NGOs

The eerie quiet of the insurance industry

January 5, 2012

If there’s one industry that ought to be concerned about the threat of global warming, it’s the insurance industry. OK, the ski industry, too, but I digress.

Dave Jones, California’s insurance commissioner, recently put it this way: “Climate change is an obvious physical threat to us all, but increasingly it also poses a serious financial threat to the insurance industry…” When extreme weather causes damage, insurers pay.

So you’d expect insurance companies to be among the most forceful voices in corporate America calling for the regulation greenhouse gas emissions.

Uh, no. They’ve been eerily quiet.

And, at the least, you’d expect them to be proudly steering some of their massive investments to clean energy or energy efficiency projects aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

Wrong again.

“It’s surprising, in a sense, because they have so much to lose from climate change,” says Sharlene Leurig, senior manager of the insurance program at Ceres, a nonprofit coalition of investor and environmental groups. But, she notes, insurance is a conservative business. The industry is all about risk, but it doesn’t want to take the risk of speaking out on climate change. [click to continue…]

{ 5 comments }

Why I’m (still) an optimist

January 1, 2012

Happy New Year! And good riddance to 2011, a year during which we made little or no progress on some of the issues that I care most about: climate change, the long-term federal debt, social mobility (aka the American dream), and our dysfunctional Congress. Yet I remain an optimist.

Texas drought 2011

I could write many words about our woes. Instead, I’ll try to be succinct. On the climate issue, global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by the largest amount on record in 2010, we learned recently, and 2011 surely brought further increases.  Concentrations of CO2 are 39% above where they were at the start of the industrial era and approaching the point when some scientists say it will be nearly impossible to contain global warming, the Guardian reports. Neither the US nor the UN moved closer to regulating CO2. In a discouraging development, Republicans Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich backed away from their once-sensible support of greenhouse gas regulation, in what can only be seen as shameless pandering to the know-nothing wing of the Republican Party. Discouraging, too, was the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which will slow down the growth of carbon-free nuclear power. So will the failure of Solyndra. Meanwhile, the U.S. suffered massive flooding of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, a terrible drought in Texas, record wildfires and at least 2,941 monthly weather records that were broken by extreme events, according to the NRDC.. Coincidence? Uh, no.

Like the atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the federal budget deficit has been growing.That’s no coincidence either. We’re living beyond our means, whether by burning fossil fuels or taxpayer dollars, and sticking future generations with the cleanup bill. Just last week, the White House asked for a $1.2 trillion increase in the federal debt limit, raising it to about $16.4 trillion. According to Marketplace Radio, that amounts to about $52,000 for every American. For a typical  family of four, that’s bigger than the mortgage. [click to continue…]

{ 9 comments }

In defense of the plastic bag

December 22, 2011

Pity the much-maligned plastic bag.

Plastic bags are being banned or taxed in cities and counties across America–just this week in Seattle, before that in San Francisco, Portland and Washington, D.C.  Beginning in January, Montgomery County, MD, where I live, will impose a five-cent charge for carryout bags at all retail stores. Like most of my neighbors (median household income in the county tops $92,000) I can afford the extra nickel.

But I’m not persuaded that plastic bag bans or taxes makes sense. Here’s why.

They’re not  based on science. Independent studies show that plastic bags are environmentally preferable to paper. Other suggest that, when they are reused, they are preferable to the reusable plastic or cloth sacks that many of us tote around.

Some of the arguments put forth for the bans don’t hold up. That plastic waste waste in the oceans you’ve probably read about? No, it’s not the size of Texas. Nor is it made of plastic bags.

Getting rid carryout bags won’t lead to a long-term solution to the problem of plastic waste. Maybe instead of banning or taxing bags, we should be recycling them. That’s the argument being put forth by a company called Hilex Poly, which will recycle tens of millions of pounds of plastic bags, sacks and wraps this year, and would like to do more.

You may disagree but after digging into this subject for a while, I’m certain about only one thing: It’s complicated. [click to continue…]

{ 13 comments }

Look who’s coming to Brainstorm Green

December 11, 2011

Next April, FORTUNE will again bring together some of the smartest people we know in sustainability for Brainstorm Green, the magazine’s annual conference on business and the environment.

