Despite an anemic economic recovery and an increasingly antagonistic Iran, President Obama decided to kill the Keystone XL pipeline. Creating thousands of jobs and securing American access to oil, the much-discussed Keystone project would transport crude oil from Alberta, Canada to American refiners in Oklahoma and Texas.

For years the pipeline was an innocuous project slowly making its way through the convoluted federal approval process. After receiving all but one permit, radical environmentalist—feeling affronted two years into the Obama Administration—set their sights on the soon-to-be approved Keystone pipeline. What should have been a non-controversial construction project became anything but. Before becoming the object of environmentalist scorn, the State Department approved and advocated for the nearly identical Canadian-American pipeline in 2009, arguing:

… the addition of crude oil pipeline capacity between Canada and the United States will advance a number of strategic interests of the United States. These included increasing the diversity of available supplies among the United States’ worldwide crude oil sources in a time of considerable political tension in other major oil producing countries and regions; shortening the transportation pathway for crude oil supplies; and increasing crude oil supplies from a major non-Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries producer.

Canada is a stable and reliable ally and trading partner of the United States, with which we have free trade agreements which augment the security of this energy supply. Approval of the permit sends a positive economic signal, in a difficult economic period, about the future reliability and availability of a portion of United States’ energy imports, and in the immediate term, this shovel-ready project will provide construction jobs for workers in the United States.

Drawing an arbitrary line in the sand, environmentalists threatened to sit out the 2012 election if President Obama approved the pipeline. Organizing daily protests outside the White House, environmentalists effectively turned a non-political issue into one of the most divisive topics of 2011.

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Now we know why President Obama isn’t spending any time fighting a war on unemployment. He’s too busy fighting his war on coal.

Indeed, while the past few months have seen tiny signs our economy might be growing despite Obama’s anti-job policies, the White House is ramping up its effort to make sure our labor force is expunged of every last coal job it can find. It’d be humorous if it wasn’t so real.

If we start exposing this radical nonsense coming out of the Obama EPA, conservatives can push back on these bad policies. Environmentalists rarely get their way when people actually pay attention to what they want to do.

The latest battle will be coming any day now, as the EPA has said it will issue its Utility NSPS (New Source Performance Standards) sometime in January. Any new utility plants will have to meet a new set of environmental standards – standards that conveniently work out great for natural gas but are prohibitively expensive for coal plants, even new ones, to meet.

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With just a few shopping days until Christmas, “You’ve Been Gored” offers….

…Holiday Ideas for Green Grinches & Climate Change Believers!

CCB – that’s Climate Change Belief – is a religion. It has a God (Gore) and prophets/saints (DiCaprio, Sting), but where are the holidays? Christmas and Chanukah offer great reasons to eat, drink and get crazy. But ALpostles, convinced that all human activity damages Gaia, are such a gloomy  bunch.

So enviro-doomsayers, pull up an old cable spool next to the artificial, non-denominational log, grab a bowl of recycled waste-punch and get in the spirit with these fun holiday ideas. (more…)

Dinesh D’Souza once said of Richard Dawkins’ problematic references to history that, “This is what happens when you let a biology major out of the lab.”

D’Souza was on to something, especially judging from a recent Slate article written by famous Harvard biologist and professor Martin Nowak and Harvard postdoctoral fellow David Rand. In it, they explain that America needs “motivation” when it comes to reducing it’s carbon footprint. This article has everything that makes conservatives squirm: love of the Prius, hardcore environmentalism, and longing for absurd government regulation. See for yourself [Caution NSFL - Not Safe For Libertarians]:

This is, after all, the end of the world we are talking about, so why stop there? Why not go full Scarlet Letter? People with more than 2 kids should have to carry signs with them apologizing for over populating our sensitive planet. People who can’t afford $25,000 hybrids, lets call them the “commons”, need to be branded with a “I Cause Cancer” stamp on their forehead.  And if you don’t recycle, Gaia forbid, you should go straight to jail. Wouldn’t that “motivate people to reduce their carbon footprint”?

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SAFE. End of story.

Please read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 [Editor: Please link to each]

Contrary to recent media reports, the Brazilian Blowout hair treatment is safe for use.  Here is a review of all the studies done on Brazilian Blowout.

Oregon OSHA:  Pass

Federal OSHA:  Pass

Health Sciences Associates:  Pass

Dr. James Haw – USC: Pass

FDA:  Conducted no studies

ChemRisk: Too much product used = faulty study

Brazilian Blowout passed every single properly performed study for both state and federal short-term and long-term exposure limits, known as the Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL – an 8-hour time-weighted average) and Short-Term Exposure Limit (STEL – a 15 minute exposure measurement).

