Going Green Reaches Economic Tipping Point at Wine and Shine 2009

Serious implications for vineyards! A few wineries in Cali are supposedly powering their operation from the sun, courtesy of solar installation and financing company, Conergy.

Being a sustainabilty company that started with wine, we’re loving the vibe. Wine and vineyards represent the essence of sustainability. Talk to any great winemaker and they’ll tell you they consider themselves part of the process, equal to the sun, the rain, the soil. And that cooperation rather than control is what leads to the magic of wine… we feel it when we taste it. That’s how this going green thing really tips… when people start feeling their connection to the world and to each other. Awareness that we evolved from the earth and we’re here to be part of nature. There’s a deep zen like quality to all of this, seeing a mountain and feeling one with it, equal to it. Part of the same field. Some say “ok, lets be hippies and live in cabins in the woods.” No, that’s not it. To the contrary its this awakening that will inspire us to create the incredible technologies and systems we need to power and renew the world. It’s already happening though. It’s simply our awareness of it that will create a coalescence.

Connectivity, health, and now renewable energy? Vineyards are going to be the power stations and spiritual centers of both human energy and electricity. You feel it?

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It’s all starting. The environmentalists have so much energy and knowledge, and now they have the all-important swagger. The surety within that they’ve been longing for to go to the politicians and have their way with them. They’re going to get what they want because as the planet heals, the (eco)nomy will heal, and people will heal. Disease will dissipate, spirit will be connected, and cashflow will become circular. Capitalism will die and ecolism will be concentrically born through the power of each person’s advocacy.

Something that excites me more than anything is the youth of the world. The interconnected spiritual nature that we all feel… the connection to each other and the connection to our world. The essence of the millennial generation.

Take a look at all the involvement and care that school sustainability programs are advocating. Every little clean up, recycling, or education program is huge now that everybody feels the impact. The critical mass needed to clean up the mess and make real change is here… for the human effort to surpass the industrial decay. The next few years are going to be unprecedented in global awareness, connectedness, debate, warfare, and ultimate renewal. We are going to reach the brink, the vesica piscis as I like to say, and then we’re going to bloom.  Thank you to everyone who has worked so hard for so many years to help bring about environmental awareness.

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I’ve been working with an amazing company here in Philadelphia called SEER Interactive and it hit me last week in our company wide meeting sitting around the whole office together with 11 women and 3 men. It was one of the best meetings I’ve ever been a part of. Not only was it relaxed, humorous, and productive, more so than most meetings I’ve attended, but I left with an overwhelming sense of peace… something I’ve never felt before in endless male dominated board, class, and conference rooms.

Sometimes I tend to feel that women possess the essence of the universe and men are simply expendable, thus the reason why man created religion and has scoured the earth with linear wasteful supply chains and chaotic ways of capitalistic thinking, because we are not in rhythm with the universe like women are. So instead we stomp around and kick up dust trying to feel what women do naturally… the connection.

There are so many problems with the world, and the reasoning could be infinite. I argue it is because of a simple disconnect between men and women, mainly in man’s lack of understanding of the enlightenment that women provide. It is the woman who is in rhythm with the world, the seasons, and the lunar cycles. They feel it, they don’t think it, they don’t have to. And they inspire men thru this feeling to create, to build… to fulfill our destiny. Everything that a man does, when taken down to its fundamental element is for a woman, the love of a woman. A man that does not love women, that does not cherish women and surround himself with strong women, cannot be enlightened… cannot create.

My personal enlightenment to all, to god, came from one thing… my love for the women in my life. There is no reason to get lost in the details and ideals. Everything is very simple. I think I’m starting to get it now.

I love women!!

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The LOHAS market in total represents $209 billion in consumer sales!

