Archive for November, 2008

Posted on November 2, 2008 - by Vic Desotelle

Seemingly “green” state ballot propositions

The language of propositions can be quite manipulative. I often think I’m voting yes when no is what I wanted, and visa versa. Below is a trust-able source – the Union for Concerned Scientists (http://www.ucsusa.org), to help you choose well at the polls on Tuesday.

When you go to the polls this Tuesday, November 4, you will face a pair of seemingly “green” state ballot propositions.

As you may remember from our earlier e-mails, a closer look at both initiatives reveals fundamental flaws that make each initiative harmful, not helpful. Based on our thorough analysis of each proposition, the Union of Concerned Scientists urges you to vote:

NO on Proposition 7, which is loophole-ridden and so poorly drafted that it could actually hinder the development of new clean, renewable energy sources in California, like solar and wind power, and
NO on Proposition 10, which would throw nearly ten billion taxpayer dollars into a program promoting natural gas and other transportation fuels that could achieve little or no reductions in smog or global warming pollution.

On a more positive note, we encourage you to support a pair of helpful ballot propositions by voting:

YES on Proposition 1A, which is a bond measure to begin construction on a California high-speed train system. Once built, the train system is expected not only to ease growing automobile and plane traffic, but most importantly, to reduce emissions of global warming pollution and save energy overall.
YES on Proposition 2, which will ban some of the worst practices of polluting CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations), and is an important step in promoting a modern approach to agriculture that is productive, humane, and more healthful.

Read more on all four ballot propositions below and don’t forget to vote on Tuesday, November 4. Polls are open from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. If you have a vote-by-mail ballot and haven’t already mailed it in, you can drop off your completed ballot at your polling location on election day. Thanks for your support.

Sincerely,

Chris Carney
California Outreach Organizer
Union of Concerned Scientists

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More Information about California’s Ballot Propositions

NO on Proposition 7
Shifting our country’s reliance from fossil fueled electricity to clean and renewable sources is one of the most effective ways to reduce global warming pollution. Combating global warming is the most significant challenge of our time. That is why it is so important to get the solutions right. Unfortunately, Proposition 7 gets it wrong, creates more uncertainty, and would likely set back our efforts to transition to a clean energy future.
Based on the experience of UCS experts on the design and implementation of renewable electricity standards in California and across the country, we are convinced that the serious flaws of Proposition 7—such as creating new compliance loopholes for utilities, setting counter-productive policies on energy pricing, and discouraging smaller-scale renewable projects-would prevent California from achieving our state’s clean energy goals. Worse still, if Prop 7 passes, fixing the initiative’s serious mistakes would require another new ballot measure or a two-thirds super-majority vote in the state legislature.
UCS strongly supports effective policies to increase renewable energy in California and is actively working towards increasing the state’s renewable standards in ways that will help, not hinder new renewable energy development in the state.
Read our detailed Prop 7 fact sheet online.
NO on Proposition 10
Because of its flaws and weaknesses, Proposition 10, would be a poor use of public bond funds at a time when the state is facing a multi-billion dollar budget crisis. Prop 10 would cost the state about $10 billion over 30 years to pay off both the principal ($5 billion) and interest ($5 billion). UCS is dedicated to finding and promoting cost-effective alternatives to petroleum fuels that will reduce the pollution that causes global warming, but Prop 10 is neither a smart nor a cost-effective solution. Three quarters of the $5 billion in bond funding in Prop 10 would be dedicated to incentives with flawed or inadequate environmental criteria. Prop 10’s rebates give natural gas an unfair advantage over other alternatives, while excluding or providing inadequate support for vehicle technologies that could provide much greater environmental benefits than natural gas in the long run, such as hybrid heavy duty trucks or plug-in hybrid electric passenger vehicles.
California has better and more cost-effective regulatory and legislative policy options available to reduce air pollution and global warming emissions from passenger and heavy duty vehicles. UCS urges Californians to reject Prop 10.
Read our detailed Prop 10 fact sheet online.
YES on Proposition 1A
This $9.95 billion bond measure will fund construction of a high-speed rail system in California which will eventually cost $40 billion when fully built out. The High Speed Rail Authority expects additional funds to come from federal and private sources. While we do acknowledge that the cost of the high speed rail is significant compared to other climate change solutions, UCS considers high speed electric trains crucial to solving our long term transportation problems and reducing the pollution that causes global warming. If ridership expectations are met, this high-speed train system would help reduce traffic demand along certain corridors, decrease the number of air flights, and help reduce harmful global warming pollution. Prop 1A has broad support among the environmental community. More information can be found here.
YES on Proposition 2
Many CAFOs (confined animal feed operations) use crates and cages to crowd too many animals into too small an area. Raising animals in these unnatural and unhealthy environments pollutes water and air, lowers property values in neighboring rural communities, and fosters excessive overuse of antibiotics leading to harder-to- treat human diseases. Passing California’s Prop 2 is one important step in promoting a modern approach to agriculture that is productive, humane, and more healthful.
Read our new issue briefing: “The Hidden Costs of CAFOs” (PDF file size of 1600 KB)

