DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

A few months back, I promised you that I would be investigating the green aspects of Nashville’s various mayoral candidates. The election’s not ’till August, so I figured I had plenty of time—but then one of the candidates forced my hand. David Briley made the following proposals:

• Create a Mayor’s Office of Sustainability to coordinate public-private environmental cooperation, to study methods of lowering carbon emissions in Nashville, to create an environmental standards report, to “address environmental racism and injustice” and to develop environmental education programs for school children;

• Establish “green building standards” for public and private construction, requiring new Metro construction to meet environmental standards and incentivizing private developers so they would build environmentally-friendly projects “through density bonuses, through fast-track approval of green projects in our community – we can do that and save the taxpayers money,” Briley said;

• Dedicate one cent from the existing property tax levy for Metro to buy private open space.

• Expand curbside recycling throughout the entire county — from the Urban Services District into the General Services District — on a voluntary, subscription basis;

• Encourage the use of “hybrid, low-emission, and alternative fuel vehicles” by creating “a Metro fleet of hybrid vehicles” and encouraging public use of green vehicles through incentives such as cheaper and priority parking; Briley would lobby the Tennessee General Assembly so that it would let such vehicle owners use HOV lanes;

• Have Metro plant trees or other greenery in the city’s rights-of-way and public property — such as in medians and intersection islands — and have Metro plant at least 1,000 trees annually;

• Establish a target for Davidson County to reduce emissions levels 10 percent below 2000 levels by 2014.
Very good beginning, Mr. Briley! So I got on the stick and mailed a fairly lengthy and detailed list of questions to the other candidates. Karl Dean’s campaign and Bob Clement’s campaign both responded, but Howard Gentry and Buck Dozier have ignored me, so far. I’m not surprised to be ignored by Mr. Dozier, who after all is the godfather of those obnoxious new animated billboards we are now plagued with, but I’m a little disappointed not to have heard from Howard Gentry. The Clement campaign requested my question list and promised a reply, but hasn’t actually done so yet. Karl Dean had this to say to me on the subject of creating a sustainable Nashville:

“I am dedicated to making Nashville an even more environmentally-friendly city. One of the biggest contributors to global warming is vehicle emissions, especially those produced in the inner city by diesel vehicles. Metro government can make an impact by using alternative fuels like biodiesel in mass transit buses, garbage collection trucks, and school buses. It can be used without engine modifications in any diesel vehicle including cars, buses, trucks, and off-road equipment. I would pursue the use of federal and state grants to pay for infrastructure changes for refueling stations and encourage Metro School and MTA to do the same.

“Increased use of mass transit will also greatly cut greenhouse gases. Nashville should begin to plan now for its future use of mass transit. But before additional transit options are funded, we need to make the most efficient use of what we already have. Mass transit will only work if we have enough flexible routes. We need to study the current routing plans, get customer feedback and look to other cities that have successful plans.

“Education programs aimed at better public awareness of the causes and solutions for green house gases can make a major impact.  The public is open to hear about this issue and seems eager to be a part of the solution. We need to lead this wave and make the most of it.

“Lowering electricity usage is important for reducing overall greenhouse gases. Again, public awareness goes a long way. Grants, incentives, recognition programs, getting schools involved with the education and publicity, are all inexpensive ways to “get started.” Partnering with NES, Nashville Gas, the Home Builders Association, and engineering and the architectural associations for outreach programs is the best way to get some expertise and free assistance for the city.

“I am also a huge supporter of our Greenways and our Park System. I’ve sat on the Greenways for Nashville Board. And I am committed to the implementation of the entire 10-year masterplan for Parks and Greenways.

All the best,

Karl Dean”

I appreciate Mr. Dean’s views, but I would have to give David Briley points for being “fustest with the mostest,” as the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, whose statue adorns the southern approach to our city, used to say. I would also give David Briley lifestyle points for having spent time teaching in Ecuador and getting to know the third world first hand, and a different kind of lifestyle points for using Jack Johnson’s “Let it Be Sung” as the song on his Myspace site. Dean’s Myspace site is run by his 19-year old son. He doesn’t feature any music.

On a perhaps more important note, dealing with crime in Nashville, Dean proposes to “Create a Plain-Clothes Neighborhood Intervention Unit. Citizens are on their best behavior when they know they are being watched. The Neighborhood Intervention Unit will reinstate the use of plain-clothes officers in unmarked police cars for daily patrol.”

