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: , , , ,

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: , , , , , , , , ,

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: , , ,

Turning JP Morgan green from the inside out

February 18, 2013
Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

Can Wall Street become a friend of the earth? For nearly a decade now, most of the big investment and commercial banks have had chief sustainability officers, but it’s never been clear to me what they can and cannot do.

To find out, I spoke recently with Matt Arnold, the head of environmental affairs for JP Morgan Chase, who I’ve known for years. Matt, a lifelong environmentalist, was refreshingly honest.

In my latest column for the Guardian Sustainable Business website, I report on what I learned. Here’s how the story begins:

Deep inside the belly of the beast known as JPMorgan Chase toils a lifelong environmentalist and former Eagle Scout named Matthew Arnold who is trying to help turn the bank, if not green, well, a bit greener. It’s a daunting job.

Arnold, 51, joined the company in autumn 2011 as head of the office of environmental affairs because, he says, of the sheer scale of the opportunity; last year, the bank booked $99.9bn (£64bn) in revenue and $21.3bn (£14bn) in profits, providing credit and raising capital of more than $1.8tn, for everything from home mortgages to credit cards to corporate bonds and IPOs. The bank manages another $1.4bn in assets (as of September 2012) for clients. If Arnold can help steer even a slice of that towards more sustainable ventures – for example, towards wind and solar energy and away from coal – he will be doing his part to make Wall Street a friend of the earth. But can he?

“The position I’m in now has the greatest potential for impact of anything I’ve done,” Arnold says. “Yet there’s no manual for this. There’s not a clear roadmap.”

You can read the rest of the column here.

On Wednesday, by coincidence, at the GreenBiz Forum in New York, I’ll be interviewing Matt and Erika Karp, who is head of global sector research at UBS, to talk about the role of Wall Street in promoting sustainability. Matt and Erika will also be joining us this spring at Fortune Brainstorm Green.

 

 

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

John Mackey: Hippie, libertarian, CEO

February 12, 2013

imageThe top executives of big publicly-traded US companies, in my experience, tend to be rather drab fellows (nearly all are men) who choose their words carefully, hew carefully to the middle of the road in their thinking and rarely say (or do) anything outrageous.*

Not John Mackey, the founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods Market. For better and occasionally for worse, Mackey is an original, who doesn’t run his company by any conventional management book.

Instead, he has written his own book, called Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, with co-author Raj Sisodia, an academic affiliated with Bentley University. It’s a good read, especially because of the insights it delivers into the unusual culture and practices of Whole Foods, as well as into Mackey’s own evolution.

Some examples from the book: [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Books, Business Ethics, Climate Change, Consumption, Economics, Environment, Food, Leadership, Media, Politics, Sustainability, Transparency, Uncategorized, Workplace Tagged With: , , ,

Welcome, Ensia!

January 31, 2013

Ensia calls itself “a new magazine and event series showcasing environmental solutions in action.”

Read that description carefully and you’ll see how this media venture  got its  name. It took me a while.

Even as the traditional press continues to shrink–my former employer, Time Inc., just this week eliminated another 500 jobs, or 6% of its workforce–new outlets arise. I’ve been particularly impressed lately by the work of such nonprofit underwriters of journalism as Pro Publica, EnvironmentalHealthNews and the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Ensia, too, is a nonprofit, published by the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, which formerly published a magazine called Momentum, and funded by a major grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which supports environmental causes.

voice-green-investing-gunther-mainI’m pleased to be a contributor. Jon Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment (and a lively presence on Twitter as @globalecoguy), asked me to write an occasional opinion piece about business and sustainability. My first one looks at some issues raised by Bill McKibben’s campaign to get institutional investors to divest from fossil fuel companies, and how individual investors might want to think about divesting. Here’s how it begins:

In the investing world, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. When it comes to climate science, predicting the future is more straightforward: If we burn all of the fossil fuels on the books of the big oil, coal and gas companies—2,795 gigatons, to be precise—or even most of them, we’re headed for trouble. Bill McKibben, the writer and environmental activist, calls this global warming’s terrifying new math. In response, McKibben and his allies at 350.org have launched a coast-to-coast campaign to persuade colleges, universities, churches, foundations and, yes, people like you and me, to stop investing in the fossil fuel industry.

“It does not make sense,” McKibben says, “to invest my retirement money in a company whose business plan means that there won’t be an earth to retire on.”

His logic is unassailable. But divestment alone won’t deliver the change we need—only political action can do that. And, while it is possible to cleanse your personal portfolio of fossil fuels, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Here’s why.

You can read the rest of the column here. I’m going to dive into this topic in more depth here on the blog in a day or two.

Meantime, browse around Ensia. I think it’s off to a good start.

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

Better Place is alive, but not well

January 20, 2013
A Better Place battery switching station

A Better Place battery switching station

I’m driving a Better Place Renault Fluence all-electric car from Tel Aviv to a kibbutz in the northern Negev, about a 60-mile trip. I can’t decide whether to keep my eyes on the road, on the GPS system to make sure I don’t miss my exit or on the data flowing out of my 22 kWh  battery, telling me how much electricity I’m using at any given moment, how much remains and how much, in theory, I’ll have left when I reach my destination. A wrong turn or two, and I could run out of juice–and without an internal combustion engine in the car, a nearby gas station will be no help at all.

