Discuss: The Big Green Lie

Great commentary.  I think it points out the fact that business cannot do this alone.  Nor can policy do it alone.  The two actually need to work together to create the changes that are needed.  Until the White House and Congress come to grips with reality, we’re not going to solve this problem on the backs of enlightened businesses and consumers alone.

Although I agree that a bit of realism is needed when talking about green economics, I must admit I’m nervous to let honesty rule the conversation.  Americans seem easily frightened by honesty, and much more willing to bury their heads in the sand than to actively work for change.  But you’re right; businesses - like people - must take various things into consideration when making “green” choices.  And it’s very difficult to know what to choose sometimes.  What I think we’ve yet to achieve is a balance between apathy and utter despair.  It’s encouraging when mainstream corporations start talking about greening themselves.  But you are absolutely right to ask, “Where does hope end and hype begin?” Like any new uncharted territory, a little honest caution is a good thing.

I live in Nebraska and our local utility is investing .05% of their annual budget on wind energy.  We have enough wind to power the United States yet our board of directors is happy paying for coal.  I think corruption is involved, but cannot prove it.  Kickbacks from the coal companies have to be involved, don’t they?

Green is trendy because we are stupid.  Instead of thinking and making choices based on information, logic, and/or reason “we” behave according to consumptive instinct.  We are easily wooed because we all spent (or are currently in the process of spending) a huge majority of our young lives in schools that teach obedience, reward memorized abstraction, and punish individuality/creativity.  We are ingrained with the idea that our country is the greatest in the world, when nothing could be further from the truth.  We think we have freedom, but we are too dumb to even consider what freedom means much less analyze whether or not we have it.  Where is real freedom?

I am an artist living in Nebraska and don’t know if we could actually power the whole country, but if we could, this would certainly be a much better use of our land than farming and cattle ranching, which are polluting our underground aquifer, rivers, and streams to the point where they are putting both chlorine and ammonia into our drinking water to make it SAFE????  (In the same breath they are warning against using it in our fish tanks!) Our local utility company is owned by us and WE should attend their board meetings, take petitions signed by our friends and neighbors, and demand more wind power and less coal-burning power plants!!!!

Isabel Cohen, Omaha, NE

Hey Nebraska, why don’t you go build another straw bale house!  (Everyone in California is doing it.) Ha ha!

Hey, I’m from Nebraska too.  Moses, what is your point?

Sorry, no real point.  I guess I was just making the connection between the “green alternative” of straw bale homes to the Nebraska participants.  Any book about straw bale home construction will always point out that straw bales were first used in Nebraska in the early 1900s.  So the technology and idea of building “green” is really not new like most people think.

To use the phrase “we” as Amoz did, and to connect back to the article’s focus on corporate/government influence, are “we” really capable of doing “green” things?  Maybe “we” should first stop wasting money destroying the infrastructures of other countries and instead invest in building up (i.e. converting) our own.  This might lead to greater freedom as a nation and maybe on the individual level as well.