Environmental Healing Tipping Points

Hal Colston recommended I read Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell, so I borrowed it from the library and read it over our break. It changed the way I think about behavior.

So I've been applying what I learned to affecting the kind of large scale change that needs to happen in order for our planet to heal. If everyone in America unplugged their appliances when they weren't using them, we'd save energy, but it would do about as much good as a band-aid on a broken arm. What is enough? Well, here's my list of things that need overhauling (not in order of importance):

1) heating fuel
2) electricity
3) transportation fuel
4) China's gotta find some better options or have higher standards (and the theory is that if America leads, China will follow)
5) Rainforests need to not be chopped down, and allowed to regrow in desolated areas.
6) human population stabilization
7) greener everyday products: matching product useful lifetime with material lifetime

Ok. That's a daunting list. Un-realistic by most people's standards (but that's why we believe in God, right? To do the impossible?)



After thinking about this list in the context of Tipping Points, something occurred to me: most everyday people don't have any choice in these things. When regular people buy a house, the type of fuel is determined by the architect, not them. When regular people buy a car they pick out a manufacturer, model, and color (I suppose some people get more involved), but since biofuels are not a mainstream option, that decision has been made for them.

So how do you affect change for home heating and transportation fuels? It's not by educating regular people, though it probably wouldn't hurt, but they're not the people to talk to. The people to start the biofuel epidemic are architects and auto manufacturers.

Yesterday my friend from NY and her husband, who's an architect, came to visit, and he assured me that green building courses are now the norm for architects, which is certainly encouraging, so hopefully that field is already shifting.

But biofuel for cars? The Catch 22 of no-supply-no-demand for biofuels is the stumbling block that we need to overcome. But how? Here's a hypothesis.

Instead of going to car-manufacturers, go to the other half of the system: fuel producers, aka farmers. The idea is

• help farmers switch their equipment to biodiesel and
  
• help them setup biodiesel production on their farm from crops they can grow.

Nobody in Montpelier will buy a flex-fuel car until they know they can fill up around here. So start micro supply-and-demand systems going on farms, and then the structures are there to expand the supply as demand increases. But you need the farmers need that mechanism to get the whole thing jump started.

If we could advertise in Montpelier that some farmer had "locally grown fuel", people would go nuts!

A lot of farm equipment is already built to run on biodiesel, so I need to do some further research on how many farmers around here are biodiesel-equipped, and secondly how many of them are producing their own biodiesel.

We might also need to have some kind of incentives program to get people around here to buy flex-fuel or biodiesel-capable cars, but that's not too hard to imagine.

Montpelier just won a $100,000 grant to make the city more sustainable, so I think I'll be writing a grant to support farmer seminars, biodiesel production equipment, biodiesel farm equipment perhaps even? We'll see.

Check out Chrysler's Flex Fuel vehicles: Chysler

Feeling Hopeful ~ Happy New Year Everyone!