Suddenly, I understand “range anxiety.” Breathe slowly and deeply, I tell myself, trying to recall a meditation DVD I’d listened to a few days before.

Eventually, I relaxed and, by the time I’d made it to the kibbutz and back to Tel Aviv, I’d thoroughly enjoyed the trip. The Renault all-electric car ran smoothly, and silently, and it was fun to drive.. The ingenious, fully-automated battery-switching technology that the company has designed to make long-distance driving easier worked (almost) flawlessly. Better Place’s customer service, which I called upon on couple of times, was first-rate.

Having said that, Better Place appears to be running out of gas, er, electricity, well, actually, money and time. That’s a shame. This is a very cool company that set out to change the world. [click to continue...]

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

Tires, and the second chemical revolution

January 9, 2013

EarthTalkTires“If we’ve made it once already, why should we make it again?”

Alan Barton, the chief executive officer of Lehigh Technologies, is talking about tires, but his question could be asked about almost any product.

In a world of limited resources and rising energy costs, why not turn everything that we no longer need or want into something else?

This is the aspirational goal of what’s called cradle-to-cradle design. It’s easy to talk about and hard to do, as I was reminded last week when talking with Barton about Lehigh, a privately-held, venture-backed company that turns worn out tires into what it calls “micronized rubber powders,” or MRPs, that are then used in new tires as well as shipping pallets, asphalt roads and waterproofing, among other things.

I learned a lot about tires during our interview. Roughly speaking, about one tire per person is discarded every year in the US or western Europe. That’s a lot–nearly 300 million in the US. They used to be discarded under bridges or in trash dumps until governments and the tire industry set up recycling and collection systems. Now, most are burned for fuel, often in paper mills or in cement kilns, with an emissions profile similar to coal. Others are ground up for construction materials, mulch, roads or sports surfaces, according to the Rubber Manufacturers Association. Some, of course, still wind up in dumps. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, Economics, Energy, Environment, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , ,

Who’s responsible for factory conditions in poor countries? Has CSR gone too far?

January 6, 2013

garment-factoryJust who is responsible for the fire in a garment factory in Bangladesh that killed more than 100 workers in November?

The factory owner? The government of Bangladesh? US and European brands and retailers who bought the clothes made there? Shoppers who demand the latest styles at low prices?

And who deserves credit for the improvements in working conditions at Foxconn, China’s largest employer and Apple’s biggest supplier?

Apple? The Chinese labor market? Journalists at The New York Times?

Similar questions could be asked about paint factories that discharge pollution into rivers, toy factories that use dangerous chemicals or factories everywhere that run inefficient equipment or burn dirty fuels.

For nearly two decades, a core belief of the social-responsibility movement  has been that western brands and retailers must take responsibility for the social and environmental performance of the factories in their supply chain. This has created an immense infrastructure–an industry, really, of consultants who write codes of conduct for those factories, inspect the factories, report on them and deploy a combination of carrots and sticks that, at least in theory, bring about improved performance.

In essence, US and European brands have become quasi-governmental, undemocratic standards setters and enforcers of social and environmental norms.

So how’s it working? The year just past put a spotlight on a glaring failure of that system–the fire in Bangladesh, where factory conditions in the garment industry are widely deemed to remain unsafe–and on what has been cited as one of its successes–the new transparency of Apple’s supply chain, and the improved conditions at Foxconn, which supplies HP, Sony, Dell and other electronics companies, as well as Apple. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Business Ethics, Consumption, CSR, Economics, Environment, Global Poverty, Health, Human rights, Sustainability, Transparency, Workplace Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

The trouble with local food

December 11, 2012

There’s lots to like about the local food movement. Fresh, local seasonal fruits and vegetables taste better. Farmers markets enhance the vitality of city life. Cutting “food miles” reduces carbon pollution, and money spent by locavores stays with nearby growers.

Alberto Weisser, the CEO of Bunge, a $60-billion a year global agribusiness and food company is, not surprisingly, unimpressed. His global business is built on trade. Bunge operates in 40 countries. It charters 150 ships a day to carry agricultural products. Only one terminal to export grain from the US has been built in the past 25–and it was built by Bunge, near the Columbia River in Washington, to ship grain from the US to Asia.

But Weisser, who spoke today [Dec 11] at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, made a good case that an expansion of global trade  will be the best way to feed the world in a sustainable way, as well as increase the incomes of millions of poor farmers. Like it or not, he said, the world is more interdependent than ever.

Alberto Weisser

“When it comes to agriculture, no country is an island–even the ones that are islands,” Weisser said, displaying a flash of humor in what was otherwise a sober look at the issue of global food security. “I remain firm in my belief in free markets, and what they, and only they, can deliver.”

[click to continue...]

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