Living the American Green

You may have seen one of those ads for GM’s Chevy Volt. They aren’t exactly intellectually honest, these ads, because they are selling a product that doesn’t technically exist yet. Theoretically, the Volt is an amazing concept: 40 to 50 miles on straight electricity, then a gas engine kicks in ONLY to charge the battery (unlike the Prius, with an electrical assist motor). You can recharge that over night with a basic three pronged plug-in. Given that more then 2/3rds of your average American commuters go less then 40 miles, you can pretty much mark this down as an ideal commuter vehicle. If the Prius has come to stand for gas reduction the Volt will be the beginning of gas elimination. The catch? The engineers haven’t actually invented it yet. But according to this amazing bit of journalism from The Atlantic’s Jonathan Rauch, the race is on.

That’s right. Advertising a product before its even created. We know what it looks like, and what it should be able to do… but we know the same thing about the X-wing. Certainly means that missing a deadline will be a pretty obvious and transparent screw up! We confess that the reasons we went into doing some research on the Volt where that we were a little nonplussed by the advertising campaigns and we were on the look for green-washing. While a little part of their ads ARE fake (eg, getting the name Chevy associated with being green, even though the product doesn’t work yet), the article actually makes me think that GM is being extremely brave:

Given the challenges, standard procedure dictates first building and testing the battery, and only then designing a car around it. That process, however, would take until 2012 or 2013—time GM does not have if it wants to beat Toyota. The only hope of meeting the 2010 deadline is to invent the battery while simultaneously designing the car. Just-in-time inventory is common now in the car business, but just-in-time invention on the Volt’s scale is new to GM and probably to the modern automotive industry.

Its a ballsy play, to be sure: making a promise that you don’t know if you can keep, and staking your spot as front-runner in a new and burgeoning industry on that promise. But, if there’s ever going to be a way to make absolutely sure that GM is doing all they can, its by making it a serious financial and social negative to fail.

Can they hope to succeed?

My own feeling, just a reporter’s guess, is that battery glitches have reduced the odds of GM’s having the Volt in showrooms by late 2010, but advances in the underlying technology have increased the odds of its producing the Volt early in the decade. In other words, delay on the order of months is looking more likely, but delay on the order of years is looking less likely. I’d also guess that the car’s sticker price will be higher than GM initially hoped, maybe north of $35,000.

Frankly, we all all for GM shooting for the moon. If they hit, then American Auto-manufacturers are back on the map, with a smart efficient car years before Toyota and BMW even get theirs into testing. Its unclear in our minds if GM has the money and marketing smarts to keep up with the set backs (and social push-backs) from our great society. But, as this Salon article correctly notes: the best thing is that GM is seeing the Volt as its way back to glory. Other auto manufacturers are sitting up and taking notice, which on our minds means that the GM machine can wear the the Giant Bulls-eye that they just painted on their own chest with pride.

Quick post because we have been subcontracted out to go help some people move from point A to point B.  This means that there will be a longer post this weekend, probably Saturday morning, instead of the usual weekend hiatus.

In the mean time: This represents an end to the two straight days of posting about cool green that we like: check out this new dating site! Honestly… this seems like a weird idea to me.  How do they afford to plant the trees?  The sign up is free, right?  Doesn’t it sort of seem like the profit margin on a second tier Internet dating sight would be low enough that you could never afford this sort of thing?

On closer examination, it turns out you need to become a paid member for you to get the benefit of a tree being donated.  However, you get a tree donated EVERY month you are still unlucky in love (and thus remain signed up for the service) so there’s that consolation.

This seems like another delightful example of green stuff being applied all Willy-Nilly all over the place, somehow cheapening both dating and planting a tree without improving either.  We can just hear the little justification bells going: “I might be signing up for a web dating service, but at least they are planting a tree!” or, conversely,  “I might be being a little green, but at least there might be a date in it for me!”.  Why?  WHY?

On the plus side, American Forests seems like a legit site, and they are sponsoring the dating service, so perhaps all is not lost.

Day Two of Green things that we like:  Its Vertical Farming!  The charge is being lead by a Mr. Dickson Despommier, a professor at Columbia here in New York.  You may remember this guy from such things as The Colbert Report, but he’s  got a series of cool ideas on how to make Urban centers even more  useful from a green perspective.  Just think: All the  Eco-benefits of  dense population, without the exceedingly high costs of busing in food from goodness knows where!  Plus, the yield  (at least according to his own statistics) is through  the ROOF! (terrible pun intended).  This is the complete outside the box thinking that we at The American Green are really into: it deals with Carbon problems in all aspects of its creation and in its use, plus it can be slotted in anywhere, PLUS it looks awesome and futuristic and makes us think of the old school SimCity2000 buildings.  Arcadiums, we think they were called?

