A rallying cry for renewable energy and green tech. A growing eco-conscious society. Increased attention on our food’s origin. All these are catalysts for change, yet the saturated, “green” landscape is intimidating for many people. The Green House, an experiential, green marketing program by Cercone Brown & Co., aims to break the stalemate between consumer intention and action.
Advertising and PR agency Cercone Brown & Co. (CBC) was recently bestowed one of the PR industry’s top honors: a 2010 Bulldog Award for “Best Green Campaign.”
Check out the world’s largest solar array planned for the Sahara Desert. About 20 German companies are looking into scattering panels throughout the region, eventually creating enough energy to power Europe.
Granted the $555 billion price tag is a bit daunting, but we spent more than that on the TARP bailout. GO EASY, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have done TARP, I’m merely making the point that if we really want it, we could change things in the USA pretty quickly.
But why is it that it seems that this type of big thinking only comes from Europe? And when we try to give tax breaks and other incentives for companies to make bold moves, the left complains that we’re favoring Big Business or the right claims Obama is a socialist?
In the words of
Hyman Roth in Godfather II, we need a “true partnership” between business and government (of course he was talking about pre-Castro Cuba partnering with the Mafia). Other countries are wooing clean energy business, innovation, manufacturing…the whole 9. And we can’t even get a
wind farm built off the shore of Cape Cod.
Wake up people. The sun is shining, but getting closer to setting.
By next year, hybrids could go the way of the 8-track tape: a relic of fast-moving technology. 2010 could see the first wave of “air cars”, or more specifically, “compressed air cars.” They could take you over 800 miles on a single fill-up, at speeds of up to 96 mph. They should refuel in less than 3 minutes, and at speeds over 35 mph emit about half the CO2 of a Toyota Prius.
Instead of me telling you about it, read
Gas 2.0. These look promising.
The blogger is back…for now. Still traditionally powered, but I’ll get to wind power in a moment.
Quick update: Working with my interactive agency,
Overdrive Interactive, it seems that as we change over this blog to my agency’s site (among other things in a project for my agency
Cercone Brown & Co.), I don’t have to stop writing. They can import all this content into the next version of Eco-Optimism automatically. And because they are moving this week to a new 10,000 ft. space, let’s just say I need to wait to get my move complete!
So without getting too much into that, thought I’d point out an encouraging sign for wind power in Massachusetts: The Boston Globe (still open for business!) today
reports that the National Guard is hoping/planning to construct 17 wind turbines on their Cape Cod base. The result would be 34 megawatts of power…just about enough to make the base self-powered.
But here’s the thing…to me it just underscores the need to move ahead on the
Cape Wind project that would build 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound. That’s nearly enough to power all of the Cape and the Islands, making this pristine part of coastal Massachusetts independent of existing power sources. And if this happens, could it be too long before we see more offshore wind farms? Seems a logical move these days.
We’ll keep an eye on it as the project moves forward.
I recently came across a partnership between a low-cost solar panel manufacturer, First Solar, and a leasing company, SolarCity. I’ve been toying with the idea of going solar…my house has a huge sloping roof that faces southwest…but the $30,000 – $40,000 upfront cost is more than a bit prohibitive. I want to be green, but I need my greenbacks more these days.
A recent article in
Green Business hipped me to a solution: lease the panels for 20 years instead.
First Solar and SunCity are making big cash layouts for solar panel installations obsolete. The companies say that a typical $150/month electric bill would require only an additional 10 bucks per month to cover the lease. Then, get this, the amount of electricity produced would actually turn into positive cash flow.
And the best part? The company maintains and owns the panels. So as better panels become available, you’re not stuck with the equivalent of a 386-cpu (a PC circa 1988) latched on your roof like a rotting albatross.
I’ll call these guys and see what comes of it. Stay tuned.
When it comes to old electronics, I feel a bit like Kermit the Frog: It Ain’t Easy Being Green. I’ve had the same old video camera in my closet for years. I really doubt I’ll shoot tape, but there it is next to my old jeans with the 33-inch waist. Someday I’ll get to it, right?
