Month: March 2011

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, propaganda, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

The latest news from Daichi makes it clear: Nothing these officials say can be trusted:

Highly toxic plutonium has seeped into the soil outside the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power complex in northeastern Japan, officials say. The amounts detected in five different soil samples taken from the facility did not pose a risk to humans, safety officials say.

Yes, I am calling that last sentence an outright lie—a disgusting, damnable, and definitely dangerous dissembling.

Want to know the safe level of inhaled plutonium? Zero. The risks are lower if it’s eaten or drank. Breathing the stuff has a very high deadliness factor because it settles in the lungs.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , , , ,

The news from Japan remains very troubling:

Now…let’s remember that nuclear power is a really stupid way to boil water for electricity generation:

  • Over the entire fuel cycle, starting with mining uranium and ending with attempting to find a solution for safe storage of nuclear waste, the process requires enormous energy inputs, so the actual gain in usable power is very tiny, if it exists at all. One study I’ve seen, by John J. Berger, states that from 1960-76, the nuclear power “generation” industry actually consumed five times as much power as it generated. I cited this study in my first book, Nuclear Lessons, published waaaay back in 1980.
  • If a plant has a major problem, and has to be removed from service permanently, it causes disruption in the energy systems of the communities that depend on it, because a lot of power generation is taken off the grid at once. In the case of Daichi, most of those reactors can never be used again.
  • In the US, nuclear power is subsidized with the Price-Anderson Act, a low-premium accident insurance policy that sharply limits liability. Basically, if you don’t own the plant, you probably won’t collect damages in case of  an accident.
  • And don’t forget: there is no permanent solution to storage of radioactive waste, isolated from the environment for up to a quarter of a million years (I, for one, don’t believe this is actually possible).
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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

I have lived in a housing project of 55,000 people in New York City—so insignificant in the city’s eyes that we didn’t even have a subway stop; we had to bus or walk a mile to one of two different trains, one of which could have easily been extended a mile over Interstate 95. In all, I lived in New York City for about 20 years, including birth to 16. In my early 20s, I lived in four of the five boroughs: Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.

At the other extreme, for the past 12+ years, I’ve lived on a working farm in a village of about 200 within Hadley, Massachusetts—a town of 4753 people—part of Hampshire County, whose 20 “cities” and towns within 545 square miles increased over the past decade to 152,251. (City, as Massachusetts defines it, refers to a municipality administered by a mayor and council rather than Selectboard and Town Meeting, and has nothing to do with population.) And I actually serve on an official town land-use committee, where we wrestle constantly with shaping the future of our town.

New York City’s five densely populated boroughs comprise just under 305 square miles, and hold 8,391,881 residents. You could move NYC to my county and still have almost half the land area left —maybe to grow enough food for all those residents. My county has 1/55 as many people as NYC, spread out over 1.78 times as much land.

Between the time I first lived outside of New York, in 1973, and settled in Hampshire County, in 1981, I lived in various cities and towns ranging from under 5000 to 1,688,210. All of these communities can offer sustainability wisdom from which other places can learn—either by doing it right, or by doing it wrong (so much so that I could write a book on this—maybe I will, some day). Here are a few of the insights:

  • Vibrant neighborhoods require mixed use. In every city I’ve ever lived in, the exciting neighborhoods are those where people live, work, play, and shop in close proximity. The best US examples I know are Northampton and Amherst, MA, New York’s Upper West Side and Park Slope, and the Fox Point area of Providence. Much of Europe uses this model, and European cities are highly livable.
  • Car-centered cultures adversely affect quality of life. Strong mass transit usually enhances it. In New York City (where a car is a liability), commuting time on public transit is productive. People read, write, get through their e-mail, walk a few blocks to their destination, and don’t feel like they’ve wasted the time. Sometimes they even build friendships with the people they see every day on their commute. In Hadley, the shopping district is suburban-style, with big malls and strip malls along a state highway. Almost no one lives on that road, and it’s not a place for cultural events, other than movies. While the largest food stores actually do provide chances to hang out a bit with neighbors (all arriving in separate cars), having a brief chat with an acquaintance you run into in the produce aisle is not the same kind of community building as you can get in a cafe or a bookstore.
  • A corollary: planning must take into account the existing transportation patterns. Mass-transit thinking can’t just be grafted onto a car-oriented culture, and car-oriented thinking won’t work in crowded urban areas. Those patterns can change over time, but it’s a slow process.
  • A real community transcends ethnic and cultural differences. My current neighborhood of Hockanum  Village has a number of families that have been on the same land for 200 years or more. Some of them trace their lineage to the Mayflower. The whole neighborhood gets together every year for a Christmas party that attracts former residents from as far as Florida, and sometimes a summer picnic along the river. A few neighbors gather at the local coffee shop for breakfast once a week. I could knock on any door in the neighborhood with a request, and people would try to help me.
  • Cities lend themselves well to centralized renewable energy collection—but this potential to make a big difference in climate change and oil dependency has barely been tapped. Instead, many centrally heated buildings in New York are overheated to the point where tenants need to open windows on cold winter days, and that’s crazy.
  • Cities could supply a significant portion of their own food, but again, this potential is not tapped much.
  • Farmers and gardeners understand the food cycle. They know what it’s like to grow food for themselves, their families, and their livestock. They’ve seen crop failure. They pay close attention to weather patterns. Localism is not a theoretical construct; it’s an everyday reality.
  • Homeowners and farmers notice details and patterns, so, for instance, they anticipate and address maintenance issues before they become failures. They don’t expect anyone else to do things for them, though they might ask for help on a big project. Tenants (especially in urban areas) are much less likely to have this attitude.
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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

