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According to a new report by the US Department of Agriculture, more than one in seven American families suffered from “food insecurity” sometime in 2008 and we should all be concerned that that figure is rising.  Many media outlets have eaten this report up at face value, blasting similar headlines about how more Americans are “going hungry.”

This hunger awareness drive is not new, though.  Feeding America, a nonprofit funded in large part by the food industry, and its partner, the Ad Council, have been running an Ogilvy-powered ad campaign for a year now which claims one in eight Americans “live with hunger.”  Feeding America even connected with Matt Damon to pitch its hunger talking points on the season finale of HBO’s Entourage.

Obviously, everyone is against hunger.  And whenever someone in a country as rich as America can’t afford food, it’s a disgrace. We clearly have the resources to keep everyone well-fed.

So here’s my problem: these hunger numbers just don’t seem to add up when you realize how many people in America are over-fed.

Just look at Feeding America’s own website.  Do their “faces of hunger” from across America look like they’re starving to you?

We don’t have a serious hunger problem in the land of the absurdly cheap one dollar double cheeseburger. We have an obesity epidemic.

Let’s check the government’s own data.  In 2008, only one state (Colorado) had an obesity rate that was less than 20 percent.  According to the latest CDC stats, 32.7 percent of American adults are now overweight, 34.3 percent are obese and 5.9 percent are are extremely obese.  I’m supposed to believe that roughly 14 percent of American families are “food insecure” when only 27 percent of American adults are not overweight or obese?

Many will counter that it must be poor people and the nation’s children who are “going hungry.”  But again, according to the government’s own data, around 17 percent of children are now obese. And paradoxically, many studies have confirmed a correlation between poverty and obesity. While the USDA claims that one in seven American families are “food insecure,” the CDC’s data shows that one of seven low-income, preschool-aged children is obese.

So why is Big Food trying to convince us that there is a huge hunger problem?  My theory is that Feeding America and its backers, which include Kraft, the Campbell Soup Company, Wal-Mart and ConAgra Foods, want to hype hunger so that no new regulations try to tackle obesity.  What politician would dare propose a new tax on fatty or empty calorie foods when the public thinks one in seven families can’t put enough food on the table?  And who is now going to try and stop the redistribution of tens of billions of our tax dollars to King Corn and his Frankenfood court each year?

One thing is certain.  President Obama’s controversial pick to lead the USDA, Iowa’s former Governor Tom Vilsack, and his friends at Monsanto, won’t be going hungry any time soon.

20 years ago today, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, taking with it the communist regimes that haunted Eastern Europe during the 20th century. World leaders are gathering in Germany’s capital to commemorate the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War.

Of course, the fall of the Wall has come to symbolize more than a political and military win for the West.  It also represents the idea that free markets work better than planned socialist economies.

However, a new global poll has found that today’s recession has many doubting pure capitalism.

According to pollster Doug Miller, “It appears that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 may not have been the crushing victory for free-market capitalism that it seemed at the time — particularly after the events of the last 12 months.”

Here are the poll’s key findings:

Only 11 percent of people surveyed across 27 countries thought free market capitalism is working well, while 51 percent believed its problems can be solved with more regulation and reform, the poll said.

In only the United States (25 percent) and Pakistan (21 percent), did more than one in five people agree that capitalism works well in its current form, the poll conducted for the BBC World Service said.

A majority now believe free-market capitalism doesn’t really work.  Were the eulogies over socialism’s demise premature?  Share your predictions below.

Al Gore has made quite the comeback since losing to George W. Bush.  Back in 2000, the former Vice President couldn’t even pull off a proper kiss with his wife.  But now he’s a rockstar among environmentalists and other policy elites for his crusade against climate change.

It’s been three years since an “Inconvenient Truth” changed the debate.  But Gore is still all over the news.  This week, he’s on the cover of Newsweek. He’s also got a new book out called “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.”

And there’s going to be even more Gore stories in the media as we approach next month’s UN summit in Copenhagen on climate change.  Gore recently sat down with CBS’ Katie Couric to make the case that America needs to act quickly to solve what he calls the “climate crisis.”

But many are growing skeptical over Gore’s fast push for laws that could fundementally alter our economy.  Perhaps that’s because Gore stands to profit off of legislation that regulates carbon emissions.  Gore’s green-tech investments could make him the planet’s first “carbon billionaire,” according to an estimate in the UK’s Daily Telegraph.

Last April, Republican Representative Marsha Blackburn gave Gore the chance “to clear the air about [his] motives, to which Gore replied, “Congresswoman, if you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don’t know me.”

Do you take him for his word? Is it ok for Gore to make money from climate change legislation?  Please discuss below.

Investors have been concerned about a “green bubble” from speculation in environmentally-friendly firms all year. Some even suggest that the bubble has already burst, at least in terms of support from politicians and the public. The most common bubble-beware argument suggests venture capitalists will repeat their dot-com mistakes and throw billions away at the green version of Pets.com.

