green washing dirty laundry — my love affair w CHP continues.

So several weeks ago, while doing laundry across the street from my apartment, I tried speaking w the Chinese owners about an Idea.  The idea of using his natural gas to generate electricity before running the dryers.  His english was not so good and my mandarin was non-existent.  He thought I was trying to sell him something.  He thought it was a scam.  He said electricity was too expensive so how could he make it.  He said he already had a private natural gas contract.  He basically flipped me away w his hand.

But hold on.  I live across the street from a pharmacy, a pizza shop, a chinese joint, and a grocery store loaded with refrigerators.  And of course, a laundry and drycleaner that doesn’t seem to do any of its own drycleaning.

Not only that, there are a ton of residential buildings.  And the laundramat is open from 7am to 8pm, hitting both the morning and evening residential peak loads.

Here is the basic flaw in logic.  People know that generating heat from natural gas is >80% efficient.  So why make electricity?  well, bc electricity is being made elsewhere at 35% efficiency and wasting heat all over the place.  What is so great about the stores across the street from my apartment, is that they have diverse energy needs, not all complementary, but certainly, my laudremat would make more money selling its natural gas fueled electricity to its neighbors than burning straight w my 4 quarters to dry my clothes for 28 minutes.

Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is appropriate in certain circumstances and city laundry would be one of them.  (Say nothing of the fact that CO2 IS the organic dry-cleaning solvent and why organic drycleaning makes me crazy that it is more expensive – so wouldn’t it be neat if someone captured the exhaust CO2 and compressed it into liquid form to make the solvent).

Good News!  This weekend, I spoke w Llew Wells of Living City Block… an initiative to develop a green neighborhood in the dirtiest community in the 5 borroughs.  He said there was a gigantic laundry facility in the middle of their target block… NYC is going to have CHP and it’s going to be SMART and Very clean.  My kind of green washing.

Local Law 38 – will someone please make an ap?!

To reduce brown-outs, NYC implemented Law 38.

“Local Law No. 38 prohibits commercial establishments from unnecessarily opening their doors while air conditioning is on, in an effort to conserve energy and reduce strain on the electric grid. The legislation provides for escalating civil penalties for successive violations and specifies the Department of Consumer Affairs as the enforcing authority. Intro. 264 was approved by City Council on Aug. 14, 2008 and signed in to law by Mayor Bloomberg on Sept. 3, 2008.” -NY League of Conservation Voters

If you’ve never experienced the sheer insanity of it, here is a great blog post about a person’s walking tour of open door retail stores flooding the street with A/C in 2009. Here is a NYT article 9 stores that were fined $200-$400 for leaving their door open in the summer of 2010.  These are single day incidents of single locations – but it happens everywhere in NYC, summer and winter and it makes me crazy!

Unfortunately, as this is not an energy savings law, it is a ‘let’s keep the grid from unnecessarily failing’ law, this does not apply to retail doors propped open in the winter letting out heat.

Will someone please make a reporting ap – so that next summer w my new i-phone, I can report every door I see propped open and do some citizen surveillance of common sense!

Please?

NYC Marathon and horsepower.

Last year was the first time I watched a marathon.  I was glib about it, but my mom was visiting, a friend was running, so it all came together and I said, Why not?  Turns out, it made me cry.  In my 1-block area at mile 6, hundreds of people all came out to support the runners.  Runners who had been preparing their muscles, nursing their knees and tendons for months, were now pushing the limits of their being, physically and emotionally.  But that is not what made me cry.  What made me cry, is that the by-standers weren’t just cheering for their one friend, they were cheering everyone on.  I was cheering everyone on. We were invested not only in the success of total strangers, but in their earnest desire to try to meet a personal challenge. If I had seen 10 runners, I would have been non-plussed.  There were 10s of 1000s of runners and even more supporters.  This was real.  Those people were not stuck in some cubicle pushing paper and toner around, they were pursuing something very personal.  En masse, I saw the freedom and willfulness of choiceful agency I long to see daily.

In the background of this experience I noted –with a kind of perverse glee — that the Brooklyn Queens expressway was backed up with traffic.  With all their promise of power, speed and freedom, those 1 and 2-ton EnergyIntensiveSteelAndPlasticGhouls spewing carbon dioxide were at a standstill;  this year’s marathon winner averaged ~13 miles per hour.

