Author: Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert

A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business Tagged with , , ,

With all the partisan conflict gridlocking Washington, it’s refreshing to read about a 16-year-old partnership between deep environmentalists and deep conservatives.

The “Green Scissors” project, with participation from the likes of Friends of the Earth on the environmental side and the Heartland Institute among the conservative groups, targets $380 billion in wasteful government spending that happens to also foster environmentally negative impact.

Among the programs suggested for the chopping block:

  • Ethanol Excise Tax Credit
  • $49.6 billion in subsidies for the troubled, environmentally disastrous nuclear power industry
  • $109.6 billion in highway subsidies
  • A $5 billion natural gas subsidy

Download your own copy of this year’s (and previous years’) reports at https://www.foe.org/green-scissors.

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

Wow! Tell this to your skeptic friends. One of America’s top research think tanks, Brookings Institution, now says that the 2.7 million Americans employed in green industries has outpaced the number working in fossil fuels.

That is quite extraordinary!

For some good analysis on what this means and where we should go from here, read Green For All’s Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins’ excellent article on Treehugger.

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life

My mother died Sunday morning a week after a paralyzing stroke and it’s been a time of NOT focusing on work. She was a remarkable woman who touched many lives. This is the obit that I wrote for our local papers:

Gloria Yoshida, lover of art and justice

SOUTH HADLEY – Gloria Yoshida, of South Hadley, died Sunday, Aug. 21, 2011, at Fisher Home Hospice in Amherst, surrounded by family, after a 12-year battle with cancer.

A native of the Bronx, N.Y., she was born in 1933 to immigrant parents, Hedwig and Fischel Gleich, and worked in print production until her retirement and relocation to western Massachusetts in 2000.

Gloria was a passionate crusader for social justice who desegregated apartment buildings in New York City and attended the 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr. She was a lover of art and music, exotic travel destinations and good food; an addicted reader, games player and joke teller; and most importantly someone who loved people and still had many friends in her life, from the 1940s to the 11 years she lived in South Hadley.

She was a docent at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, a volunteer at the Gaylord Library, and a frequent auditor of classes at Mount Holyoke.

She is survived by her beloved, devoted husband, Michhiro Yoshida; her son, Shel Horowitz, of Hadley; her daughters, Helen Horowitz, of Denver, and Jeanne Horowitz, of Valley Cottage, N.Y.; her son-in-law, Joe Clayman, of Denver; her daughter-in-law, Dina Friedman, of Hadley; her sister, Elsie Dudovitz, of Chicago; and six grandchildren, Alana and Rafael Horowitz Friedman and Naomi, Miriam, Heidi and Pearl Clayman.

In accordance with Jewish tradition, a graveside service will be held today, Aug. 22. “Shiva” (calling hours) is at the Horowitz Friedman home, 16 Barstow Lane, Hadley, from 7 to 10 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, Aug. 22 to 24. A memorial service and celebration of her life will be scheduled in the fall. Her daughter Helen will sit shiva in Denver beginning Tuesday.

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

The latest in a long series of “incidents” at the long-troubled Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, just up the river from me in Vernon, Vermont: the tritium leaking for several months at Vermont Yankee has definitively reached the Connecticut River.

The Connecticut River runs along the Vermont-New Hampshire Border and through Massachusetts (including our Pioneer Valley region) and Connecticut before emptying into Long Island Sound (bordering New York State), and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. It is widely used for boating, fishing, and swimming.

If you are in that area, I would suggest not eating fish from or swimming in the Connecticut River right now. I would instead suggest lobbying your US Representatives and Senators to block the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—that word, “regulatory” should really be in quotes, as they don’t do much regulating and have never failed to renew a power plant license—decision to relicense this failing plant for another 20 years.

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

No, I haven’t forgotten you! I was on vacation in Iceland, and had very limited access to Internet.

I’ve known for years that Iceland is a geothermal paradise, but to see it in person was quite amazing. Everywhere we went, there were geothermal hotsprings. Everywhere, there were geothermally heated municipal swimming pools and hot tubs (one of the few bargains in a rather expensive country). We visited a geothermal power plant that contained an energy museum. We enjoyed hot, hot showers, as hot as our solar-heated system at home (we saw almost no solar in Iceland, in part because usually they don’t have too much sun, and in part because geothermal is readily available and produces much steadier power).
We cooked eggs in a geothermal spring, and tasted bread that had been baked in the ground, overnight.

One surprise for me was how much geothermal power is used to create steam and spin turbines to generate electricity; I’d expected most of it to be heating water for direct use rather than spinning turbines, because that cuts down on efficiency.

But efficiency and conservation aren’t such big concerns in Iceland. We were rather surprised that conserving water or electricity didn’t seem to be a value. People just ran the water or left lights on.

But that can change with education and a values shift. Meanwhile, Iceland can truly claim to have one of the greenest power grids in the world.

In a country with only 318,452 inhabitants as of January 2011 and approximately 116,000 households, this tiny country has the capacity to supply much of Europe’s energy needs. In fact, plans are afoot to build deep-sea cables that will export as much as 5 billion kilowatt-hours of clean, renewable electricity to the rest of Europe—enough to power 1.25 million homes.

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

The word “greenwashing” is only a few years old; the practice, unfortunately, goes back much longer.

This morning, for some reason, I woke up thinking about a loaf of bread I saw in the supermarket some time in the early 1980s. This line of bakery products was very clearly marketed to the customer who wanted natural foods, and even back then, that included me. The packaging copy was all about wholesome whole grains, natural growing practices, and such–until I got to the ingredients list.

And there I saw the deal-killer: “calcium propionate added to discourage mold.” Back it went from my hands to the shelf!

