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: , , , , , , , , ,

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: , , , ,

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: , , ,

Oxfam America: Big Food is failing the poor

February 25, 2013

fig-2-brands-72dpi-1280px-nologosNew research by Oxfam America into the social and environmental policies of the world’s 10 biggest food and beverage companies puts Nestle, Unilever and Coca-Cola at the top of the list and Associated British Foods, Kellogg’s and General Mills at the bottom. In the middle of the pack are Pepsico, Mars, Danone and Mondelez International (formerly Kraft).

Oxfam American said in a presss release that the Big 10 food and beverage companies, which together make $1 billion a day, are “failing millions of people in developing countries who supply land, labor, water and commodities needed to make their products.”

That stark accusation was tempered more than a little during a telephone news conference where Oxfam America launched a new global consumer-focused campaign called Behind the Brands.

Ray Offenheiser, the president of Oxfam America, described the big food companies as “recognized industry leaders.” Jane Nelson, a senior fellow at Harvard who specializes in corporate responsibility, went further, saying these are among the “most responsible, best managed, well governed companies” in the food sector.

So which is it, really? Are these companies industry leaders or are they failing the poor?

Maybe a little of both. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, Consumption, CSR, Energy 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: , , , ,

Deep green investing: a closer look

February 3, 2013
A divestment rally at Harvard

A divestment rally at Harvard

As you’ve no doubt heard, Bill McKibben and his allies at 350.org have launched a  a national campaign to persuade colleges, universities, churches, foundations and, yes, people like you and me, to stop investing in the fossil fuel industry. The campaign raises interesting questions as, I’m sure, McKibben hoped it would. Among them:

Does divestment make sense as a strategy to curb climate change?

If those of us who are concerned about climate change want to align out investments with our beliefs, what options are available?

In a column called Deep Green Investing published last week by Ensia, a lively new online magazine about environmental solutions, I argued that, by itself, divestment will probably not accomplish much. Having said that, the campaign could prove useful as one of a number of tactics being deployed by 350.org, the Sierra Club and others that are aimed at bringing about political change–namely, taxes or caps on global warming pollutants, EPA rules to curb coal-burning, etc.

In The Nation, Mark Hertsgaard argues that these grass-roots climate efforts have already produced results–350.org galvanized opposition to the Keystone Pipeline, which may have persuaded President Obama to delay a decision after the election, and the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has, along with cheap natural gas, helped drive the decline of coal in the US. Hertsgaard writes:

As important as the victories themselves was how they were won. Both the Sierra Club and 350.org eschewed the inside-the-Beltway focus and top-down political strategy of big mainstream environmental groups, as exemplified by the cap-and-trade campaign. Instead, they emphasized grassroots organizing at the local level on behalf of far-reaching demands that ordinary people could grasp and support. Their immediate goal was to block a specific pipeline or power plant, but their strategic goal was to build a popular movement and accrue political power.

This is the political context in which the divestment movement makes sense. It won’t shake up the oil industry–the Ensia story explains why–but it’s a useful organizing tool.

But what might the campaign mean for investors? Today, I’m taking a closer look at a couple of “deep green” broadly-diversified mutual funds that have decided, unlike most other funds that market themselves as green or socially responsible,” to cleanse their portfolios of companies that extract fossil fuels. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Climate Change, CSR, Energy, Environment, Socially Responsible Investing, SRI, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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