But there are plenty of reasons why the dot-com/green-tech analogy doesn’t quite hold up.

For one, many investors have been, and still are, quite skeptical about whether the green revolution is real. Also, there have been no significant land grabs yet (with the possible exception of managing “smart” electric grids due to new regulations) brought on by advances as significant as the web browser, wireless internet or smart phones.

Furthermore, venture capitalists are playing it safe since there are so many possible ways to solve environmental problems and few established platforms from which to build upon.  In the green sector, patents and proven revenue sources matter more to funders than fancy ideas, brands and buzz, according to Bryan Korba, managing partner at Y Street Ventures, an investment firm with green interests.  And finally, the attitude seems to be that the green revolution will be a slow one that could take decades.  There are no green “get rich quick schemes” similar to flipping domain addresses.

However I could see a green bubble arising if the government meddles too much in the marketplace.  Consider the competition for the first mass-produced electric car between Fisker and Elon Musk’s Telsa Motors. The federal government has backed both of them up with roughly half a billion bucks at this point. Having your government pick the winners is sketchy but having the government pick everyone? That kind of guarantee is a recipe for disaster.

There are already a bunch of organizations (Fortune, the EPA, Greenpeace) which score American corporations on their environmental and social responsibility efforts. But this looks like the most ambitious effort to date by an authoritative third party.

Newsweek has ranked every company in the S&P 500 to determine the greenest large corporations in America. Their top 10 are HP, Dell, Johnson & Johnson, Intel, IBM, State Street, Nike, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Applied Materials and Starbucks. Ideally, rankings like this will cause corporations to take real steps towards sustainability as they fight for customers and talent.  Such a green arms race could theoretically save the planet and the American economy.

The magazine pulled in some heavyweights from academia (Yale’s Dan Esty), the nonprofit sector (John Steelman of NRDC) and the CSR consulting world to help them develop their methodology, which primarily factors in greenhouse gas emissions, water use, solid waste disposed and acid rain emissions. The data was normalized by revenue to allow comparisons between corporations of varying sizes.

But the apples and oranges issue will nonetheless fuel the debate over the validity of Newsweek’s effort, as green business consultant Joel Makover has noted:

It may not be surprising that half of the top-10 rated companies (as well as half of the top 20) are technology firms, and that 8 of the 10 lowest-rated are energy utility or coal-mining companies. That makes sense: Most tech companies don’t actually manufacture anything themselves these days — they mostly purchase components from other manufacturers — while utilities and mining companies are known to make quite a mess, in terms of emissions and other impacts.

Furthermore, many of Newsweek’s greenest corporations are conveniently consumer-oriented companies that are more likely to advertise with the weekly.  That might also contribute to skepticism.

If most people don’t really buy into these rankings, Newsweek may sell a few more magazines as the world keeps on turning as before.  Please share whether you think these rankings will make a difference in the comments section below.

Times are tough for the Obama Administration. Healthcare reform is on the ropes, partly because the President has acted like a timid politician rather than a leader. Even the President’s pitch to America’s schoolchildren has backfired. And Afghanistan is quickly becoming “Obama’s war.” Add it all up and the news has sent the President’s approval ratings to the lowest levels of his term, currently around 53%.

There is one area where Obama is still given the benefit of the doubt–the nascent green economy.  Obama has promised that millions of green jobs will materialize thanks to his policies, even though the quality and quantity of those green jobs is actually still up for debate.  But all things being equal, green jobs could be great jobs for the economy in the long run.  That’s why the job of Obama’s “Green Jobs” adviser, currently held by the Yale-educated lawyer Van Jones, is so important.

Unfortunately for the Obama Administration, Jones has been dogged down recently by two controversies.  Conservatives have always been skeptical of Jones.  And now they have their ammo.  There’s a tape on the web which catches Jones calling Republicans “a**holes.” And if that wasn’t bad enough, it turns out Jones signed a 9/11 Truth petition which questions whether the Bush Administration allowed the terrorist plot to happen.  Thus far, Jones has apologized for his past and the Obama Administration has weakly supported their green jobs advisor, saying “he continues to work in the administration.”

But as long as Jones works for the White House, entertainers like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are going to have a field day with the controversy.

Do you think Jones needs to resign for the sake of the Presidency and the green economy?  Or should the Obama Administration stand up and defend its team?  Share your thoughts below.

It can be tough to draw conclusions from surveys that ask people their positions on social norms.  In other words, if you ask a consumer whether they care about the environment, they’ve been trained to say “yes,” even though their purchasing behavior suggests otherwise.

