Green is GOOD- Fraud is BAD! We don't need the now exposed Hoax of Anthropocentric Global Warming to promote reducing expensive and polluting waste from our lives and business.
Now that we are starting to see reporting on this issue in the AP and elsewhere, in time it will make it into the "mainstream media".
Once the progressives are forced to release their deathgrip on the Green movement,
we can get back to the truth of making the people,
the planet and the economy BETTER.

This is the cover of the NGIPCC report which is over 800 pages and available for about $150 but is available on line for free:
http://www.heartland.org/publications/NIPCC%20report

The Scare is Over!

In a new 800 page book, "Climate Change Reconsidered", the NGIPCC (non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change)
has officially announced, renounced the IPCC conclusions on man-made global warming.
http://www.heartland.org/publications/NIPCC%20report/PDFs/NIPCC%20Final.pdf
It includes a petition signed by 31,000 American Scientists (over 9,000 pHDs):

Attached as Appendix 4 to this report is a description
of “The Petition Project” and a directory of the
31,478 American scientists who have signed the
following statement:
We urge the United States government to reject
the global warming agreement that was written in
Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other
similar proposals. The proposed limits on
greenhouse gases would harm the environment,
hinder the advance of science and technology, and
damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence
that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or
other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the
foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of
the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the
Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial
scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric
carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects
upon the natural plant and animal environments of
the Earth.

Al Gore could not be reached for comment.

Liberty and Individual Responsibility

Liberty and individual responsibility are fundamental to a constructive and harmonious social order. Social order fosters prosperity, and since demand for environmental quality increases with wealth, environmentalists have a stake in promoting prosperity.
James Gwartney, Economics: Private and Public Choice

The most accepted definition of Sustainability suggests that what we do must allow future generations to have the same resources and opportunity which we possess. At the rate we are digging up and burning the planet, it is apparent these will not be abundantly available to our children or theirs. We we must at the very least find ways to develop the science, technology and educational knowledge-base that will become the foundation for the next generation's continued effort to transition to sustainability.

The term, Sustainability represents a relatively new field of endeavor, even though some earlier cultures (and even a few current ones) had an intrinsic understanding of the Earth's "not being owned" by the current generation. If we compare it to the field of Integrated Medicine, we begin to understand that what we have today is not "healthcare" at all, but "disease care". Real Healthcare would be much less expensive. So sustainability, once understood, will be much less expensive than our non-sustainable planning, construction, infrastructure, and manufacturing processes. Our construction industry, for example is "Building Code" based. This promotes the construction of buildings which are the worst allowable under the law and, as such, are the most expensive to our society from an holistic point of view. As in Integrated Medicine, we must look at the whole picture (an holistic point of view) to fully understand "cost" and "value".

Jim

ThePoliticsofGreen

The Politics of GREEN
Jim Gleeson, AIA © 2005

In order for there to even be a “politics of Green” our political parties must first recognize the existence of the concept of “green” and build an understanding of the implication of “greening” both our built environment and our economy.

“Green” or “sustainable” building is a term given to construction which is more holistic and considers all aspects of a building’s performance and environmental impact in a way which produces many efficiencies making the effort not only affordable, but profitable.

Fourteen years ago the US Green Building Council (www.USGBC.org) was formed by a broad-based group of professionals, scientists and industry leaders with an initial US government grant. The problem being addressed was the huge amount of resources and
energy being expended on our American building stock, which it was thought was a major contributor to environmental problems. Of the $3.5 trillion energy industry
approximately $2.6 trillion is wasted energy. Buildings account for roughly 1/3 of energy use, greenhouse gasses and land-fill volume.

What does “greening” our processes, construction, building stock and the built environment really mean? Is this the province of environmentalists, (or “environmentalist whackos” depending on who’s talking) or is it just a design issue? Is the “sustainability movement”
something that is coming out of the need to save ourselves from global warming, ozone depletion and resource degradation: or is it something else; or has it become something else?

