Monthly Archives: December 2009

How Cash for Caulkers Could Get Accidentally Chalked by Local Government

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Cash for Caulkers — giving homeowners a tax break or some other means to decrease the cost of energy retrofits — has been getting a bunch of publicity. It’s a great way of creating jobs, and estimates show that $2 billion in loan guarantees could leverage $20-$40 billion in financing. But David Dayen at firedoglake points out a potential stumbling block:

I am in the middle of a remodel on a house, where we are not adding any square footage or changing the footprint of the unit at all. Nevertheless, to receive a permit for this work, and mainly because of an effort to change the house’s windows and exterior doors, we needed signoff from the Department of Transportation, Coastal Commission, Planning, Bureau of Engineering (including paying over $1,300 for a revocable permit which is another story), and the department responsible for the Venice Specific Plan. We are four months into the process and have still not received the permit. Due to local rules, if a homeowner seeks to make any change to any portion of the exterior, whether visible from the street or not, the authorizing agency (in this case the Venice Specific Plan) can demand a series of requirements. Moreover, the other departments involved in the process seem to have no idea what regulations apply and what do not, leading to a confusing set of signals and demands and needs.

More than anything, the point of changing the windows was for purposes of energy efficiency. But triggering the alphabet soup of agencies and adding burdens to our homeowner’s insurance eventually turned us against making those changes. Therefore, local regulatory requirements nudged us away from making energy improvements to the house and spending money we were willing to spend in materials and installation….

An energy retrofit program would be a boon to the economy, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and could reduce barriers to entry for millions of Americans who would otherwise not see upgrades in their homes or places of business. But it has to be done in concert with a process that ensures such retrofits are accessible and allowable without blockage at the local level.

It’s a good example of how high-level reforms can crash and burn if they aren’t married to a Practitioner’s Perspective.

Beyond The Underpants Gnomes: Playing the Vigil Move on the Corporate Accountability Board

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[Part 3 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]

Imagine if McKibben had decided to use the same move — vigils and other protests — but did it on the Corporate Accountability Board. Here’s how it might have played out.

Nine months before Copenhagen, 350.org would’ve said, f**k Copenhagen — it’s going to be a joke. Politicians have given up on saving us, so it’s time for the rest of us around the globe to step up.

In the next nine months, everyone from activists to academics to accountants, from India to Indiana, are going to start talking amongst ourselves about what it would take to get the biggest, most profitable corporations around the globe to do their part in getting us under 350.

We aren’t going to waste any energy on the Copenhagen farce. But during the same week as Copenhagen, we’ll have our own “No-Joke Copenhagen” meetings (that’s a placeholder name — yes, I know it sucks). In vigils and teach-ins around the planet, we’ll get millions of folks up to speed. We’ll share stories within our own communities and with other communities, and we’ll talk – and stream and twitter — about the power we have to save the planet if we are willing to take it.

We’ll also teach each other about which corporations are being naughty and which ones are being nice — from what we can see as workers, as community members, as scientists, as financial analysts, and as students. And we’re going to ask millions of folks to sign up — for the industries where they want to help “thank ‘em & spank ‘em” and for the enviros/church/etc. groups out of which they want to work.

And instead of our spending the week shouting outside the main Copenhagen meeting, hoping to get heard? We’ll spend it watching hundreds of corporate flacks scrambling to convince everybody that their company is one of the nice ones — they’re really, really, really serious about global warming, and they’ve got the hard numbers to prove it.

At the end of the No-Joke Copenhagen week — the biggest hard-core global teach-in in the history of the world — we’re going to tell the multinational corporate leaders they’ve got nine months to get their act together. Because we’re going to spend the next nine months gearing up, working out the details of each industry campaign.

Would this be simple to do? No. There’s a lot we have to figure out.

For example, corporations aren’t going to sit still — they’re going to play every card they’ve got to undermine this movement. So any strategic plan would have to talk about what the “naughty” corporations might try doing and how we’d respond.

But this ain’t rocket science. Plenty of activists have experience dealing with these issues — even when working across the globe in many cultures and languages and in many different types of political environments (e.g., Western enviros rarely have to worry about getting shot by the cops).

