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"Climate One" Produces Fabulous Conference on Consumer Adoption of Green Products

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I attended a terrific conference on Friday produced by “Climate One” at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.  For those who may not be aware of this incredible organization, formed 88 years ago, “The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation’s oldest and largest public affairs forum.”

What does that mean?  Think: “TED Talks” – “ideas worth sharing” – talks LONG before there was an Internet by which they could be shared so easily. And think: no political spin, as hard to believe as that may be to comprehend.  There are democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives, scientists and politicians; there is UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Vice President Dan Quayle. Just important ideas, good reasoning, and great communication skills (OK, I know what you’re thinking about Dan Quayle, but you didn’t hear me say it, did you?)

The conference I attended Friday covered the consumer acceptance of environmentalism – the adoption of eco-friendly products, and the rush of product marketers to add “green” messaging, whether honest or not, to their brands.  I hope readers will be interested in the notes I took from the conference, which I reproduce here; I’ve italicized the comments I added on later.

• There is an increase in awareness and demand for green products, and thus a proliferation of such products.  Green products are the fastest growing sectors of cars (hybrids and EVs), food (organics), cleansers, etc.  Though they are the fastest growth segments, we’re talking about growth that is starting from very small bases; note that going from 1% of a market to 2% in a certain product category is 100% growth. True.  But from my perspective, all movements start from a small group of early adopters; there is reason to believe that we’re seeing the formation of a huge event in human history.

• Sustainability needs to be more than a corporation’s going through the motions for the PR value; it needs to be elevated to the very top of the organization and become a part of the culture/DNA.  I’ve heard this a million times, but I’m skeptical.  Sustainability, in my mind, ultimately means leading this massive population away from blind consumerism into a lower carbon way of life.  Companies want people to buy more of their stuff, and most of the world’s successful corporate entities will come to ruin if we truly head in a sustainable direction. Coca Cola and McDonalds want more people drinking more sodas and eating more Chicken McNuggets, regardless of how many trees they’re planting to distract people from their atrocities.  Toyota had the PR coup of the last 50 years with the Prius, but they sell far more Sequoias (13/18 MPG) and the dozens of other planet-killing members of the fleet.  The average electric drill is used for 9 minutes from the time it’s taken from Home Depot’s shelf to the time it finds its way into a landfill. As gross as that is, it causes heartburn neither to the people who built it, nor to Home Depot who sold it.

• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has, after 18 years, finally come out with an edict banning the most egregious forms of green-washing, i.e., lying about the eco-friendly virtues of your product.  This was hailed as a disappointment, as, in those 18 years, the world has become far more sophisticated in deceiving the public, and the FTC has barely caught up to where green-washing was ca. 1990.  I have to admit that policing this would not be easy for any governmental agency, regardless of how sharp and honest.  Consider that the Lexus SUV hybrid gets worse gas mileage than the non-hybrid version.  Of course, this didn’t slow Lexus down from promoting it to its eco-conscious buyers – but what can government do about that? The world is powerless to deal with issues like these if people are really that dishonest.

• Consumer messaging is complicated by the fact that it needs to be extremely simple; consumers in supermarkets, for example, even those who make any effort at all to determine the eco-characteristics of the products they’re buying, spend just a few seconds making their decisions.  It’s unrealistic to expect any reasonable percentage of consumers to sort through the relative vices and virtues of, say, a rain jacket, that may have been manufactured with well-treated labor, sent to the U.S. with highly fuel-efficient ships, but may have been treated with a toxic chemical to achieve waterproofing.   No one can be expected to absorb and make sense of all this information.  Thus, eco-conscious people increasingly tend to trust their peers – perhaps out of necessity; the level of trust that we place in corporations is the lowest ever, in the entire history of measuring this statistic.  Yes, it’s true that we don’t trust them, and yes, we do have access to a wider set of peer-based information on which to make our choices.

• Corporations that try to work around this with clever attempts to harness the power of social media often wish they hadn’t.  A good example of this is what is referred to as “bashtags” (as opposed to hashtags).  When McDonalds thought it could generate good PR by taking advantage of the vast audiences on Twitter and FaceBook and asked people to share their “first McDonalds experiences,” I’m sure they thought it would elicit stories of mommies bringing their little ones for burgers and French fries after their first little league games. Instead, the comments, which went mega-viral, were things like: “I heard about the rat feces in BigMacs,” or “I learned that McDonalds is the biggest single source of deforestation on the planet.” Something to watch out for, to be sure.  The campaign “Chevron Does” met a similar fate.  The intention of the campaign, obviously, was to highlight Chevron’s many claims to humanitarian activities, e.g., “Who invests in renewables?  Chevron does.”  Within minutes, however, there were swarms of suggestions like this: “Who ruins the Ecuadorian rainforest?” and “Who profits at the expense of our health?” Ouch.

• Sustainable products, to be successful, need to be high-quality and well-priced.  I’m sure this is true, but here’s the challenge: There is a reason that unsustainable products are cheap: there are externalities that are being passed on to innocent bystanders.  This hits close to home here at 2GreenEnergy, as coal is the cheapest form of energy.  Of course it is!  No one is forcing the coal companies, nor the consumers of the electricity from coal-fired power plants, to pay for any of the damage they’re causing to our lungs or our ecosystems.  Clean energy solutions are shunned because they cost more; obviously they cost more than solutions that pass the majority of their costs on to the unwitting customers (and their grandchildren).

• Zipcar, the car-sharing success story that Avis bought this week for $500 million, is an example of what is called the new “collaborative economy.”  I’d like to think there is some truth there; I guess we’ll see.  Apparently, Bill Ford is contemplating morphing his company from the traditional car business of the 20th Century to the “mobility” business of the 21st.  I.e., he’s claiming that he’s thinking beyond the concept of car ownership for as many people aged 16 – 96 as can afford it.  Again, I’m skeptical.  When the mobility paradigm changes, and I think it’s in the process of doing exactly that, I’m not sure you’ll want to be holding onto Ford stock.

• So far, this has all been fairly good news for the human race.  The bad news is that most people in the U.S. really don’t care about any of this at all.  In surveys, 75% say that we would pay a bit more for an eco-friendly product, but in practice, only 1% – 3% actually do.  Apparently, we suffer from what’s called “green fatigue.” The “green” story is old and getting older; evidently, people are tired of hearing it.  I can understand that.  On Wednesday afternoon, our media tells us about Lindsay Lohan’s drug relapse; the following morning, we’ve all heard too much about it, and so it’s on to something else.  This cultural ADHD is a total mismatch for the problem here.  People say that recovering alcoholics are in recovery until the day they die.  Fighting a lifelong battle of anything, especially slow-rolling things like the destruction of our environment or of our social fabric caused by our addiction to fossil fuels, is the LAST thing the average American wants to do.  As long as there’s plenty of Budweiser and Doritos at the Walmart, and a Toyota LandCruiser to pick them up in, the typical American is comfortably numb.

• Looking at the problem differently, we environmentalists often have trouble communicating our messages, as our culture responds to visual images.  We had minute-to-minute TV coverage of the BP oil spill and the disaster at Fukushima, as those events lent themselves to imagery.  But as we speak, tens of millions of children’s lungs are being ruined by the effects of coal.  There’s no way to tell that in an exciting, newsworthy story with real-time televised images.

Great event.  I’m so glad I took the time.


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