What surprised me about Seth Godin’s blog post today on cars vs bicycles was the way he based his pro-bike arguments in classic liberal altruism: protect the underdog, ensure the safety of the less powerful. This is even more remarkable because he lives in New York City, whre bikes have clear superiority over cars for many purposes. (His tounge-in-cheek pro-car arguments, on the other hand, were like the modern Republican Party: I have more power than you, so get out of my way.)
I’m a big believer in convincing by harnessing the reader/listener/viewer’s enlightened self-interest. So I’d rewrite his pro-bike list with these eight positive reasons:
In dense urban areas, you’ll get there much faster on a bike than in a car, for trips of up to five and maybe as much as seven miles, especially in rush hour
You can park within a few feet of your destination (in big cities, I often start looking for a parking space half a mile/one kilometer ahead, and sometimes don’t find a space until a mile/2KM on the other side)
In less populated areas, the bike provides a healthy, fun workout
You notice more on a bike: stores and restaurants to check out, architectural details, big scenic vista, some ripe and yummy fruit to pick on a wild raspberry vine, that gorgeous hawk soaring above you
You enjoy that wonderful feeling of being outside with the breeze and sun
Your carbon footprint during your trip is reduced by orders of magnitude
You get to smile and be smiled upon by other people; positive human connection, no matter how fleeting, is a good thing, and hard to achieve encased in a ton or two of steel and plastic
Bikes are waaay cheaper—bike economics: outright purchase of something between $200 for a decent used street bike on up to, say, $600 for a new one of better quality, maintenance costs of $50-$100 per year, fuel cost of zero; car economics: at minimum, $5000 plus hundreds or thousands in annual maintenance for a functional used car with a remaining lifespan of three years or more, plus costs of fuel and insurance, on up to several tens of thousands for a new one.
Of course, Seth is using the bike vs. car argument as a metaphor for the caring vs. selfish economy. But as an avid biker (going back to commuting to high school in New York City, and continuing through my current rural lifestyle)—and a benefit-focused marketer, I had to point out that bikes do actually offer a number of real advantages.
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
It’s not often you hear a self-professed liberal Jewish feminist open her talk with ten minutes praising the Pope. But that’s how Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, and several other groundbreaking books, began her talk at Mount Holyoke College last night. While acknowledging a litany of areas where she and Francis have profound disagreements—among them same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to control her own body—she thanked him publicly for his attention to the planet in peril and its dispossessed people, saying he was a great example of what environmental leadership looks like right now.
And for Klein, those two areas—helping the planet and replacing poverty with abundance—are forever braided together. “Climate change is an accelerant to all the other issues going wrong…It’s not about saying climate change is so big that it trumps everything else. All are equally urgent, and we don’t win by pitting these issues against each other.” We win, she says, by joining forces to demand holistic approaches that simultaneously solve climate heating, create jobs and economic opportunity, and remediate ism-based oppression—by “connecting climate change with a broken economic model”—a concept she calls “intersectionality.”
(This is a message particularly dear to my own heart, and thoroughly integrated into my forthcoming 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World as well as my own talk, “‘Impossible’ is a Dare.”)
The impacts of climate change, she notes, often fall most heavily among the very poor countries, and the very poor residents of rich countries. Oil refineries, coal plants, and high asthma rates tend to be found in low-income communities, often with high concentrations of people of color. Rising floodwaters will inundate poor, tiny island nations first. “It’s not just about things getting hotter, but about things getting meaner. More militarized, more racist,” as we see in the response of countries like Hungary to the Syrian refugee crisis. Which she sees as climate-related, noting that the Syrian civl war followed the worst drought in Syria’s history. Climate change, she says, is also a women’s and a feminist issue; the impacts hit women disproportionately as well.
So her challenge to climate activists is to turn “disaster apartheid” (e.g., the detestable official response to Hurricane Katrina) into “energy democracy.” And that includes making sure that the communities hit hardest are first in line for improvements that meet their needs.
Hurricane Katrina, which inspired Klein to write The Shock Doctrine and begin her climate study that led to This Changes Everything, was a perfect storm combining “heavy weather and a weak and neglected public sphere.” She points out that by the time Katrina made landfall, it had been downgraded from a Category 5 hurricane to a mere tropical storm. The levees should have withstood the onslaught, if they hadn’t been allowed to fall into disrepair.
While the world looked on with horror as “FEMA couldn’t find New Orleans,” and “prisoners were abandoned, locked in their cells as the waters were rising,” evacuees were given one-way tickets out, and the elites seized an opportunity to remake the city as a wealthier place, with 100,000 fewer poor blacks, even tearing down public housing projects undamaged by the storm, to replace them with high-end condominiums.
