Boris Mordkovich’s electric bike ride, and mine

April 14, 2013

LUNA LIFESTYLE-01Life, it is often said, is a journey, not a destination.

Boris Mordkovich’s journey has taken him from his birthplace in Lithuania to Brooklyn, back to the former Soviet Union with nonprofit Kiva, from Capetown to London (in an 1980 Land Rover) and, most recently, from New York to San Francisco, on an electric bicycle built by Evelo, his startup company.

And he’s just 27.

Boris Mordkovich

Boris Mordkovich

“When a good adventure is offered, you don’t refuse it,” Boris said, when we talked via Skype the other day.

Boris recently reached out to me to tell me about his latest adventure, Evelo, which is one of a dozen or so companies trying to persuade Americans to try electric bikes–which are not not motorcycles or mopeds, but bicycles with pedals that get a boost from an electric motor.

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve heard about electric cars. But you may not be familiar with electric bikes. I was surprised to learn from Boris that about 30 million electric bikes were sold worldwide last year. Probably 90% were sold in China, and another million or two in Europe. But even in the US — notwithstanding all the hype about Tesla, the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf–electric bikes may well have outsold electric cars. I’d be more definitive but reliable statistics on e-bikes are hard to come by.

Why would anyone buy an e-bike? The Evelo website answers that question with a set of questions of its own: [click to continue...]

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

Mark Tercek: The business case for nature

April 7, 2013

Tercek-Adams-Natures-FortuneThe value of nature is astonishing, when you stop and think about it. Marshes protect coastlands. Urban trees clean the air. Forests provide timber. Oceans give us seafood.  Snow-capped mountains store drinking water. Some might say nature is priceless.

Not Mark Tercek, the former investment banker at Goldman Sachs who became CEO of The Nature Conservancy in 2008. His new book, Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature (Basic Books, 2013), argues that nature provides enormous economic benefits to society, business and consumers, and that, if we can figure out how to value and pay for those benefits, we can slow down and even reverse the degradation of nature that threatens our well-being.

It’s an important and potentially controversial argument, as Tercek acknowledges. While the 20th century conservation was all about protecting nature from people, Tercek and some of his allies in the environmental movement would like the future to be about protecting nature for people. If nothing else, he argues, recognizing the economic value of nature will expand the base of the environmentalist beyond the white, college-educated and relatively affluent folk, the backpackers and hikers and birdwatchers at its core. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Books, Climate Change, CSR, Environment, Leadership, Media, NGOs, Politics, Sustainability, Water

In Haiti, philanthropy could lead to profits for NRG Solar

March 31, 2013
NRG Energy volunteers in Haiti

NRG Energy volunteers working in Haiti

A startling encounter with a young boy got David Crane, the CEO of NRG Energy, hooked on Haiti.

It was his first night in the Caribbean nation, months after the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 Haitians and destroyed 250,000 homes and 30,000 businesses.

As Crane tells the story, he and his daughter, who had traveled to Port au Prince to volunteer with the Clinton Global Initiative, left a cocktail reception to return to their hotel when she said, “Daddy, there’s a body under the car.”

A security guard gently kicked a boy of about 10, who emerged naked from beneath their SUV.

“This kid looked up at me,” Crane remembers. “There was no life in his eyes. No hope. Complete nothingness. I was so shocked. There were any number of things that I could have done for that kid. I just stood there and did nothing, except act like a dumb American.”

Since then, Crane and NRG Energy, its suppliers and its employees have done a great deal. He’s been back to Haiti a half dozen times, often accompanied by his wife and five children. NRG  made a $1 million commitment through the Clinton Global Initiative and  in partnership with Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) to bring solar power to rural areas of Haiti.

“I didn’t mean to get so emotionally caught up in Haiti, but I did,” he told me, when we spoke by phone the other day.

Now, Crane says, he is hoping that what began as a charitable initiative will demonstrate the power of solar energy to spur economic development in poor countries. It could also help create business opportunities in the Caribbean for NRG. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, CSR, Energy, Environment, Global Poverty, Sustainability

Taxing carbon at Disney, Microsoft and Shell

March 27, 2013

urlMany economists, left and right, favor a carbon tax. Requiring companies and, ultimately, all of us to pay when we generate greenhouse gas emissions would deliver many benefits. By raising the costs of fossil fuels, a carbon tax would help drive efficiency and conservation. It would stimulate investment in low-carbon sources of energy, and encourage research into new clean-energy technologies. It would, of course, reduce the emissions that cause global warming; right now, anyone is free to dump the equivalent of garbage into the atmosphere without paying a penalty.

