Marc Gunther

Business. Sustainability.

Monsanto, and its critics

gavel_0Have you heard? Monsanto is going on trial in The Hague for “crimes against nature and humanity, and ecocide.” The Organic Consumers Association had the story:

The Organic Consumers Association (OCA), IFOAM International Organics, Navdanya, Regeneration International (RI), and Millions Against Monsanto, joined by dozens of global food, farming and environmental justice groups announced today that they will put Monsanto MON (NYSE), a US-based transnational corporation, on trial for crimes against nature and humanity, and ecocide, in The Hague, Netherlands, next year on World Food Day, October 16, 2016.

The steering committee organizing this citizens tribunal — which has nothing to do with the International Court of Justice, a real court located in the Hague — includes Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association, the activist Vandana Shiva and scientist Gilles-Eric Seralini, all of them unrelenting critics of genetic engineering who allegations bear only a loose resemblance to the facts. (See this and this and this.) Somehow I don’t think this trial will end well for Monsanto.

Hugh Grant, chairman, president and chief executive of Monsanto Co. for Annual Report.

I bring this up because I recently interviewed Hugh Grant, the chief executive of Monsanto, about climate change and GMOs for a story in the Guardian. He told me, among other things, that he wishes the debate about genetic engineering would become more science-based and less polarized. (Good luck with that.) Fortunately, Monsanto has retained the trust of thousands of corn and soy farmers who rely on its seeds and crop protection products.

My story describes how Monsanto now intends to work farmers to help them farm in more climate-friendly ways, and to help them adapt to the threat of climate change. Here’s how it begins:

You have an easy job,” I tell Hugh Grant, the CEO of Monsanto, as we sit down at the W Hotel in New York City. He looks puzzled, so I explain: “I just read on the Internet that Monsanto controls the world’s food supply.”

Grant, 57, jokes that it’s all effortless. The idea that Monsanto controls the world’s food is a canard, but there’s no doubt that it’s a major player in the food chain. The St Louis-based agribusiness giant produced 35.5% of the corn seeds and 28% of the soybean seeds planted in the US in 2014, with sales topping $15.8bn last year.

Success hasn’t been easy: the agriculture business is competitive, and farmers are constantly looking for ways to increase yields, says Grant, who has been with Monsanto for 34 years. “We have to win their business every year.”

It’s true that Monsanto is a big player in the ag biz, but notice that most farmers choose not to buy its seeds. It’s hardly in control of anything.

Whether or not they are customers of Monsanto, US farmers are incredibly productive. While some critics question whether the US should export its agricultural methods to poor countries, Grant notes that

while US corn farmers generate yields of 150 to 160 bushels per acre, farmers in Brazil, Mexico and India get about 100 bushels per acre and those in Africa produce only about 20 bushels. There’s enormous room for improvement in Africa, he says.

I wonder what, exactly, the anti-GMO forces who are going to spend their time and money to put Monsanto “on trial” intend to do for farmers in Africa.

More to the point, I wonder why the anti-GMO forces believe they are in a better position than farmers to know what’s good for them. In a competitive marketplace, where there are no obvious information asymmetries, farmers every year choose to do business with Monsanto. Are they misguided?

Like all companies, Monsanto has made mistakes. Perhaps more than its share. But I honestly don’t understand why this company is so maligned.

COP out

46e6a-825-iclei6-cop21-parisI wish I could be optimistic about COP21, the climate negotiations coming to an end in Paris. I can’t. Even if the world’s countries keep their promises  — known, in the mind-numbing argot of the UN as Intended Nationally Determined Commitments —  the climate reductions they are promising don’t go far enough. As Coral Davenport reported in The Times as the talks got underway:

Together the more than 170 national plans for Paris would still allow the planet to warm by as much as 6 degrees, according to several independent and academic analyses. Scientists say that that level of warming is still likely to cause food shortages and widespread extinctions of plant and animal life.

