June 2009

The Rodney Dangerfield of fuels

June 29, 2009

In the energy and climate change debate, environmentalists are for the most part united in their feelings about coal (very bad), gasoline (avoid “gas guzzlers”),  nuclear energy (scary), hydropower (small is better than big),  wind (good unless you worry about birds), solar thermal (nifty) and rooftop solar PV (even niftier). But what about natural gas, which is the source of more of our energy than coal, nuclear or all the renewable sources combined?

use_by_source_large “We’re the Rodney Dangerfield of fuels,” says Roger Cooper, executive vice president of policy and planning at the American Gas Association. Meaning that gas gets no respect, nor all that much attention. (The DOE logo, below, includes an oil derrick, wind turbine, hydro and the nuclear symbol, but nothing about gas.

I went to see Cooper and Christopher McGill of the AGA last week because of the news that the domestic supply of natural gas is increasing. A group called the Potential Gas Committee, which is based at the Colorado School of Mines, has just reported that the U.S. has about a 100 year supply of natural gas, assuming we continued to consume it at today’s rates. “That’s the largest future supply ever reported,” McGill said. Just a decade ago, the same group project that the U.S. had a 60 to 65 year supply. The increase is, essentially, a result of new (and controversial) drilling technologies that make it easier to recover the gas from saturated shale rocks that, it turns out, exist all over the country–the Applachachians, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma and in the Rocky Mountains. “You’re talking about a huge volume of saturated rock that has the potential to be exploited,” McGill said. This New York Times story explains the significance of the new estimates.

My question for the gas association was a simple one: What does the discovery of vast new reserves of natural gas, which is, after all, a fossil fuel, mean when it comes to climate change? A simple question, but the answer is anything but.
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We can solve the climate crisis

June 28, 2009

I learned two things last week about Sunil Paul, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with a passion for clean tech. One is that he thinks big. The other is that he is very well-connected in Washington.

Paul came to D.C. to release a report called the Gigaton Throwdown that, in his words, “redefines what’s possible for clean energy by 2020.” It’s roadmap that demonstrates how we can scale up clean energy to have a major impact in the next decade. Joining him at a news conference to unveil its findings were an all-star group from the Obama administration—green jobs czar Van Jones (checki him out on video, below), White House science advisor John Holdren and assistant secretaries of energy David Sandalow and Cathy Zoi, key players in Steven Chu’s brain trust at DOE.

Paul’s timing was excellent. He released the Gigaton Throwdown the day before the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the most important energy and environmental legislation of our era. While Waxman-Markey is far from perfect, it’s a step towards the ultimate goal: a top-to-bottom transformation of the global economy into one that is sustainable and just. Paul gets this as not many business people do.

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Working with scientists, entrepreneurs and investors, Paul put together a team to see what it would take to reach “gigaton scale” for nine technologies—biofuels, building efficiency, concentrated solar power (i.e. solar thermal), construction materials, geothermal, nuclear, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, solar photovoltaics and wind. As the report explains:

To attain gigaton scale, a single technology must reduce annual emissions of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases (CO2e) by at least 1 billion metric tons — a gigaton — by 2020. For an electricity generation technology, this is equivalent to an installed capacity of 205 gigawatts (GW) of carbon-free energy (at 100% capacity) in 2020.

The report found that eight of the nine technologies–the exception was plug-in hybrids–could feasibly reach gigaton scale in a bit more than a decade. Paul’s report is significant, in part, because it reflects the thinking of a many in a hurry–other studies, particularly the very good McKinsey study on how to avoid climate disaster, look out 20 or 40 years.
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Transparency, without taxpayer dollars

June 26, 2009

There are two places on the Internet where you can find out how the $787-billion stimulus package is being spent. One is run by the government. The other by a west coast tech company. Care to guess which does a better job?

Yes, it’s recovery.org, which despite its dot-org suffix, is run by a company called Onvia (Nasdaq: ONVI) based in Seattle, which is tracking thousands of stimulus projects at the state, county and local level, from building a transit center in Washtenaw, Michigan, to decommissioning nuclear facilities in South Carolina.
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Then there’s recovery.gov, the federal site that “offers little beyond news releases, general breakdowns of spending, and acronym-laden spreadsheets and timelines,” as The Washington Post put it. But don’t worry, the government is on the case. An office set up to oversee the stimulus (with a budget of $84 million) has about 30 employees, plus outside contractors, working to revamp the site, the newspaper said. “We have four and a half years to turn this thing into its final product,” Earl Devaney, the former  inspector general now in charge of oversight, told The Post. No, I’m not making this up.
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Why I like Marriott

June 25, 2009

“If the employees are well taken care of, they’ll take care of the customer and the customer will come back,” says Bill Marriott, the CEO of Marriott International.  “That’s basically the core value of the company.”

Some things never change at Marriott. The company’s core values were shaped by its founder J.W. Marriott, Bill Marriott’s father, who opened a root-beer stand in Washington back in 1927 that grew into the hotel giant (3,000 branded hotels, $12.9 billion in revenues last year).

