Living the American Green

When it comes to cheaply made, gauze-colored, overpriced furniture, Raymour and Flanigan has got the market cornered.  Their musical ditty, too, is one for the ages, and was first made famous by none other than President Howard Taft: “I can’t get this f***ing jingle out of my head!”  But now the ottoman oligarchy is trying a new selling tactic- I call it the “bouncing ball of flubber” greenwashing attempt.  Check it out:

This is certainly the oddest greenwashing commercial I’ve hit upon yet.  Specifically, I single out this text:

Cardboard becomes something like books or paper products.  Plastic and styrofoam turns into things like toys and every day useful items.  Now that’s truly beautiful.

Whoever wrote this dialogue is not really sure (a) what recycling is for, or (b) how exactly it works.  Apparently, in the R & F recylcing plant:  leftover boxes and plastic tarps have a parade, then start a conga line, and finish by dropping acid and following green balls of flubber into recycling machines.  Instantly, teddy bears and books appear, whirling around in a reefer haze, making the world greener with every bouncy step.  Ah, the magical world of recycling.  I’d like to take a tour of this factory.

Tomorrow, April 14, is “Big Picture” day at Starbucks.  Now, don’t get all excited- they’re not giving away free giant photographs of coffee beans and barista tools- I know, it’s very disappointing.  But, according to the coffee cult’’s website, if you bring a reusable mug into any Starbucks tomorrow, they’ll fill it with coffee for free.  Why?  They want to encourage customers to think of the big picture by considering the life span of each thing they throw away.  Starbucks’ goal? To encourage more people to begin using reusable coffee cups daily, resulting in more trees and less disposable cups in landfills.  They’ve got an online pledge you can take, and the numbers fuel the site’s calculator which shows  “how many trees” people are predicted to save by using their own cups.

Dutiful readers, well aware of my usual attacks when it comes to company “greening” efforts, may be suprised at my reaction to this campaign.   I actually like this one!   It’s rare for a company to discuss customer’s habits, and motivate for positive change.  And this free coffee bit, followed by Starbucks’ unending promise of 10 cents off any drink when using a reusable cup, are pretty convincing perks.  Bribery works, and I’m interested to see just how many people Starbucks can get to take one step forward in reducing their daily waste.

Starbucks, no doubt, benefits widely from this plan: they get a lot of positive PR, a flood of customers tomorrow,  and reduced costs from not providing cups, sleeves, and lids to a large percentage of customers.  Still, though, I think the net positive outweighs the gain by Starbucks big wigs.  So dig out that coffee mug and get to drinking the pep juice- your environment needs you!

You, dear reader, already know why we need a price on carbon. You know that burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, raising the average temperature of the earth and drastically affecting the global climate. You’re also well-versed in modern economic theory, and understand how negative externalities in a market can be mitigated by determining the cost to society and then including it in the price of a good or service.  So you don’t need to be lectured on how putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions would use market forces to equitably reduce the threat of climate change and promote sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels.  Good for you.

Sadly, though, there are some out there who don’t get it. According to some surveys, close to half of all Americans don’t get it. So, today I am going to give you two powerful tools to use in your quest to knock some sense into people:

• The long, technical, detailed version, by Paul Krugman, or…
• The short, fun, animated version, by Andy Lubershane

First of all, full disclaimer that “locowashing” is an awful portmanteau – almost (but not quite) as bad as “he-cession.”

This cracks me up though, it really does. Thanks to the apparent trendiness of bioregional eating, the ad wizards hailing from the four corners of corporate fantasyland have decided that it would be a tremendous idea to “go local” themselves. Unfortunately – there doesn’t appear to be a crystal-clear understanding of what exactly “local” entails…

A few examples, ranging from the mildly bile-inducing to the full-on, gut-bustingly, milk-snortingly hilarious:

The one that started the attention was most likely the Frito-Lay corporation, whose marketing campaign in early 2009 gently nudged attention from the quality of the product itself to the “local people and communities” who grow their potatoes. The logic is sound, I guess, in an infuriating know-it-all 6th-grader kind of way: “Potatoes have to be grown by somebody, don’t they? And those people are growing them somewhere, aren’t they? So the potatoes are local to the place where they’re grown. Right?” My favorite feature of this ad campaign? It would have to be the “Chip Tracker” gadget that let’s you pop in a zip code and learn exactly which ”local community” has painstakingly and lovingly grown your potato chips, hopefully taking long, picturesque siestas and relaxing with big pitchers of iced tea and 2.5 children per farmhouse.  (For the record: mass produced chips are not small-batch delicacies. It’s a neat gimmick to give you the location of where potatoes are sourced, but dollars to donuts the Chip Tracker kicks out the closest farm to your zip code without telling you anything about how millions of bags of chips are actually shipped and stored around the country.)

But it’s not just Frito-Lay. Far from it. 

(more…)

I got to thinking the other day after Alan wound up with a vehement comment accusing him of armchair environmentalism because he isn’t out raging against the machine in the streets and because he tends to express reservations about  unaccommodating social tactics. Now, to be fair, he and I do spend much of our time in a shabbily awesome armchair (indeed: here I am right now), but there’s more to the story here.

