When the People Lead….

by Matt DeNoto

There is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that Congress seems well on its way to passing through a cap-and-trade scheme to begin the process of lowering our country’s carbon pollution.

The White House had been pressing for the cap-and-trade program to start with 100% of the pollution permits being auctioned off. This would give companies the financial incentive to begin thinking about ways to cut down on their carbon output now.

But the bill recently unveiled by the House of Representatives details a plan that would call for only 15-20% of the permits to be auctioned off. The large majority of the permits would be given away to the polluters.

That is the bad news. As if the mere numbers weren’t enough of a clue, it should also be taken as a bad sign that energy companies, such as Constellation Energy Group, Inc., are applauding the bill. If the people who should stand to lose the most money are praising the new system, it’s probably not going to be very effective.

I understand the arguments. If we force companies to pay for the right to pollute, those companies will simply pass those costs along to consumers. We, ultimately, will pay for the pollution.

And that’s the whole point. Just like businesses, we regular folk need incentives to clean up our act. Because it is our responsibility. Companies don’t pollute for the fun of it. They do it to create products and services that we, the public, pay them for.

Near the end of March, the Environmental Protection Agency finally announced that it had the authority to regulate Carbon Dioxide as a pollutant. Since then, not much has been done about it because lawmakers have stated that they would prefer to regulate CO2 through new legislation than through EPA regulation.

As I watch the legislative process at ‘work,’ I secretly hope that the Obama Administration is keeping the EPA under the radar to use as a secret weapon, in the event that Congress is unable to pass effective legislation.

In other words, if it turns out that ‘The American Clean Energy and Security Act’ is a lot of hot air that sets up a useless program with no chance of actually effecting real change, I hope the White House isn’t afraid to point out to the world that the legislative angle didn’t get the job done, but luckily the EPA still has the power to regulate the pollutants and it will enforce that power.

It’s depressing to have so little faith in our ‘representatives,’ knowing that nothing matters to them except the perception of their constituents and major contributors. Their habits seem so disconnected from the real world. When Clinton was in office and pushing for fiscal responsibility, Congress abided by the Pay-Go practice, not submitting for new spending without finding somewhere appropriate to cut in order to pay for the new program. When Bush stripped away any sense of idealism, Congress dove in head first, racking up a debt that now chokes us all and still somehow getting shockingly little done.

Now, with a new President actually trying to change things, the Congress seems incapable of making strong choices, bold decisions. In sports, it is sometimes said that the best offense is a good defense. In politics, it seems, there is only defense.

Creative Destruction

by Matt DeNoto

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse.’” – Henry Ford

One factor of this great economic mess that does not come up often enough (in my humble opinion) is mention of the economic principal of creative destruction. It’s the driving force of progress. The same way arrows replaced knives and bullets replaced arrows, innovation equals market supremacy. Creative destruction is how industries that were once the best thing ever crumble into obsolescence as new ‘best things ever’ are created.

Creative destruction is the natural way of things, but it is always painful. Companies go bankrupt and workers lose their jobs as the world learns different, better ways to accomplish the same tasks. For example, our society no longer requires the services of blacksmiths.

Soon we may be saying the same about paperboys and gas station attendants.

Newspapers and automobiles have seen an unusual lack of innovation over the last couple of decades. But innovation cannot be held off forever. Not even by bailouts. Indeed, already companies that used to supply parts to the auto industry are repurposing themselves to provide parts for an industry with more growth potential: wind power.

Speaking of bailouts, there’s one other industry that has for too long seen far too little innovation…

Government.

Since the founding of this country, the government has been run in the same basic way by the same kind of people; rich, old, male, and white.

But we have changed our pattern, and innovation in government may really be on the way. Finally, something will truly ‘trickle down.’ Many criticize the new president for creating so many new offices, new government posts. Posts like Chief Technology Officer and Climate Advisor. But these positions are actually overdue. F or too long the government ignored all the different ways the world was changing around it. But it was only a matter of time before someone of the current generation (i.e. someone who knows what a BlackBerry is) made it to a position of power.

Websites of government agencies have always been notoriously unhelpful. But with a new administration calling the shots, one that understands that we live in the Information Age, things are changing. The old ways are crumbling.

