This Sucks

Experts have been saying it's too late to avoid climate change for some time now. Today's news (it's Groundhog Day, for goodness sake!), is kind of obvious then.

Janos Pasztor, the UN Secretary-General's point person on climate change, has come out with the not so surprising statement that: "It is likely, according to a number of analysts, that if we add up all those figures that were being discussed around Copenhagen, if they're all implemented, it will still be quite difficult to reach the two degrees."

At issue is the so-called two-degree (that's Celsius) target set at Copenhagen. If the earth's average temperature goes above this level (using pre-industrial 18th century temperatures as a baseline), we will be in deep, hot doo-doo.

Read the referenced material for the details. Suffice it to say that a botched and pathetic campaign in Massachusetts, the Haitian earthquake crisis, the health insurance reform debacle, and the coming Super Bowl are all in league to distract us (immensely) from job one which is immediate and continued reduction of fossil fuel emissions worldwide.

In the words of Ross Perot, I hear a giant sucking sound.

Who the heck is in charge here anyway? You?

Boy, You're Going to Carry That Weight

Yesterday, our local paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, reported on a little skirmish at the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen between the U.S. and China over climate change policy. In essence, the U.S. wants China to open its books in order to determine whether the world's most populous nation is adhering to the voluntary greenhouse gas reductions they are committing to (as a so-called developing nation, China is not confronted with the same requirements as the U.S., European Union countries, Japan, Australia, etc.).

According to the article, both countries are in stalemate mode with China scoffing at verification demands and the U.S. stressing the need for clear definition and an "international agreement." The face-off is about money and China's concern over international sanctions. While China is deemed a developing nation, the U.S. and other industrialized countries are not offering financial support for climate change assistance. More to the point, China's fear of penalties for not meeting it's goals is a classic case of cognitive dissonance, kind of like saying: "Yes, we agree climate change is a problem and we are planning to do something about it, but don't hold us to our plans and don't whatever you do expect us to share with you whether we're doing well or not. We don't trust you to not hold it against us -- the world's leading carbon dioxide emitter -- if we aren't successful."

Today there is no mention of this ruckus in the paper. Instead we get an article letting us know that Barack Obama, who arrives tomorrow, is the last hope for a meaningful set of agreements. Indeed, it would seem that any significant resolutions are out the window and have been since the conference opened. Binding, formal commitments are being put off until 2010. This is being called a "political agreement."

Besides the stalemate between China and the U.S., plans to slow and then stop deforestation in developing nations are still up in the air (20-percent of global carbon dioxide emissions are created when forests are clear-cut to make cattle ranches and plantations); and it's still not clear what kind of funding the U.S. is willing to pledge to developing nations in overall climate change aid -- not just for greenhouse gas reductions but for remediation and protection from the effects of climate change.

According to the Associated Press, early goals of a 50-percent reduction in deforestation by 2020 and a full end to it by 2030 have been set aside. As much forest is leveled each year as to be equal to the area of New York state (32 million acres -- that's 3,653 acres an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week).

These are big issues with huge quantities of money at stake. Africa is asking the developed nations for $30 billion a year for now, moving up to $100 billion annually by 2020. Japan has pledged $15 billion for short-term support to developing nations. All of this makes the U.S. pledge of $1 billion for deforestation seem rather paltry, to say the least.

So, Obama arrives tomorrow with a heavy-duty job. Fred Krupp, head of the Environmental Defense Fund, said yesterday: "If the pieces are here, President Obama is the only person who can pull them together into an agreement." Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton arrives today, presumably to pave the way for her boss with negotiations. We'll see.

Whatever this Nobel Prize-winning president accomplishes, real numbers for the U.S. and a serious financial mechanism to achieve them are still up to Congress. There's nothing like the American democratic process to solve a massive, incomprehensible problem like global warming and climate change. The only thing worse, possibly, is global democracy. Can someone say, "Chaos?"

The photo? Well, that's Copenhagen of course!

Ann Leonard and Karl Marx... Or Is It Frederick Engels?

The following commentary piece is a welcome addition to the public discourse on our current economic malaise. All too often environmental activists and green business enthusiasts ignore the intellectual heritage from which they came.

Commentary by Neil Seldman, Institute for Local Self-Reliance

Recently on Fox News, Annie Leonard, creator of The Story of Stuff, was likened to Karl Marx with a ponytail. I do not know how Annie is wearing her hair these days, but she reminds me far more of the young Frederick Engels than of Karl Marx.

Let me explain.

Annie's widely circulated animated video makes the connections between overproduction and ecological damage as well as between sustainability and job creation. In all of this, she is following in the footsteps of Frederick Engels, not Marx.

Although Karl Marx is a household name, Engels may have played a more important historical role. Firstly, he all but invented Marx, supporting him financially, emotionally and politically, and introducing him to the dismal subject of political economy that would dominate his life. Engels was Marx's source of the historical examples that allowed Marx to create his world changing theories. Further, Engels made Marx' writing accessible.

Engels interrupted the life of Marx, an itinerant philosopher who jumped from one intellectual activity to another, and set him at his life's work. Finally, Engels was the public face of Marxism from 1873 on, as Marx battled diseases that claimed his life in 1883. Engels died in 1895, the leader of powerful national political parties and unions.

Engels was charming, good-looking, athletic, popular, and fluent in English. Marx was none of the above. Generations of students learned about Marxism from Engels' shorter, more popular works, which were more immediately understandable: they provided working people with intellectual tools to understand their historic era and the role they might play in its future developments. Always ready with a military simile, Engels likened his concise booklets to grenades thrown into the enemy camp. "Why can't you be like me?" he would exhort Marx, who struggled to write.

Of course, Marx, the brilliant intellectual and trained philosopher, added to Engels' insights his pioneering ideas about conflicting class interests, the economic interpretation of history, materialist philosophy that integrates ideas and actions, the fetishism of commodities that hides human virtue, and class struggle. Perhaps, most relevant were Marx' concepts of ideology, alienation and false consciousness, which speak to us daily in our modern predicament. Marx' vision of un-alienated labor in a modern industrial society, inspires hundreds of millions of people to this day.

It was the self-educated Engels, however, who was the first Marxist. Engels' youthful insights into burgeoning capitalism were accurate, and, he thought, could be scientifically proven as the basis for optimism for change in the near future. Engels focused on real people. As a textile mill manager and owner in Germany and England, he saw, up close and personal, the raw radical nature of industrial capitalism and the new political economy that it spawned.

He arrived in England at the age of 23 -- after a short career as a military leader against the Prussian monarchy, censorship and hatred of democracy -- to oversee his father's interests in Manchester. This city in the 1840's was perhaps the only place in the world at the time that could reveal the true promise and perils of industrial capitalism. England was at the heart of industrial capitalism. The textile industry was its heart, and Manchester was the heart of the textile industry. If one could transform Manchester, one could transform the world. And Manchester was the critical center of the Chartists, who had a valid democratic, non-violent strategy for change that would transcend the dualism posed by the creative destruction of capitalism. Engels loved the English workers, for he thought they were capable of changing the world, transforming competitive industrialization with cooperative industrialization.

