Category: Energy & Sustainability

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

In 2002, when I was writing my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, a lot of the ideas in it were way out in front of the pack. Not a lot of people were talking about corporate environmental sustainability, and pretty much no one was talking about success through business ethics.

I spent a lot of time this weekend editing the manuscript for my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (which will be published about a year from now by Wiley, and co-authored with the legendary Jay Conrad Levinson). And I was struck once again by how much these issues have moved into the general discourse. It’s so easy to find sources now! Everyone’s talking about sustainability, and business ethics has a lot more street cred than it used to.

Of course, no one ever really knows what takes a radical idea and pushes it to become a trend–but I like to think that my work, and particularly the Business Ethics Pledge campaign I started in 2004, has at least something to do with the shift. The whole idea of that campaign is to move the ideas through a small number of influencers and create a “tipping point” within society. We certainly haven’t reached the tipping point yet, but I think we might be seeing some of the early rumbles.

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

Okay, we all know the usual places to put money are performing pretty badly right now. But get this: the Empire State Building is embarking on a massive energy retrofit that will return nearly 28 percent a year! The project will cost $13.2 million, not exactly chump change–but will slash energy consumption by 35 to 40 percent, and save $3.8 million a year (considerably more, if energy costs spike back up again). After the third year, that’s nearly $4 million going directly to the bottom line. If the improvements have even a 20-year lifespan, that $13.2 million investment would return $176 million, and that’s with stable energy prices. The number is much, much higher if you factor in average energy cost increases of 5 percent a year. (I’m not going to do the math here, because I don’t know all the factors we’d need to compute–but it’s sure to be at least $200 million, maybe much more).

Too bad we can’t put our Roth IRAs into renewable-energy retrofits .

Meanwhile, we can all learn from the creative thinking at Rocky Mountain Institute, which is doing the heavy lifting on this project–for example, remanufacturing the windows on-site to reduce trucking costs in fuel and money. For years, RMI has been generating this kind of holistic, big-picture energy planning that saves many times the cost, and quickly. I profile RMI founder Amory Lovins in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Unbelievably stupid quote from the agrochemical trade group Mid America Croplife Association, whose members include the likes of Monsanto, Dow, and other manufacturers of farm chemicals (oh, and can you spot the two grammar errors in those three sentences?):

Did you hear the news? The White House is planning to have an “organic” garden on the grounds to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the Obama’s and their guests. While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder.

This quote was in an e-mail to the group’s supporters, enclosing a classic-PR letter to Michelle Obama (or “Mrs. Barack Obama,” as the letter calls her–and for which one blogger took the authors to task), apparently authored by Bonnie McCarvel, Executive Director. You can see both MACA’s letter to Michelle Obama and the cover note here.

As a long-time believer in organic agriculture/sustainability and as someone who eats out of my family’s organic garden and a local organic CSA farm all summer and fall, I was all set to do a rant on the idiocy of this statement. But before jumping in, I Googled around, and decided to focus on some other lessons; that one’s been done about 24,000 times on the blogosphere already.

Lesson 1: Never say or write anything that will come back to haunt you. As MACA found out, you can’t assume an internal memo will stay internal. so say what you mean, mean what you say, and be prepared to back up your assertions.

Lesson 2: Backlash is quick and can be humiliating. Numerous petition campaigns have sprung up supporting Michelle’s desire to grow organic, and the already-shaky credibility of the pesticide industry might take a big hit.

Lesson 3: Old-school PR is no longer enough in a world where journalists no longer stand as intermediaries and gatekeepers between press releases and the public. From a technical PR standpoint, the letter MACA sent to Michelle Obama is quite good: full of reassuring language, on-the-surface well-reasoned arguments about the importance of agriculture, etc. But in a busy, harried world, it doesn’t get to the point; without the controversy, the recipient might not have even figured out (on the quick 30-second scan) that the letter was advocating chemical agriculture. Which hasn’t stopped the blogosphere from picking apart every nuance.

Lesson 4: Controversy and stupidity are just as sexy to the blogosphere as to traditional media. For all the carefully worded letter to Michelle Obama, what stands out (and is getting most of the attention) is the dumb quote in the supporter cover letter about organic gardening making them shudder.

