Category: Energy & Sustainability

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Peace and War, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

On a LinkedIn discussion board, someone asked, “So, why has bettering the world become a mantra for a new generation of entrepreneurs?”

This sparked a very lively discussion, mixing the cynics and the optimists.

You can view this discussion here (you might have to join the group first).

My first comment was quick and straightforward, discussing my new work at Business For a Better World:

I’m 57 years old, been in business since 1981, and my business has *always* been about fostering a better world. This year, I took it further, beginning a campaign to show business how solving hunger, poverty, war, climate catastrophe, etc. is not only the right thing to do, but can be highly profitable (and we actually already have a lot of the technology to make it possible).

But as others responded, I felt a need to go deeper, and I want to share my responses to two of them with you:

Tim asked, “…If these entrepreneurs are so hot on giving to humanity, why not put their technologies in the public domain? There’s a topic for debate: Which is the better outcome, the Gates Foundation or Wikipedia?…”

Tim  – great question! The Gates example has always interested me, in that it follows the pattern of 100-150 years ago, when predatory ubercapitalists like Carnegie and Rockefeller began to seek out a higher purpose later in life and became uberphilanthropists–yes, some of Microsoft’s practices were quite predatory under Gates’ leadership. I can’t think of an equally prominent example in the years between the “Robber Barons” and Gates. (I also think Melinda may have had a lot to do with Gates finding HIS higher purpose–but he has fully embraced it and discovered it provides meaning in his life.) Most towns in my area of New England are still using little public libraries built with Carnegie money.

Warren Buffett is another very interesting example, but his choices and motivations, I suspect, were very different. Buffett never seemed to care personally about accumulating wealth to “better” his own life. He still lives in the simple ranch house he bought in the 1950s. And as far as I know, Berkshire Hathaway under his leadership was not a predatory company. It didn’t shock me when he gave away most of is fortune–to the Gates Foundation (which kind of brings this discussion full-circle).

But I propose that it is possible to be socially conscious from the get-go AND do quite well financially, and that getting wealthy is not a sin. Prominent examples include ice cream superstars Ben Cohen and Jerry Silverman, Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, and many others. I suspect the Chicken Soup guys (Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen) are in this category; they do not shy away from the trappings of wealth–but they also find many ways to use their wealth to better the world. Jack I know for sure started from very humble beginnings; I have no clue about Mark’s early years, nor can I quickly find anything in public sources.

Jennifer commented, “…The world is in crisis – how do we milk it for all it has now people are focusing on the bad guys that have put the world in crisis. ‘We make the world seem like we care’ – new market. But hang on – ‘we kind of do care – well some of us anyway’ – but hang on ‘the global village concept doesn’t seem to be working’ – Ok; so now what?

Let’s make the world betterment program a thing for entrepreneurs – get rich while you increase people hopes even though those hopes are false…”

Jennifer  – Yours is one of several cynical posts in this discussion, but yours is ambivalent while the others are pretty much set in stone. So I choose to engage with you. I think we need to harness the cynicism and skepticism about business’ ulterior motives to create the action we want, despite our suspicion of their motives. For me, seeking personal wealth has never been as important as making the world better. My millionaire colleagues would laugh at my income. Let them laugh! As long as I can motivate them to make a difference.

I am personally very cynical about the ability to solve our biggest problems–hunger and poverty, war and violence, catastrophic climate change–based on the ways we’ve always done it. Too often, we’ve tried to motivate on guilt, fear, and shame–and it doesn’t work.

So I’m taking a leaf from the libertarians and ubercapitalists and attempting to motivate based on self-interest. If your goal is personal material wealth and I can show you how to realize that goal by seizing the opportunity to make money, and the work that governments and NGOs have failed to do gets done, then fine, take your fortune and go live in your big house. Think about a super-profit-driven company like Walmart: not exactly a tree-hugger hangout. But Walmart realized years ago that there was a lot of money to be made selling organic foods, low-watt lightbulbs and other green products–and a lot of money to be saved implementing green into its own operations, deeply. I have many issues with Walmart in other areas, but on the environment, I give them BIG props. Working from the profit motive, they have done more to spread green consciousness *and* green *practices* through society than I have in a lifetime of speaking and writing and consulting.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Business-general, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, language, media-general, Politics, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

A libertarian participant on a LinkedIn discussion group posted,

how does business do anything to make you miserable ??

dont like their products then dont buy them

without biz making those things you would [be] naked growing your own vegetables in the wilderness

My response:

William: I know you espouse libertarianism but I don’t think of you as naive. I was once a member of the Libertarian Party, and still see a great deal of merit in libertarian approach to foreign policy as well as civil liberties; I would love to see Ron Paul as US Secretary of Defense, because if HE were willing to go to war, the situation must be dire indeed. But when you write,

You come across as VERY naive. Or are you pulling our collective (yes, a loaded word in libertarian circles) chain?