Democrats may think of Environmentalism as- saving the planet from “real dangers resulting from what people (mostly Americans) are doing to it”. Republicans seem to think of Environmentalism as an unnecessary reaction to exaggerated or even imagined
problems. They assume any action benefiting the environment will be bad for business and the economy. The reality may very well be that both parties are being hi-jacked by their own fears. There is much evidence that says that there are solutions to environmental problems which are both accessible and economically beneficial.

But, while the building industry is undergoing a revolution in holistic, energy and resource-efficient methodology characterized by a “triple-bottom-line” mentality, most outside this industry are unaware of it and its potential impact on their lives.

Today the USGBC is a self funding organization which has caused a wealth of experience and expertise to be realized through the market acceptance of the LEED
Green Building Rating System in the US and elsewhere. Initially as the first release
of the LEED program was available, organizations with an environmental agenda began using the system to demonstrate the seriousness of their environmental roles, in the construction of their buildings. Due to proven results, the program has grown exponentially (over 2000 buildings are currently registered for LEED Certification) and
some startling discoveries have been made about how we have been wasting money, energy and resources through over-specialization and lack of integration of our building design/construction processes.
We can argue about the validity of the global warming model or whether the ozone really has a hole in it caused by human activity forever, but if we use that as an excuse not to work together using our God-given intellect to live better, more equitably and sustainably on the Earth, we will be missing a very big boat.

Whether the earth is in peril due to our misuse of its resources, or not, does it make sense
to waste huge amounts of energy and other resources which can be largely ameliorated
without additional first-cost? Projects are now being built which use half the energy of
similar or identical “non-green” projects, require much less expensive infrastructure and
are safer and healthier to live and work in- all within the same first-cost budgets and within the same time frame. When you factor-in the life-cycle costs, the return-on-investments for any additional expenses (mostly associated with greening existing buildings) are routinely 7-10 times investment. This isn’t just “good”, it means that “greening” a construction project is a better investment than any “conventional” business investment. When you consider that new green buildings need not cost any more than
non-green buildings, but are a product of holistic methodology more so than expensive technology, you have to wonder what the argument over sustainability and environmental stewardship is all about. If what we have learned from the green building movement is any indication, developing environmentally friendly methodologies and technologies
through holistic thinking is at minimum a fantastic opportunity and possible the holy grail of a growing world energy and resource depletion nightmare.

Greening our building stock is not a cost at all, but is a fabulous investment
which any enterprise can make while helping to free up our economy from the waste and environmental degradation which had become “business-as-usual”. Taken out of the “environmental” arena and looked at on a purely economic basis, especially a triple-bottom-line economic basis (with economic, environmental and social aspects), this new green methodology is nothing less than the economics of the future. This can be a future without the “zero-sum” mentality which says that resources are finite and we must fight to control what is available. The “non-zero-sum” reality is that we are only limited by our inability to think and act holistically. By thinking of the world as not a “warehouse of materials” but a “library of ideas and solutions” we begin to find a wealth of examples in nature for synergy, bio-mimicry and sustainable methodologies.

For democrats, this means that the “environmental action” can produce real results with no burden on government and tax payers. Neither should republicans be anything but excited at the opportunity to bring vast new energy-saving technologies and methodologies to a new “energy economy”- one which brings new family-wage, un-
exportable jobs to America.



This is the time for all of us, including political parties, to see the “environmental” issue in a “new” light. It requires neither an “altruistic” (expensive) view or a defensive (protect business)stance. It does require a new non-political, view of the world as a non- zero-sum, triple-bottom-lined world “business” which has the potential to be fair, healthy and profitable.
Three decades ago, visionary engineer Dr. R. Buckminster Fuller developed the World Game simulation, posing the question:

How do we make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?

