Beef pulls boy into tasty vortex

Erin Lee, thanks for being good company and for taking this!

If you're going to fail, you might as fail epically. This is one of two double bacon cheeseburgers eaten at Bob and Edith's Diner. There is absolutely no local sourcing involved here. 

Have you ever wanted to go rogue? Or better yet, have you ever had the urge to spectacularly bomb – to fail in a way that rails against the very skills and instincts that have chiseled out your craft? 

It’s more than a drive for failure, it’s a desire to tank so magnificently that you rip yourself free from yourself. 

Let me tell you about this relationship that I have with bacon cheeseburgers. I know they’re outrageously immoral. Eating one cheeseburger alone equates to roughly the same carbon emissions as drinking a two-month’s supply of tap water.¹ But they’re sooooooooo damned irresistible. I try my best not to eat them. I don’t eat them…don’t eat them…don’t eat them…and then…my world explodes! I don’t just have a bite or a taste, because that would be sheepish. I rebel with a magnitude so violent it sends ecosystem shock-waves all the way to the Sahel. 

Yesterday, I engulfed the carbon equivalent of a ten-or-eleven-month’s supply of drinking water by eating two double bacon cheeseburgers at Bob and Edith’s. Though every bite launched me further from my convictions, it brought me closer and closer to the truth, the madness, and despair.  I love the carnage. The hilarious joke of it all – environmental stewardship is so impossible in the present day. I could recycle for a year and destroy my entire effort by eating a few week’s worth of double cheeseburgers. I could offset my entire drinking water usage for four years in one road trip to Richmond.² Only in today’s world can such beautiful chaos go so vastly unnoticed. 

The devil is a double bacon cheeseburger.

Mike Berners-Lee in his book, “How Bad Are Bananas?” has come up with a figure for determining about how much carbon emissions lead to a death somewhere around the world. It turns out that an individual could wipe out a family by taking 30 round-trip international flights this year.³  

I love the carnage. It’s truly American. When we fail, we fail epically. We send ripple effects that tear down the world. Our financial crisis ripped apart Europe and stoked the fire for the Arab Spring. Our carbon footprint is submerging Maldives, the Netherlands, the Southwest Pacific, New York, and San Francisco.  

Yesterday, I lost to my impulses, but I loved it as it was happening. I thought, "Fuck it. Let’s destroy something beautiful.” I knew about the maladies of the beef industry – the hormone injections, the genetically modified cow feed, the methane volcanoes, the illegal immigrant labor force, the pink slime offshoots, the total and utter moral depravity that is systematically perpetuated by one small sliver of the American lifestyle. But I ordered the beef anyway. Twice. Sometimes, I choose to be evil. Death in Morocco tastes like paradise along Columbia Pike. 

1 Berners-Lee, Mike. How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything. A burger releases the equivalent of 2.5kg of carbon. A year’s supply of tap water for a U.S citizen releases the equivalent of about 23kg of carbon. 

2 Berners-Lee, Mike. How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything. A year’s supply of water for one person is the same as a 27-mile drive in an average car. 

3 Berners-Lee, Mike. How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything. Eleven round-trip, first class flights from L.A. to Barcelona has a climate change impact that equates to the death of one individual.

Ecologically clothes-minded

Above is $32 worth of second-hand glory.

There’s a system of bike paths that cuts through Northern Virginia, connecting the outlying burrows of DC to its city center. This time of year the path is draped with dramatic bursts of color, popping from the Magnolia trees, Cherry Blossoms, and other varieties of splendor I have yet identify. Without getting too Tolkien on you with the landscape, suffice it to say rain really brings out the color. If you’ve ever read the Celestine Prophecy, then you’ll understand how the colors of Northern Virginia’s landscape emanate beyond their spatial parameters.

Anyhow, I went shopping in Crystal City today after a four mile longboard in the rain with Ileana and her best friend Lydia. Shopping and I are pretty much incompatible. If I do go, it's about twice a year in a “let’s get in and get the hell out” time of mindset. But today was a special occasion. I shopped consignment and the proceeds went to the Junior League of Washington. 

