For Earth Day 2011, the Blue Planet Foundation held a public gathering on the steps of the Hawaii state capitol to bring awareness to House Bill 1520.  As the crowd of 300+ dwindled, I caught up with Jeff Mikulina, Executive Director of Blue Planet Foundation. The non-profit’s stated goal is to rid the [...]

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The need for green workforce development is clear. It is also clear that the majority of new jobs are created by small business, roughly 60%, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. So how do we help get a lot of startups to lift us out of this recession and dramatically shift the makeup of [...]

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Recently, in conversation with Kevin Danaher, whose non-profit Global Exchange is the co-producer of the Green Festival, I asked him what he’s learned in several years running the Green Festivals. It’s clear that the events keep growing, that more and more people are looking to get into their dream of becoming a Green Business Owner, [...]

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With eager anticipation and just a week to go before the World Series begins, we sit on the edge of our seats watching the buildup.  The potential for an epic battle of Texas versus San Francisco and California is huge. With all their shared history of national political influence, and of course, stereotypical cultural differences, [...]

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Today and tomorrow, GreenBiz.com’s Innovation Forum in San Francisco has brought together, by invite only, the biggest thinkers in sustainable strategy at some of the biggest companies to learn how to actually innovate for a sustainable future. The first “Innovisionary” to speak was Tim O’Reilly, the ‘father of web 2.0′.  He described innovation as an [...]

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This morning, San Rafael, CA-based Autodesk, Inc. announced a partnership with UK-based Granta Design Ltd.  Granta Design maintains an extensive database on material information technology.  Granta’s software has been used mostly by goliath manufacturing and engineering companies for material selection, substitution and cost optimization in order to design in the context of environmental objectives and [...]

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Recently, I had the honor of interviewing Stephen M.R. Covey, author of the Speed of Trust, as part of his PR campaign for the upcoming Leaders Causing Leaders tour, and asked him about entrepreneurship and microenterprise. Covey’s father, Stephen R. Covey, who wrote the foreword for this book, is a widely renowned bestselling author of [...]

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These geeky Mythbuster scientists pulled off a major coup when they landed a show on Discovery with the theme of testing the commonly held myths of our society.  Can someone actually die from dropping a hair dryer into the bath tub?  Was the moon landing real, or was it an elaborate hoax to drum up [...]

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It’s that time again!  Green America’s annual popular vote to elect this year’s most inspiring green business.  What defines green business is subject of some debate, but Green America’s criteria and pioneering work in the field have helped set the standard for triple bottom line metrics.  One of last year’s winners, Dharma Merchant Services, for [...]

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Mario Arrastia Avila, a Physicist in Cuba’s energy transition agency Cuba Energia, spoke in San Francisco last week about the lessons of Cuba’s transition after its own Peak Oil disaster struck in the early 1990s.  At the time, the Soviet Union’s collapse meant that North Korea, Cuba, and other communist satellites faced the end of [...]

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A few years ago, the water heater at my house gave out.  I had recently installed a 1.8 kW solar PV system on my rooftop, and was really excited about the possibility of breaking my fossil fuel dependency by replacing my water heater with an electric one, which would have been powered by the sun.  [...]

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Coming into a medical office can cause anxiety for some….and be a calming influence for others.  The former is often referred to as “White Coat Syndrome,” where people’s blood pressure is consistently measured higher in a medical office than in a normal setting.   The latter tends to occur when patients who may naturally be predisposed [...]

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An ongoing debate exists in this country and around the world about whether or not the need to transition away from dirty fuels and toward a clean energy economy is truly pressing. I’d like to simply make the case here that we’re playing with fire, not in a “touchy-feely, climate change is bad” kind of [...]

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A few weeks after the big announcement in San Francisco by GE CEO Jeff Immelt that GE would be cosponsoring a “crowdsourcing” challenge for great ideas in smart grid, green building, and renewables, the website is abuzz with almost 1,000 ideas and several thousand comments.  The contest, which will award $200 M in grants for [...]

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The Colorado governor’s race is still in primary season, but the barbs, predictably, are already flying between the likely candidates.  Republican front-runner Dan Maes, a darling of the Tea Party movement, will likely win the the GOP nomination to square off against Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a popular and well-liked Democrat who has advocated a [...]

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A recently launched website for organic, backyard gardeners offers a plethora of do-it-yourself tools designed, in essence, to help maximize yields of organic produce in backyards across the world.  Perhaps a play on the popularity of self-promotional sites like YouTube, except with a green twist that allows others to learn from your gardening experiences, YourGardenShow [...]