So why the witch hunt on Brazilian Blowout?  The answers are simple:

1) Government Bias

As described in Part 1 [Editor: Please link], Oregon OSHA is guilty of :

• Equating methylene glycol with formaldehyde in contradiction of all accepted scientific nomenclature methods.  Doing so allowed them to…
• Claim extremely high levels of formaldehyde in the product.
• Ideological bias, as at least one scientist who authored the study aligns himself with a hardcore Liberal Senator known as an environmental activist.
• Editorializing what should be a neutral scientific report, thus demonstrating its own bias.
• Deliberately taking samples longer than 15 minutes and applying those results to 15 minute periods.
• Issuing a false and misleading press release that did not report the product actually passed the PEL and STEL tests.

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Environmentalist, educator, and author of Eaarth (because evidently one “a” is not enough), Bill McKibben, has been traveling to colleges and universities across the country speaking to students about the dire circumstances that we are facing on the planet.  He has recruited the involvement of people in our religious communities and calls himself one of the “Methodist Mafia.” Introduced to the audience as “most important person in the world,” McKibben began by saying that he was there as a professional “bummer outer” (obviously taking it to a level the students would understand).  He has been studying and writing about climate change since 1989 and is in a panic over the drastic changes we are seeing in the earth’s climate.  Apparently, scientists underestimated how much we humans affected the climate and we must do something NOW, before all of this is irreversible.

McKibben explained that, at the rate we are going, we will see a five degree increase in global temperature within this century and that every degree of increase will reduce crop output by ten percent. We cannot let this happen for ethical, moral as well as practical reasons. The only solution is that we must get off of coal, oil and gas FAST! As it stands, food prices are going up and millions of people are starving. Americans burn more fossil fuel in two days than the people of the Sahara do in one year.

Our political leaders are not making changes because of threats from the fossil fuel industry.  The “greens” are becoming desperate as they see their oh-so-carefully laid plans for wealth redistribution falling apart. McKibben’s message to the students is that they can no longer talk lightly about the very survival of the planet. He is building a movement to organize the globe and force President Obama to honor his campaign promises to reduce our fossil fuel dependence. America must reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by eighty percent by 2020. We only have five to ten years before the damage is irreversible.

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When most people think about the Yellow Pages… well, do most people even think about the Yellow Pages anymore? Actually, you’d be surprised. Nearly 75% of Americans referred to the Yellow Pages for a phone number or business recommendation last year. Even given all of the Internet resources that are available right at hand, most adults chose to look up essential information in that gigantic book that most people born after 1995 remember only as a makeshift booster seat. Even in the face of rampant technology, the Yellow Pages soldiers on as one of the most used local resources and one of the most effective means of direct marketing to consumers.

But learning that about the Yellow Pages takes a bit of research–research that liberal city councils across the country aren’t doing as they undertake a massive war on what they deem not only an irrepressible nuisance but an environmental disaster as well. That’s right, of all of the societal ills local governments could address, they’re looking to take on the Yellow Pages. San Francisco, of course, has already led the way, and Berkeley, Alameda, Cleveland and other cities would like to follow suit. According to BanthePhoneBook.org, a site set up by those who seek to see the Yellow Pages (radical environmentalists among them) banished from existence, nearly five million trees are murdered per year just to bring you reliable information about plumbers and personal injury lawyers.

But is banning the phone book really the best way to save trees? A quick rundown of some key statistics puts two very key holes in the “ban the phone book” theory of environmental reclamation. First, as it turns out, the Yellow Pages aren’t actually made from five million fresh trees, cut down in their peak to bring the phone book to your door. They’re actually made from mostly recycled material or the byproducts of other paper manufacturing, non-toxic dyes, and inks, and unused directories are “upcycled” into other things. You know that coffee cup that your non-fat soy latte with non-dairy whip comes in every morning, that says it comes from “90% recycled materials?” It’s likely made out of your old phone books. (more…)

To say environmentalists are immune to reality is an understatement. When anyone dare question their conclusions, their deeply held “religious” beliefs, they are immediately attacked as a heretic, or worse, a shill for whatever industry they are trying to destroy. The soundness of the science, and the lack of such on their part, is irrelevant, it’s agenda uber alles. They find someone involved in what goes against their view who they can play “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon” with and connect to whatever industry/organization they’re trying to destroy and claim that discredits everything contrary to their orthodoxy. But every once in a while something so beautifully karmic happens…That’s what this is about.

