globally and locally. It bridges the divide between the wealthy and poor.
And it teaches the right values to the next generation: You must care for yourself, and your neighbor and the world you live in. You should live in moderation and harmony. Greed is bad. Love is good. We are one people. There are no nations that matter more than humanity. We are of the Earth, and we must care for it with all our hearts because the duty comes to us from no less than our Creator himself. Live Local and Think Global. And always always give what you can, and take no more than you need.
It's time for a change.
Thoughts, musings, political rants and squeeing below the cut. Warnings, this may get long.
The cut title is indeed a jab at the Republican National Convention slogans, and I'll expound more on that later.
Warning, I'm on record as a tree-hugging liberal, and this post will not be very Republican friendly.
So, West Coast Green is a green-building conference. There's a full 3 day program for professionals, and industry people, and the last Saturday is also a homeowner day with a trade show wherein homeowners can come to exhibitors and see what great and nifty eco-frienly and sustainable products are available, from green building materials to solar panels to efficient water heaters and drought resistant native landscaping and all the stuff that should be patently obvious but isn't.
My family and I attended two years ago in San Francisco (sadly, AFTER we finished the major remodel) and got some good info on sustainable wood and architecture strategies and a whole host of other environmental issues. That got me on a mailing list that informed me that this year, the Saturday Keynote Address would be given by Vice President Al Gore. Needless to say, I began geeking out and voluntarily gave up a Saturday of frisbee to go to the conference. That statement alone should tell you how excited I was.
Now, California, and the Bay Area in particular, is probably one of the most green and progressive places in the country. So, attending the conference put me, for once, solidly in my demographic politically, which was nice. The attendees of the conference represented the diversity of the place I live, and the attitudes were generally in line with mine. This is one of the places you go to solidify your beliefs as opposed to challenging them.
I've never actually been to a political rally, but this was probably as close to one as I've gotten. And, to be fair, the attendees of this conference were probably Mr. Gore's base. In fact, the majority of people who filled the auditorium were probably only at the conference to hear him speak. So we first heard from California Attorney General and former Governor Jerry Brown. I didn't know he was speaking until a few days ago, but was excited nonetheless. As Governor, he helped pass many of California's building codes that have led to California remaining flat in per-capita electricity usage in the past 20 years while the rest of the nation has gone up by 80% (yeah, if I didn't mention it, I know we're rude and unfriendly and superficial and obnoxious and smug and condescending and we're bad drivers, but I'm proud to be a Californian). As Attorney General, he has been involved with extensive litigation against the auto industry and by the auto industry on California's fuel efficiency standards, and with the EPA over the recent administration's efforts to block California's new carbon standards. Attorney General Brown was a surprisingly passionate and energizing speaker, talking about California's leadership role in establishing tough regulations and standards, standards that have been fought by the Federal Government dating back to the days of everyone's favorite Republican President, Ronald Regan (you know, the guy who first hired the cast of shady characters who ended up in the administrations of Bush 1 and Bush 0.5). One of Atty. Gen. Brown's most salient points was about urban planning. We've come to accept this system wherein we build homes miles away from work centers where land is cheap, tying people to their cars, forcing them to drive upwards of an hour or more each way to get to work. He called this practice "human garaging." And it's scary. Listen to people talk about their jobs:
"How long is your commute?"
"About 40 minutes?"
"That's pretty good."
...
Are you shitting me? This is good? In what way? America, for many years, has been about building these cookie cutter communities of track homes out in cheap land, which is cheap because there's nothing out there, the weather is terrible and there's no water, and it has to be pumped out of rivers and into places where people aren't supposed to live, and we need to plow over more soil with ashphalt which kills both the overall water table and the ability of the soil to absorb carbon, you know, that nasty stuff that's going into the atmosphere and slowly killing out planet, and actually raises temperatures, making people have to use more HVAC which burns more fossil fuels which dries up our rivers faster which makes us have to pump more water which kills the rivers which makes less water which kills us faster and, oh man, this is getting a bit long, isn't it?. To stop with the rant, the point is this: Ecology and Economics share a root word in "Eco" which can be translated to mean "the household." Economics is the study, then, of the inner workings of that household, be it a single home, or a nation. Ecology is the study of the "logos" or the rational function of that household.
