Today’s guest post comes from David Griesing. A student of religion and ethics, David has been a non-profit manager, a caregiver, a corporate attorney, a teacher in a school for autistic kids, a company executive, retail clerk (of women’s shoes!), an arbitrator, and an entrepreneur. If nothing else, his peripatetic career has made him an expert on work–particularly how we can make it more productive and satisfying for ourselves and for those impacted by it. From his home base in Philadelphia, David helps parties to resolve their commercial disputes when he’s not writing and speaking about how all of us can do a better job of bringing our values into our work. He’s a regular on Twitter @worklifereward and blogs at http://www.davidgriesing.com/. 

David writes today about the downside of the “everyday low prices”  offered by discount retailers like Walmart, one of which is the inability of many of its workers to earn a living wage. A week or so ago, Business Week did an excellent cover story on Costco that complements David’s arguments here. Having said that, the counterargument is that Walmart’s low prices puts billions of dollars of savings into the pockets of the low and middle-income people who shop there, and even those of us who do not, since rival retailers reduce their prices to compete with Walmart.

Our expectation that we’ll always pay less for consumer products has an impact on the people in the supply chain who bring us those products—and it’s not a good one.

I’m talking about those who mine the metals in your cell phone, pick the cotton in your socks, process the rubber in your running shoes. Workers in places like Indonesia or Peru put your toaster together, stick the pins in your dress shirt so it looks good in its package, or pack the parts you’ll assemble into an IKEA bookcase. American sales clerks, stock boys and checkout girls get the final product into your hands.

To bring you “everyday low prices,” the people in these supply chains are paid as little as their labor markets will bear so that the factory owners, shippers and retailers can make a profit. With fewer dollars to go around and cutthroat competition between the on-line and bricks & mortar stores, every link in the consumer product supply chain is squeezed. This includes workers along the arc of production—including those in America.

How is our addiction to cheap stuff making the work that many of our neighbors do everyday a losing proposition—and why should we care?

At one level, this is how capitalism is supposed to operate. Workers trade their labor for wages, and owners figure out how to make a profit after the labor and other costs of doing business are covered. In competitive markets, this creates a constant pressure to produce as cheaply as possible. Manufacturers flee the US for cheaper labor in Mexico or Bangladesh, and as wages rise in those places, to even poorer countries with “surplus workers” for hire.  American factories close because it costs so much less to make your shirt or toaster elsewhere.

But millions of Americans still staff the big box stores where you’ll likely buy that shirt or toaster this year. Over the years, we have grown accustomed to “the cheap foreign labor dividend” that enables us to pay less and less when we go shopping for consumer products. But there are only so many savings to be realized from cheap labor abroad.  At some point, full-time American workers in this supply chain also get squeezed, often to the point where they can no longer live on the money they earn.

There are “acceptable” and “unacceptable” efficiencies in capitalism.

For example, you can’t make shoddy merchandise because it won’t sell in most markets.  Child labor, sweatshops, safety and health risks, damage to the environment are also unacceptable (at least when it comes to making something in the U.S.). But what happens when all of the “acceptable” efficiencies have been obtained, and only “unacceptable” ones remain?

When it comes to many of our consumer products, we have already crossed that divide—and our expectations as consumers have a lot to do with it.

Wal-Mart was a revolutionary company because it mastered the art of selling products to consumers more efficiently than they had ever been sold before. As discussed in a recent Atlantic article by Jordan Weissmann, it paid its workers so little that they had no alternative but to shop at discount stores. . .  like Wal-Mart.  However, it didn’t end there. Many full-time jobs at Wal-Mart and other big box stores barely take a family of three over the federal poverty line. These retailers are simply not paying most of their workers enough to live on, what we call “a living wage.” As Weissmann wrote:

Ultimately, this all comes back to consumers. We are the ones who choose where to take our business. And for the most part, Americans have chosen cheap.

It’s hard to blame middle class families for making that decision—not a lot of people have the extra cash to make a political statement out of where they buy paper towels and diapers. But it’s led to cycle of [worker] impoverishment…

Economists have considered what it would cost to break this cycle, and it turns out that the cost to us would come pretty cheap. Weissmann cites a study by UC-Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education suggesting that it would cost the average shopper only $12.49 more a year if Wal-Mart paid its workers a living wage.

So the questions remain: What’s to be done about the human cost of everyday low prices? And why should any of us care?

Most of us oppose merchants paying full-time American workers less than a living wage, but our abstract moral concerns are trumped—almost every single time—by the consumer product we want and the low price we want to pay for it. Would our behavior change if the trade offs were more explicit to us as consumers?

Imagine a sign at the entrance to the big box store that says: “Be willing to pay a little more so that the workers here can get a paycheck they can live on.

Or the checkout girl wearing a badge that says: “Your addiction to everyday low prices means I can’t support my family.”

Would realizing that the person harmed is standing in front of you be enough to get you to shop at the mom & pop store that charges more so it can pay its employees fairly?

Would coming face-to-face with the social cost of consumer economics lead you to add a few bucks to your checkout bill, like a “tip,” for the “Big Box Employee Living Wage Fund”?

At the very least, the realities of our addiction to low prices and its human costs need to become more personal as close to the point of purchase as possible.

What’s also needed is an understanding of why changing this value proposition in our consumer driven economy is important to you and the value of your work?