This summer, I was home in NH and I went to our famous country fair to watch the horse-pulls – teams of 2 horses collectively weighing less than 3300 lbs.  The winning team pulled 10,900 lbs loaded on a ~6′x10′ sheet of metal across packed dirt (I refused to watch the ox pull bc they incentivize the ox by pulling a nose-ring; the winning ox team pulled 12,600 lbs!).  Including their own body weight, the horses carried more than 14,000 lbs or 7 tons.   Watching their loins is the stuff of legends.  It’s great design.  It’s powerful.  It’s erotic.  The horses prance off – seemingly proud of their accomplishment- when untethered from the massive load.

According to wiki, “horsepower is the name of several units of measurement of power. The most common definitions equal ~750 watts. Horsepower was originally defined to compare the output of steam engines with the power of draft horses in continuous operation. The unit was widely adopted to measure the output of piston engines, turbines, electric motors, and other machinery.”

The 2012 Toyota Hybrid Camry boasts its “engine produces 156 horsepower”.  Yes, horses are slower, but horses eat hay.  And not only that, hay grown in the summer and stored in sheds during the non-photosynthetic months.  Like their own personal canning-closet, horses garner calories from high cellulose food that the biochemistry and fauna in our intestinal track can’t even begin to digest.  Years of bleak access to dead grass buried under the snow, has built layers of efficiency mechanisms to make them survive winters and run up to 55mph at their peak.

Humans can run 27mph, but neither horses nor humans can sustain the speed the way the internal combustion engine can.  But it all comes down to how one defines efficiency.  Efficient use of time or efficient use of resources.  How fast one accomplishes work, or how sustainable?  Over thousands of years of evolution (aka biological invention and innovation conjured by the persistent and notorious scientist named Time), horses and man have evolved incredibly efficient systems to capture and thrive on real-time photosynthetic energy.  Cars are neanderthals dragging their knuckles.

Now I am very American and I do love a car ride, but in general driving is overrated and ecologically insane.  I’m certainly not anti-design or anti-machine. The fastest man has gone 83mph (Sam Whittingham) and the fastest woman has gone 75mph (Barbara Bursford) with a regular bicycle on a paved surface.

A human on a bicycle is pure evolutionary genius.  It’s hot.

Improv: To make do with whatever materials are at hand.

This blog tips its hat to Buckminster Fuller and his “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”.

Buckminster Fuller talks about the Great Pirates.  From wiki:  “The source of their power is that they are the only masters of global information in a time where people are focused locally. Specifically, the Great Pirates (G.P.’s) are aware that resources are not evenly distributed around the world, so that items which are abundant in one area are scarce in another. This gives rise to trade which the G.P.’s exploit for their own advantage.”  So as the 99% speak around the world, and the current political climate of our leaders rings out “No and No”, I suggest we let the current paradigm huff and puff itself to exhaustion and focus our energies on charting a path to improvise on our current system and build a new one.

Improv works by saying “Yes, and…”

My favorite definition of Improvisation is : To make do with whatever materials are at hand.

I like this definition, bc it has a distinct sense of a finite set of conditions.  There is a base, a trumpet, and a piano. There is a comedian, an audience, a theme, and a moment in history.  There are acquired skills, honed intuition, resources, memories, experiences, feedback loops, desires, wants, needs.  Improv is definitely informed by past events, but it is very much motivated by current context. It is extemporaneous.  It is immediate.  What I love about improv, is that it is constantly pushing the edges of innovation.  It is the generative outcome of play.

I’ve been culling rules of improv from the web that I like.  I appropriated them from all kinds of authors in all kinds of fields to act as conceptual guidelines to define for ourselves Sustainable Systems by group play.

10 Rules for Innovation Improv:
1) Say Yes.

2) Say Yes, and..

3) Be Specific, Provide details. Offer up changes. Share. Contribute. Add one idea per line.

4) Don’t Ask Questions, Posit solutions.

5) Don’t Block or Deny. That’s a Know-No.

6) Pay Attention, Read, Listen, Watch

7) Build. Bring anything from anywhere. You look good if you set the frame for another good idea. Don’t feel self-conscious, your idea is an inspired stepping stone to an improved or divergent pathway.

