Today’s blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a Senior Account Manager at Beaupre.

Following up on my co-generation/ symbiosis post from earlier this summer, I came across a great example of this principle in action the other day. This story explains how scientists at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland have developed a way to turn two byproducts of whiskey production into a more-than-viable alternative to corn ethanol. Treading on stereotypes for a moment, I have to say this sort of discovery would seem destined to have been made by a Scottish or Irish scientist.

The article explains that the biofuel made from the byproducts, butanol, packs 30 percent more energy per unit than does ethanol, can be easily blended into gasoline at refineries, requires no modification to engines that use the blended fuel and does not pick up water, making it far easier to handle and use than the hydrophilic ethanol. This is all terrific, and from a symbiosis standpoint, the really good news is that it’s derived from a waste product created by a useful, needed, everyday manufacturing activity.

Truth be told, this isn’t the first time I’ve come across this sort of useful byproduct in distilling. CNET’s Martin LaMonica covered a story last year wherein Sierra Nevada Brewing entered into a partnership to turn its beer making leftovers into a feedstock for a home ethanol start-up. Out on the road, distilling byproducts are already helping save money while improving safety. Read all the way to the bottom of this Wall Street Journal article from 2009 and you’ll see that leftovers from the rum-making process are an effective supplement to road salt.

So while drinking and driving don’t mix, distilling and driving may be a rather different story.

Posted by: Ed Marshall

Eco science can boggle the mind, and it’s easy to drown in the data. Unless we can see, smell or feel an environmental threat, we tend to ignore it. So if you want to make a memorable point, dumb it down. Way down.

 

That’s what TreeHugger.com and the Global Footprint Network (GFN) have done with respect to natural resource consumption. Here, for example, is an environmental data point anyone can grasp:

 

 

Pretty simple way to represent complex information, isn’t it? The Global Footprint Network chart documents the fact that we, as a country and planet, consume more natural resources than the earth replenishes and generate waste faster than the planet can absorb it. The chart considers energy production, settlement, timber & paper harvest, food & fiber and seafood. It’s backed up by more data than any of us care to examine here.

 

The bottom line is we have a natural resources deficit. Having considered that, GFN, in another example of dumbing-down genius, declares that…

August 21 is Earth Overshoot Day.

That’s the day when we humans have used up the planet’s annual supply of resources. If you pretend we get a fresh start every Jan. 1, then August 21 is the day we go into deficit spending of our natural capital. If we were prevented from borrowing against the planet’s future, we’d run out of resources on that day. As consumption soars, Earth Overshoot Day comes earlier every year. Last year, it was Sept. 25.

 

Now that we know the day, do we know the solution to over-consumption? Well, that’s hard to dumb down. In addition to conventional sustainability measures, TreeHugger.com blogger Matthew McDermott

CALCULATE YOUR ECO FOOTPRINT

recommends “radically reassessing how much stuff we believe is required for our happiness. Rejiggering what we believe to be needs and not just wants.”

 

He’s not alone. In fact, a minimalist trend is already under way, says the BBC, starting with young American urbanites digitizing their books and music and shedding large swaths of possessions, including homes.

 

That’s sounds smart.

And so does this personal ecological footprint calculator. Try it, and tell us how many planet earths you need to support your lifestyle. (I’d need 4.6. Ouch!)

In Northern New England, where I live, the sun exists only in rumor and faint memory for weeks at a time. So when sustainable energy advocates talk solar, I think of my late-February pallor and mentally check out of the discussion. Long nights, short days of limited sun. Wind for my region maybe, but solar?

 

Well, yes, actually. Two news items that filtered through the excellent Inhabitat blog recently give hope to anyone who thinks the sun could help wean us off fossil fuels. The first comes from Sicily, where the energy company Enel recently fired up “Archimede” the world’s first utility-scale molten salt power plant. Archimede uses mirror concentrators to super-heat a molten salt solution circulating through a pipe array. The heat pipes power boilers that create steam to drive electrical turbines. The key to this system is that it can store energy for nights and cloudy days, much like the solar thermal systems I blogged about a while back. The combination of sodium nitrates and potassium salts in the system can accumulate heat for extended periods. That ability to ride out nights and cloudy days makes thermal solar more practical for sun-deprived areas like mine. Photovoltaic solar, the more widely known solar technology,  generates electricity directly from the sun’s rays instead of through turbines. It’s  most often associated with places like the American Southwest, which have weeks on end of uninterrupted sunshine.

 

But photovoltaic’s geographical limitations were never a technology problem, they were an economic problem. Solar panels work as well on a sunny New England day as they do on a sunny day anywhere else. They just didn’t work often enough to make them economically feasible because solar panels are expensive. Maybe not for much longer, though. Researchers at Duke University just released a study that says solar energy is now cheaper than nuclear energy, partly because the cost of panels is dropping. When it drops enough, it will be economically feasible to mount solar panels on rooftops to power air conditioners during hot summer days, or heat during clear, sunny winter days to reduce oil and coal consumption.

 

Now if I could just do something about that late February pallor …

Who really cares? That’s a vital question, maybe the question, in clean tech communications.

 

You can sit in a conference room all day hashing out your product positioning, but if you can’t get your audience to feel, you’ll never get them to act.

 

This truth concerns me from a life-or-death perspective as some of the most concrete, tangible, visible symptoms of our planet’s problems – the things that make us care – are fading away. We, the audience, care just a little less each day.

 

The BP well has stopped spewing, so the underground oil cam is boring. Tony Hayward has sailed away from the executive suite, taking his $18 million and our anger with him. The oil slick is … well, where the hell has it gone?

