Category: Energy & Sustainability

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Innovation, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

Note to manufacturers: your green products (including recycled products) have to compete on quality. If someone buys a recycled product and discovers it’s crappy, not only are they a one-time customer who won’t repeat, but they’re also a negative talking machine, trashing not just your product but in many cases, green products or recycled products in general.

In other words, any time you put out crap in the name of selling recycled products, you hurt the prospects of every green business. Don’t rush to market; take the time to get the quality right first!

This rant was inspired by the cleanup after my daughter’s Passover Seder.  She had recycled aluminum foil. I was excited to see it, as I hadn’t known such a thing was  available in the consumer market. But my excitement quickly turned to frustration when I tried to use it, and discovered it was so brittle that I had to use about three times as much; it ripped wherever I touched it. It was as bad as the first generation of biodegradable diapers that we tried to use when she was a toddler, circa 1990. As bad as the solar cell-phone charger I bought a year or two ago that was so ineffectual I returned it for a refund.

Now, I’m a committed green, and I will give recycled aluminum foil another try in five years or so. But if this had been my first experience of a recycled product, it probably would have been my last.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Energy & Sustainability, Innovation, People Helping People, Technology Tagged with , , , ,

I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy. Especially when I see evidence all around me of brilliant minds hard at work solving “intractable” problems, I freely admit that I’m an optimist. The human capacity to destroy ourselves is eclipsed by the human capacity to creatively collaborate, and to dig ourselves out of the mess.

And since writing is what  do, I’ve wanted to do a big-picture book on this, for many years. Last month, I started writing an essay on this, and I think it will evolve into the proposal for my ninth book.

To give you a bit of inspiration on this snowy afternoon (here in Massachusetts, anyway), I want to share two sentences from a section of the essay entitled “Throw Away Assumptions”:

Assumption, 18th century: humans can travel no faster than the fastest horse. Reality: humans aboard the International Space Station have traveled at 17,247 miles per hour; future technologies such as warp-space drives and tesseracts, imagined by speculative fiction writers, could potentially take us orders of magnitude faster.

Shifting our attitudes from the impossibility of going more than 15 or 20 miles an hour to hurtling through space at more than 17,000 mph took a couple of centuries. With today’s future-think mindset, solving the problems of the world ought to be a whole lot quicker. Especially considering the consequences of failure.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Innovation, People Helping People Tagged with , , , , ,

For more than three decades, I’ve been suggesting that we need to see flat roofs as resources: they can provide space not just for solar energy, but also for gardens.

And growing up in New York City, where far too many people think that food comes out of cans or mysteriously arrives in the supermarket, this is especially true. New York has an enormous supply of flat roofs, many of which have terrific sun exposure.

So it gladdens my heart to see a project like this: utilizing flat roof space for year-round greenhouses in a long-depressed South Bronx neighborhood. On the roof of a public housing project designed to be green, in fact. My Western Massachusetts neighbor Joe Swartz (@SwartzFarm on Twitter), who is involved with this project, shared the first picture on a list we both participate on.

(The first link has an excellent picture. The second link has a crummy picture but a short informative article about the whole project.)

This is by no means the only example. It’s simpler to build without greenhouses, of course, if you don’t mind closing down for the winter. Here’s a 6,000 square-foot no-greenhouse rooftop commercial organic farm in northern Brooklyn, on a warehouse right across the river from Manhattan.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , ,

Why do businesses (and governments or nonprofits acting like businesses) worldwide continue to squander and pollute natural resources, even when we all know better?

Because it’s in their economic interest.

And why is wrecking the planet in their economic interest?

One simple reason: they’ve externalized the true cost. In plain language, they’ve passed on the true costs of their destructive behavior to us, as taxpayers, consumers, breathers of air, and drinkers of water. Often, they even get tax advantages for doing so (ever hear the phrase “oil depletion allowance”?).

This MUST change.

