September 2009

America’s 10 greenest brands?

September 28, 2009

What are the “greenest” brands in the U.S.? Until we can define “green,” there’s no meaningful way to answer that question. Of course, that doesn’t stop people from having, and expressing, opinions.

Last summer, a group of agencies owned by the giant marketing and communications company WPP – the PR firm Cohn & Wolfe, branding experts Landor Associates and pollster-consultants Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB) – joined with Esty Environmental Partners, a consulting firm run by Yale prof and author Dan Esty, to survey about 5,000 consumers around the world about green products, companies and brands. This Friday,  the agencies will host a lunch in New York where I’ll moderate a panel (see below) to talk about the survey, called Green Brands, Global Insights.

The survey produced all sorts of interesting results—would you believe that 38 percent of consumers in Brazil are willing to spent 30 percent or more for green products?—but what jumped out at me was the list of the U.S.’s greenest brands. Here goes.gw_logo

images-11. Clorox Green Works

2. Burt’s Bees

3. Tom’s of Maine

4. SC Johnson

5. Toyota

6. P&G

7. Wal-Martimages

8. Ikea

9. Disney

10.  Dove

To which I can only say: I would never, ever have predicted that list. [click to continue…]

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Let’s have a grown-up debate about climate change

September 27, 2009

If, like me, you have been confused, frustrated, dispirited or all of the above by the health care debate in Congress, get ready for more as the U.S. Senate prepares to take up climate-change legislation. The stakes are high. The debate will not be high-minded.

Expect opponents of mandatory carbon regulation to distort the science and economics of global warming, predicting an economic catastrophe if the bill passes, even as environmentalists promise a green-jobs nirvana and warn of an environmental catastrophe if it doesn’t. The fact is, any meaningful effort to regulate carbon will carry real but not catastrophic costs for businesses and consumers  – that’s part of the point, to raise the price of burning fossil fuels – and that the transition to a clean-energy economy will be disruptive, under the best of circumstances. Solar-power manufacturers in China will gain at the expense of coal miners in West Virginia. That makes the politics of the bill a challenge, but so be it.

images-1But if we acknowledge that passing a climate bill will create costs, we also need to recognize the costs of inaction will likely to be far greater. If you doubt it, read Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, an excellent report, written in plain English, about the likely impacts of climate change. Catastrophe is probably not too strong a word to describe the environmental impact of business as usual.

While the congressional debate will focus on science, economics and politics, the climate-change issue is fundamentally about our legacy. Are we willing to make sacrifices now — maybe even painful sacrifices — to better the world for future generations?

If you want to learn more about the upcoming congressional debate, I invite you to join in a webinar on Wednesday, September 30, at 1 p.m. ET, called Climate Legislation in the U.S. Senate. It’s organized by The Energy Collective, a website about energy and climate that brings together some of the smartest ideas and opinions on the Internet.

Panelists at the webinar will be Manik “Nikki” Roy of the Pew Center on Climate Change, a politically-savvy Washington insider who’s been tracking the climate issue for years; Michael Zimmer, an attorney and energy policy expert with Thompson Hine, also in Washington; and Jesse Jenkins, director of energy and climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute. I’ll be moderating. [click to continue…]

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Hyatt (still) should be ashamed

September 25, 2009

Business for Social Responsibility (“The Business of a Better World”) does valuable work with business around social and environmental issues. It’s helped organize efforts to get global companies to take responsibility for the rights of workers in their supply chains, particularly in poor countries.

So what will BSR do about its 2009 conference, the premiere event on the corporate-responsibility circuit, now scheduled for the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero in San Francisco?

hyattYou’ve heard about Hyatt’s labor problems by now, haven’t you? Last month, Hyatt laid off 98 housekeepers at three Boston hotels, replacing them with lower-paid workers from an outsourcing firm called Hospitality Staffing Solutions of Georgia, which provides 4,500 workers to hotels in more than 30 cities.

The Hyatt workers were paid $14 to $16 an hour, according to The Times, while the replacements will make $8 an hour. Workers who lost their jobs say they were told to train their replacements for “vacation relief,” then abruptly informed that they were being canned. Hyatt denies that it misled anyone.

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The Great Wall embraces Wall Street

September 23, 2009

Here comes a new carbon finance market, this one with Chinese characteristics.

In the latest sign that China takes the threat of global warming seriously, Chinese business executives with close ties to the government have launched a voluntary market in Beijing to buy and sell carbon credits.

Just don’t call it cap-and-trade, which is the regulatory approach embodied in the climate legislation pending in the U.S. Congress. The “cap” part of cap-and-trade remains anathema in China. As a developing country where billions of people earn less than $3,000 a year, China simply won’t accept mandatory limits on its emissions of greenhouse gases.

