I was invited to join a panel on Jumpstarting the Green Economy hosted by the Sustainable Business Incubator at Fairleigh Dickenson University on May 21, 2009.  Copies of the conference presentations are available from the organizers for about $50. Copies of my presentation in audio and powerpoint format are available for $15, including shipping and taxes. Call or E-Mail me here or at Furman Consulting Group.

It boils down to this: Wind, Solar, Geothermal, other sustainable energy and Negawatts vs. Coal, Oil, and Nuclear; to Sustainable Business or Bernie Madoff and the Mafia.

After thanking Matt Polsky, the moderator, introducing myself – I’ve been interested in Clean Energy since 1976 – and plugging the MBA in Managing for Sustainability at Marlboro College, and my forthcoming album, It’s Raining Outside the Cave by XB Cold Fingers, I spoke for about 20 minutes on Energy, the Economy, and the Environment.

We face some major challenges – the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Dead Zone in Chesapeake, Global Warming.

• Energy
• The Economy
• The Environment
  

There are Gyres in every ocean, and they are accumulating masses of plastics and toxic organic molecules. Plastic in the toxic soup of the North Pacific Gyre outweighs plankton 6 to 1. While it photo-degrades, into smaller particles of non-digestible plastic, it doesn’t biodegrade. There are no metabolic pathways by which this stuff is “food.” Birds and turtles eat plastic, and Die.

Dead Zone in Red

In the Chesapeake, a shallow estuary fed by waters from what we humans call New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, a dead zone in the northern spur has developed. Chicken manure from factory farms feeds aglae, which bloom, die, sink, and suck up all the oxygen.  This kills fish, shellfish, and plants. The once fertile Chesapeake is as full of life as mars or the moon.

As Gore noted, “We’re borrowing from China to buy oil from the Middle East, and burn it in ways that destroy the planet.”

And as T. Boone Pickens noted, “We burn 12 million barrels of oil per day.  Saudi Arabia produces 9 million.”

This paradigm challenges to the environment, national security, and the economy. This energy economy is, in a word, UnSustainable!

President John F. Kennedy, on May 25, 1961, challenged us:

This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

And we met the challenge on on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong, followed by Buzz Aldrin took

One Small Step for (a) man, One Giant Leap for mankind.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, considers Gore’s Challenge – 100% clean renewable, sustainable electricity in 10 years – to be easy and conservative.

I also spoke about Ceres and BICEP. Organized in 1989, after the Exxon Valdes disaster, Ceres is composed of Investors, and Environmental Organizations who, for the health of the planet and its people, have decided to integrate sustainability into capital markets. The CERES Principles demand:

• Honest Accounting,
• Abolish the folly of Free Pollution
• Higher Standards of Business Leadership
• Bold Solutions that Accelerate Green Innovation
• Smart New Policies that Reward Sustainability.

The principles are vague, so Ceres evolved into BICEP – Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy.  BICEP looked at the Ceres Principles, and announced the BICEP Goals. These are, in management parlance, “S. M. A. R. T.” – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound. The BICEP goals include a Renewable Portfolio Standard of 20% by 2020 and 30% by 2050, and Carbon Sequestration.

Renewable Portfolio Standard 20% by 2020 is not bad, but Gore and Schmidt say we can do 100% by 2019, so why settle for 20% by 2020? And as for 30% by 2050; that’s ridiculous.  Regarding Carbon Sequestration, it’s hard to tell if it’s cost effective; we don’t know how to do it! And we don’t know What will it cost.

The goals are SMART, however, they are Also S.T.U.P.I.D.

• SMART
• Then again
• Under
• Powered
• Insufficient and
• Dumb

Alfred E. Newman, by Norman Mingo

There are Limits of Private Enterprise.

Voluntary Environmental “Regulation” doesn’t work.

Private police protection characterizes banana republics run by strongmen and drug pseudo-states.

If the fire department was run by an insurance company, and if my house were to catch fire, and I had no insurance, then my house would burn down. And so would yours.  This is the problem with insurance company run health care.

When you start thinking in terms of sustainability, “Cradle to Cradle,” The Chicken Manure in the Chesapeake, The Plastic Swirling Around the Oceans, even, Mercury, Arsenic, Carbon from Coal are Resources.

Markets for Manure -

1. Feed it to Algae -
2. Pull Carbon Dioxide out of the Air
3. Harvest for Glycerine / BioDiesel

In 1849 – “There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!” Today – “There’s Gold in them thar Garbage!”

Here’s the choice: Nike, Timberland, Seventh Generation, Patagonia, or Madoff Investments and the Mafia. Or, as noted by Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia’s CEO, “Business can produce food, cure disease, employee people, and generally enrich our lives. It can do good things and make a profit without losing it’s soul.”

Sustainability – harness a process, rather than “consume” a resource. Sustainable Energy: Wind & Solar: The Wind Blows, The Sun Shines, regardless of the presence or absence of wind turbines or solar panels.

• No Fuel,
• No Waste
• No Green House Gases
• No Radioactive Wastes
• No Mercury

We are here -

Earth From Space

Curtis Brown, president of the Student Government at the Borough of Manhattan Community College is following in the footsteps of a young Jack Abramoff. As reported in the New York Daily News:

May 13, 2008, Brown is trying to evict the New York Public Interest Research Group, NYPIRG from BMCC.The PIRGs have always focused on things like responsible government, consumer protection, and an informed citizenry making intelligent decisions. As chairman of the College Republicans, in 1983, Abramoff and his right-wing storm troopers did not “seek peaceful coexistence with the left.” They felt that their “job is to remove them from power permanently.” Brown is doing what Abramoff tried to do 25 years ago.

Here’s what Thomas Frank wrote in the New York Times, August 29, 2006, “Defunders of Liberty:”

Abramoff and his clean-cut campus radicals pushed their own “defund the left” campaign with characteristic elan, declaring war on Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups, or PIRG, environmental and consumer activist outfits that were funded by student activity fees on some campuses. The young conservatives were always careful to cast the issue as a matter of “student rights” versus political coercion, but Abramoff clearly saw it as an avenue to ideological victory. “When we win this one,” he boasted in 1983, “we’ll have done more to neutralize Ralph Nader than anyone else, ever.”

The NY Times article is re-published in the blogosphere, click here, and here, and can be googled or yahooed.

Abramoff, currently serving 70 months for conspiracy and fraud, has also admitted to tax evasion, defrauding his clients and conspiring to bribe public officials.