I tell ya, this is such exciting news ! If you have any understanding of the amount of power required to fuel the electricity needs of vast server farms 24-7, you would undersatnd why this is so critically important, not only for the immediate solutions for Google, but for the ‘corporate image’ that this kind of responsible and sustainable initiative this example puts forth !

Google Inc. said on Tuesday the Web services and online advertising group plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in coming years to promote a new push to encourage cheap renewable electricity.

The project, known as Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, is hiring engineers and targeted investment financing at advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other new technologies, Google said.

Eventually, the Mountain View, California-based company said it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars in “breakthrough renewable energy projects which generate positive returns.”

“Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal” is hiring engineers and energy experts to lead its research and development work. It said it will begin on solar thermal technology and will also investigate enhanced geothermal systems and other areas.

Page said Google gained experience in designing large-scale energy projects through its investments in energy-efficient computer data centers. The roofs of Google’s headquarters buildings also boasts one of the biggest solar energy installations of any U.S. company.

“We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale and produce it cheaper than from coal,” Page said in the statement.

(Reporting by Eric Auchard in San Francisco; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Andre Grenon) Link

Google is, in effect, taking advantage of its growing mountain of cash, global brand recognition and mushrooming market capitalization as a pulpit to campaign for alternative energy. The company’s leaders argue that the time is ripe for investments in innovative research to cut energy costs.

“Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades,” Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and president of products, said in a statement.

One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.

Google is seeking to capitalize on the recent excitement among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to apply the risk taking that computer, biotech and Internet businesses are famous for to the field of alternative energy production.

Google’s latest moves come as the price of a barrel of oil nears $100 and coal, which produces 40 percent of the world’s electricity, faces regulatory and environmental pressures that could drive up prices.

Working with its philanthropic arm Google.org, the company said it plans to spend tens of millions of dollars in 2008 on research and development and related efforts in renewable energy.

“Buy American” and “Long Tail” are just so last year; marketers are all about good old-fashioned customer satisfaction and retention. Green marketing was the most popular write-in buzzword, while the least-popular concepts, named by fewer than 40%, were Six Sigma, game theory and faith-based or religion-based marketing.

The Marketing Executives Networking Group voted Seth Godin the top marketing guru.

More Info:
Chart: Buzzword Breakdown
The marketing concepts respondents pay the most attention to — and those they ignore
More than 600 of the group’s 1,657 members responded to the survey.

The top buzzwords for this group are traditional concepts such as segmentation, brand loyalty and competitive intelligence.

A few addendums
However, the old-school thinking was followed closely in the ranking by new-school media concepts including search-engine optimization, data mining and personalization.

“It says to me that you can’t walk away from the basics, but it’s also a complex world, and you can’t ignore the new ideas either,” said Chandra Chaterji, an executive at GSD&M’s Idea City, who is on MENG’s board of directors.

“It adds to the growing complexity of the CMO function, as well as marketing in general.”

“Concepts such as Long Tail and Six Sigma will continue to wane in popularity, while the renewed interest in classical issues such as customer satisfaction/retention and segmentation will continue to draw increased attention from marketers tired of these cute buzzwords,” said Tom Anderson, managing partner of Anderson Analytics, in an e-mail. He added that most of the trends mentioned fell into four broader categories: traditional marketing, global issues, new digital media and green marketing.

The study also queried MENG members about a host of other topics, including most important marketing/business gurus, key demographic groups and best business books.

Godin, Jobs top list
Seth Godin is their top marketing guru, followed at No. 2 by Apple’s Steve Jobs, whose iPhone and iPod success seems to have pushed the entrepreneur and CEO to near the top of the marketing heap. A mix of typical marketing experts and more-business-oriented execs rounded out the top 10, in order: Peter Drucker, Warren Buffet, David Aaker, Tom Peters, Jim Collins, Jack Welch, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Ries and Phil Kotler. Former U.S. vice president and current global-warming guru Al Gore made the top 20. A handful of the executives also chose “myself,” Mr. Anderson said.

Some of the gurus also made another list in the study — as authors of the last-read and most-recommended business books. The most common recent read was “Good to Great” by Mr. Collins, followed by “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman and “Blink” by Mr. Gladwell. When asked to rate the books on a five-point scale (five being the best), the highest-ranked was Eliyahu Goldratt’s business novel “The Goal,” published in 1984, with a 4.7 (although it ranked No. 14 in popularity), followed by the newer “The 4-Hour Work Week” by 29-year-old Timothy Ferriss, with a 4.4 rating (ranked No. 9 in popularity).

