Tag: amory lovins

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, localism/locavore, Technology Tagged with , , , ,

I just rewatched this TED talk by Amory Lovins: it lays out a step-by-step plan to slash our energy use through deep conservation (what he calls “negawatts” and “negabarrels” and switch to renewables, with gas as a transitional fuel. It doesn’t happen overnight, and relies heavily on profit incentives to businesses.

Lovins, who I consider the foremost spokesperson for sensible energy, is not some sort of radical do-gooder. He’s a businessman who’s made quite a successful career out of changing the way we think about energy. Just as two examples of what’s possible:

1. He helped the Empire State Building save $4.4 million per year on a $13 million deep energy retrofit–that’s about a 30% annual ROI.

2. His own house, built in the Solar Stone Age (1983) just outside Aspen, Colorado (ski country-COLD) is close to net zero, producing nearly all of the energy it uses (in 2001, he mentioned that the residence portion had a $5 monthly electric bill–even if it’s tripled since then, that’s pretty good for a 4000-square-foot house in the snowbelt). Now here’s the really remarkable thing: In Aspen, Colorado, this house has neither a furnace nor an air conditioner, and it’s warm enough inside to grow bananas. The extra cost of the energy improvements was essentially paid for by the capital savings of not needing those big clunky systems. So in other words, we’ve known how to do this for 30 years.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s get this party STARTED.

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

$5 trillion net savings, support a 158% bigger U.S. economy by 2050, using no energy from coal, oil or nuclear.

This is the capsule version of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s energy plan. RMI is a green “think-and-do tank” founded by my favorite practical visionary, Amory Lovins. By thinking holistically, Amory and his colleagues achieve “impossible” results like a house in the California desert that doesn’t need air conditioning, and one in the Colorado snowbelt that doesn’t need a furnace.

Here are the last two claims on their blueprint:

9) U.S. industry can produce about 84% more output with 9–13% less energy—without mandates or breakthroughs in innovation.

10) We can capture and integrate the renewable energy needed to meet 80% or more of our electricity needs by 2050.

Go read the other eight.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun Tagged with , , , , ,

This article in the New York Times feeds a lot of people’s ideas about what it means to live a green lifestyle: a guy all by himself in the desert, living off the grid in a dwelling he pieced together out of old shipping containers.

That scares a lot of people. Heck, it scares me! But it’s important to note that John Wells, the occupant of said desert paradise, is happy. He’s got a few hundred thou in the bank and he’s there because he wants to be.

I know people like that. My friend Juanita’s no-plumbing, no-electricity hilltop cabin that she and her late husband built by hand is as frugal a dwelling as I know, and culturally about as far from the New York City that both Mr. Wells and I chose to leave behind as it’s possible to get.

But the point I want to make is this: you can still live a green lifestyle and enjoy all the creature comforts and social conveniences of modern life. Consider Amory Lovins, energy futurist extraordinaire, whose spacious and gadget-filled 4,000-square-foot home was sustainability state-of-the-art when it was constructed in 1983. In the cold, snowy Colorado Rockies (just outside Aspen), he doesn’t need a furnace, or an air conditioner—and his monthly electric bill could be made back by skipping a couple of lattes per month at a fancy coffee shop..

Frugal, green lifestyles can be about comfort, ease, lower maintenance costs, and even luxury. They don’t have to be about deprivation—unless, like John Wells, you don’t think of being a hermit in the desert as deprivation, but as liberation. It’s his choice, and I say, go for it.

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

Two astounding pieces of news related to the nuclear industry crossed my desk this week.

First, a rundown by Harvey Wasserman, who’s been fighting nukes all the way back to the 1970s (at least two of his many books are on energy issues), on the current very sorry state of the nuclear power industry, worldwide. And only China and Russia have an aggressive construction program at the moment.

Wasserman notes that this is an industry on its knees.

The three most nuclear-embracing societies in the world are the US, France, and Japan, which together have built 217 of the world’s 441 nukes (104), 58, and 55, respectively).

In Wasserman’s article, he notes that:

  • None of Japan’s reactors are currently operating
  • France just elected President Francois Hollande, who campaigned as a pro-safe-energy, anti-nuclear candidate
  • In the US, the few nukes currently under construction are saddled with costs that make them completely uncompetitive, even without all the other negative factors, and with a loan guarantee program (a/k/a “bailout”) that looks increasingly tenuous—and meanwhile, the safe energy/no nukes movement, largely quiet since our victories 30+ years ago, is waking up (I even went to a safe energy demonstration recently whose speakers included Vermont’s governor, one of its senators, and its attorney general)
  • Even China, a country not known to pay much attention to the safety and well-being of its citizens—and one that has been expanding its energy capacity through every technology it can harness—is reevaluating its nuclear program, and may halt construction or shut down some or all of its reactors

And Wasserman didn’t even discuss the several countries (among them Germany and Italy) that have pledged to phase out or shut down their nukes.

