Entries associated with the tag "Joel Makower":

Joel Makower at Two Steps Forward reports on a survey of green marketing that TerraChoice Environmental Marketing made at six big-box stores. Their research teams found 1,753 green claims made for 1,018 products. Most of them (57 percent) were misleadingly narrow, and 26 percent offered no proof either on the product or on its website. Fewer than 1 percent were actually false.

Neither Makower nor I would call this "greenwashing," as TerraChoice does. Would other claims made for products stand up even this well? I'll make a wild guess that, for the moment, green marketing is actually a bit more honest than marketing in general -- a low standard to be sure, but if the environmental movement could raise the standards of 21st-century capitalism in this area, it should count for something.  

Like a good many professionals, Joel Makower at Two Steps Forward flies about twice a week. Unlike most, he asks the unaskable: Could air travel ever be green?

Short answer: not very, and not very soon. (And CO2 offsets aren't very credible.)

Makower has a different temperament and approaches the question in a different way than George Monbiot in Heat (relevant excerpt here), but their basic conclusion is surprisingly similar: There is no easy fix. Find another way, or don't go. 

Joel Makower at Two Steps Forward treats Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel with amused contempt. I'm just pissed.

Last week the Climate Action Partnership -- including corporate giants BP, Caterpillar, DuPont, and General Electric -- called for a national limit on carbon dioxide emissions to combat climate change. (Their report, "A Call for Action," is here [PDF].) Strassel says they'll make money on the deal -- and therefore it must be a Bad Thing:

"The cap-and-trade climate program these 10 jolly green giants are now calling for is a regulatory device designed to financially reward companies that reduce CO2 emissions, and punish those that don't.... DuPont has been plunging into biofuels, the use of which would soar under a cap. Somebody has to cobble together all these complex trading deals, so say hello to Lehman Brothers. Caterpillar has invested heavily in new engines that generate 'clean energy.' British Petroleum is mostly doing public penance for its dirty oil habit, but also gets a plug for its own biofuels venture.... What makes this lobby worse than the usual K-Street crowd is that it offers no upside. At least when Big Pharma self-interestedly asks for fewer regulations, the economy benefits."

Strassel appears to be criticizing what economists, using 18th-century verbiage, call "rent seeking," which is trying to make money by influencing legislation rather than by making better products. An honest argument from this point of view would propose that all lobbying and political contributions by for-profit entities be universally banned. But Strassel isn't making an honest economic argument. She's OK with some companies' rent seeking and not others, because she assumes -- without even attempting to provide any evidence -- that deregulating Big Pharma has no downside and cutting CO2 emissions has no upside.

Strassel's column is considerably less intelligent than this summary makes it sound, veering wildly from the above "point" to criticizing proposals that CAP hasn't made, then criticizing what she predicts will be the inaction of the Congressional Democrats on this issue.

Makower, by contrast, is well worth reading in full. He includes links for investors smart enough to want to make money from a runaway climate train, as opposed to standing on the tracks claiming it'll never come. 

GM is the big news at Detroit's North American International Auto Show, according to Treehugger, "hitting the ground running with the Chevy Volt, a battery-powered, four-passenger electric vehicle that uses a gas engine to create additional electricity to extend its range."

In the preblog world, that's all we'd know unless we were professional auto journalists willing to do some digging. Now with a mouse click or two we can read Joel Makower's thorough take on this development, with links to technical accounts of the needed developments in battery technology for the Volt to become reality. Beth Lowery, GM's vice president for environment and energy, told him, "We wanted to show our overall commitment to environmental excellence. We’ve been working on it for decades, but nothing was showing through. I think this really broke through. This allows people to take us seriously."

With another mouse click or two we can read the takedown by Dilbert creator Scott Adams (yes, he has time to blog too): "Someday GM hopes to figure out how to make a big honkin’ car battery, and figure out how to do it economically, and hope the whole project ends up saving more energy than it consumes, or failing in that, hope no one asks how much energy it takes to build the cars. It’s called a 'concept car' because that sounds better than 'something we pulled out of our ass and hope to someday shove up yours.'"

(Visit the Dilbert blog for his idea of his first and last workday in GM's concept department.)