These unenforceable “commitments” are, at best, a step in the right direction and, at worse, a way for government leaders to try to fool their citizens and, perhaps, themselves into thinking they are doing the right thing.

One reason for my skepticism is that these voluntary efforts resemble the voluntary measures taken by companies to curb their carbon emissions for the past decade or so. Even the most mainstream and business-friendly  green groups are discouraged by the scale of those efforts, so they have launched an initiative called Science Based Targets to try to persuade big companies to do better.

In a story headlined Where’s the Science?, I wrote big companies and their climate targets the other day in Guardian Sustainable Business. Here’s how the story begins:

As the UN climate meetings in Paris come to an end this week, diplomats from around the world are under pressure to reach an agreement that would reflect the plans they presented to cut their countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. These voluntary plans include targets and starting points set by each government. The US vows to cut emissions by 26% below 2005 levels by 2025; the EU by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030; and China will starting reducing in 2030.

If this sounds familiar, it should: big companies have been promising to cut their carbon output for a decade or more, setting targets and timelines of their own choosing.

It hasn’t worked. Emissions from the world’s 500 largest businesses are rising,according to Thomson Reuters. Scientists say emissions must fall to avoid catastrophic climate risks.

Science Based Targets intends to push companies to do better. It’s an initiative formed by the World Resources Institute, World Wildlife Fund, the CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) and the UN Global Compact – business-friendly, mainstream organizations that are frustrated by the arbitrary and unscientific nature of corporate climate targets.

Voluntary carbon targets–for companies or countries–are not likely to get us where we need to go, I’m afraid. They make about as much sense as voluntary speed limits or tax rates.

You can read the rest of my story here.

How to divest fossil fuels, for the 99 percent

NEW YORK, NY - JANUARY 25: Chief Executive Officer David Lissy, joined by members of Bright Horizons’ leadership team celebrate their IPO at the New York Stock Exchange on January 25, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Ben Hider/NYSE Euronext)

I’m all for the fossil-fuel divestment movement, at least as a way to start a conversation about climate change and build a movement. I’m undecided about whether it makes sense as an investment strategy, at least for individuals. With that caveat, let me point you to a story that I reported for the Guardian on fossil fuel-free investment options for people who don’t have access to sophisticated tools or high-priced portfolio advisors. Here’s how the story begins:

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the University of California and the World Council of Churches are among about 460 faith-based groups, pension funds, colleges and nonprofits that have pledged to divest some or all of their fossil fuel holdings.

They can do so with the help of consultants who will advise them on how to minimize their financial risk. High net worth individuals, with assets of $1m or more, can access such sustainable investment managers as Generation Investment Management, the London-based firm led by Al Gore, which has done very well for its investors, according to this deep look in The Atlantic.

But what about people who lack this same kind of wealth and want to divest? Few have the knowledge, time or assets to construct their own diversified portfolios. So-called green mutual funds may not be an answer, either, because many own shares in fossil fuel companies, particularly natural gas.

The story goes on to describe four choices–a new exchange traded fund (ETF) called the Etho Climate Leadership Index with the stock symbol ECLI, an older ETF known as GIVE and two mutual funds managed by Green Century Capital Management.

Why might you want to divest fossil fuels? Well, over the long term, it’s certainly possible that shares of coal, oil and natural gas companies will underperform the rest of the market. So divestment could drive superior returns.

Then there’s the moral argument for divestment, As activist Bill McKibben puts it: “If it’s wrong to wreck the climate, then it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage.”

Both arguments, I think, have merit.

That said, I’m not going to invest my own money in these ETFs or mutual funds for a couple of reasons. First, they have higher expenses that plain vanilla index funds. Those expenses eat away at returns. Academic research, meantime, has shown that index funds outperform all but the most skillful active managers over time–and picking out the best active stock pickers in advance is all but impossible for the amateur investor.

