No Impact Man

The auto industry's trick is no treat

Thanks to Jonathan, a reader, who alerted me to the Halloween action by the Pew Campaign for Fuel Efficiency. They're delivery candy and fact sheets to members of congress to let them know that what the auto industry is trying to do to the Energy Bill is is a trick not a treat.

From the Pew Campaign's Spooky Truth fact sheet:

"In June, the Senate passed a strong, bipartisan compromise to raise mileage for cars and light trucks to an average of 35 mpg by 2020.  This is the first Congressional increase in fuel efficiency in 30 years, and yet the auto industry is pushing a proposal which would weaken and delay the Senate compromise.  Their "tricky" proposal would only require 32 mpg by 2022 and actually cap American innovation on mileage improvements at 35 mpg.  The spooky truth is that just a few years and a few miles do matter when it comes to making a difference for America. In 2020:

Barrels of Oil Saved Per Day:
    - 500,000, Auto Lobby Proposal
    - 1.2 Million, Senate Fuel Economy Compromise
Consumer Savings at the Pump:
    - $11 Billion, Auto Lobby Proposal
    - $25 Billion, Senate Fuel Economy Compromise
Emissions Reductions
    - 85 mmt CO2, Auto Lobby Proposal
    - 206 mmt CO2, Senate Fuel Economy Compromise

* Data from the Union of Converened Scientists, "Energy Bill Must Guarantee Real Oil Savings" Sept. 2007."

While the Pew campaigners are handing out candy and facts to members of Congress, the rest of us can support a strong energy bill--and a step towards American sustainability--by showing our representatives that we care. Automatically send emails to your members of congress at SaveOurEnvironment.Org.

I want electric lights!

An announcement about a couple of my upcoming public talks at the bottom, but first...

If you follow the No Impact project at all, you know that we have had no mains electricity now, in the middle of Manhattan, for six months or so. Also, you'll know that the project--at least in its current incarnation--comes to an end in about three weeks.

It's 7:45 PM and I'm typing here in the nearly dark (it rained so much this week that my one solar-powered lamp has just run out of juice). As the sun recedes during the move towards winter, I've stopped enjoying the no electric lights, though it was totally fine in the summer.

I've found myself looking forward to turning the electricity back on. I'm guessing we'll end up using about 15 percent of what we used to before the project (more on that in the coming weeks and months), but the real point is that I've felt utterly guilty and ashamed about wanting to have my bedside reading light back.

Finally I realized, first, that I'll be using way less electricity than most households but more importantly, second, one of the points of this experiment is to determine what is realistic and what isn't when it comes to sacrifices people might be willing to make.

Some of the adaptations of the No Impact project made me happier and some made life too hard. That can be a guide moving forward in terms of what adaptations people might realistically be asked to make. If we're not realistic, we'll be laughed out of court.

So concrete result number one: Moving forward, I'm willing to live without A/C, the TV, a freezer, incandescent lights, probably the clothes dryer, and hot water in the laundry machine. I'm not willing to live without CFL lights in winter, the laundry machine using cold water, the fridge set at 45 degrees or so, once a week use of a vacuum cleaner.

These are the differences between feeling like I'm making a horrendous sacrifice and not. But they make a substantial difference in the power I use. These anyway are some cobbled together thoughts about the future. I'm not there yet, so we've yet to see for sure.

On the other hand, maybe I'll use the money we've saved this year to buy a Hummer....JOKE!

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Starting November 4th, New York University is running program called Footprint Forward, in which a couple of hundred students will be trying to live with no net environmental impact for a week. The program includes a bunch of cool environmental talks and events.  Also, I will be running a workshop on no impact living at the beginning of the week and giving a 45 minute talk at the end of the week. The entire program is open to the public. To sign up for any part or to find out the schedule and more, go here.

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Don't forget that the National Day of Climate Action, where we get to let the legislators know that we want action on the environment, is coming this Saturday, November 3. Click here to find your local event.