When the marketers were asked what one business book they would recommend to fellow marketers, the top answer was “Good to Great” again, followed by “Positioning” by Mr. Ries and Jack Trout and “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey.

As for the most important demographic groups, the usually overlooked baby boomers were deemed important by 88% of respondents, followed closely by Generation X (86%), Hispanic/Latino (86%) and women (85%). At the bottom of the list were Generation Z (72%) and urban (72%).

“What our members are saying is they’re all important, and they can’t walk away from any of them,” Link

Ronald Bailey | February 2002 Print Edition

The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, by Bjorn Lomborg, New York: Cambridge University Press, 496 pages, $27.95

Modern environmentalism, born of the radical movements of the 1960s, has often made recourse to science to press its claims that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But this environmentalism has never really been a matter of objectively describing the world and calling for the particular social policies that the description implies.

Environmentalism is an ideology, very much like Marxism, which pretended to base its social critique on a “scientific” theory of economic relations. Like Marxists, environmentalists have had to force the facts to fit their theory. Environmentalism is an ideology in crisis: The massive, accumulating contradictions between its pretensions and the actual state of the world can no longer be easily explained away.

The publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, a magnificent and important book by a former member of Greenpeace, deals a major blow to that ideology by superbly documenting a response to environmental doomsaying. The author, Bjorn Lomborg, is an associate professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. On a trip to the United States a few years ago, Lomborg picked up a copy of Wired that included an article about the late “doomslayer” Julian Simon.

Simon, a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland, claimed that by most measures, the lot of humanity is improving and the world’s natural environment was not critically imperiled. Lomborg, thinking it would be an amusing and instructive exercise to debunk a “right-wing” anti-environmentalist American, assigned his students the project of finding the “real” data that would contradict Simon’s outrageous claims.

Lomborg and his students discovered that Simon was essentially right, and that the most famous environmental alarmists (Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown, former Vice President Al Gore, Silent Spring author Rachel Carson) and the leading environmentalist lobbying groups (Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth) were wrong. It turns out that the natural environment is in good shape, and the prospects of humanity are actually quite good.

Lomborg begins with “the Litany” of environmentalist doom, writing: “We are all familiar with the Litany….Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet’s species are becoming extinct in vast numbers….The world’s ecosystem is breaking down….We all know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring.” Lomborg notes that there is just one problem with the Litany: “It does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence.”

Lomborg then proceeds to demolish the Litany. He shows how, time and again, ideological environmentalists misuse, distort, and ignore the vast reams of data that contradict their dour visions. In the course of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg demonstrates that the environmentalist lobby is just that, a collection of interest groups that must hype doom in order to survive monetarily and politically.

Lomborg notes, “As the industry and farming organizations have an obvious interest in portraying the environment as just-fine and no-need-to-do-anything, the environmental organizations also have a clear interest in telling us that the environment is in a bad state, and that we need to act now. And the worse they can make this state appear, the easier it is for them to convince us we need to spend more money on the environment rather than on hospitals, kindergartens, etc. Of course, if we were equally skeptical of both sorts of organization there would be less of a problem. But since we tend to treat environmental organizations with much less skepticism, this might cause a grave bias in our understanding of the state of the world.” Lomborg’s book amply shows that our understanding of the state of the world is indeed biased.

So what is the real state of humanity and the planet?

Human life expectancy in the developing world has more than doubled in the past century, from 31 years to 65. Since 1960, the average amount of food per person in the developing countries has increased by 38 percent, and although world population has doubled, the percentage of malnourished poor people has fallen globally from 35 percent to 18 percent, and will likely fall further over the next decade, to 12 percent. In real terms, food costs a third of what it did in the 1960s. Lomborg points out that increasing food production trends show no sign of slackening in the future.

What about air pollution? Completely uncontroversial data show that concentrations of sulfur dioxide are down 80 percent in the U.S. since 1962, carbon monoxide levels are down 75 percent since 1970, nitrogen oxides are down 38 percent since 1975, and ground level ozone is down 30 percent since 1977. These trends are mirrored in all developed countries.