The only way to be green?

The question of how to face up to the machine idols of our civilization has been asked for thousands of years, long before the Industrial Revolution made it concrete – asked by John of Patmos, by Marcus Aurelius, by Machiavelli, by Marx and Nietzsche, by Foucault and Borges, by Thoreau and Muir, and by Edward Abbey. And rage continues to be – as it has always been – only one of the options. Because the funny thing is, like I learned in aikido class, sometimes you have to gracefully use the momentum of your opponent to destabilize him and change his stance.

And I got to thinking: wait a second, I’ve heard this punchline before.

(more…)

Sounds like someone has been suckling at the sweet teat of Van Jones’ vision for the next wave of environmentalism, one which embraces and transformes the economy rather than raging against it. The quote here isn’t anything new, but I hope it proves emblematic of an approach that is becoming more and more mainstream, more and more well-recognized as basic economic good sense rather than a wingnut effort.

(P.S. The link above takes you to a really solid source for international news related to renewable energy and the economy. They’re based in England and keep their fingers on the pulses of both the innovator and the investor communities.)

A few words, Mr. President?

“Now, the choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline. We can remain the world’s leading importer of oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy. We can allow climate change to wreak unnatural havoc across the landscape, or we can create jobs working to prevent its worst effects. We can hand over the jobs of the 21st century to our competitors, or we can confront what countries in Europe and Asia have already recognized as both a challenge and an opportunity: The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy.”

So a few weeks ago I posted the energy breakdown for how most Delawareans receive their energy. In DE most households purchase energy from the Delaware public utility, Delmarva Power. Each Delawarean can choose to purchase their energy supply from another company and just pay transmission fees to Delmarva, but most people just take the easy route and let Delmarva figure it out. I have listed below the year to year comparison for 2007 and 2008 to see how DE is doing in its’ goal of achieving the 10% renewable energy quota by 2018 :

2007 percentages                       2008 percentages

coal                      55.9                                                   55

gas                          7.3                                                    7

nuclear                34.2                                                34.8

oil                            .5                                                      .3

methane                .2                                                     .3

hydro                      .9                                                     .9

solar                         0                                                      0

solid waste            .6                                                     .6

wind                        .2                                                      .9

wood or biomass  .2                                                   .2

carbon-free production is up by 1.2%, mostly due to new wind farms and cranking up the juice at the Salem nuclear plant. At this rate Delaware will be a carbon nuetral state by somwhere around 2057. Also, the Salem nuclear plant is pretty much maxed out now (most nulcear power plants are run at less than maximum output, but last year there was a significant spiek in energy usage and a resulting need to increase production at most plants) with no current plans for a new nuclear power plant, so we won’t have the .5% boost we got from that this year. BlueWater wind is still fighting to develop offshore wind turbines, that they claim will produce 29% of Delaware’s energy needs in the near future.  This project has met with resistance from both Delmarva, and from the beach-going community. This resistance seems to have largely been dealt with however, and a power-purchase agreement was signed in June 2008. The agreement was only for 200MWs however, and not for the 600MWs which the site could potentially produce. 200MWs is not really very much electricity, it would be about 1/5 of what the nuclear plant kicks out, and would only produce about 6-10% of Delaware’s energy needs. I am hoping that the site will eventually ramp up to provide the full 600MWs, which would result in a pretty significant chunk of DEs energy, and would power over 100,000 homes (there are only 750,000 people in DE, so that is a good percentage of DE households.) If you are interested in hearing more about the project, the link is as follows:  http://www.bluewaterwind.com/delaware.htm

My prediction is that Delaware will in fact reach its’ very modest goal of 10% renewables. I believe that we will beat that by a long shot. The Blue Water project alone gets DE past 10% by 2012 if everything goes according to plan. Also, I have met with several local solar energy company owners who all feel the same way; solar energy is going to take off over the next several years. I have been seeing the panels pop up here and there, and I believe that with coming federal cap and trade legislation Delaware solar will take off big time. The problem will be less the viability and feasibility of solar, and more the stress this will cause to suppliers of the basic inputs for solar panels. Production of highly-refined silicon is already stretched to the max, and new suppliers in Taiwan and China are coming online slowly. My bet, if I were a betting man, is that by 2018 Delaware is getting at least 1/3 of its power from renewables, and 20-25% from nuclear. Of course, this may not result in much of a real reduction in carbon output however, as our energy needs are still growing as a whole, and it may be that just the NEW demand is covered by renewables, but that the amount of overall carbon we produce reduces by only 10-20%.

Today’s story comes to you from the heart of the most beleaguered and yet hard core of the environmental supporters list.  Outsiders for generations, these champions of green are finally getting some traction: that’s right, I’m talking about Nike, Johnson & Johnson, and other BF corporate leaders.

That’s right, retail corporations are putting it to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that things are moving too slowly in terms of environmental regulation.  Whaaa?