Quoting Black Lives Matter leader Alicia Garza, Klein says it’s time to “‘make new mistakes’…we can’t demand perfection but we can demand evolution.”
Examples of the old mistakes we shouldn’t keep making:
“Projecting messianic fantasies onto politicians” and becoming disappointed when they fail to save us
Believing we can solve all our problems with market forces (she cites the recent Volkswagen fuel emissions tampering scandal as an example of why that doesn’t work)—or with technological fixes, which include not only wonderful new green energy systems but also environmentally catastrophic technologies like fracking (“the oil companies have figured out how to screw us sideways”), tar-sands oil, and massive pipelines such as the Keystone XL
“Building a movement entirely of upper-middle-class white people and wondering why people of color don’t join”
“Tearing other people to shreds” in bouts of anger disguised as political purity
Thinking that any one of us can do it all ourselves
Noting that fossil fuel companies will work extremely hard to protect their enormous profits and will try to win the public by pointing out the lifestyles of luxury fossil fuels have allowed us, Klein says we won’t win by trying to educate fossil-fuel billionaires like the Koch brothers. Furthermore, “we cannot look at this without looking at who burned what, when. Fossil fuels have allowed us to live the fantasy of a life apart from nature. But the response from the earth, though slow in coming, says there’s no such thing as a one-way relationship, and you were never the boss! We could see this as a cosmic demotion—or as a gift.”
But we do have many victories to celebrate, including Shell’s decision this week in the face of strong opposition from environmentalists to withdraw from arctic drilling…China’s major reduction in coal development and initiation of carbon cap-and-trade—due to public pressure even in that repressive society—when only a few years ago a new coal plant was opening every week…the 400,000 new jobs Germany has created in shifting 30 percent of its energy from fossil and nuclear to solar and wind (to name a few). “As I talk to people, the biggest problem is that they think they can’t win. But we are winning, as part of a global movement.
And just as the shock of the Great Depression economic collapse created space for New Deal social reforms, so the climate catastrophe, coupled with the current collapse of fossil fuel prices, with the price of a barrel of oil plummeting from $100 to $50 in three months, could catalyze transformation: “integrated holistic solutions and a road map. There’s a progressive tradition of using these shocks to build….a moment where we can do things that weren’t possible before. We can shut down bad projects and bad policy. We can win a moratorium on all arctic drilling. It’s easier to bring in a bold progressive carbon tax…the political goal has to be a polluter-pays principle…the mostr sustainable route is weaving together the yes and the no.” She delighted in recent progressive electoral victories in Alberta (long controlled by tar-sands-loving right-wingers) and in the UK, where the Bernie Sanders-like Jeremy Corbyn has just become head of the Labour Party. Also in Alberta, she took hope from a conference that brought together union miners from the tar sands, environmentalists, and many other sectors and emerged with a progressive manifesto.
Before a brief Q&A, she closed her formal presentation with a clarion call to optimism AND action:
We need to move from a society based on extraction to one based on caring, including a guaranteed annual income. Caregiving jobs are climate change jobs. We must expand the caring economy and contract the careless economy. 2016 is a leap year; we add a human-created day in deference to the earth’s rotation. That’s an increased opportunity to build a much better world. We will be told it’s impractical. But $2.6 trillion has been divested from fossil fuel.
Quoting a woman leader in Nauru, a tiny Pacific Island being lost to climate change after a catastrophic history of exploitation by First World economies (Klein chronicles the sad tale in This Changes Everything), she continued,
“If politics are immovable, let’s change the politics.” Now is not the time for small steps. Now is the time to leap!
What does that mean? Hundreds of thousands of vehicles “partying like it’s 1959,” belching unmitigated particulates into the air that you and I breathe. There were no emissions requirements at all in 1959, in case you were wondering.
This is outrageous! In addition to the recall and the fines, I think this is grounds for a widespread boycott. Being not just lied to but poisoned by a major company that pretends to care about the environment is not acceptable behavior. We as consumers need to stand up and say, ‘ENOUGH!”
And we consumers have power. There’s a long and honorable history of boycotts sparking change in corporate behavior. Just ask Nestlé.
The above link is to the New York Times article, but this act of deeply purposeful criminal fraud is all over the news media. This link goes to a Google search for “volkswagen defeat device emissions.” As of 6:09 p.m. Eastern on Friday, September 18, Page One results include stories in NPR, the Washington Post, and USA Today in addition to the Times.
