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.

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.