The results of this research show that the premier global strategy is the interconnection of electric power networks between regions and continents into a global energy grid, with an emphasis on tapping abundant renewable energy resources - a world wide web of electricity.

The benefits of this sustainable development world power solution are proven:
• Decreased pollution from fossil and nuclear fuels
• Reduced hunger and poverty in developing nations
• Increased trade, cooperation and world peace.
• Stabilized population growth
Of course Buckminster Fuller was “way ahead of his time”. We are only beginning to understand his ideas. One of his central concepts was the idea that as we become more and more specialized we become less and less able to access solutions which require holistic connections between disciplines or technologies for success. As it turns out, the biggest solutions, by far, are those which benefit from broad-based thought and action. This has been the case in the building industry where specialization had caused building design and construction to be among the most inefficient and wasteful industries in the world. Buildings in the 21st century had become loose assemblies of various systems, each with its own safety factor to compensate for lack of understanding of the possible effects of the other systems and all adding up to an often poorly performing and expensive-to-build-and-maintain building.
By looking at the building as a single system and integrating all of the disciplines, components and strategies in a more holistic approach, huge gains are being made. The really good news is that this approach is fully scalable to the community and world as a whole. When we look at our communities as a single system and work holistically to integrate all the systems which shape our built environment (as it interfaces with the unbuilt environment) we discover huge efficiencies coming from the synergistic effect.
When the city of Austin began to combine its need for better storm-water management with its need for an improved urban environment and more useable urban park land, it discovered and now displays a solution of beautiful greenways and landscaped, natural filtration/Bio-retention ponds which illustrate the benefit of holistic thinking in providing a unique solution to any “problem”.
When we move to the regional, state or national level, look for ways to grow the economy while improving quality of life.
“…most of the jobs produced by a sustainable energy economy -- focused on R&D and new energy generation, retrofitting our national building stock for higher efficiencies, moving to new rail and transit options, pushing hydrogen fuel experiments, developing more energy-efficient appliances -- won't be exportable.
Suddenly we have this dramatic convergence of 21st century energy needs, national security priorities, sustaining communities and our crying need to create solid, family-wage jobs that won't easily vault overseas.”
America’s Job Losses: An Energy Answer? Neal Pierce
We have been spending our natural capital rather than learning to live well on the interest.
As Bucky Fuller said, the oil reserves seem to have been placed here as a primer for civilization to get to the point that we can develop the ability to harness the renewable, sustainable energy available in abundance from our built-in energy generator, the sun. That time is now.
Our politics seems to have gotten so “sophisticated” that we no longer see the need to even relate to “the greater good” or anything that comes from “outside” our “platform”. If someone has to be wrong for us to be right, or someone has to lose for us to win, we are on our way to extinction. Instead of just defending business’ ability to be profitable in existing ways, we can look for ways for business to be more profitable through innovative solutions to long term problems or needs. Promoting production and use of renewable energy sources and the development of bio-pharmaceuticals and other bio-tech industries would lead to stabilization of world politics and allow a balance of economic potential while eliminating the need to mine the Earth (spending our natural capital) for fuel.
On the “liberal” side: instead of trying to “conserve” our way to environmental health, we can innovate through creative partnerships and change our goal from “saving what we can” to creating and perpetuating an environmentally sound, quality-of-life for everyone.
Neither party seems to be aware of the opportunity for the US and the West to play a leadership role in a new world economy characterized by innovation rather than fear of loss. A green building can only be the result of a partnership of all stakeholders toward a shared mission. Greening our economy will be the result of creative partnerships and a shared mission for a sustainable, vibrant future. This is the politics of Green.

The Melting Pot and the Liberty Bell
Jim Gleeson, AIA 2009

Seven Score and six years ago Abraham Lincoln spoke of “…our forefathers, (having)
brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”.

It was a great experiment, blessed by God, that worked. Less than two hundred years after a rag-tag army somehow defeated the strongest fighting force in the world, the United States of America had become the “greatest nation on Earth”.