But the company has to constantly adapt—to the economic slump, to new technologies, to the changing tastes of travelers. Before long, Marriott could well get the first non-family CEO in its history, a soft-spoken Midwesterner named Arne Sorenson. (He’s next to Bill Marriott, below.)

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My profile of the company, called Marriott Gets A Wake-Up Call, appears in the current issue of FORTUNE, part of a series of stories I’m doing for the magazine on FORTUNE 500 companies. It was a pleasure. For starters, I didn’t have to get on a plane; the company’s headquarters are about two miles from my house in Bethesda, Md. More important, I’ve long admired the company’s worker-friendly culture, its ethic of service and its commitment to voluntarism. Marriott is also leading the travel industry when it comes to envirommental issues.
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What does solar want? Lots.

June 24, 2009

Ordinarily, when an industry comes to Washington to seek special favors from the government, it hires a lobbyist or two, meets with members of Congress, perhaps quietly donates some money to the right committee chair—but rarely does it hold a press conference to talk about why it wants to be given a leg up over the competition.

That’s what made a solar-industry breakfast, hosted today by Dow Corning, so interesting. Dow Corning, a major supplier to the solar industry, and its allies, including Abengoa Solar, BP Solar, Kyocera, Sanyo and Schott, put forth a long list of federal policies that they would like to see enacted to give solar power a jump-start and bring it to scale.

What do they want? A permanent manufacturing tax credit. Renewable Electricity Standards, with set-asides for solar, which would require utilities to buy a fixed percentage of their electricity from solar plants. So-called feed-in tariffs, which require utility companies to buy ”clean energy” at prices higher than average wholesale prices. Federal support for training workers and educating the public about solar. Loan guarantees. Requirements that federal agencies buy more renewable power for their own operations. Treasury grants of some sort. (See this press release for details.)

All this, of course, on top of either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system to regulate greenhouse gases and put a price on carbon emissions–—a policy that makes good sense, because it will capture the external costs of burning fossil fuels. Of course, a cap-and-trade scheme would also benefit low-carbon energy sources like solar.

Well, at least the industry is transparent. Not to mention brazen.

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Wal-Mart’s BIG problem: climate change

June 23, 2009

Much as I’m an admirer of Wal-Mart’s ambitious sustainability goals, and its efforts to achieve them, there’s a glaring problem with the company’s “progress” to date that can be seen in the chart below.

When it comes to climate change–the defining environmental issue of of our era—Wal-Mart is moving in the wrong direction.

As Gwen Ruta of the Environmental Defense Fund, a Wal-Mart partner, writes in her frank assessment of the company’s 2009 sustainability report, the problem is that all the good things that Wal-Mart is doing–increasing its use of renewable energy, driving efficiency in individual stores, improving its fleet operations and pushing up its recycling rate–are offset by the fact that the company is adding more stores and selling more stuff.

So although WMT’s greenhouse gas emissions per unit of sales is decreasing (the bars on the right), its overall carbon footprint is growing (the bars in the middle).
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Food Inc: tasty but unsatisfying

June 22, 2009

“You can change the world with every bite.” So says the new movie Food Inc., now in theaters. I’m not so sure.

I’m sitting in my neighborhood Cosi. Just ordered a “gigante” Artic Latte and a fruit cup. Did I change the world? For better? For worse? Who knows? I ought to know because I pay more attention than most people can to the social, environmental and health impacts of the food business. I’m paid to do so. And I don’t have a clue—where the coffee in the Latte came from, where the fruit came from, or what the embedded energy or carbon footprints.

By all means, go see Food Inc. The movie serves up a provocative indictment of industrial food. It shows how our eating habits affect climate change, waste and energy. (The food processing and packaging business is one of the top five industrial users of energy in the U.S.) The film is entertaining and clever, as you’ll see if you watch this trailer And the visuals are eye-opening, even for those of us who have read Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, two stars of the movie. The trouble is, the politics, economics and science of Food Inc. are all a bit fuzzy.

Consider the argument that we can change the world by redirecting our consumer dollars. Gary Hirshberg, the founder and CEO of Stonyfield Farm, puts it this way:

The irony is that the average consumer does not feel very powerful. They think that they are the recipients of whatever industry has put there for them to consume. Trust me, it’s the exact opposite. Those businesses spend billions of dollars to tally our votes. When we run an item past the supermarket scanner, we’re voting.

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My new (almost) zero carbon website

June 21, 2009

Welcome to my redesigned website and blog. Like everything on the Internet, this blog a work in progress. I posted for the first time on August 10, 2006. Nearly three years and about 900 posts (!) later, what began as an experiment turned into a hobby, then became an obsession and is now part of the way I earn my living. Who knew?

