What surprised me about Seth Godin’s blog post today on cars vs bicycles was the way he based his pro-bike arguments in classic liberal altruism: protect the underdog, ensure the safety of the less powerful. This is even more remarkable because he lives in New York City, whre bikes have clear superiority over cars for many purposes. (His tounge-in-cheek pro-car arguments, on the other hand, were like the modern Republican Party: I have more power than you, so get out of my way.)
I’m a big believer in convincing by harnessing the reader/listener/viewer’s enlightened self-interest. So I’d rewrite his pro-bike list with these eight positive reasons:
In dense urban areas, you’ll get there much faster on a bike than in a car, for trips of up to five and maybe as much as seven miles, especially in rush hour
You can park within a few feet of your destination (in big cities, I often start looking for a parking space half a mile/one kilometer ahead, and sometimes don’t find a space until a mile/2KM on the other side)
In less populated areas, the bike provides a healthy, fun workout
You notice more on a bike: stores and restaurants to check out, architectural details, big scenic vista, some ripe and yummy fruit to pick on a wild raspberry vine, that gorgeous hawk soaring above you
You enjoy that wonderful feeling of being outside with the breeze and sun
Your carbon footprint during your trip is reduced by orders of magnitude
You get to smile and be smiled upon by other people; positive human connection, no matter how fleeting, is a good thing, and hard to achieve encased in a ton or two of steel and plastic
Bikes are waaay cheaper—bike economics: outright purchase of something between $200 for a decent used street bike on up to, say, $600 for a new one of better quality, maintenance costs of $50-$100 per year, fuel cost of zero; car economics: at minimum, $5000 plus hundreds or thousands in annual maintenance for a functional used car with a remaining lifespan of three years or more, plus costs of fuel and insurance, on up to several tens of thousands for a new one.
Of course, Seth is using the bike vs. car argument as a metaphor for the caring vs. selfish economy. But as an avid biker (going back to commuting to high school in New York City, and continuing through my current rural lifestyle)—and a benefit-focused marketer, I had to point out that bikes do actually offer a number of real advantages.
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
It’s not often you hear a self-professed liberal Jewish feminist open her talk with ten minutes praising the Pope. But that’s how Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, and several other groundbreaking books, began her talk at Mount Holyoke College last night. While acknowledging a litany of areas where she and Francis have profound disagreements—among them same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to control her own body—she thanked him publicly for his attention to the planet in peril and its dispossessed people, saying he was a great example of what environmental leadership looks like right now.
And for Klein, those two areas—helping the planet and replacing poverty with abundance—are forever braided together. “Climate change is an accelerant to all the other issues going wrong…It’s not about saying climate change is so big that it trumps everything else. All are equally urgent, and we don’t win by pitting these issues against each other.” We win, she says, by joining forces to demand holistic approaches that simultaneously solve climate heating, create jobs and economic opportunity, and remediate ism-based oppression—by “connecting climate change with a broken economic model”—a concept she calls “intersectionality.”
(This is a message particularly dear to my own heart, and thoroughly integrated into my forthcoming 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World as well as my own talk, “‘Impossible’ is a Dare.”)
The impacts of climate change, she notes, often fall most heavily among the very poor countries, and the very poor residents of rich countries. Oil refineries, coal plants, and high asthma rates tend to be found in low-income communities, often with high concentrations of people of color. Rising floodwaters will inundate poor, tiny island nations first. “It’s not just about things getting hotter, but about things getting meaner. More militarized, more racist,” as we see in the response of countries like Hungary to the Syrian refugee crisis. Which she sees as climate-related, noting that the Syrian civl war followed the worst drought in Syria’s history. Climate change, she says, is also a women’s and a feminist issue; the impacts hit women disproportionately as well.
So her challenge to climate activists is to turn “disaster apartheid” (e.g., the detestable official response to Hurricane Katrina) into “energy democracy.” And that includes making sure that the communities hit hardest are first in line for improvements that meet their needs.
Hurricane Katrina, which inspired Klein to write The Shock Doctrine and begin her climate study that led to This Changes Everything, was a perfect storm combining “heavy weather and a weak and neglected public sphere.” She points out that by the time Katrina made landfall, it had been downgraded from a Category 5 hurricane to a mere tropical storm. The levees should have withstood the onslaught, if they hadn’t been allowed to fall into disrepair.
While the world looked on with horror as “FEMA couldn’t find New Orleans,” and “prisoners were abandoned, locked in their cells as the waters were rising,” evacuees were given one-way tickets out, and the elites seized an opportunity to remake the city as a wealthier place, with 100,000 fewer poor blacks, even tearing down public housing projects undamaged by the storm, to replace them with high-end condominiums.
