Green Options » Scott Cooney

Affecting Behavior Change in the Slow Adopters of Sustainability

Scott Cooney — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:55:48 +0000

In yesterday’s Sustainable Industries Economic Forum, keynote speaker Paul Hawken discussed the political will it would take to avert global catastrophe. An underlying elephant in the room, however, was the behavior change that we would need to see from more citizens than just the progressive element, the early adopters. This may be a crucial element missing in the sustainability sphere, as beautifully put by Phil Micheal Williams, one of the excellent panelists on SI’s discussion panel following Hawken’s talk.

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Best Counterargument to Price on Carbon Hurting Jobs?

Scott Cooney — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:25:19 +0000

At yesterday’s Sustainable Industries Economic Forum, keynote presenter Paul Hawken was asked, “What is the best counterargument to the argument that carbon caps will raise energy costs and hurt our economy?” In typical Hawken style, his earlier speech was well done, inspiring and insightful. In typical Hawken style, his off-the-cuff answers to audience questions was where he really shone. And this answer was perhaps his shining moment of the day.

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Paul Hawken on Being a ‘Doomer’

Scott Cooney — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:09:11 +0000

During yesterday’s Sustainable Industries Economic Forum, keynote speaker Paul Hawken suggested that it will take a somewhat monumental effort to get back to 350 ppm in our atmosphere (we’re at 387 right now). His list was daunting. We’d need one new olympic sized pool of bioalgae fuel production every second for 25 years, for example. He said that while being a ‘doomer’ has a negative connotation, the facts are the facts, and that there is a role for this kind of startling statistic. An audience member asked the question that was on all our minds: “It seems untenable. Do you have hope that this can actually happen?”

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Viewing the world as a system will help us establish sustainability

Scott Cooney — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:56:06 +0000

Paul Hawken was the keynote speaker at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum in San Francisco on Thursday. He had some inspiring talking points (the forum’s goal was to ‘reinspire the inspired’), but one of the key takeaways was in how we should be viewing sustainability. He started by saying that sustainability should be viewed as a easily defineable. Sustainability means we survive. Living unsustainably means we don’t. But it was how he suggested we view this that was really interesting.

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Brighter Planet Bribing Us For Our Opinions…How Lame…Me First, Me First!

Scott Cooney — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:44:47 +0000

A Vermont-based company called Brighter Planet seems to think the green consumer will just give away our opinions for the chance to win $200. Since I just completed the survey, I’m going to go ahead and guess they’re right!

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Is the Green Economy the New Dot Com Bubble?

Scott Cooney — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:39:49 +0000

Bryan Welch, publisher of Utne Reader, Mother Earth News, and Natural Home Magazine, gave the keynote address at Green America’s Green Business Conference in San Francisco. (Take a look at TriplePundit for my 5 articles over the last few days on the hot topics of the conference). His guidelines for a sustainable future are simple and beautiful. As was his slideshow of his goats he raises in a humane manner on his Rancho Cappuchino (a tongue-in-cheek reference to being called a Cappuchino Cowboy by a more traditional rancher) in Kansas.

But one particular question in the Q&A session gave him pause: is the green economy the latest in the dot-com bubble mold?

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Interview of Margot Fraser, Founder of Birkenstock USA

Scott Cooney — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:43:33 +0000

Deborah Nelson, Executive Director of the Social Venture Network, interviewed Margot Fraser, founder and former CEO of Birkenstock USA, as part of the Green America Green Business Conference about the latter’s success in business, and her new book, Dealing with the Tough Stuff.

Nelson’s first question was a great one, and right to the point for the current economic crisis: what did you struggle with at the beginning?

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What Non-Profit Donation Would Be the Most Effective In Combatting Environmental Calamity?

Scott Cooney — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:10:59 +0000

We all give to environmental non-profits for different reasons. Sometimes, with local groups, it’s to fight a certain development or to protest a local company’s toxic emissions. With national groups, it’s usually to fight policies we don’t agree with that come from governments or multinational companies. Sometimes we win, sometimes we don’t. And even when we do, there are often compromises that make our hard fought victory less effective. It seems there is never a sure bet. Or is there?

There is one surefire way that donations will result in decreased emissions, decreased consumption, and slowing of environmental degradation. Can you guess how?

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Is Condensed Water the Salvation for Developing Countries?

