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Two cheers for Wal-Mart’s CO2 pledge

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

WMT-EDFUntil now, Walmart’s bold sustainability efforts were marred by a glaring omission.

The $405-billion a year retailer has worked hard since 2005 to save energy, reduce waste and sell more sustainable products.

But it resisted pressures to reduce or hold steady its own greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, its carbon emissions have grown, as the middle graphic below shows. (There’s a cleaner version in WMT’s responsibility report, here.) When it comes to global warming, Walmart would appear to be doing more harm now than it was three or five years ago.

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Today, Walmart made its first major commitment to reduce greenhouse gases–although, in typical WMT fashion, rather than set a tough goal that might affect its own growth curve, the company plans to turn up the pressure on its thousands of suppliers to reduce their emissions. (more…)

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Posted in Climate Change, Consumption, Energy, Sustainability | 1 Comment »

Nukes: Why small is beautiful

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

If anyone tells you they know what building a new nuclear power plant is going to cost, be skeptical.

No one has built a commercial nuclear power plant in decades in the U.S. During the 1970s and 1980s, cost overruns derailed more than 100 reactors. (Ever-increasing regulatory burdens and sky-high interest rates drove up costs, too.) In part because no reactor has built here in so long, no bank or group of banks wants to take on the risk of lending more for a new plant. That’s why the Southern Co., which plans to build two new reactors in Georgia, needs the $8.3 billion in U.S. government loan guarantees announced last week by President Obama. While all the other worries swirling around nuclear power—what to do with the waste, fear of proliferation, the threat of terrorism, safety and the rest—play some role, the most important thing standing in the way of a so-called nuclear renaissance in the U.S. is that building big new plants costs too darn much money.

And yet, if we want to stop burning coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, to generate baseload electricity, we need to explore the nuclear option. That means finding ways to bring down the costs.

One option? Build smaller nukes.

Hyperion's small underground reactor, compared to a conventional nuclear plant

Hyperion's 12-ft tall underground reactor, compared to a 170-foot high above-ground conventional plant

Small nukes–sometimes called backyard nukes, because some of them could literally be buried in a suburban yard–were the topic of an excellent front-page story last week in The Wall Street Journal (Small Reactors Generate Big Hopes, subscription req.) and a panel discussion the following day at the Platt’s nuclear energy conference in Bethesda, Md.  Small nukes are a hot topic right now because three utility companies–Tennessee Valley Authority, First Energy Corp. and Oglethorpe Power Corp.–have agreed to work with Babcock & Wilcox, a longtime industry supplier, to get a small reactor design approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The Babcock & Wilcox reactor, called mPower, would generate 125 to 140 megawatts of power, about a tenth as much as the big plants being proposed by the Southern Co. and others. Other modular nukes are even smaller: NuScale Power, a venture-funded startup, wants to build a reactor that’s 65 feet long and 15 feet in diameter, capable of generating 45 MW of power. Another startup, called Hyperion Power, is touting  a 25MW reactor, which would be compact enough (5 feet across by 12 feet high) to fit in a pickup truck, yet powerful enough to supply about 20,000 homes. (more…)

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Posted in Climate Change, Energy, Sustainability | 6 Comments »

Why eBay is a green giant

Monday, February 15th, 2010

“These are J. Crew pants,” Amy Skoczlas Cole tells me, pointing at the gray slacks she’s wearing. “I bought them on eBay. A season old, worn once by the seller is what she told me. I’m not going to tell you what I paid for them, but I got a great deal.”

This is called walking the talk. Amy is head of  the eBay Green Team and a lifelong environmentalist, who spent nearly 15 years at Conservation International before joining the Silicon Valley e-commerce giant.

eBayGreenTeamSo, I asked her, did you buy the used pants because you work at eBay or because you are an environmentalist?

Neither, it turns out.  “I bought them,” she replied, “because I wanted a great deal on J. Crew pants.”

eBay, it turns out, is a unique position to do what other big companies and even big environmental groups cannot: It can urge people to consume less.

This is important because, despite what the sellers of compact fluorescent bulbs, stainless steel water bottles, bamboo bed sheets, and eco-friendly dish sponges will tell you, I’ve never believed we could shop our way to a greener planet. To the contrary: Buying more stuff depletes natural resources and generates carbon emissions, pollution and waste. Conventional consumption is a problem, not a solution. (See Wanted: A Cultural Revolution.)

But shopping on eBay, arguably, is different. One mantra of environmentalism is reduce, reuse and recycle. And no one–not even Goodwill or the Salvation Army–does more to promote reuse than eBay. EBay sells $2,000 worth of  junk previously-owned merchandise per second, Amy tells me. “Barely used is as good as new” is how the company puts it in commercials like this one. Or, as she says: “The greenest product is the one that already exists.”