When some workers in your community are treated like property, it is easier for your employer to treat you that way—as an economic instead of a human resource, little more than a cog in a wheel. As more and more full time, middle class jobs are lost, it will become harder for any of us to make a living wage. Self-interest may lead us to start demanding that every single full time worker in America is making enough to live on.

It is also about community. The consumer product workforce is comprised of your family members and neighbors and people you see all the time. They don’t or can’t “move on” to better jobs, because increasingly those “better” jobs are unavailable. As an increasingly permanent part of our way of life, they are connected to you and to me, and have a face.

As we put our economy back together, there is an opportunity to rebuild our communities around the work that each and every person in it does. But communities where every worker is appropriately valued will never be possible until we confront our addiction to consumer prices that are lower than they have to be.

I recently signed up for  Capital Bikeshare, the four-year-old bike-sharing system in Washington, D.C., My experience has turned me into an enthusiastic booster of bike sharing.If you haven’t tried bike sharing yet, and it’s offered in a city where you live, by all means, do so!

Some observations on the bike-sharing phenomenon:

The big picture: New York, of course, rolled out its bike-sharing program last month. Chicago’s program opens on June 28. The number of cities offering bike-sharing in the US is expected to grow from 22 at the beginning of this year to twice that number by next spring, and the number of shared bikes will grow from 9,000 to more than 36,000, according to this excellent article by Janet Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute. Globally, more than more than 500 cities in 49 countries provide advanced bike-sharing programs, with a combined fleet of over 500,000 bicycles, Larsen wrote in Treehugger.

Interestingly, bike sharing and the ever-expanding biking infrastructure that goes with isn’t an east coast-west coast phenomenon. Tulsa was the first US city to offer bike sharing, back in 2007. Minneapolis-St. Paul and Denver offered programs in 2010. B-cycle, which operates operates bike-sharing services in Charlotte, N.C., Des Moines, Iowa, and Kansas City, Mo., has proposed a service for Indianapolis, which has one of the most robust bicycle-trail infrastructures in North America.

Bike sharing in your nation’s capital: Capital Bikeshare is the largest bike-sharing program in the US, with about 1,800 bright-red bikes stationed at 200 locking docks in DC and suburban Virginia, with Montgomery County, Md. (where I live) soon to follow. Locals and visitors have logged more than 4 million rides.

While all the usership data is public, until statisticians have a go at the information, it will be hard to know precisely how and why people are using the system. Some 6,800 members of Capital Bikeshare responded to a survey last year that found that:

• 50 percent said they drive a car less often since joining Capital Bikeshare

• 31.5 percent reported reduced stress as a result of using Capital Bikeshare

• 20.6 percent reported increased aerobic capacity

Capital Bikeshare ridership has topped 10,000 trips per day on several days this spring. The success of the program has helped spawn a growing number of bike-only lanes in the city, including a two-way set of lanes right down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue that offers great views of the Capitol.

The economics of bike sharing: They’re good and getting better, as bike sharing scales. New York City says that its program NYC Bike Share, which is sponsored by Citi,

is not receiving any taxpayer or federal-aid dollars to establish and run the bike share system. In fact, the City expects that the system will make money. The City and NYC Bike Share will split all profits.

DC’s Capital Bikeshare cost about $16 million to get going, according to this (critical) article at reason.com, but it is apparently close to break-even on an operating basis. (I emailed a city official to get more info, but got no response.)

Costs could come down dramatically, according to Tom Glendening, a consultant with E3Think, if cities adopt a “smart lock” technology, which incorporates GPS and mobile communication into every bike, as opposed to the capital-intensive “smart docks” now being used. Smart locks will soon be tested in Hoboken, N.J.

More important, to the degree that bike trips replace car trips, and even sometimes when they don’t, the benefits to individuals and cities are significant. For bikers, less money spent on gasoline and car maintenance means more dollars to spend or save. That’s good for the economy. For cities, bike sharing reduces air pollution, traffic congestions and, potentially, health care costs. When compared to costly roads or mass transit systems, bike sharing and bike lanes are bargains.

My experience: I’ve take just a dozen trips on Capital Bikeshare, and only seven since becoming a member on May 10. An annual membership costs $75 a year–a bargain if you use the system to avoid fares on the Metro or, potentially, cab rides. So long as you complete your trip in under 30 minutes, the trip is free. Added time costs $1.50 per half hour. Here’s more info on  pricing, which is designed to encourage short trips.

Most of my trips have been short. According to the log kept by the system, I’ve traveled just eight miles, burning 344 calories and avoided 5.44 lbs of CO2 emissions.

The bikes are unavoidably big and clunky, but all the ones that I’ve used have worked fine. A very cool mobile app called Spotcycle enables riders to locate bikes (usually easy to find ) and available docks (sometimes tougher). My only frustration came one evening when I arrived at Nationals Park for a ballgame about 10 minutes before game time, only to find that all the docks had filled up. I had to ride a mile away from the ballpark and then jog back! I’ve had a couple of occasion to seek out customer service, with excellent responses.

The backlash: Conservatives don’t like bike sharing. Strange. Maybe it’s the sharing part–smacks of socialism, I guess. An online video of a mean-spirited and unintentionally hilarious tirade against New York’s bike sharing system from  Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal editorial page went viral, and drew this response from Stephen Colbert. The New York Post has whined about “an endless cycle of problems for Citi Bike share,” and while there have been software glitches, more than 65,000 bike trips had been made using the system in the first 10 days.

