Who The *%#!!@ Is Annie Leonard?

Raising the awareness of my children (ages 9, 12) about our mindless consumer culture has become one of my current obsessions. I would prefer--for their benefit, not mine--that they ween off television, read more books and find contentment in a simple walk in the park.

It's not going to be easy. The pull of hand-held video games, Cartoon Network and advertising is mighty powerful.

But Annie Leonard, an environmental activist, offers hope that attitudes might be changed through education. She has produced a smart 20-minute video that explains difficult concepts ("externalized costs" and "perceived obsolescence") in a casual, almost breezy way that anybody can comprehend.

http://www.thestoryofstuff.com/

Using stick figure animation, Leonard traces the arc of "stuff," from extraction and production to consumption and disposal.

It is a story of raw political power, class exploitation and resource depletion, all that goes under the banner of "globalization" as understood by many progressives.

It is also a story about "limits," one that barely touches on the carbon emission crisis. But it shouldn't have to. Man-caused global warming is the obvious and logical culmination of all she talks about.

In fact, I say it might be better to start off the conversation with young children by telling a simple story of "stuff" and what happens to it, rather than introduce hifalutin concepts of "global warming" and "climate crisis." My experience is that these latter terms conjure up a doomsday that scares the crap out of kids and causes them to shut down mentally and emotionally.

So, who the &%#*! is Annie Leonard?

She is, among other things, a long-time expert on sustainability and materials economy issues who has tracked the offshoring of U.S. trash as well as visited and studied factories in dozens of third world countries.

Thomas Alva Edison: Still An American Beacon

I don't think people give much thought anymore to Thomas Edison, the famous American inventor who literally blazed trails for modern civilization.

The man and his gadgets seem to be mandatory subject matter for the early grades and little more.

But where would we be today without illumination? Or recorded sound and moving images? Or the innumerable domestic appliances that make life more comfortable? All these we take for granted.

According to Robert Galvin and Kurt Yeager in their new book "Perfect Power (McGraw Hill, 2009)," Edison is possibly more relevant today than ever.

The former Motorola CEO (Galvin) not only effectively diagnoses an electricity infrastructure in peril, but argues that a restored, efficient grid, one that matches the needs of a digital 21st century society, is possible only through Edison-like invention, innovation and risk-taking.

State-regulated monopolists are the villains, relics of the late 19th century when Edison lost out to Westinghouse in his bid to de-centralize electricity production through "distributed generation."

As a consequence, the big utilities, guaranteed a profit, poorly serve their customers (think rolling brownouts) and fail to make needed (big) investments to upgrade the massive, centralized grid.

The answer, according to Galvin and Yeager, is to open up the electricity distribution market to companies capable of building a "smart grid." Actually, "smart microgrid" is more apt. That's because the authors see renewal as digital, sustainable, reliable, intelligent AND local.

Unleashing the competition in retail electricity distribution would be a high-voltage shock to the status quo, prompting customer-driven service that adds real value, while creating millions of jobs in new companies.

With almost a third of the world's masses living outside the grid and an estimated 6 trillion dollars needed to renew and expand the world's aging power delivery grids over the next 25 years, there is a big job to be done.

http://www.galvinpower.org/

Great Firewall, Part 2

Ever since the Amsterdam-based group monitoring China's official internet restrictions took its test tool offline (for reference see post of June 23, 2007, "Great Firewall of China"), I haven't been able to know for sure whether this blog is viewable in China.

But just yesterday, a friend in coastal China said she could see it!

For many months, early in 2007, from the blog's inception, friends in China told me time and again they would enter this URL and come up empty.

The main purpose of my blog was to reach out to my Chinese business partners and other interested parties in China, to stimulate debate and exchange ideas on global warming, the climate crisis and appropriate policy responses and business opportunities.

I never once thought the Chinese government specifically blocked my site, but rather assumed it was a policy against all blogspot.com blogs hosted by Google.

My debut in China is puzzling--like the New York Times site going down one day and then reappearing a day or so later.

The randomness of it all, the sheer unpredictability of the internet censors makes an effective strategy and sends a chilling message whether true or not:

We are everywhere and watching everything.