Personal Health: $118.03 billion

• Natural organic products
• Nutritional products
• Integrative health care
• Dietary supplements
• Mind body spirit products

Green Building: $50 billion

• Home Certification
• EnergyStar appliances
• Sustainable flooring
• Renewable energy systems (solar)
• Wood alternatives

Eco Tourism: $24.17 billion

• Eco-tourism travel
• Eco-adventure travel

Natural Lifestyles: $10.6 billion

• Indoor & outdoor furnishings
• Organic cleaning supplies
• Compact fluorescent/LED lights
• Social change philanthropy
• Apparel

Alternative Transportation: $6.12 billion

• Hybrid vehicles
• Biodiesel fuel
• Carsharing programs (pickup pal)

Alternative Energy: $300 million

• Renewable energy credits
• Green pricing

Biggest Market Growth:

• Retail Sales +28%
• Organic foods +15%
• Solar energy +20%
• Eco-tourism +23%

*Information provided courtesy of Lohas.com

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The green movement has no doubt tipped into the public’s consciousness, and yet still hasn’t been consolidated into a feasible, economic starting point. I attempted to unify the myriad of renewable energy and consumption/waste innovations in my last post with the concept of ‘nature to the grid’, and will now attempt to expand on it further. The question is where can the average person start incorporating this concept into their life to not just benefit their ecolistic mentality and environment, but to save and make more money?

In continuance of our nature to the grid dialogue, I’ve come to the conclusion that it starts, from both an ecological and economical standpoint, with people taking a proactive role in turning their home into a renewable power station… turning their home into a ‘tree’ if you will.

This intuition has been a long build for me, from the passion that has developed over my life as an environmental scientist, to my first company doing insurance adjusting assessment and appraisals on homes damaged by hurricanes, to the Powering the Planet event at the World Science Festival in NYC last year where representatives of all areas of green power concluded that the home needs to become a power station, to the West Coast Green conference in Silicon Valley last September, which I thought was going to be filled with crazy energy innovations, and was instead 90% green building companies, not to mention a huge model green home in the middle of the trade floor. When you take all this into consideration and add on the bad debt/mortgages causing the current economic collapse, the realization hits. Our world is dealing with a natural resource crisis in building our homes and buildings, and the place to innovate and make money, the place to really seed this whole green movement is with the home.

Turning the home into an energy efficient power station is the way to take the green/clean/sustainable movement to the world and actually change it… one home at a time. If you use thermoregulated windows and wall materials, energy efficient home appliances, and solar installations and fuel cells, you’re on your way to having a self-sustaining renewable home that doesn’t need energy from the grid. It’s almost like a revitalization of the cottage industry, in which everyone can get involved with their own home, and those that are successful with energy efficiency and renewable energy systems will reach zero energy (needing no energy from the grid), and even produce a surplus to sell back to the grid! Add in growing your own food or buying locally, collecting your own rainwater, recycling systems that pay you for your garbage and prevent materials from heading to the landfill, and you’re home becomes a renewable system that contributes to a renewable community. Think of the home as an individual tree contributing to the forest… it needs to pull it’s own weight by generating its own energy and then sharing that with the ecosystem in a symbiotic relationship. Now that’s nature to the grid.

I had a great time with my friend Doug of Faithful Investments in Philadelphia this past week. Doug is a property investor/developer who likes to buy worn down houses, perform complete renovations, and then rent out to tenants. Say we test out various green building technologies over the coming years, making the homes more energy efficient, allowing us to charge a premium on rent by lowering utility bills for tenants, and upping the asset value of the house… not to mention helping the environment.

This seems likes such a practical solution to restore faith in the banks and the mortgage industry, as it will drastically boost the asset value of the home as well as the passive income potential! It’s investors like Doug that are in a position to make great change, as most people are clueless and aren’t able to afford green consultants to tell them what to do, and certainly aren’t in a position to get a loan with the state of the economy.

So let’s take it a step at a time. Work with real estate investors and developers (who have clout with banks) to implement green innovations that will make homes more profitable, while allowing the economy to gradually recover. Basing off this experience, develop a green building program to help the average person upgrade their home with energy efficient materials and renewable energy systems, which they can capitalize on when the lending industry has restored confidence and is granting loans again.

Conserve energy, lower utility bills, generate your own power that reverses the grid and puts passive income in your pocket. The home is the testing ground. This is where it begins.

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The clean tech economy is taking off, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what will actually work. What concept will bring it all together?

From a production (energy) standpoint, you’ve got solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, hydro, and ethanol. And with consumption, you have to ask how are we going to create products, how are we going to deal with waste, and where are we going to get our food and water?

