November 2009

In search of the perfect (Coke) bottle

November 30, 2009

plantbottle1Since joining The Coca-Cola Co. in 1997, Scott Vitters has gone to work most days with one question on his mind:

“How do we get to our vision of a 100% renewable, 100% recyclable bottle?”

It’s a simple question, with anything but a  simple answer—getting to a renewable, zero-waste bottle requires technology breakthroughs, favorable economics that will drive recycling, changes in human behavior and supporting policy from governments around the country, if not around the world.

This winter, though, Coca-Cola is taking a meaningful  step towards its goal with the introduction of what it calls a PlantBottle – a bottle made of PET plastic, 30% of which is sourced from Brazilian sugar cane and molasses.

That puts Coke on the road to 100% renewable.

PET, meanwhile, is 100% recyclable—although actual recycling rates are far lower.

It’s a start.

“It’s incredibly exciting for us to be able to see a route forward to zero waste,” says Vitters, who is head of global sustainable packaging for Coca-Cola. [click to continue…]

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Facebook, Copenhagen, Tamra & me

November 30, 2009

I probably should thank Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for finding me an apartment next week in Copenhagen—and for connecting me to a high school friend I’d lost track of many years ago.

Tamra Rosanes

Tamra Rosanes

I’m often delighted by the power of social media. Through Facebook, Twitter and this blog, I’ve learned a lot, met new people, reconnected with old friends and found story ideas. But this is the first time social media solved a frustrating bricks-and-mortar problem for me.

On the day after Thanksgiving, I blogged about the fact that I was going to Copenhagen to report on the climate talks and host an event for the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. But hotel rooms are all but impossible to find–the nearest one I could locate was in Sweden–and, at the suggestion of my daughter Sarah, I went online to seek help or advice. That’s how I found Tamra Rosanes, one of Denmark’s most popular country music singers.

Actually, Tamra found me. We were connected by a mutual friend, Beth Davis, on Facebook. And within a day or two, Tamra kindly had found a friend who has agreed to rent me his apartment in Copenhagen.

How cool is that?

Way back when, I knew Tamra as Tammy Miller. We lived on the same street, Glengary Road, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, and graduated from Croton Harmon High School in the same year. [click to continue…]

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Who says green biz can’t be sexy?

November 28, 2009

womensSo what should I write about today, the blogger wonders. The smart grid? Combined heat-and-power systems? Or underwear? Well, given that it’s holiday shopping season….

Meet PACT, a company that wants to persuade you to change your underwear and change the world. [click to continue…]

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Headed for Copenhagen but…

November 26, 2009

The view from the hotel of Copenhagen

I’m going to Copenhagen in two weeks for the global climate negotiations. Exciting!

But…the nearest hotel with a vacancy, best as I can tell, is in Ystad, Sweden. Yep, Sweden. [click to continue…]

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Shop with your (gay-friendly) values

November 26, 2009

67838081_e8084e86acWith the (yuk) holiday shopping season upon us, this weekend seems like a good time to devote a series of blogposts to the idea of shopping with your values. But before I get to today’s topic–the Buying for Equality guide published by the Human Rights Campaign–let me first humbly suggest that one way to express your values this season, if you care about leaving a more sustainable planet to our children, is not to shop at all, or to shop less.

Over-consumption is a problem. If all of the 6.8 billion people on the planet lived like Americans we’d be in trouble. Today, Black Friday, the busiest day of the year is also known as Buy Nothing Day. This year the organizers are saying:

We want you to not only stop buying for 24 hours, but to shut off your lights, televisions and other nonessential appliances. We want you to park your car, turn off your phones and log off of your computer for the day.

This is a nonstarter for me. I’m not parking my car, turning off my phone or shutting down my laptop (obviously). No way, no how. Indeed, I worry that a call to action like that turns off more people than it inspires. I much prefer the holiday messaging from the Center for a New American Dream, which exhorts people to simplify the holidays, by planning a holiday with more fun and less stuff. But most of us still want at least some stuff. Today, and over the next couple of days, I’ll try to suggest some ways we can acquire stuff that aligns with our values. [click to continue…]

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Poet, seeking patronage

November 24, 2009

Jeff Broin knows his way around a corn field. The 44-year-old CEO of Poet, which is the largest ethanol producer in the world, grew up in Minnesota on a family farm. He lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Poet’s 26 ethanol plants are scattered across the midwest.

Jeff Broin

Jeff Broin

Broin also knows his way around Washington,  which he visits about once a month. Smart move. Without an array of subsidies and mandates from a farmer-friendly Congress, no one would invest in corn ethanol.

Which doesn’t mean that Broin is satisfied with the status quo–to the contrary, he’d like more help from the powers-that-be in your nation’s capital, which is where we met last week. We talked about the subsidies, about the challenge of competing with Big Oil and about Poet’s big plans to make cellulosic ethanol from corn cobs.

“While the corn cob is a very small item, it can have a very big impact,” Broin says. “We have the potential to replace gasoline in this country with ethanol.” [click to continue…]

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The looming “water gap”

November 23, 2009

There’s good and bad news from a sweeping new report on the world’s water scarcity out today from McKinsey & Co., commissioned by such water-dependent companies as Coca-Cola, Nestle, SAB Miller and Syngenta, along with the World Bank/International Finance Corp.

1798824344_d4951982bbThe bad: Global demand for water already exceeds supply—about 1.1 billion people don’t have access to clean water—and the so-called water gap is increasing at an accelerating rate.

