Green Year

He’ll have to forgive me from stealing his punchline, but I can’t help it: Thomas Friedman’s The Power Of Green story from the Sunday Times is really too inspiring to not trumpet.

What it posits, in his usual three examples and a punchline style and obligatory mention of how things are flatter than they used to be, is that by rebranding the idea of ‘green,’ and with good old american know-how, we can beat this pesky global warming gang!

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.
Doesn’t that sound good?

“It’s about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet. It’s about making America safer by breaking our addiction to a fuel that is powering regimes deeply hostile to our values. And, finally, it’s about making America the global environmental leader, instead of laggard, “

Hell’s yea! I’ll admit, it sounds pretty good to me, especially the part about America being a leader. The thought of going through the mental gear thrashing required to move from the idea of self as American (read=member in good standing of world-striding collossus ) to american ( read=some guy in a place that used to matter and how is home to old people and hollywood, plus some cowboys, nei how, Shanghai boss!) is extremely unpleasant, to say the least.

One final, somewhat related thought: it came to be in a blinding flash the other day, the absolute venality of the corporate titans and their shills who denied climate change for so long. They did the math and played the odds, and will win either way. Consider: either (a) they’re right, in which case spending all that money capping their industry would be unfair and wasteful or (b) we’re right, but they denied it to save money, drove the price of a more and more limited resource through the roof and made a fortune.  So now they’ve made their pile of cash, and continue to ( Etrade’s energy sector is up 32% in six months ), and will now have enough money to get early and deep into any emerging solutions that the rest of us will soon be SCREAMING for, regardless of who they come from.  Gotta give the fuckers credit, they play to win.

HI, I’m the Jolly Green Giant..

“Nothing ever slows her down and a mess is not allowed…”

Huh, oh, sorry, caught me singing.  OK, so check this house out, as photographed by my friend Peter Bennetts; (he lives in Melbourne, and we first met on a tiny little rock called Tuvalu while both there working on stories about climate change, he with a writer for Outside, me for Sierra.  He’s also published, with Tony Wheeler of Lonely Planet, the lovely and troubling book Time and Tide, detailing Tuvalu’s loosing battle with climate change.)

Talk about function and form getting mashed up–take a look at that big gorgeous bulb there:   A second skin flows from the eaves, across the ceiling, to the interior walls, gathering bulbously in the heart of the living room as a rainwater-storage tank. “Water-catchment capacities in Victoria have fallen to alarming levels,” Morgan says. “Restrictions have been applied, and much of our state has been burning this past summer. In this context, the water tank is the most significant element of the house, symbolically taking the place of the hearth as centerpiece.” Since the house has no air-conditioning, the steel tank’s main function is to cool the living room passively. It also supplies rainwater for toilets, irrigation, washing wet suits, and occasionally drinking. It’s both a practical and an ambient element of the room: a tap of the knuckles gives a good indication of the water level, while the sound of water dripping into the tank can be heard after a rainfall.”

The house, in other words, has inverted the traditional dynamic of being a hardened shield against nature, and instead works collaboratively with it. Very. Clever.

Plus, Aussie.

Two marks.

Read the rest and see more of Peter’s photos here. 

You may have heard about Apple’s recent black eye for their green record.

It’s part of Greenpeace campaign out of Europe to Green Apple, which is a lovely idea. Their little smooth white sleek fetish inducing products do, alas, eventually break. And when they do, it should be easy to recycle them.  There’s a good story about it at Inhabitat, which you should be reading, anyway.
C’mon, Jobs–if a Texan like Dell can do it, sure as hell you can. Get them hamsters down in Cupertino spun up, figure it out, expand your value proposition even further, and see if you can’t swab up just a wee bit more market share.

Let the blowback begin. After fits and starts and plenty of navel gazing, a simple dinner with friends in Redwood City allowed us to get outside our  mental culdesac and realize our instincts were right. As Patrick put it, when asked if having innovators at Burning Man would somehow diminish his experience, “no, sounds great, i’d love to learn about that stuff. and if people have a problem with it, fuck em, you know? because if we don’t do something about climate change, there won’t be an event to go to.”

Word. Burning Man is a globally unmatched collection of early adopters, innovators, and change agents. It’s among the most fertile mental soil on the planet, and if we’re going to make a difference in the fight against climate change, then it only makes sense to bring the best, newest, most promising ideas to the desert and share then ( albiet in a non-commercial, non-commodified, un-branded way ). Delay or sticking our head in the sand simply won’t do.
We’ve had huge response so far. Melody Haller of the Antenna Group has, not surprisingly, several of her company’s clients who’re interested in bringing their widgets out to the playa for people to see and kick the tires of. But not all are interested, as it’s an interesting value proposition, to be sure. One CEO, who’ll remain anonymous, replied to her invite  ” Melody, Have you been to this event before? As far as I know it is a drug induced orgy from what my friends have told me who have attended. Is this something corporations want to be associated with? “ 

The answer, for many, is a resounding yes.
AG and I have both had a pretty significant shift on this in recent days. Too much time on Tribe, ePlaya, and other digital echo chambers have caused us to, temporarily at least, loose site of the big picture.  Her latest missive on it is here.

So, let’s start talking about some cool stuff you’ll see on the playa this year. The folks from Chlorophyll Collective have some mind-bending ideas on how to make algae eat generator exhaust and create biodiesel, a sort of snake eating its tail tale that may not be so far out there; an outfit called LiveFuels is proposing to do just that on a commercial scale (and are also an Antenna client–small world, non?)
Today and tomorrow from 12-3 Chicken John will be showing off his gasifier truck outside Ritual, giving rides and raising cash to buy a pelitizer so Ritual can become the first coffee shop anywhere to run on its own garbage.  The truck is part of a fleet of vehicles that are the demon spawn of the Mechabolic.

And of course we’re building a massive, 60kW solar array to power the man base complex, as part of our planned solar work that will hopefully when it’s done included 210kW permanent solar in Gerlach, and 90kW in Lovelock, courtesy our partnership with MMA Renewable Ventures. 

Meanwhile, from the “it doesn’t have to be green to be green” file, check this thing out. The Swarm is autonomous. The Swarm demonstrates emergent behavior. The Swarm will know you are there. The Swarm runs on green electrons. Hella cool, yo.

More to come.

After a slow start, the New York Times is closing fast on climate change, pouring out information, resources, links. This morning’s are but one good example.

Meanwhile, trouble at the ranch. After launching our Green Man pavilion message, we took it back down–after it became clear that not everyone was on the same page when it came to issues of branding at the event, even virtually. It seems some don’t care if branding of “good” products exists, while others care passionately about their existence anywhere in the burnesphere, to coin an awful phrase.  TBD at a board meeting today at 2, stay tuned.