This is will be our 5th Brainstorm Green–hard for me to believe, since I’ve been involved since the beginning–and we’ve again got a first-rate lineup of leaders from corporate America, the  environmental movement, the investment community and government, as well as a scattering of interesting writers, thinkers and doers about “green.”

Once again, the event will be held at the spectacular Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel, CA. Dates are April 16-18, 2012.

Alan Mulally

New faces for 2012 from the corporate world will include Alan Mulally, the president and CEO of Ford; Rob Walton, the chairman of Walmart; Andy Taylor, the chairman and CEO of Enteprise (they buy more cars than anyone in America); C. Larry Pope, the chairman and CEO of Smithfield Foods (they make more hot dogs than anyone in America, as I wrote in Smithfield Foods: Sustainable Pork?); Vance Bell, the chairman and CEO of Shaw Industries (the world’s largest carpet manufacturer, see my blogpost, This carpet has moral fiber); John Faraci, the chairman and CEO of International Paper; Gary Hirshberg, the CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm; Russ Ford, the executive vice president of Shell; Bea Perez, the chief sustainability officer of Coca-Cola; and Trae Vassallo of Kleiner Perkins. [click to continue…]

{ 1 comment }

Maybe the best retail ad ever

November 27, 2011

Patagonia's home page this weekend

In the midst of the madness of black Friday, and this weekend of American consumerism run amok, come a few wise words from the outdoor retailer Patagonia.

In a full-page ad in the New York Times, the privately held company asks shoppers to think more carefully about what they purchase, and the real cost of all the things we buy.

The headline: Don’t Buy This Jacket

“We ask you to buy less and to reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else,” the company says.

The rest of the ad is worth reading, and thinking about, so I’ll copy the text here:

It’s Black Friday, the day in the year retail turns from red to black and starts to make real money. But Black Friday, and the culture of consumption it reflects, puts the economy of natural systems that support all life firmly in the red. We’re now using the resources of one-and-a-half planets on our one and only planet.

Because Patagonia wants to be in business for a good long time – and leave a world inhabitable for our kids – we want to do the opposite of every other business today. We ask you to buy less and to reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else. [click to continue…]

{ 25 comments }

Time for a carbon tax?

November 9, 2011

“I was a huge supporter of cap and trade,” said Wayne Leonard, the CEO of Entergy, a $11 billion utility company.

“We developed enormously elegant solutions, but they couldn’t get done.”

Taxing carbon emissions is the next best way to deal with the threat of global climate disruptions, he said, in part because it would give the energy industry a degree of certainty about how to deploy its capital.

“A simple tax on every one is a starting point,” Leonard said. Proceeds could be used to reduce the federal deficit or rebated to consumers.

Leonard spoke today (Nov. 9) at a launch event for the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a new organization that is succeeding the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Eileen Claussen, who has directed the Pew Center for 13 years, will lead the new group, which has raised money from three so-called strategic partners — Entergy, HP and Shell — as well as Alcoa Foundation, Bank of America, GE, The Energy Foundation, Duke Energy, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Pew is no longer a backer.

[click to continue…]

{ 4 comments }

Starbucks: We are indivisible

October 30, 2011

I’m not much for patriotic displays, but I’m proud to wear this red, white and blue wristband inscribed with the word INDIVISIBLE.

I hope you’ll wear one, too. They’re available, beginning Tuesday, at Starbucks, for a donation of $5 or more to a project called Let’s Create Jobs for USA.

The program aims to create thousands of jobs across the country, by investing community development financial institutions (CDFIs) — mostly credit unions and community banks — that will then lend to small businesses, nonprofits, housing and commercial developers, micro-enterprises and the like, all to spark the economy and create jobs.

I’m a fan of this project,  for several reasons.

First, there’s no more front-of-mind issue in America today than jobs. So this a great example of how a big company can help tackle an important  problem–while enhancing its reputation as a business that supports its communities.

Second, Let’s Create Jobs for USA underscores the fact that, despite the rhetoric from politicians, jobs are best created by the private sector.  If you’re anti-business, you’re anti-jobs.