As a child Engels wandered through his hometown of Bremen, dominated by his family's textile mills, built up by three previous generations. Despite the liberal views with which the family ran its mills, Engels was confronted daily by the Wuppertal River polluted by the mills' bleacheries. Nor could he ignore the workers' living conditions; warrens where human misery, crime, drugs and sexual depravity, were the only visible outlets for its inhabitants. Where the family could not be sustained. When he got to Manchester and saw even worse conditions, he feared for the future of his homeland, and for the rest of the world should this industrial system spread.

Engels introduced Marx to Manchester--to its new class of industrial workers, and to the Manchester Library, the working people's library, recently founded by Charles Dickens. Here, Engels laid in front of Marx the classical works of political economy and ordered him to study them. This ignited the decisive historical force of Marxism. Marx' and Engels' relationship developed into the most unique partnership in intellectual and political history.

All the core principles of Marxism were present in the young Engels before he ever met Marx. He marveled at the power of large-scale capitalism: how it multiplied human labor a thousand fold with its new energy forms and technology; how it created the greatest wealth in history; and how, simultaneously, it created the greatest poverty and anguish in history. How the owning class captured the state to promote its own interest and neglect all others. How the owners loved the law because it protected them. And, how the poor feared the law because it suppressed them.

Engels was the world's first industrial economist and first industrial ecologist: the first sustainability activist. He also was the most prominent student of the English Chartists, the first civil rights movement in the world that continues to inspire today's Chinese dissidents to totalitarianism.

Classical economists, reflecting the worldview of the owning class, Engels succinctly wrote, put selfish interest above those of "trees and children," or nature and people. Their ideas hid their practice of treating nature as a free warehouse for goods and a free sink for disposal of noxious byproducts. Children and families were also dispensable. Engels called out the owning class as both immoral and inefficient: immoral because trees and children are essential for human growth and happiness; and inefficient because trees and children are the most productive of resources if their inherent value is respected and accounted for in political economy.

Engels worked as a mill manager, but spent his free time with the workers, rather than the owners, who were his father's friends and partners. He recognized and provided statistical documentation of the new class of workers emerging; their conditions, fears, aspirations, democratic organizations, and how they cared for their own with the meager resources they had. He studied closely and categorized their struggles through crime, strikes and riots. Unlike other contemporary observers, he realized the potential power of democratically organized and self-aware workers, and saw it as a positive force for change. He incorrectly assessed that radical change was imminent.

Engels was a very accomplished autodidact; he had conquered Hegel and other philosophers in his teenage years. Having graduated from philosophy, he proceeded to look at the facts on the ground. Even the work Engels did while he was Marx's graduate research assistant still impacts our thought. His book on the rifle in 1864 won the prize as the best book of its kind in 1964. His military analysis of the US Civil War, written in Europe, is still studied today, as are his manuals for the defense of Paris during the 1871 Commune: Lenin and Trotsky used them in the urban warfare in Russia of 1905, the dry run for the successful revolution of 1917. Engels' inquiry into the evolutionary theories of Darwin (competitive naturalism) versus Kropotkin (cooperative naturalism) continues to inform modern scholars. The most prominent evolutionary biologist and science writer of our time, Stephen Jay Gould, considered Engels' The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man the most important work in rejecting the "idealistic" and "Western" prejudice regarding the primacy of the brain in human evolution. Engels' analytical writings on women and the family are also the subjects of conferences and colloquia to this day. His Origin of the Family presented evolutionary anthropology that tied family history to economic history in a linear, causal relationship. The 1884 book serves as a primer for his and Marx' theory of the family.

In some matters of deep philosophy, Engels struggled without Marx to guide him. Some historians trace the origins of Soviet Totalitarianism to Engels' concept of dialectical materialism, a term he never uttered or wrote. In fact, Engels is to Soviet Totalitarianism as Christ is to the Spanish Inquisition.

Engels understood the facts of capitalism; he even saw the basic structure of society that it created -- the state captured by the owning class. He felt unable, however, to put his ideas into a historic or scientific framework. Engels was a true heir to the Enlightenment. He needed to use science to conquer religion and bogus philosophy. Engels and Marx grew up in Westphalia in the Rhineland, the outer reaches of Napoleon's empire, as part of a generation deeply influenced by freeing intellectual influences of the Great French Revolution. Heir as he was to the Enlightenment, Engels rebelled at the overemphasis on individualism, and held community and social commitment as inalienable aspects of human happiness.

Engels needed Marx to scientifically confirm his moral insights. Marx needed Engels to be his remarkably gifted researcher. Engels would learn ancient languages so that he could detect and explain land ownership and social relations to Marx. When Marx would marvel at his ability to learn languages quickly, in the evenings after a full day's work at the mills, Engels would quip, "it is not hard work, I enjoy it." Marx also needed Engels' friendship and generosity to survive.

Few people actually read Marx: many found him too confusing. Marx's prose was often a patchwork of passages written by his current philosophical enemies. One had to be familiar with the work of these enemies in order to comprehend Marx's attacks. Marx's economic writings in Das Kapital (completed by Engels after Marx' death), were undecipherable; Das Kapital remains important today because of its brilliant and invaluable depiction and analysis of history, literature, art and psychology.

Engels' writing was clear and popular in style, where Marx's was verbose and full of vitriol. Engels wrote the first draft of The Holy Family. It was 12 pages. Marx returned to him a 300-page manuscript that bordered on diatribe. There were always contradictions to interpret within Marx's work. Scholars shied away from discussions with this mean-spirited curmudgeon; he eviscerated any who disagreed with him, including former allies and teachers.

Engels wanted an ounce of action rather than a ton of theory. In 1848, when the democratic nationalist revolutions erupted throughout Europe, Marx went to the printing press. Engels went to the front, where he fought bravely and led military actions. Engels transformed dense prose into simpler messages. His use of biological similes (such as the withering away of the state, and violence as the midwife of revolution) captivated the working public's imagination and admiration. This popularity, coupled with his cunning political skill, allowed Engels to win the 20-year struggle against Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Germany. In 1870, Bismarck outlawed the openly Marxist German Social Democratic Party, which had some 500,000 members. By 1890, after Bismarck's fall, the party's membership had grown to four million. With his prestige and power to persuade workers of all nations, Engels could have stopped the world war he predicted in 1888. He died in 1895, however, leaving his German Social Democratic Party and all the others (except the Danish) in the wilderness. These organizations eventually fell victim to World War I in 1914. This event caused by the combined forces of industrial capitalism and the remnants of feudal monarchies, killed a generation of Europe's working people; never before seen in history. The war unleashed technological savagery whose devastating consequences remain to this day, as we still await the end of what Engels called the prehistory of the human race and the dawning of true human history: a history in which humans are allowed, as part of nature, to achieve their full potential. The failure of leadership in the Social Democratic movement was the greatest moral failure of the left in history.