In my last post, I described the demise of our radiator and engine while driving down the highway Wednesday. I had the car towed to our mechanic, who called this morning to tell us that the engine had indeed suffered a meltdown. Fortunately, the consequences are far less severe than in a nuclear power plant, but it meant we either had to spend $3000 to fix it or go car shopping in a hurry.

We’d gotten eight years out of the replacement engine we’d put in the last time this happened, and now the car was 14 years old. $3000 didn’t seem like a wise investment.

So off we went, car shopping. When we get into a riff like this, we’re like a couple of trucks. We go until we get the job done. When we bought our current house (in 1998), we viewed 16 houses in just eight days, and bought #15. And with three drivers, nowhere we can walk, and one working car, we needed to move fast. We had decided ahead that with a new teenage driver in the family, buying new didn’t make sense. The insurance would be huge, and so would the risk. So that made the decision simpler.

In two hours, we went to five different dealerships—four that only sold used vehicles, plus one local new/used .Oddly, we only saw one car that was worth test-driving: a 2005 Toyota Corolla stickshift with only 26,000 miles. (Corollas are typically good for 150,000 or more. Our current one has 165,000.) Considering that some of the other cars we saw included a $12,000 Prius with over 99,000 miles and a $17,000 Honda Civic hybrid with 36,000, we thought we’d found a pretty good deal.

Over the next three hours, we dropped the car off at our mechanic to check it out, stopped for lunch, went to the credit union and got financing through our home equity line of credit (that we had established earlier but never used), went to the library to make sure it wasn’t the kind with the runaway accelerator problem—and while we were there, we also googled the original owner, who had a distinctive name, to make sure there was no report of a major accident in the car (we discovered she’d purchased the car in April 2006, and died the following September of natural causes—and at some point later, the car was traded back to the same dealer that had sold it originally). Then back to the mechanic to pick up the car with a clean bill of health, and back to the dealer to go through the paperwork and specify the very minor repairs to be made.

Yup. In five hours flat, we chose a car, had it examined, and got it financed. That’s fast even by our standards, but we were under some time pressure, with the exchange student and some teenage friends of my son all descending on us in the coming days. By Saturday, the work will be done and we’ll have the car.

Know any Western Massachusetts takers for a 1997 Toyota that needs an engine and radiator?

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

In 2003, we were driving down the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Connecticut, on our way to pick up a high school exchange student from France at JFK Airport. Suddenly, steam started pouring out of the hood, the temperature gauge hit the red zone, and the car lost power. Cooked radiator, and broken head gasket (cooked engine).

With only 71,000 miles on a six-year-old Toyota, one of the car dealers we visited advised us not to replace the car, just put in a new engine. We took his advice, especially since he actually arranged the whole thing for us.

Yesterday, I was driving that same car, now 14 years old and with 165,000 miles, on my way to a business meeting. Suddenly, steam started pouring out of the hood, the temperature gauge hit the red zone, and the car lost power. Cooked radiator, probable broken head gasket.

And the craziest thing of all? Next week, assuming she’s still coming after the earthquake and tsunami, we’re scheduled to host a high school exchange student from Japan.

Hmmm. Are exchange students too expensive to host if we have to spend a few thousand dollars on fixing or replacing a vehicle? (that’s a joke.)

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By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with ,

My friend Christophe Poizat sent me invitation to try the new social-media-integrated browser, RockMelt.

I immediately liked the interface. It’s a little more elegant, and seemed faster, at least initially (like Firefox, it seems to slow down the more I use it). I also like the way it displays icons of social media friends, and if I hold the cursor over any of those icons, I got my friend’s latest status update—and also can see if they’re online now.

And I LOVE the way a Google search shows up as a right-hand column of the page I’m on, so I still have that page underneath.

