Sure has been one cold and snowy winter here in Massachusetts. One morning last week was minus 19 F, and that is the coldest day I can remember experiencing, ever. And January set snow records all over the place.

The cold snap has seized much of the country, including places like Georgia that are decidedly UNused to real winter.

The climate deniers, of course, are latching on to this news with great glee, and kind of a “ha, ha, we told you there was no global warming problem.”

However…what I’ve heard is that this weather pattern actually has a tremendous amount to do with global warming. In fact, the arctic air has become so warm that it’s no longer trapped by low pressure. The pressure is high enough, and the air rises enough that it pushes down into the south, and makes us shiver around here.

So don’t go out and buy a Hummer any time soon. The problem is real, and this is more evidence, not less.

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(This is Part 2 of my report on the Sustainable Foods Summit. If you missed Part 1, please click here.)

And some insights that I knew already, but appreciated the reminders—most of which were echoed by several presenters:

  • Yields, quality, and taste of organics have improved a lot in the last couple of decades—often due to technology innovations that allow packaging more quickly after harvest and longer shelf life.
  • Private-label supermarket brands have moved from their original positioning as generic, low-quality price-leaders to elite niche brands.
  • The best sustainability initiatives combine multiple benefits and create wins for multiple players in the supply/consumer chain (examples include a new packaging process that lowers energy use, costs less, delivers fresher food, and reduces worker risk…a commitment to ship product on trucks with full loads…ways to turn wastes into inputs for a different process, closing the loop and reducing both pollution and cost).
  • The lack of definition for “natural” causes problems.
  • Turning cropland from food production to energy production has unforeseen consequences. For example, the much-heralded corn ethanol movement a few years ago resulted in higher food prices both in the developed markets and, critically, in developing countries where the increases led immediately to greater hunger problems—and ultimately, did not have a positive impact on the energy picture.
  • Just because other people tell you a positive initiative is impossible doesn’t mean it is. Many “impossible” goals turn out to be quite possible, once buy-in spreads through an organization or its customer base—even sourcing from small farms to serve food at big cafeterias.
  • People have a wide range of reasons for going green—from committed environmental or hunger activism to personal and family health.

Although organized by Europeans—they also do one in Amsterdam—most attenders were American or Canadian, with a handful from Latin America (including one presenter who’s part of a large family-owned sustainable sugar plantation and mill in Brazil). It looked to me that about 180 people attended. The conference had only one track, which means everyone got to hear from all the presenters—a nice change.

Despite all the questions that have no consensus answer yet (see Part 1), there was a lot of agreement:

  • GMO is a major threat to organic growers because of its ability to infiltrate and contaminate organic fields.
  • Only 3rd-party certifications (as opposed to self-declaration by a grower or an industry trade group) give the consumer something to trust in, but there’s a problem of certification clutter and oversaturation, leading not only to consumer confusion but also a burden on growers and suppliers trying to comply with and document multiple certifications—and of course, very crowded packaging labels. This is likely to shift as more comprehensive certifications (for example, covering both organic and fair trade) start to come on the market.
  • The best certifications cover not only growing methods but also working conditions—and their attention covers not only the absence of chemicals, but also positive steps to rebuild soil, spread health, etc.
  • The range of practices considered “sustainable” is quite wide, and ultimately the consumer has to decide what’s really important—but any definition of sustainability has to include an adequate livelihood for the growers and their workers.
  • Sustainable products may originate locally, or from far away, though the later can have a pretty big carbon footprint.
  • Sustainable products need sustainable packaging. Many companies have drastically reduced their packaging through careful redesign.
  • Both to save money and to reduce environmental impact, many farmers and producers are moving at least partly toward green energy sources.
  • In the end, sometimes you have to make choices. You may not be able to get organic, local or fairly traded, biodynamic, minimally processed, and appropriately packaged all in the same product—so you do the best you can and help the world reach the point where you can get all the desired attributes without having to choose among them.
  • The sustainable foods industry has a responsibility to make an impact on issues around hunger, poverty, and the economic viability of indigenous suppliers.
  • Sustainability is a process, a journey of many steps. And while all of us need to start taking at least some of those steps, even those who have been on the path a long time still can find ways to improve.