Winning enviro-conscious customer loyalty

First off, readers, please, please, please comment on this post. Please help me. I want to understand what it would take to get all us enviros to engage happily with a company. Now, onwards...

One of the reasons I embarked on a low/no consumption approach to environmentalism for the No Impact project is that I don't know who to believe when it comes to trying to consume environmentally. I've read, for example, that certain hardware stores put "green" labels on a brand of chainsaw because they are gas efficient--ignoring the fact that chopping down trees is the quintessentially non-green act.

In some ways, therefore, disengaging from the market is easier than engaging with it ethically. It is too hard to wade through the public relations and advertising spin.

So I've been thinking some about who I wish I could buy from. I've been thinking about my fantasy company, a company I wish I could have a relationship with. And of course, that fantasy company would be one that I could trust. That is the first element. I would like to be able to find manufacturers and retailers whose word I could rely on.

How could you get me to trust you? There are, at this early stage of my thinking, three elements:

1. You need to consider responsibility towards the environment as part of your mission and you need to demonstrate this by your actions and your words. The typical production of CFL bulbs in very heavy plastic packaging, for example, spells cashing in on consumer concern about the environment but not a true mission of responsibility for the environment. I may buy your bulbs, but I don't trust that you care about the environment and I feel no loyalty to you. I will switch brands as soon as someone acts more responsibly.

By the way, my favorite CFLs are hand-delivered to me by NYC's Solar One. They come in recycled cardboard packaging, and a percentage of the proceeds goes to light-for-literacy charities that work in developing countries. But if you provided an easy way to dispose of the mercury-containing light bulbs--demonstrating your responsibility--I might switch to you.

2. You must provide transparency in your operations and products so that I can decide for myself how sincere your efforts are. Let's face it, in the internet age, you can't keep a secret any way. The moment you piss off an employee, they're just going to spill your beans. So, use the information age to your advantage and use it to show me how forthright you're willing to be. Give me the bad as well as the good. Tell me what's wrong with how you're operating and tell me how you're trying to fix it. I'm not going to believe you if you tell me it's all good anyway. Get an environmental audit of your company's operations and post it on your site with your plan of action. Don't just tell me your buying offsets. Show me what damage you do and let me in on your remediation efforts and tell me what you're doing to mitigate your damage in the meantime.

Back to the CFL bulb example: tell me why you package in plastic and how you're planning to get away from it. Explain to me about the problems of mercury to the environment and tell me what you are doing to make a bulb without it in the future. Show me that you are involved in mercury cleanups as a way to offset the damage done by your product.

3. But don't let me catch you trying to spin the information, or I'm just going to someone I think I can really trust to care about the triple bottom line.

4. Finally, you must demonstrate your responsiveness to changing circumstances--including technology, news, trends, and customer concerns. I want to know that you are continually keeping yourself up to date with current environmental issues and problems. I want to see you moving with the times. When a technology to produce CFL bulbs without mercury emerges, I don't want to hear you trying to convince me that they are no good. I want you to explain to bring the first to bring them to market or to explain to me why you decided it is better to wait.

Now, here's the reward for you: if you can convince me that, most of the time, buying from you is the best environmental choice, then I will become your loyal customer. We will have a relationship and, because you've treated me right, I'll want to treat you right too. I will even forgive some of your mistakes if you're forthright about them and can show you're trying to correct them, as long as I still believe in your environmental mission.

Triple bottom line image courtesy of gcbl.org. Click on it to enlarge.

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PS Don't forget that the National Day of Climate Action, where we get to let the legislators know that we want action on the environment, is coming this Saturday, November 3. Click here to find your local event.

When more is less...

I don't aspire to poverty or deprivation or asceticism. But I do think that I am easily fooled into believing that the short term pleasures brought by more-than-enough material things will translate into longer-term happiness. (In fact, I wrote about materialism versus happiness just the other day).