Independent-owned boats like these on the Spanish Costa Brava could be forced out by Big Fish. Photo by Shel Horowitz
Independent-owned boats like these on the Spanish Costa Brava could be forced out by Big Fishing. Photo by Shel HorowitzAs a vegetarian for the past 42 years, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about fish. But I went to a talk, “Food Grabs vs. Climate Justice: How capitalists and climate deniers are locking up access to land and sea, and how Food Sovereignty movements are creating real climate solutions,” part of the Center for Popular Economics’ annual summer institute in Western Massachusetts.
Moderated by Sara Mersha (Grassroots International), panelists included Michele Mesmain (Slow Food International), Betsy Garrold (Food for Maine’s Future), and Seth Macinko (Department of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island). Both Macinko and Mesmain focused on fish and fisheries.
Both experts agreed on the need to control overfishing–and both said there’s a better way than the current widely embraced privitization “solution”: taking the public resource of the sea held in common, and giving it, for free and in perpetuity, to large corporations who are already catching the most fish. These corporations then can lease fishing rights back to the local fisherfolks, who used to be able to fish them for free–or simply force them out of business.
Macinko said you can manage a resource to prevent overfishing without savaging the historic commons rights, and noted the unholy alliance of environmental groups (including Environmental Defense Fund), academics, corporate-oriented major foundations such as Pew, government and trans-government authorities including the World Bank, the Big Fishing lobby, and, lo and behold, the Koch Brothers’ foundation pushing for this rights grab. Then Mesmain showed three models of successful fisheries management without privitization: a 1000-year-old guild governing France’s Mediterranean coast, a much more recent initiative in the Basque region of Spain–both involving open-sea fisheries, and one through the Okanagan Nations Alliance (8 nations/tribes in Washington State and British Columbia) covering inland river salmon fisheries.
I’m up to the part of Naomi Klein?‘s This Changes Everything where she talks about the interconnectedness of geolocalized people’s movements opposing “extreme/reckless resource extraction” (e.g., tar-sands oil, fracked gas and oil, mountaintop removal for coal). She dubs the movement “Blockadia.” She also casts very appropriate darts, just before this section, at the crazy idea that we should avoid climate catastrophe by throwing so much pollution into the sky that the sun can’t get through. Talk about a cure worse than the disease! Hard to believe some scientists are actually serious about this.
She points out that these technologies are far more intrusive and polluting and resource-intensive than the old-style mines and wells—and that the opposition often parses out as saving our water from destruction, modeling around the Precautionary Principle of not unleashing technologies we can’t control, and using the positive framing of protecting our water (very similar to the way I framed Save the Mountain 15 years ago—the successful movement to keep a nasty housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range in my town of Hadley, Massachusetts, US). I have said for many years that we have plenty of substitutes for oil, but if the water is gone (or unusable), so are we.
Like everything I’ve ever read by Klein, the book is impeccably researched—including interviewing primary sources directly and even suffering through climate-denier conferences and similar events in person; pursuit of the truth can be painful, sometimes.
And she isn’t afraid to go after the movement’s sacred cows. She scolds some very prominent environmental groups including The Nature Conservancy for betraying their core mission in the service of their large extraction-industry funders—even putting an oil well into one of its nature preserves, where the bird it was set up to protect can no longer be found. And she finds Sir Richard Branson’s proclamations of concern for the planet to be at odds with his actions. (I’m hoping she’s wrong about him. Even if she turns out to be right—and she might well be—he has certainly used his considerable charisma to educate the public on climate change.)
Environmentalists need to take these accusations very seriously. We need to know who we fund, and what they do with the money. And we definitely need to build the movement that insists upon meaningful action to stave off catastrophic climate change—which would have been much easier 20 or 30 years ago, but, I believe, is still possible now.
However, I break with Klein over solutions. She has essentially no faith in the business community or in technology, and she seems to think that any time an environmental group partners with a polluter, that group is sullied. Maybe I’m less of a purist than she is. But I’ve just finished another wonderful book, The Necessary Revolution, by Peter Senge et al. Reading the two together was very interesting, because Senge’s book is full of great examples of NGOs and corporations working together to tackle problems in a very meaningful way, while Klein’s is the counterpoint of these partnerships leading to a failure to address the deeper issues.
Technology doesn’t have to be about extreme extraction, GMOs designed to absorb more pesticides, nuclear power, or blocking the sun. Science and engineering can actually be the climate movement’s friends. Unlike the crazy unproven schemes requiring billions or trillions of dollars and dozens of years to ramp up, these innovations often combine deep conservation, greater efficiency in harnessing clean renewable energy, and even the fascinating science of biomimcry to slash energy use, carbon footprint, and waste—right now.