 

Climate change is at least as frustrating as oil fatigue because it’s an abstraction even as it suffocates the planet. Although it’s sweltering here in New England, global warming will seem pretty academic in December. And while the slow implosion of the ocean’s food chain isn’t as jarring as the pothole on your street, ocean warming is being blamed for a 40 percent decrease in the ocean’s algal biomass.

 

Plastiki gets the art of caring. The sailboat, made of 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles, just arrived in Sydney after 128 days crossing the Pacific and spotlighting the blight of plastic trash in the ocean. It was an inspired communications gambit that has successfully given compelling physical form to an environmental concern we hardly see.

The vessel was years in the making. Sometimes it takes that kind of effort to make people care. Keep that in mind when you’re fighting the good fight for clean technology.

Sadly, bad news can be easier to care about. Although the plankton decline isn’t so scary, when Louisiana’s seafood restaurants become pasta joints, that will certainly get people’s attention.

 

If viable, the machine would help Toyota get over the hump of its gasoline dependence while putting a Tesla power train into vehicles that regular people can own. Tesla is the only automaker in the U.S. that builds and sells highway-capable EVs in meaningful volume, claiming over 1,000 Roadsters driving emissions-free in more than 25 countries.

 

You already know about Toyota’s prim gas/electric hybrid.

 

Tesla’s racy Roadster, with an MSRP of $109,000, is an all-electric sports car that can go 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds and travel 244 miles on a single charge of its lithium-ion battery pack.

 

Tesla plans to produce and deliver a fleet of all-electric RAV4 prototypes to Toyota for evaluation within the year.

Can the new RAV4 make people forget the runaway death Prius? Can it teach Toyota about harnessing reliable power from laptop batteries? Can  it bring the electric car concept (and price) down to earth? 

Let’s hope.

This has been done before, sort of. Toyota made 1,500 electric RAV4s between 1997 and 2003. Actor Ed Begley Jr. still has one:

 

• More doubtful that global warming is really happening,
• Less likely to blame humans (as opposed to natural causes) for global warming, and
• Less trusting of scientists. (Scientists, however, remained much more trusted than weather reporters, President Obama, Al Gore, religious leaders or the mainstream media.)

The brand journalist is the one of the most compelling marketing concepts I’ve encountered in a while.

 

A brand journalist is an in-house newshound, preferably with professional reporting experience, who works for your company instead of an independent news organization. You unleash him or her to mine stories – from the inside – that make good corporate blog posts, video, photos, charts, e-books, white papers and the like. The theory is that the content, conceived and produced by a real enough journalist, will be compelling, polished, believable, persuasive and maybe even authentic.

 

When I first learned of the practice, it was a eureka moment. Media consumers are starving for authenticity, and the business world is generally failing to deliver it. Brand journalism! This was the answer.

 

So leave it to BP to spoil a good thing.

 

The company has contaminated the Gulf with “BP reporters” writing eerily feel-good posts and coaxing positive comments from locals. Comments like “there is no reason to hate BP” and “the oil spill was an accident.” One ‘BP reporter’ actually characterized cleanup work as a “ballet at sea as mesmerising as any performance in a concert hall, and worthy of an audience in its own right.” Gag me.

 

As if BP weren’t already leaking credibility by the barrel, CNN last night tore them a new one for posts like these.

 

Said media watcher Howard Kurtz, “There isn’t one person in America who is going to be fooled by this propaganda campaign. The reporting has been so positive you’d think they were on BP’s payroll. Oh, that’s right, they are on BP’s payroll. Maybe that explains it.”

 

Want authenticity? You’ve got it in Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, La., and force of nature. “You know, instead of hiring PR people to talk about ballets on the water, if we just do the right thing, sit down and deploy every piece of equipment, there's something [for BP] to hang your hat on,” he said. “Look in the camera and say, ‘We're doing everything feasibly possible to save coastal Louisiana, to contain this oil, to pick it up, to make this wrong right. There's your PR. But don't just say it. Go out there and do it, and the PR will take care of itself.’”

 

Pretty good counsel.

 

I still like the idea of brand journalism, but an unprecedented environmental disaster has somehow yielded an unprecedented PR disaster. So maybe BP should just give it a rest.

If BP gets anything, they finally seem to get the need for transparency in a crisis, at least to the degree that they have begun streaming live video from the gusher that has spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. In this case, transparency is not pretty.

Are you as big a fool as I am? I’ve been giving BP the benefit of the doubt on the gulf oil disaster – until this morning, when I learned that the gusher could be spewing 11 to 16 times as much as BP has been saying. That's equivalent to a new Valdez spill every four or five days. The bigger estimate is from of a Purdue University fluids expert without an apparent dog in this fight.

Either volume is a lot for the ecosystem to choke down. But if BP’s 5,000-barrels-a-day estimate is spin (and as of this morning on CNN, BP was sticking to that estimate), it has colossally backfired. In addition to the permanent damage to the company brand, the number has real implications for how you clean the mess up.

 

“I am concerned that an underestimation of the oil spill’s flow may be impeding the ability to solve the leak and handle the management of the disaster,” said U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass. “If you don’t understand the scope of the problem, the capacity to find the answer is severely compromised.”

 

Until this morning, I’ve viewed the tragedy less as a product of BP’s greed than the inevitable consequence of our oil  addiction. To the extent we drive more miles than we need to in autos bigger than we require, I reasoned, we all share blame for this. Now, I just wonder what else BP is hiding.

 

So, apparently, does the Today show’s Ann Curry, who grilled (video) BP’s COO this morning, putting the company’s sinking credibility on excruciating display. Spoiler alert: If you expected an apology, you’ll be disappointed.

 

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, in a crisis, come clean. Early on. It’s how you start making the best of a bad situation -- or in this case, a situation going from bad to worse.

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Posts from our sister blog on crisis communications: