March 2011

GE, AT&T, Facebook and DC: a lament

March 30, 2011

Living inside the Beltway, I’m acutely aware of how much time, money, energy and creative thinking are poured into struggles over how the federal government should regulate business. The winners in this game are the powerful: Republicans, Democrats, corporate America, government employees and the industry associations, law firms and lobbyists who keep Washington’s restaurants full and its upper-end real-estate market healthy, even as the real economy struggles. The losers are everybody else.

The way out of this conundrum, I’ve come to believe, is, first, to radically shrink the size and complexity of the government. Then, regulate modestly, carefully but aggressively when necessary—in such areas as energy/climate and banking. Then, allow markets to do what they do well, which is create wealth.

Three recent stories from The New York Times and one from the Wall Street Journal that just got my attention prompted me to offer up these ideas. The headlines:

GE’s strategies let it avoid taxes altogether

AT&T Lobbyist Faces Beltway Test in T-Mobile Deal

Facebook Prepares to Add Friends in Washington

Cash softens a trade blow

These stories share a common theme. The show how big corporations exercise influence in Washington (or are just starting to, in the case of Facebook) in ways that damage their competitors, consumers or taxpayers. The Times’ GE story—which should be required reading in college government classes—is the most shocking and revealing, reporting, as it does, that GE in 2010 [click to continue…]

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Forestry wars: Who’s peddling pulp fiction?

March 28, 2011

Pity the shopper who wants to buy “green” paper or forest products.

They can choose products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI).

Only the most dedicated deep-green consumer can be expected to understand the differences between the two.

And few know there’s a war of words going on between backers of the FSC and SFI.

Todd Paglia, executive director of the activist group Forest Ethics, says this about the SFI:

SFI is dangerous because it is a lie – it tells consumers that the product bearing the label is green when it isn’t.  SFI allows logging in old growth, logging in endangered species habitat, clearcut logging on landslide prone slopes above salmon streams….  In other words, business as usual with a “green” façade.

When industry is helping write the rules and set its own standards they will be high on rhetoric and extremely low on substance. That is SFI:  this is a fake eco-label of, by, and for the forest industry.

Not surprisingly, this kind of talk angers the folks at SFI–so much so that they  approached The New York Community Trust, a foundation that supports Forest Ethics, to complain. On its website SFI says:

ForestEthics continues to peddle pulp fiction about the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, repeating the same old inaccurate and misleading information.

With just 10 percent of the world’s forests certified to any certification standard, groups should work together to increase responsible forestry. Instead, ForestEthics spends energy and resources on well-funded attacks to discredit SFI, often citing outdated, incomplete, inaccurate or misleading information.

Such conflicts aren’t unique to the forest products industry, although the rhetoric here is unusually heated. Eco-labels are supposed to guide consumers to environmentally-friendly choices, but they have become so numerous–more than 300, by some estimates–and so confusing that consumers now need their own guides to eco-labels, like this Greener Choices website from Consumer Reports. [click to continue…]

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Greener chemicals from Genomatica

March 27, 2011

You’ve got oil in your bedroom closet. Well, not exactly oil, but products that made from petrochemicals like Spandex. Spandex can be found in swimsuits, socks, intimate apparel, sportswear, ski pants and biking gear, among other things.

Christophe Shilling, an entrepreneur with a PhD in bioengineering, aims to change that–with the help of renewable crops and genetically modified bugs. He’s the founder and CEO of a company called Genomatica, a pioneer in “green chemistry” that aims to replace petrochemicals with lower-cost, more environmentally-friendly chemicals made from renewable resources.

“We are catalyzing a transformation of the chemical industry—changing the raw materials that are being used to make the same exact molecules, the same exact plastics, the same end products,” Christophe says. “But instead of using hydrocarbons , we’re using carbohydrates.”

Christophe Schilling

I met Christophe last week in Washington. A native of Grosse Point Park, Michigan, he’s just 37–he started Genomatica in 2000, right after earning his PhD., with the assistance of a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, aimed at helping small businesses get started.