Lomborg shows that claims of rapid deforestation are vastly exaggerated. One United Nations Food and Agriculture survey found that globally, forest cover has been reduced by a minuscule 0.44 percent since 1961. The World Wildlife Fund claims that two-thirds of the world’s forests have been lost since the dawn of agriculture; the reality is that the world still has 80 percent of its forests. What about the Brazilian rainforests? Eighty-six percent remain uncut, and the rate of clearing is falling. Lomborg also debunks the widely circulated claim that the world will soon lose up to half of its species. In fact, the best evidence indicates that 0.7 percent of species might be lost in the next 50 years if nothing is done. And of course, it is unlikely that nothing will be done.

Finally, Lomborg shows that global warming caused by burning fossil fuels is unlikely to be a catastrophe. Why? First, because actual measured temperatures aren’t increasing nearly as fast as the computer climate models say they should be — in fact, any increase is likely to be at the low end of the predictions, and no one thinks that would be a disaster. Second, even in the unlikely event that temperatures were to increase substantially, it will be far less costly and more environmentally sound to adapt to the changes rather than institute draconian cuts in fossil fuel use.

The best calculations show that adapting to global warming would cost $5 trillion over the next century. By comparison, substantially cutting back on fossil fuel emissions in the manner suggested by the Kyoto Protocol would cost between $107 and $274 trillion over the same period. (Keep in mind that the current yearly U.S. gross domestic product is $10 trillion.) Such costs would mean that people living in developing countries would lose over 75 percent of their expected increases in income over the next century. That would be not only a human tragedy, but an environmental one as well, since poor people generally have little time for environmental concerns.

Where does Lomborg fall short? He clearly understands that increasing prosperity is the key to improving human and environmental health, but he often takes for granted the institutions of property and markets that make progress and prosperity possible. His analysis, as good as it is, fails to identify the chief cause of most environmental problems. In most cases, imperiled resources such as fisheries and airsheds are in open-access commons where the incentive is for people to take as much as possible of the resource before someone else beats them to it. Since they don’t own the resource, they have no incentive to protect and conserve it.

Clearly, regulation has worked to improve the state of many open-access commons in developed countries such as the U.S. Our air and streams are much cleaner than they were 30 years ago, in large part due to things like installing catalytic converters on automobiles and building more municipal sewage treatment plants. Yet there is good evidence that assigning private property rights to these resources would have resulted in a faster and cheaper cleanup. Lomborg’s analysis would have been even stronger had he more directly taken on ideological environmentalism’s bias against markets. But perhaps that is asking for too much in an already superb book.

“Things are better now,” writes Lomborg, “but they are still not good enough.” He’s right. Only continued economic growth will enable the 800 million people who are still malnourished to get the food they need; only continued economic growth will let the 1.2 billion who don’t have access to clean water and sanitation obtain those amenities. It turns out that ideological environmentalism, with its hostility to economic growth and technological progress, is the biggest threat to the natural environment and to the hopes of the poorest people in the world for achieving better lives.

“The very message of the book,” Lomborg concludes, is that “children born today — in both the industrialized world and the developing countries — will live longer and be healthier, they will get more food, a better education, a higher standard of living, more leisure time and far more possibilities — without the global environment being destroyed. And that is a beautiful world.”

For pregnant women and children, the benefits are worth the higher price

Food certified under U.S. Dept. of Agriculture regulations as organic must be produced without most synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. Antibiotics, growth hormones, and feed made from animal parts are also banned.

Is organic worth the extra money? Research has yet to prove an adverse health effect from consuming the low levels of pesticides commonly found in U.S. food. But for the most vulnerable groups — children and pregnant women — going organic whenever possible for fruits and vegetables that carry the heaviest pesticide load makes sense. For organic meat, poultry, eggs, and milk, the direct health benefit is less clear. It might come down to your willingness to pay more to avoid supporting certain agricultural practices, such as antibiotic use in animals, which could promote resistant bacterial strains, or the use of growth hormones, which could prematurely wear down the animal.

Even organic advocates say certain fruits and vegetables are probably not worth the premium. For example, at the Atlanta Whole Foods, organic bananas cost 78 cents a pound, 30 cents more than regular bananas. But there’s almost no health benefit to buying organic in this case, according to Charles Benbrook, technical director of the nonprofit Organic Center for Education & Promotion, founded with the support of the industry’s Organic Trade Assn. Any pesticide residue is probably discarded along with the peel.