How did this happen? What was it that made this nation grow so fast and become the beacon of hope and freedom for the world? There are many, I’m sure, who will disagree with my answer to this question- they might even disagree with the question. And that’s why I am writing this.

This country grew like no other on a foundation consisting of three bedrock footings: the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the United States and the Holy Bible.

The inspired revolutionaries and patriots, who were not full-time politicians, but part-time statesmen, forged the Declaration and the Constitution based on an over-arching desire to build a nation which would last and withstand the test of time. They did it based on principles which were taught in every home, school and college in the colonies- those found in the Holy Bible.

Probably few disagree with this since it is widely known historical fact. So from where does the intense and often blinding polarization that has become the norm in our culture originate? Where has our standing as world leader gone? How have we become a debtor nation full of corruption, greed, pornography and hate-speech? If the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bible are still with us (it still says “In God We Trust” on our currency) then what has changed and why do we have such intense division and polarization in our society?

What has become of the “Great Melting Pot” that my teachers, years ago, were so proud to teach me about? It forged Americans out of emigrants from all over the world.

How has marriage between two men or two women, a concept unknown and unthinkable to our forefathers, become the topic of discussion, much less the law in some states? How has allowed issues that were once cultural and moral taboos to be discussed and actively promoted as “rights” and legislated as acceptable ”norms”? What has changed our sense of decency and allowed hardcore pornography be embraced by big business, condoned by government as a “right” and piped into almost every home in America? What has caused our news media and journalists to take up sides and abandon their charter to provide the news unbiased?

What has caused us as individuals and as a country to spend much more than we make and become slaves to our creditors?

On and on and on, our country is a vastly different place than it was just fifty years ago-
full of high-tech convenience and knowledge-at-your-fingertips, to be sure, but at the expense of civility, forthrightness, transparency and morality. It was never perfect, to be sure, but it had an underlying sense of reason and creative resolution.

The changes seem clear to all except the very young, but the problem seems to be that, to many, the changes are either “inevitable” or even desirable. But based on what?

Many of our oldest and most respected universities once founded and run as Christian institutions first abandoned their strict Biblical heritage in favor of loose or even secular interpretations. More recently even law schools began interpreting the constitution as an “evolving” document to be viewed in context of current cultural standards, not as the timeless, inspired document which was the cornerstone of the most respected country the world has ever seen. We are choosing to regard these documents as “temporal” or of value only in relationship to the time they were created. As long as we revered these documents as representing basic truths and used them as guideposts to steer our course through social pressures and issues, we prospered. When it became necessary to amend the constitution to clarify the message for a particular social development, we voted on an amendment and either added it or not. This is vastly different from our current tendency toward reinterpreting the Bible or the Constitution to adjust and allow for whatever some
want be true, fair or legal.

This relativism is the least common denominator or reason for the obvious shift away from world leadership toward mediocrity. When a business rises to greatness and success and grows in stature and size, it is always when it forgets what it was that made it great in its formative years that it starts its often rapid decline.

We are attempting to reinterpret these pillars of our successful culture and government as we would “adjust for inflation” the cost of goods sold in 1776. The problem is, of course you can’t adjust truth, ethics, or morality for societal “development”. Truth does not change; neither does human nature. Look around. Has our loosening interpretation of once clearly accepted and understood principals made us a better nation or better individuals? Do we really want to continue to slide into the confusion of relativism making it impossible to work together without underlying common, shared interests?

We must start a journey back toward a shared understanding of the most basic principals as a basis for adapting and responding to the present as it becomes the future. We won’t last long as lobsters trying to keep each other from climbing to the top of the basket to imagined individual power. We can only keep our freedom through a restored common cause. The original reason that the disenfranchised from all over the world wanted to come to America must be reaffirmed; reestablished: America was the only country where you could be insured freedom in return for becoming an American. You can’t go to any other country and become a Canadian or an Italian or a Swede. America was unique.