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The statistics are grim for entrepreneurs: 75% of startups are no longer in business after 5 years. Many sell, merge, or reorganize, but the majority of this number simply fail. What’s the biggest mistake that a solo entrepreneur makes? Undercapitalizing? Lack of planning? Failure to stick to the mission? Ineffective marketing? Lack of access to [...]

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GE’s ecomagination program–out of the blue two months ago–became a sponsor of the Bay Area Green Business Meetup Group, which I co-chair with the help of 3P’s founder, Nick Aster. It’s not often that sponsors fall from the sky with unsolicited ad dollars. Through a partnership with Meetup.com, GE is sponsoring not just our Meetup [...]

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In a recent Harvard Business Review Article, Timothy Ogden made the case that the U.S. is out of touch with Social Entrepreneurship.  His basic premise?  Social innovations created by the rich, intended on helping the poor, are bound to fail. 

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An afternoon session at the LOHAS Conference gave aspiring entrepreneurs a chance to ask panelists in the financial world about raising capital, especially during this economic environment.  The panel included Joseph Durnford, CEO of JD Ford Associates, Joseph Anzalone, Vice President of New Resource Bank, Rich Frankenheimer of Touchpoint Trust Group, and Deb Parsons, Co-Director [...]

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In an earlier post, I profiled the presentation of Steve French of the Natural Marketing Institute, given at day one of the 2010 LOHAS Conference in beautiful Boulder, CO, about the state of the LOHAS consumer, and the trends among the five consumer types that NMI characterizes, from deep green to non-green.  Gwynne Rogers, who [...]

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Everybody likes grilled cheese, right?  Vegetarians and carnivores, connoisseurs and cheapskates can all appreciate two pieces of grilled bread and some melty, cheesy goodness in the middle.  When this simple sandwich turns into a staple of social enterprise, it can only be a powerful addition to the green economy. Feel Good World is operating franchise [...]

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If there’s one positive that could come from the Gulf oil spill, it may be a renewed political will to catalyze a transformation away from dirty sources of power and towards a clean and renewable future.  The concept has always held a certain appeal, and with the help of former California State Treasurer Phil Angelides, [...]

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The most interesting thing happens when you talk to people about concrete.  No matter what part of the spectrum they are from, the response seems to be uniform:  their eyes gloss over.  Whether they are no-holds barred pro-development (in which case their attitude toward concrete is that it’s completely necessary) or no-holds barred preservationists (in [...]

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The annual LOHAS Conference, which I will be covering for Triple Pundit, along with MC O’Connor, is coming up June 23-25 in beautiful Boulder, Colorado.  This week, ahead of the conference itself, LOHAS released its annual “LOHAS Consumer Trends Database,” which is the Natural Marketing Institute’s consumer tracking tool.  It aims to explore what’s going [...]

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With many people calling for a boycott of BP for its lack of effective action in last month’s oil spill disaster, it is clear that consumers understand that where they spend their money matters.  Whether boycotts are effective or not is not the question…a lot of times, it’s the attention such efforts receive, which leads [...]

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Triple Pundit’s BC Upham chronicled the partnership, recently announced, between Toyota and Tesla Motors to reopen part of the NUMMI plant in Fremont, CA, creating a coup for the green economy and the SF Bay Area as it establishes itself as the hub of sustainable enterprise and green jobs.  For those of us who’ve watched [...]

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With all the big news from the governments and big businesses announcing efficiency gains, offsets, retrofits, and other sustainability initiatives, it’s easy to lose site of the local efforts gaining traction across the country and world.  Microenterprise and community-based efforts at energy efficiency, alternative energy, and social entrepreneurship–such as solar powered cafes in remote rural [...]

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As the economy as a whole remains mired in a sleepy lull, there are sectors that are red hot.  According to GreenBiz.com’s State of Green Business Report, several green industries are creating jobs, growing, and shrugging off worldwide economic slowdowns.  Among these are green building and energy efficiency. Metrus Energy, a San Francisco startup, has [...]

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Recently, I posted a series of articles on green business books.  I’m an author.  I know the field reasonably well, though I’m no expert in the publishing industry.  Blogging is a terrific outlet for book sales, as I’ve found that by giving away a sample of my writing on Triple Pundit, and letting people decide [...]

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