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.

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.

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.