David Yarnold, Environmental Defense Fund

David Yarnold, Environmental Defense Fund

But the Chinese have enlisted western partners to build a market that will, as they put it, “limit and incentivize.” The theory is that a voluntary market in carbon credits will limit emissions by providing financial incentives to Chinese companies to develop renewable energy, promote energy efficiency and, above all, find environmentally-friendly ways to burn coal. Some of that money would come from outside China and would would come from within.

This could lay the groundwork for a mandatory market in the not-too-distant future.

That, at least, was my takeaway from a Low Carbon Conference held today in New York that brought together leaders of the world’s big stock exchanges, energy industry executives, environmentalists and experts in carbon finance. [Disclosure: I hosted the event for BlueNext, a French company that recently announced a partnership with the China Beijing Environmental Exchange to develop carbon trading in China.] [click to continue…]

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UPS to FedEx: We’re greener than you

September 22, 2009

Like sports rivalries, corporate rivalries are fun. Think about the TV ad campaigns inspired by the competition between Microsoft and Apple. FORTUNE once put the Roger Enrico, who was then the CEO of PepsiCo, inside a Coke bottle on the cover of the magazine, and the Pepsi people didn’t forgive us for years.

These days, to my delight (and, I hope, yours), big companies are battling over which one is more sustainable. I’m sure Michael Dell wasn’t happy to read that Hewlett Packard landed atop Newsweek’s new sustainability rankings of the S&P 500 companies, even though Dell was right behind at No. 2. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo monitor each other’s environmental initiatives nearly as closely as they vie for shelf space at Wal-Mart, which, not coincidentally, keeps an eye on the greening of all of its suppliers.

Now UPS and FedEx, longtime and intense rivals, are going at it.

logo-upsLast week, as soon as I sat down with UPSers Scott Wicker, who runs the plant engineering group and oversees sustainability, and Lynnette McIntire, director of global reputation management, to talk about UPS’s new sustainability report, they made a point of telling me that UPS is doing a more thorough job of measuring its carbon footprint than FexEd and that UPS runs a more efficient, and therefore less polluting, fleet of aircraft than its rival.

Describing UPS’s carbon-footprint rivalry with FedEx, McIntire says: “We never used to talk about the competition. We’re over that now….This is a big deal for us for a lot of reasons.”

corp_logoIt apparently matters to FedEx, too. The company supplied me with a quick response to UPS, which I’ve attached below. I’ve also agreed to sit down with FedEx’s sustainability people to give them a full opportunity to tell their story.

More is at stake than bragging rights. Forward-thinking customers will want to do business with the more sustainable firm. The environmental back-and-forth also ties in to a bigger reputation battle between the two firms over labor issues being fought out in Congress. (See, for example, brownbailout.com, FedEx’s anti-UPS website.”) [click to continue…]

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FPL: America’s No. 1 wind power

September 20, 2009

When the wind blows hard in Florida, people take cover. But the wind doesn’t blow hard enough often enough to support wind farms. “There’s not a wind farm within a thousand miles of our office,” says Mike O’Sullivan, senior vice president of NextEra Energy Resources, an independent power producer that is part of the FPL Group, which is based in Juno Beach, Florida. That hasn’t prevented FPL from becoming America’s No. 1 producer of wind power.

“GE, Goldman Sachs, BP – all the guys you read about – they don’t have even a fraction of what we have invested in renewables, even though they run some pretty fancy ads,” O’Sullivan says.

Perhaps because it’s tucked away in south Florida, FPL doesn’t much attention. But the company, with 2008 revenues of more than $16 billion, about 39,000 megawatts of generating capacity, and more than 15,000 employees in 27 states and Canada, has become a leading generator of low-carbon energy. Notice I didn’t say renewable energy; about 28% of the FPL Group’s electricity generation comes from nuclear power, which is low-carbon, whether environmentalists like it or not. Among the top 50 electric power generators in the U.S., FPL ranks No. 8 (meaning it is among the cleanest) in terms of carbon emissions per megawatt hour of generation. Interestingly, those ranked higher (meaning they burn even fewer fossil fuels) include PG&E, Exelon, Entergy and Constellation, all of which own nukes.

Windfarm_112

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The Age of Stupid

September 18, 2009

That’s the trailer for a new movie called The Age of Stupid, which opens Monday. It stars Pete Postlethwaite, a wonderful British actor who will look familiar if you saw either The Usual Suspects or In the Name of the Father, two fabulous movies. He plays an archivist living in 2055 who looks back at the 2000s and wonders why we didn’t save the world from climate disaster when we had a chance. I haven’t seen the movie but here’s an excerpt from a capsule review in the L.A. Times.

Think “An Inconvenient Truth” but with a personality, numerous ones actually, as Armstrong hops the globe interviewing an intriguing cross section of folks — a Hurricane Katrina victim, a British wind farm developer, an aspiring Nigerian doctor, an elderly French mountain guide, a wealthy Indian entrepreneur and an 8-year-old Iraq war refugee — whose lives have all been affected by some aspect of the global warming phenomenon. Their stories vividly highlight the various tentacles of the climate change problem and, in some cases, its potential solutions.

