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.

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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.

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