The second story is a reminder of one more reason why we should never have harnessed this technology: it’s a genie that won’t stay in the bottle. Every nuclear power generation or fuel processing plant increases the chances of global terrorism, and of rogue governments getting their hands on nuclear weapons.

It turns out that Kodak had its own mini-nuclear reactor and a store of weapons-grade uranium, according to the Los Angeles Times.

As the reporter, Matt Pearce, wryly noted, “Good thing Kodak isn’t in Iran; that’s the kind of thing Israel’s been threatening to go to war over.”

But rest assured that we are out of danger from Kodak’s uranium, he notes:

Lest this story conjure up memories of the anxiety over “loose nukes” after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kodak ditched the uranium in 2007 with the coordination of the U.S. government, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Safety, cost, and atomic proliferation are just three of many reasons to oppose nuclear power. Here’s a PDF you can download (from Germany) called “100 Good Reasons Against Nuclear Power.”

The good news: we totally don’t need it. Amory Lovins and others have shown how the most energy-hogging of societies, such as the US (which uses about twice as much energy per capita as Germany, with about the same standard of living) can cut energy use by 60 or 80 percent, and even the more conservation-minded societies still can find plenty of savings. Combine that with the rapid advances in clean energy technology (solar, wind, small hydro, tidal, magnetic, etc.) and you have a recipe for safe, clean living, high quality of life, and reduced threat of catastrophic climate change.

You might want to send a link to this post to your elected representatives, with a letter about why you favor clean-energy alternatives to nukes and fossil fuels.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Energy & Sustainability, Green Marketing, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Networking, People Helping People, Technology, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, I asked for your comments on three inspirations for innovation and creativity. If you missed the original, please take a moment to go back and read it first. If you didn’t, be aware that I give away the ending to the Caine film below.

I’m writing this on Sunday, immediately after posing my question to you, and posting it on Tuesday, as promised. Hopefully a few of you have added your wisdom. And here’s what I think:

1. Chris Brogan is spot on when he says you don’t achieve greatness by following the existing paradigm. You conceive the ultimate goal—hopefully something big and bold—and then engineer a path from today’s world to that goal.

Examples:

2. A number of lessons to be learned from “Caine’s Arcade”:

  • Caine’s parents were wise enough not to interfere, not to assault their son with messages that what he was trying t do was impossible, useless, or even misdirected. They gave him room to follow his dream.
  • For Caine, it was enough to build it even when people didn’t come—just as for me, I’m driven to write my blog, my monthly column, and my books even though my audiences are small. Because I know that a few people do passionately pay attention to my ideas, it gives me a lot of juice to keep going. Of course, if I had the fame of a Chris Brogan or Seth Godin, I’d reach a lot more people. And that would harmonize with my own goals to change the world. But just knowing that I have changed the lives of a few people and the course of a few communities helps me keep going. I’m not sure I’m as brave as Caine, though. I’m not sure I could do it anymore if I didn’t think anyone at all was listening.
  • The missing ingredient in both Emerson’s “build a better mousetrap and people will beat a path to your door” and director Phil Alden Robinson and writer W. P. Kinsella’s “if you build it, they will come” is marketing. While Caine says he doesn’t care if anyone comes to play, he tells us of feeling excluded and teased when he tried to share his accomplishment at school. And his reaction when his lone customer brings a crowd to play shows that while just the achievement had been enough for Caine, sharing it with others is so much more. Nirvan, that solitary customer, did the marketing for him, and did a fabulous job. The happy ending is as much a testament to Nirvan’s social media prowess as to Caine’s creativity and ingenuity—just as the rise of Apple needed both Jobs’ vision and marketing skills and Steve Wozniak’s engineering genius. The lesson for entrepreneurs is that if you don’t have all three elements—vision, engineering, and marketing—you need to partner with someone who has the pieces you lack.

3. The actual ad featured in the going green video is a brilliant example of using big-picture thinking to convey a message. Take a walk—and find your true love. Yes, it’s absurd. But it’s also very compelling. and it talks most elegantly to the way people can change behavior and become greener—achieving both a planetary and a personal good.

Much traditional advertising of for-profit products and nonprofit causes focuses on one or the other: buy this car or smoke this cigarette and you’ll feel sexy, that sort of thing—or “only you can prevent forest fires,” give money to cancer research, etc.—helping-others messaging without a clear direct benefit.