Engels' ideas are important today because the ravages of capitalism that Engels saw in 1840s Manchester are still with us. The support system of industrial capitalism is based on human and environmental exploitation around the world. This machinery now threatens to contaminate with industrial waste the very air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat beyond human capacity to survive. The system sustains itself on the joyless labor of hundreds of millions of workers living on subsistence wages.

Engels' proposed solutions, as well as his observations, are still pertinent today. Engels pointed out that productivity increases when natural resources and open space are respected, and when workers are given decent food, water, education, housing and medical care. If these conditions are not met, needless hardship will weaken the workforce physically and psychologically. Engels was a zero waste thinker. He taught that the byproduct of one factory should serve as the feedstock of another, and that organic matter must be returned to the land to preserve fertility. Small farms, he explained to Marx, are the best way to accomplish this. He advised that industry should be decentralized and integrated throughout the world, with each region capable of its own production, distribution and consumption, to the greatest extent possible.

Under capitalism, Engels believed that "women were the proletariat's proletariat," and that a society that does not protect women and the family is unworthy of survival. Women, according to Engels, hold up more than half the world. In his view, a man who did not recognize the importance of independent women could never reach his full capacity.

In an essay he sent to Marx in 1843, Engels concluded that capitalism is inefficient because it does not invest in the two most productive things on earth: trees (nature) and children (the next generation). For these reasons, he stated, capitalism is morally bankrupt. He identified unions, worker cooperatives (production and consumption), civic associations and credit unions as the institutions forming the bedrock of a cooperative industrial society.

Without the transformation of industry that he assumed was inevitable, Engels believed industrial capitalism would destroy the world, its nature and its people. He hoped working people and people with common sense could drive a stake into the heart of this monster and reform industrial production and relations for good. If not, Engels foresaw, giant corporations as the only citizens of the world.

Annie Leonard stands for, and works for, exactly these principles. She is an international organizer on environment and labor issues -- the very issues that catapulted Engels to world fame. When we put her characteristics and Engels side by side we can see that they were both self-sacrificing, both combine theory and practice and listen to and speak to regular people. Both are strategic. Both are optimistic. Both interconnect ecological and labor issues.

The Story of Stuff is radical in that it deals with the very same causes that emerged 300 years ago when unregulated capitalism first burst upon the world. Annie Leonard has identified problems of rampant consumption, and its impact on nature and people. The Story of Stuff opens the door to inquiry among people young and old. The story leads directly to the solutions that the grassroots recycling movement has found and continues to implement. These successes are being replicated throughout the US, from Hawaii to Puerto Rico, and California to Maine. Zero Waste (90% diversion from incineration and landfill disposal) is an achievable and necessary goal for the US economy and for the entire planet. Recycling and composting are the foundation of a safe and ample future for all.

Annie Leonard's goal is to change people's consciousness and promote economic investment patterns that are good for people and nature, not billionaires and concentrated corporations. Her work points out that the mundane world of garbage is a clue to, and a powerful tool for, sustainability throughout our political economy. She reflects the values of our widespread and deeply rooted US recycling movement.

Conclusion: There is no latter-day version of Karl Marx that springs immediately to mind -- but Annie Leonard could well be a latter-day Frederick Engels.

Annie Leonard is on the right course, and bringing along many others using her talent for communicating with the public, especially young people. Her message is straightforward and transparent: By using resources efficiently, we can create a new industrial economy that does not threaten the earth or its people. This is an economic argument as well as a moral argument: it is the same one presented by Engels 150 years ago, as modern capitalism first started to flex its growing muscles and implement its powers of mass persuasion.

Thanks again, Annie.

*

Neil Seldman is co-founder and president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Since 1974, ILSR has developed and implemented scores of policies, programs and enterprises that promote sustainable local use of raw materials. Recycling and economic development have become standard planning tools as a result of Seldman's 35 years of work in the field. He was the first to recognize the fiscal danger of waste incineration, and he pioneered the organization of citizens, elected officials and small businesses owners to prevent their implementation, thus opening the door for more cost-effective and environmentally sound alternatives. Seldman's business experience comes from factory management and industrial training. He is also a trained political theorist who has taught university-level history and political science. He is a postdoctoral student of the history of ideas.

For references and footnotes, contact the author at nseldman@ilsr.org or go to the bibliography at the bottom of the page for this essay on the ILSR web site.

Whither Recycling?

Recycling got it's modern start in the late 1960s and early 1970s both as a common sense New Economy idea -- mining urban ore -- and also as a practical solution to the lunacy of the "Throw Away Society." The pioneers of the early recycling movement often don't get enough credit in the annals of environmentalism. While saving spotted owls and whales has been the rage since 1970, recycling has been a center piece of the early urban environmental equation going back to the early parts of the 20th century. Unlike wildlife conservation and wilderness protection, recycling addresses the environmental impact of each and every person in a given city or town -- at home, at work and at play.

It might come as a surprise, then, that the National Recycling Coalition (NRC) -- the premiere group that spearheaded major partnerships and initiatives back in the 1980s and early 1990s including The Buy Recycled Business Coalition; The Electronics Recycling Initiative; RecycleMania; the Chicago Board of Trade Recycling Exchange; The Climate Change Initiative; and America Recycles Day -- is about to go belly up in either Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The NRC, host of the greatest recyclers' party of the year -- the annual National Recycling Congress; voice to thousands of waste reduction professionals; and long the center of national recycling policy (for better or worse), pretty much got mismanaged and mistreated into the ground by a combination of incompetence, sloth, and foolishness. Some of this may have been the result of a hands off board of directors. Some may have been an executive director with a personal agenda. And some may just be the result of too many masters with too little money.

How is it possible to run a recycling organization dedicated to reducing waste and resource efficiency with money from the trash industry, soft drink companies, and other corporate interests whose very profits depend on excess consumption and disposable products?

The story of the NRC's demise is long and rather sordid. I won't go into it here. You can get a good dose of that here and here. What is important to know is that the slack is in part being picked up by the GrassRoots Recycling Network (GRRN). Formed some 15 years ago as a direct result of the NRC's growing ineffectiveness, GRRN is focused on the concept of Zero Waste and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR).

The struggles for the NRC, and recycling in general, might seem surprising given the nation's newfound affection for anything green and sustainable. But in a very real sense, a number of us have been warning about the demise of recycling as part of the environmental toolkit for years. As a public works principle, recycling seems to work at least on the residential level. 30% or so of this country's household garbage is either recycled or composted every year. This has been the case for well over a decade.

