Subject:  Viridian Note 00030: The View From Ecotopia

Key concepts:  Weather violence, clean energy, industrial 
policy, Washington State, media coverage

Attention Conservation Notice:  It's about regional 
American politics and state-centered industrial policy.  
Grim assessment, can cause feelings of despair.  Direct 
from Wonkville.

Entries in the Viridian "Fungal Typography" Contest:
http://members.aol.com/stjude/
http://www.saunalahti.fi/~jtlin/viridian/

Sources:  Seattle Times, Thursday, December 3, 1998; 
patmazza@teleport.com^^^*  (Patrick Mazza)

   Patrick Mazza is senior writer-researcher for 
Atmosphere Alliance, an environmental/industrial policy 
group based in Olympia, Washington.  The book NINE NATIONS 
OF NORTH AMERICA, by journalist and urban theorist Joel 
Garreau, once described Mr. Mazza's area of the continent 
as "Ecotopia."  Green political sentiment is powerful in 
the Pacific Northwest, and better yet, they have big, 
sophisticated, cybernetic industries that aren't tied at 
the wrists and ankles to smokestacks.  Mr. Mazza has some 
interesting insights and approaches to offer us.   
(((Parenthetical comments by bruces@well.com.)))

Patrick Mazza remarks:

The European insurance companies have been out in front on 
climate change, while we have not heard much from U.S. 
companies. Reason? Federal flood insurance. Here, we 
socialize the losses, insure the uninsurable, so they can 
build again on their floodplains.

((("America:  More Socialist Than Europe."  Call the 
newspapers.))) 

    Here, in the heart of the problem, the USA, the source 
of 1/4 of the world's greenhouse gases, our wealth masks 
the consequences.  The feedback loop does not connect. It 
does in places such as Bangladesh and Central America, 
where the perception that this is a stable, safe world is 
long gone, if it ever was there in the first place. But it 
is not the perceptions of those people that count. It is 
the perceptions of the people here, in the insulated rich 
world.

(((Well put, though it's not our "perceptions" that are 
emitting the carbon dioxide.  Mostly, it's our wall-plugs 
and gas pedals.)))

    So what will break the spell? Perhaps an Andrew, Hugo, 
Mitch and Camille hitting the US mainland in one year. 
Perhaps a several year drought in the Midwest that, as it 
did in the late '80s, reduces US grain production below 
consumption. Grain reserves around 1995 were at a record 
low, and accelerating global population keeps pressuring 
them.

(((Last time the carbon-dioxide spell was broken was 
during the Great Depression, when there was a sustained 
dip in CO2 emissions because everybody was broke and in 
the streets.  If we are enduring biblical catastrophes and 
famines of the kind you are suggesting here, we're not 
going to be sustaining today's booming consumer economy.  
That will be over.  We'll be living in a post-catastrophe 
emergency regime.  Paradise for eco-regulators maybe, but 
no picnic for the rest of us.)))

      The new stats for the 97-98 El Nino are $33 billion 
in losses (something like 1.3 percent of Gross World 
Product), 20,000 deaths, 120,000 injuries and 5 million 
displaced. It caused apocalyptic fires in Indonesia, 
Brazil, Mexico and Florida, droughts and killer heat waves 
in Texas and Africa, monstrous flooding in Peru. Sometimes 
in the media reports the El Nino connection was made. 
Sometimes it wasn't. But only rarely was the possible 
connection between El Nino and global warming drawn. There 
is a crucial disconnect, a place the feedback loop is 
being broken. The media holds a critical responsibility 
for alerting the public to the connection between the 
weather disruptions it reports and the probable connection 
of the overall pattern to greenhouse gas emissions. It is 
failing. A movement of artists and communicators must fill 
that gap.

    (((This connection isn't hard to find in the media.  
It's all over the place  (though I can't help but notice 
that the various media-cited 1998 catastrophe statistics 
vary by whole orders of magnitude).  I suspect that the 
tactics of the GCC  will shift soon, from their current 
bland denial of global warming, to the vigorous assertion 
that global warming is real and is *good for us.* 
Farfetched?  Wait and see.

    (((Speaking as an "artist and communicator," I would 
like to take this moment to formally declare myself "the 
media."  We've all got modems, there's a new century at 
hand, so let's put our cards on the table and all be 
"media" from now on.   Every attack I've ever seen against 
"the media" involves people who are already "media" by any 
sane definition, and who are anxious to seize more 
attention and bandwidth at the expense of rival users of 
"media."  Louche, irresponsible, scandal-hungry, trivial, 
stumbling blindly toward catastrophe, firmly in the 
pockets of corporate interests == that's not "the media", 
that's an honest portrait of global humanity.)))

   (((Mr. Mazza has also seen fit to favor us with a copy 
of his recent op-ed piece in the *Seattle Times,* which is 
a swell piece of rhetorical work, even though Mr. Mazza is 
himself, apparently, not "media."  Some excerpts 
follow.)))