Based in San Diego, the company is no longer so small. It has about 65 employees and has raised about $85 million in venture capital, including a $45 million round announced early this month. Investors include VantagePoint Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mohr Davidow, TPG and, interestingly, Waste Management. [click to continue…]

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GM’s sustainability chief: charged up about the Volt

March 23, 2011

Outside the door to General Motors’ Washington office is a photo of the Chevy Volt framed by the U.S. Capitol.

GM loves to market the Volt, the 2011 Motor Trend Car of the Year (“A car of the future you can drive today.”) It’s an engineering breakthrough, a darling of the “green” media and evidence that stodgy old GM knows how to innovate.

So why, I asked Mike Robinson, GM’s vice president of environment, energy and safety policy, is GM selling so few Volts? Just 321 in January, 281 in February, according to GM’s monthly sales report. By comparison, Chevy sold nearly 70,000 Silverado pickup trucks during those two months.

“We’re on target,” he assured me. “We’ve probably got orders for every one we can build in the next year.” Chevy plans to sell 10,000 Volts this year, and another 45,000 next year and, if all goes well, a lot more after that.

“This is not a science project,” he said. “We really want to build a mass-market vehicle. We  believe that electric cars are a better long-term solution than pure gasoline.”

Strong words from an executive at GM, which remains the No. 1 automaker by sales in the U.S., selling 2.2 vehicles last year. If GM believes in electric cars, chances are we’ll be seeing many more of them in the years ahead. [click to continue…]

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PepsiCo and Naked Juice: Confused about GMOs

March 22, 2011

I’m a fan of Naked Juice. The Protein Zone and Protein Zone Mango smoothies are great ways to refresh and rebuild tired muscles after a long run..

I’m not a fan of sanctimonious b.s., though, and Naked Juice is peddling that along with its juices and smoothies.

Here’s what I’m talking about. The other day, I noticed this message on a Naked Juice bottle:

We use only the freshest, purest stuff in the world and leave out everything else. * no added sugar * no preservatives *non-GMO**   *gluten free

The double asterisk next to non-GMO led me to this:

While many ingredients do not exist in bioengineering varieties, Naked Juice does not use ingredients that were produced using biotechnology as a matter of principle.

It was the last five words that caught my attention. “As a matter of principle.” The phrase also is used on Naked’s website.

Not as a matter of marketing. Not because the consumers of Naked Juice just might happen to be the kinds of people  who would feel good about avoiding GMOs. But as a matter of principle.

Hmm. There’s an implicit moral judgment there, no?

What, I wondered, might the principle be? [click to continue…]

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Charge it! The challenge facing electric cars

March 21, 2011

With all the dismal environmental news of late–from the nuclear crisis in Japan to the Republican attacks on EPA in Congress–it will be a pleasure this week to turn my attention to one of the most exciting developments on the sustainability front: the arrival of electric cars in the U.S.

To be sure, the sales figures so far for the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf are tiny–Chevy sold 281 Volts in February and Nissan sold fewer than 100 Leafs–but both vehicles are, for now, available only in limited quantities and locations. What’s more, there are few places outside of their homes for owners to charge the cars.

On Thursday, I’ll be moderating a free webinar on the charging issue for The Energy Collective. It’s called The eMobility Challenge: Electric Cars and How to Keep Them Charged, it’ll be held at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT, and your can sign up here. We’ll take questions from listeners throughout the hour. Here’s info on details and panelists:

Electric vehicles offer a major opportunity for more energy-efficient transportation, as well as reduced dependency on carbon-producing fuels. However, the cars themselves are only half the solution. We must create a new charging infrastructure to get those cars the power they need. [click to continue…]

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Why we’re not as smart as we think we are

March 20, 2011

Whether it’s the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant, or last year’s BP oil spill, or the 2008 collapse of the housing market, or the difficulty the U.S. is having in Iraq and Afghanistan, the headlines on any given day should make us humble.

They don’t.

