May 2011

Why knowledge is (solar) power

May 31, 2011

Remember the watchword of late 90s tech bubble?

The Internet changes everything, people would say.

They’re still saying it. Of course, the Internet hasn’t changed everything. (Random examples: breakfast cereal, flat tires and the Washington Nationals’ place in the NL East standings.) But one of the many things that the Internet has definitely and dramatically changed is our capacity for making the global economy more sustainable. In a series of stories for the website News@Cisco, I’ve been looking ways in which networks enable an array of sustainable initiatives.

Today’s story is about a renewable-energy startup that doesn’t intend to generate any energy. Instead, Geostellar is building a global, detailed platform to help developers of solar power, as well as individual homeowners, determine where the best places are to install solar photovoltaic panels. In fact, the entire home-solar industry–companies like SunRun, SolarCity and Sungevity–depends on the Internet to recruit customers and help those customers decide whether solar makes sense for them. [click to continue…]

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A renewable energy technology that gets no respect

May 30, 2011

No Silicon Valley venture capitalist has invested in it.

Government subsidies for it are skimpy, at best.

It lacks clout in Washington.

And it’s been around forever.

Yet it’s by far the most popular form of renewable energy used at home, dwarfing the impact of rooftop olar panels and appealing not just to well-to-do greens but to poor people, African-Americans and, we’d bet, climate change deniers, too.

Yep, I’m talking about–as Popular Mechanics put it recently-the “high-tech, cutting-edge, carbon-neutral alternative fuel of the future: wood.”

About 80% of residential renewable energy is created by wood heat appliances (not including fireplaces), while just 15% comes from solar and 5% from geothermal, according to Energy Information Administration statistics provided by the Alliance for Green Heat, a small nonprofit created two years ago to promote environmentally-friendly wood heat. Some 15 million American homes use wood as a primary or secondary heat source.

Of course, there’s nothing new about wood heat. Wood supplied more energy than fossil fuels in the U.S. until the 1880s, when it was displaced by coal and, more recently, natural gas, oil and electricity.

What’s new are the arrival of modern high-efficiency wood stoves, as well as a fast-growing wood pellet industry, that enable either cordwood or wood pellets to be burned more cleanly that before, dramatically reducing emissions of soot. Here’s a look at one:

Provided the wood burned in these stoves comes from waste or from well-managed forests, it can then be deemed an environmentally friendly fuel. Wood is already seen that way in much of western Europe, according to this 2009 article in Science [subscription req'd] which argued that “sustainable wood energy offers recurring economic, social, and environmental benefits.”

“We’re the only modern, industrialized country that hasn’t looked at wood as a serious way to reduce fossil fuels,” says John Ackerly, who started the Alliance for Wood Heat two years ago. [click to continue…]

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LEDs, mainstream at last

May 26, 2011

Writing in the Reader’s Digest in 1963, a scientist named Nick Holonyak Jr. , who then worked for General Electric and is now a professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at the University, predicted that light-emitting diodes, better known as LEDs, would replace the incandescent light bulb of GE’s founder, Thomas Edison.

Holonyak, who is known as the father of the LED, wasn’t wrong.

He was just early.

LEDs haven’t replaced incandescents in homes — not yet, anyway — because they’re pricey. (See my blogpost, Would you buy a $40 light bulb?) But energy-efficient white LEDs like the one below are increasingly replacing HID (high intensity discharge) lights in indoor and outdoor parking lots. They’re finding their way into commercial buildings, too. [click to continue…]

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Self Reliance never goes out of style

May 25, 2011

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I haven’t read Ralph Waldo Emerson since college, but recently had the occasion to revisit Self Reliance.

It’s wonderful, readable, short (88 pages), very contemporary and, of course, quotable.

To wit:

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Or, famously:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

And

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Relevant, no? And relevant, I think, to the theme of this blog, which is how all of us can harness the power of business to solve the world’s most important problems. [click to continue…]

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GE’s big bet on natural gas

May 25, 2011

General Electric Co. (GE) is betting big on natural gas.

The $150-billion a year company, whose power plants generate about one-fourth of the world’s electricity, today announced a new natural-gas power plant that it says is more efficient and flexible than any other in the market.

By phone from Paris, where the announcement was made, Steve Bolze, president of GE Power & Water, told me:  “This is about transforming the industry over the next five or 10 years.”

GE says it invested more than $500 million in the new plant development. It will be manufactured in France and sold first in Europe and Asia, and then later in the U.S.

One key selling point of the new plant is its unprecedented flexibility: It can ramp up and down rapidly, and thus be easily combined with wind and solar power plants that generate electricity intermittently.

It’s also efficient enough to work as a generator of baseload power, Bolze said. Here’s a GE webpage describing the plant and its operation. [click to continue…]

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Why Walmart changed

May 23, 2011

Business is business, they say, but I’m often reminded that business is personal, too.

Back in about 2005, Lee Scott, who was then Ceo of Walmart, traveled with Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, to the top of Mount Washington, to visit a weather research station and meet with environmental scientists, including Steve Hamburg, who’s now the chief scientist at EDF. On their way, Scott stopped to visit with a New Hampshire maple farmer who told him that warmer weather was threatening the maple syrup business his family had operated for four generations. By the end of the trip, Scott had seen the impacts of climate change for himself – and seen how they could evolve into business issues for Walmart.

Mike Duke, Scott’s successor as Ceo, took a climate-change field trip of his own a few years later. He spent the night in an ice hotel on a glacier in Sweden, where he heard about the impact of climate change on the arctic. A doubter before then, he was convinced. Meanwhile, another Walmart exec went to Turkey to meet with cotton farmers, visiting a conventional farm — where cotton plants are intensively treated with herbicides and pesticides — and an organic farm where workers and the land were treated better.

Jib Ellison

These trips were arranged by a former river rafting guide named Jib Ellison, whose consulting firm, BluSkye, has guided Walmart on its remarkable journey towards sustainability. A colorful character–he once arranged rafting trips with Americans and Russians to help ease Cold War tensions–Ellison is the hero of a lively new book, Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution (HarperCollins, $27.99), by Edward Humes, an award-winning journalist. It’s the first book about the greening of WalMart, and a valuable one, particularly for its insights into array of overlapping forces that drove the makeover of Walmart.

About those field trips, for example, Humes writes that the WMT execs

…returned home–as Ellison had planned and hope–moved by what (they) had seen, felt and heard. As never before, Wal-Mart’s leaders had seen the face of climate change, pesticides and air pollution–and it was the weathered face of a maple farmer, it was the vanishing snow lines of ancient glaciers, it was the clothing and skin of children dusky from pesticide residue. “You don’t get that in a briefing paper,” Ellison remarked to Scott. The CEO nodded.

Now, business isn’t just personal, of course. Scott began exploring sustainability back in the mid-2000s because Walmart had s terrible reputation, particularly in places (like Chicago and LA) where it had no stores and wanted to open some. Once Ellison got in the door, thanks to his friendship with Peter Seligmann, the founder of Conservation International, who introduced him to Rob Walton, Walmart’s chairman, he was able to show Scott that the company could save money by going green. [click to continue…]

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Is organic food the answer?

May 22, 2011

Well, that depends on the question.

Of all the things I write about – energy, the greening of business, the politics and policy of climate change, geoengineering – food is by far the most emotional. With near-religious fervor, people debate the merits or demerits of, broadly speaking, two ways to produce food.

The first can be described, depending upon who’s talking, as big, fast, modern, conventional, industrial, intensive, chemical, genetically-modified, processed and global. It’s the system that delivers most of the food that most Americans eat.

The second is described as organic, sustainable, local, small-scale, family-owned, natural, agro-ecological and slow. It’s driving the growth of farmer’s markets and community-supported agriculture, as well as Whole Foods, and it’s increasingly being taken seriously by big companies like Walmart, Safeway and Kroger’s.

As shoppers and as eaters, most of us partake from both worlds. But make no mistake about it- the advocates of conventional food and those pushing reform are deeply polarized, as I’ve seen first-hand lately. [click to continue…]

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Ted Turner: Telling it like it is

May 20, 2011

It would be easy to dismiss Ted Turner as a billionaire with a big mouth, a blowhard or even a buffoon.