    Washington, D.C., is demonstrating it's not up to 
seriously addressing global warming. But states are 
beginning to fill the leadership vacuum by seizing the 
tremendous economic opportunities of the coming clean-
energy revolution.

     The U.S. fossil fuel industry and its allies depict 
serious emissions reductions as economically disastrous. 
Precisely the opposite is true. Converting the energy 
system, now the major greenhouse gas source, to climate-
friendly energy is one of the great economic opportunities 
of the 21st century.

(((I can only agree.  It's got to happen one way or the 
other == the only question is how gray and smelly the sky 
gets, first.)))

     Even now, solar and wind are the world's fastest-
growing energy sources, each growing over 25 percent 
annually. Increased production  is generating economies of 
scale that lower prices and enlarge the market, such as 
has occurred with computer chips. Shell researchers 
conservatively project clean sources could supply half the 
world's energy by 2050. The key issue is whether clean 
energy will ramp up fast enough to stave off global 
warming.

(((Absolutely, man!  Ramp up faster!  Let's hear it for 
those righteous fellow-travellers at Shell 
(http://www.shell.com)!)))

   This is why public support is crucial.

(((Huh?  Why bring the public into this?  You just 
admitted that the US government is utterly hopeless.)))

    Driven by national security  concerns, onetime infant 
aerospace and computer industries were built into giants 
by military and space programs. Climatic disruption is as 
genuine a security threat as we've ever faced. Clean 
energy is our frontline defense, and should gain the same 
kind of boost.

(((Rather than re-routing the Pentagon's Cold War money 
into the pockets of postindustrial Greens, wouldn't it be 
simpler for you to just *join the army?*  After all, if we 
hit the wall with a genuine eco-catastrophe, you'll have 
plenty of company in uniform.  We'll all be drafted, and 
heaving sandbags at the angry rising foam.)))

     The Europeans and Japanese are nurturing their clean-
energy firms.

(((Now this rhetorical tactic could *work.*  "We must 
close the solar-panel gap with the Germans!"  Cold War II, 
here we come!  War is the health of the state, not to 
mention the health of Boeing and General Dynamics.)))

     California is spending one-half billion dollars on 
its clean-energy companies. Washington (((state))) also 
has the stuff to be a global contender.

(((Don't feel badly, Europeans; we'll pick a fight with 
California, if we have to!)))

     The state is already a budding clean-energy Silicon 
Valley boasting hundreds of companies grossing nearly $1 
billion annually. We are the world production center for 
the electronic systems that all solar panels need to feed 
electricity into homes and power grids. At its Vancouver, 
Wash., plant, Siemens, the world's top solar company, 
refines the silicon from which it makes all its solar 
cells.  Applied Power Corporation of Lacey is a finalist 
to build the world's largest  solar power plant.

(((Why not cut the government entirely out of the feedback 
loop, and just buy stock in Siemens, Applied Power, and 
Shell?  Let's make friends with their on-staff industrial 
designers.  Let's ask them to design something sexier.)))

     Washington's substantial clean-energy industry has 
huge potential for cross-fertilization with its world-
leading high-tech firms. Asia, our primary trade partner, 
represents the largest potential new clean-energy market. 
As the industry grows, solar energy equipment could easily 
join apples, airliners and software as signature 
Washington products. But to secure our position, we need 
five elements of public support:

* A clean energy investment fund - to match California's - 
created by a surcharge on electricity shipped through 
power lines;

* Economic-development priority given to clean-energy 
firms;

* A clean-energy R&D initiative by the state's public and 
private institutions;

* High-visibility clean-energy equipment purchases by 
government;

* Direct cash assistance for private clean-energy 
equipment  purchases.

(((If it were up to me, I'd kick the props out from under 
the carbon industry's subsidies *before* I tried to build 
new subsidies for solar.  This is where you find the 
missing element in this article: genuine market-demand for 
renewable energy.  It may be politically easier to ask for 
a new little solar pork-barrel than it is to demolish a 
gigantic, time-honored carbon one.  It badly needs to be 
done,though, and would save us a lot of money.  But even 
German Greens fear the coal-miners.)))

     We must aggressively shift our public policies to 
favor clean energy. With so little leadership coming from 
Washington, D.C., it is time for this Washington to lead 
the clean-energy revolution that is the only hope for 
avoiding a disastrous disruption of the world's climate.

  (((The clean-energy revolution will never happen if it's 
"the only hope."  It has to happen because it's *attractive.*  
It smells better.  It tastes better.  It's more romantic, 
it's sexier. It's gizmos are cooler and more sophisticated 
than big, crude, greasy gizmos.  It doesn't kill you 
stone-dead if you turn it on and sit  inside its garage 
for half-an-hour.  It's *prettier.*  It is an artifact of 
a more advanced, more beautiful world.  Dare I say it?  
It's Progress.)))

Patrick Mazza (patmazza@teleport.com^^^*)