When you start looking at all these variables, you seem to get to the root of the sustainability problem… it’s very fragmented. There needs to be a new holistic approach that attacks the whole issue. Where do we get our energy, our food, and a new paradigm for products and waste? To us, the answer is quite clear… it’s found in nature, where the essence is growth. Grow our food, grow our energy, grow our resources. It’s all about growth energy… bioenergy.

Currently, the word ‘bioenergy’ is somewhat limited so I’m going to define how it’s currently perceived and then go into how its meaning has the ability to grow itself.

Right now, bioenergy means the act of using organic waste products and/or algae and other microorganisms to create ethanol fuel or some other type of crude oil replacement. The company leading the way is Coskata, backed by legendary Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla. It was recently voted Hottest Company in Bioenergy. They are doing some incredibly innovative stuff, and claim to be able to produce ethanol for less than $1/gallon with their hybrid gasification and fermentation system. As Khosla says, he is a pragmentalist, not an environmentalist, and his company is surely capitalizing on the growing market for ethanol fuel. Yet, you have to believe that although ethanol burns much cleaner than gasoline, it is only a short term fix… it’s almost like putting a band-aid on a cut that needs stitches. More so, with an electric car infrastructure on the horizon, doesn’t it seem ethanol may not even be a part of our future?

This leads us to our broader concept of bioenergy. The grapethinkers are obviously inspired by nature and have always found photosynthesis fascinating. The method by which the chlorophyll molecule uses sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to create energy in the form of glucose and oxygen, ultimately the components that power nature and our own bodies. Some incredible scientists at MIT, one of which (Dan Nocera) I was fortunate enough to meet at the World Science Festival in NYC last May, are currently all over this and have invented a contraption that mimicks photosynthesis. The device uses sunlight to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, which can be stored in the form of hydrogen fuel. This is ground breaking because it makes solar energy, more specifically photosynthesis, seem to be the sustainability solution. Right now, solar cells are completely reliant on silicon (and a few other innovations), making them cost ineffective due to the price of materials, and more so because of the inefficiency of the PV cell in converting sunlight to energy and having the capacity to store this energy. By incorporating these new photosynthetic systems into solar panels, homes and office buildings will be able to generate power for their operation during the day and store excess energy in the form of hydrogen fuel in an on-site fuel cell, which can then be used at night for normal usage and electric vehicle recharging.

If you install these photosynthetic solar cells into buildings, use biodegradable innovations like Ecovative Design’s products, and start the process of urban farming, we will begin to grow our homes and buildings into living, breathing, self-sustaining bio-towers that produce enough energy, food, and other bio-materials to supply the inhabitants of that location as well as excess to send/sell back to the grid. With this, we will truly start to model the growth of nature.

Maybe if we can succeed in incorporating this paradigm shift into the way we produce our materials, food, and energy, then the mindset can move into the public mentality. Then we can grow our minds and our relationships and our businesses. Organic growth opposed to the fundamental mindset of immediate gratification and synthesis that has manifested itself in Big Pharma, Big Oil, and all the big consumer product companies. A whole new perception of bioenergy.

I’ll expand more on renewable homes, urban farming/biotowers, bio-materials as well as the ‘growth’ theory in future nature to the grid posts. It comes down to developing a symbiotic relationship with nature and embracing what has evolved over billions of years as inspiration for an ecolistic world.

Nature to the grid!

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The wikis and search results were great. Here’s the ‘Gifts for All Budgets‘ wiki for Christmas presents. I love the organization and how it breaks it down for you to easily navigate and find what you’re looking for. We love our lighting here at GrapeThinking so I made my way over to the ‘Indoor Light Fixtures‘ wiki. I clicked ceiling fixtures, and it took me to a page with 1000s of different products it found. I loved the 3 filter tools: a scroll bar for price, a drop down for brand, and a color spectrum. The AJAX functionality was amazing in how it immediately updated the search results when a change was made in one of the tools. This was a huge helper in finding what I was looking for in the sea of products it churned up.

Another really cool thing is when you hover your mouse over the ‘See All Stores’ button, it automatically pops up 5 online stores and the price. You click the store price and it takes you right to the item on that store’s page, ready to buy. ShopWiki has the chance to develop a very healthy affiliate model if they succeed at gaining traffic and users.