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Posted on November 8, 2008 - by Vic Desotelle

Policy Innovations: When Principles Pay

I found this at http://www.policyinnovations.org. It discusses the idea of when principles can be profitable in the world market. I like to think of ‘profit’ as much more expanded and profound than how we use the word in our society today. This video is worth a look. Tell me what comes up for you.

When Principles Pay

Posted on November 16, 2008 - by Vic Desotelle

Triple Bottom Line Investing: A New Framework for Innovation

I have long awaited the day when business and technology would begin to use principles of sustainability as the foundation for how we create and pay for our products and services. Well, the future has arrived with the concept of “” and socially responsible investing, which holds a whole new framework for innovation to emerge.

If you like to watch your money AND the planet grow green take a look below. Thank you Cliff for all of your years of persevering with GreenMoney Journal. You have helped make a once future idea (green investing) become a growing present day activity.

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In GreenMoney Journal’s special 15th Anniversary issue (Summer 2007) they are looking ahead at the next fifteen years through the eyes of several visionary leaders who have shaped today’s green investing and business world.

GreenMoney forecasts offer a greener future, to be sure. Be prepared to see a “green print” for a more sustainable world in which both challenge and opportunity abound. If fact, the next 15 years will be more critical then the last as we shift our attention from global war to global warming.

How will we evolve? Petroleum wars will end as people more fully realize the human and environmental costs associated with the finite commodity. The evolution will continue as the clean green energy revolution builds momentum. Issues of political justices and socio-economic justice will become even more closely tied. Higher environmental standards, clear market incentives and the laws of supply and demand will drive the culture of sustainable innovation.

Patriotism will be demonstrated not by SUV bumper stickers, but by responsible ecological behavior. As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman says, “Green is the new Red, White, and Blue.”

But this rapidly approaching future for our country is also global. Internationally, corporate accountability will include Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors as corporate management come to the inescapable conclusion that any financial analysis that excludes these factors cannot safely predict a company’s long-term profitability. According to several of our writers, the next 15 years will see the full integration of ESG into financial analysis and corporate decisions to reflect a triple bottom line.

As more individuals understand that their shopping and investing choices have impacts, they will want to make those impacts positive and sustainable. How will that happen? GreenMoney will continue to provide the answers.

In the special Summer issue: Amy Domini of Domini Social Investments shows us how the “culture of capitalism” will be fundamentally transformed; Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm outlines a dynamic future from food to technology, examining the challenges and opportunities of climate change; our favorite futurist Hazel Henderson spells out future global trends and counter trends; Spencer Beebe of Ecotrust keeps it green with an environmental discussion on advantages of Bioregions; and Joe Keefe of Pax World Funds shows us the road from Socially Responsible Investing to ESG and sustainable investing.

And if you want to get the 32-page print version (with exclusive features like the socially responsible mutual fund performance chart) of the special 15th Anniversary Summer ‘Visionaries’ issue for the Special Anniversary Rate of just $15 ( discounted from $50 ), go to the GreenMoney Journal via our website at- www.greenmoney.com . See details below.

You can also find an extensive set of ‘exclusively online’ articles on our web site by sustainability leaders, including Joan Bavaria of Trillium Asset Mgmt, Barbara Krumsiek of Calvert, Woody Tasch of Investors Circle, Allan Savory of Holistic Mgmt. Intl., Jean Pogge of ShoreBank, author and vegetarian chef Deborah Madison, as well as Tessa Tennant and many others.