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is taking heat from Johnson & Johnson, Nike and other corporate members over its opposition to global warming legislation pending in the House.  In a letter to the Chamber, Johnson & Johnson has asked the Chamber to refrain from making comments on climate change unless they “reflect the full range of views, especially those of Chamber members advocating for congressional action.”

Two theories on why these companies, rarely big on Government regulation, might do something like this: (more…)

OKAY SO this is a bit out of my territory of farming and eating, but I’m not quite up to reaming Monsanto a new one tonight, so instead I’ll just point out something that entertains me greatly.

Apparently this tuesday there was an expo of alternative-powered vehicles on Capitol Hill, featuring new vehicles from the big clunky old guard (Chrystler, GM), the sleek new cats on the block (Tesla and its sextacular Roadster; a little startup company called ZENN, showing off their mind-boggling 280-mpg short-range errand-runner), and even from the local utilities company, which brought its bucket truck that runs on used cooking oil.

Playtime at the Capitol

The Tesla Roadster: Edison's bones are doing somersaults in the mouldy ground

So far so good. But then! Some senators apparently had so little to do with their day that they wandered into the scene and started playing with them! I mean…basically exactly what we would do if we wandered into a green car expo. And because they’re senators, they were allowed to test-drive these sweet babies – which gave us some comedy gold in the form of Evan Bayh (D-IL) and Tom Carper (D-DE) gushing over the Tesla models as “chick magnets.” Ah, American lawmakers, you make us so proud!

Pros and Cons of Congress getting all up in transportation’s bidness

If history teaches us anything, which it usually doesn’t, we’ll take this as good news with some big reservations. On the one hand, to have congress actually down and dirty with the alternative-fuel toddlers of American car companies both old/established and brash/entrepreneurial (and crazy/beautiful) might mean just that little bit more familiarity with the products themselves when it’s time to make big decisions about subsidies and whether to fish or cut bait with the Big Three. It might mean a little more federal support for the startups, and a little more pressure on the big guys to start producing vehicles that impress both on the American car-loving psyche and on the twin bottom lines of economic recovery and ecological sanity. 

On the other hand, if we know anything about Congress it’s that once-brainy ideas can end up floating around the Capitol like a mouse in the swimming pool until no one remembers why they were proposed in the first place or, if they finally do get the support they need to get off the ground, have probably become obsolete in the meantime. By the time Carper of Delaware starts pushing his Chick Magnet Stimulus Bill (”i got yer stimulus package…I got it right here…”) in a year’s time, hopefully there will already be a new generation of innovations – and hopefully some out of last-gasp Detroit – that will make the existing crop look outdated. But 9 out of 10 says the lawmakers will again be left holding their gas pumps in their hands as the greenwashers profit and the innovators fail to seal the deal with the public.

President Obama officiates at an electric-vehicle drag race between the House and the Senate.

We’ll see.  If the big three CEOs come to their senses and realize that there is massive profit to be had in low-emissions vehicles, we might have a shot at a revived auto industry. Oh, and of course, the Dems need to gently remove their thumbs from their butts and get behind the damn carbon cap-and-trade so that the cost of pollution is actually accounted for in businesses’ economic equations and the alternative-energy profit actually materializes naturally. In the meantime we can hang on tight for the gripping ride – at the full-throttle, heart-stopping 35 mph of the ZENN street car. Clearly we have a ways to go…

Normally the telemarketing calls I receive are automated services that try to scam you into taking a cash advance loan that gets paid back through credit card transactions at like 33% interest or something ridiculous, but a few months ago I actually got a USEFUL telemarketing call. It was a real person who informed me that as a Delaware business owner, who had been buying power from the public utility Delmarva for over two years, that I qualified to search for my own supplier of energy out there in the big wide world of the free market. I felt like a fish that had been living in captivity and was now free to swim in the oceans of competitive bidding…ok so it was nothing so exciting as that, but I was interested to get a bid.
In Delaware we can choose from over 20 suppliers. Each gets their energy through a slightly different mix of energy sources. Delmarva provides their customers with a breakdown of their energy mix that is as follows:

Coal             55.9%
Gas             7.3%
Nuclear            34.2%
Oil            0.5%
Captured Methane*    0.2%
Hydroelectric        0.9%
Solid Waste        0.6%
Wind            0.2%
Wood or other biomass    0.2%

I haven’t yet called all of the other providers to see what their energy mix is, but I have received quotes from two of them. One called Integrys Energy quoted 10.1 cents per KWH and another, which claimed to be a “green” energy provider said they could lock our company in for 8.5 cents a KWH (although when I faxed them a copy of our usage history I never heard back from them). Currently Delmarva charges somewhere around 10.5 cents per KWH I believe, but it varies from month to month. Our monthly electricity bill is around 800 dollars. This isn’t really the kind of usage that will get you a significant discount, but maybe if I shop around I will get a good deal. I am also interested to see if the companies that have a high renewable energy percentage to their mix are more expensive. Keep an eye here for posts as I get more quotes!!

*Chickens outnumber people in Delaware by about 3:1…that’s a lot of chicken shit!!

-Also, I used to telemarket for Bank of America in college and let me tell you, it sucks…