The tragedy of this confusion is that it can lead both to the waste of planetary resources and of a life spent chasing after things I can't take to the grave. (By the way, I recently came across a blog entitled How Can I Best Spend My Time on This Earth? It's new, and there isn't yet much written on it, but lots of points just for the question. To me and my sometimes melancholy constitution, the question is perennial.)

What I wanted to send out into the blogosphere today was a quote--and I don't mean to sound pious--from Mother Theresa, left behind in the comments section of this blog by a regular reader from India named Uma. The quote comes from an interview in Time. With the repeated caveat that I am, for myself, an advocate of neither asceticism nor rampant materialism, here it is:

Q: Is materialism in the West an equally serious problem?

A: I don't know. I have so many things to think about. Take our congregation: we have very little, so we have nothing to be preoccupied with. The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have, the more free you are. Poverty for us is a freedom. It is not a mortification, a penance. It is joyful freedom. There is no television here, no this, no that.   This is the only fan in the whole house. It doesn't matter how hot it is, and it is for the guests. But we are perfectly happy.

Q: How do you find rich people then?

A: I find the rich much poorer. Sometimes they are more lonely inside. They are never satisfied. They always need something more. I don't say all of them are like that. Everybody is not the same. I find that poverty hard to remove. The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

We've got something wonderful going on here

These come via Tuco Rides:

Photographer Norbert Rosing planned to take some sunset photos of a group of sled dogs near Churchill, Manitoba, in northern Canada on the Hudson Bay, when from stage left comes a 1200 pound polar bear.

The dogs' owner thinks he's just about to lose his pack. The dogs, though, don't growl, but crouch down and bark and wag their tails as though they want to play.

The polar bear thinks, yeah, I want to play, too!

And it turns out that you don't have to weigh less than a  thousand pounds to be gentle.

So the dogs say "You should come back and play some more."

The polar bear does. He comes back several times during the course of the next week to roughhouse with his little friends.

It's pretty wonderful, this planet we've been given to live on. Need I say more?

 

Environmentalism means less deprivation

People ask me if the reduced use of consumer conveniences that goes with the No Impact project doesn't mean a lot of deprivation. I say that I spend more time with my family, eat more healthily, get more exercise and am a better dad. Then I ask: "Was I more deprived before or am I more deprived now?"

The point is that the money we make, the things we buy and the planetary resources we use--or waste--aren't what make us happier. This is the finding of the forthcoming book The How of Happiness by University of California, Riverside researcher Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky.

Her findings show that contributions to our happiness come:

• 50% from a genetically-determined set point (which we can do nothing about)
• 10% from our life circumstances or situations (which means we could trash the entire planet to get ourselves the biggest house and fastest car and still barely feel better)
• 40% from--are you ready?--how we act and how we think.

This confirms my No Impact experience that environmentalism--preserving rather than using up planetary resources--means nothing like depriving ourselves of happiness. Instead, it suggests that using less and treating the planet kindly means we get to stop distracting ourselves from what really makes us happy.

Of our assumptions about happiness, Lyubomirsky writes:

"Perhaps the most common error is that we assume that positive events ... will provide much more happiness than they really do. Take materialism, the pursuit of money and possessions, as an example. Why is it so hard for us (even myself!) to believe that money really doesn't make us happy? Because the truth is that money does make us happy. But our misunderstanding, as one happiness researcher eloquently puts it, is that 'we think money will bring lots of happiness for a long time, and actually it brings a little happiness for a short time.' Meanwhile, in our effortful pursuit of such dead ends to pleasure, we end up ignoring other, more effective routes to well-being."

