Executive Editor of Greener World Media answers your questions...Joel Makower, executive editor at
Greener World Media, was featured last issue as our Eco-Leader. He received many wonderful questions from our web community and has provided a select number of responses. Please read on to see if your question was answered and to learn more about some of the initiatives and programs underway.
1. It seems like the West Coast is the most mature as far as the green economy is concerned, but what prospects do you see for the Midwest as a region? And what’s holding us back? Is it the lack of policy, the lack of venture capital, or other?The West Coast's leadership in the green economy is born of a confluence of factors. First and foremost, California and the West have always been the land of opportunity and innovation -- the world that produced Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Disneyland, and free love. Moreover, there's an infrastructure in place to take innovation and bring it to life: world-class schools like Stanford, Berkeley, and Caltech; venture capitalists seeking the Next Big Thing; and government policies that promote green innovation, such as California's strict energy-efficiency regulations. All of which has attracted an ecosystem of bankers, lawyers, marketers, publicists, and others who specialize in entrepreneurial companies.
The bad news is that few other places boast all of those ingredients, along with a pioneering spirit. The good news is that there are emerging green-economy hubs around the country: Austin, Portland, Denver-Boulder, Upstate New York, Western Michigan, and many others. Each of these has the potential to create market niches or cleantech clusters fostered by local universities, national laboratories, and supportive companies.
2. WalMart seems to be a best practice and a worst practice when it comes to Social Responsibility. What do you think? I think that what's going on at Walmart epitomizes the corporate environmental trend: It is at once revolutionary and insufficient. That is, Walmart's leadership stands to have considerable influence among its thousands of suppliers and millions of customers, helping the former to be more efficient and less wasteful, and the latter to buy greener goods at nonpremium prices. Their influence is pushing some of the biggest companies, from Coca-Cola to Procter & Gamble, to rethink their products and packaging.
But Walmart isn't pushing them very far. The improvements are incremental, not radical, and they are doing little to reduce consumers' consumption habits. So, even if every retailer followed Walmart's lead, and each of those retailers' suppliers changed the way they did business as a result, it still would represent only a tiny blip of the change that needs to happen.
So, how should we view these companies? As polluting scam artists who should be scolded for deigning to talk about their efforts? Or as companies trying to shift directions, even if it's slower and more incremental than most of us would like? Do we beat them up or cheer them on? I vote for the latter — always, of course, remaining watchful to make sure that their rhetoric doesn't get too far ahead of reality.
3. Why doesn’t GreenBiz.com cover small businesses?We do cover them to some degree -- in fact, there's a special page
devoted to smaller firms. But we focus on larger companies because that's where the changes need to take place most. And there is an endless amount of news to report about how big companies are changing.
Smaller firms are at a disadvantage in the green economy, for three reasons. They are less likely to own their facilities, so aren't able to engage in some of the cost-effective retrofits that larger companies can do when they own the buildings where they operate: energy-efficient lighting, heating, and cooling; water-efficient fixtures; solar panels on the roof, etc. Second, because they are relatively small buyers of things, they don't enjoy the economies of scale bigger companies do, enabling them to reduce or eliminate the price premium for some green purchases; and third, they typically don't have dedicated environmental staffs, meaning that changes have to fit into someone else's job. So, there is a lot less progress among smaller companies than larger ones.
None of this is an excuse for not covering smaller firms more than we do at
GreenBiz.com (and its four sister sites, on climate, green buildings, information technology, and product design). The fact is, there is a great deal going on every day, and we can only focus on part of the picture. We've chosen, for a number of strategic business reasons, to focus on larger ones, though we have a significant audience of smaller firms, too.
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