Felix Salmon of Reuters has a brilliant theory about why some people have gone bonkers of bike sharing. He writes:

The Driven Elite used to be able to feel superior to everybody else just because being driven around the city was easier and quicker than than any other form of transportation. Their ability to ignore the subway is really quite impressive: one of the themes running through Too Big To Fail was senior bankers turning up late to emergency meetings at the NY Fed because they had been stuck in traffic when taking the subway would have been much quicker. But it’s harder to ignore bikers who are happily riding past your car and getting to where they want to be so much faster than you are. And because the likes of Dorothy Rabinowitz would never be seen dead on a bike, they’re railing against the evolution of their city into something great which they feel excluded from.

We’re at the beginning of what I suspect will become a virtuous cycle driven by bike sharing: More people will bike, generating demand for more bike lanes, making biking safer and easier, which will lead more people to bike. America’s cities could well begin to look more like Amsterdam or Copenhagen–and that’s a good thing.

A bike lane in Amsterdam

I’ve been writing for Guardian Sustainable Business in the UK for about six months, on such topics as urban greenhouses, salmon aquaculture, Amazon’s corporate irresponsibility and self-imposed carbon taxes at Disney, Shell and Microsoft. As a result, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Jo Confino, an executive editor of the Guardian and chair of Guardian Sustainable Business, Caroline Holtum, head of content for the site and Charlie Wilkie who leads the commercial operation.

When they asked me to take on the role of editor-at-large of a new, soon-to-be-launched US site, I readily accepted. I’ll be writing a weekly column for the site, and helping guide coverage of sustainable business in the US. (It’s not a full-time job. I will continue to contribute to FORTUNE and lead the magazine’s annual conference on business and the environment, Brainstorm Green.) The Guardian will soon hire a New York-based editor to run the editorial side, and Charlie has moved from London to New York to run the business side.

Guardian Sustainable Business US is essentially a startup inside a big, successful media company. The Guardian has been growing rapidly in the US for a couple of years now and, as you surely know, the newspaper just last week broke the mega-story about the unprecedented breadth and depth of US government surveillance. The Guardian has a lively and aggressive anti-establishment bent which reminds me of why I got into journalism way back when. It’s also done a fantastic job of adapting to the new digital media environment.

Here’s the mission of Guardian Sustainable Business US, as the company describes it:

There is increasing recognition among leading US businesses that they need to transform their business models to address the sustainability challenges of our age. As the Guardian continues to grow, sustainable business is a natural vertical for us to focus on in the United States. Guardian Sustainable Business plans to play an important role in challenging the corporate community to step up its engagement with civil society to develop innovative ways of addressing issues ranging from climate change and resource depletion to poverty and biodiversity loss.

Put simply, we’re going to do our part, as best we can, to help change US business for the better.

In my introductory column, I outline a few of the issues that we’ll cover. Here’s how it begins:

400. 1,127. 354.

Those three numbers made news this spring. They point to the frustrations – and failures – of those of us inside and outside of corporate America who would like business to become more sustainable.

400: Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 passed the symbolic threshold of 400 parts per million. Big companies talk a good game on climate change, but global emissions keep rising. Climate remains the defining issue of our time; if business can’t find a way to bring down its emissions, and ours, we’re all in trouble.

1,127: The death toll in the collapse of the garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, making it the deadliest disaster in the industry’s history. Years of extensive and expensive supply-chain monitoring by the biggest US clothing brands, including Nike, Gap and Walmart, however well-intentioned, have brought only modest improvements to labour standards in the world’s poorest countries.

354: Last year, chief executives of the companies that make up the S&P500 Index received, on average $12.3m in total compensation, according to the AFL-CIO. By contrast, rank-and-file workers averaged $34,645. That means CEOs made 354 times more than their employees. This exacerbates inequality, undermines trust in business, and leads ordinary people across the political spectrum to believe that the system is tilted in favour of the rich and powerful, and against them. You know what? They’re right.

And yet

You can read the rest here.

Feedback, as always, is most welcome.

So you remember CFLs, right? The curlicue bulbs? The time they took to go on? The harsh light?

Despite their drawbacks, compact fluorescents have sold fairly well in the US. They save customers money. Utilities promoted and subsidized CFLs, particularly in California. Walmart pledged to sell 100 million of them. Time magazine put one on the cover. By 2012, CFLs represented 27 percent of the bulbs installed in the over 3 billion medium screw-based sockets in the United States, according to a Navigant study quoted by NRDC. Other researchers put the number lower, about 20 percent, says IMS Research.

The trouble is, no one likes CFLs very much. Some CFLs took three minutes to turn on, for goodness sake! Consumers were dissatisfied with the quality of the light, and rightfully so, as even advocates of CFLs acknowledged.

Which is why Cree, a leading manufacturer of LED bulbs, is taking direct aim at CFLs, as well as old-fashioned incandescents, as it tries to win mainstream America over to LEDs–which, by most accounts, are a superior alternative to CFLs and incandescents.

Can CREE and other leading manufacturers of LEDS—-they include Osram Sylvania, Phillips Lumilens, and GE–persuade Americans to change their lightbulbs, yet again? The stakes are high,  for consumers and for the environment. 

Recently, I asked Mike Watson, Cree’s vice president of marketing, about the company’s approach.

He told me that Cree will try to sell LEDS by telling people that they last longer and cost less than CFLs and incandescents, without requiring any sacrifice when it comes to performance.

“The whole point of the CREE LED bulb is to mimic incandescent light as much as we can,” Watson told me.