Shel Horowitz is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and writes the Green And Profitable/Green and Practical monthly columns.

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  • Can you preserve the soil by switching to no-till farming if it means you can’t use organic methods?
  • Which is more sustainable: a lightweight plastic bag made from virgin materials (i.e., petroleum), or a plastic clamshell using 40 times as much material, but made from recycled water bottles?
  • If biodegradable (PLA) plastics are made from GMO (genetically modified organism) corn, are they any better than non-biodegradable plastic?
  • Is organic enough of a standard, or do we hold out for the much stricter but much rarer Demeter Biodynamic certification?
  • Are food-industry giants squeezing out small artisan brands, or opening up new opportunities for them?
  • And can we achieve a food system that combines the artisan quality and chemical/petroleum independence of pre-20th century food production with the massive volume and ability to feed hungry people of the 20th century Green Revolution, while achieving the distribution necessary to end hunger?

These are some of the questions attendees at the Sustainable Foods Summit grappled with on January 18 and 19, 2011 in San Francisco.

Conference presenters included a number of certification agencies and a few consultants (including me on the marketing side) as well as producers and retailers both from major companies like Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, Safeway and White Wave (whose brands include Silk and Horizon) as well as much smaller companies like Theo Chocolate and Washington State’s Stone-Buhr Flour.

Some of the things I hadn’t heard before:

  • It’s well-known that cows are a huge source of methane emissions (a worse climate change problem than CO2)—but I hadn’t known that cow burps cause almost twice the emissions of cow manure, and that cow burping can be greatly reduced through feeding the cows a healthier organic grass-based diet rich in flax, which also raises the Omega-3 level in the milk (a good thing).
  • Cows fed a healthy organic diet live an average of three times as long and have more lactation cycles; this translates directly into increased profitability of the farmer.
  • Organic farming can sequester 7000 pounds per acre of CO2 per year.
  • By converting some acreage to oilseed crops such as sunflowers, farms can supply a goodly percentage of their energy needs, feed cows, and gather the seeds as a cash crop. (These four bullets from Theresa Marquez of Organic Valley dairy cooperative; the percentages on cow emissions were from Bree Johnson of Straus Family Creamery)
  • Makers of biodegradable plastics often source from GMO corn. (Adrianna Michael, Organic and Wellness News)
  • No-till farming vastly reduces soil erosion (which can lower the altitude of a conventional farm by more than a foot in 40 years), but is difficult to do without chemical weed control.
  • Organic, interplanted, and no-till soil hold a lot more water, and look, smell, and even taste healthier than conventional soil.
  • Some private-label supermarket brands, including Safeway’s O Organics, are now being marketed through other retail channels not owned by the original company. (Alex Petrov, Safeway)
  • Even though it’s more expensive to start with, you get 20% more yield from a natural beef patty compared to a conventional one, which makes progress toward evening out the price. (Maisie Greenawalt: Bon Appetit Management Company, an institutional food service provider for colleges, museums, and corporate cafeterias)

(This report will continue tomorrow)

Shel Horowitz is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and writes the Green And Profitable/Green and Practical monthly columns.

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Nuclear Information and Resource Service reports in a recent newsletter that Congress received 15,000 letters and countless phone calls opposing the inclusion of $8 billion in bailouts (a/k/a “loan guarantees”) for new nuclear plant construction—and that the final interim funding bill to keep the government running did NOT include this boondoggle. The item is not on the NIRS website but you can find the entire newsletter reprinted here.

In other words, the power of an organized populace resulted in a victory, something that’s getting less frequent all the time but is still very much possible. Let’s hope for many more in the coming year.

Do not let anyone try to tell you that nuclear fission is in any way green. It’s an environmental disaster under the best of circumstances, and at its worst, it could make the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico look like a spilled cup of coffee. Here’s a post I wrote some time back that gives some among many reasons to oppose nuclear power (scroll past the feed from this blog).

