Last Friday I had started to wake up my kids for school, when I looked out the window and thought better of it. I checked my text messages and there was a notification from the NYC Board of Education that all NYC schools were closed – SNOW DAY! Since my son Noah has a particularly violent reaction to being woken up, I was happy to let him go back to sleep and save myself from some berating and screaming (my husband usually is the butt of this behavior, but he was stuck in California since his flight was canceled due to the snow storm). So I happily crawled back into bed for a little more sleep and reminisced about the snow days of my youth. This is the second Snow Day NYC has had in a month – woo hoo! I started thinking about how people have actually been using the snow to support their “where has global warming gone?” jokes.
Have you seen the Jon Stewart clip making fun of the global warming deniers? I posted it on our Facebook page a few weeks ago, but in case you missed it, here it is, let’s call it Exhibit 1:
Pretty hilarious, in a sad sort of way. But you may say – he’s just a comedian – what does he know? I then turn to the respected Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, for Exhibit 2: at a speech to the Columbia Business School Alumni Club last week, Sachs talked about climate change in an alarming way. He said things like: “we can’t go back” and “we are acting ignorantly, indignantly” and “we are diverging from a sustainable trajectory” and my favorite: “if we all had our own CO2 clouds over our heads, we’d be OK.”
That’s not enough for you? Well, for Exhibit 3 I give you NY Times Columnist Thomas Friedman when he writes about “Global Weirding” in this recent Op-Ed: “Of the festivals of nonsense that periodically overtake American politics, surely the silliest is the argument that because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable energy, solar panels and carbon taxes. Just drill, baby, drill.”
So what can we do? Well this week, Repower America has launched the largest call-in campaign for climate ever to urge the Senate to support a strong clean energy and climate bill. Please join me in calling the senate! And don’t put away those snow shovels yet, I hear more snow is to come!
I love discovering cool internet tools. The geek in me speaks again. So when I took a moment to check out URTAK.com I was happy I did. One of the many Columbia Business School email lists I subscribe to is made up of CBS entrepreneurs. I had seen some postings by a company called URTAK but never paid much attention. I guess what grabbed my attention this time was the following: “you might like this free collaborative poll – to embed on your site or blog.” Something that is free, collaborative, provides some feedback and insight into consumer attitudes, and has an embeddable widget? It sounded too tempting to blow off.
At EcoPlum, we are always interested in gaining insight into human behavior and attitudes about “going green.” We’ve developed complex surveys and have collected some compelling data. But I must admit it takes quite a bit of effort to obtain the survey responses. The nice thing about URTAK is that it is easy, quick, and gives instantaneous results. I don’t love that the questions are limited to “Yes or No” type questions, but I understand why they started with this format.
So here is my first attempt at using URTAK – which is clearly in beta and needs a lot of usability upgrades, but nonetheless is pretty cool.
Please – answer these questions, add your own, share with your friends, and let’s get some interesting data about eco-attitudes! Thanks!
HAPPY FRIDAY! I love Fridays. I remember the euphoric feeling I would get on Fridays when I was in high school. Maybe I was going away for the weekend on one of my youth group’s “conventions” and I was giddy with anticipation of the fun and flirting and camaraderie ahead. Or maybe I was just elated to know that I didn’t have to get up at the crack of butt for school the next day. Whatever the reason, Fridays made me happy. Now that I’m a middle aged mom and life can be a drag at times, I’m thrilled that Fridays still have that hint of excitement. Today I’m feeling generally excited about the direction of Sustainable Business. (OK, a little geeky, but true).
Over the past months, I’ve been very involved with a series sponsored by the Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York’s Sustainable Business Committee called “Making Green from Green.” The presenters have been phenomenal and I sense a true commitment to sustainable practices from these industry leaders. Yes, I know, lately I have been skeptical, frustrated and generally down on big business and its ability to lead in this area. Why just a couple of blogs ago I was saying that the consumers need to be the ones to demand and drive change. And I do believe that. But I am also seeing a genuine effort by businesses to do the right thing.
I recently discovered this really cool company, CSRHUB, that ranks about 5,000 publicly traded companies on their environmental, employee, community and governance actions and performance. They have gathered data from 50 different sources of company Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) data and aggregated it for us all to use. In fact, one of their sources is the non-profit Climate Counts, one of EcoPlum’s environmental causes. So I decided to go through and pick some companies that scored well, and see what you all thought.
Company
Overall Score
Environmental Score
EcoPlum Gives a Thumbs Up for:
Hewlett Packard
70
71
The first major IT company to report GHG emissions associated with its supply chain
AstraZeneca
67
67
AstraZeneca Among Working Mother Magazine’s 2009 ‘Best Companies’
IBM
66
67
Provides Employees With 100% Primary Health Care Coverage,
Nokia
64
61
Named the world’s most sustainable technology company, by the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes for 2009-10.
L’Oreal
62
64
In 2009, L’Oréal’s plants in Clark, Franklin and Piscataway, NJ and North Little Rock, AK sent zero waste to landfill.
HSBC
59
57
n 2005 HSBC became the world’s first major bank to become ‘carbon neutral’.
It still amazes me – our obsession with plastic bags. Yesterday I was at Duane Reade (the New York version of CVS, Walgreens, whatever pharmacy/convenience store you have in your neck of the woods) and the guy ahead of me at the cashier buys a bag of chips, stands there while the clerk puts [...]
Wow, I had really worked myself into a tizzy by the end of 2009. I was feeling disappointed about the outcome of Copenhagen, and, well, worried about the future of our planet. Closer to home, I started to really take offense at all the waste associated with the holiday season. Add to that the dismal [...]
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