Why Greening the Grid Comes First

In the US, coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, provides 50% of electricity, with all fossil fuels fuels providing 72%. Globally, coal provides 40% and all fossil fuels around 66% of the world's electrical power.

This reality suggest that we should first green the grid, then plug into it for transportation and other energy needs.

(Click the image to go to the original website and see a clearer image. It is also, of course, a vivid record of population, wealth, and probably other distributions.)

Our New Place

We leased a fabulous place in Mission Canyon: Craftsman styling with redwood everywhere, island and ocean views, huge yard with vegetable garden and chicken coop. It's a 2 bedroom, 2 bath, large kitchen, huge fire-placed living room, hardwood floors, well-kept funky place from the 1880s. Oh and a pool too.

We might even be able to afford it if we live off the chickens and vegetables.

The End of Economic Fetishism

I laughed at Barbara Ehrenreich's comment on the bipartisan politicos' effort to stave off recession:

With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you’d think that the economy is a giant clitoris.... The immediate challenge...is how best to get the economy engorged and throbbing again.

The joke works, too, if the economy were a giant penis. Either way, politicians' desire to stimulate our economic lives is the politics of the pimp, a $1200 come-on from the Wall Street john. For most of us struggling in the middle classes, all this economic stimulation will produce at best fleeting pleasure, consumerist titillation, climaxed at the cash register, and usually ending there. To be sure, $1200 is not nothing, which is what we would otherwise get, what we usually get. But is that what we really want? Will such consumerist titillation change anyone's lives?

Even if this stimulation works and gets the economy throbbing again, the politicos' obsession with the consumerist fetish doesn't begin to address deeper questions:

1. Does economic growth really make us wealthier?
   
2. Does it make our world better?
   
3. Does it make us happier?
   

1) The much ballyhooed economic growth in recent decades serves mainly to create a huge and increasing gap between rich and the rest of us, who try to keep up by working too hard, 350 hours a year longer than Europeans or Japanese. Much of that enforced workaholism is economically ephemeral, except for those who own a home. No surprise, then, that the bursting housing market bubble is the reason the politicos decided to get together and throw a $1200 sop to us middle class saps. Santa Barbara is perhaps a great example of this class dynamic of comfortable wealth, invisible poor, and struggling, over-worked, middle class DINS (double-income no sex), except that the middle class in Santa Barbara hasn't been able to purchase a home since maybe 1998.

2) Even if our politicians won't connect the economy to the environment, many people, especially in places like Santa Barbara, are now beginning to realize that a stimulated, throbbing economy predicated largely on the dizzying production and consumption of stuff ain't natural. Global economic growth, especially in China and India, is stretching resources and stressing the planet. Choose your Armageddon: peak oil or global warming. Rather than addressing the question of sustainability, politicians can only think to provoke our consumerist fetish in order to stimulate unsustainable economic growth.

3) Finally, fortunately, is the question of happiness. As Bill McKibben argues with grace and hope, "the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the more we will recapture our own." He advocates sustainable, local economies, that value connections to people rather than wealth as the source of human happiness. Why work so hard for money if it doesn't make us happy? Why destroy the environment if there's no happiness in it? Why do we focus on our consumerist fetish when what we really want is so much bigger and more human?

I'm not advocating that our leaders do nothing to prevent recession or depression. I also have to struggle to feel the hope promised by local economies in some murky, idealistic, post-apocalyptic future. I'm not sure what the answers are. But I'm not turned on by stimulating economic growth or tricked by the john's promise of $1200.

Trailing Peter Pan

Check out the trailers for Peter Pan, the DVD, from the young talents at Santa Barbara High School:

1. In a Time of War starring Jenna!

2. A Face at the Window


(Apparently Blogspot doesn't allow Adobe Flash videos.)

At the Corner of Ruin and Grace

When I first moved to Santa Barbara, I was struck by how pretty everything looks all the time, too pretty for my east coast blue collar blood. The line from "Orange Juice Blues" kept haunting me: "I'm tired of everything being beautiful, beautiful." So I went on a mission to find grit in Santa Barbara.

I couldn't find any, at least not Anglo grit. I found sleaze, both working class and upper crust, but that ain't no authentic, dare to do the right thing, unconcerned by dirty finger nails, do the hard work of the world, grit. The closest thing I could find was stylized designer grit, created from the clean pretty drafting tables of clean pretty minds, whose rebellion from stucco walls and red-tile roofs created coffee shops, bars, or restaurants where graduate students and ex-graduate students like me could drink four-dollar coffees or five-dollar beers and feel the authenticity of bared brick and ductwork, pre-distressed furniture, and the atmosphere of antique Coke bottles and old license plates. Had I moved to a new state or a new state of being?

After a year or two in town, a bit slowly, really, I discovered the venerable concert series, Sings Like Hell. Producer Peggy Jones and her hellions have succeeded in introducing grit into the dreamy prettiness of Santa Barbara far better than most, certainly far better than I. Within the beautiful, beautiful Lobero opera house, they stage some of the best musical acts in town, specializing in the graduates of--and those still enrolled in--the school of non-commercial knocks. Heavily flavored by the Austin scene, Sings Like Hell offers singer-songwriters who are more familiar with loud bars a chance to perform for a sit-down audience in an acoustically designed venue. The tag line of the series is "The best music you've never heard," and indeed the best shows not starring Richard Thompson are the ones by unknown surprises. Anyone familiar with Sings Like Hell knows all this.