If you’re ever contemplating shopping for clothes, I highly recommend consignment.  It’s a thrill to think about how much money you’ve saved – I got two pairs of casual pants, three dressy shirts, a pair of socks, and two kitchen towels for $32. But even better than the money, and the charity, was the environmental perk of it all. Because I bought used clothes, greenhouse gasses weren't emitted in the production of new clothes, carbon expended in the clothes' transport was minimal (items were donated by individuals of the charity hosting the event, so transportation merely involved getting those items to the event) and I didn’t add to the conversion of natural resources into consumer goods. 

According to a BBC article, “it takes ten times more energy to make a tonne of textiles than it does a tonne of glass, and when you throw wool and cotton clothes into landfill, they produce methane.” Methane is estimated to have a warming effect about 25 times as great as CO₂, according to the article.

Climate change: here to stay?

  

On Friday March 9, during a record day of warmth, Ileana takes in the scent of a blooming Magnolia by the Washington D.C. Smithsonian Castle.

It’s here guys. Global warming is no longer intangible. Throughout the United States, over six thousand heat records have been set this March. In the past few decades, extreme weather events like heat wave, storm surge, sea level rise and flooding having become have become more prevalent and with higher intensities. Between global population rise, standard of living increases, static economic infrastructure, and political malaise, humans have emitted more carbon dioxide in the last 50 years than throughout our entire existence and are having great difficulty stopping the trend.  

Some of these things you’ve heard, you know, and like me are searching for the answers or waiting for realistic measures to reverse climate change. The environmental world is now pushing something called adaptation, to circumvent the politics and overall taboo issue of climate change. Adaptation recognizes that our climate is constantly changing and that strategic responses to these changes are necessary to preserve the earth’s life systems. Yet, less psychologically damaging than climate change, which is embedded with the difficult truth that human life systems are causing the Earth’s climate to change, adaptation is value neutral and doesn't fault humans.

It notes that our climate is changing and will continue to change, and that the impacts of climate change are affecting our earth’s systems and these effects are predictable within certain intervals. In other words, there is no way to ascertain exactly what will happen to our earth’s systems, but there is enough of an understanding to plan for a probability of events, take action, and then continue to adapt a coherent strategy for a given earth system. 

I have great hope for our species, but less hope for our federal governing apparatus. Environmental strides, such carbon accounting, local and statewide greenhouse gas compacts, and robust environmental networks, have emerged despite climate change censorship in the Bush regime, and increased oil drilling during the Obama administration. Meanwhile non-profits are fueling an environmental awareness that’s spreading like wildfire among consumers, and some of the corporate world is responding to the fervor by supplying sustainable products, gridlock in Washington is preventing much needed and eagerly awaited environmental legislation to incentivize the rest of the business world and the major utilities to bring us to the energy future we’ve been envisioning for the last half century. 

Check out this podcast on adaptation.

 This is just on feel, but once China surpasses the United States in renewable energy supplied per capita (I’m thinking 2020-2025) and signs the Kyoto Protocol or an equivalent, the federal government will get its act together.

From the trenches

Photo taken by GMU Associate Professor Todd La Porte

 

Embracing Jetson-like technology, our class- conferenced with UC Berkley PhD Student Esther Conrad about climate adaptation strategies for watersheds.

Loyal blog readers, I promised a post from the trenches. Grad school is basically one enormous bowl of Pho. You can see that there’s good stuff in it, but it requires so much effort getting through the boiling brothy stuff that when your finally there you say “fuck it, just give me some ice cream.” 

Alright, let’s start this post over, because grad school has nothing to do with Vietnamese soup.

I’ve learned a lot, and it may take a couple of posts, but I want to disperse some pearls of knowledge, for your benefit. 

The first thing is, though the U.S. government sucks fuck at being able stave off any sort of environmental problems, state and local governments are kicking ass and taking names in the environmental arena. “To date more than 700 American local governments and nearly all state governments have engaged in some form of climate change policy making” (U.S. Conference of Mayors). 

And get this, states are working toward the big picture, capping carbon emissions. “Twenty-one states are actively involved in establishing regional zones for capping and trading carbon emissions from electrical utilities” (Rabe 2008b; Pew Center on Global Climate Change 2007).