Scott Cooney — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:37:41 +0000

Yesterday, I wrote about the new DH9 from DewPointe, one of the cool eco-innovations to be showcased at West Coast Green October 1-3 in San Francisco. The DH9 is capable of extracting water vapor from the air and converting it to (very) pure drinking water, at a rate of about 6.5 gallons per day. The technology is inspiring, in that this is a free-standing water manufacturer, needing no water supply, and conjures up images of moisture farms and growing forests where once there was desert. Indeed, even in 30% relative humidity, which is akin to some of the driest deserts in the world, the DH9 can produce 4 gallons of water per day from the air.

The big drawbacks are the cost ($1600 retail price) and the need for electricity. While standing, the DH9 uses 80 Watts, and while actively filtering, it uses 500.

Researchers in Stuttgart, however, have solved one of those two problems: their system is completely based on renewable, on-site energy.

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Oatmeal Kids (Of All Ages) Will Love

Scott Cooney — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:11:36 +0000

Oatmeal has gotten a bad rap. Kids (and adults) may view it as a health food with all the flavor of drywall. There are a lot of ways to get kids of all ages to wake up and WANT oatmeal for their breakfast of choice.

Of course, the health benefits are clear. I’m 34, and while I don’t worry about this kind of stuff, my family history of very high cholesterol had me wondering about the claim Wilford Brimley made about Quaker oats removing cholesterol from your bloodstream. So I decided to run a little self-experiment. In one year, my cholesterol dropped from over 300 down to 164. Call me a believer.

But what about that drywall?

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As Fisheries Deplete, Sea Veggies Offer Sustainable Nutrients to Our Diets

Scott Cooney — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 19:17:43 +0000

Depending on which studies you read, it appears that we will run out of fish, at least the plentiful bounty of diverse fish we’re getting all-to-accustomed to eating regularly. According to the book and upcoming documentary called The End of the Line, most of the fish we’re used to seeing: tuna, halibut, snapper, and the like, will effectively be gone from the world’s oceans by 2050.

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A Little Foresight on Health Care Could Go a Long Way

Scott Cooney — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:37:36 +0000

Eight billion dollars. It’s what we currently spend in the National School Lunch program. It’s not currently part of the health care legislation being debated, but some, including Ann Cooper and Beth Collins, co-founders of the Lunch Box Project, think it should be. The Lunch Box Project is tool for schools and their various stakeholders to bring healthy food to their cafeterias. Cooper and Collins claim that when fully developed, the toolkit will include a multi-faceted approach that can help any school transition from processed food to a “whole foods environment where food is procured regionally and prepared from scratch for the student population.”

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Myths About Raising Chickens in Your Backyard

Scott Cooney — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:34:31 +0000

Just like many other social phenomena that are good for the environment, the exploding trend of people growing their own chickens in the backyard has its naysayers. Naysayers come in a wide variety of stripes. For example, the widespread understanding that global warming is real and that we’re causing it has its naysayers, many of whom stand to lose a lot of money when their oil and coal has to internalize the cost of the pollution they’ve been making us pay for since their inception. Or those that say that electric cars are not realistic…sure there are naysayers…wait, is there a trend here that the oil industry is against everything good? Hmm…

But I digress. Suffice it to say, there are naysayers who don’t want us to live well, to live with a lower carbon footprint by producing our own food. Kimberly Willis and Rob Ludlow, co-authors of Raising Chickens for Dummies, can be counted among those that are dispelling these myths and empowering the people.

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Communicating Green Business to Non-Green Audiences: Clean Tech Makes a Great Educational Tool

Scott Cooney — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:40:11 +0000

Recently, I was given the opportunity to give a guest lecture for an entrepreneurship class at a local community college. The teacher wanted to give his students a glimpse into the green business world. For me, it was a terrific opportunity to reach out to an audience of poor, mostly minority students, many of whom had GEDs at best, and to test the universal appeal of green business.

The class went amazingly well, and I found that these students were as jazzed about green business and clean tech as any group of Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists. More so, in fact. Below, I present the outline of my approach so that others in a similar situation may build on this communication success, and adapt the approach as they wish.

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Green Business Opportunities for Aspiring Eco-Entrepreneurs

Scott Cooney — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:35:30 +0000

Ecopreneurist does a terrific job of educating the public about green business, especially startups. My own personal blog, EcopreneursGuide, has a variety of pages that also address this topic, though with woefully less information and diversity, since it is only my blog, and doesn’t have the wealth of writers associated with Ecopreneurist.

But the interesting thing is that my blog gets a decent number of hits. Not, mind you, for any of the articles I write, but only for the resources I list. The page that, overwhelmingly, gets the most attention, is the “Green Business Opportunities” page. With Google Analytics, it is easy to see that most of the people who come to my blog do so because they are searching for this exact phrase. People want to change the world. We need to make sure they have the resources to do so.