REPEAT OFFENDERS
Other produce contains several times the amount of pesticides as the organic equivalents, and the residue can’t be peeled or washed away. Some 98% of the peaches tested by the USDA in 2002 showed evidence of at least one pesticide (www.ams.usda.gov/science/pdp). Other repeat offenders over the years include apples, strawberries, and pears — fruits children gobble as finger food.

That’s worrisome given that contaminants pose the biggest risk to children and fetuses. Pesticides have been shown to cross the placenta during pregnancy, and a recent study by scientists at the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health in New York found a link between pesticide use in New York apartments and impaired fetal growth. Another study, from the University of Washington in Seattle, found that preschoolers fed conventional diets had six times the level of certain pesticides in their urine as those who ate organic foods. And a 2003 report from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention detected twice the level of some pesticides in the urine of children as in that of adults.

Few doubt that high doses of pesticides can cause neurological or reproductive damage. With infant reproductive organs still forming and the brain developing through age 12, and with young livers and immune systems less able to rid bodies of contaminants, eating organic is more important for children and pregnant or breast-feeding women.

But even then, the argument for some foods is less compelling. While 47% of the produce sampled by the USDA in 2002 had detectable pesticide residues, only 16% of grains and 15% of meat tested did. Most of the residues found in meat (almost always in the fat) were from long-banned chemicals like DDT, which remain in the environment and is not a problem organic farming methods can solve.

Widespread use of antibiotics and growth hormones is a larger issue for those considering organic meat, poultry, eggs, and milk. Here, the major health benefit to consumers is indirect. Antibiotic use in animals helps promote antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, explains Urvashi Rangan, director of eco-labels.org, a site developed by Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports. And while the U.S. Food & Drug Administration says the growth hormone used in cattle is virtually identical to what cows naturally produce, consumer groups such as Consumers Union argue that milk from treated cows has higher levels of a growth factor linked to increased cancer risk.

With meat, a more recent concern is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. The disease spreads when cows ingest animal feed made with parts from dead animals. The human form of the illness, Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease, is believed to be caused by eating contaminated beef. It is always fatal. The risk of contracting the disease, however, is low. The U.S. has had only one confirmed case of mad cow disease, and the only American case of CJD involved a woman who contracted it in Great Britain.

Whether to shell out more for organic beef will depend on your budget — and how seriously you take the threat of mad cow disease. Other ways to lower the odds include avoiding processed meats such as hot dogs and preground hamburger that might contain bits of brain or spinal cord and eschewing cuts sold with the bone, says Michael Hansen, a senior research associate at Consumers Union.

The next product in line for organic certification is fish. The USDA is studying what such certification would involve.  Link

This is the real question.  It is not about assuaging guilt though buying into borderline marketing schemes, or ever outright scams.  As to whether the company commits to planting a tree for your opening an account with them somewhere or whether the only tree that was planed was the one in your mind, when it comes to ‘green’, the idea behind this is really about sustainable strategies living here on Planet Earth, not Planet Marketing.

I have just recently picked up a client that caused me to really pause and drill down into the keyword space that ‘green’ describes:

Overall attitude that wants to be expressed:

” Integrity-cultural and moral integrity - environmental ethics w/in the process of production
Traditional methods, local sources for materials
Custom, bespoke, craftsmanship, environmentally responsible - sustainable
Sam is supporting - building a resource by teaching people to become weavers, also in Nepal supporting school and medical facilities in community.”

environmental ethic, environmentally responsible, sustainable, community, bespoke, environmental ethics

I was amazed how little original content that there is out there dealing with these words/keywords.

There’s a lot of opportunistic positioning going on with the use of the term ‘green’.  Do you think ? Global warming is a serious issue. Running out of energy is a serious issue. The people who are concerned about these issues aren’t fooling around. And neither should be marketing industry. If you’ve got a compelling story to tell, and the tools and methodologies to back it up, the more than merrier. No one person or company is going to have a lock on solving this problem. But if you’re just looking for another way to spin your latest feature, let’s do everyone a favor and show a bit of restraint.

In recent months we’ve seen a wave of corporate announcements about green data center technology and environmentally-friendly IT. Some are genuinely substantive and progressive, and others less so. Chuck Hollis, the VP of technology alliances at EMC, is concerned that it’s becoming harder to tell the difference:

I’m watching with mixed emotions as more and more vendors start to describe their products as addressing challenges associated with reducing power and cooling in the data center. On one hand, clearly it’s a monumental challenge — and opportunity. On the other hand, I’m starting to see vendors with thinner and thinner claims start to add this message to their marketing drumbeat. That’s not a good thing.