I had a chance to talk with the director Franny Armstrong about the movie. There’s digital video of our interview, below. It’s not 60 Minutes quality–the q-and-a begins 10 seconds after the video starts rolling, and although our conversation lasted four minutes, the tape rolls on for another two–but it will give you a sense of why she made the movie, how she financed it, and what she’s doing to get people out to their local movie theaters on Monday. You can find out where the film is playing, near you, at the Age of Stupid website. I hope the movie reaches a big audience.

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Why enviros can’t sleep at night

September 17, 2009

Guess what keeps environmentalists up at night? And worries me, too?

If President Obama and the Democrats are struggling to find 60 votes in the Senate to pass domestic climate-change legislation, how on earth will they get the 67 votes needed to ratify a global treaty to deal with the problem, even assuming –and this is a big assumption — that the UNFCCC (that’s the United Nations Framework  Convention on Climate Change, for the uninitiated) can get a global deal done this winter in Copenhagen?

For the U.S. to approve a climate bill and a treaty, Congress will have to be persuaded of three things:

  1. A cap-and-trade scheme that few people understand will help, not harm, the economy.
  2. It makes sense to ship American consumer or taxpayer dollars to China and India, to help those countries develop low-carbon economies.
  3. We can trust the UN to make the whole shebang work.

See the problem?

The climate-change issue takes center stage next week when President Obama addresses the UN in New York, and government officials from around the world converge on the city for a series of events organized as part of Climate Week. (I’ll be moderating a panel on carbon finance for Greenbiz.com and Ecosecurities on Tuesday afternoon; email me if you’d like an invitation.)

Mark Kenber

Mark Kenber

To get some insight into the global negotiations, I met with Mark Kenber, policy director of The Climate Group, a global NGO that is working with government and business leaders all  to get a deal done. The Climate Group’s point man is Tony Blair, so these folks get in to see anyone they want. They have published an excellent series of reports on the politics, economics and technology of climate, all of them in plain English and with few wasted words. In fact, the studies are designed with CEOs and heads of government in mind – people with no time to waste – so they provide an excellent overview of the issues. I’d especially recommend a 2008 report called Breaking the Climate Deadlock: A Global Deal for Our Low Carbon Future [PDF] [click to continue…]

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SunRun: A new deal for solar

September 15, 2009

Until recently, you had to be deep green—and have deep pockets—to put solar photovoltaic panels on the roof of your home. The costs were high–$20,000 to $50,000 or more. The technology was baffling. The return on that big upfront investment was uncertain.

A California company called SunRun is changing that. A well-funded renewable energy startup – yes, even in these tough times, this small company has raised capital — SunRun offers homeowners a simpler, cheaper and less risky way to go solar.

Photo credit: Gray Watson, Creative Commons

Photo credit: Gray Watson, Creative Commons

It’s doing so by adopting a business model that has been proven in the corporate arena. When you see solar panels on the roof of a Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, Safeway or Kohl’s, chances are that they don’t belong to the retailer. Instead, those companies have signed what’s called a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with a solar provider. The provider (Sun Edison, near me in Maryland, is a big one) buys and installs the panels, owns and maintains them and sells the electricity at a fixed long-term rate to the customer. The retailers, in other works, benefit from solar power without paying a lot upfront or worrying about maintenance. [click to continue…]

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Alas, energy efficiency isn’t sexy

September 14, 2009

If The Graduate (1967) were remade today, the famous scene where Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) gets career advice might have to be rewritten this way:

Mr. McGuire: I want to say two words to you. Just two words.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency is not as sexy as solar power or wind turbines or electric cars. It’s not even as sexy as plastics. In fact, it can be stupefyingly dull. It’s not much of a punchline. But it matters. It matters a lot.

Efficiency isn't as sexy as Mrs. Robinson's stockings

Efficiency isn't as sexy as Mrs. Robinson's stockings

Today, I’m in Indian Wells, Ca., in the southern California desert where I spoke to the Energy and Technical Services Conference of the Food Marketing Institute. About 450 people are here. They are mostly engineers, responsible for the energy operations of America’s supermarkets, and the business people who sell them such products and services as micro-channel coil technology, optional variable speed EC motors, refrigerant-based industrial dehumidifiers, advanced aerodynamic fan blades, fluorescent leak detection products, etc. Breakout sessions covered such topics as “Refrigeration Innovation: Evaporative Misting/Cooling” and “The High Cost of NOT Doing Preventative Maintenance” and “Energy Innovation: Target Ventilation Case Study.”

Are you still with me?

Here’s the thing: These are the kinds of people who, if they do their jobs right, are going to help us solve the climate crisis. [click to continue…]

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