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Ted was on display in all his Ted-ness the other day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Cooking for Solutions conference on food and sustainability. He ranted, he raved, he clowned, he ignored questions from interviewer, Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post. Moderating Ted is about as easy as domesticating a bison. (His herd numbers 50,000.)

But what Turner said made a lot of sense, even as his answers wandered, ADD-like, all over the map.

I’ve covered Ted, on and off, since the late 1980s,when I was a media writer.  He’s always been underestimated. Conventional wisdom in the broadcast industry was that CNN, his pioneering 24-hour news channel, would never work. Much later, after he merged his Turner Broadcasting  Co. with Time Warner (my employer at the time), he was one of the few top execs who opposed the disastrous merger from the start. He has always lived his values, using the platforms he created to support causes dear to him–the environment, nuclear disarmament, the end of the Cold War. Remember the Goodwill Games?

His bombastic demeanor  may be a reason why he hasn’t gotten the credit deserves for his philanthropy. Turner, who is 72, has given away more than $1.3 billion to the Turner Foundation, the United Nations Foundation, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Captain Planet Foundation, and the Turner Endangered Species Fund. He also took the Giving Pledge put forward by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

As if that weren’t enough, Turner owns about 2.1 million acres of land in the U.S., making him the nation’s 2nd biggest landowner (behind his fellow cable mogul John Malone). Most of his land is protected from development.

So what’s on his mind these days? Lots. Some highlights:

Food, population and women: “What really concerns me is if we go to 8 or 9 billion. The natural world is collapsing all around us. There are two things we can do that won’t cost a lot of money… Millions of women don’t have access to family planning. If you provide people with  family planning, they won’t have unwanted pregnancies and they won’t have to  have abortions. The second thing we could do and we should have done it a long time ago is half the women in the world don’t have equal rights with men. In the Arab world, people are treated like dogs. They can’t vote in Saudia Arabia. They can’t drive a car. They don’t get an education. Women need to have equal rights with men, and equal education and equal rights to a job, and when women have that, they will choose to have smaller families.” [click to continue…]

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Why we can’t shop our way to sustainability

May 19, 2011

Can we shop our way to sustainability in the supermarket aisle?

Eco labels are cluttered, confusing and unreliable.

Organic food gets a tiny slice of the market.

Most shoppers don’t pay much attention to environmental factors. Perhaps understandably so. They’re busy, or  ignorant. Or they don’t care.

Which makes me believe that we can’t count on consumers to bring about a sustainable food system.

So, like it or not, that it’s going to be up to business to fix the food system.

That’s my takeaway from today’s discussions at the Sustainable Food Institute, part of Cooking for Solutions, a great event on food/ag/sustainability organized by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m here for a couple of days of good talk, good food, good wine, shared by reporters, chefs, people in the food business, scientists, activists and a farmer or two.

In several panel discussions–one on eco-labels, another about the popular but nevertheless limited Seafood Watch program run by the aquarium, and also during my own interview with Louise Nicholls, a sustainability executive from the British food and department store Marks & Spencer–it became clear to me that the dizzying complexity of food and agriculture systems, including as they do health, environmental and economic concerns, will make it very difficult to communicate simply to shoppers what’s “good” and what is not, even assuming scientists can reach consensus on that.

Persuading shoppers to then change their habits is even tougher. [click to continue…]

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Mickey Mouse, ravager of rainforests?

May 18, 2011

Those pesky activists from the Rainforest Action Network are at it again.

RAN protestors at Disney HQ

Today (May 19), four activists including a couple costumed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse were arrested outside the Burbank headquarters of The Walt Disney Co. They accused Disney of printing children’s books with paper that is driving the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests after after lab test results found that paper used in Disney’s kids books contained fiber from Indonesia.

Disney is the largest publisher of children’s books in the world, producing over 50 million books and 30 million magazines a year. RAN has been critical of Disney’s paper buying policies for more than a year, saying that [click to continue…]

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