Herding Cats Toward a Green Harmony

Anyone, who does not believe, at this late date, that our planet and the human race is not in serious trouble, is either in denial or is an idiot.

Is what is happening on the planet part of natural cycles? Probably. Are we making the cycles more intense with our activities? Yes, probably.

Is there dire danger in continuing those activities, unregulated and unabated, as if science didn't exist? You bet there is, and the people living closest to the poles are already seeing the consequences.

Why do some people refuse to see reality, where this is concerned? Well, of
course, we can count on greed playing a role in this unreasonable thinking and behavior.

What is less obvious, is the disconnect from our origins. I'm not talking about family of origin or original nationality, though those origins are important, in some respects.

Right now, I am talking about our national origin. I am talking about our identity as a "can do" people; a people with vision, typical of people who move away from their homelands to come to a new country, because they have dreams for themselves and/or ideas for making life better for everyone.

As a nation, we have always been too adventurous, when it comes to taking valuable land and resources that do not belong to us, for my taste, instead of negotiating and being patient with a process toward the good of all.

This nation's government, in many of its incarnations, has been too quick to war, instead of finding the value in and of peace.

Lincoln warned us about the danger of corporate power, long before Hitler and Mussolini proved it, way beyond a reasonable doubt..

Eisenhower warned us about the Military/Industrial Complex; the beast that would have to be fed, constantly. As we have seen, over and over again, since Ike left office, feeding that beast is alot like throwing money down the toilet, or using the money as a fire starter, with which to burn down the house, more often than not.

Both of these good men were, seemingly, presceint.

Even, the man who led us down the road to splitting the atom, warned us, that the splitting of the atom changed everything, except the heart of man. Einstein was wise as well as a genius; a rare find in human beings.

By the time the oil crisis hit in the 70s, many of us already had a pretty good hunch, based on early scientific evidence and common sense, that the industrial revolution was taking its toll on the environment, as well as on society and culture. Industry is good, but it also polutes, unless it is regulated, to some degree, and made to act like good citizens, when its loyalty is to the bottom-line.

Richard Nixon and the congress of his day, started the EPA. Nixon may have gone off the deep end, but at least he had a functioning brain and was capable of seeing further than his nose and deeper than his pockets.

I was not a fan of Richard Nixon's, by a long shot, nor was I a fan of Lyndon Johnson. They both lied to the American people and to our elected representatives about something as important as war; the escalation and expansion of that miserable war in Southeast Asia, which haunts our minds, anew, today.

Johnson wanted to create the Great Society; one in which there would be real equality under our Constitution, for everyone. Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act, helped, I am sure, by the murder of the young, martyred president he replaced.

Both Nixon and Johnson did good things for the American people. Unfortunately, their attempt to deceive the people, and/or abuse their power, drove them both from office, eventually.

Now, we have an administration filled to the rim with officials who have deceived the American people into another hideous war, yet who have not done one clearly indentifiable good thing for the American people and, until this month, have been aided and abetted by a forthing-at-the-mouth, partisan congress.

We have an administration which certainly seems to hate science and finds it threatening, will go to any lengths to throw major wealth at their corporate cronies, while giving the people the shaft in every way possible; from Medicare D, to Hurricane Katrina and disaster-profiteering, to war-profiteering in Iraq, and god only knows where all else, to draconian bankruptcy laws (which favor their theory of evolution; socio-economic Darwinism), to some of the worst abuses of power I have seen in my lifetime.

We, the people, need to face the simple fact that we are not going to get any real leadership from the Bush administration on anything. The environment cannot wait for another two years. It may well be that we are already past the point of hoping or working for anything other than a soft landing.

We are, once again, on our own, just as we were when we faced off with the other King George.

So, let's remember who we are, when we are at our best, as a people.

David Roberts is a staff writer at Grist and contributes frequently to their blog, Gristmill. This is the first of a two-part attempt to present a potential unified agenda for greens. Part II will be published Thursday.

It is up to greens to make sure that in 2007, a year full of possibility on energy and environmental issues, change moves in the direction of long-term sustainability and justice. Powerful forces will be pushing the other way. They—chambers of commerce, dinosaur corporations, think tank and government shills—tend to speak in a unified voice.
The good guys—the side of clean energy and emissions reductions—are a rump coalition of liberal environmentalists, libertarian conservationists, conservative evangelicals, geeked-out entrepreneurs and paranoid defense hawks, among others.

That's a lot of cats to herd, and the green movement-that-isn't usually produces a cacophony. Diagnoses and solutions range wildly in spatial and temporal scale, emphasis, cost and feasibility. Everything from light bulbs to organic food, to flex-fuel cars to a carbon freeze tax—no, make that a cap-and-trade program—clamors for attention.

