Last week I saw a fascinating movie premier, The Age of Stupid.
Never mind that it was the first time a movie premier was broadcast live via satellite (from here in New York) around the world on over 550 screens in 45 countries. Or that they had in attendance the likes of Kofi Annan (former Secretary General of the United Nations), Heather Graham and Jillian Anderson as well as music from Moby and Radiohead. Or that The Huffington Post called the movie launch “One of the most important films of the year (perhaps decade)….” as both a new way independent films will be released and for the environmental message.
Instead, what was fascinating was it was a film about an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching ‘archive’ footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change while we had the chance?
Today expert climatologists around the world are agreeing we are about to hit the point of no return for our planet.
And that point is 2015, almost five years away!
What does this mean? The UN’s Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced in 2007 that if we do not stop our earth’s temperature from increasing beyond the levels it will hit by 2015, there will be no stopping the environmental impacts that will ensue.
A month or so later Time Magazine wrote Can We Save the World By 2015? and quoted David Doniger, the policy director of the world renowned Natural Resource Defense Council’s climate center, “We’re almost at the point of no return. If we don’t turn these emission trends down soon, we’re cooked.”
Does this sound dramatic and doom and gloom? Ok, it does!
And we’re here to learn about being UnReasonable in creating powerful results. Quickly.
What I teach, train and coach businesses on is the fastest way we will not only stop this disaster from occurring but actually reverse it is to show people how to make money regenerating the earth’s resources.
And a new major player just joined the contest to being the greenest. And it’s not the United States. You may be surprised by whom…
China.
Yes, Red China is now going green!
Just this past week Thomas Friedman, writer and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize wrote an Op Ed piece for the New York Times: The New Sputnik, arguing, “I believe future historians may well conclude that the most important thing to happen in the last 18 months was that Red China decided to become Green China.”
Examples from the past few weeks are China announcing at the UN last week it will cut carbon emissions by 2020. While they did not explain more clearly what they meant by this, they have already recruited America’s premier solar equipment manufacturer, Applied Materials, to open the world’s largest privately funded solar research facility… in China. This is after already having the world’s largest supplier of solar panels, Suntech, in China.
So this is where YOU come in.
It’s kind of like playing basketball here on the street in Brooklyn. There is a lot of “trash talking”, a form of insulting that is meant to challenge and often poke fun at the other team. And when that happens, often times it motivates the other team to play much better.
Experts predict that before the end of the next year, China will surpass the US in energy technology. And so perhaps we ought to take this as a form of China trash talking us to really step up.
Have you been thinking of going green and catching the “green” wave? Now is the time.
Have you already down this path? Now is the time to raise the bar to take on this competition from China.
Are you not interested in going down the path of “greening up” your act? You may want to seriously rethink that.
Because in case the predictions of 2015 looming just six years away isn’t enough to get you reconsidering, being caught holding the modern-day equivalent of the buggy whip might be.
Action Steps for the Week:
– Take a look at your business. How can you “green it up” big time?
– It does not matter what type of business you have. Look at energy consumption, travel, water and pollution issues.
– Ask yourself, “How can I:
– travel less?” (i.e. video conferencing, teleconferencing, etc.)
– travel locally (and gain fitness)?” (i.e. bike, walk, use public transportation)
– conserve electricity?” (i.e. turn off all appliances when not using them… especially computers!)
– go solar or wind power?” (i.e. sign up for your utility that promotes this source of power.)
– consume less?” (i.e. less paper, stop using bottled water, no disposable bags, etc.)
And if you’re really UnReasonable, ask yourself this question: “How can I compete with the Chinese and out-greening them?”