(Time to read this Blog is about 3 minutes)

Before we get to the main topic, here are a few things to get you thinking or smiling:

1. My Biz Quote of the week:
   “Many businesses make the mistake of promoting their Brand Promise and Brand Values to their target customers before they’ve successfully ‘sold’ them to their own staff.  If your staff haven’t bought into your Brand Promise and Values, they won’t deliver it to your customers.”     
   …Donald Cooper.
    
2. Quick Biz Tip:
   Just satisfying your customers won’t ‘cut it’ anymore:   

   Many businesses believe that the key to success is ‘customer satisfaction’.  But just ‘satisfying’ customers simply won’t ‘cut it’ anymore.  ‘Satisfied’ is somewhere just slightly north of ‘not satisfied’, but far below ‘thrilled, delighted and amazed’.
    
   ‘Satisfied’ is not where emotional connection, brand loyalty and customer ownership take place. ‘Satisfied’ is not where customers become fans and tweet, text, blog, TikTok and tell 100s of friends about you.
    
   ‘Satisfied’ is where customers are not unhappy enough to complain, but not thrilled enough to come back for more.  So, rather than just ‘satisfying’ your customers, you need to absolutely delight and amaze them.  And, if you’re not prepared to do the work to make that happen, you should just pack it in right now!
    
   So, what will you commit to do in 2023 to surprise and delight your customers and clearly differentiate your business from your competitors.  What would ‘extraordinary’ look like at every touch-point?   What has never been done before?   Then, how will you make that part of your corporate DNA? 
    

3. A weighty problem: 64% of Canadians and 68% of Americans are overweight or obese.  It’s predicted that by 2035, over half the world’s population will be overweight or obese.
    
   Why it matters:  A jump in obesity rates of that size will cost the global economy more than US$4 trillion in added healthcare costs and reduced productivity.
    
   Why it’s happening:   People are eating unhealthier, highly-processed foods and doing less physical activity.
    
4. Broken hearts…huge financial losses…shattered lives. According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, Canadians lost over $50 million to romance schemes in 2022.  A 64-year-old widow from Barrie, Ontario was scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by an online ‘lover’ and then duped into becoming a ‘drug mule’. She is currently in a Hong Kong prison facing serious drug trafficking charges.
    
   Romance fraud is a huge problem.  Keep an eye on elderly relatives and friends…and be careful yourself.    

Now, to this week’s important topic:

There’s no such thing as a zero-emission car or truck:  

I’m feeling ‘cranky’ again. It might be my age…or it might be my commitment to straight talk and intellectual integrity!

In a recent speech, President Biden talked about the positive impact and bright future ahead for ‘Zero-emission’ vehicles.  This is pure bunk.  There’s no such thing as a zero-emission vehicle.  We’re wrapping ourselves in a righteous blanket of delusion and denial.

The folks crying out against the internal combustion engine are quick to remind us, not only of the emissions of such diabolical pieces of machinery, but also of the pollution caused by the extraction, transportation and refining of the fuel that powers them.  But these same righteous individuals lecture us about the virtue of their ‘zero-emission’ electric vehicles. This is astoundingly and transparently dishonest, even to the willfully blind.

What about the emissions from the coal and gas-fired electrical plants that generate 60% of electricity in America.  What about the non-recyclable nature of the windmills and solar panels used to generate ‘clean’ energy, or the hideous environmental damage and sometimes human tragedy surrounding the extraction of the materials required to produce the ‘zero-emission’ car battery?

A typically vehicle battery contains about 25 pounds of lithium, 30 pounds of cobalt, 60 pounds of nickel, 110 pounds of graphite, 90 pounds of copper, about 400 pounds of steel, aluminium, and various plastic components.

From these figures and average ore grades, one can estimate the typical quantity of material that must be extracted from the earth, typically by huge diesel-powered machines, and then processed to yield the pure minerals required to produce an electric vehicle battery. 

All the earth moved and ore extracted to produce one battery comes to between 90 and 750 tons, depending where the mining takes place.  Then there’s the enormous amount of energy used to transport and refine the ore into usable metal.

There are huge emissions generated in producing and powering a ‘zero-emission’ vehicle.  We’re just pushing them out of our immediate field of vision and pretending they don’t exist.  It’s like buying a plump, plucked ready-to-roast chicken, plastic-wrapped on a sanitized styrofoam tray, and pretending that no chicken was actually butchered to make that happen.  The messy part happened where we couldn’t see it…but there was still a messy part.

For many well-meaning people, ‘green’ has become a religion, more than a science, complete with the denial of reality, suspension of rationality and false hope that goes with any religion.  

So, let’s stop deluding ourselves by referring to ‘zero-emission’ vehicles and do the real math.

That’s it for this week…

Stay safe…live brilliantly!       

Donald Cooper 

Donald Cooper speaks and coaches internationally on management, marketing, and profitability.  He can be reached by email at donald@donaldcooper.com in Toronto, Canada.