intellectual properties

fashion designers, istas, consumers and fans: watch this

“we are not “eco” brand, and i don’t think any “eco” brand exists…how can it possibly be good for the environment? you produce things. you make them.”

~via

lika volkova is my new hero.

hippies and hipsters suffer the same fate

Traditionally, environmentalists have not been in very high demand as friends. This is in part because they have developed a reputation for being long-winded and angry about the state of things, because they want you to replace all of your belongings with green ones, and because until now, they have been largely inaccessible, living in communal farms in Vermont and in the world’s biggest hippie compound—commonly re­ferred to as the Pacific Northwest. They can seem like a very difficult group to infiltrate and eventually exploit.

–intro to stuff environmentalists like

“environmentalism” (quotes denoting a specific trend which many say has, as a social movement, failed, and has IMO now been greenwashed to death) is now popcultural enough to be a massive joke.

voteVOTEvoteVOTEvote

halloween was fun and all, but because prop8 was my pet issue this election, i failed to voice my opinion earlier on some of the other things on the ballot that i think are super important and/or i’m passionate about and i think i should blog about those first.

Proposition 2: Fair Treatment of Farm Animals: as a vegetarian for almost 10 years out of concern for animal welfare and the environment, i’m in full support of prop2. this measure will give farm animals more room to do things like lie down that unfortunately many animals don’t already have because industrial farms will do anything to maximize profit, even cruel, disgusting things. also, smaller, better managed farms protect your air and water which are polluted by huge factory farms, which is not only good for the environment but helps family farmers. mostly though, if you vote no on this, you are heartless and cruel.

Proposition 4 aka “Sarah’s Law”: Waiting Period and Parental Notification for Abortion. the third time’s a charm, people. VOTE NO, AGAIN. while i understand the stated fears of repercussions for very young girls (not getting proper aftercare, sexual crimes not reported properly), i think the repercussions the other way (like minors going to people who are NOT doctors for abortions instead so their parents won’t be notified) far outweigh the few instances wherein this might make a difference. this essentially will create a black market for non-parentally-notified abortions, which will cause more problems than it will solve, guaranteed.

and while it might seem intuitive to vote YES on alternative energy propositions, the fact is that both Prop 7 and Prop 10 are flat-out greenwashing that will only result in certain groups/people making tons of money with little benefit to citizens or the green energy market. specifically, vote NO on 7 because it “Caps price impacts on consumer’s electricity bills at less than 3 percent” and “Utilities entering into contracts with alternative fuel providers will be required to sign 20-year contracts.” caps the price? 20-year contract? since when has the energy market stayed stable for 2 years, let alone 20? why is it a good idea to cap and control prices on something that should fluctuate with market demand?  hell, even the UTILITIES are against it, and they’re the ones who probably stand to profit most! the only backers of this are some billionare dude – something is sketchy here. likewise, prop 10 is being funded by one petroleum billionaire who just wants to make a fuckton of money. oh, and it’s expensive and not actually very feasible.

for information on things on YOUR ballot, wherever you live in the U.S., visit Ballotopedia. For info on CA ballots, click here for statewide or here to find your city/county. for a local SF cheatsheet, i suggest the False-Profit 2008 Voter Guide.

YAWN ??

in my line of work, there are a lot of acronyms. acronyms for projects, for agencies and organizations, for species, for work tools, for groups, for research, everything. in the social world there are also a lot of acronyms, and now with people writing in txt shorthand all over the place sometimes it’s impossible to tell what’s an acronym and what’s just a word without vowels.

there are a lot of words in general use out there that most people don’t even realize are acronyms, like “SCUBA”. and YUPPIE. oh, the yuppie. how much i try to avoid fitting into that acronym. here in SF we also have “yippies” = yuppie hippies, or white collar hippies (they’re richer and smell better. they own hybrids and spend thousands on solar electricity for their houses and yoga retreats and eco-vacations, etc.) i think most of my friends (and many of my coworkers) almost qualify as yippies. afterall, we’re young, urban, often-professional with disposable incomes, and semi-hippie in that most of us have a sustainability bent. but for some people, the connotation/connection to the word yuppie is too strong, and many of us are artists, not “professionals”.

so, avoiding the “yuppie” link and focusing explicitly on Gens X and Y and dot-com era 30somethings, a new acronym has been created for this group of young wealthy people who care about the environment: YAWNs – Young and Wealthy but Normal:

They drive hybrid cars, if they drive at all, shop at local stores, if they shop at all, and pay off their credit cards every month, if they use them at all.