For just one example, visit the webpage of the Environmental Protection Agency. On the bottom left side of the screen is a box titled ‘My Environment.’ Enter in your address or zip code, and a page will come up with all kinds of ecological information about your area, including air quality, water sources and cancer risk.

Creative destruction is all about the natural tendency of people to find the most efficient methods to overcome our obstacles. But to get there, we must leave behind our old, less efficient ways.

opinion: Allergic to Learning

by Matt DeNoto

People are strange. How many of us go about our lives making the same mistakes over and over again? Even after we’ve been made aware of the mistake, it can still seem impossible to change our behavior.

Unfortunately, the same seems to hold true for us as a population. Change is slow and painful, and circumstances must become extreme before the motivation exists to take action.

Now that the Swine Flu ‘Epidemic’ seems to be doing exactly what logic and history have suggested it would – that is, fading from the public consciousness after being blown out of proportion – have we learned anything about rational reactions?

It has to do with the Green Revolution only insofar as we can’t concentrate on saving the planet if we’re busy being terrified of this week’s ‘disaster.’ And sadly, outside of trying to point out to those around us that there are better things to worry about, I fear there’s not very much that can be done to bring people around.

Climate change will continue to rear its ugly head, which means that in some form or another it will sporadically return to the public consciousness in frightening ways. But if we are unable to react in a reasonable way to a new strain of the flu, what’s really in store for us all when climate change ultimately begins to invade our lives in ways that we have not yet imagined? How will our panic-stricken, quick-to-judge, manic-depressive friends and neighbors react?

We are not, as a population, terribly level-headed. And to be frank, that part scares me more than climate change itself.

Will there ever come a time when we stop quibbling about silly distractions like trying to hold up gay marriage, or change children’s textbooks to weaken evolution, or wasting any journalistic resources to report what some celebrity did?

I remember not liking Math class as a kid. Especially Algebra. It didn’t make any sense to me why we had to learn all these bizarre formulas to manipulate variables. What made it worse was that I was GOOD at math, so my folks would encourage me to take more, harder Math classes.

Looking back now, it’s easier to appreciate the value of Math class. It was just never presented to me in the right way.

Math classes teach us more than how to work with numbers. They teach us how to solve problems, how to take a set of circumstances and analyze it to determine the best possible outcome. Other classes like History, Foreign Language, and even Science, generally deal more with rote memorization of facts and processes. The analytical tools we learn in Literature and Art classes are more subjective. Only Math teaches us something beyond what’s there in class. Math teaches us a skill. Math isn’t about numbers at all, it’s about learning how to process information.

Based on the grades our educational system has been getting over the past couple of decades, my conclusion is that our ability to think critically about the world as it is presented to us will continue to be severely underdeveloped.

Hopefully that’s just me making the same mistake again.

culinary class

by Matt DeNoto

In celebration of Earth Day recently, some university cafeterias made a small but significant change designed to raise awareness of what may be one of the biggest contributors to climate change. They cut out beef and cheese for Earth Day.

The industrial processes that go into large scale cattle and dairy farming result in a large amount of methane being produced. Then there is the pollution generated by the shipping of the products.

On top of that, Americans just eat too much beef in general. It raises the danger of heart disease and diabetes. So anything to encourage people to eat less beef is generally a good thing.

I remember taking ‘Health’ classes in school growing up. But they weren’t full year classes like math or science. They were half year classes. So for the first half of the year we’d have Health and the second half of the year would be something like shop class. And we wouldn’t even take it every year. We’d have half a year of Health, every other year. If memory serves.

Looking back, it seems silly to me how little attention health got in school. Health classes, physical education and home economics (the only class where students sometimes cooked) have all become easy targets for schools look ing to trim their budgets.

But what good is all the history knowledge in the world, if you’re not able to adequately care for your body?

My girlfriend is an amazing cook. It’s an interest she picked up from her father. Unfortunately for me, neither of my parents were much interested in cooking. In my home, cooking was a chore. I imagine it was that way in lots of homes.

Why aren’t schools picking up the slack? After all, feeding oneself is a lifelong responsibility. I don’t know that it will ever matter that I read ‘The Catcher In The Rye,’ but there are definitely times I feel helpless in the grocery store as I try to think of uses for the aisles and aisles of unfamiliar ingredients, only to find myself reaching for the old standards I’ve been making since I began living on my own.

