Each year in recent memory, General Motors (GM) has invited the press and other key influencers out to the famous Milford Proving Grounds to spend a day testing out its upcoming model year line of vehicles on a closed course. The company has learned a lot from their last (hilarious) attempt to leverage social media, and for the first time ever, they decided to bestow the same access upon writers from around the blogosphere. Although they made sure that a smattering of green blogs were in attendance, tech blogs, trend blogs, and others were represented as well. Since by now, they have all covered major aspects of the event and GM’s green and non-green offerings , I’ve decided to use the opportunity to take a look at how the proceedings reflect on GM’s move toward sustainability, both in its marketing, and in reality.

First, credit where credit’s due: GM is one of the few major public corporations (and the first I’ve seen in the auto industry) to realize that social media, and the blogosphere in particular, doesn’t take kindly to being treated like any old marketing mechanism. On-message spin doesn’t work online because bloggers are people who take pride in peering through the fog, and distilling information for their readers. Conversations on the web are not one-way, and information can’t be controlled in the ways executives are used to. They are learning that the blogosphere is never afraid to call “bullshit” when it sees it, and the possibility of instant feedback ensures that all viewpoints can be heard, immediately.

Okay, I’m being too kind. I’d guess that the vast majority of the company’s top executives still don’t understand exactly why they approved the creation of their social media unit, but at least they know they needed one. They managed to hire people who realize that success in the blogosphere is about having an honest conversation, good or bad, and that admitting mistakes builds trust with consumers. But a disconnect remains. Bob Lutz, GM’s main internal blogger, has advocated for a gas tax to help create consumer demand to force the industry to invest aggressively in breakthrough transportation technologies. That’s great, but if he can’t speak for the company, is it doing any good?

GM’s social media people hope that it will. I honestly got the sense that they really do want to help change the company’s culture from the inside. Obviously, that’s a long road. In this environment, only an honest, respectful dialogue is ever going to overcome the decades of inertia of a behemoth like GM.

Finally, with the advent of our medium, that dialogue is becoming possible in ways it never has been. One thing’s for sure: the louder and more aggressive the environmental community is in calling GM a bunch of fascists who pushed the Hummer on unsuspecting Americans, the less they’re helping their (and our) cause. They only provoke a more defensive reaction from the people at the top of the company. Despite my distaste for Hummer owners, no sane person can fault a company that answers to shareholders for responding to demand in a high-margin niche. A part of me can’t help but think that activists who try to pressure corporations into putting the planet above profit are missing the forest for the trees.

Obviously, something is seriously wrong with a system in which well-meaning people continue to create products that ignore the environmental, resource, and economic crises that lie ahead. But it’s not as if they’re acting irrationally, given the information available to them. We all work in a system that is fundamentally flawed, and if activists want things to get better, they might be better off banding together to address root causes rather than the symptoms. If every person with a “downstream” (i.e. GM- or DuPont-specific) complaint joined a national movement to advocate for public financing of elections, or changing the way corporate rights are considered under the law, we might finally be able to start addressing the fundamental tensions between activists and the business world.

As an activist who runs a business, I can say with confidence that both sides are well-meaning. No one wants a world in which our grandkids look back and scream “What were you thinking?!” So let’s start working together to create a future we can be proud of. None of us can succeed without the rest of us.

Note: GM paid for my airfare and accommodations in connection with my coverage of the event. Finally, in the spirit of honest, open dialogue, I’d like to issue a formal invitation for someone from GM to discuss with an electric vehicle activist the issue of the EV1 electric car, including the “hows” and “whys” of its history. The movie Who Killed the Electric Car? was a great way to start the conversation, but film remains a one-way medium, and I am personally interested to see a real conversation about the issue develop. Email me, and I’ll make sure it gets set up.

It's nights like this I'm glad I moved to Berkeley to start Green Options. Although it was only a few hundred people packed into the First Congregational Church, authors Bill Mckibben and Michael Pollan were there to talk about the mid- to long-term fate of our way of life, and what we need to be doing now to minimize the disaster, and ensure a reasonable quality of life for future generations. I feel like this is a conversation that more people should hear about, no?