Riverbend, a "girl blog from Iraq," lists nine ways to tell if your country's in trouble, starting with "the UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI," and  "the abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country."  (Hat tip to Sam Smith's Progressive Review.)

Gristmill lists the ten most bizarre environmental events of 2006, including, "When Chevy offered net surfers the opportunity to edit their own Chevy Tahoe ads online, enviros grabbed the opportunity to match slick, soaring shots of SUVs rolling over mountainous terrain with titles like 'Gas Guzzler!'" Joel Makower has a more sober list, on which Wal-Mart's green makeover ranks #1.  [CORRECTION FROM COMMENTS:  Wal-Mart was one of ten; the list was not prioritized.]

Dan Gilmoor at the Center for Citizen Media makes ten predictions about blogging and journalism in 2007, in the form of a multiple-choice quiz. For instance, "5. Most newspaper executives will: A. Continue to downsize their newsrooms without any real plan for the long term. B. Complain incessantly about competition from online advertising competitors. C. Remain suspicious of citizen media except as a possible way to save money. D. Innovate at the edges, not in the core functions."

At Guardian Unlimited Tim Radford lists the 11 most interesting science books coming out in the next few months. Best title:  How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take to Change a Planet? Best synopsis: the book about various "gloriously implausible but not necessarily impossible ideas ... including, of course, the proposition that we will all be reassembled as cyber-identities in a cosmic computer and experience a subjective eternity in the last crushing seconds of time." See ya there. (Hat tip to Butterflies and Wheels.)

Dean Baker at Beat the Press offers ten resolutions for writers on economics, for instance: "Unless a reporter can identify the cause of a run-up in stock prices, he/she cannot say whether it indicates good news for the economy as a whole. Therefore, it should not be reported as good news."

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate ranks the ten most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006. Guantanamo was only #9. Be afraid, speak out anyway, and don't forget the ACLU.

Are you:

(1) environmentally well-informed?

(2) business-minded?

(3) willing to relocate?

If so, then check out Joel Makower's listing on behalf of Environmental Defense, which apparently is having a hard time finding the right savvy individual to work for them and Wal-Mart while living in Bentonville, Arkansas.

"To work effectively with Wal-Mart, you've got to be able to keep up with them," Gwen Ruta, ED's director of corporate partnerships, told Makower. "And you've got to be able to be creative along with them. There's almost nothing they won't explore, but you also have to be able to challenge them with aggressive goals."

Joel Makower blogs infrequently but well at Two Steps Forward, where recently he described the vinyl industry's attempts, so far successful, to insure that LEED green-building standards protect their private interests. He writes: 

"The green-building industry is coming of age. And with that maturity comes growth, profitability—and big, well-heeled players seeking to stake their claim. In doing so, they often find that there's enormous profit potential to be had by shaping the rules in their favor, never mind that doing so all but thwarts the environmental and social benefits intended in the first place.

"We've seen it in organics. We're seeing it in green buildings. We'll soon, I predict, be seeing even more of it as companies seek to claim 'climate neutral' status."

Jacob Gordon interviews green-business guru Joel Makower at Treehugger. Asked about green startups, Makower mentions some but adds,

"I’m less interested in these pure-play green companies than in the greening of big business, helping large, industrial companies, from utilities to plastics companies find their way in the emerging green economy. It’s no pipe dream; it’s starting to ramp nicely: companies as varied as GE, DuPont, Shaw Carpets, and Sharp are creating new products and services that have the potential to be game-changers from a sustainability perspective. What gets me up in the morning is the prospect of seeing these and other companies make radical shifts in their thinking about what they do and how they do it.

"Please understand, it’s not that I don’t care about the smaller, more progressive companies. I think they are our future. But we won’t have a future if we don’t bring old-line industrial companies into the fold."

Q: If you could wave a magical eco-legislation wand and pass one law, what would it be?

"No question, it would be something that puts a fair price on carbon and other constrained resources. Note that I didn’t utter the 'T' word. I don’t believe there’s the political will for carbon or natural resource taxes, at least in the U.S., and there won’t be for some time. But there are other means of incentivizing green behavior on the part of consumers and industry, and in ways that won’t place an undue burden on the economically disadvantaged."

Read the whole thing, and learn why he drives a BMW convertible (maybe Barack Obama and Dennis Hastert could learn something from his rationale).