A new European survey shows a substantial majority of consumers and business decision makers are eager to invest in energy efficiency.
(Thanks to @thecentristword for sharing the link on Twitter).
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)
Busy week of interviews. Catch me talking about green marketing:
November 15, 8:00 pm ET/5 pm PT, January Jones interviews me: 818-431-8506
November 16, 7 pm ET/4 pm PT: Interviewed on Your15Minutes Radio’s “Brand This” with Shaun Walker and Reid Stone, https://www.your15minutesradio.com
November 17, 11 a.m. ET/8 am PT: Interviewed by Susan Rich on “Get Noticed Now.” https://www.richwriting.com/2011/11/shel-horowitz-on-get-noticed-now-w4wn-com/
November 25, interview with Susan Davis on Good and Green Radio will become available at https://wgrnradio.com/archive-good-and-green-radio-with-susan-davis/ as well as at iTunes
Here’s a description that Susan Rich wrote. It’s pretty accurate for all four calls:
Join get-you-noticed expert and internet radio host Susan Rich as she talks marketing ideas that help you grab attention and drives sales.
This week she’ll be joined by the ultimate expert in Get-You-Noticed tactics: copywriter, marketing consultant, author, and speaker Shel Horowitz. He has published eight books on the topic, the latest is: Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.
An eerie, devastated, and highly radioactive place, according to the New York Times.
Nuclear power is NOT the answer. It has an abysmal record. The March 2011 accidents are only the latest in a long line of hundreds of mishaps, including earlier accidents at Fukushima going back to 1985.
Even a majority of Republicans, according to this detailed survey of Americans’ feelings on alternative energy in Huffington Post.
A popular slogan during the 1960s was “If the people lead, the politicians will follow.” Might be time to bring that one back.
Thanks to C Gauvin for the link.
Did you know that war has been illegal in the United States—as well as in Australia, Canada, Czechoslovkia (now Czech/Slovak Republics), Germany, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Poland, Belgium, France, and Japan since 1929—when a 1928 treaty called the Kellogg-Briand Pact went into effect?
I discovered this thanks to a Veterans Day post by Roots Action, which highlights this section:
The High Contracting Parties solemly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.
The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.
I already made a Veterans Day post, about the grisly mess we left behind in Iraq—but this needs attention. Isn’t it time we—the peoples of these nations—demanded that this law be enforced?
Never, ever think that war solves problems. It multiplies them.
Before the illegal and immoral US invasion, Iraq was a garden-variety dictatorship, similar to at least 30 other countries around the world, where dissent was suppressed but society was basically functional.
Now, it’s a wreck. And of course, US mainstream media only talk about the impact on Americans: the US soldiers (and their mercenaries) who died or were wounded or who suffered post-traumatic stress, and their families who are impacted by the hurt to these brave men and women. The impact of the war on the people of Iraq is rarely talked about.
An article by John tirman in the November 15 Washington Spectator (not yet posted on the newsletter’s website) lays out some of the litany of chaos and devastation. A few “highlights”:
The first five bullets come directly from the article, “How Will We Remember Operation Iraqi Freedom?” The last two points are my own analysis. The stats that follow come from another article in the same issue, “Left Behind,” by editor Lou Dubose.
While the war was entirely a creation of George W. Bush and his advisors (particularly Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney), it hasn’t really gotten better under Obama. His withdrawal process has been slow and incomplete, and he’s leaving behind a “diplomatic” apparatus big enough to run a small country: 17,000 people including 650 American diplomats, in the largest embassy in the world (not counting several satellites around Iraq), with a $6 billion budget and another $13 billion in private contracts.
And why has Obama steadfastly refused to even consider war crimes trials?
Political advisors spew so much crap about the need to tear down your opponent. Here’s a refreshing case study that proves the opposite is possible.
Congratulations to the newly-elected mayor of Northampton, Massachusetts, David Narkewicz. While his opponent went negative to the point of craziness (even going so far as to attack him for riding a bicycle, with an ad that talked about training wheels as a metaphor for inexperience), Narkewicz stayed positive, focusing on community-building, achieving widely held goals, and his own civic history. He was also deeply issue-focused and very articulate during the numerous debates (more than I can remember for any previous local election, in my 30 years in the area).
As a marketing consultant who has occasionally advised politicians, I have long held the opinion that such a positive campaign could be quite popular. I used this positive focus writing the press releases for the successful first mayoral campaign of a different mayor, who won in 1989 and went on to serve four two-year terms.
And while I predicted that his opponent’s strategy (using the considerable talents of a very good local ad agency), would fail, even I was pleasantly shocked at the margin of victory. Narkewicz took 70 percent of the vote, sweeping every ward, even the traditionally conservative western parts of the city. And he had coattails for progressives in every other contested race, as well as a ballot initiative to keep a land-preservation bill that the right had attacked.
Bravo.