More broadly, economists say, governments should impose taxes on things that we want less of, like alcohol, tobacco and pollution–these are known as Pigovian taxes–and try to reduce the costs of the things that we want more of, like jobs, which, unfortunately, cost more to create when government burdens employers with payroll taxes and health care mandates.

What impact might carbon taxes have on business? In my latest story for the Guardian Sustainable Business, I look at three companies — Disney, Microsoft and Shell — that have decided to impose carbon taxes on themselves. They also favor government action to regulate carbon emissions.

Here’s how the story begins:

Visitors who climb aboard the steam trains in the Disneyland resort in southern California need not worry about their carbon footprint. The trains are powered by soy-based cooking oil recycled from the resort’s kitchens.

It’s a Mickey Mouse gesture, really, when set against the millions of miles that park visitors travel by car and plane to reach Disneyland. But it’s driven, in part, by an innovative and forward-thinking tool that Walt Disney, which posted revenues of $42.3bn (£27.8bn) in 2012, uses to regulate its greenhouse gas emissions. A self-imposed carbon tax.

It’s not just Disney. Although most of the world’s governments have declined to put a price on carbon emissions, a handful of global companies, including Microsoft and Shell, have chosen to act on their own. They have established internal carbon prices in an effort to reduce emissions, promote energy efficiency and encourage the use of cleaner sources of power, just as a government tax or cap-and-trade program would.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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

In defense of environmental extremism

March 21, 2013
David Brower and friends

David Brower and friends

The other night, I saw A Fierce Green Fire, a documentary history of the environmental movement, as part of the excellent DC Environmental Film Festival. The movie was OK, worth seeing, but not great, a bit PBS-like in its sweep.  By trying to cover a  lot, the filmmakers mostly skim the surface: Here’s Sierra Club  founder John Muir, there’s Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, remember when Jimmy Carter put a solar heater on the White House roof, say hello to Stewart Brand and Bill McKibben, meet Wangari Maathai, and let’s not overlook environmental justice and the Copenhagen climate talks, and wasn’t that Buckminster Fuller? Nor does the film look critically at environmentalism; it’s narrated by Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, Isabel Allende and Meryl Streep, which pretty much tells you all you need to know.

FierceGreenFire_posterHaving said that, the film, sometimes by design and sometimes inadvertently, manages to deliver a useful reminder about radicals and rabble-rousers: They are often the ones who drive change. Had Barry Goldwater been an environmentalist, he might have said that extremism in defense of the earth is no vice and that moderation, when it comes to climate change, is no virtue. The environmental movement’s heroes, at least in this telling, are David Brower and Lois Gibbs and Chico Mendes and Greenpeace, and not those who work inside the Beltway or travel to UN conferences. At the very least, grass-roots, bottom-up activism created the conditions that drove change in Washington.

Consider, for example, these stirring words from a presidential State of the Union address, which is (too) briefly excerpted in the movie: [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Books, Climate Change, Environment, NGOs, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Meat lovers, rejoice! Cattle could be a climate-change solution.

March 13, 2013

cattle-ranch-sierra-nevada-mountainsIt’s become a truism of the environmental movement. Eating meat is bad for the planet. A few years back, a couple of researchers published a study claiming that livestock is responsible for 51 percent — 51 percent! — of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The FAO says it’s closer to 18 percent, but still…

Jim Howell, a lifelong rancher and the CEO of a company called Grasslands LLC, says this conventional wisdom is ill-informed and misleading. More important, he has set out to disprove it. Grasslands owns four cattle ranches in South Dakota and Montana, where the company is monitoring the environmental impacts of its unconventional approach to ranching — called holistic management – and forging relationships with nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy and the Natural Resources Defense Council, hoping to turn them into allies. Last month, Howell’s partner, mentor and friend, Allan Savory, who is a Zimbabwean farmer, politician and environmentalist, delivered a TED talk called “How to Green the World’s Deserts and Reverse Climate Change” that rapidly attracted about half a million views. Their argument, in brief, is that traditional ranching methods can degrade land and threaten biodiversity but that, when managed well, cows can actually be restorative.