What are the more effective routes? Well, that gets you back to how you think and how you act, and for more on that, you'll have to read Lyubomirsky's book. But a few bullet points include:

• Nurturing and enjoying relationships with family and friends
• Being comfortable expressing gratitude
• Being the first to offer help to coworkers and passersby
• Practicing optimism about the future
• Savoring life's pleasures and living in the moment
• Exercising at least once a week
• Committing to lifelong goals and ambitions
• Coping with challenges with strength and poise

A whole country goes dumpster diving

First off, thanks to all the readers who made phone calls to New York State Assembly members yesterday. You really did make a difference in getting diesel fumes out of kids lungs. And by the way, if you live in New York State, and you'd like to help some kids by dialing a couple of numbers, click here.

Meanwhile, apparently "reuse" is all the rage in Germany. My wife Michelle took note of an article about it in the Wall Street Journal because, as you may know, part of the No Impact project is not buying anything new--except underwear and socks (you can read about that rule here).

The idea behind the rule is that over-consumption contributes to our planet's environmental ills.

Anyway, I'm tired and need to go to bed, so I'm doing the lazy thing by giving you the first few paragraphs of the WSJ article:

Why shop till you drop when your neighbors are throwing away perfectly good stuff?

Sven Brylla has been furnishing his apartments for years with discarded furniture, wood and fittings snagged off the streets of Berlin.

In his kitchen stands a fridge so old that it predates electricity. Meltwater from a metal icebox once ran between the panels of the wooden cabinet, cooling its contents. Now it's his cupboard.

His kitchen table is a gnarled old workbench. He found his favorite armchair at a garbage dump. His revolving inventory of street junk has included 20 vintage radios and half a dozen prewar bicycles made in the USSR.

In many other countries, dumpster divers like Mr. Brylla would be written off as eccentrics. In Germany, he's just a normal 36-year-old graphic printer brought up to look down on wasting money on new things when sturdy old stand-bys are there for the taking.

Read more...

Your chance to get diesel fumes out of kids lungs (but you have to act NOW!)

By dialing two phone numbers, we can help save a bunch of kids from getting asthma. Not hopefully. Not maybe. But definitely. I’ll tell you what to do in a minute, but first some background from an OpEd by Errol Louis of the Daily News (or you can skip the background and go straight to the instructions in bold below):

“The latest chapter in New York City's saga of garbage politics - and political garbage - is being written on the West Side of Manhattan, where a group of allegedly liberal pols are, once again, bargaining away the health and very lives of children in Harlem, the South Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.

I wonder how these politicians sleep at night. Right now, Manhattan generates 40% of the city's garbage. Nearly every last scrap of it - all the rotting food, dirty diapers, restaurant waste and nonrecyclable office trash - gets trucked outside the borough to other neighborhoods for sorting, packing and shipping to landfills.

This results in heavy concentrations of diesel-truck traffic, rodent infestations and smog in a handful of neighborhoods like the South Bronx- which, not surprisingly, have sky-high levels of asthma.”

The good news is that we can help the asthma kids. In 2006, New York City passed a new Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP) that depends on new, state-of-the-art, environmentally-safe transfer stations based in the boroughs where the trash is generated, transportation of trash by barge and rail instead of trucks, and the elimination of truck-dependent clusters of transfer stations in the outer boroughs.

These features taken together will eliminate 5.5 million truck miles traveled in New York City each year, improving air quality and quality of life for City residents. Think of the diesel fumes the kids won’t have to breathe! The of the eliminated greenhouse gases! The plan is supported by New York’s major environmental organizations and by the New York Times.

But the entire plan faces catastrophe this week thanks to not-in-my-backyard politics in the New York State Assembly. Members Deborah Glick, Richard Gottfried and Linda Rosenthal, representing constituents on the west side of Manhattan, don’t want the plan’s associated recycling facility on the Gansevoort Penninsula just south of 14^th Street or the transfer station at 59^th Street (you can read more about the issues here and here and here). The assembly members are trying to ensure that the requisite legislation never gets to the Assembly floor.

Needless to say, I’m upset. I live very near the Gansevoort Peninsula, and inside the relevant Assembly district, but all the same, my representative is choosing to try to screw up the plan. Well, I don’t want little kids in the South Bronx and elsewhere paying the price for trash produced by me and my neighbors, especially when the price is not being able to breathe.

