Greek Austerity: Pressure on the Environment

“While patrolling on a recent cold night, environmentalist Grigoris Gourdomichalis caught a young man illegally chopping down a tree on public land in the mountains above Athens. When confronted, the man broke down in tears, saying he was unemployed and needed the wood to warm the home he shares with his wife and four small children, because he could no longer afford heating oil. ‘It was a tough choice, but I decided just to let him go’ with the wood, said Mr. Gourdomichalis, head of the locally financed Environmental Association of Municipalities of Athens, which works to protect forests around Egaleo, a western suburb of the capital.”[1] Tens of thousands of trees had disappeared from parks and forests in Greece during the first half of the winter of 2013 alone as unemployed Greeks had to contend with the loss of the home heating-oil subsidy as part of the austerity program demanded by the state’s creditors. As impoverished residents too broke to pay for electricity or fuel turned to fireplaces and wood stoves for heat, smog was just one of the manifestations—the potential loss of forests being another. On Christmas Day, for example, pollution over Maroussi was more than two times the E.U.’s standard. Furthermore, many schools, especially in the north part of Greece, had to face hard choices for lack of money to heat classrooms.

Greek forests were succumbing  in 2012 to the Greeks' need to heat their homes as austerity hit.   source: Getty Images

Essentially, austerity was bringing many people back to pre-modern living, perhaps including a resurgence in vegetable gardens during the preceding summer. At least in respect to the wood, the problem was that the population was too big—and too concentrated in Athens—for the primitive ways to return, given the environment's capacity. 

The full essay is at "Greek Austerity and the Environment."

1. Nektaria Stamouli and Stelios Bouras, “Greeks Raid Forests in Search of Wood to Heat Homes,” The New York Times, January 11, 2013.
2. Skip Worden, God's Gold, available at Amazon. 

A European Utility Re-Envisioning Energy: An Opportunity for Visionary Leadership

When Eneco began a business called CrowdNett in which the company would sell large home-batteries to people having solar panels, the Dutch electric utility was on the way toward putting its electricity-production business out of business. The company would continue, though radically transformed. The strikingly different strategic-course correction was based on a rather unique vision of a novel social reality in which homes generate their own energy and then some. In the context of climate change and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Eneco’s CEO had an opportunity in 2017 to lead not only organizationally, but societally as well by promoting the radical social reality already envisioned.

The full essay is at "Re-Envisioning Energy."

For more on visionary leadership and management, see The Essence of Leadership: A Cross-Cultural Foundation, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon. 

Electric Utilities Thwart Solar Applications: A Conflict of Interest Rewarding the Status Quo

Considering the contribution of coal-burning power-plants to atmospheric carbon-emissions and thus global warming, governments around the world should be encouraging rather than discouraging home-owners to install solar panels. That is to say, we ought not privilege the status quo when it has contributed so much already to an uncomfortable or even uninhabitable Earth for mankind. So it is unfortunate that energy officials in Hawaii’s government had to step in to pressure—no, order—the Hawaiian Electric Company to approve its “lengthy backlog” of solar applications.[1] I submit that the officials should have gone further in correcting for the conflict of interest in the utility. Put in the vernacular, electric companies tended at the time to screw customers who could sell back “home-grown” solar power. The root problem here is in the utilities’s dual roles of seller and consumer of power.


The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

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[1] Diane Cardwell, “Utilities See Solar Panels as Threat to Bottom Line,” The New York Times, April 19, 2015.

Ignoring Institutional Conflicts of Interest

I submit for your consideration the thesis that people, particularly in American society at least, tend to have keen radar for conflicts of interest specific to individuals while institutional conflicts of interest tend to go undetected. The reason may be that a conflict of interest in which a specific person benefits is more tangible (e.g., receiving a bribe of $50,000) than is the on-going pressure on a department or organization to pursue an unethical policy or decision from an institutional conflict of interest. It may also be that we, as human beings, are more envious when another human being enriches oneself unethically than when an institution profits at the public’s expense—even if the ethical and financial damage of the latter is greater.

The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available at Amazon.