Ben Packard

Third, although credit for the campaign ultimately belongs to Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO, Let’s Create Jobs for USA unfolded as it did because of a connection between Ben Packard, vice president of global responsibility at Starbucks and Mark Pinsky, president and CEO of the Opportunity Finance Network, a national network of CDFIs. Ben, Mark and I serve together on the board of Net Impact, a great organization of students and young professionals whose purpose is to inspire and equip young people to use the power of business to make the world a better place.

Let’s Create Jobs for USA is very much in the spirit of Net Impact. [click to continue…]

{ 9 comments }

Sierra Club’s Brune: We’re stopping coal

October 23, 2011

Michael Brune

“We are starting to create the ecological U-turn that David Brower talked about, decades ago. On coal, it’s dramatic. We’ve seen a halt to the coal rush.”

“Primarily because of regulations (from)  the Obama administration, we can now project a future where our oil consumption will decline.”

“It’s not sufficient to address the problem, but it’s a positive trend.”

So says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. [David Brower, who was made famous in John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid, was one of his predecessors.] Others fret that the environmental movement is on the defensive these days. Mike, an optimistic, sees progress.

Indeed, Mike argues that the effort by Republicans in the House to roll back a slew of environmental regulations as a sign that the enviros are winning.

“Republicans in Congress and their corporate benefactors are worried about the threat to the status quo in the energy industry,” he says. “That’s the reason this is happening. We’re making progress.” [click to continue…]

{ 8 comments }

Wendy Schmidt does damage control

October 11, 2011

Wendy Schmidt

The Schmidt Family Foundation, which was established in 2006 by Wendy and Eric Schmidt—he was the longtime CEO of Google—has taken on a very big job: It wants to help transform the world’s environmental and energy practices in the 20th century.

In the meantime, there are messes to clean up.

So in July of 2010, as the BP Deepwater Horizon continued to spill oil, Wendy Schmidt joined forces with the X PRIZE foundation to create the $1.4 Million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE, a competition to find better, faster and more efficient ways to capture crude oil from the ocean’s surface.

Today (10-11) in New York, they announced a winner—a private company from Illinois called Elastec that specializes in oil spill recovery. Team Elastec won the $1 million first prize in the competition by developing technology that sucked up oil at a rate of 4670 gallons per minute – more than three times the industry norm.

“The point here is to have a better first response,” Wendy Schmidt told me by phone last week. “We can keep the immediate damage from the next oil spill from being so damaging.”

I spoke to Wendy Schmidt last week because I was curiously to learn more about the Schmidt Family Foundation and its mission. The foundation reported assets of about $168 million, as of December 2009 and it has made about $13 million in grants in 2011.

Why focus on energy and the environment?, I asked Schmidt. She replied:

We look at the world and say we have a 150 year old energy infrastructure that can fail. It’s not designed well enough not to fail, catastrophically. We look at how we can commit our creativity to help safeguard the living systems of the world, to protect them and protect us, from the failures of a system of extraction and combustion that we know will have to end anyway.

To that end, the 11th Hour Project, which was started by Schmidt and is financed by the foundation, makes grants to a long list of  advocacy and educational groups including The Regeneration Project, Green for All, the Rocky Mountain Institute and Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff project. All are designed to help people better understand their connection to the planet.

But changing attitudes takes time, and Schmidt said she felt a sense of urgency to do something as oil gushed during the summer of 2010 from the Deepwater Horizon spill. [click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

Fixing older buildings…and market failures

September 20, 2011

Markets promote efficiency and drive out waste…

Except when they don’t.

A glaring example of market failure in the U.S. economy is the energy wasted in buildings. When the Empire State Building renovated its heating and cooling system, upgraded its lighting and installed new windows, the owners cut their energy bills by 40%. Think about it—a 40% cost savings. That’s big.

Today, at an event called Business Climate 2011 in New York, a group of cities and companies and a nonprofit called the Carbon War Room announced a plan to curb wasted energy and unecessary pollution—importantly, at no taxpayer cost.

Jigar Shah of the Carbon War Room, which put the group together, said this is a very big deal. “I think this is the most important climate announcement in the last five years,” he said.

“Building retrofits have been a colossal failure,” Jigar said, and that’s about to change. [click to continue…]

{ 4 comments }

← Previous Entries