Earth Profit
News
December 23, 2008
- P&G Reduces Bill for Energy Conservers
Northern and central California energy customers are among the most energy-efficiency conscious in the US, said Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), which has started a program to reward them for their efforts.
Customers who reduce their cumulative gas usage by 10 percent or more during January and February, 2009 will receive a bill credit on [...]- 14 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - What is your entrepreneurial IQ?You think you know business? Take our quiz and find out how well attuned you are to the demands of being an entrepreneur.
Common characteristics in areas such as family background, childhood experiences, core values, personalities and more turn up time and time again in studies of entrepreneurs. Find out how you fit the mold by determining your Entrepreneurial Quotient, or EQ. The following test is no measure of your future success, but it may show you where you excel and where you need to improve to help make your business soar. Answer the following questions with a “yes” or “no,” and total your score at the end to find out your EQ.
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source: (4 entrepreneur) - The Credit Outlook for Small Business
By Stacy Perman
Over the past year, the economic downturn and the frozen credit markets have harmed small business owners' access to get loans and credit lines. While the severity of the effects on entrepreneurs are still being debated—with some noting that credit has always been difficult to obtain and others finding the tightening typical after an economic expansion, an important question is, what will the climate look like in 2009? BusinessWeek's Stacy Perman spoke to a spectrum of economists, academics, entrepreneurs, and lenders who offered their predictions. Edited excerpts of their conversations follow.Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist, National Federation of Independent Business, Washington
Last year's balance sheets won't look so good, so next year people will find it harder to get credit or their credit worthiness will depreciate and the loan pipeline will decrease. The percentage of companies planning capital projects has dropped to historic lows. It's just not a good time to be borrowing money, and we won't be seeing much change in the current situation in credit availability or lending criteria. It will be tough to try and get a loan with big banks like Bank of America (BAC)—they made a lot of mistakes and are short on capital. Small community banks are the way to go. We let the big banks get so big that they are too big to manage and that means too big to fail.
I am the chairman of the board of a little bank and we still make loans. In fact, our loans grew 30% this year. We don't have the kind of stupid stuff Wall Street invented—we are in the business of savings and lending. [Of course,] business is tougher now, and we have a record number of [small businesses] whose own sales are in decline and that will impact their balance sheets.
Mitch Jacob, CEO, alternative lender On Deck Capital, New York
It is going to be extremely challenging. Historically, small business owners have been in a credit crisis since 1776, and the events here in the U.S. and around the world are taking that difficult funding environment to new heights.
Even prior to the credit crisis, access to capital from banks for small businesses was extremely limited. Most relied on alternative sources to meet their capital needs. We have always woefully undercapitalized this critical segment and now it's even worse.
I think there will be a critical shift in how we look at the capital markets and begin focusing on the product that will fix the broken relationship between lenders and borrowers. If climate change results in innovation like clean technology, then the financial crisis will result in innovation in financial services. Just pumping money into system will not solve the problem.Posted via email from Jay’s posterous
- 14 days
source: (4 entrepreneur) - The Credit Outlook for Small Business
By Stacy Perman
Over the past year, the economic downturn and the frozen credit markets have harmed small business owners' access to get loans and credit lines. While the severity of the effects on entrepreneurs are still being debated—with some noting that credit has always been difficult to obtain and others finding the tightening typical after an economic expansion, an important question is, what will the climate look like in 2009? BusinessWeek's Stacy Perman spoke to a spectrum of economists, academics, entrepreneurs, and lenders who offered their predictions. Edited excerpts of their conversations follow.Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist, National Federation of Independent Business, Washington
Last year's balance sheets won't look so good, so next year people will find it harder to get credit or their credit worthiness will depreciate and the loan pipeline will decrease. The percentage of companies planning capital projects has dropped to historic lows. It's just not a good time to be borrowing money, and we won't be seeing much change in the current situation in credit availability or lending criteria. It will be tough to try and get a loan with big banks like Bank of America (BAC)—they made a lot of mistakes and are short on capital. Small community banks are the way to go. We let the big banks get so big that they are too big to manage and that means too big to fail.
I am the chairman of the board of a little bank and we still make loans. In fact, our loans grew 30% this year. We don't have the kind of stupid stuff Wall Street invented—we are in the business of savings and lending. [Of course,] business is tougher now, and we have a record number of [small businesses] whose own sales are in decline and that will impact their balance sheets.
Mitch Jacob, CEO, alternative lender On Deck Capital, New York
It is going to be extremely challenging. Historically, small business owners have been in a credit crisis since 1776, and the events here in the U.S. and around the world are taking that difficult funding environment to new heights.