But recycling as a field has never adequately addressed specific structural issues that continue to make waste diversion a difficult row to how in the public policy sphere as it relates to trash economics. Most specifically, recycling calls forth the need to measure and manage waste and recovered material using high-tech scales that allow haulers to charge a certain rate per pound for trash and another charge for recycling services. Presumably, measurement along these lines would allow for truer market comparisons between disposal and recovery.

Similarly, in the mid-1990s the US EPA came out with two seminal publications that should have revolutionized recycling in America. The first was called "Full-Cost Accounting for Municipal Solid Waste Management: A Handbook." The second was a set of case studies and prescriptive rules for re-writing the rules of institutional waste management systems, moving trash companies from the job of filling landfills and feeding incinerators to making profits from total resource management systems, optimizing waste reduction and recycling, and minimizing waste. This book, called "Resource Management: Strategic Partnerships for Resource Efficiency," seems never to have been read by anyone on the commercial side of the trash equation.

Numerous other issues have not been adequately addressed over the years. Recycling markets are the key to the economic viability of materials recovery. Over the past two decades the North American recycled product industries have taken a back seat to China and other Asian nations. US bottling, plastic packaging, paper packaging and scrap steel commerce has taken a dramatic nose dive, while China's recycled products infrastructure has exploded. With relatively modest competition from domestic North American companies, China has been able to call the shots on pricing, material quality and environmental impacts.

All of which is to say, that the NRC did not do the job it needed to in order for recycling to remain the primary urban environmental initiative on every business, institution, and household's agenda. These days folks want roof gardens, solar electricity, biofuel vehicles and permeable driveways. It is a shame. State of the art recycling , composting and waste reduction systems should mean a 90% or greater level of waste diversion. Instead we get watching the demise of the National Recycling Coalition as a diversion.

Climate Change: Unskilled Rolling of the Dice?

Sunday's reporting on Friday's passage of the House climate change bill, at least in the New York Times, seemed a bit odd (check it here). The first paragraph of the article says: "Democrats...were dogged by a critical question: Has the political climate changed since 1993?" That's kind of dumb thing to write.

Regardless, Republicans appear miffed that the bill passed (I assure you there a number of liberal environmentalists who are livid as well) and were in such a tizzy that they harkened back to the BTU tax malaise Bill Clinton struggled with in 1993, which some believe backfired on the Dems, providing conservatives the political fodder they needed to jump start Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract with America."

Republicans are said to have chanted, "BTU, BTU, BTU" as the bill passed in Congress on Friday (ironically, I had a dinner conversation that same night about how annoying it is when inept, losing teams in Little League baseball chant nursery rhyme curses at opposing pitchers and hitters).

For more on this supposed parallel with Clinton in 1993, read (better reference material) Andrew Revkin's "Dot Earth" blog site entry dated Sunday. Revkin points out that in 1993 Clinton was simply looking to come up with revenue for a struggling federal government, whereas, here in the present, the House has proposed their legislation to begin the process of curbing climate change once and for all.

I would add that whatever bill eventually comes out of Congress, policy had better be crafted so as to once and for all shift the nation's energy economy in a direction that reduces our dependence on both foreign oil and the inherently destructive coal industry within our own country. This is no loger a moral issue or a question of values. It is about survival and meaningful economic growth into a long-term future.

President Obama, the NYTimes reported online yesterday, addressed his own concerns about the Republican's odd glee over the seeming parallels between the House climate change bill and President Cinton's energy tax of the last century. Those Republicans "are 16 years behind the times," he said. Obama also commented on an odd little piece of the bill slipped in at the last moment seeking to control U.S. economic involvement with countries that don't share our minimum standards for greenhouse gas mitigation. The Prez was none too pleased with folks messing around with import-export business policies.

On a side note, the media is a bit confused that global warming came to the fore when last week there was so much emphasis and ink spilled over health care reform. Congress, of course, is running the show right now with respect to climate initiatives, while the White House has been out in front the past few weeks on heathcare.

Whatever the issues this week, the Senate still has to grapple with their own version of climate legislation and this may take months. The gauntlet, though, has been laid down: cap and trade is the policy choice politicians think will work politically (that's why they call them politicians). They're wrong, of course. A progressive and aggressive tax on fossil fuels that cuts across the industrial, transportation, commercial, and residential energy sectors is the only way we're actually going to solve our end of this problem meaningfully. Now's the time to do it too while energy prices are down.

What matters is not that we try to do something, but that we actually succeed in doing what we've known for years we have to do. If you don't believe me, check out last week's New Yorker piece by Elizabeth Kolbert on James Hansen, the grandfather of global warming. "The Catastrophist." (you will need a subscription to read online, but you can also obviously go buy the magazine at a newstand or bookstore). Hansen continues to say over and over that we have one chance to fix this climate problem and it has to happen within the next 10-15 years. One chance. How much do you bet as a gambler if you know you're only going to get one chance?

Zero Culture: Stop Trashing the Climate and All That...

As we gear up for a new world in the war on climate change and global warming (meaning that the Obama Administration will soon provide laser-like, focused leadership for both this nation and, eventually, the global community), the idea of Zero Waste needs to have a major seat at the table. While mainstream energy and environmental policy groups talk about high-tech technology solutions not quite here yet like fuel cells, carbon sequestration, plug-in hybrids, smart transmission systems, and, of course, the magic of bio-fuels, Zero Waste solutions are fully loadable today.

Zero waste is not so much a single technology, but an approach to manufacturing and resource utilization that seeks to maximize recycling, reuse and reduced material inputs. As Philadelphia Dumpster Diver Neil Benson has said, "Waste is a failure of the imagination."

Indeed, while many people recycle most of their paper, cardboard, bottles and cans, another 70% of the nation's waste stream still gets thrown in landfills or burned in incinerators. A report published by the environmental/resource management advocacy groups Institute for Local Self-Reliance, GAIA, and Eco-Cycle, called Stop Trashing the Climate, shows that taking zero waste principles seriously can impact about a third of the nation's economy through reduced energy requirements in manufacturing, mining, and timber harvesting. The authors posit a national goal of 1% reduction in a waste generation each year up to 2050 and show that the energy use reduction effect is the equivalent of taking 20% of our coal fired power plants off line.

Important to note as well is that recycling, composting and reuse businesses create far more jobs than the trash and incineration industries. If the Obama Administration is serious about "green collar" jobs, some of that investment should go to new, regional organic waste composting systems, reuse management centers, and retooling of the nation's recycling industries so that they can use state-of-the-art manufacturing processes to compete again in the global marketplace.

