Green jobs

My husband's architecture newsletters (via e-mail so they come to me) are so covered with ga-ga-green, I'm surprised they aren't moldy by the time I open them. All businesses are getting on this band wagon. Some of the ads are just ridiculous--"Great minds think green" Dow Chemical. (Librarians have 2.0, but architects have LEED v3) And if it were just business, I wouldn't care, but when the government is pushing it--look out--reeks of planned economy. Governments don't create--they take, and then send a little back to you in the form of block grants, subsidies, tax breaks, and civil service jobs. For real innovation whether it's in stem cell research or google, you need smart, young, know-it-alls who aren't afraid to ask questions and take risks.

Google was incorporated in September of 1998. By 2008, Google employed 20,000 people. It didn’t cost the American people anything to create these jobs. But the American people, and the rest of the world, have benefited greatly from Google’s excellent search engine and other innovative products like Google Maps, Google Earth, and Gmail.

Google shows us how jobs are created in a market economy. Without imposing on the American taxpayer, they made a superior product for consumers and 20,000 jobs have been created. As a result, humanity reaps the benefit of being able to use Google’s superior products. And as an added bonus to the government, Google pays millions in taxes each year.

Consider Exxon Mobil as another example. Even in these challenging economic times, Exxon Mobil earned billions in profits, employs 80,800 employees, and pays billions of dollars in taxes and fees to the government every year. Exxon Mobil makes money because people are willing to buy, without being forced by the government, Exxon Mobil’s gasoline and other products. When Exxon Mobil hires a new employee, it doesn’t receive money from the federal government to help create that new job, because Exxon Mobil sells a product people will voluntarily buy.

So if Google and Exxon Mobil can create jobs without Federal subsidies and payments, why do so-called “green jobs” need to cost the American taxpayer so much? President-elect Obama says his 5 million new green jobs will cost $30,000 taxpayer dollars per job. And Obama’s plan is far more optimistic than those of even his closest allies. It takes a lot of government green. . .

There's a lot of green in going green

It's deja vu all over again. I was working in the Agriculture Library in the late 1970s-early 1980s and have seen all the green economy, save-the-environment stuff before. In its newer, pantheistic version, it's a phenomenal building boon for state legislators, contractors, architects, and engineers. A huge green snow-ball, if you will. My husband's architectural and construction magazines are so deep into green it's crazy. It has created huge new investment and employment opportunities, much of it for the same corporations and industries that gave us the pollution! The proposed e-regs mostly benefit the largest companies which is why you see the heavy investment in Democratic candidates. Here's an item from Ohio State University's "News and Information"

The Ohio State University Medical Center has made a commitment to incorporate sustainable technologies, including energy conservation, into a $1 billion master plan for campus expansion. The EPA’s National Risk Management Research Laboratory has provided funding to enable the medical center to track non-financial benefits such as greenhouse gas reduction, research productivity and community well being.

This will create a whole new cottage industry on campus and Washington measuring, reporting and publishing "non-financial benefits" of going green. A real feel-good opportunity for the folks in the social sciences who have probably been feeling under-fulfilled and unsatisfied on the Al Gorgasmic scale of experiences.

SAM is carbon neutral

SAM means Sustainable Asset Management. I didn't know these folks, who manage other people's assets, even had a carbon footprint; they have no product. But I suppose they have to turn on a light every now and then, feed the monkeys in the back room peddling to keep the computers running, give a bowl of rice to the slave girls fanning them (in place of air conditioning), or even occasionally send their CEOs someplace beyond the Alps via pack animals. They can trade their emissions from funny looking, low energy lightbulbs from China (highly recommended by John McCain) and be neutral. Isn't that nice? From their webpage.

SAM – TACKLING CLIMATING CHANGE

As a forerunner in creating and managing sustainable asset management products and services, SAM also strives to ensure that its day-to-day management and operations are sustainable. Having witnessed the great challenges arising from global climate change, SAM has adopted a clear climate change policy in 2000. In line with Switzerland's Kyoto Protocol commitment, SAM has set its target to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) by 8% per employee by 2008 (compared to the base year 2001). Moreover, beyond the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, SAM commits to neutralise its nonreducible GHG emissions. To achieve these goals, SAM adopted the following measures:
1. avoid greenhouse gas production;
2. reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and
3. neutralize all remaining greenhouse gas emissions through investments in alternative energy technology or clean development projects.

Who said it's not easy being green? Kermit?

Will the New Green just be a shade of Cabrini Green?