The very concept of the ‘Freshman Fifteen,’ the number of pounds the average student allegedly gains in his/her first year of college, should be a wake up call that we are not doing enough to educate and train kids to feed themselves properly.

As my girlfriend has (slowly) taught me, food can be an incredibly creative and rewarding outlet. And since you need to eat everyday, why not encourage kids to see it as fun?

Typically, kids at school are served mass produced, generally low quality, unhealthy lunches like meatloaf and pizza. If we instead provided kids with the information and tools to make20their own lunches, we’d probably quickly see them fostering healthy habits that will last even after they’ve left school.

(Full Disclosure / Shameless Plug: My girlfriend is a recipe developer / writer for Hungry Girl.)

** edit note: all images are of vegan foods… showing that it doesn’t have to be full of meat and cheese to be tempting

good business, bad business

by Matt DeNoto

At the office where I work, we get a weekly delivery of the ‘Los Angeles Business Journal,’ a newspaper aimed at people with business-related interests. As I flip through the paper, one thing becomes very clear:

These people love their money, and anything that stands in the way is considered bad.

Obvious, I know. But it never really sank in for me until I started reading these stories about how much it hurt a busines s to have to follow this regulation or negotiate with that union. There was a story about how much it was costing a company to revise its balance sheets after an independent auditor found out how off their books were.

“Awwww, too bad,” I thought, “A company is losing money because it has to actually tell the truth.” Break out the violins.

But stepping back, the disparity between my perspective (as someone who puts the wellness of the world above the bottom line) and theirs shows just how far there is to go before we’re all living in a world where everyone considers the consequences of their actions. To me, it just seems fundamentally wrong to fight so hard against something as obvious as not emitting noxious fumes into the air or dumping harmful chemicals into the ground.

So how do we bridge the gap? In a twist that may or may not be ironic, they may actually be doing some of the work for us.

The uncertainty comes from whether or not you believe that a company’s media campaign actually represents the perspective of the company, or merely the image that company is trying to portray. Over the past few months, large corporations have been advertising themselves as Green, trying to tell us how they’re making the world a better place. GE has been promoting a commitment to the environment it calls Ecomagination. FOX Broadcasting has launched a series of PSAs with the tagline ‘Green it. Mean it.’ Even oil companies like Shell and BP have been putting up spots hoping to encourage the minds of consumers to link those companies with environmentalism.

For the sake of cynicism, let’s say that these companies are not actually interested in saving the planet. They’re just typical corporations that would happily dump their garbage in your pool if it would save them money. Even if all this ‘Green Branding’ is simply companies trying to profit from the enviro-‘fad’ going on right now, it’s still putting the Green philosophy out there, into the minds of the public. If it keeps up, even those in the population who have been resistant to change are going to find that those messages of change have worked their way in. Then the public will start to throw around the power it has always had: the power to vote with its wallet. After that, companies are going to have to practice what they preach.

Until then, there are still businesses out there now founded on principles of responsibility. And thanks to the internet, we can all start voting with our wallets now. For a whole marketplace of sustainable goods, visit World Of Good.

this green house

by Matt DeNoto

I do a lot of my TV watching over at Hulu, where I can watch full length shows (and feature films) for free, and with less commercials than watching them on an actual network.

That’s where I discovered Building Green, a PBS offering that applies Green philosophy to the most practical application possible: the building of a home.

Over the course of 13 episodes, home designer and host Kevin Contreras brings viewers along on his journey of building his very own green dream home. Because the building process is broken up over a whole season, Kevin is able to go in depth to each facet of the design, discussing with experts the pros and cons of the ever-expanding array of green options.

One immediately attention-getting detail about the house is that the walls will be insulated with straw bales. The builders literally stack straw bales where the walls will be, then cover them with chicken wire and plaster over it. According to the show, this will offer excellent insulation and protect against termites while preserving a delicate natural resource (trees) by using an abundant material often seen as a waste product by farmers. It’s also saving the project a lot of money. The only ‘downside’ mentioned so far (I’m only 3 episodes in) is that the outer walls of the house will need to be two feet thick.

 

Kevin’s driving concern is the high number of toxic chemicals that find their way into our living spaces, often causing the air inside our homes to be significantly less healthy than the outside air. But that’s just one part of keeping the house green. From adding fly-ash to the concrete that becomes the foundation to capturing rain water for use in the home, every aspect of the house has been considered. Reusing materials, energy efficiency, buying locally, all of these are factored in to every decision.