This caused me to wonder if surveillance cameras would be the next step, and left me feeling slightly creepy.

Briley, on the other hand, notes that “10,000 young adults ages 16 to 24 in Nashville are responsible for 80 percent of our crimes, and that taking measures now to reach out to struggling students may help change this.” This seems like a much less scattershot approach to me, and one that I would feel more comfortable supporting—plus which, it would probably be cheaper than hiring plainclothes cops. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and all that.

So, at this point in the marathon, David Briley is far and away the “greenest” candidate running, with Karl Dean a healthy second, Bob Clement saying he’s gonna get with the program, and no word from Howard Gentry or Buck Dozier. Stay tuned.

music: Greg Brown, “One Big Town”

Stacey Campfield, a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives, has gotten a lot of publicity for his bill proposing that aborted foetuses be issued death warrants. This bill was termed “the most preposterous bill I’ve seen” by Judiciary committee chairman Rob Briley. It joins Campfield’s list of wacko unpassable legislation, such as a bill that would require women to pay their husbands’ legal bills if they filed for an order of protection and it was denied. Some have termed this “the wife beater protection act.” Campfield has also introduced legislation to substitute a tax on pornography for the state sales tax on food, and another bill intended to prevent university professors from introducing their opinions into classroom discussions. In his two terms in the legislature, he has not introduced any legislation that actually passed.

Campfield actually managed to win a contested election to get into the Tennessee House, unlike many of his fellow Republicans and Democrats. His opponent promises to try harder next time, and the ten thousand people who voted for him should be ashamed of themselves for giving this bully a bully pulpit.

If Stacey Campfield were serious about being a Christian and upholding the preciousness of life, he would be doing something to free Paul House from death row here in Tennessee. Paul House was found innocent by the US Supreme Court, but somehow, nearly a year later, he is still in jail, suffering terribly from multiple sclerosis and getting virtually no medical care for his condition. Call Governor Phil Bredesen at (615) 741-2001 and ask him to grant a full pardon to Paul House.

music: Eliza Gilkyson, “Man of God”

I was cruising along in my car the other day, listening to the competition—NPR. They were telling the story of Jennifer Harris, a perhaps unique female Marine helicopter pilot, who had died when her helicopter was shot down while evacuating wounded soldiers. The profile that NPR ran characterized her as a truly extraordinary human being—not just motivated, but smart, compassionate and outgoing—and now very, very dead. I started crying so hard I just about had to pull over to the side of the road. Yes, I know she was a Marine, and I’m a pacifist. She was also a human being.

Tears of rage, tears of grief—because here was one of America’s best and brightest, killed just five days before she was due to leave Iraq. We are entering a very challenging time, when we are going to need all the good hearted, intelligent, clear-thinking people we can muster. To lose Jennifer Harris in a war that “should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and on which we’ve now spent $400 billion, and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted” isn’t just a tragedy, it’s a crime.

I am quoting Barak Obama here. Senator Obama gets—not the truth in strange places, but the “profile in cowardice” award for backtracking on that remark. Those three thousand deaths (and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths we so conveniently sweep under the rug) and four million Iraqi refugees are the “collateral damage” from criminal fraud at the highest levels of the US government. None of Bush’s stated reasons for invading Iraq have turned out to be valid. Saddam was not a threat to anyone outside his country—the country Don Rumsfield and friends helped him control. There were no WMDs. The ones the US government gave him in the eighties were long gone. Establishing “democracy” in the Middle East was a bunch of hooey. Democracy cannot be imposed from the outside.

Our government’s political meddling has opened the way for Iraq to become a radical Shiite state like its neighbor, Iran—much to the dismay of Iraq’s other neighbor, Saudi Arabia. Putting more American troops into this situation is like pouring more gasoline on a fire in an attempt to put it out. Our army is in a situation it can’t fix, and to call insisting that it stay there “supporting the troops” is totally hypocritical, especially coming from an administration that has been repeatedly called to task for failure to supply our soldiers adequately, and for cutting back on the benefits and care available to injured veterans. The US military has been sent up in a box kite called Iraq, and to call insisting that it stay there and be shredded “supporting the troops” is another Orwellism from an administration that increasingly seems to conduct business in Newspeak.

