The no-holds-barred video features a cross section of people wearing a black T-shirt that reads “UNF–K THE GULF” and unleashing on BP, the federal government and the whole mess in a way that millions of people wish our leaders would.

Sick of yelling at the TV in frustration over the Gulf spill, environmental activists Luke Montgomery and Nate Guidas produced the video as a way to channel their “f–king righteous anger with all that is going on and not going on in the Gulf into something positive.” They put out a casting call on Craigslist for people upset over the oil spill, cast the best in the video, and created the website www.UnF–kTheGulf.com.

“It’s both therapeutic and funny to see people go off in an F-bomb-laced tirade about the spill,” Montgomery said. “There’s a lot of anger out there and people need to vent about the destruction but we also need to have a laugh at the expense of those responsible.”

The “UnF–kTheGulf” video has received more than 20,000 views in one week and raised more than $5,000 in funds through T-shirt sales, exceeding organizers’ expectations and rapidly circulating on social media. This unconventional charity fundraising campaign allows the public vote on how the funds are spent. For each $13 shirt, $5 is donated directly to four Gulf wildlife rescue and environmental charities.

Montgomery and Guidas report receiving hundreds of positive email responses, several complaints, and dozens of requests for uncensored versions of the T-shirt.

In response to the controversy of using such raw language, Montgomery said it is a calculated tactic to get noticed and thereby raise more funds to assist in the Gulf recovery. The organization did recently tame their Twitter name to a censored version, however, to encourage more people to share.

The Gulf oil spill is being called the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

“This is a heinous crime against the environment, people’s livelihood and the ecosystem’s ability to support life,” Montgomery said. “People realize that the really offensive thing is the oil spill, not the word.”

UnF–kTheGulf will soon launch a week-long Facebook and Twitter “F-Bomb-a-Thon” campaign of status updates geared toward building buzz and raising at least $25,000 for the cause. The F-Bomb-a-Thon will run from July 26-August 1.

The Ricoh Eco Board, which is 47 feet high by 126 feet long, is the first billboard in Times Square to be totally lit by solar energy. It is powered solely by 62 solar panels and 24 thin-film PV solar modules, and illuminated by 16 LED floodlights. Ricoh made a promise not to use conventional electricity from the grid to light the Eco Board and will allow it to go dark due to lack of sunlight. By using only solar power to light the sign, Ricoh is playing a part in reducing the amount of carbon emissions released by conventional electrical power sources. A special ceremony to celebrate the completion of the Eco Board will take place on June 8 in New York’s Times Square.

“When Ricoh decided to advertise in Times Square, we wanted to do so in an environmentally-responsible way that would have minimal negative impact on the environment. Our hope was that the Eco Board would become a powerful symbol of Ricoh’s commitment to green practices and would challenge others to become more active,” said Jason Dizzine, Director, Corporate Communications, Ricoh Americas Corporation. “Most billboards deliver a message, but this billboard is itself the message. For Ricoh, if the sign goes dark, that is ok. What is more important is that Ricoh is sharing in the bettering of our planet for everyone.”

Ricoh chose Rec Solar, one of the pioneers of the solar industry, to equip the top of the Eco Board with a high-quality series of solar modules optimized for low-light conditions. In addition, Ricoh worked closely with Cooley Group, which has been at the forefront of polymer technology and coatings on flexible reinforced substrates for nearly a century, on the thin-film PV solar modules, manufactured by Xunlight Corporation.

“Ricoh’s commitment to sustainable management is reflected not just in this solar billboard but in the products and services we offer our customers,” said Ike Kakegawa, Vice President, Environmental Sustainability, Ricoh Americas Corporation. “We are making significant environmental contributions on a global scale through Ricoh’s Total Green Office Solution, which takes a holistic approach to document management, combining green consultative services, energy-saving imaging equipment and software solutions to help customers meet their sustainability goals such as saving energy and paper, and reducing waste.”

The ads, produced for the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA), feature sequences of short phrases with facts about sugarcane ethanol delivered by Indy drivers, including Ryan Hunter-Reay, Ana Beatriz, Takuma Sato, Davey Hamilton, E.J. Viso and the pole sitter for Sunday’s race, Helio Castroneves, a three-time Indy 500 winner. Since last year, UNICA has provided 100 percent fuel-grade ethanol for the IndyCar Series.