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Online at- www.Greenmoney.com
US – $15 a year, Canada – $20 a year, International – $25 a year
Cliff Feigenbaum, Founder and Managing Editor,
GreenMoney Journal and greenmoney.com
Co-author, “Investing with Your Values” with Hal Brill and Jack Brill
Subscriptions – (800) 849-8751
Email – cliffgmj@gmail.com

Posted on November 20, 2008 - by Vic Desotelle

Innovation and the Great Global Warming Debate

We’re also warned that tropical diseases are going to spread, and that we can expect malaria and encephalitis epidemics. But scientific papers by Prof. Sarah Randolph of Oxford University show that temperature changes do not correlate well with changes in the distribution or frequency of these diseases; warming has not broadened their distribution and is highly unlikely to do so in the future, global warming or not.

The key point here is that living things respond to many factors in addition to temperature and rainfall. In most cases, however, climate-modeling-based forecasts look primarily at temperature alone, or temperature and precipitation only. You might ask, ”Isn’t this enough to forecast changes in the distribution of species?” Ask a mockingbird. The New York Times recently published an answer to a query about why mockingbirds were becoming common in Manhattan. The expert answer was: food — an exotic plant species that mockingbirds like to eat had spread to New York City. It was this, not temperature or rainfall, the expert said, that caused the change in mockingbird geography.

You might think I must be one of those know-nothing naysayers who believes global warming is a liberal plot. On the contrary, I am a biologist and ecologist who has worked on global warming, and been concerned about its effects, since 1968. I’ve developed the computer model of forest growth that has been used widely to forecast possible effects of global warming on life — I’ve used the model for that purpose myself, and to forecast likely effects on specific endangered species.

I’m not a naysayer. I’m a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us. I have worked for 40 years to try to improve our environment and improve human life as well. I believe we can do this only from a basis in reality, and that is not what I see happening now. Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book ”Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.
Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naive. ”Wolves deceive their prey, don’t they?” one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.
The climate modelers who developed the computer programs that are being used to forecast climate change used to readily admit that the models were crude and not very realistic, but were the best that could be done with available computers and programming methods. They said our options were to either believe those crude models or believe the opinions of experienced, data-focused scientists. Having done a great deal of computer modeling myself, I appreciated their acknowledgment of the limits of their methods. But I hear no such statements today. Oddly, the forecasts of computer models have become our new reality, while facts such as the few extinctions of the past 2.5 million years are pushed aside, as if they were not our reality.

A recent article in the well-respected journal American Scientist explained why the glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro could not be melting from global warming. Simply from an intellectual point of view it was fascinating — especially the author’s Sherlock Holmes approach to figuring out what was causing the glacier to melt. That it couldn’t be global warming directly (i.e., the result of air around the glacier warming) was made clear by the fact that the air temperature at the altitude of the glacier is below freezing. This means that only direct radiant heat from sunlight could be warming and melting the glacier. The author also studied the shape of the glacier and deduced that its melting pattern was consistent with radiant heat but not air temperature. Although acknowledged by many scientists, the paper is scorned by the true believers in global warming. (DKJ: I would think snow deposition and cloud cover would be variables that link to climate – may be in the article but not mentioned here)

We are told that the melting of the arctic ice will be a disaster. But during the famous medieval warming period — A.D. 750 to 1230 or so — the Vikings found the warmer northern climate to their advantage. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie addressed this in his book ”Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000,” perhaps the greatest book about climate change before the onset of modern concerns with global warming. He wrote that Erik the Red ”took advantage of a sea relatively free of ice to sail due west from Iceland to reach Greenland. . . . Two and a half centuries later, at the height of the climatic and demographic fortunes of the northern settlers, a bishopric of Greenland was founded at Gardar in 1126.”

Ladurie pointed out that ”it is reasonable to think of the Vikings as unconsciously taking advantage of this [referring to the warming of the Middle Ages] to colonize the most northern and inclement of their conquests, Iceland and Greenland.” Good thing that Erik the Red didn’t have Al Gore or his climatologists as his advisers. (DKJ: Author’s personal dig at Gore?)
Should we therefore dismiss global warming? Of course not. But we should make a realistic assessment, as rationally as possible, about its cultural, economic and environmental effects. As Erik the Red might have told you, not everything due to a climatic warming is bad, nor is everything that is bad due to a climatic warming.