In another Orwellian development, the Bush junta continues to rattle its saber at Iran over its alleged support of Shi’ite insurgents in Iraq, as if nobody noticed that the Iraqi government is Shi’a dominated and the Iranians have nothing to gain from destabilizing it. Most of the violence comes from Sunni groups, who are supported by Saudi Arabia—but the Saudis are our friends—or sell us lots of oil, which in the junta’s view is the same thing—so we’re not going to fuss at them. Until we dominate Iran’s oil just as handily as we control the oil in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, Iran will be the enemy.

Now the Democrats are creating the appearance of moving to withdraw US troops from Iraq. I say, “creating the appearance” because they are talking very specifically about pulling US combat troops out—the operational word here is “combat.” The US has established five very permanent bases in Iraq—four heavily fortified military bases and the likewise heavily fortified “green zone.” (Did they call it that just to smear our party?–but, I digress…) Any “withdrawal” that leaves these bases intact will not be seen by anyone in the Arab world as a withdrawal. It just positions the Dems to be scratching their heads in a year and asking, “why do they hate our freedom?” We have no right to make free with their country, their resources, and their way of life. That’s called “imperialism.” That’s what they hate.

We need to admit that occupying Iraq was as much an act of aggression as the Nazi occupation of Poland. We need to bring our war criminals to justice and make them pay the price for this oil war. American taxpayers should not have to bear the financial burden of the Bush junta’s calumny. Not that we won’t paying the price for their crimes in other ways even if we donate all of the combined treasuries of Halliburton, Exxon, and Shell to the Iraqi rebuilding effort, but you’ve gotta draw a line somewhere.

And Obama doesn’t seem to be the man to draw the line. He retreated from his honest statement about the lives of young Americans that have been wasted in Mr. Bush’s oil gambit. Furthermore, although he waxed eloquent over the evils of the Military Commissions Act, he has yet to cosponsor the bill that could repeal it. On the domestic front, despite his populist veneer, he has not endorsed universal availability of medicaid, although this simple solution to the insurance/health industry crisis is obvious to most Americans.

Why is Obama, like Bush, looking more and more like he’s all hat, no cattle? Just like Bush, it’s because of the money. The supercharged, superstar atmosphere that has been created around the Presidential race means it takes lots of money to be a player, and the only way to get lots of money is to get it from those who already have it—defense industries and insurance companies—thus insuring that there will be no radical new ideas introduced into the presidential debate. It insures that America will fail. It insures that Jennifer Harris died in vain. I put my fingers against the glass, and bowed my head, and cried….

Sen. Obama, there was no need to apologize. We ARE wasting our young people’s lives in Iraq. Iraq was not a problem until George Bush made it one. His obsession with Iraq has diverted our nation’s attention from the real issues we should be addressing: an environment that is spinning out of control; a dangerously selfish obsession with material security; an overdrawn and inefficient energy supply; loss of national and local self-sufficiency; and lack of accessible health care coupled with a media-induced ignorance of good lifestyle habits, to name the top few. These, not some ephemeral “victory in Iraq,” are the missions we need to accomplish.

music: Richard Thompson, “’Dad’s Gonna Kill Me”

There was an unexpected development in Texas this month. TXU, that state’s largest utility, had been gearing up for a battle with environmentalists over its plan to build fifteen new, dirty, coal-fired power plants in Texas. It wasn’t just hardcore hippie environmentalists fighting this— the Mayor of Fort Worth and a coalition of other Texas mayors had raised over six hundred thousand dollars to try and stop these plants. Texas Governor Rick Perry, a Bush protege, to judge by his behavior, (“We’re not going to let these bureaucrats jerk us around,” he said, as he attempted to jerk everyone else around.) had moved to”fast-track” the approval process—the courts ruled that he couldn’t. The University of Texas did a study and announced that the plants would, no surprise, negatively impact air quality over most of Texas, dropping it below federal standards in places as far apart as Beaumont, Houston, and Fort Worth. The plants would spew an estimated 78 million tons of carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere annually, twice what California’s clean car initiative is expected to save. The Environmental Defense Fund had taken up the struggle, but didn’t expect to succeed in stopping the plants.

It was starting to look like a Mexican standoff in Texas, when a couple of strangers stepped into the bar and changed everything: Two large private equity firms–Kohlberg Kravis and Reilly and Texas Pacific–made TXU a buyout offer it just about couldn’t refuse. It seems that, due to investor concerns over the environmental battle shaping up, the company’s stock price was slipping, (which is a grievous sin in the religion of economics) and the private investors’ offer would reimburse TXU’s stockholders for their losses. Halleljuah, brothers and sisters, we have been saved!

