The Clean and Green Club

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My heart goes out to all those impacted by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the flooding in Bangladesh and other parts of Asia (not much in the US news but also very severe), or the out-of-control fires in the American West (a friend in Oregon told me, “the whole state is on fire. I can’t go out of my house because of the smoke.”

Every bit of research (read more)

When a new technology is introduced, people often object because they see increased costs. But a closer look often reveals that they’re comparing apples and eggplants.

An example would be the nuclear power industry. Nuclear is hailed by people who don’t know better as a miracle technology that doesn’t have a significant carbon footprint and is so economical. But they’re wildly wrong. Actually, nuclear is a multiheaded hydra of a disaster.

As it happens, my first book was on why nuclear is not a viable technology, and I updated that book following the 2011 accident at Fukushima. So this is something I know quite a bit about.

Both the economics and the supposed carbon benefits of nuclear are very dubious. Because its apologists only count the costs of actually operating the nuclear power plant, the numbers appear on first glance to work. But to be fair, we have to add in all the other parts of the fuel cycle: mining the uranium, milling it, processing it into fissionable form, encasing the fuel mixture into metal-clad fuel rods, transporting it hither and yon for each of these steps, encasing those fuel rods in a massive, carbon-hostile structure of concrete and steel, storing and/or reprocessing the spent fuel rods, keeping them isolated from the environment and secure from terrorists for an unfathomable 220,000 years, friction losses in power transmission, etc. Once we do that, the economics, the carbon costs, and a bunch of other factors are a lot shakier.

Then add in the costs of a catastrophic failure every ten years or so—a very conservative estimate considering that we have experienced over 100 potentially devastating nuclear accidents in the seventy-odd years of this experiment, including two (Chernobyl and Fukushima) that made wide swaths of land unlivable for decades. More than 30 years after Chernobyl, the 1000-square-mile (2600-square-km) dead zone is still not even open to the public.

Of course, renewable energy has hidden costs too, and we need to look at those as well. Once we do, we may find that centralized wind or solar farms don’t make as much sense as distributing small solar and wind (and other renewable energy), constructing them at or near the point of use and moving away from the central power grid model.

Let’s look at counting all the costs in a different context: industrial pollution. Through the first couple of centuries of the Industrial Revolution, companies poisoned tens of thousands of toxic sites by using public air, land, or water as their private dumping ground, externalizing all those costs to the taxpayers and abutters—or so they thought. However, it’s become common practice to hold companies financially responsible for decades-old toxic dumping, even if that dumping had been legal at the time. And the cost is far higher now than it would have been to just clean it up properly in the first place.

Your business can avoid this huge and expensive headache by doing it right the first time. And as we see in question 3 above, the best way is to find a use for the stuff being dumped. Reuse or resell it instead of throwing it away-but-not-really-away.

Lakhiani is a proponent of changing yourself first, and from there, changing the world. But I think sometimes those growths can be in parallel. For me, I found the purpose of changing the world long before I gained the life skills to make it happen—but making the commitment to the world gradually helped me find the road toward my own highest self (and I’m still on the path to get there—I see much more potential in my future and—at age 60—I’m far from done).

Lakhiani offers ten new laws to improve our physical and mental health, our relationships, financial security, and our ability to impact the world. Each law gets a chapter. He also includes many nuggets of wisdom from some of the most successful people in our time, from Richard Branson and Elon Musk to the Dalai Lama and meditation teacher Emily Fletcher.

Perhaps more importantly, starting in Chapter 1, “Change the Culturescape,” he gives you reasons to question and discard the old rules, imposed by others who don’t understand your loves or your purpose—even if these rules have been handed down through your culture for centuries What other people think you should do for a living, who they think you should marry, what they think you should eat is not your concern—all of those are matters for you to decide. You’ll need strength if the whole culture lines up against you, but you can still be true to your inner self.

But the power to choose what to believe or not to believe is a powerful gift to yourself (p. 88). And that’s one tool in understanding that your “software,” your “systems for living.” They are not static. Just like a computer, they can be upgraded. Lakhiani says he tries to upgrade at least one of his systems for living every week (p. 95). Just as we’ve learned to clean out our bodies, we can also consciously deactivate our anxieties, stress, fear, and other negative emotions that hold us back (p. 106), and emerge into disciplined bliss: “Blissipline.”

By Chapter 3, he’s talking about our ability to engineer our own consciousness, finishing the chapter on pages 63-64 with a checklist of 12 areas of life you can self-rate.

This just one of many self-help exercises scattered throughout the book. Others I particularly like are the question from parenting expert Shelly Lefkoe, “What beliefs is my child going to take away from this encounter?” (p. 77) and the “I love you” mirror exercise (pp. 181-182).

But all this is prologue. It’s necessary to go through it, so you’re ready for the really life-changing parts of the book. Parts Three and Four (chapters 6-10) need all the pre-work of the first five chapters, just as most of us first learn to crawl, then walk, before we try to do a four-minute mile.

By this time, you’re ready to really learn the tools to create the reality you want in your own life, and in the world. You’ll become an extraordinary person when you see happiness less as a goal than as an empowerment tool (p. 124); you begin to think in the future, and not in a past that holds you back, and when you stop overestimating your short-term possibilities while underestimating the long-term ones (p. 125).

To realize those possibilities, say goodbye to traditional “goal-setting.” Instead, learn to sift END goals—which you’ll actively pursue—from MEANS goals—which would lock you in to the existing limited reality (pp. 151-157).

And we haven’t even touched on some of the really life-changing pieces near the end, like the concept of “beautiful destruction (p. 192) and the Godicle Theory (pp. 196-198).

Read this book. Set some time aside to do the exercises and to drink in some of the many extra resources for readers online. And then go out there and do the amazing thing you are here to do.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).