Flint’s Green Future?
Once the great Vehicle City, most of Flint is now more of a rusty graveyard and ghost town of despair. Flint is at the top of the nation’s lists for highest unemployment rates, highest foreclosure rates, and it’s ranked as one of the most depressing cities to live in nationwide.
Everywhere you look businesses are closed, buildings sit empty, homes are for sale or just boarded up and abandoned, even the once affluent areas like Grand Blanc and Flushing that are on the outskirts of Flint have been touched with economic troubles.
With all the focus on economic issues in Flint and surrounding areas the green focus isn’t real strong. Who can afford to think “green” when they don’t even have a job? Politicians are trying to shift the focus from ecomnomic troubles and promise that Flint’s future will be green, but it’s more hype than fact.
While I don’t expect the entire city of Flint to try to go completely green (like Reynolds, Indiana). Flint and Michigan politicians in general all have a “green vision” that is one dimensional and, as always, focused on the auto industry and related automotive stuff: biofuels and biodiesel production. They hope that by having GM’s (the company that made and destroyed Flint) new hybrid plug in car, the Volt’s, gasoline engine built here that Flint will appear to be “greener”. They think that just because Flint is building GM’s first plug in hybrid’s engine that will make the city “green”. Not likely. Especially since most of the nation’s electricity is still powered by coal. Therefore plugging in a car isn’t the best solution it just alters where the pollution comes from.
Politicians’ other ideas involve bringing biodiesel factories and other biofuel and biogas makers to the Flint area and other parts of Michigan. Hmm, do you see a trend here? Can Michigan not get past the automobile and focus on anything else?
One company talks of cutting down Michigan’s beautiful expanse of forests to make cellulosic biofuels. Excuse me. How on earth is that green? Just because it’s not petroleum based fuel doesn’t make it green. Cutting down trees, our biggest weapon against greenhouse gases, isn’t going to solve any problems. It will only create more. Not only that, once you get out of the urban areas Michigan is full of vast amounts of natural beauty. Let us not destroy all the real green to be green.
There are tons of other “green” companies and industries that could come to Flint and make things better. Bring someone in here that can recycle and make something out of the enourmous amounts of rusty vehicles and condemned buildings. Bring green cleaning and green focused stores to the area. Help Michigan farms convert to being organic. Plus laws need to be passed that really mean something like Massachusetts’ laws forcing biodiesel blends and exempting ethanol from being taxed so heavily.
There is more to Michigan than automobiles, fuel and manufacturing (isn’t there?), why can’t people see that? If the future of Flint really is green why does it only have to be about vehicles and gases? Make it really green by focusing on other aspects of being green, there are so many other avenues to explore.
At least Hemlock is focusing on something other than green automotive technology, they are building products that are for solar cells.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for just about anything that will help Michigan’s economy and make the area a little greener. I just have a hard time believing in the automotive industry.
As we in the U.S. start our long journey back to an oil-less society our values, and hence our demand for material things is lessening. As with Thoreau, on Walden Pond, self-sufficiency will become highly valued over the current, commercial stoked fellatio of buy, buy , buy! and we will return to a post-Bush/McCain era of moral, educational and democratic values where saving for something will make sense, because the world has caught on, and the era of the sick notion that a fiat monetary system is appropriate for this truly great and powerful country is over! The Arabs learned, with this last round of deflating the dollar by ‘presidential decree’, as have the Chinese, and our greatest debtor, the Japanese, that our money, as it is, isn’t worth the paper it is written on and can be screwed with by presidential whimsy! The convulsive changes ahead will provoke paradigm change in the very soul of each North American, and we will start again, wiser, and chaste in the ways of the world and filled with shame that Bush has brought on us with his monetary tomfoolery. After the crash, If we are lucky, and pay in Euros, up front, the Chinese, Japanese and the Arabs will do a small scale business with us - no credit, cash, in Euros, on the barrel-head, if we are lucky! Flint will suffer the crash of Fanny and Mac by the terrible effect that printing money, Bush style, has; devaluation, or dilution of the dollar and the natural inflation in prices that follows. The price of gas will go up and so will the price of everything else. We will all contribute to the huge overpayment of salaries and benefits to the Bushian neo-con uber-rich executive class that ran these companies into the ground as they are rewarded for it with huge payoffs! The collapse of the Soviet Union was kinder to its people than this! Disgusting.