Month: January 2013

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

In a discussion on the merits or nonmerits of nuclear power plants, with particular emphasis on nuclear power plant safety, someone sent me an article by Gregory Clark. Clark argues that because another nuclear plant down the road from Fukushima had a higher seawall and was not damaged by the tsunami, nuclear power should be considered a good alternative.

This one really had me scratching my head; it’s one of the most bizarre arguments for nuclear power I’ve ever seen. Just because one plant managed to avoid a problem that brought several plants at Fukushima to collapse, how is that any kind of justification for the technology?

Here’s what I wrote in response:

I find Dr. Clark’s argument particularly puzzling: that a different nuke didn’t not fail during the earthquake/tsunami that clobbered Fukushima s not even relevant. I don’t know of ANYONE who would argue that every nuclear power plant will have a catastrophic failure. The argument against nukes boils down to two areas:

1. ROUTINE nuclear power plant operation is unhealthy, inefficient, does NOT solve the carbon problem (because the fuel cycle has many carbon-intensive and environmentally destructive components, starting with mining the uranium and continuing through milling, processing, transportation, creating the fuel rods, transporting again, actually running the fuel through the reactor, aging of the waste, transportation of the waste, etc.), causes thermal pollution, and releases radiation into the environment.

2. The potential for CATASTROPHIC FALURE is constant, and the industry’s safety record is abysmal. Although there are a relatively small number of nuclear plants operating in the world, at least a dozen have had major failures (including, ironically, the Fukushima plant the summer before the tsunami–as well as others you never heard of, like Windscale, Enrico Fermi, and Browns Ferry), and hundreds have had serious safety issues).

Here’s a very brief and far-from-complete list of the problems: Huge creation of carbon, huge safety risk, chance of wiping out a large area, need to store the waste completely isolated from the environment for a QUARTER OF A MILLION YEARS–which we have no clue how to accomplish, btw–risk of sabotage, risk of structural failure (especially on older nukes that have been embrittled by decades of high-intensity radiation, uranium mining that’s just as destructive to the environment as oil drilling etc., centralized power generation with all its problems, risks, and wastage…

I applaud the bureaucrat who built the higher seawall at Onagawa–that was a good decision. But I fail to see how that in any way justifies this corrupt and very dangerous industry that does nothing to solve our environmental problems and could make them quite a bit worse.

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By Posted on Posted in language, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , ,

Yesterday, I heard a RepubliPundit on All Things Considered, decrying Obama’s inauguration speech because he felt it was confrontative and didn’t offer any “olive branches.”

Seems to me, Obama has spent the last four years offering olive branches to the right—and having 98 percent of them snapped off, chewed up, and spat back in his face. The Republicans have been incredibly unwilling to compromise, or even make any substantive proposals. Meanwhile, Obama’s base rightfully feels like a whole lot of areas where there should have been progress have stagnated. I personally I’m glad he is finally stepping up and saying he was elected to make change, and he’s going to make change. If he can at least bring us back to the economic stability and human rights approaches of the Clinton era (and yes, he’s better than Clinton on gay rights), that will be a big step in reversing the Rogue State government of George W. Bush.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, General Commentary, Other, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , ,

I listened to a call with Debra Poneman, and she shared one of the most astonishing and moving stories I’ve ever heard.

During the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in South Africa following the fall of the apartheid government, an elderly South African woman listened to a soldier confess the brutal murder of her husband and son. The jude asked her what she wanted from this man, and she had three requests.

1. To take her to the murder site to gather some ashes and give it a proper burial

2. To “become her family”: to be her surrogate son and absorb some of the love she still had, by visiting her every two weeks

3. To accept her complete forgiveness for him, starting with the powerful hug she wanted to give him right then and there.

If this woman can find the strength of love in her heart to not just forgive her enemy but to make him a part of her family, is there anything the rest of us have experienced that could not be forgiven? I took this to heart—and when Debra led us on a forgiveness exercise after recounting this story, I took on a deep challenge: forgiving the stranger who had grabbed me off the streets of my West Bronx neighborhood and raped me when I was about 11 years old.

This was not easy for me. I don’t know if I fully succeeded. But I definitely got through at least some of my “stuff” about this man, who I never saw before or since. And quite frankly, I felt better afterward. I was reminded that forgiveness is not for the benefit of the person who transgressed; we forgive, and we heal ourselves.

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By Posted on Posted in Green Business, Green Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , , , ,

Marc Stoiber, in his article, “Seven Crazy Reasons Consumers Won’t Embrace Your Green Innovation,” argues that many green initiatives fail because humans (to make sweeping generalizations) are too inertial:

  1. we don’t like change
  2. we resist new facts that contradict our worldview
  3. we prefer the familiar
  4. we’re more scared of losing what we have than excited to gain something new
  5. we are biased toward what we already know
  6. we judge innovation based on comparison to what we’ve already experienced, rather than on its own merits
  7. we prefer immediate gratification to long-term benefit

Stoiber explores each of these a bit in his article, which I recommend reading. And I basically agree with him, at least when talking about the majority culture.

Which is why, in my work as a strategic marketer and copywriter working frequently in the green marketing world, I always do my best to:

  • include both emotional and rational benefits,
  • root my arguments in both self-interest and planetary interest,
  • match my message to its intended audience

Let’s make this concrete.