Like many environmentalists, I have serious issues with fracking: injecting a highly pressurized toxic sew of chemicals and water into shale rock, to blow it apart and release the gas trapped inside. This technology has spread widely in the last 15 years or so, and has been a lot of why fossil fuel prices have actually fallen.
In my mind, the big problem was always the risk to our water. We can live without oil, gas, coal and nuclear; there are plenty of alternatives. But we can’t live without clean, usable water, and fracking puts that at risk. There also seems to be a correlation between fracking and earthquakes, which should make anyone a bit nervous.
So why are we investing billions of dollars in infrastructure and putting our water at risk? Why not use that money to push our economy further toward renewables like solar, wind, and small hydro? Why not retrofit every building with deep-conservation insulation, thus reducing the demand?
No wonder people around the country and around the world–including my own area of Western Massachusetts, where a proposal to pipe fracked gas has encountered fierce opposition despite gas company dirty tricks that extend to imposing a moratorium on new gas connections
Ask your utility company these sorts of questions. It’s your right to know.
Office of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1916. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Daily_Eagle2.jpg
We have a kilowatt of solar electric on the roof of our 1743 colonial farmhouse. But a few years ago when the October Blizzard knocked out our power for three days, we couldn’t tap into that solar.
Editor’s note: Too much power can be as discomfiting as too little. Judi takes this analogy from a real-world electrical issue through some deep soul-searching I thought you’d enjoy.
—Shel Horowitz
Guest Post by Judi Ketteler
Last week, during a storm, lightning struck the power sub-station just a few blocks away. At the time, I didn’t know that had happened. I just knew that our power flickered strongly. When it came back on, I noticed that the fan in my office was running more vigorously. It was louder. I turned it off and back on again, but it was still loud. I was in the middle of deadline, so I chalked it up to “oh well, whatever.”
Then I went downstairs to get some water. The lights in the kitchen were crazy bright. But . . . it had grown dark outside with the storm, so I thought my perception was off. Plus, I had been sitting at my computer all day. Perhaps my eyes were bleary and playing tricks on me, I thought. Even the light in the refrigerator was brighter. I’m really working too hard, I told myself.
All evening, I thought the lights were brighter, but I shrugged it off and didn’t say anything. By the next day, when the normally quiet bathroom fan sounded like a train, the microwave sounded like it was going to blow up, and the toaster oven burned red hot, looking like it would catch fire, I knew something freaky was going on. “We’re getting too much power!” I told my husband. His senses aren’t nearly as heightened as mine, but he couldn’t argue with a toaster oven about to blow.
I called our energy company, and they came out a few hours later. They measured the current we were getting. It’s supposed to be regulated to 240. Ours was at 275. “So that’s why everything is turbo-charged?” I asked the guy. “Yep. The regulator blew. If I were you, I’d go turn everything off and unplug it all until the crew comes in an hour or so. Otherwise, it might fry your stuff.”
A 75-watt light isn’t just a 75-watt light: it may be all the power that is safe, but it’s not actually all the power that is available. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to push it. I’d prefer not to fry thousands of dollars worth of electronics in my house. To that end, the energy crew fixed the sub-station later that day, and all was back to normal: a very good thing.
But this notion that there is more power available than meets the eye has been sticking with me. There is an explanation in the world of currents and voltage and energy regulators at electric sub-stations. But what about mysub-station? Do I have an energy regulator? Because I’d really like to find it.
What Regulates It, Anyway?
You know how some days, you’ve got energy to spare? It sizzles through you, as you knock thing after thing off your to-do list. You’re motivated, creative, and have all the right ideas at all the right times. I live for these kinds of days.
I just have absolutely no idea what creates them.
I could list what I think contributes. But it’s a long and random list, that ranges from caffeine to hormones to the phases of the moon to the amount of sleep I’ve gotten to the kind of food I’ve eaten to my husband’s mood at the time to whether or not my hair lays right that day to some inspiring movie or TV show I may have happened to watch or book I may have happened to read.
None of it is IT though. Like really it. That X-factor. The regulator in the sub-station.
What governs the amount of power getting through, not just to my physical body, but to the part of my brain that cares, has interesting and creative ideas, and—most importantly—the will the execute them?
I have learned that there are rhythms to my inspiration and creativity. If I’m in a good rhythm, I better go with it. If the muse is coming to me, for crying out loud, I better welcome her and not send her away so I can check email. Likewise, when I’m in a dark place—and I go there sometimes, because I am human—I can’t will myself out of it. I have to let the force of whatever woe me back.