Bisphenol-A (BPA) is a chemical used to harden plastic so it can be used in the countless ways it helps improve countless millions of lives. As it is a chemical, it was only a matter of time before the extremist environmentalists started talking of the “dangers” of it to human beings. Ironically, charges of this nature are always led by people who have no concern of human beings. They are the same type of people who effectively banned the mosquito killing agent DDT. That ban has led to millions of avoidable deaths around the world from malaria. While the banning of BPA wouldn’t lead to deaths, it’s banning wouldn’t save any lives either. But it would put a lot of people out of work.

But work, jobs, livelihoods of individuals has no place in the environmental extremist agenda. They’ve replaced what was known to kill malaria carrying mosquitos with nets to sleep under. So instead of eliminating the problem they’ve reduced the problem…during sleep hours. Malaria’s largest number of victims are infants and children who don’t have the wherewithal to swat mosquitos away when they land on them, and since no one can live their whole life in a net, their exposure risk is high.

The book from which the religion of modern environmentalism sprang is “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. In many ways it is the Bible of that movement. And even though it has been discredited, the “Silent Spring” model still serves as the modus operandi of the environmentalist cult. Ban first, ask questions later. That’s what they were trying to do with BPA.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Utopia…

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The unsightly film on our “clean” dishes had become a source of great frustration in our household.  Dish washing was the job of my daughter and she was evidently was really slacking off.  We worked with her on critical strategies like pre-washing, proper loading technique and the importance of rinse aids.  Still, we found that the dishes usually had to be washed at least twice and with increasing amounts of detergent.  In this lousy economy and runaway food and fuel inflation, I was using 50% more Cascade detergent and running twice as many loads.  This deal worked out great for the the water and electric utilities, and especially for P&G (Proctor and Gamble) but not so well for us.

As a conservative, I believe there is a right way and a wrong way to do just about anything from how to install toilet paper to what ingredients are key to a product.  That makes me a consummate label reader. So one day I noticed that Cascade was “phosphate free”.  That struck me as really odd because I dutifully inject that naturally occurring element into the ecosystem every time I use my Miracle Grow “Bloom-booster” plant food.  So how could something that is good for plants be evil for the environment?

I asked my friend Kat, who is a full time environmental activist and I challenged her. I am now using at least twice as much water and electricity, not to mention time as I spent before on clean dishes.  She toed the party line, that too much phosphates in sewer systems somehow creates too much algae which disrupts ecosystems.

So I explained my situation and the fact that a huge corporation about which she should be suspicious of before me, was making out like bandits. I asked her, “Do you realize you are working for the man?”  “What?” She asked. The irony was quite amusing.

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If you don’t believe that Obama and his administration’s over-reach on so-called climate change costs America jobs, then how to explain even Labor bailing on Obama and the Democrats?

Unable to pay off the Environmental lobby through legislation, Obama’s EPA is looking for every opportunity to end-run Congress by enacting stringent and un-neccesary new regulations.

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration’s environmental agenda, long a target of American business, is beginning to take fire from some of the Democratic Party’s most reliable supporters: Labor unions.

And it isn’t only Labor. The American people as a whole have turned cold to the notion of climate change. Unfortunately, just as we saw with the passage of ObamaCare, this administration isn’t going to allow democracy in the form of the American people to get in the way of their kowtowing to special interest groups, be it the health care lobby, or the far-Left environmental movement in this case.

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who are worried about global warming has fallen to nearly the historic low reached in 1998, a poll released Monday showed.

This has resulted in a House panel acting today to begin to tell the EPA, no way!! Unfortunately, the battle isn’t over and we’ll need to be especially mindful of how the Senate may eventually behave.

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Thanks to Ronald Reagan’s legacy and a legal miscalculation by leftist environmentalists, this week a California judge stopped the implementation of California’s Cap and Trade law: better known as Cap and Tax. This is the same type of carbon trading that Al Gore has hawked for years, but failed to get through the most radical Democrat Congress in generations. That’s how bad it was. Of course, that didn’t stop whacked out California from passing a Draconian version of the same job killing scheme.

