UC Green Marketing-- Co-teaching with My Dad-- Cuba and Bicycles

This past Friday and Saturday, my dad and I launched version 1.0 of our Green Marketing class with the MBA students at UC. It was a smashing success! All our coffee/smoothie dates over the past year brought us together in mushy father-son ways and our guest speakers' expertise made us look like we actually knew what the heck we were doing. And guess what-- we kind of did! But we still learned soooo much from our guest speakers and have so much to learn. 

Dr. D and Mr. D.-- whoop there it is, tag team back again. (Dr. D authored the #2 cited marketing paper of the last 100 years. Mr. D authored the blog that's too often about the #2 biological function)

Biggest Takeaways
On day one, students were saying they didn't understand why our bibliography included a video about permaculture. "Don't you think permaculture is a radical hippie lifestyle; no one is going to do that to be green," one woman shared during the opening group discussion. But then guest speaker, Pat Murphy, from Community Solutions (in Yellow Springs, Ohio) rocked our worlds with his award winning documentary The Power of Community-- How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. It looks like we are ALL going to be intimately connected to the permaculture movement. And he gave ample evidence that it has everything to do with measurable quantities like energy (BTU, gallons, KwHr) and very little to do with immeasurable quantities like green-ness.
 
Since Cuba essentially ran out of oil once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, economic catastrophe forced them to re-design their entire society without oil. Now 25% of all workers are small-scale farmers. And that means without all the oil-born fertilizers. They're organic, baby!

Another cool thing--Cuba imported 1.5 million bicycles and manufactured 0.5 million. Even doctors ride their bikes to work! They have the same infant mortality rate as the US and the same life expectancy.

Cubans and Pat Murphy are what we call the "Plan C" camp-- the 1% of people who believe the response to our energy crisis is a radical shift in lifestyle. How can they do so well with so little? They value development over growth. Cemeteries do an awful lot of growing, but they don't do a lot of developing. So what will we decide for ourselves-- un-economic growth (growth at any cost) or economic de-growth, as advocated by the steady state economists?

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1251126

My dad and I also had a representative from the Plan B camp-- that larger minority of the population who believe the coming energy crisis will be solved by renewable energy. Family friend, Tim Weick, is chief engineer for Amp Motors, an electric car retrofit company based in Cincinnati. They claim "zero emissions" with their electric cars. (Of course, they are only concerned about emissions from the car and not the power plants-- figure that out). But they just sold 1000 cars to a billionaire in Iceland who gets his 100% of his electricity from geothermal sources. So these actually will be zero emission vehicles (ZEVs). They welcome competition, like the Chevy Volt, because to them, it validates the market for plug in cars.

I'm not so sure that's a good thing. According to my homey, John Robbins' source, the Energy Info Agency, "US electricity from non-hydro renewables in 2010 was 15% higher than 2009. But RE electricity was only 1.2% of total generation and total consumption of kilowatt-hours in 2010 was 4% more than in 2009. In other words, growth in use is much faster than growth in renewable energy."

This Chevy Equinox has been retrofitted to be a 100% electric car. The "gas" cap is where you plug in 220V or 120V power that you already have in your house. Amp loses $20,000 on every car they sell. They're biz plan buys them time to do this as they get more efficient with their production process and markets ramp up.

The Plan A camp wasn't represented by our guest speakers. They're are kind of the agnostics, who believe the market and technology will take care of the climate, whether a problem exists or not. Perhaps next year. But, if I had my druthers, I'd skip that token consideration for their viewpoint. There's just too much good data.

In fact, one of our speakers, Dr. Robert Dahlstrom from Miami University, gave an Inconvenient Truth-esque presentation, making the business case to respond to the ecological imperative, quickly. It included no less than five headlines from THAT MORNING'S New York Times referencing revised insurance forecasts due to water shortages, or NOAA adjustments of 30 year average global temperatures, to name a couple. Talk about keeping a presentation fresh!

Our final speaker was Larry Falkin from Cincinnati's Office of Environmental Quality. He excited the class with an overview of the progress Cincinnati has made on it's Climate Protection Action Plan. This plan was essentially drafted by a bunch of dudes (yours truly included), experts, wanna-be's, and straight-up slimy sales people on weekday evenings (volunteer time), with not a whole lot of marketing muscle power behind them. Sure the city did an noteworthy $15M worth of energy retrofits for 69 buildings using those genius cash-positive energy loans, but the real exciting success has been 1) the curbside recycling program and 2) the "Complete Streets Policy".

The recycling program will save the city $1.5M this year and has made 40% of Cincinnatians active participants. How did they do it? Wheels on green carts rather than clunky, heavy bins. Simple and genius! Get a new pic

Recycling was in full effect at the Hyde Park Blast this year.

I ripped the image from the web after googling Mayor Mallory recycling cart. I think it's just a black guy recycling and not really the mayor. But since the bins have an radio frequency ID chip inside them, the city knows who is NOT recycling. If you are not recycling, you get a call from ROBO-Mayor-Mallory encouraging you to recycle. How neat is that!

And the City's "Complete Streets Policy" is a worthy topic for its own blog on another day. Sorry. Too much to get ready for this weekend-- visiting my brother on a bio-dynamic farm and pacing my friend on her 100 mile trail run. I commited officiallyto do 20, but I've been craving 30 since turning 30. We shall see!