GM: Have they been eating their bailout dollars?

This morning General Motors unveiled a new concept: the P.U.M.A. project. This project alone appears to reveal just about everything that is wrong with General Motors and why it might not be destined for bankruptcy, but rather total irrelevance and failure. 

The concept appears to be this: partner with the manufacturer of Segway to provide people will another excuse for not exercising or using mass transit. It's almost as if they put five people in a room and said "design us something that will make us the laughing stock of the auto industry." The P.U.M.A looks like a cross between a Ferris wheel bucket and something you'd ride at Epcot center. It's eerily reminiscent of the people movers all the fat people were riding around on in Wall-E.

Seriously GM, why not get into the business of building MAGLEV trains or highly affordable, zero pollution mass transit trains that towns could actually afford to build, maintain, and promote? Why not find the answer to moving rural and suburban people from home to work in cities 15 to 20 miles away? Why on earth would you design something for city dwellers who will have nowhere to store it and already have access to a wide variety of transportation that is being greened: taxi cabs, buses, and subways?

GM, you were supposed to spend that bailout money on solutions for the future. Not offer it as an appetizer in the lunchroom. 

Be a Noah

While out in the yard enjoying the arrival of spring and tending to the work of getting things growing again outside, I listened to a chapter of Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman that was incredibly fitting for the week ahead. As proof of how the universe works, the ideas presented by Friedman reinforced a conversation a friend and I had this morning over oatmeal and eggs: that the sustainability movement in residential energy as well as commercial has the opportunity to fundamentally reshape how we do things. However, the answer to a new sustainability model is not to wait for some megacompany to come along with the incredible single invention that will solve our problems. 

According to Friendman in the book, "Noah had one ark to save the earth's biodiversity in his day, and we need a million of them to save the biodiversity in ours....Some say the key to solving our energy problem is just one really smart Thomas Edison - one inventor who can come up with that magic breakthrough to generate abundant, clean, reliable, cheap power. Maybe."

I tend to think that's a very BIG maybe, and for that reason why sit around and wait. A friend and I spoke this morning about the immense opportunity green jobs and green entrepreneurship brings to our region, and just how few companies out there are engaging in the work now. We talked about how few people in our state today have the training and certification to engage in the work of greening energy, and if they are out there, we aren't all connected as we should be. 

If energypreneurs can muster the will and courage to take a leap into the business world, not only could we push the envelope when it comes to sustainable business practices in our region, but we could potentially create hundreds of good paying jobs and successful companies in the process.

Help Local Companies Connect the Dots, Because No One Else Will

I'm a little disturbed by some articles I've been reading this week in Central Pennsylvania about businesses addressing their energy and natural resource usage. The Central Pennsylvania Business Journal publishes an intriguing publication called Currents that explores various new trends in sustainability, energy conservation, and going green.  David Dagan had a good piece on "5 Ways to Fight the Price Surge" referring to the removal of rate caps from electricity prices by PA energy generators this year. While Dagan did a nice job at cataloguing the steps companies can take to save money in the new energy-climate era we now find ourselves opening the door to, he only scratched the surface, and like all things related to "greening" in Central Pennsylvania, failed to really connect the dots for the reader.

What left me most aggravated about the latest issue however was the company directory supplied in the back. As with all publications, consider the agenda, right? Well, try this on for size. The listing of17  fuel companies included only a single local company that engages in selling biodiesel or other biofuels. United Biofuels,  Amerigreen - not on the list despite that being their specialty. Wouldn't a publication about sustainability work to find a listing of biodiesel and biofuel companies?

Worse yet, when you turn the page to a list of electricity-distribution companies, the list is only 8 companies long because not a single renewable energy company (as in their primary function is the production or sale of clean, renewable electrons) is listed there.

And finally, the listing of electrical, plumbing, and HVAC distributors seems to be a listing of suppliers of this equipment, not necessarily a listing of the contractors and skilled workers in the area who would actually be qualified to install high efficiency air conditioning, solar, wind or other systems.

To be abundantly clear, we will not achieve a new model for business efficiency and sustainability if we take old energy economy firms and paint them green. They have to be retooled, retrained, and re-educated in the language of green. Their standards must rise. What I wish the Central Penn Business journal would have said was "When you think about 'going green' think how Google would do it, not Wal-Mart.