greenandprofitable.com

This article in the New York Times feeds a lot of people’s ideas about what it means to live a green lifestyle: a guy all by himself in the desert, living off the grid in a dwelling he pieced together out of old shipping containers.

That scares a lot of people. Heck, it scares me! But it’s important to note that John Wells, the occupant of said desert paradise, is happy. He’s got a few hundred thou in the bank and he’s there because he wants to be.

I know people like that. My friend Juanita’s no-plumbing, no-electricity hilltop cabin that she and her late husband built by hand is as frugal a dwelling as I know, and culturally about as far from the New York City that both Mr. Wells and I chose to leave behind as it’s possible to get.

But the point I want to make is this: you can still live a green lifestyle and enjoy all the creature comforts and social conveniences of modern life. Consider Amory Lovins, energy futurist extraordinaire, whose spacious and gadget-filled 4,000-square-foot home was sustainability state-of-the-art when it was constructed in 1983. In the cold, snowy Colorado Rockies (just outside Aspen), he doesn’t need a furnace, or an air conditioner—and his monthly electric bill could be made back by skipping a couple of lattes per month at a fancy coffee shop..

Frugal, green lifestyles can be about comfort, ease, lower maintenance costs, and even luxury. They don’t have to be about deprivation—unless, like John Wells, you don’t think of being a hermit in the desert as deprivation, but as liberation. It’s his choice, and I say, go for it.

Two commentators demonstrate why solar continues to be viable, and why the dramatic and very public failure of Solyndra has nothing to do with the viability of solar.

On Huffington Post, Graciela Tiscareño-Sato writes, in “A Teaching Moment About the Green Economy,” of several brilliant entrepreneurs who are helping us take big steps toward a green economy, emphasizing multiple benefits such as saving cost and carbon and creating jobs at the same time. Her examples (all from the Latino world, incidentally) cover the building industry (specifically, solarizing schools in California), fashion, eco-consulting, and more.

And in the New York Times, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman points out that Solyndra’s failure was directly related to the success of solar. Solyndra’s model was based in high prices and scarcity, but as solar becomes more popular, the energy equivalent of the computer industry’s Moore’s Law kicks in; we get ever-more-powerful, cheaper, more effective systems as the quantity goes up. Solyndra couldn’t compete with the new low-cost solar providers. (Note: this is a different aspect of the same article I blogged about yesterday.)

Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, in the NYT, on why the solar economy is really here, and why natural gas fracking is a lousy idea.

(Thanks for the link, Bobby Cookie Hirtle)

Eeeeew! Yesterday’s New York Times had an eight-page story on the antics of an Internet criminal: a fraud artist who takes people’s money for genuine brand names, sends counterfeits, or maybe just pockets the money, threatens his customers with bodily harm or worse when they complain—and is delighted by the complaints because they get him great positions in Google! Somehow, he manages to keep his merchant account and mostly stay out of jail.

According to the Times article, he has even had someone call up a customer’s credit card-issuing bank pretending to be the customer, withdrawing the fraud complaint. He’s the sort of person that makes you want to wash your hands with strong soap after just reading about him.

I am not going to risk increasing his Google juice by naming him or his company. You can get all that in the Times article. And promise me you’ll read it before buying any designer eyewear online.

Given the appalling lack of business ethics, the clear and numerous cases of fraud, the monstrous encyclopedia of wronged customers, I don’t understand why he hasn’t been shut down. These are the sort of people who give business, and especially online business, a bad name. This is massive fraud and theft—and the credit card processing companies, law enforcement agencies, and of course his hundreds of victims need to band together to shut him down permanently and show him that even though it may take a while, ultimately, crime doesn’t pay. I’d love to see him get a looong sentence.