I also really like the ability to set up multiple autofill profiles and quickly select which one to use on a particular form. Given that I’m often switching between the e-address I use for low-priority mail and the one I actually want to be contacted at, that’s really nice.

However, and it’s a BIG however, something about the way it actually processes a form’s submit button is very problematic. I failed to logon to Twitter, Yahoogroups, and Paypal (the last being particularly frustrating  because I was responding to a one-time offer that went away). Also some pages simply don’t load, and they work fine when I copy the URl to Firefox.

In sort, from my point of view, the jury is still out.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , ,

It seems we’ve escaped complete catastrophe at the six failed reactors in Japan damaged in the earthquake and tsunami—for the moment, But it was (and may still be) pretty dicey.

Two of the reactors had to be cooled with seawater, in a last-ditch effort to prevent catastrophic meltdown. Those reactors probably can’t be used to generate electricity ever again. And the chance that the other four will return to service is probably pretty low, considering the extensive damage, high levels of radiation, etc., not to mention the risk of further damage in future quakes.

Thank goodness this happened in Japan, the country with probably the best earthquake-related building codes in the world (imagine what would have happened if a nuke had been sitting on earthquake fault during last year’s quake in Haiti—shudder!)

But here’s my question: WHY in the name of creation are we still hopelessly, haplessly, playing with nuclear fire? Did we learn nothing from the Chernobyl disaster? Or the barely-contained accidents at Three Mile Island, Browns Ferry (Alabama), Enrco Fermi (Michigan) and other near-calamities at nuke plants not only in the US but around the world? The nuclear industry’s safety record is horrible, and as Chernobyl proved, we don’t always get lucky with containing the damage—and when we don’t, large areas are rendered uninhabitable for decades.

Back in 1979-80, I had a monthly column about the dangers of nuclear power. I devoted two of my columns to the possibility of accidents resulting from earthquakes, and that information was taken form commonly available sources (even in the pre-Google era). More than 30 years later, we appear to have learned nothing. And earthquakes are only one of a dozen or more very compelling reasons NOT to use nuclear power. Some of the others include terrorist threat, waste disposal issues that need to be addressed for a longer timespan than human history, the problem (with US nukes of sharply limited liability in the event of an accident), diversion for bomb-making…and perhaps most shocking, the lifecycle analysis that shows that by the time you count the energy and fossil footprint of mining, milling, processing, transporting, running the reactors, reprocessing, waste storage and transportation, etc., you don’t actually create very much energy. One study I saw even claimed it was a negative number! (And another study showed that renewable energy is two to seven times as effective in reducing greenhouse gases.)  For this very dubious benefit, we’re putting our own and every future generation at enormous risk???

Here’s my call to action:

  1. IMMEDIATE world-wide shutdown of any nuclear power plant within 100 miles of an active earthquake fault and entombment in the most solid possible barrier
  2. Phased shutdown of remaining N-plants over perhaps six months
  3. A world-wide Marshall Plan-style initiative toward the high-gain, relatively renewable low-cost energy solutions of the sort promoted by Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute in their “Winning the Oil End Game”: a plan to rapidly exit from fossil fuels without needing nuclear.
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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Business Tagged with , , ,

When is certification NOT a good idea? When the body doing the certifying owns the company being certified but doesn’t disclose this. Can you say “conflict of interest?”

“Tested Green” Environmental Certifications were neither tested, nor green.  The Washington, D.C. based company was apparently running a pay-for-certifications program and improperly stating that independent associations endorsed the certifications (the “independent associations” and Tested Green were all owned by the same person).

Ironically, the page where I first found this was trying to sell people on a high-priced and kind of dicey-looking conference about certification fraud. I had to dig around on Google until I found a link I felt comfortable sharing.

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By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business Tagged with , , ,

Packing waste is a scourge in our society. Filling landfills, choking birds, littering our streets, it definitely is a problem that needs to be addressed.

One way, of course, is by generating less packaging in the first place. Do companies really need the little plastic baggie inside the pouch inside the form-fitting foam insert inside the cardboard box inside the shrinkwrap inside a forest of packing peanuts inside a shipping box inside another layer of outer wrap? That kind of overpackaging is all-too-common among boxes I’ve opened. 100 years ago, many products were sold in bulk. We could certainly return to bulk packing for more things.

But another way is to deal with the packaging once it is created. As individuals, we can do a lot of this: reuse glass jars and plastic containers, recycle or compost cardboard and paper, bring our egg cartons back to the farmer, and so forth. But for a lot of the products sold through mainstream retail channels—and particularly for the less simple packing like aseptic boxes, snack chip bags, and drink pouches—we simply don’t know what do to with the packaging.