A lot of visionary people out there are convinced that pretty much anything in the waste stream can be turned to more productive use. And quite a number of them are building low-cost houses out of other people’s discarded junk.
The above link takes you to several articles, with cool photos, about various people who are doing just that. (Note that the first, second, and fourth links all cover the work of one man, Dan Phillips of Huntsville, Texas—but with different pictures and narrative).
What I love about this kind of approach is that it simultaneously accomplishes multiple goods:
Today is Election Day in the United States. And something like the 7th week of the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Everywhere movement that sprung up in September.
A good day to reflect on different social change strategies—as someone who’s done both grassroots and electoral politics.
I began to get involved in grassroots movements in the fall of 1969, shortly before my 13th birthday. I marched to end the war in Vietnam, was arrested at the 1977 Seabrook occupation trying to shift society away from nuclear power and toward safe energy, and organized on a whole raft of social justice, environmental, and human rights issues over the decades. I even founded the grassroots community group that saved a mountain. This activism led directly to my career as a marketing consultant; much of my early work in marketing drew on my experience doing publicity for the grassroots groups, and my move toward green marketing in the last 12 years or so is a natural outgrowth of my need to braid together these two stands of my life: the activist and the entrepreneur.
On the electoral side, I’ve been an active volunteer on numerous campaigns, managed a successful City Council campaign, wrote press releases for a successful mayoral candidate—and ran three times for local office.
This year, we’ve once again seen massive evidence of the power of grassroots nonviolent activism to bring down governments. In Tunisia and then Egypt, deeply entrenched autocratic governments were forced out. (Libya, which was more of a civil war, lots of violence on both sides, is a different case.) Historically, this pattern has shown itself countless times, though often taking much longer to achieve victory. A few worth mentioning: India, 1930s-40s; South Africa, 1976-94; Poland, Czech Republic, and much of the former Soviet bloc, 1968-1990. And yes, we have to put the 1979 revolution in Iran in this category, showing that active nonviolence can be used toward authoritarian as well as democratic ends.
And this is important to note: activists have to have a plan for victory, and for safeguarding the democracies we fight so hard to establish. I’m very concerned right now that Egypt’s new government will prove just as authoritarian as Mubarak’s.
Also, we have to note that nonviolent organizing doesn’t always work. American protestors opposing World War I accomplished very little (though the feminists of the same period accomplished quite a bit). Tibet is still deeply repressed by China, more than 50 years into the occupation.
While the Occupy protests owe much to this long heritage of nonviolent action, the demands on Wall Street are different than the demands of Arab Spring. The 99 percenters are not looking to toss out the Obama government. They are simply calling for economic justice. They’ve been criticized in mainstream media for a lack of a cohesive vision, but in this situation, a simple cry for justice may be enough.
While inspired by Arab Spring, Occupy’s real roots are in the issue campaigns in the US going back at least into the 19th century: labor, civil rights, peace, feminism, LGBT, safe energy, and so forth—and decision-making structures, especially, owe much to Clamshell Alliance and other players in the 1970s safe energy movement. All of these movements can point to massive victories—to cultural changes. The kinds of oppressive behavior that were considered normal a few decades back are no longer socially acceptable.
Yet many other movements like these also failed to make a difference. The more people in the Occupy movement who can take the time to study what worked and didn’t work in social movements, the more likely they are to achieve their goals.
If the process of organizing in the streets seems slow, the process of moving change forward by electing progressives seems glacial. For every Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan who is able to accomplish enormous structural change while in office, there are dozens of Jimmy Carters and Bill Clintons, hamstrung by budgetary constraints, partisan warfare, and their own desire to please everyone (pleasing no one in the process).
I’m not just talking about presidents. Most people enter Congress, or even local political bodies, out of a desire to do good in the world, and are quickly beaten down by the system (or corrupted by the platform it provides to enrich themselves, their financial backers, and their friends). For every fire-and-brimstone Bernie Sanders, there are dozens in office whose names we don’t even know unless we live in their districts—people who are not making much of a difference.
A charismatic figure like Barack Obama can galvanize support and get elected—but then has to either show real progress, fast, in a social structure that moves painfully slowly and is steered by forces outside the victor’s control, or show how the opposition’s intransigence is a roadblock to progress and press for a larger, stronger governing coalition. So far, Obama hasn’t risen to the challenge, though he’s showing signs of moving in that direction. He could still become one of our great presidents—but in failing to act, he risks becoming a one-term nonentity that dashed the hopes of those who voted for change and didn’t receive it.
Occupy Wall Street actually presents Obama a huge opportunity: to embrace the progressive agenda he was elected to advance, to use the anger of the people in the streets to “have his back” as he pushes for real change, and to negate the arguments of Tea Partiers and other right-wing extremists that his minor reforms are “going too fast.” I doubt he’ll seize the moment, but I’d love to be proven wrong.