“CFL presented consumers with a lot of frustrations and tradeoffs,” he said. “As energy efficient as they may be, you paid for it by not having the light you want.”

As for incandescents, he said, they are like throwing money out the window. It’s time to bury that technology, as this Cree TV commercial suggests.

One thing that Cree will not do is focus on the environmental benefits of its bulbs.

“We don’t market ourselves as a green company, even though we really are,” he said. “The term ‘green’ to a consumer is as much political as anything else.”

“The economics come first,” he said.

He’s probably smart to shy away from green labels. As National Geographic reported recently, when academics at the Wharton School and Duke surveyed consumers about energy efficiency, they found that conservatives turned away from the bulbs when they were labeled with a “protect the environment” sticker. Crazy.

The fact is, LEDs are the environmentally-preferable choice. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) studied LEDs, CFLs and incandescents, looking at their  ”total environmental impact, including the energy and natural resources needed to manufacture, transport, operate and dispose of light bulbs.” Its reportconcluded:

Today’s light-emitting diode light bulbs have a slight environmental edge over compact fluorescent lamps. And that gap is expected to grow significantly as technology and manufacturing methods improve in the next five years.

But while LEDS make economic and environmental sense, persuading consumers to try something new and different–again–won’t be easy. Sticker shock remains an issue. But a Cree 9.5-Watt dimmable LED bulb, which is the equivalent of a 60-watt incandescent, retails for $12.97 at Home Depot. A 6-pack of GE 60-watt incandescent bulbs sells for $3.97.

Of course, they are simply not equivalent products. LED bulbs use 80% or more less energy and last 25 times longer than incandescents, as CREE’s marketing message says:

Most experts believe that CREE and the other leading LED makers will eventually be able to overcome those obstacles and drive sales. Prices of the bulbs are falling–some sell for less than $10–and the light quality is fine. CREE sent me a few sample bulbs a few weeks ago and I’m satisfied, so far. They turn on instantly, and they are dimmable. Consumer Reports said recently that its initial tests of Cree and Phillips bulbs priced between $13 and $15 showed promising results.

Earlier this year, Gerard Wynn, a market analyst for Reuters, wrote:

The LED lighting industry is set to dominate the global market more than a century after its discovery, benefitting from a widespread ban of conventional incandescent bulbs and as the market share of competing green replacements fade.

Let’s hope he’s right.

That’s true when it comes to climate change.

That’s true, too, when it comes to genetically-modified organisms, aka GMOs.

That’s why I’m uneasy about the path-breaking policy towards GMOs announced recently by Whole Foods Market. Whole Foods is requiring that, by 2018, all products sold in its stores must carry labels if they contain GMOs. It is also  encouraging “manufacturers and producers to create products without GMO ingredients or processes and to have them verified and labeled as such.”

But why? Just as most scientists believe that climate change is real, caused by man’s activities and a big-time worry, most scientists believe that genetically-engineered foods now on the market are safe to eat and not really a concern.

Interestingly, in all of its communications around GMOs, Whole Foods makes no claims that there’s anything wrong with genetic engineering technology. It talks about transparency and consumer choice, but it can’t point to problems with GMOs…in part because products containing GMOs are everywhere in the store!

This issue became salient for me this spring when I learned about Verlasso, a salmon-farming venture co-owned by DuPont and AquaChile. [See my post, Verlasso: Farming salmon the right way.] Verlasso was explicitly developed to fix some of the environmental problems with salmon aquaculture. In particular, DuPont developed a genetically-engineered yeast, tailored to feed the salmon, which could become a substitute for the fish oil used to feed salmon on conventional farms. Catching the wild feeder fish that are ordinarily needed to supply all that oil puts pressure on marine ecosystems. Put simply, DuPont was not just trying to build a new business; it was trying to build a business that would help solve an environmental problem. But Verlasso salmon, for a variety of reasons–not just GMOs–is unlikely anytime soon to find its way into Whole Foods (which has an admirably rigorous seafood buying policy).

I’ve written a column about this that appears today in Guardian Sustainable Business. Here’s how it begins:

When the agribusiness and chemical giant Dupont decided to get into aquaculture, Scott Nichols, the executive in charge, went to see experts at the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defence Fund.

He needed their advice and wanted their support. DuPont planned to feed genetically-engineered yeast to farmed salmon, instead of relying on oils from wild fish captured from the ocean. That would help preserve marine ecosystems, but Nichols was well aware that using genetically-engineered feed could become an issue.

“Sisyphus has a job,” he told the experts. “I don’t want it.”

Since then, DuPont has joined with AquaChile, one of the world’s big aquaculture firms, to create Verlasso, a brand of salmon that is marketed as “harmoniously farmed” in the “crystal-clear water of Patagonia”. DuPont grows the omega-3 rich yeast. AquaChile grows the fish. Environmentalists like WWF’s Jason Clay praise this thoughtful approach to aquaculture, saying “to take pressure away from taking fish out of the ocean is a good thing.”.

But there’s a problem. Whole Foods Market – the US’s most important retailer of organic, natural or sustainable foods – won’t carry Verlasso salmon.

Because the Guardian is read in the US and the UK, where there’s considerable trepidation over GMOs, an editor there asked me to defend my claim in the story that there is a “broad scientific consensus” that the genetically engineered crops now on the market are safe to eat. I took the phrase from a blog by plant scientist Pamela Ronald (who I’ve met, and respect) that appeared in 2011 in Scientific American.