Second, these ETFs and funds screen out companies and entire industries in ways that don’t make a lot of sense to me. The ECLI ETF screens out McDonald’s because of its reliance on beef and its labor practices–even though the chain outperforms its peers when it comes to climate intensity. Monsanto also gets nixed over GMOs, which strikes me as, well, nutty, because crops that are modified to survive drought or flooding are potentially an important climate solution. Nuclear power, which provides more low-carbon energy that solar or wind in the US and globally, is also screened out; it’s hard for me to see a way out of the climate crisis that doesn’t require lots more nuclear energy, but I could well be wrong about that, if the costs of solar power continue to drop.

All that said, I’m glad these fossil-free investing choices are out there. You can read the rest of my story here and if you are serious about investing, please follow the links and dig deeper.

Turning CO2 from waste into an asset

coal_fired_power_plantIt’d be nice if the world could be powered with zero-carbon energy but wishing it so doesn’t make it so. We’re going to be burning fossil fuels, for better or worse–actually, for better and worse–for many years. So we need to figure out how to deal with CO2 emissions from burning coal, natural gas and oil..

The XPrize Foundation this week announced a $20 million prize for recycling CO2, and I covered the story for the Guardian. Here’s how my story begins:

Given the threat of climate change, what should the world do with its reserves of fossil fuels? Some say keep it in the ground. Others say fossil fuels are needed to in order to provide electricity to the poorest areas of the world.

With the announcement Tuesday of its new $20m Carbon XPrize, the non-profit XPrize Foundation is taking a middle ground – launching a competition to find new uses for carbon dioxide (CO2) , the greenhouse gas emitted by coal and natural gas plants. It’s intended to allow the continued burning of fossil fuels while reducing or eliminating their climate impact.

“How do we take that CO2 that’s coming from power plant emissions, and incentivize teams to create novel products?” said Paul Bunje, senior scientist for energy and the environment at the XPrize Foundation. “The CO2 could be turned from a waste into a valuable product.”

The award, not surprisingly, is sponsored by fossil fuel interests: NRG Energy, a coal-burning utility as well as a strong advocate for solar and wind power, and the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), a coalition of companies that extract oil from Alberta’s oil sands, which are a mixture of sand, water, clay and heavy oil.

With all the excitement over the rapid growth of wind and solar power–excitement that’s merited–it’s easy to forget that, according to the International Energy Agency, 82% of the world’s energy supply is derived from fossil fuels and that overall energy demand is expected to grow 37% by 2040.

The idea of recycling CO2 isn’t new. If it were easily done, it would have been done by. See my 2012 feature story for YaleE360, Rethinking carbon dioxide: From a pollutant to an asset, which look at capturing CO2 from the air. Or this 2012 story, also for YaleE360, Can environmentalists learn to love a Texas coal plant? That plant, which was designed to capture CO2 and use it to extract oil from deep wells, hasn’t secured the financing it needs to be built.

Which is no reason to give up. I’m a big fan of prizes. Maybe this one will produce a breakthrough project.

You can read the rest of my story here.

Goldman Sachs, and the evolution of sustainable investing

Will socially-responsible investing (SRI) ever grow up?

With roots in religious communities and the anti-war movement of the 1960s, SRI funds have long shunned investments in tobacco, alcohol, guns and (low-carbon) nuclear power. Much as I admire the pioneers of the field–folks like Amy Domini and Wayne Silby–this never made sense to me, particularly after I attended the SRI industry’s annual confab in the Rockies and found that where ample quantities of wine and beer were poured.

This wasn’t hypocrisy. It was a reflection of the fact that the early SRI funds never came up with a rigorous or consistent definition of “socially responsible.” This became even more clear a few years ago when the fossil-fuel divestment movement was launched, and it turned out that some  “socially responsible” mutual funds owned oil and gas companies, including those exploiting the Canadian tar sands.

Nor, for the most part, did the socially responsible investment firms have the resources that would enable them to do the deep research needed to identify those companies that are committed to socially and environmentally sound practices, and those who are not.