See an article on this topic and others ready to publish at EzineArticles.com

New Lords of the Moving World

In May of 2007, I published an essay at GetUnderground called New Lords of the Moving World. It's worth a read even a year later now that the business community is so hopped up on Green Koolaid. In "New Lords" I add to my argument that the business and corporate sectors around the world are pulling the rest of the social institutions along in the fight against greenhouse gases. For those interested in finding out about solutions, there's a good number of resources that I offer in my essay. This is an important point as we move toward nominations in August -- and elections this fall. People who worry about which candidate has the best plan to attack global warming may be missing the point: it's not about the best plan, it's about who can work properly with the private sector. Solutions are going to come from invention, investment, and intention -- not regulation or master plans (a cap and trade system and an escalating carbon tax wouldn't hurt, though).

Two special points of note since "New Lords" was published are:

1) The Supreme Court decided that, indeed, EPA can regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobile tailpipes, and yet, bizarrely, EPA Administrator, Steve Johnson, refuses to give his approval to California's regulations -- regulations demanded as much by the private sector as environmental NGOs and public sector environmental planners;

2) The new rage in pooh poohing global warming is to claim that the costs associated with trying to mitigate the next 100 years or so of rising temperatures do not justify the price of re-tooling the global economy. A variation of this second point is that modern nations must simply adapt to changes in climate, and since changes will be fairly slow it shouldn't be hard to keep up with our problems (take New Orleans, for instance, where they're building a better levee system).

The Supreme Court's involvement with environmental policy and law, which I wrote about in another essay called "Is It Science Yet?," is a fascinating turn of events in this unfolding story about how the U.S. addresses global climate change. Many legal experts felt that the case brought by the states was really going to be kept to a narrow decision about executive branch power. Instead the Court basically said, "You have given us no credible reason for why your are not dealing with this problem, EPA. Get with the program."

There are no doubt a huge number of lobbyists and elected officials who make their money off of the fossil fuel industries gathering in closed rooms and hidden web spaces talking about their next move. The clock is ticking, of course. By this time next year people who know what they're doing will be back in power (yes, even John McCain understands you pay attention to scientists and work to solve problems rather than denying, lying, and censoring).

Which is why understanding what is now being said about adaptation and the cost-benefit problems of global warming is so important. These arguments are actually very rational and a number of folks have been debating them for quite a while. The cost-benefit issue is obviously a tough one and is really at the root of the Bush administration's foot dragging these days, but the point is that you just have to consider things like less snow in the Rockies and the Alps, a couple more Category 5 hurricanes lambasting big cities on the Eastern Seaboard, or a major long-term drought in the Midwest or Southwest. How do you do a cost-benefit analysis that makes sense of these catastrophes?

The adaptability issue, however, is definitely something to think about. Already, many of the drought-stricken Western prairie urban areas are scrambling to figure out long-term water rights issues and backup technologies such as de-salination plants. Bio-engineering firms are cutting their teeth on new drought-friendly crop hybrids. And, a lot of people just aren't moving back into New Orleans (which, sad to say, is a really smart idea).

Part of the problem with trying to adapt our way out of this mess is that we kind of need to solve the problem, not hope we can shape-shift and cope with whatever comes our way. The global community generates 7 billion metric tonnes of greenhouse gases annually (and we're on track if we do nothing for that number to rise to 10 billion metric tonnes by 2025). Another part of the problem is that adaptation after a disaster tends not to be a very rational process. It's quite possible that states or groups of states might adapt by facing off against each other in ways that are anything but conciliatory.

I could go on about how there are projections of carbon dioxide concentrations rising from 370 parts per million to 650 parts per million over the next 30-40 years. I could give you all the evidence that our current way of doing things at best, if we were to halt all CO2 emissions tomorrow, would still see the global mean atmospheric temperature rise another 3 degrees centigrade or more over that time period.

But what I really want to get at is the fact that we absolutely have to start solving this problem by investing in today's technologies and today's opportunities TODAY. That means recycling the crap out of everything at home and at the office (I'm willing to bet you don't have a very good recycling program at work). It means selling your car if it gets under 35 mpg on the highway. It means driving 55 mph even if you do use a fuel efficient car. It means doing away with incandescent lighting (now outlawed in Canada and Australia and California by 2012). It means buying green power even though it costs a lot more -- NOW! It means investing in green and clean technology companies and divesting in any stock having anything to do with the fossil fuel industries -- especially coal. It means walking to the store, buying local farm products, eating less meat (or none). It means taking vacations closer to home. It means buying your new house near public transportation or living in a city center. And it means more conference calls and fewer business trips.

In that vein it also means thinking locally again (remember that?) and voting for candidates who understand the idea of regional and local economies -- candidates who eschew large-scale, over-the-top national and international cartels and programs that leak profits out of communities.

In the end, it all means getting our shit together. Personally, I know I'm not doing the best I can, and I'm sure you aren't either. But I'm trying. And I will continue to try -- both as an example to my peers and friends, but also as a duty to my sons and my future grandchildren.

The business world has the tools right now to truly reverse the carbon economy in this century. But it also means that we all have to pay to get there. The simple life is over. Time to get real and get complicated. If you understand that and are willing to actually do something to get us beyond where we are today, then half the battle's over.

Bashing Recycling for Confusion and Profit

The following essay is a work in progress. I invite all readers to give me criticism and direction.
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Recently, the ABC show, Good Morning America, ran a segment interviewing columnist and author Stephen Dubner (co-author of the book Freakonomics) on whether recycling works. You can watch it by clicking here. While Dubner's basic argument about recycling turns on the idea of market economics (which is sensible), he also says some really weird things that drew me back into the good old early 1990s when bashing recycling was the sport of kings.

In particular, Dubner says that plastic water bottle recycling doesn't make sense because it costs more to recycle water bottles (they aren't as valuable as aluminum cans) than it does to make new ones. He also says that old newspapers have such a low value that cities often simply landfill them after they go to the recycling center. He doesn't really provide us with any evidence. He just says these things as an "expert." Neither are true. Plastic bottles and newspapers have immense value these days. The real question is why they aren't being recycled more.

Bashing recycling as an odd form of entertainment and/or intellectual strutting crops up every few years. Before Dubner's mis-informed proclamations we had Penn & Teller really going to town on resource recovery in the second season of their Showtime series, Bullshit! In a nutshell, they put words in recycling experts' mouthes and then "disproved" them by having other experts say things like: "It's just not true that recycling saves money." These "experts" for the most part are funded and employed by fringe conservative think tanks who few people could call adequately informed or objective.

The episode is actually worth watching no matter what your thoughts on the matter. It is entertaining and informative in a twisted way and Penn Jillette's use of curse words is right up there with Eddie Murphy and Bob Saget. But the method they use to supposedly debunk recycling is truly bizarre.