We call on the marketing community to offer substantive ways for customers to evaluate environmental marketing claims, arguing that the issue is “too important to be messing around.”  ‘Nuff Said !

Environmental activists are encouraging people to find alternatives to bottled water — and water bottles. Cities like San Francisco have banned city agencies from buying bottled water, even the big jugs for water coolers. They’d rather have folks drink tap water.

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson calls bottled water “the greatest marketing scam of all time.” He wants his city’s employees to refrain from buying bottled water and fill up reusable bottles with tap water instead.

The statistics leading up to the tap water movement are staggering: 37 billion bottles’ worth in 2005. That number comes from Food and Water Watch, a Washington-based group that is behind a “Take Back the Tap” campaign.
According to Jennifer Mueller, a spokeswoman for the group, an estimated 47 million gallons of oil are used to produce the bottles that Americans drink each year.
Another downside is that bottled water generally does not have fluoridation, which is essential for young children.
Oh, and then there is the expense; even the lowliest brand of water usually goes for at least $1 for the half-liter bottle.
So, if the guilt is kicking in right about now and you’d like to make a positive change — but not be far from some H20 — what are your options?

UltraSuperGreen Homes is designed with passive solar features and is super insulated. It blends architecturally with its surroundings while fitting the aesthetic tastes of its owner. Passive and active solar design is suited to the home’s specific climate and higher grade materials means less maintenance. Sunlight homes are comfortable, beautiful and a joy to live in.

UltraSuperGreen Homes have become popular in recent years for a variety of reasons, which is fortuitous because size influences a home’s impact on our natural resources more profoundly than anything else. A small home takes up less land, uses fewer materials in construction and less energy to operate and maintain.

Considering how many people will live there, how large should a home be? It could be smaller than you think. Some spaces are used by everyone in the family, in effect reducing the square footage used per person. A well-designed home has public places that comfortably fit small groups, and places where family members can have privacy. A well-designed small home should have comfortable public and private spaces too, but the fat is trimmed from space that doesn’t serve a specific purpose.

The challenge in designing environmentally conscious homes is to create a home that works for the people who will live there without it’s being wasteful or extravagant. The trick is to choose materials that work efficiently and are made to last and that harness renewable natural resources to assist the home with heating, cooling and lighting. Energy saving techniques used in small homes make larger homes for families more efficient too.

Gandhi quoteUltraSuperGreen Homes was created to showcase our next generation of Sunlight homes; those designed to work in even closer harmony with nature to utilize the sun’s limitless energy for day lighting and natural heating. Other materials and design techniques provide natural summer cooling to make our homes more comfortable throughout the seasons in all climates and locations across America.

Recommended Serving Size: 5 caplets per day or 2 tablespoons of powder per day.

• UltraSuperGreen Food !

• UltraSuperGreen Food are complete whole food supplements that provide the vitamins and minerals you need to achieve better health and feel your best

• UltraSuperGreen Food Original are powerful whole food formulas packed with antioxidant green grasses, micro-algae, sea vegetables, whole vegetables and their juices, sprouted grains, seeds, legumes, and acerola cherries

• UltraSuperGreen Food is also ideal for those on low carbohydrate diets who are unable to eat enough dark green leafy vegetables

• UltraSuperGreen Food Contains No Fillers, Binders or Excipients

Whole Food Nutrition vs Vitamin & Mineral Supplements
People often wonder if they should also supplement with a green food blend while taking a multiple vitamin/mineral formula. Whole foods provide vitamins and minerals as nature intended, with all of the naturally occurring co-factors and synergistic compounds in tact. They contain hundreds, and possibly thousands, of yet to be discovered nutrients, that cannot be isolated and put into a vitamin / mineral supplement.

With whole foods and their concentrates containing complete nutritional complexes, the body is able to recognize these as food, easily assimilating what it needs and excreting what it doesn’t, this is called selective absorption. Most vitamin and mineral supplements however, are made from fractionated, isolated, or synthetic sources, leaving your body no choice but to deal with these incomplete substances, thus creating a potential environment of bio-chemical imbalances and toxicities.

For optimal health, there is nothing better or more compatible to the human body than nutrient-rich, unprocessed whole foods in their balanced, natural state. UltraSuperGreen is a new standard in whole food nutrition.