In my opinion the Liberty Bell should be remounted upside down and proudly displayed as a symbol of the great melting pot and the Liberty that can be found by becoming an American. Only then will America return to its status as beacon to the world for liberty,
human rights and truth.

GreeningtheFuture

Greening the Future

Course Correction for an Omni-lateral Sustainability

Jim Gleeson, AIA © 2009

Greening the future implies that what we should do and can do is actually

for the future and will positively effect and benefit future generations to the extent

we allow them to have the same natural resources we had and not less. This is in contrast to current “Green” efforts to market and produce “green” products and projects which

please ourselves and help to generate wealth and sales for today by improving efficiency. Am I condemning the current Green Movement? Of course not, but it is a rationalization to say that we are creating sustainability through “re-branding” our “growth” as “green” when we are actually not getting any closer to sustainability.

Pioneers in the Sustainability arena, an arena which didn’t exist until fifty years after

Buckminster Fuller put forth the idea and labeled our planet, “Spaceship Earth”, set out

in the nineties to bring attention to the growing need to think long-term about energy, health and resource use. The advent of the US Green Building Council and many, many other “Green” based organizations, has truly called attention to this need to focus

on energy and resource use. No one could deny that we have been wasting vast amounts of our resources compared to the savings we now know are possible through more holistic, integrated processes. The question is, “Can we create truly sustainable construction and manufacturing processes through efficiency alone?”

Perhaps we should start by clarifying the difference between “green” and “sustainable”.

“Green” is a term used to describe a host of strategies aimed at improving the efficiency

of resources or energy and the health characteristics of interior spaces or manufacturing processes. It does not signify arriving at a certain “state of green” or “state of sustainability” but is both a relative and unquantifiable term. Green Scoring tools attach arbitrary point values to combinations of strategies in order to grade the participants. There is no arrival point at a state of GREEN. “Sustainability” on the other hand strictly implies by definition a state of being or process which is able to be maintained indefinitely without causing a reduction in resources or a quality of life for future generations. We know the intended result (sustainable!) of any building or process we might call sustainable but we don’t yet know how to calculate, quantify or determine actual “sustainability”.

Our green building guidelines don’t even directly address Life-cycle Assessment (LCA) which is only one component of true sustainability. The life-cycle assessment method considers the air, water and solid waste pollution that is generated when raw materials

are extracted. It examines the energy used in the extraction of raw materials, and the pollution that results from manufacturing the product. It also accounts for environmental harm that might occur during the distribution and use of the product. Finally, LCA considers the solid and liquid wastes that enter the environment following final use of the product. As such, it has been far too complex to be widely useable and so is largely ignored. Hence there are many “green” materials and strategies which would likely be deemed “unsustainable” if LCA studies were done on them.

We only know that Green is somehow “good” and that we must move toward sustainability; that has gotten the ball rolling, but perhaps rolling down the wrong hill.

The Green movement in the US has become a marketing frenzy, with everyone vying for the “greenest” product, service or organization with little progress being made to work

together on holistic processes which actually will change the future for the better.

Those that have actually worked together to produce a LEED Certified building which performed at the level of it’s projected goals, know that it was the cooperation and holistic planning that made it possible not the sophistication of the technologies available.

“Efficiency has long been a key element of the economic design for extending the growth system, and a major focus of the whole global competitive economy for many decades. So far it has had the effect that it would most certainly continue to have, i.e. working as intended to remove bottlenecks, and serving to multiply the consumption of everything else. That’s what efficiency in a growth system is used for. Pushing a system’s limits of efficiency also makes it much less adaptable and resilient to change.” Phil Henshaw, www.synapse9.com

Speaking on the reverse effects of efficiency and productivity, Mr Henshaw notes,