KKR and TP offered an olive branch to the environmentalists, as well: they would drop eight of the eleven proposed coal plants, pledge to reduce emissions at all of TXU’s plants to 1990 levels, begin an energy-conservation program, erect wind turbines, and put its support behind carbon-emissions caps, which, if not quite a carbon tax, are at least on the way there. The Environmental Defense Fund has hailed this as a victory and dropped its opposition in the case, but the three plants that may still be built are the three dirtiest, according to Texas Public Citizen. Across the country, utilities are trying to build a hundred and fifty new coal plants before the emissions standards get raised. That would inject about another eight billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually…can you say, “worst-case scenario,” boys and girls? The fight will go on.

I had to wonder why, in a sunny, windy place like Texas, they were building coal-fired power plants in the first place. I learned that there is local coal in Texas—lignite, which is the youngest, most polluting grade of coal. Local coal—how green! Not! Well, digging it up and burning it now means that people millions of years in the future, when it might have become bitumous or anthracite coal, will never be tempted. We’re saving future generations from sin by burning lignite, yes, sir. Of course, they’ll have to deal with the carbon dioxide, but hey, that’s a small price to pay, isn’t it, kids?

What this story reveals to me is, on one hand, the depth of the environmental movement—with William H. Reilly, daddy Bush’s man at the EPA, coming across as one of the good guys in this story. We have Goldman-Sachs, renowned for its dizzying levels of employee compensation, helping broker the environmental deal and saying they will not fund projects that “significantly convert or degrade a critical natural habitat.” On the other hand, it shows the limited vision that still rules. Centralized power grids and centralized governments go hand in hand. Even with the best of intentions, they respond poorly to local needs, and they are not subject to local control.

At a less broad, philosophical level, we can look at TXU’s new owners’ pledge to reduce power prices by ten percent. Texas Public Citizen has pointed out that TXU’s rates are about 30% higher than those charged by co-ops and municipal utilities. BUT one of the things that makes people conserve is higher prices. That has contributed to California’s status as one of the most energy-efficient states in the country. Texas, by the way, is one of the least energy-efficient states in the country. If Texans used energy like Californians, they wouldn’t be building power plants, they’d be closing them down.

Here we are up against one of the drawbacks of our worship of economic growth—the notion that it is better for utilities to sell more and more electricity and make more and more money doing it, as if there were an infinite supply of energy and no environmental consequences for using it. California attempted to counter this with a technique called “decoupling,” in which utilities were closely regulated by the state and allowed to make a reasonable return on their investment regardless of how much electricity they sold. This was swept away by the deregulation mania of the nineties, when voodoo economics put a spell on America that resulted, for California, in the energy trainwreck that removed Gray Davis and put Arnold Schwarzenegger in charge of the state—and about the first thing Ahnuld did was effect a low -dollar settlement of the Enron lawsuit…but, I digress….

The perceived danger from global warming is great enough that some people with enough money to matter are taking it seriously, and for the foreseeable future, very unspectacular events like buying power companies and changing their policies are the ways in which we will inch back towards a planet in balance.

But what about the unforseeable future? We have a tendency to assume that things will continue to be as they have always been. Well, those money people are doing their best to get ahead of the curve on that one, too. I have recently read a document entitled, “ Impacts of Climate Change–A System Vulnerability Approach to Consider the Potential Impacts to 2050 of a Mid-Upper Greenhouse Gas Emissions Scenario.” It’s put out by the Global Business Network subdivision of The Monitor Group. GBN “specializes in helping organizations adapt and compete more effectively and more responsibly in the face of mounting uncertainty—whether it’s uncertainty about their future, the future of their industry, or the future of the world at large…. GBN’s consulting and training services focus on strategy, decision-making, innovation, visioning and alignment, and organizational and leadership development.”

The Monitor Group “ offers a portfolio of strategic consulting services to clients who seek to grow top-line revenue, shareholder value, and individual and organizational capabilities. The firm works with the world’s foremost business experts and thought leaders to help major multinational companies, governments and philanthropic institutions develop specialized capabilities in areas including competitive strategy, marketing and pricing strategy, innovation, national and regional economic competitiveness, non-profit management, technology/e-business, organizational design and development, and scenario planning.” Their best-known client is Muhamar Qaddafi, ruler of Libya, who has engaged them to modernize his country Chinese-style—economic liberalization without any letup in political repression. So Monitor Group and Global Business Network are not “good guys”–they’re typical, opportunistic neoliberals, the kind that are running (and ruining) the planet these days, so it’s important to know what they are thinking, especially on the issue of what kind of future we are all going to have together.