It’s all the times in between, which turns out to be an awfully big chunk of my working life.
Big inspiration and energy? You bet I’ll follow. Down in the dumps? I accept it as a time to refuel. But status quo, ho-hum, low inspiration, trudging through it? That’s where I’d like to tweak my sub-station. Find the dial that turns up the voltage, just a notch. Or strike it with lightning, to shock it out of its banality. Can you make that kind of lightning, or, like actual lightning, is it solely an act of nature?
I honestly don’t know.
I want to respect my psyche’s natural balance, while finding my way to more of those inspired days. Because to walk into a room and feel the lights shining brighter? That’s sort of something. I know 240 is where the voltage in my house needs to stay. But I’d like to feel that extra bright light in my brain, just a little more often. I’d like to find that sub-station. Consider the search launched.
Warmly,
Judi
This piece by Judi Ketteler originally appeared on The Story Economy blog. Find her at judiketteler.com.
Consider these stats, all of them taken from that article:
More than 2000 “significant accidents” on pipelines since 1995, causing $3 billion in property damage
A single pipeline company, Plains All American Pipeline LP (operators of the line that spilled over Santa Barbara, California this week) has had 223 accidents $32 million in structural damage, 864,300 gallons spilled, and 25 federal enforcement actions just since 2006
A 60 percent increase in the number of accidents annually since 2009—and, not coincidentally, also a 60 percent increase in US oil production
Causes? Corroding pipes, failures in welds—aging infrastructure, in other words—with a generous helping of natural disasters and careless backhoe operators.
These accidents leak toxics, cause a risk of severe fires, and of course, drive up the price of energy.
Isn’t it time we stopped relying on fossil and nuclear for our energy needs? We already have the technology to switch to save, reliable, renewable sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, magnetic, tidal…and deep conservation, which just by itself could cut our energy use in half.
Whole grain cracker (stock photo, not the brand I’m writing about)
In the next town over, there’s a store I frequent that sells remaindered natural foods. I bought some whole-grain rye crackers there recently, costing 99 cents for an 8.8 ounce package. Yesterday I noticed this astonishing bit of small print on the label:
Made in England from local and imported ingredients…Imported and distributed by [address in Australia] and [address in New Zealand].
Our nearest full-scale international airport is in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, about 100 miles away. Googling the distances, it’s about 20,000 miles from England to Boston via either Australia or New Zealand.
The cracker label does something very odd about ingredients: wholegrain rye flour and salt are listed, and then—presumably because they’re recycling the same back panel across several flavor varieties—”May Contain Oats (Gluten), Wheat (Gluten), Sesame Seeds, Soya.” It’s a fair guess that at least the sesame (definitely included in this flavor) and soy traveled an additional few thousand miles to get to the factory in England.
Mind you, I’m not a locavore purist. Yes, I prefer to eat local, but I’ve got plenty of olive oil, chocolate, and other products in my kitchen that don’t grow around here. But when there is a local product available, I prefer to buy it. Years ago, I stopped buying the very wonderful bread I used to get because it’s made in California, and there’s perfectly lots of good bread made within 10 miles of my house—and I’ve basically only bought locally baked bread since then. (I did buy a loaf of my old favorite when I was in Berkeley, where it was local.)
Grains can be grown in my area, and some of the local bakeries actually use local ingredients (including a tortillaria that uses local, organic heirloom corn, and their tortillas are delicious).
It should not even be possible that something could travel 3/4 of the way around the world, be sold to me at that price, and have anyone involved make a profit. The shipping costs alone have to be much higher than that. And if externalities were counted and the true costs figured in, I should have been looking at a price tag somewhere around $10.
In the privileged middle-class country where I live, the impact is somewhat modulated, because only a small percentage of people make their living as farmers, and many of those farmers have secured markets that are insulated from these kinds of macroeconomics games (farmers markets, specialty restaurants, etc.). But talk to any dairy farmer in the US, and you’ll find that the economics are very troubling.
And when imports are dumped below-cost into subsistence farm economies in developing countries, the results can be tragic. Farmers who cannot compete with these artificially low prices lose their markets, and eventually their land. They crowd themselves into massive urban slums where they can find menial jobs, and those overcrowded megacities become crime-invested nightmares—while the land they once farmed withers or is polluted by some big industrial scheme where manufacturing jobs have been outsourced because it’s cheaper to operate in countries without strong environmental regulations.
We need to rethink our food economics and our whole consumer economy. Desperately.
