permaculture

[Misha Gale-Sinex <mgs2369@attbi.com>]

Yo, Kirb and all--

Sorry for the delay in responding. I'm trying to get a Web site beta 
version launched by the end of the week, and frankly, all I feel like 
doing is outdoor chores and painting banana slug portraits.  :^)


> > The most sane policies would act immediately to stop excavating
> > below-ground carbon and seek alternatives--like the nearly limitless flows
> > of photon, kinetic (wind and surf), and other energies.  And would address
> > from a cultural standpoint the hurry-sickness.
> >
> > It ain't gonna happen.
>
> What do you think our take should be on this?  I'm inclined to jump on the
> tree planting band wagon.  I'd like to find some paying work rebuilding
> forests and restoring degraded lands - does it matter who pays for it and
> why?  Yes, of course...

The work I did on climate change policy with Redefining Progress led 
me to believe strongly in an immediately applied transitional 
strategy of a user-pays approach to carbon. That is, those who use 
the atmosphere as their sewer (which is all of us who burn fossil 
fuels) pay a per-ton carbon tax toward mitigation and transition.

This would replace the current practice of concentrating the profits 
and socializing the costs (wars, environmental destruction, economic 
violence, health problems). For carbon spewage is also a 
social/environmental justice issue. Those who spew the most 
correspondingly have the most wealth. Those who have least wealth and 
use the least fossil fuel energy are most likely to suffer from 
things like rising sea level rates, increasing severe weather, etc., 
just as they already pay the most in terms of externalized costs of 
the fossil fuel energy system (health problems, urban blight, and on 
and on and on).

I refer you all to the RP Fair and Low-Cost Climate Protection 
program (no longer in existence) publications from the fall of 2001 
and earlier:
http://www.rprogress.org/programs/climatechange/publications.html

See also the information on green taxes in general.

For an example of why I say "It ain't gonna happen," see my other 
message, entitled "Fossil fuel addiction."

Paige Brown authored a lot of the FLCCP papers; she's now with the 
San Francisco office of the Corporation for Enterprise Development. 
http://www.cfed.org

Cliff Cobb wrote a great study of the externalized costs of private 
automobile ownership. I'll dig around for that one.

Re: Claude's observation--"If we get money to green up the earth in 
exchange for "them" getting a little greenwashing, is that so wrong ?"

You bet my voluptuous ass it's wrong. Corporate PR flacks are engaged 
in a multi-million-dollar campaign of disinformation designed to 
thwart understanding and action on fossil fuel use and human induced 
climate change. They confuse people to protect the influence of the 
oilygarchy. They lull people into stupidity and strive to quash 
enlightened action.

"Greenwashing" isn't "little," on this or any other issue. It 
represents major, studied, strategically and tactically well-planned, 
well-funded co-optations of grass-roots communication to further 
corporate interests. Corporations know what's going on. But what they 
care about is a bunch of economic abstractions (like next quarter's 
profits or market share or product positioning) in the short term.

There's also a time element. Corporations are entities chartered to 
have the legal status of persons, with immortality attached (since 
corporate charters are no longer sunsetted). That legal fiction 
ensures that large corporations' goals will by definition be at odds 
with those of us mortals. Especially in a capitalist system, whose 
rewards (and powers) accrue over time through the miracle of the 
algorithm known as compounding.

I've been a professional PR person. I can't summarize quickly what 
being a PR professional means in terms of cynical manipulation and 
hollow souledness. Except to say the point is to spin. If one happens 
to have a soul, the best one can do is spin on behalf of something 
one believes in.

Claude, my Rx for you (offered respectfully) is that you read a 
couple books by the folks at /PR Watch/. Start with /Trust Us, We're 
Experts/.  http://www.prwatch.org

Greening Earth is funded by a large consortium of FOSSIL FUEL 
corporations that actively lobby against any challenges to or 
movement away from a fossil fuel economy. They exist to thwart 
evolving awareness of ecological science and to continue the 20th 
century's engineering of consciousness around fossil fuels.

What's called for is a breaking of this nation's key addictions: to 
fossil fuel and other highly concentrated energy forms (like 
oil/coal/gas, sugar, caffeine, explosives), to the zoomy rammy 
lifestyle to which we have become accustomed, and to the bipolar 
cranky homocidal skygod who holds it all up.

Back to Kirby's question. Kirby, in our household, we've taken a 
two-fold approach.

First, to slash our fossil fuel use. I'm still putting the figures 
together on that for the past three years, but will be glad to share 
them through a Web page; we hope to have it up in a month or so.

Second, to assess and reduce our CO2 emissions and engineer our own 
absorption.

As for finding paying work planting trees, I don't know what to say 
to that, though I respect the yearning. My own personal philosophy is 
do the work, and the money may or may not follow. But in my 
experience, at the point where I start trying to turn my passions and 
paths into a cash-cow, there is danger of corruption of the path and 
myself.

What I'd do is, just do it. Plant trees. Feed the soil. Scale back. 
The rest will follow. Nobody ever said right livelihood would have a 
salary attached.

As for sequestration, see my other message ("Fossil fuel addiction").

> "You take the King's shilling, and you become the King's man."

Word.


> I seldom let who is doing right or paying for it bother me any more. 
> People doing the right stuff for whatever reason are OK with me

Translated into Latin, that would be the motto of the ag college at 
that damn comfy little enclave, Harvard-on-Mendota (UW-Madison). At 
least in my nearly-fifteen-year experience of it.

And those pear-shaped, cream-licking lapcats just hired a 
biotechnologist as the director of the sustainable ag center, you all 
know?


Bob wrote:

> they clean, or pay someone to clean, up after themselves.

My husband and I--pandrogynes both--were talking about this while 
cleaning the house for our Thanks-giving party. Think of our disdain, 
as a culture, for janitors, trash-haulers, bedpan-emptiers, sewage 
workers, mothers, housekeepers, pigeons, gulls, crows, flies, 
cockroaches....

Being appropriately powerful/Masculine comes to mean, precisely, 
making a mess in all directions, then zooming away when it threatens 
to dirty one's own wing-tips or $200 Nikes. Think of those big manly 
stacks spewing clouds of black from locomotives, factories, etc. 
That's progress, my boy! Now let's catch the train back to Long 
Island.


> We cannot simply accept money for repair work in lieu of doing it 
> right in the first place.

Amen, righteous babe brother. Testify.

Thanks for listening.


love
mish