That may–may–be changing.

Hugh Lawson of Goldman Sachs
Hugh Lawson of Goldman Sachs

I say that because several big Wall Street banks–Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch–are becoming increasingly interested in SRI which, interestingly, has been rebranded “sustainable, responsible and impact” investing by US SIF, an industry group. Today in the Guardian, I wrote about Goldman’s new head of environmental, social and governance (ESG), Hugh Lawson. Here’s how the story begins:

Wall Street’s big banks are becoming increasingly interested in sustainable investing. The most recent convert is Goldman Sachs: in June, it named Hugh Lawson, a partner and managing director, as its global head of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing. This move was part of a larger trend: a month later, Goldman acquired Imprint Capital, a boutique investment firm that seeks measurable social and environmental impacts on top of financial returns.

“We think ESG is going, in essence, mainstream,” Lawson said. “A wider set of clients is interested.”

Those clients include public pension funds, insurance companies, universities and foundations that want their investments to take social and environmental issues into account. Given the size and scope of these large institutional investors, it’s not surprising that some of Wall Street’s major players are getting involved: Goldman and its rivals, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, are following the money, as they always do.

In addition to attracting big clients, the sustainable investing initiatives being led by Lawson and others – including Audrey Choi, who leads Morgan Stanley’s global sustainable finance group, and Andy Sieg, head of global wealth and retirement solutions for Merrill Lynch – have the potential to steer more capital into investments that promote corporate sustainability. “Clients are telling us that they want their portfolios to reflect their values and help improve the world they live in,” Sieg has said.

When we met a couple of weeks ago, Lawson told me that he became interested in sustainable investing while serving as a trustee of the investment committee at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which divested from fossil fuels last year. Lawson analyzed the relationship between divestment and financial returns, and came to believe that eliminating fossil fuel holdings from the fund’s $857m portfolio would not necessarily limit returns or increase risk.

What’s promising about about all this is that Goldman and its rivals intend to bring more rigor, sophistication and scale to the field of sustainable investing. As an example, Lawson told me that investment advisors could construct a portfolio that overweights companies that are carbon-efficient and underweights those that are high emitters. This could reward companies with the most favorable social and environmental profiles; over time, it might even generate above-market returns. In any event, bringing more resources and brainpower to sustainable investing is almost surely going to be a good thing.

 

 

I’m sorry to inform you that your pet is bad for the planet

PetProtectionAside from, perhaps, GMOs, few topics in the sustainable business arena are as emotional as pets. When my friend Erik Assadourian wrote a well-researched story for the Guardian last year asking whether pets are bad for the environment, he was assailed in the comments as a a “dumbass,” an “animal hater” and “an overpaid media commentator.” (The last allegation, I can assure you, is false.) It goes without saying that people love their pets. “My dogs are my family,” one commenter said. And we certainly can’t blame pets for the world’s pollution problems. As Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society of the United States, a pet owner and a defender of all four-legged creatures, once said, dogs and cats “aren’t driving to work.”

True enough. But dogs and cats have environmental impacts. They make waste. They’re eat, and many are overfed. They consume resources, including plastic toys and costly health care. And while, yes, they provide companionship, improve health and get us to spend more time outdoors meeting people, as Erik noted, couldn’t all those things be provided just as well by, er, people? Do we really need dogs to get us to talk a walk around the neighborhood.

When I recently revisited the topic for the Guardian, focusing this time on the impact of pet food, an editor told me that my story wasn’t good enough to run. I learned long ago not to argue with editors–they’re powerful and, occasionally, right–so I took the story to the Worldwatch Institute, where Erik works, and it then made its way to GreenBiz.

The story is anything but an assault on pets. Instead, it’s an effort to show how the giant food company Mars, which makes more pet food than candy bars, is trying to reduce its environmental impact, focusing on cat food, seafood and the oceans. Here’s how the story begins:

The United States is home to 85.8 million cats and 77.8 million dogs. They all have to eat. And that’s a problem — particularly when owners decide to feed their pets as if they were people.

