Yesterday, I said that convincing American’s to do something about global warming is the biggest marketing problem in history. Beloved readers emailed that they thought the problem is convincing the public that global warming exists. I disagree. Look at the numbers below from an Environmental and Energy Study Institute factsheet: According to an April 7, […]
No Impact Man
The biggest marketing problem in history
Tell people that air pollution causes asthma in one in four children in central Harlem and the Bronx or tell them that global warming may cause millions of children to die of dysentery and the best you’ll get may well be a shrug. Show them a child who has collapsed on the street and is struggling for breath, on […]
Healthier planet, healthier people
One thing I go on about on this blog is how in many ways we benefit rather than sacrifice when we change our lifestyles and public policies in order to treat the planet more kindly (see here and here, for example). Because very often, making the planet more healthy makes the people more healthy, too. […]
Changing our behavior
During World War II, posters like this persuaded us to ration, save food, conserve gas, turn our electric lights off at night and not talk about where our soldier relatives were deployed. With a little leadership, we changed our behavior for the sake of the common good. We changed the social norms. So my question […]
What No Impact feels like after ten months
Unremarkable. Life as usual. Isn’t that strange? You click off family’s electricity and make them go to bed at nine every night because it’s too dark to do anything else. You ban them from the elevator so they have to walk up and down nine flights of stairs. You take away their fridge so they can’t keep more […]
A race to save the planet
When my friend Elizabeth drops her son off at school in Connecticut, the moms gather in the courtyard to chat. There is a cool new feature to their SUVs which allows them to lock the doors while leaving the engine on. They stand around, a bunch of them, having a nice chat, while their motors […]
A letter from Bill McKibben
Dear Friend– There are occasional moments in history when we desperately need leadership, and this is one of them. If we’re going to deal with global warming, then we need to go beyond politicians who say the right words and find champions who will actually do the tough work to transform our energy economy. And you could play a […]
A company I’d buy from—part 2
I was talking yesterday about how a company could make a loyal customer out of me by being the first to make a good-faith effort to clean up its own environmental mess. The example I used was a way to easily return CFL bulbs, which contain toxic mercury, for recycling and disposal in a non-crushable tube through the postal service. […]