“For the first time ever, we are taking our message about sugarcane ethanol to national network television during one of the most prestigious sporting events in the world,” said Joel Velasco, UNICA’s Chief Representative in North America. “These commercials seek to educate American consumers about sugarcane ethanol and how it can benefit their pockets, the environment and the market, by promoting competition on and off the track,” Velasco added.

The ads were produced especially for this year’s 99th edition of the Indy 500, the main event in the IndyCar season. The two 30-second spots will appear during the race telecast on Sunday, May 30, on the ABC television network. UNICA plans to continue running television ads throughout the season.

To view other commercials, click on “I Compete” and “Cuts Emissions” or visit www.sweeteralternative.com/indy.

At that price, the LEAF is a good $10,000 more expensive than gas-fueled sedan models like the Honda Civic, Toyota Camry and Nissan Altima, but cheaper than announced prices for EV models like the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Coda Automotive’s sedan and far below the nearly $60,000 Tesla Model S.  Plug In America calls the price a “game changer” and I’d have to agree.

Not convinced?  Here’s more to consider.  The price includes the installation of a home charging station, it will be available for lease for $349 a month (not too shabby when you compare it to the mortgage-sized lease payment for the Tesla Roadster) and once you apply federal tax credits, you’re actually looking at a $25,280 car.  If you live in a state like California that’s offering an additional $5,000 rebate, that price drops to $20,280.

Now you’re in the territory of a base model Toyota Prius.  The cost of a hybrid, but it’s all electric.  I have a feeling there are people at GM right now recrunching the numbers for the Chevy Volt.

via Nissan and Earth2Tech ]]> http://greenbusinesses.com/2010/03/31/nissan-sets-price-for-the-leaf/feed/ 0 http://greenbusinesses.com/2010/03/30/green-branding/ http://greenbusinesses.com/2010/03/30/green-branding/#comments Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:26:39 +0000 Steve http://greenbusinesses.info/?p=22 Sustainability Must Go Mainstream
Punk rock wouldn’t be very punk if everyone listened to it. This isn’t the case with the sustainability movement — which, as we argued in our first guest post on why green branding and marketing is important, isn’t going to “sustain” anything unless everyone gets on board. Good-for-the-world businesses need to express sustainability as the vibrant, exciting, game-changing proposition it is if we are going to engage a critical mass of people and take sustainability firmly into the mainstream. We should put our heart and souls into what we do. And that means we need to differentiate ourselves. And you can’t do that by using the same typeface as everyone else. You can’t do it by basing your logo on a leaf or by putting a hand cupping a seedling on the cover of your annual report. You can’t do it by being yet another green business to use a tag line that says “Saving the planet one [your product here] at a time.” But there are plenty of ways to stand out from the crowd…

Category Membership vs. Brand Identity
If sustainability is the only thing that differentiates your business, then you’re positioning yourself to go out of business as soon as sustainability starts catching on. The twin essences of branding are consistency and differentiation. If you consistently use language and visuals that represent the overall sustainability movement instead of your core business — all you end up evoking is category membership, as opposed to an actual brand identity. Being a green business and basing your logo on the planet or a leaf would be like Toyota basing its logo on a set of wheels.

Think of sustainability as a lever, not a pedestal. Use it to give your brand an initial lift — as opposed to building your entire identity on it. Businesses are increasingly moving toward sustainability. In an era when Walmart is actively seeking to switch over to organic cotton (and they are), you’d better not hang your whole brand on the notion of organic.

Brand Appeal Beyond Green
The process of branding begins with understanding your institutional strengths – and it continues with integrating them into all points of contact with your audience(s). A cornerstone of American Apparel’s brand proposition has been “sweatshop free”. Yet the brand has always been about more than that. The soft cotton jersey they chose along with the tighter fits and founder Dov Charney’s unabashed enthusiasm for sexuality — gave the brand an alternative, youthful sensibility from the start. Early on, the company developed a brand culture that conveyed its enlightened labor practices as a part of a consistent image. An image that conveys authenticity, youth, and sexiness through clean 70′s style typography and deliberately non-slick photography. As American Apparel has developed its image as a trend-leader, it has also deepened its commitment to organics and renewables. Whatever you think about this controversial company, they have a lesson to teach in terms of integrating sustainable practices into a brand that has much broader appeal than your average ‘green’ apparel.