However, do go to the web page and check out all the benefits of these things.  With such a controlled environment, you could theoretically create ideal growing conditions, thus eliminating the need to all the pesticides and other products that go into mass farming now.  Plus, although the scale isn’t as large per, you can run these puppies year round.  And finally, to really unleash our inner geek a little: this is the technology that we are going to have to get right if we ever want humans to explore space.  And, frankly, considering the number we are currently doing on the globe… we do.  We REALLY do.

The moral of the story at PdF was pretty simple: I blog therefore I am (relevant). Thus, with our new found relevance firmly in hand, we are setting out to bring you some highlights of the things we like in the green world. Good Green, if you will.

First on the list: Carbon Offsets. It’s basically the ideal thing for the Lazy Environmentalist, because it involves doing very little whilst shedding copious amounts of Liberal Guilt. But, when one is throwing money at a problem that one doesn’t want to sack up and solve, its important to figure out WHERE the money should go. We endorse the Nature Conservancy as the best option to offset your terrible habits!

Seriously though, sometimes you have to fly. Sometimes you have to travel. There are events that shouldn’t be avoided simply because of carbon output. And there are really easy ways to partially offset the damage that’s being done. Carbon is, at the end of the day, a natural element. It’s just… you know… when there are billions more tons of it in the air then there should be that we run into something of an issue.

Just remember: operation costs are huge parts of many charities, and for some ungodly reason, nature is still considered a charity. So, as long as its a cause Celebe, The Nature Conservancy gets pretty good bang for your buck all things considered, but we would love to hear other good carbon offset options.

Coming to you live from day two of the personal democracy forum, which managed to become even more relevant and even more interesting. Seriously, there are some great thinkers here, and there is a lot of hope ricocheting around Jazz at Lincoln Center these days. We even had time to hear from my favorite green thinker out there right now: Van Jones was here, if only for a moment. He talked about what he always talks about, namely the fact that the economy and the environment are in the toilet, and they are both circling the drain. However, Jones had some fascinating stuff to say about the power of the web, and how social technology can work to solve Global problems.

The question is, as always: How do we harness this the new media in a way that creates actual social change? This is particularly relevant for the green movement. Lets be fair, if there ever were a fractured and loaded social movement that could use some internal organization and healing, it would be the “eco” or “green” movement. We, and we use that collective term loosely, are sort of an enigma when it comes to being an organization. We don’t talk well, and we don’t agree on much, even internally, and there really is SUCH an ethos of guilt and aggression from a portion of the green movement that we’re (not We, but we) are not even sure that we want to play with those people. They make us feel bad.

So, we learned in the last two days that technology can solve just about anything. Main Man Obama, where he to be elected president, would roll into office with an email list of over 3 million people, meaning that he would have the power to interface with his supporters in ways that are far deeper then just getting him elected. Sunlight foundation and others are making the entire political process transparent. Craig Newmark, of Craigslist.com, isn’t great in person, but man is the web his medium. Lawrence Lessig is one of the most amazing people we have ever gotten the chance to meet, and if he can’t take money out of politics (check out Change Congress RIGHT NOW) then no one can. But most important to us, we got to see a side of the tech community that is so positive, and so forward looking that it needs to be integrated into every aspect of social life. It isn’t in the green movement as well as we would like (greenforall.org being one nice exception) but we need to move in that direction.

P.S. I would link more, or throw up one of the millions of pictures we have, but I am far too exhausted. Participatory Democracy is sweet, but god damn is it hard on the body.

Sitting here at the Personal Democracy Forum at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and hearing about the connections, both social and political that can be created through the blogosphere, we thought we would throw up a quick post. There are all sorts of things that can be drawn from a presentation like the one given by Mathew Hurst, from Microsoft Live Labs. Check out his work. Interesting stuff. In sum: the social connections created by linking A to B and B back to A are responsible for the spread of information on-line. Well, duh, you say. But when it comes to something like the Environment, and issues of green-ecology, that actually is a pretty important statement. That means that, as blogs grow to being the go to place for green readers (take, for example, tree hugger), they become defacto gatekeepers for the people interested in this type of information.

We know “gatekeepers” is a troubling term. Because they aren’t gate keepers in the traditional sense — we can create a competitive blog and wrest control from them by simply being linked and read like anyone else. But, that still means that the reality of the situation is that the blogs are controlling what we think about and what we read about. Lots of hits, lots of diggs… that has the capacity to actually pick and GO with an agenda. It’s fascinating to think of it along these lines, but within the (still too insular) green community, blogs actually are the people who make policy seem inevitable or impossible. The debate about actual control and actual policy rages on, but the presentation that we are watching today made clear that the battle for hearts and minds is actually really important. No Impact Man, for example, has the real social power to decide what green policy stays in peoples minds and reverberates around the blogosphere.