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A Ride on the Hornblower Hybrid Ferry to Alcatraz

Scott Cooney — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:04:56 +0000

Ariel Schwartz covered the inauguration of the first hybrid powered ferry boat, of Alcatraz Cruises, Inc., that would bring tourists to Alcatraz and Angel Island, back in December of 2008, with the potential concern that the boat was simply a “publicity stunt”, unless “Alcatraz Cruises takes the time to educate the school groups and visitors from around the world that take trips to Alcatraz every day.” One reader’s comment under her original blog post asked whether it was inefficient to use wind energy to create electricity, when you could simply use it to power the darn boat in the first place (I’m paraphrasing).

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Starting a Mobile Sustainable Food Vendor Business

Scott Cooney — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:40:46 +0000

Economic downturns have historically been times in which there are more startup businesses than usual. This particular recession is a great time to start a green business. One easy place to start, for someone without a great deal of startup capital or knowledge base, would be to start a mobile food vendor business.

Sometimes the bain of parents who learn that their kids are spending their lunch money on junk food from mobile food vendors, the business concept is a simple one to go green with.

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Hey Red States, Get With the Freaking Program!

Scott Cooney — Wed, 27 May 2009 11:06:04 +0000

Republicans are not just talking about slowing progress on clean energy, energy efficiency, and climate change, they’re doing it…by doing nothing about it.

I’m over it. There’s a lot of phooey balooey about compromising, reaching across the aisle, Republicans and Democrats working together, a spirit of bipartisanship, a ‘new kind of politics’…

I’m done. Republicans have made it clear they don’t care. Nope. Not one iota. And they won’t compromise, even though they’re an ever-shrinking minority with no leadership, national vision, unified agenda, or interesting alternatives to Obama’s progressive agenda. No way they’re going to let us wacko, socialist lefties have our way. Ain’t gonna happen, Bubba.

We have to move on. We don’t need the few dwindling hangers-on of Rush Limbaugh’s angry white man culture of hate, mistrust, and relentless pursuit of global environmental destruction.

“But wait, Scott,” you say, “we’ve worked so hard to get them to buy in, and now everyone’s paying attention to environmental issues.” Phooey, I say. It’s a ruse. Let’s look at the facts.

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Bay Area Organic Farms Benefitting from My Broccoli Stalks

Scott Cooney — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:04:28 +0000

San Francisco has a wealth of…well, it seems like everything. Great views, amazing beaches, the best quality municipal tapwater in the country, day hikes within the city, bike lanes, good public transit, fantastic restaurants, art, museums, great weather, nightlife…perhaps the only thing lacking is backyards. With real estate at a serious premium, backyard space is likely deemed too costly. Most people simply don’t have yards in this town.

As an avid composter and gardener, this puts me, like many city dwellers, in a pickle.

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Walkable Communities, Healthier Food…Europeans Healthier than Americans?

Scott Cooney — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:49:14 +0000

A study* in the American Journal of Public Health looked at health differences between Europeans, English and Americans across age and income levels and concluded “American adults are less healthy than Europeans at all wealth levels. The poorest Americans experience the greatest disadvantage relative to Europeans.”

The U.S. spends 2-3 times more than European countries per capita on health care, but several recent studies showed that the health of Americans was worse than that of the English. This study was one of the first to examine the difference between EU countries and the U.S. in terms of diabetes or high blood sugar, stroke, heart disease, hypertension, cancer (excluding skin cancer), and lung disease. The fact that poor Europeans have equal access to primary and preventive care and education would logically lead to a health gap between poor Europeans and poor Americans. However, the study finds that rich Americans are less healthy than rich Europeans as well.

The study discusses some possible reasons why Americans are less healthy than Europeans:

Several factors may explain why Americans have worse health than Europeans. Although major risk factors such as smoking are similarly prevalent, the obesity epidemic is more advanced in the US than in Europe. In addition, Europe’s social and healthcare policies are more comprehensive and contrast with a marked focus on specialist care in the US.

In addition, one has to wonder about walkable cities, less time spent in traffic, stricter environmental regulations, better protection from toxic chemicals, the banning of Genetically Modified Foods, and a diet that is not centered on a food pyramid that was heavily influenced by agribusiness interests.

Scott Cooney is the author of Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur (McGraw-Hill).

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*Am J Public Health. 2009;99:540-548. Health Disadvantage in US Adults aged 50 to 74 years: A Comparison of the Health of Rich and Poor Americans With That of Europeans. Avendano, Mauricio, PhD., M. Maria Glymour, ScD., James Banks, PhD., and Johan P. Mackenbach, PhD.