BP oil spill: let us break it down for you

Image from The Rachel Maddow Show Flickr

Over 50 days ago, on April 20th, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig (a mobile offshore drilling unit designed to drill underwater wells for oil extraction) exploded due to a high pressure in the well, leading to what experts now think may be one of the largest oil spills in history.

With news reports every day updating citizens on new estimates of oil spilled, who's blaming who, which politician is offering his two-cents, which celebrity is offering his new technology, why they went wrong, and who is in trouble, it can be near impossible to figure out what's happening.

Over the next few days, I'll be writing some posts about:

1) What is the BP oil spill?  What's been done?  Who are the players?  Who is affected?

2) What are the business implications?  What are the political implications?  And, most importantly perhaps, how are these intertwined?

3) What's going to happen and how can we help?

I'll split it out over a few days so it's not like reading a novel but all we can say with certainty is that this event could be a major turning point - but of what?  (We don't quite know... a turning point for big corporations?  For small business?  For President Obama?)

Even more than a month later, there's quite a bit of conjecture, so, as always, your feedback is appreciated.

Greening Graduation

As this weekend is Parents' Weekend, Jostens set up cap and gown pick-up/purchase in the bookstore, and I was pleasantly surprised/intrigued to see Jostens injecting some environmental responsibility into their messaging.

Here are the points presented:
1) Fiber from renewable, managed forests
2) Fabric proven to decompose in soil
3) Eco-Zip coil zipper
4) Earth-friendly plastic gown packaging
5) Student give-back program



What makes a zipper eco-friendly? Apparently, it is made with 100% recycled PET plastic.

I think it is cool that the fabric will decompose, but I am not planning to test that out.

However, what I would recommend testing out is the Student give-back program. I still have my gown from Commencement, but if you are buying a new one, go to the Jostens website. Fill in the code from the hang tag, and Jostens will donate $1 to the Green Belt Movement or the Nature Conservancy.

(Note: The attached photo is the graph of aforementioned donations--currently at $121.)

Frozen Food, a Staple of the College Diet

...But should it be? The New York Times wrote a follow up report on the salmonella breakout two years ago, which was traced back to ConAgra's frozen pot pies. ConAgra's response? To transfer the responsibility to the consumer. ConAgra decided to repackage its frozen food meals with new instructions. The normal kill temperature for salmonella is 165 degrees Fahrenheit, which means the inside of food needs to reach that temperature.

Do you know the temperature your microwave reaches? Do you own a food thermometer? Most likely not. NYT reporters tried to follow the new instructions, which failed to get the food to reach the kill temperature. ConAgra responded that they are aiming to get the food to be able to reach this temperature, as it is a "safety issue." But if it's a safety issue, why are these meals still allowed to be sold?

This all goes back to knowing the source of your food. If there were more transparency, American consumers wouldn't be faced with this problem today. What it boils down to... is the question of who's responsibility is it for food safety? Of course, it's debatable... but as a consumer, you are the one with the most at stake.

A follow-up comment from the American Frozen Food Institute can be read here. Comments from other NYT readers and experts can be read here.

Book Review: Ecological Intelligence

I just finished reading Daniel Goleman's Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything . Goleman is also the author of the books Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence. You have probably heard about the former, considering how prevalent "EQ (or Emotional IQ/Quotient) tests" appear online.

Ecological intelligence, considered by Time Magazine to be one of the ten ideas changing the world right now, is a very new and very powerful concept. Ecological intelligence refers to the knowledge and understanding of the histories of the products we buy and the decisions we buy. When you go to the supermarket, for instance, you only see products on shelves; you do not know about how much water, how much energy, and how many miles went into their creation. When you choose paper or plastic, how do you know which bag has a less effect on the environment? And how do you know how much of an offset that reusable tote is? Goleman explores these questions and the role of INFORMATION and RADICAL TRANSPARENCY in this discourse...


One would hope that, given full information on two equivalent products, the consumer would opt for the one that has a better social and environmental history; however, greenwashing (common in marketing campaigns today--just think of some ads in the metro stations) is far from a carbon footprint label.

The Good Guide is one of many innovations Goleman discusses. One of my friends recently told me about the Good Guide when he had been thinking about such an idea himself. Founded by students in Berkeley, it is a cell phone- and Internet-based service that rates consumer goods on their health, environmental, and social impacts, letting you know the product's and company's history with just a snapshot (for the cell phone) or a click (for the Internet). Essentially, it compiles and condenses all of this data for you in the moment in takes to make that shopping decision. The Guide is only in its beta version now but could have a lot of potential.

Likewise, Goleman speaks a lot about the idea of RADICAL TRANSPARENCY. With new technological advances, consumers are able to find out more about companies, and more info can come out through the press as well. Radical transparency, then, can be the best of defenses: businesses should make all of their information available to consumers and position themselves for innovation and openness.

The ideas in this book are akin to those in the online web video The Story of Stuff by former Greenpeace activist Annie Leonard. Leonard's video has come into the news recently under accusations that it is an attack on capitalism. However, in my firm opinion, it is not an attack on capitalism itself, but rather a misguided manifestation of it. In the economic model of PERFECT COMPETITION, both consumers and producers have full knowledge of the product. With the lack of information that exists today for so many of the goods we buy, this "perfect knowledge" is noticeably missing. Such a lack of shared knowledge also prohibits the innovation provided by a competitive market; if consumers had all of the information about their purchases right in front of them at the store, then companies would probably be much more likely to innovate, a lesson that needs to be learned from the current problems in the automobile industry.

I think that the last lines of Goleman's book are perhaps the most powerful and most telling. He quotes Ian McCallum, a South African physician and naturalist who writes about ecological intelligence, saying, "We have to stop speaking about the Earth being in need of healing..the Earth doesn't need healing. We do" (247).

Photo courtesy of amazon.com.