What’s most interesting (to me, anyway) is that Howell, Allan Savory and their investor-partners in Grasslands believe that they can use markets to drive their unorthodox ideas about ranching to a much, much larger scale. They argue that holistic management is better for business, better for the land, better for the climate and, not incidentally, a way to raise more cattle on less land than conventional methods and thus help feed a hungry, growing planet.

If it sounds too good to be true….well, their arguments have been controversial for decades, and certainly since 1988, when Savory described his methods in a 564-page book called Holistic Resource Management,  In a book review[PDF, download] in the Journal of Soil & Water Conservation, a Berkeley range ecologist named James Bartolome wrote: “Holistic resource management itself is a model for a management system with little novelty and severe technical problems…Those who apply Savory’s approach do so at their peril.” The Savory Institute has compiled a portfolio of supporting evidence, including peer-reviewed papers, but the debate rages on.

Jim Howell

Jim Howell

Howell, 44, comes from a family that has been ranching in Colorado since the late 1800s. He intends to bring further science and economics to bear on the question of whether ranching, done right, can help regenerate the planet, improve the farm economy and, as one of his investors, John Fullerton, puts it, “harness the power of capital and markets to shift the course of capitalism onto a more just and sustainable path.” A former managing director at JP Morgan, Fullerton is now president of the Capital Institute and an investor in Grasslands LLC, along with Larry Lunt, a private investor and environmentalist who runs a family office called Armonia. The Savory Institute, a for-profit company that carries out Savory’s work–Howell’s wife is CEO–is also an owner of Grasslands. Other investors will be brought on as Grasslands grows, as its owners expect it to. [click to continue...]

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

Can a solar-powered plane help curb climate change?

March 7, 2013

solar-impulse

If you are among those who believe that the environmental movement needs more upbeat and inspiring stories, and less gloom and doom, you will want to hear about Bertrand Piccard, Andre Borschberg and their solar-powered airplane, Solar Impulse.

Solar Impulse is an engineering marvel. Its has the wingspan of an Airbus A340 — it’s 208 feet across — yet weighs only about 3,500 pounds, about the same as mid-sized family car. Powered only by the light of the sun, which is captured in nearly 12,000 solar cells (built by US manufacturer SunPower) arrayed on the wings, it can reach an altitude of more than 27,000 feet and stay aloft for more than 24 hours, day and night. In May, Piccard and Borschberg, the Swiss adventurers who founded and built Solar Impulse will fly the plane from California to Virginia.

Piccard, left, and Borschberg

Piccard, left, and Borschberg

This is very cool. I’m not a tech geek, but I was intrigued enough to take the opportunity to meet Andre Borschberg when he visited Washington early this week. Piccard, who is the better known of the duo, comes from a family of explorers; his grandfather August was the first person to pilot a balloon into the stratosphere, and see the curvature of the earth with his own eyes. He’s a psychiatrist by profession. Borschberg, by contrast, is a 60-year-old MIT-trained engineer and entrepreneur, who led the team of engineers, physicists, software designers and who have spent nearly a decade (and about $120 million) designing and building several versions of the aircraft. A round-the-world trip is planned for 2015. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Energy, Environment, Leadership, Media, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , ,

If electric cars are the answer, what’s the question?

March 5, 2013
An eVgo charging station

An eVgo charging station

Like many environmentalists, I’d love to see lots of people driving electric cars. If  broadly adopted, electric cars will go some way towards limiting air pollution, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and undermining the power of oil oligarchs in the Arab world and elsewhere. Electric cars produce what economists call “positive externalities,” that is, consequences that benefit people other than their owners.

But what problem to do they solve for electric-car owners? That question has been on my mind since my recent visit to Israel, when I drove a Better Place car and experienced, first-hand, one of the obvious drawbacks of electric vehicles: They don’t go very far without refueling. [See my January blogpost, Better Place is alive but not well.] This is a problem not just for Better Place, but for other sellers of pure electric cars, like the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla Model S.

Today, I took a closer look at Better Place in a story for the YaleEnvironment360 website. Here’s how it begins:

If you want to sell electric cars, Israel looks like a great place to start. It’s a small country, with most people clustered around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Gasoline costs more than $7.50 a gallon, and oil revenues help support Israel’s Arab foes. So it’s easy to understand why Shai Agassi, an entrepreneur who was born in Israel and made a fortune in Silicon Valley, chose to launch his Better Place electric-car company in Israel, while preparing plans to expand in Europe, Australia, Japan, China, and the U.S.

