Peak meat: Can Al Gore, Jay Z, Oprah and Rick Warren all be wrong?

December 10, 2013

Raw-Meat-1

 

Hungry? Does this photo make you eager for dinner? Not me. I almost never cook red meat at home anymore, and I don’t miss it. I feel mildly unAmerican, having given up red meat and the NFL, but so it goes.

Turns out I’m not alone. Al Gore has gone further–he’s now a vegan. The evangelical pastor Rick Warren (who I profiled in Fortune in 2005) is advising his flock to eat less meat in a new faith-based diet book called The Daniel Plan. Jay Z and Beyonce have sworn off all animal products for three weeks.

The decline of meat is the topic of my column this week for Guardian Sustainable Business. Here’s how it begins:

What will be hot on restaurant menus in 2014? The National Restaurant Association, which surveyed more than 1,400 chefs, says the top three trends for next year will be locally sourced meats and seafood, locally grown produce and environmental sustainability. That’s welcome news for people who care about the health of the planet, but the chefs may have missed an even bigger change coming to the US diet – the decline of meat.

Today, Americans consume more meat – approximately 270lbs per capita – than carnivores elsewhere (except Luxembourg). But meat consumption in the US has been declining for nearly a decade, according to the research firm Packaged Facts. About 12% of US adults strongly agree and 19% somewhat agree that “they are eating many meatless/vegetarian meals,” says David Sprinkle, publisher of Packaged Facts. Beyond the data, there are signs all around us that meat is falling out of favor, for health, environmental, ethical and economic reasons.

The decline of meat creates opportunities for an array of competitors in the protein business. They include the developers of sustainable aquaculture, producers of vegetarian analogs like Beyond Meat andBeyond Eggs, and consumer products firms whose vegetarian products like Boca and Gardein have moved from natural foods channels to mainstream retailers like Target, Safeway and Kroger. Fast-casual chain Chipotle recently launched Sofritas, a tofu sandwich, under the headline,Vegans and Carnivores Unite, while Subway is rolling out a vegetarian falafel sandwich. On its website, Starbucks says: “If you’ve ever heard someone dismiss vegetables as “rabbit food,” you should introduce them to our Hearty Veggie & Brown Rice Salad Bowl.”

The decline of meat is welcome news. Industrially-produced meat is bad for the environment. Eating too much red meat is bad for your heart. I’m personally troubled by the way chickens, pigs and cows are treated on factory farms. Of course, it is theoretically possible to raise and slaughter animals in ways that are good for the planet and your health, as I’ve written before. I’m not a vegetarian (yet) and I can’t imagine becoming a vegan because I’m fond of cheese, butter and eggs. But I’m thinking more and more about what to cook and eat. As Jonathan Safran Foer writes in Eating Animals: “One of the greatest opportunities to live our values – or betray them – lies in the food we put on our plates.”

Hat tip to Josh Balk of the Humane Society of America, who gave me the idea for my story.

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, Environment, Food, Sustainability, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

A bank that’s about more than money

November 14, 2013

628x471Kat Taylor is a piece of work. Last month at the Net Impact conference in San Jose, she began her prepared “remarks” by belting out a jingle for One PacificCoast Bank, the community thrift she founded in 2007 with her husband, Tom Steyer, the billionaire investor and climate-change activist. She can’t abide the fact that the big money-center banks like Bank of America and City finance the coal industry, so her bank has issued a credit card that is co-branded with the Sierra Club. She is surely the only member of Harvard University’s Board of Overseers who sports a half dozen tattoos.

When I met Kat at Net Impact, I knew that I wanted to learn more about her and One PacificCoast Bank. So, on a reporting trip to San Francisco, I visited the bank’s headquarters in downtown Oakland. The bank is small, but Kat has big plans for its growth, which I wrote about today at Guardian Sustainable Business.

Here’s how my story begins:

Like global billion-dollar corporations, every one of us manages a supply chain. You might be supplied groceries by Whole Foods, clothing by Gap, shoes by Nike, gas by Shell and electronics by Apple. Or not – most of us have dozens of retailers or brands from which to choose.

But when it comes to credit cards, the majority of Americans turn to a small number of big banks: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, Capital One and US Bancorp.

Kat Taylor, the founder and CEO of One PacificCoast Bank, has set out to change that. One PacificCoast Bank (“Welcome to Beneficial Banking”), based in Oakland, CA, offers a socially and environmentally preferable alternative: a bank with a mission to serve low-income communities and the environment.