If every organization had to incorporate true costs over the entire lifecycle, including environmental degradation, resource depletion, and disposal of waste at the end of the cycle, our economy would turn toward deep sustainability in a very short time—maybe even just a year or two.

Green business expert Joel Makower, of GreenBiz.com, is among those calling to change this. He’s quoted in this article about converting the business world to true-cost accounting. It’s not overly technical, and certainly educational.

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

Last night’s State of the Union address laid out a strong progressive agenda, including a green jobs program.

It’s not new for President Obama to say the right things, but he tends to back down when it’s time to follow through. So we, the environmentalists, have to not just “have his back,” but apply some pressure. Obama moved to the right numerous times over the past four years, to mollify Republicans. It’s time for him to return to the left in order to mollify his progressive/environmentalist constituents.

And that will only happen if we create a political climate where he has to listen to us and act for us. So let’s get out there and create that climate.

If you can attend Sunday’s massive climate change rally in Washington, DC, that’s a great first step. If you can’t—thee are several solidarity actions around the country. Check this list to see if there’s a rally about catastrophic climate change near you.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Greenwashing, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Fascinating profile of Peter Brabeck, Chair of Nestlé, and his crusade for world-wide water conservation and water sustainability. Especially fascinating since Nestlé’s water bottling approach has often gotten the company in trouble with water rights and environmental activists, and has occasionally brought it to court. (In my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, I discuss Nestlé being hauled into court in Canada by green activists, on greenwashing/misleading advertising charges.)

These days, Brabeck is saying that 5 liters of water to drink, and 25 for other personal needs, should be the daily right of every human being. But he also says that direct human consumption is the smallest portion of water consumed by humans—just 1.5 percent. The energy and agriculture sectors use far more (and he didn’t even discuss industry in general). He is particularly troubled by “unconventional oil” (such as tar sands), which he says consumes up to 6 liters of water for every liter of fuel, compared with just a tenth of a liter to produce a liter of oil conventionally. Water conservation, he says, is essential—and thus we shouldn’t be using those water-hogging technologies. Of course, there are MANY other environmental arguments against tar-sands oil, in addition to water conservation!

And he notes that when he was born 68 years ago, the world had 2.7 billion people and stayed well within its water budget, using only 40 percent of the renewable water. But now, with 7 billion people on the planet, we’re already exceeding what the planet can renew—and we’re heading to 10 billion.

Note: just because in our daily lives our water consumption far less than what industry and agriculture use, please don’t take that as a license to squander. As individuals, we still have a responsibility to be frugal with the world’s water. Even something as simple as brushing our teeth can be done with about 95 percent less water, just by not letting the water run the whole time—voila, instant water conservation. Wet the brush, turn off the water, repeat as necessary. Use the same principle when washing hands, washing dishes, etc. And when it makes sense (as it does in most of the US, Canada, and Europe), use filtered tap water instead of bottled water. Many people don’t realize how much water consumption is involved in the bottling process—wasting,often, up to three times as much water as actually goes in the bottle.

Go ahead and read the interview. If you’re skeptical about Nestlé, that’s OK. So am I. But I think there’s a lot of wisdom in Brabeck’s thinking, and a wake-up call to the world.

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

In the 1990s, the US had a 40 percent share of the world-wide solar market. According to widely respected sustainability consultant Gil Friend of Natural Logic (@gfriend), the current US share of the global solar market is a pathetic 5 percent, while China now has more than half the global market: 54 percent. And that’s 10 times as much solar as the US is producing.

Friend’s article doesn’t discuss such solar leaders as Germany, Brazil, and Israel, but I’d expect all of those are currently making more solar than the US is.

It’s really hard to take US government claims that they care about creating jobs and greening the economy very seriously when they let a plum like this slip away. Solarizing the US housing and commercial stock would create tens of thousands of jobs, lower carbon footprint immensely, and also reduce dependence on imported oil (while lowering oil bills too, of course) A trifecta win, and we let it get away! Earth to Congress: Get with the program, for goodness sakes! Erth to Obama: Press your agenda on this!

 

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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 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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