Efficiency and productivity enhancements are the popular strategies for promoting sustainability, but generally have the opposite accumulative effect in fact because of how we use them. It's both a "micro" and "macro" effect, of what we do with the resources "saved". We spend them on something else! If you make cars that use half the gas, "pushing to the limits" then gives you twice the cars, and the same dependency on foreign oil! The problem is with the plan to push the limits, rather than hold back from them, because it actually ends up pushing all our interests into conflict! That's why so many of our interests are coming into conflict. Increasing the effectiveness of talents and techniques saves resources locally, but in our culture that is used to multiply what we do globally. That's the problem. Saving waste locally and ends up multiplying waste and complications globally. It's an even bigger problem that we're relying on it as our primary sustainability strategy, and won't be solved without thinking it all the way through.

In 1866, William S. Jevons expressed it this way:

“An action taken to conserve resources reduces the cost of daily life to such an extent that entirely different kinds of environmental damage become affordable.”

Even more succinctly he states:

“It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”

I have seen estimates ranging from 2- 5 Earths being needed to provide the entire Earth’s population resources necessary to live at our current American lifestyle. Guess what? Everyone wants to live our lifestyle; AND these estimates don’t take into account population GROWTH.

Bucky Fuller used to say that the Creator put oil reserves on the Earth to give us easy but temporary access to energy while we learned how to harness the permanent forms of energy inherent in the wind, water and Sun. Oil is only the “primer” or as Mr. Fuller put it, “like the battery in your car… you wouldn’t expect to run your car very long on just the battery.”

So how do we “Green the Future”?

At the root of the issue is the reality that high-performance/high quality green construction/development is still high impact, if you are talking about impact on the Earth. Current “Green Development” is an oxymoron.

Everything now needs to be coordinated in a way that is very different from how it ever was before.

In Phil Henshaw’s words:

“In a growth environment having everyone become more productive and efficient is what promotes growth, as it always did. "Green design" is just improved technology with a new name. With the global plan to always push the limits no global relief of the limits results. Locally as you relieve pressure on one thing you remove constraints on using it. For a business, reducing unit costs is done in order to multiply the units produced, though, increasing rather than decreasing its total impact on the earth. That's what the curves all show, steadily improving technique with steadily multiplying impacts. One of those is improving our techniques for protecting human lives and welfare that increase population and the growing spiraling cost of resources for supporting people in the style they would like.

We're not confronting the real moral questions with that, and have not been adding up the totals. Our desire to be ever more 'productive', defining "good" as "more", is exactly how we got in our present crisis of dependency on high consumption and multiplying impacts. What we need is a complete switch from being "takers" to becoming "healers", but it's tricky to understand how, so we need to think it through. It's NOT so much a question of reducing your 'waste'. It's finding a way to relieve the urge for growth rather than satisfy it. We need a change of purpose in how we spend the savings that efficiencies and productivity create, understanding true effects, to find choices with our intended effect.

It's a profound error to think efficiencies in a growth system will reduce impacts, but it's nearly everyone's central sustainability plan.

Efficiencies that save you money leave you more to spend on other things, so without cutting back you get to use more. The solution is to make sure the impacts of your uses have your intended effect, figuring out how to use your taking for healing. How to do it is a learning process we have yet to attend to, though, and starts with studying the problem and remembering details of the world we've been skipping over... Your effect on the system is your ripple effect on others, so your way to change the loops is by changing the opportunity and signals offered to others, not by controlling their choices. It's a different approach.

The earth is a stable system and we need to begin becoming one too. “Growth” is an unstable system. Fixing the institutions we've built around it will require a change in perception perhaps as great as being born…. Still, its clear we need to make the Earth our home, not just our launch site!”

So where do we go from Here? Perhaps a Biblical perspective would be helpful.

From The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship:

Public policies to combat exaggerated risks can dangerously delay or reverse the economic development necessary to improve not only human life but also human stewardship of the environment. The poor, who are most often citizens of developing nations, are often forced to suffer longer in poverty with its attendant high rates of malnutrition, disease and mortality; as a consequence, they are often the most injured by such misguided, though well-intended, policies.