Even prior to the credit crisis, access to capital from banks for small businesses was extremely limited. Most relied on alternative sources to meet their capital needs. We have always woefully undercapitalized this critical segment and now it's even worse.
I think there will be a critical shift in how we look at the capital markets and begin focusing on the product that will fix the broken relationship between lenders and borrowers. If climate change results in innovation like clean technology, then the financial crisis will result in innovation in financial services. Just pumping money into system will not solve the problem.Posted via email from Jay’s posterous
- 14 days
source: (4 entrepreneur) - 10 Ways to Prepare for a Post-oil Society
Bigger must give way to smaller, smarter. A novelist tries his hand at some doable proposals.
downsizing Villages and towns will have to replace our urban sprawl. By James Howard Kunstler
n the public arena, essayists often are criticized for not offering solutions to our looming energy crisis. Here are some suggestions for those tired of the hand-wringing and ready to do something useful.
Expand your view beyond simply finding fuels other than gasoline to power vehicles. The obsession with keeping cars running at all costs could prove fatal, especially because so many self-proclaimed "greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Cars are not part of the solution, no matter what fuel they use. They are at the heart of the problem. Trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting from gasoline to other fuels will only make things worse. Think beyond the car. 
We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto/Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is headed toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soil and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to solve this problem. Farming soon will return closer to the center of American economic life. It will have to be done more locally, at a smaller and finer scale, and it will require more human labor.
We have to redistribute the population. Virtually every place in our nation organized around automobile dependency is going to fail. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami) can support only a fraction of their residents. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature — as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components — at a more modest scale. Like farming, this will require the revival of skills and methods long forsaken.
We have to move things and people differently. Get used to it. Don't waste society's remaining resources trying to prop up car and truck dependency. Water and rail are vastly more energy efficient. Start with railroads, and let's make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuels. We also have to prepare our society to use water much more to move people and things. This will require rebuilding infrastructures for our harbors and for our inland river and canal systems, including the towns associated with them. The great harbor towns, such as Baltimore, Boston, and New York, no longer can devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the accommodations for sailors).
Programs are under way to restore maritime shipping based on wind — yes, sailing ships.
We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies of scale are going down. Wal-Mart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of scarce, expensive oil. They will not be able to run their "warehouses on wheels," those tractor-trailers rumbling incessantly along our interstates. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to Asia also are endangered as the United States and China compete for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of commercial interdependency that these chain stores destroyed will have to be rebuilt brick by brick. This will require rich, fine-grained, multilayered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff.
Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping depends on cheap delivery, and delivery no longer will be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead.
We will have to make things again in America. However, we will make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we still will need household goods and things to wear. As a practical matter, we are not going to relive the 20th century. The factories from America's heyday of manufacturing (1900-1970) were designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have been demolished. We're going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don't know yet how we're going to make anything.
The age of canned entertainment is coming to an end. It was fun for a while. We liked Citizen Kane and The Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players, playwrights and scenery makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stagehands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time.
We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they 
will fail anyway. Since we will be a less affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home-schooling movement, as those efforts gather locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher education itself may engender huge resentment among those blocked from it.
But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage — and, in any case, probably will outperform today's average college graduate. One thing for sure: Teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line of work, compared with endeavors such as public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do in education, and lots to think about. Get busy, future teachers of America.
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source: (4 entrepreneur) - New Double Decker Buses To Hit London Soon
the Foster/Aston Martin busLondon has a new Mayor who has started filling some of his campaign promises. One of the main items on the list was the pledge to bring back the iconic and much-missed double decker bus.
The design for the new bus was the subject of a competition with 700 entries. The remit was to create a new design for a bus that would be environmentally friendly, accessible and hearken back to the much-loved Routemaster (as it was called). The old bus had two levels and one could jump on and off at will. Two winners shared the prize: one version by Foster + Partners and Aston Martin and another by Capoco.
the original RoutemasterThe two designs will go forward to the manufacturer, yet to be chosen, who will include the best elements from both when they create the new buses, planned to hit the streets in the year 2011.
The Aston Martin and Foster design is a zero-emissions double-decker that is highly manoeuvrable, with warm lighting and wooden floors and is accessible for disabled passengers. There will be reconstituted leather upholstery to create a tactile ‘living room’ feel. The top of the bus will have a glazed roof which incorporates solar cells to "generate energy and filter daylight to control the temperature inside."