They may have disposable income, but whatever they make, they live below their means in a conscious effort to tread lightly on the earth.

They are a new breed of Gen Xers and Y’s, Young and Wealthy but Normal, or Yawns.

this acronym has a lot of issues. first, obvi, is the phonetic. YAWN!? secondly, what does “normal’ mean here? not paris hilton? because “normal” in most parts of the country does not = eco-conscious and living below your means. even in SF, where many of these YAWN types live, the young and wealthy are often concentrated in the Marina district, which although it does have a lot of yoga studios and organic coffee shops, is not what i would call a hotbed of sustainable living philosophies and is what is normal there is what is normal elsewhere: affluenza. my point is that sustainable living isn’t “normal” almost anywhere – although it’s on the rise among affluent types, yes (and greenwashing has made some people think they’re living sustainably when they’re NOT), it’s not “normal” in a general population context – and i’m finding this “wealthy BUT normal” phrasing really odd.

i love sociology, and i love demographics and statistics (which is why my current internship @ american environics has been very interesting), but i hate that the tendency is to recognize loose patterns as definitive categories instead of as points on a spectrum. the YAWN label is ill-fitted, and i don’t think going to stick.

arduous sustainability blog agrees and offers an alternative acronym: Apples! APLS: Affluent Persons Living Sustainably (nothing that affluence is relative).

buzzfeed has more links.

green lies

i’ve noticed more and more recently how when you start looking for something, you see it all over the place.

anyway, as anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, one of the things that’s been at the top of my mind for a while is greenwashing, and so now i see it everywhere. on the plus side, it’s great that so many companies are finally realizing that they need to be (or at least promote themselves as) environmentally conscious and hopefully that eventually leads to real change, but so much of it is just pure advertising spin and not actual corporate change, and when you see it, it makes you sort of ill. i was reading NPR news this morning, and saw a little ad for Fiji water on the righthand column, directing you to their website “Fiji Green”. bottled water is a huge no-no among environmentalists, and now that everyone is so carbon calculator obsessed, bottled water FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD is especially seen as overly decadent. so Fiji water has attempted to ‘green’ their image by claiming that the ‘food miles’ calculation is a myth, based on the recent New Yorker article that pointed out some of the unexpected results when you really tabulate all the factors from production to shipping to consumption.

We here at FIJI Water hear a lot of complaints about “food miles,” ours in particular. The concept is that the longer your food travels, the worse it is for the environment.

We think this is a load of hooey…and so do scientists who have studied lifecycle carbon footprints. The key word here is lifecycle – how a product is developed or packaged, what the transport mode is, and other factors can have a far greater impact for better or worse than the mere distance traveled.

this is the real kicker:
There are still people who are choosing to “buy/eat local” and thereby actually making their environmental impact worse than it otherwise would have been.

WTF – bashing the “buy/eat local” movement?! Fiji gets a tiny bit of credit for engaging this issue with open public comments on the blog and everything, but i think this one scores pretty high on the greenwashing index.

big footprints

i think one of the reasons that many people – myself included – are skeptical about the idea of a global carbon market – in which companies/organizations/governments buy and sell their carbon emissions – is that the calculation of such a thing is so complex, nearly every eco-economist disagrees with the metrics of the others. in the same vein, for the last few years the idea of individual “carbon footprints” has been around – that each person can easily calculate how much their standard of living costs in carbon each year, or consumers can calculate whether it’s better go paper or plastic or buy a real or a fake christmas tree. websites like carbonfootprint.com make it seem like it’s a straightforward computation that anyone who cares enough should be able to figure out. but is it? for example, which is greener:

1. For a New Yorker to buy a French wine, or a California wine?

2. For a Londoner to buy English lamb, or lamb imported from New Zealand?

Proponents of the local food movement would probably that in both cases, buying the product produced in your own country is always the best choice, using the logic that buying food produced closer to you is greener because it is transported a shorter distance:

It is a logical and widely held assumption that the ecological impacts of transporting food—particularly on airplanes over great distances—are far more significant than if that food were grown locally. There are countless books, articles, Web sites, and organizations that promote the idea. There is even a “100-Mile Diet,” which encourages participants to think about “local eating for global change.” Eating locally produced food has become such a phenomenon, in fact, that the word “locavore” was just named the 2007 word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. — “Big Foot” by Michael Specter

however, as New Yorker Big Foot article discusses, beginning with one British grocery chain’s challenge to put a carbon sticker on every one of its 70,000 products showing how much carbon was used to produce that product, once the math really gets going, the results are often surprising. due to differences in transportation, energy production, and farming practices, in both cases above the answer is that it’s greener to buy the product produced on the other side of the ocean (see article for details).