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I have only half an hour left of being 53. It seems a good time to reflect on the whirlwind year I’ve had. Professionally, a lot has gone right for me this year.

First, of course, this has been my initial year as a Guerrilla Marketing author, and the publishing world is definitely nicer to authors who have hitched their wagon to a star. The folks at Wiley have been far more collaborative and helpful than many authors experience with their big NYC publishers, and certainly more so than Simon & Schuster was with me all those years ago. I’ve been promoting the book constantly all year long, and the publisher and even Amazon have also worked on that goal. And as a result of all that effort, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green has been on the Environmental category bestseller list for at least 11 of the last 12 months—we’re not sure about March—and was #1 in the category for part of April and May. Even cooler—within three weeks of publication, a Google search for the exact phrase “Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green” brought up 1,070,000 hits—far more than I’ve ever seen for anything else I’ve been involved with. Some of those pages have come down since, but as of today, it’s still quite respectable at 551,000. And a search for my name peaked last month at 119,000, nearly double the previous high point of 62 or 64,000.

Because of the new book, I’ve also done quite a bit of speaking this year, including my first international appearance (at an international PR conference in Davos, Switzerland, home of the World Social Forum and World Economic Forum. This was a different event, but in the same venue, and it felt pretty trippy to be speaking from the same building that the likes of Bill Clinton and Warren Buffett speak from. And when you write a book called Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, you have automatic “chops” in both the green community and the marketing world—which is great, since the book really looks at the intersection of profitability and sustainability. I’ve spoken and exhibited at quite a few green events this year (ranging from the mellow, outdoor SolarFest in Vermont to the huge Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival in the Washington, DC Convention Center) and made numerous great contacts.

And I discovered, particularly when doing media interviews, that I really do know quite a bit about going green, on a much deeper level than just “made from recycled materials” stuff. I was very pleased with the quality of some of the more than 100 interviews I did this year, finding that a number of the journalists went a lot deeper than others I’ve experienced in the past—and I was able to take them deeper still. I’m not saying this to brag, but because I didn’t actually realize how much I do know about many substantive issues around sustainability until I started answering so many great questions about it.

Part 2 will discuss the most exciting part of my year: a way to get the message in front of a much wider audience. Stay tuned.

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It sounded like a good idea from the blurb posted on the International Network of Social-Eco Entrepreneurs LinkedIn discussion board:

Ever wanted an energy question answering by the world’s leading experts?!

For all of you reading this, here is a rare opportunity to ask your toughest energy-related questions to the world’s leading energy scientists, including Dr Clement Bowman, Tom Blees, José Goldemberg, Marta Bonifert and Ambassador Pius Yasebasi Ng.

Simply click the link to this feature, and submit your questions by next Friday 26th November!

But when I got to the article, I was so appalled by some of the panelists’ credentials that I posted this:

Why are advocates of dirty technologies like tar-sands extraction and nuclear power judging energy prizes for a group called Eco-Business? If you look at the entire production cycle, including externalized pollution factors, these are among the dirtiest of all energy sources.

I believe our real energy future lies with much cleaner, fully renewable technologies like solar, wind, and hydro–all on a human scale and generating power at or near the point of use–and especially with what Amory Lovins calls “negawatts”: slashing energy consumption in existing buildings, vehicles, etc. Energy savings of 50 to 80 percent are achievable in many cases, thus removing the need to build more centralized power plants in the first place.
–Shel Horowitz, primary author, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, https://GreenAndProfitable.com

What do YOU think? Please use my comment field below, and then post it on the comments of the original article.

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As it happens, my breakfast reading this morning was the latest Utne Reader, specifically an article called “The Big Green Machine.”