To add insult to injury, the so called “republican” Governor Schwarzenegger signed the bill into law in 2006. It was opposed by the Chamber of Commerce and most sane taxpayers (admittedly, CA doesn’t have enough of those). The opponents claimed that the law would drive out business to other states and dramatically increase the cost of energy. Energy costs would, of course, be passed on, driving up the cost of everything else-in the midst of the nation’s worst recession.

The voters of California even had an opportunity last year to put the brakes on it at the ballot box with Proposition 23, but the environmental left spent millions fighting the proposition. It wouldn’t even have scrapped the whole law, but only would have suspended the Cap and Tax until state unemployment dropped below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters. The proposition was defeated overwhelmingly. Considering our unemployment rate is well over 12% here, the California voters essentially supported assisted economic-suicide of their own state.

It took two forces working together to finally defeat Cap and Tax: a group of radical Lefties and Ronald Reagan to put the brakes on this law.

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Everyone knows the hypocrisy of the environmental movement runs very, very, deep. When it comes to the kings of hypocrisy, none do it better than the limousine liberals in Hollywood.

In this video directed by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, who produced and directed Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria, Robert Redford is exposed as the typical Hollywood elite whose actions don’t quite match up to their words.

People like Redford believe they are exempt from the notion of following your words with actions, because they’re doing such good deeds by going around and preaching the evils of corporations and ‘saving our planet’ from “man-made global warming.” They abide by the mentality of “do as I say, not as I do.” After all, if you ask them, they are better than you. Not only are they ‘morally superior’, they’re practically saving you from catching on fire.

Of course, this is nothing new.

Essentially it boils down to this: Robert Redford is opposing an eco-village near his property in the Napa Valley whilst quietly selling $2 million lots in the Sundance Preserve for luxury vacation homes. Take a look.

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When movie director James Cameron descended upon the Athabasca oil sands a while back, Albertans were subjected to the predictable but nonetheless aggravating media blitz of misinformation that occurs when a mega-star chooses a cause to elevate.

The elevation came in the form of a supercilious warning to put the brakes on the world’s second largest proved oil reserve. It could, he feared, become a curse if not properly managed. This revelation came upon reflection via a government sponsored helicopter tour and a token chat with a group of not-so disenfranchised First Nations peoples in the area. (In 2009, oil sands companies contracted more than $890 million for goods and services from Aboriginal owned businesses and employed 1600 Aboriginals in permanent jobs).

And with that, Mr. Cameron and the media were able to close the case on the oil sands, as Mr. Cameron purportedly had to jet. It’s not Mr. Cameron’s fault, completely. The oil complex is just that – complex. It’s not the kind of business one just picks up as a hobby horse. Sure, Cameron can regurgitate the technical terminology if he likes. It would be difficult for a techno-geek of titanic proportions to resist a sexy term like steam gravity assisted drainage (SAGD).

Here is where I suggest “putting the brakes on.” Perhaps a moratorium on incendiary statements by celebutantes or politicians a-la-Pelosi who are not able to, because of their lack of training, do the type of deep comprehensive assessment required for these matters.

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We’re preparing to move out of my Sacramento apartment so I went online to check rates to rent a small truck.

I first checked U-Haul; they have a great brand name and I’ve used them before.  The cost to rent a 10 foot truck from Sacramento to Irvine: $219.  It all seemed pretty straightforward – until I started to complete the online contract.  In addition to the $219, U-Haul suggested I buy some insurance for $60, saying that most car insurance policies don’t cover rental trucks, unlike rental cars.  OK, reasonable enough.  Then I came to a $5 “Environmental Fee” payable at the store.

“Environmental Fee?!?” I thought.  I clicked on the link to explain this unexpected fee and U-Haul treated me to a rambling eight paragraph paean to their environmental consciousness, saying, in part, “For more than 60 years, the U-Haul Companies have provided an economical, sustainable and environmentally friendly means for families to move to a better future.” And that “sharing” trucks rather than buying one for the average family’s twice a decade move reduces “hundreds of thousands of tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.” And “With 15,000 locations across the United States and Canada, U-Haul truck sharing helps to reduce the carbon footprint of many local communities.” So far, the $5 fee hadn’t been explained – I was on the edge of my seat for the punch line – until finally, in the last paragraph: “The Customer money collected as an environmental fee is expended to reduce the negative impact of our business on future generations. Aerodynamic fuel saving truck skirts, the fuel economy gauge, storage re-use centers, environmentally friendly truck wash soap, are examples of where these funds go.”

Ahh, I see.

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Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) announced the latest Obama administration “green” initiative: Assign cars an A-D letter grade, to be noted on labels affixed to car windows at auto dealerships, based exclusively on the car’s purported environmental-friendliness.