Lesson 5: If the mainstream media wants to stay relevant, it needs to be visible. On three different Google searches on this story, including one for the exact quote from the cover letter, I did not see a single mainstream media result in the top three pages. The closest was a non-journalist’s blog quoted (apparently by a content-scraping robot) on the Wall Street Journal site, which was #28. Blogs and newsletters about gardening, sustainability, and progressive politics were all over this story, but the voice of traditional journalism was not being heard. I was actually beginning to wonder if the whole thing was an urban legend, until I finally tracked down the actual letter, on a local-foods blog. As newspapers are folding every week, as electronic news organizations are laying off staff, people will be asking why we need these trained and theoretically unbiased filters, if they’re AWOL on important stories (or if not AWOL, hidden deep under a rock). This will be a critical question. I’m of the strong opinion that we still need journalists to keep politicians and corporations honest, but journalism’s lack of presence on this and other stories makes that a much tougher argument.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, media-general, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

Want to know why right-wing pundits far outnumber those on the left in mainstream US TV? Bloggers Jay Rosen and Glenn Greenwald shared a theory on Bill Moyers Journal: having someone like Amy Goodman of Democracy Now would interfere too much with the construct disseminated by US mainstream media that the US government and major corporations are our benevolent friends, and they don’t want to air views that might help explain why the US has enemies abroad.

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter, those preachers of hate, are OK in their view because they are simply putting out a more vitriolic version of the Reaganite “mainstream.” But the soft-spoken, highly articulate and very well informed Goodman (who I consider one of the best interviewers in contemporary journalism) is considered a threat!

Of course, this doesn’t explain how another articulate and well-informed progressive,
Rachel Maddow, gets air. But it says a lot about the nature of today’s corporate media.

In the “know your enemies” department, fans of intelligent TV must read this brief transcript or watch the video. It’s a shocker.

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

Mycelium mushrooms reclaiming oil spills, sequestering carbon, fighting disease, hunger, and pests, more. One of the most inspirational videos I’ve ever seen. A must-view.

He even makes a claim that the Internet is essentially humanized mushroom technology.

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

From December, so a few references to Obama’s Cabinet choices have shifted. Vital analysis, lightheartedly delivered out of her personal experience, looking not only at implications of squandering water, but also on our current system’s vulnerabilities, and how much it will really take to rebuild infrastructure.

My favorite quote:

Here in California, fish have much better lawyers now than they did back in the day. Sustainability and environmental concerns are not going away in California or anywhere else.

If you don’t know Rachel Maddow, she’s a host on MS-NBC TV and AirAmerica radio, very progressive, very smart. I’ve been following her since her first radio gig maybe 10 or 12 years ago, here in Western Massachusetts.

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

President Barack Obama’s inaugural address was deeply moving to me on many levels. And one of the most promising was his statements on energy.

First, he recognized both the environmental and national security disaster of our present policy:

Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

And second, the clean solution:

We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.

Not since Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House and wore sweaters instead of overheating the building have we had a U.S. President with this consciousness.

Not Reagan, who promptly took the solar system OFF the roof. Not George H.W. Bush. Not even Clinton. And even though George W. Bush’s Crawford ranch is one of the Greenest houses in the country, his presidency has been a disaster for the environment, and an eight-year lost opportunity to address climate change while it’s still possible.

Hooray!

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life, travel

Just back from a week aboard a cruise ship, with almost no Internet access (Yeah, I could have bought access at 75 cents a minute, but I saw no reason to grab my email at highway robbery prices. I did manage to use an Internet cafe on shore, twice, just to check if my Virtual Assistant forwarded anything urgent. But it wouldn’t be a vacation if I were still dealing with 300 incoming messages a day.

Anyway, some totally random thoughts from the trip:

Transportation Safety Administration has spiffy new bright blue uniforms (my last flight was several months ago). They look gorgeous–but aren’t we supposed to be in a budget crisis? There was nothing wrong with the old white ones.

Cruise ships completely distort not only the local economy but also visitors’ perceptions. The feel we got for Guatemala in our three-week trip last summer was almost completely different from the artificial world of a cruise port that waits only for boats to dock. It’s even different from the land-based tourist towns and attractions that deal with a continuous (but much smaller) flow of tourists but also have a vibrant non-tourist life, integrated into the fabric of the nation.

The cooperative movement and indigenous self-help organizations have even penetrated the restricted corridors of cruise terminals–Good!

If you turn off email and Internet, it’s not that hard to completely ignore the outside world.