One source for that claim is a 2004 book, Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods, published by the National Academy of Science. It reflects the work of several scientific bodies, including the prestigious Institute of Medicine, and it says that all forms of genetic modification–both traditional breeding and genetic engineering–have the potential to raise health issues. But, as I read the executive summary, there’s no reason to single out GMOs for special concern.The relevant passage says:

All evidence evaluated to date indicates that unexpected and unintended compositional changes arise with all forms of genetic modification, including genetic engineering. Whether such compositional changes result in unintended health effects is dependent upon the nature of the substances altered and the biological consequences of the compounds. To date, no adverse health effects attributed to genetic engineering have been documented in the human population.

If you want more, here’s a fair-minded story from The Atlantic about GMOs that explodes some myths about the technology, including the claim by ag biotech companies that genetically-engineered crops represent our best hope for increasing agricultural productivity and reducing world hunger. The author, Greg Jaffe, writes:

There is no reliable evidence that ingredients made from current GE crops pose any health risk whatsoever. Numerous governmental and scientific agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Academy of Sciences, have conducted reviews that did not identify any health concerns. Indeed, even the fiercest opponents have not shown any health risks.

None of this is to say that we can be casual in our approach to GMOs. Far from it. Government and industry have done a  poor job of regulating the technology, as we learned again recently when GMO wheat not approved for consumption turned up on a farm in Oregon. Back in 2007, I wrote about a story for FORTUNE (see Attack of the Mutant Rice) about unregulated GMO rice found its way into the food system, to the dismay of American rice farmers. The industry has largely failed to make its case that GMOs can feed the world.

But GMO technology carries great potential to do good, as well as risk. Farmers–many millions of them–choose to plant genetically engineered seed.

More broadly, it’s a mistake, I think, to try to fix our broken food system by returning to a simpler past. Instead, we’ll need to deploy the best technology we can develop–from “precision” agriculture to plant-based meats to GMOs–to help farmers and, yes, agribusiness to deliver safe, healthy and affordable food in a sustainable way. As I write in The Guardian:

Whole Foods’ aversion to GMOs could stifle efforts to use genetic engineering technology to produce crops that deliver benefits whether to the environment (crops that use less water, or require less land), health (foods with more nutrients), or the economy (higher-yielding crops that cost consumers less).

You can read the rest of the story here. I’d love to know what you think, in the comments below.

A letter signed by Phil Radford, who leads Greenpeace USA, paints a dire picture of the state of the environment:

We all see polluters poisoning our air, water and land; killing innocent wildlife, destroying our forests, pillaging aquatic life, increasing global warming and endangering human health–particularly the health of our children.

This is, alas, mostly true. US air quality is improving, although 40 percent of Americans live in counties that sometimes have unhealthy levels of air pollution, according to the American Lung Association. Water quality in most American streams and river is poor, the most recent report from EPA says. The amount of forest land in the US has been more or less stable for about a century, says the USDA’s Forest Service, but just this week, it was revealed that valuable forest land is being destroyed to supply “green” wood for burning in Europe. As for global warming–yes, there’s lots to worry about, and Greenpeace’s activism around the climate issue has been one reason why I’ve supported the organization for years.

Noisy activist groups like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the Rainforest Action Network have important roles to play in the “ecosystem” that includes business, government and environmental groups. They spotlight the most egregious practices, target the worst polluters, build popular support and, indirectly, help connect  companies to other NGOs. In a way, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and RAN function as the business-development arms of NGOS like the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy; they raise a ruckus and companies turn to the corporate-friendly NGOs to help them get out of trouble.

Greenpeace also deftly deploys a tactic called “rank ‘em and spank ‘em,” comparing, for example, the climate footprint of leading IT companies or the seafood purchasing practices of big retailers. These campaigns helped persuade Facebook to shift away from coal and influenced major grocery chains to adopt seafood purchasing policies. What’s more, Greenpeace has the ability to work effectively with business, notably by helping to persuade Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Unilever and others to join in a global shift towards natural refrigerants.

So what’s not to like? Well, there’s this, from Phil’s letter:

Greenpeace Speaks Out to Eliminate Nuclear Power:

Greenpeace is working to end the expansion of nuclear power. The U.S. already has more nuclear power plants than any other country. The United States currently has 104 operating nuclear reactors, and each one is a threat to public health, safety and the environment.

Nationwide, 1 in 3 Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant. Do you? If a meltdown was to occur, the accident could kill and injure tens of thousands of people and leave large regions uninhabitable.

This passage, by the way, follows a section headed Greenpeace Speaks Out to Curb Global Warming. Does that make sense to you?

It doesn’t make sense to me. If we want to keep the lights on, and at an affordable price, without increasing the risks of climate change, nuclear power–at the very least, the plants we have today, and quite probably, more–has to be part of the solution. If Greenpeace manages to persuade the US or other governments to “eliminate nuclear power”–that’s what the headline says–the risk of catastrophic climate change will grow much worse. Climate activists/environmentalists who  support nuclear power include Stewart Brand (in his excellent book Whole Earth Discipline), ex-DOE chief Steven Chu, contrarians Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus (see Going Green? Then Go Nuclear), the former British prime minister Tony Blair, economist Jeffrey Sachs nd ex-NASA scientist James Hansen.