We should approach the problem the way we decide whether to buy insurance and take precautions against other catastrophes — wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes. And as I have written elsewhere, many of the actions we would take to reduce greenhouse-gas production and mitigate global-warming effects are beneficial anyway, most particularly a movement away from fossil fuels to alternative solar and wind energy.

My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.

Many of my colleagues ask, ”What’s the problem? Hasn’t it been a good thing to raise public concern?” The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves.

For example, right now the clearest threat to many species is habitat destruction. Take the orangutans, for instance, one of those charismatic species that people are often fascinated by and concerned about. They are endangered because of deforestation. In our fear of global warming, it would be sad if we fail to find funds to purchase those forests before they are destroyed, and thus let this species go extinct.

At the heart of the matter is how much faith we decide to put in science — even how much faith scientists put in science. Our times have benefited from clear-thinking, science-based rationality. I hope this prevails as we try to deal with our changing climate.
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Posted on November 28, 2008 - by Vic Desotelle

Collaboration: The Dance Between Inner and Outer Realities

So what’s real? And what influences it? Is it all withIN me where the control power lies? Or is it withOUT me? … And what the hec does this have to do with COLLABORATION ?

<p style=”text-align:left”><img src=”http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/images/h_consciousness.jpg”/></p>
Some say to themselves; I have no power of my own and I am controlled by the outer world, and by the influence of other people, events, and circumstances – an outer perspective. Yet the guru’s say that we are makers of our own reality – an inner perspective. So, if you go within yourself, then all the power you need to change is there. Well I would hereby like to raise the B.S. flag.

From this guy’s mountain top view both are correct. It is not one or the other that brings us to Nirvana. It is the dance between the Inner and the Outer that IS the FULL reality. For my world, your fire’s reality is outside of me. Yet in your world, your life’s flame is within you. So inner and outer are very relative to whose doing the conscious perceiving, right?

So the new Story (I believe) will be based on the relationship between INNER and OUTER reality. Between what happens withIN me and at the same time what happens withOUT me. (Notice my use of the word ‘without’ is different that is normally used.)

Interesting that is what Collaboration is all about. It is an unfolding story of how you the individual and we the collective are considered and co-created together. Diversity is from the individual theme, and Unity is from the collective theme. And COLLABORATION is just another way to describe the dance that occurs between me and them, you and us, I and we.

Posted on November 30, 2008 - by Vic Desotelle

Sustainable Innovation: The Organizational, Human, and Knowledge Dimensions

Contributing Editor: René JornaWith a Foreword by John Elkington
http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/catalogue/innovation.htm
HOW SUSTAINABLE IS INNOVATION?

Problematically, most contemporary patterns of innovation in human social systems and organisations are not sustainable. This prevents people from learning effectively, from recognising and solving their problems, and from operating in sustainable ways. It is arguably why societies, businesses and industries around the world are so unsustainable.

Sustainable innovation is a pattern of social learning and problem- solving that is, itself, sustainable. The sustainability of innovation, moreover, is linked to the sustainability of its outcomes, which manifest themselves in what people produce and do in the world. Sustainable innovation, then, is a necessary precondition for sustainability in how societies and organisations function – the ways they organise, the products and services they make, the energy and resources they use, and the wastes they produce.

As challenges such as demographic pressures, ethnic tensions, terrorism, global poverty, pandemics and abrupt climate change force their way into mainstream politics and business, so we see growing interest in innovation, entrepreneurial solutions and, critically, issues such as how to ensure successful solutions replicate and scale. Sustainable Innovation aims to illustrate that shift. Instead of simply focusing on environmental and technological matters, it views and evaluates innovation-for-sustainability in terms of the human, social and management challenges and responses.

Developed from the Dutch research programme `Knowledge Creation for Sustainable Innovation’, this book presents empirical research and cases to develop a theory of sustainable innovation that is based on management of knowledge, knowledge and cognition and innovation approaches.

Sustainable Innovation suggests that knowledge and innovation will be the key drivers of social and corporate sustainability in the years ahead. It will be essential reading for managers and researchers in areas such as sustainability, innovation, knowledge management and organisational learning.

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To place an order for this title at a discount of 10%, or to view/download `The Foreword` by John Elkington, `The Preface` and `Knowledge creation for sustainable innovation: the KCSI programme` by Rene Jorna

Please visit the Greenleaf website at:http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/catalogue/innovation.htm

You can also request a review copy or inspection copy from this site – see the home page: http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com