(and John Podesta, but watching his part is not so necessary, nowhere near as focused, and i dare say, less interesting.)

A Green World is a Safer One from National Building Museum on Vimeo.

Now, this is a recording of a museum lecture, which means (for those of you who have never been to one) there’s about 10 minutes of introduction and thank you’s to supporting organizations, et cetera, ad nauseum. Just skip ahead. Also, it is a longish talk (Ed’s part is about 35 minutes long).

Oslo will soon begin fueling it’s public transportation with processed sewage. According to a worldchanging.com article, the city will begin it’s testing with 80 buses in September, having by then adapted 2 of it’s sewage plants to capture and process the methane from it’s resident’s waste. The plan will save money in the cost of the fuel, and carbon emissions in the operation of the vehicles.

The U.S. of A is now the world’s top producer of wind-generated electricity. An article from the Scientific American website reports that the total wind-energy capacity of the country has risen to “25 gigwatts (GW) — enough to power more than five million homes.” Let’s hope the Obama administration’s far sighted plans to continue this kind of growth will work as well as we all hope.

And finally, depending on your reproductive plans, you may want to take that cell phone out of your pocket, gentlemen . . . recently i posted a link to research about the apparently dramatic effects of slight cell phone use (in increasing the likelihood of developing cancer). More new research, here reported by CNN describes the cell phone’s effects on sperm. Again, it is not good.

“If the upholstery fabric isn’t abrading an allergen, the paint and the office furniture are off-gassing formaldehyde. If the carpet is said to be recyclable, it might be backed with PVC, a polymer built with a vinyl chloride monomer, a known carcinogen”

~ William McDonough & Michael Braungart, from the essay redefining green

waste = life

There was a time in human pre-history when we were primarily consumers. We ate, and we drank; any parts of an animal or plant which were unused in nourishing, clothing, or housing ourselves was left for scavenging animals, fed to pets, or for the earth itself to consume. Our structures and clothes themselves would, when abandoned, become food for further production by other animals or the earth. In this kind of pre-historic state, the word waste (should it have existed) would not have been a negative: nearly any waste was fodder for growth.¹

Stone, used in the early construction of some of our smallest and most enormous structures alike, can also be swallowed by the earth, in eons long geological processes. Stone is constantly being eroded by wind, water or sun, or broken apart by plants and freeze/thaw cycles, and while mountains of earth and stone turn to fields of soil, volcanic and seismic activity make new mountains.

Simply to observe the earth is to realize that it wants constantly to reuse everything (and that come what may, it will reuse everything, whether to it’s health benefit or not). When we speak of a closed loop industrial production cycle, like the one being begun by HP for sale and take-back of it’s ink-jet cartridges, it’s based on exactly this: earth’s basic cradle to cradle closed loop of energy and matter.

waste = death

“consumption”

Now, as the descriptor “consumer” gains everyday use and acceptance in characterizing our increasingly world-wide lifestyle, we see it become increasingly abstract (as with so many things in our culture). In the mid 18th century, political changes began generating the first middle class—a group of people able to buy things they didn’t need—to this group, early economists applied the word: consumer. (the word had existed for at least 400 years by that time, but was used to mean “to take, to use, or to eat.” it now carried the specific economic meaning it still has today, “to buy.”)

For a period in the U.S. of A, beginning in the 1920s (with a gap during the depression), and lasting until quite recently, the word was used by politicians, and public-relations men almost exclusively; and generally, the public resented the implications that they were of no good to the country other than as spenders of money. During the cold war, political promotion of spending was veiled in anti-communist rhetoric, imbuing the spending of money with an ideological importance. In campaigns from this era, the word consumer was generally absent. Recently, however, it has been taken up with some pride by the public, and can now be used unabashedly. It is even politically correct: President Bush told us to fight the recession by buying, to help our country by consuming.

And we are able, by and large, to do just that (although, how much it will help our financial predicament is debatable). Various facets of the industrial revolution gave the United States middle class citizen more income than they need (and by the widest margin in the history of having income (in the form of money)). Based on U.S. census averages, our necessary expenditures break down as follows: 17% of our income on food, 21% on housing, and 15% on cars. This leaves 47% of our income “expendable.” Certainly you can argue about just how necessary the car is—or could be—in the above figures, along with the choice of not including other “necessities” like digital communication tools: computers or cell phones, TV or cable service, et cetera.

What most of us are able to ignore or forget in this “consumption,” is that all we’re really consuming is that same old food and drink from 100,000 years ago. The difference with our waste, then to now, is that not only could the earth reuse that pre-historic waste, but it was actually beneficial to do so, it was nourishing to the earth and benign to us. Most of the waste we create now is dangerous or deadly to us and the earth. We often call this kind of waste pollution.

