Thursday, March 5, 2009

ECO:nomics Conference, Ford, the New Green Economy




Head of Ford Motor Company at Dow Jones' ECO:nomics Conference:


"'We really have lost a generation,' he said, turning back to the issue at hand. In the past, Ford 'did not have a consistency of purpose,' he said, but is now committed to producing vehicles that are 'best in class.'

"He reiterated that Ford’s mix of vehicles will do a 180 in coming years, with light cars—rather than trucks and SUVs–representing two-thirds of the automaker’s lineup, as rising energy prices make fuel-efficient cars a priority for consumers." "Ford’s Mulally: Replacing the Lost Generation One Customer at a Time"



Head of Sierra Club: ECO:nomics Conference, Disappointingly,
Largely Still Not Moving Past the Economy vs. Ecology Debate


"Santa Barbara, CA -- The 'ECO:nomics' conference was billed as an opportunity to learn about the economic opportunities of a new green economy and 'creating environmental capital,' and Dow Jones/The Wall Street Journal certainly pulled together a stellar resource pool -- not only Al Gore and Amory Lovins but also Ford CEO Alan Mulally, Anne Mulcahy of Xerox, Boone Pickens, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the heads of three of the nation's biggest electrical utilities (Duke, AEP, PG&E), and Bill McDonough.

"But while the Journal's deputy managing editor, Alan Murray, conceded that this year's conference took place in an entirely different economic climate than last year's, it seemed that for the Journal and Dow Jones it was 'forward to the past.' Huge chunks of time were given to enviro skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and Vaclav Klaus but, far worse, the Journal team interviewing the luminaries seemed firmly stuck in the paradigm of 'now that we have a global economic crisis, surely we can't afford this environmental stuff anymore.'" Dow Jones Misses It

2007 Article About Carl Pope speaking on "Changing the U.S. National Agenda"


" ... a huge part of society’s resources will be devoted to the reality that climate change is happening. For example, I was in Chicago recently. You know what the biggest challenge facing Chicago with climate change is? Termites. They don’t have termites; it’s too cold in the winter. So every building in Chicago has been built without any consideration about protecting them from termites. The whole city could just fall down.

"Cities like Santa Barbara are essentially engineered on the model of a roof to the gutter. Water falls on the roof and then you get it into the gutter, down into the storm drain, and to the ocean. We are going to need to re-engineer all of our urban areas into a model of a sponge. They are going to have to catch every drop and store it if we want to survive....

"The only way carbon dioxide is ever removed from the atmosphere is by living creatures: oceans, grasslands, forests, and soils. We have never really thought about the degree to which soil degradation is now a climate problem." Sierra Club’s Executive Director Carl Pope on Global Warming, Water, and Al Gore ... The Green Pope

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