Quoting Black Lives Matter leader Alicia Garza, Klein says it’s time to “‘make new mistakes’…we can’t demand perfection but we can demand evolution.”
Examples of the old mistakes we shouldn’t keep making:
“Projecting messianic fantasies onto politicians” and becoming disappointed when they fail to save us
Believing we can solve all our problems with market forces (she cites the recent Volkswagen fuel emissions tampering scandal as an example of why that doesn’t work)—or with technological fixes, which include not only wonderful new green energy systems but also environmentally catastrophic technologies like fracking (“the oil companies have figured out how to screw us sideways”), tar-sands oil, and massive pipelines such as the Keystone XL
“Building a movement entirely of upper-middle-class white people and wondering why people of color don’t join”
“Tearing other people to shreds” in bouts of anger disguised as political purity
Thinking that any one of us can do it all ourselves
Noting that fossil fuel companies will work extremely hard to protect their enormous profits and will try to win the public by pointing out the lifestyles of luxury fossil fuels have allowed us, Klein says we won’t win by trying to educate fossil-fuel billionaires like the Koch brothers. Furthermore, “we cannot look at this without looking at who burned what, when. Fossil fuels have allowed us to live the fantasy of a life apart from nature. But the response from the earth, though slow in coming, says there’s no such thing as a one-way relationship, and you were never the boss! We could see this as a cosmic demotion—or as a gift.”
But we do have many victories to celebrate, including Shell’s decision this week in the face of strong opposition from environmentalists to withdraw from arctic drilling…China’s major reduction in coal development and initiation of carbon cap-and-trade—due to public pressure even in that repressive society—when only a few years ago a new coal plant was opening every week…the 400,000 new jobs Germany has created in shifting 30 percent of its energy from fossil and nuclear to solar and wind (to name a few). “As I talk to people, the biggest problem is that they think they can’t win. But we are winning, as part of a global movement.
And just as the shock of the Great Depression economic collapse created space for New Deal social reforms, so the climate catastrophe, coupled with the current collapse of fossil fuel prices, with the price of a barrel of oil plummeting from $100 to $50 in three months, could catalyze transformation: “integrated holistic solutions and a road map. There’s a progressive tradition of using these shocks to build….a moment where we can do things that weren’t possible before. We can shut down bad projects and bad policy. We can win a moratorium on all arctic drilling. It’s easier to bring in a bold progressive carbon tax…the political goal has to be a polluter-pays principle…the mostr sustainable route is weaving together the yes and the no.” She delighted in recent progressive electoral victories in Alberta (long controlled by tar-sands-loving right-wingers) and in the UK, where the Bernie Sanders-like Jeremy Corbyn has just become head of the Labour Party. Also in Alberta, she took hope from a conference that brought together union miners from the tar sands, environmentalists, and many other sectors and emerged with a progressive manifesto.
Before a brief Q&A, she closed her formal presentation with a clarion call to optimism AND action:
We need to move from a society based on extraction to one based on caring, including a guaranteed annual income. Caregiving jobs are climate change jobs. We must expand the caring economy and contract the careless economy. 2016 is a leap year; we add a human-created day in deference to the earth’s rotation. That’s an increased opportunity to build a much better world. We will be told it’s impractical. But $2.6 trillion has been divested from fossil fuel.
Quoting a woman leader in Nauru, a tiny Pacific Island being lost to climate change after a catastrophic history of exploitation by First World economies (Klein chronicles the sad tale in This Changes Everything), she continued,
“If politics are immovable, let’s change the politics.” Now is not the time for small steps. Now is the time to leap!
Office of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1916. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Daily_Eagle2.jpg
We have a kilowatt of solar electric on the roof of our 1743 colonial farmhouse. But a few years ago when the October Blizzard knocked out our power for three days, we couldn’t tap into that solar.
Consider these stats, all of them taken from that article:
More than 2000 “significant accidents” on pipelines since 1995, causing $3 billion in property damage
A single pipeline company, Plains All American Pipeline LP (operators of the line that spilled over Santa Barbara, California this week) has had 223 accidents $32 million in structural damage, 864,300 gallons spilled, and 25 federal enforcement actions just since 2006
A 60 percent increase in the number of accidents annually since 2009—and, not coincidentally, also a 60 percent increase in US oil production
Causes? Corroding pipes, failures in welds—aging infrastructure, in other words—with a generous helping of natural disasters and careless backhoe operators.
These accidents leak toxics, cause a risk of severe fires, and of course, drive up the price of energy.
Isn’t it time we stopped relying on fossil and nuclear for our energy needs? We already have the technology to switch to save, reliable, renewable sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, magnetic, tidal…and deep conservation, which just by itself could cut our energy use in half.