A question might leap to mind: how is this possible? If we are indeed a part of nature (undeniable), and we’ve been using natural resources that have always been on the planet to make what we make (equally true), then what are we doing wrong? how is it so dangerous? The answer, it turns out, is that we’re just not thinking about our future, or not putting any value on it when deciding how to make what we make. In efforts to make things as efficiently as possible, to achieve a limited set of productions goals (often cost and profit related), we make poor decisions. These decisions have led scientists and tinkerers alike to make combinations of things that nature never made before we came along. As when Leo Baekeland mixed tarry carbolic acid and formaldehyde in this garage in Yonkers to make the first commercially made plastic: “Bakelite.” Leo’s process (and those of the rest of the world’s chemists soon at work trying to make their own polymer breakthrough) did not put much thought into what would be done with the stuff once it was no longer useful. In other words, as a species, we’re making poor design decisions.

So let’s look at just what it is we buy, briefly address how it’s made, and what pollution that creates. First our food: industrially grown and processed plants, industrially fed and processed animals, both shipped over great distances for our convenience, some shipped and processed under refrigeration in an effort both to keep it fresher longer, as well as to combat the time taken up in processing and shipping.²

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Something most people forget is that all energy is solar energy.

Or to be more precise, almost all energy that we use aside from our own kinetic energy and the exceptions of wind and water power, is solar energy.¹

This might need some explanation; for the long story, continue on, but if you’d like to cut me off at the pass, scroll down to the section below, called “energy now.”

life on earth came to pass by the evolution of photosynthesis in organic molecules. Organic molecules (it is believed) generated spontaneously either as a result of ultraviolet rays entering our atmosphere from the sun, from kinetic energy generated by seismic activity during that period in earth’s history (perhaps 3.7 billions years ago), or from the electricity generated by lightening. Or perhaps all three, but in any event it effected a chemical change which led to the development of amino acids, and lipids of various sorts, and so on, and so on, until photosynthesis evolved probably many millions of years after that first chemical reaction.

Photosynthesis suddenly gave that cell the power to create it’s own food, gave it the power to build itself, and self replicate. No longer did it depend upon the random burst of electricity or accidental proximity of two molecules under the influence of ultra-violet light. The cell could now take carbon dioxide (of which there was then great concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere) and water and in turn make oxygen and carbohydrates, such as sucrose, glucose or starch. Those carbohydrates can then be turned to cellulose, cell walls, structures.

Hosts of other organisms then found that if they couldn’t photosynthesize, they could at least devour those beings that could, and get the the effective energy of the sun stored in the products of photosynthesis, still making use of the energy of the sun.

Zap to about 100,000 years ago and find early humans discovering that not only can they eat plants, and get the energy of the sun stored in them, but they can eat other animals who have managed to take that plant energy and enhance it further, making proteins and other nutrients, giving us not only that, but also other minerals and vitamins, with which we were then able to evolve stronger and smarter, and lead ourselves down whole new evolutionary paths.

Arguments can be made as to whether any God or Gods led this progression, but soon, in either case, we found ourselves burning the plant matter we found to generate a new violent kind of energy called fire. This could do many things for us, but we realized relatively quickly that it could create steam to work the mechanizations we’d created based on gravity-, water-, wind-, horse-power (that is, energy generated by transmuting the kinetic energy of a thing moving). This is another in a progressive line of examples where energy outputs exceeded inputs, changed our habits based on it.

Coal had been used as early as 4000 years ago in China for fire, and natural gas had been used for about as long in China and Japan for lighting, heating, and cooking. Petroleum oil has been pumped since the first century B.C.E in Rome and various states in what we now call the middle east. The only uses for these substances early on were, again, for lighting, heating, and cooking; the first roads paved in tar were in the middle east during the time Muhammad.

The boon of these fossil fuels was that they burned hotter or longer than an equal amount of wood or other plant matter: they were more efficient. And these efficiencies were taken as a great advantage, but it wasn’t until that chemical efficiency met our extant mechanical efficiencies in an engine that the world changed drastically.

energy now.

The burning of fossil fuels is more efficient than burning wood or other plant matter because it is a concentration of those same plant matters into a smaller space; Concentration, veritably the definition of efficiency. Fossil fuels take millions of years to produce by a geological process, the hyper compression of decaying plant matter, into tiny packets of that solar energy photosynthesized by plants, which have turned water and carbon dioxide into cellular structures: full of carbohydrates and sequestered compounds/elements. The difference between burning wood and burning coal is the difference between reading a book with single words to single pages and reading a book with many hundreds of words to that same page. What you might call “a lot more bang for your buck.”

These prodigious amounts of stored solar energy were soon burned directly in an engine, such as those developed in the mid-late 19th century. Electric and steam powered carriages had already existed for 40 years by this time, but they were soon put out of the running for most popular automobile by the gasoline fueled machine (gasoline already having been in use for lighting, heating, and cooking for half a century). Rudolph Diesel did his best to promote his peanut-oil powered engine in the 1890s, but ultimately failed in the face of the same consumer concern that helped gasoline to win out: power. The diesel engine was (and remains) strictly more fuel efficient, but lacked that certain something so desirable, it lacked “punch.” There were other considerations at play in it’s construction, and it’s downfall to be sure, but in any case, we were left with the gasoline engine which is inherently wasteful.

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