In an essay about this scientific paper, Hansen and his NASA colleague Pushker Kharecha recently wrote:

…without nuclear power, it will be even harder to mitigate human-caused climate change and air pollution. This is fundamentally because historical energy production data reveal that if nuclear power never existed, the energy it supplied almost certainly would have been supplied by fossil fuels instead (overwhelmingly coal), which cause much higher air pollution-related mortality and GHG emissions per unit energy produced.

Using historical electricity production data and mortality and emission factors from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, we found that despite the three major nuclear accidents the world has experienced, nuclear power prevented an average of over 1.8 million net deaths worldwide between 1971-2009. This amounts to at least hundreds and more likely thousands of times more deaths than it caused. An average of 76,000 deaths per year were avoided annually between 2000-2009, with a range of 19,000-300,000 per year.

Likewise, we calculated that nuclear power prevented an average of 64 gigatonnes of CO₂-equivalent (GtCO₂-eq) net GHG emissions globally between 1971-2009. This is about 15 times more emissions than it caused. It is equivalent to the past 35 years of CO₂ emissions from coal burning in the U.S. or 17 years in China — i.e., historical nuclear energy production has prevented the building of hundreds of large coal-fired power plants….

We conclude that nuclear energy — despite posing several challenges, as do all energy sources — needs to be retained and significantly expanded in order to avoid or minimize the devastating impacts of unabated climate change and air pollution caused by fossil fuel burning.

As I understand it, this paper compares nuclear power to fossil fuels. Greenpeace and the Sierra Club will argue that the superior alternative, for a host of reasons, is an electrical power system that relies on solar power, wind power and other forms of renewable energy. In theory, they’re right–but it has yet to be demonstrated that a modern electricity grid can rely upon intermittent sources of energy for round-the-clock affordable power.

Germany is the country most often praised by enviros for its commitment to renewable energy. According to Osha Gray Davidson’s excellent Kindle Single, Clean Break, Germany gets about 25 percent of its electricity from solar, wind and biomass. But  Osha reports that getting to Germany’s goal of 80% of electricity from renewables will require building 5,000 miles of power lines, at a cost of $25 billion, as well as developing cost-effective means of energy storage for days when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Already, Germany residential electricity customers pay about 28 cents per kilowatt, roughly three times the average cost in the U.S.; about 5 cents of the 28 cents is attributable to renewable energy subsidies, according to Der Speigel. Electricity from Germany’s solar installations cost four times as much as a Finnish nuclear plant that’s behind schedule and over budget, according to this analysis by Alex Trembath. Solar panel prices have dropped more than 80% in the past five years, so driving prices lower won’t be easy.

To be sure, nuclear power is also expensive and it comes with significant tradeoffs, as do all forms of energy. (Solar and wind projects in Germany are destroying natural habitat, provoking a backlash from environmentalists.) Nuclear waste disposal remains a big issue in the US, although the problem is more political than technological. Another big drawback:  Nukes take a long time to build, in part because of opposition from groups like Greenpeace. But countries like France have devised solutions to the problem of nuclear waste, and smaller-scale, next-generation nukes could be deployed more rapidly, assuming they clear regulatory hurdles in the US. In any event, in the near term, no new nuclear plants will be developed in the US because natural gas prices are too low. So the issue is moot for now.

Given that, I’m renewing with Greenpeace. The NGO does a lot more good than harm.

But I hope my friends at Greenpeace and the Sierra Club will rethink their opposition to nuclear power. We don’t need an all-of-the-above energy strategy–that’s folly, if it includes burning lots of fossil fuels–but we do need an all-of-the-above low carbon energy strategy, led by a strong commitment to renewables and energy efficiency, but including nuclear and some natural gas (ideally with carbon capture) to provide affordable baseload power. Instead of trying to eliminate nuclear power, environmentalists should work with industry to make it safer and cheaper.

As the Greenpeace banner above says: “Climate change is deadly. Get serious.”

Human ingenuity, new technology and market signals have increased supplies and helped us become more efficient. When the price of petroleum rises, for example, companies redouble their efforts to discover and recover oil from out-of-the-way places, like deep under the ocean or in the Arctic, for better or worse. When demand for food rises, so do commodity prices–and yields. When water is scarce, we use it more carefully.

But the fact that Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich of Population Bomb fame have been wrong — so far — does not mean that the world has an endless supply of energy, food and water.

Scott Jacobs

Scott Jacobs and his colleagues at EFW Partners, who manage investments for wealthy individuals and institutions, believe those resources are already becoming scarce–as evidenced by rising commodity prices. EFW Partners (the initials stand for energy, food and water) seeks to invest in a variety of companies that help the world use resources more efficiently and discover new ones, while respecting planetary limits. My latest story for Guardian Sustainable Business looks at EFW Partners.

Here’s how it begins:

Is the world running out of energy, food and water? Or not? The debate has raged since Thomas Malthus wrote “An essay on the principle of population” in 1798.

In 2011, McKinsey & Co, the esteemed consulting group, provided a modicum of support to modern-day Malthusians. It published Resource Revolution: meeting the world’s energy, materials, food and water needs, a voluminous and influential report. It acknowledged that, until recently, new technology had overcome any so-called limits to growth, but warned of big challenges ahead.

“During most of the 20th century, the prices of natural resources such as energy, food, water and materials such as steel all fell, supporting economic growth in the process,” the consultants wrote. “But that benign era appears to have come to an end.” If current trends continue, governments and companies will face high and volatile commodity prices, unpredictable climate impacts and the threat of political instability if the needs of the world’s poor are not met. “Nothing less than a resource revolution is needed,” said McKinsey, and it will not be cheap: “Meeting future demand for steel, water agricultural products and energy would require roughly $3tn (about £2tn) average capital investment per year [which is] $1tn more than spent in recent history.”

