Yeti by Philippe Semeria

The only question in regards to the death of the current green enthusiasm is, “Will the new green fad die via popular adoption, or via wholesale abandonment?”  Well, I guess this is the first question, not the only.  The second one would be, “What will green living look like when it is either abandoned or adopted?”

An intelligent reader (I know you are out there!) would of course respond, “Well, economical solutions will be adopted while unrealistic and utopian greening will be abandoned.”  And while making sense, this sort of reasoning with the American people is redonculous at best and dangerous madness at worst.  Just look at corn ethanol, still going strong all these years despite its fairly wide-known economic unfeasibility.  And we all know that the milk of the female Yeti could be a financial boon for holistic medicine if someone would just put in the hard work to create a Yeti milking program, or at least learn to synthesize the stuff.

All good fads come to an end.  Bad ones sometimes uncannily remain, but good ones, they always end.  Some of these fads become the next compact disc or Garth Brooks Juice Tiger juice diet – loved and embraced by all, effectively ending the fad.  Compact fluorescent bulbs have reached this level in the green world.  LED’s are currently still just a fad, but they may reduce CFL’s to vinyl status eventually.

On the other hand, some fads fade away like goldfish shoes and Scientology (ouch! I am such a insensitive jerk.  Luckily, jerkiness is hear to stay.)  Within the green living movement there will certainly be many such fads that never cut the mustard. (Mmmm, green mustard…)  A list of undecideds include smart home meters, ERVs (energy recovery ventilators), urban chicken coops, hemp diapers, anti-polyethylene-terephthalate and/or polycarbonate mania, cloth shopping bags, not wasting water on Kentucky Bluegrass in Utah, and duel-flush toilets.

New technologies are sexy, and they can make going green seem Hollywood.  Getting a green app for your iPhone can be a breathless affair, but this is all a bunch of who cares in the end.  Sure LED lights, if made affordably and practically, could once again radically alter energy consumption from structural lighting.  But so could turning off the lights when you don’t need them.  So why is it that buying flashy new bulbs is hip while insisting on turning off unused lights is totally fuddy-duddy?

I, for one, think that this latest fad of green living will actually die a death of wide-spread adoption.  It will no longer be a fad due to being mainstreamed more than forgotten or ignored.  While this makes my dirty, hairy toes all tingly with excitement like a cool squish in the mud on a hot day, I also fear it may not matter much in the end.  If the lasting heritage of this round of green living includes only a smattering of genuine technological innovations clumped together with a bunch of persisting yet questionable green devices, then who cares?  Really?

Behaviors have to change and Yeti’s must be milked if this new green fad is to become anything that will matter in the end.  If only our behavior would truly be driven by economic sustainability and a rational passion for sustainable free-markets, then we might see some wonderfully amazing and surprisingly simple ideas.  These could include wasting less, workable new energy sources, sweatshop-free labor, more shared-space and less consumer-product redundancy (a TV in every room and a lawn mower in every garage).

It ain’t sexy, but it would be a future enhanced by the fad.

You may be thinking, “Who gives a diddly ding dang do.”  But let me tell all you Flanders swearing neigh-sayers, this is pretty ding dang diddly cool.  Let’s not forget that 76% of all electricity produced by U.S. power plants goes to the building sector.  Passive House started up as PassivHaus in the UK, but that was too stinking European sounding for God-Bless-’Em-Americans, so we changed it to Passive House Institute US, but it is the same thing.  Passive House is a certification that literally beats the insulation off of rating systems like LEED.  The graphic shows it pretty well (although LEED is not pictured because it is a bit like comparing apples to oranges).  But the point is that Passive House is the stiffest energy efficiency standard the world has seen by far.

The idea is pretty much how it sounds.  To qualify a house needs to be almost completely passive in its heating/cooling.  The basic philosophy is to capture all possible energy from external sources like sunshine and geo-thermal as well as retaining energy from humans, electronics,etc. and use all that energy as efficiently as possible.  When this is done well, very little other energy is needed.  Dividing your energy needs into the four categories:  household stuff, ventilation, heating/cooling and hot water,  the chart shows how much of each of these you can use and still be considered passive.  The other very cool and very practical element of Passive is that it requires you to be smart, and for the most part low-tech, rather than rely on very expensive gizmos to be efficient.

