You’ve heard of “carbon offsets”?
Get ready for “garbage offsets.”
In an effort to make its Ziploc plastic bags as environmentally friendly as possible, consumer-products company SC Johnson has joined forces with RecycleBank to keep more than 100 million pounds of waste out of landfills during the next two years. [click to continue…]
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Did you notice that President Obama didn’t say the words “climate change” or global warming” in his 7,000-word State of the Union speech? He described government support for clean energy as
an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people
Partly this is repackaging, and not in a good way. Partly it’s a recognition that we’re utterly failing, here in the U.S. and globally, to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. (See the chart at the end of this blogpost.) That’s not something the president wants people to think about. It’s actually not something that anyone wants to think about–not environmentalists, because it leads to a sense of hopelessness, not free-market ideologues, because it’s a glaring example of market failure, not the press because, well, climate change has become an old and depressing story,.
But ignoring the threat of climate catastrophe won’t make it disappear.
So, sooner or later, as people come to see the threat, scientific and political attention will turn to geoengineering—deliberate intervention in the climate system to moderate global warming. By coincidence, on the day after the president spoke, scientists at UNESCO published a guide to one of the early approaches to geoengineering, a technique known as ocean fertilization or iron fertilization. The idea here is that sprinkling iron dust atop the oceans will stimulate plant growth and suck large quantities of carbon dioxide out of the air.
Ocean fertilization has been bruited about for decades. “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age,” a scientist named John Martin said back in the 1980s. The technique attracted some notoriety more recently when a couple of U.S-based startup companies, Climos and Planktos, were created to explore the idea. (I wrote about Climos for Fortune.com in 2008.)
Unfortunately for advocates of ocean fertilization, UNESCO’s 20-page report delivers mostly discouraging news. [click to continue…]
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Masdar, the clean energy company in oil-rich Abu Dhabi, is best known for building a green city in the Arabian desert. But while the zero-carbon city has captured the lion’s share of attention, Masdar as a company is having an impact far from home by investing in clean technology projects and startups in Europe, Asia, Africa and the U.S.
With a reach that extends from Silicon Valley to the Seychelles, two of Masdar’s business units are investing large sums of money overseas. Masdar Power is developing and financing wind and solar energy projects in the UK, Spain, Germany and Egypt, as well as in Abu Dhabi. Masdar Capital manages more than $500 million in venture capital, a sizable amount in the still-emerging clean tech space. All of Masdar is owned by the Mubadala Development Co., which in turn is owned by the government of Abu Dhabi.
A week or so ago, when visiting Abu Dhabi, I met with Frank Wouters, the director of Masdar Power and Alex O’Cinneide, head of investments for Masdar Capital. Both said their businesses are intended to be for-profit, stand-alone entities. But they are also part of a broad and long-term strategy to transform Abu Dhabi’s economy from one based on oil and gas to a more diversified economy driven by knowledge, innovation and the export of clean technologies. So learning, as well as return on invested capital, shapes their approach. [click to continue…]
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I’m too old to have grown up with video or computer games and my daughters, thankfully, never got addicted. So I was surprised recently to learn about “serious games”–games designed to spur activism or educate people around social and environmental issues. Even the staid World Bank has come up with a game!
I wrote about serious games this week for the News@Cisco website. Here’s how the story begins:
Lagos, Nigeria, barely survived a maize shortage. Japan is down to its last month of rice reserves. London, meanwhile, has been without clean water for a couple of days, and a case of cholera has been confirmed.
No need to worry—this is just a game. On the other hand, maybe we should worry a little more about global food shortages, people without access to clean water and the threat of epidemics. All are part of a “serious game” called Evoke: a crash course in changing the world, created last year by the serious people at the World Bank.
Their goal? To educate young people, particulary those in Africa, about creative ways to combat poverty, famine and disease, and ideally inspire them to act.
“Instead of doing a generic website, we really wanted to engage people,” says Robert Hawkins, a senior education specialist at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We’re very interested in the potential of games to motivate people to learn.”
As broadband Internet connections spread, governments, businesses and nonprofits are deploying what are being called serious games. Serious games can be fun to play—they should be, in fact—but their purpose is to educate, motivate or train people. They’re being used to explore an array of complex social and environmental issues, ranging from pollution in the Chesapeake Bay to the refugee crisis in Darfur.
You can read the rest here.
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A rug factory in Nepal, photographed by Robin Romano for GoodWeave
When confronted with a big, hard, seeming insoluble problem — today’s topic is the practice of child labor, in which an estimated 215 million children around the world are engaged —it’s helpful to recall the words of a rabbi cited in a Jewish text known as the Pirke Avot, or Sayings of the Fathers:
It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.
This is the approach that a nonprofit called GoodWeave USA is taking when it comes to child labor in the carpet industry. Since its beginnings in 1994, GoodWeave has rescued more than 3,600 children from rug-making factories, helped educate another 5,000 to 6,000 to keep them out of the workforce and, most important, developed a trusted label that assures retailers and shoppers that the carpets they buy and sell were not made by children.
These are modest gains, to be sure, but meaningful accomplishments for a non profit with a budget of just $3.5 million a year and staff of about 35 people.
What’s more, GoodWeave is gathering momentum.
“The goal is to transform the industry—to end child servitude,” says Nina Smith, the group’s executive director. [click to continue…]
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Today’s guest post comes from Randall Davidson, who is the lead project manager at Audio Transcription, an eco-friendly transcription service based in San Francisco. Clients send audio files to the company, which are parsed into smaller clips, digitally distributed to a network of trained transcribers and returned as a complete, quality-assured transcript. In addition, the company offers online transcription services, which are the greenest form of transcription available because no CDs or flash drives need to be shipped through the mail. Randall, who is 28, has introduced a number of the green practices outlined below into Audio Transcription’s marketing operations.
