Category: Energy & Sustainability

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability

Thoughtful article by Mallen Baker in the UK publication Ethical Corporation, discussing a number of specific companies who’ve been called on the carpet for greenwashing: claiming to be more ecological than they really are.

As one among many examples:

Shell, which said “we use our waste CO2 to grow flowers”, was in breach of the advertising code because the wording could be seen to imply that all the company’s waste CO2 was so used, not just 0.33 per cent of it.

The result of this corporate misfeasance is not surprising. As Baker notes,

According to a recent survey, 80 per cent of Britons now think that companies simply pretend to be ethical in order to sell more products. Widespread cynicism over all the claims has set in, and is hardening with every ill-judged poster or TV ad. Nobody can see an ad with flower petals floating from the exhaust of a motor car and be anything other than cynical.

Oil companies are often making green claims, which I’ve learned to treat with skepticism. Yet I admit to being fooled occasionally. I once profiled BP as the socially responsible company of the month in my Positive Power of Principled Profit newsletter on the basis of its stated policies and actions on environmental responsibility. Later, I found out that BP still has quite its share of environmental problems, even disasters.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, media-general

Is it outright deliberate deception, bad science, or merely urban legend run amok?

The widely cited study that claims the manufacturing and transport of Prius batteries has worse environmental impact than building and driving a Hummer has serious flaws:

  • It bases assumptions on the Hummer being driven for 379,000 miles, while the Prius gets retired after just 109,000 miles (and having owned many Toyotas, I can tell you that most of them are just hitting their stride at 100K); this alone is enough to completely invalidate the study
  • The issues about nickel mining are taken out of context and based on 30-years-obsolete data
  • In general, life-cycle issues related to cars skew 85% toward use over the vehicle’s lifetime, and only 15% to manufacturing and distribution–so even if the Prius energy consumption has a higher front-load than typical, it’s not likely to be enough to overwhelm the energy savings during the car’s useful life
  • Oh yes, and no independent researchers reviewed the data

    • Two good articles with real data: This very readable one from the Sierra Club, and this more technical one from Pacific Institute (it’s a PDF).

    I would be very curious about what economic interests were behind the original claim–which got picked up by George Will, among many others.

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    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics: General, People Helping People

    Playwright and former Czech President Vaclav Havel has a fabulous op-ed in the New York Times on addressing climate change as a moral and ethical imperative.

    He calls for each of us to take personal responsibility, makes the analogy that human damage to the environment is an unpaid loan, and finishes with dire predictions if we don’t move forward on this issue NOW.

    As someone who writes regularly on both ethics and the environment, all I can say is read it. And then read it again. And then think about what actions YOU can take.

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

    I just learned that Dame Anita Roddick died yesterday, at the young age of 64.

    Roddick was a woman of great principle, one of the leading lights of ethical and socially/environmentally conscious business. The founder of The Body Shop, Roddick embodied the idea I write about in Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First that doing good in the world, through business, is a pathway to doing well financially.

    Starting from almost nothing, she built an international chain of socially responsible cosmetics shops, and she never forgot her commitment to the earth and to justice.

    Not that she didn’t have her own blind spots. The obit in the London Daily Telegraph offers a thorough resume of her life in both business and activism, from the rough childhood to becoming the fourth-richest woman in Britain. Many of her causes are listed, and so are the many places where purists found her lacking or even hypocritical. It makes fascinating reading.

    Speaking of reading, Roddick wrote several books. I read Business As Unusual, which was done in copper-colored ink and a bizarre layout. I think some of her other books were easier to read because the design didn’t get in the way.

    Dame Anita, you will be missed.

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

    Cruise for Free as a Speaker/Entertainer
    Go get your free report at https://www.frugalfun.com/cruise.html

    For my wife’s 50th birthday, her parents sent us on a cruise through Alaska’s Inside Passage–a magnificent trip.

    But it got me thinking–surely there are more eco-friendly ways to run a cruise ship. There ae astounding issues of waste aboard ship, and with so many ships plying these waters, the impact on fragile ecologies in these beautiful locations we all want to visit can be quite significant–and quite negative. And then I found out that on top of issues like food waste, ship sewage gets dumped into the water! There’s got to be a better way.

    So, while still on the ship, I started working on a business plan for an eco-friendly cruise line that would serve as a lab for (and be funded initially by) the traditional cruise lines, developing new Green practices and technologies that the whole fleet could adopt. And maybe the land-based hotel industry could get in on it as well.

    Making this a reality is a bigger task than I could take on on my own but if any one has ideas as to how to make this a reality, I’m very willing to listen, and to share my thinking. E-mail me through my contact form on https://www.frugalmarketing.com.

    And hey, I’d love to be Marketing Director if such a line ever launches . Let’s reinvent this industry together.

