How To Measure Green

One of the frustrating things about changing to a sustainable practice model is finding ways to measure the total impact of your actions. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, after two years of work, has just launched a framework for measuring this very thing.

Oil Addiction Hastens Desert Planet Earth

A new report from WWF-UK warns that efforts to extract so-called “unconventional oil” from shales and sands in Canada and Colorado will produce a far heavier carbon footprint than existing oil recovery systems - thus hastening, in the effort to gain the last drop of oil, the dangers of climate change.

Tar sand and shale extraction increases emissions as much as eightfold, while also destroying vast areas of forest.

Disruptive Obama

Is government the friend of sustainability or its enemy? The most generous opinion on this matter from sources I consult is that government is slow, and this alone renders it inadequate to the emergency needs of the current global eco-decay.

Enter now the disruptive force of Senator Obama, whose adherents at any rally are notable for their diversity, sprawling across the whole demographic spectrum of America.

Obama is a disruptive force like any other disruptive technology. And disruption is always worth a generous look, to see if change for the better may be coming.

Sustainable Business Practices

Going green is stabbed with a two-pronged fork: the complicated and slow effort required, and the low odds of getting any positive encouragement along the way. So how does a business start developing sustainable business practices, and go green?

Sustainable Business Requires Customer Loyalty

A sustainable business begins with your customers. If you don’t have customers it doesn’t matter how eco-positive your business model is. A sustainable business should start with having a customer base that will endure for a long time. How about customer loyalty that lasts for, say, seven generations? That would be a sustainable business.

Sustainability Gets Weak Publicity

The 2008 UT Sustainable Business Summit illustrated first hand the two biggest surprises for any business going green. First, transforming business procedures into sustainable practice is extremely complicated. And secondly, when you do start making the transition, you’ll find it surprisingly difficult to talk about.

If companies are surprised at the number of tiny steps it requires to develop sustainable procedures just in one small part of their system, they recoil in amazement when they announce what they’re doing, and get slapped for it.

Sustainable Business Summit

I’m off to the Sustainable Business Summit at UT in Austin this evening. I’ll report back after the weekend is over.