I’ve become a big fan of social media—blogging, Facebook and, yes, even Twitter, to which I came late, long after after my pal, Fortune editor-at-large Adam Lashinsky, but a few days before Oprah (who, as it happens, I also outpaced in the 1994 Marine Corps Marathon.). As a longtime print journalist, I’m delighted by the ways that blogging, Facebook and Twitter have connected me with readers, colleagues and friends. This blog, for example, has readers in India (71 in the last month), China (60), Sweden (21), South Africa (13) and the Ivory Coast (1, so you know who you are). Those aren’t big numbers, but still.

The redesign comes courtesy of Madeira James of xuni.com, who I’m quite sure is a wonderful woman although we have never met. Nor have we ever spoken by phone. Madeira politely advised me after we began work on the site that she preferred email communication; she has found that her clients focused their thinking better if they communicated by email. Email also enabled both of us to keep a handy record of what we’d said to one another, and what we’d agreed to do. We got to know one another in that weird 21st century virtual way, and the collaboration went very smoothly. (Maddee, if it turns out that you’re a 16-year-old boy, know that I’m OK with that.)

So what’s new? Mostly the look and feel and a contemporary design that should make the website and blog easier to navigate and click on links. I’m planning to add video to the Speaking page. I may put up some Google Ads. And I’ve written a new page (illustrated with a photo of Jay Leno and me) about disclosure and conflicts of interest which is intended to help me (and my clients) understand what I do in my new role as a writer and consultant.
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The Congressmen from Coal

June 19, 2009

Most congress people, when they want research, turn to the Congressional Research Service, a organization that dates back to 1914 and prides itself on doing research that is “confidential, authoritative, objective and nonpartisan.”

And then there is a group of Republican legislators, organized as the Rural American Solutions Group, who held a telephone press conference to argue that the “Democrats’ Energy Tax” — that’s the GOP talking point for climate change legislation – will “make it more expensive for rural Americans to fertilize the crops, put fuel in the tractor and food on the table.”

They unveiled a map showing the state by state impact of cap-and-trade indicating that New York, California, New Jersey and a handful of other states will benefit, but that a vast swath of the south, Midwest and southwest will suffer.

The map, it turns out, came from the National Mining Association.

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Blogger Vitor Zapanta at ThinkProgress.org has a digital image taken from the Republicans’ Power Point presentation showing that it was created by Peabody Coal, the nation’s biggest coal producer. Kate Sheppard of Grist did some sleuthing of her own and found out that the map appears on the mining association website. She notes that the research has a footnote explicitly saying that the calculations do not take into account the current version of Waxman-Markey, and, worse, that they cover only the costs of the legislation and not the benefits, including allocations back to utility companies to mitigate against price increases. This isn’t research at all; it’s advocacy.

This is what is politely called the influence of special interests in Washington.

The congress members peddling the NMA’s work were Frank Lucas (R-OK), Sam Graves (R-MO), and Doc Hastings (R-WA). Way to think for yourself, guys.

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Fidelity, Vanguard and the genocide in Darfur

June 18, 2009

Recently, I voted in a contested election with repercussions for a big Islamic nation. (No, not Iran.) As a shareholder in mutual funds run by Vanguard and Fidelity, I voted to ask both mutual fund companies to sell their holdings in companies doing substantial business with Sudan, and thereby helping to finance the genocide in the Darfur region.

If you own stocks or mutual funds, this is the time of year when shareholder proxy ballots arrive in the mail, usually accompanied by pages of small print asking you to change the corporate bylaws or “elect” a slate of directors who have already been chosen. They’re boring and easy to ignore.

This year, however, shareholders of Vanguard, Fidelity and other mutual fund groups should keep an eye out for the important shareholder proposals about genocide on the ballot. These proposals don’t mentions Sudan because they are broader in scope. They ask but the funds to refrain from investing in companies that “substantially contribute to genocide or crimes against humanity.”
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Perhaps surprisingly, Vanguard and Fidelity both recommend a “no” vote on the proposals.

“They don’t want to have limits on where they invest,” says Eric Cohen, the co-founder of Investors Against Genocide, a volunteer organization that got both proposals on the ballot.

Cohen, a retired tech executive, is a soft-spoken and usually understated guy but he says this of Vanguard and Fidelity: “Their lack of due diligence connects their customers to the very worst companies in the world.”

The Investors Against Genocide website puts it this way:

Looking back, who would support the idea of investing in firms that sought to make a profit by selling Zyklon-B gas to the Nazis or machetes for the genocide in Rwanda? Looking forward, who wants their personal savings and pension funds invested in companies that help fund genocide?

Investors Against Genocide was formed in January, 2007. (I wrote one of the first stories about the group, under the headline Fidelity’s Sudan Problem, for CNNmoney.com.) By then, campus activists had persuaded the endowment managers at Harvard, Yale and Stanford to sell stocks of companies that were doing business with the government of Sudan, which is responsible for the genocide that has now taken the lives of an estimated 300,000 people in the Darfur region. (Another 2.7 million have been forced out of their homes.) Pension funds in half a dozen states, including California, had also agreed to divest.
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