The environmental impact of pet food is big, although no one knows just how big. Like the rest of us, dogs and cats consume meat, fish, corn and wheat, thus creating pressures on the global food system, along with carbon emissions as the food is manufactured and transported.

What we do know is that pet food is big business, generating about $22 billion in sales a year, industry groups estimate.

Much could be done to “green” pet foods — dogs and cats are getting more meat and fish than they need, for starters — but the industry is just starting to grapple with its sustainability issues.

Privately held Mars is leading the way, at least when compared to its big rivals. Better known for chocolate bars and M&Ms, Mars is the world’s biggest pet food company: Mars Pet Care has revenues estimated at $17 billion, employs 39,000 people, operates about 70 factories and owns the Pedigree, Whiskas, Nutro, Sheba, Cesar, Royal Canin and Iams brands.

The story goes on to say that Mars has

promised to buy fish only from fisheries or fish farms that are certified as sustainable by third parties. Importantly, Mars also said it would replace all wild catch whole fish and fish fillet with either by-products or farmed fish — so that demand for pet food does not compete directly with food that could be served to people.

That’s a step in the right direction. Other pet food companies, including Nestle and J.M. Smucker, have yet to follow. You can read the rest of my story here.

There was more bad news this week for pet owners. Did you happen to see the massive New York Times series about slavery at sea? The headline reads Sea Slaves: The Human Misery that Feeds Pets and Livestock. In four long stories, The Times reports on harsh, inhumane, just plain awful way that people are treated in the Thai fishing industry, which is being driven by “an insatiable global demand for seafood even as fishing stocks are depleted.”

Here’s where pets come in:

The United States is the biggest customer of Thai fish, and pet food is among the fastest growing exports from Thailand, more than doubling since 2009 and last year totaling more than $190 million. The average pet cat in the United States eats 30 pounds of fish per year, about double that of a typical American.

Though there is growing pressure from Americans and other Western consumers for more accountability in seafood companies’ supply chains to ensure against illegal fishing and contaminated or counterfeit fish, virtually no attention has focused on the labor that supplies the seafood that people eat, much less the fish that is fed to animals.

“How fast do their pets eat what’s put in front of them, and are there whole meat chunks in that meal?” asked Giovanni M. Turchini, an environmental professor at Deakin University in Australia who studies the global fish markets. “These are the factors that pet owners most focus on.”

So should you give up your cats and dogs? Not necessarily. But small pets are better than big ones. And if you feed them fish and meat, you might want to go vegetarian more often, to offset their impact.

The fossil fuel divestment movement is failing. Except it’s not.

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Harvard divestment activists sit in

Despite all of the sound and fury set off by the campaign to divest fossil fuels — and there has been plenty — Bill McKibben, 350.org and their allies have persuaded only a handful of big institutions to sell off the coal, oil and gas holdings in their endowments. They’ve had little or no direct effect on publicly-traded oil companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil, and none on the government-owned oil companies of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran and Iraq that are shielded from chants of rag-tag college students telling them to “leave it in the ground.”

That said, by any measure other than financial, the divestment campaign has been a big success.

That’s the argument I make in a story about divestment, published today by YaleEnvironment360 under the headline Why the Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement May Ultimately Win. Here’s how it begins:

Nestled in Vermont’s bucolic Champlain valley, Middlebury College is a seedbed of environmental activism. Middlebury students started 350.org, the environmental organization that is fighting climate change and coordinating the global campaign for fossil-fuel divestment. Bill McKibben, the writer and environmentalist who is spearheading the campaign, has taught there since 2001. Yet Middlebury has declined to sell the oil, gas, and coal company holdings in its $1 billion endowment.