“Our single minded mission is to build a movement in society to use what already exists,” Amy says. “Very few companies can stand up and say to consumers, let’s use what exists in the world today.”

Interestingly, eBay has begun to explore the idea of “sustainable consumption” — if that’s not an oxymoron. (more…)

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Posted in Climate Change, Consumption, Sustainability | 3 Comments »

Is geoengineering inevitable?

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Geoengineering, says scientist David Keith, “is like chemotherapy. It’s something nobody should like.”

But if you can’t avoid cancer, chemotherapy may be your best option. And, if it becomes evident that the earth can’t avoid the catastrophic impacts of climate change, it is not merely possible that governments will turn to geoengineering.

Some people believe that it is all but certain.

Geoengineering, as you probably know, is the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planet to counter global warming. It can take a number of forms, as the graphic below shows, some perhaps still to be discovered. Long a taboo subject, geoengineering is being talked about openly these days by scientists, environmentalists and policy thinkers.

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The National Academy of Sciences held a workshop on geoengineering in June. Influential books including SuperFreakonomics and Whole Earth Discipline, by longtime environmentalist Stewart Brand, argue that it’s time to take geoengineering seriously. A congressional subcommittee held its second hearing on geoengineering just last week.

Among those testifying was Keith, who directs the energy and environmental systems group at the University of Calgary and, interestingly, also leads a team of engineers who are developing a technology to capture CO2 from ambient air. I heard him speak a week ago during a six-hour workshop on geoengineering organized by the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit known for its pragmatism. EDF invited me to attend, on the condition that I seek permission from the scientists before quoting them. (more…)

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Posted in Climate Change, Economics, Sustainability | 3 Comments »

Why green business is like teen sex

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Corporate sustainability is like teen sex.

Everybody talks about it.

Nobody does it very much.

And when they do it, they don’t do it very well.

My friend and colleague Joel Makower likes to tell that joke, and it’s as good a way as any to introduce Greenbiz.com’s third annual State of Green Business report. The wide-ranging report was unveiled today in San Francisco at a conference hosted by 100203-sobg1-wJoel. I won’t try to summarize it;  it’s available free for download here, and well worth a read. Among other things, Joel and his colleagues identify 10 green business trends–they include radical transparency, green fleets, toxics as strategy, and the rethinking of packaging–and they measure progress (or the lack thereof)  around 20 different metrics, including carbon transparency, carbon reporting, clean-tech investments and green power use.

The teen sex joke is fitting because the ratio of of talk to action in the green business arena remains high. Particularly when it comes to climate change–now and most likely forever the No. 1 environmental issue for business, and for everyone else–progress has been halting because of the absence of consistent government policy, at the national or global level. Only 34% of the S&P500 companies have promised to (more…)

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The power of small changes

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

When Chris McKenna, who manages a fleet of trucks for Poland Spring, learned that the company’s drivers were racking up as much as 1,400 hours a month of idle time, he saw an opportunity to make a difference. Running truck engines in winter kept the cabs warm — the company is based in Maine — but it cost Poland Spring money and polluted the air.

To see which of the company’s 65 drivers were racking up the most idle time, McKenna ranked them, based on data from onboard computers. “All we did was talk to them about it, and put a list up in the break room,” he told me. “Human nature, no one wants to be at the bottom of the list.” To sweeten the deal, the 10 drivers with the lowest idling time got a gift card for fuel they could use for their own cars.

The results were dramatic. Idle time dropped from 1,400 hours in February 2007 to 1000 hours in February 2008 to just 380 hours in February 2009. Depending on fuel costs, cutting idle time has saved the company thousands of dollars a year—roughly $20,000 during 2008, for example.

There are two lessons here. First, as I wrote recently about OPower, changing behavior is a powerful and low-cost way to curb climate change. Second, small changes can add up to big impacts, as the Environmental Defense Fund makes clear in this cool video from its Innovation Exchange website.

As EDF notes, fleet vehicles are driven hard, averaging nearly double the mileage, fuel consumption and emissions of personal vehicles. Currently, EDF says there are more 3 million corporate fleet vehicles in the United States emitting 45 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.

I spoke with Chris McKenna last summer while helping EDF write a series of case studies on greening fleets. (The case studies (more…)

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Posted in Climate Change, Consumption, Economics, Energy, Environment, NGOs, Sustainability | 1 Comment »

Next steps: Climate action and green business

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Under the category of shameless promotion of self and friends, I want to call your attention to three upcoming events where I’ll be asking questions of some very smart people.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, January 26), I will be moderating a webinar for my colleagues at The Energy Collective called Is Global Action on Climate Change a Pipe Dream? Breaking Down What Was (Or Wasn’t) Achieved at COP15.