The Mother of All Critics
Way back in 1996, columnist John Tierney published a notorious essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine called "Recycling is Garbage." Although there have always been recycling bashers (rag picking and scrap handling used to be the job of immigrants, after all, and who better to bash than those who handle our waste and clean up after the rest of us?), Tierney's piece was seminal in that it carried the authority of the nation's top newspaper and it was highly detailed in its analysis of recycling as consumer behavior, attempting to sound as if the author was smarter than every environmentalist and do-good liberal in America.

"Recycling is Garbage" demonstrated a phenomenal lack of sophistication by its author, focusing primarily on household waste diversion in the New York City area at a time when the city had profoundly cheap landfill costs and was simply dumping its trash in the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Several years later the city closed Fresh Kills, trash costs tripled, and the economics of throwing things away got a bit more complicated.

Simultaneously, Tierney, like every other idiot who claims they know the "truth" about recycling, was actually only talking about residential recycling, a completely different beast than commercial and institutional recycling (read, recycling at work). Rest assured, if someone makes no distinction between recycling at home and recycling and work and says "recycling this" and "recycling that," they don't know what they're talking about. In actuality, about 60% of the trash generated in the average urban area in America is from offices, institutions, and other commercial enterprises; and much of that material is mixed paper and cardboard -- very valuable if collected properly.

An Anthropology of Waste
Tierney's, Dubner's and Penn & Teller's odd little exercises in self-appointed debunkerrhea point up a very important aspect about waste that has been at play since the beginning of this country: for the most part, human beings find it very difficult to think rationally about stuff they feel has no value.

The American way of life is based on a deep and rich value system that exalts the economy of goods and consumer satisfaction. More than any other country in the world, the U.S. social system bolsters these values -- materialism -- through the elaborate philosophies of free market enterprise and capitalism. At the core of this set of philosophies is the idea of reason and rational decision making. As such, the American economy, and by extension all of American society, can be successful if and only if the logic of the free market is allowed to prevail. The effect of these philosophies is all too apparent in every shopping mall, business district, and neighborhood of this country. Strict adherence to a rational free market may carry many unwanted side-effects, but there is no denying that it is at the center of our nation's history from start to finish...it is, indeed, the reason that we fought for our independence some 230 years ago. Life is good because of all this stuff we possess and want to possess. Our stuff is evidence of our culture, pure and simple.

What then of waste? Waste is certainly a cultural item. It is a category into which a material good is placed that renders it useless. Waste is something that an individual or group of individuals (e.g., an institution or industry) deems valueless. What we do when we take a plastic package or a used cigarette lighter or a cardboard box is "throw it away." The item goes from having use and value and meaning into a bin or black plastic bag. It has been discarded. It is trash. Rubbish. As such, by moving something from the sphere of reasoned economic utility into the land of Away, that thing moves from the realm of the rational into the realm of the irrational. Through what may essentially be called a process of negative definition, waste is something that we willingly place outside the realm of the rational free market.

Nothingness and Danger
In a very real sense, waste and garbage are part of a much broader category of things that also includes dirt, pollution, disease and putrescibles like animal feces, sewage, and -- perhaps the most abhorrent substance known to puritan America -- human waste. All of these items carry with them varying levels of aversion. Besides being outside our rational cultural classification systems, they present us with a multiplicity of emotional responses combining the notions of danger, impurity and even taboo.

In her book, Purity and Danger, the great anthropologist Mary Douglas (who died this spring) presents interesting, pan-cultural examples of these emotional responses. But she also points out that a by-product of these "impure" categories is the creation of a boundary that separates order from disorder. Of dirt, she writes: "Dirt is essentially disorder… it exists in the eye of the beholder… In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating, tidying, we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea." A few pages later, Douglas writes: "Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to dis-order, form to formlessness, life to death."

The implications of all this should be self-evident. Recycling, as a system for taking stuff that has historically been deemed outside of our system of order -- stuff that is valueless and impure -- and reconstituting it into something that can be re-inserted into our system of order, runs against deep cultural constructions. Recycling in all its complicated facets, is an attempt by some of us to inject meaning, value and rationality into the realm of Nothingness and Danger that is waste. This is no easy task. It should not be surprising then that confusion and irrational responses would find their way into the public discourse on waste management options. By mandating recycling governments across the country essentially seemed to be regulating a very fundamental and personal combination of thought processes and behaviors.

And free marketeers are not the only ones guilty of irrational thinking about recycling. Environmentalists and recycling advocates can also fall into the bucket of emotion and unreasoned policy framing: issues of convenience, personal hygiene, public safety, and economic efficiency often take a back seat to recycling advocacy; proven enhancements to recycling programs like single-stream processing, incentive-based recycling systems like RecycleBank, and expanded bottle bills have all met with a great deal of skepticism and even hostility from the mainstream recycling community. In addition, within the world of environmental advocacy, large-scale media attacks on corporations like Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and Apple Computer have been successful media ploys but they often don't address underlying problems like consumer demand for cheap and convenient products -- and the broader spectrum of the complicated and crazy lives that Americans lead.

The point here is not to trash recycling advocates or opportunistic journalists and free marketeers. The point is to make clear that the cultural implications of recycling (and waste management in general) represent a dynamic and shifting boundary for what is part of our ordered existence and what we define as outside of order (disorder). We should, in fact, expect irrational discourse on both sides of this issue.

In some ways it is possible to make the claim that recycling is a major revolution in one of the more fundamental and core components of culture. What is being questioned is the very notion of what is Real and what is Not Real. We are at play with the nuts and bolts of meaning in our consumer society. Recycling represents as much an obsession with materialism as does consumer culture and the profusion of disposable products that got their start in the middle of the 20th century.

In fact, using the logic above, recycling becomes a kind of canary in the coal mine and can tell us something very important about the direction public discourse is moving with respect to environmentalism. While much of what environmentalists are concerned about is the stuff that is cognitively relegated to the realm of the impure -- disease, pollution, toxins -- environmentalists are also concerned with the notion that extracting natural resources from wilderness areas (destroying the beauty of nature in the process) in order to produce resources for manufacturing material goods is not necessary. These two realms of concern are either part of our reality or part of the nether world of danger. As a liminal concept, recyclables are actually in both worlds. Recycling is both pure and dangerous. It is part of the Real and part of the Not Real. Conceptually, then, recycling is vulnerable to critique and confusion. It also has the potential to instigate emotional and magical notions of grandeur and moral superiority.

We need to watch out when recycling is attacked. It is the easy target. Destruction of beauty, dominance of nature, and the danger of toxins, disease and pollution carry more valance and charge.

Environmentalism today is once again a goose laying golden eggs. If I use the word "sustainability," people's pleasure zones light up. If I use the words "renewable energy," readers or listeners will pay attention and nod in the affirmative. But for how long? Let's take a look at the early days of bashing recycling.