Scott Jacobs, a leader of McKinsey’s global cleantech practice, sensed an opportunity. He decided to help raise some of that capital and to help save the planet in the process. Last year, Jacobs, who is 35, left McKinsey, and joined veteran investors Tom Cain, 58, and Charlie Finnie, 54, to form EFW Partners, an investment fund that focuses on environmentally-friendly ways to produce energy, food and water, as well as opportunities to use resources more efficiently.

You can read the rest here.

A fun guy? Not really. A fascinating guy? Yes.

I spent time with Paul Polman, as well as other executives at Unilever–including US president Kees Kruythoff, global marketing head Keith Weed, sustainability honchos Gail Klintworth and Jonathan Atwood–while researching a story on the company for FORTUNE. It appears in the June 10 issue of the magazine, under the headline Unilever’s CEO Has A Green Thumb. (The story is behind a pay wall, for now.)

I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Unilever, which takes a uniquely expansive view of its role in the world. Far more than IBM, GE, Walmart or any other big company, Unilever puts sustainability at the core of its business — its strategy, its operations, its R&D and its marketing. (Patagonia, a much smaller, privately held firm, strikes me as similarly driven by broad concerns.) Polman’s theory, put simply, is “to put the challenges facing society smack in the middle of the business.” So Lifebuoy soap helps prevent the spread of disease in poor countries. Dove stands for the self-esteem of women. Lipton’s sustainable supply chain will help tea growers earn a livelihood. Operations, of course, are efficient, and the global supply chain of tea, tomatoes, onions, etc. aims to become sustainable.

In Port Sunlight, a tidy little suburb of Liverpool where the company got its start back in the 19th century, I visited a research and development lab where some of the scientists are focusing on coming up with laundry soap that can clean clothes using very small amounts of water, at any temperature. Much of the R&D at Unilever, in fact, revolves around planning for what the company expects to be a resource-constrained world.

Will the strategy pay off? So far, Unilever under Polman has done very well, outperforming consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble. But whether the firm’s financial results are driven by its focus on sustainability is very much an open question; more likely, it’s a result of the fact that Unilever has a strong commitment to emerging markets, which have been growing more than the US and EU.

There is, however, one way in which I’m convinced that Polman’s determination to make Unilever a better company has paid off on the short run, and that is with its employees. People I met, as best as I could tell, come to work at Unilever with energy and a strong sense of purpose.  That’s invaluable. As Polman told me, proudly, Unilever is one of the five most searched-for employers on LinkedIn, behind Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. That’s impressive.

Here’s how my story begins:

Paul Polman calls himself a “hard-core capitalist.” Sometimes you have to wonder. The day he became the chief executive of Unilever in 2009, Polman said the consumer products giant would stop providing earnings guidance and quarterly profit reports. “I figured that the day they hired me, they can’t fire me,” he says, “so that was probably the best moment to do that.” The stock fell and analysts grumbled. Not long after came word from the CEO that Unilever, whose brands include Dove, Lipton, Hellmann’s, and Ben & Jerry’s, was determined to tackle big social and environmental problems like climate change, disease, and poverty. “If you buy into this long-term value model, which is equitable, which is shared, which is sustainable, then come and invest with us,” Polman told investors. “If you don’t buy into this, I respect you as a human being, but don’t put your money in our company.” Shareholder return, he insists, cannot and will not trump nobler aims. “Our purpose is to have a sustainable business model that is put at the service of the greater good,” he says. “It is as simple as that.”

This sounds like the boilerplate that fills corporate responsibility reports, but Unilever, which has headquarters in London and Rotterdam, has gone beyond big U.S. Companies like GE, IBM and Wal-Mart by putting sustainability at the core of its business. In a 2010 manifesto called the Sustainable Living Plan, Unilever promised to double its sales even as it  cuts its environmental footprint in half and sources all of its agricultural products in ways that don’t degrade the earth by 2020. The company also promised to improve the well-being of 1 billion people by, for example, persuading them to wash their hands or brush their teeth, or by selling them foods with less salt or fat.

The Fortune story goes on to talk about Polman’s background (he once wanted to be a priest), the company’s paternalistic past and Unilever’s commitment to a water-purification product called Pureit that has little chance of ever making a profit. I hope you’ll find a copy of the magazine and enjoy the story.

BrightFarms builds hydroponic greenhouses in cities to grow lettuces, tomatoes and herbs for supermarkets. Retail chains are intrigued: They can satisfy their consumer’ appetite for local food, and be assured of a predictable supply of healthy, fresh vegetables. While hydroponic farming isn’t new, BrightFarms has developed an innovative business model that should enable the company to finance its expansion.

The result is that BrightFarms is growing (pun intended) at a nice clip. This month, it announced plans to build a greenhouse in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

Here’s how my story  begins:

Most of the organic baby greens sold in Washington DC supermarkets are not “green” at all. They’re grown in the Salinas Valley in California, which has been called the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet. Then they are shipped in refrigerated trucks roughly 2,800 miles across America.

