The speaker, Joel Makower, provided his insight on the state of the green economy. Joel has been described as, “The guru of green business practices” and he is the Chairman and Co-founder of Greener World Media, Executive Editor of GreenBiz.com, and the author of “Strategies for the Green Economy”. The EcoTuesday blog provides more information about him here.

What did I learn from his presentation? Joel provided a clear, thoughtful perspective on trends in the green economy as well as the encouraging and discouraging parts of these trends. Here are some key themes I took from the speech:

1. Generally speaking green practices have been integrated into businesses and the economy in two ways. (1) Big businesses have had the ability, resources, and funds to integrate successful green practices and make fundamental, well-received changes in green economy. It has allowed companies like Walmart to become green leaders. (2) It has been challenging for everybody else to get traction and attention with these practices in the marketplace.  Storytelling is crucial to making progress: How has integrating environmental practices increased profits, reduced costs, enhanced branding, etc? What should individuals know to have a better understanding of your business and how they could be a part of it?

2. Green economy technologies will likely revolutionize the market like the internet has. Innovative energy, building, information, and vehicle technologies are transforming industries across the board, providing us with the ability to do things that haven’t been done before. For example, let’s think about cars. Why do we own cars? For mobility. Innovative technologies provided us with increased convenience, sharing, on-demand access, etc that make alternatives to vehicle transportation more viable appealing.

3. The green economy is not looking optimistic. There is lack of direction and clear leadership. There has yet to be a prevailing theme of urgency. Businesses and people want to know how they fit into the green economy and where the business and personal opportunities are. Everyone is looking for help. The green economy has also moved slowly and has not scaled. Political barriers have discouraged growth and not connected the dots as they should. There also seems to be an appetite for green but not for change. People love change as a noun but not as a verb. Three ingredients that are necessary for change in the business community are (a) policy, (b) technology, and (c) money or funding. It takes committed, passionate people to bring forth this change with strong leadership, movements, and collectiveness.

4. Many small businesses are on the edge of green economy but not at the epicenter. How do we change this? Policy, technology, and money are important factors here. How do we transform sustainability from small local scales, to states, and the nation?

What are my thoughts? I agree a lot of what was said but I think there are some smaller companies and non-profits that have boomed in the industry. Looking forward, I’m interested to see how city environmental programs develop across the US. This is what crosses my mind:

San Francisco has many progressive environmental policies and programs – will they be successful and sustainable in the long-term? Will other cities see these pilot programs as successes and follow the trend? How do we measure success and reduced carbon footprint?

A few notable environmental programs and policies in San Francisco include:

- GoSolarSF residential and business solar incentives (and the California Solar Initiative) have really spurred growth in the solar industry. But what does the future look like as funds dry up and how does it hurt local businesses? For example, the program budget has reached its capacity for this fiscal year ending June 30, 2010 and so only low income residential applications are being accepted. Will new initiatives like GreenFinanceSF serve as a safety-net or alternative to programs like GoSolarSF?

*On a side note the city has a cool map of solar activity and installations: http://www.sf.solarmap.org.

- The Zero Waste program instated mandatory recycling and composting with goals of 75% landfill diversion by 2012 and zero waste by 2020. I think this is a great and ambitious program overall but think it will be difficult to enforce this mandate with all the shared waste collection containers. I hope to see other cities incorporate mandates and goals similar to Zero Waste.

- Other programs I’m keeping my eye on include: PlantSF (permits for sidewalk gardens), Recology’s Artist In Residence (AIR) program, and Pavements to Parks.

How does Bay Area activity fit into the green economy now and how will it shape the future? What about other leading green cities/urban regions – New York, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, Portland, etc?