It’s Getting Hot In Here

By Adam Solomon Zemel, Breakthrough Generation

Dark horse third party presidential candidate Paris Hilton released an online campaign ad taking on allegations about her connections to other 2008 candidates, and formally announcing her energy policy. Hilton’s announcement is an effort to put an end to speculation about how she would lead our country to energy independence. Like many others, I’m not surprised to see Hilton proposing a plan that will garner support from both sides of the political spectrum (and one can only assume it is part of a larger strategy to carry the votes of centrists from both parties):

“We can do limited offshore drilling–with strict environmental oversight–while creating tax incentives to get Detroit making hybrid and electric cars. That way the offshore drilling carries us until the new technologies kick in which will then create new jobs and energy independence. Energy crisis solved!”

(watch video here)

Continue reading ‘“Like, Totally Ready to Lead”’

Cross posted from the Breakthrough Generation Blog

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The time for the environmental movement to become great has arrived, and we must grab this opportunity by its horns before it passes us by.

Despite what my you may have derived from my previous posts, I think that the environmental movement is a good movement. It has done good work cleaning up smog, fixing the ozone, and cleaning up lakes and rivers. The results, like the movement, have been pretty good. But the time for good is over. The time for the environmental movement to become great has arrived, and we must grab this opportunity by its horns before it passes us by.

I spent a good chunk of my Sunday afternoon reading sections of Good to Great, by Jim Collins. The book studies businesses that made a lasting, sustained transition from a “good” company to a “great” company. Collins wrote about corporations, but what he said can be applied to any organization of people, including environmental NGO’s or the movement itself. Collins dug up articles and conducted interviews with executives from these companies, including businesses like Walgreens and Circuit City, to learn what these companies had done in common during the point of their transition from good to great. He identified a few different practices and factors, including the presence of adversity, honesty about the brutal facts, and identifying what each company had the capacity and potential to become the best at. It’s critical that we similarly apply these to our movement in order for us to be great: Continue reading ‘Polar Bears or A Clean Energy Economy: What Can Make Us Great?’