In light of all this thinking, I just wanted to throw up a post, since the video from our interview cleared today. Check out the interview with Deron Lovaas and Colen Beavan, AKA No Impact Man. With the rising prices of gas and energy, people are starting to go green out of financial need. But, will this impact the reality on the long run, or is this another flash in the financial pan?

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.610953&w=425&h=350&fv=]

Watch the video, visit the links, change the policy. In essence, as PGP mentioned, talking about vertical farming is a real applicable way to get green farming up and going.

Shout out to the Alter of Entropy for breaking the Wordpress hold on our graphical styling and giving the top of the blog a much needed face lift.

This is one of them there blog posts that ya gotta squint at all sideways like to see its green nature.  It’s also a good circular connection type thing, where I get to say how much I like the music of Joe Raciti and the pure premium.

Check out the video here… then we get to the green bits.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-tFHV8sq-A]

Get it now?? It’s cause its all built out of cardboard!  And its a good song!  right?…

To be honest, one of my pet green peeves is the “made out of recycled material” trope.  I know that there are a series of real and logical reasons to do things like this:

But we don’t have to like it.  For some reason, we have never been fans of the self-conscious look-at-me style of green design.  Make the product awesome (and then make it green) instead of making it so obvious in its look. Maybe its because of the associations that we’ve built up about the sort of people who have this conspicuous green stuff: they are the branch of the green movement that – ahem- gets under peoples skins.  These are the people who often imply that you should feel bad for not having a eco-green-coffee table made totally of old toe-nails of your own.  Sure, its not the artists fault, necessarily… but you got to admit that there’s a stigma.  A REVERSE stigma!  Wow.

This is why we like Joe’s video: its a musical masterpiece that he threw together with improvised instruments, not a look at me statement with a musical afterthought.

We had such a great post for you this evening.  A real wiz-banger, to quote the late great Roald Dahl.  Unfortunately, certain unavoidable things came up in the day/evening.  Its now 2 am, the Living The American Green institute is cumulatively totally exhausted, and we have to get up in 6 hours.  So, instead of the planned amazing – nay, WORLD changing – post we had had planned for today, we leave you with this: a pretty funny comic that made us laugh.  Yeah.  What WOULD you say to something like that? 

For real though, this comic continues to amaze us.  Its not that its always good… its just that its always SO dorky!

Just produced a really cool BLL interview with No Impact Man and someone from the NRDC. The topic: high cost of oil and energy, and how its pushing people toward being ecologically mindful… for financial reasons. Will post the video as soon as it clears.

Meanwhile, we at the American Green thought that Hydrogen cars were years away from actually being available. Well, that might still be the case for much of America, but these cars are at least on the roads out there.

Check out this first person account of driving one!

Ok, so it turns out we aren’t really that close to everyone having hydrogen cars in every garage. Despite the jaw dropping MPG numbers, as well as the emissions being limited to… well… water, GM and Honda are releasing a few of them over the next few years, there simply isn’t any infrastructure around the country to refuel the suckers. Also, at any point in this blog post, you can go ahead and cue the long list of people claiming that hydrogen has a series of problems, ranging from cost ($ and energy production costs both!) to explosive capacity. And its true. Hydrogen is not an energy creator, its an energy CARRIER, meaning that you need energy to get it into the state that a car can use it. But, there are many ways to convert energy to useful hydrogen! MANY!

Resistance is strong in America. Strong to any change away from gasoline. And do you know why we think this is? It’s just three little words: “Oh, the humanity!”

[youtube=http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F54rqDh2mWA]

We were having a conversation recently with the Elder Variano, an honorary member of the LtAG brain trust, and he brought up this interesting point: Incalculable damage has been done to the public perception of hydrogen as fuel source and as stable element because of one disaster in 1937. If you watch the silver screen, Hydrogen is often lumped in there with C4 and TNT. This stuff is just waiting to blow up in the most dramatic way possible! Well, in point of fact, a hydrogen explosion is probably a lot safer then a gasoline explosion (unless one happens to be suspended directly above the tank or leak). You might not know this, but 2/3rds of the Hindenburg’s passengers survived that crash, and many of the injuries sustained were from falling, not from the explosion.

Of course, Hydrogen is a volatile liquid, but so are all sorts of things. Gasoline and Plutonium, just to name two. The point we are trying to make is this: just imagine if the Hindenburg isn’t seared into the minds of millions of people around the globe. Just imagine if this doesn’t become one of the most famous examples of video from the early footage era. What if every time the word HYDROGEN was said, the first image that popped into your head wasn’t the earlier video of destruction and mayhem? We are willing to wager that it might have resulted in a little more research, and we might have a safer and more widely spread hydrogen system then we do now, that’s what we bet. So, check out the new cars, ranging from the goofy GM SUV to the kick ass sleek BMW here: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykl2PH2B-tM]

But remember… this could have been us in the 1970’s if we could al get over our fear of the nasty little H symbol.