Franke’s visual essays have been spreading virally over the past few years with mentions on major blog sites like Kottke and Treehugger. Now they are gathered together in a book, Bothered by My Green Conscience (New Society) and I think it gives us a very good reason to still value having a bound and printed object that we can share without peering into a screen.

Franke’s essays are illustrated guides to her process of changing internally and externally- we literally see into the conscious and unconscious thought process as she decides to take real action in dealing with the personal effects of climate change. Not content to simply change lightbulbs and stop drinking bottled water, Franke (with her husband) sells her SUV, rips up her driveway and plants a garden (battling a confused bureaucracy in the process) and writes a moving letter to her unborn grandchildren, a letter bemoaning in advance our pitiful lack of effort to improve a world we’re destroying. This essay, To My Future Grandkids in 2020, goes beyond the humor of the situational earlier essays and paints a poignant picture as Franke attempts to explain our collective failure to change things now when change is required- an explanation written for a generation yet to come.

The essays must be seen to be appreciated. Combining text, illustration and collage, they express the messiness of creativity and the beauty of action. This really is a book to give to your friends and family. Though we’ve never met in person, Franke and I are friends, separated by 80 miles of Lake Ontario water. We’ve been corresponding for several years now and I’ve had the pleasure of seeing these essays appear on her blog. When the book arrived in my mail I realized that they were deeper and more thought-provoking when revisited in this format.

I hope Sterling is wrong but he makes a compelling case.

“1. The climate. People still behave as if it’s okay. Every scientist in the world who isn’t the late Michael Crichton knows that it’s not. The climate is in terrible shape; something’s gone wrong with the sky. The bone-chilling implications haven’t soaked into the populace, even though Al Gore put together a PowerPoint about it that won him a Nobel. Al was soft-peddling the problem.

It’s become an item of fundamentalist faith to maintain that the climate crisis is a weird leftist hoax. Yet, since the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, an honest fear of the consequences will prove hard to repress. Since the fear has been methodically obscured, its emergence from the mists of superstition will be all the more powerful. Unlike mere shibboleths of finance, this is a situation that’s objectively terrifying and likely to remain so indefinitely.”

And that’s just one of seven…

NASA has a devastating look at the drought being experienced this year in parts of America. It is rated at the worst level that NASA tracks. Be sure to check out the images and maps- they are frightening. If this isn’t a repeat of the Dust Bowl experienced during the Depression in the 1930s I don’t know what is.

I’ve been looking at the hot button issues for blogs like this one for the coming year- not predictions but rather the stories that are unfolding right now, at the beginning of the year. When I started this blog a few years ago there was some debate about warming but the effects and proposed solutions were not totally clear. Now we’re seeing direct effects almost daily around the globe and starting to understand that dealing with this disaster is a global economic challenge rather than a political one. This hodgepodge of stories supports this contention:

• Switchgrass ethanol study shows that this source returns 540% of the energy required to grow and refine it. Corn returns something like 50%. Corn ethanol is not viable.
• The introduction of the $2500 Nano car in India and other emerging economies is going to have a profoundly negative effect of energy prices and generate enormous new emissions as the number of cars on the planet explodes.
• We’re using 2.9 million barrels of oil per day more than 6 years ago, globally. If you think oil at $100 is a story, think about oil at $200. When demand goes up and supply goes down, prices skyrocket.
• Automotive technology is poised for an explosion of innovation this year with the Tesla electric sports car, fuel cells, new biological hydrogen extraction techniques, highly efficient hybrids and plug-in hybrids and more. What does this tell us? That the conspiracy theories of the past that said oil and car companies were killing and/or stifling innovation were true- this stuff didn’t just appear out of thin air.
• Greenland Ice Sheet Scares the Crap Out of Climate Scientists. We’ll be watching the ice globally this year, especially in Grenland where the volume of water held in stasis by the ice sheet is equivalent to the entire Gulf of Mexico (!). Estimates for ocean rise by 2050 due to rapidly accelerating melting and calving of the ice sheet range from 2-6 meters. Goodbye virtually every coastal city worldwide including our nation’s capitol (anyone remember the flooded national Mall last year, New York’s subway floods and the ongoing national shame of Katrina?)
• The weather. It’s impossible to describe how big this story is. Here in Rochester, NY, the famously chilly winter upstate area was 70 degrees earlier this week, breaking all records. Killer tornados in the midwest in January, winter storms with CAT 4 winds (140 mph+) in the Pacific Northwest. Droughts in the southwest and southeast with no reserve water supplies. That’s just this week, folks.
• Water, water, nowhere. Only 1 in 500 Chinese have free access to potable drinking water. In much of the world it is worse. Yes, they have to buy drinking water and it’s not cheap. Repercussions of water issues cross all geographic and economic boundaries.
• Carbon costs. We’re going to have to start measuring the carbon costs of virtually all of our activities and products if we’re going to startle people into awareness of how their own actions are worsening the problem of climate change. I’m not buying organic milk that is shipped across the country when I can get local milk for half the price, dollars and carbon-wise. Look at what you buy and how far it came to get to you. And don’t forget the packaging.
• Freegan culture and the Chinese product backlash. Because of the Chinese toy scandals a lot of parents who don’t have time to worry about environmental issues are questioning the provenance of the products they buy and the immediate response is ‘I’m not buying Chinese’. A secondary response is the rise of freegan culture that says ‘I’m not buying things I don’t need and when I do need something I’m going to look for used or free stuff’. You don’t have to dumpster dive, there’s a huge thrift shop culture out there. Do you really need a new blender when your neighborhood Goodwill probably has ten perfectly good ones for a buck or two?
• Home and automotive energy costs crush economy by limiting disposable income. We’re paying five times as much as ten years ago for heat/AC and gas, yet incomes have not risen much. When you take $300-400 more out of a typical family’s monthly budget because of energy costs that money does not flow into the economy.

These stories are just the ones at the top of my awareness today. There are dozens more, so many in fact, that it is daunting to even write a quirky blog about climate change- it is overwhelming in the reach and impact it already has. Nevertheless I’ll be at it again in 2008.