The difference is that with this campaign, operating at this scale, we’ve got much better cards to play then we normally do. Usually corporations win because too few people notice when a company stomps folks into the ground. But here? Pity the poor corporation that was the first to get caught playing dirty — the one folks across the globe retaliated against with everything we’ve got to make sure other corporations get the memo.

We could even get proactive. For instance, when rating a corporation’s naughtiness/niceness, we could include how they spend their PR and lobbying money. If they switch to fluorescent light bulbs but keep spending millions fighting green laws, they’re going to get spanked (or at least a time-out).

So yes, there’d be a lot to work out. Yes, it would be hard. But Mission Impossible it’s not.

Maybe you’re still daunted by how much work it would take. So stop for a second and ask yourself a question. It’s a little more than a week after Copenhagen. How do you feel right now? Are you feeling hopeful? Fired up? Powerful? Really?

Then imagine what you would feel like right now if we’d spent the last nine months playing on the Corporate Accountability Board — and if we’d just spent a week with folks around the globe exploring the power we have as we gear up to use it.

So you tell me. Despite all the obstacles we might face, which way do you wish we’d played? How do you wish you felt at the start of this new year?

Up next: playing on the Local Board

Play on the Corporate Board, Stack the Deck for Green Biz Guys & Gals

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One of the many benefits of playing big on the Corporate Accountability Board is that it gives an assist to other players. Take Newsweek’s interview with 5 of the 800 CEOs who’ve signed the Copenhagen Communiqué on Climate Change. Newsweek asked:

Isn’t there an inherent contradiction between the interests of business and the environment?

Reinoldo Poernbacher, CEO of Klabin S.A., “Brazil’s biggest paper producer, exporter, and recycler,” says no:

It would be a contradiction if there aren’t common rules for everybody. If we all play by the same rules, I don’t see any contradiction. On the contrary, the way we see all this is as the biggest opportunity in the world, whether for scientists or for creating new jobs—for everything. The key point is that everyone should play by the same rules, and then we will have a big opportunity for business worldwide.

In short, by Stacking the Deck In Favor of the Good Guys, we make it easier for the Poernbacher’s, the Auden Schendler‘s, and many other folks pushing for environmental change inside their corporations.

Beyond The Underpants Gnomes: Playing on the Corporate Accountability Board

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[Part 2 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]

If you want to win the social justice game, first you have to figure out where you’re going to play.

Enviro groups do a lot at the local and state level, and they also go after individual corporations. But the heart of their effort, where the Big Boys play, is DC politics.

As the healthcare and stimulus fights have painfully demonstrated, that board is tilted against us. Yes, some effort has to be made around DC fights like cap-and-trade. But on the DC board, right now the best outcome we can hope for is a crappy, watered down mess. If global warming is as much of a threat as enviros say it is, we need to play to win — and that means there’s no point in wasting a whole lot more time on DC for the next few years.

Where do we go? To two boards where the odds are much better. First up: the Corporate Accountability Board.

The Corporate Accountability Board

Just because we can’t get strong federal or global laws passed doesn’t mean we can’t change the rules of play.

When Wal-Mart decided to go green — and drag its subcontractors with it — it wasn’t because of Beltway bills. Wal-Mart did it because it was a smart way of deflecting the heat it was taking from union, enviro, and other community activists (and going green cost a hell of a lot less corporate power than going union).

Enviros have had some remarkable successes going after corporations, and that’s just from isolated campaigns. Suppose groups across the globe banded together and, drawing in millions of people who are fed up with getting stepped on by corporations, acted together around a common strategic plan?

For example, let’s say Enviro groups around the globe declared, since Copenhagen failed, we’re putting on notice Microsoft, Apple, Dell, Toshiba, and Lenovo in computers; Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Heineken Holding, and SABMiller in beverages; AT&T, Verizon, Nippon, Deutche Telekom, and Telefonica in Telecomm , etc. – the biggest players in each industry on the planet. We’re going to rank you on how you’re doing in getting us to producing less than 350 parts per million of CO2 in our atmosphere.

If you’re serious about stopping global warming – and you’ve got the plans and the hard stats to prove it – we’ll work with you to help you succeed.

