Welcome to the first official entry of a multi-part series documenting the green business, building, marketing, branding, and festival-izing conferences that are ramping up as the summer comes to a close (including Opportrunity Green). I’ve previously provided a first-hand account from WINDPOWER 2007 and Green Festival Chicago, and missed countless others.

I recognize all the benefits of green building, but, as I’ve never owned any kind of building, I’ve never explored a homeowner’s eco-friendly options in much depth, or been to a conference targeted at the industry.

Right from the opening plenary, visionaries (led in prominence by Steve Wozniak) hammered home the feeling that the green building industry is really at a tipping point where a cascade of exponential growth is possible. In this respect, I didn’t feel too out of place. I had heard a similar message at every niche conference I’d been to since starting Green Options. Indeed, the implications of a true transition to a sustainable economy are the same for green pioneers in every industry. If you can provide any product or service in a more environmentally responsible way, and do it as cheap or cheaper than the old way, you are the future.

So what? People have been saying we’re at a tipping point for years… They’re just another kind of salesman trying to drum up business, right? Even if it’s growing, it’s just a bubble, like everything else.

Wrong.

In the many industries that demand consistent natural resource inputs (energy, building, transportation), people have been doing things essentially the same way for a long time. And entrepreneurs are finding solutions that preserve all of the advantages of our unsustainable practices, but with less toxicity, fewer resource inputs, and beautiful outputs. Any industry can optimize a business model for more than one variable–say, profit AND impact on the system as a whole.

Some of the exhibitors did just that.

There were multiple firms that recycle packaging styrofoam into insulated concrete forms. The best one I saw was Apex-Block. Some might object to the use of styrofoam in any "green" building, but my take on it is that we need cost-effective, energy-efficient solutions now, and there’s no shortage of styrofoam being produced and thrown away that none of us can do much about at the moment, so… get real.

There are were also some "breakthroughs" whose green-ness I question: both of the two ethanol-burning fireplace booths I visited were more concerned with emphasizing the simple, sleek, user-friendliness of ethanol as a fireplace fuel than where the fuel came from. I found it ironic that 10 minutes later I was listening to a pre-eminent architecture professor use his Powerpoint to contrast decreasing crop yields from global warming against our policy of sacrificing food for fuel.

It didn’t surprise me too much that my fireplace salesmen friends weren’t up on the significant disadvantages of corn-based ethanol. All day, the fragmentation of the green building professionals I saw at the conference struck me; it seemed a little like most of them didn’t know there were that many others out there. As they grow, WCG and conferences like it continue to help refugees from the old economy find their place in the new.

Yesterday I hopped down to LA for the first day of WINDPOWER 2007, the wind energy industry’s annual conference and trade show. It’s not an event that will make a lot of waves in the media (despite high-profile speakers), but I wanted to provide GO readers with an inside look at how the wind industry sees itself and what that means for the rest of us. However, it’s such a huge event that even one day’s coverage demands multiple posts. I apologize for not getting part one up earlier, but here it is.

EcoGeek’s Ransom Riggs sat next to me at the morning press briefing featuring Sen. Tom Daschle, head of conference sponsor AWEA, Randall Swisher, and other energy big-wigs. Ransom's writeup provides a good overview of conclusions coming out of the briefing and the message of the conference in general, so we asked the EcoGeek if we could feature Ransom’s overview in addition to my thoughts and analysis.

Looking down on the showroom from the press room, the wind industry's largest gathering was a sight to behold. Whereas Greenfest Chicago called the ‘green’ world together to speak to tens of thousands of consumers, WINDPOWER 2007 has brought 7,000 wind energy professionals to a showroom about the same size, with the extra space filled by glitzy, expensive (and effective) marketing displays.

Similarly, WINDPOWER replaces Greenfest’s impassioned speeches with multiple themed tracks of seminars and panels for the various types of stakeholders at the event. I hopped around to as many sessions as I could, and every speaker I heard had a particular expert perspective on wind power's potential to help mitigate and solve many of the problems facing our present and future. I'll save the real analytical meat for part 2 of my coverage, but for now, some highlights:

• acclaimed scientists picked apart myths and bogeymen about using and expanding wind energy;
• engineers beamed at new technologies that are ready to make a huge difference in energy production given continued investment growth and economies of scale;
• regulators warned that transmission capacity is emerging as a bottleneck for harnessing the best and most plentiful wind resources, although there remains lots of wind that can be exploited with today’s transmission infrastructure;
• every question about how best to bring wind power to scale (AWEA would like to see 300GW of capacity installed by 2020) had a single answer: stable, supportive long-term government policies that will signal investors that the opportunity profit from wind energy is here to stay.

Until I have time to tackle each of these points and others in greater depth over the next few days, GO and EcoGeek aren’t the only online media outlets providing coverage of the happenings at WINDPOWER 2007. Renewable Energy Access definitely wins the award for most frequent updates from the conference. In keeping with REA’s industry professional focus, most of their updates look like press releases from one of the 400+ exhibitors, but there’s some good, meaty info in their coverage nonetheless. Also, my buddy Summer Bowen of BTC Elements (who kindly chauffered me around at the last event I attended in LA, Phoenix Motorcar’s SUT launch) covered the event for Treehugger (link to come). Lastly, I can’t forget NewEnergyNews. If I’m forgetting any bloggers who are providing their take on the action, or if any of you at home have feelings about wind power or policy you’d like to share, leave a comment below.

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?

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.