[6] Green Gone Wrong: Heather Rogers - Review

Though the book is  little old it constitutes an expansive piece of journalism. Much of what the general public takes for granted concerning the conversation around "organic,"carbon offsetting," or "such and such certified" is shown to be a corrupted puddle of politics, marketing, and part of a significantly larger picture that makes you feel good verses actually fixing anything.

There are any number of problems with oversight and regulatory committees. From faulty standards, under staffing, people appointed to head the departments who come from the industry that made them rich, it's a fairly common tale. Regulations get imposed which cripple small farms in taxes and equipment costs they don't require. Most are compelled to sellout. The farms that don't are often not profitable, despite what you may be paying at the local farmer's market.

Certain bastions of sustainability and potential of green engineering/building do exist. The lessons learned from these places is that much of it is a work in progress, even if they've existed for 20 or 30 years. (Un)fortunately, these places seem mostly likely to exist as a result of some disaster. Freiburg, Germany remembers the destruction from WWII and was emboldened after Chernobyl to categorically reject nuclear as a prominent source of power. This helped create a social and political culture that supported the investment in green initiatives. It's important to note, that it's not enough to simply live in smarter homes, by design, they make it so people are consuming less at the same time.

You'll get an insight into the world of SUVs as well.Certain gas guzzelers had the cards stacked in their favor in lax manufacturing standards, foreign competition being priced out of the market with shady tax laws, and incentives offered to businesses who used their SUVs for work purposes .All insured an unfair advantage at the expense of better technology. How refreshing it is to hear that GM was instrumental in dismantling public infrastructure for transportation, you know, to encourage more car buying. and upon them getting caught, a pawltry fine and then back to monopolizing business as usual.

It's not exactly new news, but the idea of carbon offsetting is more joke than not as well. The industry is unregulated, which means baseline measurements, from which to judge the amount carbon offset, are all over the place. This in line with the fact that a trip overseas could take your purchase of a tree over one hundred years to "equal out." The impoverished areas that these trees might go to end up getting mismanaged and underdeveloped., while many of the funds get diverted to other investments.

We treat 'green" like we treat most things. Haphazard effort that's talked about in much rosier terms than is ever accomplished. In the opinion of Obama's head of, I forget which agency related to environmental protection that's not the EPA, "it will take the weather 9/11" to galvanize people into wising up.When you read how messy it gets to even accomplish something small, I can't help but to think the same.