 

Of course, as one can see from the ‘Reviews & Discussions’ section on the Hulu page for the ‘Foundation’ episode, there are still plenty of points of contention about the choices being made. One commenter blasts the home for having steel supports, even though Kevin addresses the alternatives and explains his reasoning in the episode. Other commenters argue that the home is too big for Kevin’s small family.

Overall, the show is well-balanced in its approach to the various green options. There are a lot of factors to every part of the process, and all must be taken into account, including preserving the quality of life we as a society have come to expect from our homes.

With a light, fun tone and tips in every episode about how viewers can make small changes to green up their homes right now, Building Green is an important part of the discussion about how we start to work Green into everything we do.

For more information, visit Building Green’s website

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Evolution of the Revolution

by Matt DeNoto

Before the Industrial Revolution, travel was slow and dangerous. Goods were made by hand. Everything took much, much longer.

And that’s because there was a limiting factor to all human endeavors. Back then the limiting factor was power. The only means we had to affect change were our own hands or the animals we domesticated.

So we did the smart thing. We found a better source of power. At first it was steam. Over time we discovered oil. Suddenly power was, for the most part, no longer part of the equation. Human productivity flourished. We were able to make more food, stronger shelters, and faster modes of transportation and communication.

Today there are new limiting factors to our endeavors. These new limiting factors include the dwindling supply of natural materials, the buildup of waste, and the strains of urban populations.

Now we must do the smart thing again. We must find better ways of using what we have. That’s what the Green Revolution really is. A smart reaction to our problems.

I imagine that one of the reasons the Green Revolution is so polarizing is because it is a response to problems that we ourselves caused. We chose to use a limited resource that causes pollution when we burn it for power. We chose to bury our trash in the ground, rather than find ways of re-incorporating it into the flow of goods. We chose to allow cities to become clogged beyond their reasonable capacities.

Why didn’t we see it earlier? Why have we not been self-correcting all along?

For one thing, we didn’t have the information. Sure, burning oil churns out nasty-smelling fumes, but the fumes dissipate and then they’re gone. As far as we knew, trash buried was gone for good and would never bother anyone again.

It’s only over the past couple of decades that our collective consciousness has really started putting the pieces together. And a lot of that has to do with a technology that simply didn’t exist previously. Computers.

The ability to store and manipulate huge amounts of data has finally shown us the consequences of our choices. Computer models are what tell us that the climate changes we’re seeing now do not line up with nature. They tell us when we can expect every oil well to run dry.

And just as computers were able to show us the problem, they are now being utilized to formulate the solutions. They are modeling more efficient batteries and cities. They are finding the ideal placement for solar arrays and wind turbines. Perhaps even more significantly, the internet has allowed like-minded individuals to come together and form plans of action.

Just as railroads and the telegraph helped speed up the Industrial Revolution, so our modern means of communication are building the momentum of the Green Revolution.

I guess the point I’m getting at is that the Green Revolution is not terribly revolutionary. And that’s a good thing. We’ve been through this before. It should be a comforting thought to those who believe we as a people don’t have a capacity for change, and it should be a wake-up call for those who don’t want to.

At the same time, there are those who feel we are not moving fast enough. It can be hard to look at the huge problems facing humanity in the future and not feel frustrated with it for the slow pace of change. To those people, I hope this little meditation has a calming effect. It’s only been a relatively small amount of time that we’ve known enough to see the problems we’re causing.

It will take time, but we’re now doing the smart thing.

community recycling

By Matt DeNoto

If you live in an apartment building in Los Angeles (as I do), you may have this sticker on your dumpster:

I first noticed it a few months ago. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I called the number to see what the deal was. Apparently all the trash that gets put into the dumpster is picked up by Crown Disposal and then, instead of heading straight to the landfill, it is dropped off at Community Recycling in Sun Valley. Over the phone, I asked what, exactly, did they recycle. “Paper, plastics, glass, you know, everything.” My first instinct (being a cynic) was suspicion; was this for real or was it just a hollow PR smokescreen to make residents feel like they didn’t have to take responsibility for doing any recycling because it’s all being done for them?

So I asked for a tour. And they said yes.

