What is green marketing? Green marketing refers to the process of selling products and/or services based on their environmental benefits. Such a product or service may be environmentally friendly in itself or produced and/or packaged in an environmentally friendly way.

The obvious assumption of green marketing is that potential consumers will view a product or service’s “greenness” as a benefit and base their buying decision accordingly. The not-so-obvious assumption of green marketing is that consumers will be willing to pay more for green products than they would for a less-green comparable alternative product – an assumption that, in my opinion, has not been proven conclusively.

While green marketing is growing greatly as increasing numbers of consumers are willing to back their environmental consciousnesses with their dollars, it can be dangerous. The public tends to be skeptical of green claims to begin with and companies can seriously damage their brands and their sales if a green claim is discovered to be false or contradicted by a company’s other products or practices. Presenting a product or service as green when it’s not is called greenwashing.

Green marketing can be a very powerful marketing strategy though when it’s done right.

Everything is Connected to Everything else: Economic and Ecological Bubbles

Triplepundit By Amie Vaccaro

Denis Hayes, President and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation, kicked off today’s Ceres Conference in San Francisco with a reminder that no nation can solve climate problems on its own – we must come together as a species because everything is connected. North African dust has been correlated to hurricanes. We have all breathed an atom that was exhaled by Julius Caesar when he said “Et tu Brutus?”

Economic bubbles and ecological bubbles
Globalization has raised the stakes for both economic and ecological bubbles. “In America bubbles have to do with…delusions that mouse clicks can be monetized, and that my house can double in value every three years,” Hayes explained. But economic bubbles and today’s crisis will end – illiquidity is not irreversible.
Ecological bubbles on the other hand are not reversible. Ecological bubbles don’t bounce back. Today’s prices do not reflect ecological realities. We are undermining values of ecosystem services and not including it in our accounting. These costs that are treated as external are larger and more important than internal factors, and they have grown to awesome proportions. “Sooner or later, mother nature will break our kneecaps,” Hayes warned.
What should we do?
Hayes had three suggestions: Continue Reading

By Bill McKibben

Superheroes indeed! I found them all over South Africa, from Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg to the botanical gardens of Cape Town. This is a country, obviously, that knows a little bit about political movements, so it’s not entirely surprising that people are coming up with dramatic and creative actions: a mass climb of the iconic Table Mountain that juts out above the confluence of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans in Capetown, or simultaneous bike rides in the three main cities, or — the list is long.

I ate breakfast with bishops and other clerics; lunch with biologists; dinner with journalists. South Africa is incredibly diverse and beautiful, which means it will suffer from all the various forms of trouble that climate change brings — drought on the desert edges that now support agriculture, for instance. And because it’s a developing country with an enormous first-world population, it has a real mix of causes and consequences. But more to the point, there seems to be a surplus of people ready to go to work, on Oct. 24 and in the months thereafter. This place has worked miracles before — and everyone we talked to pointed out that it the international movement against apartheid helped pressure the country to change. That’s the kind of pressure we need now!

Scientists wonder whether rising CO2 may trigger something else that further warms the climate

Fifty-five million years ago, the world was a much warmer place. The poles were ice-free year-round. Palm trees grew in Alaska. Forests stretched right into the Arctic Circle.

There, swamps like those in today’s southeastern United States hosted alligators, snakes, and giant tortoises.

Scientists call this time in Earth’s history the Eocene, the dawn of the age of mammals. And climatologists have naturally taken a keen interest in how it began.

They know that a dramatic spike in carbon dioxide associated with rapid climate change kicked off the epoch – called the “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum” (PETM). But what scientists don’t understand about the PETM may hold the most relevant lessons for where the world’s climate is headed today.

So far, scientists have been unable to reproduce the PETM in a climate model. In order to get the climate they suspect existed, they have to crank up carbon dioxide far beyond what they think was actually the case. Continue Reading