The good: Cost-effective, sustainable solutions are available to close the gap, particularly if governments and business focus on reducing demand rather than trying to generate additional supply.

The challenge: Getting beyond the nostrum that water is a “human right” so that water, which is obviously a scarce resource, can be priced in a way that drives conservation.

One more thing to know: Water issues are at least as complex as energy, and all water problems are local, so generalizing about water, while inevitable, is invariably misleading.

As Martin Stuchtey of McKinsey put it: “We are not saying there is one way to close the water gap, and we fully acknowledge the complexity of the water arena.”

The 185-page report, published by the 2030 Water Resources Group, was released this morning at a [click to continue…]

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Tom Konrad: We need transmission!

November 22, 2009

Today’s guest post comes from Tom Konrad, Ph.D., an investment analyst specializing in clean energy.  Tom, who is 40, and calls himself a policy wonk, lives in Denver and writes about stock market investments in clean energy at his excellent blog, AltEnergyStocks.com. Tom wrote this article  in response to a column by John Farrell (which we published here) arguing that localized, distributed renewable energy sources are preferable to  massive transmission lines. Tom’s response  first appeared on his blog Clean Energy Wonk, where he writes about energy policy and economics.  John replied in the comments there if you want to dig deeper into this controversy.

Be warned: this is a long post. But the underlying issue is important and not well understood–the fact is, the best places to generate wind and solar energy are, unfortunately, far from the population centers where energy is needed.

Energy Self-Reliant States [pdf], a flawed study on local Renewable Energy availability from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ISLR) found that 18 of the 50 states could not meet their electricity needs with local renewables.   In fact, no state can meet its electricity demand through local renewables without expensive electricity storage.  On a national basis, such storage would cost an estimated $13 Trillion, or over 65 times the cost of the transmission investments they oppose.

Image: GE Smart Grid Scarecrow (video)

One of the study authors, John Farrell, has been promoting the study as a “Heresy on Transmission.“  Rather than a heretic attacking misguided establishment shibboleths, this flawed study attacks a simplistic misunderstanding of why we need transmission.  Farrell and his co-author David Morris are either intentionally promoting this misunderstanding as a straw man, or they simply fail to grasp the reasons behind long distance transmission’s necessity. [click to continue…]

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Heroes of the meltdown

November 20, 2009

Not many heroes emerged from the rubble of the global financial meltdown. Two are Sheila Bair, the chair of the FDIC, and Brooksley Born, the former head of the CFTC.

Both warned of the crisis. Both were ignored.

In a June 2008 column—written before things got really bad—Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post described Bair as

one regulator who refused to be muscled by an industry that appeared to be generating lots of new jobs and new wealth, who never bought into the notion that bureaucrats should not substitute their judgments for those of the marketplace, who understood the magnitude of the mortgage crisis.

Born, meanwhile, called for the regulation of derivatives that magnified the mortgage market collapse. Again, here’s The Post, from last May:

A little more than a decade ago, Born foresaw a financial cataclysm, accurately predicting that exotic investments known as over-the-counter derivatives could play a crucial role in a crisis much like the one now convulsing America. Her efforts to stop that from happening ran afoul of some of the most influential men in Washington, men with names like Greenspan and Levitt and Rubin and Summers — the same Larry Summers who is now a key economic adviser to President Obama.

She was the head of a tiny government agency who wanted to regulate the derivatives. They were the men who stopped her.

FDIC+Chair+Sheila+Bair+Briefs+Media+Bank+Thrift+EeeuRYAwoRpl

Sheila Bair

Last night, Bair and Born made a joint appearance as they were honored at the annual dinner of the National Women’s Law Center. (My wife Karen Schneider is v.p. of communications at the center, which explains my presence.) They were interviewed by Judy Woodruff of PBS, and it was revealing to hear them talk about what went wrong and what, if anything, we’ve learned.

Brooksley Born

Brooksley Born

Agencies like the FDIC and CFTC are part of the alphabet soup of Washington regulatory agencies  that ordinarily get no attention from anyone other than the industries that they regulate. That’s one reason that virtually no one, other than industry insiders, their family or friends, paid much attention Bair or Born until it was too late.  With the downturn in Washington journalism, which continues unabated, you can be sure almost no one will be watching those agencies or others like them in the future.

Bair had worked as an aide to Sen. Bob Dole, and then at the treasury department before becoming head of the FDIC  in 2006. “I was just horrified by what I saw,” she said. Banks and individuals were wildly overleveraged. [click to continue…]

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The green race to the top

November 19, 2009

If climate regulation will burden businesses or increase costs,  then why are so many companies strengthening their voluntary response to the climate crisis in the midst of an economic downturn?

The reason is, there’s a race to the top when it comes to sustainability, particularly among consumer companies. No one wants to be seen as a laggard by  customers, workers, NGOs, government or the press.

Reputation matters. Ignoring the climate emergency is no longer an option for a big consumer brand.

climate_counts_logo

That, as far as I can tell, is why so many companies are surging ahead in the third annual corporate climate scorecard put together by the nonprofit group Climate Counts. Gary Hirshberg, the CE-yo and “main moover” behind of Stonyfield Farms (yum) put up the money to start Climate Counts, and Wood Turner is its able executive director.

“We see a real competition ensuing, as companies race to the top,” Turner told me the other day, as the new ratings came out. “Companies are preparing their businesses and their brands for the future.” [click to continue…]

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