Consider…there are many corporations that do great things, create reasonably enjoyable workplaces, and work to heal the planet. BUT, worldwide, there are others that 1) create utter misery for their employees (think about the sweatshop workers in the factory that burned in Bangladesh a year or two ago); 2) pollute and destroy the neighborhoods they’re located in, causing severe adverse health effects for their neighbors and others; 3) rape the earth for their raw materials and then dump the toxic leftovers back on the poor, beleaguered planet, taking no responsibility for their actions.

You will say to #1 that no one forces people to work in slave conditions; they could just go off and start their own business if they don’t want to work for “The Man.” I did that, and from your ID line, it looks like you did, too. But that’s disingenuous. Not everybody can think through that alternative, not everybody has access to even a sliver of capital. If you’re making barely enough to keep your family from starving and from being thrown out of your one-room shack, even a few bucks will be too much.

I started my own business with $200. I was pretty poor at the time, but I did have the $200 (and even a bit more) in the bank. And I had to survive during the very lean start-up phase. At the time (1981), I knew almost nothing about marketing and was in a community that had little use for the service I was offering. I made $300 the first 6 months—before we moved to a more supportive community—and lived on a mix of rapidly depleting savings, odd-job income, and what my wife-to-be brought in from her meager job at a restaurant. But I had that luxury! I had a couple of thousand in the bank that I could draw from. Many people in developing countries, or even in our own inner cities and poor rural areas, do not. If they have no job and they start a business that isn’t immediately viable, how do they eat?

I would have more respect for the libertarian position if it accepted responsibility for #s 2 and 3. But libertarians discredit themselves with me when they claim that it’s their right to plunder the earth because they got there first, and that it’s perfectly OK to extract the resources, pollute and dump wastes just because of that arbitrary fact.I don’t object to profit; I make a chunk of my living writing and speaking about how to be a better capitalist, after all. But I have no respect for businesses that claim they have every right to privatize their profit while externalizing—dare I say socializing—the harm. A true libertarian would see overharvesting and pollution/dumping as theft from others, forcing them to incur economic costs to clean up someone else’s mess. But somehow, the libertarians I know sound a theme more like “we got here first, too bad for the rest of you, and the mess is not our problem.”

Libertarians often cite economist Milton Friedman on the social responsibility of business to maximize profits. However, even Friedman saw a need to limit business. I went back to the source: his New York Times Magazine essay of September 13, 1970. And to my amazement, I found that Friedman added some major conditions to his remarks. Here’s what he actually said:

In a free-enterprise, private-property sys­tem, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct re­sponsibility to his employers. That responsi­bility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while con­forming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. (emphasis added)

At the very end of the essay, he quotes from his own textbook and repeats the qualifier, phrased a bit differently:

“there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use [its] resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” (emphasis added once more)

To put it another way, in this essay, Friedman was totally willing to concede that self-rule doesn’t always work in the business world. Government is needed to keep business from exercising its self-interest at the expense of others’ self-interest and the wide society’s interest. Whether it’s a retailer avoiding the cost of health insurance by paying its workers so little that they qualify for government assistance or a manufacturer spewing poisons into the air and water and land, expecting that the government—in other words, the taxpayers: we the people—to clean it up,  I would definitely count as “deception or fraud”: the externalizing of responsibility for the mess.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, Green Marketing, Marketing Trends/News, Socially Responsible Investing Tagged with , ,

A new report confirms (yet again) what I’ve been saying for years: consumers flock to companies that actively support companies with a clear environmental agenda. A survey of 31,000 consumers around the world reported:

• 21 percent of American consumers often or always bought a brand they perceived as more responsible over another in the past year.
• Factoring in respondents from other countries, that figure rises to 34 percent—that’s more than one in three
• 67 percent would like to make purchasing decisions based on social responsibility in the future.

