Sustainability

(Solar) power to the people

March 14, 2012

A Grid Alternatives installation in Kerman, CA

Like many environmentally-friendly products, rooftop solar power is a luxury that most Americans can’t afford: Before subsidies, it costs tens of thousands of dollars to power a typical house.*

GRID Alternatives, an Oakland, CA-based nonprofit, is trying to change that–and making headway.

Launched in 2004, GRID Alternatives has grown along with the solar industry. This year, it expects to install solar on the rooftops of about 1,000 California homes owned by low-income people. It has seven offices, a staff of about 100 people and a budget of about $25 million. The organization will soon expand to Colorado and beyond. [click to continue…]

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Direct air capture of CO2 is becoming a business, for better or worse

March 11, 2012

Klaus Lackner

Since 1999, when Columbia University physicist Klaus Lackner wrote the first scientific paper [PDF, download] about capturing carbon dioxide from the air, his unlikely idea has grown into a nascent industry. Four start-up companies, including his own, Kilimanjaro Energy, are working on technologies to extract CO2 from the atmosphere using chemical processes. The air-capture start-ups are funded by billionaires (Bill Gates, Edgar Bronfman Jr.) and venture capitalists (Arch Venture Partners), and they are attracting interest from private equity firms (Warburg Pincus), investment banks (Goldman Sachs), energy companies (Summit Power) and a military contractor (Boeing).

This week, a group of about 70 entrepreneurs, academics, investors and partners gathered in Calgary, Alberta, for the first-ever North American conference devoted to air capture. (Someone said it felt like history in the making. That remains to be seen.) As the industry’s pioneer, Lackner, who is affiliated with Columbia’s Earth Institute, played a prominent role, but he was in no mood to celebrate. While climate change was on the agenda, much of the program focused on the biggest emerging market for air capture technology–namely, using liquid CO2 for enhanced oil recovery.

Kilimanjaro’s CEO, Ned David, said that CO2 could do for the oil business what hydrofracking has done for natural gas, unleashing vast amounts of fossil fuels that might otherwise remain in the ground. “A money gusher,” he called it. Others talked about using air capture to make fuels at the military’s Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) and even, half in jest, to “green” the fizz in Coke and Pepsi.

This, of course, was not what Lackner had in mind way back when. “What makes air capture worth doing is its climate impacts,” he told me. “What will pay for it are these other applications.”

“The real problem I want to solve is not interested in being solved,” he lamented.

The conference was the strongest sign yet that direct air capture is becoming a business–for better or worse. For better? Because air capture technology has enormous potential to reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, albeit very slowly and at considerable expense. The costs remain unknown, with estimates ranging wildly from $30 per ton of CO2 captured, which is almost surely too low, to more than $600 a ton, which is almost surely too high, although the bigger number comes from a report [PDF, download] from the respected American Physical Society. For worse? Because as air capture transitions from academia into the marketplace, the start-up companies will need to generate revenues to stay alive, even if those revenues enable more oil to be pumped out of the ground. Put another way, air-capture technology has become a solution in search of a market, while its backers wait for the world to get serious about climate threat. [click to continue…]

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When “green business” isn’t enough

March 7, 2012

Into my inbox every day come press releases about this company putting solar panels on a roof or that one making its fleet more efficient. These incremental steps are laudable but  also (1) boring (2) old  hat and, most importantly, (3) unlikely to get us the environmental change we need.

Transformational change, by contrast, usually requires entire industries or groups of industries to work together, often with NGOs, sometimes with government. That’s  been going on for years–Unilever and WWF organized fisheries, NGOs and companies to form the Marine Stewardship Council back in 1997 to promote sustainable fishing practices–but lately, there seem to me more of these cooperative but complicated efforts. That’s reason for optimism.

Last fall, for example, I attended a Starbucks “cup summit” at the MIT Media Lab where the company, with the help of business guru Peter Senge, brought together paper companies, NGOs, government officials and rivals like Green Mountain coffee to figure out how to design a system to eliminate waste from coffee cups. [See The Starbucks Cup Dilemma in Fast Company.] Now Alcoa, with the help of sustainability consultant BluSkye, leading a broad and even more ambitious effort to drive up recycling rates across the US.

Reclaiming (valuable) aluminum cans

To learn about the Alcoa initiative, I met last week  in San Francisco with Jib Ellison, the founder of BluSkye,  and talked by phone with Kevin Anton, Alcoa’s chief sustainability officer.

The problem, as they both described it, is simple: Between $1 billion and $2 billion worth of aluminum cans end up in landfills each year.

Now that’s waste! [click to continue…]

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Car sharing, revving up

March 5, 2012

Who would have thought that Bill Ford, the executive chairman of the Ford Motor Co., and GM Ventures, the venture capital arm of General Motors, would invest in peer-to-peer car sharing companies?