McKibben’s alma mater, Harvard University — which has a $36 billion endowment, the largest of any university — also has decided not to divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies. Indeed, virtually all of the United States’ wealthiest universities, foundations, and public pension funds have resisted pressures to sell their stakes in fossil fuel companies. And while a handful of big institutional investors — Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, Stanford University, and AXA, a French insurance company — have pledged to sell some of their coal investments, coal companies account for less than 1 percent of the value of publicly traded stocks and an even smaller sliver of endowments.

Put simply, the divestment movement is not even a blip on the world’s capital markets.

Yet McKibben says the campaign is succeeding “beyond our wildest possible dreams.”

Why? Well, you can read the rest of the story to find out, but in essence, the divestment campaign has in short order built a vibrant global climate movement, which is exactly what McKibben and his allies set out to do nearly three years ago. (See Do the Math: Bill McKibben takes on big oil, my 2012 interview with him.) Hundreds of US college campuses, cities and foundations have been forced to respond to divestment demands. They’ve debated and analyzed the climate threat. And, as the story explains, even when institutions decide not to divest — often for good reason, I might add — they almost always do something. What’s more, the campaign has spread wildly, er, widely to Europe and  Asia, thanks to social media, and it has taken on a life of its own, as a decentralized but loosely connected series of campaigns that are gathering momentum.

As a practical matter, divestment has re-opened an important conversation about whether and how institutions and individuals are investing with their values in mind. Last week, writing on my other blog, Nonprofit Chronicles, I asked: Why won’t foundations divest fossil fuels? Most of the big ones have not, but they are all talking about “impact investing,” that is, aligning more of their endowment money with their programming goals. Some of that money is flowing to climate solutions including renewable energy and energy efficiency projects.And it would not surprise me to see one or two big foundations–Bloomberg Philanthropies, maybe?–decide to divest.

I invite you to comment on the divestment debate, preferably at YaleE360 or at Nonprofit Chronicles where the stories can be found.

We’re losing the climate battle. So we may need to harvest CO2 from the sky.

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Carbon Engineering’s new plant in Squamish, BC

The Guardian this week published my latest story about direct air capture of CO2, a topic that has fascinated me since the late 2000s. My 2012 Amazon Kindle Single, Suck It Up: How capturing carbon from the air can help solve the climate crisis, chronicled the very beginnings of the air capture story;  since then, startups working on harvesting CO2 from the sky have made tangible progress, as this story indicates. Here’s how it begins:

In Squamish, British Columbia, a Canadian town halfway between Vancouver and Whistler where the ocean meets the mountains, a startup led by Harvard physicist David Keith – and funded in part by Bill Gates – is building an industrial plant to capture carbon dioxide from the air.

Carbon Engineering aims to eventually build enough plants to suck many millions of tons of CO2 out of the air to reduce climate change. Its technology could help capture dispersed emissions – that is, emissions from cars, trucks, ships, planes or farm equipment – or even to roll back atmospheric concentrations of CO2.

The Calgary-based company is one of a crop of startups placing bold bets on technology designed to directly capture CO2 from the air. Lately, at least three have shown signs of progress. New York City-based Global Thermostat, which is led by CEO Graciela Chichilnisky and Peter Eisenberger, a Columbia University professor and former researcher for Exxon and Bell Labs, tells me it has recently received an infusion of capital from an as-yet-unnamed US energy company. As part of a demonstration project financed by Audi, Swiss-based Climeworks in April captured CO2 from the air and supplied it to a German firm called Sunfire, which then recycled it into a zero-carbon diesel fuel.

These companies are a long, long way from success, it must be said. Deploying direct air capture at a scale sufficient to make a difference to the climate would be a vast and costly undertaking. But their work matters because of the increasing likelihood that we will need to deploy “negative emissions” technologies like direct-air capture to avoid pushing through the 2 degrees of global warming that governments have agreed is a safe upper limit. This isn’t as well understood as it should be, in my view.