Another example is GE’s Ecoimagination initiative which combines sustainability (i.e., “eco”) with a core quality of the GE brand (i.e., “imagination”). The basis of the initiative has been to position sustainability as a natural function of GE’s longtime strength as an innovator.

Nau: Destined to Fail?

A not-so-good example would be Nau clothing, which recently went under. Nau presented a professionally crafted slick exterior with not much under the hood. The brand’s only reason to exist seemed to be to start a sustainable clothing company. While their sustainability initiatives may have been laudible, from a branding perspective there was little else to differentiate Nau from any other slick clothing company. There was no singular perspective, no core characteristics. Compare Nau to Loomstate, whose consistent use of black and white illustration and rural photographic settings create a distinctive brand persona that feels pure, natural, earnest and hip — without trying too hard.

Moving Beyond the Cliches of Green Design
Here’s some nuts and bolts counsel. A logo is precious visual real estate. It’s core job is to provide a visual identifier that belongs to you. To the extent you use common visual signifiers that belong to your category rather than your individual business — you fail to differentiate your brand. What does the Starbucks mermaid logo have to do with coffee? Nothing. But it has everything to do with Starbucks. Along the same lines, a leaf makes a middling logo for a green printing company. A drop of water is a bad choice for a water-harvesting system brand. And the planet earth makes a bad logo for an organic clothing brand. Similarly, typographical choices should represent the persona of your business, as opposed to a generalized leafy environmentalism. (Papyrus is only a good font choice if you want to look like every other massage therapist, conservation non-profit, or crystal healer in the country!)

If you can’t think of anything to associate your business with aside from your eco-goals, then find a different business that you are passionate about. Because business is hard and it’s competitive — if you’re not fervent about your core product or service, you will not survive. When my company chooses what clients to accept, one thing that we look at is how dedicated they are to the specific industry they’ve chosen. Because we have the absolute conviction that any higher-minded business owes it to their mission to outperform their competitors on all fronts, not just the green ones. (And indeed, we ourselves are passionate about the pursuit of creating differentiating brands.) If you can’t differentiate yourself, potential customers won’t be able to differentiate you either. The challenges of doing this are more than offset by the rewards. Not only will your business be better, you’ll have more fun in the process. Good, differentiating branding is a liberating experience.

Jerry Stifelman is founder and creative director of The Change, a brand-strategy and design agency that works exclusively with companies and organizations that make the world more sustainable, equitable or authentic.

More From Jerry Stifelman on Green Branding and Marketing
Branding for Non-profits: Why It’s Important
Rebirth of the Producer
Greenhushing Doesn’t Help Anyone: Why Green Business Should Speak Up
Reality vs. Perception: On Being Born With a Green Spoon in Your Mouth
The Virtue of Humility: Why Coke’s Ethical Store Failed
Green Branding and Marketing: Who’s Out in Front?
Be More Than Green
Authenticity: Get it Free With Your Commitment to Preserve the Earth
Just Because It Saves the World, That Doesn’t Make it Popular
The Planet Wants You to Market Really Well

Brand expert Richard Seireeni interviewed over two dozen “ecopreneurs” from a broad range of industries – home improvement, transportation, household products, food and beverage, energy, real estate, finance, and fashion. The collective experience of leaders such as Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm, Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation, and the grandsons of Dr. Bronner, as well as other green experts, are a rich source of wisdom for green businesses getting off the ground or for any business aiming to improve its environmental performance.

The result of these interviews is the discovery of “The Gort Cloud” – a term coined by the author that describes the vast and largely invisible network of NGOs, trendspotters, advocacy groups, social networks, business alliances, certifying organizations, and other members of the green community that have the power to make or break new green brands.

Integrating The Gort Cloud into brand development and marketing strategies is critical to the success of any aspiring green brand. This “green community” can supply technical assistance, venture capital, the first line of core customers, and tremendous “echo effect” in getting the word out quickly and inexpensively.

Creating a cause, building credibility, developing a simple and compelling message, identifying core customers and sales channels, deftly playing the green alternative media, and fending off second-to-market competitors are all required to build a green brand. How these skills are put into practice will vary for each business, but Seireeni’s research points toward a set of shared characteristics and basic tenets that every business can use to build a credible and successful green brand.