If you don’t? Everywhere you are, we’re going to be in your face – with our bodies, our 401(k)s & union pensions, our campus’ investment funds, our union power, our consumer power, our Facebook accounts, our local government’s & campus’ contracts, and everything else we got. You thought government regs were going to be bad? Wait till you get a taste of people power.

Is pulling off this kind of massive corporate campaign a gianormous ask? Yes. But not for the reasons you might expect.

You might think putting all the pieces together would be the hardest part. Continue reading →

Beyond the Underpants Gnomes

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[Part 1 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]

After I beat up on Bill McKibben, I felt a little bad. Ripping somebody for not having real strategy is kind of lame if you don’t have one yourself. So, the next few posts are my quick & dirty effort to throw together a draft of a strategy. I’ll also use it as a chance to push the rules & game metaphor a little further and see where it goes.

One caveat: in the real world, coming up with a winning strategy is not something you do by yourself — especially if you’re one lone middle-class white guy in the US of A. So think of these posts not as a full-blown solution but just some thoughts to get a conversation going.

The Series:

  1. Introduction
  2. Playing on the Corporate Accountability Board
  3. Playing the Vigil Move On the Corporate Accountability Board
  4. Playing on the State/Local Board
  5. Current Moves on the Local Board — and the example of Seoul
  6. CityFight 2020: Seoul Kicks San Francisco’s Ass!
  7. Ready, Fire, Aim!
  8. Conclusion

How to Avoid Getting Fried by iPhones and Derivatives

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Can we create rules to stop Wall Street from ripping us off? No, says Wall Street. You aren’t smart enough to understand what we do. Your rules and regulators will just get stomped by traders. All your pathetic attempt to keep up with us will do is stifle innovation. So shut up and let the grownups do their thing.

Imagine if Apple said, you can’t write rules to protect you from your iPhone exploding or frying your brain. You aren’t smart enough. All you’ll do is stifle innovation. Would anyone take them seriously? Fuggedaboutit.

Is it because you understand how your iPhone’s physical innards work? For that matter, how the brakes on the last elevator you rode on works? Or the engines of the last jet you flew on? I’m guessing not.

Most of us are ignorant techno-peasants, swimming in a river of quasi-magical objects we don’t really understand. But that doesn’t mean we give manufacturers a free pass.

How do we do it? As a society, we’ve put together rules of the game that foster an ecosystem of players that create checks and balances and stack the deck in favor of us not getting killed and foster innovation. It’s not perfect, but it works.

Why should Wall Street’s “products” be treated any differently?

UPDATE: based on some feedback I got, some folks really don’t get how insanely complicated the iPhone is — they think derivatives are much, much harder to understand. So here’s a reality check. Continue reading →

Heck of a Job, Wired!

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According to Wired’s Spencer Reiss, Copenhagen is too little too late:

The really inconvenient truth: We’re toast. Fried. Steamed. Poached. More so than even many hand-wringing carbonistas admit. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, C02 that’s already in the air or in the pipeline will stoke “irreversible” warming for the next 1,000 years. Any scheme cobbled together in Copenhagen for slowing—forget reversing—the growth of greenhouse gases will be way too little, way too late. In the apt jargon of industry, a hotter planet is already “baked in.”

But fear not — technology will save us!

Coastal communities, for example, will survive not because the world will somehow unite to stop sea levels from rising (it won’t). They’ll survive because they’ll learn to adapt—much as the Dutch have done since the Middle Ages.

I’ve got one word for you, Spencer: Katrina.

I don’t know how anyone could see how our country abandoned our poor brothers and sisters during & after Katrina and think technology will save us. Maybe it’s the “us” where Spencer is having trouble opening his imagination; guys like him don’t worry that our government would abandon them.

But it wasn’t just poor folks of color our country abandoned. Here’s how well we’ve “adapted” to Katrina’s lessons:

Three days before the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (August 29), a coalition of 17 advocacy groups today urged the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to honor President Obama’s priority in his budget and campaign “to restore nature’s barriers – the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast.”…

The severity of Katrina’s damage in Louisiana was caused, in part, by the fact that the state has lost 1/3 of its original wetlands – about 2,000 square miles — an area larger than Delaware.