And it’s not just consumers; it’s employees, too. Another study notes that an astonishing 71 percent of Americans would choose employment by “a company whose CEO is actively involved in corporate responsibility and/or environmental issues.”

Thanks to envirojournalist Debra Atlas for pointing me toward both these studies.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, localism/locavore, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

Maybe my family’s organic garden (and my neighborhood) is a microcosm of the changes in the world ;-). We normally stop getting zucchini by the end of July. Last year, it went halfway through August. And this year, the one surviving plant finally died today, and I harvested the last two very tiny zukes on October 7. The season was approximately five weeks longer than usual,even though hey like hot weather and we pretty much didn’t have any.

Tomatoes, on the other hand, are normally extremely prolific until the first killing frost, usually very late in October. This year, the season peaked in early August, and even at its peak, we had far fewer than usual. I did manage to put a few pints of sauce in the freezer, and a few jars of dried tomatoes in the pantry, but the abundance that normally covers our entire counter never materialized—and the tomatoes had pretty much gone away by September 1, producing only one or two not-so-big tomatoes (many of them bloghted) and a handful of cherry tomatoes every few days since then. Normally, our six plants produce two or three dozen every day this time of year.

Our berry bushes were odd this year, too. The one blueberry plant gave one to two pints a day for about ten days, but one of our raspberry plants produced next to nothing, and the other a fairly paltry amount. On the very best day,I got half a pint. Ditto our blackberry bush. Normally,I’m able to put several pints by. This year, I managed to gather together and freeze a single half-pint of mixed blackberries and raspberries in July; we ate the rest as it came in, and it wasn’t much. But the bigger raspberry plant actually produced about eight very tasty fruits in September, a time when we’ve never gotten berries from it before.

Our celery was severely stunted, only about six inches high and mostly leaves, on very thin stalks. In the past, we’ve had celery that looked as good as supermarket varieties. We grew potatoes for the first time, and they came out great.

Nobody cultivates them, but I like to go gather Russian olives this time of year. I went to one of the two groves I know and found a total of one berry from several dozen plants. Fortunately, I know another grove, which was its usual prolific self.

Farmer neighbors who grow winter squash did not get a crop this year. Neither did several of the local apple farmers.

In short, not-normal is the new normal in the garden. Do you think, just maybe, global climate change has something to do with it?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, localism/locavore, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

A front-page story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that a court ordered a utility company to buy the organic grass-fed cattle farm it ruined by driving a powerline through it. Nice to see David beat Goliath every once in a while.

Hmmm. Maybe this strategy can be applied (at least in Minnesota) by organic farmers suffering the double indignity of losing their organic status because of contamination by GMO plants from nearby farms, and then getting sued by Monsanto for illegally using the seed they didn’t want in the first place.

But a far better solution, of course, is to develop projects in ways that don’t threaten organic farms. We need more of those, not less.

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By Posted on Posted in Diversity, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation Tagged with , ,

Offices: too hot, too cold, and no Goldilocks to find the happy middle ground of “this one is just right.”

How can you find that happy medium that accommodates the woman in a sleeveless sundress ?and? the man in the suit…the person whose desk is a foot away from the air conditioning vent (which chills air far below the ambient room temperature) ?and? the one sitting in the hotspot caused by a sunny window?

The obvious solution is zoned temperature control, at a much more granular level than we typically get.

Here’s a really interesting article about temperature control in offices. Don’t worry; it’s not particularly technical. It’s not written for geeks, but for ordinary people trying to solve the problem.

It starts by discussing the problem in context: demonstrating several reasons why office temperature control usually doesn’t work very well.

Then it solves the problem with a smartphone app that lets individual users have a say in the temperature of their little area.

And here’s the really good news about this: in testing in one office building, HVAC bills dropped 23 percent. Lots more opportunity for savings, too.

There’s potential for much greater energy improvement. The General Services Administration (purchasing arm of the federal government) has prepared thinks raising office temperatures in federal buildings a mere two degrees F in the summer could save $1.87 million of our tax dollars. It has identified seven specific steps the federal government could take to drop energy use by an astounding 568.2 million kilowatt hours per year. Only two of them are in the “very expensive” category.