Here are a few sustainable wikis/searches I found useful:

Green Guide

Organic wine

Energy Star Rated

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His team includes:

Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the EPA: former commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection

Nancy Sutley, Chairman of White House Council on Environmental Quality: former energy advisor to California governor, Gray Davis

Carol M. Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change: former EPA administrator under Bill Clinton

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior: Colorado Senator

Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture: former Iowa Governor

The carbon tax is favored obviously because it lends predictability to energy prices, whereas the cap-and-trade system tends to be more volatile and discourages investment in carbon-free technologies (clean coal, energy efficiency, renewable energy).

The way cap-and trade works is the government sets a cap or limit on the amount of pollution that can be emitted. Companies are then issued a set number of emission allowances/permits, with which they trade amongst each other based on the amount of pollution they need to emit for operations. This system obviously rewards the seller for limiting emissions and punishes the buyer for needing to emit more. If the monitoring and enforcement of this system is sound and the ‘cap’ limit and initial allocation of allowances is determined using an appropriate process such as grandfathering provision based on historical emissions, then the cap-and-trade system can actually be more effective than a carbon tax by creating a marketplace of competition to solve the issue. However, the stipulations and costs to enforce this system may be too great, not to mention the potential corruption the system tends to encourage.

The carbon tax might be the simplest, most straightforward way to address emissions. The tax revenues would not only offset other taxes, be used to fund environmental projects, and give incentives for clean tech investment, but could also be allocated to start paying off the insane amount of debt that the US has racked up this year trying to prevent our economic collapse!

Whatever course of action we take, I’ve got faith Obama, Chu, and gang will figure it out.

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A holistic philosophy on products, services, businesses, organizations, and humanity as a whole that advocates growth and change through systems thinking. I recently found an amazing write up at the LOHAS website about how this philosophy will help the business culture of the future.

Here’s my favorite excerpt:

“For the last 250 years, we have been living in what Peter Senge calls the ‘industrial age bubble’, based on a ‘take, make, waste’ worldview. Behind this way of life has been a set of attitudes and beliefs about economics, wealth, and business. We tend to think of these beliefs as “common sense”, or even as objective natural law. But in fact, they are received knowledge, the inheritance of centuries of cultural, political, and philosophical tradition. Our way of business is based on learned behavior, not natural law.

With this worldview, we’ve created unprecedented wealth, knowledge and communication. And, we’ve created environmental toxicity, cheap throw away products, denatured industrially-produced food, and a culture of low self-esteem and spiritual poverty.”

So how do we change? How do we grow?

Bio-inspiration is very interesting to us. Recognizing that many of the solutions to our worlds’ most urgent problems are right in front of our face, in nature. Anything from how plants use water and sunlight to produce energy to natural supplements being the preventative medicine to perceiving businesses as living systems much like forests, and even to feeling a oneness with nature that fills that spiritual void many of us feel inside. The answers are right there, we just have to see it and feel it, and take action. If we can incorporate this way of feeling and thinking into our own lives as well as our products, services, and business operations, we can work toward helping the planet become what it was meant to be and pretty much already was until humans arrived… a living, breathing, renewable system in itself.

There is no doubt a groundswell forming behind this message and when it reaches critical mass, it will sweep the world and help bring about the unity we need to start healing. So who’s gonna do it? Who is going to help bring about this change? Well, for starters, we’ve just elected a great man to the presidency of the United States. He is a symbol of unity and as he surrounds himself with more and more incredible advisers, his message will be honed, and he will be able to deliver it to the American people and the world in a way that touches their hearts and inspires them to find their own answers inside.

On our end, we see ourselves as bio-inspired marketers and technologists. The grapethinkers incorporate this understanding and awareness into our own personal lives, and now feel ready to build an organization that incorporates it as well. I talked about similar philosophies in a previous post on biodynamic agriculture and anthroposophy. The idea of a living system where people are simply parts of the whole. This is why I love wineries so much because I think that they’re physical locations that people can touch and be a part of, that gives tangible meaning to the words behind the message. It’s the essence of Zen… you can’ t just contemplate these things as intellectual ideas, you have to experience the world and feel it for yourself. I had to go all the way to Alaska this year and then ride a motorcyle to LA to start understanding what it is and start feeling it… everybody obviously can’t do that, so wouldn’t it be cool if you could go to a biodynamic estate and get the holisitic experience?