From the outside, Community Recycling starts with a large, flat expanse covered with huge piles of garbage. Bulldozers move the different piles around while garbage trucks arrive to drop off their precious cargo. Just beyond lies the facility itself, an interesting-looking jumble of structures connected together like a hamster’s habitrail. One box-like structure, a couple of stories up off the ground, is connected to the next by a downward sliding cylinder. Unfortunately, I was only allowed to take one picture while I was there, and here it is:

This is Mr. Basura, who sits in the Community Recycling main offices when not out teaching children about garbage and recycling. I was told this by Nicole, Community Recycling’s PR person, who would be giving the tour to me and couple of other community members. This was going to be the first tour specifically for community members. Nicole had previously been giving them only to schools. Once we’d all arrived, Nicole brought us up to a presentation room where the tour would begin.

At this point, I am going to stop using the word ‘tour.’ Because, as it turned out, the morning consisted mostly of a slideshow that Nicole narrated for us, followed by a brief walk around the outside of the facility on the sidewalk (basically the same view anyone driving by would get). While it was generous for the company to bring us in and give us some information, tour is a bit generous of a word.

The first slide was of a pie chart, labeled 1999 California Waste Characterization. As Nicole explained, the chart represented a breakdown of all the different types of garbage California threw away in 1999. It represented trash not just from residents, but also businesses and industry. Easily the biggest pie slice was Organic Waste, which includes food and yard waste. (The chart may be based off this study by the California Integrated Waste Management Board. According to this study, organic waste also includes rubber, textiles and carpet.) The next biggest slice was Paper. Then C&D (Construction & Demolition). Much smaller were the slices for Plastic, Metal and Glass.

In order to recycle as much as possible, Nicole said, Community Recycling devised three separate processes to handle almost all the different categories.

The first process handles ‘traditional’ waste, which includes the trash collected from my dumpster, along with other residential and office-based garbage. When the garbage trucks drop off the trash, it is first loaded into a trommel, a big cylindrical tumbler that shreds the waste out of the garbage bags and separates it for the next step. The waste leaves the trommel and is loaded onto a conveyor belt where workers pull out whatever looks recyclable.

At this point I asked Nicole about the privacy concerns associated with having people go through every piece of garbage someone throws away. She indicated that there was no hard and fast policy in place, but there were supervisors watching over the workers at all times and the pace of the work doesn’t really allow the trash to be inspected that closely. She did advise that sensitive information should always be shredded before being thrown away.

The workers separate out the recyclables into their appropriate categories: paper, metal, plastic, and glass. These are then pressed into large bales, where they can be sent out to other plants for the actual recycling process.

So once again, we are faced with a bit of a misnomer. Community Recycling doesn’t actually recycle these materials. It sorts waste and sends it along, either to be recycled or (what’s left over) to the landfill. Perhaps we simply haven’t yet thoroughly enough defined the concept of ‘recycling.’ The Community Recycling facility mostly sorts waste and then sends it off to other places. Does that count as recycling? It’s a noble and necessary process either way, but we may need some new terms to parse down the steps of what ultimately is ‘recycling.’

Tangents aside, the bales are sent off to other recycling plants. For the majority of materials, this means a trip overseas.

I asked Nicole about contamination. Doesn’t having all the trash mixed together result in a lower-grade product? Nicole’s answer, which I can’t really argue with, is that if the recycling plants are buying it, it must be good enough. So apparently separating and cleaning the different classes isn’t really that big of a deal for people throwing things away.

The only real piece of advice Nicole had for residents was to hold onto ‘hazardous’ materials. These include batteries and CFLs, which should be recycled at a dedicated center that handles those types of items.

I then asked Nicole how much ‘traditional’ waste gets recycled and how much gets sent along to the landfill. She said about 20% is recycled. It doesn’t sound like much, but it must be remembered that most of the products we use and throw away were never designed to be recycled, as I’ve mentioned in a previous article. Even items that can be recycled, like a plastic bottle, cannot be recycled into new plastic bottles. They are ‘downcycled’ into less valuable plastic items, like park benches or speed bumps. For products that are made from several different classes of items, like a toy with metal gears inside a plastic shell, the work necessary to break the item down is not cost-effective. It gets sent to the landfill.