From “A Comprehensive Torah-Based Approach to the Environment”:

“So we see that one extreme is to regard no sacrifice today as too much to impose upon ourselves to protect all future generations until the end of time. Had earlier generations followed this perverted logic, they might well have restricted the use of whale oil. One can imagine the decrees from zealous eighteenth-century environmental activists, banning the use of oil lamps past nine o’clock at night to ensure sufficient whale oil would remain to light the homes of the twenty-first century. In so doing, what they may well have effected is limiting the educational possibilities of the early scientists who studied and experimented late into the night to discover petroleum and its many uses.”

For sure what is needed at the least is a broad-based, inclusive, holistic viewpoint and a willingness to work TOGETHER to find appropriate directions for our future AND our children’s future.

Environmental Defense Fund:

Claims that fighting global warming will cripple the economy and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs are unfounded. In fact, companies that are already reducing their heat-trapping emissions have discovered that cutting pollution can save money. The cost of a comprehensive national greenhouse gas reduction program will depend on the precise emissions targets, the timing for the reductions and the means of implementation. An independent MIT study found that a modest cap-and-trade system would cost less than $20 per household annually and have no negative impact on employment.

Experience has shown that properly designed emissions trading programs can reduce compliance costs significantly compared with other regulatory approaches. For example, the U.S. acid rain program reduced sulfur dioxide emissions by more than 30 percent from 1990 levels and cost industry a fraction of what the government originally estimated, according to EPA. Furthermore, a mandatory cap on emissions could spur technological innovation that could create jobs and wealth. Letting global warming continue until we are forced to address it on an emergency basis could disrupt and severely damage our economy. It is far wiser and more cost-effective to act now.

We need to know what they are using for a model. Who has a properly designed Cap and Trade Program? The European Union has yet to make it work:

Instead of being required to buy 100 per cent of their "carbon emission permits" in 2020, as proposed by the European Commission, heavy industries including cement, chemicals and steel will have to buy only 70 per cent.

Robin Webster, Friends of the Earth's climate campaigner, said: "This could have been one of the EU's finest moments, but once again short-sighted national self-interest has been put ahead of the long-term safety of the planet. Huge loopholes allow big energy users to carry on polluting."

Joris Den Blanken, a spokesman for Greenpeace EU, added: "At the time that the US is finally re-engaging with the international community on climate, the EU's leadership is dropping away. Instead of acting to stop climate change, EU leaders are subsidizing it."

Sweden on the other hand is succeeding to green both their environment and their economy. Predictably it is because they have taken a different route. Instead of a political

football, in Sweden it is recognized as an integrated “way of life”.

Sweden’s Example

The ambition of the Östergötland region to become green is reflected in the country at large. Between 1990 and 2006, Sweden cut its carbon emissions by 9% - largely exceeding the target set by the Kyoto Protocol – while enjoying real economic growth of 44%.

Under Kyoto, Sweden was even allowed to increase its emissions by 4% given the progress it had already made. But "this was not considered ambitious enough," explains Emma Lindberg, a climate change expert at the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation. "The mindset was 'we need to do what's good for the environment because it's good for Sweden and her economy'. So the Swedish parliament decided to cut emissions by a further 4% below 1990 levels.

In 2007 Sweden topped the list of countries that did the most to save the planet - for the second year running - according to German environmental group, Germanwatch. Today, Sweden has the EU's highest proportion of renewable energy in its energy use – over 43% - and virtually uses no fuel for heating. Most fossil fuels in Sweden are used in the transport sector. For electricity, the country relies on hydro-electric and nuclear power.

But developing a green economy is not only about saving the environment and meeting climate standards. Sweden has a long industrial history, and the success in developing a green sector comes back, in many ways, to the number one rule of business. "There will be no belief in green industries without the belief that you can make money out of it," reckons Eklund. "This, not concern for the environment, is the biggest motivator for change."