It describes a speaking tour featuring four veterans speaking on climate change and energy independence. The vets are one unit in Operation Free, sponsored by the Truman National Security Project, which has an all-star board fronted by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Vets speaking as part of Operation Free have logged 25,000 miles in 21 states to make the case that switching off oil to renewable energy is crucial not only to our prosperity, but also to our national security. Speakers note that both the Department of Defense and the CIA have endorsed the energy transition and are taking major steps forward. “These are not organizations known for hugging polar bears,” points out Robin Eckstein, a former Army fuel truck driver in Iraq.

This might be the way we make change as a society: by moving people from sectors not typically involved in activism to convince others who don’t listen to activists.

Drew Sloan, who was badly inured in a grenade attack and went back for another duty tour in Iraq, says even if we don’t know everything, we have to make the shift:

When [people attack] the science of climate change, they ridicule the data as being uncertain. “Veterans know you can’t wait for 100 percent certainty. If you wait until everything is clear and laid out, you’re probably no longer alive. . . . Veterans know how to deal with ambiguity and still make decisions.

As Ms. Eckstein notes,

When certain individuals hear the words “climate change,” they shut down. For whatever reason, when they hear veterans speak on it, they actually listen.

Utne’s article was excerpted from a longer piece in On Earth, which ran under the title, “Patriots Act.”

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Absolutely fascinating BBC News article about the ultra-energy-efficient, ultra-tiny future of supercomputers (Thanks, Twitter friend @whatgreeninvest).

I found some bits especially startling: According to the IBM researcher leading the team,

“The cost of a transistor works out to 1/100th of the price of printing a single letter on a page.”

“In the future, computers will be dominated by energy costs – to run a data centre will cost more than to build it.”

“It takes about 1,000 times more energy to move a data byte around than it does to do a computation with it once it arrives.”

Even the early protoype of the team’s water-cooled computer is half again as fast as today’s fastest supercomputers—but it’s larger than a refrigerator. Scientists want to shrink it to the size of a sugar cube!

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I’ve written a great roundup of the cool Green trends I discovered walking the floor of the Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival in Washington, DC this weekend. some amazing stuff in fashion, transportation, shelter, food, and more. They’re doing another one in San Francisco November 6-7.

This will be the lead article in November’s Clean and Green newsletter, which will be published next week. If you’re not a subscriber yet, visit https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/ to sign up, so that you’ll see this coverage (no charge–just put your e-mail in the space at the upper right). You’ll also get eight freebies: Seven Tips to Gain Marketing Traction as a Green Guerrilla–and a series of seven action tipsheets covering:

  • Green printing (eight specific steps)
  • Saving energy (six steps)
  • Reducing waste (ten ideas)
  • Conserving water (five ideas)
  • Green transportation (six steps)
  • Deep-Green measures (six steps)
  • Effective Green marketing (six ideas)

So what are you waiting for? Just visit <a href=”https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/”>https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/ and leave your e-mail in the form at the upper right.

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Good article on Triple Pundit about how to discuss environmental issues with people who either don’t care or are actively hostile to the Green perspective. Five talking points you can use to reach people via their own self-interest.

The list includes the sweeping headings of population, education, “natural capital,” and the economy.One particularly thought-provoking point in the natural capital category: the easiest and cheapest half of any natural resource is always extracted first, meaning the environmental and economic impact of continuing to extract starts climbing very steeply once the low-hanging fruit is gone. This is why gasoline was only 30 cents a gallon when I was a kid, and floats between $2 and $4 in my area currently (much more expensive in Europe, by the way).

But on the whole, this article doesn’t give a lot of ammunition to environmental advocates in the trenches. The next step is to take these categories and make them specific and actionable, and really appeal to the self-interest of those listening.

Examples?

  • Whether or not you care about climate change, you should care about the huge inflationary spiral caused by soaring fuel prices. If we can reduce our fossil fuel consumption by 50 percent, that means your dollar will continue to go a lot farther than it would otherwise. Otherwise, it will continue to get worse because the oil that’s easy and cheap to get is already used up.
  • Do you know I saved 40 percent of my paper costs in my business, just by switching to a two-sided printer and using the double-side feature? Do you think that could work in your business?
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