The second process is exclusively for the ‘organic wastes,’ mostly food. Community Recycling takes the wastes to its composting facility, the biggest in the nation. One hundred and fifty acres of compost. Here the waste is laid down in huge, seven-hundred-yard long mounds. As the composting process takes place, the centers of the mounds reach well over one hundred degrees. The facility has a machine that rolls over the mounds, churning the compost to ensure that every bit is processed.

One of the great things about this process is that most of the waste doesn’t come from you and me. Community Recycling gathers the food waste from those who throw it away the most: restaurants, cafeterias and grocery stores. When produce goes bad, grocery stores load it up into the cardboard boxes in which they receive it and hand it over to Community Recycling. An interesting part of the process is that the food is dumped onto the composting mounds as it is received, boxes and all. These boxes may be laced with plastic or wax, but they’re left on the mounds during the composting process. The big churning machines break up the foreign material into strips, which makes it easy to filter out at the end of the process, resulting in clean, pure compost. It generally takes about three months to get from food to compost. This is sold to local farmers, or used at one of the four thousand acres of Community Recycling-owned farms.

The final process is strictly for C&D. Constructing or demolishing a building results in a completely different kind of waste than living in a home with a family or working in an office, but the opportunity for recycling is still great. The main types of waste from this process are wood, metal and drywall.

The metal is sold off to be melted down and recycled.

The wood is processed into woodchips, which are then transported to one of Community Recycling’s two biomass power facilities in Central California. Together, the two facilities generate over thirty-five megawatts of power.

The drywall is broken down into its component parts, namely paper and gypsum. The paper is recycled and the gypsum is broken down into a dirt-like powder. This powder can then be used for fertilizer or for erosion control because of its excellent water absorption and retention properties.

As one who is familiar with the economic arguments AGAINST recycling (namely that recycled material is more expensive than pure, virgin material), I asked Nicole whether or not the plant pays for itself. Nicole said the plant was owned by a private company and did indeed pay its own way.

At this point, the presentation ended and Nicole led us out of the building to the sidewalk, where we looked at the facility a bit. She showed us a large pile of compost and offered for us to touch it. We declined.

It was a bit anti-climatic, but still an informative morning. As I mentioned earlier, this was the first ‘tour’ specifically for community members. Community Recycling is slowly reaching out to the public, as their currently half-unfinished website demonstrates.

Community Recycling is important not just for the work it does, but also because it demonstrates that recycling can be a successful business in and of itself. As the Revolution progresses, Community Recycling could become a model for others entering the Green Industry.

But for now, it’s just nice knowing my own garbage is going to good use.

opinion: Addicted To (Snake) Oil

by Matt DeNoto

 

Just four weeks ago, I wrote a piece for this site extolling the virtues of ‘Cradle-To-Cradle’ design, in which products are planned from conception to be as environmentally friendly as possible. I mentioned the book Cradle To Cradle: Remaking The Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart. At the bottom of the piece, The Golden Spiral’s editor placed a link to video of a talk given by William McDonough, in which he details a city being built in China founded on C2C. The city would provide food and energy for all of its inhabitants, without producing any waste to sully the surrounding lands. The video left me with a sense of wonder.

But it also left me with a sense of unease. After all, the book was published in 2002, and it ends with the authors optimistically discussing their plans with Ford to redesign their factories. The video was from a talk McDonough gave in 2005.

So…where are the results? Why are we not hearing about C2C on the news? What about the Ford plant? What about the city in China? Is there really so much of a bias against environmentalism that the world would ignore these amazing accomplishments?

No. There is not. The actual answer is more complicated than that, and while it may not have much to do with the environment, it has everything to do with nature. Human nature.

An intriguing and revealing profile in the November 2008 issue of Fast Company reminds us that the people at the forefront of the environmental movement are just as subject to the whims and weaknesses of life as anyone else. While William McDonough has done an excellent job spreading the word about the problems our world faces, his record with solutions is less than exemplary.

That city in China? It now sits abandoned and rotting. Not only did it cost far more than estimated, the design was fatally flawed. The city planned to use corn husks as biofuel to run the village. But the Chinese farmers who would actually be living there already had a use for the corn husks, as feed for their goats. When presented with this conflict by his crew as the village was being constructed, McDonough was evasive. He seemed only to visit when there was a camera crew following him around, planning to portray him as a visionary who could save the world.