Small businesses employ more than 52% of working Americans, according to the Small Business Administration, and comparable percentages in other developed countries. It follows that small businesses generate a substantial portion of the business world’s environmentally harmful waste. To help small business owners and employees minimize their environmental impact, here are 20 simple ways to more sustainably market a small business. I hope that you’ll contribute your thoughts – what I’ve gotten right and wrong and what I’ve omitted – in the comments.
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Corporate America has pretty much had its way in Washington for the past couple of years. Its CEOs and lobbyists got the Wall Street bailout. They got the auto bailout. They set the terms of the health care bill. They blunted financial regulation. They blocked climate legislation. If they were tied to the defense industry, they enjoyed a surge of military outlays. Of course they preserved the tax cuts for the rich. They did all of this, mind you, after the Democrats swept the 2006 and 2008 elections and gained control of Congress and the White House.
Remarkable, isn’t it?
Now, with business-friendly Republicans in control of the House, the most powerful corporate lobbies—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers—have even more clout. They can, at minimum, stop just about anything they don’t like.
But they would be well advised to use their power sparingly.
I write this as a rational optimist, and as an unabashed believer in the power of business to do good—by creating jobs, generating wealth, satisfying people’s wants or needs, and enabling an unprecedented wave of economic growth during the past half century. (See China, cappuccino and cell phones, my first blogpost of 2011) But it’s hard for me to ignore the fact that the benefits of that growth are not being as broadly shared as they should be, at least here in the U.S., and that the reason for that, at least in part, is business’s outsized power in Washington.
The growth of inequality is especially troubling in the aftermath of the great recession. Wall Street is booming again, the stock indexes are up, corporate profits are growing…while the middle class and especially the poor—43.6 million of them, one in seven Americans—are being left behind. [click to continue…]
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Solar powered lights in India
Even as the world has become wealthier, an estimated 1.5 billion of our neighbors on this planet live without access to electricity. Think, for a moment, about what your life would be like for even a single day without an on-off switch, and you will grasp the problem that E + Co and its chief executive, Christine Eibs Singer, are trying to solve.
E + Co is a nonprofit investment fund that finances and supports clean-energy entrepreneurs in the developing world. It’s been around since the early 1990s, and currently operates in Asia, Africa and Latin America. It invests relatively small amounts of money — $125,000 to $1 million per company, $7.3 million in all in 2009 — but it has had an out-sized impact, by backing companies that brought cleaner energy to about 6.2 million poor people in the last decade.
Of course, that’s not nearly enough given the scale of what’s sometimes called “energy poverty.”
“You can’t have economic development without energy,” Christine says. “They’re connected.”
But–and here’s the encouraging news–the experience of E + Co suggests that efforts to deliver clean energy to the poor have the potential to be scaled up, big time. Distributed, small-scale renewable energy technology is getting cheaper. Small and mid-sized companies, it turns out, can make money selling solar panels or cleaner cooking fuels. Few things will drive change faster than a vast, untapped market that can be profitably served by entrepreneurs. [click to continue…]
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This is a plaza in Masdar City, the new “green” city in Abu Dhabi, where I’m enjoying a pleasant, cooling breeze.
The breeze is generated by a wind tower, above, which is the centerpiece of the Masdar Institute, a graduate school devoted to sustainability that bills itself as “the Green University.”
The tower isn’t a wind turbine–it doesn’t have blades and or make electricity. Instead, it’s a 147-foot tall structure that uses open and closed louvres and changing weather patterns to draw drafts down to the plaza, which otherwise would be unbearably hot in the summer.
The towe
r is also an energy monitor, tracking usage in the student apartments that overlook the plaza. When the tower’s LED beacon is blue, as it is here, efficiency standards are being met. When it’s red, someone’s AC is blasting.
“That’s my guilt trip right there,” says Martyn Potter, director of operations and facilities at Masdar City. “It’s 45 meters tall.”
Yesterday, traveling with a group of reporters, I took a tour of Masdar City — the audacious, carbon-neutral, zero-waste $15 to $20-billion planned development rising out of the Arabian desert. About $2 billion has been spent so far, much on planning, design and infrastructure.
Announced in 2006, the project has been delayed and downsized by the global financial crisis. For now, it’s barely a spech on the vast urban sprawl of Abu Dhabi–six buildings, on a site no bigger than a couple of football fields. But there’s enough experimentation going on at Masdar City so that it could–could–have implications for clean tech, renewable energy and urban design in the Middle East and elsewhere.
So please join me on my Masdar City tour, illustrated by iPhone images and a Flip movie…
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For Jeffrey Hollender, the longtime chief executive of Seventh Generation, business has always been about more than selling laundry detergent and paper towels.
At Seventh Generation, Hollender looked for ways to do business better–better for customers and their health, better for its workers (who were also owners) and better for the environment.
Those efforts came to a abrupt halt in October when he was unceremoniously ousted by Seventh Generation’s board, which was forced to choose between Hollender and Chuck Maniscalco, the CEO he’d recruited as his replacement 18 months ago.
The story behind the falling out remains murky. Neither Seventh Generation nor Hollender have been willing to air their dirty laundry, presumably because their break-up agreement included a promise not to speak ill of one another.
Hollender broke his silence last week, not to talk about the past, but to discuss his future, which he says will involve business and political work to address social and environmental problems that he thinks are mostly getting worse.
“I’m very worried about where the country is headed,” he told me, when we spoke by phone.
Jeffrey, who is 56, divides his time between Burlington, Vermont, where he has lived for years, and New York, where he grew up. (Disclosure: Jeffrey and my wife Karen Schneider were high school classmates.)
So what’s next? [click to continue…]
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