The executive branch reportedly got the idea from Britain, where the labels have already been introduced in order to push drivers to purchase more “energy efficient” cars.

But here, unlike there, the idea is already meeting with stiff resistance from pretty much everyone– free market advocates, automakers, car dealers, consumers, and even some green types– on a variety of grounds that could imperil the ultimate implementation of the scheme.

The free marketeers object to the scheme on the basis that it represents a “nanny-state” approach in which government seeks to interfere with the natural operation of the market for cars.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers takes a different view, and following its announcement bashed the proposal, suggesting it was overly simplistic and reminiscent of “school-yard” style grading, while pointing out that “grades may inadvertently suggest a government label of approval.”

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Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza recently published an insightful, much-discussed article in Forbes, “How Obama Thinks.”

Drawing upon Obama’s writings and history, D’Souza concludes that his policy agenda—so at odds with traditional American values and principles—is rooted chiefly in the anti-colonialist intellectual influence of his Kenyan-born father:

What then is Obama’s dream? We don’t have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father’s dream. . . .

[T]o his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. . . . Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America . . . .

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” Obama Sr. . . saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa . . . . As he put it, “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now.” The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that “theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed.”

Like father, like son, says D’Souza:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

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In the wake of yesterday’s terrorism outside Washington, DC by Discovery-network hostage-taker James J. Lee, let’s consider the position articulated by, say, radio host Glenn Beck to not attribute responsibility to Al Gore’s eco-ranting. The latter is of course larded with assurances of a certain eco-catastrophe brought about by dark forces impeding salvation, and disturbing utterances like “the tide in this battle will turn only when the majority of people in the world become sufficiently aroused by a shared sense of urgent danger to join in an all-out effort.” (Earth in the Balance, p. 269)

Any sane person knows that such exhortations for an all-out effort to stop urgent danger are merely calls to get involved, say with direct mail campaigns and bake sales.

Now, both Fox News and CNN have reported that Lee attributed his radicalism to the writings of two men — Daniel Quinn and Al Gore. The Washington Post carried a fairly lengthy article exploring the former, who dismisses any connection. That piece and the main news feature are both silent on the deceased’s giving equal credit to Gore (although a pop-up ad for China’s solar industry does accompany one of them). This is true of the Wall Street Journal’s coverage, among others.

Beck’s (somewhat backhanded, I understand) rationale for exculpating Gore of partial responsibility is that the terrorist was not a sane person. Yep. But the two — culpability by Gore and other radical green imams, and acting out by mentally unstable members of their targeted demographic — aren’t mutually exclusive. We know that individuals bear responsibility for reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions, both the instigator and the instigated.

One might not like the connection, what with environmentalism being as chic as a Che Guevara handbag, but you can’t deny it. Take the quiz, “Did Al Gore say it? Or was it the Unabomber?“. I dare you to score better than 50%. That should make you uncomfortable. Then read Lee’s manifesto, and really squirm at the similarities.

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As we mentioned in our last article, the prevalence of the Triple Bottom Line philosophy is signaling a changing paradigm, a time of transformation. Our question, then, is this: What exactly are we transforming into?  The knee-jerk answer might be that we are transforming from a capitalist system to a socialist system. However, the widespread adoption of 3BL belies such a simple answer. Socialism, with its complete government control of production, is hardly desirable for private business interests. American corporations are willingly embracing 3BL without even a government mandate. There is something deeper going on than simply a tug of war between two economic systems, and we are seeking to explore just what that may be.

Our first clues as to where we are going lay in the past, with the origin of the term “Triple Bottom Line.” For that we can credit John Elkington (his personal website and blog is here), who introduced the public to the term for the first time in his 1997 publication Cannibals With Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business. Elkington is a longtime advocate for corporate environmental and social awareness, having cofounded the business development consulting firm SustainAbility in 1987. In fact, we may consider him a “founder” of corporate sustainability, having been called a “dean of the corporate responsibility movement for three decades” by BusinessWeek.  Elkington currently serves as the Executive Chairman of the sustainability think tank Volans, which he helped found in 2008. His work with Volans is what provides a real glimpse into the end game of 3BL, in a concept termed “The Phoenix Economy.”