The big automakers historically craved market share, which means selling as many new cars as they can. If Americans decide that they don’t need a car–or maybe that they only need one, instead of two or three–the car companies could be hurt.

But Bill Ford’s Fontanalis Partners, a firm that invests in “the future of mobility,”  invested last month in a campus-based car sharing startup called Wheelz, and GM Ventures is backing RelayRides, another startup that announced today that it is rolling out its service nationally.

Maybe the peer-to-peer car sharing biz is going to be a big deal. Certainly it’s revving up.

To learn a little about car sharing, I arranged to speak last week with Jeff Miller, the co-founder and CEO of Wheelz. Next week, I’ll interview Shelby Clark, the founder and chief community officer of RelayRides, at VERGE DC, a conference organized by GreenBiz, where I’m a senior writer. (Please join us a VERGE DC if you can.)  I’ll also be interviewing Steve Case at VERGE; he’s been an advocate for the sharing economy as an investor in Zipcar and in a vacation home-sharing company. [For more, see How Steve Case and his company are driving the sharing economy in The Atlantic and my own blogpost, The sharing economy and me.] [click to continue…]

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Suck It Up: My book about climate change, geoengineering and air capture of CO2

March 2, 2012

I’m pleased to let you know that my book, Suck It Up: How capturing carbon from the air can help solve the climate crisis, is being published today as an Amazon Kindle Single. Please buy the ebook here for just $1.99.

The book reflects two years of reporting and my best thinking about three topics that matter: climate change, geoengineering and a technology called direct air capture of CO2. It explains why we’ve made so little progress (none, actually) in dealing with the climate threat, and how that might change. Part of the answer is to look for ways to recycle and reuse CO2.

I’m going to print the introduction to the book below, but first a word about the publishing process. As the newspapers, magazines and book publishers that traditionally support long-form journalism are struggling, exciting new outlets like blogs and ebooks are opening up. I’m the publisher as well as the author of Suck It Up, with a big assist from Amazon, which has selected the book as a Kindle Single.

The Kindle Single allows writers to tell stories that are longer than a magazine article and shorter than a book. Suck It Up is about 17,000 words long, the equivalent of 60 to 70 double spaced typewritten pages. It’s intended to be read in one or two sittings, and it’s priced so the ideas in it will spread. If you don’t own a Kindle, you can read the book on your smart phone, iPad or laptop. Just download the free Kindle software here.

I’d like to sell lots of copies of Suck It Up not just because I think it’s a good read about an important topic, but because I want to make the ebook business model work. It’s an exciting new platform for in-depth reporting.

So, please read the intro, check out the book and if you like it, help me spread the word through social media or the old-fashioned way–tell a friend about the book. [click to continue…]

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Is investing in poor women good business?

February 29, 2012

A health educator at her work station in Bangladesh

One lesson of the Apple in China scandal is that factory monitoring is a necessary but insufficient way to improve the lives of workers in poor countries. Apple inspected its suppliers’ factories, but conditions remain harsh. While strengthening inspections and sanctions, smart brands and retailers are finding ways to help workers in their supply chains gain more control over their work and lives.

A program run by BSR (Business for Social Responsibility) called the HERproject, which gives women working in export factories access to health information, is an example of what could–and should–be done. Teaching young women about health, including reproductive health and family planning, is, by itself, a good thing. It also delivers a not-so-subtle message to factory owners that it might be good for their business to take better care of workers, instead of exploiting them until they are used up.

Many factory owners “see their workers as cogs in a machine” and act accordingly, says Racheal Yeager, who leads the HERproject for BSR. “That’s why there are high rates of turnover and high rates of absenteeism.”

“What we’re trying to do is change the mindset of the factory management,” she says. [click to continue…]

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A business-friendly, SUV-driving Lorax

February 26, 2012

Forty years after Dr. Seuss wrote the classic children’s book The Lorax, about a creature who “speaks for the trees” and the greedy industrialist who ignores his warnings, things sure have changed.

Some change has been for the better: Many, if not most, corporations are no longer the evil despoilers of the planet. To the contrary, these days they are often “greener” than consumers, and allied with environmental groups.

Some is for the worse: While Dr. Seuss, to the best of my recollection, resisted commercialization of his characters , now even the anti-industrial Lorax is for sale.

I’ve got The Lorax on my mind because, as you’ve probably heard, Universal Studios this week will release a 3-D animated movie based on the book, with the voice of Danny DeVito as The Lorax. (I haven’t seen the movie yet, but it looks great.) I moderated a panel last week in Washington for HP, one of about 70 companies, nonprofits and government agencies selected as sponsors for the movie, and I’ll moderate another on Tuesday afternoon in  San Francisco (more below, if you’d like to join us). That got me thinking about how dramatically business has evolved in the last four decades–although obviously there’s much more to be done. [click to continue…]

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“Rethinking CO2″ at Yale Environment 360

February 23, 2012

I’ve been a devoted reader of  YaleEnvironment360, an online magazine that offers excellent reporting and solid analysis of all things environmental, since its launch in 2008.  So I’m pleased that this week I wrote my first story for the website.