I’ve come to believe that another big part of this understanding sweeping the world is an acceptance of evolution and what evolution really is. That the planet has grown over time and that people and other life are simply extensions of the one life force that is our planet, our galaxy, and ultimately our universe. Just as our life force as human beings is comprised of all the individual living cells that make up our bodies. Seeing the recurring pattern in nature. However, many devout religious sects have trouble believing in evolution, for many reasons… it takes away the crave for afterlife, it’s below them to think we evolved from apes, or most significantly it implies a lack of belief in God. But what if evolution is simply the force of God? Human beings didn’t just appear one day, did they? It’s a humility that I think the world needs to find, a beautiful insignificance if you will. When we see a mountain or a tree or another person, we feel one with that ‘other’ object. We overcome the dualism and delusional developed sense of self that has evolved, and find unity within ourselves and with the world around us. Yet, it’s only when we find and feel this individually that we can form organizations that feel it as well.

What lies ahead is unknown, and it may take great hardship and struggle over the coming decades to reach this point of enlightenment in our world. We’re currently in the middle of one of the greatest economic crises ever, and are fighting multiple wars in the middle east. The world is reaching a boiling point, and I don’t know if it’s going to spill over, or if the movement can gain enough momentum fast enough to calm things down and begin the healing. It’s important to keep spreading the message and working together, but yet sometimes creative destruction is necessary.

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Here’s a company that’s doing something very special. I watched Ron’s presentation at VLAB (MIT/Stanford Venture Lab) Green Tech for the Consumer Market this past January and got very excited. Then after hearing Trae Vassallo’s glowing presentation at the Silicon Valley West Coast Green conference, I knew they were out to change the world.

Recycle Bank is influencing the creation of a cutting edge process called single stream recycling. They supply their customers with a Recycle Bank garbage bin in which they can throw all of their paper, plastic, metal, and glass. The bin has an RFID microchip inside, which is read by special levers retrofitted onto city garbage trucks that weigh the amount of garbage. This value is sent to each individual consumer’s online Recycle Bank account, where it is converted into Recycle Bank Reward Points at a ratio of 2.5 reward points for each pound of garbage. These Reward Points can then be redeemed at local businesses that consumers normally buy from, such as Whole Foods, Bed Bath & Beyond, and many more. What an incredible incentive to get people recycling!

With such a dynamic program that will certainly increase the recycling rate, RB gains the credibility to negotiate exclusive long term contracts with city municipalities to deliver garbage from Recycle Bank customers to material recovery facilities (MRF) and in essence divert trash from going into a landfill. This creates great economic value for the city by allowing them to sell the trash to manufacturers such as Coca Cola or Pepsi instead of paying landfills to take the garbage. Wow, make money instead of pay money? and Recycle Bank takes a cut off the money saved from landfill diversion rather than the money earned from sales to manufacturers. A very smart marketing decision that influences cities to broadcast how much money they made in a year, which in turn gets other cities excited about the Recycle Bank program.

This is big for 3 reasons:

1) high profitability with exclusive municipality contracts and a valuable online advertising engine

2) environmental health through the elimination of waste

3) the ability to influence consumption behavior

This 3rd reason is what really fascinates me.  With other green businesses, sure it’s great to benefit the environment, but obviously the price has to be right for adoption. And yet, even when the price is right, people are lazy and don’t want to change their behavior. They might call their utility company and say I want green power, if and only if its cheaper (Austin Energy). With Recycle Bank, the single stream recycling program that they’re pioneering is enough to influence people to actually start recycling. And even more so, RB gains the ability to influence consumer purchases with their Reward Points system. For example, they’re planning to roll out a program that gives people greater rewards for shopping at ‘green’ businesses.  Organic food stores, LEED certified establishments, and even specific products.

This is a business that’s right in front of the American consumer’s face… they can touch it, they can feel it, they can put more money in their pocket, while being guided to a healthier life and changing their local environment. Recycle Bank becomes an incredible solution to the entire consumption side of the sustainability equation. We still need the west coast to figure out solar and fuel cells so we can get off coal and oil, but this is a practical solution to get us moving in the right direction. I’m lovin it!

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