As stated earlier “greening” any process only works in an Omni-lateral framework and in an omni-lateral, consensus-based, all-stakeholders-represented-at-the-table, framework it can hardly fail- it has no one trying to sabotage it and everyone is playing a role.

Climate-Change/Global Warming Debate

We have movies of the very first airplane flight- that’s how recent it was. A wood and paper craft propelled down the beach by a sewing machine motor, with its pilot laying on the wing. Less than a hundred years later the space shuttle goes to outer space, docks with the international space station and returns to land on a runway not far from Kittyhawk.

If Wilber and Orville were alive today I’m not sure they would believe their eyes.

On June 26^th 2009 Bertrand Piccard unveiled the Solar Impulse:

The Solar Impulse measures 211 feet from wingtip to wingtip and features four electric motors producing just 40 horsepower. The sleek aircraft has more than 11,000 photovoltaic cells, can fly to 27,000 feet and cruise at 45 mph day or night.

“Yesterday it was a dream. Today it is a plane. Tomorrow it will be an ambassador of renewable energy,” Piccard (pictured), the plane’s creator and pilot, said at a news conference at Duebendorf airfield near Zurich today. “If an aircraft is able to fly day and night without fuel, propelled solely by solar energy, let no one come and claim that is impossible to do the same thing for motor vehicles, heating and air conditioning systems and computers.”

Do we really doubt that in less than one hundred years we can and will be functioning on renewable energy? Do we need Cap and Trade to do it? Did we put a cap on automobile use to promote the airplane?

The real issue is not whether there is Global Warming or whether it is man-made. There are many good reasons to create a broad-based, consensus driven, holistic plan for becoming the first developed nation to transition from fossil fuel to clean, renewable energy. Half of the country won’t successfully force the other half to do it by penalizing parts of society and rewarding others in a complex, unfathomable forced march. It doesn’t matter which side is right and which side is wrong if the argument is over the wrong issue.

A vision for future climate change assessments

includes both sustained, extensive stakeholder

involvement, and targeted, scientifically rigorous

reports that address concerns in a timely fashion.

The value of stakeholder involvement includes

helping scientists understand what information

society wants and needs. In addition, the problem solving

abilities of stakeholders will be essential to

designing, initiating, and evaluating mitigation and

adaptation strategies and their interactions. The best

decisions about these strategies will come when

there is widespread understanding of the complex

issue of climate change – the science and its many implications for our nation.

U.S. Global Change Research Program, २००९

How can this happen in our current polarized political culture? Our growth strategies must also be healing strategies. It costs much less to save a kw than to produce one (60% of the energy produced is wasted). It costs much less to save a gallon of water than to desalinate one. It costs less to produce buildings healthy to people than to care for the sick. Presumably it would cost less to transition to renewable energy than to fight the wars which will inevitable ensue from fighting over oil.

What we have to do is build consensus one step at a time. Create agreement on issues which affect us all. Would it be better long term, even for the CEO of Exxon and his children, if we were no longer dependant on foreign oil or even oil at all? The buggy manufacturers who were first to switch their production to automobile parts thrived. Would it be agreeable to all that more forests are better than less forests and we need to develop and produce non-virgin wood building products. Would it be better for municipalities if there were no polluted run-off flooding expensive storm water systems and causing the need for ever-expanding storm water and purification systems? Would it be better for people if they lived in well conceived environments which required very few vehicular trips to conduct communication-rich, healthy lives?

There are hundreds of questions like these that have viable solutions, given integrated,

holistic processes with lots of public-private partnerships. Sustainability is NOT a political issue. It is a fundamental issue that must be addressed as a nation and supported

by a partnership of science, private industry and government working together to create and follow a Sustainability Action Plan for the United States of America as an example to

the world.