Goal: Crowd Source Think Tank

The goal of this website is to form a Crowd Sourced Think Tank.  The Think Tank provides a platform where we collaborate by identifying problems (technical, financial, social and policy) and respond with inspired solutions.  But notably, the objective is to create integrated solutions that shave off inefficiencies by layering improvements of incremental efficiency gains across the larger system. The idea is not that we present one-off solutions, but that we weave our various ideas together to come up was a sequential series of improvements along the chain of production for an overall improved system.  So for example.

Say NY decides to implement an incentive policy to increase private solar panel use to diversify the State energy profile.

Someone suggests it be linked to the grid to shore up the grid and reduce battery needs.

Someone suggests that it be prioritized for NYC in the beginning because it would provide most benefit to the State by getting the most light capture at peak load to benefit the State electric system as a whole.

Someone suggests that isn’t fair, bc upstate NY’ers don’t get a chance to experience solar.  Someone makes an amendment and suggests all upstate schools have solar panels and monitoring systems and when the NYC system is maxed out, other NYS areas are targeted in a methodical way.  Someone else notes that by addressing NYC solar opportunities first, NY State reduces the State per capita GHG emissions fastest.

Someone suggests that whoever gets the solar panel incentives, must also be required to paint their roof white or silver to increase the albedo (reflected light) that reduces warming in the city, thus also reducing demand for A/C in the city.

…

The Goal of the Think Tank is to redefine civic entrepreneurship, by LAYERING ideas, LAYERING complex systems, and LAYERING efficiencies in the larger system to get the most return on investment, financially, socially, and environmentally.

Reduce

In January 2010, I made 2^5 (or 32) sets of my grandma’s molasses cookies spelling the word “REDUCE” for an exhibit at 18 Rabbit Gallery in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  The pun of this project is in the command: REDUCE. It is eaten and it is itself reduced. It plays with viewer participation: does the viewer A) not consume the cookie so as to reduce his/her personal consumption, or B) consume the cookie and reduce the cookies available for others. As the cookies disappear, entropy takes over and the pattern REDUCE becomes an incomprehensible landscape of characters transformed from its original meaning. Both the non consuming viewer and the consuming viewer are tied together in the entrophic landscape. One leaving resources for another to partake. The other eating away at the cliche and in so doing, is fueled to share new observations of the world, to tell the time of now – generating living phrases to effect a meaningful environmental action in the current context. Both the consumer and the non consumer influence each other by their ‘action’ or ‘inaction’ in a shared commons. Together, they transform their surroundings and their understanding by their agency.

Squander of Conservative

I was born in 1973.  I vaguely remember something about fuel prices and a hostage crisis, but more notably how jellybeans could help stop cigarette smoking.  My brain didn’t really begin to formulate a sense of politics until 1979 as my parents talked about Reagan and Carter.  My political coming of age was during what my father, a lifelong Republican, despairingly called Reaganomics.  I grew to dislike Reagan, not because I was paying attention to who he was or what he was doing, but because he was the only thing I ever heard about.  Reagan poisoned my potatoes. I felt my dad progressively become more and more politically disempowered and disoriented.  My father was a life-long union member weathering though its upper administration corruption.  He was a dogmatic ‘buy-American’ consumer despite the better gas-mileage of Japanese cars and lemon status of his patriotically purchased Dodge Aries K-car that added to his big-business-bailout/corruption name-calling, like Lee-I-A-Coconut.  And more personally, he was my Turn-Off-The-Damn-Light-When-You-Are-Finished-Using-It mentor.

I grew up in rural NH – the Live Free or Die State.  1400 people in my hometown.  Probably more cows than people and certainly less people than may live in one NYC block – my current home.  I drank warm, unpasteurized, and unhomogenized milk from a classmates family farm.  We would fill up those glass bottles at a big stainless tank and close them with the paper stoppers while the cows named Daisy and Moe moo’d contently.   I grew up with homemade bread and cookies my mother baked and a wood stove that burned 7 cords of wood my brothers and father chopped to keep us warm.  In high school, I was very aware that it made my clothes smell of smoke, always.  My parents did all kinds of things that I didn’t really understand until much later.  In 1976, they helped convert an open dump into NH’s first volunteer Recycling Center.  The wood of the new building was treated with waste car oil and still gathers the towns newspapers and continues to host the industry of paper hornets.  That is when I began to learn the curious differences between materials — how to separate tin from aluminum because the tin recycling bin had a magnet hanging over it.  That is also when I began to enjoy the great pleasure of throwing glass bottles (to compact the glass volume in a 50-gallon drum of course, not just to vent my frustrations of adolescence) on the Saturday’s our family was responsible for stewarding the community recycling agenda.  The recycling committee that met on the second Tuesday of the month (that took precedent over my not-sweet-16 birthday) coined or capitalized on the jingoistic phrase:  “Recycling makes cent$”.

My point is, it wasn’t until my early 20′s when I was a budding environmentalist that I realized that my parents weren’t ‘environmentalists’ per se.  My parents were conservatives — old school conservatives, people whose value system was to conserve resources so as to conserve money.  Perhaps another tautology, but to me I had become an environmentalist:  one that conserved resources for environmental reasons.  Regardless of our personal rationales for conserving, when we conserve individually we also conserve our shared natural resources.  Conserving one’s usage is intrinsically civic; one leaves resources for another to access.  There is no tragedy in the commons.  So while I saw images of Sally Struthers holding emaciated children from Ethiopia, the U.S. deficit exponentially grew and grew during Reagan’s time.  Reaganomics was so contentious in my family because it was when resource conservation flew out the window.  Today, to my mind, all the right-wing “Conservatives” have any more is some kind of wacked-out moral conservatism that has morphed into the extreme of the Tea Partiers and the Religious Right and both are seemingly oblivious to growing strength of the Corporatocracy.  The political party identified as “Conservative” today, doesn’t resemble the definition of conservative as I learned it from my family. I’m going to conclude this post with the etymology and definitions of the words — conserve, conservative, and conservation — so that perhaps those that wish, can begin to take back the word. In the meantime, a quiet nod to all those old-school conservatives that hold my heart steady.  Politics feel far from leadership these days.  May the root of the word, conserve, bring Democrats and Republicans back to center of our material world.  The Laws of Thermodynamics don’t have a political agenda and entropy doesn’t care whose side you are on.

Etymology of Conserve:

late 14c., from O.Fr. conserver (9c.), from L. conservare “to keep, preserve, keep intact, guard,” from com-, intensive prefix , + servare “keep watch, maintain”. Related: Conserved; conserving. As a noun (often conserves) from late 14c.

Conserve:

Conservative: