When we left off with Part I, Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center was asking “who is going to receive the benefits of exploding investments in green industries? What does this all mean for the future? Where do we go from here?” In part II, I’ll outline Van’s vision for the answers to these questions. In the broadest sense, there are three possible future scenarios:1. Eco-apocalypse: This is the scenario relating to business as usual. If we do nothing, we face accelerating environmental catastrophe. It is the fear of these impacts that motivates most activists now.2. Eco-apartheid: This represents the current trend where the affluent use their considerable resources to find ways to mitigate the impacts of environmental damage on their own lives, while the poor and underprivileged are left without a way out. Depsite the progress that has been made, we find ourselves “already staring down the barrel” of eco-aparteid. So what? Well, allowing our society to go down that path would certainly be immoral, but besides that, it won’t work: eco-aparteid is just a speed bump on the way to eco-apocalypse. In order to work, the green economy has to include the majority of people, not just the majority of affluent people. Letting the rich fix their own problems is a quick fix, but not a sustainable solution. So what is the alternative?

3. Eco-equity: Essentially, eco-equity means we need each other. It’s not about charity, guilt trips, or accusations. The overriding message of this imperative is that our children’s children won’t be here if we don’t figure this thing out. Relying on “a free market evacuation plan” is not a viable solution for society as a whole. A “sink or swim” mentality doesn’t work. See: Katrina.“We must reject sink or swim in an age of floods; stand together, be together, thrive together.”

Equal access and opportunity to the best of the green economy is essential for the challenges we face as a society. What is the best agenda to pursue? A green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Given the complexity of these issues, how can green advocates explain them all in a short period of time? A rhetorical device: “The Fourth Quadrant.” (The rest of this explanation really needs some version of Van’s Powerpoint slide to make sense. Until we can get the actual diagram from Van's people, I took the liberaty of drawing it out on a napkin for you. High tech, I know…)On a basic level, people understand the spectrums of ‘gray’ moving to ‘green’ (environmental problems, moving to solutions), and rich to poor, but rarely do they think about where these two intersect. If you plot these on a crossing axis and draw a box around the four endpoints, it creates four quadrants. The altruism afforded by affluence defines the top left quadrant. It is predominantly this type of person who has the time and resources to care about environmental problems that don’t directly affect their daily lives. They are the most active supporters of polar bears, the rainforest, and other such external problems. Are the people who can afford to wrong to focus on these problems? Of course not. When keystone species in ecosystems disappear, we’re next. This line of reasoning may be selfish, but it’s as good a justification for altruism as any. We need people to take up these causes.How, then, do poor people think about abstract environmental problems? Quite simply, they don’t. The bottom left quadrant of this diagram represents the practical environmental concerns of marginalized communities: industrial pollution and the health problems it causes, rising energy prices, and many more issues. It’s not hard to see why polar bears don’t get a lot of traction in the barrio.But defining and raising awareness about environmental problems is only half the battle. In order to avoid disaster, we have to actively move towards solutions. The top right quadrant is defined by the intersection of affluence and green solutions. This includes people who can afford hybrids, carbon offsets, solar panels on their vacation home, and boutique organic products. These people often see green as an investment opportunity.Are they wrong to take this view? Once again, of course not. It is essential for the people with capital to invest in helping the earth with their disposable income. But what about the fourth quadrant? What is the meaning of the green economy for the poor? Until now, this last quadrant has too often been undefined (at best) and ignored (at worst). These people have been locked out of the material benefits of the pollution-based industrial economy. If we are serious about tackling the social and environmental challenges of our times, green collar jobs for the underprivileged and opportunities for community health improvement are the only way forward.So, how does this work in practical terms? If you put up solar panels, you’re on your way to a professional job with union benefits. This is a ‘green collar’ route out of poverty. When you learn how to double pane glass to weatherproof a home or install bamboo flooring, you’re beginning down a path to a career that is sustainable on both personal and social levels. Jobs like these are the first step on ladder towards ownership, entrepreneurship, and empowerment. This is the true win-win of the emerging green economy—but only if we make it happen. (After explaining the Fourth Quadrant, Van closed with the beginnings of a success story. His work on creating a green job corps model in Oakland has become a model for Nancy Pelosi’s Clean Energy Jobs Bill. How did he pitch it to Pelosi? For this and his closing remarks, I’ll let Van’s words speak for themselves; during this part of the speech, I was typing furiously while the audience clapped)

“People have only told poor youth what not to do, never said ‘stand with me, and be at the center of this movement.’ If you do that, Nancy Pelosi, you will change America.”“We can build a real movement again, across the lines of race and class. All of us have been lonely and isolated and frustrated. No one joined the movement to go it alone. We have the opportunity now to move forward and build a coalition greater than the New Deal, but we need to get the government on the side of the problem solvers in our new economy, not the problem makers. And when that happens, it won’t be because of bitching and moaning.” “We want America to lead the world in clean and green solutions, bring a multiracial country together and leads the world to something beautiful again. And when we do that, we won’t be taking America back, we’ll be taking it forward.

Is this too long for you to read? Or did you read the whole thing straight through and want to see more? Either way, this YouTube video is for you.

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?

If you have been following politics on TV since last November, there’s a good chance you’ve watched Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) using an imaginary middle-class family as a rhetorical device to unify the Democratic message around this crucial target market. (note: if you object to comparing politics to marketing, keep in mind that Republicans have been using micro-niche issue targeting and other staple techniques from the marketing world for years, with great success)

At Green Options, when we build services and features, we hold ourselves to a similar standard: can my mother use this? Of course, I don’t expect my mom to get linked to our site through Digg and then add our RSS feed to her news aggregator (indeed, she’s never heard of Netvibes), but we try to make sure that all of the information we provide is accessible to not only the less green-savvy, but the less tech-savvy as well. At the same time, we do our best to make sure those users have the tools to understand terms like RSS and Web 2.0.

In the end, we know that all of the resources we provide won’t be right for all users, but we are confident that there is something useful or interesting for practically everyone, and we trust our users to decide for themselves what features and information they find useful.

Contrast our market-making philosophy with the multi-level marketing (MLM) approach taken by Citizenrē. Instead of giving users the resources to make their own energy and lifestyle choices through open information, independent ‘Ecopreneurs’ claim to provide a one size fits all solution: wait on buying solar panels today to get on a waitlist for renting them a few years down the road.

For those of us trying to build green markets now (especially solar energy), this pitch immediately raises two major concerns: lost consumer confidence in the solar industry if promises go undelivered, and the pre-empting of legitimate projects for solar installers by overzealous Citizenrē reps.

Over-hyped grand visions of a sudden MLM-based energy revolution are harmful at worst and apparently infeasible at best. The vast majority of ‘green collar’ professionals who spend their time in the details of building their industries understand that transforming our energy economy is (and will continue to be) a painstaking process.

I’m sorry to say that multi-level marketing will not be the hero of this story, at least not without having proven deliverables in place before initiating such a campaign. I may come to eat my words: it is possible that Citizenrē is just using MLM to prove consumer demand, and the word is out that the company will announce its investors and factory location a mere two weeks from now. But if I do, I’ll eat them happily, because it will mean that at least someone got through to the world.

While the rest of the solar industry obviously shares in the hope that (for example) solar energy’s market share will reach 25% by 2025, unsupported promises and unbridled enthusiasm are obviously not enough to get us there. Development is more likely to be accelerated by unexpected climactic, economic, or political events than by down-line residual sales commissions. Indeed, in their ebullience, Citizenrē executives appear not to take into account the complexities of implementing such a huge, vertically-integrated business plan—but at least they have a vision.

I was taught that a company’s vision statement should be defined by an ultimate, unachievable goal. Given the company’s robust projections and …interesting (for lack of a more judgmental word) ‘pyramarkting’ choices, Citizenrē’s goals certainly appear to be just that: unachievable.

But that doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water. One secretive company might not be able to do it, but a sea change in public perceptions certainly could. Grand visions of transformative change can and will spur innovative solutions, but only if we can help green markets grow in honest and transparent ways, and keep intact the trust of a cautious public.