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By Posted on Posted in Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation Tagged with , , , ,

Don’t call me a potty-mouth, but today, I’m going to talk about porta-potties.

You see, I spoke at SolarFest again this past weekend, and once again, I noticed some major innovation. A few years ago at SolarFest, I first encountered vented porta-potties: a major new innovation.

This year, another one: Porta-potties earmarked “pee only,” with a catch basket to make sure the rule was followed.

These toilets are collecting urine to use as fertilizer on hay fields, under the auspices of the Rich Earth Institute. It’s a pilot project sanctioned by the US Department of Agriculture.

And I have to tell you, it smelled great even near the end of a big festival day. I’ve been in home bathrooms that didn’t smell as good.

We can and should incorporate these kinds of innovations into every aspect of society. Always, we need to ask ourselves how we can live better, use fewer resources, and generate less waste or turn the waste we do create into something useful.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, localism/locavore, Technology Tagged with , , , ,

I just rewatched this TED talk by Amory Lovins: it lays out a step-by-step plan to slash our energy use through deep conservation (what he calls “negawatts” and “negabarrels” and switch to renewables, with gas as a transitional fuel. It doesn’t happen overnight, and relies heavily on profit incentives to businesses.

Lovins, who I consider the foremost spokesperson for sensible energy, is not some sort of radical do-gooder. He’s a businessman who’s made quite a successful career out of changing the way we think about energy. Just as two examples of what’s possible:

1. He helped the Empire State Building save $4.4 million per year on a $13 million deep energy retrofit–that’s about a 30% annual ROI.

2. His own house, built in the Solar Stone Age (1983) just outside Aspen, Colorado (ski country-COLD) is close to net zero, producing nearly all of the energy it uses (in 2001, he mentioned that the residence portion had a $5 monthly electric bill–even if it’s tripled since then, that’s pretty good for a 4000-square-foot house in the snowbelt). Now here’s the really remarkable thing: In Aspen, Colorado, this house has neither a furnace nor an air conditioner, and it’s warm enough inside to grow bananas. The extra cost of the energy improvements was essentially paid for by the capital savings of not needing those big clunky systems. So in other words, we’ve known how to do this for 30 years.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s get this party STARTED.

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By Posted on Posted in Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environmenl, Environment, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, Peace and War, People Helping People, poverty, Technology Tagged with , , , , ,

Watch this video about the Copenhagen Wheel, a device that captures and stores energy from cyclists pedaling and coasting, and supplements pedal power on the uphills or over long distances. And then read a few of the comments.

To me, this is brilliant technology! First, it makes biking—and particularly bicycle commuting over distances of 20 to 50 miles—an attractive option for tens of thousands of people who’ve felt unwilling to try it before. That, in turn, reduces the number of cars on the road, which has dozens of advantages to the planet and to our pocketbooks. Second, it makes it possible for the moderate cyclist (like me) to go much farther by bike.

A lot of the comments are angry that this will disrupt their exercise. I think they’re not thinking about it the right way. Instead of blaming a machine for interfering with their workout, think about the ability to bike instead of drive to good riding places some distance away, or to bike much farther distances to explore an area farther out.

I do ride for exercise. And I do face a BIG hill when I go out my door. I’ve learned to manage it, but when I first moved to that area, it was very tough. Something like this would have been a nice transition as I learned to conquer that tough hill.

And for the exercise-only bikers, I have one more suggestion: write to the company and tell them you want a manual override option: an off switch, in other words. Then you have the boost when you need it.

Let’s apply this kind of creativity to every aspect of our lives! We could not only solve climate change but war, poverty, and other global issues. I wish this company much success!

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, language Tagged with , ,

My hometown newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, MA, noted today that the City of Northampton’s Office of Planning and Development has been renamed the Office of Planning and Sustainability.

When I moved to town in 1981, Northampton was in the midst of a building boom and developers were snapping up large farm and forest parcels on the fringes of town. Sprawl was the order of the day.

Now, huge amount of acreage have been protected, both in Northampton and all surrounding communities; Hadley, the neighboring town where I currently live, has preserved thousands of acres. And the City of Northampton has openly changed the mission of the planning department to embrace sustainability.

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