And the reason you don’t hear cradle-to-cradle more often? Because McDonough’s company has the term trademarked, and they charge hefty fees for its use. According to the Fast Company article McDonough has been heard to say, ‘I want to be the Bill Gates of sustainability.’ The article makes the case that by this statement McDonough is not ju st referring to the way Gates is ubiquitous with computing, but also the way it has made him an icon. And rich.

To be sure, McDonough has brought attention to the Green Revolution and that is a good thing. He’s a charismatic speaker who leaves his audiences shining with hope. But he appears unwilling to open his tightly-controlled world up either to the rigorous scientific testing that refines and improves ideas like C2C (and keeps disasters like the city in China from happening), nor to the masses who would spread C2C around the world, but as a philosophy first and a marketing term second.

The article concludes with McDonough seeming to gain a sense of self-awareness. An acceptance that the way he has been trying to get things done for the last couple of decades is not working and may in fact be harming the overall movement. But whether that will be enough to convince him to change his ways will be up to him. Whether it will be too late for the rest of us to care will be up to us. Now that the Revolution seems to be gaining momentum, there will be new icons to take McDonough’s place.

The Revolution came about when people began to question the world as it was. The world that made toys with toxic chemicals, the world that burned or buried its trash, the world that puts profit ahead of basic human life. The Fast Company article serves as a stark reminder that we must continue to question everything. Especially those who would sell themselves as saviors.

opinion: green backs

By Matt DeNoto

What if doing the best thing for the environment also meant never having to pay income taxes again?

One of the major factors slowing down the Green Revolution is cost. New technologies, new infrastructure and new designs all cost money, even though they’re not (yet) commercially competitive. So where would the money come from?

Visionary book Natural Capitalism, by Amory & Hunter Lovins (co-founders of the Rocky Mountain Institute) and Paul Hawken, paints a picture of a world where doing the right thing is not only the most responsible choice, but it’s also the most economical. And it all rides on one simple fact that lawmakers everywhere should come to accept.

Taxes are a burden.

Like jury duty and voting, paying taxes has been pitched to us as a civic duty. But at the end of the day, no one looks at taxes that way. All we see is the money draining from our wallets. First through the deductions from our paychecks, and then again through sales tax when we go to buy anything. Come April, everyone in America does their best to pay as little in taxes as possible.

As it stands today, taxes appear to be punishment for doing exactly what we’re supposed to be doing – working hard and contributing to society. What if we took the negative connotations associated with taxes and used them to encourage more conscientious behavior?

The first step is doing away with all income taxes. The second step is reapplying those taxes to practices and materials that do harm to the community and the world. Under this scenario, when a contractor was shopping for windows for a new building, the most affordable windows would no longer be the ones made from the flimsiest material. Shoddily made windows don’t insulate well, and they would be taxed more heavily for it. Windows that do insulate well would be subject to less tax, thus helping make them more competitive. Recycled paper would be taxed at a lower rate than paper made from virgin pulp. Gasoline would be taxed at a higher rate than sustainable biofuels. Sustainable fish, sustainable wood, sustainable sources of heat, products made without toxic chemicals, all of these would become commercially viable options.

The really wonderful thing about this system is that it reinforces where responsibility truly lies, with the consumer. If a homeowner wants a certain brand of siding on his/her home that isn’t as environmentally friendly as a different brand, the homeowner knows s/he is paying the price for that choice.

Another benefit of the system is its flexibility. As consumers become more and more aware of their purchasing power, unsustainable products and practices will become uneconomical and go bankrupt. Now the government can redistribute the taxes in order to encourage even MORE sustainability.

It appears that the process may already be starting, albeit slowly and without much fanfare. Part of the recent stimulus plan passed by Congress is income tax cuts, which as President Obama has pointed out we can expect to see factored into our paychecks next month. The money for the tax cuts will come from the carbon ‘cap and trade’ plan that Obama is currently trying to get through Congress. The plan will most likely mean, as Republicans are quick to point out, that energy prices will rise. But it also means that we as consumers have more money in our pockets. It will be up to us whether we use that extra money to pay the higher energy prices, or put the money toward finding ways to cut our energy use altogether. It means that the choice most industries have made to pollute indiscriminately is one we will no longer have to carry on our backs.

So what do we do when the system is as sustainable as it can get, and there’s nothing left to tax?  I think that’s a problem our great-great-great-great-grandchildren will be happy to have.

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