The passive building philosophy has been around for ever and often requires nothing more than a brain and basic building materials that include dirt, stone, and cellulose.  When building a passive House chances are your most expensive device will be the heat exchanger (which does its best to transfer all heat energy in escaping air back into fresh air entering the home – usually accomplishing somewhere around 70-80% exchange).  After that the next most expensive gizmo might be your hot water heater.  Passive means you absorb solar energy directly from the sun rather than spending $30,000 for solar panels to do it for you.  This means you can’t build a stupid design and slap some expensive gear on it and call it good.  Instead the home has to actually be a smarter and healthier way to exist with and within nature — in other words, sustainable.  Yahoo!  No more LEED debacles.

Passive House may not catch on that fast for just that reason.  There is very little room for commercial greed and muggery.  Building passive also requires a level head for design and a certain kind of Dutch pragmatism.  There, I said it.  Americans just aren’t passive.  We hate the very idea, especially when we find out it used to be spelled, PassivHaus.  I mean,  what is that?  Dammit man.  Tear me out a house from the raw nature around me and beat back any damn thing that tries to encroach on my private castle.  There ain’t nothing passive about it, and if I want a nature retreat, I will buy a Hummer to get there (or a helicopter).  But ding dang, if more of us level-headed ones can start spreading the passive house philosophy sustainability in home building gets much more realistic.

For more practical info. on Passive House Certification and passive building philosophy you can check out Treehugger and the Passive House Institute US.

So we may not be as screwed as the Spartans were when it came to the battle of Thermopylae, but we aren’t helping our cause any by sitting around on our methane exuding asses.  I mean come on.  McKibben wrote his first book on Global Warming 20 years ago when it was still a farce.  Now, the enemy of our indeference and affluence has loomed much nearer, and we need to respond.

Now before you cast off into the world of finger-pointing and accusation saying, “China! China and India! Those bastards.  What can we do?”  or even, “Belize! Those slash and burn maggots!” It is time to take some of our own medicine.  Here in the grand ole U.S. of A. we consume more carbon emitting energy per capita than anyone else on the planet.  I know.  Even more than the tea swilling Brits.  Americans pump off twice as much carbon per person than Europeans do and four times more than the Chinese.

Yes, we are going to need China and India to back off on their mad quest to follow in our footsteps.  Yes we will need small-fry countries around the world to stand up against us and the other developed countries to defend the last vital remaining resources in the world.  But we will also need to use hand-cranked espresso machines in the morning, and learn to grow some hemp under a strategically placed shade screen in the back yard.  (Note to DEA:  I don’t grow hemp under a shade screen in my back yard.  I don’t have a shade screen, or a backyard.  I promise.)

We have been world leaders in Global Warming so far.  Why stop now?  350, prepare for glory!

Can we get there?  Within the last 15 minutes of ABC’s show, Earth 2100, a positive picture of our potential future was painted.  (How is that for alliteration?)  The interviewed experts posed that it would be possible to perform the heavy lifting of global clean-up by 2050, with only the peripheries to remain after that.  Really?

Now, many bloggers and commentators have spoken out that the first 100 minutes of the show were simply too devastatingly depressing.  I don’t know.  I thought the bulk of the show was pretty entertaining.  Instead, it was the end that brought me crashing down into middle of the afternoon, bathrobe shuffling, bacon eating depression.  If the bright, hopeful version of our future requires us to bond together globally in loving harmony in order to completely revolutionize our cultures, values and worldviews…  I think I just peed a little.

I don’t normally consider myself a pessimist, certainly not a realist.  Normally I fully and heartily endorse optimistic dreamland.  It is a great place to walk the dog or grab a doughnut.  But when it comes to sustaining human life on earth we got some serious shiz to tend to.  And I am starting to fret that we just can’t make the changes soon enough.

