Ideas Have Consequences. Bad Ideas Have Bad Consequences. Earth Day Reflections

Eight or nine days ago we celebrated Earth Day, touting the importance of taking care of this Third Rock from the Sun, Spaceship Earth.I personally concur with the idea of taking care of our world, being wise custodians of our home planet and its natural resources.

Being good steward of the earth and caring about people should not be mutually exclusive. This is what scares me when I read quotes like this one by John Davis, editor of Earth First! "Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.” That just flies in the face of everything I believe about the value of people. Clearly we're witnessing a collision of worldviews in our time.

Here are some quotes by well-known people who have been leaders of the Green movement. If you take their pronouncements to heart, it scares me that there may be people who might actually be cheering the loss of life taking place as a result of our current pandemic.

“I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

"The crippling human cover spread over the living layer of the Earth must forcibly be made lighter: breathing holes must be punctured in this blanket and the ecological footprint of man brushed away. Forms of boastful consumption must violently be crushed, the natality of the species violently controlled, and the number of those already born violently reduced — by any means possible." — Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 170

"Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental."
--Dave Forman, founder of Earth First

“We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into the Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion-guilt-free at last!”
--Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue)

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing… This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” --Economist editorial

“Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planet… Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”
—David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

Is COVID-19 anything like your "right virus" Mr. Graber? If you did not say this, I will remove it.

Here's another quote that seems especially disconcerting, in light of these present times.
“If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”--Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

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I'm curious if these people have any regrets about such ridiculous assertions? 

What do you think?

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Related Links
Earth Day: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
Speaking For Themselves
Could These Be Lines from Avengers Infinity War Part 2?

A Green-Themed Wordless Wednesday

It's Electric

I have a pet peeve and it's this. I find it annoying how some people, with a brassy personality and a measure of high-powered PR, can get a whole batch of publicity and dollars for ideas that are so full of holes they can't possibly float. No, that isn't quite the wording. It annoys me when people get publicity for very tentative things way off in the pipe dream realm while very real solutions, albeit incremental, are within our grasp.

Here's an example. Last fall the September 2008 issue of Wired magazine featured a cover story called The Future of the Electric Car, subtitled One man's audacious plan to change the way the world drives. The feature story was about an Israeli fellow named Shai Agassi whose idea is essentially an all-inclusive system of battery powered cars, re-charge systems and infrastructure that integrates computers, cars and GPS. It's a total system.

Here are a few clues to how things would work in a Better Place world.
1. Key fob tells how charged the battery is...
2. Driver unplugs and drives off...
3. During commute car locates three open parking spots to plug into during work day...
4. The car and energy control center connect and communicate...
5. While on the road, if re-charge needed, car OS locates best place for battery swap site...

Evidently it's this last item which is a central piece of Agassi's brainchild, I think. He envisions all these buildings around the country which operate like our car washes, where you drive in at one end and the equipment swaps the batteries so you can hit the road again quickly, efficiently, re-juiced.

But to be honest, I just can't picture it. First off, people hate waiting in lines. When I was growing up in New Jersey you had to go through annual vehicle inspections and if you weren't there a half hour before it opened, you could be in line for more than an hour, a line which sometimes stretched a block or more. Can you imagine having to wait in line to re-charge or swap out your battery every couple hundred miles?

The infrastructure issue alone for this system would be a nightmare. Converting enough parking meters and parking slots in cities like New York to accommodate a gazillion electric cars in need of re-charging would not be cheap or fast to implement. But this is not, as I see it, the biggest hurdle.

When I was at the New York Auto Show last year I saw a whole range of ideas for dealing with this issue, from hybrids to electric transmissions to hydrogen cells and the like. Before we see a technology become truly dominant, won't we have to see buy-in across the board to establish the infrastructure to implement it? Right now we have gas stations everywhere. There are so many gas stations that I almost never have to wait in line to fill 'er up. When we start a ramp up to one of these alternative technologies, how long will it take to put this infrastructure in place? Or more importantly, which infrastructure? Who is going to pay that kind of money to set up a system that may not become the dominant system of the future?

Video movies are a good example. VHS and Beta went head to head. Beta was better, I've been told, but VHS won out. In the automobile power game, a car wash costs about a million dollars. It takes time to recoup that investment. How much will these electric battery swapping stations cost to build or buy and own? Who is going to spend a million dollars on a technology that has a high possibility of not becoming the adopted system for tomorrow? The total rollout can be hundreds of billions... with no certainty of success either in implementation or adoption.