Climate science is ridiculously complicated and, as a non-scientist, I’ve struggled to make sense of the conflicting claims about how dire our situation is likely to become. Some people tell me that environmentalists and climate scientists are alarmists, exaggerating the dangers we face and squelching dissent. Matt Ridley, a writer whose work I admire, makes that argument in this excellent, in-depth podcast. Others say just the opposite, that scientists and economists feel pressure to underplay the seriousness of the problem, for fear of leading people to despair and inaction. Oliver Geden, head of research at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, made this argument recently in the journal Nature, writing: “The climate policy mantra – that time is running out for 2C but we can still make it if we act now – is scientific nonsense.” Esquire magazine, of all places, published a long and powerful story last week under this headline:

When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job

Among many climate scientists, gloom has set in. Things are worse than we think, but they can’t really talk about it.

It’s an unsettling read.

Here, meantime, is how David Roberts put it in an excellent analysis at Vox:

The obvious truth about global warming is this: barring miracles, humanity is in for some awful shit.

The fundamental problem is that the world’s biggest GHG emitters — China, the US,  Germany, the UK and India — are unlikely to stop burning fossil fuels anytime soon for a whole bunch of reasons, including, in the case of India, the fact that hundreds of millions of its poor people don’t have access to electricity. As Roberts puts it:

Holding temperature down under 2°C — the widely agreed upon target — would require an utterly unprecedented level of global mobilization and coordination, sustained over decades. There’s no sign of that happening, or reason to think it’s plausible anytime soon.

No matter what happens this winter in Paris.

Last year, in a report that deserved more attention than it got, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that avoiding the goal of 2 °C of global warming will likely require the global deployment of technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air.(For more about the need for carbon removal, here’s a good story from Brad Plumer at Vox.) Such technologies don’t exist today, at meaningful scale.

This is why direct air capture matters.

Edelman’s climate problem

magnifying-glass-valuesLast summer, the big PR company Edelman faced a problem that no amount of spin could resolve. Kert Davies, the former head of research for Greenpeace who now leads the Climate Investigations Center, had surveyed big public relations companies to see where they stood on the issue of climate change.

Edelman waffled. The company published a position on climate change that raised as many questions as it answered. Last August, I wrote a story about the issue for the Guardian that began like this:

A 1930s union song, popularized by the late great Pete Seeger, asks pointedly: “Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?”

Since then, an insider told me, “a struggle for the soul” of Edelman as been unfolding inside the firm,which has more than 5,500 employees and reported worldwide revenues of $768m in FY2014. Some of those employees work for fossil-fuel clients who oppose efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and want to extract as much oil and gas from the ground as they can. Others work for companies like Unilever, Starbucks and The North Face that have lobbied for meaningful climate regulation.

Yesterday, I revisited the story and reported in the Guardian that Edelman has lost four valued staff members, all of them leaders of Edelman’s “Business and Social Purpose Practice,” and two influential clients, the We Mean Business coalition and Nike, at least in part because of its refusal to take a stand on climate change.

Does this mean that the fossil-fuel crowd inside Edelman has won? It sure looks that way, but it’s hard to know. Edelman executives declined to be interviewed for my story. No one was willing to explain what the climate position means if, indeed, it means anything at all. 

Richard Edelman, in Davos
Richard Edelman, in Davos

This surprised me, not because Edelman execs are obligated to talk to reporters (they’re not), but because I took at face value the company’s platitudes about trust, values, corporate responsibility and openness. Company president Richard Edelman: “Transparency is not optional.” And: “We strongly urge business to take the chance to redefine value as being also about values.”

As a reporter, I’ve dealt with the Edelman firm for more than a decade; my relationships with people there have been excellent, until this climate issue came along. Shortly after I was laid off by FORTUNE in 2008, I did some writing and consulting for Edelman. I soon learned I wasn’t cut out for PR, but again, my experience with the firm was good. Call me naive, but I thought Edelman was a different kind of PR firm.