And if the idea of switching checking your checking accounts (with their very sticky electronic bill-paying services) or your deposits to a regional bank (without its own nationwide network of ATMs) seems inconvenient, Taylor has a simpler proposition for customers who want to clean up their financial supply chain, just switch your credit card.

“We’re asking people to fund all of their purchasing activity from a bank with which they are aligned,” Taylor said.

But can a little-known bank with just $320m (£199m), in assets take on Wall Street? Certainly not on its own, but Taylor is enlisting some formidable like-minded allies, notably the Sierra Club, in her crusade. As America’s oldest and largest environmental group, with 2.1 million members, the Sierra Club has agreed to issue a credit card with One PacificCoast Bank. The club’s share of the proceeds will help support environmental campaigns, often targeted against polluters who are financed by Wall Street.

The idea of affinity credit cards isn’t new, of course. You can get credit cards emblazoned with the logo of your favorite retailer, sports team or university. Working Assets has since the 1980s offered credits cards that support groups including the Rainforest Action Network and Human Rights Watch, but the cards are now issued by Bank of America and donate only 10 cents per transaction (a miserly amount, since other cards give 1 percent of your spending back). By contrast, One PacificCoast Bank is owned by a foundation, and intends to plow 100% of its profits back into groups that support the environment and low-income communities.

After meeting Kat, I was fascinated read in The Times that she and Tom Steyer operate a small cattle ranch, called the TomKat Ranch, which sells beef under the Leftcoast Grassfed brand; it’s aiming to become a model of sustainable agriculture. Steyer was profiled in The New Yorker in September by Ryan Lizza; he’s working with New York Mayor Bloomberg and former California Governor Schwarzenegger to build a bipartisan climate movement. And if you would like to know how this power couple met, read the rest of my story, here.

Photo: Courtesy of sfgate.com

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, Energy, Environment, Sustainability

A libertarian joins The Nature Conservancy

October 29, 2013
Lynn Scarlett

Lynn Scarlett

Can conservatives be brought back into the conservation movement? That’s the question facing Lynn Scarlett, the new director of public policy at The Nature Conservancy, who joined the environmental NGO after working as president of the Reason Foundation and in the interior department of the Bush II administration.

As I wrote today at the Guardian Sustainable Business, Scarlett is taking on a big and important job:

Fortunately, she’s not alone. Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, leads the Energy and Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University, which aims to “unleash the power of free enterprise to deliver the fuels of the future”. A group called the Conservation Leadership Council, which is led by Gale Norton and Ed Schafer, who were interior and agriculture secretaries during the George W Bush administration, is “encouraging conservative voices to join the conversation about the environment”.

Furthermore, prominent business leaders, including John Faraci, the CEO of International Paper, and Jim Connaughton, a vice-president at Constellation Energy and a former White House official, also belong to the council.

“There are solutions to environmental problems that are consistent with conservative principles,” Scarlett told me last week at The Nature Conservancy headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The business-friendly NGO works across party lines and has branches in all 50 states (and in 35 countries).

The story goes on to say that no major environmental law has been enacted by Congress without bipartisan support. But, for reasons that have mostly but not entirely to do with the climate-change debate, Republicans and conservatives have broken away from the environmental movement since the 2008 presidential election.

Bringing Republicans and conservatives back into a climate movement will be tough. Some in the Tea Party wing are anti-science; they simply reject the notion that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are warming the earth. Many climate-change solutions are big and complicated, and similar in that sense to Obamacare, which has united Republicans like no other issue. And the big business lobbies that could help bring back conservatives are dominated by fossil fuel interests.

Still, there’s something fundamentally conservative about the idea that people and companies should clean up after themselves and be responsible for the messes they make–even if the mess, in this case, is CO2, the colorless and odorless gas that drives climate change.

You can read the rest of my story here.

Filed Under: Climate Change, Economics, Energy, Environment, NGOs, Politics Tagged With: , , ,

Bankers, behaving badly, backing coal

October 1, 2013

india-coal-power-007The  big Wall Street banks say all the right thing about sustainability and corporate responsibility but investment bankers are, above all, driven by the deal. Turning away business is just not part of their skill set, or mind set.

That’s the best explanation that I can come up with for the fact that Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, along with three India-based banks, are managing a share offering for Coal India, a company with an environmental and human rights record that is, at best, spotty.

