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.

“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. 

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.

So Ray Allen and I need to go to Lovelock on Wednesday, to meet with the Pershing General Hospital and explain why we want to build them 90KW of solar power for free. Which means flying to Reno. Which means pollution, carbon, all that bad stuff the solar power is designed to offset.

Enter Terrapass. I’d heard of them before–you buy some offsets, fly a little less guiltily. But this was the first time I’d seen ( noticed? ) them embedded in the sales options at Expedia. So, I clicked and bought two. Easy, peasy.

But what, exactly, had I purchased? According to their site,
“TerraPass purchases and retires Green-e certified renewable energy credits from wind farms across the country. These wind farms generate electric energy that might otherwise come from the burning of coal or oil. In this way, Wind Power takes CO2 emissions out of the energy producing cycle. And that combats global warming.”

Hmm. Is that additive? I mean, does it make a real difference? Decide for yourself, a good place to learn more is right here. As for me, I’ll keep buying them–if NOTHING else, they’re a small reminder that their are hidden costs for all the jetting around I do, a bill my ( gulp ) kids are gonna have to pay.

By now you’ve likely seen or heard of the Obama1984 mashup ad, pairing pro-Barack sympathies with the old Apple 1984 ad, with Hillary Clinton standing in for Big Brother. Well done, I must say. Notice–the woman is wearing an iPod, nice touch. North of 1 million views, and counting.
This repurposing of content for political ends reminded me of what happened when GM had the idea of letting customers at the content for their new Chevy Tahoe campaign ( chronicled by Wired Magazine ); they ended up with heaps of clever customer generated ads, many lambasting their gaz guzzling ways.
(For a great analysis, shot by shot as well as historical/social context, of the brilliant, original spot ( directed by Ridley Scott, of Alien and Blade Runner fame) check out this story by Sarah Stein.)

This story is interesting for two reasons. One, to see just how out of touch the mainstream media is with open source content generation ( read how the New York Time refers to it has having “gone viral,” like it’s a disease or something, yet fails to drill down at all on the substantive implications of this kind of new media. Yawn, NYT. You can do better.)
And two, and more germane to our purposes, because it’s one of the first widespread uses of advertising content rejiggered for political aims. My hope: people see this, and start creating more mashups that take the carefully crafted messaging of the corporate consumption overlords, and use them instead to create opportunities to reflect on just what we’re doing to our little world, and how we might yet save it.