The story is about how carbon dioxide can be removed from the air, a technology I reported on last fall for FORTUNE and that will be the subject on my forthcoming book, Suck It Up: How capturing carbon from the air can help solve the climate crisis. The ebook will be published next month as an Amazon Kindle Single. I’ll have more to say about it (and the ebook publishing model) when the book is released.

The YaleE360 story is headlined: Rethinking Carbon Dioxide: From a Pollutant to an Asset.

Here’s how it begins:

With global greenhouse gas emissions still on the rise, despite decades of talk about curbing them, maybe the time has come to think differently about the climate crisis. Yes, we need to burn less coal, oil and natural gas, but clearly fossil fuels are going to be around for awhile. So why not try to clean up the mess they make?

That’s what a handful of prominent scientists are trying to do by developing technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air. These scientists have launched start-up companies and attracted well-to-do investors — most notably Bill Gates — along with venture capital and, most recently, the attention of Wall Street. They say their technology does not need government support, though it would help. What it needs, above all, is a mindset that regards CO2 not simply as a pollutant but as a valuable commodity.

Nathaniel “Ned” David, the chief executive of a startup called Kilimanjaro Energy, puts it this way: “The single largest waste product made by humanity is CO2. Thirty gigatons a year. It’s immensely valuable, and today we just blow it out the tail pipe. What if there were some way to actually capture it, use it, and make money?”

You can read the rest here.

Writing the story gave me the opportunity to reconnect with Roger Cohn, the editor of YaleE360, who was a classmate of mine at Yale in the 1970s (although we didn’t know one another then.) Roger, who went on to report for The Philadelphia Inquirer and edit Audubon magazine and Mother Jones, has done an excellent job with the Yale site.

A last thought: If you write a blog or host a radio show (or know someone who does)  I’d like to get the word out about the book, which explains why we’ve failed to deal with global warming and why air capture of CO2 could be a promising, market-based response to climate change. I’ll be attending the first scientific conference devoted to air capture in Calgary, Alberta, on March 7-8. More to come, soon.

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Peter Gleick, climate hero?

February 22, 2012

I need to say a few words about Peter Gleick.

If you haven’t heard of him, you will. Gleick is a co-founder of the respected Pacific Institute, a widely-recognized water expert and a McArthur Foundation “genius” fellow, but none of that matters anymore. This week, Gleick confessed to lying to the Heartland Institute to obtain confidential documents. He wrote:

I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

Until he resigned last week, Gleick was chair of the American Geophysical Union’s Task Force on Scientific Ethics.

This is a sad and shocking turn of events, and you can be sure that those who try to undermine or distort climate science will make the most of it. They already are, here and here and here at Heartland. Ugh. [click to continue…]

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A kinder, gentler hot dog

February 22, 2012

Melissa and Aaron Miller of Kinsman, Ohio recently received Food Alliance certification for their pastured pork and lamb.

Consider meat. It’s bad for the planet. It’s bad for your health if you eat too much of it, which most Americans do. (We eat three times more than the global average.) As for animal welfare, trust me, you don’t want to think about it.

Helene York is a vegetarian, but as director of strategic sourcing and research at Bon Appetit Management Co., a big food-service company, she needs to think about meat. This week, Bamco made a serious commitment to change the way it buys pork, beef, poultry and eggs.

First, the company said, it will

stop serving all pork produced using the cruel and inhumane practice of gestation crates and all eggs, including “liquid” ones (those removed from their shells), from hens confined to battery cages by 2015.

This won’t be easy. About 90 percent of female pigs are raised in metal cages so small that a pregnant sow cannot even turn around. This commitment aims to eliminate one of the worst practices in the meat industry.

Bon Appetit said it will also aim to drive best practices by promising that, by 2015,

at least 25 percent of all our meat, poultry, and eggs will meet the highest animal welfare standards, as verified by the independent third parties Animal Welfare Approved, Food Alliance, Humane Farm Animal Care, or Global Animal Partnership. These four groups don’t just ban gestation crates and battery cages, they prohibit routine antibiotics and all hormones, and reward producers for allowing animals to engage in their natural behaviors.

The news from Bon Appetit, which provides cafeteria food and catering to more than 400 companies, colleges and other venues in 31 states, comes in the wake of an announcement that McDonald’s–which, of course, is much bigger — will ask its pork suppliers to phase out gestation crates. (A stunned Mark Bittman wrote OMG: McDonald’s Does the Right Thing.) Bon Appetit and McDonald’s made their announcements in conjunction with the Humane Society of the United States, an animal rights group. [click to continue…]

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