The article also talks about other important aspects of this debate, such as the sometimes confusing line between science and morality:
Possessing an excessive carbon footprint is rapidly becoming the modern equivalent of wearing a scarlet letter. Because neither the goals nor acceptable emissions limits are clear, however, morality is often mistaken for science. A recent article in New Scientist suggested that the biggest problem arising from the epidemic of obesity is the additional carbon burden that fat people—who tend to eat a lot of meat and travel mostly in cars—place on the environment. Australia briefly debated imposing a carbon tax on families with more than two children; the environmental benefits of abortion have been discussed widely (and simplistically). Bishops of the Church of England have just launched a “carbon fast,” suggesting that during Lent parishioners, rather than giving up chocolate, forgo carbon. (Britons generate an average of a little less than ten tons of carbon per person each year; in the United States, the number is about twice that.)

“People tell me, well, these are bad guys, and corporate guys who just want to buy the right to pollute are bad, too, and we should not be giving them incentives to stop. But we need to address the problems that exist, not drown in fear or lose ourselves in morality. Behavior changes when you offer incentives. If you want to punish people for being bad corporate citizens, you should go to your local church or synagogue and tell God to punish them. Because that is not our problem. Our problem is global warming, and my job is to reduce greenhouse gases at the lowest possible cost. I say solve the problem and deal with the bad guys somewhere else.”

as well as the tension between environmentalists vs. technological progress:
‘The trouble with you environmentalists is that you see a problem coming and you slam your foot on the brakes and try and steer away from the chasm. The problem is that it often doesn’t work. Maybe the thing to do is jam your foot on the pedal and see if you can just jump across.’ At the time, I thought he was crazy, but as I get older I realize what he was talking about. The whole green movement in technology is in that space. It is an attempt to jump across the chasm.

it’s a long article, but a great read that touches on a lot of the ideas around not only the carbon market but ways of thinking about dealing with global warming (note: we can’t stop it. even if we stopped all greenhouse gas production today, the earth would still continue to warm because of what we’ve already done. we need to DEAL with it). halfway through, i started to get a little exhausted. how can any average consumer, then, be expected to make a good judgment? will the market drive change if no one understands the market? are consumers too overwhelmed, and is it government’s job to regulate? where is the middle? i think the carbon market is definitely PART of the solution, but as previously noted, there are a lot of things it leaves out (like equity), and as discussed here, the calculation is really like hitting a moving target.

however, i do have more hope than i used to about humanity moving forward in a progressive (not regressive) and sustainable way. 2 years ago i was pretty much with the fatalists who were pretty sure we were all totally screwed (damn Al Gore and his depressing movie) unless we all became Amish or something. now, i see dim lights of hope.

behind the green curtain

i’ve written about how much the greenwashing marketing tactic infuriates me, so i’m pretty happy to learn about this site: The Greenwashing Index, where users can vote on and discuss current ad campaigns that may or may not be pulling one over on consumers.

~via

eco-worriers

San Francisco Magazine: Green with Worry: on the Bay Area’s rising neurosis around every little environmental impact, from food orthorexia to fear of plastic.

In a blink, Bay Area residents have gone from being the most eco-conscious in the nation to the most eco-neurotic. We fight with our spouses over plastic bottles, head to our therapists in tears over rising oceans, and swing uncomfortably between guilt and denial every time we pull out a credit card or jump in the car. So how do we save the world without driving ourselves (and everyone else) crazy?

these little things people are fretting over – plastic bags, recycling, lightbulbs, hybrid cars – only make up the smallest percentage of total real negative impacts on the environment/global warming, but they are the things people feel they have the most control over. industrial pollution – including agribusiness/food production – far outweighs the impact that any single family has, or even collectively. what is true is that consumer spending drives most of these businesses, so instead of fretting about the plastic bag, people should be more concerned about what they are or aren’t putting INTO the bag and where their money is going. what’s ironic is “eco”businesses marketing (greenwashing) the hell out of consumer goods, from bamboo clothing to recycled dinnerware, but really the only green thing to do is stop buying so much stuff.