In modern America, we've shifted our economy to a finance and service based economy, rather than a manufacturing economy. In case you didn't get the memo, that economy is failing. We're trying to come up with a $700,000,000,000 bailout package to that economy because that economy thought it could take high risk, sub-prime mortgage debt, securitize it into large packages, and then buy and sell that debt for profit. People will tell you that this economic crisis is complicated. It's very simple actually. This economy was a get-rich-quick scheme. The white-collar folks thought they could make money out of nothing. Someone forgot to tell them that you can't do that. But, I guess it's not entirely their fault. At some point, we stopped making new thingamajigs to sell to people, so, they had to start figuring out other things to sell. Securitized Prime-mortgages were actually making a decent profit, and there weren't enough out there to satisfy the greed of Wall St. So, the solution, make more mortgages. Sell houses to people who couldn't afford them. Take away the simple precautions like, oh, I don't know, figuring out if people have enough money to pay back the mortgage. As long as the interest rate goes up in 2 years and you collect more money, you're peachy keen, right? So, obviously, as the financial sector would like us to believe, this is all the fault of those nasty independent mortgage brokers who sold these bad subprime loans to innocent folks, never suspecting that they might default. Nevermind the fact that Wall St. demanded more subprime mortgages to buy and sell.
MOAR MOAR MOAR!!! It's not a recipe for success people.
The economics trumped the ecology. We went from Blue Collar to White Collar. We went from selling things to selling things on paper.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for a revolution.
America's economy is sagging. Our national security is threatened. And we're killing the planet we live on. Believe it or not, the solution is tied together.
Go Green.
Want to grow the economy? Want to stop funding our enemies because we need their product? Want to save the whales?
Go Green.
Big Business and The Right will tell you that going green is a moonbeam hippie notion that will send more jobs overseas and will hurt us economically. Bullshit. Utter and complete bullshit. We negotiated the trade agreements that don't factor in sustainability. And EVERYONE is paying.
Yeah, labor is cheaper in China and Mexico, because they aren't nearly as green as us. Is this good for us? No. Ask anyone whose job got outsourced. Is this good for China or Mexico? The Right will tell you yes because they have the jobs now. Fine. Take a closer look. China is rapidly approaching environmental crises of every size, shape and flavor. Pollution is causing rising rates of asthma. 150,000,000 people depend on the drying Yangtzee River for their water. Industrial pollution is decimating this river, and bad well water practices are causing the water table in China to drop nearly a foot per year. There are a billion people in China competing for dwindling resources. China isn't winning.
Going Green CREATES jobs where it might otherwise take them away. Going Green means we don't have to bow to Saudi Arabia's every whim because we don't need their oil, and it means Hugo Chavez can't avoid his critics because he doesn't have to tax his people to fund his disasterous policies, and it means the rebel groups in the Niger Delta can't sell oil to buy the guns they use to kill innocent people. Going Green means we recognize that we are intimately tied to the fate of this beautiful blue and green planet, and we have to do what it takes to make sure we survive. The Earth will far outlast us, even if we kill ourselves. If we keep polluting the planet and starve ourselves and freeze ourselves by starting a new ice-age, the Earth will endure. It just will do so without us. It's US we have to save. Earth will take care of itself, one way or the other. I'd much rather Earth keep sheltering us though.