Their decision to do so is the topic of my story today at Guardian Sustainable Business. Here’s how it begins:

If you’re an investor seeking to profit from the coal industry and you’re indifferent to the issues of climate change, forest destruction and human rights, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank have a deal for you.

The four US and European banks, along with Indian investment banksSBI Capital Markets, JM Financial and Kotak Mahindra Capital Co., are managing a share offering in Coal India, one of the world’s biggest coal-mining companies.

They’re doing so despite Coal India’s dismal environmental record, despite the climate impacts of burning coal, despite allegations that the state-owned firm has run roughshod over tribal communities and despite objections by the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network, as well as by Indian environmentalists.

They’re also doing so despite their own rhetoric about sustainability and corporate responsibility.

I hope you take the time to read the story. It’s tough, I think, but it’s a reflection of the difficulty that the corporate-responsibility and environmental movements have had gaining traction on Wall Street. Most of the big financial institutions have made “green” commitments, and that’s great, but if they continue to finance fossil fuels on a grand scale, they could wind up doing more harm than good.

None of the banks would talk to me on the record for the story, and I imagine that if they did, they would say, correctly, that burning fossil fuels is perfectly legal in India, and everywhere else, as is dumping emissions into the atmosphere at no cost. That’s a political problem, and not a Wall Street problem, they could argue. True enough. But if the banks believe what they say about climate change and the environment, they should then make their voices heard more forcefully in the climate debate in Washington and elsewhere.

Until they do, their rhetoric about sustainability will remain hollow.

Filed Under: Climate Change, CSR, Economics, Energy, Environment, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Sustainability at McDonald’s. Really.

September 24, 2013

coffee-cupHere’s a question. Which trio of companies has done more for the environment…

Patagonia, Starbucks and Chipotle?

Or Walmart, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s?

I don’t have an answer. Patagonia, Starbucks and Chipotle have been path-breaking companies when it comes to sustainability, but Walmart, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s are so much bigger that, despite their glaring flaws, and the fundamental problems with their business models, they will have a greater impact as they get serious about curbing their environmental footprint, and that of their suppliers.

Small and mid-sized companies create sustainability solutions, as a rule, but the impact comes when big global corporations embrace them. Size matters.

All that is by way of introduction to my latest story for Guardian Sustainable Business, about McDonald’s coffee-buying practices and the role of the consumer in driving them to scale.

Here’s how it begins:

Across the US, McDonald’s last week introduced pumpkin spice lattes made with Rainforest Alliance-certified espresso. No such assurance comes with McDonald’s drip coffee. Why? Because consumers haven’t yet shown Mickey D’s that they care.

That’s gradually changing, says Bob Langert, the vice president of sustainability for McDonald’s, and not a moment too soon. As the world’s biggest fast-food chain, which has 34,000 restaurants in 118 countries, seeks to make its supply chain more environmentally friendly, McDonald’s is trying to enlist its customers as allies.

That’s why the pumpkin lattes marketing features the little green frog seal of approval from the Rainforest Alliance. That’s also why McDonald’s fish sandwiches, for the first time, feature a blue ecolabel from the Marine Stewardship Council certifying that the pollock inside comes from better-managed fisheries.

By talking to consumers about its sustainability efforts, McDonald’s hopes to build brand trust and loyalty. Until recently, people had to dig into the company’s website to learn about its environmental performance.

“We’ve had sustainable fish for many years, but we didn’t tell people about it,” Langert told me during lunch in Washington DC. (He ordered fish.) “We feel there’s a tipping point coming. We see the consumer starting to care. Consumer expectations are rising.”

What McDonald’s is doing with its coffee isn’t innovative. Starbucks paved the way. But if McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, 7-Eleven, Walmart, Costco, Target and others follow, the world’s coffee farmers will be a lot better off.

Meantime, McDonald’s is leading the way as it encourages potato farmers to use fewer pesticides and less fertilizer, as the story goes on to say. And it could potentially have a huge impact as it tackles its most important supply chain–beef.

Elitists will scoff at everything McDonald’s does, of course, and some of their criticisms have merit. A Big Mac, it’s safe to assume, has a big carbon footprint. Eating too much food from Mickey D’s (or anywhere else) makes people fat. I’d like to see fast-food chains pay their workers better, even if that means customers will have to pay more for breakfast or lunch. But on the environment, McDonald’s is moving in the right direction. Just as important, the company is trying to move its customers along, too.