Our flight to the boat was canceled, so we arranged with the boat to meet it at the next stop, arranged with the airlines to reroute us to the closest point, arranged for a one-way car rental, and drove four very scenic hours to meet the boat. This astounded many of our fellow passengers–but we’re used to making our own travel arrangements and it didn’t faze us at all. It didn’t even seem like one of our more difficult travel adventures, compared with some of what we’ve done over the last 30 years together, but cruises for the most part don’t attract intrepid travelers. Of course, it helped that we followed the Principled Profit philosophy and were so nice as we explained our situation that people went out of their way to bend the rules for us. And it also helped that we had access to a cell phone and a laptop.

Environmental consciousness has penetrated even to the cruise industry. I went to a lecture from the ship’s environmental officer and was pleasantly amazed at the sophistication of waste treatment, etc. Still a ways to go. But they’re even considering having one nonsmoking ship as an experiment.

Rainforests are very special places, and some of the landowners know this. In Belize, we visited a 3rd or 4th generation landholder, a young man in his mid-20s, who has organized his neighbors to provide many acres of unbroken habitat for howler monkeys, and has done quite a bit of research on them.

Weather can always impact a trip. In addition to having our flight canceled, we had to skip our call in Mexico, because it was too windy to dock the boat. Bummer!

It’s always better to have a reservation for car rentals. We didn’t when we docked in Tampa, and the cruise terminals had no cars. So we had to buy tickets to an airport shuttle, hunt around the airport for a car to rent, and then go off to see Tampa.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability

Your holiday spending can support sustainability goals. It’s not that hard. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

  • Shop local–and that doesn’t mean the local branch of a giant international conglomerate, but a locally owned, locally operated merchant. The dollars will continue to circulate in your own local economy, helping to recession-proof your own community.
  • Consider gift certificates to local stores, or even a town-wide gift certificate redeemable at many participating stores (many Chambers of Commerce offer these).
  • If buying food products, look for organic, locally made items whose every ingredient you can spell without looking.
  • If you live in an area where the tap water is drinkable, or can be made drinkable with a simple filter, make a family promise to give up bottled water, or use it only in special situations (long car trips, extended hikes). for most people in the US, Canada, and Europe, this is an easy one. The environmental costs of bottled water are enormous and complex.
  • Buy some family presents that will pay energy dividends for years to come: window caulk, door snakes, heat-trapping blinds or curtains, even things as simple as foam pads and baby protectors for your electrical outlets on outside walls (you’d be amazed at how much energy you’ll save). They may not be glamorous, but if you point out how the money you collectively save will be channeled into some fun family activity, it’s a good way to make the shift.

    Plenty more eco-friendly gift and living ideas at https://www.frugalfun.com/ – look for the back issues of Monthly Frugal Fun Tips as well as Frugal & Fashionable Living magazine.

    Shel Horowitz has been combining frugality and sustainability for over 20 years, including his e-book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics-International, Social and Economic Justice

    The company that so many of us love to hate has started addressing some of the reasons why I won’t do business with them. This short article by Mallen Baker shows progress on both labor standards and energy. Reprinted in full with Mallen’s generous permission.

    This is big news, as my understanding is a major part of why so much of the US economy picked up and moved to Asia is Wal-Mart’s constant demand that suppliers reduce the price 10% every year. About time it started adding some social responsibility to its demands.

    Wal-Mart has told a meeting of its Chinese suppliers that social and environmental standards will need to be raised to help the company meet its goals and to move forward in the wake of the milk poisoning scandal that has left many Chinese children still in hospital.

    The company’s requirements will aim to improve energy efficiency, with a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency required of the top 200 suppliers, full disclosure of locations of factories including sub-contractors, and product improvements in terms of energy ratings.

    Wal-Mart said that many of the measures would be good for suppliers, helping them to save money by reducing waste. But in any case, it made a direct link between the quality of products and whether or not a supplier cheated on overtime or used child labour, or dumped polluting waste.

    In return, the company has said it will change the nature of its relationship with Asian suppliers, aiming to develop deeper long-term relationships to mutual benefit, rather than focusing simply on the price of each transaction.

    Overall, I continue to be highly critical of Wal-Mart, but glad to see the company moving forward. I think this is only the third time I had anything good to say about Wal-Mart in this space. The first was after Katrina, when the company stepped in to do what the federal government should have done. And the second was almost two years ago, regarding one of the company’s other energy saving initiatives.

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