Well, Shai Agassi, on the force of his personal charisma alone, appears to have garnered $300 million seed money for the company he's called Better Place. But will Better Place become the better place he aims it to be? Some are already suggesting that the bloom is off the rose.

My prediction is that this guy Shai will be just another Mary Tolan.

In 2003, the mag Business 2.0 produced a laudatory article by Ralph King about a woman exec from Accenture named Mary Tolan who was pushing the notion that the U.S. could wean itself from big oil by 2015 by switching to hydrogen cell power. The article boldly stated, “Her ideas could help catalyze needed change.” (Mary Tolan’s Modest Proposal, Business 2.0, June 2003.)

Six years later, and where is Mary Tolan? Yes, she is still a connected exec with Accenture, but a zealous advocate for hydrogen cell batteries? Do your own research and you’ll see an impressive 2003 campaign that is just another blip in the history of the automobile.

This is not to suggest that I am opposed to electric cars or efforts to move toward green. If we're serious about being greener, there are certainly things we can be doing now if we wished. I just think there are too many unanswered questions with regard to going electric, straight up. How long will it take to get the power grid up to a level where it can juice all these cars? And when the power grid goes down, is it a paid vacation day or are we simply stuck?

Well, enough of that. Tomorrow's another day.

Of Knights White and Dark

Up front, the reason I am writing about knights today is that I did this picture of me as The Dark Knight. Laugh, please, because it's intended to be comic. (You may click to enlarge.)

As for chivalry and knights-errant, I have always enjoyed the whole idea of knighthood. As a kid one of my favorite coloring books was Crusader Rabbit. As a college student I was taken up with Don Quixote by way of the musical Man of La Mancha. During my tenure at AMSOIL, where I am employed in advertising and PR, I have seen my role as something of a white knight, doing battle against the forces of darkness.

An aside: There are many cynics who believe that the foundation of advertising, and inherent in the job, is a need to lie. Like lawyers, admen are tarred as dishonest hucksters. What I have always believed is that if you have to lie to sell a product, then you should not be in that situation. Or at least, you should strive to exit that position as quickly as feasible.

For those unaware, AMSOIL makes synthetic motor oils and performance products. Their claim to fame is being the first synthetic motor oil to satisfy American Petroleum Institute service requirements. In addition to being the first synthetic oil for cars, they were also first to recommend a 25,000 mile one year drain interval. The company has done that since its inception 35 years ago.

Imagine how many fewer oil cans and bottles would be in our landfills if for the past 35 years everyone changed their oil but once a year. The oil industry, on the other hand, likes having people change their oil frequently. For more than a decade major oil companies have gone out of their way to fight extended drain intervals. For years we've all heard that you're supposed to change your oil every 3,000 miles. Is that really because frequent oil changes are in the best interest of the consumer? I have in my file a 2001 quote from the president of Jiffy Lube International saying that if they could get people to change 100 miles sooner, Pennzoil would make 20 million more dollars. In addition, "If we could move our customers to make one more oil change per year, it's worth $294 million for the oil change alone and $441 million in revenue, when you include ancillary products and services." (Lubricant's World, Sept. 2001, p. 30)

So it is that the little company I work for is jousting with behemoths for whom bottom line profits are the primary driver, not truth or what is in the best interest of the consumer, or the earth for that matter.

The irony is, however, that even though I feel like a white knight, and our company has true environmentally beneficial solutions, if you get into a throng of really Green folks, I am a leper because I'm part of an oil company. "Oil companies are bad, green is good."

Add to that the popularity of seeing business people in a somewhat negative light, and the corporate guy that I am can also be perceived as "bad" in many sectors simply by virtue of my wearing a suit to the office every day. Hmmm.

Well, this might be where the Dark Knight comes in. His motivations are good, but in the end we see he is just a human trying to do the best he can. He's playing a role that in some way fits who he is. And like the comic book hero and Cervantes' Quixote I, too, am just trying to do the best I can within the context of our postmodern environs. If occasionally the giants I'm fighting are windmills.... well, so be it.

Here are a couple of links to articles I've published related to the environment and ethics.