You can read the rest of my Guardian story here.

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, CSR, Environment, Food, Sustainability, Workplace Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Will solar power disrupt regulated utilities?

September 3, 2013

Applications_ResidentialOne of the business megatrends of my lifetime has been decentralization. Mainframe computers gave way to laptops and PCs. The AT&T monopoly exploded, and landlines led to a proliferation of cell phones. Airlines were deregulated, creating space for startups like Southwest  and JetBlue. Newspapers have been rattled by the Internet, where anyone and everyone has a voice.

Could distributed power–specifically, rooftop solar–nowbe poised to disrupt regulated utilities?

That’s the topic of my latest contribution to the YaleEnvironment360 website. Some utilities evidently feel threatened, so they are pushing back against subsidies for solar.

Here’s how the story begins:

Issues of electricity regulation typically play out in drab government hearing rooms. That has not been the case this summer in Arizona, where a noisy argument – featuring TV attack ads and dueling websites – has broken out between regulated utilities and the rooftop solar industry.

An Internet web video attacks the California startup companies that sell rooftop solar systems as the “new Solyndras,” which are spending “hard-earned tax dollars to subsidize their wealthy customers.” Meantime, solar companies accuse Arizona Public Service, the state’s biggest utility, of wanting to “extinguish the independent rooftop solar market in Arizona to protect its monopoly.”

Similar battles about how rooftop solar should be regulated have flared in California, Colorado, Idaho, and Louisana. And the outcome of these power struggles could have a major impact on the future of solar in the U.S.

The politics of this debate are unusual, as the story goes on to explain. Please read the rest here.

A couple of thoughts. First, it’s important to keep some perspective here. Solar is growing fast but off a very, very small base. It generates less than 1 percent of the electricity in the US. Some coverage of this issue–notably a long story in Business Week with the absurd headline, Why the U.S. Power Grid’s Days are Numbered — conveniently overlooks that context. Regulated utilities are not going away anytime soon and if the grid’s days are, in fact, numbered, it’s a really really big number.

Having said that, a regulatory system that tilts heavily towards solar–by allowing solar customers to sell their excess power back into the grid at inflated rates, for example–will create problems for the utilities, as well as inequities for other customers. While the regulatory debate has become politicized in places like Arizona–the Koch brothers make a cameo appearance at the end of my story–what’s needed is fair treatment for solar customers and the utilities.

What’s fair, you ask? That’s why we have regulators.

Filed Under: Climate Change, Economics, Energy, Environment, Politics, Sustainability Tagged With: , , ,

What Ben Franklin can teach US companies about climate

August 4, 2013

Benjamin-Franklin-006Given the inability, or unwillingness, of political and business leaders to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, it’s no surprise that governments and companies are increasingly talking about adaptation or resilience. It’s only prudent. We need to prepare for climate disruption.

But it seems strange that businesses would tackle the question of adaptatation without, simultaneously, doing all they can to push for climate regulation. At least, that was my reaction last month when I attended a Washington event on adaptation organized by the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES). Everyone acted as if extreme weather and a warming planet were all but inevitable.

And perhaps they are. But as companies, understandably, prepare for a warming world, it’s incumbent upon them to engage politically in any way they can to slow down emissions. That’s the topic of my latest story for Guardian Sustainable Business. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, CSR, Energy, Environment, Politics Tagged With: , , , , ,

Launching: Guardian Sustainable Business US

August 1, 2013

GP_SusBus-logo_RGB_colourGreetings, blog-readers! I’m just back from vacation, in time for the launch of Guardian Sustainable Business US. Much as I enjoy my work, I confess that I enjoy my time away from work even more. I felt fortunate to be able to spend a week in the south of France, hiking and biking with my wife, two daughters and their spouses, enjoying the scenery, the food and the wine, and not necessarily in that order. I’m more of a beer guy than a wine drinker but the chilled rosé in Provence is a perfect complement to the warm summer days and nights. Nearly as good as our local Dogfish Head. But I digress.

My new part-time gig as editor-at-large of Guardian Sustainable Business is going great. It’s enormous fun to be part of what feels like a startup inside a media organization that is nearly 200 years old. Working with the Brits is a treat–they are a lively and irreverent bunch, none more so than Jo Confino, who is an executive editor of The Guardian and founder of the sustainable business site.