Say, for example, you want to market a “magic” all-natural enzyme that neutralizes the odor and stain of urine, and thus dramatically reduces the need to flush. The environmental benefit is saving water, a supercritical but very much underappreciated (and underpriced) natural resource. But to someone without a deep green consciousness, living in a place where water is close to free and appears to be inexhaustible, saving water is not a benefit they can wrap themselves around. A traditional green marketer would go to people in big cities and laboriously educate the audience on why it’s important to safe water (people in rural areas often already recognize the importance of water).

But an easier approach, based in appeals to self-interest, might take the marketing campaign to places that restrict water use—with arguments like “your bathroom can smell as clean as it did when you were allowed to flush”, “good-bye to icky yellow toilet stains”, or even an economic argument aimed at large-scale users (including landlords and property managers at large residential complexes—let THEM educate their residents, as hotels did with the towel-washing issue), like “cut your water and sewer bills in half.”

Those kinds of arguments open your product up to those who are caught in the kind of rigid thinking Stoiber describes.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , ,

What do you notice about the two images in this photo?

Deceptive comparison ad

Here’s what I notice; the placement and composition of the vegetables and fruits are exactly the same. Look at the carrots, for instance. It is statistically impossible to pose a bunch of carrots in exactly the same alignment for two pictures taken at different times, and just as impossible to find two different bunches of carrots where each carrot has exactly the same shape as one in the other batch and are in the same order. It’s somewhat easier with mushrooms and peppers, but still highly questionable.

What this tells me is that one of two things happened, neither of which are OK if you’re an honest marketer:

1. The same photo was used as the basis for both images. At least one of them was retouched to change the colors, probably the didn’t-use-it one, which also had believability-enhancing touches like aging in the mold on the grapes.

OR

2. The advertising agency took the first photo, and then left the fridge untouched for some period of time, and came back and took the aged picture.

Either way, just like the food in the aged picture, it doesn’t pass the sniff test. The ad claims that these were different batches of food and implies that they were subjected to a scientific comparison. That would mean two different sets of vegetables aging in different but calibrated refrigerators for the same time, one with the treatment and one without (or the same refrigerator used to test each batch one at a time, starting with the untreated one to avoid tainting the results). I do not see any evidence in this photo that this is what happened.

Chose your own term: false advertising, deceptive advertising, misleading advertising—whatever you choose to call it, it’s certainly a major ethical violation and quite possibly a violation of truth in advertising laws such as Section 43(a)(1)(A) of the Lanham Act.

And therefore, I don’t believe the ad. And therefore, I don’t trust anything else in the catalog where I found it (an in-flight sky mall). And therefore, this entire catalog loses any chance of getting me as a customer, forever. And therefore, I am sharing my perception that this company engages in deceptive practices. Perhaps this post could even go viral and be seen by thousands or millions of people.

So on a practical as well as a moral level, this deceptive advertising practice backfired. Big time. My question to the ad agency and to the people at the client who approved it (who may, in fairness, not have realized the ad was deceptive): was it worth it? This catalog company should fire its ad agency for engaging in false advertising, and should look with a critical eye at every other bit of advertising this agency prepared.

And if you’re a marketer, take a look at your own marketing. Have you accidentally or deliberately engaged in similar false advertising practices? Are you aware that one demonstrable lie can ruin a long-built reputation for integrity if anyone publicly calls you out for deceptive advertising in the press or in social media?

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

I take this supercontrarian climate change hypothesis with a whole shaker of salt, but it makes fascinating reading. Thirty years ago, before we knew all that much about catastrophic climate change, Jeff Berkowitz wrote a brief paper entitled “The Consequences of Gaia, or The Carbonist Manifesto.” Berkowitz, a computer programmer and technology geek with a background in alternative energy and the Gaia Hypothesis, posits that the earth is out of balance; the human epoch is the coolest period in many millions of years, because too much carbon got sequestered, so the earth designed humans to release it back out again. And yes, he admits to a certain amount of tongue-in-cheekness, but in a recent interview, Berkowitz stands by his hypothesis. I have not downloaded the actual paper, but I did read all three pages of the article about it. What do you think?

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

A brief explore of Montpelier, Vermont, tiny capital of a sparsely populated and very progressive state. More brief than it would be, because it was minus 4 F as we were walking around last night.

Based on a very small sample—two restaurants and one Bed & Breakfast that we tried, and a few more whose windows we peered into (including the local cooking school and the artisan bakery it operates), this town may have one of the highest percentages of people who pay attention to the food they eat—to its provenance, the craft of growing and processing it, as well as to the taste and nutritional qualities. And I didn’t even visit the food co-op.

But it’s amazing. All three establishments—a creperie called Skinny Pancake and a bagel/burrito coffee shop called Bagitios, both in the center of town, and High Hill Inn, a B&B in East Montpelier up on a hill—had menus emphasizing local foods, even in a frigid Vermont January. Fair trade beverages, local greens and meats, artisanal approaches to bread, beer, wine…on the menu, and heavily marketed, along with appeals to waste reduction, energy conservation, and other good green principles. High Hill was even more remarkable because the proprietor, Ann Marie, is from the American South (an area where I’ve found it very challenging to eat decently, let alone well).

I’m sure

Go team!

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