As a green marketer, I constantly say that marketers need to hit both the self-interst and the planetary interest, especially if they want to reach beyond the deep greens. In fact, I wrote my last Green And Profitable column on this very theme. The ad is a nice example, and the opening slides give us some very good framing about the power of art to influence thought, in many contexts.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , ,

Someone just asked on a LinkedIn group who inspired group members to go green. I decidced my answer is worth sharing here:

For me it was a gradual process with many key moments. Here are a few:

  • Age three, realizing I had some power over my environment and didn’t have to tolerate cigarette smoke in my own house. I destroyed several packs of cigarettes at a party my parents threw–their guests had left the packs lying on the coffee table.
  • Age 12, feeling injustice in a much more personal and direct way: I had to pay adult price for a movie ticket but sit in the children’s section. I started a boycott of that theater, and have not been back in 42 years–even though it was my neighborhood theater until I went to college.
  • 1974, doing a research project on the pros and cons of nuclear power, I discovered that there were no pros but a lot of very serious cons–and recognized that I had to be actively involved in changing this country’s energy picture.
  • Beginning to read (in the late 1970s) sustainability thinkers like Amory Lovins, Hazel Henderson, Ralph Borsodi, Helen and Scott Nearing–and to learn via magazine articles some of the ugly history of car companies buying up and yanking out trolley tracks, etc.
  • 1981, having an 80-something woman demonstrate to me that we could wash dishes with about 5 percent of the water I’d been using, by turning the water off, soaping them all, and turning on a small stream to rinse.
  • In 1999, learning so much from my fellow organizers of Save the Mountain—and proving that we could in fact harness enough citizen energy to protect our endangered mountain range

There are many more, continuing to the present day. Going green is a process.

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

I’ve always said that if we could get most of our hot water from the sun in our antique (1743) house in cloudy, cold Massachusetts (which we do), it should be easy for most of the country to heat water with the sun.

Taking that philosophy much farther, Paul Brazelton’s Minnesota family has just done a deep-green retrofit of a 1935 house—and yanked out the furnace. With frequent temperatures of -20F and spikes well below that, this is a brave thing to do.

But not unproven. Energy visionary Amory Lovins also lives in the snowbelt (just outside Aspen, Colorado). While he doesn’t see the temperature extremes of a Minnesota winter, his no-furnace house was designed and built back in 1983, with technology we’d now consider quite primitive—and he grows bananas in his sunroom. And thousands of Passivhaus Institute-certified EnerPHit homes have been built in Germany and Scandinavia (also not known for balmy winters).

The Brazelton project will be the first certified EnerPHit home in North America.

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

Recently, I suggested that Obama do a massive solar/sustainable stimulus package. And I wrote,

The really good news? Such a plan could be put into place with surprisingly little capital outlay, because creative financing structures already exist that can let private investment step to the plate. I’ll talk more about this in my next post.

OK, so I squeezed a couple of posts in between. But I’m getting back to it.

And I think the answer is the deep-energy work by people like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who looks holistically at problems and comes up with amazingly intelligent solutions. I profile him in my book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green; here’s a little excerpt:

Though he lives in the Colorado Rockies, where it often goes well below zero Fahrenheit (–18ºC) on winter nights, his house has no furnace (or air conditioner, for that matter). It stays so warm inside that he actually grows bananas. He uses about $5 per month in electricity for his home needs (not counting his home office). Whether your company is looking for a huge competitive advantage, a more responsible way to do business, or both, the Lovins approach may be the answer.

Lovins built his luxurious 4,000-square-foot home/office in 1983, to demonstrate that even then, when energy technology was much less evolved, a truly energy-efficient house is no more expensive to build than the traditional energy hog—and far cheaper and healthier to run.

The payback for energy efficiency designs in Lovins’s sprawling, superinsulated home was just 10 months. The sun provides 95 percent of the lighting and virtually all the heating and cooling, as part of an ecosystem of plants, water storage devices, and even the radiant heat of the workers in his office.
Noting that energy-efficiency improvements since 1975 are already meeting 40 percent of U.S. power needs, Lovins claims a well-designed office building can save 80 to 90 percent of a traditional office building’s energy consumption.

Conventional building logic, says Lovins, says you insulate only enough to pay back the savings in heating costs. But Lovins points out that if you insulate so well that you don’t need a furnace or air conditioner, the payback is far greater, “because you also save their capital cost—which conventional engineering design calculations, oddly, don’t count.”

“Big savings can cost less than small savings,” Lovins says—if designers learn to think about the overall system, and how different pieces can work together to create something far greater than the sum of its parts. The trick is to look for technologies that provide multiple benefits, rather than merely solving one problem. For instance, a single arch in Lovins’s home serves 12 different structural, energy, and aesthetic functions.