A couple weekends ago, a great example of grit in paradise came to Hell. Eliza Gilkyson was born in Hollywood to folk-singing DAR cultural elite, but she must have used her silverish spoon to feed on large doses of unrefined life. Her songs celebrate a scar-studded, mistake-wizened, regret-free history of seeking truth, heat, and marrow from the acid Sixties through the current era of consumerist delusions. Tall, thin, and still attractively hip, she wears a guitar as naturally as any grizzled rocker. Her voice reaches the ache of longing as readily as it belts Bush-bashing blues. ("I'm from Texas," she said in the intro to 'Man of God,' "and we're still missing our village idiot.")

The grittiest thing about her is that she keeps improving as a songwriter and performer even as she pushes 60. Five or six years ago she warmed up the audience in Hell, a performance memorable mostly for her stand-up comedy between likable songs. A headliner this time, Gilkyson's hit her confident stride. She regaled us plenty with her wit, but settled in the second half of her set into moving us with her artistry, her songwriting, her lyrics. I was especially impressed by glimpses of what I think are unreleased songs, including the great line for locating grit, at "the corner of ruin and grace."

Candidate of Choice

Dale Francisco ran for Santa Barbara City Council as a pro-choice candidate; that is, he wants public policy to support private transportation. In short, he's a car guy, and he doesn't want Santa Barbara in the business of encouraging people to walk, bike, or ride public transit. People have chosen cars, he reasons, and government should respect that choice. Now that Francisco has beaten the odds and Brian Barnwell for a seat on the City Council, I'm compelled to make a few common-sense points to help ensure that his argument to support cars in the 21st century doesn't gain traction in Santa Barbara public policy.

First, people's personal choices are defined by public choices. Calling the choice to own and drive a car simply a matter of "personal" choice ignores the public choice to invest enormous resources in roads and parking and suburban sprawl. The infrastructure is set up for cars. That I and nearly every adult in Santa Barbara chooses to own and drive a car is possible only because of tax-supported infrastructure. How many of us would invest tens of thousands of dollars in personal transportation if roads were unpaved and parking non-existent? How many would choose public transportation if enough money were invested in it to make it more convenient than cars?

Second, the public choice to invest in personal transportation has never been a simple matter of democracy in action, never a simple reflection of Americans love affair with the automobile. Powerful corporations with vast sums of money at stake, notably General Motors, pursued calculated policies to cripple public transportation, eliminate competition, and leave people with no other option but to purchase a car. Los Angeles is probably the most tragic result of this effort. Blessed in the first half of the twentieth century with the largest streetcar system in the world, boasting a per capita ridership exceeding current-day San Francisco and New York, LA now famously suffers from the horrors of auto-dystopia: asphalt jungles, traffic nightmares, vacant downtown, smog, endless commutes--and on and on.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the choice to invest public money in personal transportation, which may have made some sense in the first half of the twentieth century, makes no sense today. The Average Man has pointed out to Dale Francisco the green reasons for public transportation, which I think are obvious and I fully support. I'd also like to point to the, dare I say, emotional benefits of public transportation. For sure, cars can be fun and, perhaps more so than any other commodity, bring real pleasure. But maybe getting out of our cars and interacting with our neighbors is even more fun. As Francisco himself has said, "I originally came to Santa Barbara partly because this is one of the world's best places for biking and hiking, and because it has a walkable downtown. If I never had to drive a car, I'd be delighted." Well, then, why not support public policy that fosters the choice for such car-less joy?

Warner Warning

The widely reported $120 margarita at the San Ysidro ranch got me thinking again about Ty Warner's effect on the quality of life in Santa Barbara. Walking by Ty Warner's various sea-front properties in Montecito last spring, I witnessed an army of laborers building, renovating, beautifying. Some might point out how many jobs "Ty" is creating, how much money he's pumping into the local economy (though I wonder how much of the reported hundreds of million actually stays in the local economy and how much goes to imported luxury items and materials). But to me, the significant fact is that so much capital and so much human labor, skilled and unskilled, lower class and lower middle class, is being devoted to the exclusive benefit of rich people.

Consider the local Warner properties, not including his multi-lot bluff-top estate, and not including the cost of actual purchase, only the renovation cost:

• Biltmore Hotel, recently renovated for a cool $240 million (for 233 rooms). Rooms "start at $550" a night.
  
• San Ysidro Ranch, recently renovated for $130 million (for 40 cottages and suites), plus an additional $25 million for the Stonehouse restaurant. Accommodations available for $800-$4,000 a night.
• Coral Casino, currently completing a $35 million renovation. Enrollment fees more than $20,000, plus monthly and other fees.
  
• Montecito Country Club, renovation plans in the works, with Jack Nicklaus designing the golf course. Membership, $10,000 plus fees.
• Sandpiper Golf Course, $124-$144 for a round of golf.
• Rancho San Marcos, currently a relative upper-middle-class bargain at $65-$85 for a round of golf, though changes are expected.

Apologists might point to the $1.5 million he donated to the Sea Center on Stearns Wharf or the $500,000 to renovate the path in front of his bluff-top estate. But I'm not impressed. He invests hundreds of millions of dollars, probably more than a billion dollars, in properties that benefit exclusively rich people and gives two local donations worth roughly.2% of his other local investments, just barely enough to get his highly visible name on a highly visible public building, plus, of course, the aesthetic satisfaction of beautifying the view from his estate (even changing the color of the Sea Center).

Ty Warner epitomizes the worst of contemporary capitalism. He makes a fortune selling frivolous beanie babies to kids and crazed collectors, then invests that fortune in luxurious playpens for the rich and super-rich. His idea of public spirit, his contribution to making the world a better place, begins with personal aesthetics and ends with public relations, little more than individual aggrandizement with an impoverished sense of larger purpose.