environment « John Caddell's blog

Archive for the ‘environment’ Category

Is it time to downsize that big house?

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

Friends of ours, as their small business grew, moved up into a large, spacious house with a big deck and yard overlooking a creek. Business is still good, but this month they are moving back to the smaller house they used to live in.

The VP of Common Sense has from time to time floated the idea that we downsize our house as well. “Wouldn’t it be great to live in a nice little Cape?”

And today’s New York Times profiles people who are radically downsizing into “tiny homes” that measure 100 sq ft or less.

Rising energy prices and carbon-awareness are certainly impacting this thinking, but there are other factors as well. Bigger houses mean more stuff–furniture, wall hangings, rugs, toys (if you have kids). Keeping them clean is hard to do yourself. Maintenance costs are higher. And neighborhoods can be a factor–our friends found that their large-home neighborhood was too quiet. They rarely saw their neighbors, there weren’t kids around. It was lonely.

The “little Cape” discussions in our house usually don’t last long. But they keep coming back. Who knows? If you come visit us someday, you may have to sleep on the living-room couch.

(Photo: a Tumbleweed Tiny House)

Tags:

real estate, housing, environment, New York Times

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The beginning of the end of the oil crisis

Monday, April 28th, 2008

It may very well be a stupid statement. John Cassidy contended in a recent issue of Conde Nast Portfolio that oil prices would begin to drop as the high price spurred more exploration and production–and that was when oil was a relatively cheap $100 per barrel–not near $120, as it is at this moment.

But there’s no doubt that the oil replacement/carbon-reduction innovation machine has swung into high gear. Two articles caught my eye recently. In yesterday’s New York Times, reporter Michael Fitzgerald wrote about a new home still that can create ethanol from sugar, reducing carbon emissions (the owners say) by seven-eighths. And in Saturday’s Times, Matthew Wald discussed A123 System’s power pack that converts the Toyota Prius into a plug-in hybrid.

These projects very well may end in failure. But they are but two of thousands of important initiatives around energy diversification, conservation and carbon reduction. And that’s a recipe for dramatic change. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote in Harvard Business Review in November 2006 (link – $$), “an organization is more likely to get bigger ideas if it has a wide funnel into which numerous small ideas can be poured. One of the secrets of success for companies that demonstrate high rates of innovation is that they try more things.”

And so it is with industries. More ideas at the top of the funnel means more, bigger successes at the bottom. The energy innovation pyramid is well-stocked, which means, sometime in the future, when petroleum is just another niche chemical, we can say it all started today.

Tags:
energy, environment, innovation, technology, automobiles, green technology

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Greenwashing is a marketing worst practice

Monday, November 19th, 2007

Following on to the posts from last week on using marketing in bad faith (here and here), today I read Joel Makower’s excellent post on “Greenwashing” (a great turn of phrase)–the incomplete or untrue attribution of environmentally-friendly characteristics to products.

Joel assesses a report from TerraChoice Environmental Marketing, which analyzed marketing claims on behalf of green products. They identify six worst practices, such as “the sin of the hidden trade-off,” which “suggest a product is ‘green’ based on a single environmental attribute (the recycled content of paper, for example) or an unreasonably narrow set of attributes without attention to other important, or perhaps more important, environmental issues.” This neat trick was the most prevalent “sin,” found in 57% of the claims studied.

Such misbehavior will only serve to heighten the public’s cynicism toward all green claims, with the possible result that green content gets devalued, and therefore companies stop taking pains to create it.

environment, worst practice, marketing

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How globalization can help the environment

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

I argued in a post yesterday that Lloyd Field’s condemnation of globalization in his book “Business and the Buddha” was erroneous. Here’s one area where I think globalization is a big help: reducing business’s harm to the environment.

Most multinational companies can’t/won’t choose to do business only in countries with lax environmental standards. Doing so removes large swaths of the marketplace from their reach. And in selling or producing in many countries, they also submit themselves to multiple forums of regulation and oversight. And typically, since it’s difficult to change fundamental product makeup for different markets, products are architected to surmount the highest bar and then sold everywhere with surface modifications.

(Frankly, a bigger danger to the environment are smaller local or regional companies. Operating under the radar and having local political power insulates them from national or global standards.)

In the US, California frequently serves as the most difficult regulator. Thus California’s environmental mandates, immediately or later, become national norms of doing business. Similarly the EU is more willing to be first with environmental standard-setting. And very, very few companies will pull out of doing business with the EU, especially since they know that their standards will migrate to Asia and the US sooner or later.

The change in the corporate dialogue about carbon emissions illustrates this. In the October Harvard Business Review, Alyson Slater of the Global Reporting Initiative talks about how publicizing carbon emissions is good for business (free link). Such an article in a business publication would have been unthinkable even five years ago. Yet it shows how rapidly corporate thinking has changed.

And we have to give globalization at least part of the credit for that.

(Photo from triffo via stock.xchng)

corporate social responsibility environment Harvard Business Review