Paul Lightfoot thinks there’s a better way to get fresh lettuce, tomatoes and herbs into the hands of supermarket shoppers. Lightfoot is chief executive of a startup called BrightFarms, which builds and operates urban, hydroponic greenhouse farms. The company operates a greenhouse farm in Philadelphia, it’s building another on a massive rooftop in Brooklyn, and it is developing farms in St Louis, Kansas City, St Paul and Oklahoma City.

You can read the rest here.

Paul Lightfoot

The aptly-named Paul Lightfoot, by the way, is a marathon runner, which naturally predisposed me to like him and BrightFarms. He joins a distinguished group of “green” marathon runners including Mark Tercek of The Nature Conservancy, Paul Polman of Unilever, “Speedy” Seth Goldman of Honest Tea, Tony Hansen of Fortune Brainstorm Green, Jason Graham-Nye of gDiapers, DOE solar guru Christina Nichols, ethical sourcing expert Melissa Schweisguth, Natalie Bailey of the Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group and Sheryl O’Loughlin of the Nest Collective. If I’ve forgotten anyone, by all means let me know by email or in the comments.

Cooking for Solutions is a delightful annual conference, fund-raiser and celebration of seafood sustainability produced every spring by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m just back from the 2013 event, and there is reason to feel good about the progress the seafood industry is making.

Consumers, chefs and, most importantly, major retailers in the US and Europe are more aware than ever that the choices we make about what kinds of fish to eat–and not to eat–have an impact on the health and sustainability of global fisheries.

The result is that, in the last decade or so, virtually every major retailer and food service company in the US and EU has adopted a seafood sustainability policy. Some are stronger than others, but the issue is on the agenda and not going away.

“Large corporations may very well turn out to be our angels of salvation,” said Matt Elliott, an oceans expert at California Environmental Associates, which last year published a landmark report on global fishing practices.

You could say that seafood is having its Portlandia moment. I’m referring, of course, to the hilarious scene on the cable TV show in which a couple interrogate a waitress about the chicken on the menu. (“How much room did the chicken have to roam?”) Chefs who gathered last week in Monterey told me that they are asked by diners if their salmon is wild or farm-raised, and whether their shrimp is local or imported from Asia.

By themselves, consumers can’t drive changes in fishing practices. But when consumers make themselves heard, and emerge as part of a larger ecosystem that includes activist NGOs such as Greenpeace, business-friendly environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, certifying bodies like the flawed but important Marine Stewardship Council and brands like Whole Foods Market and Darden, change happens. Regulation of the oceans–a public commons if ever there was one–is important, but markets, too, can drive sustainability.

The world-renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium has done as much as anyone to raise awareness about seafood choices–and it has done so relatively quickly. It was in 1999 that the aquarium launched its Seafood Watch program and began distributing wallet-sized cards that rate seafood items as green (“Best Choices”), yellow (“Good Alternatives”) and red (“Avoid”).  Since then, the aquarium has distributed more than 40 million pocket guides; its smartphone app has been downloaded nearly a million times.

Seafood Watch is an unavoidably blunt instrument. It rates species, not individual fisheries or fish farms, of which there are thousands. It can also be confusing. Consumers who pay close attention know to avoid Chilean Sea Bass. [An aquarium campaign called “Take a Pass on Sea Bass” surely helped.] But shrimp, salmon and tuna are all rated as “best,” “good” and “avoid,” depending on how and where they are caught or farmed. It’s asking a lot of even caring consumers to have them consult a pocket guide or smartphone each time they visit a supermarket or dine out.

So Seafood Watch has evolved, to engage with chefs and companies. “We started as a consumer awareness movement, and we have been forced–and it’s been a ‘good’ forced–to shift,” said Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly, the director of Seafood Watch. Big companies employ people who do nothing but buy seafood, and a lot of it, and they can influence fisheries management. In the late 2000s, the big food service companies Compass and Aramark and giant retailer Walmart all adopted seafood purchasing policies in which they promise to favor sustainable practices.

Greenpeace, which has been rating the retailers since 2008, reports progress. The “US seafood retail industry has improved significantly” since then, Greenpeace says. Last year, for the first time ever, Greenpeace gave two companies–Safeway and Whole Foods Markets–a “good” rating, citing their “progressive policy development, public support for conservation measures, and elimination of unsustainable seafood inventory items.”

A thorough foundation-funded fisheries report, called Charting a Course to Sustainable Fisheries, had this to say about the “market transformation” strategy:

Over the last 15 years, the power of the market has served as a catalyst for certain fishery reforms. We now have the ability to define and certify sustainable seafood, educate consumers, engage businesses, and channel that interest toward fishery reform. Soon, a critical mass of engagement will be reached, with major markets making sustainability a condition of entry. We anticipate that Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification of wild seafood is likely to grow to 15-20% of global fisheries, temporarily reaching a plateau at that level.

To be sure, as CEA’s Matt Elliott pointed out in Monterey, most of the world’s wild fisheries remain in a precarious state. Some corporate policies are weak; others are taking effect gradually. Most important, the strategy of using “progressive consumerism” to drive change has yet to take hold in the developing world where seafood consumption is growing rapidly.

“To what extent can we influence the future trajectory in China?”  Elliott asked. “Right now there are dozens of organizations trying to figure out whether there is a path forward.”

The encouraging news, though, is that when it comes to managing the world’s seafood supply, we know what works. Good science, consumer activism, corporate responsibility and smart regulation can help prevent overfishing and allow depleted stocks to recover. Best of all, over time, sustainable practices will deliver more and not less fish to our plates.