These points were all underscored when Vice President Gore spoke. The self-described "Recovering Politician, currently on step 9," was warmly greeted by the audience. Once again, as we all watched him on stage, I'm sure I wasn't the only one who looked up and thought "What if..." But as he himself said, you can't go back and change the past. We have to look forward. He opened with an interesting analogy, describing the sub-prime debacle. The financial system basically assumed that it could securitize subprime mortgages and basically ignore the risk by lumping them together. That has turned out to be a fraud of the highest order. There is another assumption that is about to go splat. And that is that we can take subprime carbon assets and deposit them in the atmosphere. This is also a fraud. You don't need an economist to tell you this (and who trusts economists anymore these days?). Science, peer reviewed, scrutinized, reproduced, and accepted, is telling us that this assumption is fatal. And yet, big oil, big coal, big car makers and the politicians they buy are deaf to these cries. Very much unlike the ozone crisis of 15 years ago when the world listened to the scientists (which, as VP Gore said was a novel concept as opposed to the current policy of censoring scientists that the powers that be are taking) and made a change that prevented a crisis from escalating. We went CFC free by making it a moral cause and changing the way we looked at how we did things. We went from relying on CFCs to clean circuit boards, to making circuit boards that required no cleaning, and we did it in 4 years instead of the 7 we thought it would take.
We know how to do this. Why aren't we doing it?
We're willing to put $650,000,000,000 into a war started on a lie and operated by Haliburton and Blackwater for enormous profit, and exploited by OPEC which can tell us that the war is making supply unstable. We're willing to put $700,000,000,000 into a financial system that sold us snake oil. But a few million for a future in which we are green and sustainable? The Right will tell us it's wasteful spending and a poor usage of taxpayer dollars.
The Right wants to drill, so that we're no longer dependent on Foreign Oil. Never mind that you won't see a change in the market for at least 10 years, and even then only fractionally. Never mind that drilling makes us MORE dependent on Oil overall by stifling growth in alternative energies. Never mind that burning more oil while deforesting the planet to satisfy our need for beef and other wasteful products and destroying the ocean's ability to photosynthesize carbon is going to destroy us. Drill Baby Drill! Send the Advocate for more Nukes and the Governor elected on Oil Money so we can Drill Baby Drill! Put Country First!
Give me a break.
Thinking that making us slaves to the same oil driven system that had our parents willing to drive from Suburbia to The City and buys our oil from hostile regimes on money borrowed from China is a loser of a proposition. Explain to me how any of that puts Country First.
Country First to those people is putting a fence around America, and exporting fear, mistrust and condescension, something we've done quite enough of these past 8 years. Let's remember that 7 years removed from the attacks of September 11th, 2001, America has basically no standing as a world leader. And yet, such is the potent power of America that in the past 5 years, developing nations now account for over half of worldwide carbon emissions. America remains the highest emitter per capita by far. But still, if "developing nations" cut their carbon emissions, we'd make real progress. But, without fail, each of those nations will point to America and say, "America is not doing it. Why should we?"
As much as seed change in excited attendees of this conference matters, leadership is required. We've lacked that the past 8 years. VP Gore reminded us that we can't wait for a new administration to make changes, but it certainly won't hurt, and that we have to vote for a leader who is for change in the right direction.
At this point, he quipped, "Now, I'm not here to talk politics or anything, but..." and then he leaned over and gave a very melodramatic and theatrical conspiritorial wink, which of course had the crowd rolling. He followed up with, "As I told the Democratic National Convention, I'm all for recycling, but this is ridiculous."
Most days these days, I'm sad for the world. Domestically, the economy is crap. The achievement gap is widening, healthcare is out of reach for most people, prisons are getting more and more full, and everything is falling apart. Worldwide, there are wars, refugee crises, violations of human rights and womens' rights and war crimes and a general lack of hope.
Going green represents hope. We can make jobs to increase the standard of living. We can live healthier so that we don't need as much healthcare. We can export hope to the world like we used to do. The Marshall plan worked and Germany and Japan are valued allies now. America was, is and can be a world leader. Going green breaks the shackles of the oil and finance system that enslaves the world. It brings value to places both globally and locally. It bridges the divide between the wealthy and poor.
And it teaches the right values to the next generation: You must care for yourself, and your neighbor and the world you live in. You should live in moderation and harmony. Greed is bad. Love is good. We are one people. There are no nations that matter more than humanity. We are of the Earth, and we must care for it with all our hearts because the duty comes to us from no less than our Creator himself. Live Local and Think Global. And always always give what you can, and take no more than you need.
It's time for a change.