Hot off the presses. I originally posted this blog about ThisIsReality.org’s new spot in there their clever campaign to reveal the truth about “clean burning coal.” Then I leaned this morning that Academy Award winning directors Joel and Ethan Coen directed the “Air freshener” spot. Pretty cool to get a couple Hollywood legends not just behind your cause, but contributing to it.
I first learned and wrote about the campaign when it launched in December. They’re doing a tremendous job of balancing humor, sarcasm, wit, and reality to expose the burning of coal for what it really is: Not Clean!
Have you seen the work CoolPeopleCare.org have been doing on communicating simple things you can do in five minutes to make the planet healthier? I give them an A- for terrific green marketing & messaging (They’d have an A+ if they’d update their blog more often)
Friends and co-founders, Sam Davidson and Stephen Moseley, created the site to educate on and demonstrate the myriad of little, easy things we can all do to make a big overall difference. And they’ve orchestrated an equally impressive set of green communication tactics to engage the masses.
Here are just seven that caught my eye:
Daily email tips on what you can do in five minutes
Robust website that offers events and activities specific to your city (9th Annual Strong Beer Festival in Phoenix) with an area to post your own events
Links to other great green messaging causes like “A Pledge for a Song,” where you can download a free tune from Missy Higgins when you pledge to reduce your carbon usage by just two percent. See below for the 10 easy ways to do just that.
Sam and Stephen have done an excellent job of making their easy environmental tips as accessible to the public as possible. I leaned about them in a Homestyles magazine (my wife’s an interior designer), so their P.R. machine isn’t bad either. I hope they’re on the front end of a trend to make green marketing and messaging, and the environmental lifestyle tips at its core, as easy, accessible and digestible as possible for the mainstream.
Hey, they got my attention with beer and music.
Ten Quick and Easy Ways to decrease your Carbon Output this year:
Drive smarter – keep your tires properly inflated, go the speed limit, drive less and walk more!
Buy local and organic – the average American meal travels 1,500 miles from the farm to the plate. Be more conscious of where your food comes from and you can pollute less at dinner time.
Call your electric company and switch over to green power! Most utility companies offer renewable energy options for just a few dollars more a month.
Replace incandescent light bulbs w/compact fluorescent bulbs. Compact fluorescents produce the same amount of light as normal bulbs, but use about a quarter of the electricity and last ten times as long!
Save energy at home! Caulk and weather strip doorways and windows. Keep your thermostat a few degrees higher in the Summer, and a few degrees lower in the Winter. It makes a big difference!
Get shower smart. Install low-flow showerheads and faucets and turn your hot water heater down to 120 degrees F to see hot water costs go down by as much as 50%!
Replace electronics and appliances with energy efficient models. Look for the Energy Star label when purchasing.
Plant a tree! Planting shade tress around your house will absorb CO2 and slash your Summer air-conditioning bills.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! Recycling paper, glass and metal saves 70-90% of the energy used to produce new materials while keeping more waste out of landfills. Buy purchasing used clothes and furniture you save the environment from the effects of all of the energy that would have been used to create those same products if they were brand new!
Mount a local campaign against global warming and participate at the national, state and local level. Click here for details.
Do you have a tip to add to the list? If so, comment below and feel free to Tweet away!
The BBC asked its correspondent Justin Rowlatt, “Ethical Man,” to make his family as carbon neutral as possible for one year. In the process, the now green Rowlatts offset nearly 20 percent of their carbon producing ways.
The idea of the project was to see what we can all do as individuals to curb greenhouse gas emissions and curb global warming. Rowlatt and his wife say that it was an astonishingly small amount of carbon, about two tons, for the sacrifices made. “Ethical men and women acting alone will not be enough to stop climate change.”
The BBC has given Ethical Man an even greater challenge: To travel across America and save the entire world from global warming.
“I’m going on a 6,500 mile trip around the nation that brought the world the motor car, the aeroplane, the suburb, the drive-thru hamburger joint and the hot tub, in search of solutions to the biggest problem on earth.
Each American is responsible for 20 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, more than twice that of the average European. But America is also the most innovative and powerful nation on earth and, what’s more, has a president who says he is serious about tackling global warming.
The idea is simple. If we can solve global warming here, we can solve it anywhere.”
- The BBC’s Ethical Man
Here’s Where You Come In
Hey Ethical Man, if you’re coming to Phoenix, AZ we’d love to talk about our work in sustainability and water conservation. Plus, we’d love to introduce you to a couple of our friends, including Russ, the hydroponic gardener and Donal, the green mobile messaging inventor.
Ethical Man is looking for people across America to talk about solutions to global warming. If you have an idea or want to refer Ethical Man to someone you know who is making a difference, contact him on Facebook and Twitter. He’s starting his adventure in Muskegon, Michigan, of all places, and will be circling the nation looking for anybody who is or has ideas on how to reduce greenhouse gasses and curb global warming.
Now you can offset the carbon created by your creative.
New York Ad Agency Brooklyn Brothers claims to have just produced the first carbon neutral TV commercials. But do they add up?
According to agency co-founder, Guy Barnett, the agency worked with UK resource management company ERM to calculate and offset the carbon produced for a TV campaign created for Versus TV Channel.
Here’s the math:
15 TV commercials
Shot on location in Texas
80 crew members
40 vehicles
10 flights
Extensive shoot production facilities
Hundreds of hours in post production editing
= 8.9 tons of carbon produced
Cost to offset? Just $20 per ton = $180
This sounds all very impressive until you get to the $180 part. Can anyone tell me how the $180 offsets nearly 9 tons of carbon? This seems like such a minimal cost for so much pollution. So I dug deeper. ClimateCare.org is the organization that helped Brooklyn Brothers make their spots carbon neutral. Here’s a quick explanation of how it works.
So now all of us in the green advertising business need to consider how we can easily offset our creative carbon footprint. We probably don’t even have to do the calculation. Just budget an extra $200 into every production budget and get with organizations like ClimateCare.org to help us clean up our mess.
Have you ever consider the carbon footprint of your TV or photo shoot? If so, how’d you go about offsetting it?
Dang, now even our online surfing is melting the glaciers. A recent study by Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross says that performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a pot of tea.
According to an article in Times Online, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2, while boiling a kettle generates about 15g. The reason: “Google operates huge data centers around the world that consume a great deal of power,” according to Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist. His report on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon.
Pictured above is Google’s Earth Day logo. Read Google’s response to the claim.
Learn more on how you can reduce the carbon footprint of the web.
What do you do to reduce your use of computer time, and hopefully your virtual carbon footprint?