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Next Thursday, February 4, I’ll be in San Francisco to join my colleagues at Greenbiz.com, led by executive editor Joel Makower, at their annual State of Green Business Forum at the PG&E Auditorium.

logo_sogbf_2010

The following Tuesday, February 9, Joel and I and the Greenbiz crew will reconvene for a State of Green Business Forum at the Chicago Mart Plaza.

Here are some details:

We’ve got a great panel for The Energy Collective webinar, which is free of charge. Robert Stavins, the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at the Kennedy School at Harvard, as well as director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. Prior to Harvard, Stavins was a staff economist at the Environmental Defense Fund. You can read one of his thoughtful blogposts about Copenhagen here. Aimée Christensen is an activist and consultant who’s worked in government, business, law and the nonprofit world on climate, human rights and development issues. She’s now got her own company, Christensen Global Strategies, which advises corporate, governmental,  and non-profit clients seeking to address the global challenges of climate change, ecosystem degradation, and resource scarcity. Her clients have included the Clinton Global Initiative,  Swiss Re, the United Nations Development Program, Virgin United, and Wolfensohn + Co.  Our third panelist will be Dirk Forrister, managing director at Natsource, a leading carbon finance company. Dirk previously worked for the Clinton White House and the Department of Energy, so he knows the Washington scene.  We’ll begin our conversation at 1 p.m. ET, and allow plenty of time for questions from the audience. You can register for the event here.

In San Francisco and Chicago, after Joel Makower and Greenbiz release their annual State of Green Business report, we’ll spend the day talking about where green business is going with an impressive array of business leaders. In San Francisco, they will include Carl Bass, the president and CEO of Autodesk, Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist for Microsoft, entrepreneur and MacArthur fellow Saul Griffith, Rich Lechner, v.p. of energy and environment at IBM,  Rick Rommel, who leaders emerging businesses for Best Buy and Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials. (Van Jones, the former White House green jobs czar, is also on the SF agenda, but he will be appearing by telepresence from Washington, D.C.) In Chicago, we will be joined by David Baum, president of the Baum Realty Group, Jim Davis, executive director for sustainability at SAP, Donna Ducharme of the Delta Institute, Rich Lechner, Sonia Medina, U.S. country director for EcoSecurities, C. David Myers, president for building efficiency at Johnson Controls, and Richard L. Sandor, chairman and founder of the Chicago Climate Exchange, among others. To register for either event, or obtain further info, visit the State of Green Business website. We’ll be talking about these topics:

Carbon Management After Copenhagen: How are companies considering carbon now that the Copenhagen summit is behind us? Hear how companies are viewing carbon as a strategic issue, implementing sophisticated new accounting schemes, realigning their products and processes, and preparing to compete in a low-carbon economy.

Green Marketing in the Age of Radical Transparency: In a world in which vast amounts of information are available about companies and products, the rules of green marketing have changed. Today, companies must respond to green ratings and rankings from websites, media companies, nonprofit organizations, and big players like Walmart. In a world where consumers have unparalleled access to data about products and companies, how does a company truly be seen as green?

Can IT Solve the World’s Problems? The information technology sector is responsible for 2% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but its impact on the other 98% is growing rapidly. Hardware, software, and service providers are creating new products and services that are enabling large and small companies to better measure and manage their environmental impacts.

When Green Business Meets Cleantech: It used to be that green business and clean technology were separate realms. No longer. Today, the two are converging, as global companies and start-ups alike are harnessing clean technology as the foundation for a new generation of green business opportunities. The result are some unlikely corporate players and alliances.

On a personal note, it’s been about a year since I began working with The Energy Collective and Greenbiz. Robin Carey at TEC and Joel Makower and Pete May at Greenbiz are great partners, and their support for my writing makes this blog possible. So, thanks guys!

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Posted in Climate Change, Economics, Energy, Sustainability | No Comments »

A Naval officer’s “Atomic Insights”

Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Rod Adams

Rod Adams

Rod Adams has not followed a typical career path: Formerly the chief engineer on a U.S. Navy submarine, he’s now a prominent blogger on nuclear power.

Rod is well qualified to preside over Atomic Insights, the blog where he writes about energy supplies, technology and politics from an atomic point of view.

For one thing, he knows nukes–not only was he an engineer on a nuclear-powered sub, he has taught “the principles of naval weapons systems” at the U.S. Naval Academy.

For another, he’s trained to do without sleep. “You get four hours of sleep, maximum,” he says, about submarine life. Now, he is able to hold down a day job as a Navy commander (assigned as a ship and submarine maintenance analyst) and still write, prolifically, averaging four to 10 posts a week. That’s because he often posts to his blog between 3 a.m. and 5:30 a.m.