Now I can’t help but conclude that they are no different from their peers, as yesterday’s story indicates:

Some clues about where Edelman is headed can be gleaned from a new set of values and a statement of purpose published last month. The statement makes explicit the company’s willingness to work on both sides of controversial issues, including climate change:

We believe that independently held, opposing views deserve to be heard in the court of public opinion and we assert our role as a firm to being advocates for our clients.

Doing so doesn’t condone every action every client takes or imply implicit support for every position a client may adopt, but does reflect our absolute commitment and support of their right to exercise their freedom of expression.

It also grants each employee the “right to elect not to work on a piece of business that does not align with his or her personal beliefs.”

In a recent video to employees about the new statement of purpose, Matt Harrington, Edelman’s global chief operating officer, said simply: “We exist to be advocates for our clients.”

Which is OK, I guess, and wouldn’t even be a story if Edelman hadn’t tried to have it both ways on climate.

The upshot is that Edelman has lost some talented people and a couple of clients.

We’ll never know what would have happened had the company taken a different path. Instead of mumbo-jumbo about how “marketing communications” has to become “communications marketing,” Edelman could have adopted a bold, values-based position on climate change. It could have worked with its more forward-thinking fossil-fuel clients, like Shell, to bring them along on the issue. It could have positioned itself as the go-to PR shop for companies and NGOs that take sustainability seriously.

It could have walked the walk as well as talked the talk.

That’s a story I would have liked to write.

Ramez Naam, ecomodernist

ramez
Ramez Naam

I was introduced to a set of ideas known as “ecomodernism” back in 2009, when I read Stewart Brand’s book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Stewart, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, argued that cities are “greener” than the countryside, that low-carbon nuclear power will be need to curb climate change and that genetically-modified crops allow farmers to grow more crops on less land, thus preserving nature.

Ecomodernist ideas have gathered steam since then, driven in large part by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus, the founders of The Breakthrough Institute. Recently, Michael and Ted herded together a group of scientists and economists — including Stewart, David Keith, Mark Lynas and Roger Pielke Jr. — to publish An Ecomodernist Manifesto. They write:

Intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world is the key to decoupling human development from environmental impacts. These socioeconomic and technological processes are central to economic modernization and environmental protection. Together they allow people to mitigate climate change, to spare nature, and to alleviate global poverty.

In mid-June, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel at the Breakthrough Dialogues, a conference in Sausalito where many of the authors of the Ecomodernist Manifesto spoke. I’m increasingly persuaded that their arguments make more sense than the low-tech, anti-nuclear, anti-GMO, all “natural,” small-is-beautiful, local-beats-global approach to environmental issues pushed by the most traditional environmentalists. And even those green groups that are market-friendly, technology-friendly and science-friendly hesitate to stand up in favor of nuclear energy or GMOs.

All this is by way of introduction to Ramez Naam, the author of a book called The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. He, too, is an ecomodernist, and a believer that regulated capitalism and technology will help us solve our environmental problems. I wrote about Ramez and his book today in The Guardian, in a story headlined: Ramez Naam: Capitalism is not the enemy of climate.

Here’s how the story begins:

Futurist and author Ramez Naam is an optimist, even when it comes to the problem of climate change, and for good reason.

As a student of world history, Naam has seen how humanity has flourished in the last century. People live longer and suffer less than before. Doom-and-gloom predictions have not just been proven wrong, but spectacularly wrong. Take food: some forecast that the world would starve by the 1970s. While population has doubled since then, the food supply has grown by two-and-half times, and today there are more obese people than malnourished people in the world.

“This is the best of times,” Naam writes in his 2013 nonfiction book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. “We live in a period of health, wealth and freedom never seen before.”

Natural resources – notably the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases – may be limited, Naam argues, but ideas and innovation are not.

The story goes on to talk about why, when it comes to climate change, the most important idea is a carbon tax, coupled with investment in energy R&D. You can read the rest of the story here. I’d also encourage you to read the Ecomodernist Manifesto.