“Scientists agree that these lost wetlands could have helped reduce Katrina’s storm surge,” said Charles Allen, assistant director of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities and co-director of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. “Wetlands are ‘horizontal levees’ that in many cases are more economical and effective at damage prevention than man-made vertical levees because they absorb storm energy, slow incoming waves, wind, and surge waters. It is widely recognized that we urgently need to restore these wetlands and coastal forests to prevent similar or worse storm damage in the future.”

Despite these facts, four years after Katrina, Congress has been unable to fund major coastal restoration projects it authorized in the 2007 Water Resources Development Act because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has not completed the projects’ design and engineering.

In the face of these facts, how can Spencer write:

Ditto the other supposed horsemen of the climate apocalypse. Drought? Check out Perth, on the edge of the Great Australian Desert, where more than a million people keep hydrated with seawater that’s been desalinated by wind power.

Who does he think is going to pay for building a system like this for Africa?

Spencer isn’t completely clueless. At one point he hints at the bigger issue:

But won’t the transition to a warmer world be painful? The honest answer is that we don’t know. It depends on the resources we can bring to bear, technological and otherwise.

But that’s about it.

Look, I love Wired as much as the next geek. But it’s stunning that after decades of political deadlock over stopping global warming, Wired assumes politics will disappear when we try to cope with global warming’s aftermath.

Spencer’s article appeared in the same issue as Wired’s holiday gift guide; here’s my recommendation for Spencer.

Bill McKibben and The Underpants Gnomes, or Why We Keep Getting Our Asses Kicked

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In a recent Nation article, Bill McKibben reviews Al Gore’s new book, Our Choice. McKibben likes the book, but he’s got one major problem with it:

Gore, I think, has reasonably answered … the good-faith (as opposed to talk-radio) objections of anyone wondering if the world really could exist without fossil fuels. The answer is, not easily, but it’s well within the realm of technical possibility. If we followed his advice, we’d make it. What’s lacking, of course, is the political will to really do it.

And if there’s one weakness this time around, it’s that Gore could have devoted a little space to figuring out how we should build that political will….

Simply adding a few thousand more tons of scientific reports to the environmental side of the scale won’t tip the debate, not when Exxon can afford to buy the necessary coterie of Congress members. The only thing that will suffice is to build a movement strong enough in some other currency (bodies in the street, votes in the ballot box) to provide serious counterpressure.

That’s why McKibben helped found 350.org, an attempt to build a grassroots movement to stop global warming. In October, it organized an incredible number of people around the globe who held thousands of vigils. It was a good first step, says McKibben.

But this kind of movement will need to continue and grow. We’ll need civil disobedience, of the kind that blockaded Congress’s coal-fired power plant last spring; we’ll need symbolic witness, like 350.org; we’ll need old-fashioned lobbying.

McKibben ends his review with a quote from the end of Gore’s book, an imaginary speech from the future about how the US and the world have become prosperous because of their fight to stop global warming. It’s a great dream, says McKibben.

[But] making it real will depend on how hard we push the system. There’s no question it’s capable of responding, and no question that left to its own devices it won’t.

Sounds good to me. But what exactly are McKibben and 350.org going to try to do? Since McKibben’s article didn’t provide details, I went to 350.org to find out. What I found was… more vigils!

The weekend for these vigils falls smack in the middle of the two-week Copenhagen talks. President Obama just announced that he will visit Copenhagen on December 9th–and there’s no doubt that he’ll deliver a rousing and eloquent speech. The following day, December 10th, he’ll go on from Copenhagen to Norway to collect his Nobel prize. We need to send a signal to say that speeches and prizes are good, but action is what’s really required–enough action to head us back towards 350 parts per million….

The United States now holds a big key to unlock this process, and we need Obama and the U.S. Congress to turn that key–which is why many of the candlelight vigils will take place at U.S. senate offices, and at U.S. embassies and consulates around the world.

Candlelight vigils to try to move the Senate?? Good luck with that.

I’m not looking for a 50 page strategy document (okay, I personally am, but I’m an activist geek). But this? This is not a recipe for success.

A friend of mine calls this the Underpants Gnomes strategy. It’s from South Park; <a href=" AllExperts AllExperts explains:

The Underpants Gnomes are a community of underground gnomes who steal underpants, notably from Tweek.