One of the most influential players in the success of this new environmental movement is entertainment and media. From movies to plays, to magazines and webisodes, entertainment and media frame what is happening in the world in a creative way in order to make the message more available. Entertainers by nature are our society’s storytellers and have the unique talent of raising social issues, showing the unseen and challenging us to think differently. Believe it or not, as the recession creeps at a petty pace, people are still going out to the movies and catching a play here or there. As the world gets harder to face, entertainment serves as a means for us to escape realty and look at our world a little differently.

When it comes to the environment, entertainment serves as an integral vehicle of change and information. Think about it. When the message of global warming went to the silver screen with “An Inconvenient Truth,” people began to pay attention. When celebrities started sporting hybrids and dressing in organic threads, more and more people are “going green.” Previously environmentalists were a select few who participated in protests and ate things called organic foods, but today the faces of environmentalism are celebrities who have taken a stand to protect the environment like Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Alicia Silverstone, Bette Midler, Edward Norton, Julia Roberts and George Clooney.  Many members of the community serve on the boards of various environmental groups, while others donate and/or host fundraisers for specific organizations.

When looking at environmental entertainment, there are two areas to explore—content and production. Environment Content is when the message, script and theme of the story carries environmental importance. Think of this like the environmental documentaries, network television how-to shows and “green” programming. Whereas Environmental Production, the less explored area of this topic, is focused on what does it take to make the content—the energy used, the water consumed, the miles traveled and the overall footprint of a movie, play, commercial or television show. Increasingly, this is beginning to change. Filmmakers, theater owners and big production studios are taking on climate change by adopting environmental practices into their means of production, but more can always be done.

If we look at the environment as being the context in which entertainment is created, we can begin to see a larger picture of the environmental impact of filmmaking.

Burning coal to generate one megawatt-hour of electricity produces about 2100 pounds of carbon dioxide. Using that electricity to make hydrogen would yield enough fuel for a fuel-cell [PEM] car to travel about 1,000 miles. But driving those 1,000 miles in a gasoline-powered car that gets 40 miles per gallon would produce just 485 pounds of carbon dioxide.

From “Hell and Hydrogen”, David Talbot, Technology Review, March/April 2007

Of course, most cars today do not get 40 mpg, either…The point is, fuel-flexible SOFCs using traditional fuels like natural gas make less CO2 than hydrogen-burning PEMs (PEMs cannot operate easily from hydrocarbons since CO poisons them). When you factor in the losses due to hydrogen generation alone, not including storage in tanks, the true efficiency of PEMs is reduced to less than 10%. SOFCs reach over 40% efficiency with natural gas. Of course, SOFCs can operate from hydrogen as well. Fuel cells hold the promise of world-saving, pollution-free, reliable, electricity – when clean, efficient hydrogen generation becomes a reality.

Hydrogen – The Fuel of the Future Providing Energy Today

Transitioning to a hydrogen-based economy can deliver three main benefits:

• Energy Security - Hydrogen can be produced from a variety of sources including renewables, which can help diversify our energy supplies and lessen our dependence on foreign oil.
• Economic Growth – Hydrogen can contribute to economic growth through job creation in a developing industry and investment opportunities.
• Environmental Health – Hydrogen can be produced and used in ways that improve health-related air quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Hydrogen Facts:

• Hydrogen is the lightest of all elements. This causes it to be buoyant and to rapidly disperse when released in air, so a leak is quickly diluted and rendered harmless.
• Hydrogen is colorless, odorless and has no taste.
• Hydrogen is non-toxic and non-poisonous, and there are no significant environmental hazards associated with accidental discharge.
• A hydrogen fire radiates very little heat compared to a petroleum fire.
• For a flammable mixture to exist, a four times higher concentration of hydrogen is required than that of gasoline (4% versus 1%). An electrostatic spark from the human body is just as likely to ignite gasoline as hydrogen at these minimum concentrations.

Hydrogen has been mass-produced for more than 50 years.

End Result?

While hydrogen fuel cells are readily available, the commercial adoption of these technologies is hindered by the inability to produce hydrogen safely, efficiently and economically. Consequently, developments in hydrogen fuel cell technologies have slowed and the technology remains too costly for average consumers. Unless we can find better methods of storing and delivering hydrogen, the realization of a hydrogen economy will remain a distant hope. Only through solving the problems and deficiencies in storage and delivery of hydrogen, will we see the price points of fuel cells and other hydrogen based technologies decrease to levels that are economical for the masses.

If and when all these obstacles are overcome Ambassador Energy will be there providing hydrogen solutions.

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