But we can fix the problem. I am hoping that those of you who are New York State residents will join me in making a couple of phone calls to let the State Assembly know that we want NYC’s solid waste plan enacted as it stands. The calls that need to be made are, first, to our own Assembly members (you can search for yours by zip-code here) and, second, to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (his numbers are 212 312 1420 and 518 455 3791).

Please ask your assembly member to let Speaker Silver know that they support the "forthcoming amendment to the Hudson River Park Act (HRPA) that will allow for the construction of a Manhattan recyclables acceptance facility off of the Gansevoort peninsula" and that they want it brought to a vote. Then call Speaker Silver and say the same thing.

I’m told that 20 phone calls to an Assembly member’s office is a virtual landslide. But they need to be made today (Monday) or tomorrow. This is a case where we can really make a difference. So please help, and let me know you did by leaving a comment on the blog or emailing me privately. Thanks for your help!!!

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Yeah, there's global warming but I need a job

Yesterday, I said that convincing American's to do something about global warming is the biggest marketing problem in history. Beloved readers emailed that they thought the problem is convincing the public that global warming exists. I disagree.

Look at the numbers below from an Environmental and Energy Study Institute factsheet:
According to an April 7, 2006 Gallup poll--

• 58% believe climate change as a result of global warming has already begun
• 58% also believe that increases in Earth’s temperature over the last century are due more to human activities than natural changes

According to a March 26, 2006 Time Magazine/ABC News/Stanford University poll--

• 85% say global warming is probably happening
• 88% think global warming threatens future generations

Most Americans believe there is global warming and that's good news, right? Of course, it is.

But now take a glimpse at these numbers on voter priorities from a CBS News poll taken in September, 2007 (via PollingReport.com) . The numbers are in answer to the open-ended question "What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?"

28% say War in Iraq
16% say Economy/Jobs
8% say Health care
6% say Terrorism (general)
5% say Immigration
4% say Foreign policy
3% say Poverty/homelessness
3% say Defense/military
3% say Misc. social issue
3% say Misc. government issues
16% say Other
5% say Unsure

Notice any issue missing like, um, say, the environment or global warming?

The problem, I think, is not so much getting people to believe that there is a climate crisis. It's getting them to care enough to change their lives and their voting patterns. That is what I meant yesterday when I said that what we faced is history 's biggest ever marketing problem.

The biggest marketing problem in history

Tell people that air pollution causes asthma in one in four children in central Harlem and the Bronx or tell them that global warming may cause millions of children to die of dysentery and the best you’ll get may well be a shrug.

Show them a child who has collapsed on the street and is struggling for breath, on the other hand, and it would be a rare passerby who wouldn’t move heaven and earth to save the child.

The problem with promoting the environmental message is not that people aren’t caring. It’s that people care most about things they can see and hear—things that have proximity. They care about things they are connected to. And they care about things they feel they have power over (marketing guru Seth Godin made the point with the National Lampoon magazine cover to the right--wanna save the dog?).

The question is, how do we get people to feel they are connected to the kids with asthma or the kids who will suffer disease because of climate change? How do we get people to see that they have the power to help?

It’s the biggest marketing problem in history.

One person who solved a similar but much smaller problem was the Brit Mark Glover, whose organization, Lynx, almost single-handedly turned fur coats from a symbol of status to a symbol of cruelty.

But what is really important is the then-highly controversial way he went about it. He made it clear to consumers that they personally shared in the cruelty—he gave them proximity—and let them know they had, not only the power to stop the cruelty, but the responsibility.

His methods were shocking. Watch the ad below, and make sure you get to the message at the very end (If you read the blog on email, you can watch by clicking here). You may not like it. You may find it distasteful and even sexist.

But, as we all try to figure out how to get people connected to our environmental problems, bear this one thing in mind: it worked.