The Clean and Green Club

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Want to see the WHOLE new Making Green Sexy Powerpoint presentation—at ZERO cost? You saw some slides from this last month. If you’re in Western Massachusetts, join me…

—> Tuesday, April 30, 12 noon through 1:30 p.m., Jones Library, Amherst, MA: presentation for the Amherst Area Chamber of Commerce (and be part of the taping for my new speaking video). To RSVP: info@amherstarea.com, 413-253-0700. Examples include toilet paper, ice cream, and even the Empire State Building. Learn how to market differently to deep green, light green (or “lazy green”) and, yes, nongreen audiences—plenty of time for questions in this one, too.

I’d really appreciate a good crowd for this. If you’re local, please bring a lunch and come on over.

Other events:

I’m doing the Making Green Sexy talk again at SolarFest’s new Business2Business Day, Friday, July 12, Tinmouth, Vermont. This will be my third time speaking at this lovely (and completely solar powered) music and technology festival. Think of it as a much tinier, Vermont-scale version of South x Southwest. www.solarfest.org

Another Recommended Book: 

But he channels Cassandra, the prophet of doom, when he tries to imagine these solutions manifesting in the politically schizophrenic chaos of today’s (well, 2008’s) United States of America. And he’s not sure which way China will go, pulling the rest of the world willy-nilly over a cliff, or developing and marketing the green solutions the world needs (cleaning the US’s economic clock in the process). Many of his statistics are frankly bleak.

Friedman himself sums up this tension at the end of the book: “I would call myself a sober optimist…If you are not sober about the scale of the challenge, then you are not paying attention. But if you are not an optimist, you have no chance of generating the kind of mass movement needed to achieve the needed scale.”

He knows the solutions are out there, but in today’s political and business universe, he’s not sure how the planet will survive the “hot, flat, and crowded” perfect storm of his title: rising temperatures causing numerous natural and agricultural disasters, a voracious appetite for fuel to power US-style standards of living around the globe, a world population expected to more than triple from 2.68 billion in 1953 to 9.2 billion by 2050 (a mere 37 years in the future)—demanding ever-more resources from a finite and endangered planet. A world in which atmospheric carbon, which had been stable at about 280 parts per billion for 10,000 years, shut up 37 percent to 384 ppm by 2007, nearly all of the increase occurring in less than 40 years. London, around 1800, was the first city to exceed one million; now there are more than 300, including 26 super-megalopolises of 10 million or more. The people who will feel the strongest negative impact of these colliding trends will be those at the economic margins: the so-called bottom of the pyramid.

The threat to our environment is also a threat to our freedom, he says. There is a correlation between the rise of authoritarian “petrodictator” governments and the oil addiction in developed and developing countries that cements their power.

Though the book draws on research and his own experience around the world, he addresses his message to Americans: we have to get rid of ossified tax and subsidy structures that favor fossil fuels and disincent renewable energy. We have to go on an energy diet that might not bring us to the per-capita levels of China or India, which use 1/9 to 1/30 of what we do—but could certainly achieve the high standard of living with roughly half as much energy use per person that is common across Europe.

Without really using the word, he talks of the need for better framing. Seeing going green as a national security issue, for instance—and he has some very interesting examples from the military—is a powerful way to communicate with those for whom green is not yet religion. And so is his wonderful frame of “Code Green” as the most massive economic opportunity since at least the Industrial Revolution: rebuilding our entire society along sustainability lines. I’ve previously called for a Marshall Plan-style initiative, but this is framing it even bigger.

Here’s some particularly sweet framing: if the climate deniers turn out to be right, we get so many benefits like cleaner air and water, greater spending power, and jobs that can’t be easily offshored that we should do the massive “Code Green” conversion anyway. He notes, too, that as in so many issues, the people are well ahead of their elected leaders on this.

And I also love the way he argues that environmentalists can respond to conservative condemnation of carbon taxes by pointing out that our current fossil-fuel economy is essentially paying taxes to foreign governments that are not our friends.

But if catastrophic climate change is a real problem, as the vast majority of reputable scientists are, not to address it is to destroy our society; we need a systemic and holistic solution—just as nature provides systemic and holistic solutions—and we need it NOW.

Friedman also points out the urgent need to stop allowing companies and governments to externalize the real costs of environmental destruction: to pass them on to others, whether people living in poverty in unregulated economies or future generations in our own culture. He even recognizes the numerous problems with certain biofuels, including he severe negative consequences of corn-based ethanol. However, he has a blind spot about nuclear power, and seems not to recognize that this particularly terrible technology would not exist if its backers had to count the real economic, health, and safety costs.

If you had to isolate one message from this long book, it would be the need to innovate our way out of the mess, and to do it fast. Friedman sees value in Kaizen-type continuous improvement, as well as in better sharing existing resources, such as letting a culinary startup use a school kitchen after hours—but he believes we’ll really move forward as we achieve big breakthroughs in three interlocking areas: clean power generation (he calls this “clean electrons”), massive efficiency increases, and deep conservation. The first provides clean, renewable power while eliminating the risk of rising fuel costs; the other two reduce demand at a far lower cost than building new capacity. And those new technologies will really sprout and flower once the tax and subsidy structure currently squashing them under a Bigfoot carbon footprint is thrown away and replaced with incentives to conserve and invent and bring the innovations to market.

Progress in all these areas will also create jobs and economic success; Denmark, he notes, has eliminated foreign oil and doesn’t use nuclear. It does use a carbon tax, which has massively stimulated cleantech industries. And Denmark’s economy has jumped 70 percent while keeping fuel consumption constant, and has brought unemployment all the way down to 2 percent. And many more breakthroughs are possible; he quotes Amory Lovins (p. 283) on the notion that buildings can become far more efficient as they start to interact as a holistic system, so that, for instance, windows not only regulate heat and light directly, they can talk to the heating and lighting systems and tell them they don’t need to work so hard.

Another challenge is helping locals in biodiverse regions under threat of land-rape see the natural resources such as forests, as whole and harvestable over time—more valuable alive than clearcut. Code Green, in other words, must be built around ladders out of poverty that are at least as attractive as the environmentally destructive path the West has taken for 200 years; the planet cannot sustain countries such as China and India taking that road on a large scale.

A New York Times journalist and author of several major business books, Thomas Friedman has access to the halls of power. He speaks at the World Economic Forum, hobnobs with government and corporate leaders, and not only interviews people like Bill Gates and Jeffrey Immelt, but achieves candor from them. Perhaps it’s fitting to end this review with a quote he extracted from a former Exxon Europe vice president, a man named Oystein Dahle (p. 259): “Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.”