Having seen government overreach in such areas as raw milk, I clicked over and took a look. And found very little information. Rather than spend my morning following links on a Google search, I merely posted this response:
But the article says very little about what the proposal actually would do. European cosmetics standards are a GOOD thing, and, as I understand them, would make it far harder for big corps to sell us harmful “personal care” products. Which doesn’t mean this law isn’t overreaching–just that I don’t know because the article doesn’t tell us. Seems like an easy way around this would be a minimum number of bars per year underneath which producers would be exempt. But even artisanal soapmakers *should* disclose ingredients.
Would small-batch organic soaps be affected? No.
Later, I saw another comment from someone who did take the time to do the research; businesses with less than $100,000 in sales are exempt.
In short, this article is an attempt to stir up hostility with a nonexistent controversy. And it seems that Senator Dianne Feinstein is not an evil tool of the personal care companies after all.
I wonder, if we dig deep enough, if we would find some of the big chemical-based personal care products companies—or perhaps an opponent of Senator Feinstein—have a hand in this disinformation campaign. The list of industry giants supporting the new legislation (and thus, imposing tougher standards for themselves) is a long one but it’s certainly not every company.
Incidentally, I’ve said for years that the tough European Union rules on personal care products were a huge marketing opportunity for companies that meet the standards. Whether based in the US or Europe, the first few companies that demonstrate they meet the tougher standards ought to go be very successful in the stores.
Value is about not just price, but quality. This busy market obviously understands.If you want to market on price, look at words like “affordable” and “value.” “Cheap” can be deadly.
As a service provider, I did lead on price for a number of years. Back in the days when much of my business was resume writing, I used a simple half-inch in-column ad in the Yellow Pages (remember them?) with the slogan “Affordable professional resumes while you wait.” The year they changed it without permission to “Affordable professional resumes while U wait,” I successfully argued that proper grammar was a key selling point in my line of work and they killed it—and got the cost of the whole year’s ad refunded. I turned out to be wrong; that ad brought me plenty of clients. But I personally would not patronize a writing service whose face to the world was ungrammatical.
Those ads ran in the 1980s and 1990s, and resume writing is only a tiny fraction of my current business. These days, I stress value, not price–for all the services I offer. Some are still quite inexpensive, like writing a press release or book cover—or, for that matter, the occasional resume I still write. Others, including strategic consulting on green and social change profitability as well as book publishing consulting, can be fairly pricy.
I would have moved away from marketing on low price anyway, as my business matured. But if I hadn’t, my business would have dried up. The market is very different now. Nobody is a prisoner of their own geography any more. I can’t compete on price with some clown on a bottom-feeding service bidding site who throws an article into a word-blender and spits out crap for $5 a shot. But I sure can compete on value and quality.
As a consumer, I’m price-sensitive on some items, but quality will trump price, and so will politics. Yesterday, I spent $40 or $50 at the farmers market. I could have bought the (theoretically) same items at a supermarket for half the price, but not the organic/local/fresh choices I purchased. But I also stopped at the local independent discount store and picked up some just-past-date polenta for a buck. I cooked it last night and it was fine. I have a less gourmet one in my fridge that I paid $3 for at a different store and it doesn’t expire until November, which means the one I ate tonight was probably packed last summer. But that’s OK, it was fine.
I learned all the way back in the 1980s that price and value were not necessarily the same. After a couple of bad experiences with cheap electronics, I started buying better quality components for my stereo, better telephones, and so forth—and being much happier with my purchases. I learned that I could get a good deal through a remainder catalog, and that a $100 item with an original list price of $300 was generally going to be a much better value than a $75 item that had never sold for more than $100. And when I bought my first computer, I went with the expensive but easy-to-use Macintosh and was very happy I did.
I will shop at that local discount store, but I won’t shop at that very famous low-price big box store beginning with a W. While I recognize that they are among the best in the industry on sustainability (something very important to me), I’m also painfully aware of how much I dislike their store siting and closing policies, their community relations, labor practices, supplier practices, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus, I’ve heard that the quality is often less than stellar. I give them kudos in my speeches for, among other things, developing a massive market for organic foods among people who have never been inside a Whole Foods. But I personally choose not to shop there.
But I’m perfectly happy to drive inexpensive, functional cars. Right now, we have a 2004 Mazda, bought new for $17K, and a 2005 Toyota Corolla, bought at six years old but with only 26,000 miles on it, for $10K. I expect both to last several more years. When we bought the Corolla, one of our other options was a used Prius with 99,000 miles, for $12K. The Corolla seemed like a MUCH better deal. It wasn’t the lower price so much as having only 1/4 as many miles.
In short, as a consumer, I’ll definitely factor in price, but it won’t be the only factor. How about you? As a business owner and as a consumer, how does price factor into your decisions.
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?
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.
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.
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.