There are some big ideas at work. Though a backlog of info is required to qualify this next statement, it gets at the general trend of dealing with environmental issues. The federal government is at an impasse when it comes to climate change, any sort of overarching legislation that the government could pass won’t happen (A) because its political suicide to have your name attached to anything containing the phrase “climate change” (I’ve got to thank our Fox “News” viewers for that one) and (B) because at this point anything the government actually did pass could actually hinder the environmental movement. This is because it would probably be too soft. Any bill that actually makes it through Congress comes out on the other side so badly hacked up and altered that it lacks any substance and bears little resemblance its original form. I wouldn’t want a federal “dud” to restrict the eco-fury of the glory states like Oregon or California, which set the agenda for the rest of the degenerate states out there.

  ***Read following paragaph for an example, or skip following paragraph if you have Steve Bert ADHD***

(I’m thinking of what happened under California’s lead, when fourteen states banded together to win a U.S. Supreme Court case designed to force the federal government to allow states the discretion to establish the world’s first carbon dioxide emissions standard for vehicles. Bush originally rejected California’s waver before the successful collective effort put him in his place. If the federal government has any role besides getting overturned it would likely err on the side of being too soft to have any meaningful ecological impact. For those of you environmentalists who think Obama is on our side, please realize he operates under the guidelines of economic primacy and has already showed his hand many times with his eagerness to drill.) 

With state and local governments circumventing our sham Congress and our president who is caught in the web economic primacy, we’ve got the stage set for our current framework for understanding and dealing with environmental issues: climate adaptation. 

This post has been a long one so we’ll get to that goodie soon. 

Ciao and farewell for now, 

Steve

Call me lazy, but why should I work another day in my life?

 I want to live in a world where Rosie Jetson does the chores. (Image provided from google images.)

Is anyone else out there pissed off about the lack of coordination in overall technological advancement? Technology should be leading us to working less, not working more. 

If we had an awesome socialist government like Sweden, we could be directing our businesses to innovate for social benefit.  Robots could handle all the menial crap that we have to do each day and in the meantime we could live life well. 

So I know a lot of people have this ingrained notion that hard work is part of the American spirit. It’s this unspoken right-of-passage; without putting our noses to the grindstone we’re somehow not being patriotic. But why not work smarter? If we spent less time laboring over things that we could essentially write-off through new software and hardware applications, we could develop to our full capacities. 

Back in Shakespeare’s day, people learned and shared knowledge through the application of all sorts of mnemonic devices. They had to memorize large quantities of info to share with others, because books, pamphlets, and shared knowledge through writing was expensive and not readily available. 

Then came the printing press, and not only did people no longer have to sit and copy texts by hand, they didn’t have to devote large volumes of time memorizing mnemonic devices to share stories that could now readily be shared through written word. 

Yesterday we were on the verge of that next printing press. Software could’ve been the text directing machines to carry out the processes unnecessary today, much like memorizing mnemonic devices was replaced by the Gutenberg Press in the past. 

But our system is so locked into personal wealth creation that we miss out on personal fulfillment. I want to live in a country where it is a good thing when automation takes away someone’s job, where teleconferencing takes away the need to go to work, and people can have robots hold up their “Cash for Gold” signs. 

The world is never at a dearth of frontiers to be breached. If we had universal unemployment we could beautify the landscape, make awesome board games like Co-opoly, build treetop villages like those on Endor, clean up our rivers and lakes to the point where we could actually drink from them, or even learn how to play the piano or tuba. 

Anyhow, thanks loyal blog readers for keeping it real. I can’t wait for the future, when writing  a software program will be as easy  as writing a blog post.

Visions of an Oneironaut: ‘Go forth and be scrappy’

This was borrowed from a dream exploration image search.

Dreams are so telling, yet as circumstantial as the snapshots our minds glom onto when we rouse from them. Earlier this week I dreamt that I had been slipped LSD in a beverage. I got to see my world go Technicolor and I felt like I could pick apart the essence of the world around me. In yesterday’s adventure, I was in coven of business students tucked away in a secret library in a prestigious university’s basement. Before class, I’d studied the background of my professor and found a pattern correlating his pay increases as a professor to jobs switches he’d made after teaching for a bit of time. 