When city planners, social workers, developers and architects start eyeing the neighborhood and deciding that they know best how Americans should live, hang on to your wallet. You might get the Cabrini Greens of the mid-20th century, or the paradigm-shift-responsible-growth green designs of the 21st century. What we've got going up on Tremont Road here in Upper Arlington isn't exactly a Cabrini Green, but it's ugly as hell and is euphemistically called "mixed-use development." That means the developer was allowed to tear down four family units inhabited by modest income elderly and young couples, and put up four story, half million dollar condo units sitting on top of a Walgreen's or Starbucks.

Cabrini Green for those of you who didn't grow up near Chicago is the infamous public housing complex that was going to fix slum housing and crime through regulation and relocation of the poor. When I was a teen and we would drive past those shiny new developments, I probably believed that new bricks made new people. I was so open minded you could have driven a loaded dump truck through my brain. Even though I could hear my dad grumbling in the background about what a waste it was and how it'd be a slum within a decade. He was right (he was a Republican and my mother a Democrat and they regularly cancelled each others' votes on election day). Didn't work. Stacking 15-20,000 poor people and welfare families into high rises creates a high rise slum. Imagine! In fact, it probably contributed to more gang violence and white flight than anything else social scientists have pushed Americans in to over the years from their protected ivory towers and government buildings made of pork. Then when they decided to tear it all down 40 years later because it was so unsafe and unsightly (not to mention sitting on increasingly valuable land), the poor had to be uprooted again, just a different generation and a different ethnic mix.

The Green Alphabet Soup

Here's the green alphabet soup of code words for the New Green, minus the Cabrini. Keep in mind that asbestos in insulation and lead in paint were the best ideas of the smartest people of an earlier generation. A generation from now your grandchildren might be ripping out extruded-polystyrene foam and collector panels with glycol. And if you thought your local zoning board was tough, just wait till you encounter the green czars of building regulatory agencies.

LEED - Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design

USGBC - United States Green Building Council

CNU - Congress for the New Urbanism

NRDC - Natural Resources Defense Council

ND - Neighborhood Development

You may think you have the right to vote, that we have a representative form of government, and that there are courts to whom you can take your case as an American citizen, but regulatory agencies and groups can snatch that away from you faster than you can say "endangered species."

Here are the non-acronym code words and phrases that I see in all my husband's magazines and newsletters. Some can be mixed and matched, not that I'd suggest that just to take it to your community's zoning board.

sustainable

alternative

renewable

payback

energy efficiency, energy costs, energy investment, energy footprint, energy security

ecosystem, eco-friendly

wetlands

recycled

effects of global warming

green choice

safe environment

high performance replacement [fill in the blank]

drought resistant or drought tolerant landscaping

smart growth, responsible growth

access to transportation (public), walk to the grocer (this is code term for keep out big-box stores), bicycle paths, footpaths

best practices

benchmarks

neighborhood design, mixed-use design

geothermal, solar, photovoltaic, window film

How to have an award winning home

Here's how to have an award winning design that will get past your regulatory and zoning commissions and get your home into the latest building magazines.

1. Buy a lot that is near public transportation, a bike path, and within 1/2 mile of the nearest store--even if you'd never shop there. But look out for places like Ohio State where the bike path ends for 100 ft. under a bridge and the city and university can't agree on whose responsibility it is.

2. Use photovoltaic panels on the roof. Have a battery back-up if you live in a low sun area like Columbus (37% sunshine) or Seattle.

3. Collect rain water and heat it with solar panels. Keep an eye on the mold problem.

4. Use paint that has one of the approved, seal of perfection from one of the above groups. No one knows how long this stuff will last or what the long term affects are to your health, so be forewarned.

5. Make-up for the cramped square footage by having high ceilings (steep roof helps those panels). Spiders love it.

6. Don't attach your garage to the house so you can avoid all those environmental codes about fumes. Live in North Dakota? Tough.

7. Use less wood by not using headers of traditional framing and pray for no tornados in your life time. Or, don't build in tornado alley.

8. Site the house on the lot to take advantage of the sun, even if you're facing the free-way or the landfill and missing the forest, the view for which you bought the lot.

9. Don't build on a compacted landfill like just off Trabue Road in Columbus, Ohio. Something might ooze up later. (I watched them create that.)

10. Choose a climate for your lot where you won't need air conditioning. Like Huntington Beach, California or Bainbridge Island, Washington.

If you had to do all this, when would you do the rest of your job?