The Underpants Gnomes have a three-phase business plan, consisting of:
Collect underpants
???
Profit!

Although Silicon Valley folks see it as a parody of dot com business plans, it works just as well as a description of our side’s typical organizing plan. When this plan — surprise, surprise! — doesn’t succeed, we blame the politicians and big corporations. Then we move onto the next big fight. And once again stealing underpants somehow doesn’t produce victory.

Bottom line: if you want to change the rules of the game, you’ve gotta know the rules for change.

UPDATE: I am not implying that McKibben isn’t very smart or extremely dedicated. This isn’t about him, it’s about a structural problem on our side. We’ve yet to build a progressive culture that really understands what movement building is all about. The reason I get this isn’t because I’m smarter than McKibben — I’m not. It’s because I’ve been lucky enough to have worked in parts of the progressive world where I got schooled the hard way (and because I have friends who smack me upside the head when I start forgetting those lessons).

Former Credit Card Company CEO: We Rob the Poor to Give to the Rich

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Speaking of thieves, it’s not everyday that a former CEO lays out how stacked the deck has become against working families. Atlantic blogger Mike Konczal on a recent Frontline special on the credit card industry:

[It] traces a narrative of the changing nature of credit and debit cards, where services and goods became free because they explicitly took on hidden fees and charges, hoping to net enough from a large body of consumers to make profits. Shailesh Mehta [former CEO of Providian, a major credit card company] is quite explicit about this, as are other insiders.

There’s been a lot of fascinating research in behavioral applied microeconomics along these lines recently; it seems that the credit card industry already figured it out a long time ago. Mehta points out that the most affluent consumers pay the least, while the poorest pay the most.

Mehta’s exact words are pretty stunning:

Mehta: Now, if somebody pays their monthly bill in full, and zero interest income, and if you don’t charge annual fee, zero fee income. So you have to make up everything from the merchant side, which you cannot. So what banks ended up doing is therefore they were subsidizing this whole group, because still two-thirds of the people were not making full payment. And that interest income covered the losses of the people who were paying in full.

So overall, the business looked profitable. But … in a strange way, banks were charging borrowers higher interest rates in order to give the wealthy people a break — in a strange way, if you look at it, because the people who have money were paying in full, and they were getting the break at the expense of the people who couldn’t pay in full. [Emphasis added]

PBS: So it was sort of an unintended transfer of wealth.

Mehta: It’s unintended, exactly. I don’t think anybody thought through that. But correct.

Epicurious Dealmaker: Set a Thief to Catch a Thief

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If we don’t want let Wall Street to walk all over us, we’ll need regulators who are ready to rock ‘n roll. Epicurious Dealmaker spells out who he thinks we need (and no, it’s not Cary Grant):

Many observers of the smoking wreckage which now passes for our banking system have opined that, in addition to being hobbled by a fragmented regulatory system riddled with overlapping and ill-defined responsibilities, the regulators who were supposed to be watching the chicken coop were woefully overmatched by the foxes. Staffed primarily by lawyers, on government pay scales, the SEC almost by definition is not up to the task of monitoring Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, or anyone else, if by “monitoring” we should expect true informed oversight and control….

This shortfall in regulatory intellect has been exacerbated by what the Japanese call amakudari, or “descent from heaven”: from time immemorial, a steady stream of former regulators has resigned their posts to assume positions on Wall Street, sometimes at the very firms they had been charged with overseeing. There is very little incentive to push a little harder or dig a little deeper into a question if it irritates a powerful firm that might be your future employer. Furthermore, this practice provides a steady stream of inside knowledge on current regulatory focus, practice, and ignorance that is of tremendous value to oversight-minimizing investment banks.

The answer, of course, is obvious, if politically difficult to put into effect. Staff the SEC, or whatever “Super Regulator” the government decides to deputize to oversee this mess, with a bunch of highly-paid, tough-as-nails, sonofabitch investment bankers. You will have to pay them millions, just like regular bankers. (You can tie their incentive pay to improvements in the value of securities held under TARP and TALF, if you like.) Pay them well, and investment bankers won’t be able to treat them like second-class citizens at the negotiating table. Pay them like bankers, and your regulators won’t hesitate to read Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein the riot act, because they won’t give a shit about getting a job from them later.
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