Enter TerraCycle(R). This company actually pays consumers to pack up their trash and send it off, where it gets transformed into a host of interesting products like fencing, picnic coolers, and—isn’t this cute—recycle bins. In all, the company creates 256 different products out of recycled packaging that would have (in many cases) been thrown in the landfill.

Cool, huh?

Also cool is the way the company involves schools in the collection effort.

BUT…with my particular consumption habits, the site doesn’t work for me. First of all, the company only collects 38 different types of waste, out of the thousands of possibilities. And of those 38, 13 require specific brands—not necessarily the brands I buy. I might dispose of one tube of Neosporin in a year, and that’s not worth collecting. But if I could bring all my empty tubes of toothpaste, skin cream, mentholated muscle-relief cream along with my single tube of Neosporin, that would be worth setting aside, if the drop off was convenient.

The company has made big strides since my last visit, in broadening many of the items from specific brands to generic categories taking any brand, but still…

Then there’s the matter of collection. Each of the 38 has a different set of collection sites. I can’t really see that I’m going to drive hither and yon, dropping off three wine corks here, two cereal wrappers there. And I don’t really understand the logic of having multiple collection streams for essentially the same kind of waste (e.g., a cardboard box for macaroni and cheese is handled differently form a cardboard box wrapped around a tube of Colgate toothpaste).

Using schools as an organizing force makes sense, but not all of us have school-age children. I’d love to see the company partner with landfill and transfer station sites around the country, so collection could be streamlined at the place we’re bringing our trash anyway.

And finally, while I recognize that e-mail can go astray and forms can break, it does bother me that I wrote the following and submitted it through the company’s website back on November 21. Six months later, I haven’t gotten an answer yet:

I was hoping to come to your website and determine whether there are collection points near me. I am surprised by how difficult that is–there’s no way to search by geography, only by product. And the products–so many of them tied to specific brands–don’t correspond well with my buying patterns.

Thus, even though I would be delighted to ship off my trash to you, I see no practical way to participate. I’d love for instance to be able to send you the plastic bags my home-delivery newspaper arrives in on wet days. Or sandwich baggies that are contaminated with food residue and no longer suited to direct re-use. Or the pet food bags which are paper lined with plastic.

Still, I wish them well. I’d love to come back in another six months and discover that it’s vastly easier to get rid of my junk and see it turned into great stuff.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” —Archimedes, 230 BC.

All of a sudden, it seems like the universe is dropping a lot of opportunities in my lap. The last few weeks have brought me these and other possibilities (all tentative):

  • A chance to speak in a country I’ve always wanted to visit
  • Working partnership with a startup that could very quickly scale up to be a major force in the environmental movement
  • Several big potential clients, including one who was recommended to me by someone who heard me speak and bought my book at the Sustainable Foods Summit in January, and whose CEO is an actual rock star
  • A remote, long-shot possibility to travel throughout Asia, Africa, and South America, making a movie and a book on sustainability (the longest of long shots, but I’m hoping!)
  • Agreement in principle from a new magazine in Asia to start running one of my new columns; that will make the third continent where a media outlet is running it.
  • An ongoing partnership with someone who has bought a quantity of one of my books in the past, and who wants not only to buy a few hundred of guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, but also to work with me on some ongoing speaking opportunities (for which he gets a nice commission, and therefore is likely to make it happen)

    • As you might gather, it’s been a pretty exciting few weeks.

    So…if you believe in Law of Attraction (LOA) stuff, you might be asking what I’ve done to create this torrent of abundance. I’m not sure, but I have some thoughts.

    I’ve made two big shifts in the last few months, and have another one pending.

    First, I’ve launched my two columns, Green And Profitable and Green And Practical—and set a specific monetary goal and a timetable to achieve it that would convert these columns to the primary revenue stream in my business. It has been a dream since my teen years to be a syndicated columnist, and I’ve made a couple of rounds over the years pitching the big syndicates. I decided that the most likely way it would finally happen would be if, rather than waiting for a big syndicate to pick me up, I did it myself. And I’m doing it!

    And second, I’ve set myself a time management regime and have been pretty good at sticking to it.

    Thirdly, I am moving forward on a new way of structuring my business that will free up significant time for me to focus on the parts of my business I most want to build (writing and speaking).

    And while I’m far from an LOA junkie, I do believe that the things we choose to focus on tend to dominate our lives. I’ve been focusing on these deep goals and I think the universe is responding by showing me enough opportunities to convince me I’m on the right track.

    And I also have a Great Big Goal: making a lasting and significant impact on the world and helping to shift planetary consciousness to create a healthy, just, and peaceful planet. Yes, I’ve learned to think big. I have seen big ripples from the little things I’ve done, and I want the columns to provide me a big enough platform that I could, like Archimedes with his giant lever, move the world.

    It’s going to be a wild ride…and I’m ready!

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