Before I suggest a positive agenda most elements of the green coalition can agree on (in my dreams, anyway), it's important to understand why circumstances are uniquely aligned for action, and forecast a few of the forces against which greens should consciously countervail.
Circumstances favor progress. Greens confront opportunities in 2007 that haven't come around since the energy crisis of the 1970s. A new consensus is coalescing.

Public awareness is high, thanks to Al Gore and whole cavalcade of events and media coverage this past year. In addition to a few counterintuitive new members of the green coalition (among them God and Wal-Mart), pop culture trendsetters embraced green as the new black.

Everybody's talking about it.

Virtually every winning Democratic candidate in the dramatic November elections was vocal about alternative fuels, energy independence, and (to a lesser extent) global warming, issues that have largely been stripped of their effete, elitist connotations. Particularly at the state and local level, Republicans are blazing environmental paths, part of the coast-spanning Schwarzenegger/Pataki Axis of Non-Crazy. Bush and his political appointees represent an increasingly isolated, reactionary anti-green corporatism. Green is emerging as one of the few areas ripe for efficacious bipartisanship.

Business elites have also seen a vision of our fossil-free future and are aggressively preparing for its arrival. Corporate behemoths like Wal-Mart, DuPont, and GE are focusing on efficiency. Venture capital is pouring into the clean energy sector. The mighty giant of American entrepreneurialism awakes.

Nonetheless, certain political and corporate interests hope to stall progress, or at least use it to further entrench and enrich themselves. There will be the obvious polluters and the old battles , but also a new set of politically-connected industries pushing solutions better for their bottom lines than the public interest. Only a united green front can counter their influence and push in more sustainable direction.

Ethanol. The recent hype around ethanol stands primarily to benefit Big Corn: Archer Daniels Midland alone stands to receive about $2 billion of direct or indirect government largesse in 2007. Big Auto's also getting a piece: For every "flex-fuel" car they crank out, American automakers receive a credit against their federal gas mileage requirements. They put those credits toward making more gas guzzlers while the vast majority of flex-fuel car owners don't even live in areas where E85 is available, much less use it.

Add to this the fact that corn ethanol's energy balance is modest in the most optimistic assessments. Not to mention that corn production is environmentally devastating. Not to mention that ramping up ethanol will increase food prices, and there isn't enough arable land in the U.S. , even if we wanted to level all of it for chemical-intensive monocrops, to supply both sustainably.

Different green constituencies will offer varying levels of support to corn ethanol and its much-discussed but rare successor, cellulosic ethanol. But they should all be able to agree that the backing of multiple large corporate lobbies and a network of powerful farm-state legislators is enough for ethanol, and other, less-heralded sustainability options would benefit from their attention.

"Clean" coal. Following closely behind ethanol on the energy hype scale is coal liquefaction at what are commonly referred toIGCC plants, usually accompanied—at least rhetorically—by carbon sequestration. Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle plants burn somewhat cleaner and can more easily separate out the CO2 so that it can be injected underground. This is how coal companies justify their continued existence.

But where are the IGCC plants adjoined by working sequestration operations? Good luck finding them. IGCC technology is substantially more expensive than traditional coal plants. Sequestration, which is highly speculative, adds another 30-60 percent to the cost, along with huge new demands for energy and water. Meaningful commercialization and deployment are likely decades away. Even if that bright day arrives, "clean coal" still involves the environmental devastation of coal mining, the generation of substantial mercury and particulate pollution, and a per-kilowatt energy costs no better than wind and far worse than energy efficiency.
Nuclear power. The threat of climate change has given the nuclear industry its best talking point since "too cheap to meter" went inoperative. A few fear-stricken greens have fled into the nuclear embrace, much to the delight of man-bites-dog loving pundits.

But nuclear's problems have gone nowhere. Each nuke plant is fantastically expensive, uninsurable, subsidized out the wazoo, vulnerable to terrorist attack or accident, and constantly generating waste that we still don't know what to do with. Nuclear is a market Frankenstein, kept alive with jolts of taxpayer cash and bully-pulpit support from political, military and business elites.

Note that all these are supply-focused solutions. The same focus is behind the perpetual push to drill and mine more places (offshore, ANWR, Rocky Mountains, Appalachian Mountains). It's behind the implacable opposition to carbon emissions limits. It goes to the very animating spirit of U.S. power elites.

The green agenda threatens all that. The decentralization and democratization of energy production and the development of a more conscious, thoughtful consumer lifestyle will yield an economy powered by less cheap oil and more valuable human labor—along with a foreign policy conducted from a position of security and independence. Justifications for imperial adventures will be harder to come by.

If greens hope to make any progress, they must use this time of immense possibility to join together and push in the same direction.