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    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability

    Bill Becker, a former US Department of Energy official, published a very cogent article in the Denver Post, opposing nuclear power on the grounds that…

    Those who say it will reduce global warming ignore the huge carbon cost of mining, milling, and transporting the fuel and of building the plant in the first place.
    Many scientists say we only have a window of about a decade to turn our energy patterns around, if we’re to avoid catastrophic climate change. Nukes take many years to approve and build.

    He also notes some of the more familiar arguments, e.g., terrorist target, weapons proliferation, and waste storage issues–although he only mentions these and does not elaborate.

    So let me elaborate at least on waste storage. We’re looking at isolating extremely deadly and volatile compounds for longer than the span of civilization–a devil’s bargain if there ever was one.

    This is an issue I know something about. I started researching issues around nuclear power in 1974, and my first book, published in 1980, was on why nuclear is a really stupid way to generate electricity, and I’ve seen nothing since to make me change my mind.

    Want to know more? I still don’t know a better book on the subject than No Nukes, published way back in 1978 and apparently still in print.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

    Audio interview on a year of eating only local foods, many of them from her garden.

    https://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_6208.cfm

    I confess–while I try to eat local and organic as much as possible, I’m not to the point where I can completely give up cocoa, olive oil, and tropical fruit, among other pleasures. But nothing beats a perfect-tasting tomato or raspberry from our own planting and harvesting.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability

    Apparently, 59% of the market isn’t enough for Scotts Miracle-Gro. The company is suing its tiny competitor, TerraCycle–a maker of compost made from worm poo, on trademark infringement grounds.

    Well, I looked at TerraCycle’s logo and trade dress, and then I looked at MiracleGro’s. Yes, they both use greens and yellows–but different shades, and in very different ways. The only similarity I can see is that they both use a circle to hold their logos. It’s one thing to trademark a truly distinctive shape, such as the McDonald’s arches. But a circle? Come on!

    In fact, TerraCycle makes a very clear distinction on its website. Its whole brand identity is as a no-artificial-chemicals alternative to products like MiracleGro, packed exclusively in reused soda bottles and other packaging that would have otherwise ended up in landfill.

    Hmm–sounds like a company I should feature in my monthly Positive Power of Principled Profit spotlight article.

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

    An amazing juxtaposition of two stories in the Organic Consumers Association’s latest newsletter:

    A Reuters report, “Organic Farming Can Feed the World“:

    “Model estimates indicate that organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base,” they wrote in their report, published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems.

    Wow! We can have the much higher food quality, eliminate a major pollution source, and increase yields. Sounds good to me!

    The other story examines research that examines specific effects pesticides have, interfering with plants’ natural ability to fix nitrogen. It’s rather technical but I found a paragraph in ordinary English:

    Drawing on their recent work and other published studies, the team projected that pesticides and other contaminants are reducing plant yield by one-third as a result of impaired SNF. This remarkable conclusion suggests one mechanism, or explanation of the yield-enhancing benefits of well-managed, long-term organic farming systems.

    In fact, yields can be as much as three times higher than conventional agriculture.

    Isn’t it time to reclaim our organic heritage and stop farming the old, destructive ways?

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    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Uncategorized

    A politics-neutral report on how to vastly reduce New York City’s energy use could serve as a model for cities around the country, and around the world.

    Some of the plans make a huge amount of sense, especially for a city like NYC with a well-developed transit system and large inventory of existing buildings.

    In NYC, most of those buildings have flat roofs. I have long advocated using those roofs for food and energy self-sufficiency, through garden spaces and solar collectors. The report points out that solar hot water is 60-70% efficient–far better than photovoltaic (solar systems that change sunlight into electricity). In my own very non-urban house, my experience bears this out. Our solar hot water system works extremely well, but our photovoltaic panels generate a much smaller percentage of our energy than I’d hoped. The three hot water panels immediately sliced out a big part of our electric bill (we had been heating our water with electricity), while the four PV panels made a much smaller reduction.

    Better still, says the report, would be a crash program to retrofit existing buildings with low-energy light bulbs and capture the heated or cooled waste air that escapes (often because tenants in overheated apartment buildings actually keep windows open in winter!).
    Combine that with a serious program to switch from cars and trucks to other transit alternatives, and NYC would slash its energy use.

    While this report mentions a number of technological alternatives to conventional fossil fuels, I feel one area where it’s weak is in evaluating those technologies. It gives lip service to the major problem of food displacement if there was a widespread switch to biofuels, but doesn’t go into any detail. And then it brings up tired dead horses with high energy and pollution costs, such as oil shale extraction. Haven’t we learned something in the last 30 years?

    Still, this report has enough easily- and cheaply-implemented strategies to be well worth a look–as long as we use a critical thinking filter to evaluate the ecological and dollar consequences of each recommendation.

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