What’s harder to understand is why things have gone so badly. Better Place, which staked out its position in the electric car market with an innovative battery-swapping technology, has sold only about 750 cars in Israel, while piling up losses of more than $500 million. Agassi was forced out of Better Place in October, his successor as CEO quit in January, and the company has put its global rollout on hold. Better Place needs to raise more money this year, and that won’t be easy, insiders say.

Start-ups often stumble, of course, but Better Place’s woes raise questions that matter to anyone who cares about electric cars and their future in a low-carbon economy. Has Better Place sputtered because of its own mistakes, or are the company’s difficulties a sign of the broader challenges facing electric cars?

As part of my reporting (much of which didn’t make its way into the story) I spoke to executives at General Motors, Nissan, the charging network eVgo and others, to see how electric cars are faring here in the U.S. Last year, Americans bought 52,000 all-electric cars or plug-in hybrids–vehicles, that is, designed to run primarily on electricity, like the Leaf,  the Chevy Volt and the Tesla. That’s about 0.35% of U.S. car sales, which topped 14.5 million in 2012. By comparison, the best-selling passenger car, the Toyota Camry, sold 405,000 units, without, incidentally, the benefit of the billions of dollars in government loans, grants and tax credits that have flowed to the electric car industry. EVs have attracted lots of attention but they have been slow to penetrate the mainstream. [click to continue...]

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

d.light: Solar power for the poor

March 3, 2013
A girl in India, studying with d.light

A girl in India, studying with d.light

About three decades ago, Donn Tice was an MBA student at the University of Michigan, studying with the late C.K. Prahalad, who was developing his argument that companies can make money and do good by creating products and services for the world’s poorest people. It’s an exciting notion, popularized in Prahalad’s  influential 2004 book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Today, Donn Tice is the CEO of d.light, which sells solar-powered lanterns to the poor. He’s trying to prove that his teacher was right, that a fortune awaits those who can create and sell life-changing products that help the very poor.

For now, this remains an unproven hope. Dozens of startups have ventured into the global south, selling everything from $100 laptops, cheap bikes, clean cook stoves and solar panels to the poor. Some have enjoyed success [See, for example, my blogpost, Clean Star Mozambique: Food, fuel and forests at the bottom of the pyramid] but few have achieved meaningful scale. Or made anything approaching a fortune.

The good news is that d.light is getting there. The company is now selling about 200,000 solar-powered lanterns and lighting systems a month in about 40 countries. By its own accounting, d. light has sold nearly 3 million solar lighting products and changed the lives of more than 13 million people. And, if all goes according to plan, the company will turn profitable this year.

“In addition to bring lighting to people who need it and power to people who can’t acccess it –which is our mission–we think we have the ability to demonstrate that this is a business model that works,” Donn told me, during a recent visit to the d.light offices  in San Francisco. Earlier this year, d.light was recognized with the $1,500,000 Zayed Future Energy Prize.

[click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Energy, Environment, Global Poverty, Small Business, Social Entrepreneurs, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Shell: Get ready for a warmer world

February 28, 2013

image.1614211676Solar power and natural gas will grow rapidly in the next few decades, if new scenarios from global energy giant Shell prove accurate.

And as the technology to capture carbon from the burning fossil fuels reaches scale, and sources of clean energy grow, net carbon emissions could drop to zero by 2100.

Even so, it will be hard, if not impossible, to meet the goal set by the world’s governments of holding the average increase in global temperatures to 2 degrees centigrade.

6280287836_2ccdb72913_mToday in Washington, Royal Dutch Shell’s chief executive, Peter Voser, and Jeremy Bentham, the head of Shell’s scenarios team, unveiled a pair of “New Lens” scenarios, dubbed “oceans” and “mountains,” and available in much greater detail here. In essence (and it’s more complicated this), the “mountains” scenario envisions a strong role for government and coordinated global policy, while the “oceans” scenario sees dispersed power, greater volatility, a stronger role for markets and rapid economic growth. Shell has been generating scenarios for about 40 years, to help guide the company’s long-term planning as well as influence policy makers.

Underlying both scenarios, though, are assumptions about the world’s increasing population and economic growth that together will drive demand for energy by about 80% by 2050. That rising demand is all but unavoidable, Bentham said, even assuming strong policies to promote efficiency or high energy prices that discourage consumption.

Meeting that demand for energy, while reducing carbon emissions dramatically, will be extremely difficult, to say the least, the Shell executives said. [click to continue...]

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