(He’d teach for a while then get a corporate job. Teach somewhere else for higher pay and then work somewhere else for higher pay, and then get an even higher paying teaching job after that.) I realized after I woke up, that he was gaming the market to earn faster pay bumps.

How is this relevant? Hold on…I promise.

In my dream of being in this class, most of the other students in class were asking the professor for his connections to life in the fast-line, but I wasn’t. The instructor asked me why I was there. Another student chimed in, “he’s an environmentalist and wants to…” So I cut her off and said, “That’s right. I am. I want the environmental movement to have the scale and intensity of the best of anything.” He looked at me quizzically, and I clarified jokingly. “I probably shouldn’t have told you that I’m an environmentalist, because now you won’t take me seriously. Just pretend I didn’t tell you. In order to be effective at this it’s best if no one knows.”

So anyhow, what I realized about this dream was that, one, yes it’s entirely true. In order to change the world you have to keep it hidden. No one wants the gravity, the mess, the comparative analysis to how they’re actively living their lives. This is why the professor was actively switching from instructing to working in the corporate world. He’d loved the prestige of teaching, but couldn’t get access to teaching at elite institutions or make the wage he desired without climbing the ladder through corporate “experience.” (He had to work in the corporate world to build the currency to teach in the elite world.)

So, for those of you that buckled your seatbelts and hung on for the ride. Here’s my point and the point of the dream. If you really want to do something – you have to think about all of the avenues to get there. This professor of mine in my dream, could have stayed at his first college, doing what he loved, teaching. But he never would have professed to the student group he’d hope to reach, nor earned the wage he was fit for earning. He had to game the system to get there. The same is true for the environmental movement. Though I love efficiency, wind turbines and solar panels, geothermal installations, bikes, and public transportation, the rate at which these items are creating an infrastructure is not fast enough to counteract our current construct. Population, deadweight loss of our global society (inmates, refugees, etc) and our brand of employment are the real items to adjust. 

Anyhow, I know this is a long post and not necessarily in the style that I take traditionally, but I wanted to treat you loyal blog readers with that message from the dream world. Alas, go forth and dream big, but be scrappy. If you want to invent a new spaceship you may have to grow bamboo and sell furniture. After a decade you may have sold enough furniture to buy the necessary materials for your spaceship.

Drill Obama Drill

Watch Obama's State of the Union Address by clicking on the video above.

I came back from my first day of class at George Mason feeling pretty excited. Our political climate has been more conducive to justice and the everyday Schmendrick has been getting their fair shake. Europe has pledged to stop using Iran as its source of oil and the embargo will begin fully in six months, effectively cutting Iran’s oil sales by 20 percent. (Assuming Latin America and China don’t fill the void).

Anyhow, with the Keystone XL Pipeline permit being denied, catch limits on fish being carved out, and NOAA being put into the Department of Interior as it should have been in the 1970s, I thought that things were looking pretty good for us environmentalists out there. Then I read the State of the Union. (I wanted to watch it, but it turns out if you miss the State of the Union and there’s damn punditry going on afterwards, all the online sources stream to the damn punditry.)

So it turns out that Obama’s energy plan is to open up 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. He also wants to keep launching into using natural gas. Apparently the US is endowed with a 100 year supply of natural gas. (By the way we possess two percent of the world’s oil reserves.) Anyhow, I can understand why it makes sense to drill here, and though I am an environmentalist, I get the pinch we’re facing right now for oil and the problems that arise from funding oil despots overseas. However, I think Obama is a coward for not even mentioning the responsibility we face for climate change. Re-election’s got him backed into a corner and whimpering. 

If I were him, and I had no reasonable alternative but to open up our offshore oil wells, at least I would make a trade of some sort. I’d also bring home the fact that this measure is dire and only being done as a short term concession for a global crisis and offer up a trade.  He could have used this moment to start the first stages of a cap-and-trade system, where carbon emissions are traded as a commodity and their revenue goes toward funding a renewable energy system. He threw an ace card away. 

In his defense, Obama is pushing to expand clean energy. He aims to double US investment in clean energy (which isn’t much comparatively) and provide enough clean energy to power the equivalent of 3 million homes.

Ahhh, I want to love the guy, but he just lost a lot of momentum that he recently accumulated. It didn’t have to be that way. 

I highly recommend reading the State of the Union Address.