Capoco's proposed bus has a low flat floor to allow passengers to get on and off easily, with a Routemaster-like front engine, an open rear platform; it will also be low emission.
by Bonnie Alter
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source: (4 entrepreneur) - Bulletproof Paper Is Stronger Than Kevlar
New nanopaper is not only super-strong, but made from renewable materials.
by Jocelyn RiceBulletproof vests of the future may be constructed from an unlikely material: paper. In May a team of researchers announced a new “nanopaper”—made of tightly woven nanosize cellulose threads—proven in lab tests to be stronger and tougher than cast iron.Cellulose fibers are hardy strands of sugar found in the cell walls of plants and algae; they are the most abundant polymer on the planet. Cellulose fibers give wood hardness and cotton toughness. But the normal papermaking process destroys the inherent strength of cellulose fibers. The wood pulp used in making paper is so coarse that the individual strings of cellulose can’t latch on tightly to their neighbors.
So the researchers, including materials scientist Lars Berglund of the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, used enzymes and a blender to chew standard wood pulp into a stew of much finer particles—about one-thousandth their original size. Then they filtered the stew into a goopy gel and smashed it in a press, creating sheets of nanopaper. In this form, the cellulose fibers could intertwine in strong, tight networks, just as they do in nature.
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- 14 days
source: (4 entrepreneur) - Companies Looking At Alternative To Clamshell Package
Companies like Amazon.com, Sony, Microsoft and Best Buy have begun looking into alternatives to plastic “clamshell” packages, The New York Times reports. A goal of at least some of these efforts is to be more environmentally friendly by using less packaging material
In November, Amazon.com launched “Frustration-Free Packaging,” which ships products in recyclable cardboard boxes. [...]- 14 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - Commercial Building Monitors Results From Its Green Features
The home of Ferreira Construction and Noveda Technologies is going one step ahead with its green building. The building uses patent-pending technology that is accessible from any computer to monitor the building’s green features, such as solar panels, the building’s carbon footprint, and the status of vehicles being charged with solar power, MyCentralJersey.com reports.
The building [...]- 14 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - San Francisco Businesses Get Ten Thousand Dollars for Solar
<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-1100" src="http://go635254.s3.amazonaws.com/ecopreneurist/files/2008/12/newsomsolarevent.jpg" alt="Newsome announces San Francisco commercial solar subsidies" width="250" height="333" //> As we end the year, I’m looking back at 2008 and am happy to see that some good things did happen this year. In addition to Federal subsidies for renewable energy purchases being renewed and even increased, cities governments also stepped up with programs to support cleaner energy adoption.
On September 30, 2008, City Solar Tour stopped in San Francisco, and Mayor Gavin Newsom used the opportunity to announce a program to subsidize conversion to solar power for commercial users in San Francisco.
Although commercial users throughout the City can apply, the City of San Francisco is reaching out to commercial users whose location makes solar power particularly financially viable. They used the sfsolarmap.org to identify 1600 companies in downtown San Francisco where it is sunny much of the year and sent letters letting them know about the availability of up to ten thousand dollars for solar subsidies and the availability of a free audit to evaluate the viability of solar power for their commercial building.
- Bombardier Meets 5-Yr Reduction Targets
Bombardier Inc. released its first company-wide corporate responsibility report (pdf), announcing that it has achieved five-year reduction targets set in 2003 for water and energy consumption and is on track to meet its 15 percent reduction target for greenhouse gas emissions.
The Canada-based company makes transportation equipment (e.g., commercial aircraft, rail transportation equipment) and had $17.5 [...]- 14 days
source: (Environmental Leader) - Dell vs. Apple, The Corporate Greenwash Wars
<img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1098" src="http://go635254.s3.amazonaws.com/ecopreneurist/files/2008/12/green-my-apple.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="133" //>Last week, Tom Lauria, Vice President, Communications for the International Bottled Water Association commented on a post about greenwash happening over at Nestle Waters where he accused me of being an anti-corporate type that hides behind ’saving the earth’ to bash businesses because I hate capitalism. My sense is that Tom, and quite possibly others, do not think there is any valid way to criticize green claims made by companies without being anti-corporate and anti-capitalist.
What about when a Dell Exec Knocks Apple’s Green Ads? Is Dell anti-corporate and anti-capitalist because it wants to set the record straight? Dell is currently ranked No. 25 among the Fortune 500 companies and No. 88 in the Fortune Global 500. Since its pretty hard to be anti-corporate and anti-capitalist with those stats, maybe Dell is just calling it like it is.