First off, I was impressed with the format Global Exchange came up with for the event. A short summary of McKibben's book, Deep Economy, a long, lively conversation between the two authors, and then a well-organized Q&A. Maximum variety, maximum information. Other book tours/speakers series take note. As such, I have a hunch that my paraphrased notes will give you more information, quicker, than me writing prose about the subjects these two covered. So, here goes:

McKibben's Introduction of Deep Economy

The book critiques the dominant paradigm of growth as the ultimate economic goal. A model that relies on growth can't continue. A quick check of what would happen if China and India continue at their current rates of growth shows that resources would collapse before they reached current American consumption. (He had detailed examples, but if you want them, read the book)

Despite what ads tell us, more widgets no longer make us happy. Economists have started to realize that 'utility' is no longer an entirely sufficient term, as more does not equal happier. Although more generally does = happier in underdeveloped countries, human satisfaction surveys have shown a 50-year decline in American 'happiness' despite increasing levels of consumption. And in western Europe, happiness levels have not declined, even though they have moderated their consumption.

Why?

There is a loss of social connection, supported in the data. Average numbers of close friends per person has dropped in the US; many other indicators. Again, I guess, read the book.

Solutions to both the problem of growth and the problem of lost social connection: smaller communities, utilizing local resources.

Example: the supermarket vs. the farmer's market. A duel. Which one fosters more community? Which one requires more energy to feed you?

Community: Sociologists who strolled many a supermarket and many a farmer's market and tallied their results found that there was a ten-fold difference in the level of interaction between shoppers. (I have to agree with Bill here. And besides, my degree in Sociology compels me to dwclare it valid science)

Energy: On average, food eaten from a supermarket takes 5 to 15 times more energy to get a given amount of calories in your stomach than a local farmer's market.

Winner: Farmer's market, on both counts. (I'm not saying I'm a good enough cook to get all my food there, but why buy produce that's been sitting in a plane and then a truck when I can get local stuff picked that morning?)

Dialogue between Bill McKibben and Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma

(Warning: the following is even more heavily edited and paraphrased than the last section)

MP: This is fine to tell a culture that already has so much, but what about all the people around the world who are striving to achieve the consumptive example we've set? Can we just tell them not to want stuff? What do we do?

BM: Our chief export is the image of the American Dream through TV and film, but there simply aren't enough resources to accomodate the demand. Going back to the topic of food, there are lots of innovative, sustainable practices that are more productive. One problem is that we've confused 2 kinds of productivity, yield/$ invested and yield/acre. The industrial food economy relies exclusively on the prices of inputs, and aims to maximize yield/$. Small farms that produce a variety of crops and animals can yield more per acre than vast monoculture tracts, without degrading the soil or polluting watersheds. (This is a big deal, people)

MP: But don't we need industrialization of food to maximize efficiency as the world's population continues to rise?

BM: If that growth in efficiency could be sustained forever, that's one thing, but history shows that gains are always temporary, lead to more problems, and require more chemicals, more inputs, to keep pushing yields up. Working with the uniqueness of local ecosystems, rather than trying to destroy them, keeps giving good yields year after year, no matter what the price of natural gas-fueled fertilizer is. It's not like eating localy is some crazy idea: "it's worth remembering that 50 years ago everyone ate locally, and 90% of people worldwide still do."

MP: There's talk of another revolution in agriculture, this time based around genetically modified organisms (GMOs) instead of chemicals.

BM: The metrics by which we measure success need to change. We're so convinced that the ends we puruse are correct just because they're possible. To frame a push for sustainability or organic farming as giving up modernity is wrong. It's more a question of trajectory: what course we choose, what we invest in as a society, and how we lead the world. China and India could follow either the European or American model of development, and if they all decide they want to drive their Hummers to the suburbs, it's game over. (Note: his actual quote was "…Plan A isn't possible. If that's all we can think of, we're going to drive off a cliff.")

What, no more?

This is long enough already, so I'll spare you the Q&A (unless the comments explode with requests), but there is one last thing. Bill McKibben, as a writer and professor in rural Vermont, has close ties to his community, and strongly believes that community action is the only way to create enough pressure (well, at least until the frequency of disasters and weather weirdness increases) to compel government to act in the interest of our society. He's using the power of the internet to build a National Day of Climate Action, to be held on April 14th at hundreds of rallies across the country. If you want to get involved (there are over 950 events currently planned), go to the Step It Up 2007 website at stepitup07.org.

Thursday I attended the birth of what sponsors Yahoo! and AC Nielsen hope will be a grassroots movement to upgrade incandescent light bulbs to a new generation of CFL bulbs on a national scale, saving billions of dollars in the process. A grassroots campaign with corporate sponsors? Weird.

GO Contributor Michael d’Estries (who moonlights with us from Ecorazzi and GroovyGreen) was Johnny on the spot with a Thursday morning post about the launch and features of the website itself, but I thought the event for the launch deserved a little more coverage, so I put together a play by play run-down of the action, with my thoughts added in. If you were there, chime in with a comment with anything I forgot. If you weren't, share your reactions. More after the jump…

Thursday’s launch was the second such event held for the 18seconds organization: Las Vegas previously hosted a pre-launch brainstorming session among many of the same stakeholders. Officially, that "summit" was sponsored by Wal-Mart.