The Phoenix Economy is a concept professing that the failure of an existing economic system will leave a void and an opportunity for a new system to take its place.  (The term “phoenix” refers to the bird of that name which, in ancient mythology, dies in a self-created fire and is then reincarnated from the ashes.)  Old paradigms and established principles are replaced by a new way of approaching economics — and indeed the culture. Elkington recognizes this as an opportunity to establish a new paradigm based on 3BL philosophy. Global sustainability is the principle by which the economic and social culture will be driven. The Volans website provides a concise explanation of the Phoenix Economy.

According to Volans:

From the ashes of the downturn, a new economy is self-assembling—focused on providing social and environmental solutions, where markets and governments have failed.

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Certainly the philosophy of the Triple Bottom Line (“3BL” or “TBL”) is unconventional when compared with accepted business practices which are based upon the typical single bottom line of profit. We know that profit is essential to business survival, but we should ask how this expanded 3BL business model gained traction. For an answer, we need to look at the history of 3BL, and that history shows us that environmental and social idealism have been closely linked since the modern global environmental movement began in 1972.

In 1972, Maurice Strong, a patriarch of the global environmental movement who now sits on the board of directors for the Chicago Climate Exchange, led the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which met in Stockholm and released a declaration linking the human exerience to nature. It acknowledged that “man is both creature and moulder of his environment” and has advanced to the point where he has the power to significantly affect nature and, by extension, his own intellectual, moral, social and spiritual growth. The global social ramifications of man’s environmental stewardship are thus clearly stated in the Stockholm declaration:

The protection and improvement of the human environment is a major issue which affects the wellbeing of peoples and economic development throughout the world; it is the urgent desire of the peoples of the whole world and the duty of all Governments.

The UN felt the environment and social well being were so linked that the declaration’s first Principle focused on it:

Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being, and he bears a solemn responsibility to protect and improve the environment for present and future generations. In this respect, policies promoting or perpetuating apartheid, racial segregation, discrimination, colonial and other forms of oppression and foreign domination stand condemned and must be eliminated.

Without question, the UN has made a particular commitment to social and environmental ideology since the very beginning of the green movement, and in the Stockholm declaration we can see much of the framework for global socio-environmental ideology already in place.

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The story of ShoreBank has caught national attention, as this relatively small, so-called ”community development bank” has been the target for bailout assistance via state and federal taxpayer money. In the past, particular banks have received assistance if they were deemed “too large to fail,” on the presumption is that if they did fail, they would take the banking industry — and possibly the economy itself — with them. ShoreBank, however, is a special case, and the favoritism shown it is based more on its banking philosphy than its size. What is it about ShoreBank’s philosophy that has garnered the favor of those who apparently see it not as “too large” to fail, but too important to fail? To answer that, we will be exploring the concept of the “Triple Bottom Line” (TBL or 3BL), which is the most succinct statement of Shorebank’s mission and purpose. In this series of articles we will discuss what the triple bottom line is, where it came from, and where it is leading us. We will see just how important 3BL philosophy is to those who subscribe to it and why they must protect its champion, ShoreBank, at all costs. As we explore it, we will see how it is more than just a new business model, but an maturing philosophy that begs protection from stakeholders whose goal is to establish it as a societal norm. Indeed, as we shall see, the Triple Bottom Line represents a philosophy which has been deemed “too important to fail.”

What is the Triple Bottom Line?

The Triple Bottom Line (TBL or 3BL) is the most succinct statement of Shorebank’s mission and purpose, and the bank proudly touts its commitment to the 3BL objectives. What are these objectives? Essentially, they are an organizational commitment to social and environmental concerns in addition to economic concerns (profit). Shorebank’s website summarizes it as follows:

Most businesses have a single bottom line – maximizing shareholder return. “Triple bottom line” companies typically manage to achieve three returns: profitability, social return and an environmental return. ShoreBank describes its triple bottom line as profitability, community development impact and conservation.

ShoreBank claims that pursuing profit alone is inadequate for businesses today, and therefore it feels traditional accounting measures must now also incorporate the goals of social welfare and environmental responsibility as well.

How is the Triple Bottom Line Practiced?

The vision behind 3BL is praiseworthy, as responsible and upstanding companies will by necessity conduct their business in ways friendly to their employees, customers, and community — as well as protect and preserve their environmental resources. However, how does 3BL actually work in practice? Is it a feasible and practical business model that accomplishes its stated goals? Let’s look again at ShoreBank’s website for the explanation. ShoreBank explains that it invests and loans money to foster community development and environmentally friendly projects. Then it attempts a description of how it codifies its progress towards fulfilling its 3BL aims:

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