Flat world -> Round world -> Finite world w 7 Billion people

Throughout history, we have come upon ideas that are difficult to integrate.  It’s normal.  Think of when we thought the earth was the center of the Universe.  It was a completely reasonable idea based on our immediate senses.  Or that the world was flat – also a reasonable hypothesis.  Or that the world ended at some edge of some ocean – just bottomed out like the edge of our bed!  Or that the earth was round, a very reasonable hypothesis.  Following this hypothesis, explorers from the flat world were rewarded with gigantic landmasses of unmined natural resources – ‘the new world’.  So while we don’t have to worry about sailing off the face of the earth at some unknown (but infinitely far) edge, we now have to worry about its finite surface area.  The possibilities implicit in finding the new world, also defined some basic physical limits.

And like our predecessors who tried to integrate sensory perception w abstract thought to conceptualize a round earth when for all intents and purposes it was flat, I recognize it is difficult to think about a finite earth when I can buy asparagus in NYC for $2/lb in October.

As a biologist, I often struggle w economic structure (asparagus in October for $2/lb, really?!); economists (generally) think of material resources as just subservient materials to the agency of humans rather than being the very intimate and mineral cycling of what we call humanity.  But Herman Daly is an economist I actually like.  In his “Beyond Growth”, he sees the disgruntled logic when an infinite economic growth paradigm is placed in the context of the Laws of Thermodynamics.  I’m going to quote at length from the first chapter of his book that set up the notion of a steady state economy:

“The growth advocates are left w one basic argument:  resource and environmental limits have not halted growth in the past and therefore will not do so in the future…

Earl Cook offered some insightful criticism of this faith in limitless ingenuity in one of his last articles (1982).  The appeal of the limitless ingenuity argument, he contended, lies not in the scientific grounding of its premises nor the cogency of its logic, but rather in the fact that:

‘the concepts of limits to growth threatens vested interests and power structures; even worse, it threatens value structures in which lives have been invested… Abandonment of belief in perpetual motion was a major step toward recognition of the the true human condition.  It is significant that “mainstream” economists never abandoned that belief and do not accept the relevance to the economic process of the Second Law of Thermodynamics; their position as high priest of the market economy would become untenable did they do so.’

Indeed it would.  Therefore, much ingenuity is devoted to ‘proving’ that ingenuity is unlimited.  Julian Simon, George Gilder, Herman Kahn, and Ronald Reagan trumpeted this theme above all others.  Every technical accomplishment, no matter how ultimately insignificant, is celebrated as one more victory in an infinite series of future victories of technology over nature.  The Greeks called this hubris. “

Daly ends this section by quoting from Cook again “without the enormous amount of work done by nature in concentrating flows of energy and stocks of resources, human ingenuity would be onanistic.  What does it matter that human ingenuity may be limitless, when matter and energy are governed by other rules than is information (Cook, 1982, p194).

So as we enter this magnificent period of the internet of ideas on a materially finite world, I am reminded of a book I read by Barbara Novak titled “Nature and Culture; American Landscape and Painting”.

America has become wealthy for many reasons.  In my mind, entering a pristine landscape and discovering oil catapulted the American dream for the various ex-patriots that arrived in ‘the new world’.  But that dream was predicated on growth by increased access to unspoiled resources.  America was rich in natural resources.  So incredible economic growth was totally possible (in that context).  What I like about Barbara Novak’s book, is that she notes the transition of styles of landscape paintings of the 1800s that I think reflect an important transition in thinking about nature.  There developed a tension between the pristine quality of the untouched land and the opportunity for mobilizing unexploited material wealth.  Artists went on dangerous expeditions to capture and record the virgin landscape and then they documented the transformation of that virgin landscape.  Landscape images ranged from untamed wilds of nature, to wilderness mysteries, to gardens of eden, to utilitarian topographic maps,  to pastoral narratives, to pre-industrial documentation.  What kind of landscape paintings do we have today?

In the 1800s, people on a crammed and overpopulated European continent, moved to an underpopulated and materially rich continent.  Growth! Unless we get to the moon and can grow our carrots there, there is no place to expand this growth paradigm as we currently understand it.  Given that I accept I live on a finite round earth, receiving a finite amount of sunlight daily, yet thriving on a trust fund of fossil energy, striving for a sustainable world is a real concept – an hypothesis that seems worthy of serious thought and meaningful exploration – not to be reduced to cynicism about how people appropriate the word ‘sustainable’.

We are not the center of the universe.  We do not live on a flat planet.  We live on a finite planet.  And on Halloween 2011,  world population is projected to hit 7 billion, each of us with varied demands on this finite surface, but 7 billion, none-the-less.  Trick or Treat.