Is Green Even Possible?

Is it even possible to stem the tide of global warming? What hardware would accomplish a roll back in global carbon dioxide emissions, say to cut them in half by 2050?

According to Copenhagen based green author Bjorn Lomborg, the good news is that a 50% emissions reduction is doable. We simply need to build a mere:

• 30 new nuclear plans
• 17,000 windmills
• 400 biomass power plants
• two massive-sized hydrocarbon facilities
• 42 coal and gas power plans with a better carbon-capture technology

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the list above is not what we need to build by 2050. It’s what we’d have to build each year until 2050. The global price tag to do that is $5 trillion a year, says Bjorn Lomborg. An amount that’s as likely to get spent as the US congress is to join hands and sing Kumbaya.

So we’re supposed to throw up our hands and wait for the tidal waves? Nope, says Lomborg. The solution is a huge, federally subsidized R&D investment in solid-state physics and electrics engineering. Its aim is to make solar power cost-beneficial for the common electricity user. Said in other words, presently solar, wind and other green energies represent a paltry 0.6 percent of global energy consumption. Lomborg argues that R&D investment could lower the cost of solar panels, boost their efficiency and make solar affordable for the millions, dramatically raising that percentage.

Lomborg cites the example of mainframe computers, unaffordable for the common man in the nineteen-seventies, now ubiquitous because R&D dramatically reduced P.C. costs and they became are as common as toasters. Make solar electricity similarly cheaper, less expensive than fossil fuel electricity, and the market forces will accomplish our clean energy goals. Makes cents to me.

Bjorn Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool it and is one of both Esquire and Time Magazines’ most influential people of the twenty-first century.

Bjorn Lomborg

From the reception desk to the shipping department, the video shows you areas of office greening opportunities

If one of your missions is to green your office, a new 25 minute video from My Green Mind can help. The new video titled The Ultimate Guide to Greening an Office, shows employers and employees how to cut office waste and reduce energy consumption.

 The Ultimate Guide to Greening an Office focuses comprehensively on the major areas of office opportunity including:

• commuting to work and telecommuting;
• office lighting;
• tactics for office heating and cooling;
• digital filing and the dream of the paperless office;
• paper consumption;
• office meetings and presentations;
• purchasing tactics for going green;
• office furniture considerations;
• safe electronics recycling;
• healthy office cleaning;
• inside air pollution;
• electricity consumption tips and more.

 The video is informational, not an advertorial.

“We’ve set out to a offer a practical guide that’s chock full of specific actions employers and employees can take,” said My Green Mind’s Marketing Manager, Michael Grossman. “Tips are appropriate for offices of all sizes from the small home office to the facilities of a mid-size corporation,” he noted. “The video does not cover green office design, which is technical and architectural in scope, but rather it suggests changes in workplace habits and ways of operating that will absolutely reduce an office’s carbon footprint. Every step will positively help the environment and many will also reduce corporate costs.”

The twenty-five minute The Ultimate Guide to Greening an Office program is available at www.mygreenmind.com. After viewing the video, a link is provided for a free checklist to help office mangers implement the video’s recommendations.

Honestly some days I wake up and rub my eyes thinking, this has to be a dream. Why would Congress allocate stimulus dollars to China to make windmills for a West Texas wind farm that Americans could make?

U.S. Renewable Energy Group, Cielo Wind Power and A-Power Energy Generation Systems, the business consortium behind the Texas based wind farm, has asked congress for nearly a half billion dollars so the project’s 240 windmills can be built in a turbine factory in the city of Shenyang, China.

Despite congress’ undisputed expertise in windbaggery, the Chinese understand what the project means to their economy while we don’t. China, like India, labels renewable technology a top priority, calling it a “strategic industry”. Thus categorized, they give free land, low cost loans and they underwrite jobs for green collar workers employed by companies developing green technology.

We, despite having lost 40,000 manufacturing companies–that’s right companies–in a decade, turn to China to manufacture our windmill turbines. We’re sending US jobs to China along with nearly half a billion US stimulus dollars. With U.S. support, the consortium is contracting with Chinese firms, not American companies, to build Texas’ turbines.

2,330 jobs will come on line, created by the $1.5 billion dollar West Texas farm. That sounds good until you learn that 2,000 of those jobs are in China.

The consortium argues that the Chinese-built wind turbines, made with low cost labor and benefiting 

from a subsidized currency, will cost less than American made turbines. But are they cheaper in the long run, given the generally acknowledged higher maintenance costs and poorer quality of the Chinese made turbines? The calculation further shifts to favor stateside production if you factor in the increased domestic tax revenue when Americans go to work, and reduced social costs when fewer collect unemployment.
 
And while we’re talking about China, are you familiar with my favorite Chinese proverb?

“IF WE DON’T CHANGE DIRECTION,
 WE ARE LIBLE TO END UP WHERE WE ARE HEADED”

If U.S. tax dollars can’t be spent to stimulate domestic green jobs, then where indeed are we headed?

Are we heading for an economy based on easily replicated services? ‘Cause if that’s where we’re headed, then we will continue to see a descent into lower wages, decreased buying power, and a quietly dissolving middle class.

Which brings me to my admittedly lame takeoff on another old saying:

“PEOPlE WHO LIVE IN GREEN HOUSES
DON”T NOT NEED FOREIGN LOANS”

What kind of middle class are we betting on? One in which the workers manufacture breakthrough green technologies? Or one dependent on revenues from shopkeepers and clericals? And I am a shopkeeper!

Finally, what about the military implications of ceding yet another manufacturing sector to China? Should, God forbid, we have to confront the powerful Chinese militarily, would we ask them to please build our weapons before the war starts? Would we ask them to add the cost to our tab?
 
Take a hard look at the West Texas windmill project and the powerful consortium behind it. Perhaps federal dollars provided for the project should stipulate that turbines carry a “Made in America” stamp.

Credit to Leo W. Gerard for bringing this to our attention.

(Comment by My Green Mind’s I Michael Grossman. We welcome your comments as well.)