I’m now dividing my time between Fortune and The Guardian, which, I suppose, goes to show that the sustainability agenda can cross political, cultural and national boundaries. Or maybe it’s just evidence that biology is destiny. My father worked for Fortune back in the 1950s and 1960s, and I remember as a kid visiting him in the Time & Life Building. And we spent a summer or two back then in Manchester, England, my mom’s home town, where the local paper was The Guardian, then known as the Manchester Guardian. I would search the paper for baseball scores, and toss it aside when I couldn’t find them. Only recently has The Guardian begun to cover America’s pastime. You could look it up. But I digress, again.

The Guardian has hired Jennifer Kho, formerly of GreenBiz, to be the managing editor of the US site. Charlie Wilkie has moved to New York from London to lead the business side. Over the next few weeks and months, Jenn and I will be looking for contributors, as well as story ideas, so please feel free to be in touch.

Here’s how Jo explained our plans for the site in an introductory essay:

Today we officially launch the US edition of Guardian Sustainable Business, focusing our unique style of journalism on how American companies can rise to the sustainability challenges of our age.

This is an exciting time, given the increasing recognition that the business of business is much more than just business.

How times have changed. When I was a Wall Street correspondent back in the heady days of the 1980s, there was little if any space to talk about the role of business in society. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, CSR, Environment, Human rights, Investing, Media Tagged With: , , ,

The end of consumer culture as we know it?

July 18, 2013

ErikI wanted to eat insects with Erik Assadourian. Erik is a senior fellow at the Worldwatch Institute who directs its Transforming Cultures project, and he believes that we need to think differently about everything we consume, including our food. We’d first hoped to cook up some cicadas, but the much-anticipated bugs never made it to my neighborhood in Bethesda, Md. The Dutch Embassy served crickets and mealworms at a dinner last month to talk about the future of food, but I had a prior engagement. (Really.) Then we’d hoped to sample an appetizer called Cazuela de Chapulines, i.e., grasshoppers, at Casa Oaxaca, a Mexican restaurant, but they were closed for lunch. Bummer.

So we settled on Thai food, no bugs and a conversation about why western consumer culture as we know it has to come to end, at least in Erik’s view. He tells me that consumer culture could end more-or-less happily because we choose to make the transformative changes needed to adapt to a world of finite resources. Or it could end badly.

In the 2013 edition of  the Worldwatch Institute’s annual state of the world review, titled Is Sustainability Still Possible?, Erik writes:

…given that consumerism and the consumption patterns that it fuels are not compatible with the flourishing of a living planetary system, either we find ways to wrestle our cultural patterns out of the grip of those with a vested interest in maintaining consumerism or Earth’s ecosystems decline and bring down the consumer culture for the vast majority of humanity in a much crueler way.

Erik, who is 36, is not your typical environmentalist. He studied anthropology and religion at Dartmouth, and he’s as interested in economic “de-growth,” pet care and burial rituals as he is in Washington politics or electric vehicles. He’d like to see a broader and deeper environmental movement, one that helps people find their purpose in life. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, CSR, Economics, Environment, Food, NGOs, Politics, Religion, Sustainability Tagged With: , , ,

Our misguided fetish for “natural” foods

July 7, 2013
fresh-frozen-7

Fresh Frozen Vegetables: Which is it?

The supermarket has become a festival of oxymorons.

Fresh-frozen peas. Jumbo shrimp. Boneless ribs. Chanukah ham.

And the most common of all:  Natural food.

If you are eating wild-caught fish or mushrooms gathered from the woods, you’re eating natural food.

Otherwise, probably not.

There’s nothing “natural” about agriculture, whether it’s practiced on the industrial-sized soy and corn fields  in the midwest, on the sprawling fruits and vegetable farms in the Salinas Valley of California or on the local and regional farms whose owners truck their crops to the  7,800 farmers’ markets across America. Agriculture is, by definition, about the management of nature– fertilizing the soil, getting rid of weeds, insuring that crops get the water they need. Even if you grow a few tomatoes or cucumbers in your backyard, you’re enjoying the product of decades of selective breeding.

The misguided fetish for the “natural” is a problem for a couple of reasons, as I’ll explain. But first, if you doubt that the claim of “natural” is a selling point, take a look at a few of the labels that I came across the other day at the Whole Foods Market in Bethesda, Md., where I live: [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Books, Climate Change, Consumption, Environment, Food, Health, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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