Nonetheless, marketing surveys have consistently found that roughly 3/4 of consumers could be roughly characterized as green (the light green/dark green divide is another story).  The Shelton Group, an ad agency focused on the green market, surveyed the consumers who could be classified as green and found six myths that are “shattering the stereotypes of the green consumer.” Here the are, edited down for length:

• Myth: Green consumers’ top concern is the environment. Greens still care more about the economy (59 percent) than the environment (8 percent).
• Myth: Green consumers’ main motivation when reducing their energy use is to save the planet. 73 percent are mainly motivated “to reduce my bills/control costs.”
• Myth: Green consumers are all-knowledgeable about environmental issues. 49 percent incorrectly believe C02 depletes the ozone layer.
• Myth: Green consumers fall into a simple demographic profile. While the study detected some demographic tendencies, it found that green consumers aren’t easily defined by their age, income or ethnicity.
• Myth: Children play a big part in influencing their parents to be green. Only 20 percent of respondents with children said their kids encouraged them to be greener.
• Myth: If people just knew the facts they’d make greener choices. Individuals who answered all of the science questions correctly did report participating in a significantly higher average number of green activities. However, the 25-34 age group consistently answered the question correctly, yet, on average, their green activity levels were lower than those of older respondents.

Are you surprised by this survey’s findings?  What do you think is the biggest “myth” about the green consumer movement?  Please share your thoughts below.

You’d think that Generation Y, defined as those who are now between 18-24, would care more about the planet than previous generations.  After all, the idea of human-caused climate disruption has generally been accepted as scientific fact in the political and media spheres since Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

But here is another inconvenient truth.  A study commissioned by IBM on the environmental habits in the United Kingdom found that while Gen Yers may seem like the most informed age group when it comes to environmental issues, they actually have the worst habits when it comes to wasting water and energy.

“The good news is that Generation Y is showing clear concern for environmental issues,” according to IBM’s Jon Z Bentley. “The not-so-good news is that far too few are taking even simple, small steps to control their own wasteful use of resources.”

The survey qualified water and energy wasters by asking whether they left the sink on while brushing teeth or knew which appliances were more energy efficient.  For example, 55 percent of Gen-Yers didn’t know that tumble dryers use more energy than incandescent light bulbs, compared to 43 percent for the entire population sample.

What do you think are the implications of this study for the green business movement?

In January, Dow Chemical announced it would invest in India by researching how castor oil could be used for bio–based products.  The company plans to make money by making sustainable products, all while creating wealth and jobs in India.  It sounds like the perfect corporate social responsibility (CSR) effort and fits nicely within the firm’s “Human Element” ad campaign.

And it will cost a lot less than fully compensating the victims of the Bhopal gas leak, which many claim is Dow’s responsibility after it purchased Union Carbide.

So is Dow a responsible corporate citizen?

Although many have tried, there still is no reliable ranking system that can objectively distinguish between the leaders and the laggards.  Furthermore, a recent study by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, Landor Associates and Burson-Marsteller found that there was no correlation between how companies were ranked as corporate citizens and whether consumers viewed them as socially responsible.  

Landor already knew this.  It was the agency that turned British Petroleum into a new-age, green sunburst that represented “Beyond Petroleum.”  Although environmentalists consider this branding maneuver to be one of the most egregious “greenwashing” cases ever, it successfully changed consumer perceptions in the company’s favor, nonetheless.

Therefore, companies that are the most responsible need to do a better job communicating their efforts to their customers. Otherwise, they won’t be rewarded financially for their efforts and might stop bothering to be responsible.  Or, perhaps we should realize that companies which aren’t that responsible can cheat the system by investing in marketing rather than taking significant steps towards sustainability.  

Is it time to reevaluate whether CSR itself is sustainable?

As part of its forthcoming sustainability index, Wal-Mart is asking its suppliers to start tracking their greenhouse gas emissions, water usage and waste production. Companies have been concerned with their carbon footprints for years and over 1500 global firms have already disclosed their emissions through initiatives like the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Carbon will continue to dominate the headlines as the Senate debates the cap-and-trade bill and December’s Copenhagen conference on climate change approaches. However, there are indications that the next big business battles will be over water rights.  If your company hasn’t inventoried its “water footprint” yet, now is the time to get a game plan going.

Health and food lobby groups in the UK are now pushing for “water footprint” labeling on consumer products. Get ready to hear more about how one kilogram of beef requires 16 thousand liters of water.  It’s going to be tougher to swallow that steak in the States (each American’s water footprint stands at 2500 cubic meters per year) when more people realize over a billion don’t have adequate access to safe water.

The catastrophic effects of climate change could take decades to materialize.  Assessing blame and assigning liability will be difficult, if not impossible.  But the industrial extraction of water causes immediate issues.  When companies compromise water reservoirs and pollute public waterways, locals fight back, as they’ve done in Maine against Nestlé’s Poland Spring operations. A new bill in Congress aims to tax businesses that turn profits from products containing municipal water or contribute to water pollution.

Coca-Cola aspires to be the first “water neutral” corporation by 2010. It probably won’t be the last.

Photo by Flickr user “Jim Linwood,” CC 2.0.