I was so deeply offended to see this very common bread additive in a bread marketed as wholesome and natural that I can still recall the exact wording. In fact, I remember telling several friends how corny and false this company was, trying to disguise its use of chemicals by saying “discourage” instead of the more typical, and harsher sounding, “retard mold.”

And that got me thinking about another early greenwashing offender: nuclear power. As a child in the 1960s, and one who was impressed by the promise of technology, I was enchanted by the idea of clean energy that would be “too cheap to meter,” as one prominent nuclear bureaucrat famously put it.

This enchantment didn’t stop me from getting involved in a local group that was questioning the wisdom of a proposed nuke two miles from New York City, but back then, all we knew about was thermal pollution. Thank goodness the utility abandoned that plan!

Two years later, I chose as a college research topic the pros and cons of nuclear power, and started reading in depth. Turns out, thermal pollution is the least of nuclear’s problems. Factor in these:

  • Potential for catastrophic accidents that could make Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island look like a romp in the park
  • Deeply subsidized limited-liability insurance that means if there is a catastrophe, private citizens aren’t going to collect on their losses without a massive infusion of billions of dollars of government money (this is a US law, the Price-Anderson Act, but many other countries have similar provisions)
  • A long and sordid history of literally hundreds of small accidents that could have become big very easily–this link with pictures and descriptions of the nine worst shows that five of the nine were AFTER Chernobyl
  • A 250,000-year pollution problem in the need to isolate extremely deadly wastes from the environment for a quarter of a million years (think about how few artifacts remain from even 5000 years ago, and almost nothing of human origin exists from even 30,000 years ago)
  • Huge inefficiencies that lead one analyst, John Berger, to conclude that nuclear–counting the entire fuel cycle–had actually consumed five times as much energy as it produced, so all this risk is for NO benefit (I have the full citation in my book, Nuclear Lessons)

And you wonder how any environmentalist (and several very prominent ones have) can endorse this terrible, deeply flawed, and very UN-green technology.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Politics Tagged with , , ,

Here’s a fascinating article that says the recent debt vote was actually a huge victory for liberals.

I don’t have time to do the fact-checking (I’m actually going on vacation in an hour and a half)—but taking the anonymous author’s claim that the claims have been verified at face value, it’s clearly a better bill than the media has reported, with half the original cuts and triggers to take extras out of right-wing pet programs.

In any case, I support the author’s call for massive voting. The paralyzing focus of the House this term could have easily been avoided by better mobilization of Democrats and progressives in 2010, and it will get much worse if there’s a Republican President and Senate majority next time around. Though I’d still love to see a Left challenge to Obama, whom I’ve been calling the Great Conciliator lately.

Whether this is indeed a victory, or simply less of a loss, is something I’ll leave to your judgment—and I’d love to see a spirited debate on this in the comments section, below.

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

New England Environmental, Inc.’s new headquarters in Amherst, MA just became only the fifth property in Massachusetts (and the first in Western Massachusetts) to achieve LEED Platinum Certification.

I toured this facility several months ago during a Chamber of Commerce event, and saw features such as

  • Pavers that allow water to drain off driveways and parking areas
  • The 40KW photovoltaic array, providing solar electric power
  • Wonderful use of natural light
  • Waterless urinals

The green design features of this design are expected to save the company $21,000 a year, according to today’s Daily Hampshire Gazette (warning: typically, Gazette links are only open to subscribers).

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

I just love this! While one of Los Angeles’ major freeways was closed (the so-called “carmageddon”), and Jet Blue offered $4 airfares for the 40-mile jaunt between Burbank and Long Beach, a group of cyclists

 issu[ed] a modern-day John Henry challenge: on their bikes, they would beat the plane to the other side of the city.

And they did. The cyclists, part of a group called Wolfpack Hustle, made the ride in an hour and thirty-five minutes. Another member of the group drove to the airport, arrived the requisite hour early, waited in the security line, boarded the plane, landed, and took a cab (which apparently got lost) to the finish line—arriving more than an hour after the cyclists, and after a challenger who made the trip by public transit and walking, and another who rollerbladed it.

That’s right: On Sunday, an airplane got its butt kicked by bicycles, metro rail, and a pair of rollerblades.

Score two for self-propelled transportation (bikes AND inline skates), and another for land-based mass transit. I thought it was pretty cool that when I was a high school student in the Bronx, I could easily beat the bus coming back from school on my five-mile bike ride, and took about the same time on the way there (uphill). But this, I have to say, is so much cooler. 🙂

(Thanks to Eric Eustache  (@E_volution on Twitter) for sharing this terrific article.)


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By Posted on Posted in censorship, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

For more than 30 years, one of the arguments I’ve made against nuclear power is the chilling effect on our freedom.

Now, it seems that Japan may have passed a law heading down that slippery slope. Or not—I am not so far convinced that the claims are accurate.

A blogger for the UK Progressive put up a rambling, jumbled article claiming that Japan has passed a law giving sweeping powers to shut down bloggers, people who post videos on Youtube, etc. when they’re critical of the government and/or TEPCO.

I did a bit of Googling and found dozens of other blogs basing their story on that same article, which I consider unreliable. But I did find this in the Tokyo Times, which seems to be a genuine news organization that fact-checks and posts corrections. The Tokyo Times article says the Computer Network Monitoring Law was passed on June 17.

It also says that during March and April, even before the law was passed, government agents sent 41

“letters of request” to internet providers, telecom companies, cable TV stations and others to take measures in order to respond to illegal information, including erasing any information from the Internet that can be seen as harmful to morality and public order.

However, this article links back to coverage in the Examiner which again ties back to the original, untrustworthy blog post. I certainly am not going to pore over all 6000 citations to see whether this story is legitimate. But it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on.

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