the article has tips on practical things to do that make a difference, and about how to stop stressing so much over the small stuff.

the dark side of the carbon market

i’ve been in a few not lengthy but sort of serious debates with people about the effectiveness of carbon trading/the carbon market. people who believe that it is THE way to make people care about global warming because it ties monetary values to emissions. but what i’ve always felt is that the financial trading is sort of a way to allow higher polluters to pay their ways out and not have to change anything, sort of like allowing industrial polluters to just pay fines but not change their actions (a huge issue here in the SF bay).

this article in The Nation (and yes i am aware of the reputation of that publication) makes some pretty grim statements about the carbon market, the corruption taking place, and how it sort of reeks of other Rich Nation schemes that say they will help the poorer ones but then don’t (NAFTA).

When money is on the table, there can be plenty to fight about. And right now there is a hefty wad of cash being dangled before governments and NGOs that comes with a catch: accept carbon trading as the deal or get nothing at all. Even so-called adaptation funding, arguably the largest piece of the pie, if done correctly, is being proffered to cash-poor countries–but only as a percentage of the carbon-trading budget. The message: accept carbon trading or your poor will starve.

…But here’s the deal: carbon trading is not some innocuous attempt at climate stability. It is the neoliberal agenda writ large. Countries that are already on the treadmill of debt will become even more beholden to the institutions that have so successfully advanced the corporate agenda via the World Bank, the WTO and other agents of hegemony.

i don’t pretend to understand all of this. this could be totally wrong, and maybe carbon trading is the best thing ever. but it’s never sat right in my gut, and reading this article just made my heart sort of sink. if it’s true, what we’ve been told about the carbon market has been greenwashing at a most hideous level, and poorer countries are being strong-armed into agreeing to something that not only won’t work but might cost them dearly while the market participants profit.

what then? the article makes suggestions for how to move forward, the first being to admit we’ve been ‘hoodwinked’.

obama hearts CTL

a follow-up political footnote to the post on synthetic crude for you Obama fans: the New Yorker article reports that from extraction–> production process–>use, a barrel of Coal to Liquid (CTL) fuel (another fuel process being heavily invested in) creates 2x as many total greenhouse gas emissions as a barrel of conventional oil. Barack Obama, along with republican senator Dunning from kentucky, put forward the Coal to Liquid Fuel Promotion Act in January:

U.S. Senators Jim Bunning (R-KY) and Barack Obama (D-IL) today introduced the “Coal-To-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2007.” This bipartisan piece of legislation is based on the bill first introduced by Senators Bunning and Obama last spring and would help create the infrastructure needed for large-scale production of Coal-to-Liquids (CTL) fuel. It is a comprehensive bill that expands tax incentives, creates planning assistance, and develops Department of Defense support for the domestic CTL industry.

“This bi-partisan piece of legislation that I have re-introduced with Senator Obama today will lay out a plan for the 110th Congress on how we need to work together for energy independence. CTL technology offers America the chance to capitalize on an abundant domestic resource that is found in eastern and western Kentucky and across the country. To help spread the message of how important the CTL process is for energy independence Senator Obama and I will form the Senate Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Caucus to help lead this fight. With a strong investment in CTL, America will wean itself off of foreign sources of energy, and at the same time create jobs for working families back home. CTL is a viable, environmentally friendly energy resource that will help cure America’s addiction to oil.”

since when are coal mines environmentally friendly? not to mention that the CTL process is extremely energy consumptive and produces all kinds of toxins and emissions. i like how they frame it as an “environmentally friendly energy resource” based on the final product being cleaner, ignoring the source and process by which it is produced.

after much criticism, obama backpeddled to say he will only support clean(er) CTL plants. to me, this move is barack obama catering to a special interest/industry in order to gain votes from the other side, and then trying to wiggle out of it when challenged by his voter base, and that pisses me off. more on this and barack’s environmental tendencies (not all bad): http://www.blueclimate.com/blueclimate/2007/06/barack-obama-re.html and http://www.grist.org/feature/2007/07/30/obama/ .