So I was watching the ABC special together with a friend.  He felt that radical change was already occurring in the U.S. and certainly he is correct.  Obama is nothing if not a frothing madman of radical and visionary change.  But…  I don’t know.  Obama doesn’t run the nation alone, and I am not even convinced a bulk of his efforts at change are going to turn out to be sound ones.  I mean, is anyone else worried here?  How much money does the world have left to throw at this problem?  And is it going to be enough? And soon enough?

For example, Architecture 2030 states that 76% of U.S. electricity consumption is for building operation.  76%.  It would seem obvious that something would have to be done about such significant energy consumption for us to make any progress toward licking global warming by 2050.  So that means we have 40 years to do what?  Completely retool how we construct modern buildings, tear down and replace our entire infrastructure, and do so while economically in the crapper?  How many homes and factories and office buildings and commercial outlets can we tear down and replace in forty years?  What materials are we going to use to do so?  What energy will we use for the work?  And yet, we will have to get down and dirty now.  I am just not sure that we are up for it.  Even with the recession, life might just be too comfortable to give up all the unsustainable, electricity draining bloggers out there.

I by chance stumbled upon the last half of ABC’s show Earth 2100 a couple nights ago.  Now understand, I just returned from a trip to Texas, the land of my birth.  And Texas, with the exception of Austin, is not the land of environmental sensitivity.  And so my frame of mind was stemming from what some other bloggers on the topic of Earth 2100 have been referring to as “the lowest common denominator.”  Imagine my reverse culture shock when I found myself watching an acid trip induced, enviro-documentary/graphic novel about the end of humanity on prime time television.

Break out the shisha and tea.  I need to relax.  Now for the last couple of days most of the reviews on the show have been critical, but personally I think everyone needs to take a few puffs from the hookah.  After you feel a little light headed you should keep reading.Yes, temperatures and sea levels are rising here on planet earth (taking into account that temperatures have leveled off some over the last couple decades, but you know, follow the overall trend).  Yes, most of us have come to agreement that humans and our affinity for burning petroleum has contributed to these trends.  Over the last few years most people seem to be admitting that we should even do something about it.

But here is where level heads must prevail.  Most of us are not in agreement as to what the human impact is and will be.  Most of us are not in agreement as to how much and how quickly our planet will heat and what effects that temperature increase will have.  And get this, most of us are continuing to move forward under the assumption that everyone else either sees it our way or is a nonconsequential moron.  This sort of flippant name calling is the backbone of our national conversation these days and the biggest reason I randomly crap myself while wondering around the park considering life.

I thought Earth 2100 was interesting and imaginative.  It should cause many regular Joes to stop and think a little.  On the other hand I did think that their method was a bit heavy handed and overdramatic.  The last thing we need is for several of those regular Joes to take the whole thing seriously just to decide that when the dramatic predictions fall short that global warming was just a hoax after all.  Maybe Earth2100’s predictions are on the nose.  Maybe not.  Some people still need to be scared while others need to be encouraged, challenged or comforted.  A few people on either extreme will need to be ignored, it is true.

The main truth in all of this is that our petro-industrial revolution has run its course and we need to come up with another.  Intelligent people that disagree as to what this revolution should be and how we should come about it will need to work together (with one voice or another taking the lead).  This fact, above all, is what keeps me awake at night.

Burning hemp based fuels also has the benefit of not releasing an array of other toxic chemicals.  But, the real beauty of hemp as a replacement for petroleum based products is not in the gas tank, but instead the shower, the pantry and the closet.  Before the 1930’s most of America’s paints and cosmetics were not based on petroleum but hemp oil.  Hemp actually works better for paint, especially when applied to wood.  Think about the life span of the plastic waste finding itself into the Pacific Gyre and our local landfills.  Hemp based plastics have a natural degradation rate and will return to dust when their purpose has passed.  I mean, holy shizbat.  Look around you right now at how many things you can touch made out of petroleum based plastics.