Wired! magazine just published a great article called
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Your Old Gadgets. It is well worth the read. It suggests several easy, convenient and lesser know options to get rid of TVs, computers, phones, etc.
Now all I need to do is come to terms with the fact that even if I do get down to 165-lbs again, chances are that the acid washed look is (thankfully) gone forever.
Fine with me…Can I have another slice of that coffee cake, please?
Study Shows San Francisco is America’s Least Wasteful City
From rain barrels and recycling to walking and buying second-hand clothes,”The Nalgene Least Wasteful City Study” puts top 25 metros under scrutiny for wasteful behavior.
With thrift and conservation on the minds of many Americans, a new study put the spotlight on wasteful behavior in our nation’s cities. “The Nalgene Least Wasteful City Study” ranked 23 waste-focused habits of urban Americans, from recycling, to using public transportation, to shutting off the lights when leaving the room. When the results were tallied, San Francisco earned the title of America’s Least Wasteful City, while Atlanta ranked last in the study.
Other cities at the top of the least wasteful list are New York (2), Portland, OR (3) and Seattle (4). In addition to Atlanta, Dallas (24), Indianapolis (23), Houston (22) and St. Louis (21) were in the bottom five of those surveyed. Individuals can visit www.leastwastefulcities.com for complete rankings or to the take the survey themselves.
Surprisingly, in trying economic times, frugality isn’t the leading factor motivating Americans to change wasteful ways. In fact, over half surveyed (57 percent) cited “that it is our responsibility to ensure the health of our planet for future generations” as the motivation for changing behavior, followed by “it makes financial sense” (22 percent).
(more…)
While AIG is handing out millions of dollars to execs who lost millions of dollars, a smaller insurance company in Salt Lake City has quietly gone about its business of awarding top performers in an entirely different way.
Next month,
Beneficial Financial Group, a 100-year-old company, will take its best agents on the incentive trip of a lifetime. But instead of sipping margaritas at a seaside resort, their reward will be quite different: building a permanent latrine system in the remote Mayan outpost of
Chimaxyat, Guatemala. (Note: Beneficial is a
Cercone Brown client.)
Three years ago, Beneficial decided to break away from the traditional posh incentive trips as a way to attract agents that embodied the family values of the company. If you can remember that far back, the Dow was surging and it was commonly believed that financial advisors could be any sort of human being as long as they made you money. As a company that has always
believed prosperity is measured by quality of life, peace of mind AND financial wealth, that sort of logic just didn't work. Thus, the service trip to Chimaxyat was born.
The village of 275 or so people has no running water or electricity. There is a small school house (which the BFG agents have worked on the past two years) and precious little else. They speak an ancient Mayan dialect, so your high school spanish is of little use here. But its beauty is beyond compare, and its simple joys are frozen in time.
And if you're wondering if agents motivated by this sort of adventure service can make you money, too, consider that Beneficial has seen unprecedented growth in the past three years. Not bad for a company that was founded just six years after the Spanish-American War.
As business continues to wrestle with economic and environmental change (the very point of this blog), it's great to see the confluence of commitment, values and healthy bottom lines. Let's hope that this sort of unconventional but effective thinking becomes the norm, and the foolish bumbling a la AIG becomes a thing of the past. We'll all be better for it.
I'll post news from this year's trip scheduled for April 17-25.
At my house, we recycle religiously, as do many across the US. And we’re real proud of ourselves. But I think it’s time we rethought recycling. It’s waste that’s killing us. Too much packaging and still too much consumption, at least from where I stand.
Check out this photo I snapped in front of my house this morning: one lonely bag of trash, but a virtual mountain of recycling.
Granted, this isn’t all bad. And to be honest, it’s a month worth of recycling and a week of trash, But still it illustrates the point that REDUCE is the new RECYCLE. What we don’t use is much more important than what we reuse.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