I have to say that I’m still not inclined to shop at Wal-Mart if I can help it (I understand that there are compelling reasons why people do), but you have to give credit to Wal-Mart’s VP for Sustainability Andy Ruben. Jeff, our Editor, interviewed Andy right when Greenoptions.com launched earlier this month about their pilot program to reduce the ecological footprint of their stores.

Another Inconvenient Truth

Right or wrong, the truth of the matter is that small, incremental steps like greening their big-boxes, leveraging online social networks (MySpace users, that means you: lobby Tom!), and supporting a compact fluorescent campaign like 18seconds.org have to be the starting point for creating a tide of public sentiment.

Steps like these are realistically all some of the largest corporations can be badgered into doing without public pressure, a law, or (oh no!) regulation to make them take major action. You can’t entirely blame huge companies when their reaction time to new concepts is found wanting; that’s what startups are for, so they can get bought by big companies and implemented on a wider scale. I think of it as federalism for the corporate world. (Maybe Joe Biden has a point?)

At the same time, it is nice to see unlikely bedfellows trying to force incandescent light bulb makers out of business. Thursday’s launch–which also included a lengthy brainstorming component–was hosted by Yahoo! and featured key figures from across the political, NGO, and business spectrum (plus me and Nick Aster from TreeHugger).

Motivational Speeches

Speakers included environmental guru and former Sierra club President Adam Werbach, all the way to Paul Dickerson, appointed by the CEO of our nation as the COO of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (was there always a COO there?). Oh well—that $1.5 billion budget has enabled many of the technologies that might just save us, right?

Dickerson received a warm welcome from the crowd, assuring everyone that although it won’t cater to demands of the liberal left and reasonable middle and just acknowledge that humans are a cause of climate change, the Bush administration firmly supports the 18seconds.org project. Well, he didn’t say all of that: Dick Cheney supplied the first half. Paul stayed on message, emphasizing that sustainability is a business strategy, useful for reasons of environmental respect, national security, and economic security. And no one in the room could disagree.

Werbach, on the other hand, viewed his time to speak as an opportunity to give context to the 18seconds.org project as an intersection between grassroots green movements and technological change in how we light dark places. (Did you know that whales would all be extinct now if oil from the ground hadn’t dropped in price? Thank you, Standard Oil!)

A common theme in the speeches of Werbach and many other speakers was that CFL technology is a great example of the state of a particular art at a tipping point in readiness for mass commercialization. But Werbach seemed more concerned with the CFL’s ability to create a simple mental frame for how to introduce larger principles of sustainability—to get the ball rolling, so to speak. After he spoke, the term “gateway bulb” was used several more times.

An Inconvenient Truth producer Lawrence Bender used a similar metaphor, calling the CFL a “Trojan horse” into the public consciousness, putting people on the lookout for new technologies that cost less over time but perform just as well when upgraded now. In the case of CFL's, a slight price premium gets you a longer lasting bulb, and saves you 10-20x it's original price over its lifetime.

The enthusiastic speeches are more fun to talk about, but there also were plenty of in-depth speeches addressing the issues that remain for CFL’s, such as how to recycle them, how to ensure quality standards as the industry and technology matures further, and how to best spread 18seconds.org's message. (Am I doing a good job with this post?)

The Nitty Gritty

After a quick website demonstration and some discussion about how to divide stakeholders into brainstorming groups… we broke for lunch. I won’t go into details on the brainstorming session, but I did come out of it with one basic message: there are obstacles to overcome, but those that used to be deal-breakers have largely been solved.

For example, a former Microsoft executive commented to me that with an off-white or tan lamp shade, he’s even converted to CFL’s for reading. Nit-picky or not, he hit the nail on the head: consumers don’t want new light bulbs to mean different light.

I personally came away with another lesson. If everyday people believe that their lives are too busy and filled with daily minutiae that they can just leave the thinking about environmental impact to the people who do it for a living and expect the world to be fine, then Houston, we have a problem. To me, that makes about as much sense as leaving politics solely to politicians and expecting that arrangement to work out to the benefit of society. Alas, one can only do so much. Thank you, internet, for empowering grassroots movements.

Which brings me back to: 18seconds.org.

Comments tip jar: which established star in the green business world or green leader in the regular business world do you want to see interviewed next on GreenOptions.com?