We humans make lots of mistakes, some terribly costly, and yet we continue to believe that we are smarter than we are.

We don’t even understand ourselves very well.

David Brooks, The New York Times columnist, has written a couple of excellent columns about overconfidence–see The Fatal Conceit from 2009 and, more recently, The Modesty Manifesto – and in his best-selling new book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, he takes a broader and deeper look at how people and societies are shaped by “the unconscious realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, character traits, and social norms.” Much of this, by definition, is invisible to us.

I’m a Brooks fan, so I went to hear him speak last week at The Aspen Institute in Washington. (Here’s the video.) He was funnier in person than he is in print.  (“I know many people in the audience. I know you didn’t come here to hear me speak. You came to hear yourself speak. So I’ll try to be brief.) He told a few stories about politicians and how they have “phenomenal social skills,” yet they consistently underestimate the role of emotion, passion and irrationality when they make policy. [click to continue…]

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Stuff, and how to think about it

March 17, 2011

I hope your home doesn’t look like this. If it does, stop reading, shut down your computer and start cleaning–now!

Seriously, though, how much time, effort, money and brainspace do you devote to stuff? Buying it, taking care of it, thinking about it, arranging it, rearranging it, throwing it away, buying more…you get the idea.

I think about consumption a lot–as part of my job and part of my life. We’ll never stop consuming–it’s part of our DNA, I imagine–but for the global economy to become sustainable, we need to find ways to consume in new ways that don’t pollute and deplete the earth’s resources.

But how, in the meantime, should we approach our personal consumption? Recently (thanks to Ian Yolles of RecycleBank) I came across an essay by the writer Bruce Sterling, called the Last Viridian Note, which, as best as I can tell, is the conclusion of a more than decade-long effort to rethink design. In  2000, Sterling released the Viridian Manifesto, which he has described as an attempt to use design “to end our substance-abuse problem with fossil fuels.”

We’ll leave for another day the question of whether changing our personal consumption habits has much impact on the planet. (Hint: It doesn’t, at least not until many, many millions of us do so, not just here in the U.S. but in China, India, Russia, Brazil, etc.) But changing our habits–which begins by being purposeful about what we buy–will change our lives.

In the Last Viridian Note, Sterling begins by saying this his ” personal relations to goods and services – especially goods – have been revolutionized” and led him to a “different mode of being in the world.” Historically, he says, “material goods were  inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship” so it made sense to hold onto them. No more–now they can become a burden:

The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

Do not “economize.” Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It’s melting the North Pole. So “economization” is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don’t seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It’s in your time most, it’s in your space most. It is “where it is at,” and it is “what is going on.”

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Japan’s nuclear crisis makes it harder to prevent climate instability

March 16, 2011

The short-term human and economic costs of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami are staggering.

The long-term repercussions could be worse.

That’s because, even if the situation does not deteriorate any further, the fires, explosions, radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant will  lead to greater scrutiny–and higher costs–for new nuclear plants.

That will make it harder to develop low carbon energy to replace fossil fuels and avert potentially catastrophic climate change. [click to continue…]

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Justin’s Nut Butter: a squeeze play!

March 15, 2011

Little things matter.

Like squeeze packs.

I’ve surely tossed away hundreds, maybe thousands, of the little silvery plastic packs of ketchup, Gu and Power Bar gels, but I’d never thought much about the environmental impact of squeeze packs.

Then I was introduced to Justin Gold, the founder and CEO of Justin’s Nut Butter, a small but fast-growing company that sells gourmet, organic peanut, almond and hazelnut butters in 1.15 ounce on-the-go squeeze packs that retail for $0.69 to $0.99. These packs were great for business at the Boulder, Colorado-based company, which now gets about 80% of its revenues from single servings. But squeeze packs are a blight, albeit a small one, on the environment because they are made out of several layers of different materials that are welded together and can’t be recycled or composted.

Most small-company CEOs  would have shrugged their shoulders at this problem and moved on. Not Justin. [click to continue…]

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