And as business people, why should we complain about greenwash anyhow?
First, it is not anti-corporate and anti-capitalist to set the record straight on environmental achievements versus environmental distortion. It is every business person’s—from the entrepreneur to the VP of communications at a Fortune 500 company—job to do just that so we do not dilute real environmental achievements.
Second, Bob Pearson, VP—Communities & Conversations at Dell said it well in his blog post:
“…companies who choose to lead have an obligation to be open and transparent. We have a responsibility to engage in dialogue about the environment, whether we agree or disagree with an individual person or group. It all contributes to the greater good.”
- World Famous RETREAD© Jar Openers
This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy (see proformagreen.com). John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.
<img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1064" src="http://go635254.s3.amazonaws.com/ecopreneurist/files/2008/12/rt5fo-foot-300x206.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="206" //>Do you need a cheap, green and useful tool to promote your eco-friendly business idea? Well look no further than the World Famous RETREAD© Jar Openers from Americanna.
These items could easily be our top seller for 2008 in terms of interest from clients. At EQP $0.41 per unit, the jar openers - also a great garlic peeler or coaster - come in over 150 shapes and provide likely the largest print area on a promotional item for your money.
As the name implies the World Famous RETREAD© Jar Openers are made from recycled tires. They come in many green theme shapes like suns, trees, water drops, homes, hearts, school houses, feet (as in lower your green footprint), you get the idea.
We love this item because it really, really works and people hang onto to them. They are cheap and light enough to use in mailings, great for handing out at events, and perfect as an easy to understand example of recycle and reuse thinking, i.e. this was a tire now it opens jars, ok. Got it.
More information on the World Famous RETREAD© Jar Openers is available here or just visit the Americanna website.
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source: (Ecopreneurist) - Product Stewardship Gains More Allies
<img src="http://www.greenbiz.com/files/imagecache/blog_landscape_large/1208recycle01.jpg" alt="Recycling event - CC license by Flickr user Samuel Mann " title="CC license by Flickr user Samuel Mann " />Councils in Vermont and British Columbia are the latest to adopt framework principles for developing product stewardship policy; Los Angeles has declared support for product stewardship and will integrate it into purchasing decisions.
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source: (GreenBiz.com Green Business News) - CDM Takes Off Around the World
<img src="http://www.greenbiz.com/files/imagecache/blog_landscape_large/1223WindWide.jpg" alt="WInd turbine -- Licensed by stock.xchng user johnnyberg" title="Wind Turbine licensed by
stock.xchng user johnnyberg." />The United Nations boasts its Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is having a global impact on cutting emissions.
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source: (GreenBiz.com Green Business News) - DOE Awards Up to $80B for Efficiency, Renewables, Water-Saving at Fed Sites
The U.S. Department of Energy is awarding as much as $80 billion for 16 contracts covering energy efficiency, renewable energy and water conservation projects at federal facilities.
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source: (GreenBiz.com Green Business News) - Can Eating a Sandwich Stop Your Heart?
A little over a year ago, a 25-year-old woman visited University Hospital Birmingham in England complaining of frequent 10-second bouts of nausea and lightheadedness, which was sometimes so intense it caused her to pass out."She was very thin, she was pale, a very sensible young woman," says Una Martin, a clinical pharmacologist at the hospital assigned to the case shortly after the woman's first visit. She had no history of smoking, heavy drinking or psychiatric disorders. Strangely, her fainting episodes coincided with eating sandwiches and drinking fizzy beverages.
By the time Martin saw her, the woman had been bounced from one physician to the next and hospitalized twice, once in 2001 and once in 2007—but her condition remained a mystery.Posted via email from Jay’s posterous
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite - 15 days
source: (4 entrepreneur) - San Jose Library Installs Photovoltaic Glass Art
Last week, the Pearl Avenue Branch Library in San Jose, CA became the first municipality in the United States to install permanent public art combining photovoltaic cells and art glass.
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source: (GreenBiz.com Green Business News) - Radio Station K-TAO Broadcasts with Solar Power
Many companies are only now discovering the wonders of solar energy, but New Mexico radio station KTAO has been broadcasting with help from the sun since 1991.
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source: (GreenBiz.com Green Business News) - Management Systems: The Bedrock for Building a Sustainable Business
Many operations professionals have either little appreciation of the role of management systems play in process improvement, or they haven't had a positive experience with them. Yet those systems are the foundation for building a sustainable business, says Robert Pojasek.
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source: (GreenBiz.com Green Business News)
