Core77

Michel Gelobter takes the stage wearing an army green shirt that claims "Property of Mother Earth" and captivates the audience with one simple statement: "In the black church there's a saying: 'How can I make it plain?'" He has the poetic cadence of a preacher in one of those churches, and there's not a sound in the room besides his gentle, booming voice.

He's looking to Washington for leadership in helping to "bend the Mauna Loa curve," named after the place where scientists in Hawaii first started noticing atmospheric changes. To make even the slightest little bend, we have to not burn 70% of known, already-on-the-books fossil fuels. In 2017, he predicts, we can add enforceability, maybe even military action, and then in 2022 we might actually start to see some change.

In the Western world, there are two known behaviors Gelobter saw that he could affect: we vote and we shop. And that's what he kept in mind when he started his company, Cooler (which has to be one of the cooler company names out there), where consumers can use their buying power to support companies that are fighting climate change. But the way we spend our money has drastically changed: In 1901 low-income people spent half their income on food, now it's 9% and it's only that cheap because we have fossil fuels. Carbon offsets make him happy, because it's a step. But he hopes that the right to burn carbon in the future will be as expensive as the cost of oil and fossil fuels are today. To reach that kind of equilibrium would be a huge step in bending that curve. It really does all come down to money: He breaks down what we could have spent that $3.5 trillion Iraq war budget on; I won't depress you by ticking off everything we could have bought because it's really too depressing to consider.

Now here's something we haven't heard with all this talk about the WPA in light of the economic stimulus plan. The New Deal was the "single greatest investment in racism" by design, says Gelobter, because it effectively prevented blacks from getting mortgages and kept communities homogeneous. A New New Deal can be not only based on green technology and infrastructure, but it can offer a role for the black community already very involved in this work, which he's been very, very vocal about. But we have to communicate all of this to the right people, he says. It's a statement that already resonates pretty well with designers: How do we make it plain?