Recently, Rod and I met at 7 a.m. (early for me, mid-morning for him) for coffee at a Starbucks in Crystal City, Va., near his office, to talk about nuclear power. I wanted to get the perspective of an expert who has, literally, lived with nukes. He handed me this:

photo

“You know what that is?” he asked me. “It’s the equivalent of a ton of coal.” It would be, that is, if the tiny metal cylinder was made of uranium. (more…)

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Posted in Climate Change, Energy | 9 Comments »

Green China: Friend or foe?

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Barely a week goes by without new evidence of the greening of China. This is great news for the planet—but some people say it’s bad for the U.S.

Are they right to worry?

What got me thinking about this was a phone conversation the other day with Bill Gross, the brilliant and tireless entrepreneur who is the chief executive of eSolar and a founder of electric-car startup Aptera.

Bill was calling with great news for eSolar, a Pasadena, Ca-based firm that makes software and equipment for utility-scale solar thermal power plants. This weekend in Beijing, eSolar announced a deal with a Chinese electrical-power manufacturer to build at least 2 gigawatts (2,000 megawatts) of solar thermal power plants over the next 10 years, beginning with a 92-megawatt plant that will break ground this year.

ESolar power plant

ESolar power plant

“China is really moving fast to implement as many green technologies as they can, to become experts at them and to scale them up,” Bill told me. “It’s a statement that China is thinking about clean energy for the long term.”

I’m hearing this more and more. Tulsi Tanti, who runs a big Indian wind power company called Suzlon, told me last month in Copenhagen that China is his biggest market. My blogging colleague Jesse Jenkins (at The Energy Collective) has written about a report from the Breakthrough Institute, where he works, called Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant (available here as a PDF) that argues, among other things, that:

Asia’s rising “clean technology tigers” – China, Japan, and South Korea – have already passed the United States in the production of virtually all clean energy technologies, and over the next five years, the government’s of these nations will out-invest the United States three-to-one in these sectors.

(more…)

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Posted in Climate Change, Economics, Energy, Sustainability | 4 Comments »

Roger Ballentine: COP was not a flop

Friday, January 8th, 2010

696--roger ballentine croppedThe COP15 meetings in Copenhagen left  many of us discouraged, as I wrote here. But some smart people are taking a closer look at the Copenhagen Accord and finding reason for optimism. One is Roger Ballentine, the president of Green Strategies, a Washington-based consulting firm who is today’s guest blogger. Roger’s a longtime expert on the climate issue—he served in the Clinton White House, as chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force,  and he remains a player in Washington environmental politics, as well as a Harvard-educated lawyer and clean tech investor. Roger will be among the speakers this year at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference on business and the environment. This is an edited version of  post-COP15 memo that he shared with his clients and friends.

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The Copenhagen Accord’s approach to emissions reductions asks nations to propose and pledge to fulfill their own emissions commitments. This approach was proposed by Australia last spring and has been a favorite of American diplomats (going back to the Bush administration) who sometimes refer to it as a “bottom-up process.” It’s unlike the Kyoto Protocol, in which emissions reduction commitments were negotiated internationally.

Under the Accord, developed nations are expected to submit by January 31, 2010 quantified economy-wide emission targets for 2020 using whatever base year they wish.  In another break from Kyoto Protocol, the Accord also invites developing countries to submit their “nationally appropriate mitigation activities” by January 31. While the copy of the Accord released by the UN [PDF]does not yet list any national commitments, most nations have already said what their emission reductions or mitigation actions will likely be. For example, in November, President Obama pledged to reduce U.S. emissions by about of 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 (consistent with the House-passed climate bill), and China agreed to reduce its “carbon intensity” (i.e. the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per unit of GDP) by 40 to 45% by 2020.

The Accord also includes two important financial commitments designed to address the needs of developing countries in mitigating and adapting to climate change. Collectively, developed countries pledged $30 billion in new and additional sources to the developing world for the period 2010-2012. The developed countries also agreed to provide up to $100 billion annually to the developing countries  by 2020. The $100 billion is to come from public and private sources and be delivered both bilaterally and multilaterally. A “significant portion” of such funding is expected to flow through the Copenhagen Green Climate Fund, which the Accord establishes as a financial mechanism operating under the UNFCCC to support adaptation, mitigation, technology transfer and forestry programs and policies.

Most importantly from the U.S. political perspective, the Copenhagen Accord requires transparency in the reporting of mitigation actions by developing countries. China had resisted international verification, but compromised in the final deal. As a result, mitigation actions taken by developing countries with financial support from the developed world will be subject to an international verification process.

Here are my key take-aways from Copenhagen: (more…)

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