Early Signs of Castration and Magical Thinking
Taken on cultural terms, what is going on with those who seek to bash recycling (residential recycling, anyway) is not so much rational thought or even moral logic as evidence of confusion -- a challenge to what they seem to take as the common wisdom of market-speak and the hardcore reality of old-school materialism (do not forget that media is one of the biggest purveyors of meaning and order in our society and that newspapers are in many ways the heart of urban curbside recovery programs).

We first began to see signs of recycling's curious place in the American Experience during the final year of the TV show Cheers. Shelley Long, in the character of Diane, tries to explain why the novel she left Sam Malone for never got published, whining something like: "I even wrote it on recycled paper!" It was the whining -- pathetic, oozing, a combined little girl contriteness mixed with moral twittery. I remember thinking: "Okay, here we go."

Around that time, 1992, the short-lived "environmentally-friendly renaissance" was coming to an end. Folks were beginning to forget the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Mobro trash barge, Philadephia's incinerator ash barge, the Khian Sea, and the massive environmental disasters in Bhopal, India and Chernobyl. Those few words spoken by Shelley Long on a sit-com were surely meant to illuminate Diane Chambers' effete, self-absorbed magical thought processes, but at the same time it showed that recycling had attained a level of cultural relativism, and, by association, that it had become the province of effete, self-absorbed, magical thinking liberals everywhere. (ouch!)

By the time the show aired, Reader's Digest, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal were lambasting government waste diversion programs everywhere. And as the '90s cruised along, numerous anti-environmental and anti-liberal publications and organizations went after recycling with addled glee. It was almost as if headlines like Recycling is Garbage, What a Waste, Recycler's Talking Trash, were just too enticing to not find some kind of copy for.

And there was rather deep truth to some of the criticism. Somehow recycling became for a while there the focal point of the media's idea of ecology and consumer environmental behavior. Critics charged, in essence, that recycling wasn't a panacea after all and that the religious zeal with which it was being taken had become anti-market, anti-consumer, and anti-American.

Environmental advocates were accused of acting as if recycling was going to save the world, when there was so much evidence to the contrary (i.e., it's expensive, inconvenient, creates more environmental problems than it solves, and is just plain environmentally inconsequential). The truth, of course, is that recycling is simply one new piece of a sustainable economic future (post-materialist) that we're trying to build here, and that we have a long way to go before technology, commerce, and social mores align properly for things to work efficiently.

Dusting Off Old Arguments
Since Tierney's pinnacle tirade, things have changed -- Penn, Teller, and Dubner not withstanding -- in the world of waste because of climate science. Green is back. It took a great deal of work, but through the efforts of scientists, non-American politicians (and one retired American one), some of the top economists in the world, and a few intrepid journalists and writers, the proposition that climate change is in large part out of control because of human endeavor has brought back concern for how the industrial world interacts with Nature.

Green has been a theme of media (that and the insanity going on in the Middle East) from the end of 2006 and all of 2007 so far. Energy, of course, is now the main focus, but on the grand stage where hype and sound bite govern who gets to use the megaphone, "environmental stuff" in general is all the rage.

In America, however, most everything that seems to be on the side of The Good is fair game after a year or so of worship. Additionally, with Democrats getting much of the credit for "environmental stuff," as election '08 rolls towards us, you can be sure that the anti-environmental arguments (especially against recycling) will be dusted off again and again (dare I say, they will be recycled?).

It is the dusting off thing that we need to watch out for. Most everything in the environmental world has changed in the past four to five years. If you were paying attention, you might recall that Environmentalism died in late 2004. Solar, wind, and energy conservation technologies have improved dramatically over the past decade. Even more important, with the rise in oil, natural gas and electricity costs, investment dollars are now flowing into renewable technologies. Companies like Tesla Motors, Vestas Wind Systems, and HelioVolt Corporation, are creating surprising products. And what of Wal-Mart's use of their deep pockets and negotiating savvy to push issues like compact fluorescent lighting on pretty much all shoppers in America? Environmental stuff isn't really about nature anymore, it's about life in the human world. It's not even really about solving problems, so much as coming up with better, cleaner, more effective ways to do things.

The question is whether the critics really understand these changes, or whether they are simply going to use the arguments of days gone by to make tired, old statements of disapproval about a world that inevitably must change.

It's Just Business
With all due respect to Mssrs. Tierney, Jillette, Teller, and Dubner, a decade or so ago, the economics of recovered newspaper and plastic bottles was indeed marginal and exceedingly complex. The pulp industry was very whacky back then due to foreign competition and low demand for recycled content; and plastics were extremely hard to collect and process because technology had not advanced enough. These economic equations were made all the more complicated as well because landfill prices were relatively low (in NYC especially) and oil was still relatively cheap.

But today’s world is completely different. China is driving recycling markets for practically all materials. Commodity prices for recyclables are higher and have been relatively stable for several years now. Landfill fees are also up, meaning that the cost of disposal is becoming harder and harder for municipalities and businesses to pay without seeking alternatives. And oil prices are through the roof, making energy-intensive raw material extraction and conversion more costly – and making the cost of trucking material to landfills and incinerators more expensive as well.

In addition, recycling collection and processing technologies have gone through two generations of change since Mr. Tierney’s article was first published. So-called single-stream processing is now the norm, and while not perfect, has truly reduced collection costs for municipalities and also allows processors to handle far more material at a relatively fixed cost, giving their businesses a better margin through economies of scale.

Similarly, end-use industries in North America, particularly the paper industry, have re-tooled to incorporate recycling more effectively and minimize contaminants. There have also been tremendous advances in recycled product applications over the past decade – from fleece fibers to tissue and box-board to crumb rubber, glass cullet, automobile steel, and printing and writing papers. Many recycled products are now better, cheaper, and more marketable than they were a decade ago (go check out Staples and compare the cost of their recycled copy paper to non-recycled).

Are things perfect? Of course not. The point is that this industry, if we can call it that, is still growing and changing and developing. All this despite massive subsidies and protection by federal and state government for the virgin resource extraction sectors of the economy. What we've been up to with recycling over the past 20 years is the first tentative steps toward investing in an infrastructure that reflects the ideals of efficiency and minimal harm to the planet. We have also been investing in the concrete and material representations (special trucks, blue separation bins, processing facilities, recycled products) of the belief at least some hold that discards shouldn't necessarily be relegated to the Land of Away. The operating term here is "investment" -- spending money today, committing ourselves, making the effort to bring about serious cultural change both in the real world and in the world of the mind.

When solid waste planners look at the real economics of trash vs. recycling these days they find that recycling is often the better option in many cities throughout the country. Indeed, the true and obvious arbiter in all of this is the marketplace. Paper and plastic are certainly highly sought commodities in many large urban centers and recycling companies are willing to compete to obtain this material.