The white paper starts with a quote from futurist Thomas Homer-Dixon, who says, “I’m a believer in non-linear systems theory. I don’t think that a lot of these things will manifest themselves in an incremental way. I would expect, instead, that we might see some pretty sharp system shocks…. I think that the kind of crisis we might see would be a result of systems that are kind of stressed to the max already, where policymakers are trying to keep ten balls in the air simultaneously and keep all the various constituencies satisfied as best they can. And then there’s some exogenous shock on an already highly stressed system that produces a kind of overload situation.” Key phrase: “we might see some pretty sharp system shocks.”

So how does the business community propose to deal with “sharp system shocks” and still stay in business? First of all, what do they think might happen? GBN assumes the IPCC’s “A2” scenario, which postulates “continuously increasing population. Economic development is primarily regionally oriented and per capita economic growth and technological change more fragmented and slower than other (scenarios).” Basically, a continuation of current trends. The A2 scenario posits the most extreme rises in CO2, temperature, and sea level.

This could lead, speculates the report, to such things as “Increasing temperatures and rainfall result in the reemergence of malaria in the southern U.S. Local environmentalists mount a massive PR campaign to prevent the spraying of pesticides such as DDT, leaving the government with the dilemma of how to stop the disease from spreading.” To which I would add, that a combination of rising sea level, increased likelihood of tropical disease and the reluctance of insurers to guarantee the safety of homes and businesses in hurricane-prone areas could lead to the depopulation of the southern US. And then there’s the little item of insect resistance to pesticides…

Another scenario: “A paralyzing dust storm sweeps through Cairo, exacerbating an already precarious supply of water and food. The government’s inability to respond sparks riots in the streets and creates an opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood to step in as the de facto provider to the people, rallying them around the incompetencies of the state.” My comment: the business community would prefer a secular state to the Muslim Brotherhood/Hezbollah—but can they prevail over wind, sand, and declining rainfall?

Closer to home, the report posits: “A major earthquake in California combined with flooding along the eastern seaboard pushes a major reinsurer to the brink of bankruptcy. As a major financial crisis takes shape, the U.S. Treasury and a coalition of financial institutions devise a bailout plan.” My comment: because if millions of people can’t somehow be compensated for their losses, the US middle class will have taken a fatal hit. Any massive insurance bailout will also be hindered by the fact that most of our government’s credit has been used up paying for the war for oil in Iraq.

This one was interesting: “Climate change creates an influx of “participation science,” where amateurs become the leading purveyors of information related to the human impact of climate change. ClimatePulse.com, a user-generated online site that styles itself a “wikipedia of ecosystems,” becomes the “authority” on climate impacts, providing a heady mix of scientific half-truths and doomsday reporting on the local impacts of climate change. As it morphs into an organizational platform for transnational environmental activists, the site becomes one of the most frequently visited pages in the developed world.” So, they’re worried about us amateurs taking over, eh? Well, it’s a fine mess the professionals have got us into, isn’t it? Why the bleep should we trust the neoliberals any longer?

So…what does this business white paper say its wealthy clients should DO about the cascading crises that it forecasts? Learn to anticipate ‘em and ride ‘em out, basically—no “preventive” strategies are presented. And that’s the nut right there, folks—GBN and the Monitor Group, the cream of the economic brains at Harvard, seem to me to be agreeing here that things are spinning out of control and the best we can do is try and take a whole-systems approach to anticipating the breakdown of global—and local– order that will inevitably occur.

To quote further: “In its analysis of climate change impacts, this paper makes the assumption that the global political economy will continue to operate under more or less the same conditions as it does today—in other words, with a continued emphasis on expanding global GDP as the No. 1 economic priority, heavy reliance on fossil fuels, no radical redistribution of global wealth or power, and no major political breakthrough on how to curb global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. “ So—IF we can change any of these “givens”–and the more we can change, the better–there is a chance of ameliorating the bleak range of scenarios envisioned by the Harvard boys.

If we can’t change any of the current vectors of our culture, then this old gloom-and-doom voice in the wilderness isn’t a crazy pessimist—I’ve intuited what the smart money boys just made a lot of smart money figuring out.

music: Eliza Gilkyson, “Requiem”