As a biofuel, hemp is probably not the answer, not by itself anyway.  Right now it is a challenge to get below a cost of $6.00 a gallon for hemp biofuel.  Now hemp waste could be used to contribute and would be better for the environment than say, rice waste (which is tough to dispose of without carbon pollution. But hemp oil can be a wonderful golden crude.  Hemp has promise as a fuel, but that discussion will have to wait.  Hemp seed can produce between 15 to 25 gallons of oil per acre.  When hemp is grown in a fuel and fiber combined manner this oil becomes very affordable and very real.

Third, hemp could easily replace our lust for cotton textiles.  Cotton uses 50% of the U.S.’s pesticides, damages the soil, uses over twice as much water to grow and produces less than half the crop that an equivalent acre of hemp will produce.  Fourth, by being burned or converted to ethanol, alcohol, etc. hemp could help significantly lower carbon emissions, as well as providing a carbon sink as a planted crop.  Widespread use of hemp could also save forests and other endangered carbon sinks.

Fifthly, hemp has great value as a source of nutrition for humans and an even greater potential as feed for animals.  Lastly, hemp could have a major impact in our growing construction industry by replacing or supplementing everything from fiberboard to concrete.  Each of these uses could easily be enough to make hemp a valuable crop.  Combined they make it impossible to ignore, yet ignore we do.  For the next several days I will highlight each of these glorious possibilities one at a time.

Industrial hemp was going strong throughout the 1920’s.  It found uses in everything from paint to cosmetics to food.  It is even rumored that the first pair of Levi jeans were made from Hemp in the mid-1800’s.  (The evidence was destroyed in the great San Francisco fire.)  People have long derided prohibition as one of the stupider achievements of American history, blaming it for (among other things) giving rise to organized crime.  Well, if prohibition was stupid you have to lump reefer madness into the same category of dumb.

Hemp has long been a product that was known to be useful for fuel, food, feed, textiles, croplands, oil, building materials and many other goods.  It has also been long known to contain such low levels of THC as to be completely inane and harmless when it comes to psychotropics.  But, it’s growth and manufacturing have been banned in the U.S. for over 70 years for several lousy reasons.  First, individuals wanted to continue to get wealthy from timber production and use.  Second, the use of petroleum for almost everything under the sun was just taking root (and people wanted to make money off of this).  Third, Mexicans and blacks were taking good jobs from white people (these minorities were the main users and purveyors of marijuana at the time).

Anyway, you get the picture.  Here we are current day still trying to get back our right to grow and use one of natures miracle products, and despite the huge roil surrounding “green” and sustainable innovation we are still flushing money down the corn ethanol toilet.  What the hell?  We’ve learned nothing.  Again the public is being ignorantly bullied about by powerful interest groups while we light an ecological match to our country’s farmland.  Meanwhile, places like China, Romania, Germany and Canada are greatly outstripping us to the finish for growing, refining and profiting from hemp.

It is not like hemp is some newfangled product or flaccid pipe dream.  It was a miracle crop hundreds of years ago and has remained one.  God bless America, but we just don’t care.

This entry might reveal a little too much about myself, but I just have to give a shout out to this little community in Missouri.  Dancing Rabbit has been around for 10 years now and some might refer to them as a “Transition Community,” but they really are something different.

A Transition Community is, according to Transition Towns Wiki, “a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?”

I think this idea of transition towns/communities is awesome, and I hope to see it continue to catch on around the U.S. and the world.  But from what I can tell about Dancing Rabbit (through their website) they are something pretty different.  If a transition town is a group of people within a community, then what do you call  a group of people that decide to start their own town?  That is what Dancing Rabbit is trying to do.  Their town is a small one right now at 30 people, but they claim to desire to reach 500 to 1000.  Their covenants include things like not driving a personal vehicle (they share two for the whole community) and not using fossil fuels to heat their homes, etc.

I have been looking for community experiments like this one and am surprised it took me this long to find Dancing Rabbit.  I was so excited to find them I thought there might be others like me out there.  May the rabbit keep dancing.