In Philadelphia, for instance, the city receives $24 a ton for its paper, bottles and cans from a local processor. Factoring in the avoided disposal fee of $65 a ton, this is a swing value of $89 per ton. The main problem is collections. Single-stream makes it theoretically possible to collect recyclables at roughly the same cost as trash collection, however only about 30% of the city’s households regularly put material out for recycling. This is Philadelphia's big conundrum. With only 1 in 3 houses on any given street recycling, the cost of truck and crew time is inefficient.

There are many, many reasons for this lack of participation. One of them, of course, is people’s quick willingness to take the thoughts of anyone who says recycling isn’t cost effective (or environmentally effective) and use them as a justification for not recycling. That’s kind of what Dubner and Penn & Teller give people in their televised pulpits, and it’s certainly what Mr. Tierney did with his "Recycling is Garbage" piece. Are they pandering to cognitive dissonance, or are they looking to speak the truth? Who knows?

I’m not saying recycling is the solution to a disposable world. But without doubt, continuing to send trees, metal ore, and petroleum, etc. to landfills rather than capturing them as urban ore and reconstituting them into products that are economically sound and clearly marketable makes very little sense – especially when you take into account the future of this country’s economy ten and twenty years out as energy costs continue to rise and new landfills must be sited further and further away from urban centers.

What we’re trying to do is build a new kind of economy here. We’re trying to build it for the future. Analyzing recycling from a single frame of time (and using ideas from ten years ago) certainly isn't very thoughtful. Hopefully, over the next few years all of the big meanies out there will see that it's all just business and maybe come out and talk to those of us doing the policy, planning, and coordinating work – and those buying, processing, and selling recycled commodities. It’s a weird field, but it’s also very interesting being on the cutting edge while being so close to the beast's magnificent belly -- or should I say sphincter?

Freezing Our Asses Off at GetUnderground

A version of "Freezing Our Asses Off at the Feet of Al Gore" has been posted at GetUnderground.com. Watch out for the indie music that plays at will when you go to the site, but listen to it anyway. I've found some great stuff there. Also, if you've got a second, go check out The Formality of Occurrence for my poem on September 11th called "The New World."

Freezing Our Asses Off at the Feet of Al Gore

The last time we went out on a date was back in 1990--before $3.00 gallons of gasoline; before the Prius; before the iPod; before the World Wide Web; before frickin' Harry Potter. We saw Darkman, and Marion was so disgusted by the opening scene where the bad guy cuts off Darkman's finger with a cigar trimmer she walked out of the packed theater (I got her to come back and there were no more problems; it was a bad movie--very dark, but that's about it).

Last Friday night, sixteen years later--one boy off in Maine, one in Florida, and the youngest at his friend Charlie's for an overnight--we decided it was time to rekindle our pre-child relationship. There was only one movie to see: An Inconvenient Truth. We're so happy we went, even if it cost $19.00 to get in, the popcorn line was insanely long (we went without), and we felt lost in the Big Box suburbs of Philadelphia. The movie is fascinating, disarming, and important for everyone in this great country of ours to see at least once. I will not ruin your day by doing a review of it. By now you've read and seen enough, I'm sure (although I promise to write in here one day soon a treatise on why it is that the liberal version of apocalypse is just as weird as the fundamentalist version).

I do want to share with you a number of ironies and interesting tidbits that should at least be amusing, if not downright deep.


First of all, we were dismayed to find when we got to the theater parking lot that they did not have big Al's movie posted on the giant marquee over the theater. Such an experience with sins of omission out in the real world provided us with the opportunity to revisit our old conspiriologist days. Could Regal Cinema somehow be in league with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute? We didn't know, but as practiced curmudgeons and rebellious freedom fighters from the old guard, we certainly weren't going to leave blank spaces like that up to chance--nor were we going to take it lying down. Something had to be done! But what? (Later we figured that they just didn't have enough lettering for every one of their movies since they did indeed post An Inconvenient Truth on the marquee out in front of the theater plaza where all cars and trucks and SUVs are whizzing by--or sitting in traffic jams).

Secondly, An Inconvenient Truth has been running now for something like ten to twelve weeks. You'd think that on a Friday night, love birds that we are, Marion and David would be the only people in the theater (I was kind of hoping we could makeout during the boring parts). Not so. The room was at least half full, maybe more. I'd say they made about $600 bucks off of us responsible and concerned citizens. That's not bad when just down the hall Talladegha Nights was packed on it's opening night.

It may be that An Inconvenient Truth was so well-attended because of the heatwave that we recently experienced here. It sucks when your basic feeling towards the outdoors is: "Screw this 21st centurty summer crap. I'm climbing in the fridge. Let me know when it's over." In fact, two weeks ago several respectable media outlets reported that scientists feel there is a definite connection between global warming and the overwhelming heat waves we've had around the world over the past few years. Probably the most disturbing aspect of these studies is the insight that average nighttime temperatures are on the rise. A good resource for some of the new data out there is the NOAA site--especially for skeptics and nay-sayers. Real information! No bull!

The third irony here is that Gore learned that carbon dioxide traps heat in the outer reaches of the earth's atmosphere from his professor at Harvard, Roger Revelle, who had been studying carbon dioxide levels since 1958. I couldn't help thinking about the fact that there were people who knew that global warming was a real possibility while the rest of America was busy going through its hippie phase--stoned, oblivious, hooked on free love, and rebellious as hell. Imagine if we could have tapped into all that frenzied positive energy back then...

1958 was also the year I was born. In fact, the history of the planetary greenhouse effect goes back more than another 100 years.

But the most ironic experience of the night was that we froze our asses off sitting there staring up and chuckling along with our good buddy Al while he talked about how hot it was getting. The air conditioning in the theater had to be set at 68-degrees--maybe lower. I was wearing long pants for the first time in two months along with a sweater. If Marion hadn't been there to snuggle with, I would have been thrown out because my chattering teeth were violating the "silence is golden" rule they broadcast before the movie starts. My guess is the Regal spent about $100 on cooling that it didn't need...Later on we went to dinner at the UNO Chicago Bar & Grill and had the same problem. We begged the waitress to put us as far away from the air conditioning vents as possible. My guess is that whatever we paid for our dinner was used to keep everyone else there cucumber cold.

At any rate, if you haven't seen the movie, it's time to go. Take three or more people with you and make sure at least one of them is someone you've been having arguments with about global warming. We are heading back next week with both Jesse and Conor (Sam saw the movie the first week it was out) and are going to invite everyone from all three baseball teams I coached this year to meet us there.


In closing, I will note this: There should be no need to argue about whether global warming is real or not once you see this movie (yes, there are technical points that Gore probably needs to revisit, but the main ones are kind of inescapable--unless you don't understand math and science). The question now is whether you are willing to take responsibility for your 15,000 pounds a year of greenhouse gases, or whether you don't give a damn. There really isn't a middle ground. Hopefully, it's the former and not the latter.