The profile in the book goes on to talk about a house in the California desert that not only cost $1800 less to build, but saves $1600 a year in maintenance…and hydrogen cars that compare favorably on every criterion and use far less energy. Lovins’ company just completed a deep-energy retrofit on the Empire State Building that will save over $4 million every year. And Lovins is only one of the practical visionaries with real-world solutions you’ll encounter in the book.

In other words, we have the technology NOW. Combine this with such strategies as lease-to-own programs, or programs where the solar company fronts the cost of installation and pays it back to the homeowner out of energy savings, and we can easily get off the fossil-nuclear treadmill, or at least cut it back by 80% or so. Especially since a stimulus program would bring in economies of scale and lower the cost of the installations.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, International Association of Green Marketers Tagged with , , , ,

You’ve all heard, “Necessity is the Mother of Invention.” Well, perhaps that’s true. But another parent might be frustration: wanting to do something better, more easily, faster than you currently can.

Yes, some products are developed to fill a need we haven’t known we had. Advances in portable technology, from the beach transistor radio and Sony Walkman to smart phones and PDAs, have often come up to create whole new markets once we realized that these devices we never had were indispensable. Ditto with kitchen technology improvements, like the microwave oven (I still don’t have one of those, by the way). Maybe we could call this “visionary innovation.” A lot of the really big sweeping changes come from these types of innovations: telephones, personal computers, solar collectors, bicycles…

But other innovations clearly arise because someone got frustrated by the limitations of what existed. Thomas Edison went through 10,000 experiments before he could develop a workable light bulb. Would he have had the patience for that long quest if he hadn’t felt frustrated that the dark hours were so unproductive? Certainly the idea of lighting a room has existed since the discovery of fire, thousands of years ago. But the need for better lighting became much more acute as the 19th century brought not only the Industrial Revolution (with big dark factory spaces to be illuminated) but also a mass culture that began to read actively.

Look at Google: Existing web search tools were very frustrating in the mid-1990s. To completely change the paradigm of how material was scanned by searchbots in order to achieve not only faster and more accurate searches but also a much cleaner interface was likely a response to the clumsiness of Yahoo and Alta Vista at the time.

I’m not an inventor, but I am an innovator. A few years ago, I registered some domains for what I thought was a very cool concept: Enter a budget for airfare, enter available departure and return dates (and how much latitude you had with each of those), possible departure airports, choose domestic or international, and have the site spit back suggestions for actual trips you could book (I remember that one of the domains was wherecanifly.com). This came directly out of my frustration trying to plan a trip without having a clear destination and having to laboriously enter itinerary after itinerary.

I still think it’s a brilliant idea, and one that would be easy to fund with venture capital, advertising, and commissions on travel services. But programmers I talked to told me that was a lot harder to engineer than it seemed. After a year of not finding anyone willing to run with it, I let those domains expire. (Anyone want to run with this, talk to me about being your marketing director 🙂 ).

People like R. Buckminster Fuller and Amory Lovins seem to have an almost magical ability to fuse the visionary and the frustrated; they harness their frustrations not for the obvious incremental solution, but for something new and deep and very exciting—and they also have a certain inventor’s ADD. The present is never enough for them; they’re always on a quest for something new and strange and wonderful

Both Fuller and Lovins had an impact in industry after industry—reinventing construction, transportation, industrial manufacturing…whatever struck them as in need of improvement.

Right now, I’m in the process of launching the International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers: a trade association for Green marketers. I hope that what comes out of this will also be a fusion of the best in these twin fathers of innovation.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Advertising, Energy & Sustainability, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , ,

Scott Cooney writes on Triple Pundit about ecopsychology…the correlation between sustainable lifestyle choices and happiness (which seem to focus, in this particular article, on how much happier Germans are than Americans, even though Americans earn and consume so much more. But Germans have a lot more time off work, and presumably spend some of that time getting close to nature.

While he doesn’t exactly connect the dots–in fact, relying on the reader to make some rather big leaps in assumptions–there is a key takeaway here: that beyond the feel-good aspect of doing what’s right for the earth, sustainable lifestyles also offer inherent psychological benefits, because being outside in a clean and well-functioning environment reduces stress, increases feel-good hormones, etc.

And the implication for marketers–and this, I think, is extremely important–is that when marketing a Green product, you should have some hooks not only about saving the world, but about the better mental state that results in doing what’s right for your soul and your psyche, as well as the earth. I bet some very powerful campaigns could be shaped around this message.

For more on marketing Green,I recommend my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. It includes profiles of people like Amory Lovins and some unique, holistic ways of looking at Green issues in the marketing world.

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